2019 Wriston Lecture: Peter Thiel

welcome i'm ryan salaam president of the manhattan institute and i'd like to welcome you all to the 33rd annual and I'd like to welcome you all to the 33rd annual Walter B Wriston lecture we are thrilled to have Peter teal with us tonight to discuss the end of the computer age the program for the evening begins with dinner which will be served shortly then our Chairman Paul singer will come up to give Peter a proper introduction before I let you enjoy the company at your table though I would like to briefly acknowledge what is a deeply felt absence in the room tonight recently Don Smith a trustee of the Institute and a dear friend to many in the room tonight passed away Don was a person who cared about ideas and their power to improve the lives of others and for those who had the pleasure of knowing him personally he was a constant source of warmth wisdom and good humor I know I speak for the entire Manhattan Institute family when I say he will be missed ladies and gentlemen please enjoy your meals we will be back with this evening's program shortly thank you good evening everyone and welcome to the 33rd Wriston lecture this lecture has become an important night in America's intellectual life through the force and consequence of the ideas offered at this podium over the years the formula for that success is simple we invite extraordinarily bright speakers who offer bold perspectives perspectives which rarely get a hearing in Manhattan ballrooms or or progressive covens delivering the Wriston lecture in 1995 there was a huge laugh line I mean are we napping delivering the westin lecture in 1995 James Q Wilson asked why Americans were so unhappy with a country that was more prosperous and powerful than ever Wilson drew attention to several insufficiently addressed signs of disorder crime failing schools a course in in culture and deteriorating civic life Wilson argued that these problems had begun with the dissolution of the family then as now a controversial view today disorder is rising again and I'm not just referring to mayor de Blasio's much lamented returned from Iowa you're getting there this disorder is the consequence of a nationwide effort to roll back many of the successful policies that mi scholars have spent their careers advancing de Blasio's presidential campaign may have ground to a halt surprisingly but what the preposterous policies he supports are moving full steam ahead carried on the platforms of less incompetent but equally radical candidates here in New York but not just in New York we face an Opie opioid and single parenthood crisis overlooked for too long by their experts America's labor market and civic well-being suffer from an education system that continues to prioritize bureaucrats and administrators as well as entrenched power of power over students not to mention the curricula now ubiquitous throughout higher education that indoctrinates our students to be ashamed of Western civilization and to despise private enterprise and economic freedom as for today's campus culture just say that it welcomes a broad diversity of ideological viewpoints from know'm Chomsky all the way to Robespierre Wilson's remarks in 1995 and their echo and residence today are typical of the work and approach of the Manhattan Institute my scholars have never been afraid to challenge lazy conventional thinking and offer bold diagnosis and solutions were persistent and when we have a view about something we do not back down under pressure from elites and cloistered cabal's of holier-than-thou academics am i adapts with the times but and also more so with the journal where's Dan but we've also stood for certain principles rule of law public safety free markets and the belief that culture is a key determinant of the welfare of societies in investing where I spend much of my time this combination the ability to adapt without losing sight of core convictions is a necessity you must be able to think independently and form strong contrarian views while at the same time maintaining a good deal of humility about how much you don't know when I first started investing my dad thought that if his son was brilliant enough to get into Harvard Law School then he must be smart enough to make money in the stock market wrong I learned the hard way that listening to the so-called authorities and blindly following the trend was no substitute for starting from a few core principles and applying them in innovative ways to the unique investing challenge that each new era brings it's the same in policy in politics and the Manhattan Institute embodiment of this athos is I believe what gives us our competitive advantage it's embodied in the outlook of our new president reihan Salam back in 2008 Ryan and his then co-author Ross Douthat was challenging the GOP to adopt its guiding principles to the new political realities he's already bringing the same spirit to his leadership of m-i and we're looking forward to the leadership that he has in store our lecture tonight is another example of this spirit of Independence persistence and innovative thinking he's also one of the most effective critics of groupthink whether in business politics or philanthropy Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur venture capitalist and in the words of economist Tyler Cowen one of the most important public intellectuals of our time Peter has spent his professional life in Silicon Valley he helped found PayPal was the first major outside investor in Facebook and more recently co-founded data security giant Palantir as well as the venture capital firm founders fund well peter has been one of the most successful architects of the information age he's also been one of the most incisive critics Peter argues that our technological imagination has been too modest to content to fiddle on the margins when what we need or transformational breakthroughs the country that brought the world the automobile the skyscraper the airplane and the personal computer has become enamored with kitschy applications that facilitate things like takeout delivery late night car rides and being able to tell your friends that you liked what they had for lunch these are no substitute for the path breaking world-changing innovation that America needs peter has distilled his argument into a tweet sized Max Maxim worthy of our age we want flight we wanted flying cars and settled for a hundred and forty characters at first I didn't understand and that reference rehab perhaps because I'm banned from Twitter not by Twitter but by my internal communications team true Peter understands as we do it men at the Manhattan Institute that robust innovation relies an assembly on a system of free enterprise like so many philanthropists and scholars in the room Peter has committed himself to preserving the policy framework necessary for experimentation growth and most critically America's reputation for unimpeded inquiry which is historically driven our culture of innovation and must do so again if we're to meet the unique challenges of this century a society the challenges that sensors challenging ideas may well be headed on the path to suicide for those of us with the means and courage to not just speak out against the intellectual mob but to actually build something superior in its place there's a great and there is great and urgent work to be done tonight that means providing a forum for the challenging ideas of our 33rd Wriston lecturer ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Peter Thiel [Applause] well Paul thank you so much for that an incredibly flattering introduction I was worried goes downhill from from there I I thought I'd maybe start with a somewhat modest story this was about 20 years ago and I was starting PayPal I was speaking to a friend of mine Peter Robinson to the Hoover Institute we're brainstorming on advisors to get to the companies he thought you know trying to this innovative finance tech company you should talk to Walter Wriston and my response was who is Walter Wriston and and then he's sort of complained about how young people don't know anything about the past and how America does a terrible job not honoring it's great business innovators and and leaders and so I'm extremely honored to be here tonight and try to correct this in in some in some small ways and and and the the part of the Walter Wriston legacy that I think is still so so present as he you know it was he you know he transformed Citigroup into you know it scaled it up like crazy from the bank that served a city to Bank that serve the world ATM machines credit cards interstate banking the money turning into money center banks it was and and then what the legacy of Wriston draws our attention to in so many ways are questions of scale problems of scale and that's what I'd like to focus my remarks on tonight that we have you know a question of scale as if something's good more of it's better so as a quantity element and then of course there's a quality element where once you get to a certain scale maybe you can do qualitatively different things and this was you know this was the vision for Citibank and then and then and then perhaps there's also a normative dimension where maybe you're changing the world into a better place and from a libertarian or free market perspective perhaps by making you know expanding capitalism you can sort of transform the world on trans political level and that was certainly the hope that that Wriston had and you know in some ways this resonated with me very deeply when when I was when I was starting PayPal where we have this sort of vision that we're going to lead this financial revolution a libertarian revolution again all central banks we're gonna liberate money from government control and we're gonna go to this trans political technological level to to transform things of course I think there are sort of a lot of qualifiers on this door there times all right I'll slow down a little bit I've a lot to say though there are there are times when there are times when this sort of transformation does not work in a libertarian direction and and the global scale can be can be quite different and and you know sort of think of Margaret Margaret Thatcher's biggest mistake was she thought that in the late 70s that embracing the EU would be a way to crush the unions in the UK so you went to a trance political scale to on to bring about more free markets within within the UK and then at the a decade later she thought of this as her worst decision ever where the free trade of the you came with and not so inexpensive Brussels burocracy that would regulate everything from the size of bananas on down and so so there are sort of a lot of challenging questions about about scale if we were to tell the to technological stories about scale at this point one of them is a story about it's still the sort of crypto revolution which is which is still going on with Bitcoin and has has has this sort of libertarian potential but I think there is there is sort of an alternate text story which is about AI big data centralized databases surveillance and and the which does not seem libertarian at all you're sort of gonna have the big eye of Sauron watching you at all times in all places and I often think that we live in a world where the ideology always has a certain valence so we we if we say that crypto is libertarian why can't we say that AI is communist and and at least have the sort of alternate account of scale so there are there are things where you scale things up and you get a qualitative difference but the quality difference isn't always a good one and we need to think very hard about which ones play out in in which ways now I think for ristin in the 1970s if you want to sort of summarize it as a picture it was it was that if Manhattan if New York City was going to scale the next logical scale was the world and that was that was a scale on which one one had to move to and I think there is a sense in which finance technology and the internet form has sort of a natural limitless scale and and that kind of makes sense there are a lot of other things where scaling is very different I think in you know in a democracy if you have sort of a majority vote that's good if you have a supermajority that's even better so you've got you know 51% that's you're probably right if you get 70% you're even more right on the other hand if you get you know 99.99% of the voters you're sort of in North Korea and you have sort of a sense that and so there is always this wisdom of crowds that that works up to a certain point and then that transitions into sort of a madness of crowds and I think this is sort of the unhealthy development that's taken place in Silicon Valley in recent years where we had very positive Network effects that at least have tilted tilted in this more negative thing at scale which seems you know completely deranged in in in in recent years and I suspect this will be this will be bad for innovation at least maybe maybe the business can still work at scale but I think one of the things that does not scale terribly well at all are ideas and innovation and you know there are a lot of different critiques of big tech we can we can discuss but one critique that I am sympathetic to is that innovation does not scale well and that that it as as the tech industry has gotten bigger or it's bigger governments think things like that you're going to have the innovation more slowly and so whether we go to the Communist AI or the libertarian crypto world or some complicated intermediate hybrid I think will actually happen slower than people think this is always you know there's always a big concern I have there are on good one you know one of the other institutions that I think has scaled quite badly and so I always think of science as the Big Brother the older brother text older brother who's fallen on hard times and and big science has scaled extremely badly this is sort of the you know the groupthink of the universities that they sort of have this ethos I think give us a universal knowledge about the universe that everybody gets it's something that scales to an extraordinary degree and the lies that we tell around big science have been linked in with the university lies and I think I think sort of a lot of our problems on can be described in this way one that I am I'm gonna this is my sort of candid candidate for the biggest lie that the Obamas ever told a lie much bigger than any any sort of inaccuracies told by the current president bigger than anybody I and and I'm not concerned about lies like the WMD thing in Iraq or the if you want a doctor you like your doctor you can keep them because those are sort of partisan there were some partisan push back this is one that's sort of all-encompassing that sort of follows from getting the scale wrong 20s and they both did it so violently ladies first Michelle Obama first so quote the one thing I've been telling my daughters is that I don't want them to choose a name I don't want them to think oh I should go to these top schools we live in a country where there are thousands of amazing universities so the question is what's going to work for you and so at scale you obscure all the differences of course you know we know they were lying the Obamas daughter ended up going to Harvard and it just you know it's reassuring I mean it would be very disturbing if they if they actually believed that this this stuff worked at scale in the way they claimed it does you know her husband it came up with an even more succinct one telling two lies at once you know just because it's not quote just because not some name brand famous fancy school doesn't mean that you're not going to get a great education there so let's parse that two lies first off if it isn't a name brand famous fancy school you're not going to get the great education you're just going to get a diploma that's a dunce hat in disguise if it name brand famous fancy school you probably also won't get an education and and that if we and so you know if we were to if we were to right-size the scaling for our intellectual life you know you should describe Harvard not as one of the thousands of great universities you should describe it as a studio 54 nightclub you know it's probably it's this tournament it's probably you know good for the self-esteem and bad for the morals of the people who go there and maybe call it call it a wash probably not a criminal thing doesn't need to be shut down but probably does not deserve a probably does not deserve a tax deduction so if we if we if we come if we come back to if we come back to sort of the this sort of you know less the much healthier world of finance and capitalism and back to the you know the theme at hand you know one of the questions is what are the kinds of scales we should be working on in in 2019 and you know how would one how would one update the the wrist and perspective and I think I think one one sort of bright framework for this is that you know that there's and there's a sort of question you can ask on the level of Manhattan New York City you know it's it's sort of but the capital city of the world we can't we can't really go back from that because you know you can't be that go back to the capital city of New York you know Albany has more standing under the US Constitution than New York City but we don't really want to turn it into Albany or something like that and so there are sort of questions about how on how how do we succeed at at scale in these in these places and there's a you know Silicon Valley version of this question but I want to maybe focus it on the United States version and and the question for the United States is is is the best strategy for the u.s. to go big to go with with with this sort of global scale and this has probably been a thread throughout the u.s. the u.s. history of at least the last hundred years everything from you know on the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson you know the new dealers after World War two setting up the global institutions from which they'd run the planet from Washington DC and that you know there was sort of a sense the US was at scale and and should go to should always operate on an even bigger scale and you know should be leading the sort of world revolution not always you know not always a libertarian one there I was reminded of the the joke you know why is the United States the only country in the world where revolution is impossible it answered because it's the only country that doesn't have an American Embassy and so but but this was in some sense this wasn't some sense a very good strategy for the u.s. it was it was to lean into the bigness of the country and and to and to go to go even bigger but I think there are sort of some ways we we may need to update this in the world of of 2019 where and and in some ways it's it's shaped by the the rivalry with with China and and if we sort of think about a rival that's that's also incredibly big simple bigness is not necessarily the right strategy so we think of the four vectors of globalization that I often think it's movement of goods free trade movement of people migration immigration laws movement of movement of capital banking finance movement of ideas the internet and and it made sense for the u.s. to lean into all these things because being the biggest we sort of got outsized returns from scale was I think if we do sort of ledger on these today maybe only two of them are still ones that the u.s. really has has a powerful advantage and I think it's financed and and the Internet even though we of course have misgivings about those two so so it's sort of and there's sort of a sense in which we don't fully trust the banks we don't fully trust the tech companies they don't fully trust the u.s. the feelings are sort of mutual and so it is difficult for us to to really support these companies as national champions you know in in the 1950s the CEO of General Motors can still say what's good for GM is good for America it's a little bit of a distortion but it was not that inaccurate he would be inconceivable today for the CEO of Goldman Sachs or Google to say that what's good for Goldman Sachs or Google is good for America they it would be just inconceivable to say that and so and so even though this is sort of the model that we probably should should still be working on it's it's quite a tough lift I think I think when you think of trade or immigration policy it's the scale question is is is much more sobering for the US we're not simply not able to compete with China at scale when you have seven out of ten of the largest container shipping ports are in China the largest in the US Los Angeles is only number eleven you know you sort of make the world safe for container shipping it's it's making the world safe for the for the Chinese Communist one world state at the end of the day that's sort of what you're what you're tilting towards or or on the you know on the immigration issue it's it's striking how on how difficult on how much better China is at moving Goods and people than we are you know China has probably had the greatest internal migration of any country in the world in the last twenty thirty years if you look at Shenzhen in southern China it had 60,000 people in 1980 it's expanded to something like 12 million growth of the factor of 200 in the last 40 years and you know sort of use the contrast of New York City where we had a 7.1 million people in 1980 it's grown to 8.4 million in the last 40 years and it simply does not scale on people we can scale finance we can scale tech people were really bad at scaling costs 3.8 billion dollars to buy build one mile of subway in New York City and it's it's only four hundred million dollars per mile in Paris and that's and that sort of suggests that you know any attempt to scale on people is not the place we should be we should be competing and so there is I think some urgent need to rethink all these different scale questions where we're going to be good where where is it going to be sort of much more challenging you know I'm not I'm not a fan of aoc to say the least but if you you know if you were to steal man one of her arguments that you know Amazon should not come to New York the argument was basically that that all about it was just sort of drive up rents and prices for everybody there and we have to ask seriously with it that's not entirely wrong what is actually the end elasticity of real estate in a place where the zoning is so so controlled that it's it's not possible it's very hard to build new things it's hard to build new transportation and things like that there's a famous economics theorem from Henry George in the late 19th century that you know in a certain city that's too restricted and too heavily regulated the elasticity of real estate ends up being complete so that any gain in the economy the city simply flows to the landlords and of course the mistake AOC made was this is also a libertarian argument because you could say that you need to get rid of all welfare in New York City because all the welfare simply goes to the landlord's because it's it's a hundred percent of a transfer and of course it's also an argument that we would have to rethink migration very hard so you know to the extent the China has focused our competition focuses our competition it suggests that we need to think about the scale issue very differently I it's a very open question where the US should go from here you know I don't think we simply can go sub scale so it's not like Israel or Switzerland or something like that you know I sort of would like the u.s. to be a tax haven don't know if that quite works at our scale but but but it's a very urgent question to think about what are the kinds of places we can scale and in in a good way where we can win and and do that better in the in the years and decades ahead and if I had to sort of give one one general gloss on it I would say that that perhaps we have to shift a little bit from quantity from simply scaling in size to to quality and that's sort of the that's sort of the question and this is you know back to innovation back to intensive growth not just doing more of the same but but shift towards IP protection shift towards you know fewer scientists fewer but actually doing real science fewer you know fewer good universities but we understand them to be elite universities and and somehow a shift to quality over quantity is probably the place of comparative advantage that we have to think through really hard visa vie China now the place where I think you know this you know one of the things I always find so the fuddling is why these questions of scale have not been asked for such a long time why the why the China rivalry in some ways has remained obscure for as long as it has and I sort of I sort of think in closing I'll give my thesis on both the the left and the right there's sort of our some ideological blinders we've had and I'm gonna sort of be critical on both sides here I think on the Left you know the the sort of the distraction machine from asking a question about what to do on the scale of the United States the distraction machine has been driven by identity politics of one sort or another and it's sort of like a sub scale we don't think of the country as a whole we think of just subgroups within within the country and I think you know there's something you know insane self contradictory about identity politics I always think you can sort of start with identity means what makes you unique it means what makes you the same if you start with a and not a you can prove anything and I keep thinking the identity politics monster gets crazier and crazier maybe it's just flopping around its tail and sort of final death throes but it does seem to have a lot of energy left and until the left is able to move beyond identity politics it's not going to be able to focus on the scale that we need to be focusing on for it for this country I think from from the right the the sort of doctrine that I would encourage us to rethink is the doctrine of American exceptionalism which was again sort of a super big scale but sort of put the US on a scale which simply could not be compared to any other country any other place and you can think of exceptionalism as you know I often lose the sort of theological analog that it's like it's like the radical monotheism of the God of the Old Testament or the Quran whereon you can't compare anything to God you don't can say anything about his attributes and and exceptionalism is sort of like saying the u.s. is this country that can't be measured or compared or evaluated in any way possible and and what what happens when you aren't say you're exceptional all these ways is you probably end up being exceptionally off in different ways you end up with subways that cost 3.8 billion dollars a mile you end up with people who are exceptionally overweight you end up with people who are exceptionally self unselfish and I think the you know I think something like the corrective to exceptionalism is is that you know perhaps in the 2020s the United States needs to settle for greatness thank you very much [Applause] mr. teal has kindly agreed to take a few questions would anyone care to volunteer ai you Tech people are so annoying how many of us old people know what a is but it's artificial intelligence why is it communist well again there's a lot ok there's a lot of qualifiers to this AI is sort of the buzzword of the day can mean the next generation of computers the last generation computers anything in between it can mean the Terminator movie where it's a robot that kills you it can mean it can mean sort of all these sort of creepy social credit scoring things in China but but in practice the the the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people know more about people than they know about themselves and you know in the limit case it solved maybe can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves and and you can sort of enable communism to work maybe not so much as an economic theory but at least as a political theory so it's it's it's it's it is definitely a Leninist thing and then it is literally communist because China loves AI it hates crypto and so that's that that tells you that tells you I think tells you tells you something and then I think and then there I think there's a common sense level on which it is this is what you know people are creeped out about it and this is why you know and we should we should we should label it accurately so what does a hopeful great America look like like what can we look forward to what are your hopes for the next 24 months what say well I certainly hope that the country has more of a future than just 24 months but I think I think I think that you know my my my hopes are that we we find a way back to more intensive intensive growth you know the UH the sort of the focus on globalization has been we sort of divided the world into developing and developed countries and the developing countries the ones that are converging with the developed world the developed countries are those where we're sort of saying there's on the future is just not going to look different from the present it's just this sort of eternal Groundhog Day and and I think somehow breaking that that logjam would be good so that there will be a future again things will be different from from the present and we've had progress around tech around IT this narrow cone of progress around the world of bits but you know the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old none changing our environment is how this you're grinding a subway that's 100 years old and and I think you know I think sort of a a healthier form of progress would happen on on many different fronts and then we can sort of debate you know why that hasn't happened what some of the challenges are but I would like I'd like to see innovation not just in some kind of narrow iPhone app but but across the board so you've talked it on the past Silicon Valley talks about ubi universal basic income like everyone's replacing robots are replacing humans the average American and Iowa is not gonna have a job that's a common view in Silicon Valley in New York it's not as sympathetic but Trump has tapped into this as people have been left behind those people have rallied behind him you also agree with this that we should be more nationalist how do you see tech and kind of this like San Francisco of New York centric world making room for people to enjoy the America dream whatever that looks like different from the past 50 years so it looks like for the next 50 years so I disagree with all the premises behind your question I I think I think you you you you you you you bought the Google propaganda hook line and sinker which is which okay but let's articulate this which is which is that we have runaway technological progress you know a lot of people will be left behind we need to take care of them this doesn't show up in any of the data we have three point five percent unemployment the productivity numbers are still pretty anemic and it doesn't show up in any of the economic data so that's sort of like the that's sort of the that's sort of the starting point if you think about automation and the rate of automation it's basically happened over on it's happened over it's been going on for 200 250 years since the Industrial Revolution and my suspicion is the rate has slowed because the things that we were able to automate easily like farming or manufacturing have been automated and even if we're still automating manufacturing at the rate of 5% a year it's a much smaller part of the economy and so the total productivity gains are are actually slower these sectors that are left are sectors that look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago and so it's like kindergarten teachers nurses yoga instructors you know all these sort of non-tradable service sector jobs are fairly immune to automation they're a large part of the economy and that's perhaps why why things have slowed and then we always have the sort of fantastical story that this is about to change but if you look back over the last 40 years you know the simple reason it slowed is because the sectors that were immune to automation have just become bigger and bigger parts of parts of this economy and so I think the you know I know I tend to think the Silicon Valley ubi discussion it's like some it's like identity politics like this sort of magic trick we're drawing your attention away to something else it's like oh the technology's going to take all your jobs and should we have ubi to take care of you and what we should be paying attention to is that people in Silicon Valley have not been doing enough you know there are a lot of critiques of the big tech companies of you know things they've done wrong and you know different different things over the last few years my mic cut on why there's such a political pushback against the tech comes in Silicon Valley's they've not innovated enough there's no it's like if you've done bad things you know one of the things you can always say is well we've done these good things too and the list of good things is it's sort of like you know the the probably the biggest one in the Google list is self-driving cars you know I think that would be a significant innovation on the other hand they've been promising it for 10 years they're talking about it less than they were four or five years ago the expected time seems to be expanding but it's not that big of an innovation I think going from a horse to car is bigger than going from a car to self-driving car and and so we have to sort of quantify this and really think through you know how much is how much is going on and any of these problems are you know if anything you know even more more serious on on the science side and you know one of the one of the one form this problem of scale that I talked about is if your two biggest scale it becomes impossible to actually know the particulars of what is going on and I think it's maybe it's a feature of late modernity that things are so specialized and we have you know the cancer researchers talking about how great they are and the quantum computer people say they're going about to build a quantum computer and you have all these narrow and narrow groups of self-policing experts telling us how great they are well I can't resist mentioning sort of the anecdote from one of my um one of my friends his advisor at Stanford Bob Laughlin that got a Nobel Prize in Physics in late 90s and he suffered from the supreme delusion that once he had a nobel prize in physics he would have academic freedom and he could do whatever he wanted to and so what they decided what he decided to do was he was going to he was going to sort of investigate all the other scientists at Stanford who he was convinced were sort of stealing money from the government and sort of engaged and mostly for Rajal and research they're just you know a lot of input of money but not much output you know the two grad students he sort of come into their office once a week and it would be you know I'm very proud of you you're we're on the front lines of we're doing battle for science against the whole universe in this office and you can sort of imagine how this movie ended sort of was what's quite catastrophic the grad students couldn't get PhDs he got defunded and and my sort of my hermeneutic of suspicion is always when there's speech that is completely forbidden and questions that are not allowed to be asked normally you should assume that that those things are simply true thank you I too have a premise which I now shudder to offer but I will thank you I welcomed your critique of the very notion of American exceptionalism which I interpret to be a call for greater humility on a national and cultural level that's my premise if the premise is accurate and accurately reflects your view how is how might we achieve that on the political level is there a way wow this is probably above my pay grade too but I I think I I think the starting point surely is to frame the issues at the at the right at the right scale and and you know exceptionalism can be inspiring it's on it is but it is there's something about it that's so abstract that we're not able to talk about the details of what's what's actually going on and so I think anything where where we focus we're able to focus on these questions of detail will be you know will be helpful and that's that's sort of the place that I would that I would start so it's like you know can we wear and and I think I think you know I think the rivalry with China is what's going to you know is going to push us to ask these scale questions a new good-ass we're not in a great place in a lot of ways but country still has a lot of advantages and we should think really hard what are advantages where do we where do we push them things like that and I think it is you know it is it is one of the few issues that are essentially bipartisan so I think it is actually a place where we could we could we could have a reasonable discussion please join me in thanking Peter tail [Applause]

Channel: Manhattan Institute

Views: 87,795

Rating: 4.7250857 out of 5

Keywords: manhattan, institute, peter thiel, paypal, Facebook, Wriston, tech, Silicon Valley

Id: E-IaSS0bbGU

Length: 42min 44sec (2564 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/WhiteRabbit16]

That was bit mean that person yelling out telling him to slow down. But he handled it quite well, is he perhaps bit Aspergers and highly intelligent might explain blind spot in zero to one Yeh if the family scapegoat system is unlearned then the intelligence will be better collectively for humanity. Was subconscious the famous celebrity’s in zero to one, Britney Elvis etc all family Scapegoat kids

[u/WhiteRabbit16]

Is he saying Harvard University is a yuppie dummy college for Politicians kids