Peter Thiel: Japan Has Stopped Copying The West

Japan for many years was the absolute poster child for this globalization you know it was started with the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century with Japan copied at a breakneck pace the West I need to have them it was it was one of the countries that you know they actually caught up within a few decades to to you know Western Europe the United States and then and then even and then again it's sort of after World War Two there was again this sort of breakneck copying where they copied cheap toys cheap cars who was treated as a joke by the US for quite a while but by the 1970s and 1980s Japan had become this incredibly fearsome competitor and this is Bo this is parenthetically one of the things that's a little bit tricky I think in the globalization dynamic because when you copy things that work you're often creating much more intense competition and so that's always a aspect of that's quite tricky so even though Japan copying the United States was not quite flattering after 3040 years they had copied us so well that they were you know wiping out the car industry in the US and all sorts of other sectors of our economy were under a lot more pressure because they in a sense copied us almost too well now I think I think that if you go to Japan today and I was you know for just a little over a week but the I've been there once before in 2000 I think the change over the last 15 years or so is it's it's a move away from globalization they're much less interested in the United States people are fewer people are studying English they're not even playing golf anymore you know the 1980s golf was the rage that all forces are being turned into solar panel farms but no one really wants to play golf anymore there are there's still some interest in information technology my industry so they were interested in that part but but I think it's I think it is actually much less imitative and it is no longer the Japan of the 1870s or even the Japan of the 50s and 60s or even of the golf courses of the 1980s they are no longer interested in us and and so I think that's a striking move away from globalization in Japan that's that's happened and and and I'm of course always much more interesting what this means about America than about Japan and what and I think it's a disturbing it shouldn't push us to ask some disturbing questions about America are there is our society less worthy of being emulated than it was in the past is Japan right that there isn't that much that it should copy that there is not much left to learn from us and and so I think we should it should push us to ask some very tough questions in that direction Japan is you know it's just one country but it's it's interesting because Japan was the most extreme on copying it was doing it so incredibly well for over a hundred years and and the fact that they have stopped altogether you know maybe something's gone badly wrong in Japan but but I think the critical question we should ask is has something gone badly wrong in our society where it's no longer one that that is producing as many new things that are worthy of being emulated and so you know one way you could scribe the dynamic was Japan sort of caught up to the u.s. there was not at the end of the day that much innovation that took place in Japan once they had caught up and and so they never really overtook us and then it was just a country that was you know maybe fought with you know third to 40% of the population of the United States and and it would never become a country the larger GDP or anything like that now you look at a country like China it has four times the US population and so if China simply copies everything in the US and if it were to catch up to the u.s. you might have a country that has a GDP you know three to four times that of the United States it might not surpass the US on a per capita basis but geopolitically that would be a much more important event where there may be the most important country in the world is the one with the largest GDP now the the way the US historically the Western world historically had had stayed ahead was by advancing technology much more quickly so if China's copying but we're continually doing new things then we would be able to uh stay ahead of India and China from a GDP perspective for a much longer period of time and that but then that gets the question of how healthy the state of technological progress is as well so but I think I think there's something a little bit different about China and India because they're simply on such a such a bigger scale [Music]

Channel: ManOfAllCreation

Views: 225,579

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Keywords: peter thiel japan has stopped copying the west, peter thiel japan, peter thiel, peter thiel japan copies, peter thiel the west, japan has stopped copying the west, peter theil

Id: DZEdfZGSSXA

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/reddit_abc]

I'm getting like voted down and up every 1 second. Like WTF lmao.

[u/Dvtera]

He has a fucking anime character as his profile pic