Peter Thiel on "The Portal", Episode #001: "An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure."

[Music] hello and welcome to the portals first episode today I'll be sitting down with Peter teal now if you've been following me on Twitter or perhaps as a podcast guest on other podcasts you may know that I work for teal capital but one of the things that people ask me most frequently is given that you are so different than your boss and friend Peter teal how is it the two of you get along what is it that you talk about where do you agree in 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 is 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 as pundits in the world of science and technology I hope you'll find Peter as fascinating as I do 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 Tila Peter welcome to the portal well Eric thanks for having me on your program know this is a great honor one of the things I think is kind of odd is is that 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 I can't think of a single occasion so this proves were not the same person we're not the same person 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 40s 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 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 are 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 um I'm always hard-pressed to answer that since the conclusions all seem correct to me so you know it's uh and it's always mysterious why why we right it feels like we're the outliers and we're the only or among the very few people that reach some of these conclusions about sort of the relative stagnation and science and technology the ways in which this is arranging our culture our politics our society and then how we need to try to find some some bold ways out some bold ways to find a new portal to different a different world and and I think there's sort of different ways the two of us came at this I feel like you got you got to some of these um perspectives at a very early point sort of the mid-1980s that something was incredibly off I probably got there in the early mid 90s 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 and in the sort of elite you know undergraduate in law school education I had gone through and so yes I think I think we're sort of point we we got to these insights but it's it's still striking how um you know how how out of sync they feel with 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 as 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 which is 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 at the initial frame issue so with your indulgence let's talk a little bit about what you and I see and 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 fraying and it's been fraying for some time but it it is something like you know we're in a world of generally fast scientific and technological progress things are 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 so fast and so scary it might be destructive but it's a it's a generally acceleration ax story and then there's some sort of micro adjustments within that that that one would have to would have to make it is there's you know there's sort of are all sorts of ways that I think it's fraying you know I think 2008 was a big watershed moment but but that's still what's what's largely largely been holding together and then you know there's sort of different institutions when you look at you can look at the universities where you know 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 and this was probably already questionable in the 1980s nineteen in college debt in the United States in 2000 was three hundred billion dollars now it's around you know 1.6 1.7 trillion and so there's a way in which the story was shaky 20 years ago and today is is much Shaker it's still sort of holding together somehow so in this story in essence the great dream is that your children will become educated they 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 to yes I think now again I think I think people are hesitant to actually articulated quite that way because that already sounds not quite true to well there's a year to your point they've been adding epicycles for some time so so it's maybe it's a bright future but it's really different from the parents we can't quite know and they've you know they have all these uh these new devices they have an iPhone and they can text really fast in the iPhone we can't even understand what the younger generation is doing so there's so maybe it's better on it but better has sort of an objective scale maybe it's just different and unmeasurable but but better in sort of an unmeasurable way so they're sort of our ways it's gotten modified but but that would still be you know very powerfully intact narrative and then and then that there are sort of straightforward things we can be doing the system's basically working and it's basically gonna continue to work and there's sort of a global version of this there's a US version there's a upper-middle-class US version there are a lot of different variations on this so it always strikes me that 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 are certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story more than the general economy and that you have to kind of give those stories their due 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 you know I I sort date the this era of stagnate relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970 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 this has been the world of bits computers internet mobile internet software and so Silicon Valley has somehow been this up in this dramatic exception you know it and where's the world of atoms it has been has been much slower for for something like 50 years and you know when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s almost all engineering disciplines in retrospect were really bad feels 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 were bad fields computer science was that would have been a very good field to go into and and that's been sort of a an area where there's been tremendous growth so I thought that's that's a that's sort of the the signature one that I would I would uh I would cite there questions about you know how healthy it is at this point even within that field so so you know there's the iPhone is now looking the same as it did seven eight years ago so that's the iconic invention not quite so sure and so there's been sort of a definitely a change in the tone even within Silicon Valley in the last five six years on on this but that that had been that had been one that was very very decoupled on the decoupling itself had had some odd effects where where if you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of vets then the people who are in the those parts of the economy have more to do with atoms will feel like they're being left behind so there was something there was something about the tech narrative that had this very um 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 I'm you know we've been working on the 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 can't you know re-engineer in sort of this cornucopia world where there's no scarcity and 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 that's 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 it's the collision of the communications and the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue and I I date the the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972 73 74 it's really quite sharp in my mind is it that way in yours yes it's it was probably like I'd say 1968 people still you know the the narrative progress seemed intact on 73 it was somehow over so somewhere in that in that five year period you know one I mean I've sort of had you know the 1969 version was we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and you know Woodstock starts three weeks later and maybe that's that's one way you could describe the cultural shift you can describe it in terms of the oil shocks of 1973 at the at the back end there probably you know with with the benefit of hindsight the were things are already framed by the late 1960s so the environment was getting dramatically worse you have the right the Graduate movies you should go into plastics I think it was 1968 or 69 and that would have you know that would have um so there were sort of things were where the story was fraying but but I think 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 1970s structural change in the economy that it was largely a sort of man-made problem which is what we seemingly implicitly always assumed or might it be a scientific one and let me give you the one exotic example that really kind of drives it home for me I think quarks were discovered in 1968 and to find out that the proton and neutron are comprised of up and down quarks 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 so there's always I think one one one way to parse this question of scientific technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture um didn't ate the ideas in nature run out or at least the useful ideas maybe we find make some more discoveries but they're not useful or the easily useful easily useful it's the sort of nature so it's a problem with nature and then the the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful but somehow the culture had gotten gotten deranged and I sort of go back and forth on those two explanations I think it's it's it's it's very complicated obviously we had um I think in physics you'd say even though you know I mean probably even the fundamental discovery stopped after the mid-1970s but but certainly the translation didn't happen quarks don't matter for chemistry and chemistry's what matters on a you know on a human level I would I would say there was a lot that happened in biochemistry so sort of the you know not chemistry down to sort of chemistry up the interface between chemistry and biology and that's where I would be inclined to say there's a lot more that could happen and has not quite happened because maybe the problems are hard maybe but maybe also the cultural institutions for researching them are a restrictive it's too heavily regulated in certain ways and and it's been just somewhat slower than one would have expected in the 1970s 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 culture is linked to nature and then you know the culture deranged is it also will look like nature stops so so I think these things are theirs they're probably elements of both but I am I am always um optimistic in the sense that I think we could have done better I think we could do better I think there are you know it's not necessarily the case that we can advance on all fronts in every direction but I think there there's more space on the frontier than just in this world of bits so I think there are various dimensions on atoms where we could and 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 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 going to 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 you know all sorts of things one can one can point to I mean you know I always point to the productivity data and economics which aren't great and then you get into debates you know how accurately are those being measured you um you have the sort of intergenerational thing where you know our generation Gen X is at a tougher time than the boomers the Millennials seem to be having a much tougher time then you know either us or the boomers had so there seems to be this generational thing so there are some of these sort of macroeconomic variables that seem that seem pretty off the UM 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 it on 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 where it's narrower narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are this theorist 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 you know quantum computer there will 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 and this is somehow a very different feel for science or knowledge than you would have had in 1800 or even in 1900 in or 1800 Goethe could still understand just about everything where 1900 Hilbert could still understand just about all of mathematics and and so the sort of um the 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 it should 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 a sort of my starting my starting bias well 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 the associates would hope to become partners who could then hire associates and so that has that pyramidal 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 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 as high and as stable and as technologically led as before has a pretty surprising implication which is I mean let's not dance around it it feels like almost universally all of our institutions are now pathological or sociopathic or whatever you want to call them yes yes I suppose there's sort of two two ways one could imagine going you know you had these expectations of great growth great expectations he's the Charles Dickens novel from the 19th century when I had great expectations and then you can try to UM be honest and say the expectations are dialed 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 and and the incentives have been for the institutions to drange until I so there's a pop there's probably a way the universities could function if they did not grow you know you'd be honest most people in PhD programs don't become professors maybe you'd make the PhD programs much shorter maybe it'd be much more selective you let fewer people and 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's seeming that was taken and and you know something like this could have been done in the law firm context or maybe maybe um you uh you still at the same percentage 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 a 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 to out-compete the honest one and so that would become a self-extinguishing strategy unless you somehow had like a truth in advertising program yeah I I I don't know you know I I do think the truth you know when it breaks through you're better off having told it than not not having and so it's always it as long as everybody was dishonest it could work well this and that's but ya know it's look it's it's it's it's mysterious to me how long it worked we had you know we had these crazy bubble economies in the you know we had the the tech bubble in the 90s the housing bubble in the 2000s you know what I think is a government debt bubble you know this last decade and so if you've had this sort of you know up down bubble that's um that's that's sort of harder to see than if things were just flat so if the growth in 1970 things just flatlined in the end you had 40 years of no growth that would have been problematic and you might have noticed that very quickly right but you know in a sense simplifying a lot you could say we had you know the 70s were down the 80s were up the 90s were up the 2000s were down so two down two up net flat but it didn't feel that way he's like 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 you know the last three recessions in California were much more severe than in the country as a whole the recoveries were steeper and so California's felt incredibly volatile the volatility gets interpreted as dynamism and then 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 who 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 you know Paul Krugman wrote this column called a protectionist moment mmm-hmm 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 were 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 it 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 the individual incentives were very different from the collective inside the collective incentive we should have not 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 working great for you it's like if you're you know the twenty thousand people here who moved to Los Angeles to become movie stars about twenty of them make it and so you could say well it's been really hard nobody wants to hire me this is a terrible city or you could say you know this has been wonderful that all the doors are being opened to me and that's the second one is more fictional but that's that's the that's sort of the thing you're supposed to say if you're if you're succeeding and there's I think there's a way this is how we've been talking about globalization where it's sort of a glib globalization it's working great for me and and I'd like to have more people um more talented people come to the US I'm not scared of competing with them and an on and on so this sort of is is this um yeah this or academia if you're you know if you're a professor in academia so the tenure system is great it's just picking the most talented people I don't think it's that hard at all it's it's completely meritocratic and if you don't say those things well we know you're not the person to get tenure yeah it's so I think so I think there is sort of this individual incentive where um you're supposed if you if you pretend the system's working you're simultaneously signalling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it so one image that I have in a you know you and I have talked I use the word kayfabe for the system of nonsense that undergirds professional wrestling and you you've taken to using LARPing a live-action role-playing it strikes me that we have two separate parallel systems now this podcasting experiment that you and I are now part of 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 so 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 can be kept separate it's like a real wrestling league and a professional wrestling 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 cut contact I I don't think it's a terribly you know I don't think it's alt ultimately stable so I think ultimately you know our account is going to prevail on the institutional account is so incorrect that it will ultimately fail I've probably been more hopeful about how quickly truth prevails then it has but in forever I would still I would still be very hopeful that that that our account is really gonna break through and you know in the next few years I've been talking about the this the the tech stagnation problem for for you know the better part of a decade and I think when I was talking about this in 2008 2009 2010 this was still you know a frenzied view it was very fringy within Silicon Valley and I think even within Silicon Valley there's sort of a lot of people who've come around to it who have partially come around to it there's a sense the tech has a bad conscience it feels like it's not in delivering the promises you know Google had this propaganda about the future and it's now seen as you know the self-driving cars are further away than people expected and so 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 I moved out to work with you in 2013 I'd never seen a boom before I mean this was one of the things that was really important to me is that being in academics the Academy had been in a depression since this change around 1970 to 73 and 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 and then very very quickly it all started to change it I felt like a lot of people moved back into the behemoths from their little startup having failed a 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 that's always its am I wrong about that no 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'd think that people people be as angry in Silicon Valley as they are today the stock market must be down 40 or 50 percent it's like you know people in New York City were angry in 2009 they were angry at the bank's they hated themselves but you know the stock market was down 50 60 percent the banks had gotten obliterated and that sort of makes sense psychologically and and the strange thing is that on a in terms of the serve law the macroeconomic indicators the stock markets the valuations of the larger companies it's it's like way beyond the dot-com peaks of 2000 and in all sorts of ways but the mood is not like late 99 early 2000 it has this very different mood and 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 um yes this is where where things are but are they gonna be worth a lot more in five years ten years and that's gotten that's gotten a lot harder to tell and 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 you know very very decoupled for for such a long time now 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 and yet what I sense is 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 it my is that a fair telling that well I think that 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 2080 browsers um you know you could say there's some sort of break with Trebek Siddhant Trump and in the last few years it's still like a little bit undecided with it what that all means but I think I think there were a lot of reasons to to question this and reassess this for some time the three assessments 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 to two decade I don't think The Truman Show can keep going keep going that much longer you know when I was you know and again I've been wrong about this me too no no I mean I've been very wrong I've called it we had a bit an off site when I was running PayPal in spring of 2001 you know the Nasdaq had gone from 2,000 to 5,000 back to 2000 um comm bubble was over and I was explaining you know we're just battening down the hatches at least one little company has survived we're gonna survive and but the ins sort of insanity that we saw in the dot-com years will never come back in the lifetimes of the people here because you know it's psychologically you can't go that crazy again while you're still alive right the 1920s didn't come back till the less maybe the 1980s or something long generationally yeah was over and yet already in 2001 we had the incipient housing bubble and and somehow some other shows kept going for for it for 20 years with the narrative like the whole narrative behind the Great Moderation I mean I remember just like clutching my head how can you tell a story that we banished volatility yes it's always I always think of the 1990s narrative was the new economy and you lied about growth and then the 2000s narrative was the Great Moderation and you lied about volatility and and maybe you know there's sort of the the 2010s one is a secular stagnation where you lie about the the real interest rates because the other two don't work anymore and sort of a complicated way these things connect but but yes new economy sounded very bullish in the 90s Great Moderation was still a reason belong stocks but it sounds less bullish and then secular stagnation in the Larry Summers forms to be specific what we're talking about means again that you should be long the stock market the stock market's going to keep going up because things are so stagnant the real rates will stay low forever so so they are equally bullish narratives although they sound less bullish over time so that effectively we needed what happened with the roaring 20s followed by the depression was that there was a general skepticism and here the septa sysm seems to be specific to something different in each incarnation that view it you keep having bubbles with some lie you have yet to tell yes but I think and of course I think the the crazy cut on the 20s and 30s was that we didn't need to have as big of a crash you could you could have probably done all sorts of intervention because the 1930s was still a period that was very healthy in terms of background scientific technological innovation if we just rattle off what was discovered in the 1930s that had real-world practical things was the aviation industry got off the ground the talkies the movies got a got going you had you had the plastics industry you had the you know you had secondary oil recovery you had household appliances got developed and an ziyan by 1939 there were three times as many people who had cars in the US as in 1929 and so it was there was this crazy tailwind of scientific and technological progress that then somehow got you know badly mismanaged financially by you whoever you blame the crash on huh and so I think that's that's what actually happened in the 30s and then and then we tried 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 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 an ended World War two to fit 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 as powering the world economy on the other hand it's very strange to me that we had the three-dimensional structure of DNA and 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 now 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 it you know whether it's two black holes colliding or you know a third generation of matter or quark substructure we haven't been able to use these things are we somehow between revolutions well I think I would say the question of what's going on and but I'm I wouldn't bet I wouldn't I'd be pessimistic on physics generally so that's sort of B he's my bias on that one biology I continue to think we could be doing a lot more we be making a lot more progress and 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 the more optimistic one is that though the the culture is just broken we have we've 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 that you can sort of think of it as Darwinian terms you you can think of biology as a selection for people with bad math genes and if you're good at math you go into physics go to math or physics or at least chemistry and and biology we sort of selected for um you know all of these people who were somewhat somewhat less talented so that might be there might be a cultural explanation for for why it's been been slower progress but I mean we had people from physics we had like teller and Fineman and Crick there's no shortage of I mean you know to my earlier point molecular biology anyway was really founded by physicists more than it more than any other thing I think why is it that in an era where physics is stagnating we don't see these kind of minds like I'm a little skeptical that that theory well III I'm not I'm not so sure like if you you know 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 I mean these the you know these disciplines have gotten sort of more um more rigid it's it's it's pretty hard to to transfer from one area to another i had you know i when i was an undergraduate you still had some you know older professors who were polymaths who knew a lot about a lot of different things Rises 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 they you know they they were certainly world class and in in their field but also like incredible in the water fairly aggressive and and and you know the the cultural or institutional rule is no polymaths allowed you know you could you can be you can be narrowly specialized yeah and if you're interested in other things you better keep it to yourself and not tell people because if you say that you're in you're interested in computer science and also music or studying the hebrew bible wow that's uh that's that's just uh that must mean you're just not very serious about computer science well so i totally want to riff on 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 about the stories that every institution predicated on growth has to tell about itself when things are not growing the biggest danger is that somebody smart inside of the institution will start questioning things and speaking openly and it seems like the blue mouse would be the people who could connect the dots and say you know there's not that much going on in my department there's 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 uh studied physics at stanford in the late 90s um his advisor was this professor at stanford bob Laughlin who in the late 90s brilliant physics guy late nineties he gets the Nobel Prize in Physics and he suffers from 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 direct it at you know I mean they're all these areas you should probably shouldn't go into each position question climate science they're all these things when 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 university who were doing fake science for wasting government money on fake research that was was not really going anywhere and he started by in investigating other departments start with the biology department at Stanford University and you can imagine this ended catastrophic Lee for a professor Laughlin you know his graduate students couldn't get PhDs he no longer got funding Nobel a Peace Prize a certain Nobel Prize in Physics no protection whatsoever a Julian Schwinger 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 a book where he wanted to redo quantum field theory around something he called source theory he said if you can't join him 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 and then at some point you think you would think that you've proven yourself and you can you can talk about the whole and not just the parts but you're never allowed to talk about more than the parts you know like the UM the person in the university context the core the class of people who are supposed to talk about the whole right I would say our university presidents because they are 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 hole and and you know we we don't you know we certainly do not pick university presidents who think critically about these these questions at all well I remember discussing with a president of a very highly regarded University he 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 like how does he come to this conclusion and I said well look Peter 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 zero day effort but it's all yeah but it's but you know in some sense if you're a president of a university you know you 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 disruptive thoughts because you have to you know convince the government or alumni or whoever to keep donating money that everything's everything's wonderful and and great and and you know I think one has to go back quite a long time to UM to even identify any university presidents in the United States who said things that were distinctive or interesting or or powerful well you know there was you know there was Larry Summers at Harvard you know a decade and a half ago and tried to do like the most miniscule critiques imaginable and got you know crucified but 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 in which he undoubtedly saw himself a part of had the right to transgress boundaries and and I think what's stunning about this is the extent to which this breed of outspoken disruptive intellectual has no place left inside of this system from which to speak but it's you know but there's it's not that surprising like in a healthy system you could have wild descent and it's not threatening because everyone knows the system is healthy in an unhealthy system the descent becomes much more dangerous so so you know this is and I think that's it's it's it's not that surprising that there's always a one-one riff I have on this is always you know if you think of a left-wing person as someone who's critical of the structures of our society right there's a sense in which we have almost no left-wing professors right in this key still is still there as sort of a last remnant of some clade yes we're no longer doing in the sense of let's say just being critical of the institutions they're part of right and there may be some that are you know much older so if you're maybe in your 80s we can you know we can pretend to ignore you or you know it's just what happens to people in their 80s sure and but but I don't I don't see you know younger professors in there say 40s who are deeply critical of the of the university structure I think it's just it's just not you know you can't have that it's like again if you come back to something as um as reductionist as the ever-escalating student debt right you know the bigger the debt gets you can sort of think what is the 1.6 trillion what does it pay for and in a sense it pays for 1.6 trillion dollars worth of lies about how great the system is and so the more of the debt goes the crazier the system gets but also the more you have to tell the lies and these things sort of go together no it's it's not a stable sequence at some rate this breaks you know again I would I would bet on you know a decade not a century well that this is the fascinating thing you of course famously started the teal fellowship as a program which correct me if I'm wrong on this 2005 is when student debt became non dischargeable in bankruptcy 43 bankruptcy revision right now that yes is so if you if you don't pay off your student loans on when you're 65 the government will garnish your social security wages to to 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 afraid and that College might be enervating some of our sort of most dynamic minds um well I think I think there's a lot of different critiques when you want your half of the universities I think the debt one is a is a very simple very simple one it's on its it's always dangerous to be burdened with too much debt it's for does limit your your freedom 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 owe $100,000 and you know it's never clear you can get out of that hole that's um that's going to either demotivate you or it's going to push you into into maybe you know slightly higher paying very uncreated professions of the sort that are probably you know less good at moving our whole society forwards and so I I think yes I think I think the whole thing is is is extraordinarily pernicious so and it's it's it's it is it was one of these things where I'm you know and I started talking about this back in um back in 2010 at mm mm um it was already it was already like it it was controversial but it was not like you know younger people all agreed with me the younger people younger they you know and and and it's a decade later it's a lot crazier it hasn't you know we haven't yet completely won but but I think there are 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 were Aang where um you could say the tracking debt you know roughly made sense as long as everything all the track careers worked in 2008 really blew up you know consulting banking and sort of a number of the more track professions got got blown up and so that was kind of a watershed now something that 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 let alone general inflation this becomes a crushing debt problem for people who are entering the system I saw a recent article that said that the company that I think is called seeking arrangements which it introduces older men and women with money to younger men and women with a need for money for some sort of ambiguous hybridised dating companionship financial transfer and the claim was that lots of students were using this supposed sugar daddy Inge and sugar mommy I don't know what the terminology is in order to alleviate their debt burden it's almost as if 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 to honest prostitution I know I okay I don't I don't want to impute too much intention ality know how this happened you know I think it's what emerged a lot of these it was mostly emergent mostly uh mostly these things people you know yeah that we had sort of somewhat cancerous we don't distinguish real growth from cancerous growth and then you know once the cancers for metastasizes at a certain size you know you have you sort of somehow try to keep the whole thing going and it doesn't make that much that much sense um but but yes I look I think I think one of the reasons are one of the challenges and right on our side this is people more self-critical here on on on this is that the question we always are confirmed with 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 makes sense to go you know probably isn't make sense to go to number 100 or something like that that's I think but but so there is sort of a way can still work individually even if it does not work you know for our country as a whole um and and and so there are sort of all these all these challenges in in in in an in you know coming up with alternate tracks like I think I think in software there's some degree to which people are be hired if they're just good at coding and it's not quite as critical if they have a computer science degree ok can we do this in other other careers other fields on I would ten thing 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 continue to be mystified by is that we are somewhat politically divided where you are well known as a conservative and I really come from a fairly radical progressive streak so we have this common view of a lot of the problems but sometimes we come to very different ideas about how those problems shouldn't be saw do you want to maybe just try riffing or 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 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 at a technological level family formation making our civil society healthier what where would you where would you start to work first well yeah there there's a lot of things that so I always I'm always a little bit uncomfortable this sort of question because you can talk about me too because um you know I feel like uh you know we're not going to be dictators of the United States and then you know all sorts of things you could do for your dictators if um but but certainly on look I would I would I would I would look at the college debt thing very seriously I would say that you know it's dischargeable in bankruptcy and if and if and if if if people um go bankrupt and part of the debt has to be paid for by the university that 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 know socialize the debt in some ways and the universities should never pay for that which would be more the you know Sanders warrant approach but but it's but there'll be one version I think you know I think there is I I think there is you know I think one of the main ways inequality has manifested in our society last twenty thirty years I think things more stagnation than inequality right but just on the inequality side it's it's the runaway housing costs and there's a baby boomer version we have super strict zoning laws so that the 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 I would try to figure out some ways to dile dile that stuff back back massively and and that's probably intergenerational transfer where it's bad for the acid prices of baby boomer homeowners but better for younger people to get started in in sort of family formation or I was starting house households what do you think about the idea of a CED 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 a fraction thereof where you have the ability to prove that through some sort of online delivery mechanism you create an I love it yeah I think it's very hard to implement again I think I think these things are hard to do well again about great idea there's a possibility of we have all these people who have something like Stockholm Syndrome where they they you know if you if you if you've 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 um 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 um 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 so we're gonna hire all sorts of people maybe maybe that's self-defeating four out for your own positions I think I think there are you know I think one should not underestimate how many people you know have 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 teal fellowship for those who don't know is a program that has historically at least began paying very young people who'd been admitted to colleges to drop out of those colleges so they got to keep the idea that they'd been admitted to some fairly prestigious place but then they were given money to actually live their dreams and not put them on yes it was it was it has been an extremely successful and effective program it's not scalable right so so we had a hack the um we had a hack the prestige status thing where it was as hard or harder to get a teal fellowship than to get into a top university Randa and so that's that's part that's that's very hard to scale well so 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 a JD or an MD PhD none of them seem to carry the requirement of having a BA 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 a level playing field and then it worse comes to worse people would leave as a mass with a masters they would in general get a stipend because a lot of the tuition is remitted to them in graduate programs is that a viable program to get some group of people who are highly motivated to avoid the BA entirely is sort of the administrators degree rather than the professor's degree um let me see I yes I mean all these different subtle critiques I can have our disagreements but yeah I think look I think I think the BA is not as valuable as it looks I also think the PhD is not as valuable as it looks 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 um at the top universities the BA is the far more prestigious degree than a PhD at this point so if you're at Stanford or Harvard you know it's it's it's pretty hard to get in to the undergraduate and then you have you have more PhD students then you have undergraduates there all these people who are on you know a very questionable track they've made a questionable choices it's not clear you know you know and so if you sort of and and and and they're probably probably are gonna have some sort of psychological breakdown in their future you know the dating prospects aren't good there all these things that are a little bit off so yet in theory if you had a super tightly controlled ph.d program right that might work but but you have to at 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's it's it there's you know we have you know just so many and they all feel expendable and unneeded and it's it's sort of it's just that's that's not a good that's not a good place to be you know and and where's I think the undergraduate conceit is still that it's more you know k-selected instead of our selector that it's more on that everybody is special and valuable you know that's often not true either so I'd be critical of both right and and I think but yeah if we 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 one of the questions I always come back to and this is what is the teleology these programs where do they where do they go and and what I think has gone you know um and one of the analogies I've come up with is you know I think undergraduate elite undergraduate is like junior highschool football you know if you always go foot budget I'll see that coming it's it's it's playing football and junior high schools probably not damaging for you but it's not going anywhere I see because if you keep playing football in high school and college and then professionally that's just bad and the better you are the more successful you are the the let the less well it works and and then the question is what's the motivational structure you know when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s there was still a part of it where you thought the professors were cool it you know might be something you'd like to be at some point in the future you know um and and they were role models just like in you know junior high school football and an NFL player you know would have been a role model but there's great damage in both side now now I think it's it's it's you're just yeah you're just doing lots of brain damage and and it's it's a track that doesn't work and therefore the teleology sort of was broken down so undergraduate part of the teleology 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 then graduate school well it's preparing you to be a postdoc and then well that's the postdoc apocalypse where we want to call it postdoc ellipse postdoc ellipse postdoc you heard it here folks host ups and and so but just at every step I think the teleology the system is is in really bad shape it's of course this is true of all these institutions with fake growth that are sociopathic or pathological but at the universities it's it's it's striking is it's very bad and I think this was already true in important ways in a back in the 80s early 90s 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 teleology 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 what that was going and and I was by the time I was you know 25 I was far less motivated than then at age 18 so and I think I think these dynamics just in a more extreme than ever today what I find so dispiriting about your your diagnosis is first of all that I agree with second of all 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 insight go ahead and you know go ahead keep going 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 you know Reed College was sex drugs and Goethe 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 beyond 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 training people in physics or even these fields that seem completely dead I'm not you know super important but I think the question is um we have to always ask is how many people should we be training and you know my intuition is you want even if you want the gates to be very tight one of my friends is a is in the professor in the Stanford Economics Department and the way he describes it to me is they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics at Stanford every year it's you know six to eight years to get a PhD at the end of the first year the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students where they sort of agreed who the top three or four are the top that the ranking never changes the top three or four have a are able to get a good position in academia the others not so much and and you know this is it we're pretending to be kind to people and we're actually being cruel incredibly cruel um and and and so I think that that if there are going to be you know it's a supply demand of labor if they're gonna be good um 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 you want you don't want the sort of Malthusian struggle if you have ten graduate students in a chemistry lab and you have to have a fistfight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker and you know if somebody says one politically incorrect thing you can happily throw everyone them off out of the overcrowded bus but 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 this down and have you know zero people right at least feels that this is what's scary that's it that's not that's that's not what I'm advocating or what what's what's being advocated here but 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 it it seems to me that power laws those distributions with very thick tails where you have a small number of outliers that often dominate all other activity are ubiquitous and that particularly 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 of all of the innovation what do we do if power laws are common to 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 to humans well I I'm not convinced these sort of power laws 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 and you know most people were farmers and presumably some people were better farmers than others but you know everyone started within 140 acres of land and and there was this wide-open frontier even if you had some parts of the society that had more of a power-law dynamic there was a large part that didn't and that was that was what what I think gave it a certain certain amount of health and yeah the challenges if we've geared our society saying that all that matters is education and 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 uh that's uh that's that's that's the way I would I would frame it but yeah I think I think there are there's definitely are some areas where this is the case and and then you know we just need you know we need we need more growth for the whole society if you have growth you'll have a rising tide that lifts all boats and so it's always you know it's the stagnation is the problem well you know I I've joked about this as we are not even communistic in our progressivism because the old 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 or physicists who encountered John VII Normans just said he the guy is smarter than I am it's not necessarily the deepest or he did all of the great work but you know when you're dealing with somebody who is able to employ skills that you simply don't have I mean I know I'm not a concert pianist and right okay 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 well I want a society in which we have great mathematicians and great answered pianists that that seems that that would be very healthy society right it's very unhealthy if every parent thinks their child has to be a mathematician or initiative pianist and and that's that's that's the kind of society we 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 know this is the thing that that I wish more people understood about what you bring which is that you're able to think in fifteen 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 is really something that you know I've watched firsthand for six years [Music] 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 progress and in tech than is because look I think I think yes look if we had if we have runaway automation right and you know if we're building robots that are smarter than humans and can do everything humans can do then we probably have to have a serious conversation about a universal basic income err 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 productivity growth um there is you know we've been automating for 200 250 years since the Industrial Revolution agriculture and industry factoring and the sort of society we have in the early 21st century is one in which most jobs our non-tradable service sector jobs that are not easily automatable so it's like a waiter and restaurant it's a yoga instructor it's 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 this may be one of the reasons why um the productivity numbers are are slowing down even if we're still innovating as fast and manufacturing and even if 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 than manufacturing 60% of the economy than it does when it's a 20% of the economy and so that's that's roughly uh that's roughly what I what I think I think would happen and you know if you just if you just look at the you know the current the current dynamic in the u.s. is we have you know unemployment like 3.6 3.7 percent right it's super low it's um and 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 there'd be enormous and quite conservative me yeah um but I think again Mike Mike my read on it is just the the automation story has been oversold like I agree the automation story's been over it's like it's possible it's going to happen the hospitals 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 you know 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 ofin if you will where people actually want to go shop in a physical place and are willing to pay a premium that we haven't understood but to have human contact maybe there's some information exchanged 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 GI 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 quite a bit of pressure is going to stay under quite a bit of pressure that that's maybe the top that's the the top one I would it's pretty looks like vulnerable to me but that's the and 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 you know making things more efficient but you know probably with with a lot of sheer forces at work in that process so um 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 aggregate shifting things that much you know and then go through and go through all sorts of individual job descriptions where you know uh people used to have secretaries because typing was a skill and you know the word processor you don't quite need this you can do short emails you don't quite need a secretary people still have executive assistants that sort of somehow do slightly different set of responsibilities but it's it's not clearly a fewer executive assistants that we used to have secretaries and so when one actually concretize is it it's uh it's it's not quite clear how much you know how disruptive the automation that's happening you know it really is it's a it's always straight is he and this is it's a version of the text AG nation thing right it's always last 4050 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 the last 40 to 50 years perhaps the the default is that we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation that's really interesting and and so yes if and again I think if we had the sort of runaway automation I mean you could get to like 3/4 percent GDP growth and at 3 to 4 percent 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 kappa hyper capitalism where you can do more experimenting or playing copper couple to some kind of hyper socialism where you recognize that the median individual might not be able in the future to easily defend a position needed for family formation well let me rephrase this a little bit you're not gonna get a conversion experience on your first podcast here to make me wait for the next and maybe a little longer than that too but I would say um if we can get the GDP growth back to 3 percent a year on a sustainable basis without fudging without fudging without lying about productivity numbers etc then on there will be a lot more room for for various social programs I wouldn't want them to be misdirected in all sorts of ways but there would be a lot of things that we we could we could do I should say and I'm and um I I would be very uncomfortable starting with the social programs without the growth and and that's that's the that's the sort of conversation that I often see happening in Silicon Valley where where it's we start with ubi right because we're lying about automation if automation of automation is happening then we'll see in the productivity numbers and then eventually maybe we need something like ubi if automation is not happening and you do ubi then you just you know blow up the economy right I should say and you know you've caused a question you know it's you've come somewhat toward coming them doing them in parallel yeah I'm ok with that no no I'm not not ok with starting with the socialism well so I appreciate you even a Marxist wouldn't believe this even a Marxist thinks to the you have to first get the capitals to do things before you can redistribute stuff right I know and you can't start with a redistribution before we've done the automation I'm not even a Marxist Peter but the thing that I was going to say is is that as you talk about the fact that we can solve some of these problems socially I want 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 and 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 that there's a 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 at the wealthy oh it's targeted at the lower middle class at the deplorable z-- or whatever you want to call them and it's a way to tell them that they will never get ahead nothing will happen in their life and 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 and he's always heard as an insult and and I'm not sure they're wrong to feel that well and I feel that a lot of the talk about redistribution is actually families of hi 8 through 11 figures trying to figure out how to target families of six figure through low eight figure wealth as 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 and accountants are going to be the ones viewed as the rich who are going to be incapable of getting themselves out of the way so I think that partially what what good-faith conversation between left and right opens up is is that we have a shared interest in 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 reason so that's one way I would I would restate what you just said sure would be that um you know redistribution from the powerful to the powerless from the rich to the poor is like from the powerful to the powerless and so you're using power to go after those with power and that's almost oxymoronic 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 you know the the very end I know the 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 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 you know 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 u.s. politically and it was broadly middle-class today California is the second most democratic states a d-plus 30 state it's a super unequal and and at least on a correlated basis and not causation but at least on a correlated basis on the further to the left it's gone the more unequal it's become and there is something pretty weird about that there is you know something that to fits in here is that in part I've learned from you 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 two ask what is the absolute minimum 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 attractive mm-hm and that this flips many of these propositions into territory where I suddenly realized that something that people see is being very attractive actually can only 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 and what I've yeah that look the the the visceral problem with communism is not is not its redistributed 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 professor's I studied under at Stanford Rene Girard was 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 communists in spite of the millions of people being killed they were communists because of the millions of people that were being killed as long as you were willing to kill millions of people that was a 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 gonna be like lethargy of the Brezhnev ear or something like that and that that was not inspiring I mean people shift from Stalin to Mao or Castro or but but the the violence was charismatic ice being very charismatic and then not but then also you know if you think about it's very undesirable I think that there it's 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 you 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 30s where people realized 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 you know a hero of the of the of the left you know was extolling starla 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 open 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 the the hope that it was going to be a racially more equal society my own family you know I would say was talking about you know interracial marriage and homosexual opened the support of homosexuality female access to birth control those things were associated with the Communist Party and a lot of those ideas are now commonplace but we forget that you know once upon a time only the Communists were willing to dance with these things yes I look I what I don't wanna make this to ad hominem but I want to say that people like your family yeah we're likely very intelligent people but we're somehow still always the useful idiots and and there was no country where the Communists actually came to power were people like those in your family actually got to make the decisions no I think so and somehow somehow like maybe yeah it maybe there were indirect ways that it was helpful or beneficial in countries that did not become communist but in countries that actually became communist 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 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 to an extent some of the things that we just take for granted as part of living in a tolerant society we're really not found outside and so if you were trying to dine a la carte maybe you could take something from the comedy buffet you could take something from the anti-communist buffet and you could steal a little from you know 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 - too harshly so I think I think that's a that's a that's a good generalization I I would I would say that the you know that there's something about the the revolution at the extreme revolutionary movements that always um seem to be from my point view the violence was always too much and I wind and you know it's a it's a 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 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 gotten to a point which I think 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 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 well I think that it's um it's very hard to see how anything like the kinds of societies we have in Western Europe the United States could function without without growth I think you know I think the way sort of a 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 pie is growing you can give something to everybody when the pie stops growing it becomes a zero-sum dynamic and the legislative process does not work and and so the sort of democratic types of parliamentary systems we've had for the last 200 250 years have mapped on to this period of of rapid growth we had sort of a very bad experiment in the 1930s where the growth stopped at least sort of Nathan economic sense and the system you know systems became fascist or communist it didn't it doesn't actually work and so I I suspect that if we're in for a period of long growth I don't think um I don't think our our kind of government can work I think there is a prospect of all sorts of forms of violence more violence by the state against the citizens there may be more zero-sum Wars globally or there may be other ways things are super deformed to pacify people so maybe you know maybe everyone just smokes marijuana all day but that's that also kind of deformed but I think I think a world without growth is either going to be a much more violent or a much more deformed world and and again it's 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 can still you can still have bad things that can happen but that's our only chance without growth I think 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 private means look you or you have to know that there is a version of a view 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 I think um I think is always hard for me to come with a good answer these sort of sociological questions I think that I think people generally don't think of the problem of violence as quite as central as I I think I think it is I think it is a I think it's you know I'm a very deep problem you know on a human level if you think of sort of this mimetic element to human nature where we copy one another we want the things other people want and there's sort of there's a there's a lot of room for conflict and that you know if it's not channeled very carefully a violent conflict in human relationships and in human societies between human societies and this this is sort of I think a very very deep problem and it's it's not you know sort of there's Christian anthropology but you also have the same in Machiavelli or you know there are serve a lot of different traditions where you know human beings are if not evil they're at least dangerous and and I think I think the sort of softer anthropological biases that that a lot of people have in you know sort of late modernity or in the Enlightenment world are that you know humans are by nature good they're by nature peaceful um and that's not the norm so there's you know that might be sort of a general bias people have is that people can't be this vile it's not it's not the stipa problem it's a problem other people have there's some bad people who are 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 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 had gotten bound up in a level of mechanized and planned violence you know the decimation of a great intellectual tradition and one of the 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 are two communities that have held somewhat similar thought processes from the perspective of memetic competition maybe you know there was a there were there was a problem that they were doomed to run into each other but that in some sense 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 in for our conversation well I think I think there's certainly um an element of that between between the two of us I I think that there's there's probably a degree to which on the history was so traumatic that that people still understate the 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 in many other places and there was something very synergistic very very generative about that and and and and then you know getting at all these ways that at the the it was lost are very very hard to do you know it's uh it's a you know sort of a a the sort of social democratic response to the Hitler era and the Holocaust was sort of radically egalitarian and it's everybody's equal you shouldn't kill people everybody is equally valuable and yet in some ways what was Hitler killed the best people and so there's a way in which the the social democratic response to to what happened doesn't even come up to the terrible thing that happened so inegalitarian society will we don't miss quite as many people were all equal nothing's really changed but but well 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 that right you feel like it's uh you know like if I say it people won't they won't they won't contradicted or anything but but it's uh it's you know it's it's sort of profoundly profoundly uncomfortable so I think I think there is a sense yeah that that you know it's there's from all these strange ways that Germany still under the shadow of Hitler even even you know the ways that people are trying to you know exercise Hitler you know in some ways have deformed the society where you can't you can't go back to the things that worked incredibly well in you know pre-world War one Germany there was probably a lot there was unhealthy and wrong with it too but but but yeah there's a sense that something um you know something something very big has been lost there's that probably are a Jewish version of this that one could one could articulate as well but but yeah I think there's something about the synergy that's uh that's that's very powerful and that's quite missing so you know from 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 there's something about it that is shocking in today's era and so there's been a Jewish loss you know I felt this a couple of times I avoided to be honest going to Germany because I didn't want to run into old people and wonder where they had been but eventually at Soros invitation found myself at a conference in Berlin and when I checked into the hotel I heard my last name pronounced in you know impeccable German and it was both a horrible feeling and a wonderful feeling like somehow weirdly something was home or I went to a restaurant near checkpoint charlie with my wife and I was missing a fork even like the person spoke no English and I remembered from a some old story of my father and I asked for a Gopal 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 by by 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 north to south was singing leader I mean he was German was the language of of the culture it was the language of the intellectual and that never left him and so I think that weirdly this is the first time because I think it'll be too late if we wait for in 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 I think the I think the challenge on the on the Germany side is that it's it's it's it's sort of I had I'd somewhat of a you know 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 he spoke German at home and lived in Africa and Namibia where it went to German speaking school but it was it was very different I think from the from from the general post-world war ii german experience and and i and so there are gather all these things that i can see from the outside looking in to germany that i think are you know it's still like i still have a connection to it and this of all these ways you know you visited it as a child many times and this is something that i connect with and it's it's obviously like like super different you know and and the the sort of you know the contrast of germany in california always like to give is that california's optimistic but desperate and germany's pessimistic but comfortable but the from a Californian perspective the past the the incredibly deep pessimism is is is is is is really really striking and and even on that one dimension i think you know jewish culture is is super different well and I feel like Jewish culture is in part starting to attenuate that we don't feel 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 and 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 at any 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 ii seems to suggest the same nation and 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 is you know we can you sort of describe these things we can speculate on you know you know some of the causal things it's uh I think it's a it's somehow we don't want to go back we can't go back and don't want to I agree and uh and so yeah there is there's a history and you know I I think something's been lost in both Germany and in Jewish culture and how when how in reconstitutes this is is is even we can convince people of you know the causes and the losses what you actually do about it is is super hard to say and that's uh that's sort of always the the strange dynamic in this something I'd be open to us working on at 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 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 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 were much more I think we believed that Trump was much more likely to get elected than the general population did and this has to do with the theory of preference falsification that people will 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 have a schrödinger's you had experiment you find out where the actually is yes I ya know I felt this was a dynamic that was going on in all these strange ways in in 2016 there was a dinner I had in San Francisco about a week before the election with a group of center-right people one 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 he 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's I couldn't say that he was gonna vote for Hillary Clinton like the facial muscles wouldn't work or something would go wrong but Gary Johnston was 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 you know collapsed from - um like six to two percent or whatever and as far as i can tell all of that went to to trump and and the question one has to ask is were these people you know lying all along were they lying to themselves did they sincerely change their mind in the last month or some some combination of that but but yeah one one sort of vehicle for this preference falsification was that you had got a third party Canada was sort of a gateway to the transitions this would happen with Ross Perot where the people when you know eventually went to Clinton in 92 or John Anderson in 1980 so that's been that's been a sort of repeated pattern and that's I think that was one element of what was going on but then I think there were also um all these all these aspects of of the Trump candidacy that people were super uncomfortable about polite society and and so one would you know that the preference falsification was somehow perhaps much greater than in in many other other past contexts and so you know even even the day of the election the exit polls suggested that Trump was going to lose and so there was still a two to three percent effect like this literally the day of the voting well I look I voted for Bernie in the primaries and I felt that both you and I had realized that the Clinton neoliberal story was a slow-motion 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 true of course of course one of the complicated questions all this is um you know did people actually already this and were they lying about this so like everybody was saying all the way throughout 2016 most of the people are 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 20/20 hindsight I wonder was the fact that everyone was clicking on the Nate Silver a 538 statistical polling model cite 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 it wasn't really as done a deal as they they were they were constantly saying so so there's there's even a version of that question that I I wonder about yeah I'm you know because there was something about the polling that took on this unusually iconic role in 2016 it was so important and there was no truth outside the polls I remember there's you know one of the Democrat Talking Heads saying something like you know publicans don't believe in you know climate change they also don't believe in polls that's why they're going to lose and generally polls are right but there was something about how how all-important they were in 2016 that that might have been a tell that something something was a little bit of us I think people knew and 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 and skillful in sidelining Bernie and we're the party regulars were you know clearly backing Clinton my sense is that it could well have been Bernie versus Trump and that would have been enough to say the neoliberal story is over so I think there was that fear that this was coming to an end 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 war monger turned the u.s. into a police state which of course doesn't seem to have happened as of this moment in 2019 yes yes 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 IIIi look I'll concede your point they were they were pretty shocked they were shocked but you know if but I still have my question why were they clicking on the national interest a few times a day one version of it was let's say even if Hillary trounced Trump but it wasn't enough that would be a scary thing given what Trump had been built up to which is a you know orange Hitler you know if you imagine that your country is supporting somebody who thinks all Mexicans are rapists and is going to take the country back to you know to the Middle Ages it would be very disconcerting if such a person could get 20% of the vote so I think that the poll had his own significance however you know I I think that one of the things about preference falsification is is that when you start to believe that this is a robust phenomenon that all of the economic models that assume that your private preferences and public preferences are the same 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 as not to get surprised by revolutions well it's always um you know it's always this question on in my mind this question of preference falsification the two McCrone theories tightly coupled to this question of you know how intense is the problem of political correctness where how how much pressure is there on people to say things they don't actually believe and and 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 say what they think that it's it's sort of dangerous to use you use the Silicon Valley context um it's a problem that Silicon Valley has become a one-party state but there are two different senses in which you can be a one-party state one sense is that everybody just happens to believe this one thing which you know um you know 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 for like a it's a dynamic with super majorities where you know we is in a democracy we think fifty-one percent of people believe something they're probably right if 70 to 80 percent believe something it's almost more certainly right but if you have ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the people believe something at some point you shifted from democratic truth to North Korean and sanity and and so there is there's a subtle tipping point where the wisdom of crowds shifts into into something that's sort of softly totalitarian or something like that so in my mind it maps you know very much on to this 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 what we think we all love stalling we all of chairman mao and and maybe you know we're just singing these songs because we're all enthusiastic about it and and i think my read on it is that that's that problem has gotten more acute in 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 darkweb concept in part to create kind of a broad-based and bipartisan coalition of 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 at work and then when I asked them well what is it that you can't say it work it's absolutely shocking mm-hmm completely commonplace things and things that are not at all dangerous not not Saverio frightening one of the things I believe and I don't know whether you're gonna you're gonna agree with this is that you start to understand that a lot of the people who are enforcing the political correctness suspect that they are covering up dangerous truths so for example if you believe that IQ equals intelligence which I do not I mean let's just be honest about it you're going to fear anything that shows a variation in IQ between groups if you don't believe IQ 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 and this is 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 Aryan equivalents suggests that males and females one protein apart sry 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 to have an intellectual conversation that was quite open about it so maybe I can turn that around is it yeah I let me see there's sort of a lot of different things I want to react to there I um yeah I suspect that it's it's a distraction of sorts you know I think I mean I'm this very superficial layer and we want to have we want to have debates when I've debates in a lot of areas a lot of you know hard questions and their 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 and 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 hairdo 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 the that that political correctness starts with correctness about politics and the that's it this time 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 you know and we're you know we're certainly not gonna have a debate about string theory if we can't even have a common sense debate about politics or something like that um 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 that what's going on our society is like a psychosocial magic hypnotic magic trick where you know we're being distracted from from something something very important and political correctness identity politics in maybe American exceptionalism sort of these these various ideological systems on you know are distracting us from things the the you know the thing I keep thinking is the main thing is distracting us from is the stagnation and is that you know that there are these problems that that we don't want to talk about in our society it's possible it's also a way to distract us from bad thoughts that we have about people or the sword use you said but the one 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 and politics with these zombie politicians and you know you know Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever it might might be is that we're 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 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 want to emphasize issues of Merit because you don't really think that the merit is gonna translate and so therefore all you can focus on like you know a 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 right 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 that is already there and so I worry that that is you know I guess where I break with a lot of progressives is that I believe that most progress comes from progress rights technologically led and informational II led that the more we know and the more we can do the more we can take care of people yes I I mean again this is always maybe naive hope on my part or or um or something like this but I always think that when we can't talk about things yeah I can't solve them and and that this is exactly and so that maybe these are maybe these are the calculations you make and this is you know this is the way we Pat people on the head even though they're never gonna get ahead or something like that but you know it's never going to work it's people aren't that stupid and they will eventually figure it out and so that's that's that's sort of why I'm under motivated to play that game 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 watched the world go from viewing removing Gawker as removing a nuisance or worse that was threatening people selectively to a concern you know about like First Amendment rights and silencing you know free speech and you know III do have the strong sense that people are willfully misinterpreting these actions that are necessary to sort of self correct in our society and are not being terribly honest there's a lot of bad faith acting and in our system at the moment yeah but you know again I'm always I'm always like this again where I'm I'm always quite hopeful that people realize there's a lot of bad faith acting and they they you know they just can't like go out of it accordingly and I you know um you know I I don't know how many of the people disagree with me on the the support for Trump you know we'll be more open to it in five years or ten years and we'll see on the Gawker matter I'm you know I'm gonna win that one and and I think that 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 right they have to act in sociopathic ways to get clicks by their readers right that this is just the game they have to play I think people I agree than you think and uh and therefore you know it's it's uh 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 nothing I think I was I was extremely disturbed by Gawker a decade decade and a half 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 the scapegoating machine but people didn't see it as such um and because of that it was it was super powerful once you you know 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 in litigation again against Gawker I think it would be a weaker version of that today because and you know there are of course equally nasty things on the internet but they're not as powerful because a little well-organized people people can sort of us the there's more transparency into them into the bad motives and people get it and the hate factory only works when it's not perceived as 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 reputation 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 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 few remember this when Trump won you had a gathering at your house and you did not invite me and I was so pissed at you that even though I was tooth and nail against Trump and I remain really pretty close to a never Trump er 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 F through these windows Trump has not changed mostly day to day life except for the phenomenon of Trump but it's it's no there's the gate you know a policeman on every street corner with a an automatic rifle we're not in some sort of siege from the White House and you said I think much less is going to happen than people imagine and I think we're going to be in a much less interventionist mode then we were previously and whether or not you were right or you're wrong so far I think you've been borne out to be right on both of those points I knew that you had an idea that we had to shake things up or we were going to be in some very dangerous situation there was I mean I had two speeches in 2016 one was at the Republican convention one was at 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 neoconservative neoliberal foreign policies of you know on that you know Bush 43 that Obama still continued and that Hillary was was likely to can been likely to continue on and and I still think that that's roughly what's happened it's not been it's not been as far away from interventionism as I would like but it's directionally directionally that's happened and I think and I think that you know I do think we're not going to go back to that on the Republican side which is like a very important thing we're not going to go back to the Bush foreign policy ever yeah that's that's in him that's that that was an important thing you know it was it was when when in the in the primaries when you know publican primaries when when Trump spoke out against the Iraq war right that was you know that was a very important moment for my point of view yeah and I think you know I think you know we always think of the you know I think the way one way to think of the president United States is that you're sort of the mayor of this country and but you're the dictator of the world because in the u.s. your power is very limited outside the US you can do a you know a great number of things and that's why I think these these foreign policy questions are actually are very important ones in assessing a president well 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 oral torah 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 the 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 be said and done not that I did think I did think that we needed to break out of our Overton Window if you will on many topics I was just the way that Trump touched those whereas not comfortable for me yes look I don't look yeah I agree there are certain ways in which President Trump does not act presidential in the way in which the previous presidents inarguable things that need it and then maybe said but then maybe there's some point where it was too much acting and the acting was counterproductive and that's that's you know it's it's it's III I think there is something extraordinary about how it was possible for someone like Donald Trump to get elected and and probably a useful question for people on both the left and the right would be to to try to think about you know what the underlying problems were with some of the solutions to that are and and you know it's you know I think I think I think the the left or the Democrats you know they could think it 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 this 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 beaten 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 that it couldn't actually you know if you imagine that he's orange Hitler you would think orange Hitler would be the occasion to think deeply in question hypotheses and I really had been shocked at 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 ya know it's it's I think this feels a lot of time to to do that and 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 the the big distraction on on the left over the last 40 50 years have come in forms of identity politics where you know we we don't look at the country as a whole we look at parts of it and and sort of it on it and it's sort of been a way of you know um I think obscuring these questions of stagnation Pharaoh had a right I would say the right the right wing distraction technique has been a would say something like American exceptionalism which is interesting which is you know this doctrine that the u.s. 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 and you know it's if you want the it's it's I think it in theological or epistemological terms you can compare it to the radical monotheism of the God of the Old Testament where um it means that 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 there may be all these things on the ground that seem crazy we're you know we you know we have people who are exceptionally overweight we have we have subway systems that are exceptionally expensive to build we have universities they're exceptionally sociopathic I mean you know of the student debt problem any other country on you know we have a trade regime that's exceptionally bad for our country like no other country is self-destructive this they're all these things that we somehow don't ask us I think exceptionalism somehow led to this country that was exceptionally and strange and that's uh that's um and so you know there's you know greatness is adjacent to exceptionalism but it's actually still quite different because many countries can be great and great is more it's more a scale and there's some something you measure it against multi an area it's where as exceptional it's just completely and commensurate with anything else and and and I think that's that's gotten us into have very very bad cool to sack night I think that 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 monster is flopping about more violently than ever and even though I think it might be its death throes but maybe not yeah it could be that it's gotten very strong or it could be on its last legs and it might as well go for broke yes so let me return back to the the line of inquiry I mean I'm sorry I just enjoying so much hearing what you have to say some of its new to me the 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 it before was Gerard's various theories and I wonder if you might say you've often credited your success in business to 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 Renee Gerard's theories as a portal into a different way of seeing the world well it's a little bit about the theory so it's a it was sort of this um theory of human psychology as deeply mimetic where you sort of um you copy other people so just for the folks at home mimetic as in mime rather than me medic is in meme yes can closely relate you imitate people but you imitate that's how you learn to speak as a child you copy your parents language that's how then you also imitate desire and then there are sort of all sorts of aspects of mimesis can lead to sort of mass violence mass insanity so it has it's it's both what enables human culture to function but it also it also is is quite quite dangerous and you know when I came across the sort of constellation of ideas as an undergraduate at Stanford my my biases were sort of libertarian classic liberal you know only individuals exist individuals who radically autonomous can can think for themselves and so this was a it was both you know it was sort of a powerful corrective to that intellectually but then it also worked on an existential level where you sort of realized while there all these ways that I've been hyper mimetic I've been hyper tracked why my Stanford what does this matter so much why you know why am i doing all the things I'm doing and and and that's it's a prism through which one one looks at a lot of things that's uh that I found to be you know quite helpful over over over recent decades I think the preference falsification you can think of in mimetic 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 you know not simply rational it's not quite correct to to model people as these sort of classical atoms or something like that it's more entangled do you 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 for the number of different books that Gerard wrote I think the the Magisterial one is probably things hidden since the foundation of the world so it's this truth of mimesis and violence and the waste so it's sort of part psychology part anthropology part part history you know all portal I should point out because it's the draw hit it's you know it's a portal onto the past onto human origins it's a it's a and our history it's a portal onto the present onto the interpersonal dynamics of psychology it's uh it's um you know it's a portal onto the future in terms of you know you know are we going to let these mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence for you know um even the entire planet to come no longer absorb the violence that we can unleash or are we gonna learn from this and and transcend this and in a way where we 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 and just extraordinarily different from from what when one would normally hear there was you know there was there's sort of like almost a cult-like element where you had you know these people who are followers of Gerard and it 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 so you know it was always this parts of it that are unhealthy but but it was um you know it was it has sort of an incredible dynamism and then just you are aware that you know maybe things are so different from how how they appear to be that you know it's you know there may be a portal out there there may be you know what 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 a quite a lot of anger and furor 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 scapegoat in Waiting so that the king is not necessarily something that one would 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 a person who's 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 as individuals because of the possibility of being picked off you know I I think um well I think it has Universal thinking I think it is you know oddly 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 there are certain types of people who are more likely to become scapegoats but but it's not an absolute thing yeah and so there is you know there's always um you could say there's an arbitrariness about scapegoating because the scapegoat is supposed to represent to stand in for for everybody and so 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 are times when the scapegoat is the sort of outlier you know extreme insight or extreme outsider you know King slash criminal or you know whatever personality and that's that's probably a dangerous sort of thing it's like Abraham Lincoln the the incredible orator who's also grows up in a log cabin so you know these sort of extreme contrasts are often often um you know people who who are at risk of this maybe more than others and then at the same time you know because these are 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 but yes it's a it's it's it's it's a yes but there's sort is a thought that one of the sort of history ideas that Gerard had that is is that is that there's a dynamic to this process where scapegoating it only works when people don't understand it and so there's 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 you know if you have a witch-hunt say you know we need to find a witch to bring back peace to the community that's sort of a psychosocial understanding of what you're doing is actually counterproductive the witch hunt itself you know the witch hunt is supposed to be supposed to be a theological epiphany right you know that God's telling you who the witches if you think of it as some sort of psychosocial control mechanism then they won't work anymore and so so that you know the metaphor that Gerard uses is that you know um the sacred is like phlogiston 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 will will 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 scapegoat the scapegoat or sort of go up one level that's actually and and that sort of always it 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 uh that's often you know that's often a super powerful way and since it's like slightly too complicated there was 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 itself contradictory yeah 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 um sort of works even though um you know it's it's again when everyone sees these moves when everyone understands them it just doesn't work that well anymore so it's like it's like it's like saying well like would you like me to prescribe you a placebo in other words that probably does not work very well it doesn't work very well it probably does not work very well and 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 yes 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 you know a way to limit violence that that you know we violated by Allah knew I've out violence and this is this is how this is how our societies how our societies work and then it's it's it's not quite clear how things will will continue to work so there's yeah so you could always say that there's a sense in which and this is 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 and there and there are ways in which um they're both right and then there ways in which they're they're both deconstructing each other I suppose you could say the nation-state a nation-state contains violence in both senses of the word contain because that's good it contains it as it limits it a channels it in certain ways well then it's also part of part of its very being and and you got into 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 you know it's a very serious problem but to also recognize hands instrumental major she said we're gonna get rid of all violence tomorrow it's gonna stop you'd be talking about nothing or I think I think so he's no way in which that can well that that might require tremendous amount of violence to enact or on or if we're gonna have no more violence at all you'll you know maybe you'll have just total chaos and a lot of violence well in that form so it's it's a it's a it's an interesting problem to ant yeah they're sort of all these interesting descriptors but then how to 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'll 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 by us and we are actually envious of oppression and there is something of a civil war I mean I would say this is the way in which the IDW is left wing or left flank is misunderstood which is that almost none of the left wing members of the IDW are interested in oppressing anybody so there's no give me no payback period that that sounds like fun to us and one of the things I hadn't understood until it was said to me quite starkly if progress is messy you got to 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 whereas the cessation of oppression is interesting to another part of that group yes much less 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 gonna stop them and if you try to construct a political speech in um it was we're gonna unite people we're gonna get everybody onto the skull 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 I and and and so I you know it's it's uh let me take issue with that slightly my excitement was it a political speech exactly what you said so I don't think I miss can 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 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 progress scientific progress more people being able to form families etc that's where the excitement is it's not coming from the politics it's coming from what the politics facilitates and 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 for mm-hmm we might as well riot or something because at least that's exciting and that's got some energy behind it and then it's my team versus your team but I think that would both you and I have been focus um level anybody is focused on technology as you are is a progressive in the sense of caring 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 crowd at a 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 described I I just one of the right Joey it often is not and and so yes scientific technological progress right in a way can hope as it can lead towards a more cornucopia in which there's um less Malthusian struggle less less violence um and then at the same at the very same time you know an honest account of the history 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 one sort of account of the tech stagnation the scientific tech stagnation is that you know the the breakthrough thing was the atom bomb and then you know we and then you built the rockets to deliver the bombs more quickly and by 1970 we had enough bombs and rockets destroy the world ten or twenty times over or whatever and the whole thing made no more sense and and so if one of the big drivers of scientific and technological progress was um was actually just this sort of military dimension when that 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 it 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 does it really make sense for people working 80 hours a hundred hours a week around the clock and again I don't think it's all that but but I think one of the one of the challenges that and we should not understate how big it is in resetting Science and Technology in the 21st century is you know how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice incredibly hard work deferred gratification for the future that's uh that's not intrinsically violent yeah and and and it was it was combined with that in 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 is it because I think this is this is like this is one of the reasons you know if you sort of take people you know the 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 as well you know maybe it's not progressing as but do we really want it to progress this fast and isn't it dangerous and isn't it you know we're just gonna build the AI that's gonna kill everybody or it'll be you know biological weapons or it's going to be you know runaway nanotechnology or you know and and and III don't think we should you know dismiss those fears you know completely they're not completely oh the fear is that it's going to make these things cheap and easy whereas right now you you still need a state to do a lot of this work I mean you know you let the Elan musk is one of the first private individuals with a space program you know 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 maybe it's a large state maybe it's you know maybe it's autonomous AI weapons which in theory are controlled by state but in practice not quite so it's yeah there's sort of all these all these scenarios where the stuff can conspire a lot of control you know I I I'm more scared of the one where nothing happens right so I'm I'm more scared of like the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes this is straight to apocalypse this is the way my much more scared of that but we have to understand why people are scared of the non stagnant world well it's a very straight I mean point they're a couple of threads here that are 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 how much fossil fuels you're able to burn climate is not paired with kind of a reduction in opulence it's paired on the other side with with war and if you over focus on climate and you result in a situation in which growth is 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 your face 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 an economy without an environment but it may also be the case that you can't have into our environment without an economy right and and and then if both of those statements are true 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 so yeah it is why it's so important for me to have environments in which people who don't agree on things would agree on what constitutes a conversation can sit down with an idea that nobody's going to leave the table so but the reputation in tatters to the extent that they can't find a job on Monday to support themselves is that you have to actually weigh both of these things simultaneously and the great danger is people trying to solve either problem in isolation well you know um you know if one goes with a general climate change narrative that you know it's it's anthropogenic it's um it's the co2 levels are rising in in a way that's dangerous and has you know serious risk of some kind of big big runaway process um you know I think always the the political question my mind is on you know what do you do about China and what do you do about India because these are the countries that are you know trying to catch up to the developed world they have an enormous way to go to catch up and and you know it's a helical consequence I think Western Europe you're I think Europe has something like 8% of the carbon emissions in the world and and then and then we have to have more than just the sort of magical political thinking where it's something like 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 and people aren't they're not willing 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 know you need to do some really different things we need to find energy sources that are not carbon dioxide intensive maybe we need to figure out ways to engineer carbon sinks you know the is all the sort of crazy geoengineering stuff that maybe should be on the table maybe we should be more open to to nuclear power either sort of like a range of very different debates it pushes you towards let me take a slightly different tack the two statements that I found later in life unfortunately but have both been meaningful to me one is vapors definition that a government is a monopoly on violence and and the other one it's a guy I can never remember who said I think as 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 then 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 able to 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 trade-offs let's say yes why I always do think there's a privacy transparency trade-off and and and there's it's always you know it's always a one thing is always confusing about transparency it means there's transparency in theory which is like this panopticon like thing where the entire planet gets illuminated brightly and equally everywhere all at once and and so that's in theory but then in practice it is often it sounds more like a weapon that will be directed against certain people we're on you know it's a question of who gets to render who it's transparent and who gets and maybe it's even a secret path dependent sequencing question where if you do it first for strike first strike transparency is very powerful and so you think about like you know um mr. Snowden against the NSA and then the NSA trying to expose mr. Snowden's Swedish a sex cult or whatever you want to describe it as and and I think a lot of it ends up having having that kind of an having sizes it's very Assange sorry two something yeah Assange yeah Assange is swedish sex called someone's you can see NSA NSA against Assange is swedish sex culture so bright like that and that's yeah and and and so i I think um if 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 through all these ways that that would seem creepy totalitarian if we if we you know if you stated in terms of the problem of violence right you can think of the trade-off between transparency and privacy as you know transparency is you know we're looking at everybody and therefore they can't be that violent but the state may be very violent and forcing all this transparency and privacy is you know um you get to have a gun and you get to do various dangerous things in the dark and no one knows what they are and so there's probably more violence on the individual level but then less control on the state and it's again this question of you know are you more scared of the violence of individuals or more scared of centralized violence and you probably one should not be too categorical or too absolute about this but you know it can 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 twenty 19:4 simply saying well I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant as if that constituted an argument now 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 disinfectant 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 and the inspiration for turn turn turn there was an idea that there was a purpose to everything and inclusion or exclusion were both needed a time to kill a time to die 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 in the modern era you know and 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 account for it yeah everything you know if you sort of have no backroom deals maybe that's less corrupt but maybe nothing that's functional you know it's the US Supreme Court still doesn't televise its hearings and I suspect that's that's the right call even though you know that it's there's always ends if 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 you know if you're a politician or aspiring politician on and you you want to you know you're not going to engage in bold ideas you're not going to experiment with different different ways about thinking about things you're going to be super conventional super curated and 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 you know they come with a very very high cost on and and I I do you know I I do wonder if 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 watch there's this you know great eye of Sauron to use the Tolkien metaphor that's looking at you at all times and 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 if you're always being watched um I suspect it really changes your behavior you know it's interesting 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 on the street where we live and you know you I'd never noticed them before but sure enough there they were in in 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 are surrounding us at all time let me ask you about one more theory before we break for this session we can have you on at another point it's been great talking are you familiar with the theory of Jennifer Freud's called institutional betrayal uh I know you've mentioned to me but I don't know all the details so tell me a little bit 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 your agent in order to take care of you that the 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 going to ask you about is given our central belief that there was something about growth that led to universal betrayal by institutions which is compromised experts in the minds of most people do you think there's a preferred way of waking up as a society out of a kind of universal institutional betrayal if we're excited about the next chapter what I'd love to talk to you about in a future episode is what we're excited about about what comes next is there a way of waking up from this most gracefully don't know don't know about that it it strikes me that there are ways we don't want to wake up and we don't want to wake up in a way where it D energizes us and demotivates and so 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 you know motivational and you study you get good grades you'll succeed in our system right and and so one way you know when you sort of deconstruct these institutions you know there's sort of one one direction that I think is always very dangerous that it just shifts people into sort of a much more nihilistic very low-energy mode where it's just well there's no point nothing can be done and and that's the way I that's that's the that's the way that I definitively do not want to wake people up so I think it has to always be coupled a little bit to you know um yeah that 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 to you need to look at and if you uh if we are just saying all the paths are blocked you know I think probably the risk is people just sit down where they are and stop moving altogether and that's that that feels like the very wrong way 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 like seasteading or radical longevity or some other ideas from your background in venture capital and as 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 belong to all this time what are what are the first sort of subjects and people that you would move back into institutional support to re-energize our society um people or programs well I do I do think there is something about basic science that has you know doesn't all have this sort of for-profit character someone has this nonprofit character we're building up this knowledge base for all of humanity and and and so and so I don't yet know how we do basic science without some kind of institutional context and so that's one that's that would seem you know absolutely critical you know I I'm super interested in the you know problem of longevity radical life extension and you know my my sort of disappointment in the nonprofit institutions in nonprofit world has directed me more and more over the years to just invest in biotech companies and try to find these sort of on better functioning corporate solutions and then I always have this worry in the back of my my head that maybe there are these basic research problems that they're being sidestepped because they're four to hard so I I think I think basic science is is one that that you you'd have to do and but you have to somehow also reform the institutions so you 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 on everything 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 as crazy he certainly has a lot on the ball and probably is the exactly the kind of a person who might energize a department even if you might infuriate if you can get him back in you would 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 a 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 are most excited about doing next we'll 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 comment section below on YouTube [Music] [Music]

Channel: Eric Weinstein

Views: 1,032,345

Rating: 4.8793983 out of 5

Keywords: Portal, Thiel, Peter Thiel, Technology, Science, Education, Universities, College, Economy, Future, Debt, Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, The Portal, Girard, Violence, Stagnation, High Tech, Tech, AI, Life Extension, Trump, Politics, Preference Falsification, College Debt, Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google, Communism, Stalin, Mao, Marx, Capitalism

Id: nM9f0W2KD5s

Length: 172min 6sec (10326 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/chartbuster]

Listened to this the other day. Decent talk although I’m a tiny bit weary of the armchair think-tanky ness these two can trot into.

In regards to Scientific progress, isn’t Eric talking more about Physics? I think the difference between what Sam would ‘worry’ about in terms of A.I. is more along the lines of technological progress. I find it difficult to grant that our soft and hardware hasn’t been progressing at very steady rates so far this century.

I don’t, however, necessarily believe Moore’s law will necessarily stay at a steep incline. But will go through periods of stagnation. I actually would think periods of technological and scientific stasis might be beneficial in the long run in terms of a broader metaphorical chance to evaluate what we have before the next thing is already underway- to gather our bearings. Considering some of what we presume to be convenient and novel (social media) can become a runaway train. Having a chance to learn from mistakes isn’t a bad thing, in other words.

[u/victor_knight]

I would hope that Sam Harris (who is extremely optimistic about the promise of AI, as he was about medical science before that) take a good listen to these two men who put things in proper perspective. Science, unfortunately, is not progressing at an accelerated rate as most people (including Sam) thinks. In fact, it is probably slowing down if it hasn't stagnated already.

[u/bitterrootmtg]

I intuitively agreed with some of their claims, but I was struck by the absence of any discussion of actual data or statistics. If you want to claim the prevailing narrative on progress is radically wrong, it would be helpful to have evidence.

Would love to hear Thiel interviewed by Russ Roberts of Econtak, who always has intelligent skepticism and pushback when guests claim progress (economic or scientific) is slowing.

[u/Stratahoo]

If you want to learn about stagnation, read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher.

[u/SigmaB]

Peter Thiel almost went full mask off with his ideas about race when he talked about how Germany wasn’t acknowledging that they killed their “best people”, and that they have a lot less dynamism due to loss of Jews. Weird take and doesn’t seem like Germany is “not dynamic”, at least not any less than other countries.

As far as I’ve heard, “Thiel” is much more red pilled than he lets on, at least according to some leaked chats between some people at his Trump election party (that Eric wasn’t invited to.)

[u/planetprison]

Good talk for very average people who greatly overestimate their own intelligence and like to feel smart by listening to right wing pseudo-intellectual nonsense.

Very convenient that billionaire Peter Thiel thinks all redistribution talk by people like Bernie is evil because it's targeting the lower middle class. I'm sure he has no self-interest on this issue and his opposition to higher taxes really is about concern for the poor lower middle class.

[u/Palentir]

I think we are stagnant to a degree, and it's because we already have most of what is required for a comfortable life now without much need for inventions. The Earth is of fixed size and we can already fly to any point on the globe in about a day. We already have enough food and clothing and so on to care for everyone (the problem being distribution, not amount), and everyone has a pretty nice computer in their pockets. As such we aren't working all that hard to invent new classes of products. It's probably going to stay that way until we have permanent bases in space.

[u/agent00F]

Timecube guy interviews his trump loving boss. Big fans of the 14 words like OP find it very educational. Pretty much the IDW in nutshell.

[u/backtoleddit]

So is Eric Weinstein podcast BS or what?