Peter Thiel Speaks at Brain Bar

good evening ladies and gentlemen what can I bring more and thank you so much for joining us tonight first of all I would like to welcome on stage and introduce you your hosts your moderator one of our returning speakers professor Steve fuller I found it drain bar a little bit more than three years ago to inspire my generation but also the younger ones by bringing the most interesting most inspiring and most challenging people's to do the best and thanks to my really marvelous team we have achieved some modest success this time is still different following his life for more than a decade and carefully reading every single piece by and about him well I can tell you is that the arrival of this guy quite simply is the defining moment of rain bars history ladies and gentlemen please welcome on stage b13 [Music] okay first of all thanks to everyone for showing up to this this is going to be a momentous event and this is a great place for it to be here because this is this is the festival of the Future for Europe so Peter why don't you take it away with your opening statement well Steve when one talks about the future and the future of Technology it's it's always hard to know where this is going to go where it's going to happen I think I think rather than start with the future maybe it's worth just reflecting a little bit on the past and how people thought technology computers were going to develop in the past and I think if we look over the last 60 70 years of the computer age there were very different visions people had of how it would develop and if you sort of go back to say the late 1960s people had a view of computers as being the sort of powerfully centralizing force that you'd have sort of large computers large databases that that would run the planet there was sort of the science-fiction movies 2001 Space Odyssey if sort of the computer that's running it's a little bit too powerful it's Hal or IBM one letter different from from the computer in Space Odyssey there's a there's a early Star Trek original Star Trek episode where they become to this planet beta where there's a computer that's been running the planet for 8,000 years and it sort of runs the whole planet the people are kind of peaceful but boring nothing ever happens and and as usual they on the Star Trek people they don't follow the prime directive and they sort of convinced the computer to destroy itself and then hit you know history begins again but but that was sort of the future at circa 1968 it was that the the computer age would be massively centralizing and then if we are fast forward to the late 1990s people thought of computer technology as powerfully decentralizing that the information age would break down very large structures and was certainly linked to on the fall of the Soviet Union and you know the dissemination of information there wouldn't be a single centralized source of truth it would be much more diffused and and that you'd have sort of this very decentralized crypto anarchists future and that was that was sort of the future of the world circa 1998 and if you then fast forward to 2008 een somehow we're back to 1968 we're back to thinking that the computer age means evermore centralization in the form of you know large companies large governments large databases but what I think this history tells us is that we should at least realize since the pendulum has swung so wildly from one end to the other we should at least be open and we should ask this question is it really going to be ever more centralization or could it could it go could it also go the other way and certainly on you know if I was if I was betting on it might my sort of contrarian bias at this point would be to bet on decentralization because the pendulum is so far in one direction I tend think it can only go go the other way and you can you can sort of frame this in terms of specific technologies so I think that in some ways AI artificial intelligence which is this very ambiguous word it means all these different things but it certainly stands for more centralization it stands for the computers the database is knowing more about you than you know about yourself it's like the it's like the God of st. Augustine it's completely inside you it's completely outside you it knows more about you than you know about yourself and and that's sort of this powerful centralizing vision of the future but then I think the alternate technology would be something like crypto and and all these technologies that suggest there'll be more room for privacy for individual sovereignty for for things going very much the other way and sort of you want ideological formula you know if crypto is libertarian which is the way it often gets described then we should also say that AI is communist and and you know the easy way to see this is the you know the Chinese Communists government loves AI it hates crypto and and it's because it understands that it is you know these technologies different technologies can push it very much you know in one direction or another but I think you know I think this general theme of are we heading towards more centralization or decentralization is one that we should it's worth thinking about a lot let me let me give a more concrete version of this in terms of starting on tech companies building on new businesses and and there's a centralized version of this where tech is somehow centered on Silicon Valley it's something that happens there it was I there was a talk I gave about 13 years ago in 2005 at Stanford University in Palo Alto and the the question that was raised at the time was where will we find the next Google which was you know interesting from a it was mostly a student student audience at Stanford University and people were interested in joining the company that was going to be the next Google it was a search question but you can't type it in on the search engine so it's a very important question but you couldn't type it into Google and get the answer and and the answer I gave at the time was that I thought there was a 50% chance that you would find it within five miles of the room we were at or eight kilometers so it's like I'm still like yet still search that area but that was there was a one millionth one one millionth of the surface area of the of the planet was within you know eight kilometers of the of that auditorium at Stanford University on you know I think the correct answer in some ways turned out to be Facebook and it was actually about it was about three kilometers from from where we were at the time a 2.8 2.9 kilometers by bike 3 kilometers by car something like that and now if you had a fast-forward to 2018 if I had to give the same the same talk I think it's a much less than 50% chance that it would be within 50 miles with an 80 kilometers of Silicon Valley I think it is going to be much more decentralized these things can happen you know in many different places the knowledge of what it takes to build companies is much more diffuse and even though there are these Network advantages that you have in a place like Silicon Valley or that you have in the in the in the big cities they also have some costs and some disadvantages and and and you know one one way to articulate this in the in the context of Silicon Valley is that even though you have on you have network effects you have other people who've done it you have on you have capital you have sort of this all's institutional history that's very helpful you all it's you know it also you have a tax that comes with it it's gotten very expensive to live there it's gotten there's certain a certain on a certain conformity of thought that is helpful up to some point and then beyond that point gets to be very counterproductive and so um and if I had to bet on where it would happen I think I think we have to look you know far more you know all over the world you know there and I think there's been some early signs of this in recent years that it's uh it's going to happen outside of Silicon Valley of the crypto phenomenon has been very diffused that's happened in you know many places outside of Silicon Valley it's something Silicon Valley's largely missed you know the Chinese internet which again has all these political dimensions that happen in China not in Silicon Valley and I think over the next decade it will be it will be much more much more decentralized in various ways and so I think that's a that's that's this very big trend I would I would point to okay well thank you very much for that Peter and I was wondering given what you said that the the fact that you've recently in the least in the past and this year moved to Los Angeles is that some indication that in a sense you're leading by example in moving away from Silicon Valley I don't want to exaggerate any any of these things but but yes I think there were there were tremendous advantages to being in Silicon Valley for a very long time and at this point I think it's a it's it's quite a bit more ambiguous and it's not it's not just myself if you look at if you look at something like Y Combinator though the most prominent of the Silicon Valley accelerators four or five years ago people would come from all over the US all over the world to Y Combinator was a three to six month program and then you'd stay there and you build your company today the pattern is much more you go there for three to six months and then you come back to where you start where you were from it was just much it's gotten much less expensive to build companies outside of the outside of the mega cities you know we've been we've been in this age of globalization where we were we told that the future is in the big cities there's no future outside the big city so it's New York or Silicon Valley London and Europe and and I think we're headed towards a time where it's gonna be a little bit more balanced now this distinction that you've raised between AI versus crypto which I think people who followed your work know about and and it kind of tracks it sort of general trajectory in in the way in which you might even say civilization develops right we go from centralized to decentralized and since information technology is the primary form of technology driving everything we have this pattern there - do you see I mean the way you've presented it in your introductory remarks is that you make it seem like it is a kind of cyclical thing but is there anything in the middle that's stable so I think I think it's always a question of human choice human agency what what choices we make we talk ourselves into these stories that it's going to be centralized or decentralized today the dominant story is one of further centralization and I think it's a much more it's a much more open question you know we're not we're not at the end of history no no I understand that and in fact I guess let's okay so let's accept for the moment this kind of fictional narrative that there it is somewhat cyclical do you think that people now should be aiming for more decentralization so for example in Europe we've got this this general data protection regulation that's just been imposed right which which in a sense is an attempt I guess to re-regulate stuff that in a sense had been deregulated I mean I take it this is something that you would oppose yeah although III am sympathetic to a lot of the concerns about about privacy and and certainly on you know certainly I I would I would describe the GDP are as you know even though it's a you know it's an EU level regulation it is on it is in a sense it is a move away from you know the global Internet you know if you sort of think of globalization you know I often thought there are these different dimensions of globalization it's a movement of people's immigration policy its movement of goods trade policy its movement of money a bank regulation and then movement of ideas which is uh which is the the internet and and you know the top you know without commenting on the desirability of it the tide on this is just going out the tide is going out on globalization and if I had a rank these four types of things I would have thought the hardest one to regulate the hardest one to be against globalization was in the free movement of ideas and so you could sort of say that the EU with the with the GD P R is the you know it's it's building a wall greater than any wall president Trump is building it's more extreme than anything that you're doing because you know building a wall to stop people is much easier than building a wall to stop ideas but they are they're setting out to do it China succeeded in doing it yes was a Great Firewall of China and so there's nothing about the future that set in stone where where these things can't happen look I understand exactly what you're saying I think though if I may play devil's advocate from the EU standpoint and this is kind of the way the European Union normally thinks about itself it sees itself as actually a vanguard of a certain kind of globalization right a globalization that will allow protection of privacy that will allow free everything right I mean that's been the standard way with the European Union in you know the the idea is all these countries getting together would actually set a standard for a greater sense of globalization but you're presenting quite an opposite story in terms of how the EU narrative is going you're seeing it as ultimately a protectionist organization well again this and this I have a look I have an American Silicon Valley bias on this but certainly from from the point of view it's Silicon Valley it looks very much like it's targeted against the these sort of globalised big Silicon Valley Internet companies and and that Europe is saying they're different sets of rules apply in your from from elsewhere in the world and certainly Europe would like its rules to apply to the whole world but but as a starting point it is uh it is it's it's building a sister internet and separating Europe from from America and you know I'm not it I'm sympathetic to a lot of the privacy concerns but it's it's so much at odds with with this narrative that we have that all the walls are going away no no I agree with mean I think this is a real interesting kind of issue with regard to how the EU defines itself whether it sees itself as a very global universalizing thing or whether it's going to be protectionist because it's afraid about China or the US or somebody like that I want to ask you a little bit about China for a moment okay because in a sense China I mean at least in terms of how you presented this initially China setting a certain kind of standard with regard to its own protectionism with regard to the internet and so forth and I'm just wondering how do you see China figuring in the long term in terms of you know given that China is now already the second leading economic power who knows it may be the leading one before we know it I mean what do you see the role of China ultimately and how should people in in Europe respond to that well it's I you know it's again it's hard it's it's hard to the eye I can sort of depending which day you ask me at the you know China's gonna take over the world or its gonna collapse from its own internal contradictions or maybe maybe both I think the there's again something about a certain story we have about how history is going and you know there was the Fukuyama version and with liberal democracy and uh when you know President G was made president for life in China earlier this year from a libertarian or democratic perspective that's not a good thing from a from an anti history's determined perspective it was the definite end to the end of history yes so and so we live in a for better and for worse we live in a time when history has not ended and and I think so I don't think there's anything to terminus about what's going to happen you know it's it's it's it's and certainly not the case that that the Western EU Brussels understanding is automatically going to win okay so because you know one of the ways in which people thought Fukuyama's end of history by the way for those of you who don't know what we're talking about here Fukuyama in 1992 the end of history in the last man the idea was liberal democracy was gonna triumph over everything because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union and usually the way people talk about that story falling apart is because of terrorism in 911 right and the idea of Islamist Islamism and all that kind of stuff but here you're talking about a different kind of way in which the end of history story ends which has to do with the fact that maybe we weren't that the world wasn't all that committed to democracy in the first place and so I'm wondering you know when you look at somebody's you look at the way in which China is organized what we do have a kind of president for life kind of situation going on in a very advanced economy what do you see the fortunes for democracy generally speaking should China be in some sense be used as a kind of model or example because I think in this part of the world not and I mean in this part of the world Eastern Europe there there's a lot of questions up in the air about just how valuable democracy is especially parliamentary democracy well I think you know I think one of the questions is just what what kinds of things are charismatic what what kinds of things are futures that are likely to happen and so there is a narrative about China taking over the world so it has a certain certain power there is a narrative about AI taking over the world and replacing human beings I think there are a lot of other a lot of other possibilities about that but but certainly um certainly it's not automatic it's not just it's not just one thing and wheel it we live in a time when when I think these things are going to be more open-ended certainly I much preferred living in in a Western American or European context would be very uncomfortable living in in the sort of panoptic on like society that China has but just because it's undesirable doesn't mean that it can't be powerful or that it can't last for a very long time okay so let me ask you this question if I may I understand I you and I agree that freedom is a really important thing and that people should have it and so forth but do you think the time has passed when Elementary democracy is the best vehicle for delivering that I don't know what the alternatives are so III do think I I think I think there are ways in which um you know our the Western governments are not working that well they're all these things there that you know they're not they're not very competent they're sort of theirs for corruption they're all these things they're not doing well but but it's still like the Churchill question what's you know what is the better yeah yeah you know this certainly in a in a in a United States context there's been you know as a libertarian I'm always sort of anti-government anti-law when an extraordinary decline of competence of the of the US government and so you know we could we couldn't do the Manhattan Project anymore in the yes I I don't think they could send someone to the moon I I'm not even sure they can rebuild the building in Washington DC I understand this has been a very constant theme and you're thinking that the state doesn't work just Germany it's declined is that it has actually declined in the Western world yeah I live in San Francisco and in the backyard is the goal to the view you have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge which was built in three and a half years in the 1930s and then there's an access road to the bridge that cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars to build and took eight years to build and so that that sort of is again this on this extraordinary decline in incompetence that's that's happened and that's that's something and we shouldn't gloss it too ideologically so it's not you know the libertarian glosses all governments in all places don't work well this is why I want to know Peter what would it take for states to demonstrate that they are working I think the sort of question in a developed Western context would be that people think the futures getting better you know there's always a survey does the young generation think they will do better than their parents or not and and in the US the majority of young people think they'll be less well-off their parents in in Western Europe's and even smaller minority that thinks they will be better off in their parents and so that's I would say that's sort of an indicator of that were broadly not progressing in the right direction and certainly the government's not that well-functioning governments are a part of that that lack of progress there's always a way the technology story gets gets portrayed as you know accelerating technology it's getting faster things are changing at a dizzying speed and then you have sort of utopian versions which is sort of the Google propaganda of self-driving cars and you know space elevators and and things like that and then there's the dystopian version which is the Hollywood science fiction movies where the robots kill everybody or you know the whole world self-destructs but the both the accelerating and dystopian story is that things are happening so so fast and the the concern I have on the on the technology side is that things are not happening quickly enough and you know there are there certainly are certain verticals the computer piece is one where there has been a lot of change but you know the cell phones that you know the new cell phones that we have that distract us from our environment for the most part distract us from how our environment has not changed how you know if you're in London or New York City or riding on subways that are 100 years old and and and and so I I worry that this debate isn't really about you know utopian acceleration or dystopian apocalyptic technology destroying itself but that the the general stagnation is something we need to try to break Peter I can agree with you more but then I wonder why do you call yourself a conservative if what you're worried about is stagnation and the failure to progress and the lack of acceleration I mean why why because you know for example in a lot of the the news reporting about you like when you move to Los Angeles it's always said it was for because you're a conservative and I'm saying when I read your stuff or listen to you it's hard to actually see what's so conservative about you unless you mean conservative is that as a sort of synonym for libertarian look I think these these look I think these political labels are always more misleading than helpful but but certainly what I would say Framus in terms of Western civilization since the Enlightenment um it was a civilization in which every generation was better off than the generation that was before and so that that is actually that has been the way our societies have worked for you know at least 250 years maybe maybe even longer and and so and so the so the change towards stagnation that's that is a change from you know there's a certain way you can organize a society if it's progressing if it's growing if the economy grows 2 3 4 percent a year you can solve a lot of problems that's the way our parliamentary democracies work the way the way our democracies our Parliament's work is you have a growing pie and so yeah everybody agrees we figure out new ways to divide up the growing pie if the pie no longer grows then then I can only gain gain something by taking something from you that's right becomes this sort of zero-sum game it becomes more of a racket and then our whole system does not work very well if you look at you know the decades you know the 1930s we're sort of a bad decade for growth and for DeMarre lament eree democracy in the Western world and I would say I would say that our system only works with with growth if you try to have a zero growth Society maybe that works if you have something feudal maybe it works if you have something that's you know completely totalitarian but it represent a tremendous break from our past again I couldn't agree with you more but I think the word conservative is very misleading under those circumstances it's a kind of failed progressivism a failure of progressive people to actually deliver on their promises and you want to see progressive people deliver on their promises basically well I'm not gonna get into all the terminology here so okay well look why don't we turn now look at some of the audience's questions I mean because we've got eight questions and we can return to some of the themes that we've discussed earlier but I want to make sure because people have taken a lot of trouble to submit questions and so forth and and we've talked about which ones to go through so the first one is why hasn't Europe produced successful temp tech companies on the scale of Facebook Apple or Google well I'll give you what the standard answer that question is then I'll give you my my somewhat different answers I think the standard answer is always that Europe is too conservative to use your terminology it's too risk averse people are too scared of failure it's the fear of failure that that dominates Europe and and certainly there are elements of that even though I I never I never actually think that a celebration of failure is that good of a thing and so there's sometimes in in Silicon Valley there's almost like this pornography of failure where you talk about all your failures and this is somehow the somehow means that you're going to succeed if you've failed at a lot of things and and so that's that's sort of the way it typically gets described on the the somewhat alternate answer I would give which I think is at least as important in the European context is what I would describe is not a fear of failure but a fear of success that in the sort of social democratic European societies it is on it's acceptable to be moderately successful it's not acceptable to be wildly successful and so if you have a if you have a successful company that's starting to grow it will get short-circuited and you will you know you will sell the company at some point and maybe that's the right answer but you will never get to a to an enormous company if you sell it along the way the you know the anecdote the Facebook anticodon this that I always tell is I think the single most important decision in the history of Facebook summer of 2006 was two years into the company we got an acquisition offer for 1 billion dollars from Yahoo to buy the company and and so there were three of us on the board Mark Zuckerberg myself another venture capital investor and we had a Monday morning board meeting and to decide should we take the billion dollars or not and you know the two of us to investors Python you know it's probably a lot of money we should maybe take it Mark sort of started the board meeting and said you know this is just a pro forma thing we're just gonna talk about this for 10 minutes because we have to have a quick board meeting to turn it down obvious we're not taking it and then the two of us said well you know we maybe we shut it you should use a billion dollars a lot of money and you're 22 years old you'll get 250 million there's a lot you could do with 250 million dollars and then your mark sir well I don't actually know what I would do with the I'd probably start another social networking company but I already have one so why would I sell it and anyway took more than ten minutes we went back and forth like this for about eight hours but at the end of the day the decision was not to sell the company and and I would submit that any super successful super big tech company is one where you've you've been offered multiple times people have offered to buy it and you you've chosen never to sell it you're not that afraid of success and I think I think in Europe the answer is to check out sooner rather than later to go back to having back to your to the you know decade-long vacation that people are on in Europe that's sort of that's that's the answer people are given okay well look I didn't realize you were going to give such a deep answer which leads me then to ask a follow-up question which and it says in connection to the fear of success and how not to be fearful of success and it's this idea that you are obviously quite success yours quite successful at thinking with money okay and so you're you've just given a kind of scenario about when you hold on when you give away and all the rest of it and I'm just wondering generally speaking given that you will you know you are this wealthy person and you're someone with an enormous amount of vision I mean you have a general kind of view about how you think with money because you invest in certain things and not other things and and you think certain other kinds of investors are investing in the wrong things I mean can you give a general kind of view about that because obviously you're successful at what you're talking about here well it'll sound like the wrong thing to say but there is a sense in which money is somewhat overrated um it's incredibly you know charismatic it's incredibly powerful you know when I when I pitched PayPal I used to UM see if I can I'll do this as a prop right I don't have my wallet on me but I used to always hold up a hundred-dollar bill and was like this hypnotic effect everybody would would look at it and then why why you want it and so there's something on there's something where we think of money as the answer to all our problems if we have money you can you can you can on you can figure out what to do with it there all these all these problems you can solve on but what I think you know is at least as important or more important is actually having some ideas or some some some concrete instantiations and in the sort of over financialized world we live in money is pure optionality you know if you have money you can do anything with it but if you have no ideas you will just just leave it in cash and again to pick on Europe a little bit here you're the most in the extreme versions you have you know you have negative interest rates in Europe and it's because people want money so badly and they have so few ideas they're willing to keep it in a checking account that earns negative interest rates they lose a little bit of money every year but but that somehow is preferable to having concrete ideas I think we live in this over financialized world where we think you know money is the answer to everything and yet the negative interest rates tell us that we're in a world with way too much money and way too few ideas well that may be true actually and and I just want to step back a little bit because of course in the 20th century one of the things that was very noticeable was the way in which a lot of people who made a lot of money through industry in various ways ended up putting their money in philanthropic foundations okay so we talked about rockefeller Ford Carnegie right all these guys Sloan and in Germany Zeman's mercedes benz volkswagen right in britain we have welcomed and Nuffield we have all these different sorts of industry based foundations that actually did a lot in terms of shaking up the academic establishment with regard to the way science and technology goes now i take it that that kind of model is not really appropriate for the 21st century at least based on the way you do your investing you don't really think you don't think the foundation model is really appropriate well it's definitely something that people do I mean I've done my share of it and it's it's on at the same time it's amazing how ineffective right most nonprofits seem to be and it's on there's something I find almost emotionally exhausting and talking to to nonprofit people sort of like if you're investing in a business you know it's like there's your business we're on other sides the table but once I invest we're both partners and then we're on the same side and it's sort of this healthy relationship whereas if you have a non-profit and if I give you some money then you know you come along and you'll want even more money the next year and so it's just this sort of super adversarial emotionally exhausting relations are acidic and then and then you know sort of this the very low standard that I've started to have for nonprofits is I'd like to I'd like to give money to nonprofits where the people I give money to won't hate me afterwards and that sounds like a ridiculous standard but it's actually it's actually not that lowest standard because it's like you'll then get annoyed at me because somehow you have this dependency on my money and then you start hating me because I'm giving you money and it's all like incredibly screwed up beyond belief and and so so I've come back to thinking that that you know corporations are underrated because so many of these other institutions do not work it's one of the things that's endlessly frustrating to a lot of the very successful people in in Silicon Valley they've had these you know corporations that have transformed the world and then there's always a thought that the the next step is to then do something with a foundation or a non-profit side that will be on there will be even bigger than the company they built even more impactful in the company and and you know without naming names are going to particulars it's a you know the rule seems to be that they did a hundred times as much with their company than they will ever do with their nonprofits so when in this video that we played for you in the beginning where you were seen as the john d rockefeller of our time is that kind of mistaken or do you resonate to that in any way well I I'm not as successful as Rockefeller was that's but I but again I think I think Rockefeller was successful for building the Standard Oil Company that was you know you should not take that away from from Rockefeller counterfactual question you know it's always if you didn't do it would it have happened anyway and I think um I think a lot of the great companies if they hadn't been built they would not have been built on the philanthropy side on I would that a lot of it would happen anyway and and it's it's there's always my sort of contrarian question where it's always on you know what business is nobody building you know what ideas do you have that nobody agrees with you on so what's you know what's the unique edge what's the unique insight the nonprofit version the question is what great nonprofit that I always have is what great nonprofits is nobody supporting I don't want to support nonprofits that everybody supports because they presumably have enough money I want to support nonprofits that are unfashionable that nobody supports and in the nonprofit world even more than in the corporate world or the world of ideas fashion is all important and and it's so dominated by fashion by fitting in by doing things that everybody would would do anyway that that as a result you end up making very little of a difference and so I think if Rockefeller hadn't done it Carnegie would have done it they were all doing this roughly the same things and and this is still the very same problem so that the nonprofit version I I have is on you know if you give money to nonprofit cause you should be willing to do it anonymously and you should and you should ask the question you know are you doing it just to get social status respect recognition or are you doing it because you you really believe it I look I I actually agree with the general sentiment here and and we we're gonna have to move on to the other seven questions I'm afraid but one thing I would say to you and to the audience is actually the rock I mean its place to something you're concerned about very much which didn't come up in the questions and that is the rigidity of universities in terms of how they motivate their their the academics and one of the things that the Rockefeller Foundation and this is how we got molecular biology it was basically breaking down disciplinary boundaries that were not otherwise not obviously going to be broken down just let left to the devices of academia so I would say that the Rockefeller Foundation was just as innovate was very innovative in that regard innovative with regard to a rigid academia which of course placed your argument about why academia is such a problem but we don't have to talk about that anymore but I just want you to think about that for future because I know you have a lot of problems with the University and I share them and it has to do with this issue okay by the university the second question that was asked was how much do you trust your instincts instead of mathematical business plans well uh Moe's a little bit bad at these sort of general psychological questions but I you know what what struck me about that question is on is how it's it's set up as though it's instinct versus mathematical science and even though they might be exclusive surely they're not exhaustive and there's a lot that's in between there's common sense there's local knowledge there's you know logical reasoning there's you know there's sort of all these other sort of intermediate forms of approaching things that I think are are actually very underrated and so I think we live in a world that over eights instinct and mathematical science and that under rates everything else and the problem with instinct is you know it's just so irrational it doesn't actually help you so you know it may be works in some cases but probably way overrated problem with mathematical science is that most of our world can't be reduced to math and and you know if you only work on problems that can be mathematically described you know maybe you should be a math professor but but it's you're gonna end up distorting the world in very big ways and I think there's you know this this large range of intermediate things and so if I if as a venture capitalist if I'm investing in a another company you know there's um you know if you went just with instinct or just with mathematical science I mean you'd lose all your money so quickly and if I said oh I'm only going to invest in companies that the supercomputer generates that the mathematical model says they're good well that doesn't work there's no supercomputer for that and if it's all instinct if it's just well I'm just going with a five second impression it's like you know five seconds I'm not gonna only go talk to you for five seconds at a time the longer I talk to you that interferes with my instincts and you'll you'll convince me of things I shouldn't believe and I should just go with my instincts to be like 10 seconds 20 seconds but 20 minutes is worse than 20 seconds yeah that's uh that's probably a little bit wrong too so so so I think the yeah I think that I would I would go with all the things that are in between so I take it that when you give this kind of answer you're actually describing your own practice sure well that's that's where okay just to be sure no there's to be sure and I and I and that's what I I thought I think it's clear for the audience to realize that you gotta know both in some sort of way it's also all the stuff that's not covered by no no of course of course and also the stuff not covered but no that's a good that's very good okay so do you have people in your life who question your ideas other than the media you do know I think of course and I I think I think we all have you know enormous numbers of people who who question our ideas the thing I would push back a little bit on is on there is always a point you know there is a point where it's it's good to have questioning and then there is there is some point where it's um it's it's too powerful so every time you have a half-formed idea it's a slightly different idea and immediately you have 15 people who shoot it down oh that's too crazy it's too different you shouldn't think that nobody thinks that that must be wrong that's the way things go wrong so so you have to always realize that there are two kinds of ways things can go wrong one is for ideas never to be questioned and then the other one is for them to be questioned too quickly for them to always get shot down for them to always get distorted and and and mischaracterized in one way or another and and I tend to think that the world we live in is one where heterodox ideas are questioned too aggressively you know they always get mischaracterized they get sort of turned into a straw man version and and what would be healthier would not immediately distorting someone's ideas into some soundbite that you can tweet and say well they're a terrible person because they think this but instead of always straw Manning ideas and and being quick to debunk them to tear them down it would be actually much more generative for us sometimes to do the opposite uh let's call it steal man ideas make them even stronger than they are so you have an idea it's not very coherent it doesn't totally make sense but I'll work with you and I'm gonna try to strengthen your idea so it's even stronger so the other nineteen people who are going to tear it down won't be able to do so quite so quickly I could again I couldn't agree with you 100% I mean more than that no but so I don't disagree with you on this one that's good good okay now here why do you think Silicon Valley is such a left-leaning place you know I I I do think the first first part is that it's always hard to score what people really think so it's it's probably not as left-leaning as people say and of course it's part of the the problem of political correctness is that people don't always articulate their views and so it's not as it's not quite as uniform as as people make it make it out to be but but you know I think it is it is it is sort of a combination of of different things that have come together it's there certainly is a K through 16 education it's the most educated part of the US and the education tilt tilts people in a certain way there's a there's a there's a there's a version where it's it's not it's not really the politic of Silicon Valley aren't radical left is sort of establishment center left and and there's a sense things have worked and and for the people for whom things have worked they generally think everything is it was working pretty well and there's sort of less less critical in that sense I think it's a combination of these of these different factors so and the next question is why did you support Trump and what's his best and worst decision so far we're not getting away from politics here this is what the audience wants well you know the the you know it might it was in some ways both my least contrarian decision ever since about half the people in the US did it and of course within a Silicon Valley context you know it felt it felt very very - Aryan on I think that I think that you know a lot of the political debates um had gotten too sterile and in the US and was somehow it was the Wall Street Left liberalism versus the zombie Reaganism it was you know Clinton versus Bush we had like the same two families battling it out for the last 25 30 years and it's like it's like something out of Shakespeare the Clintons versus the bushes you know like the opening line of Romeo and Juliet the Montagues versus the Capulets and the the Shakespeare play starts with two houses alike in dignity and so they hate each other but they're identical they're no differences between the bushes and the Clintons and and somehow that's perfectly fine if they'd been doing you know a good job running the country if everything was was going well but I thought my judgment was that there were you know too many questions that were being you know left on unasked unanswered that the solution for a lot of our political cultural challenges isn't going to be in a very narrow zone we have to sort of widen the range of debate wide in the range of discussion there all sorts of things one can say about President Trump or it's you know - it's not to imply - all these things that he's done that are very controversial but I think it has blown open the debate in a very powerful way and and I think I think the US and the Western world is better for that let me ask you a question because I speak as someone who actually supported Hillary Clinton even when she was running against Obama so I'm really behind the wave on this one but but the thing I would say about Trump and I just wondering whether you would agree is that given the kinds of decisions the kinds of judgments he may he's been making when he makes them and so forth is I would say and you can disagree that this is a guy who actually has pretty good political judgment but it's definitely it was it's definitely been underestimated all the way through so it was you know it was it was assumed that you know he would get badly defeated in the Republican primary it was assumed he would never win the general election it was assumed that he'd be impeached within a year or so and and so no I think you know it has a very good feel for what is what is going on and I think the you know the thing that that Trump understands the president Crump understands in a way that let's say Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the US did not understand was that things weren't quite right in the country things were kind of you know going the wrong way you can say that the you know the Trump slogan make America great again is in some ways it's the most pessimistic negative slogan any major presidential candidate in the US has had in decades because it's like things are really off track it's probably as perhaps why why he's so offensive to Silicon Valley because the Silicon Valley self understanding is we've been doing everything great we've been making the country the world a better and better place and so if you have someone come along and say well in some ways things were better in the past that's a that's an incredibly incredibly jarring thing to say but but yes I think you know in some ways of course you know um President Obama also you know stood for change you know that's that's at least that woody that's what he campaigned on at the end of the day he did not change things all that much but but certainly you know the original Obama slogan in 2008 was hope and change so it was sort of expansive things weren't on the right track we need to change things a lot that's what people thought they were voting for with Obama in 2008 and in that sense I would say President Trump is actually a continuation of some of the things people thought they were getting with Obama oh that's very interesting actually now you know Trump in the last week assigned this right to try legislation which actually allows people who are who have incurable diseases to be able to use various kinds of treatments that haven't yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and I take it you're very sympathetic to that yes I mean for those of you who don't know I mean this is a quite animate this is quite interesting because this goes against the sort of precautionary aspect of government that has been very domin for a long time and so in a sense Trump is kind of allowing the government to open up people to do stuff they weren't allowed to do previously well you know Steve you and I have talked about this in the past but there's always this precautionary principle that we have to be very scared about all the possible things that can happen that can go wrong with technology that can go wrong with with experimental drugs or experimental medical treatments and and then I always think for the counterpoint to the precautionary principle I think you have it the proactive Roe action area action airy principle but for the counterpoint to it is always that we're not living in a perfect world I think you know if we live in a world where nobody ever got sick or died maybe a precautionary principle would be a good thing if we're living in a world with terrible incurable diseases maybe you know we want to actually disrupt that we want to try exactly some things that are very different and so I think a lot of the again using conservatism in your sense a lot of the sort of techno anti-technology anti science we should not change the world everything is it sort of has this implicit assumption that things are actually pretty good that they're they're better than people think and and and the assumption I have and maybe the two of us have is that things are actually a lot worse than people yeah I think we don't realize how terrible it is to be sick you know we're the people are talking on stages like this are always healthy and so we don't understand what it's like to have you know a terrible incurable disease because if we did we'd be you know in a hospital in bed and we wouldn't be lobbying for for these medical treatments and so so I think I think we should always try to overcome this you know overly precautionary bias that we have this is a really good point I hope people pay attention to this okay now we've got these last two questions and and they are the deepest questions and one of them has to do with the with the future of Christianity and the era of the of the digital ear in the era of digital technology and also why should we live longer if we're destroying the earth so I was like really really small really small questions here take them as you wish we've left enough time I take for you to deal with them well I um you know I think I think the there's there's always a sense that the the future of technology and science and the modern world is that you know religion is going to disappear Christianity will disappear it will sort of get successively deep debunked you know it's like just one fairy tale among many and that you know this is like I remember there's a sort of soviet-era thing where they had a cosmonaut in outer space and then the headline was God does not exist we went to outer space we didn't see there's no God in heaven and so there's always sort of a on sort of the debunking of the metaphysics of it in a way but the you know the question I think is more interesting about Christiana your religion is as perhaps not the metaphysical question but more the political ethical cultural question and that and you know I think that I think one of the things that I take you know even it may be sort of this sort like a contrast I would say between say let's say and what the Enlightenment view and let's say what I'll call the Christian view is sort of the Enlightenment view is that people are reasonable and the more people you have beliefs something the more reasonable it gets and this is sort of you know you sum up what people think and you sort of converge to the truth and then there's sort of a Christian counterpoint that if everybody thinks something that doesn't make it more true it makes it more suspicious it's Joseph against his twelve brothers or it's a you know it's Christ is right but then the crowd is wrong and and and so I think one of the questions always worth asking is when is the Enlightenment view right when do we have the wisdom of crowds and when is what I'll call the Christian view right when is it the madness of crowds and and what I what I would what I would submit is that that this is not an easy question to answer and that we should always keep both possibilities in mind to go back to the Malcolm Gladwell book the wisdom of crowds which people always cite as a you know a simple thing to refer to and this is why crowds are smart and bigger the crowd the smarter it gets on you know what the book actually says is you can trust crowds to be wise when every single person is making a rational decision not influenced by anybody else and then of course and then when you some all those rational decisions you get to an even better sort of collective result and when does that happen maybe it happens if we had a glass of marbles you know estimate how many marbles are in it but it often does not there's so many other things that are more fashioned they're more mimetic it's more these crowd contagion effects that are very powerful you know the the political version of this would be you know we in a democracy we believe in the wisdom of the majority we believe you know so if you have a 51/49 majority that's probably you know that's probably more right than wrong if it's a 70/30 majority oh that's even better it's even wiser but if you have a 99 to one or hundreds of 0 majority you're in North Korea and so there is some there is some point where you go from you know the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds and then you know just to come back to the question I always formulate is what do you believe to be true that nobody agrees with you on that is sort of this that's that's this individual question the truth is not at the end of the day is not with a crowd it's with the individual it's on and there's always space for for individual thought and which you know maybe the crowd will be correct if we're at the end of history we've discovered everything you know you have some crazy new idea because we've already figured everything out the crowd should just go ahead and lynch you and throw you out of your university position but but I don't think we're at the end of history I think there's still a lot of things we don't know and so we have to have we will have to have a lot of space for for individual thought for for some time to come and and and so we have to always have this wisdom of crowds but heavily counterbalanced by an awareness of the madness of crowds Network effects aren't always positive Network effects can be negative they could be points where you get lemming-like behavior you've got crazy financial bubbles you get sort of mass insanity of one form or another and that's something to always keep an eye on yes and I think what you're saying to me resonates very much with a with a with a very particular understanding a very strong understanding of Christianity that were fallen creatures and in a sense we should always operate on the assumption that fala betwee were wrong and so if a lot of people who are fallible believe the same thing it doesn't follow that therefore it's gonna more likely be right it could just be wrong and so therefore the idea of someone challenging that might be quite an acceptable thing to do it doesn't even have to be false and it just it's just that we're you know wrong about things not even about moral things no no I'm just saying they're trying to put it into a Christian context because one of the motivations for the experimental method was that we're fallen and so therefore we have to try extra hard to go over our biases right to counteract our biases to counteract the crowd effects and that was kind of how science got off the ground was by individuals saying we're fallen but we can rise above it but part of what we have to rise above is the crowd I think you agree with that yes and when we and and and and maybe there are times where the crowd is wise but if we're too quick to defer to the crowd that's where things are likely to go especially wrong you know there's always a some there's always this weird terminology on science where you know I like science as as you know an objective thing as something that's true I don't like science as something where you're simply deferring to the crowd too much which is also phenomenologically a lot of what happens okay yeah science gets used in both senses the word and and the way one of my colleagues always likes to put it is it he likes science but he doesn't like things that are called science and so we don't call things physical science or chemical science we just call them physics or chemistry because you know there's nothing controversial social science political science we use the word science because these fields are not scientific and we're trying to imbue them with this party yes that we don't ask too many questions well now immortality that's the because this is the final thing that was raised here and we're running a little bit out of time and I just want you to say something about you're interested in mortality especially given all this environmental stuff you know everybody saying that humanity is the worst thing on the planet we're gonna destroy the earth and now you want people who live forever you know these two things aren't that closely linked so I mean I think we're about to destroy the world we should figure out ways to stop it if it's desirable to live forever we should figure out ways to live okay anything if these two fairly discrete problems what's striking is that they're so easily linked and and you know the the on the on that you know on the you know it's always the thing that's always striking to me is not that I care about life extension or people having longer and better lives but it's how other people don't seem to care about listen how this is you know you know why is this not something people are alarmed about you know everywhere and and I think you know I think one of the the psychological ways that we we deal with with mortality is through some combination of extreme optimism and extreme pessimism extreme optimism you know we're not gonna die soon so we're in denial no need to worry about it extreme pessimism there's nothing you can do you should accept it so it's a combination of denial which is extreme optimism and acceptance which is extreme pessimism and extreme optimism extreme pessimism are opposites in some ways but they they're both equally fatalistic no need to do anything no ability to do anything it sums to you do you do nothing and and I think sort of a healthier attitude would be somewhere in between that you know it's not certain that we can do things that we can solve this but on between denial and acceptance there's something called fighting we should be in we should be fighting you know a lot harder you know life expectancies have been going up by about two to two-and-a-half years a decade in in Western Europe for the last you know 150 years you'd like it to go I'd like you to go up by ten years a decade but but still I'll take I'll take two and a half years and it's been it's been this long debate between the biologists and the mathematicians the biologists always say there's a limit it can't go much further the mathematicians say no it's just a straight line it's been going for it's been straight lines from going for decades and I would and this is this would be one case where I would at least take some guidance from from the front from the mathematicians but but it's you know it is it is striking uh when you sort of talk about talk about these things there these objections people have to to UM to longer life so one's the environmental objection there's you know maybe people will be bored maybe maybe you know maybe people maybe people are bad they don't they don't deserve is like you know spoke to Woody Allen a few years ago and sort of them it was one moment where it's sort of shifted to it was like all of a sudden it was like he was playing a role like he was an actor in a Woody Allen movie and and I was like this existential negative loss when we're talking about one of these books the humans last century I think was the Sir Martin Rees the the British astronomer who said that there's a 50% chance humanity won't survive the next hundred years and uh and and Woody Allen said something like you start with something like well you know I don't think we'll make it and then sententiously added and I don't think we deserve to you know because people are so bad and and my view is the opposite so my view is the or you know my view is the opposite you know we should we should you know if you know if we don't deserve to we should maybe change our behavior and we should try to to act in better ways you know it's uh it's one of my one of my other friends a older professor had a conversation with them a few years ago was like well I don't really know if there's an afterlife or not but I certainly hope there isn't because I don't want to run to my ex-wife and and now you know and and so what I would say is you should maybe you know maybe we should change it so that so that when you run into your ex-wife it won't be that bad so so I oh the way I would connected with the ethical thing is you know I want us to I want to live forever and I want to make a world where it's worth living forever - we'll look Peter we're gonna have to stop here I really want to thank you this is a fabulous discussion thank you and thank you everyone you

Channel: Brain Bar

Views: 102,004

Keywords: peter thiel, thiel, investor, paypal, facebook, palantir, trump, donald trump, trump advisor, thiel capital, USA, Europe, EU, European Union, future, Future of humanity, zero to one book, 0 to 1, billionaire peter thiel, transhumanism, capitalism, GDPR, progress, mark zuckerberg, zuckerberg, google, china, communism, communist, AI, artificial intelligence, A.I., CIA, FBI, crypto, cryptocurrency, ebay, brain bar, brain bar budapest, machine learning, peter thiel fox, zero to one book summary

Id: FDkhfm6CYjE

Length: 61min 43sec (3703 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018