The End of the Future with Peter Thiel

foreign my name is Russell Berman I'm the faculty at Stanford and uh I'm uh I've been asked to introduce Peter it's a privilege to introduce Peter Thiel a privilege but also a considerable challenge to introduce someone as well known as Peter a leading entrepreneur with a high public and political profile He's Surely familiar to very many of you PayPal palantir Facebook Founders fund suffice it to say that Peter Thiel is one of the leaders of the private sector in the United States today in another era one might have said a captain of industry I wish the academic world would have more more dialogue with the private sector born in Frankfurt Germany in 1967 he moved with his family to Ohio then to South Africa and then Southwest Africa and then to California he graduated valedictorian near here from San Mateo High School in 1985 and proceeded to Stanford where he majored in philosophy that was the era of the controversy over the Western culture curriculum in response to which Peter co-founded the conservative student newspaper the standard Stanford review which still thrives and you heard from the current editor Mimi St John Mimi St John I'm proud to say an advisee of mine has I'd be remiss also in omitting another aspect of Peter's Stanford trajectory his encounters with the later in Asia are then a member of the Departments of French and comparative literature and Jurassic counts of religion competition and scapegoating in my sense my feet my point of view a big piece of what goes on in cancel cultural events has to do with that logic of scapegoating add to Stanford's to Peter's profile his attending school of law where he received his degree in 1992 before launching his storied career in technology entrepreneurship politics and the public sphere let me end with a quotation that would frame Peter's work from a student I've been fortunate to be able to teach several seminars with Peter where we've had to limit enrollment and ask for students to apply for admission here's what one student wrote I can't wait for the opportunity to interact with and learn from Peter Thiel I admire Mr teal for helping found the modern financial payment system with PayPal and for supporting and inspiring hundreds of entrepreneurs through the founders fund and the teal scholarship as someone interested in deep Tech palantir has always fascinated me for its use of AI techniques on massive amounts of data I admire Mr Teal's Integrity to stand by his ideas and believe that this course will add unparalleled breadth to my Stanford education that's the student said and I'm sure that Peter will not disappoint Us in his comments today Peter Thiel Russell thank you so much it's always hard to uh hard to live up to such a flattering introduction I'm gonna try to cover a lot of different somewhat disjointed ideas today and then try to make it interactive and make it as much of a conversation as possible but maybe maybe uh you know question I always like to start and frame is what is the antonym of diversity and uh the placeholder answer I would give the for an antonym for diversity the antonym of diversity is University and um and we should um and you know and in some ways what I what I gather we're trying to come to terms with her all these ways that the university as a place where we search for Truth where there's a certain amount of Freedom civility uh you know a certain Canon is uh is is being threatened by the sort of amorphous thing that somehow uh the anti-university that is uh um you know the postmodern multiversity that is maybe you know it's somehow in some parts nihilistic in some parts relativistic in some parts totalitarian and probably would take you know more time than I have to unpack all of those paradoxes but and then of course it's it's the it's the it's the problem of the university in the larger context of the questions of Classical liberalism and which you know seems to have be failing in in trouble in a lot of different ways that and that one should also think about you know I've I've been involved in these uh in these campus Wars culture wars debates for something like 35 years we started the Stanford and let's just recount one one act one story from 35 or so years ago uh around the time we started the Stanford review 1987 uh the the live issue was the uh debate about uh Western Culture The Freshman Core Curriculum program uh and it was going to be sort of phased out uh the 88-89 school year was the first year where um the first of the new experimental culture ideas and values was the first uh the program to replace Western culture it's framed as Multicultural and I thought we should do an expose on on this sort of the first class um and uh and it was sort of you know tendentious Marxist Professor it was not really about non-western cultures was also these various anti-western writers one sort or another and so I went to the Stanford bookstore and just started reading through the books to and of course you know I was sort of men with a hammer tries to find a nail everywhere and was just trying to find the most tendentious things that were you know um and they all were on on different dimensions but then I finally stumbled on one book that was just the perfect book that encapsulated everything that was Preposterous about it was uh irigobertamenschu um and it was a set of interviews with uh uh the sort of uh Guatemalan peasant Indian woman who had been oppressed in every Vector of Oppression it was like a it was like a perfect Pastiche it was you know she was oppressed as poor and as um there was a racial war and there was a war and she was an orphan and um and on and on down the line and and it was and you know then they've got these sort of chapters you know rigoberto renounce his marriage in motherhood rig Alberta makes plans for the May Day Parade so has sort of somewhat you know communist undercurrent um and um and as so many of these debates the you know the Western culture debate was somehow very important was on one level about this freshman course at this at one you know Elite University Stanford but then it was in some sense it was a debate about our whole culture and so it sort of kicked up all these bigger things and you know as a sort of 20 year old senior I managed to convince the editors of the Wall Street Journal to to reprint uh some some of these excerpts and um did a long long excerpt on this Europe in the Americas class um when Dinesh D'Souza wrote his book on a liberal education in 1991 the uh the Stanford chapter was entitled travels with rigoberta so this was sort of got this iconic uh um Framing and then uh and then fast forward to the uh fall of 1992 I'm clerking for a judge in Atlanta driving to the office in the morning have the radio on and uh and it's uh well you know there's uh there's uh um a new uh someone's been selected for the Nobel Peace Prize no one's ever heard of this woman it's rigoberto menshu and there's always This legal concept of the difference between approximate causation which is like I punch you or something versus but for causation I was not the proximate cause of her getting the Nobel Peace Prize but I I was about four cause but for me she would uh not have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize and sort of the scales fell off my eyes at that point I realized I was you know I thought that I was you know fighting in some sort of cosmic struggle and you know the forces of Good and Evil and actually I I was just like what I really had been doing was I was some two-bit actor in a left-wing psychodrama where I completed her victimization the one group she had not been victimized by were you know white Republican conservatives in the United States I completed her victimization and uh guaranteed her her Nobel Peace Prize there's a whole post-mortem to the story where it's um apparently much of the book was too good to be true it was sort of semi-fictionalized uh there was an attempt to get The Nobel Prize rescinded but uh you know they can never sort of uh revisit these things and uh and so it's still uh it's still quite disputed but you know I think so many of these debates have this kind of quality there's there's a way that um you know uh you can sort of it's like shooting fish in a barrel the arguments are uh are super powerful on our side um it is like screaming into a hurricane it often does not matter you know we have we have and this sort of is always this worry that we are somehow you know those of us who are conservative libertarian classical Liberals are just somehow fighting the long defeat and uh and uh and that that is that is that's sort of the vibe of what's going on and and the challenge uh with you know Classical liberalism broadly and so I want to so it's rather than sort of go through a whole set of these sort of semi-pornographic stories which I could entertain you with um the whole morning long I wanted to try a somewhat different approach and um and I I think it's always important not to sort of straw man our opponents not to take the most ridiculous um version of it and make fun of it we should always try to steal man people to try to understand the arguments as as uh best as they are possible I wanted to I wanted to uh it's a little bit complicated but I want to do is I want to give you the best argument against the best argument against the best argument against the best argument against Classical liberalism against um the the classical universities and uh so for for Steelman arguments and uh um if you counted it there are four so if you do you know a double negative is a positive a quadruple negative is still positive so uh the the four best arguments add up to a sort of argument for Classical liberalism but uh we're gonna let me let me and this is sort of um the way I've come to think of um you know what what the real nerve of so many of these debates is and how we should how we should think about it um the you know let me let me start by Framing if you if you um if you talked in the during the Western culture debates in the 1980s at Stanford if you talked to the university president Donald Kennedy or you know the senior leadership at Stanford you know alumni went to complain um you know I mean there's definitely always some radical crazy people who said crazy things but uh the standard answer was something that was sort of technocratic you know Shakespeare doesn't matter the humanities aren't that important uh we have the Sciences we're making enormous progress in Sciences we're building a you know particle accelerator slack etc etc we have Stan uh you know you have all this sort of cutting-edge scientific research and uh that that sort of fundamentally is what the university is about that's what shows it's on track that shows what what it is valuable and uh and there is sort of some way that we have to always ask this question about you know the The Sciences and uh the Technologies how they are how they are doing and the the version of the question that I have come to ask over the last 15 years um about you know um is the the universal question is about the progress of all these things how fast our Science and Technology as a whole progressing is the sort of propaganda the stem propaganda accurate that uh we have just sort of exponentiating progress runaway progress things are getting sort of um you know it's just dizzying how fast things are improving or is it uh is it perhaps quite the opposite and uh and so um and and so if if one could show that the Science and Technology areas are actually pretty weak that the so-called crown jewels of stem are not actually delivering the goods this strikes me as a decisive crushing uh blow it's it's like uh yeah um Humanities we all know are ridiculous uh stem but if if stem is ridiculous you know there is just nothing nothing left at all and uh and this is the idea that I've explored in sort of a variety of formats over the last uh 15 15 years uh there's there's sort of a um it's it's very let me say it is very hard to evaluate this stuff in general because uh one of the other problems of the postmodern University is that it's extremely compartmentalized it's extremely specialized and you're supposed to only be able to comment on these things after half a lifetime of study and so we have ever narrower sets of Guardians guarding themselves to use the sort of corrupt platonic metaphor so you have the string theory people telling us how wonderful String Theory people are and how everybody else just has bad math genes and can't talk about it we have the the cancer researchers promising us that they will cure cancer in five years which they've been doing for the last 50. we have um in an on and on in all these sort of hyper hyper-specialized areas and um and then the question is you know how much how much progress is actually happening the um the sort of indirect intuitions I have on where it seems very very slowed are things like um if you if you if you look at things like um the the economy the the standards of living among younger people the younger generation doesn't seem to be doing better than their parents this this is sort of very odd in a sort of context of of massive generalized progress there is uh there's sort of a question how big are the breakthroughs that are really really happening does the definition of Technology we say technology is the thing that is changing and then let's say the 1960s technology meant computers but also rockets and supersonic Aviation and the Green Revolution Agriculture and underwater cities and new medicines it was like a lot of things and when we use technology today it just means information technology and I think that's kind of a tell that we have a narrow cone of progress around the world of bits you know computers internet mobile internet it's generated some great companies but it's not quite been enough to take our civilization to the next level we have a tagline on my uh my Venture Capital site you know they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters not an anti-twitter argument not an argument against Twitter as a company it can it can work as a company it can work you know 8 000 people I think it's gonna be about half after elon's done today but uh even even those 4 000 people can just still just go to the office and smoke pot all day and earn decent paychecks so it works on that level it doesn't quite work on the level of taking our civilization the next level uh when I was I think that these things were not that obvious in in in in the past when I was at Stanford in 89. in in retrospect the only subject matter you were supposed to study was computer science that's what really worked it wasn't even an engineering field it was sort of a you know I always think whenever people say science I'm in favor of science but not science and quotes and when people use science it's it's a tell that something isn't a science like political science or climate science or computer science is sort of like that it's for the people who are not very good at electrical engineering and they sort of flunked out into computer science even though that turned out to be the one thing that worked all the engineering fields did not work I think electrical engineering sort of works maybe another decade after I was class of 89 um certainly mechanical engineering chemical engineering like my dad did all of these were terrible things we lived in a world where there was nothing you could do in the world of atoms by the 80s it was already clear you should not go into nuclear engineering aeroaster engineering um and we are just not allowed to do stuff in in the world of atoms it's it is it is massively massively slowed and I think this is sort of the this is sort of the uh this is sort of one kind of a a framing I would give that so we've had this incredible stagnation for the last 50 years and then we have unbelievable amounts of propaganda this is not true and that um I'll do one one other sort of thought experiment on you know why the question of technological progress however however hard it might be um can't be avoided because um and let's I'll lose one more as a thought experiment if you um laughs if you want to sort of solve our macroeconomic problems in the United States you could solve every problem in our society if you got to four percent GDP growth you'd grow your way out of the deficits um you'd have enough growth for everybody to do better and how do you get to four percent GDP growth well um you could do um you could do something like um one one version would be you could change get rid of all the environmental rules all the immigration rules you could you could get rid of all these rules where you would never get elected and you probably have too much cancerous growth but you know there's certain ways you can do it politically completely and feasible and uh the other way I'll sort of do this as a thought experiment would be um you appoint a commission on accelerating technological change and um it would it would try to measure how fast the technological change has been happening um and um you know you'd have some um you know some crazy techno-utopian person probably from Silicon Valley uh you put them on the commission and uh they would come back with the result that yeah it looked like we had two percent growth and two percent inflation but really we have four percent growth and zero percent inflation because the qualitative technological improvements are greater than they look and uh if you could just lie about technological progress you could save trillions and trillions of dollars uh I I don't go into all the details this is basically what happened under the Clinton Administration the 1990s with the Boston commission uh they sort of lied about all these hedonic adjustments and that was a key thing to balancing the budget as a Libertarian I I'm actually quite sympathetic to this because I want the welfare state to be dialed back and so if you exaggerate technological progress um this is the way to do it as an intellectual I I don't like uh I don't like lying and I think we should try to figure out uh we should try to figure out the the truth of these things and and probably you know if we say that uh you know the flatness of the new iPhone um is such a large hedonic adjustment that Grandma should be happy to eat cat food there's probably something about that that's wrong and I'm and these sorts of questions cannot be avoided so the the question of generalized technological progress cannot be avoided go into a lot more detail but uh but it has for for a whole set of reasons slow down so that's sort of uh um the basic counter argument is don't look at the humanities look at the Sciences they're great the counter-counter argument um they are there are there may be as defective or more so than the humanities Humanities we can sort of evaluate you can evaluate Ruger bear to mention you can evaluate string theory and so it's sort of like government analogies it's like uh you know do you think the uh the DMV or the CIA are better run and it's obviously the DMV is better run since people can see what they're doing um and uh and that's probably the political intuition we should have about the Sciences versus uh versus the humanities the the polemical version of it that I I had once was that uh you know I I think um I think that it's better for undergraduates to um to major in the humanities rather than the Sciences let's set Computer Sciences side is the one thing that sort of works but everything else because um in the humanities you at least know you're not going to get a job you'll be unemployable um whereas in The Sciences you have uh people who are so deluded as to believe they'll be taken care of by the natural goodness of the universe and it's just it is just uh malthusian competition nature beared red and tooth and cloths you know 10 grad students in the chemistry lab fighting each other for Bunsen burners and beakers and if you know one person says one wrong word they get thrown off the overcrowded bus and it's a relief and and uh it's sort of cycle and repeat now the question people always ask me is why you know why did this stagnation why did the shift happen in in the 70s and I normally try to avoid the question say I don't like answering why questions they're they're over determined and you know there's sort of a lot of different kinds of things one can one can point to um you know everything from uh you know uh extra government regulation to um you know some of some of the low-hanging fruit is picked it's gotten harder to find new things that's sort of the Tyler Cohen argument um you know sort of strange ways the cultures changed you know the younger people have anxiety attacks and don't want to do anything anymore and they're sort of hiding in the bait in their basements which is probably maybe not you know um not that compatible with rapid technological progress but uh but if I had us if I had to sort of give a single again Steel Man idea the best argument for why why this has been so slowed for the last 50 years and I think we have to somehow engage with and take take more seriously is that there is something about science and technology that has taken you know a very dystopian very destructive turn in the um in the in the 20th century and there are you know it is um it is not we're not in the 18th century 19th century you know rationalist Enlightenment age where um it seems to be simply um making everything better in every way all the time uh you know already the two World Wars certainly uh certainly the nuclear weapons you know on some level suggested that uh the sort of um I don't know the the sort of uh rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run you know a little bit thin by by the 50s and 60s and and the the kind of um the kind of uh history I would tell it's not perfect but of the last 70 75 years is this gradually seeped into society it sort of manifested in different ways you know um you know you have a crazy person like Charles Manson you know what did he see when he was overdosing you know on LSD he saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war and then he decided to become some sort of you know anti-hero from Dostoyevsky and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse and there was something like this that seeped in this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the 70s it's like we have to just slow this down we have to put some brakes on uh and it is it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this uh have this dual use component I always like to argue rhetorically in favor of more nuclear power plants uh I feel that's like it's like arguing for the gold standard so far outside the Overton window uh and I think the the history is that it's hard to avoid the Dual use nature of these Technologies you know uh and the the the turning point with nuclear power was not uh Chernobyl or Three Mile Island it was 1975 when India got the bomb we had transferred the nuclear uh technology to India we believe that it was not dual usable it was there was a certain way it could be used for only peaceful nuclear power it easily got weaponized they got a nuclear bomb we can't give nuclear power plants to everybody in the world because everybody will have nuclear bombs and that sort of uh profoundly unstable and will will blow up the world and something like this this dual you know this dual nature of Technology runs through uh so much of the stuff is obviously you know there's obviously an environmental uh version on the left that uh that I I would say is you know on some level more powerful than people on the right often like to admit there is um there is um you know even even the kinds of breakthroughs that we we had in recent years the MRNA vaccines and again the sort of the polemical version I have is why can't we have a ticker tape parade for the scientists who invented the MRNA vaccine and you know well if we don't celebrate individuals that's too dangerous in the 21st century so no longer particular type parades for individuals but um but I think the deeper reason is people are really uncomfortable with the MRNA vaccine because it is you know it's very adjacent um it's one toggle switch away from this thing that was going on at the Wuhan lab called gain of function research which we suspect is sort of an orwellian word for a bioweapons program and uh and then this is and so it's again there are you know there are these things that you know could potentially be big breakthroughs so many of them are adjacent to something that is that is quite dystopian I used to love science fiction it is um and I think would be sort of an interesting survey course that one could do on on you know trying to understand why it is all so drably dystopian at this point I mean there's still you know maybe you can do the Retro Star Trek stuff from the 60s but anything that's been published in the last 40 years it just sort of shows this futuristic world where nothing works and the question you have to ask is this is this a deep law of nature features it's a deep truth that if there is more progress things will just break down or is it somehow a reflection of of this of this very dystopian culture we're in where we just can't imagine anything um anything getting better no I think um I think that uh I think that um this sort of dystopian um limit of Science and Technology where you know it's lost energy because you're just sort of building the machines that will destroy the world um has even at this point seeped into the um has even seeped into the uh into the um into the uh um computer uh world where the you know the futuristic technology on the computer side is AI AGI artificial general intelligence it's a it's always I always hate the word because sort of this catch-all word that can mean everything and therefore nothing but um but I was involved peripherally with some of these sort of East Bay rationalist futuristic groups uh there was one called The Singularity Institute in the 2000s and the sort of the self-understanding was you know building an AGI it's going to be the most the most important technology in the history of the world we better make sure it's friendly to human beings and we're going to work on making sure that it's friendly and then you know the vibe sort of got a little bit strange and I think it was around 2015 that I sort of realized that uh that they weren't really oh they they didn't seem to be working that hard on the AGI anymore and they seem to be more pessimistic at where it was going to go and it was kind of a it sort of devolved into sort of a burning man um burning man camp that was sort of um had gone from sort of transhumanist to Luddite um in in 15 years um and some something has sort of gone wrong uh my um and it was finally confirmed to me by by a post from Mary machine intelligence Research Institute the successor organization in April of this year um and this is again these are the people who are this is sort of The Cutting Edge thought leaders of the of the people who are pushing AGI for the last 20 years and and you know it was fairly important in the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem title Miri announces new death With Dignity strategy and then the summary it's obvious at this point that Humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem I how is AI aligned with humans or even try very hard or even go out with much of a fight since survival is unattainable we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping Humanity die with slightly more dignity and then anyway it goes on to talk about why it's only slightly more dignity because people are so pathetic and they've been so lame at dealing with this and of course um you can you know there's probably a lot you can say that you know this was there was somehow this was somehow deeply in the logic of the whole AI program for for decades that it was was potentially going to be very dangerous if you believe in Darwinism or machiavellianism um there are no purely self-interested actors and then you know if you get a superhuman AGI you will never know that it's a line so there was something you know there was a very deep problem people have had avoided it for 20 years or so at some point one day they wake up and the best thing we can do is um is is just uh hand out some Kool-Aid Allah people's Temple to everybody or something like this and um and if we um and then I think uh unless we just dismissed this sort of thing as as just uh as just the kind of thing that happens in a um in a uh in a post-covet mental breakdown world I I found another article from Nick Bostrom who's sort of a Oxford academic and you know most these people are sort of I know they're somehow they're interesting because they have nothing to say they're interesting because they're just mouth pieces they're it's like the Mouth of Sauron it's it's just sort of complete um um sort of cogs in the machine but they are they're useful because they tell us exactly where the Zeitgeist is in some ways and and um and this was from 2019 pre-covet the vulnerable World hypothesis and that goes through you know whole Litany of these different ways where you know Science and Technology um are creating all these dangers for the world and what do we do about them and it's the precautionary principle whatever that means but then um you know he has a four-part program for achieving stabilization and I will just read off the four things you need to do to make our world less vulnerable and Achieve stabilization in the sort of you know we have this exponentiating technology where maybe it's not progressing that quickly but still progressing quickly enough there are a lot of uh dangerous Corner cases you only need to do these four things to uh to stabilize the world number one restrict technological development number two ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives so uh that's a that sounds like a somewhat incompatible with the Dei at least in the in the ideas form of diversity um number three establish extremely effective preventive policing and number four establish effective Global governance since you can't let you know even if there's like one little island somewhere where this doesn't apply it's no good and uh and so it is basic and this is you know this is the Zeitgeist on the other side it is uh it is the precautionary principle it is you know we're not going to make it for another Century on this planet and therefore you know we need to have you know we need to embrace a one world totalitarian state right now um and uh and so yeah so third and fourth counter arguments the third okay just to repeat the first argument first counter argument is science is great it's solving if you don't even pay attention to the humanities counter argument no it's not a third main counter argument well science is too dangerous we have to slow it down so it's it's good that it's not so great we're slowing it down we need to slow it down even more and then the uh the counter counter argument um and this is is where I would return to Classical liberalism is that uh however dangerous however dangerous Science and Technology are uh it seems it seems to me the totalitarianism is far more dangerous and uh and that uh and uh that uh you know uh whatever the dangers are in the future uh we need to never underestimate the danger of um you know one world totalitarian state once you get that hard hard to see what it ends uh you know there's always a you know I I there's always sort of the uh um the the frame um where uh um I think it's in first Thessalonians 5 chapter three the the political slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety and uh and I think uh you know what I what I want to suggest is that and this is and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized One World totalitarian state and uh and what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would uh uh do well to be a little bit more scared of the Antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon thank you very much and I I write your point that four percent growth is the key to solving all problems about once a week so I'm glad you brought that up I don't think you you had quite hard enough it almost sounds like you were um uh sympathetic with the Dual use criticism of Technology um but I think it's it's important to bash that if if you were bashing it super hard and if you weren't bashing it I get to disagree with you um we could have abundant essentially free energy right now if the anti-nuclear movement hadn't stopped it in the U.S it wasn't about India Pakistan that the region of the nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn't certified a single and nuclear power plant since 1975 in the United States has nothing to do with that we could have breeder reactors now the danger is much less than the danger of burning coal even if you include the three mile Islands it isn't um it isn't because of uh dual use that every airplane down at the Palo Alto Airport uses an engine designed in the 1950s it's the FAA uh the reason that that roads the high-speed train cost that's 100 billion dollars and therefore will never be built that Subways cost four billion dollars a mile never we built I I think you the the thesis of growth comes from technology but the thesis that it that we are not growing because government regulation is in the way I think is one that we need to take more seriously well I and it's a leftist cause I'm sympathetic to that I I would disagree with the nuclear history where I think you know I think it was fear of nuclear war that was conflated with nuclear power plants and that turned people against them so we could and we could spend a long time going going through that history you know I I I I agree with you on all the micro regulatory stuff there is the regulations are stupid I'd get rid of them I I'd want to I'd want to roll them back uh and then at the same time there is this you know there is this cultural backdrop where you know there are some things that have gone wrong with you know thalidomide you know know that that was you know that empowered the FDA to to become far more Draconian I think the FDA you know overreacted to the the my disaster but there's something in our society where where um some of these risks you know were able to be weaponized in um in a very drastic way and I I I I think this is this is where the the simple naive libertarian arguments they just never carry the day even though yeah if if I could do it every in every so instance I'd push a button and deregulate and but uh but it's it's it's it's not been working you know and the nuclear power thing is a striking one where it's obvious we should be doing this and it is it's been completely stuck for 45 years it's not it's not like it's a little bit outside the open window it's way way outside the Overton window hello um so my name is Aditya I'm a undergraduate student studying philosophy and political science here at Stanford right for the review um one of my so my question is uh there's this quote I remember uh I think it's from adorno Theodore dorno or maybe some like anti-colonial scholar commenting on him something like that it goes uh the only way to gain progress is to stop talking about it and uh his argument essentially if I recall correctly is that the more we talk about progress the more it gives leeway to sort of totalitarian and you know colonialist structures imperialist structures that allow you to oppress people who are behind right it's like the West is better or more farther in progress than the east or something like that if we sort of invert that argument it seems like the language of progress in many ways motivates the DI officers to progress by you know perhaps expanding access of Education into minorities we're learning new things about equity and fair freedom and equal all these values which we didn't have before therefore we should impose them on the you know the the sort of loser reactionaries who are convening at a conference talk about academic freedom so um basically my question is why not adopt this sort of motto of we will continue to progress and pursue progress but we frame it all in a language of return the same way sort of a lot of I think religious reactionaries like myself and others on on the Stanford um are trying to trying to do uh so we still want progress but we we don't we don't sound like we do um I'm somewhat confused by exactly what that means but I look I I I would agree with you that um there's there's something about progress that's been hijacked we still have people who call themselves progressives um it's it's it's it's it's much less clear how you quantify what they are uh progressing on um and then if we if we frame it in terms of science technology per capita GDP number of nuclear power plants we try to quantify these things um it seems like we are we're not actually that uh that Progressive on um you know on a lot of Dimensions I I think one way I just sort of just a narrow political framing but one way to describe the decline away from progress that you know which I think still had this more General sense of not just a political word but also a science word and also a societal word in the 1930s 1950s 60s um to today is that is the way that we have uh instead of using the word progress we use the word change and the uh the Obama 2008 campaign it um the initial slogan was hope and change which was um and then they changed the slogan in the course of the campaign to um um the change we need which if you think about it is the exact opposite of the first one the first one was as much change as possible the second one was as little changes is absolutely necessary and it was because the word change poll tested very badly because people sensed that when you talk about change you're not talking about progress and in fact most the time you talk about change when it's non-progressive change I.E it is regressive and it's changed for the worse um and so yeah so I think it is it is all a very Paradox I I don't think we can you know I'm not I don't think we can simply go back to the past I don't think we can um we can um we should completely uh I think we should try to reclaim this question of products we should be asking you know how where is the growth how will the next Generation do better than the current ones in any of a number of different dimensions of of what counts is better um and uh and uh and I think the the fact that the left no longer believes in these things means there there should be some opening to to reclaim to reclaim this ground but but simply going back to the past can't work because then we're just going to cycle and repeat there has to be something that didn't quite work with Classical liberalism even if it was a golden age of classical liberals in the past you know we end up here today this is always you know I know this is too political but you know it's sort of like you know in the 80s when I was standard we saw these Marxist professors and the sort of line was you know um true Marxism has never been tried they always said and I often wonder that if someone someone calls themselves a liberal classical liberal today you know is it are they like a Marxist Professor from 1985 where you know true liberalism has never been tried I think it's tried it hasn't quite worked we have to be a little bit critical of it to figure out where it went wrong and then you know how to progress into something that combines the best elements of classicalism with uh with something else for the future um hi uh Hollis Robbins I'm dean of humanities at University of Utah and I certainly like the idea that uh I can tell people to say why Humanities well Peter Thiel says you should study Humanities I know that you didn't exactly say that but I but I'll use it for my own it was a relative argument it was but I'm interested you're out the admixture of optimism and pessimism because on the one hand the past isn't enough but we should study it on the other hand we we have to be we have to be looking toward the future but can't be too too optimistic we have to be realistic so I suppose I want to ask just a simple question uh especially in the midst of this uh of this discussion that is up to this point been very pessimistic is what does success look like well I I always I always um dislike that question a lot um you know I um I I I I I tend to think um I dislike cycle psychology we don't we have two we've overdosed on psychology it's it's just uh We've overdosed on therapy all this all this nonsense and uh optimism and pessimism are just you know I think bad forms of psychotherapy um they are um you know the they are in some sense um at the extreme limit case they're the same thing you know extreme optimism it's like okay you just need to sit back and watch the movie of the future unfold and eat some popcorn you don't need to do anything The Singularity is near it's that Ray Kurzweil type thing that's extreme optimism extreme pessimism is um you know die with dignity or not very much but you know um and uh and nothing you can do and it's because extreme optimism and extreme pessimism uh you know extreme optimism is um is denial extreme pessimism is acceptance but they both they both sum up to sloth it is they're both forms of extreme laziness where you're not going to do anything and so if if you had to if you had to give you know an accurate picture you know I'm not sure it's true but the healthy the healthy one is we're somewhere in between you know it we're it is not it is not destined that this planet is going to self-destruct it's not destined that it's going to become a totalitarian One World State there is some path in between it's it's hard we shouldn't accept totalitarianism or or destruction you have to fight you have to work on it and uh and that's that's sort of where I always uh I always get back to some form of individual human agency uh you know the indomitability of the human spirit and uh but it can't be guaranteed if you're as soon as you make it too optimistic or too pessimistic that is uh that's uh you're lost I'm Rick schwader I'm a cultural Anthropologist and cultural psychologist at the University of Chicago first of all thank you for that utterly engaging and provocative talk um everything is the state nothing is outside the state nothing is against the state something like that was Mussolini's definition originally of fascism how far down that road do you think we have gone in this Society um a dangerous question um I uh you know I I never know how to how to think about that I think um it's it's way way further than I would like um you know on the other hand we can have we have conferences like this we can we can talk about things a lot of things you get in trouble for but you can still talk about them in small groups anonymously uh you know they're parts of the internet that have been taken over by the state but the internet still is in some ways more free than it was you know it was it was it was 20 years ago um so I don't know I think it's um it's it's uncomfortably there's sort of uncomfortable elements that are that are that way uh there's an uncomfortable entanglement that the U.S has with China where you know you know we're Rivals but the Danger's always you know you have to choose your enemies well because you'll soon become just like them and are we going to copy the kind of surveillance totalitarian AI that China has and impose that in the U.S so they're sort of I think there are you know in all sorts of ways where I think it's uh it's it's been pushed too far but uh but it's still um you know I don't know I'd still much rather live in the US than China so all these all these ways we shouldn't be too extreme on it Peter Blair from Harvard and Hoover Peter when you opened the talk you said that the antonym of diversity is the University and one of the things that I've been thinking about during my time at Hoover is the ability of universities to cultivate human potential for the past 12 years through the teal fellows program you've encouraged people to drop out of the University what are some of the lessons that you've learned through the teal fellows program about how to cultivate human potential especially given that in a sense like the Tila fellows program is operating as kind of like the antonym to the university for the cultivation of human potential well I I'm always I'm always hesitant to do too much of a pitch for for these these various programs it was um it um you know in in some sense it was a very narrow program it was you know uh 20 20 students a year we've done about 10 classes at this point uh a little bit over 200 um 200 uh people um you know it's been you know it's been very uneven but uh even the median I think has been been quite successful I think about a quarter they can always go back to college so it's not it's we never say it's drop out because the colleges always want to um they want to have High graduation rate and so um if you if you stop out we always use the word stop out if you stop out you can always still come back 10 years later because you know the universities are so corrupt they're just they're just trying to you know they're just trying to rig all their numbers um and so um but uh but but uh um and it's you know there's one sense in which it was a very narrow program you know and you know what should be so shocking about it that you could have 20 people a year in the U.S who could do better than going to a university or in the world you know it's mostly mostly us program and um and then um but then it you know it obviously triggered all these larger debates about you know our general Society where you know there's um there's sort of uh too much of the tracks are just not going anywhere and even though I can't accept that many people in our program if you haven't figured out how to scale it there is this very broad anxiety that you know the the call the colleges are not teleological they're not leading to to something but something better you know it's uh it's I you know I think Stanford is a little bit healthier than most places because people figure out you're supposed to study computer science it's a it's a little bit narrow but uh you know I always say there only are there only are there only are two majors that that translate into reasonably well-paying jobs outside the universities computer science and petroleum engineering um and and there's and so there is there's some way that you know even on the elite University level there's some way this whole Elite formation thing has has badly broken down it's not all the universities fault but um but I I wonder whether the sort of extreme egalitarianism of elite universities is a kind of defense mechanism to avoid dealing with the ways in which they're betraying their students and so um if you tell your students Check Your Privilege um you know you shouldn't expect to do more than the average person um that's a way for the University to you know to absolve itself of the responsibility to um to see that its students become you know the leading leading members of our society so egalitarianism is sort of the excuse for a failed elitism thanks [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative

Views: 239,940

Keywords:

Id: ibR_ULHYirs

Length: 49min 21sec (2961 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/al_spaggiari]

Here’s a fun quote from 20:34.

“I don’t like answering why-questions. They’re overdetermined”.

—Peter Thiel, certified fucking brain-genius.