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[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter

Robinson born and Germany Peter teal moved to the United States with his
family when he was a child he graduated from Stanford and then from Stanford Law
School and after deciding not to practice law he co-founded PayPal and
Palantir made the first outside investment in Facebook funded companies
such as SpaceX and LinkedIn and started the teal fellowship which encourages
young people to drop out of college to start their own businesses mr. teal
remains a very active tech investor now based in Los Angeles Peter welcome
thanks for having the show we'll come to
tech and politics and all the matters of
current affairs in which you're involved
in a moment first the deep the substrate of your thinking in an essay you wrote

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in the early 2000s you talk about an impasse and you write about the
Enlightenment tradition which we in the United States have inherited as a kind
of treaty or settlement after decades of religious warfare in Europe quoting you
the Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat if the only way to
stop people from killing one another about religious questions involved a
world where nobody thought about it too much
then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay
the question of human nature was abandoned close quote
you're famous as a contrarian there could be almost nothing more contrarian
than saying that the Enlightenment represented a retreat explain yourself
well well if you want to use atomistic category you can distinguish the the

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intellect in the will on the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but
in the power of the intellect and moderns tend to believe in the power of
the will but the weakness of the intellect and so yeah I use a slightly
different metaphor if you have an evangelical Christian
I will study the outward-facing thing is that people are moral and that they're
good Christians the inward-facing thing is that you're sinful and if you say
well I mean this Bible study not figured out that I'm I'm a really good person
you somehow not quite gotten the message now if we transpose this to a modern
rationalist meetup the outward facing thing of modern rationalism is that
you're more rational better able to think through things than other people
you're one of the brights as I think Dawkins liked like to put it the inward
facing thing is that you're not capable of thought that that it's basically your
mind is full of spaghetti code you can't believe how bad people are thinking

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through things and that's I think the the scenic went on of sort of
enlightenment rationality at this point and we see in all sorts of forms we do
not we do not trust people's ability to think through things at all anymore in
the 21st century I think it's a cultural aside one could say that the the mania
we have around artificial intelligence is because it stands for the proposition
that humans aren't supposed to think we want the machines to do the thinking but
it's because we're in a world where individuals are not supposed to have
intellectual agency of any sort anymore we don't trust rationality we can maybe
believe in the wisdom of crowds we can believe in you know in big data and big
data we can believe in in some sort of mechanistic process but we don't believe
in the mind all right you continue in your essay to write about the German
legal scholar Karl Schmitt mmm Karl Schmitt has a checkered record we better
state that but that's not what you're talking about here you're talking about
a particular point he makes it offers I'm quoting you again Schmitt offers an
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alternative to all the thinkers of the Enlightenment he concedes that there
will never be any agreement on the most important things on questions of
religion and virtue in the nature of humanity but Schmitt responds that it is
a part of the human condition to be divided by such questions and to take
sides politics is the field of battle in
which that division takes place in which humans are forced to choose between
friends and enemies close quote so the well lived life the truly human
life the fully human life requires politics and politics requires making
choices and choosing sides right well that's pretty well that's putting words
that's what Schmidt would say it's not necessarily what what I would say okay
what I would say is that there is something about politics that's deeply
adversarial that's almost you're reduce ibly adversarial if you listen to a

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political speech and this is the sense of I think Schmidt is right that if you
listen to political speech the applause lines are never the positive ways the
positive things are going to do the applause lines are always how we're
going to fight the other side how we're going to unite against the other side
how terrible they are and we're going to stop them and and that that is kind of
this this dynamism of of politics and then as a as someone who who's generally
libertarian I'm always very complicated I would like to live in a world that's
less political where there's less politics but I would also like us to be
honest about how terrible politics is I think I suspect we can't avoid it
altogether but but it is it is it is a it's a it's not a it's not a nice it's
not a nice thing okay so one more step in this piece of the of the impact it's
like I think we should I think we should
always resist these sort of naive use of politics the politics are just you know
some sort of against some sort of mechanistic process where we take a poll

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and we all get to some you know syrupy answer that everyone can agree with and
that's that's not what politics is about at all
okay I'm continuing to quote you from your essay the world of entertainment
represents the culmination of the shift away from politics the Enlightenment
says well we've had all these years of warfare over religion we'll stop asking
important questions and all these decades these centuries after the
Enlightenment here's the world we've reached this is the way I read you you
can correct my reading but let me finish quoting you instead of violent wars
there could be violent video games instead of heroic feats
there could be thrilling amusement park rides instead of serious thought there
could be intrigues of all sorts in a soap opera it is a world where
people spend their lives amusing themselves to death close quote
now that is a devastating indictment of much of contemporary America correct

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well it is I mean I think this has been the trend of modernity now it's it's
it's not as though politics has disappeared though it's it's often just
gets displaced in various ways but but yes I think there is this this
incredible degree to which we've we've we've substituted the realities of
politics for these sort of increasingly fictionalized worlds and and it's
probably uh that's probably a very very unhealthy thing there's sort of a
slightly different frame that I've often given on this is is that in in the last
40 or 50 years there's been a shift from
exteriority which I which you know doing things in the real world to the sort of
interior world which is sort of in a way can be thought of this also the shift
from politics to entertainment or something like that and and the the from

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a dr. Phil a the powerful frame I give is you know almost exactly 50 years ago
today and you know July of 1969 men reached the moon and three weeks later
Woodstock began and with the benefit of hindsight we can say that that's when
you know progress ended and when the hippies took over the country or
something like that and then we've had we've had this incredible shift to
interior tea in the decades since then I would include things like the drug
counterculture I would include videogames you know maybe a lot of
entertainment more generally you know there's sort of parts of the internet
that can be scored both ways but but certainly there all these things where
we've shifted towards the you know your world of yoga meditation there's a world
of interior culture that sort of and it just sort of super inward facing all
right or if you want to if you want to frame it theologically you could say
it's a it's like it's always the I always like the quote
from Milton and Paradise Lost where the mind is its own place and of itself can

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make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell and this is what you're supposed to
be skeptical that that's what Satan says
when he gets um get sent to hell my says well just my mind if I just changed my
mind you know right I can change where I am and that's not quite true you know
there's an external reality but but somehow the temptation to turn
everything into something therapeutic something psychological meditative has
been a very powerful one in in the in the post 1960s America okay this is
fascinating although I should I should just stipulate it's it's going to be
frustrating because these are deep thoughts and you've read and written and
Carl Schmitt is a major and here we are reducing it ox to the size of a bullion
cube but that's television and now I'm about to do it all over again because
from Carl Schmitt to someone who is one of your favorite thinkers and was a
friend of of ours we both knew this man until his death a few years ago Rene

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Girard Rene Girard is difficult to summarize but a central aspect of his
thinking is the so-called scapegoating mechanism in primitive societies
conflict was often resolved by sacrificing a single individual or
scapegoat whose death would reunite would calm he'll reunite the community
we see murders like this in myth and sacrificial practices in the classical
world so forth okay once again Peter teal for Gerard there remains a denial
of the founding role of violence caused by human mammy so that is the human
desire to imitate each other which is the source of a great deal of trouble in
his thinking and therefore a systematic underestimation of the scope of
apocalyptic violence what if mimesis are urged imitate each other drives others
to acquire nuclear weapons for the sake of for the prestige they confer the
world that best describes this unbounded apocalyptic violence is terrorism

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close quote there's a lot there but but Rene Girard is in some ways the
addresses an aspect of human nature well it's it's good it's the very thing that
the Enlightenment says no no don't even think about such things right
yeah well the Enlightenment always whitewashes violence it's one of the
there are many things we can't think about an under Enlightenment reason but
one one is certainly violence itself and and if you go to the anthropological
myth of the Enlightenment it's the myth of the social contract so what happens
when everybody is that everybody's else's throat what the Enlightenment
says is everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down and has a nice legal
chat and draws up a social contract and that's maybe maybe that's the founding
myth the central lie of the Enlightenment if you will and what
Gerrard says something very different must have happened and when everybody's
at everybody's throat the violence doesn't just resolve itself and maybe it
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gets channeled against a a specific scapegoat where the war of all against
all becomes a war can of all against one and then somehow gets resolved but in a
in a very violent way and so I think you know what what Gerrard and Schmidt or
Machiavelli or you know the judeo-christian inspiration all have in
common is this idea that human nature is
problematic its violent it's um you know it's it's it's it's it's it's not
straightforward at all what what you do with this on it's not sort of simply
utopian or where we can say that everybody's not fundamentally good where
someone like Gerard and Schmidt very much disagree is that Gerard believes
that once you describe this it has this dissolving effect so scapegoating
violence only works if you don't understand what you're doing and so if
we say well we have we have a crisis in our village and we're gonna have a
witch-hunt so that everybody can you know get out

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all their negative energy and you know will target this one elderly woman that
only works if you don't think of it as a fake psychosocial thing right once you
think of it in those terms it stops to work and so there's sort of a there is
the sense of late modernity where this unraveling has been for Gerard an
ambiguous thing it's both it's both a bad thing because they're
these cultural institutions that were the only way we had ever had of working
and they're there unraveling but it's also inevitable we can't
somehow put the genie back into the bottle and and so the the Rorion
critique of schmidt would be that that somehow when Schmidt says politics is
about friends and enemies he's being so explicit Schmidt thinks by being
explicitly that he's strengthening politics but maybe it has this effect of
of undermining it and and this is I think you know there are elements of
this that one sees in you know in the contemporary scene in the US where that

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you know there's something about it that's super intense but then also you
know is super fake at the same time that's that's sort of what what what
people would people what people see and and and it doesn't quite work when it's
going to simply fake Peter Thiel I'm quoting you again we are at an impasse
on the one hand we have the newer project of the Enlightenment which
perhaps always came at too high a price of self stultify Haitian again the
Enlightenment looks at three centuries of religious warfare in Europe and says
we can just we'll just rule those questions out of order stop asking them
and Peter teal and Carl Schmitt say yes but that leads to a narrow small life
okay on the other hand we have a return to the older tradition now elsewhere in
your essay you're talking about terrorism in the third world and Islamic
radicalism we have a return to the older tradition but that return is fraught

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with far too much violence that is to say places in the world where they are
asking the first about first thing by first principles human nature the nature
of God there seems to be violence involved and so we're at an impasse now
soluble or insoluble well it's always easier to describe problems than to
solve them this is this this is a certainly a case in point so yeah so the
impasse if you frame this in more scientific or technological terms the
impasse is that the weapons have the technologies such that you know
we could probably destroy the world many times over and there's some point at
which this sort of breaks down you know maybe World War one didn't make that
much sense people still thought it made sense pre-world War one they still
thought there was such a thing as a winnable war debatable in the cases of
World War one and World War two but certainly you know by by the time you

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get to say 1970 and you have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20
times over it just doesn't make any sense anymore and and I think one you
know I've spoken a lot in different contexts about the sort of technology
stagnation yes we've come to the last 50 years but but sort of one way to relate
the tech stagnation to this theme is that is that it was just not motivated
anymore you know if you can think of the Manhattan Project the Apollo space
program were had military motivation maybe the space program ended in 1975
when we had the Apollo Soyuz docking we're just gonna be friends why do you
have to work 80 hours a week you know around the clock and and there is a
certain sense in which I would like to see us accelerate technological and
scientific innovation on back to you know the rate at which these things were
progressing the first half of the 20th century but you can't motivate it by
building you know more advanced weapon systems and and then it's not clear we

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found a substitute for that okay now you taught a course here at
Stanford I'm not I'm sticking with the impasse for a moment because you taught
of course here at Stanford last year and
I have a couple of undergraduate friends who took notes and slipped me their
notes and and then I looked over the syllabus there's one one reading that
you gave the kids that fascinates me I'm
not sure you presented it quite this way
but it almost seems as though there's an underlying suggestion that it's the way
out of the impasse or it's an a way out of the impasse now yet my hopes are high
Peter don't if you - them just let me down gently would you please so here's
the tech you used the 2006 address at Regensburg by pope benedict xvi not
the current pontiff his predecessor the theologian the shy theologian benedict

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xvi the pope again this takes a little moment or two to set up but i'm just set
it up and then get out of the way and let's see what you do with it
he makes a couple of assertions the first concerns the reasonableness of
religious belief and he quotes an exchange between a 14th century
Byzantine Emperor and his Muslim captors in which the emperor tells them they're
wrong to impose religion by force benedict xvi in the speech he asks is
the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts god's nature
merely a greek idea or is it always and intrinsically true modifying the first
book of Genesis the first book of the whole Bible John the Apostle John begins
the prologue of his gospel with the words in the beginning was the logos
John thus Spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God and in this word
all the often tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination
and synthesis close quote alright huge amount there but the

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fundamental idea is that properly understood faith is reasonable it's not
merely the idea of the reasonableness of
faith is not merely a cultural construct that belief belongs in one place or one
time it is intrinsically faith is intrinsically reasonable the
Enlightenment got that wrong and we we need some how or other to reown to grasp
the reasonableness of the first questions that will enable us to ask
them once again right well this is there's a lot that we could one could
I'm just gonna let you take a look at what can unpack in all of this I I would
say the Sun though isn't it it's is wow this is like this is a harder interview
that I was expecting way harder than I was expecting uh I think that I think it
is a little bit tricky to say both that it's you don't want faith to be
unreasonable you don't want it to be merely reasonable because then you could

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just use reason and so it's always a little bit of a complicated question of
how how you get faith Nathan and reason to work together the I'm naturally quite
sympathetic to to the Benedict position position right an approach in a lot of
ways and yet the from a literary point of view what was so interesting about
reading the Regensburg address where it was you know who's maybe using this 14th
century Byzantine Emperor maybe as a mouthpiece for the pro reason thing we
know what happened to the Byzantine Empire it sort of fell apart shortly
thereafter ashore and the suspicion one has is maybe the Byzantine Emperor in
the 14th century should not just have been making reasoned arguments but
should have also been getting some weapons and protecting himself from what
was on you know the disaster that was about to befall the Byzantine Empire and
and then the the thought I had in looking at the speech from the point of

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view of 2019 that I wonder about is was there
something about it that was somehow prophetic of something going wrong with
sort of rationalist conservative Catholicism where you know Benedict is
just like the 14th century Byzantine Emperor and maybe even I'm pro reason
and I think we live in a society where people don't respect reason enough he
somehow believed in it too much and and and then you know my I'm not not
Catholic like like you and I I've always I always have a two-word rebuttal of
Roman Catholicism to all my conservative Catholic friends it's just uh Pope
Francis and and there were there was something about you get to say that now
if I start on those I just add 10,000 years just to my time in purgatory just
have you back on your show yeah exactly okay okay so that's that's that's the so
it's it's it's a it's a fascinating speech but so you act on all these
levels so I read the RET Regensburg address in your syllabus and I thought

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ah Peters offering here's the way out of the impasse and you're saying no not
exactly I take that as a warning to place too
much faith place too much faith in the reasonableness of faith or
unreasonableness itself and ten years later everything you stood
for will be wiped out well I think look I think I think we have to always try to
go back to intellect mind rationality as as core values and there are there are
ways in which we've we've gone too far from them but at the same time I also
think there's something be said for it can't be just in Terry or T we also
should be you know acting in our world we should be we should be you know we
shouldn't be in this sort of yoga meditative psychological retreat and and
that's the that's MN and then there are and then there's sort of all these ways
where science and technology you know that the were the sort of the

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that there was such a big driver of progress for centuries there's so many
parts of these that no longer feel positive to people okay and that that
feel like a retreat I'll give a I'll give a Silicon Valley version of this
you know I was I was involved in the early 2000s and a lot of the futuristic
AI initiatives you invested in there's a
singularity Institute that we're sort of all these groups and right
the basic premise was you know AI is gonna happen it's gonna be if it happens
it's this barium hold on you better just
for viewers you better explain give us a two-sentence definition of it yeah it
means all these different things but the the context in which they used it was
sort of the science fiction version of AI so SuperDuper smart computers that
can do anything and they're gonna be very powerful so sad they'll seem like
humans and or maybe even smarter than humans and it's very important whether
or not they're friendly or unfriendly and this was sort of an important
problem that we needed to solving and circa 2003 it felt like okay we don't
know which way it's going to go and we need to to work on it and if you had a
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score it circuit 2019 it's um it's far more pessimistic and people now believe
they know what's going to happen at the singularity that Dai is going to kill
every human being on this planet that's what people actually believe and
including you well I'm we can be skeptical how fast it
happens you know but no that's the that's the general zeitgeist even in
Staten Valley okay Vanessa talking about it certainly anyone who watches a
science fiction movie believes that and your point is that this value which
used to be bright and hopeful has gone very dark and so maybe for an AI
researcher you should be working on it very very slowly and you're gonna be
somewhat less motivated to work on it and it has a very different has a very
different sort of a sort of a feel to it and so even even this sort of fairly
theoretical part of computer science it's more in the world of bits than the
world of atoms has has shifted into this much more apocalyptic direction where

00:25
you know the we're you know 2003 2004 it was we need to move as fast as we can
and now it's it's sort of like the precautionary principle and maybe you
know we should be scared of her own shadow and just be very very slow and
that's happened even in even in computer science this is one of the healthier
fields still twenty years ago all right contemporary politics the issues of the
day China what went wrong let me be a simple quotation here the late economist
and foreign policy analyst my colleague here at the Hoover Institution Harry
Rowan Harry Rowan by the way was a lovely humane highly intelligent man I
say that because I'm about to make a read a quotation from him that suggests
he was just mistaken he wasn't always mistaken he wrote this in 1996 when will
China become a democracy the answer is around the Year 2015 this prediction is
based on China's steady and impressive economic growth which in turn fits the

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pattern of the way in which freedom has grown in Asia and elsewhere in the world
close quote economic growth was supposed to lead to democracy in China and that
wasn't madness there was the example of South Korea first they got rich and then
they became democratic and of Taiwan they got rich and then they became
democratic and you could argue that the American foreign policy establishment
has lost a quarter of a century expecting things to go right in China
and they haven't how come well I think these you know these things are are
always some would over to determine but maybe maybe if I had to come up with a
simple mistake that people made was it was way too
deterministic a view of history there's nothing automatic about the way history
can happen and it's it's it's not that you get to you know $8,000 per capita
GDP and you automatically become a democracy these things can go go in a

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lot of different directions there's there's a great deal of contingency and
if I had to pick on you a little bit Peter here it would be that you know
there's the that speech that you helped ghostwriter right tear down that wall
mr. Gorbachev yes yes and and it was effective and the Berlin Wall came down
in 89 and communism fell in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union stop
there but we can't stop there because because there were other people who paid
attention to this and there are people in China and East Asia who paid
attention to this and they drew some very different lessons and the lesson
they drew was that we have to make sure that we keep the Leninist part of the
state running very strongly we can have you know you can have perestroika you
can have restructuring but you can't have glasnost and we're going to
decouple them and we're gonna learn the opposite lesson because yeah you open

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things up just a little bit too much and things fall apart and then and I think
yeah I think for you know 28 years it's at least 89 to 2017 we basically in the
West read the events of 89 is that was inevitably going to happen in the east
mhm and China read them it's not gonna happen because we'll learn we're gonna
learn from history we're gonna make sure it doesn't happen here and the exact
same events were interpreted in in different ways and they were probably
not going to happen because China wasn't going to let them and we were oblivious
to this because we were just so convinced of this determinacy of history
right that you know the Rif I always have on this is that 2017-2018 is the
year that G became president for life and that's the year that fukuyama's end
of history definitively came to an end but you know there are all these reasons
you could have said you know right it was there was a lot of evidence earlier
that things were off okay in your book zero - I'm quoting all
kinds of at least I get high marks for doing my homework the quotes are

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accurate okay in your book zero to one quote China is the paradigmatic example
of globalization its 20-year plan is to become like the United States is today
close quote so China this is this is another I think
dated thought but I'll let you tell me China can only copy it is incapable of
genuine innovation on its own and as long as the United States remains
innovative then we have the hope of remaining a step or two ahead of them
yes yes I agree with that but I would read it a little bit differently so I
think I I do think that the West is still far more innovative than than
China but if you're only one or two steps ahead that's not very much and so
if things are copied very quickly then maybe you don't need to innovate at all
you can outsource all the very hard R&D
work to to the West you have a lot of deadweight economic costs associated

00:30
with that and then if you can just steal all the IP it might that might even be
you know a more efficient way to to innovate here maybe you're six months
behind but you don't be behind that far and so I think that's I think that's
roughly the way to think of a lot of the contemporary sort of technology racist
you know you know if there's innovation happening in AI and I think most of the
breakthroughs or just about all the breakthroughs I believe have happened in
the West but they they get transmitted to China within six to twelve months and
so that's that's that's not another one origin for us so we yes we're innovating
but it only gives you so much now you have said actually this is something
else I have in here but I'm not going to take the time to go back and find it
that one of the six all paraphrase you said one of the signal accomplishments
of the Trump administration is causing everybody to rethink to reevaluate China

00:31
how is so Trump we've got a number of different what's getting all the
attention is the trade policy slapping on tariffs
The Wall Street Journal takes one whack at him after another's arguing that
we're harming our sabab zelich in the journal this morning was arguing we're
doing far more harm to ourselves and our own trading partners than we are to
China then you've also got I believe you'd know more about this than I but I
believe there are also stepped-up intelligence efforts and stepped-up
enforcement efforts concerning technology transfers just a sort of
open-ended question how is the Trump administration doing in terms not just
of waking everyone up to the danger of China but the actual implementation of
specific policy well I think I think this is all still very much a work in
progress right I think that there has been a sea change on the on the
perception with China and in a way the way I think of US politics is it's yet

00:32
sadly tribal it's too polarized most the times we just have this trench warfare
with the two parties fighting each other
no one makes much progress it's when you really win on issues when you get the
other side to agree with you and I believe that on the China issue the
Trump administration has gotten the entire center left to left to agree with
him I think maybe maybe Biden is still the one Pro China candidate running and
that that seems like a catastrophic albatross for him in the Democratic
primary this year I think all the others are are probably as anti China or it's
tough on China as as the president is maybe they'll be even tougher if they
get in because to some extent the Trump administration policies are still
moderated by we're trying not to hurt American businesses and I suspect the
the Democrats will be less concerned about about business got it but but I
think I think there's been a there's been a sea change a sea change on that

00:33
yes and of course the free trade theories are correct in theory there are
all sorts of but in in the real world the stuff is always super messy and if
you're negotiating a free trade treaty you want the person negotiating it to be
one who's not a deck doctrinaire free trader because the doctrinaire free
trader will believe that the worse a job that you go
shading the better a job they're doing because if you you know even if even if
you you concede everything and you get nothing from the other side
there still are these gains from trade and that's what free trade doctrine
always tells you that you don't need to work very hard on these trade treaties
and the u.s. is really the only country in the world that that believe that you
know you know Western Europe Japan have in effect far higher you know they've
got barriers to trade you have you have tariffs in the form of VAT taxes you
know different it's right percent or across the board on goods in Western

00:34
Europe Japan and and you know it's there's a there's a yes if we got rid of
all that maybe that would be a sort of more efficient world but we've obviously
gotten to a very very unbalanced point you know the other the other metaphor I
always give on this is that you know the basic flow is we have you know five
hundred billion dollars that we import from China one hundred billion a year
that we export to China and in effect four hundred billion dollars of cash
flows uphill from being saved by poor Chinese peasants and being invested in
low yielding US government bonds and so if you're looking at this from outer
space that alone tells you that it's just it's just a completely crazy regime
but that's some what about well what if they want their peasants to finance our
government debt why not well rightly type free-trade argument
but if we believed in globalization yes the way globalization is supposed to
work is the less developed countries are supposed to converge they converge they
grow faster therefore you get a higher return on investing in them and

00:35
therefore capital should be exported from the developed to the developing
countries that is the direction which capital flowed circa 1900 right when the
United Kingdom had a current account surplus a four percent of GDP and the
extra capital was invested in Argentinian bonds and Russian railroads
and all these different things and you know the globalization ended badly in
1914 in the late 19th 20th century but that at least made sense yes the money
flowed in the correct direction this time we're in a much crazier form where
the money is flowing but the wrong way that's not what
Chinese peasants shouldn't be saving money and low-yielding government US
bonds or negatively yielding European bonds there should be a you know
investing in China where they should be getting a higher return and so should we
alright I want to come back to Trump in a moment but first it sort of a summary
question about China population of 1.3 billion intense work ethic the ability
00:36
to to deploy capital and infrastructure everybody says including you have told
me this you go to China and the airports
are dazzling and the trains run fast and they're clean and efficient and of
course now they have a habit of rapid economic growth and in the long contest
to come between the United States and China what if we got democracy a free
press innovation that keeps us six months ahead are you optimistic well
it's very hard to to score I I would say
the my pessimists hoping you cheer me up about this my my neutrally pessimistic
description is is that you know if you scored it I think both sides think
they're going to lose I think the United States thinks that yeah it's it's sort
of like this declining power but but China does not think it's going to win
you know it's you have a demographic collapse right um you know anyone who

00:37
makes money tries to get their capital out of the country people are still you
know if at all possible trying to to get
out of China and so so if you sort of if you were to try to you know
psychologically score the two sides and say who believes they're going to win
actually they both think they're going to lose and and I you know I even if you
think you're going to win doesn't mean you're going to win although I think if
you think it's better way to go to life that you think you're going to lose you
will see anybody if you think you're going to be on a test don't always get
an A if you think you're gonna get an F you always get enough right and and so
so what's what's very confusing is I think I think both sides think they are
they're going to lose I told a lie one more question about China you said a
moment ago that in the 50s and 60s a lot
of the technological progress was driven in effect by the Cold War by the neat
the military need to develop technology which reminds me of again I can't quote
this I can only paraphrase it but there's some place in fairly early

00:38
George Kennan one of the diplomats and important writers in the Cold War fairly
early George Kennan in which he wrote that he welcomed the long struggle to
come between the United States and the Soviet Union because it would bring out
the best in the United States we had nothing to fear from this as long as we
lived up to our own best traditions he he expected it to be a bracing struggle
struggle between China and the United States help us technologically will it
be good for our character well the Cold War you know we won the Cold
War but but there are a lot of modern ways that could have gone so I'm I'm not
quite sure I'd rather not totally I'm not totally convinced of that
but I think yeah I think I think that I think the future the future version of
you know I do think that we we the future the China represents is not a
future that is that is particularly desirable I was I was struck by this

00:39
when I was in Western Europe a few months ago that I think I think the
future is something that always has to be thought of in relatively concrete
terms and it has to be different from the present and only something that's
different from the present and very concrete can have any sort of
charismatic force and and looking at Western Europe I would say there are
they're basically three plausible futures on offer number one is on
Islamic sharia law and if you're a woman you get to wear a burka
number two is totalitarian ai Allah China where the computers track you in
everything you do all the time and that's kind of creepy sort of the the
Eye of Sauron he's the Lord of the Rings reference watching you at all times and
then the third one is is hyper environmentalism where you drive a nice

00:40
scooter and you you recycle and even though I'm not you know not a
radical environmentalist I think if those are the three choices you can
understand why the green movements winning because those are the three
visions of the future we have right and and the challenge the challenge on the
conservative or libertarian side is is to offer something that's that's a
picture of the future that's different from from these these two very distant
and one somewhat stagnant one okay a note from a friend of mine young friend
of mine who took this is a note that he took in your class so this isn't in your
syllabus it's something you said in class if you've got economic growth you
can solve most problems this brings us to Donald Trump we've got economic growth
now the 3% seems to have cooled as we sit here talking maybe it's going to
average out this year is something between one point eight two point four
something like that but it's economic growth maybe we all relax

00:41
well Reagan we got 6% growth in 83 84 85 we got something like 6% growth almost
three years in a row so so it's yep 2 or 3% is is definitely better than nothing
the the the the question on the on the Trump administration is can we keep
going with this for the next decade and and I think you know I think in some
ways the president will get reelected if people believe that this sort of growth
is going to be sustainable for for for the next decade that's the future he
offers and that's it you know it's it's not quite as exciting as Reagan but it's
still on you know to 23% for a decade we will graduate things will gradually get
better we will work our way out of a lot out of a lot of these challenges and
then and then the the concern is if it's if it's just this temporary blip driven

00:42
by too much debt too much things like that then then Joe Biden or Elizabeth
Sanders starts elizabeth warren's Elizabeth Sanders they might as well be
Bernie were nor Elizabeth sander start to look ok socialists are right you know
not to be underestimated I mean it's you
know it's it's there's there's a there's a Marxist theory that that you know
the marks the time for communism would come when interest rates went to zero
because the zero percent interest rate was assigned the capitalists no longer
had any idea what to do with their money and therefore there was they're no good
investments left that's why the rates are zero and therefore all that you
could do at that point was redistribute the capital and so I'm you know it's it
doesn't means or percent rates lead us to socialism but it is always something
that I find I find it alarming that the rates are as low as they are last
question about Donald Trump do you expect to endorse him yes I mean I
certainly will not endorse any of his any of his opponents all right a couple
of closing questions here we became friends when you were still a student

00:43
here at Stanford imagine imagine a young Peter teal listening to us now Peter
teal himself Stanford undergraduate Stanford Law School practice law at a
big fancy firm in New York for seven months and then said this is horrible
came out here and began investing in tech but now Peter Thiel himself has the
teal fellowships which are to entice really bright kids to drop out of
college and you've just sat here telling
us that the the the valley that you came back to from New York and began
investing in is not the valley of today things have gone dark so what path would
you recommend to an 18 or 20 year old now Wow you know it's these are always
such hard questions to UM to answer and I think even if I knew all these things
I'm not sure what I would have done of course that's a that's a fake thought

00:44
experiment you know the question looking back would be when I graduated
undergraduate in 1989 what what are some different choices I would have done and
okay I think I should have the advice I would the reasonable advice I'd give my
former self from thirty years ago would be something like just think a lot
harder about the future don't think of education as a substitute for the
you know try to think concretely what what you want to do and and and there's
something about the sort of tracked educational system that again it gets
packaged as a form of thought but it's a it's a substitute for thought it's a
substitute for the future and and yeah you have to
it's it's you probably don't want to do the things that are hyper competitive
that you know that everybody's doing there's you know and I think there's
always a question you know where's the frontier where there some pockets

00:45
innovation where where you can do some some new things and not be and you know
in a in a crazed competition that's that's that that was a hard question
answer then I think it's a harder one now but I think it's still the right
question to ask all right it's always money it's always the
contrarian intellectual question tell me something that's true that yes yes yes
this is your favorite question you know what what is what's a good career that
other people aren't pursuing you know the politically the politically
incorrect career engineering careers petroleum engineering so it's it's it's
it's it's super lucrative and the just are um you know ideological reasons not
enough people go into it alright let's that's a that's a straightforward
ideological answer alright so here's the last question Peter you're still
investing but you're teaching classes at
Stanford you're fielding telephone calls from the White House at this stage in
your life what are you trying to accomplish you all yours you're famous

00:46
for saying having a plan you you may not follow the plan but having a plan is
better than no plan what are you thinking over the next five years or ten
years for you well I you know I this is always this always sounds too too
ambitious or too grandiose but you you know I um I would like to get our
society our society to get back to the future to get back to to a society
that's that's a you know progressing in in all these all these important
dimensions and there's sort of a you know there's sort of a very local
way of doing that which is investing in futuristic technology company so that's
a small you know manageable way you do this and then there's sort of our you
know broader conversations like the one we're having today where we try to we
try to get people to think about this topic but it's yeah we should we we need
to think about you know the future arrives it will be different from the

00:47
present and if we don't think about it it's much less likely to be a good
future than if we if we work to craft it peter thiel thank you for uncommon
knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you