Conversations with Tyler - Peter Thiel on Political Theology

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

In this conversation recorded live in Miami, Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it's a concept we still need today, why Peter's against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we're entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we're overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded February 21st, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Peter on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [e-mail] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, Peter. Thank you for doing this. Hello, Tyler. Now, the title of this conversation is political theology.

That was a phrase, I think, first used by the Russian anarchist. Bakunin, Tamak the Italian nationalist, Mazini. German legal theorist Carl Schmidt then picked it up and said it's something that everyone needs. They all need a political theology. What does the term mean to you? Well, it's a bit of a fuzzy, broad concept, but maybe sort of to motivate it as a contrast. I think that in late modernity, we're often living in this world of hyper-specialization where you can't think about the big picture. And it's sort of like, I don't know, It's like Adam Smith's pin factory on steroids is sort of our world.

And I think there is some way that we have to try to integrate all these different facets of our life to try to make progress. And that's what political philosophy does. That's what political theology does. The reasons these sorts of things were abandoned. You know, I think maybe it's already was like the Enlightenment sort of abandoned from, you know. And one type of reason it was abandoned was because it's too hard to figure this stuff. out or it's just a sort of a fool's errand. I'm inclined to think the other reason was it was often I think it's too dangerous, too divisive. You're not supposed to have debates about religion.

We settled that in 1648 of the Treaty of Westphalia. We're just going to forget about it and not talk about these things. And I think that might have been a reasonable compromise in the 18th century. It's my view that when you fast forward to the 21st century, it's maybe more dangerous not to think about things. And it's again more dangerous to go for us to become ever small. cogs and an ever bigger machine, you know, a la the Adam Smith Pin Factory. And then the, you know, the political dimension on it, just to say one thing on that, is there's always sort of a question, you know, if we're trying to figure out something about the whole, about our whole world, you know, do you start on sort of a human scale or do you start on, you know, sort of a

microscopic, telescopic, atomic or cosmic scale? There's probably some way these things are related, but the political theology, political philosophy debate, our frame, I think this is also a Socratic idea. We start the sort of turn to common sense, human, the world around us, questions about politics, economics, society, culture, and that's sort of actually this important way to get access. You know, there's some deep link between the university and the universe. There's some deep link between the failing multiversity and the crazed multiverse. verse, the sort of political orientation I have is you're never going to solve these things. You have to start with the university or whatever that's gone wrong if you're ever going to make sense of the

universe. And there's some analog to that that motivates all these things. Let's say I'm trying to make sense of your political theology. So I recall you saying in a recent talk, you consider yourself religious but not spiritual. And that strikes me as quite a Calvinist point. So if you put aside predestination and think of Calvinism as insisting we know nothing about heaven. So it's an arrogation of man's power to claim to know about heaven that's related to your critique of the left. The notion that we don't know anything about heaven, it also means you can't really be spiritual. That's also a kind of arrogation. Isn't the consistent Peter Thiel really a Calvinist thinker? And Calvinism, it's quite concrete. It's quite serious. It takes governance and authority,

very literally. Why aren't you just a Calvinist? I'm, like, I'm still like mostly a libertarian, Tyler. But you can do both. And that's, you know, I mean, I think probably there are things I, they're probably redeeming things I can find in Calvinism. It's probably, you know, it's so anti-utopian that it's probably helpful in the battle against communism. You know, I don't know if that's the only way to be anti-communist.

And I don't know, if you do five-point Calvinism, it's, you know, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints, I don't know if I agree with even one out of those five things. I would say, you know, a Girardian anthropological frame is that, you know, there is this deep link between gods and scapegoats, and we tend to always, we have these scapegoats, we turn into gods, we project our violence onto them, and this is what, you know, archaic religion does. This is in some ways what, you know, atheist liberalism does. you blame everything on Mr. God, isn't Calvinism just an extreme form of scapegoating where Mr. God did

everything? He determined everything. He's why you're wearing that blue jacket and it's why everything you did wrong. It's all Mr. God's fault. We should be deeply distrustful of scapegoating Mr. God for everything like that. So that's an anthropological argument against Calvinism. And then the intellectual reason I'm not Calvinist is that I think we should be trying to make sense of the world. And if you're, you know, so depraved that you can't even think, which is sort of, I think, a core Calvinist thing, we shouldn't be having a conversation. So if I were a real Calvinist, we wouldn't even be able to have a conversation here. You know, there's a toomistic distinction between the intellect and the will and the medievals believe in the power of the intellect,

the weakness, the will, the moderns, it's sort of in some ways reversed. But if you sort of take an effective altruist, East Bay. rationalist. These people, they're much closer to Calvinism. They claim to be rationalist, but if you're in a rationalist Bible study equivalent, and the outward facing thing is that you're rational and you're pure and your thinking, the inward facing thing is all just spaghetti code. You can never be right about anything. Maybe you can be a little bit less wrong. And so I'm, yeah, I'm against both Calvinism and so-called rationalism. But here's then the puzzle I'm faced with. Let's take all of that at face value. Why is that you just don't slide into Catholicism?

or Eastern Orthodox, belief in free will, there's some middle position. And why is your middle position stable? You could either be Catholic or, for that matter, Mormon, where there's plenty of room for free will, right? Well, again, these aren't, they're presumably not all the alternatives. It's always a little bit of a cheap shot. My two-word rebuttal to Roman Catholicism is Pope Francis. And, you know, we were talking a little bit about, you know, the, you know,

I grew up as a Lutheran. There are probably all these things that are problematic about Luther. There are things that were good about him. But, you know, I think the one part of it that if we judge him by the standard of the 16th century, I don't know. I think the Reformation had to come from the outside. It was not actually possible for it to start from within. And there is a way that, you know, the Lutheran piece, it was the less globally centralized

church, it was going to be a less centralized church. And there's probably, you know, there's probably still some part of the Protestant political project that lines up more closely with a libertarian view. What is it from the Hebrew Bible, or one could say, Old Testament, that you've incorporated into your own political thought? I think my views on this are pretty, fairly orthodox Christian in that there's some continuity between the old and the new. You know, there's some, some sense, it's sort of hard to define, where maybe the Christian God is the original progressive, where the new is better than the old. I think it's the first time where the new is simply better than the old just by virtue of being new. If you exaggerate the difference too much, that ends up being problematic.

And that's sort of where you end up saying that the Old Testament God is like maybe just a different God from the New Testament God. Sort of all the extremely progressive forms of higher criticism, things like this in the 19th century, we're all deeply anti-Semitic. So I think if you're too progressive, you end up becoming an anti-Semite. And then you have to someone say there's some progress. But the Girardian intuition I would have is it's just always this reversal and perspective where the Bible takes things from the side of the victim. It's already in the book of Genesis, where it's the story of Canaan Abel,

the founding of the first city in the history of the world, is a parallel but opposite story to the story of Romulus and Remus, the founding of the greatest city, where, you know, Romulus and Remus stories told from the point of view of Romulus, the Canaan Abel stories told from point of view of Abel, or the, you know, the Israelites coming out of Egypt that would normally be told from the point of view of the Egyptians where you had these troublemakers and we got rid of them, and you have this sort of inversion of perspectives throughout the Old Testament, I would say. Is it possible that we can read the Old Testament, conclude essentially, history is

something really bad? That's the central message of the woke, and then just say, basically are correct. We should side with the woke. They have all these excesses. Those are terrible, but they're in a way a method of advertising, the fundamental conclusion that history is bad, and they're the ones who make us deal with that, and thus you and I should be woke. What's wrong with that line of reasoning? I think you have to say that the history was, yes, I think the history was very bad. I think it's always a mistake for conservatives or anti-woke people to whitewash it too much. And so if we say that, you know, yeah, there used to be slavery, but the slaves were all happy people,

they were all happy slaves. That is a loser argument, and you shouldn't do this. What I would say, the, again, the sort of rough Christian frame on this is somehow the history is really bad. And I think Christianity probably, it is much worse than Islam or Judaism on this,

because, I don't know, you know, Islam and Judaism, it would be inconceivable that you could murder God, you know, in the form of a person. If someone claimed to be God and a God, killed, that would just prove that he's not God. So yeah, so sort of the original sin, the violence, in some sense is far greater in a Christian context. But then there is some way that we're all

part of that matrix and you also need to have, you know, you need to have forgiveness. So if you want to maybe outline three, three rough possibilities, there's this, you know, hard to define Christian in between one, which is the history is terrible and it's awful, but we need to try to find a way to forgive people. And then there is a, let's say, a, version where the history is terrible, but we're going to forget about the forgiveness part. And then there is, I don't know, maybe sort of a right-wing Nietzschean Bronze Age pervert alternative, which is, you know, we're going to forget about the history. It's kind of oppressive. I'm sick of the skill trip and don't want to hear anything more about the history.

And somehow the sort of in-between Christian one, I think is the most tenable, even though there are all sorts of tensions in that. There was a recent Harvard talk you gave where, if I understand you correctly, you suggested the last. left needed to learn how to relativize its victimhood. What did you mean by that? And how does it relate to what you just said? The context was, you know, how much victimhood is unhealthy for people to have. And there are all these ways where you can identify yourself as a victim.

I don't want to have sort of blanket rule where you can never say that you weren't a victim. You know, I sometimes like to joke that I'm a poor and persecuted Peter person. And that's, maybe there are elements of truth to that. Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's, it's very exaggerated. But if I, if I absolutize that too much, it's probably unhealthy and sort of a Christian division that I suggested at the Harvard talk was that it's okay to say you're a victim. It's, it's okay to do these things up to a certain point. You can't say that you're a greater victim than Christ. Once you do that, you've probably lost perspective. Are there other holy books besides the Bible that you draw ideas and inspiration from? And what would those be?

In some sense, it's all the great books. Were these sort of, I don't know, they're not quite at the scale of these holy books. But there was a way that, you know, we treated, you know, I don't know, Shakespeare or Servantes or Goethe as these almost semi-divine writers. and I think that's the sort of attitude one has to have to read any of these books, you know, appropriately and seriously. So the Western canon would be your answer, so to speak. Something like the Western canon. I don't think that the great books are quite as holy as the Bible. You know, as a result, I probably don't read enough of them. But yes, that's the closest approximation. And it includes science fiction, yes or no? I read a lot as a kid. I read so little of that nowadays. It's just so little of that nowadays.

it's all too depressing. Last week I was teaching my graduate class, and a bunch of them asked me, why is it we keep on hearing about Carl Schmidt now? And I tried to explain that to them, but why do you think there's now a resurgence of interest in Carl Schmidt? And for you, what are the valuable insights in Schmidt? Carl Schmidt was one of us sort of this group of thinkers who came to prominence in the 1920s in Weimar, Weimar Germany. And there was, you know, obviously there were a lot of things that went,

very haywire with many of these people, you know, that sort of, in some ways, Schmidt got somewhat entangled with the Nazis who distanced himself a few years later, but it was some very bad judgment in certain ways. But the thing that I think is interesting, dangerous about looking at the Weimar thinkers. It was somehow in the aftermath of World War I, Germany had lost, You couldn't go back to sort of the throne and altar empire, the Habsburgs. We didn't really want to go forward with liberal democracy. And so there were all these people had these fairly deep critiques. And in some ways, it was going back to these questions of political theology, political philosophy

that had been sort of whitewashed and set aside since the Enlightenment. And there were, again, there were things about it that were dangerous. You know, sort of, you know, one way to think of the Weimar period was, I don't know, like the dwarves in Moria where they dwelled too deep, and finally they awaken the nameless terror of the Balrog. I think there are, and again, I don't think we're ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s where liberalism is exhausted.

One suspects the democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window. What is it you think that Schmidt missed? That's very important. I'll just sort of do one insight that I think is powerful and then sort of what's, what's wrong about that. One of his books was the concept of the political and sort of what defines politics. And it's sort of this, it's some of this division of friends and enemies. Then that somehow is really foundational and you shouldn't get sidetracked with all these other things.

And then all these interesting ways you could apply this. There's sort of a 1980s Reagan coalition question. I always like to ask people where you had this, you know, The Reagan Coalition was somehow the free market libertarians, the defense hawks, and the social conservatives. And so if you ask, what does the millionaire and the general and the priest, what do they actually have in common? We just sort of imagine these three people are seated at a dinner table and they're having dinner, and what do they actually talk about? It's really hard to come up with an answer, and yet the coalition worked incredibly well. And the answer I submit that they have in common is they're anti-communist, and they have a common enemy.

And that was, you know, incredibly powerful. It was, in some ways, my formative political idea as a teenager, you know, junior high school, high school, late 70s, early 80s, was anti-communism. And then there was a way that, you know, when the Berlin Wall came down in 89, this seemingly incredibly powerful political consolation disintegrated. And there's sort of a natural Schmidian analysis of this. So that's sort of where I find Schmidt quite powerful as a thinker. You know, the place where it probably tends to always go haywire is there's always a question whether politics is like a market or is it a sort of thing where if you understand it better, it works better?

Or is it something like a scapegoating machine where the scapegoating machine only works if you don't look into the sausage-making factory. And so if you say we're having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we'll atree some psychosocial unity as a village, this sort of thing doesn't really work if you're that self-aware. And so there was sort of, you know, Schmitt had this,

you know, in a way had this optimistic enlightenment rationality to it where if we just describe politics as, you know, the arbitrary division of the world, world into friends and enemies, then this will somehow, you know, strengthen the political, and it probably actually, you know, in some ways, accelerated its disintegration instead. Is Schmidt missing out on a certain possible cyclicality in history? So the notion that liberalism will collapse in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, obviously that was the correct prediction.

But if you reappear in West Germany of 1948, it was a completely incorrect prediction. And just as well, liberalism had collapsed, leading up to World War I, it tends to come back. Why isn't the cyclical perspective the correct one? Man, that's a big question, but I don't know. I think you can stress the aspects that are timeless and eternal. I prefer to stress the aspects that are one-time and world historical. I think that in some sense, every moment in history only happens once.

And I think there is some kind of a meaning to history. I think it has a certain type of linearity to it. I think that is sort of the, let's say, the Judeo-Christian view of history as distinct from, let's say, the classical Greco-Roman one. I don't know if you can have a concept of history that's cyclical. I don't know. If you look at Thucydides, where it's this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta.

So the Periclean age, some of them gives way to this great conflict. And then people came back to studying Thucydides right after World War I because there were certain paralleling 100 years of peace between the Napoleonic wars and then led to this great conflict. But there's nothing particular in the history. None of the details matter in Thucydides. He makes up all the speeches and so on. And then you contrast this with something like of the Book of Daniel in the Bible

where it's a succession of four kingdoms and it is a one-time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated in. And there's sort of a sense in which I would say the real first historian was Daniel. And the city isn't even close. And then, yeah, we talked off the settle a little bit about, you know, well, what about, you know, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire and isn't the European Union sort of like the Roman Empire? And then, I don't know, my response is, well, you know, we have nuclear weapons today, and they didn't have those, you know, even in 1900.

And so even just on the science and tech arc, things are so different. and I would not trivialize the importance of science and technology. So you think now the stakes are too high for the cyclical version of history to work? Because at some point, it's just not possible to come back? It's just that the science and tech has a progressive character. And so it is, yes, there are elements, I think, that are probably quite apocalyptic about our time. But I just start by saying they're very different. And we're in a very different world than we were in 1900.

and I don't know how you go. I don't know how you unlearn all the knowledge we've gained, even since 1900. Do you think we're entering a new age of millenarian thought? Somewhat akin to the English 17th century. Everything was very fertile. There's a scientific revolution. Tech, you could say, is revitalized again.

A lot of people went crazy. Highly diverse theologies. They execute a king. Many strange things happen. But in many ways, we're living in the world of the English 17th century, right? With constitutions, political parties, central banks. Is this the new millenary age? This is again, this is again like an absurdly cyclical frame you're putting on things. It's just, no, I don't think any moment ever repeats itself. It is just radically different.

Of course, there are things that are apocalyptic about our world. We have, you know, we have all these kinds of dangers that, unlike the 17th century, they seem to come from, you know, this place that's very non-religious. It's like science, technology. It was nuclear weapons after 1945. You know, maybe it's environmental degradation, climate change. We can debate about various forms of the environment. There certainly are fears people have about bioweapons.

We can ask what really happened with the Wuhan lab. There are apocalyptic fears, you know, around AI that I think, you know, deserve to be taken seriously. So, yeah, if it's millenarian or apocalyptic, it has a, very, very different feel. It's sort of an apocalyptic violence that comes from a purely human source. It's not, it's not really being, you know, orchestrated by God. One of the points that Renee Gerard always liked to make was that in the Catholic Church, it was I think the sort of during the Advent season, you'd often have these sort of sermons on the end times and the terrible things that

happened at the end of the world. And Gerard's telling the church stopped those sermons and that after 1945 because people needed to be reassured that the nuclear weapons had nothing to do with Armageddon or fire and brimstone or anything like this, even though, of course, you know, there were all these slight mythic elements, you know, the first nuclear test was called Trinity, or, you named it after all these Greek gods, the Saturn, Jupiter, Zeus, whatever. There are elements of that that I think are very true. But if I've had to do my anti-millanarian frame, or maybe it's not a pro-tech argument, this is sort of an anti-anti-tech argument, is that if we, if we again talk about all these

existential risks today, nuclear weapons, climate change, biotech, you know, nanotech, killer robots, the AI that's going to turn everyone to a paperclip or whatever, I always think you have to, you should at least include, you know, one more kind of existential risk if we're going to throw it in, in my mind, one other existential risk is a one-world totalitarian government. And I find that at least as scary as the others in sort of a biblical eschatological context. You're supposed to worry about Armageddon. You're also supposed to worry about the Antichrist. Maybe you're supposed to worry more about the Antichrist because the Antichrist comes first.

And so, you know, if we're going to find a pathway through this apocalyptic age, you have to sort of navigate between the silla of all these, you know, existential risks that are, and the cribbous of this sort of political totalitarian catastrophe. If I had to do sort of a more literary version on this, you know, it's very hard to write sort of a literary account of the Antichrist, but there were sort of the two good Antichrist books that were written, the two best fictional ones in my mind were pre-World War I. There was 1908, Robert Hubez, was sort of a Catholic book, Lord of the World. There was a 1900 one by Solovee of War Progress in the End of His. They both had these sort of accounts of this future totalitarian world dictator who took over the whole world.

And both of them, it's kind of a daemonium ex machinus. So it's really unclear how the Antichrist takes over. It's like it gives these hypnotic speeches and no one can remember word he says, but they all just sell their souls for no apparent good reason whatsoever. And he just takes over the world. But it seems to me that if we were to write, if one were to try to write a novel like this post-1945, it's very straightforward. It'd be like one world or none. This was a short film by the nuclear scientists after 1945. If we don't give the nuclear weapons to the one world government, it's going to blow up the whole world.

And basically, the literary version would be that the Antichrist comes to power by constantly talking about Armageddon and constantly telling us scary millinery and stories. And so that's sort of my complicated, nuanced answer is there's a lot of truth to these existential risks. I don't want to completely dismiss them. That's also how we're going to get this totalitarian state. If you look at all these versions of this, I can go down, but it's like, you know, do you want to worry about Dr. Strangelove or Greta? It seems like Dr. Strangelove's more dangerous, but if everyone's going to have to, you know, ride a bicycle, that's not just going to happen on its own. And that requires, you know, some, some real, real enforcement of this

stuff. Where there's, you know, there's a short, you know, Bosterment, there's a Boston essay from 2019 on how to stop all the AI risks. And it's basically, you know, maybe we can change the culture so that nobody will have heterodox ideas anymore. And so a few different ideas like this. But then what you really need is really effective global government and really effective policing because you have to have some kind of global compute governance. That sounds to me at least as scary as the AI. But isn't the much greater risk collapse into a kind of disorderly feudalism. So where in Florida, the United States seems to be becoming more federalistic. It's very hard for me to imagine China, say, taking over India. You can look at the Balkans,

it's even a word, balkanized. You look at the Middle East. If it goes very badly, it's hard to see any single power just ruling any substantial part of the Middle East. It's easy to imagine it being in a kind of chaos. Why think there's so much scale, but that kind of totalitarianism would be possible? Man, I don't know. There's so many different versions of this, but just if we think about the reversion of this, I would have been more on your side. Let's say post-9-11.

You know, it was, you know, well, aren't we just going to have all this chaotic terrorism all over the world? And we didn't get that much terrorism. And we instead got, you know, the Patriot Act, you know, incredible tracking of, you know, of money flows, incredible monitoring of people. And, of course, you know, there's still, there's still things that can go wrong, but the political slogan of the Antichrist, first Thessalonians 5-3, I think, is peace and safety. It seems that we've gone far more in the peace and safety direction

than the global chaos direction. I don't know. I think it's hard to even have like an illegal Swiss bank account. And that's like a really modest, modest way. It's hard to exit. It's much harder to exit the United States than it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Let's say you're trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddles through and just keeps on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that?

What do you watch? I don't think it's a really empirical question. Yes, if you could convince me that it was empirical and you'd say these are the variables we should pay attention to, if I agreed with that frame, you've already won half the argument. And so it would be like variables, well, you know, the sun has risen and set every day. it'll probably keep doing that. And so we shouldn't worry. Or, you know, the planet has always muddled through, so Greta's kind of wrong.

And, you know, and we shouldn't really pay attention to her. And I'm sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don't think this is a great argument. Or, you know, this is, of course, if we think about the globalization project of the post-Cold War period, where in some sense it's, you know, globalization just sort of happens, it's going to be more movement of goods and people. and ideas and money, and we're going to sort of become this, you know, more peaceful, better integrated world. And you don't need to sweat the details. We're just going to kind of muddle through. And then what, you know, in my telling, there were a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. You know, one simple version is the U.S.-China thing, hasn't quite

worked the way people in Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. And I think one could have figured this out much earlier. If we had not been told, you can just, you're just going to muddle through. You know, the alarm bells would have gone off much sooner. You know, maybe, maybe globalization is leading towards, you know, sort of a neoliberal paradise. Maybe it's leading the totalitarian state of the Antichrist. I would be, yeah, I'd be, let's see, it's not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn't ask questions about muddling through, I'd be so much, like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you, stopped asking questions about muddling through, I'd be so much more assured.

So are you... So much more hopeful. Are you saying it's ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question? I don't think it's metaphysical, but it's somewhat analytic. And moral even? It's... That you're laying down some duty by talking about muddling through. It does tie into all these bigger questions.

So I think, I don't think if we had a one-world state that this would automatically be for the best. And so there are, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be, you know, maybe the absolute power that a one world state would have would corrupt absolutely. I don't think the libertarians were critical enough of it the last 20 or 30 years. So there was some way they didn't believe their own theories. They didn't connect things enough. I don't know if I'd say that's a moral failure, but there was some failure of the imagination.

nation. So this multi-pronged skepticism about muddling through, would you say that's your actual real political theology? Like have we gotten to the bottom of this now? You know, it's whenever people think you can just muddle through, yeah, you're probably set up for some kind of disaster. That's that, that's fair. I mean, it doesn't, it's not like, not as positive an agenda, but, but I always, I always think, you know, as a, you know, it's one of my chapters in the zero to one book was, you know, you're not a lot of ticket. And it's sort of like the basic advice is if you're an investor. And, you know, you can just think, okay, I'm just muddling through as an investor here. I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people. I don't, I can't pay attention to any of them. I'm just going to

write checks to everyone, make them go away. I'm just going to set up, you know, a desk somewhere here on South Beach. And I'm going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk or, you know, not everybody, but I'll just, it'll, it's just I'm writing lottery tickets. And that's just a formula for losing all your money. The muddling, the place where I react so violently to the muddling through, it's just, it's, again, we're, we're just not thinking. And this is like it's, it's, it can be Calvinist, it can be, it can be rationalist, it's, it's, it's anti-intellectual, it's, it's not thinking about things. So the muddling through view and the Calvinist view, in your opinion, they have the same flaw, actually. It's a distrust in human agency, a

distrust in human thought, a distrust, you know, in our ability to make choices. Now, for months I've been asking myself why you and also Schmidt are so interested in this catacon idea, which is also from the Bible. You can explain that to us in a moment, but am I correct and now thinking? It just occurs to me that the catacon is in a sense your substitute vision for what for me is muddling through. So you're not willing to believe in muddling through, but things haven't collapsed now, not here. So you need something else holding the finger in the dike, and that's catacom, or no? Well, it's a very mysterious idea. There's always a question why the Antichrist hasn't taken over yet, and it's this mysterious force that holds back, this restraining

force that holds back, you know, the totalitarian one-world state. You know, I don't necessarily put too much stock in it, because on its own terms, it's somewhat unstable, it's provisional, It has these sort of archaic, sacred elements. It can work for a while. You can't identify it with an institution. And again, the Schmidian view is there were all these different things that played the role of the catacon at various points in time. You're not supposed to eminentize the Eschaton.

You're also not supposed to eminentize the catacon. If you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong. If you think of the catacon as the thing that restrains the one world state, or that restrains the Antichrist. Anything that's sort of like the opposite, this is sort of a Girardian cut, is always going to be memetically entangled, and so it's going to have sort of this parallelism.

And so there's always a risk that the catacon becomes the Antichrist. You know, the original anti-the-proto Antichrist was Nero. Claudius, the good emperor was the catacon. He was restraining Nero. But then at some point, you know, Nero is the opposite of Claudius, but they're both Roman emperors.

Or, you know, you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, I don't know, from let's say, 1949 to 1989, I would identify the catacon as anti-communism. I would identify communism as the ideology of the Antichrist in the 20th century. And anti-communism was this, you know, it was not, you know, what stopped communism was not, you know, the United States couldn't have done it. It was not just one country. It was not like some libertarian debating society. It was, you know, something was like pretty violent, pretty, pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian, that sort of had this unifying effect. And then the way it morphed would be in 1989, something like anti-communism morphs into

neoliberalism. And that's actually, you know, if you're anti-communists, you're not aspiring for world control, you're just trying to stop the communists from getting world control. Once you've defeated the communists, what are you supposed to do? And like maybe you can just go home and forget about all of what you did. But in practice, these things, have a tendency to perpetuate themselves, and it was like Bush 41, anti-communism became the New World Order, and we're now going to just govern the world in the name of anti-communism. And so there's something about it that's always misleading, or even what I said about the Antichrist in this apocalyptic thing, doesn't the Antichrist just come to power by acting as a catacon?

This is what Greta says she's doing. She is the catacon stopping climate change. And so it's, yeah, it's a somewhat useful concept, but I wouldn't put too. much weight on it. So at the macro level, all the weight you're putting on human agency, is that really so compatible with Lutheranism? I'm not a perfect Lutheran. There's a lot. There's a lot that was about all these people that one would judge very differently in retrospect. If you look in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, and you think about all the Christian thinkers who believed in some form of predestination or Moses was chosen and the like, Abraham was chosen,

What is it in the Bible that points you in the direction of so much belief in human agency being so important? There's sort of a lot of different levels on this. But certainly, if you think of it as this shift away from sacrificing individuals, sacrificing people, there is sort of an anti-sacrificial theme. And, you know, you can always say how is modernity or enlightened values. How are they tied with this? but certainly the idea I would have would be something like the idea of the individual came out of this context where, you know, the state was not absolute,

it was not not sacred, it was not necessarily providential. Girard liked to always say that Christ was the first political atheist. Because on the level of the political order, Christ says that he's the son of God, son of the father, there's a way you can go into Trinitarian metaphysics, but the political interpretation of this is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, somehow that's not exactly the son of God, and the Roman Empire is not simply divinely ordained, and then that somehow opens a space for a less unitary system that takes many, many centuries to develop or something like this.

But this is where, I don't know, I think of, you know, I think of even Ein Rand is like a pretty good Christian in this way. I wonder what you would say to say. But it's just, it's at least, you know, yeah, it's Jewish and atheist and shrill and crazy, but it's just, you can't sacrifice the individual. You shouldn't sacrifice your mind. You shouldn't sacrifice your reason. It's just that you can't sacrifice that. You've been quoting The Tempest lately in some of your talks.

How is it you think the Shakespearean political vision differs from the Christian? It's always hard to know what Shakespeare really thought. You certainly have different characters. You have someone like Macbeth, I think, says life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound fury signifying nothing. So that doesn't sound like a particularly Christian worldview, but maybe that's what Macbeth says. It's not what Shakespeare says.

So it's always very hard to know. Maybe it's a sort of a Christian nihilistic view of the world or something like that. But I think the contrast I always frame is. that the way I understand Shakespeare is always in contrast with someone like Carl Marx. Marx believed that people had battles over differences that mattered. It was, you know, the different classes and they had objectively different interests, and this is what led to the intensity of the struggle. And there's something in Shakespeare that's sort of proto-Gerrardian or very memetic,

where people have conflicts over, the conflicts are the most intense when they don't differ at all. And so it is, you know, it's the opening line of Romeo, in Juliet. It's the Capulets versus the Monagus's two houses alike in dignity. They're identical, and that's why they hate each other so much. Or it's at the end of Hamlet where Hamlet says, you know, to be truly great, you must stake everything for an eggshell. Because an average person would fight over things that mattered, but a truly great person would fight over things as ephemeral as honor or an eggshell or something like this. And of course, you know, Hamlet's problem is he doesn't really believe all the, you know, the sort of insane revenge

drama he's supposed to be in. So I think there is probably a place where I would say, yes, Shakespeare would probably be very distrustful of extreme ideological differences today. That would probably, in some ways, also be a kind of a political atheist. I find the play Julius Caesar very interesting because there's no catacom, there's no muddling through, so they sacrifice Caesar. There's a civil war and a lot more people dying and no end to that in sight. It's the the pessimistic scenario of the teal mental universe, I think. It is also, in some ways, you know, there's sort of a strange way where they're all going back and thinking they're reenacting things, right?

So it's, you know, the way Brutus gets pulled into the conspiracy in Julius Caesar is that he gets reminded or that, you know, his ancestor, another person named Brutus had overthrown Tarquin, the last of the Kings of Rome in 509 BC. And so he thinks he's just, you know, reenacting. that murder. And then I think there is some part in the play where Shakespeare has the actors say, you know, I'm going to get this slightly garbled, but it's something like centuries hence there'll be people reenacting this on a stage in front of an audience. And this is what motivates Brutus to do it.

It's like the future applause in the Shakespearean theater. And then of course, you know, the crazy literal reenactment of it was John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in 1865, where Booth was a Shakespearean actor, and then it was Sixth Semper Taranus, was what he said. It was like he thought he was reenacting the Brutus Caesar thing. And then you can look at the, I think it's 1838 Lincoln speech, the young men's Lyceum address where Lincoln sort of portrays himself sort of in a somewhat coded way as sort of a proto-seizor. And he sort of tells the audience, there are people in this country who wouldn't be happy to be, you know, there are all these, some people are like really ambitious, but no one could be like a founder,

because that was in the past, and the most you can now be as a president. But there are people from being president's not enough, and there's some people who, if you didn't stop, then they would keep going until they enslaved all the white people or freed all the slaves. So Lincoln talking about himself and saying that he has the ambition to be like a Caesar or a Napoleon

or something like this. But yes, so there's sort of a bit of a roundabout answer. So, yes, so there are ways we can see it as a cycle, but surely that's what we want to transcend. It was a bad idea for Brutus to think he was reenacting the Caesar thing, and somehow there was something about the John Wilkes-Boothe story that's pretty sad to. For our last segment, let's turn to artificial intelligence. As you know, large language models are already quite powerful.

They're only going to get better. In this world to come, will the word cells just lose their influence? People who write, people who play around with ideas, pundits, are they just toast? What's this going to look like? Are they going to give up power peacefully? Are they going to go down with the ship? Are they going to set off nuclear bombs? I had this ripper.

I think, again, sort of the, one of the things, I'll say the AI thing broadly, the LLMs, it's a big breakthrough. It's very important. And it's striking to me how bad Silicon Valley is talking about these sorts of things. And there's sort of, you know, there's sort of all kinds of, the questions are either way too narrow where it's something like, you know, we're going to have, you know, is the next transfer. former model going to improve by 20% on the last one or something like this, or there may be too cosmic where it's like we go straight. From there, we go straight to the simulation theory of the

universe. And surely there are, you know, a lot of in-between questions one could ask. Let me try to answer yours. My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people. And what people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the U.S. math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit. There's sort of a longer history I always have on the math versus verbal riff where if you ask, when did our society bias to testing people more for a math ability? I believe it was during the French Revolution because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families. Math ability was sort of distributed in the sort of idiosavant

way throughout the population. If we prioritized math ability, it had sort of this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society. And then I think by the time you get to the Soviet Union and Soviet communism in the 20th century, where you give a number theorist or chess grandmaster a medal, which was always a part I was somewhat sympathetic to in the Soviet Union, maybe it's actually just sort of a control mechanism where the math people are singularly clueless. They don't understand anything. But if we put them on a pedestal, we tell everyone else you need to be like the math person, then it's actually a way to sort of control, or that the chess grandmaser, doesn't understand anything about the world, that's a way to really control things.

And if I sort of fast forwarded to, let's say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it's way too biased towards the math people. I don't know if it's a French Revolution thing or a Russian sort of Straussian secret cabal control thing where you have some prioritized it. But that's the thing that seems deeply unstable. And that's what I would bet on getting reversed, where it's like, And the place where math ability, like, you know, it's sort of, it's the thing that's the test for everything, right? It's like, do you want to go to medical school? Okay, we weed people out through physics and calculus. And like, I'm not sure that's really correlated with your, you know, your dexterity as a neurosurgeon. I don't really want someone operating on my brain to be, you know, doing prime number of factorizations in their head while they're operating on my brain or something like that. In the late 80s, early 90s, I had sort of a chest bias because I was a, you know, pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was you should just test everyone on chess ability.

And that should be the gating factor. Why even do math? Why not just chess? And that got undermined by the computers in 1997. And isn't that what's going to happen to math? And isn't that a long overdue rebalancing of our society? And how is manual labor going to do in this world to come? There'll be a lot more new projects, right? If you're a very good gardener, carpenter, will your ages go up by 5x? Or is there something else in store for us? It's hard to say, but let me just not give the answer, but let me sort of suggest some of the questions I'd like us to focus on more with the AI. So I think one question is, you know, is it going to, how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality? And probably it does some of both.

Is it a very centralizing technology? That's another question I'd like to get a better handle on. I had this ref five, six years ago. if crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist? And one of the things that I'm still probably a little bit uncomfortable about it is that it seems to lead to these incredible returns to scale. Man, I thought, you know, I thought San Francisco had at least, you know, committed suicide and we could move on from San Francisco. The returns to scale on AI are so big that maybe even San Francisco will survive with the AI revolution. But then, you know, there are benefits to this,

but it also leads to this kind of a set of centralization questions. Or the geopolitical question. If it is as big a technology as you and I think it is, what is it going to do to the China-U.S. rivalry? Will it, you know... And what do you think? I don't actually... I'm just saying, like, it would be good if we just at least ask the right sorts of questions.

I don't have answers to all these. I can do the pro-China argument is they will not hesitate to use the AI and train it on all their people. It'll be more quickly implemented. The pro-US argument is that we are probably ahead of China. Maybe the large language models are not really communist. Maybe if you can't ask the large language model who Winnie the Pooh is, nerfed it so badly that it doesn't even work or something like that.

So I think there's an intuition that the effect of altruists are not just fifth columnists on the part of the CCP where they're trying to sabotage us, but where they actually simply are doing what the CCP wants, which is actually to stop the LMs and that it's very disruptive. To the extent, I think, the second one, that it probably helps the U.S. more than China, is that actually massively destabilizing, where China was this sort of low volatility plan to victory,

where they were just going to slowly beat the Western world. If you now have this volatility-increasing technology that China cannot match, does that just accelerate China's time-tebril. table. And it's China become sort of like Russia where, you know, you're ultimately going to lose and you have to, you know, maybe you have to invade Taiwan in the next year or two and you can't wait for another decade. Final question. What is the next thing you will choose to learn about? Man, this is always, these are all these questions, you know, this is all, there's all this projections of your personality, Tyler, you know, it's like, and it's the Isaiah Berlin thing where, you know,

you have this sort of the hedgehog who knows one thing, the fox who knows many things. You know so many different things, you're interested in so many different things. You know, I'm just, I don't know, it's just sort of a few core ideas I come back to. And it's something like this, you know, wonderful and terrible history of the world that we're living through as, you know, Christianity's unraveling our culture and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side. I think that's what's going to keep me busy for a long time. Peter Thiel, thank you very much. We now have time for questions. Yes. Hello. It's kind of a basic

question maybe to you, but to me, I'm wondering your opinion. You have this dystopic view of like one world order, which I totally understand. And I know that Founders Fund has invested in cryptocurrency and made money on it, but do you view crypto or Bitcoin in particular as something

that could put power back in the hands of the people, or something that's likely to catalyze more centralization of power in this one world order in the future? I'm still hopeful that on net Bitcoin is on the anti-one world order side just based on all the people who are against it. But maybe that's a little bit too of a simplistic Schmidian analysis. The questions are, you know, the sort of questions would be, do you have genuine anonymity, genuine pseudonymity?

And probably there are certain ways in which, you know, if we want to have decentralized things where you use, money for questionable purposes. You know, maybe physical cash is still better than Bitcoin and things have not gone in quite the crypto anarchist utopia that people were fantasizing about in the late 90s. On the other hand, I think it probably is still, if you're just, you know, thinking of it is a one-time way to get money outside of the control of a particular government, it's probably still extremely good for that. Thank you.

So you can hobble and tell you. you need it. Next question. So Nick Bostrom and communism both sort of start out with very different premise, end up in the same place. We need a one world government. Do you think that there's some sort of metaphysical reason for that, some kind of attractor well there? There's a certain rationality to it. If we, maybe it's just an enlightenment rationality where if we say that there's, you know, some set of things that make sense that are good and then, you know, it's, it's probably, there's some kind of a way you should have in a world order. It sounds more peaceful in both cases than having a divided world. But yeah, there's probably just some kind of some kind of a rationality where

if you had one modality of governance, if it's the best, that would make for the best possible world. You should have that everywhere. And then if you have, it's only you have, you know, some very deep concerns about maybe human nature or the people would run the government or things like that, that you start to second-guess that. They're probably both, you know, somehow pretty optimistic about human nature. Thank you. If one extra year at the end of your life was for sale, what would you be willing to pay for it today? Man, I don't agree with hypothetical questions where I don't believe in the premise. I would probably not pay the person who asked me that anything because I think they were just ripping me off since it's a

I hope to live for more than just one more year. By the time I needed to collect on that extra year, I think that person would be long gone. All right, cool. Thanks. What are the Straussian messages of the Bible, and what do they tell us about political theology? Simple questions tonight. Oh, boy.

Strauss was this political philosopher who's, you know, I wouldn't describe as Christian, was probably sort of very classical, but the place where I'd say both, let's say someone like Strauss and Gerard agreed on, was that there's certain ways of understanding the world that have this disruptive way. And you don't want enlightenment simply that if you just tell people the secret messages, it has this sort of unraveling effect. And so the, I don't know, I'm not sure it's esoteric, but it is,

it's the book of revelations is the apocalypse, because, you know, apocalypse in Greek means unveiling. And if you unveil the social order, you might end up, you know, deconstructing and destroying it. And, you know, this is, you know, one of Gerard's book was, I see Satan fall like lightning. And it's sort of to see Satan is to see Satan fall. So the only time Satan appears in the Bible is at the very end of the world. Every other time, it's maybe he's talking to God or he's talking to Christ in the desert. But no human being ever sees Satan simply because to see Satan is to see Satan fall.

You know, there's sort of the libertarian, another libertarian cut on Christianity is that, you know, when Christ is tempted in the desert and Satan says, just worship me, and you can have all these kingdoms in the world, it's somehow saying that all the governments are more satanic than divinely ordained. And then people don't understand that they think governments are somehow divinely ordained. And so once you see how satanic the government is, how satanic taxes are, other things besides the governments do, it will. It will, have this unraveling effect. Thank you. Hi. My big part of the thesis of the sovereign individual is that the defenders will be able to have an advantage over offense and that that's the way that violence and the exertion of force is going. I'm interested if you still think that to be the case, particularly with companies like Andorow, where the thesis is kind of there is no inherent properties of a smaller weapon that a smaller state can easily have, but rather the proliferation of those is simply a tactic that larger states need to use to evolve their strategies. Yes, I was extremely influenced by the Rees-Mock-Davidson book, 1997, The Sovereign Individual,

where the thesis was, let's say the computer technology information age, was trending in this very deeply decentralizing libertarian way. And that seemed very true in 1999. And then certainly, by the end of the 2010s, one would have said that there's something about a lot of information technology that seemed to maybe. centralizing, maybe the opposite. There's always a riff I have on this where, you know, if we look at, there's a, you know, Star Trek or, you know, the world of 1968, people also thought 2001 Space Odyssey's, IBM is how,

you know, it's sort of you're going to have one big supercomputer that's going to run a planet or the planet beta, and one of the early Star Trek episodes where there's one big supercomputer that runs the planet, the inhabitants are sort of these docile robot-like people who've been living peacefully but uneventfully for 8,000 years. And then, of course, as always the Star Trek people, you know, don't follow the prime directive and blow up the computer and then leave the planet. But that was, you know, the future of the computer age in the late 60s was highly centralized. By the late 90s, was very decentralized. And by the late 2010s, maybe crypto accepted, it was, again, seemed to be pushing back to centralization. My intuition is these things are not, you know, absolutely written in stone.

And it's up to us to work on, you know, making the technologies have in the push it one way. the other. As a follow-up, it's not quite that predetermined. Would you bet on open source AI? If decentralization is great, it should have more dynamic properties, should innovate more, should be safer, have many other virtues. I don't quite know if that's the

main variable that's going to push the centralization or decentralization with it. But yeah, there probably some version of that would be helpful. I don't know, the Linux versus Microsoft precedent. Not sure that changed anything that much on the

on the level of the operating system. Thank you. When do you think humans are going to destroy themselves, and do you think AI is going to do it? I don't think these things are written in stone. I'm not a Calvinist. I'm not a P. Doom, an EA, East Bay rationalist. I think it's up to us.

But as I said, I'm much more worried about the humans trying to stop the AI than the AI destroying us. You know, like a force that's powerful enough to stop the AI is probably a force that's powerful enough to destroy the world, too. So I want to worry more about the humans that are trying to stop the AI. Ayhan Hirsi Ali recently converted to Christianity, but it seems mostly for utilitarian reasons, something like for the great civilizational war, because secularism doesn't provide a good enough answer. Do you see religion as mainly a utility in the postmodern world? You can have utilitarian elements.

I don't think one can ever stress those too much. And so my bias is always to focus more on questions of truth. You mentioned Lincoln's Lyceum address where he talks about that towering genius figure, and I'd never heard before that he thought, did you think at the time he thought he was the towering genius? And do you approve of Lincoln's political religion or view for America? Well, I think it's a very fascinating speech because he references some Caesar-Napoleon-like figure, who will enslave the white people or free the slaves. And so that seems like, it seems plausible to think that he was thinking of himself.

I have a question about your personal life, if I may, and if possible, if you could give your answers a story, that'd be lovely. Obviously, you feel a great sense of personal responsibility, indeed responsibility to history. How did that sentiment begin? How has it evolved? Sort of what have you found to be the more fruitful and less fruitful avenues for expressing it? how I'm always so bad at doing a self-psychoanalysis or something like that. I don't know.

There were sort of all these ways I was, you know, I was like incredibly competitive and tracked as a kid. My eighth grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, I know you're going to get into Stanford in four years. I got into Stanford and I went to Stanford and I went to law school. I ended up, you know, the top law firm in Manhattan from the outside. It was a place where everybody wanted to get in on the inside. was a place everybody wanted to get out. And so, yeah, I sort of had some kind of a quarter-life crisis in my mid-20s.

Unclear what to do. But somehow, you have to try to avoid the worst memetic entanglement, the worst forms of memetic competition possible. I don't think psychology really works. I don't think sort of awareness of these things is quite the way to do it. But, yeah, there was some part of that that was very important for me. Thank you. To that point, to get people off.

the momentic track, I think, you know, T.L Fellowship was really amazing and has had tremendous success. Have you thought about trying to scale that in a way that might be profitable or can make a larger impact than, say, 20 folks a year and maybe 20,000 eventually? We've thought about scaling a lot of times. It's probably quite, quite hard to scale. It's always, you know, the sort of the paradox of something like the TL Fellowship or my zero to one book or any sort of self-help thing is like, you know, it's always bad to just sort of give advice where, okay, these are the things you're supposed to do. I worry that trying to scale things, you know, the only way you can scale things is by somehow automating them, mechanizing them, turning them into more of a cookie cutter

type process. And then I always worry that deranges at scale. So somehow, you know, it's, you know, I don't have like a, I can't give it people a formula what to do. It's something like, well, you should think for yourself and figure it out. But then if I try, you know, try to scale that. It's like, I don't know, it's like some kind of, I don't know, it's a moist little red book or something you're producing, and that's, it's quite the opposite. Thank you. Peter, my question is about diversity, equity, inclusion. DEI has become very prevalent in corporate America, and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you're seeing this in some of the early stage companies also, like the companies that

founders fund is investing in. And what are your thoughts? Do you think this, is something positive? Are you neutral? Or you think this has gone a little over the top? We'd love to know your views on that. I'm very against it. I don't always know if it's the most important issue either. So somehow, you know, I wrote a book from my undergraduate years entitled The Diversity Myth, and it was sort of focusing on a lot of the craziness, the campus wars, cultural wars that were taking place at Stanford in the late 80s, early 90s. There are parts of it that seemed very prescient, and it sort of described a lot of things that eventually spread to the broader culture. On another level, it was like a completely ineffective book where the arguments didn't matter.

What drove these things somehow was on a very different level. If we think about the woke corporation in Silicon Valley, it seems unhealthy if a company is leaning too much into the DEI narratives. But there always are probably are Machiavellian ways. where this can also work, where it sort of distracts people. So there's, you know, I don't know, Walmart was sort of the proto-woke company in the 2000s, and they were constantly being attacked by the labor unions because they weren't paying their workers enough.

And then, you know, they could pay their workers more or they could rebrand themselves as a green, environmentally friendly company. And that turned out to be a very cheap way to split up the left-wing anti-Walmart coalition. And so that was a version of it, I don't know, as this sort of capital. capitalist conspiracy against it, and then there are, you know, there are cases where that can work in cases where it can go wrong. For the most part, I think that it's just a distraction from more important things. And so there's, you know, there's one level on which I find the issue is very silly. There's another level where it's evil because it's stopping us from paying attention

to more important things. And it, you know, it's things like the economy, like science and tech, or even these broader religious questions that we've talked about today. People always talk about in terms of cultural Marxism, but I think a real Marxist would be much preferable to a diversity person. Rosa Luxembourg, who's sort of this crazed communist from the early 20th century, it was like, I think one thing she said was there can be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker, nobody can be more revolutionary than a proletarian. And so a diversity officer in a university or corporation, what would Rosa Luxembourg think of this? It would be in the same category as a bank robber or a prostitute as someone who's just an extremely corrupt form of crony capitalism.

Thank you so much. There's a fair amount of variation in regulation on biotech. You know, there's Prospera, you funded some C-setting places. What's your sense for why there aren't crazy, cool, ambitious biohacking things going on? Where are the gene-ended babies? The only one that we know about happened in China and that guy went to jail. Why isn't there more crazy stuff happening in different jurisdictions? My sense is the FDA has a global stranglehold on everything.

It is because there are a lot of different reasons. In practice, most governments are not willing to have looser regulations than the FDA. There is less regulatory arbitraris than it looks. And then secondarily, the U.S. pays a lot more for this than other countries. And we can go into all these debates about whether we're paying too much in the U.S. or whether the rest of the world should be penalized for free writing off of it. But if you develop a biotech drug and if you can't sell it in the U.S., the economics are much less good. And so in practice, it tends to be U.S. or bust.

Do you think that technology will eventually render a larger proportion of the human population unproductive or unable to contribute to the economy? And if so, what should those unproductive people do with themselves? Well, I think the Luddites have always, they've been wrong for a long time. There are certainly ways you could probably scare me some with AI. I am. But even if you convinced me that the Luddites were right about AI and that it's actually going to just replace people without, you know, if you were a Luddite, you know, in the mid-19th century, you said, you know, the machines are going to replace the humans. And that was, well, that would be such a relief because there's so much work for people to do. And they would just free them up to do other things. And so maybe less complimentary, more game of substitution date. Even if you could convince me of that, I'm still in favor of the AI because my default is muddling through. isn't good. My default is, you know, the default is really bad. And so, you know, you're not, you don't get to muddle through with Greta on our bicycle. Thanks for coming. You've alluded to a lot of

the forces between decentralization and centralization, particularly around AI, with forces around the individual. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more, describe what you think the forces could be that stop AI development, particularly as it relates to the state's role. or how a politician or another entity co-op that force for their own benefit versus the benefit of many. But maybe the premise of your question is what I challenge is. It's why is AI going to be the only technology that matters? And so if we say there's just, there's only this one big technology that's going to be developed and it is going to dominate everything else, that's already, in a way, you know, conceding a version of the centralization point.

So, yeah, if we say that it's all around the next generation of large language models, nothing else matters, then you've probably collapsed it to, you know, a small number of players. And that is, you know, that's a future that I find, you know, somewhat uncomfortably centralizing, probably. But, you know, this is, you know, the definition of technology. In the 1960s, technology meant, you know, it meant computers, but it also meant new medicines, and it meant, you know, spaceships and supersonic planes and the green revolution in agriculture. And then at some point, technology day just means IT. And maybe, you know, we're going to, you know, narrow it even further to AI.

And it seems to me that this narrowing is, you know, is sort of a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation that we should be trying to get out of. Earlier you mentioned that tech might end up saving San Francisco from itself. AI specifically, yeah. Sorry, AI, AI specifically. How do you evaluate the efforts of places like Miami and Austin to present themselves as alternative tech hubs and has that opinion changed over the course of the last two years? I'm still very pro-Miamy. I think the Miami story has been more of an anti-New York story.

So it's a tale of two cities and the finance part of the economy doesn't have to be centered in New York. That alone, I think, explains a great deal of Miami's success. I think the tech, again, it's how we're in a very different place from what people were focused on even two, two and a half years ago. But two and a half years ago, there was sort of much more of a crypto story. And, you know, crypto is a decentralizing technology, but also the companies that were doing crypto were decentralized, not just in the U.S., there's a decent number of them outside the U.S. And so crypto was going to be a big part of the future tech story. that would have been a naturally decentralizing from Silicon Valley narrative. Silicon Valley had really missed out on the crypto thing in a relative sense.

And then consumer internet, a lot of this happened in Silicon Valley for all sorts of complicated reasons. It's supposed to get rid of the tyranny of place, but it all happened in one place. And then the AI piece seems to be even more centralized in Silicon Valley. So again, if we say that the next decade or two decades are just going to be doubling down on AI, that probably suggests that, you know, San Francisco and in Silicon Valley will maintain or even gain in power. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you for coming out and doing this event. It's been wonderful. I have a silly question, and I'm going to bring Star Wars into it since we were talking Star Trek. But when you, this concept of the world order, it's the first time I've really dove into it and thinking about it.

I'm wondering, do you envision a world order that's just like totalitarian, dictatorship or just the similar to like there's just too much information, too many countries, too many people trying to vie together and that everything just kind of gets lost and that the power isn't really about the people, but that kind of world central, I mean a global central, like what is that that you envision? Well, I'd like to avoid the first type. Yeah, the second one, I will concede it's a little bit more confusing. I would like to have, you know, a libertarian world order of, you know, many nations and you can move between them. There's some transnational thing. You're not completely

stuck in a particular country, but then the transnational thing can't be so powerful that it actually controls all the nations. And this is, these are, these are sort of maybe, maybe this is sort of a paradox of globalization. Like Higalian thought is always, you know, thesis and antithesis, synthesis. Even if you agree this is the correct framing, the problem is people always confuse the synthesis with a superposition of the thesis and antithesis. So if we say globalization, some global world order is the final synthesis, is globalization, as is described today, just a superposition of a slightly unstable global market, but no global government? And then can that really be maintained? Yes, I think there probably are, you know, some paradoxes in my

my picture of a desirable world order that one could unpack some more. But yet, if we have too concrete a picture of exactly what the world order looks like, that's probably really bad. Thank you. A bit of a follow-up to the gentleman too before me. I understand you've spent a little bit of time in Miami. So kind of coming down from the macro level to the street level, local governance, almost like an economist getting lunch perspective. What is Miami doing well? And what does Miami need to improve upon? Well, there are a lot of things I've been here the last four winters, so it's been two, three months each winter here. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I think are going incredibly well.

I'm always into these sort of Georgiaist real estate theories where if you're not very careful, all the value in a place gets captured by this sort of corrupt real estate group of people. And there's sort of a Henry George was a late 19th century economist who's, sort of like sort of socialist then today seen as sort of libertarian, which probably just tells something that our society's changed. The worry in Miami is that, is it, have we really escaped the Georgia's disaster that is San Francisco, that is New York, that is London, where even though there's been a tremendous increase in GDP, you know, it's, it's not good if 100% of it gets captured by slumlords or something like that.

Thanks. Last question. Thanks. So a question about AI and theology. Voltaire had this great quote. If God didn't exist, we would need to invent him or her or whatever the pronoun is. Do you find this view of like superintelligence AI, which might be in the near future as a kind of deity, as a kind of machine God? Is that useful? Is there leverage to that? And could it even be more than just a heuristics and kind of substantive statement? It's sort of a purely theological question. I want to focus more on the political theology question, which would be something like, you know, if it's a centralizing AI that's controlled by communist China, will it just be very good at convincing people that the party is God or that the wisdom of crowds or, you know, whatever, the consensus is the truth? And then, yeah, there are these metaphysical questions where, It doesn't seem like it's exactly, you know, I don't know, a transcendent traditional monotheistic God. But I would go to more of the political questions than the, you know, the metaphysical ones. And probably the, you know, the risk danger is that there's something about sort of telescopes even more. the sort of consensus,

truth, wisdom of crowds, you know, I think probably all the models will tell you that there's no particular religion that's more true than any other one. Is that really what the models generate or has that been hardwired in? Those are the questions I'd be more curious about. Thank you all for listening to Conversations with Tyler

at the Mercatus Center. Most of all, thank you, Peter Thiel. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowan Convo's.

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