Pirate Wires - Peter Thiel On The Diversity Myth - 30 Years Later | Pirate Wires Podcast #24 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

EPISODE #24: This week, the Pirate Wires staff is off for the Thanksgiving holiday. But fear not! We're re-releasing a special interview that Mike Solana recently recorded with Peter Thiel, in case you missed it. This is a must watch for the Pirate Nation. We'll be back to your regularly scheduled, clown world induced, programing next week. Nearly 30 years after publishing "The Diversity Myth," Peter Thiel sits down with Mike Solana to unpack what the book got right and wrong. Thiel argues that social distractions have stunted scientific progress, slowed economic growth and weakened our geopolitical standing. How did anti-Western rhetoric popularized on college campuses in the 90s morph into the culture wars that divide our country today? How can we move past this pessimistic, hyper-political moment and continue building the future? Featuring Mike Solana & Peter Thiel Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:30- Part One: Retrospective - "The Diversity Myth" Predicted The Future - What Peter Saw Back In The 90s 14:40 - Part Two: Science - What Is Broken In Science? 29:10 - Part Three: Economics 40:00- Part Four: Religion 54:45 - Part Five: Politics

Hey guys, welcome back to the pod and happy Thanksgiving. We've got an interesting one for you today. I wanted to share an interview I did with Peter Thiel a little bit earlier this year about his book, The Diversity Myth. This is a really fascinating conversation about not only the past, but I think more importantly, the future. What have we not been focusing on while we've been focusing on the dumbest clown shit possible? Technology, religion, politics. It's a good conversation, an important conversation. And I'm proud I got to sit there and listen to it. So sharing it with you now, have a great Thanksgiving

and enjoy the weekend with your family. If the smartest people in the world are the physicists and they're just going to build bombs to blow up the world, maybe it's better if they spend their lives puttering around with DEI grants and diversity. It sort of seems kind of pathetic, but at least they're not going to blow up the world. You and I met 15 years ago now. And back then, when we first met, I think after the first meeting, I went and I bought your book. I read the whole thing cover to cover, the diversity myth,

and tried to talk about it with you in our next kind of coffee when we're hanging out. I think it's very funny now looking back. You just, I mean, you didn't want to talk about it at all was my sense. And I felt almost like silly for having brought it up. You just seemed completely over it. This was in like 2008, I think, when this was happening. And my sense was that you thought everything that you had written about maybe just didn't really pan out. Maybe a year after I started at Founders Fund, 2012, let's say, early kind of signs of everything that you had written about were there again. And by 2015, I would say, Wokeness or DEI, whatever we're gonna call it, had pretty much taken over every single institution

in the country, which makes the diversity myth, I think to my knowledge, the only book that accurately predicted basically the last 10 years of America. And so here we are today, 30 years later, to do a kind of retrospective on that work and maybe have the conversation that we could have had, I think, 15 years ago when I first asked you about it. You know, I was in college, late 80s, early 90s, was involved in all these campus wars, culture wars. Some of them seemed to be just these crazy people doing silly things.

Some of them seemed to involve cosmic battles. There was a big battle in the late 80s at Stanford University over the core Western culture program. You know, there's a rally, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's gotta go. And there was in some ways a debate about this one mandatory class that all freshmen had to take. And another level, it was this much bigger debate

about our whole civilization had to be thrown out. And then, you know, my friend David Sachs and I published this book, The Diversity Myth, back in 1995, shortly after we're out of college, and sort of synthesizing a lot of these kinds of arguments. It's all focused on happenings at Stanford, and you have to somehow, you have to make some kind of argument that what you're talking about matters to other people, to the whole country. And the somewhat contrived argument we made was that, you know, ideas have consequences, that what happens at these elite colleges will eventually spread into the broader society.

It was a somewhat contrived argument, and probably by the time we met in 2008, it already felt, wow, it was just an embarrassment in a way where I sort of turned Mole Hill into a mountain or something like that. And certainly even four or five years after I wrote the book, 1999, 2000, during the PayPal years, it was just not an item. It was not something anybody ever asked me about. I was never asked to explain things in the book. I was never asked to explain my past as sort of a right-wing campus libertarian type person. The vibe of the, I don't know, 1999.com internet was profoundly apolitical, optimistic, and so incredibly disconnected from these crazed culture wars. And then when you forward to the Silicon Valley of the last few years, even though in some sense

it's done so incredibly well as a financial or economic matter, the vibe is sort of angry, financial or economic matter, the vibe is sort of angry, pessimistic, you know, endless culture wars, hyper-political. Something like the diversity myth resonates in a very different way. And yeah, it now feels prophetic. You know, I suppose I'm kind of proud that I wrote it. I can say I was right about everything. Well, in some ways, you know, it would, maybe I'd rather live in a world where, you know, I'd been less right about things. And then, of course, I think there probably are things that I miscalibrated and also got wrong. There's a question of terms, I think. Is it wokeness? Is it diversity? Is it DEI? What exactly are we talking about? I think it's important because one thing that happens again

and again is you're asked, while talking, trying to talk about this abstract thing that seems to be sort of pervasive, you're asked, well, is it even real? If you can't define it, does this even exist? It seems like, you know, you've made it up. It is a mountain that you've made out of a molehill. There's nothing going on here. Well, there is something very slippery about all the words. You know, I think the late 80s, early 90s when it was multiculturalism, which has probably gone a little bit out of fashion.

It's more wokeness. Diversity feels like it's been a quasi-permanent word for 30 years, so it's probably not the worst one to focus on. But yes, there is something about the seeming slipperiness of it that's an important feature. And in some ways, one of the things that I think has held up extremely well is the title of the book, The Diversity Myth. And it's an ambiguous title. And you can think of it in one of two ways.

If you put the stress on the word diversity, then there's this sort of natural critique that follows where you don't have genuine diversity on a college campus if you have a group of people who look different but think alike. That diversity, intellectual diversity should mean more than hiring the extras from the space cantina scene in Star Wars or something like this. And then this was sort of the idea, you know, people talk about diversity all the time, but on a lot of important dimensions, they don't really have it. It's sort of a powerful internal critique. But then the second meaning puts the stress on the word myth. And under this meaning, diversity is kind of, it's a poorly defined word. It's something we tell stories about.

It's a kind of shibboleth. It's a false god that we're worshiping. And then the kind of questions that that leads to, and maybe it's a diversion from things that are more important. And if we're sort of all encamped at the altar of the diversity god, what are we not paying attention to? And this is sort of where I've described it as a kind of hypnotic performance or a magic show in which you're quasi-hypnotized and you can't pay attention to the orange gorilla jumping up and down on the back of the stage or something like that. And maybe the question to ask is not sort of specifically where one is, you know, where some of the pro or anti diversity arguments are correct. But what are the things it is distracting us from?

What is it diverting our attention away from? Where is it redirecting our attention? That's a set of questions that I've come to think are very important and that didn't even register when I wrote the book. So I think the specific arguments of the diversity myth, I stand by the vast majority of them. I think they were right. The people we argued against were wrong. But then there were all these ways

where I think David Sachs and I were not even wrong. You know, we sort of took these arguments at face value. We said these were the important debates and we had no sense of this bigger map We sort of took these arguments at face value. We said these were the important debates. And we had no sense of this bigger map and how there were other things going on on the map that were far more important. I do want to just sort of get right into basically what you got wrong. And this will be, I think, the premise of the entire discussion. I would say not even wrong.

Not even wrong, right. Not even aware of the question, the right question to ask maybe. But first, I mean, the book wasn't just quickly the premise of the book. It was not what was going on at the Stanford campus that was sort of the background. What was the thesis of the diversity myth? There was a fault line around this debate about the West, Western civilization. You know, there was one way in which the multiculturalism, diversity arguments were that we needed to study other cultures and other countries. And then the argument we wanted to make was that

it wasn't really sort of interested in diversity in that sense, but it was more, you still had all these authors that were writing in a Western tradition, but they were sort of anti-Western. So it wasn't non-Western, but anti-Western. So that was sort of an intellectual framing in terms of what was going on. It was not about learning from other cultures, but it was about tearing our own culture and our own society and our own history down. There was this incredible intensity around identity politics,

and there was already a lot of craziness about these questions of identity. There was always something paradoxical about the way the word identity means two diametrically opposite things. Your identity can be that which makes you unique or different, or your identity can be that which makes you identical or the same. And then you have all the people in group X, their identities that they're identical to the other people in group X and somehow completely different from the people in group Y. And then that's sort of the paradoxical definition of identity politics, where you start with meaning both the same and different. If you start with a word that means A and not A, you can do a lot of mischief.

And so there's a lot about, yeah, sort of the paradoxes and insanities of identity politics. So you were pretty focused. There were speech codes at Stanford where there was sort of increasing restrictions on what you could say. There were sort of a lot of informal speech codes where people, for the most part, the speech codes were just the tip of the iceberg. And then people knew you weren't supposed to say things or you'd get in trouble. So you were focused on essentially the subject of what was happening, but you just-

All these sort of campus wars. You alluded to the fact that the real story was what we were not paying attention to because of it. What are they? Let's just take it in just a brief list before we take them apart, I think, one by one. Well, probably a different list one could come up with, but four things that I would say are bigger than DEI and that DEI today or even back then is distracting us from. The first one would be that in a campus context, there's all this focus on the insanities and the humanities, but somehow the sciences were more important. And the thesis I came to in the years since is that we have lived in an era of general

stagnation in science and in much of technology outside of the computer context. And that in some ways, all the craziness and the humanities served the administrators well because it stopped people from asking questions about the crown jewels, which were the sciences. And if the sciences were corrupt, this was in some ways a much bigger indictment of what's going on and a much bigger crisis for us to deal with.

And these sort of intense campus wars were actually a very comfortable way to avoid this much bigger question about the sciences. There's a Marxist or libertarian critique of all these sort of campus and culture wars that they distract us from economics, from the real economic relationships. A Marxist would say it distracts us from inequality, a libertarian from economic growth or how to build a more prosperous world. And I think there's something to both of those critiques where we have this extraordinary situation where in the US and the Western world as a whole, the younger generation for

the first time is doing less well than their parents, has reduced economic expectations. That's an extraordinary development. We should be thinking really hard about how to fix that, how to correct that. And I think in some ways, as long as we get caught up in these crazed battles about personal identity or these culture wars, we will never tackle these bigger economic questions. The third one, maybe I already alluded to it, where, you know, as diversity as a false god or a false idol in some ways functions as a substitute or distraction from, you know, from religion in the Western context from, you know, Judeo-Christian, Judeo-Christian tradition.

And if you, I don't know, sort of frame this a little bit polemically, but you say that God is the biggest thing that we could possibly be talking about in the universe. If you're distracted from God, that has to be the biggest distraction imaginable. And so there is something very strange where I think it's distracted us from that religion or squeezed out certain religious questions. And then the fourth dimension would be, if you think of maybe science and economics and religion are in some sense more important than politics, but maybe they're also distractions from politics. And then, you know, the riff I always like to have is maybe it's just

a distraction. You know, the etymology of political correctness is, you know, by the 1980s, early 90s, political correctness was a term that conservatives used to describe intolerant liberals. Go back to the 1970s, it was a term liberals used to describe themselves. If you go back to the 1950s, it actually had a very specific meaning, and it was you were a politically correct person if you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and you took orders directly from Stalin in Moscow, and you just followed the party line. And I sometimes wonder whether it's still just a distraction from communism in the context of 2023 from the CCP, and that whenever people use the word DEI, they should

just think CCP. We can drill into all these a little bit more. Yeah. In terms of science specifically, it seems, this is always the rebuttal, it seems like, you know, there's a lot going on. There's like the new molecule and there's, I don't know, rocket ships that land. What about science is really broken? Well, we can always start with a meta question, which is how fast is science progressing generally? How do we measure it? How do we know whether it's healthy or broken? If you talk to the scientists, it always gets framed in these sort of breathless terms. You know, we are five years away from curing cancer. String theory is a theory of everything.

We're really close to understanding everything about the universe. And there's sort of all these, you know, breathtaking developments around the corner. And maybe, you know, maybe it's accelerating too fast. It's a dizzying pace and we should slow it down. Those are sort of the narratives you get. And then it's actually very hard to know how you would actually drill down into it. You know, I'm not an expert on string theory or, you know, what do I know about quantum computing or cancer? theory, or what do I know about quantum computing or cancer. The argument that in a lot of these areas things are stalled and slowed is a difficult

one to make, because in practice you run up against all these sort of self-congratulating experts, these guardians guarding their narrow sub-disciplines and telling us how great they are. The sense that it has slowed, you know, there's an economic sense that somehow all this progress has not translated into, you know, better living standards for people. There is a sense that if we just think about, you know, the way the world changed in, you know, our, I don't know, my grandparents' generation from 1900 to 1980, 1990. That was a world where you went to car, from horse buggies to cars to supersonic airplanes, you landed on the moon.

And then the last 50 years, there's a felt sense that things have changed in computers and all these things, but almost all the other dimensions feel less that way. When I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 80s, I always think that with hindsight, all the engineering fields were bad ones to go into. You didn't want to go into mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. All these things were sort of not really progressing quickly. They weren't really dynamic. AeroAstro was a bad idea. engineering, chemical engineering, all these things were sort of not really progressing quickly.

They weren't really dynamic. AeroAstro was a bad idea. Nuclear engineering, people already knew, was a very bad idea. I think electrical engineering still had a good decade or two. But the only roughly good field was computer science, which was this not very challenging field for people who weren't that good in math. I always have this riff where things that call themselves science are fields with an inferiority complex. And so computer science was sort of like climate science

or political science. It was not a science at all. And then that turned out to be adjacent to the internet and this one sector that was going to boom in the next 30 years. Yeah, all the hardcore engineering fields went haywire. There was the Founders Fund soundbite riff we had on our manifesto back in 2011. They promised us flying cars. All we got was 140 characters. There is some sense that we don't have quite the Jetsons or Back to the Future future. We had 280 characters, and now you can post entire essays on Twitter.

Sure. Of course, it's complicated. There are ways Twitter is important culturally and politically, and there are ways that it's a terrific business. And then there's probably still some sense where that by itself is not enough to take our civilization to the next level. But is your sense on the college campus, something happened that inhibited progress in the sciences? Certainly sort of the basic research part of science, the hardcore part of science was in some ways,

it was not all on campuses, but a lot of it was adjacent to the universities. There were government programs. There's some large corporations that were funding it. And something started to go wrong in that culture in the 70s and 80s. And it was hard to see at the time. It's sort of more obvious in retrospect. It became bureaucratized.

There was something about the peer review process where people couldn't do breakthrough science. There was probably something about the signature achievements at Los Alamos and Apollo had this sort of, you know, military thing. So if the smartest people in the world are the physicists and they're just going to build bombs to blow up the world, maybe it's better if they spend their lives puttering around with DEI grants and diversity. It sort of seems kind of pathetic,

but at least they're not going to blow up the world. And so I think there's some way that it's overdetermined. There were a lot of different things that went wrong, but I think it generally slowed down a lot. In the 80s, I mean, you mentioned the exception to that general trend, which was computer science and the inferiority complex and all of that. What exactly is the reason for that?

Is it just the absence of the other science department pressures or maybe the degree didn't matter at all? And I mean, the science is, I guess the tech was built outside of academia completely. If it's the kind of thing where you don't need a PhD, let's say, you don't need a postdoctoral degree or a PhD, then it's the kind of thing where you can get to the frontier pretty quickly. And then once you're at the frontier, you can start doing new things. And so, yeah, if you're Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, you drop out of college your sophomore year and you know enough computer science to start building a great company in those spaces. And then probably, you know, a lot of the other fields, like even something like biotech by the late 80s, early 90s, which was one of the things I thought of going into at first.

It already had this very elongated thing where, you know, you needed to at least get a PhD to have sort of a basic entry-level credential. And that was maybe in some ways a symptom of a field where the frontier was very far away. And then once you got to this frontier, maybe it turned out not as much was happening there as advertised. Would it seem to you that college still is not really playing much of a role in development, let's say in technology rather than science? So for example, computer sciences. It does seem like there are more people are getting this degree.

It's still the only real outlier, it seems like, in our economy. Now there's artificial intelligence. Has the trend sort of kept that you don't really need a PhD to progress in the field? I think it's certainly maintained for all the fields outside of computer science where I think in the 1980s it was not clear that the college thing was not working. When I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I would say two-thirds of the students ended up in consulting, law, medicine, or investment banking. And medicine, you get an MD.

Law, you get a JD. Banking, you get an MBA. So it's sort of these professional post-undergraduate degrees. And probably all of those things have decayed quite a bit. The hardcore science and engineering fields have decayed a lot more. I think electrical engineering still felt like a very hard and valuable thing in the late 80s. That's turned out to be much more challenging. And then I think there were all these other things that people still would have thought of as potentially adjacent,

and they were really on the way out. When was it working? I mean, what would have been an example of this in the age before distractions, let's say, in the sciences and technology? When was college really sort of coupled in an important way in America with progress? It's always a question whether it ever worked, you know, as the only engine. But certainly early to mid-20th century, you know, America, there was a way in which I would say science and technology were progressing on, you know, many, many different fronts. And there was, you know, I think there was a lot of it that, you know, happened outside of a college context. So I don't know, you know, Howard Hughes started

building airplanes and they built the planes before they figured out all the aerodynamic rules. And you just built the planes, and you saw which ones flew and which ones crashed. And then you sort of retroactively figured out the aerospace theories. And so I think there was a lot of things that happened sort of outside of college. But then there were also all these ways that college was more adjacent to industry in all these ways. It had more of a translation function You know the origin of Silicon Valley was you had you know, I think you had a lot of You know very hardcore electrical engineers that had you know

Fairly intense education and then it also got applied. It was it was a lot more applied there was probably something about the Cold War context where was a lot more applied. There was probably something about the Cold War context where you always wanted to figure out ways to apply the science, at least to military applications. And then it was really in the end of the Cold War and the aftermath that it spiraled into these fields that were truly inert. Typically, though, we'll talk about, I mean, in the past, when I've heard you talk about decline, and now we're talking about the 60s and the 50s, it seems like it began, you know, long before the Berlin Wall and the distractions that you've written about in the 80s. Was there some shift that took place in the 60s or the 70s? Were the social distractions maybe present on campuses then as well in a way?

Is this actually not the second wave of DEI? Is it like the third or the fourth? I think these things were very overdetermined. Certainly one underrated part of the story, I think, is that a lot of science and technology was linked to the military. And then at some point, this became deeply problematic. It was already problematic World War I, which just led to all this carnage. And then certainly World War II and the immediate aftermath where, you know, do we really need to go from an atom bomb to a hydrogen

bomb? And, you know, and, you know, as a scientist who's working on that, like Dr. Teller, really just a Dr. Strangelove. And by the time you get to Charles Manson in the late 60s, and he's overdosing with his groupies on LSD, but what they see is that the world's headed towards thermonuclear war, and then it probably doesn't logically follow that, therefore, you can be a Dostoevskyian antihero and just go around randomly killing people because everything's permitted because the whole world's going to be destroyed. But I think it eventually led to this very crazed vibe. that had the effect of undercutting the entire utopian science project of modernity of 400 years, starting the 16th, 17th century. And then in my time, it was something like a 25-year delayed reaction, and it really kicked in in the late 60s and 70s. There were earlier versions, but yeah, it really kicked in then. You know, sort of related to this entire conversation of academia and the sciences is obviously just college in general.

And also around the time that I met you, you created this program, the 20 Under 20. The premise was you were going to pay, I think, 20 kids to stop out of college, just leave school. And people lost their minds. It was seen as incredibly controversial, but now I think it's pretty obvious that you were right. This was a major problem. College debt is, that entire conversation is just like table stakes. Anytime you're talking about college, what would you say kind of reflecting back on that, you know, today, like 10 years later? It already felt very late to me. And, you know, I had thought that these institutions had

gotten more ridiculous, more racket-like, more corrupt for decades. I think that already in 2010, it was kind of more, I was more like the little kid saying the emperor has no clothes. And so it was, yeah, it was, nobody was saying it. It was in some sense controversial, but there was surprisingly little pushback. And then, of course, the colleges, it was just on autopilot, and it kept going for another decade. And student debt was $300 billion in 2000. It's now $2 trillion. So in some sense, there was enough of it that was just on autopilot.

People didn't really know what else to do. The anti-college thing, it was the winning side in 2010, and it's even more so today. And yet people are still, it seems like people are still going. My guess is that COVID was somehow a big accelerant and a big point where we we ask some very hard questions about these institutions and man that the colleges went even even crazier in in that period and from my perspective I think yeah they just finally jumped the shark but you know I've thought that for decades yeah I think it is just this ridiculous internal echo chamber where they don't realize how messed up it's gotten. But probably there still are a few that it's worth sending your kids to.

I'm not. Oh, you're completely, you're over that as well. Well, I'm not sure. I think the elite colleges, in the 80s, it was definitely still a good thing to get into an elite college like Stanford. And then there's some point where, just from a point of view of child, teenage development, if your entire life gets tracked into doing all these, filling out college applications, activities, and you never develop any interests or any passions because it's just this, you know, completely contrived

resume that you're building, there's some point where that's, you know, that has to be more of a liability. And, you know, my sense is that even for the kids that get into the elite colleges at this point, it's like you've passed some Mandarin examination in China, but you're just so exhausted. You're never going to do anything more with the rest of your life. You're burned out at 18. Just the other day, while I was preparing for this interview, the Starbucks union, they're contemplating going on strike. And they're not going on strike for more pay or time off or anything like that. They're going on strike because they want to make sure that they're allowed to put LGBTQ decorations in the stores. And that struck me as just kind of hilarious in the context of unions, right? You have these

famous unions in the 20th century fighting, changing, transforming entire countries for economic power of the working classes. And it's super Marxian. And in a way, here we are in this sort of weird space that's supposed to be leftist. And the diversity stuff, which is framed as leftist, seems like this weird subversion of the core thing. Yeah, this is where, you know, I don't exactly believe this, but I'm open to even something like the conspiratorial Marxist theory a la Noam Chomsky, where obviously the Starbucks union is just a fake construct that's been invented by the management, and they're sort of distracting the workers, and they're stopping them from really organizing for the things that matter, and that would hurt the starbucks shareholders which would be paying them a

living wage or something like that in some ways there's always what's very ambiguous about uh the woke corporation more generally you know is it is it a feature or a bug is it you know is it just a form of mass insanity of companies too woke is eventually just going to self-destruct and sometimes yes and uh or or is it more feature where it's just a very clever way to make the workers forget about their economic interests or their class interests and to divide them by gender and race and pay them less. I think sort of a proto-woke corporation that did this pretty well was Walmart in the mid-2000s. There were all these sort of left-wing groups, unions.

We're always saying it's ridiculous. People at Walmart are paid so little they can't even afford to shop at Walmart. There's sort of all these stories that made a pretty good case on some level. The Walmart plan was to reinvent itself as a green corporation, as sort of having these sort of eco-friendly shopping centers.

And then that sort of split the anti-left lines, got Walmart out of the doghouse, and it was much, much cheaper than paying the workers more. So I think there are, yeah, there sort of are versions where it's this sort of Machiavellian racket, and then there are versions where, you know, it's a crazed ideology. And the woke corporate probably has elements of both. It wouldn't work if it was just a racket,. It wouldn't work if it was just a racket.

It wouldn't work if it was just an ideology. And so you need some combination of true believers and useful idiots and sort of Machiavellian people taking advantage of the whole thing. Probably the economic dimension. I think there's a tendency to focus too much on ESG and corporations as sort of the main vector. And I think perhaps the bigger vector, bigger economic vector, where there are distortions and where diversity, woke ideologies distracting us from realities is something like real estate. And this is where I'm sympathetic to sort of a Georgist economic analysis, which is that if you have distortions in real estate, they lead to forms of economic injustice and can lead to a really, really crazed society. The way I would tell this sort of somewhat strange story would be that if we were sitting in San Francisco or Manhattan

back in 2007, and I would have said, wow, the rent is so high in these places. It's so ridiculous. And obviously, this can't go on. People are just going to move. They'll find some other more reasonable, more affordable place in this country to live. If you had told me, well, no, in 15 or 16 years, the rents will actually be doubled, I wouldn't have believed you. But if you say, well, I'm just telling you, I'm back from the future and the rents have doubled. Wow, there must have been some extraordinary ideological superstructure that came with that. People must have had, there must have been some kind of Stockholm syndrome. They must have been brainwashed in a really crazy way. And the sort of identity politics story I want to tell would be like, if you're gay,

you were told that if you ever left Manhattan, if you made it even to Hoboken, you'd get beaten up right away. Or if you're a woman living in a rat infested apartment in San Francisco and you're daydreaming about a nice suburban house you could have in Reno, Nevada for the same price, you'll be told that you'll be chained to your bed and be forced to carry a baby to term or something like that. And so there was some way where, if you think of it as, you know, there were somehow trillions of dollars at stake for these urban slumlords and, you know, the zoning and the ideology doubled up to keep it going. That's the Georgist real estate story that I think was really going on. So the main beneficiaries of this are no political candidate. It's it's just landlords

It's something like landlords or you know, it's it's it's older people who own the houses if the real estate prices went up so Correlation does not always prove causation. But if there are trillions of dollars at stake, we should at least ask the question so if the rents doubled and you had and Correlated with people going crazy on identity politics and some people made trillions of dollars from that, we should at least ask the sort of economically causal story. In a conversation on the sort of failure of progress now in the economic dimension, it's a little nerve wracking to be talking so much about Marx.

You've previously mentioned there's a libertarian component to this as well. How exactly, I mean, what do they both get right that has sort of been subverted in this sort of age of social distractions? Well, there's always some question about, you know, how do you grow an economy? I think this is sort of probably basically across a lot of different theories. If you want to have non-inflationary growth, you need productivity. And in some ways, that's a question around science and technological progress and how much we're happening. And if you don't have productivity growth, you could have more inequality or the inequality gets felt more severely because it has a very zero-sum aspect to it.

But generally, you end up with just stagnation. I think if you're on the left, you stress the inequality. If you're on the right, you stress the stagnation. But you end up with something that's definitely not a progressive society in any economic sense. It's not one where people are getting more prosperous and wealthier over time. I've often defined the middle class as the people who think that their children will do better than themselves. And so the sort of society we have is no longer a middle

class society in that sense. It's just gotten extremely hard to believe that about one's children. Last question on the economics piece. How does this all play out in, or how have you seen this all play out in the context of companies? It seems maybe, I mean, now tech seems to be entering or is, seems to be in this kind of bear market. We've just had a series of high-profile reckonings with the sort of political language in the office. In some cases, it's not allowed at all anymore. What was that, that phenomenon

that we just sort of watched happen in which politics became sort of an essential part of the workplace? What is your sense of why that happened and why is it ending? Or do you maybe disagree that it's ending at all? It's hard. Yeah, it's always hard to know what's going on in the moment we're in. But yeah, there was something about the politicization and the intensification in the tech industry was somehow, I want to say, it was somehow the tech was not enough anymore. Or the product you were building or the company you were building was not enough, and you needed something extra. And it was somehow, even though tech was still in some broad boom and the companies were, on the whole, doing very well, I don't think it felt that way.

The average person in Google felt like they were an ever smaller cog in this ever bigger machine. And then there were sort of ways where even if you were at one of the top tech companies, the housing was more and more unaffordable in Silicon Valley. And so even for the people at the cutting edge of tech in Silicon Valley, it didn't feel like it was translating individually as well as it should have. And then it crystallized into this very, very different direction. I think there was sort of, obviously, there was a way that it coincided with the Trump phenomenon politically. But I tend to think it was more, it was more structural. People were primed to be angry for lots of other reasons. Was it possible that there was some sort of a distraction? I mean, in the context of monopolies,

for example, you've talked previously about how people will try and distract from the fact that they are a monopoly. We talked about Google. They're also, you know, they have X labs and they're, you know, doing a million different sort of crazy science sci-fi moonshots and things like this. Was maybe this, was this like the sort of social version of that? Yeah, I think it worked on all these different levels at different places. But if one were to pick on Google, there was something about the moonshot science programs that was much less charismatic in 2019 than 2014. 2014, 2015, it was all about the self-driving car. And then 10 years later, we've kind of gotten there, but it doesn't really capture people's attention anymore.

Google doesn't get a lot of credit for it. It's not what Google wants to talk about. And then when they lost the brand or the cachet around being this sort of place of intense innovation. And maybe it was too much of a brand and not enough of a reality all along. But at some point, the time ran out, they hadn't delivered on it, and somehow it was harder to resist the awokening of the workforce. Religion is, I think, a pretty interesting one. It's also maybe, while the most unpopular of the four categories, the most obvious and talked about because wokeness is sort of constantly referred to as religious in nature.

What is your sense of how it operates in that way? Well, again, to be, let's maybe concretize it in terms of Christianity specifically. As sort of a hardcore, unreconstructed Girardian, I always think of, you know, what is unique about Christianity and some of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it's this story that gets told from the side of the victim. It's, you know, Cain and Abel, Abel's blood cries out from the ground. It is, you know, Moses leads the Jews out of Egypt, which is this sort of oppressive slave society. You know, in some sense, Christ is the victim of the mob, of Pontius Pilate, of the authorities, and is the innocent victim. And then this is always sort of a contrast with

most of mythology, which tells it from the point of view of the persecuting community. So the Roman story of Romulus and Remus, it's like the Cain and Abel story, but it's told from the point of view of Romulus, the founder of Rome, whereas the Cain and Abel story is not told from the point of view of Cain, who's said to be the founder of the first city. So the first city in the history of the world versus the greatest city of the ancient world, same story, different perspectives. If you sort of map the woke religion into this sort of Christian context, it is not wildly divergent from Christianity. It is just like one toggle switch away. also very concerned for victims. And it is, you know, there's a long history in Christianity where there were all these people who said that, you know, they were more Christian than the

Christians. And it was, you know, and this was, you know, this was Marx or Tolstoy in the 19th century was, you know, Christianity promised you, you know, the poor shall inherit the earth, but we're going to have a communist revolution. The poor will get the earth right now in the here and now, and we're gonna have a communist revolution the poor will get the earth Right now in the here and now and we're gonna be more Christian than the Christians and it's not gonna be this this long long story of redemption It's gonna be it's gonna be a revolution that we're gonna do do right now You know, that's sort of the the history in which I I see it. So it's somehow dealing with a lot of the same themes.

And then of course it escalates them in some ways too, where by having this concern for victims, maybe you end up victimizing other people, or there's a lot of bad in history, and people did a lot of bad things in the past. But if you get rid of forgiveness, that's an important deviation that doesn't work. But I think of it as basically something like a, I don't know, Christian heresy sounds too old-fashioned, but it's something very, very adjacent to Christianity.

And is that the primary difference would be the lack of forgiveness within the context of this sort of... Sure, but it's also that somehow we have an absolute sense of who the victims are. You know, I think Christianity will always say that some ways we're all part of the—none of us are pure victims. The only pure victim was Christ. The way medieval anti-Semitism worked was people said—medieval Christians said if we lived in the time of Christ, we wouldn't have been like those bad Jews who killed him. who killed him. And then, of course, that's, in a sense, a lack of Christian awareness, because what you're supposed to understand is, you know, if you'd lived in that thing, you would have been just as bad as Peter, who is the disciple who betrays Christ. Everybody betrayed Christ. It

wasn't just, you know, the bad Jews or the bad Romans. It was everybody. And then this is, you know, you could say sort of a, I don't know, a modern liberal atheist in the 21st century would say that if we'd lived in the Middle Ages, we would have been tolerant, unlike those bad medieval Christians. And there's probably some way where if you say that you would have been different, you would have known better. The Christian critique is that's always like a sign that you don't know better. There's no chance you'd be better. Your only chance is to realize that you'd have been just the same. And if you think you're going to be much better, you have no chance. So there's

something like that is probably the animating idea. But then there's sort of a question, what do you do? What do you do with all this bad history? And I think, I don't know, there's, I would say, maybe outlining the three kinds of responses, there's kind of a, you know, I don't know, a Nietzschean Bronze Age pervert, BAP type thing that I find emotionally very tempting, which is, you know, the history wasn't that bad, and I don't want to feel guilty about it. And I'm done feeling guilty about the history. You know, there's sort of, let's say, a woke version of the history where it's extremely bad and we need to punish all the bad people and we need to separate the good people from the bad people.

And so it's a bad history without forgiveness. And then, you know, in some sense, I would say the Orthodox Christian version is that the history was bad, and then you need to find some way to forgive. And then, obviously, this all gets sort of weaponized and turned into something ideological, where, you know, if you're too much into forgiveness, you're some sort of evil reactionary person who wants to downplay the history. some sort of evil reactionary person who wants to downplay the history. And if you're too much into the history, then you're this woke Christian. But there's some kind of balance that I think Orthodox Christianity tries to strike. In terms of the broader conversation on distractions, this one reminds me a little bit of science in that it does seem like the decline, let's say the decline in religious observance in America started a long time ago, and it's just been getting worse and worse and worse. new social religion is the reason that religion is declining, or has it replaced this vacuum left by a trend perhaps caused by something we don't really understand? Yeah, it's always hard to know exactly what's going on sociologically, but I would

say that if Orthodox Christianity declines, and it loses institutional power or things like that, my bet would be that something like the woke religion will be stronger than the BAP religion. And because the woke religion is at least right, just the problem of violence in the past. On the topic of religion, there really has been such a tremendous decline. A lot of people are going to have a hard time caring. And one just easy, sort of obvious question is, what are the kind of rotten fruits of a decline in religion? What is the evidence of that as a problem? I think there are a lot of different reasons that institutional Christianity is in trouble.

It's very hard to know how to reverse it. I think these things can always change. People can always, you know, these things are not, you know, absolute laws of history that are written out. But I think, you know, these things are not, you know, absolute laws of history that are written out. But I think, you know, I think the basic problem is you can't, it's unlikely that you go to a sort of a Nietzschean, Ayn Rand, rational East Bay atheist thing. That's somehow an unstable halfway house, or maybe it's an insane asylum

for a small number of people. There's too much of a need for meaning for things like this. And so I think, yeah, I wanna say the woke religion filled the vacuum, and then it's, I think it's worse than what it replaced, and that's not enough to reverse that. Science itself is often framed, and to a certain extent I would say technology is often framed, as in some sense at odds with religion. And so a decline in both seems strange, because the opposite would imply they both were, before the decline there were some golden age when they were both at their height. How do they, how do you as sort of, I guess, one of the more famously

outspoken Christians in tech, how do you reconcile the two? Because it seems like many people see them as just completely at odds. I mean, there's so many different layers to that question. There's obviously, there's obviously a history where they were institutionally at odds, and there was something about early modern science that wanted to resist the Aristotelianism of the Catholic Church. And so there were sort of historical debates and contexts in which these things operated. But yeah, when you fast forward to our world, I do think of the decline as much more correlated. In some sense, both science and Christianity were concerned about the truth. There could be conflicting truths, and there were ways that could be attention. That was a common value. And then we have somehow moved away from that.

And maybe that was already implicit in the whole project, but there's sort of ways it has manifested more and more. There's a line Obama always liked to cite, quoting Martin Luther King, something like, the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice, or the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. And I think that in some sense, you know, the word in that sentence that people no longer believe exists is the universe. And this is like a physics riff, but the universe, if the universe is one thing, then it leads to certain questions like, you know, was there something that created the universe that's not the universe, something like God, or something like this. And somehow it's adjacent to the God question.

And then you can always say, well, it doesn't point to God, it's just a brute fact, there's no explanation for the universe. But then the universe points to a limit on science. So it either points to God or it points to questions science can't answer. And so somehow the idea of a universe is somehow at this intersection, I would say, of this question of, let's say, science and religion. And then the way we've pivoted away from the universe in the last 20 years is to the multiverse, where we can't know anything

about the multiverse as a whole, because we're in some completely unrepresentative subsection of it. And then you can't do induction. You can't reason about the whole. We can't know anything about the whole. And that's why I've often said that I think the multiverse has actually become a kind of gateway drug. I don't mean this. I mean, it's actually almost in a non-metaphorical sense, but it's become a gateway drug to the simulation, to Boltzmann brains, to the matrix, to, you know, you're just a brain in a vat being manipulated by a mad scientist, or you're just this

sort of disembodied mind being manipulated by Descartes' demon. And then it's become this gateway drug to sort of a world, a cosmos that we can no longer make any sense of at all. And if you can't make sense of the whole cosmos, maybe you can't really make sense of any part of it all. And if you can't make sense of, you know, the whole cosmos,

maybe you can't really make sense of any part of it either. But this is certainly not the way the early science project thought of itself in the 17th, 18th centuries. But somehow in the 21st century, I want to say somehow the abandonment of religious truth and the abandonment of scientific truth seem to me to be both symptoms of this very unhealthy postmodern world where we live in just different subjective fictions. It seems like, I mean, are you saying the red pill was a mistake? You should not, this isn't, don't take the red pill. I don't think we're in the matrix. I don't think we're in a multiverse. Don't take the right I don't think we're I don't think we're in the matrix. I don't think I don't think we're in a multiverse I don't know

I'm not sure it's a scientific with the sort of pseudo scientific thing has been reframed as an escape from the theistic or Scientific questions the universe would point you to they're really compelling ideas that are almost impossible to get out I mean the matrix is one obviously the multiverse is another the simulation matrix obviously related to simulation theory. Once you kind of start to think about them, there's no looking away. What do you think it is about them that makes them so attractive? Well, that's a different question. There are ways to avoid these ultimate questions. And we're in a world that, you know, if you want to have oblivion from the ultimate questions, that's what you get with those things.

But I think the price seems very high. The price seems to be that you just can't know anything, and you have to sort of give up on ultimately knowing anything about the world. And my intuition is that that's probably correlated very negatively with a technologically progressing society. If you're trying to figure out things about the world, you're trying to figure out things about parts of the world, that's a world where you're tinkering, you're improving, you're making it better. At least people are asking the question.

I mean, this is... I don't think so. I disagree with you on this. I don't think they're... No, they're pretending to ask, but I don't think they really are. Okay. And they've asked it in a way where it's designed never to get to answers. You know, if you ask a question in a way where it's designed that you can never get to an answer, I think that's actually a way to avoid a question or avoid a different question. So politics, in some sense, it seems all roads kind of lead here. This is the central piece of it all.

I mean, it's right there in the etymology, as you mentioned at the top of this thing, politically correct. Is DEI a plot by the CCP to take over Silicon Valley? Difficult question to answer. I don't want to go down the full conspiracy theory. And then, of course, it's all ahead. And take a trip down.

I think it is not the most important question of what the mens rea of these people are. Are they truly card-carrying members of the Communist Party? Are they getting instructions from Beijing? Or are they just useful idiots? Are they getting instructions from Beijing or are they just useful idiots? You know, it's sort of it's in the intelligence community context it's sort of the the difference between an agent and an asset an agent, you know an agent is

Is someone who has full mens rea? Full full knowledge full intentionality an asset can be just useful idiot of one sort or or another You could similarly ask the question whether you know is Bill Gates China's top agent or China's top asset and It seems to me If it's either of them that's interesting enough and we don't need to we don't need to If we disagree that he's one or the other, that's pretty interesting. In terms of politics, what have we been distracted for? You're saying it's communism specifically and it's a threat from China in particular.

Yeah, on some level it is, you know, there's a way in which China is a massive geopolitical rival to the U.S. to the U.S. It is, if China gets to have a bigger GDP than the U.S., does this manifest as some great power competition a la Victorian Britain

against Wilhelmin Germany before World War I? And then, in some ways, it seems far worse than these historical analogs because it is being driven by a totalitarian ideology. It's again, I would say Leninist, you can sort of debate how Marxist it is, but certainly it is sort of a totalitarian one-party control.

And it seems to me, you know, the stakes very high. And it's a very important thing for us to think about and what we do about it. And it's hard. And there's sort of, it was like we have sort of a little bit of this with the Germany-Russia stuff and the Ukraine war where you had this one pipeline and this somehow was maybe a bad idea to have the pipeline because you were entangled with this bad government. Maybe people were somehow naive about these things automatically working. And the US-China relationship, it seems to me we have 100 pipelines connecting us with China.

And we're sort of entangled in this very bad way. It's a very unhealthy form of globalization. It depends on certain unhealthy differences remaining, where we have a lot of trade as long as the world is half slave, half free. And so, yeah, I think there are all sorts of extremely big, important questions about how one should manage the relationship between China and what's going on. and anything that distracts us from that is very bad. And we should at least suspect that functionally it's doing the job of the Communist Party. They want us to be distracted for surely.

To go back to the Bill Gates thing, you're saying it doesn't really matter if we've distracted ourselves or if we're being distracted perhaps by them. I mean, if this is some kind of actual psy-op. The talking points of the Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, are completely in sync with the CCP on COVID, on foreign aid, on globalization, on all these sort of things. And so, you know, what exactly motivates them is almost a secondary question do any of these distracting forces actually work against I mean do

you think they might work against China to some degree for example religion I mean it's an atheist country are they how are they progressing I mean they seem way more distracted from religion maybe then then we are we at least have wokeness well they have Xi Jinping thought. Is that their version of... It is, I don't know, it's probably a lot. I'd take wokeness over that any day. But yeah, no, there probably are different ways

that this manifests over there. There are, I don't know, there are a lot of things that are very crazy about China. There are a lot of reasons to think that it will not ultimately quite succeed. But I also think we shouldn't tell ourselves that they're automatically going to self-destruct. You know, I think there's sort of these two narratives we generally tell about China. One is that they're going to take over the world. We should just accept it.

And the other is that, you is that no one's having kids. The whole society is going to self-destruct and we don't need to take it seriously and we can ignore it. So it's acceptance or denial. The truth probably is, and it's probably healthier to think that the truth is, somewhere in between. And that what we need to do is actually think really hard through how do you block and tackle it? What do you do about semiconductor policy with China? It's very complicated.

You need to figure it out. And what do you do with trade? Where is it OK to trade? Where is it not OK to trade? Where do you push back? Where do you not push back? But it's a very hard fight we have on our hands. Where distractions from science, academics, economics, and religion seem sort of ambiguous,

it's hard to pin down when exactly the decline began. It's clear that DEI, this sort of broad multiculturalism, whatever, this sort of distracting social stuff that you've talked about has a huge role there. Politics seems more obvious. It seems like the fall of the Berlin Wall was pretty much the moment that the distractions began. Once Russia was gone and was no longer a serious threat or no longer perceived as a serious threat to us, we stopped thinking about this. I wonder, what is it about China that makes it so hard to care, as opposed to the USSR? Well, I mean, there's all sorts of different answers. There's obviously, there's the end of the Cold War history in the 70s and 80s, where even the anti-communists like Nixon and Reagan, the strategy was to ally with the weaker China against the more powerful Soviet Union.

This was the Kissinger opening to China in 1972. It was, in some ways, the Reagan administration continued this. And even when they killed all those people on Tiananmen Square in June of 1989, within a month, Brent Scowcroft, the Bush 41 National Security Advisor, was in Beijing saying, we don't care because you're anti-Soviet. The Berlin Wall didn't come down until six months later. And I sometimes think if the history had been the opposite, if Tiananmen had happened a year later, then maybe we could have reacted very differently.

But there was a way in the 70s and 80s where China was seen as an ally, albeit a crazed communist one, against a more powerful Soviet Union. There's a certain realpolitik. And then there was some way that needed to be updated, and it wasn't. And then I think the Berlin Wall coming down was, you know, it was basically, it got interpreted in two very different ways in China and in the West. In the West, we interpreted it as, wow, these systems will collapse under their own weight, and we just need to wait them out. And something like the Berlin Wall will eventually come down and all these other places, China,

Vietnam, North Korea, places like that. On the other hand, in China, it got interpreted as, wow, we have to really learn from what happened in the Soviet Union, avoid making those mistakes. And Gorbachev had perestroika economic restructuring, which is good, but glasnost, political opening, that's bad. And so we'll do it with, we'll have perestroika, but no glasnost. And we'll learn from it. And if we learn from it, we can avoid that from happening. And so the downside of the Berlin Wall coming down in this almost miraculous way and communism collapsing in this miraculous way in Eastern Europe in the late 80s, early 90s, was that we thought it was going to be too easy with China. And then, in fact,

China learned lessons on how to shore up their system. And then we are where we are today. It does kind of seem at this point that all of the social distractions are kind of at an end, or at least they're not at the peak. It feels like the peak was something like 2020. It's been getting a little more open since then, at least in the context of tech. There's all sorts of pushback that's allowed now. And like I said earlier, a lot of this stuff is not even allowed inside of your workplace.

A lot of these conversations are not able to happen. And probably there's something about ignoring the China challenge has also gotten a lot harder. There's probably, you know, there probably is close to a bipartisan consensus that you need to do something. I think there's sort of a lot of other countries that have, you know, are coming around to the U.S. view on this. And, you know, there obviously are still all these, you know, all these people in our society that have benefited, you know, there's Hollywood, the universities, Wall Street. So there are these institutions

that somehow were long the bilateral thing with China. They were somehow long these pipelines. But they all feel like they're on the losing side. It's sort of the decoupling, the de-risking. That train is leaving or has left the station. And it's not a good idea, not even in your economic self-interest to be just picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer. That's sort of what you're doing.

And this is where, I don't know, just to pick on the Sequoia venture capital firm would be, it seems to me like a very clear calculation that, okay, this train's leaving the station. We better- You're talking about getting rid of the China- Just decoupling, the radical decoupling, the radical spinning off all the different funds. And then we're sort of in this world where if you track it relative to statements they were making, op-eds that Mike Moritz was writing in the Financial Times

three or four years ago. It's, wow, it's hard. They sound like they were 100 years ago. So we are in this, I mean, for sure. But then we are in this moment that's diverging from the previous five years, six years, seven years trend. I never thought that this stuff would come back the way that it did. I didn't even really have a sense of it in the early 90s at all. Do you agree that

it's a kind of less distracted moment? And then I guess the next question is like, if this is just a DEI winter, what does it look like when it returns? I think people are aware of the science stagnation in a way they were not 10 years ago. I think they're aware of the science stagnation in a way they were not 10 years ago. I think they're aware of the economic stagnation. The college thing. And so all these things, the kicking the can down the road doesn't work as well anymore. I think the China thing they're aware of. You know, I think even the Christianity piece is, you know, it's somehow, you know, it is something to say that's anti-Xi Jinping thought.

And, you know, the new atheists, I always think in the mid-2000s, you know, new atheism was just, it was a politically correct way to be anti-Muslim, and it seemed very desirable in some ways at the time. And whereas if you fast forward it to 2023, I'm not scared of Islam. I don't even feel anything that bad about Islam anymore. It's clear the enemy is Xi's totalitarian China. It's atheist. And the East Bay rationalists have lost their way because they had a lot to say about Islamic fundamentalism. They have nothing to say about the groupthink that is Xi Jinping thought. I feel like we should end on something positive and I don't know what that could possibly be after this sort of like horrifying specter of communism.

Well, if we, you know, if we, there are a lot of reasons the tech stuff didn't happen. People were scared of the military. It was hard to come up with new ideas. People were too risk averse. But there was also, you know, there's also just a lot of regulation. And we just wanted to hamstring it and stop it. If you look at the large language model breakthrough with AI, that seems like a big deal. It's a big thing that's happened.

It's hard to know all what it means. It's disorienting in all these ways. But my hopeful model is that there's going to be way less pushback on it than there was, say, on the big consumer internet companies. than there was, say, on the big consumer internet companies. And even though, you know, the AI might be dangerous, it might be disruptive or destructive to various jobs, the thing it's going against is so exhausted. And the thought experiment I sort of have is you have, let's say you have a politically correct English PhD person

who at the end of her PhD is in a dead-end job working as a barista at Starbucks and now is being told that the AI is going to disrupt everything. And then do you fight the AI or do you fight to preserve your dead-end job? And I think there's no energy left to fight the AI. And so we're sort of in a moment where the willingness by the woke left, whatever you want to call it, to fight the future, I think is much weaker. You don't need a Manhattan Project for AI. You don't need a government project. You don't need the universities to do it. It's just happening.

And all you need to do is for it not to be stopped. And if it doesn't stop, the future will happen. And I think that's the moment we're in.