The Eric Metaxas Show - Peter Thiel

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor, presents ideas from his best-selling book, "Zero to One," in this event hosted by Socrates in the City back in January 2020.

to Socrates in the city. First of all, it's always touching and wonderful to see so many old friends and new friends in the room. Also a handful of pseudo friends. You know who you are. And it's very important to be honest about that. I hate you. I hate you. You don't fool anybody.

And sadly, a few former friends as well. But, you know, once I get the money back, talk, but tonight, the big question that we're daring to ask is how much money does Peter Thiel really have?

No, I mean, I mean really. I mean really. Of course, I'm joking. But the reason we do have Peter here tonight, I want to know, is my question, what does Elon Musk really like? That's, that's I hope you don't feel used, but that's just the way

it is. we've got a number of special guests here tonight. I won't point you out unless you're in Coulter, who's sitting right over there. She's here with her boyfriend, Jimmy J.J. Walker from Good Times. Kid Dino mite is in the house. And I'm sorry. Am I embarrassing you?

And have you put on weight? What the hell happened? Unbelievable. Wow. I think you've got a boyfriend. You could eat. I mean, come on. Anyway, I'm so grateful that Anne still might be my friend. And following tonight's conversation, Peter and I are going to have a conversation up here,

I think most of you know, Peter has to leave immediately. I guess he's catching a bus at the Port Authority or something like that, which is very impressive. I mean, even if I had a million bucks, I wouldn't go to the Port Authority. So I just got to say that's kind of amazing. In any event, he cannot stay around, so we have to let him sneak away. And the Union League Club has a couple of housekeeping things I should cover.

Number one, anybody here wearing a catheter? Actually, you don't have to tell me, but I'm trying to join the club to, not the catheter club, the Union League Club. because they don't let you do events anymore. They have let us for 20 years, but unless you're actually a member. So I'm joining the club,

and I just want to get all the rules right. So let me just say, so I've said it, if you're wearing a catheter, you need to register it with the club, let them know. And that's, I've done my part, okay? I've done my part, but you don't want them. It's very embarrassing if they catch you with an unregistered catheter.

I don't know why I bring up catheter. I guess I'm looking at my friend, Rich Egan. I always think of catheters when I think of Rick. And I know you've registered anyway. All right. Now, I'm going to introduce Peter Thiel. We'll get on with it. Now, I guess it's such an awkward thing.

I realize Peter's sitting here wondering what he's gotten into. And I guess, you know, just to be honest, Peter, I know you're probably a little intimidated by me. And let me just say I get that, okay? My intellect, my accomplishments, whatever it is, my heart toward others, perhaps. But a lot of times guests are intimidated by that kind of stuff. But I just want you to know, or I'm just letting you know, that I put my legs on two pants at a time, just like everybody else.

I'm no different. And now I'm going to tell you who Peter Thiel is. Now, I get the problem with certain people is you already know who they are. So what am I going to tell you in case you just stumbled in? Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor, probably most famous for having started PayPal in 1998, at which point he led it as a CEO, and then he took it public in 2002, and he got really, really rich. It's unbelievable. He made so much money that in 2004, he made the first outside investment in Facebook.

Did you know that? some of you knew that and in making that investment he helped to accelerate the establishment of a global bank, one world government and the coming of the Antichrist which is really he didn't

mean to do that I want to be I want to be clear but you know you got to be careful where you invest because you because you didn't yeah okay I gave $20 to the breeding of a red heifer I don't know if you know about that

but But so, hey man, we're equal. Peter has written a number of books. The one we're going to touch on tonight is called zero to one. I think a lot of you are familiar with that. And I have by now, for sure, gone on too long and embarrassed Peter too much. So, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Peter Thiel. It's such a joy to have you here that I joke.

Joking is my love language, so don't feel bad. You asked me upstairs where we're going to start, and I said, I don't know because a lot of the folks here don't realize that we were together last evening and we had a conversation and I realized we could just talk about anything. You say we, meaning human beings, are the only ones who can invent new things. Talk a little bit about that idea. If people have read the book, they know it. But, you know, the vertical and the horizontal that you refer to in the book as a principal

thesis of entrepreneurship? Well, I believe there's sort of outlined two basic ways that we have progress as a society, and one is what I describe as horizontal or extensive growth, which involves copying things that work. And this is most evidently seen through globalization in the last 40, 50 years. And then the other one is sort of intensive or vertical progress, doing new things. And this is sort of iconic. seen in technology or new inventions or things like that. And I think these are two sort of modalities of progress that I contrast. And I think for those of us living in the United States, Western Europe, in the advanced countries, my claim is that the second is much more important

than the first. Globalization is perhaps good if you're in Burkina Faso or, you know, in China or places where you have a lot of catching up to do. It's not how we're going to implement. improve living standards in the West. Now, when you say globalization, just to be clear, when I read that in the book, it wasn't immediately clear to me what you meant. And in case, there's anybody not getting that? You mean, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, just to sort of spread what we have, right? In other words, to take what we have in the West and the best of the West

and to get it into every corner of China or any part of the world. That's what you mean, effectively. I mean in the standard sense. I mean, it means all these different things. But it's basically sort of homogenization of the world, convergence, things becoming the same. When you describe the world as the developed and developing world, that is a globalization narrative.

The developing countries are the ones that are going to become developed by copying and converging. And then it's also an anti-tech narrative because the developed world is a place where nothing new is going to happen. It's developed, it's done, it's finished. And this is very different from the way we would describe the world 50 years ago when we would have described it in terms of the first world and the third world,

and the third world was permanently screwed. up, and the first world was the one that was technologically advancing. And so we're living in a world that is extremely pro-globalization, that has bet everything on globalization, and that is not at all that excited about progress in other forms. And my underlying thesis is that we've had relatively little progress in technology broadly defined in the West in the last 50 years. there's perhaps been a narrow zone of progress around the world of bits, computers, internet, mobile internet. Even that, we can get into debates as to whether it's

positive or negative, that you sort of alluded to a little bit in the intro, and I'm not trying to take you up on that, but we can, but certainly... I just said that because I don't care. Certainly, you know, most engineering fields were bad fields for people to go in in the Western world in the last 40 or 50 years. If you didn't want to become a mechanical engineer, chemical engineer. Electrical engineering was already on its way out when I was at Stanford in the late 80s.

And certainly, if you were so stupid, it's become an aeroaster engineer or a nuclear engineer, that was a bad idea, a full stop for the last 40, 50 years. And I think, I do think that a lot of the challenges and problems we have in our society is that we are no longer progressing as fast as we're often told. Let there be no doubt, big tech and the far left have joined forces to purge America of conservative views. But even if you keep your accounts, you don't have to give big tech websites access to your data. That's why I choose to protect my online activity by using ExpressVPN. Ever wondered how free to access social media companies make all their money? Well, by tracking your searches, video history and everything you click on and then selling your valuable data. When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address.

That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from eavesdroppers on your network. And the ExpressVPN app couldn't be easier to use. You just tap one button on your phone or computer and you're protected. Take back your online privacy with the VPN I trust at ExpressVPN. dot com slash metaxis. By visiting my link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free on a one-year package.

Again, that's ExpressVPN.com slash metaxus, E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N. com slash Metaxis, Express.com slash Metaxis to protect your data today. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot, have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick-start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start,

they lose money. In fact, they don't even break even until about four to five months after if you keep ordering it. Friends, that's huge. People don't keep ordering relief factor month after month if it doesn't work. So, yes, Pete and Seth are literally on a mission to help as many people as possible. deal with their pain. They really do put their money where their mouths are. So if you're in pain from exercise or even just getting older, or to the three-week quick start for 1995, let's see if we

can get you at a pain too. Go to relieffactor.com, relief factor.com or call 800-500-384-800-50-3-8-4. Relieffactor.com. I use it. It works. Investors, seeking steady cash flow, ready to diversify, NRIA has grown to be one of the nation's leading specialists and offers 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses targeted at 18 to 21%. That's right. You could receive steady 10% return monthly payments with bonuses. As their slogan says, they specialize in realty investing done right. You can even use your 401K or IRA to invest. NRA's 15-year track record and 1.2 billion in new construction development backs you. Learn how you can invest in this hard asset real estate cash flow fund today and receive 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses. This is something savvy investors should

research and consider. Call now 800, 700, 500, 5483. That's 800, 700, 5483 or visit nria.net. An offer to buy or sell any security is only made by our private placement memorandum. Read it first. See us at nria.net. You just make this statement. in the book that in a way, since 1970, we haven't progressed much. And when I read that, I thought, that's the first thing I want to ask you. In other words, when you're talking about not much happening in 50 years, I sort of get it. But tell us what you mean by that. And at some point, you can bring up Apollo 11 on Woodstock, as you did last night,

because it was a very fascinating way of framing the whole thing, I thought. Well, I mean, I'm not saying there's been zero progress in the last 50 years, but, you know, outside of the world of computers, there's not been much. And if you were, you know, the main function of our iPhone seemed to be to distract us from the way in which we're in subways that are 100 years old and the ways in which nothing in the rest of the world has changed or progressed very much. And if you look at, you know, cars or houses or things like this, haven't changed that much in the last 20, 30 years. Maybe 70s were still a little bit different. but it has not progressed very much at all.

I think there's a meta level of question you could ask, which is that in science we measure Avogadra's number, the fine structure cons in physics, to many, many significant figures. But the question of the progress of science, how fast it is progressing, is it accelerating, is it decelerating, is it relatively stagnant, never gets asked.

And if it gets asked, we get nothing but short propagandistic answers from, let's say, university presidents who will tell us using adverbs and as a substitute for thought that clearly and demonstrably, science is progressing faster than ever before. And I think it is instead rather stuck. And we can go through sort of any of a number of places where things have fallen way short of expectation. Nixon declared war on cancer in 1970. It was going to be defeated by the bicentennial by 1976. So we're, you know, past forward 50 years. We're presumably 50 years closer to curing cancer than we were 50 years ago,

but the expected time has gone up quite a bit. You can't forget that LBJ declared war on poverty in 1965. So, that was really meant mainly as a joke. But when you say that Nixon,

I really have to say, I'm hugely fascinated by, I mean, you are a science guy, and so I want to hear more from you about this, because when we think of, we were talking about this last night, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Project, put a man on the moon, those were times when people came together and accomplished extraordinary things. There's just no way around it. And obviously, you know, since then,

you're right, we don't seem to have done anything like that, but is there really nothing we can think of? I mean, would the Human Genome Project at least impress you a little bit? A little bit, although I'd say it fooled me a lot since, you know, I thought they would translate it into all sorts of cures by now 20 plus years later. And so, you know, there's always sort of a question how this actually translates. And we can, you know, I think even if we say that things are progressing at roughly the same rate, I think that they're slower. They're objectively slower, life expectancy is not going up anymore. This would be like one way to measure progress in medicine is how fast is life expectancy going up? Last three years has actually been going

down, which is, you know, like even someone as pessimistic as me would have never predicted that it actually would go backwards because surely, you know, we might progress more slowly. It's scary to hear that. I think one of the things I, you know, there's sort of the failure, the question, you know, why has this happened or what changed, what went wrong, is always a little bit over-determined, but certainly one cut on it is that big science is something like an oxymoron. And when you make it big, it stops being science. And, you know, we have probably about 100 times as many people today in the world or in the United States who have PhDs in the sciences as in 1920.

If progress was happening still at the same rate as in 1920, that you would infer that the productivity of the average scientist is 99% less than it was 100%. years ago. And I think it's even worse than that. So one, you know, one partial history I would tell of what happened is that we had sort of a decentralized, healthy, scientific world before the New Deal. And, you know, it was heterodox. It was science as discovery, not science. I always think you have science as discovery, which is sort of the science one now only reads about in children's books on Einstein, sort of like a creative person thinks of new things. And then there's science. as governance, where it's sort of, you know, you're a robot in a lab, and that's what you do.

And most of science is science as governance, not science as discovery. So what I, part of my history of what happened is that in the 1940s with the Manhattan Project, it was possible to take this pre-existing healthy system and accelerate it one time only. The New York Times, I'm going to paraphrase this, but this was about four or five days after the Hiroshima bomb. the op-ed in the New York Times was, you know, hopefully this will silence the sort of conservative and libertarian people who said that the Army could not ever direct scientists and just tell them what to do because the Army has proven all these people wrong and hopefully they will now be quiet

because they were able to get a new invention to the world in three and a half short years of the bomb that if you had left these prima donna scientists to their own devices might have taken them 50 years. Wow. So now I will say the New York Times doesn't write editorial's last. like that anymore today. And I think part of the history is you were able to accelerate science one time by pouring money into it and scaling it, but then it came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions. It still worked with NASA and Apollo. But at this point, it is all just a slow bureaucracy. It's, you know, it's peer review, never have any heterodox ideas. And you have

sort of a, you've created a very large monoculture, which is pretty unhealthy. And that's sort of one cut of what happened. It was, you know, the government was able to accelerate it and then at the price of destroying it forever. There's so much here. But the basic thesis, I have to say, it startled me. I thought, huh, I haven't thought very much about this. I think you mentioned in the book that, you know, jetliners, you know, in the 60s. Everybody can jump on a jetliner and we can go 650 miles an hour.

and today, if anything, we're going slower, but we're certainly not going faster. And for sure, as a kid, I was sure that we would have flights to the moon or at least that planes would be able to go 2,000 miles an hour or something like that. So I get it when I begin thinking about it. But I guess my question is, is there anything we can do?

Is this the same problem we have with growing government? Is this just part of what happens in a free culture? is that entropy causes you to become less and less free, unless people are really vigilant about understanding how freedom works? Well, I think, let's see, you know, I'm pessimistic in the sense I think we've had stagnation. I don't think it's a problem of money, which is one of the liberal explanations. If we had Larry Summers here, he might say there's stagnation. Oh, yeah, we need more money.

We're not spending enough money, so I don't think it's a shortage of money. But I also don't think that it's a natural problem. I don't think it's the case that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and there are no new ideas, there are no new discoveries that we could make. So I actually think it's more of a cultural problem, which is better than nature, but still hard to change. And there's sort of a series of cultural things that are wrong about the nature of science. We're not willing to take risks.

We're not, you know, there's too much conformity of thought. But I think we could be making progress in all these areas. There's no reason we couldn't cure cancer. There's no reason we couldn't cure Alzheimer's. And when you say that, right, why is there no, why do you think that's the case? Because I think those of us who've lived, it was kind of like growing up with the Soviet Union. You sort of just assume it'll always be there. You just assume we'll always be dealing with cancer.

When people talk about a cure for cancer, why should we assume that that's possible? It's always a question who has the burden of proof in doing these things. And I think, you know, I think that I would say the burden. proof is still on the side that it's, you know, if you say it's impossible, there's no mathematical proof that it's impossible. There's nothing, we don't know enough about biology to say, say this stuff doesn't work. You know, I think, I think one, you know, one cut I always have on biology is it's sort of the feel that people with lower IQs went into. Sort of, it's sort of like people had bad math genes went into biology. Any biologists in the room?

One, two. You know, I think there probably are some cultural interventions that could improve it quite a bit. Physics might be harder. You know, we seem to not be making progress on string theory, and maybe we're not going to make a lot of progress there because you've had smart people working on that. So that's one I'd be a little bit more agnostic on what you could do. But biology, I think, you could do a lot better. And I think the explanation that it's in the nature of the world that you can't change this, you have to always think of this as a baby boomer scientist. who's failed. And we're talking to an imaginary conversation with a baby boomer cancer researcher.

First thing is we're making so much progress. We're going to cure cancer in the next five years. But you've been saying that for the last 50 years. Well, we don't have enough money. Second line of defense. Responsible, you've been getting more money every year for 50 years. And then third line of defense is, well, it's an impossible problem. And we're doing the best we can. And so if you think of these as, you know, the excuses that are made, the natural excuses by a generation of scientists who failed to do things, we should take the contrarian view, the minority view, is that it's stagnant, it wasn't about the money, and it's the culture, and therefore these things could be fixed. Set me free. Set me free. Let there be no doubt, big tech and the far left have joined forces. to purge America of conservative views.

But even if you keep your accounts, you don't have to give big tech websites access to your data. That's why I choose to protect my online activity by using ExpressVPN. Ever wondered how free to access social media companies make all their money? Well, by tracking your searches, video history, and everything you click on

and then selling your valuable data. When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from eavesdroppers on your network.

And the ExpressVPN app couldn't be easier to use. You just tap one button on your phone or computer and you're protected. Take back your online privacy with the VPN I trust at ExpressVPN.com slash Metaxus. By visiting my link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free on a one-year package. Again, that's ExpressVPN.com slash Metaxus,

E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash Metaxus, Express.com slash Metaxus to protect your data today. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son, owners, Pete and Seth Talbot, have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1990.

to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start, they lose money. In fact, they don't even break even until about four to five months after if you keep ordering it. Friends, that's huge. People don't keep ordering relief factor month after month if it doesn't work. So, yes, Pete and Seth are literally on a mission to help as many people as possible deal with their pain. They really do put their money where their mouths are.

So if you're in pain from exercise or even just getting older, or to the three-week quick start for 1995, let's see if we can get you at a pain too. Go to Relieffactor.com, Relieffactor.com, or call 800, 500, 8384, 800, 500, 8384, relieffactor.com. I use it. It works. Investors, seeking steady cash flow, ready to diversify, NRAIA has grown to be one of the nation's leading specialists

and offers 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses targeted at 18 to 21%. That's right, you could receive steady 10% return monthly payments with bonuses. As their slogan says, they specialize in realty investing done right. You can even use your 401K or IRA to invest. NRA's 15-year track record and 1.2 billion in new construction development backs you. Learn how you can invest in this hard asset, real estate cash flow fund today, and receive 10% annualized monthly payout.

with bonuses. This is something savvy investors should research and consider. Call now 800, 700, 500, 5483. That's 800, 700, 5483, or visit nria.net. An offer to buy or sell any security is only made by our private placement memorandum. Read it first. See us at nria.net. You're not suggesting, I don't think, that they don't want to cure cancer.

In other words, I would assume that anybody working in a lab any place, it would be their dream to get on the map to have done that. So what do you think is the issue? You know, I'm not, I'm not really sure what I would say they want to do. I think they want to get money from the government to do, to get, to keep, keep whatever research they're doing. So is this like welfare? They're disincentivized because they're happy? It's certainly, it's certainly questions about this do not get asked. You know, one of my, one of the people I know that Stanford is this guy Bob Loughlin, he got a Nobel Prize in physics in the late 1990s. And Professor Loughlin believed that once he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he would have complete academic freedom. He could do whatever he

wanted. So he was an extremely delusional person, as you can tell. And then, you know, the area he decided to go after was not something like, you know, climate change or evolution or, you know, topics like this that are pretty dangerous. He went after something far more dangerous than those topics. He was convinced there were all sorts of other science. scientists, and he started with the biology department at Stanford that were basically stealing money from the government and engaged in semi-fraudulent research. And you can sort of imagine how this movie ended. And, you know, Professor Loughlin promptly got defunded. And so the questions about the integrity of the process are ones that nobody can ask. We have a replicability crisis in science. People are starting to talk about that. But the politically correct way to talk about it is always in broad statistical terms. What do you mean replicability crisis? Well, there are all these experiments that can never be replicated. And so I think psychology, something like 80% of the psychology results, can't be replicated.

Is psychology a science? Well, it claims to be doing experiments that in theory you should be able to replicate. And then the replicability crisis suggests that, yeah, there's something between lying and fraud and self-delusioner. And there's something very weird going on. in a lot of these fields. And you can talk about that. You can't, of course, you can't name names. This particular scientist has,

no of the results can be replicated. That gets to be very problematic. So, yes, I think it's a pretty corrupt system at this point. I read earlier today, I got my Discovery Institute newsletter in the mail, and they were talking about James Tour. He is a nanoscientist in Houston. at Rice University. Are you familiar with him at all? He really seems to be doing some truly

groundbreaking things, the kinds of things that you're saying aren't happening very much. I find it ironic or at least funny that he is very outspoken about his Christian faith. I mean, clearly one of the greatest scientists of our time is very outspoken about his Christian faith. But you can't argue with these kind of results. I don't think there's a nanoscientist in the world who really could touch him. You know, he's the best. So there are things happening. And I guess I wonder, I wish he were here, he could answer the question.

But I wonder if there are places where the culture is different than what you're describing it. I think if it's messed up in the United States, we should assume it's worse than most of the rest of the world. I mean, the United States is the country on the frontier. It's the country where we do new things. And so if it's gotten very hard to do new things in the U.S., you're not going to be saved by science in Western Europe or Japan or China or any of these places. So this is our area of comparative advantage as a country. We're a frontier country. We're the place where you should be able to do new things.

And if even in the United States, it's very challenged. It's likely to be that way in most other places. Although, I mean, I guess you'd say that we are still doing new things because China is still ripping us off. They're not doing new things. You know, in other words, their – globalization for them means, you know, stealing our technologies. But it is interesting to me that we do. They haven't quite gotten the memo that we're not doing that much. So they're still trying to steal a lot, but I'm not sure they've figured out that there isn't that much left.

Right. Well, when you talk about us being the only ones who can enjoy. invent new things, obviously. Well, I should say you seem to be alluding to the idea in that statement in your book that we are unique, we're created in the image of God. Obviously, there's something there. I want to know if we could explore that a little bit, because it's a concept, I mean, the idea that anyone would be able to do what you describe in your book to come up with

something completely new and, you know, suddenly go vertical in that way. it sounds miraculous, right? Like, why should we be able to do anything like that? Well, there's a lot of different threads here. I think that one of the healthy modalities of progress, of thinking about the future in business or in politics and culture and science is that you have, I think you have some sort of definite goal and you have agency, and it's directed towards that goal, and that you have agency, and you design,

you create the future. And I think I often contrast this to the sort of view of the future is just a fundamentally unknowable random process. And so if we say that it's just completely random, completely unknowable, that's sort of an abdication of age. You know, the powerful images of the future are concrete, they're specific, and they're things we can work towards and we can build towards. I think one of the things that's gotten very unhealthy in the Western world is we no longer have an idea of the future that's powerful. We don't have an image of how it's going to look different in 10, 20 years that will be generally better. Let there be no doubt, big tech and the far left have joined forces to purge America of conservative views. But even if you keep your accounts, you don't have to give big tech websites access to your data.

That's why I choose to protect my online activity by using ExpressVPN. Ever wondered how free to access social media companies make all their money? Well, by tracking your searches, video history and everything you click on and then selling your valuable data. When you use ExpressVPN, you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. That makes your activity more difficult to trace and sell to advertisers. What's more, ExpressVPN encrypts 100% of your data to protect you from eavesdroppers on your network. And the ExpressVPN app couldn't be easier to use. You just tap one button on your phone or computer and you're protected.

Take back your online privacy with the VPN I trust at ExpressVPN. dot com slash metaxis. By visiting my link, you'll get an extra three months of ExpressVPN service for free on a one-year package. Again, that's ExpressVPN.com slash metaxus, E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N-V-P-N. com slash Metaxis, Express.com slash Metaxis to protect your data today. Hey, folks, I've got to tell you a secret about relief factor that the father, son owners, Pete and Seth Talbot, have never made a big deal about, but I think it is a big

deal. I really do. They sell the three-week quick start pack for just 1995 to anyone struggling from pain like neck, shoulder, back, hip, or knee pain, 1995, about a dollar a day. But what they haven't broadcasted much is that every time they sell a three-week quick start, they lose money. In fact, they don't even break even until about four to five months after if you keep ordering it. Friends, that's huge. People don't keep ordering relief factor month after month if it doesn't work. So yes, Pete and Seth are literally on a mission to help as many people, possible deal with their pain. They really do put their money where their mouths are. So if you're in pain from exercise or even just getting older, or to the three-week quick start for 1995, let's see if we can get you at a pain too. Go to relieffactor.com. Relieffactor.com or call 800-500-384, 800-500-800-384 relieffactor.com. I use it. It works. Investors, seeking steady cash flow, ready to diversify. NRAIA has grown to be one of the nation's leading specialists in our offers 10% annualized monthly payouts with bonuses targeted at 18 to 21%. That's right.

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That's 800, 700, 5483, or visit nria.net. An offer to buy or sell any security is only made by our private placement memorandum. Read it first. See us at nria.net. Well, my daddy left home when I was three and he didn't. What are the actual pictures of the future people have in Western Europe that are different from the present? Because if it's just Groundhog Day, it's an eternal Groundhog Day, that's not charismatic, that's politically weak. And I believe there are three pictures that people have. Behind door number one is Islamic Sharia law, and if you're a woman, you'll be wearing a burqa.

So that's a very different picture. Behind door number two is the Chinese Communist AI that will be monitoring you all the time in every way possible. It's sort of the big eye of Soron, to use the Tolkien reference, that will be looking at you in all. times in all places. And behind door number three is Greta Thunberg, and it is you'll be puttering around with an e-scooter and you'll be recycling everything. And those are the only three doors. There are no other doors available.

And I didn't want to make a pro-Greta argument, but I actually, I can understand why she's relatively more charismatic than the big eye of Soron and the ISIS Sharia law. And you have to understand that if you're going to create an alternative, you have to have an alternative specific picture of the future. You have to have an alternative of what the future can look like. And until you have that, you know, she's going to win. You mean Greta? Yes.

Wow. She's just a kid. I feel so sorry for her. Actually, given those three choices in Europe, I don't even blame them. Right. I just feel so sorry for her. She's a kid. My gosh, it's so insane that her parents,

are allowing her to do this. Yeah, when you're talking about Europe like that, it is interesting because I always think of America. I'm certainly not alone in this. We, you know, and you have to really go back to the 60s, as you say. But we really believed you can put a man on the moon. You can do these things. The reason, and we were talking about this last night,

so we can go back to this where the reason, reason it seems to me, or the reasons that we don't have that view of the world anymore, one of them, and I've never heard anyone say this before, but I literally thought of it last night, if there were a place near the moon, a little farther away, we would have gone there next. But the next place we could have gone is Mars. And it's so far away, we just kind of sank into the beanbag chairs and started playing video games because, you know, we went to the moon, we're done, that was it. but so that's one really practical thing that you know when you achieve something like that once you climb mount everest you have climbed the highest mountain you are done with that you can't really there's not a way to do that again

well but i think i think there were a lot i think there were a lot of things you could do that were not in outer space there were a lot of things and of course this was not the only thing that went wrong people were expected to go to Mars, but you know, we landed Apollo 11th landed on the moon in July of 1969 and three weeks later you had Woodstock and I think, you know, in some ways there was a cultural shift and it was the shift

from thinking about sort of an exterior world that we were going to change and improve and explore to an interior world of psychedelic drugs and yoga and meditation and video games in a basement.

And I think this shift from exteriority to interiority is something that's characterized the last 50 years. Let's talk about that, because when you say interiority, we have to say that all interiority isn't bad, right? In other words, if I am not taking acid or wasting my life in my parents' basement playing video games, There are a number of things that I could be doing that are somewhat interior, if I'm using the term right, that are good things. I could be reading great books. I could be thinking about great ideas. So I know you don't mean to be denigrating that.

And then when you talk about exteriority, if that was the term, if you really have gone to the moon, what do you mean, right? Like, you know, if there isn't another mountain to climb that, I guess the point is that there's something about reaching the moon that really is hard to top. It doesn't mean that there aren't other things to do. But it seems reasonable to me that once you reach the moon, it's hard to come up with a second act. Well, we can debate about how the history, you know, how many choices there really were and what the counterfactuals were. And yes, we have not yet sent a man to Mars. that still is probably quite a ways off. There's something about space that has lost a lot of its magic and its appeal.

But I think there were many other things that we could have done where we could have progressed. And I think on some level, it's not, again, this is the question, is it nature? Is it just too hard to get to Mars? Or is it the culture that we're not reaching? We're not trying. Well, one example of this that I've noticed for years is that I thought since I was a kid, nothing has gotten better in the sense that there are no new bridges or tunnels. They were all built before I was born or around the time it was born.

I mean, the idea of building another bridge across the Hudson or another tunnel. And I thought, what a wild idea that they were doing this. They were doing plenty of this in the earlier parts of the century. And then it just stopped completely. The number I've seen is that in Manhattan or New York City, in inflation-adjusted dollars, it costs about 50 times as much to build a mile of subway in real dollars as it did 100 years ago. And why? I mean, you know, 50% of that is the unions. It's a corrupt government. It's environmental rules. It's all sorts of things.

But yes, it's if you define it. If you define it. find, you know, one sort of economic definition of technology is doing more with less. And there are a lot of these sort of profoundly diseased sick institutions, including the city of New York, which are characterized as very anti-technological. We're doing, you know, we're doing, you know, we're doing, we're doing less and less with more and more. This is true of education. It's true of, you know, probably significant parts of our health care system where you're not,

it's costing more and more to at best stay in place. Since we're leaping around, let me just pick up on something you've touched on here. You mentioned in our previous conversation that universities today, the level of corruption in academia, is similar to the corruption of the medieval church and that we need some kind of reformation. Can you expand on that? because I think for sure most people in this room know that something is very, very wrong with the academy. The basic analogy is that, you know, if you sort of think of the Eve of the Reformation 500 years ago, you had, you know, you had sort of runaway indulgences, which are like the runaway tuition costs.

You had this sort of priestly class that often had sort of tenured sinecures, which are sort of like the professors. And the universities, they even have a sort of so teriology, a theory of salvation, where if you get a diploma, you're saved, and if you do not have a college diploma, you end up in a bad place. You know, you go to Yale or you go to jail, that sort of thing. So I think we should think of the universities

as, in a sense, the successor to the Catholic Church. It is the atheist church. You mean the bad Catholic? I just want to be clear. I'm not Catholic, but I'm a pro-Catholic, non-Cathlet. Even most Catholics like this because they think the Catholic Church is pretty screwed up.

And so if the universities are as bad as the Catholic Church, maybe the Catholic Church isn't as bad as people often think. Well, okay, but to talk about the Catholic Church of the pre-Reformation, there's no question that what was going on there was bad. I mean, I think that many people like, you know, Erasmus and Francis, who never would dream of leaving the church, they knew it was bad and it needed reformation. And the reformation had to come from without.

These institutions, they are not reformable from within. That's the main point of the analogy I would give. So what do we do with universities? What do you mean? We just try to get people out of them. We try to, you know, you're, you know, one of the, one of the things I, one of the things I tried to do years ago, I had this fantasy of starting a new university that would be sort of a better version, sort of a all-around good liberal arts education, with less political correctness, less, you know, thought control.

And one of the people who worked for me spent about a year looking at all the universities that had been started in the preceding 100 years, 1907 to 2007, when we were looking at this. And it was a sorry tale of donor intent betrayed, wasted money, just all the stuff had not worked. And you got the sense that there's something about this setup that's really bad. There's sort of a mathematical description you can give of this where corporations are mortal beings. And over time corporations get worse and worse. And then if they're sort of very corrupt, they sort of go out of business. And universities tend to be immortal.

They last forever. And, you know, the top universities, the most prestigious ones in the U.S. are the ones that were here, you know, 17th, early 18th century. And so we're sort of dealing with the corruption of something that's a quasi-immortal being. I mean, I don't think it's, you know, omnipotent. I don't think they're omnipotent. I'm glad to hear that. But it's, you know, it's gotten, it's dramatically, they're dramatically worse than they're a mortal being. They're dramatically worse than they were 30, 40 years ago.

and it's still very hard to come up to alternatives. There's still some sense in which, you know, Harvard is at the top of the pecking order. But yeah, I think we have to try to find just ways to exit the system altogether. Well, but isn't it ultimately? There's no way to sort of co-opt it, to change it from within. Right. Those are all, I think, complete fools, errands. But I guess my question would be, don't you have a situation where Harvard and Yale or the New York Times to skip over

to another kind of institution. There are institutions that have value because people say they have value, right? It's that simple, right? Having been to Yale, I can say that it has really, really minimal actual value. There's no question in my mind that the value that it has is... But I think when you're saying things like this,

you're not even supposed to say this. Why? Well, because if they have value because people say they have value, than if someone, like you says, the things you're saying right now, that's undercutting what other people are supposed to say. Right. Well, that's the whole point of this. That's why we're here. I don't mean to freak you out, but that's exactly what I want to talk about because it's, you realize this is true, right? There are people who are unwilling to say that, or unwilling to see that they become politically correct asylums. There's pure madness and their kids, you're spending all this much.

money, so really so that your kid can catch this virus and have a messed up worldview forever. And once people realize that, once people stop giving money, once people start, stop saying, I want my kid to go to that place, those places won't any longer be able to have the value that they're seen to have. And so you... I'm slightly more pessimistic. I mean, I think they are very robust. They're not going to go away that quickly. The analogy I would have for Yale or Harvard is it's like a studio 54 nightclub. And you have, which is probably bad for the morals of the people and maybe it's good for their status and we can sort of debate, which is more important, which is less important.

But these institutions are remarkably robust.