TRIGGERnometry - "The Real Risk is Totalitarian World Government" - Peter Thiel

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and philanthropist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion. Through the Thiel Foundation, he funds non-profit research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, ‘Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future’ - available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J6YBOFQ Follow Peter on X: https://x.com/peterthiel  Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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amount that's happened in the world of bits around computers, but many other things that would have been called technology have really stagnated and this sort of world of Adams has seen dramatically less progress. Are we going to get, you know, this dangerous AI that disrupts our society and maybe, you know, it becomes this dangerous weapon? Or are we likely to get the one world in any state that stops it from being built? Since people are worried about the former and not the latter, that tells you you should worry about the latter and not the former. Peter Thiel, thank you so much for giving us your time, hosting us here in your office. It's great to be with you.

The first thing I want to ask you is actually two questions that are very tied in together. You're one of the most visionary people, I think, that we could possibly talk to. Where are we today, the Western world, and where are we going to be 10, 15, 20 years from now, do you think? Well, it's hard to tell. Well, questions about the future are really hard for people to answer. My thesis that I've articulated in various forms over the last 15, 20 years is that as regards questions of technology and science, we've been in a relatively stagnant period for something like 40 or 50 years since maybe the 1970s, that, that, um, that, um,

That, you know, there is a tremendous amount that's happened in the world of bits around computers, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, maybe now AI. But many other things that would have been called technology, let's say 1967 the year I was born, like rockets, supersonic aviation, underwater cities, the Green Revolution agriculture, new medicines have really stagnated. and this sort of world of adams has seen dramatically less progress. And this is sort of a thesis that I've articulated about. And it's about the present and maybe the last 50, 50 years or so of our past. It gets debated a lot. People don't agree with it. It's very hard to figure out because it is perhaps also a feature of late modernity

that things are extremely specialized. And so, you know, who are actually? you to say that there's no progress in string theory, if it takes half a lifetime of study to even get a handle on it, or what's going on in quantum computers or cancer research. And so it's extremely hard to get a handle on these things. But my sense is that in many areas of the sciences of many of these STEM fields have been quite corrupted, politicized, bureaucratized, de-risked, where people aren't willing to to have bold ideas take risks.

And we have this sort of incrementalism and snail's pace type of a progress. And it shows up, it shows up in a lot of different ways, but economically it shows up in these sort of stagnant living standards, in governments that have ever-rising debt because it's okay to have debt and borrow from the future if you have a lot of growth. And if you don't have growth, it's very, very dangerous.

And it shows up in sort of a variety of different ways. And that's what I think has been the story for some time. And probably if one were to extrapolate my median case is that that's what continues. We continue to have a certain powerful progress in the world of bits and continued regulation, stagnation, sclerosis. whatever you want to call it in the world of atoms, which is, in my judgment, the more important part because we're physically embodied beings and we don't want, we don't just want an app that tells you that you're going to get dementia. We want actually cures for that too. Yeah.

It's not just on the level of data and information. And you said in the speech around 10 years ago now that in the modern West courage is in shorter supply than genius. A, what did you mean exactly and B, why does that matter? Well, there's sort of a lot of different, different applications of it. But it's, you know, it's, you know, I often have said that, you know, our greatest political problem in the sense is the problem of political correctness of, of the sort of conformity of thought. and then, you know, if we're, and the question is always, in order to get fresh new ideas and, you know, a larger surface area of discussion and debate, do we need great genius? Because, you know, it's extremely hard to have new ideas.

Or is it just like some sort of courage of going against certain kinds of social norms and things like that? And, you know, my intuition is the problem of political correctness, you know, is very great. The pressures for conformity, you know, in some sense are, you know, people don't get sent to the Goulog, but they somehow the felt sense is that these pressures are extremely high. And that's why, you know, even a little bit more courage would probably do a lot of good. Peter, isn't genius a combination of the two? Because you need to have the brilliant idea, but you also need to vocalize the idea.

And then you also need to implement it. And if you think about the geniuses, and we can mention right the way through history, practically every one of those ideas was controversial. And in some time, at some points, even it could have ended the life of the person who vocalized it. Yeah, that surely is correct. I think I was using genius, you know, in a more narrow sense of someone who has just a very high IQ. Which would probably be, you know, the sort of IQ mania, Silicon Valley perspective where, you know, people talk, you know, Google tries to give people quasi IQ test and these algorithm tests when they hire people. And then, and so I do think you in some sense get people who are very intelligent in some sort of definition, but end up being not very creative, not very impactful in all these.

other ways. It's quite strange. The, you know, the academia version of it would be, you know, there was a type that was already going extinct when I was in college in the 1980s, which I would describe sort of the, maybe the brilliant, but eccentric, the eccentric professor type who had, you know, was somewhat of a polymath, had ideas about a lot of different subjects, and that type has basically gone extinct. Whereas you probably still have a lot of people in academia still who would score reasonably highly on an IQ test. But that's a very interesting point. Can you blame people for not having courage

when they're incentivized to conform? Because, you know, we talk about Google. Google don't want people challenging. Google don't want people who are, you know, so creative that they're difficult to control. They want people to come in to do the job and then leave. Well, you can, you can, you know, it's a great deal this is surely done at the margins. And so, you know, yeah, I'm not encouraging people to be foolhardy or to be martyrs or to be suicidally insane or anything like that.

But, you know, at the margin, I think it would do a lot of good. And people had just a little bit more courage in all of these cases. there are probably ways you can blame people for putting themselves into these contexts. So if someone goes into academia and thinks that they will have this sort of creative intellectual career, you know, at some point they should figure out that the pressures are enormous and militate against that in very powerful ways. And, you know, they should try to figure out a way to do something creative outside of academia because they will not be able to do inside. So, so yes, I think there's a way in which if you look at it locally, it's always not

your fault. You know, you're going to Google that day and you don't want to create a hostile work environment or something by articulating some heterodox view on gender relations or something like that. But then if you widen the aperture, I think you can blame people a little bit more for, you know, having made the decisions to put themselves in these situations, not thinking about the social context enough and having having have the winders on in some sense. Do you think that's one of the reasons why there's so many autistic people who go on

and found big companies around these huge level entrepreneurs? Because they see the world in a different way and they're not as connected to wanting to be part of a group as much as neurotypical people are. Yeah, it's probably if someone's fully autistic. there probably are ways that that's pretty not helpful in all sorts of ways. But yes, certainly there are probably people who are very mildly on the spectrum where it's strangely been helpful. There probably are a number of people in tech where something like that is true.

But then I think this is not a pro-aspurgers. This is more a commentary on wow, our society. is really insane and deranged. Well, in a healthy society, someone who had Asperger's would be a less functional person that would be able to get less done. And we must be just in an incredible social pressure cooker society where, you know, an average person with a pretty good social EQ just picks up on all these pressures and, you know, nose to censor and get rid of every heterodox idea they ever had.

Well, very much on the point of society being deranged, I want to come back to the idea of the future. And I understand perfectly well what you say, making predictions, especially about the future, as a bad idea, as they say. However, in your career, the thing that many people will know you for is making investments or making moves that were visionary. That's why I introduced you the way I did. I wasn't sucking up to you. It's just an observation of your trajectory through life. So I would be curious if you don't mind just finding out what you see coming down the pipe. And we're not going to say, you know, Peter Thiel in 2024 predicted this and now he's an idiot because it didn't happen. I guess we're just curious of what you might see as the things that are

likely to occur. Well, I'm always, I'm always extremely hesitant with the categories, the buzzwords. And so, you know, if we, you know, there's, in Silicon Valley tends to, you know, traffic in, you know, mobile internet or cloud computing or big data, machine learning. You know, the current one is AI, which, you know, people have been overusing for a long time and has gone completely into into overdrive. And, you know, as a venture capitalist or investor, you know, I want to invest in successful businesses. And, you know, I think the really successful businesses, um, I think the really successful businesses have to do something that's unique, you know, they have a moat or, dare we say, even a monopoly, you know, around the business, they're doing something that isn't just this commodified

competition. And so, you know, there are, and I always think of a restaurant as the sort of paradigmatic example of a bad business. If you want, you know, if you want, you know, if you want, you know, Nature-beared red in tooth and claw, bloody competition. You should open a restaurant and I always, you know, my one heterodox idea I have is that competition and capitalism are opposites. In a competitive world, you compete away the profits and you do not accumulate capital. Competition is for losers. You want to find, you want to find something where you're doing something that's unique, you

have a significant head start, you're ahead of people. And so, on the technology side, I would say that I think the AI breakthroughs are important. They're going to have an enormous impact on our society in very different ways. But as investments, they're very, very treacherous at this point. And I think it's roughly, I mean, the rough analogy is that AI in 2024 is like the internet in 1999. It's clearly going to be important, big. transformative, have all kinds of interesting social, you know, political effects, maybe even

effects about how humans think about themselves. But on a business level, it's very, very treacherous because there were a lot of different internet businesses that failed and even the ones that succeeded, it was quite a roller coaster. Amazon was the leading e-commerce site in 1999. It was $113 a share on a pre-split adjusted basis on the price of the time. December of 1999, by October of 2001, it was $5.5.5. You know, you had to wait till the end of 2009 to get back to the 99 level, and then it went

up, you know, it went up 25x from there. So if you'd held it from December 99 to today, you would have made 25 times your money, but you would have first lost 95%. And then if you'd bought it in October 2001, you would have made 500 times your money or so. And so in some sense, Amazon was the obvious internet company to invest in. And even that was quite a roller coaster. And my suspicion is that that's roughly where we are in AI. It's correct as a technology, but then extremely bubbly and crazed as a company building thing or as a sector to invest.

A lot of people are very concerned about AI from the perspective of the things that you mentioned, which is the impact that's going to make on human beings, the way we relate to each other, whether we have jobs to go to which have been the source of me not just money but meaning and purpose to a lot of people over time the source of social connections where you meet you might meet your spouse i mean the the things that people think might happen as a result of AI could potentially transform humanity in a way that will be extraordinarily significant do you see that happening well um you know I suppose there are a range of dangers and risks. There are questions how it affects the labor market, whether is it fundamentally a complement

to human labor that makes humans more productive or is it a substitute for human labor where human workers will get paid less at the end of the day? The history of the Industrial Revolution was that most of the time the Luddites have been wrong. Machines didn't really replace people altogether. They freed people up to do more productive things and in some sense increased the GDP per human being. And my intuition is that that seems like the far more likely outcome with these AI technologies that is, which is, you know, also what computers did and, you know, in some sense what, you know, what has been happening since the Industrial revolution. I think there are complicated distributional questions will a lot of the gains be captured

by a few big tech companies, will be more evenly distributed in our society. I don't think people have particularly good models on that. And of course you have, and of course you have also all these scarier existential risks where, you know, maybe, I mean, I don't really believe the science fiction version where the AI becomes, you know, a superhuman. God-like being and strives to destroy the world. Why not? I think well before you get to that point, it can be weaponized by humans in a military use, which is probably also just as scary.

And so there are all sorts of, you have all sorts of intermediate scenarios that are dangerous. But look, I would concede that it is a, you know, it's a fairly, there are some great dangers in the technology and I understand why people are nervous or scared about it. I, however, the place where I do strongly come down on the opposite side of the precautionary principle and the effective altruists and the East Bay rationalists and the, you know, Eliezer, Bostrum, Cabal of people is that, you know, if we talk about different, you know, different kinds of existential risk in the world, you know, in the, you know,

And there's nuclear war, there's the AI that kills everybody, maybe dangerous biotech, maybe climate change or various types of environmental factors. And parenthetically, it's always interesting that the people who talk about these things are always just focused on their own one. So you can, you know, I always think there's a critique of someone like Greta that she's insufficiently apocalyptic in her thinking because she's not worried about AI and she's not worried about nuclear weapons and then the AI people aren't worried enough about climate change and maybe we should get them all in a room and have them fight it out first. But the existential risk that I

always want to also put into the hopper, if we were to have a comprehensive discussion of these risks is the risk of a totalitarian one-world government. And I think that the answer, the implicit answer to so many of these existential risks is a totalitarian one-world government. And so, you know, Greta thinks climate change is the biggest problem. Everybody should ride a bicycle. I would submit that the way you'd actually do this would be going from the frying pan into the fire of this. And in a similar way, if we were to really regulate and stop AI from a precautionary principle, you would need something like global compute governance or something like this, which would have to be pretty heavy. heavy-handed because anyone can program a computer and it can done on this very local level.

So it has to be much more heavy-handed than the international regulatory bodies that regulate, let's say nuclear weapons proliferation. It's hard to build a nuclear weapon, and so you don't need necessarily a super heavy-handed one world government to stop it. You would for AI. And so a lot of it has the character, I think, that that risk is much greater than the risk people want to talk about it. And then if I had to do the sort of the, I don't know, not sure, the contrarian take or the, if you held a gun to my head and said, which do I think we're going

to get? Are we going to get, you know, this dangerous AI that disrupts our society and maybe, you know, it becomes this dangerous weapon? Or are we, are we likely to get the one world nanny state that stops it from being built? Since people are worried about the former and not the latter, that tells you you should worry about the latter and not the former. It's interesting to say that because you all know. Harari, who's a very interesting thinker, who identifies many of the global threats, the ones that you describe, he's open in terms of calling for global coordination in order to deal with them. Is your concern about that based on the fact that no one else is concerned about it, or are you

saying you see steps being taken towards that outcome, the global government outcome? My intuitions are that a true global government would be quite bad. It would have a totalitarian character. It would have a character that there could be no escape from it. My classical liberal intuition would be that the marginal tax rates would be somewhere between 95 and 100%. So like the UK then. You know, like, if you could actually stop people from leaving the UK.

Yeah. With the, you know, what, I don't know, what, what Corbyn would set the tax rates in the UK if you could actually prevent people from leaving. But what I'm asking is... Yeah, if you built a wall to stop people from leaving. But what I'm asking is, Peter, do you see things that are currently happening that are taking us in that direction? Do you see people, you know, coordinating in the shadow, so to speak, to make that well?

government a reality? Well, I think that is, I think in a way that is the implicit answer to all these, all these existential risk. Do you think that's why they're being talked about so much? Um, you know, I think there are, there are good, look, there always are true believers, they're useful idiots, there are people who are part of a racket, and so, you know, is environmentalism? Are there people who genuinely believe it's a problem? Yes.

Are there people who are useful idiots and just tools for others' agendas? Yes. And are there people who are part of a corrupt racket? Yes. And it's always, these things always have elements of all three. If we could just collapse it to one of them, they wouldn't be as powerful as they are. But yes, I, my sense for it is that a number of these things, the implicit answers, require this sort of supernational coordination in a very deep way.

And then my sort of political philosophy sense is that that kind of coordination, you know, would, it would be very non-democratic. You'd have, you know, you'd be deferring even more to experts, even more, even more to, you know, extremely large, centralized structures. So it would be very non-democratic, very bureaucratic. probably fairly high taxes. In some ways, the kind of transformation that you've had as Europe has turned into the EU.

In some ways, the common market was envisioned in, you know, in 1979 by Thatcher, when she was pro-EU in 1979, because it would be, you know, you'd have this level playing field and you'd have this market, and it would be a way to weaken the unions and all these things. It would sort of be pushed things in a more. capitalist direction. But then as the common market got created, it came with, you know, this bureaucracy in Brussels that regulated the size of bananas and everything else you could think of.

And that's not in the Econ 1 textbooks. That you have free trade. The trade always comes with a supernational bureaucracy that regulates it and standardizes and things like this. And yeah, my judgment is that that trade-off would be, you know, it may be still okay on the level of Europe because, you know, one can still leave, one can still leave Europe. But on the level of the world, it would be quite another matter. Are you optimistic, Peter, about the future of the United States? Or are you one of those people who looks at it now and sees that we're in a period of steady decline? I am, I always, I always dislike the, you know, frames of extreme optimism or extreme pessimism. Yeah. Because, you know, in some ways, you know, my question about the future,

you know, maybe the place where I would have, should have disagreed with the whole premise of your question is it's not like the future is, you know, written out there somewhere. And it is that all we have to do is, you know, sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. You know, my, my bias, it always comes down to individuals or small teams of people and that the question of agency is extremely important. And we get to decide, in part, what kind of a future we want to build. And if you are extremely optimistic or extremely pessimistic, I think they both end up, both of those attitudes lead to a kind of passivity.

Extreme pessimism, there's nothing that can be done. extreme optimism, there's nothing that needs to be done. And so I think of both of them as sort of code words or euphemisms for sloth and laziness in practice. And so, you know, probably a healthier attitude is moderate optimism, you know, moderate pessimism where, you know, at the margins, you know, a lot can be done. So with that, you know, big qualifier, yes, you know, there are all sorts of places where one can have very serious concerns about the, you know, there are, you know, the United States, you know, the deficits are out of control. There's sort of all sorts of things that seem to be on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. The thing that I think is very

paradoxical about it is that, you know, maybe we have absolute stagnation or even, maybe even decline, but on a relative sense, there's just this felt outperformance. And I've started to wonder whether the absolute crisis and the relative outperformance are somehow very deeply linked. Because if someone who is somewhat pessimistic lists all these places where the U.S. has very deep problems, the rebuttal from people like you coming from the U.K. will always be something, well, do you want to move to the U.K.? Or where would you want to go? And then that's very hard to answer.

And somehow, maybe it's a, yeah, there are these problems in the U.S. And it's coupled with a sense that there are, there are really no other places that are doing better at all. Or that the problems are maybe even more acute. And, you know, the demographic crisis is more acute in Europe or the sort of tech stagnation is even more felt. We at least have still have the tech piece. The IT computer piece is still working in the United States. So, Peter, what are the things that you would change about this country in order to make it more effective, work better? And I think one of the things that we can all agree on is tackling that deficit because I'm no economist.

I'm not a numbers guy, but I look at the numbers and I'm like, I'm pretty worried. Well, it's always, you know, yeah, in theory that if you could wave a magic wand, there are all kinds of things. you would, one would try to do. My, you know, probably my policy intuitions are still broadly quite libertarian in terms of what one should do. And so I think, I still think there is a lot that one could do by deregulating, having, you know, a less severely regulated economy, everything from, you know, the zoning laws here in Los Angeles.

You know, if you look out the window, we have all these skyscrapers. You do not, you don't, you don't see a single construction crane. And that, you know, that tells you, that tells you something about, you know, an incredibly, you know, bad regulatory regime where it's very, very hard, very expensive to build, to build new buildings. And there's, and so, yeah, my intuition would still be that there's, you know, a lot that went, can do on the regulatory side. You know, I think I think the answer that the left has is that you have to raise taxes like crazy. I don't think that's the one we should try to do. It's, you know, the Republicans probably don't have a great answer to this right now. And I think they're implicit answers. We're just going to keep borrowing money indefinitely. And I worry that that's not going to be

adequate at the end of the day and we will eventually get sort of a, you know, a very big move to the left if we don't figure out some way to get back to growth. Can I just ask on this point? I've been wondering later, Peter, and obviously feel free to disagree with me entirely, but it seems to me people often talk about political polarization and it's tangible, of course, in both our countries. But the one thing that I'm wondering is, is the inability to deal with the deficit a reflect of that polarization. In other words, if you were running a small company and you had 40 employees,

let's say, and you hit tough times and you said to all the employees, guys, look, in order for us to survive as a business and for all of us to keep our jobs, we all got to take a 10% pay cut. You're going to get less money. I'm going to get less money. You're going to have less money to spend on your family. You're going to have less money for social benefits. You're going have less money for health care, but that's how we're going to make it as we're a team. That works if you feel that you're one team. But if you've got a society in which half the country suspicious and hateful, you might argue of the other, that seems to me to be the position where you might struggle to tackle

something like effectively what we're doing is spending more money than we have, right? Yes. Do you think that these things are connected? They are somehow connected, but probably the causation is very different from the way you're articulating. The way I would articulate it is that maybe a sort of representative democracy, sort of a constitutional Republican government of the sort the U.S. has, it always works. You know, you have a lot of checks and balances.

The decision-making process isn't fast. It requires a lot of complicated compromises to make decisions. And perhaps it works best when you have... a lot of growth going on in the background. And so if you have an ever-growing pie, then there's always some question, how do you divide up this growing pie? And if you're like a very difficult, obnoxious political actor, you don't get a bigger piece of the pie for yourself.

And that's sort of a person doesn't do well. But then if the pie is not growing and it becomes this very brutal zero-sum thing where there's a winner for every loser or something like that, you know, I would expect the politics to have a much nastier sort of edge. So I, again, my, you know, sort of a man with the hammer sees a nail everywhere, but I would say that the sort of relative stagnation that we've had, you know, I think of the polarized and nasty politics as downstream from that. And then, you know, and then probably, you know, the kind of bad compromise you always end up with,

and that is, well, we just keep borrowing money because that's that we just keep borrowing money because that way, you know, we can sort of pretend that we have growth and the future will take care of it, even though it obviously won't if the growth doesn't arrive. Because it all comes down to a weakness of leadership, in my opinion, Peter, in that we are a society that seeks comfort and everything has been tailored to our own comfort. So why are our politicians going to make us feel discomfort and that discomfort that discomfort that we feel it's just going to make, it's going to be even more shocking because we've done we've spent our whole lives avoiding it. Yeah, surely there are there are elements of all of these

things that are correct. But it's, you know, it is, it is, it is sort of unclear what kind of leadership one is likely to get in a, you know, in a deeply stagnant zero-sum world. And it's, you know, it's likely to be, you know, very polarized and not very charismatic. and not very unifying. So, Peter, that being the case, effectively feels like every rock we lift with you, stagnation is under it. Is there a way for our, it almost doesn't feel

like you're just talking about the West. You're talking about the entire world, really, at this point, right? Is that fair? It's, you know, there's a way that the crisis takes different forms. But I would say in the developed countries, I always think the progress requires us to do new things. And so if the younger generation will do better than their parents, we have to have some kind of innovation.

There may be other ways to do it, but technology, I think, is this incredibly technological progress, scientific progress, are these incredibly vectors for the developed world. For the developing world, there probably is some kind of globalization story. where China maybe does not need to invent anything new. If they just copy or steal or whatever, all the intellectual property from the West, maybe they can just catch up to our living standards. And then we can get into questions,

whether globalization without technology can work or how well that's going to work. But there seems to be, there's some kind of globalization convergence story that one can tell for, you know, the less developed countries. But I always think, yeah, if we divide the world, you know, and again, if we went back to the 50s and 60s, you would have divided the world into the first world and the third world. The first world was the part that was technologically advancing. The third world was

just sort of messed up and stuck. So it was a pro-tech story, but a non-globalizing thing. They were just these separate worlds. And now we divided into the developed and developing worlds, which is a pro-globalization story because of the story of convergence, the developing countries will become developed, but then it's also implicitly a story of stagnation where the developed world is that which is done, finished, there's nothing more to do, we are developed. And so, yeah, so the kind of, if you wanted, a slogan or something would be something like, you know, how do we restart developing again? How do we have progress in the so-called developed world?

How do we move beyond the so-called developed world? It sounds good, but it's actually this very pessimistic description of where we are. Well, we don't know what a woman is and we're told that's progress, but in terms of actual progress, isn't AI the answer here boosts our productivity minimum, as you say, if not just takes over and makes everything free of charge effectively? Isn't that how we get out of this? Is that possible? It's, well, I certainly think it can help and it's something.

that should be pushed. But this is again where I would come back to the internet circa 1999, which, you know, it led to a lot of great companies. It probably did increase the GDP, you know, some. It did increase productivity some, but, you know, in this sense, when this was the only new thing that really happened in the last quarter century, it probably was not enough to transform the living standards.

We had this manifesto we wrote for my venture fund back in 2011 where we had the tagline, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. And it was not meant, in some ways there's all these ways you can make fun of Twitter or I guess now X. But it worked on the level of a business, right? It was a few thousand people. They had very cushy jobs.

They could work from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and smoke marijuana at the office or whatever they were doing. And so it worked on the level of the business, but it wasn't necessarily enough to, you know, increase living standards across the board for our society. And then that's, you know, my sort of placeholder would be that AI is something like the Internet. It will, you know, gather all sorts of places where you can, you know, ring. efficiencies out of the system, but I don't know if it will be as economically transformative as we need. You mentioned social media. I think a lot of people, well, I'm certainly one of them, rather than saying a lot of people

I'll say, I am concerned about the impact social media is having on our brains, not only young people, but the way we relate to each other. And increasingly, I see with younger generations, we've had numerous people. on the show from younger generations where it's clear, we all know, because we grew up without the internet, that most of the way the conversations are had online is bullshit. But younger generations don't. Are you worried about what social media is doing to us?

You know, I always think it's too easy to turn social media or various other Silicon Valley tech companies into the scapegoats for all of our problems. And surely the bigger problem You know, maybe, you know, surely the bigger problems are things like the failure of the schools, the wokeness of, you know, K through 12 schools, the derangements of the universities, there's something that's gone really haywire on the educational thing. And then there probably are ways in which, you know, I think a lot of younger people don't

know what they should be doing with their lives. And this, this again would be more the stagnation than that you're spending too much time on TikTok or something like this. And, you know, there are things I don't like, I don't like all these things that push us towards conformity. I think, you know, the critique of social media that I would, the political critique I would have would not be that it's polarizing our society, but actually that it's homogenizing our society. There's less heterodox thinking, but again, if you think of it as a compliment or alternative to the mainstream media, we probably still have a wider range of ideas that you can explore on the internet than you could before. So, yeah, there's probably, I know, there's something probably wrong with radio and television

and all these forms of media also, you know, in some ways made people dumb. In some ways, you know, people shouldn't be working all the time. You know, you have some downtime, some entertainment. And if you if you think of it as a, you know, is it really, is it really worse than television was for people? It's an interesting point. I mean, so people would actually argue that social media is a pipeline. I mean, if you think the wokeness, let's compare it to a virus, I mean, that's the standard metaphor. It's really, it's how it's how it transmitted, really, into everybody's brain. It started at the university, and then it went. into...

Leaked out of the lab. It leaked out the lab into Twitter, into Facebook, into Instagram, and that's when it started to proliferate. Yeah, but I... I still think that was not... Again, we can... It's very hard to know these cultural arguments, but I don't know, I'd be open to sort of a religious interpretation.

That it's, it is, you know, it is Christianity, the main religion of the Western world. you know, it always takes the side of the victim. And there's something where it is like some kind of deformation or intensification. And maybe you should think of wokeness as ultra-Christianity or hyper-Christianity. It's just like an extreme intensification. And, you know, there's no forgiveness. And so it's sort of, it's, you still have original sin and you have all these bad things that happened in the past. The past is terrible and you can never overcome it. But there's surely is a religious interpretation that this is sort of, you know, what happened is as let's say the church lost a certain amount of authority, but people didn't become,

you know, rationalist, atheist people. They went into this sort of woke religion, which, you know, has to be, which I would interpret as, you know, a certain, you know, extreme form of Christianity. Yeah, because, you know, they knew... There's a religious interpretation. There's an economic one. You know, it's... There's a...

There is a... There's an educational one. And then, you know, there's obviously some technology piece, but that was, you know, it was probably channeled by... I think the liberal, the bad liberal idea has been channeled by Hollywood for decades. And because it's an interesting point about the, you know, you were saying, you were saying, about the bad Hollywood ideas. Because it seems to me that we were sold a lie with the whole new atheism movement

where it was kind of said, we don't need religion anymore because we have rationality, we have science, we have facts. Science, rationality and facts, I mean, great, but they're not going to fill that particular part of you that needs filling that religion does so beautifully.

Well, it, you know, it's, you know, I always think one should try to steal man So there are all these things I disagree with it. The new disagreed, disagreed with the new atheists on. But if I had to steal men, new atheism, circa 2005, you know, I think it was a very politically correct way to be anti-Muslim. You sort of grouped all these religions together, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, a bunch of others.

And then they're violent and intolerant. And they just randomly kill people. And it was a problem with Islam or. maybe fundamentalist Islam or something like this. It was sort of a politically correct way to be opposed to that. And there was surely some need for that. Maybe there still is today if you look at, you know, the sort of, I don't know, murderous insanity of the Hamas people in Gaza and things like that.

And then the sort of geopolitical way in which it lost. its way is at some point, you know, the crisis, the danger to the West is surely more from communist China than it is from, you know, medieval Islam or something like this. And I think the new atheists did not have anything to say about communist China, which is, it's a consensus theory of truth. It's a social theory of truth. It's the wisdom of crowds or the wisdom of the Communist Party, which somehow distills the collective. It claims to be scientific. You know, it's probably not, but of course the word science always gets misused. It's almost always where people use the word science. It's almost always to tell that it's not science.

We don't call it physical science or chemical science, but it's social science, political science, climate science. That's how he knows. I'm in favor of science. but not in favor of people using the word science most of the time. Yeah. And so it's scientific socialism, and the new atheists were, they were, they were good at, you know, explaining why bin Laden was a bad person. They were a lot weaker when it came to Xi Jinping thought.

Because what the new atheist did is they took away the idea of religion. The flaw with the new atheist is they did. didn't really know how to replace it and what you created was a vacuum and something is going to fill a vacuum. Yeah, there's sort of a lot of different levels. I sort of, I don't really like going as much as you're going into the sort of spiritual, moral meaning of life direction. I think it's, if you say it's a critique of things that, yeah, it's a critique of societies that

are organized in a certain way. And I think it was important to have a critique of a medieval Islamic society. That there were a lot of things that were not desirable about that. I think it is perhaps equally important to have a critique of a totalitarian communist society. And I think that, in my judgment, that is a greater threat. And that's one where there's something about the methodology and the approaches, you know, they weren't able to say. Yeah. And so, yes, you know, maybe religion sometimes brings very bad things out of people and we should find a way to criticize religion when it does that. But the notion that only religion brings bad things out of people, you know, maybe you could have defended this in 1780 before the French Revolution,

but surely that's been out of date since 1789. Right. Well, it's interesting that you mention how you see comparatively the threat of communist China and the threat of Islam, because as I'm sure you're well aware, certainly in Europe, particularly on the right, the concern about the demographic dimension of that, the concern about the fact that European societies are failing to integrate their Muslim populations well, certainly less well than the United States, is now giving rise to very strong sentiments about immigration, generally. but about Muslim immigration in particular. And a lot of people in Europe would say,

actually, you know, Muslim terrorists are way more likely to have an immaterial impact on my life or a grooming gang in England or whatever versus communist China way far off in the distance that's not really affecting me personally. How do you see those two threats and why do you say you're more concerned about China? Yeah, well, look, there probably are ways

that one has to be able to talk about more than one thing at a time. But, and I, yeah, there probably are all sorts of things that, where people were, you know, too cavalier about these things. You know, the number, the number, the demographic number that I've seen is, and if you look at continental Europe, so not the UK and not, not Russia's Soviet Union, but in 1930 had something like 10 million. Jewish people and something like 5 million Muslims, mostly like in the Balkans. And today it's

something like maybe less than 2 million Jewish people. So there's a Holocaust and then a lot of Jews left. And something like 50 million Muslims. And so the ratio of Jews to Muslims went from twice as many Jews to 25 times as many Muslims, you know, less than 100 years later. And if you have a 50 to 1 demographic change, Surely that's something, you know, one, one, one should have thought about and what that, what that meant. And then people were, you know, too cavalier about it doesn't matter because the education institutions work great. And all these people will become, you know, modern liberals and productive members of our society. And so it was, yeah, there were demographic questions people didn't want to talk about. There were educational things people didn't want to talk about.

And they were they were they were all linked to the the you know the the way I see the China one is sort of qualitatively quite different is that it is you know it is in some it is in some zero you know it is it is determined to beat the West to catch up to the West in these you know questions of science and technology and then you know in some ways to you know exert some leverage through that where it can, you know, it can dominate the planet. Why do you say that, Peter? What's your evidence for that? You're someone in the public space who seems to be uniquely vocal about this. Why are you so focused on that issue? I, you know, I think, I think that that's, well, I don't know, I think there's different

different levels one could one could look at it but it is um i i think that's the way the the china's leadership sees it let's so it's it's it's always you know you have these sort of questions about the lucidity's trap the the rising power meets the the great existing power and does this often lead to conflict and and i think in the western world you know we've uh people have generally looked at this, you know, rather optimistically, I don't, I don't really think that's the way people in China think of it. They think of themselves as, you know, on an ever greater collision course with, with the West, and then, you know, that on some level, maybe it leads to armed conflict over Taiwan, maybe it leads to some sort of really violent decoupling in different ways. And then that's something,

that I think, you know, we have to think about very hard. Peter, there are people who, sorry, there are people who go, look, the threat of China has been wildly blown out of all proportion, and they'll point out to the fact of, you know, the demographic problem that China has with the old people, which is due to the one-child policy, they'll look at the fact that the economy is not doing particularly well, in fact, some people are predicting it to go into recession in the next couple of years. So we're overstating the threat of China. Where would you push back on in those points?

Well, I certainly think we understated it for a very long time. And so, and there was probably, I don't know, there's sort of always, I think, a prehistory where in 1989, you would have, you know, I was thinking, you had Tiananmen in June of 89, the Berlin Wall comes down in November of 89. If it had been reversed and Tiananmen happened in June. of 1990. So in summer of 89, Brent Skorcroft, the Bush 41 National Security Advisor, flies to Beijing, reassures them we don't care about all these people who are killed in Tianan because you're anti-Soviet, you're blocking the Soviet Union six months. And if it happened

the other way around, maybe we would have rethought the China thing back in 1990 or something like this. And there were, yeah, there were surely a lot of, you know, very dubious decisions. There was the decision to admit China at the WTO and sort of to hollow out a great deal of the economies of the Western world. And maybe it doesn't matter if we're only concerned about how much cost the consumer to buy an electric car. But if these things have a military dimension and you no longer have a shipbuilding industry in the UK, and then you will not have a Navy and you will not, the UK will not, and the UK will not, and the UK will not have a role to play in protecting Taiwan. And so, there were sort of these questions that one should have thought about.

And so I think there was a great power version of this. And then I think there was also an ideological version of this where maybe there was a way to manage the rise of China if it had been transformed into a liberal Western democracy. You might have still had rivalry. It might have still had, it was, you know, it was non-trivial to have the handoff from, you know, the British Empire to this American-centric world, but there was a way, there was a way that could work. And then there was some sense in which China was just not becoming a liberal democracy. And this is sort of where the, you know, Fukuyama end of history thing was, has been, has proven to be comically wrong. And people should

have figured that out much earlier. And I think they would have figured it out in June of 1990 if TN Amendment had happened one year later. And but for that because of that one year delay, it was something like, you know, maybe the, maybe took until the Trump presidency that this even, you know, this even started to register, to register as an issue. And yes, I, I don't know, I, I, you know, I'm not, I don't think we should go to war with China. I don't think, but I think we should be very realistic about how deeply misaligned we are, how, you know, how the sort of totalitarian ideology is deeply incompatible with our values and all these ways where, you know, in some sense, China wants to become America. that wants to become the leading power and that's a that's a setup for a very very

difficult thing to manage. Peter, it's been in. Let me ask actually a couple more. We've got a little bit of time. On geopolitics Peter, you mentioned totalitarian ideology. We have Iran, we have China, we have Russia all making moves to put it mildly around the world. How do you see the geopolitical situation? they are, there's, there's some way where they are, they're all entangled. You know, they're all,

they're all entangled with each other. There are all these things one has to, you know, one has to think of, of separately. It's, I don't know, there's a lot of things one can say about, about each of them, you know, probably, there probably are, it's probably, there's probably, there's probably a way that, the Middle Eastern policy of the U.S. of the Western world should be focused extremely squarely on Iran and the Iran problem. And I think there are critiques one and have of the neo-conservatives, of Obama, of all these different people the last 20 years, where the focus was on Iraq or on all these different things and ended up being a distraction from Iran. And the reason I would say Iran is the most important one is, you know, if they achieve a nuclear weapon,

I think that has the effect of radically destabilizing the Middle East. I don't think they would use the nuclear weapon, but it would mean that they could support Hezbollah, Hamas, other things with far more impunity, and you'd get sort of a violent regional war. You know, the Korean war starts in 1950, one year after the Soviet Union gets the bomb. Vietnam War starts 1965 one year after China gets the bomb. Because the bomb means that we can't really hit back at the people who are supporting the North Koreans or the North Vietnamese. And so you get a very nasty regional war. And that's why I think you want to do a lot to prevent the Iranian, Iran from getting to the bomb.

And that's the Middle East focused. You know, there's a great deal that one, you know, that one can say about Russia. I think I was probably in 2016, you know, I gave two speeches for Trump at one of the convention and one of the Washington Press Club. I was not pro-Russia, but I was sort of anti-anti-Russia involved. This was not the battle we have. You know, we have a bigger crisis with China. It's a distraction from that. And, you know, the place where I'm a little bit more confused on that at this point is that I, you know, I think in some sense, I think of Russia as a, you know, the Ukraine-Russia war, it's almost already a proxy for the conflict over Taiwan.

And in some ways, Russia is a Chinese client state of sorts. It's like North Korea or something like that. It's very different. But, but, and then, and then the real challenge is China, which in some ways, you know, maybe the broader Chinese playbook is to sort of, you know, organize the developing countries against the developed world. And this is sort of, you know, Iran is, you know, this poor country in the Middle East versus the wealthier Saudi Arabia or something like this.

And then Russia is the former Eastern Bloc country against Western Europe. And then there's a version of that of that playbook in many other parts of the world that China wants to play. That's, yeah, that's where the problem of these is the way that they're all entangled with each other. You know? I was going to actually ask because we've touched on it, but we haven't spoken about it, which is Taiwan. I mean, how do you see that situation evolving? It's, man, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it is a, it's quite a big black box. I don't, I don't know if we're capable of defending Taiwan.

And so I think we have to somehow be realistic about what our actual military capabilities are. And, um, but I think if, you know, if the, if the, if the Taiwan crisis comes to head, I don't I don't know if we end up with a, you know, a full-scale war with China. I think you end up with, you know, with extreme economic decoupling. So, you know, I still don't think TikTok will be banned until 24 hours after China invades Taiwan. And, you know, you have the north stream pipeline between Russia and Germany, and we have the equivalent of 100 pipelines between China and the West, and the pipelines, they will all blow

up the day of the Taiwan invasion. And then I think we would be well advised to think about the decoupling, to prepare for the decoupling in advance and not have this fake notion that the coupling somehow creates stability. In the case of the Nord Stream pipeline, the coupling of Germany and Russia led to instability because it made Putin think you can invade Ukraine and Germany would not go along and then the Germans didn't understand anything about it. energy and so they they were actually tough on Ukraine but it almost blew up the whole economy. And, you know, I think the China-Taiwan thing, you have to think of the 100 pipelines between the West and China will blow up. And surely it's better if that happens on our

timetable than theirs. Well, hey, at least there won't be a global government, right? Not for the time me. No, for the time me. Peter, it's been an absolutely pleasure talking with you. We're going to go to locals to ask our supporters questions before we do. The final question of the interview is always the same, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about? You talked earlier about political correctness preventing people from saying what they should. What should we be talking about? Man, it's just, it is, it is just always this crisis of the West, how we get back to the future that we've been going through. And that's, that's surely, you know, how do, you know, how do we create a

a better world for the young generation in these Western societies. Well, give us some ideas on that. It's, you know, I think so much, I would always say the paradoxical answers, you know, maybe we'll disagree with the premise of the question, you know, undercut this interview too much. It's always the, the UK bias is too much on the level of speech, too much on the level of, you know, some Oxbridge rhetoric debating society and the UK's having to go of me, man. Yeah, exactly. Well, I've like that.

I just did a great speech. You did very well. You're fantastic at that sort of a thing. And then, but you know, the sophists, what they have in common with the biblical God is they believe in the omnipotence of speech. And it's also we just, you know, we need to act and we need to do things. and you know, I think talking about it is perhaps necessary, but it surely is not sufficient, and we need to actually act on things and build the future.

As a great philosopher once said, a little less conversation, a little bit more action, please. There we go, we end the interview with me getting criticized by Peter Thiel. Head on over to Locke's well, I'm sure he'll do a lot more of that. Peter, you're given the option of following the teaching an example of just one philosopher in all human history. Who would it be and why? This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures.

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