Peter Thiel | Cambridge Union

[Music] was about about larger larger questions about the nature of our society one one of the big debates uh at at Stanford uh um was uh was a debate about the the core Western culture curriculum that the freshman were required to take and it was a chant uh s reminded of it in a way uh hey hey ho ho Western cultures got to go and uh there were sort of a you know a group of activists that got mobilized They got R got rid of the sort of mandatory Western Civ curriculum and in some ways

it was a debate about a freshman class but then it was a larger debate about about the entire uh culture that was being discussed in that class and uh and a friend and I David Sachs uh put together you know involved in all these debates and about 30 years ago 1994 1995 we uh we wrote a book uh that was sort of our uh you know tell all book about all the insanities of Stanford uh the diversity myth and it's sort of a 250 page uh you know subtitled multiculturalism and the politics of intolerance at

Stanford and was sort of a um a pasti of 250 pages of you know of horror stories about what what the was doing in one way or another and uh and I'll I'll just read from from one part this is uh this is the uh new curriculum and there's Shakespeare's uh The Tempest got replaced by a book uh called a tempest which uh was sort of a uh Inverted revolutionary account in which uh caliban the sort of not so good person in the Shakespeare book is the Revolutionary hero and it ends with a long di

tribe against um against Prospero and uh the west and so I'll just read the diet tribe from uh um the sort of U am CER the um leftwing writer of the book understand what I say Prospero for years I bowed my head for years I took it all of it your insults your ingratitude and worst of all more Degrading than all the rest your condescension but now it's over over do you hear of course at the moment you're still stronger than I am but I don't give a damn for your power or for your dogs

or your police or inventions and you know why it's because I know I'll get you um and I know that one day my bare fist just that will be enough to crush your world the old world is falling apart and by the way you have a chance To get it over with you can [ __ ] off you can go back to Europe but in a pig's eye you will I'm sure you won't leave you make me laugh with your mission your vocation your vocation is to give me [ __ ] and that's why you'll

stay just like those guys who founded the colonies and how who now can't live anywhere else you're just an old Colonial addict that's what you are and then we sort of go on like this s 250 pages and the you know the conceit is that uh that you Know we're speaking truth to power and that uh if you just sort of expose what's going on that is enough to um that is enough to somehow change uh change these debates and of course uh you know there's a you know and uh there was a there's a

wrapper we put around this which was uh which seemed a little bit contrived in 1995 but it was sort of that uh you know the reason you should pay attention to what happens on these college campuses is because ideas of Consequences and eventually the ideas spread Beyond College this was a very it was a very artificial contrived argument because you know it was really just it it felt like just this sort of crazed uh very local kind of a debate and then um I don't know there's probably like a 20y year for 20 years after

I wrote this book my retrospective on it was mostly you know I don't I don't understand why I wasted two years writing this book it was such A waste of time uh and uh and then you know the last decade or so I feel better about it in in the sort of Cassandra like prophetic sense where you know you you you have you have some sort of a prophecy of Doom and uh you um you're you know I guess in theory you don't want to be proven right but uh sort of as a matter of

vanity it's always flattering that uh the prophecy of Doom sort of more or less comes true and um everything we predicted uh you know in Some ways happened and you know these ideas spread and and um and of course you know in some ways uh you know the uh the conservatives or whatever you want to call the The Establishment has uh has just been you know fighting a long defeat for uh for many many decades um now now there's um you know I think one of the one of the pieces of the book that I

think has held up very well is the title itself the diversity myth and and it's uh it's an ambiguous Title and I think the ambiguity is uh you can put the stress on the word diversity and then um there's sort of all these arguments well you know you don't it's it's not really about diversity it's it's not you know you don't have true diversity when you have a group of people who look different but think alike or diversity is more than just hiring you know the extras from the space Cantina scen in Star Wars or

something like that um and that's sort Of that's sort of a one version of uh of of the title but the the other uh deeper version of it is uh to put a stress on the word myth that uh you know we actually nobody knows what diversity means it's just kind of this empty word this shth this Idol that we worship and and then um it's it's and there's this mythological rapper around it and um and and then you know the the uh and the then the point of it or you know what's what's going

on on one level you know is Extremely um silly and you have sort of debates about all these all these different debates what's what's right what's wrong but on another level you have to think of it as as just a giant um I don't know a giant magic show in which your attention is being redirected from things that really matter and it's a it's it's sort of a magic show attention redirection operation and what I what I want to um speculate on a little bit tonight instead of going into All the nuances of the pro

and anti-diversity arguments on their own terms is what is it that our attention is actually being uh directed away from what are the things that are much more important that we should be talking about EXC sorry you'll have your time to make your point this this is not the time for audience questions sorry if we can have the EMS sorry this is not your time to make your Point we'll have to remove you from the chamber if you want to make a disruption [Music] only am I supposed to be shouting you down what what do

you want me to do do do do you want to be victimized by me women in this room this mon very sorry if you want to make your points you'll have the time to do that in your audience [Music] Q&A I I I assume you're not on the paler Payroll very I'll I'll try to offer rebuttal somewhere in my remarks technology is no alternative to politics technology is politics this man has blood on his um well I I I I I will get I will I will sort of get get to it by and by

but the uh the the 30 second rebuttal and why I was wondering whether uh the the gentleman uh who was uh just for some reason escorted out of the room um Whether he was working for paler is that uh is that uh there's always a question you know my my thesis is that most of Technology doesn't even work and uh there's always a question you know is it good or evil that's the ethical question we always get stuck on but uh so much of it is not even it doesn't even work it's simply bad it's

fake fraudulent bad and um and so uh by that man protesting I I assume the paler technology at least Works he's not protesting IBM he's not protesting Lockheed rathon all the vaporware providers and um and so you know um if you're even if you're evil you're at least not bad you're not incompetent and in a world that's full of total incompetence um uh uh you're even kind good but let's uh I'll uh I'll I'll try to get back to that point in some ways so uh so I know there sort of are are a range

of things these uh these um These uh these campus debates distract us from probably uh probably the first the first big one that I would I would submit um it always distracts us from our just questions of economics and uh and if you wanted a you know a a Libertarian or even a Marxist critique of identity politics Dei multiculturalism Etc is that it's strangely not focused on these economic questions and when we are you know when when we are um and uh and and there sort Of are all these strange ways that uh the economy

has not worked that well for 40 or 50 years there are there are reasons for people to be frustrated uh the frustration you know often gets gets misdirected but but it is sort of this this very deep question of what what has gone wrong in in all these different economic spheres and when you focus on categories like race um or gender or all these other identity categories a uh a Marxist critique would be you're not Focused on class you're not focused on on the nuts and bolts of the economy that uh you know if Rosa

Luxembourg a the the the Marxist theorist of the early you know 20th century if she were here she would she would be telling you that that gentleman or you know anybody who is not focused on the economy is simply a member of the reactionary class that uh that A diversity officer at a university is roughly you know it's roughly in the same you're you're you're Still actually part of a very corrupt capitalist Racket and you're sort of in roughly the same category as a bank robber or or a prostitute you're you're sort of a part

of this uh of this very very dysfunctional system and uh and and certainly one one of the kinds and again you know even the economy is is sort of an abstraction I always think the uh the the more concrete economic thing to try to focus on are are things like housing real estate uh I'm I'm always very Partial to the theories of Henry George the late 19th century Economist who is considered socialist in the late 19th century in the early 21st century is considered libertarian sort of a symptom of how much our societies have changed

in some ways but the uh the the rough thesis is that uh the single thing you need to always pay attention to in an economy is distortions around land use property and if you're not careful you end up with uh with um a sort of runaway Effect in which um the people who are the winners are not the technologists or you know various people but people who sort of uh won won the housing lottery in one way or another and that this leads to sort of a a lot of lot of very strange Dynamics and

if if one were to think of um a university Dynamic if all right I I I think you're not going to say anything new here so sorry if you want to make your point you can do that during audience Questions otherwise we'll have have we'll have to remove you from the chamber um um and and and so Bas basically uh you know the the if you want to make your point you can do so during audience questions like I said otherwise we will escort you out of the man I I'm so tempted to just um

never mind I'm not not gonna not I'm going to Resist the temptation I will keep going and um and and the you know um the the example I gave at the the Oxford in the Oxford context and I suspect that in some ways Cambridge is very similar is was a news item that uh you know the old house tolkien's old house was for sale for four and a half million pounds in Oxford and I would submit that if you are even if you are a fully tenured professor at Oxford if you were able to buy

tolkien's house um you should be Investigated like where did the money come from how did you do this and um and then the sort of uh the sort of left-wing radicalism from a Marxist or libertarian perspective the economically reductionist explanation is this is simply what happens when um when the society becomes proletarianized across the board and uh and then of course there are sort of a a lot of ways in which uh this is this is also uh the the Experience of of of the uh younger generation in the UK the US that you know

if we say where where the economy has specifically failed it is specifically on this question and uh and we should uh it's very hard to solve but uh um if we're not talking about that we are um we're missing a a great deal and I would um and I would I would submit that the two people who interrupted me um I don't have a clue on how to fix the housing problem in the UK and maybe That's uh maybe that's that's that's a thing that uh they should spend a little bit more time thinking about

now the the uh the second the second sort of broad category of where where I think the uh um in in some ways uh these these debates distract us from are uh are this question of Technology science and uh and again the two people interrupted me you know they they just assumed all these things are working incredibly well that we are we're living in in a world Where you know technology is progressing at a dizzying pace you know maybe it's it's it's accelerating towards distopia but uh the uh the uh the thing that I've come

to wonder about a lot is um is whether this is happening at all how much progress is actually happening is the is the slowness is it possible that technolog is actually progressing more slowly than we think and uh and you know and science is sort of Technology's older brother or older sibling who's Fallen on especially hard times and that uh and that uh somehow the you know the corruption of the Sciences is perhaps as great as the corruption of the humanities there um you know it is it's a very it's it's by the way it's

a very hard question to figure out what is going on in the Sciences in general you know it's a feature of late modernity that we're all hypers specialized everybody is working in some super narrow specialty and in some sense to Comment on the health of all science I have to know something about I don't know Quantum Computing and string theory and uh and cancer research and you know I have to be an expert on all these different things and probably uh nobody since Gerta had in the 18th century had a handle on everything and and

then and then the the suspicion of course is that if you can't know what's going on all on all these things and you have ever narrower groups of Guardians guarding Themselves and the cancer researchers tell us they're going to cure cancer in 5 years they've been telling us this for the last 50 years and the string theory people tell us they're the smartest people in the universe but uh but they somehow it's been sort of a degenerating research program for quite some time um it's it's it's very very hard to evaluate even though one one

suspects that uh that the Enterprise is is deeply corrupt um and you know there was in the In the American context we had sort of a we had this sort of dramatic I would say tale of two different universities with University presence getting fired in the last year and the very dramatic one was the the Harvard president Claudine gay was sort of the you know the um I don't know the uh A diversity bureaucrat got fired for for plagiarism you know it's sort of uh you know it was literal plagiarism even though you know on

some level you could say that she had not Said anything particularly original if she had said something original like we need let's say we need to worry about uh uh discrimination against Martians if if she if that had been her thesis I I would I would guess there would would have been at most one other person who would have said that and you would have caught the plagiarism much earlier so if you simply were uh copying more or less what thousands of people had said um it was a little bit harder to catch the Specific

plagiarism but it was it was deeply unoriginal it was it was sort of like again it was it was like what I did my me and my friend did with the diversity with book it was sort of shooting fish in a barrel it was really easy to take her out and then the the parallel story in a way was the uh Stanford University president Mark Tessier LaVine who um who was a neuroscientist and uh and it's again it's it's a complicated story but uh had Basically it was basically um the the key papers he he

had written had all this sort of falsified semi fraudulent science and um and on some level had you know Abed with tens of millions of dollars of government grant money and uh and that was also a a tale of uh of of very deep University corruption but it's one that's extremely hard to understand it's one people were not focused on and somehow um in My Telling these are at least two different sides of the coin And uh and we need to sort of find a way to to talk about both and it's very very hard

to do the the science version of this my um one of my one of my good friends was a physics PhD student in the late '90s and he worked for this professor at Stanford uh Bob Laughlin who uh 1998 gets a Nobel Prize in physics and uh Laughlin suffers from the Supreme delusion that once he gets a Nobel Prize he finally has academic freedom and he can do anything he can Finally investigate taboo topics and there are you know there probably are sort of a lot of taboo topics in The Sciences you could question Darwinism

or you could qu question stem cell research or climate change but uh he decided it was something far more taboo than all these things Laughlin was convinced that uh most of the most of the scientists in some sense were um were uh not doing any science at all they were all they were all like Mark Tessy LaVine they were Stealing money from the government um and uh and I think they started by you know investigating the the biology department at Stanford um you can sort of imagine I don't even need to tell you how this

movie ended it sort of was quite catastrophic uh Laughlin got defunded he got no more grant money his students could not get phds and um and then the sort of you know shortcut you know because it's hard to know what's going on but one sort of Epistemological shortcut that I always have is that if you have things that are taboo that you cannot investigate my um my my shortcut answer is they're simply true and so if you cannot investigate the Integrity of the Sciences as a whole because it's all you know super um uh um

complicated um then that actually just tells you that the entire Enterprise is pretty pretty corrupt and pretty broken and um U or or if you want to use a and I have to I'm going to be careful not to Step on UK sensitivity so I'll try to use a US analog so if you if you ask you know what is you know what's the you know what's the most corrupt part of the US government is it the post office is it the Department of Motor Vehicles where you have to just you know wait in line

for hours um till a bureaucrat fills out the paperwork and you get your driver's license or is it the NSA and um and the the uh the hermeneutic of Suspicion I have is that The the things that are esoteric and complicated you should assume are the most corrupt and so the DMV and the post office the corruption is transparent just like the corruption in the humanities is transparent and so uh so the rough suspicion I have is the Sciences are um at least as corrupt as the humanities maybe maybe more so and again to you

know there's always sort of a little bit more of a science science focus at a place like Cambridge I I Would say that you know um it's always tricky what you're supposed to study as an undergraduate I always think one of the ways in which broadly the Humanity's people are better off than the scientists is that the Humanity's people at least know that they will be unemployable um and then whereas whereas these you know it takes a scientist to be uh duded into believing that they will be taken care of by by the natural Goodness

of the universe or or something like this or uh or if you frame this as a as a debate uh I always I always I always think there are basically two kinds of debate techniques one can use if you're going after an opponent and you can go after your opponent at the weakest point where um and the weakest Point are you know all the Ridiculousness in the humanities everybody can see that uh the book I quoted from is not quite as good as Shakespeare um and that's at the weakest Point you're likely to get maybe

a tactic win but um but if you go after your opponent at the strongest Point um and you win it's game set match and that's why that's why I always think we should uh we should call out the Sciences a little bit more as well and that you know something has gone has gone very wrong in most these areas uh you know I think there's progress around computers internet the world of bits but It's this narrow cone of progress you know most of the areas of science When I Was An undergraduate late ' 80s already

didn't work you were out of your mind to go into aeroastro engineering nuclear engineering and in retrospect everything else didn't work either it was you know you didn't want to go into mechanical engineering chemical engineering um you know you you didn't want to go electrical engineering sort of barely worked although by 1995 it was clearly Worse than computer science and computer science was I mean it was this fake major in the 80s right it was it was you know it was you know normally you know this again sort of this a linguistic riff but uh

whenever people put the word you know I'm I'm in favor of science but I'm not in favor of Science and quotes so whenever people call something science You Know It Isn't So political science isn't science social science isn't science climate science isn't Science it's it's a tell that people are suffering from an inferiority complex we don't call it chemical science or physical science because those are real and computer science it was this um it was this very silly major in the 1980s that people who were not good at math or physics or electrical engineering flunked

out into and uh and and it was sort of a symptom of this inferiority complex so it did work but um but it's it's sort of more commentary on this uh This this this extremely strange world where um where so little else else worked there's always this uh this broad question why why this uh why this stagnation which you know I date back all the way to the 1970s that we've had this period of slowed growth reduced expectations for the younger generation um you know even the definition of Technology you know in a way technology

is always defined in a circular way technology is That which is accelerating but if you think about what it refers to you know I was born in 1967 in 1967 technology would have meant computers but also medicine and Rockets and supersonic Aviation and the Green Revolution in agriculture and it meant you know this wide area of different things and and where I always have to be careful I'm sort of using technology in the slightly retro way but if you use technology in 2024 it mostly means just information Technology just you know this this narrow set

of things around uh computer science and doesn't the narrowing of the definition of Technology tell us that something is something's gone um very very uh very very wrong in this in this discipline there's um there there are probably one other sort of digression on this in terms of the history of the last 50 years it still is remarkable it's taken this long for people to figure out that something is is really broken and I Think I think one way to think about it is that there were there were these onetime fixes that did not involve

Innovation that did not involve intensive progress that did not involve Innovation or doing a more with less and um there was sort of a center right Reagan Thatcher one in the 80s and there was sort of a uh um Clinton Blair late 90s 2000s version uh the the 80s version was um there was a one-time fix to stagnation by uh by leaning very Aggressively into capitalism and it worked I believe it was the right thing to do in the 1980s but it was a it it was not a permanent Eternal truth you know if you

cut tax rates from 70 to 28% you will get some you'll unlock some some significant growth but you can't repeat that you can't keep cutting taxes in a similar way or um or if you you know if you aggressively reorganize all the corporations like they did in the US and to some extent the UK in the 1980s You fire all these people and you have all these sort of mergers and Acquisitions um that can work one time but eventually the corporations get reorganized and you don't get compounding growth out of this you know McKenzie even

Mckenzie was a real thing in 1985 and uh it was not yet this totally fraudulent racket that it became uh later and uh and then um and then I I would say the you know probably the Virtue of the uh of the right of the of the Tory side of the Republican side in the US is there's at least some kind of awareness that we can't quite go back to the 1980s you know there was a 50e 50-day detour with Liz trust in the UK and I probably like her the best of the of the

five uh uh last five Tory Prime Ministers but even I have to acknowledge that somehow um the uh the sort of um um detour to the 1980s did didn't quite work the um the center left solution for How you know how do you how do you create growth how do you have progress in a world without innovation without science um these the was was was was sort of that you leaned into globalization and this was sort of the uh the Blair the Blair Clinton conceit it had um it had sort of a you know somewhat

elongated boom it was probably uh it was in some ways a much crer version you know the 19 80s the Reagan Thatcher piece was actually relatively Egalitarian if you look at inequality um it the the president in the US where inequality went up um more than anybody else was Clinton and it was somehow you know there's something where globalization you know even in its Heyday in the 90s and 2000s it was again a one-time way to unlock growth you could fire all these people you could replace them with uh uh workers who got paid on10th

as much in China uh there's a way it you know it helped Multinational profitability but it uh um it it was something that had to be done by the central left almost because uh because it was um it was so uh cruel in its darwinian capitalism or something like that that uh you could never have gotten away with it as a as a thatcher or or Reagan person you had to be sort of this uh this Central left Blair Clinton type person and then um there probably is some level on which um the globalization project

has been running On fumes it's again I don't know if you can reverse it I'm you know it's just like I don't think you should reverse the Reagan Thatcher policies of the 80s but uh but there's there are not any incremental gains left from it and this is kind of where we are stuck today um and uh and then this is always where I think we have to somehow you know find a path Back to the Future um back to uh um the real innovations that will take our our our civilization to the next Level

um you know the the you know the third third area where I would say uh where I would say that uh um you know all of these uh all of these sort of uh things have been distracting us from are things uh you know maybe maybe the biggest thing of all is something like religion um or Christianity in particular and if you say that you know there's nothing bigger than God something like you know the ontological you know something like God is the Greatest thing that exists if you can distract people and you stop thinking

about that that's a pretty effective magic show and uh you know there sort of a lot of different ways in which you one can ask is the woke diverse uh Multicultural you know how is it entangled we don't we don't ask these religious questions anymore and uh I think I think it is you know it would pay a lot um of dividends to somehow ask how it is entangled with Christianity it Somehow is in in My Telling it's it's it's uh it's it's it's not really correct to describe it as simply an alternate religion it

is somehow extremely adjacent to Christianity like Christianity it takes the side of the victims you know it's the the Bible you know it's already the story of Cain and Abel takes the side of Abel over Cain it's the same story as Romulus and Remis but it's Romulus and Remis you know the classical story takes the side of the City the Bible takes the side of the victim and in some ways you know um wokeness all all of these kinds of movements are are um are are somehow Downstream from that and then somehow uh they are

also in some ways just like an almost anti christic parody where it is uh you have original sin but you have no hope of forgiveness and uh that seems that seems like sort of a bad combination theologically speaking and so this is where this is where sort of In my in my telling the uh you know in some ways the the fundamentalist Christians are the more tolerant people and the uh you know the uh the woke liberals at you know let's say um I pick on Elizabeth Warren at Harvard sort of who's like a Puritan

Minister from the 17th century from the nastiest part of the Puritan 17th century imaginable um and those are the truly uh intolerant people at this point but it's it is it is somehow extremely entangled with this And uh I think um you know I always think there are you know several different perspectives you can you know um I'm I'm always emotionally I'm always partial to sort of a nian Bronze Age pervert type perspective where I don't want to hear about the past I don't want to hear about all the crimes that were committed can't we

just forget about it and move on um and then um um but then I think there I think we have to find some kind but but then I I keep thinking you Know we're not going to be able to forget about the past but uh but if we if we do the the opposite direction where we constantly recycle the past with uh with no hope for forgiveness or anything like that um that seems um that seems like sort of a bad mirror image of N and bronze AG pervert and all the rest of those people

um you know to um you know now now to return briefly to the question of politics you know there's always one Version where you know various people said you know people interrupted me various people might say well you know um yeah maybe diversity has distracted us from economics or science or religion but all these things are distracting us from politics and that the fundamental thing you always have to come back to are these political questions and if you you know if you had to say um that there's some kind of political thing that we've been

raed from um here here's Sort of the rough candidate I would go with and I I always uh like to go with the sort of atmology of the term political correctness where did this word come from and you know by the 1980s it was this term that you know conservatives used to criticize people on the left if you go back to the 1970s it was actually something very Progressive people said about themselves they're sort of proud you know we're politically correct we're more liberal Than thou we're you know ier than the other liberals and if

you went back to 1950 or so a politically correct person was simply a card carrying member of the Communist Party you you were simply taking orders directly from Stalin that's what it meant to be politically correct um and I always wonder if uh if that's uh if if somehow the original meaning um might be telling us something something rather important and I know this is a in some ways a distortion in Some ways a simplification but um you know um you could do worse than every single time that you hear the word Dei to Simply

think CCP thank you very much [Applause] thank you so much Peter and just as a reminder to the audience you will have time at the end to ask questions what we're now going to do is there'll be some time um where I will ask some questions of Peter and then it will be Over to you to ask some questions um but firstly I I think I want to touch on some of what you started to talk about in your speech at the beginning and you started by discussing how universities and Science and one of the

biggest issues with them was the idea that they had become about setting a fix set of Dogma upon students and within the discipline and when you look at how big science universities have become of part of our life what do you think the Solution to that is about the fact that they do instill Dogma wow this is again man how do we have all evening or how do we um uh yes I I I I think I think that's true and that's certainly a concern I have I I always think that um um one has

to a little bit like steel maned a little bit at least understand you know why there's this tendency towards excessive dogmatism in the universities and I would say in Particular in the in the sciences and I um you know my my one idea sort of in the philosophy of science you know what is science and it's something that is engaged in a two-front war against excess dogmatism and excess skepticism if you're too dogmatic can't be a scientist if you're too skeptical if I if I don't believe you're sitting here that also probably makes it bad

to be a scientist and the um you know the early modern scientists 17th 18th century you Know probably you know a lot it was more on the anti-dogmatic side against sort of I don't know the decayed aristotelianism of the Catholic church or of medieval scholasticism or things like that um and um and then um and then you know there's there's some point at which this history changed quite a bit and I think if you read a um I don't know a a a book for a five-year-old it's still describes a scientist in these 17th or

18th century terms where a Scientist is somebody who thinks for herself and who you know um somehow looks at the world in Wonder um with fresh new eyes and and things like this this is not the experience of let's say a graduate student in The Sciences where you you are just sort of like you know an indentured uh servant at best um you're sort of a robot in this uh in this uh giant machine you're a small Cog in a big machine and your future is to become An Ever smaller Cog in an Ever bigger

uh bigger machine and uh and so there's something about the balance that's gone very very wrong and so there are you know there are all these places where where uh the scientific establishment um pushes back back against excess skepticism we don't want climate Skeptics we don't want vaccine Skeptics we don't want Darwin Skeptics there all these places where you're not supposed to be skeptical and the uh the question I will just leave for you is give me one place where the science establishment thinks that people are the scientists are too dogmatic and I submit there

is no place where they think the scientists are too dogmatic and that itself is a tell that we are we are way way in the wrong Zone and we've we've uh We've somehow lost lost the thread and I touching on the second part of that about universities right and the role that science plays in universities so You've done a lot of work with the teal Foundation about getting young people to rethink their careers outside of a traditional University education and going on from that from your opinion what do you think is the impact that young

people can have outside of a traditional University education is that are there any particular areas that we we need to divest and divert young people into um aside from the traditional University degree man I I I Always I always feel very bad giving advice here this is obviously this is probably the wrong context for people for me to tell people not to go to university um it is um so I'm not going to fall for that trap um it is uh and then I always I always feel there are ways in which I you know

I don't know I I I I I I suffered from many of these I don't know delusions mistakes myself so I'm not necessarily the right person to give advice you know I was I was in the 80s early 90s I was always just this hypertrack kid you know my eighth grade Junior High School yearbook my best friend wrote in you know I know you're going to go to Stanford in four years and four years later I went to Stanford and then I went to Stanford law school and then I ended up at an elite law

firm in Manhattan where I lasted for seven months and 3 days and um and from the outside it was a place where everybody wanted to get in and on the inside it Was a place where everybody wanted to get out and I had I sort of somehow was self-aware enough of the insanity of all of it that I had a real quarterlife crisis in my mid-20s and I did not have as much of a midlife crisis later as um most the rest of my uh classmates did but um so there is you know there's some

kind of uh way that uh all of these tracked status things um are very dangerous uh I don't know what you do instead but that's that is what what has Been um so catastrophic so misleading you know there's some way that uh I think the 2008 uh Global financial crisis what it meant culturally for uh Millennial kids which is sort of an older generation at this point but it was somehow the tracks broke down and there was a need to rethink this in the US the rethinking pushed people towards Tech you know in Europe I

think there was sort of much less rethinking UK somewhere between uh Europe and the us but if I if I had to give you know if I had to give some kind of programmatic advice of what people should do and again this is very simplified and reductionist it is um everything should be about uh programming and deprogramming uh you should learn how to program computers because that way you'll you'll be employable and you should be deprogrammed as humans and um if if you're engaged in an activity where You're not doing one of those two you're

wasting your time I think that's very good advice um but when you so I want to go back a bit and touch a bit about what you said on the idea of dogma and a fixed set of dogma and then tie that with what you said about the rise of technology in the US I think obviously there's a lot that's said about free speech today and the state of free speech today um and I think one of the issues that a lot of people would say That affects Free Speech aside from a fix set of

Dogma being imposed upon people is the rise of technological Mass Avail to you essentially kind of have with the rise of tech companies governments that are able to use technology to survey their citizens so you have that I mean an example of that would be the Modi government in India with the recent elections and the way that they use technology um to survey their citizens and given the context in W in the ways that technology is then used by governments um against citizens I'm curious as to what you think the social responsibilities if any um

are technological companies that produce these Technologies well they they should push back against it it's it's not always that easy for for um the companies to do this they are often quite Downstream from you know from from the governments you know I was I was on the board of Facebook for something like 18 years and um and uh you know my my my defense of Facebook meta as it's now called um is that uh is that uh you know if if you know there's always this very difficult balance you had to strike between uh stopping

hate speech and censoring you know you know um true genuine ideas um and uh and that balance was very very hard to strike but but uh the uh the you know the to the extent that there was an excessive censorship regime I think it Was very much pushed from the outside in where you know these these large companies tend to be Downstream of um you know a lot of pressure from the governments and that's um that's that's where I would always situate the problem but the you know the the the the premises of the question

I I would push back on more are um you know even if we even if we say that there are elements of of the tech Revolution that have been dangerous or you know there's probably Something about the screens that's very addictive and that's you know you know one could one could push back on that it is it it always feels disproportionate to me for um us to turn Tech into the scapegoat and to put 100% of the blame on on Tech and um you know is is the reason is the reason we're really stuck because

you know we're constantly looking at our iPhones and they're distracting us from the way in which we're in a Subway that's 100 years old Old and that's you that's part of it maybe that's a 10% or 20% explanation but 80 or 90% is we can't build new Subways and we can't build new houses and uh we're we're stuck on all these other dimensions and that uh you know it's it's so hard for people to innovate in all these different areas and there are a lot of complicated reasons why why that's the case but uh but

I I always think that uh we have to somehow find a way to uh to um talk about some of the Problems with tech without turning Tech into simply the scapegoat for everything and I want to touch on that really briefly the idea of turning Tech into the scapegoat in many situations um and the balance between governments and Tech so I think in the case of paler specifically I think when I was doing research online a lot of the criticisms that people want to make about paler is the idea that the technology that paler produces

um is used to crack down on Indiv ual Liberty so often the examples that people use to make this criticism is the idea of um the example of policing departments across the us or even with the protest outside the contracts with the IDF and how do you in your position and as involved in Palante how do you navigate that balance um between governments and Technology man you you um you always well you you think about it we have we have very vigorous debates inside paler About all these things um you know I I personally am

think of at least I think of myself as as a fairly strong civil libertarian um I think that uh you know uh P the Genesis of palente here was sort of in the aftermath of 911 and um and my you know my political theory on it at the time which I still stick with was that we had um we had a doing more with more versus doing less with less and you could have more security with more civil liberty restrictions which Was let's say the Dick Cheney version of the debate and then there was like

an American civil liberties Union you have less um um you have a less heavy-handed approach but you'll allow more terrorists and more terrorism to happen and um and uh and the technological answer if the technology is real is always you have to find a way to do more with less to have more security with uh with fewer infractions on civil liberty and I I don't know the emotional Reaction I had was you know every time I went to an airport and had to take off my shoe that felt like an incredible infraction and How likely

was it that there was going to be another shoe bomber that was going to explode the plane and um it was like this one crazy shoe bomber managed to you know reorient our whole society and uh and if we have if we're stuck if we're limited to these Lite lowtech Solutions um you're you're going to have um it's it's going to end Up being very heavy-handed so the the the the Hope was that you could find you know something that's uh that's somewhere in between obviously the surveillance works you know in in a lot of

different ways where uh um if if you have if you have a computerized approach there is also at the end of the day there's probably some track record of what people in government are doing and uh and the hope is that uh that this Ultimately it It ultimately means that uh uh it limits the kinds of things you can do you can't you know um you can do um the really egregious violations on the government's side happen when nobody knows what's going on so you know are you better off are you better off as an

Islamic terrorist in Guantanamo or as a suspected cop killer in New York City and um yeah there were a few years they were out of control in Guantanamo by 2005 the lawyers and the inmates had More or less taken it over and um but if you're a suspected cop killer in Manhattan you know they they'll just find a way to do it off the books and shoot you yeah and speaking there and touching on the egregious government violations what we have seen more broadly in the United States is that the government seems to be posing

a challenge to the rise of technological development and technological entrepreneurialism so and Some would call this an example of government Outreach so the cases that I'd be referring to would be the recent bills about Tik Tok um as as well as Government bills about AI generative models and in your opinion where do you think the government action into technological development extends into the line of overreach and reaches into actually stifling technological entrepreneurialism um well I I um you know I I don't know I don't I Don't want to give simply a do sort of a

doctrinaire li libertarian classically liberal answer but uh in in My Telling um it's in in practice it's almost always overreach in practice uh you know I I I I don't think that no government is the answer but I think in practice um I would always I would always turn the dial back the other way and then uh and then we have very complicated debates about you know all of the uh all of the all of the specific verticals one could Have so I think uh you know I I think nuclear power has dangers attached with

it um but surely um you know the extremely heavy-handed regulation where we cannot design any kinds of new nuclear reactors ever um has some very high costs especially if we're concerned about climate change and and and things like that and we don't want to Simply you know uh have the um have the Greta policy of everyone riding a bicycle and um and uh and then you know if we if we Went through the um you know if we went through the AI uh debates um uh I I I it's it's you know there is a

is there's you know there there there is a lot of dangerous potential in these Technologies and uh one of the points I've tried to make to Sam Alman and all the various Pro AI people in Silicon Valley is um is that there is a way that you if I scor it as a debate I think the effective altruists all these um the Lites the effective altruists they've Been winning the debates um and they you know they have been they have been pretty good at at at scaring people and um and you you can't oppose them

by just telling a naive cornucopian theory of the technology but uh but the you know the thing that I I would worry about is that uh you know a government that's powerful enough to stop something like AI man that that has to be sort of it has to have some sort of global totalitarian character and that seems Really really scary to me so you know one of the one of the big organizations that's uh probably been uh fighting open AI on the governmental side is the Rand Corporation in Southern California which is sort of this

public uh private uh thing they're very focused on sort of a variety of National Security issues and uh and one of the one of the verticals the Rand corporation's been pushing is something they call uh Global compute governance and um that basically means You need a global government to regulate all computers and uh since you know computers are they're in some ways they're more local it's just what you put on a keyboard or something like that it's uh it's it's it's in a way it's harder to regulate computers than something like let's say nuclear power

and so Global compute governance has a you know it has a very totalitarian character to it and if you you know if you held a gun to my head um you know I Think uh you know I think the power is on the the Lite side on the regulatory side and um and that's the one I I I find more scary and going back to your speech then and looking to the future I mean so in your speech you paint this picture of what seems to be cultural stagnation across science across religion um across technology

and education it very much seems like we're living in a world where things aren't really going that well um and Considering what you've said I'm curious why do you think we should have hope in the future should we have hope in the future um and if so how do you think that we can overcome this stagnation where does that change kind of begin well um I I I don't think the stagnation is absolute um and then you have all these questions you know why why it's happened uh there you know there's one argument that we've

just run out of ideas there's you know all the low hang Fruits been picked um and I I tend to think it's it's not that the cupboard is run out or that the low hanging fruits been picked I tend to think it has to do with these regulatory cultural changes where our society's become risk averse it's very hard to change culture but but it's not you know it's not absolutely possible so I I I don't think it's you know it's it's an impossible task I'm always um I'm always a little bit however against you know

um let's say um Simple optimism or something like this and I um I in some ways I um you know I don't want people to be extremely optimistic as a corrective to the extreme pessimism that that people have um because I I I always think that in some ways extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are um are very similar extreme pessimism tells you there's nothing you can do extreme optimism tells you there's nothing you need to do you just um you other people are going To build the future you can just sit back and eat some

popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold and so um both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism Converge on sort of laziness and uh and I I so I you know I I I I want to have sort of a more my my preference would be for a somewhat more nuanced thing there are things that are scary about it there things that are very dangerous about our world there's some path forward but uh we are most Likely to succeed if we don't think of it in these you know um probabilistic things and if we if

we take some agency and if we try to make a difference and uh and you know if you want to you know um if you want to predict the future you should try to build it and speaking of the future and extreme pessimism or optimism depending on how you look at and turning over to British politics and the UK so when you look at the current state of the British political scene it Very much seems like conservatism and the right um are becoming increasingly in poopular so in the UK polling in February by the financial

times showed that only one in 10 people under 40 um will vote conservative at the next election um in the local elections that we just had the conservatives lost lost about half the seats they were defending um and with the general election coming up some national polls are showing labor leading by about as much as 20 points And considering what you've said about cultural change and the way forward for politics and the way forward for the way that we interact with politics what do you think the conservative party in the UK um and political parties

more broadly as well in the UK need to do differently heading into the general election to perhaps bring about the kind of cultural change that you mentioned well I I don't know I I I I certainly think that you know I don't Want to be extremely pessimistic this is probably one place I would be inclined to think that uh you know the die is rather cast at this point and uh that uh in some sense there have been you know um many decades of you know somewhat somewhat Mis misdirected decisions you know there are all

these things that I would um I don't know there's all this advice I would give there all these you know conservative politicians I've talked to over the years it's it's very Difficult you can't convince them of anything uh they were they're wrong about China they're confused on immigration they're uh they're clueless on technology so there's sort of all these ways I can um I I I can say that the the interactions were not you know particularly hopeful that I had in in the past and uh you know I don't know you know if if you

want to I don't know this is probably too too violent a suggestion for the milk toast reddish People here but uh you if the Tories want to win they should just throw every real estate broker and person who makes money in real estate out of their party and um and then that's you know and then and then and then you know there's there's a complicated you know there's a complicated history with with the the real estate policy where you had you you didn't create new housing um and it was a way for older people um

property owning older people to save for The retirement because the property prices went up and then eventually you had you know you had um you know a lot of immigration and you sold the property to non-british people and you gradually sold off the family silverware and the younger generation was disinherited but it kind of It kind of sort of worked and held things together for many decades and um and uh one day you wake up and you know here here you are and uh it's uh it's very hard to have this reset but Yes it's

just it's just uh just the housing conversation that I've had with uh it it's sort of like they can't do anything and people will acknowledge yes there's a problem but uh you know they have all these older voters that like their houses and don't don't want anything new to be built and uh and my my my prediction is until until they're able to do something about that uh you know I I I I don't think the I I wouldn't say that the that starmer Deserves to win but uh I I I do think the Tories

deserve to lose thank you and with that we'll head into audience questions so way the way this is going to work is um once you raise your hand and I pick you please wait till you get a mic that is an opportunity for you to ask a question and that is then an opportunity for Peter to respond and then you will hand your mic back to our audience me uh to our team and we'll go right at the front there in the SHO Oh yeah thank you so hello okay hi um so thank you uh

firstly thank you very much for coming to speak to us today it's a um fantastic to listen to uh so my question is regarding the 20 the upcoming presidential elections uh you mentioned you wouldn't be supporting Donald Trump uh would that change if he selected JD Vance for as his vice presidential candidates Man I'm always I'm always tempted to go back I I am so determined to try to stay out of it but uh um I um I I I think uh I'm not I'm not going to make an announcement of my political intentions here

at Cambridge today so um you know I'm I um I I I I I think I I I think I think I think I think Trump will win I don't I I think uh sorry this is not your opportunity to ask a question of the Speaker we'll ask that you sit down otherwise you will be removed from the [Music] chamber as I said The more time you're spending it's the less time for other members to ask questions so you will be escorted out of the chamber if you don't sit down [Music] please man I am

to respond to that if you if you like I I feel I shouldn't dignify it With a response but it is it is just you know this is just um you are you you are you are it's it's it's it's sort of feel look um it sort of feels like the pot calling the kettle black or people in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks but um you know in my you know in my my telling the um the only genocidal thing there is Hamas and uh you know they um they didn't kill every last Jewish person

in Israel but it Wasn't for lack of desire to do so they wanted to kill every last Jewish person and they just did not have the means to do it and so if if one element of um you know normally the the the the the the int the intent to commit a crime is you know is is where you know the crime gets committed and this is and so I I keep thinking that uh this this this genocide chant and again I don't like to just psychologically reduce the people who disagree with me be so

psychologically Reductionist but it it just feels like some kind of a projection where the people who chanted are themselves um you know uh complicit in this and uh this uh I I don't think this does not mean that you know um Israel has um um a right to commit genocide or even to you know dresd denize Gaza and firebomb them to Smither it um I don't think Israel is doing that um but I I I do think uh I do think the uh the sort of extreme nature of the context um put puts me in

a place Where I'm more on the pro Israel side and uh I think Israel should have fairly broad latitude to do what it it deems it deems right and necessary and we with that we'll move on to another audience question as I said The more disruptions we have the less time you'll have to ask audience questions so if you want to ask a question that is the time for you to ask one question and then give your mic back and then wait um him to respond we'll go Right at the front there so um I

I completely sort of I think a lot of people in this room and a lot of people who sort of have had their views changed over the past couple of months will have started on the 7th of October will have been absolutely horrified by I think what you rightly call an active genocide but then over the past couple of months will have increasingly been sort of falling into dispair supp to falling into horror and sort of you know for Example um you know 30,000 getting to the point where it's 30,000 dead most of them are

civilians um there's you know combat for footage on the internet of 5-year-olds being targeted by sniper rifles in the streets of Gaza and aren't there isn't there you know some whatat of a concern that what you're doing and what you know your company is contributing to this you know Mass um you know Mass Attack of civilians you know Mass death and mass casualties and What's you know one of the most destructive Wars of the century I look I I I I [Applause] am uh I I don't I I I don't I don't know what your

alternative is and um and it is um I don't know we're on the you know we're at the 30th in in practice I don't think the alternative is to Simply let Hamas run things and the fake alternative that I think people can only imagine to be real in a in a sort of a In as decoupled from reality and environment as this is something like it should be run by the United Nations or some International lawyers committee or or something like this and um and I think you know I I I think where again I'm

sympathetic to the Israeli side is their their view is these things don't actually work you know the the United Nations did not protect the randons from the genocide in um in 1994 we're the 30-y year anniversary of that and um and You know I don't think you know I don't think kagame is a perfect human being but uh in that in the in that crazy context um you know he basically what what he did was basically the correct thing and you know a million people got killed while the UN was twiddling its thumbs the UN

is not able to do something here and um and that's that is sort of the that that's sort of the Israeli uh perspective they they will not be protected by these fake International institutions and then and then it is it is what what is what is your alternative you know it's you're if you're dealing with uh with uh you know something is in int is intentionally genocidal on on the on the Hamas side uh no we'll have we I'm sure I'm sure somebody else will ask a followup uh so we'll have more time for audience

questions um we'll go right at the front in the blue there um so what do you think about the Use of artificial intelligence or lavender by the IDF in identifying Hamas targets and secondly do you agree with Elon Musk about that the population decline is a risk for Humanity um um look I'm not I'm not um you know you know with without without um going into all the you know I I'm I'm not on top of the details of what's going on in Israel because my my bias is to defer to Israel it's it's it's

not for us to to Second guess every um everything and uh I I believe that um broadly the IDF gets to decide uh what it wants to do and that they're broadly in the right and that's that's sort of the the perspective I come back to and if I if I fall into the Trap of um arguing you on every detailed point I'm I'm actually going to I would actually be conceding the the the broader issue that um the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge and I think that's just simply Absurd um and so

I'm not I'm not going to concede that point um uh and what was your your other oh uh uh uh man that's again we could spend an hour talking that topic but that's I think that uh I I think there is something very odd about a a world in which people are not reproducing themselves um it probably is a is probably somehow entangled with the Stagnation the decline you know um the the sense of pessimism around the future I I disagree with Elon in that I don't I don't think I I don't think there's some

kind of a magic thing you can do around natalism and so yes if if if um if you got um women to have more children that would somehow be Cor at with solving all these problems but the fact that uh um that people are not reproducing in all 50 states the US the fertility rates are below 2.1 they're low in Italy they're Low in South Korea they're low in Iran the fact that it's this uh Universal conserved phenomenon tells you that it's uh something you know very deep about late modernity and it's it's probably there's

probably no magic bullet solution we'll have time for two more audience questions um so we will go uh in the black with the glasses there oh hello so um thank you so much for your talk and um I also read your book um zero to one I thought it was a Really cool book and um thanks for the royalties and um what I want to ask was because it's also related to your talk is um because you had this chapter about um where you mentioned how a lot of people have tendency these days to think

in terms of like indefinite optimism and and especially like um like when it comes to biotech startups like when you compare you even had this table like comparing biotech startups to uh uh Software startups and how like biotech startups face a lot of challenges such as like how much you have to invest in R&D and the heavy regulations and how like biology is not like artificial or something you can engineer just like software and um I was wondering if um because he wrote this book I think in was it in 2014 and I was wondering

if you still think these challenges apply to biotech start up today and if so um what are the ways by which we can Overcome these huddles and um and aside from this um a follow-up question to that is because I also attended uh some A's talk in L in November and I thought he was also a really cool guy and I was wondering if um with like AI do you think that um the progress of innovation when it comes to like um biology and life sciences and also the other Sciences like what you mentioned like

like um do you think it Will accelerate progress in these fields um especially when compared to technology and um or is there something more fundamental that we have to change I'm really sorry I think I got I got the question I got the question um um and I think um uh look I think there always are there always are sort of two different hats that I I have one is as you know as a general Observer of what's what's Going on in our world and that's the main capacity in which I I spoke tonight and

then another one is as you know a narrow investor that's trying to you know invest in um in these in these specific um companies and so I think um you know I I think on some level the um the the way in which biotech is broadly stalled in which it's extremely hard to get these companies to work um you know it's it's somehow it's true I I've I've tried investing in many of Them over the years it's been um much much harder than tech there are all these things that that kind of go wrong it's

uh it would be um it's it's on some level it's it's it seems at least as important for our society for our welfare as human beings to um to um to make progress to improve um um improve in the these biotech areas and then um and then it's um you know it's it's much much easier said than done and there's there you know there's no no simple Magic formula and it is uh you know it is it's extremely regulated um there are ways it's very hard there are ways in which culturally these companies uh you

know get set up in a in an unhealthy way where um you know some at some point people internalize a kind of nihilism about the future they they don't believe they don't know what works they don't believe anything works um everyone is just a part-time consultant and U and it sort of becomes a a negative Self-fulfilling prophecy and then it's it's not that easy to correct for that if you if you correct and say well you know I want I want to only invest in companies in which people really believe um then um you know

you're you're either you're either investing in nihilist Consultants or you turn the dial too much and you go um into a a crazy cult and that's probably also not always the best for uh for a financial return or even for uh for getting things to work And so um so yeah there there's sort of a um there's a set of very deep challenges around these uh you know I the place where I'm you know I guess not wildly optimistic but always hopeful is I think there are always things to do at the margins there always

are you know you can you have to always ask questions what can you do what what has not been done why why you know um You probably don't want to try doing something that you know a 100 people have already tried Um and and and so I'm always inclined to ask you know why why are there some blind spots where where are there some areas where where um where people have not looked this is this is always why I you know I I you know I I I one of the the questions I asked at

my the start of my book is uh the this interview question Tell me something that's true that you know very few people agree with you on or that nobody agrees with you on and and there's one type of answer where The answer is something that's um that's like extremely hard to figure out truth it takes an IQ of 200 like it's some new um you know you solve for Ma's Last Theorem some it's some herculian Super Genius thing that only one person in the world can do but then um the other you know the other

kind of answer is one that uh for some reason is socially awkward there's some kind of politically correct blind spot and uh and my intuition is there are quite a lot of Things in that in that second category and that's by the way that's why uh you know most of the time if you if you tell people an interview question in advance it's a bad idea because they can they can game it and they can come up with ways to uh to um to come up with fake answers and this is why this is a

it's an unusually good question if I do say so myself because um it can't be gained and I can I so I I can I just describe to you all the Dynamics to it but if I If I ask you the question in a one-on-one interview um it will still be very hard to answer because you you have to tell me something that I'll be offended by most likely and you don't want to say that we'll have time for one very quick question um and this will be the last question of the evening um we

will go right um there in the black check yeah yeah okay okay thanks scarcity of Question thank you so Palante released um quarterly report a couple of days ago and the there is something that lots of investors waited for quite some time namely the grow of commercial revenue and in this regard I have a question there is a lot of mystery around what paler is doing and my question is what exactly does because when it comes I'm I'm not let's let's take a different question I'm not I I I really Don't want to do corporate

propaganda and I probably will violate some Securities Law if I do okay so um thanks so much for coming you spoke a little bit about uh the varying qualities of scientists and their ability to kind of balance um skepticism dogmatism of all the scientists who have ever lived which one do you admire the most man it's uh I'm always so Um I I don't know I I think I think uh I don't know I I do I do think I I I I can come with probably lots of answers but uh but probably probably the

early modern ones all have this heroic quality so it's Galileo people like that um and uh and and uh yeah I'm Pro I'm probably still in some ways anchored on this retro early modernity of the 17th and 18th centuries cool thank you so much um and thank you so much Peter for speaking as Well thank you [Applause] um could I please ask that you all stay seated while we leave the chamber and then we we will let you know when you're allowed to leave so please stay seated um until we leave fast thank you