Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson born and Germany Peter teal moved to the United States with his family when he was a child he graduated from Stanford and then from Stanford Law School and after deciding not to practice law he co-founded PayPal and Palantir made the first outside investment in Facebook funded companies such as SpaceX and LinkedIn and started the teal fellowship which encourages young people to drop out of college to start their own businesses mr. teal remains a very active tech investor now based in Los Angeles Peter welcome thanks for having the

show we'll come to tech and politics and all the matters of current affairs in which you're involved in a moment first the deep the substrate of your thinking in an essay you wrote in the early 2000s you talk about an impasse and you write about the Enlightenment tradition which we in the United States have inherited as a kind of treaty or settlement after decades of religious warfare in Europe quoting you the Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat if the only way to stop people from killing one another about religious questions involved a world where nobody

thought about it too much then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay the question of human nature was abandoned close quote you're famous as a contrarian there could be almost nothing more contrarian than saying that the Enlightenment represented a retreat explain yourself well well if you want to use atomistic category you can distinguish the the intellect in the will on the medievals believed in the weakness of the will but in the power of the intellect and moderns tend to believe in the power of the will but the weakness of

the intellect and so yeah I use a slightly different metaphor if you have an evangelical Christian I will study the outward-facing thing is that people are moral and that they're good Christians the inward-facing thing is that you're sinful and if you say well I mean this Bible study not figured out that I'm I'm a really good person you somehow not quite gotten the message now if we transpose this to a modern rationalist meetup the outward facing thing of modern rationalism is that you're more rational better able to think through things than other people you're one

of the brights as I think Dawkins liked like to put it the inward facing thing is that you're not capable of thought that that it's basically your mind is full of spaghetti code you can't believe how bad people are thinking through things and that's I think the the scenic went on of sort of enlightenment rationality at this point and we see in all sorts of forms we do not we do not trust people's ability to think through things at all anymore in the 21st century I think it's a cultural aside one could say that the

the mania we have around artificial intelligence is because it stands for the proposition that humans aren't supposed to think we want the machines to do the thinking but it's because we're in a world where individuals are not supposed to have intellectual agency of any sort anymore we don't trust rationality we can maybe believe in the wisdom of crowds we can believe in you know in big data and big data we can believe in in some sort of mechanistic process but we don't believe in the mind all right you continue in your essay to write about

the German legal scholar Karl Schmitt mmm Karl Schmitt has a checkered record we better state that but that's not what you're talking about here you're talking about a particular point he makes it offers I'm quoting you again Schmitt offers an alternative to all the thinkers of the Enlightenment he concedes that there will never be any agreement on the most important things on questions of religion and virtue in the nature of humanity but Schmitt responds that it is a part of the human condition to be divided by such questions and to take sides politics is the

field of battle in which that division takes place in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies close quote so the well lived life the truly human life the fully human life requires politics and politics requires making choices and choosing sides right well that's pretty well that's putting words that's what Schmidt would say it's not necessarily what what I would say okay what I would say is that there is something about politics that's deeply adversarial that's almost you're reduce ibly adversarial if you listen to a political speech and this is the sense of

I think Schmidt is right that if you listen to political speech the applause lines are never the positive ways the positive things are going to do the applause lines are always how we're going to fight the other side how we're going to unite against the other side how terrible they are and we're going to stop them and and that that is kind of this this dynamism of of politics and then as a as someone who who's generally libertarian I'm always very complicated I would like to live in a world that's less political where there's less

politics but I would also like us to be honest about how terrible politics is I think I suspect we can't avoid it altogether but but it is it is it is a it's a it's not a it's not a nice it's not a nice thing okay so one more step in this piece of the of the impact it's like I think we should I think we should always resist these sort of naive use of politics the politics are just you know some sort of against some sort of mechanistic process where we take a poll and

we all get to some you know syrupy answer that everyone can agree with and that's that's not what politics is about at all okay I'm continuing to quote you from your essay the world of entertainment represents the culmination of the shift away from politics the Enlightenment says well we've had all these years of warfare over religion we'll stop asking important questions and all these decades these centuries after the Enlightenment here's the world we've reached this is the way I read you you can correct my reading but let me finish quoting you instead of violent wars

there could be violent video games instead of heroic feats there could be thrilling amusement park rides instead of serious thought there could be intrigues of all sorts in a soap opera it is a world where people spend their lives amusing themselves to death close quote now that is a devastating indictment of much of contemporary America correct well it is I mean I think this has been the trend of modernity now it's it's it's not as though politics has disappeared though it's it's often just gets displaced in various ways but but yes I think there is

this this incredible degree to which we've we've we've substituted the realities of politics for these sort of increasingly fictionalized worlds and and it's probably uh that's probably a very very unhealthy thing there's sort of a slightly different frame that I've often given on this is is that in in the last 40 or 50 years there's been a shift from exteriority which I which you know doing things in the real world to the sort of interior world which is sort of in a way can be thought of this also the shift from politics to entertainment or

something like that and and the the from a dr. Phil a the powerful frame I give is you know almost exactly 50 years ago today and you know July of 1969 men reached the moon and three weeks later Woodstock began and with the benefit of hindsight we can say that that's when you know progress ended and when the hippies took over the country or something like that and then we've had we've had this incredible shift to interior tea in the decades since then I would include things like the drug counterculture I would include videogames you

know maybe a lot of entertainment more generally you know there's sort of parts of the internet that can be scored both ways but but certainly there all these things where we've shifted towards the you know your world of yoga meditation there's a world of interior culture that sort of and it just sort of super inward facing all right or if you want to if you want to frame it theologically you could say it's a it's like it's always the I always like the quote from Milton and Paradise Lost where the mind is its own place

and of itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell and this is what you're supposed to be skeptical that that's what Satan says when he gets um get sent to hell my says well just my mind if I just changed my mind you know right I can change where I am and that's not quite true you know there's an external reality but but somehow the temptation to turn everything into something therapeutic something psychological meditative has been a very powerful one in in the in the post 1960s America okay this is fascinating

although I should I should just stipulate it's it's going to be frustrating because these are deep thoughts and you've read and written and Carl Schmitt is a major and here we are reducing it ox to the size of a bullion cube but that's television and now I'm about to do it all over again because from Carl Schmitt to someone who is one of your favorite thinkers and was a friend of of ours we both knew this man until his death a few years ago Rene Girard Rene Girard is difficult to summarize but a central aspect

of his thinking is the so-called scapegoating mechanism in primitive societies conflict was often resolved by sacrificing a single individual or scapegoat whose death would reunite would calm he'll reunite the community we see murders like this in myth and sacrificial practices in the classical world so forth okay once again Peter teal for Gerard there remains a denial of the founding role of violence caused by human mammy so that is the human desire to imitate each other which is the source of a great deal of trouble in his thinking and therefore a systematic underestimation of the scope

of apocalyptic violence what if mimesis are urged imitate each other drives others to acquire nuclear weapons for the sake of for the prestige they confer the world that best describes this unbounded apocalyptic violence is terrorism close quote there's a lot there but but Rene Girard is in some ways the addresses an aspect of human nature well it's it's good it's the very thing that the Enlightenment says no no don't even think about such things right yeah well the Enlightenment always whitewashes violence it's one of the there are many things we can't think about an under

Enlightenment reason but one one is certainly violence itself and and if you go to the anthropological myth of the Enlightenment it's the myth of the social contract so what happens when everybody is that everybody's else's throat what the Enlightenment says is everybody in the middle of the crisis sits down and has a nice legal chat and draws up a social contract and that's maybe maybe that's the founding myth the central lie of the Enlightenment if you will and what Gerrard says something very different must have happened and when everybody's at everybody's throat the violence doesn't

just resolve itself and maybe it gets channeled against a a specific scapegoat where the war of all against all becomes a war can of all against one and then somehow gets resolved but in a in a very violent way and so I think you know what what Gerrard and Schmidt or Machiavelli or you know the judeo-christian inspiration all have in common is this idea that human nature is problematic its violent it's um you know it's it's it's it's it's it's not straightforward at all what what you do with this on it's not sort of simply

utopian or where we can say that everybody's not fundamentally good where someone like Gerard and Schmidt very much disagree is that Gerard believes that once you describe this it has this dissolving effect so scapegoating violence only works if you don't understand what you're doing and so if we say well we have we have a crisis in our village and we're gonna have a witch-hunt so that everybody can you know get out all their negative energy and you know will target this one elderly woman that only works if you don't think of it as a fake

psychosocial thing right once you think of it in those terms it stops to work and so there's sort of a there is the sense of late modernity where this unraveling has been for Gerard an ambiguous thing it's both it's both a bad thing because they're these cultural institutions that were the only way we had ever had of working and they're there unraveling but it's also inevitable we can't somehow put the genie back into the bottle and and so the the Rorion critique of schmidt would be that that somehow when Schmidt says politics is about friends

and enemies he's being so explicit Schmidt thinks by being explicitly that he's strengthening politics but maybe it has this effect of of undermining it and and this is I think you know there are elements of this that one sees in you know in the contemporary scene in the US where that you know there's something about it that's super intense but then also you know is super fake at the same time that's that's sort of what what what people would people what people see and and and it doesn't quite work when it's going to simply fake

Peter Thiel I'm quoting you again we are at an impasse on the one hand we have the newer project of the Enlightenment which perhaps always came at too high a price of self stultify Haitian again the Enlightenment looks at three centuries of religious warfare in Europe and says we can just we'll just rule those questions out of order stop asking them and Peter teal and Carl Schmitt say yes but that leads to a narrow small life okay on the other hand we have a return to the older tradition now elsewhere in your essay you're talking

about terrorism in the third world and Islamic radicalism we have a return to the older tradition but that return is fraught with far too much violence that is to say places in the world where they are asking the first about first thing by first principles human nature the nature of God there seems to be violence involved and so we're at an impasse now soluble or insoluble well it's always easier to describe problems than to solve them this is this this is a certainly a case in point so yeah so the impasse if you frame this

in more scientific or technological terms the impasse is that the weapons have the technologies such that you know we could probably destroy the world many times over and there's some point at which this sort of breaks down you know maybe World War one didn't make that much sense people still thought it made sense pre-world War one they still thought there was such a thing as a winnable war debatable in the cases of World War one and World War two but certainly you know by by the time you get to say 1970 and you have enough

nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over it just doesn't make any sense anymore and and I think one you know I've spoken a lot in different contexts about the sort of technology stagnation yes we've come to the last 50 years but but sort of one way to relate the tech stagnation to this theme is that is that it was just not motivated anymore you know if you can think of the Manhattan Project the Apollo space program were had military motivation maybe the space program ended in 1975 when we had the Apollo Soyuz docking

we're just gonna be friends why do you have to work 80 hours a week you know around the clock and and there is a certain sense in which I would like to see us accelerate technological and scientific innovation on back to you know the rate at which these things were progressing the first half of the 20th century but you can't motivate it by building you know more advanced weapon systems and and then it's not clear we found a substitute for that okay now you taught a course here at Stanford I'm not I'm sticking with the

impasse for a moment because you taught of course here at Stanford last year and I have a couple of undergraduate friends who took notes and slipped me their notes and and then I looked over the syllabus there's one one reading that you gave the kids that fascinates me I'm not sure you presented it quite this way but it almost seems as though there's an underlying suggestion that it's the way out of the impasse or it's an a way out of the impasse now yet my hopes are high Peter don't if you - them just let

me down gently would you please so here's the tech you used the 2006 address at Regensburg by pope benedict xvi not the current pontiff his predecessor the theologian the shy theologian benedict xvi the pope again this takes a little moment or two to set up but i'm just set it up and then get out of the way and let's see what you do with it he makes a couple of assertions the first concerns the reasonableness of religious belief and he quotes an exchange between a 14th century Byzantine Emperor and his Muslim captors in which the

emperor tells them they're wrong to impose religion by force benedict xvi in the speech he asks is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts god's nature merely a greek idea or is it always and intrinsically true modifying the first book of Genesis the first book of the whole Bible John the Apostle John begins the prologue of his gospel with the words in the beginning was the logos John thus Spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God and in this word all the often tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis close quote

alright huge amount there but the fundamental idea is that properly understood faith is reasonable it's not merely the idea of the reasonableness of faith is not merely a cultural construct that belief belongs in one place or one time it is intrinsically faith is intrinsically reasonable the Enlightenment got that wrong and we we need some how or other to reown to grasp the reasonableness of the first questions that will enable us to ask them once again right well this is there's a lot that we could one could I'm just gonna let you take a look at

what can unpack in all of this I I would say the Sun though isn't it it's is wow this is like this is a harder interview that I was expecting way harder than I was expecting uh I think that I think it is a little bit tricky to say both that it's you don't want faith to be unreasonable you don't want it to be merely reasonable because then you could just use reason and so it's always a little bit of a complicated question of how how you get faith Nathan and reason to work together the

I'm naturally quite sympathetic to to the Benedict position position right an approach in a lot of ways and yet the from a literary point of view what was so interesting about reading the Regensburg address where it was you know who's maybe using this 14th century Byzantine Emperor maybe as a mouthpiece for the pro reason thing we know what happened to the Byzantine Empire it sort of fell apart shortly thereafter ashore and the suspicion one has is maybe the Byzantine Emperor in the 14th century should not just have been making reasoned arguments but should have also

been getting some weapons and protecting himself from what was on you know the disaster that was about to befall the Byzantine Empire and and then the the thought I had in looking at the speech from the point of view of 2019 that I wonder about is was there something about it that was somehow prophetic of something going wrong with sort of rationalist conservative Catholicism where you know Benedict is just like the 14th century Byzantine Emperor and maybe even I'm pro reason and I think we live in a society where people don't respect reason enough he

somehow believed in it too much and and and then you know my I'm not not Catholic like like you and I I've always I always have a two-word rebuttal of Roman Catholicism to all my conservative Catholic friends it's just uh Pope Francis and and there were there was something about you get to say that now if I start on those I just add 10,000 years just to my time in purgatory just have you back on your show yeah exactly okay okay so that's that's that's the so it's it's it's a it's a fascinating speech but

so you act on all these levels so I read the RET Regensburg address in your syllabus and I thought ah Peters offering here's the way out of the impasse and you're saying no not exactly I take that as a warning to place too much faith place too much faith in the reasonableness of faith or unreasonableness itself and ten years later everything you stood for will be wiped out well I think look I think I think we have to always try to go back to intellect mind rationality as as core values and there are there are

ways in which we've we've gone too far from them but at the same time I also think there's something be said for it can't be just in Terry or T we also should be you know acting in our world we should be we should be you know we shouldn't be in this sort of yoga meditative psychological retreat and and that's the that's MN and then there are and then there's sort of all these ways where science and technology you know that the were the sort of the that there was such a big driver of progress

for centuries there's so many parts of these that no longer feel positive to people okay and that that feel like a retreat I'll give a I'll give a Silicon Valley version of this you know I was I was involved in the early 2000s and a lot of the futuristic AI initiatives you invested in there's a singularity Institute that we're sort of all these groups and right the basic premise was you know AI is gonna happen it's gonna be if it happens it's this barium hold on you better just for viewers you better explain give us

a two-sentence definition of it yeah it means all these different things but the the context in which they used it was sort of the science fiction version of AI so SuperDuper smart computers that can do anything and they're gonna be very powerful so sad they'll seem like humans and or maybe even smarter than humans and it's very important whether or not they're friendly or unfriendly and this was sort of an important problem that we needed to solving and circa 2003 it felt like okay we don't know which way it's going to go and we need

to to work on it and if you had a score it circuit 2019 it's um it's far more pessimistic and people now believe they know what's going to happen at the singularity that Dai is going to kill every human being on this planet that's what people actually believe and including you well I'm we can be skeptical how fast it happens you know but no that's the that's the general zeitgeist even in Staten Valley okay Vanessa talking about it certainly anyone who watches a science fiction movie believes that and your point is that this value which

used to be bright and hopeful has gone very dark and so maybe for an AI researcher you should be working on it very very slowly and you're gonna be somewhat less motivated to work on it and it has a very different has a very different sort of a sort of a feel to it and so even even this sort of fairly theoretical part of computer science it's more in the world of bits than the world of atoms has has shifted into this much more apocalyptic direction where you know the we're you know 2003 2004 it

was we need to move as fast as we can and now it's it's sort of like the precautionary principle and maybe you know we should be scared of her own shadow and just be very very slow and that's happened even in even in computer science this is one of the healthier fields still twenty years ago all right contemporary politics the issues of the day China what went wrong let me be a simple quotation here the late economist and foreign policy analyst my colleague here at the Hoover Institution Harry Rowan Harry Rowan by the way was

a lovely humane highly intelligent man I say that because I'm about to make a read a quotation from him that suggests he was just mistaken he wasn't always mistaken he wrote this in 1996 when will China become a democracy the answer is around the Year 2015 this prediction is based on China's steady and impressive economic growth which in turn fits the pattern of the way in which freedom has grown in Asia and elsewhere in the world close quote economic growth was supposed to lead to democracy in China and that wasn't madness there was the example

of South Korea first they got rich and then they became democratic and of Taiwan they got rich and then they became democratic and you could argue that the American foreign policy establishment has lost a quarter of a century expecting things to go right in China and they haven't how come well I think these you know these things are are always some would over to determine but maybe maybe if I had to come up with a simple mistake that people made was it was way too deterministic a view of history there's nothing automatic about the way

history can happen and it's it's it's not that you get to you know $8,000 per capita GDP and you automatically become a democracy these things can go go in a lot of different directions there's there's a great deal of contingency and if I had to pick on you a little bit Peter here it would be that you know there's the that speech that you helped ghostwriter right tear down that wall mr. Gorbachev yes yes and and it was effective and the Berlin Wall came down in 89 and communism fell in Eastern Europe and in the

Soviet Union stop there but we can't stop there because because there were other people who paid attention to this and there are people in China and East Asia who paid attention to this and they drew some very different lessons and the lesson they drew was that we have to make sure that we keep the Leninist part of the state running very strongly we can have you know you can have perestroika you can have restructuring but you can't have glasnost and we're going to decouple them and we're gonna learn the opposite lesson because yeah you open

things up just a little bit too much and things fall apart and then and I think yeah I think for you know 28 years it's at least 89 to 2017 we basically in the West read the events of 89 is that was inevitably going to happen in the east mhm and China read them it's not gonna happen because we'll learn we're gonna learn from history we're gonna make sure it doesn't happen here and the exact same events were interpreted in in different ways and they were probably not going to happen because China wasn't going to

let them and we were oblivious to this because we were just so convinced of this determinacy of history right that you know the Rif I always have on this is that 2017-2018 is the year that G became president for life and that's the year that fukuyama's end of history definitively came to an end but you know there are all these reasons you could have said you know right it was there was a lot of evidence earlier that things were off okay in your book zero - I'm quoting all kinds of at least I get high

marks for doing my homework the quotes are accurate okay in your book zero to one quote China is the paradigmatic example of globalization its 20-year plan is to become like the United States is today close quote so China this is this is another I think dated thought but I'll let you tell me China can only copy it is incapable of genuine innovation on its own and as long as the United States remains innovative then we have the hope of remaining a step or two ahead of them yes yes I agree with that but I would

read it a little bit differently so I think I I do think that the West is still far more innovative than than China but if you're only one or two steps ahead that's not very much and so if things are copied very quickly then maybe you don't need to innovate at all you can outsource all the very hard R&D work to to the West you have a lot of deadweight economic costs associated with that and then if you can just steal all the IP it might that might even be you know a more efficient way

to to innovate here maybe you're six months behind but you don't be behind that far and so I think that's I think that's roughly the way to think of a lot of the contemporary sort of technology racist you know you know if there's innovation happening in AI and I think most of the breakthroughs or just about all the breakthroughs I believe have happened in the West but they they get transmitted to China within six to twelve months and so that's that's that's not another one origin for us so we yes we're innovating but it only

gives you so much now you have said actually this is something else I have in here but I'm not going to take the time to go back and find it that one of the six all paraphrase you said one of the signal accomplishments of the Trump administration is causing everybody to rethink to reevaluate China how is so Trump we've got a number of different what's getting all the attention is the trade policy slapping on tariffs The Wall Street Journal takes one whack at him after another's arguing that we're harming our sabab zelich in the journal

this morning was arguing we're doing far more harm to ourselves and our own trading partners than we are to China then you've also got I believe you'd know more about this than I but I believe there are also stepped-up intelligence efforts and stepped-up enforcement efforts concerning technology transfers just a sort of open-ended question how is the Trump administration doing in terms not just of waking everyone up to the danger of China but the actual implementation of specific policy well I think I think this is all still very much a work in progress right I think

that there has been a sea change on the on the perception with China and in a way the way I think of US politics is it's yet sadly tribal it's too polarized most the times we just have this trench warfare with the two parties fighting each other no one makes much progress it's when you really win on issues when you get the other side to agree with you and I believe that on the China issue the Trump administration has gotten the entire center left to left to agree with him I think maybe maybe Biden is

still the one Pro China candidate running and that that seems like a catastrophic albatross for him in the Democratic primary this year I think all the others are are probably as anti China or it's tough on China as as the president is maybe they'll be even tougher if they get in because to some extent the Trump administration policies are still moderated by we're trying not to hurt American businesses and I suspect the the Democrats will be less concerned about about business got it but but I think I think there's been a there's been a sea

change a sea change on that yes and of course the free trade theories are correct in theory there are all sorts of but in in the real world the stuff is always super messy and if you're negotiating a free trade treaty you want the person negotiating it to be one who's not a deck doctrinaire free trader because the doctrinaire free trader will believe that the worse a job that you go shading the better a job they're doing because if you you know even if even if you you concede everything and you get nothing from the

other side there still are these gains from trade and that's what free trade doctrine always tells you that you don't need to work very hard on these trade treaties and the u.s. is really the only country in the world that that believe that you know you know Western Europe Japan have in effect far higher you know they've got barriers to trade you have you have tariffs in the form of VAT taxes you know different it's right percent or across the board on goods in Western Europe Japan and and you know it's there's a there's a

yes if we got rid of all that maybe that would be a sort of more efficient world but we've obviously gotten to a very very unbalanced point you know the other the other metaphor I always give on this is that you know the basic flow is we have you know five hundred billion dollars that we import from China one hundred billion a year that we export to China and in effect four hundred billion dollars of cash flows uphill from being saved by poor Chinese peasants and being invested in low yielding US government bonds and so

if you're looking at this from outer space that alone tells you that it's just it's just a completely crazy regime but that's some what about well what if they want their peasants to finance our government debt why not well rightly type free-trade argument but if we believed in globalization yes the way globalization is supposed to work is the less developed countries are supposed to converge they converge they grow faster therefore you get a higher return on investing in them and therefore capital should be exported from the developed to the developing countries that is the direction

which capital flowed circa 1900 right when the United Kingdom had a current account surplus a four percent of GDP and the extra capital was invested in Argentinian bonds and Russian railroads and all these different things and you know the globalization ended badly in 1914 in the late 19th 20th century but that at least made sense yes the money flowed in the correct direction this time we're in a much crazier form where the money is flowing but the wrong way that's not what Chinese peasants shouldn't be saving money and low-yielding government US bonds or negatively yielding

European bonds there should be a you know investing in China where they should be getting a higher return and so should we alright I want to come back to Trump in a moment but first it sort of a summary question about China population of 1.3 billion intense work ethic the ability to to deploy capital and infrastructure everybody says including you have told me this you go to China and the airports are dazzling and the trains run fast and they're clean and efficient and of course now they have a habit of rapid economic growth and in

the long contest to come between the United States and China what if we got democracy a free press innovation that keeps us six months ahead are you optimistic well it's very hard to to score I I would say the my pessimists hoping you cheer me up about this my my neutrally pessimistic description is is that you know if you scored it I think both sides think they're going to lose I think the United States thinks that yeah it's it's sort of like this declining power but but China does not think it's going to win you

know it's you have a demographic collapse right um you know anyone who makes money tries to get their capital out of the country people are still you know if at all possible trying to to get out of China and so so if you sort of if you were to try to you know psychologically score the two sides and say who believes they're going to win actually they both think they're going to lose and and I you know I even if you think you're going to win doesn't mean you're going to win although I think if

you think it's better way to go to life that you think you're going to lose you will see anybody if you think you're going to be on a test don't always get an A if you think you're gonna get an F you always get enough right and and so so what's what's very confusing is I think I think both sides think they are they're going to lose I told a lie one more question about China you said a moment ago that in the 50s and 60s a lot of the technological progress was driven in effect

by the Cold War by the neat the military need to develop technology which reminds me of again I can't quote this I can only paraphrase it but there's some place in fairly early George Kennan one of the diplomats and important writers in the Cold War fairly early George Kennan in which he wrote that he welcomed the long struggle to come between the United States and the Soviet Union because it would bring out the best in the United States we had nothing to fear from this as long as we lived up to our own best traditions

he he expected it to be a bracing struggle struggle between China and the United States help us technologically will it be good for our character well the Cold War you know we won the Cold War but but there are a lot of modern ways that could have gone so I'm I'm not quite sure I'd rather not totally I'm not totally convinced of that but I think yeah I think I think that I think the future the future version of you know I do think that we we the future the China represents is not a future

that is that is particularly desirable I was I was struck by this when I was in Western Europe a few months ago that I think I think the future is something that always has to be thought of in relatively concrete terms and it has to be different from the present and only something that's different from the present and very concrete can have any sort of charismatic force and and looking at Western Europe I would say there are they're basically three plausible futures on offer number one is on Islamic sharia law and if you're a woman

you get to wear a burka number two is totalitarian ai Allah China where the computers track you in everything you do all the time and that's kind of creepy sort of the the Eye of Sauron he's the Lord of the Rings reference watching you at all times and then the third one is is hyper environmentalism where you drive a nice scooter and you you recycle and even though I'm not you know not a radical environmentalist I think if those are the three choices you can understand why the green movements winning because those are the three

visions of the future we have right and and the challenge the challenge on the conservative or libertarian side is is to offer something that's that's a picture of the future that's different from from these these two very distant and one somewhat stagnant one okay a note from a friend of mine young friend of mine who took this is a note that he took in your class so this isn't in your syllabus it's something you said in class if you've got economic growth you can solve most problems this brings us to Donald Trump we've got economic

growth now the 3% seems to have cooled as we sit here talking maybe it's going to average out this year is something between one point eight two point four something like that but it's economic growth maybe we all relax well Reagan we got 6% growth in 83 84 85 we got something like 6% growth almost three years in a row so so it's yep 2 or 3% is is definitely better than nothing the the the the question on the on the Trump administration is can we keep going with this for the next decade and and

I think you know I think in some ways the president will get reelected if people believe that this sort of growth is going to be sustainable for for for the next decade that's the future he offers and that's it you know it's it's not quite as exciting as Reagan but it's still on you know to 23% for a decade we will graduate things will gradually get better we will work our way out of a lot out of a lot of these challenges and then and then the the concern is if it's if it's just this

temporary blip driven by too much debt too much things like that then then Joe Biden or Elizabeth Sanders starts elizabeth warren's Elizabeth Sanders they might as well be Bernie were nor Elizabeth sander start to look ok socialists are right you know not to be underestimated I mean it's you know it's it's there's there's a there's a Marxist theory that that you know the marks the time for communism would come when interest rates went to zero because the zero percent interest rate was assigned the capitalists no longer had any idea what to do with their money

and therefore there was they're no good investments left that's why the rates are zero and therefore all that you could do at that point was redistribute the capital and so I'm you know it's it doesn't means or percent rates lead us to socialism but it is always something that I find I find it alarming that the rates are as low as they are last question about Donald Trump do you expect to endorse him yes I mean I certainly will not endorse any of his any of his opponents all right a couple of closing questions here

we became friends when you were still a student here at Stanford imagine imagine a young Peter teal listening to us now Peter teal himself Stanford undergraduate Stanford Law School practice law at a big fancy firm in New York for seven months and then said this is horrible came out here and began investing in tech but now Peter Thiel himself has the teal fellowships which are to entice really bright kids to drop out of college and you've just sat here telling us that the the the valley that you came back to from New York and began

investing in is not the valley of today things have gone dark so what path would you recommend to an 18 or 20 year old now Wow you know it's these are always such hard questions to UM to answer and I think even if I knew all these things I'm not sure what I would have done of course that's a that's a fake thought experiment you know the question looking back would be when I graduated undergraduate in 1989 what what are some different choices I would have done and okay I think I should have the advice

I would the reasonable advice I'd give my former self from thirty years ago would be something like just think a lot harder about the future don't think of education as a substitute for the you know try to think concretely what what you want to do and and and there's something about the sort of tracked educational system that again it gets packaged as a form of thought but it's a it's a substitute for thought it's a substitute for the future and and yeah you have to it's it's you probably don't want to do the things that

are hyper competitive that you know that everybody's doing there's you know and I think there's always a question you know where's the frontier where there some pockets innovation where where you can do some some new things and not be and you know in a in a crazed competition that's that's that that was a hard question answer then I think it's a harder one now but I think it's still the right question to ask all right it's always money it's always the contrarian intellectual question tell me something that's true that yes yes yes this is your

favorite question you know what what is what's a good career that other people aren't pursuing you know the politically the politically incorrect career engineering careers petroleum engineering so it's it's it's it's it's super lucrative and the just are um you know ideological reasons not enough people go into it alright let's that's a that's a straightforward ideological answer alright so here's the last question Peter you're still investing but you're teaching classes at Stanford you're fielding telephone calls from the White House at this stage in your life what are you trying to accomplish you all yours you're

famous for saying having a plan you you may not follow the plan but having a plan is better than no plan what are you thinking over the next five years or ten years for you well I you know I this is always this always sounds too too ambitious or too grandiose but you you know I um I would like to get our society our society to get back to the future to get back to to a society that's that's a you know progressing in in all these all these important dimensions and there's sort of a

you know there's sort of a very local way of doing that which is investing in futuristic technology company so that's a small you know manageable way you do this and then there's sort of our you know broader conversations like the one we're having today where we try to we try to get people to think about this topic but it's yeah we should we we need to think about you know the future arrives it will be different from the present and if we don't think about it it's much less likely to be a good future than

if we if we work to craft it peter thiel thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you