business figure and thinker author and ajon provocateur Peter Thiel from fieszole Italy uncommon knowledge now [Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford and then from Stanford law school a few months after joining one of the most prestigious law firms in New York he decided not to practice law returned to California and soon co-founded a tech startup after selling that startup PayPal he became an investor making the first outside investment in Facebook since then he has invested in companies such as LinkedIn palantir and SpaceX Peter Thiel has also become a
public intellectual Peter welcome Peter thanks for having me things slow down in the last quarter Century of economic growth in the United States has slowed real wages have remained for the most part stagnant Moore's law that computing power per dollar would effectively double 18 every 18 months hasn't applied for years instead we've got a kind of parity of Moore's law in rooms law which is more more spelled backwards that every new bio the price of a new biotech drug doubles every seven years and in field after field even theoretical progress seems to have slowed physics
in the last 50 years nothing like the enormous creativity of the first half of the 20th century from Einstein's general relativity in 1916 to putting a man on the moon in 1969 just over half a century the last time we put a man on the moon half a century ago Peter Thiel we were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters what has happened well I think you just gave a very a very good summary of what happened that some somehow um we you know we had uh we had the sort of multifaceted
multi-dimensional progress in the first half of the 20th century where if you Define technology in the late 1960s it would have meant rockets and Aerospace and the Green Revolution and Agriculture and you know and computers and new medicines and all sorts of things whereas uh today uh maybe the last quarter Century the world technology is synonymous with information technology which is we've had some continued progress in this world of of bits internet computers mobile internet maybe even that slowed over the last decade or has at least become much less charismatic um but uh but there
has been sort of this generalized sense of stagnation it's always uh it's always quite a complicated thing to talk about because you have to sort of evaluate all these different things so you know how do you wait um um the smoothness of your iPhone versus the lack of a flying car how do you sort of how do you sort of measure and quantify all these things I think the difficulty of quantifying it is one of the reasons that we have not talked about it enough and that this has taken us so long to figure out
that uh we've actually been been stuck that that you know we think we've been Enchanted a forest but we've been wandering the desert for 40 or 50 years or something like that so since you raised it how do you handle the counter argument which is which is perfectly straightforward look progress takes place and fits and starts it's not smooth and continuous in every field it jumps around and we have had a Communications Revolution which if in this period of time we've gone well we didn't get flying cars but we did get Dick Tracy watches we
did get iPhones we have got an internet which means that we here in Italy are connected you get the picture that's the counter argument well uh well again I think the the challenge is to somehow try to quantify over all these things how how big are they how significant they are are they and I would say on the level of the politics the culture the macroeconomics um there is this profound sense of stagnation there's this profound sense that the younger generation will not do do better than their parents there's some kind of generational compact that's
that's been broken we still have progressivism in politics we still have it as a word but uh it's sort of we don't have it in anything else in our society and and then I think even you know I think the computer uh internet Revolution was the one one big exception and it is striking how um how uncharismatic that has become over the last uh six or seven years where uh you know even in San Francisco or Silicon Valley um the felt sense is that most people are somehow being being left behind that it is not
it's not this utopian inclusive future at all um again I'm quoting you this is something you mentioned just the other day there's a sense that Science and Tech are a trap that humanity is setting for itself well there's always a question you know why why the Slowdown has happened and uh and I'm always hesitant to answer the why question because these things are so so over determined and it can be things from sclerosis and over regulation government to uh to you know ways of Education institutions have deranged it's possible that in certain areas it's just
become harder to discover new things where even if we build new particle colliders in physics how many new particles are we finding and so um so this sort of are a whole range of of components to it but if I had to you know if I had to anchor on a single narrative the one the one that I've come to believe very strongly is that there's something about science and technology that is uh very dangerous that feels somewhat like a trap where um where so many of these uh Technologies um have sort of a very
dark violent even apocalyptic Dimension the paradigmatic example are probably nuclear or weapons where you know didn't progress didn't stop immediately after 1945 but it was some kind of a delayed quarter Century reaction where say 1970 people woke up one day and realized you know we can blow the whole world out up you know 20 times over you know we're sending people to the Moon to build these icbms to send the nuclear thermonuclear bombs to the Soviet Union even faster and at some point what's the point and uh and then I think what what happened with
nuclear technologies true of so many other areas um you know there's a question about AI is this is this is a fundamentally dangerous apocalyptic technology there's a left-wing version of this with climate change but maybe you can generalize this with various other forms of environmental degradation uh there is um you know um you know I polemically I've often suggested you know we should have a ticker tape parade for the scientists who invented the MRNA vaccine so we're going to you know impressive breakthrough in biotech and I think we're uncomfortable giving them a ticker tape rate
because immediately adjacent to the MRNA vaccine is um we're immediately reminded as we have that ticker tape parade or if we were to have it of the sort of gain of function research that was being conducted at the Wuhan lab and which is sort of this orwellian word maybe for uh for a bioweapons program and so so all these things are are deeply adjacent so the notion is that every one of these technological and scientific advances that we used to be so thrilled about every one of them has is a double-edged sword it at least
at least has a it's at least double edged now you know I it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing them I I'm still I'm still on the you know I'm still on the accelerationist camp I'm still on the deregulation side I'm still I I still think it's a catastrophe that the things have slowed down but um but it's not simply a failure it's also you know it's also uh it's also what uh what people have done because you know the Alternatives were were quite quite dangerous and quite frightening I would like there to be all
you know we've made very little progress in cancer research I'd like there to be more progress in in biotech but maybe if we'd had a lot of progress there would have been some dangers with that and people were very very scared of those dangers there's a there's a there's a nuclear power plant debate in Germany you know why did they shut down the nuclear power plants is the dumbest thing ever but but so many of these nuclear power plants you know are dual use you know you you create plutonium and then you can build you
can build bombs and it's it's not that easy to separate the civilian from military uses right so the idea here is we've slowed down for all kinds of little reasons that we can see increase in regulation this that fine but there's a deep reason almost at the level of the the reptile brain something so deep that we don't often talk about it and aren't often perhaps even conscious of it Tech and science is frightening so if you're just as happy to have it slow down if you look at uh you know I used to as
a as a teenager I used to love science fiction I haven't read much science fiction in decades because it's it's all just dystopian and depressing and maybe that's a maybe that's some reflection of of our culture but uh maybe it is also telling us something about um about the logic of um of science and technology that uh that so many of the paths to the Future are um are extremely dangerous you know if you had a if you had a warp drive like they have in Star Trek you know um could you send weapons at
warp speed and then they would hit you faster than the speed of light and you would you wouldn't even see them before they they hit you and so they're all these sort of plot holes in the original Star Trek universe that over time people figured out um we'll come back to that China the late foreign policy analyst Henry Rowan writing in 1996 that year is important 1996 quote when will China become a democracy the answer is around the year 2015. this prediction is based on China's steady and oppressive 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 first economic growth than democracy not a crazy suggestion it worked in South Korea and then it worked in Taiwan but of course the prediction that China would become a democracy in 2015 today looks preposterous Why didn't it work in China you know it's it's uh it's again why questions always always hard hard to to answer it's uh you know the you know one one cut I always have on China was that uh they learned from the fall of
the Berlin Wall 1989 and they were they were going to have um perestroika without glozenus they were going to have a certain liberalization of the economy without becoming a sort of a free and open Society um it's certainly there certainly were a lot of indications well before 2015 that wasn't quite trending that way you know you had a you had a great firewall around China where the big U.S internet companies didn't have any effective presence in China 2010 2005 2000 it was you know it was it was pretty pretty effectively walled off and uh and
you know if you ask people in Silicon Valley Circa 2005 or 2010 there was still some fukuyama inevitability law that you know China would have to open up to the U.S tech companies it wasn't obvious why that was true even in 2005 or or 2010 but yeah but I think um I think I think somehow we were there's always a question how much of these things are personal or structural so there's a personal version where you can say that there's something you know unusually crazy about G that he's the second coming of Stalin or Genghis
Khan or something like this um and then there's maybe but maybe it's maybe it's not personal to you maybe it's just structural that uh that China could be moderately free not completely totalitarian as long as the economy was growing eight percent a year and at the point when that slowed down and all exponential things eventually slow you had to actually clamp down a lot more that once China grows at three or four percent a year and the growth is uneven um it's it's actually going to become more authoritarian more totalitarian some something like that let
me try two quotations on you here the historian Stephen cotkin whom you know when asked to name his main finding after a lifetime of studying in the Soviet archives quote they were Communists close quote president Xi Jinping of China this is he's speaking to the Central Committee in 2013 this is a speech the Chinese republished in 2019 and that as far as I can tell from looking at the internet American analysts discovered in 2020. Xi Jinping in 2013 to the Central Committee there are people who believe that communism is an unattainable hope but facts have
repeatedly told us that Marx and engel's Analysis is not outdated capitalism is bound to Die Out close quote so in the conflict with China to what extent are we facing just another great power struggle but this was always the question with the Soviet Union right oh it's just another great no it isn't they're different because they're Communists same question for China yeah I I would I would agree with that that we need to take it more seriously at face value right they say they're Communists we should just take that very argue with it we should
we should take that at least at face value uh there probably are a lot of sub questions one can ask so maybe they're not strictly marxists but they are strictly leninist and so it is sort of this totalitarian one-party structure uh maybe there are elements of it that are also fascist where you know the the Prague spring was communism with the human face and maybe maybe China is fascism with a communist space or something like that um and then of course there are some some ways in which it's it's also different from fascism and communism
in the early 20th century forms or both fascism and communism were fundamentally youth movements um uh and uh and then China is kind of a gerontocracy and and so it is a it's sort of is distinctive I don't know it's sort of a half fascist half communist gerontocracy uh it is um you know it is it is it is strange it's strangely much less idealistic or ideological I think than the Soviet Union it it strikes me that people probably don't really believe in any of these ideas there's they have certainly forced down in a in
a very strange way so there are certainly a lot of things that are unique and and different but uh but yet taking it as a communist country at face value we could do much worse than that oh okay Grand strategy since at least the Civil War the United States has relied on Superior material Grant just ground downly during the second world war we produced thousands of planes and tanks and ships the Kaiser Shipyard in Oakland was producing a ship a day if that won't work against China we can't out produce them we can't outspend them
Our Only Hope goes the argument is to out innovate them I've even heard the historian Andrew Roberts say that the future of civilization will be decided in Silicon Valley so on the one hand in the coming conflict with China we need Innovation goes at least one argument that I find compelling but we ourselves to some extent as you just were suggesting have locked down Innovation this is a serious pickle um yeah I I mean I think there's sort of are a lot of a lot of different ways one can one can describe it if you
I worry that if you frame it simply as a conflict between the United States and China that is almost self-defeating where um probably you know China has four times the population so we have to we would have to really out innovate them and they would we have to really block them from stealing any of our Innovations to to win a conflict where it's that lopsided four to one on on population um probably you know probably a big part of the question of the next few decades is sort of how does the Strategic map of the
world shape up and uh you know do um you know maybe China can beat the us but it probably can't be beat the whole world and there is sort of a question whether whether um there's something about you know um the communism in China which is you know it's very it's it's it's it's nationalistic it's it's it's it's it's a it's a certain way it's a socialism of a nationalistic sort right and uh and it's extremely racist it's extremely xenophobic and there's something about that where I don't think they'll be able to beat the whole
world Okay so so in the shape of the conflict it is correct to identify China as the adversary China is the enemy but it's not just the United States we have to we really have no choice we have to think in terms of the west or in terms of as many allies as we can stitch together what what how do you describe I think they're both you know they're both unilateral and multilateral moves I think the Trump Administration was correct that you had to try to do things unilaterally because multilateral approaches were too slow I
think the uh the Biden Administration is correct that at some point you know you also have to try to do things more multilaterally but I think there is there is some kind of a there is some kind of a logic to this and uh you know uh if you look at the the um the Ukraine conflict with Russia uh there's obviously was this incredible mistake that Western Europe made to entangle itself so tightly with uh with Russia um you know with with the pipelines with the denuclearization in Germany and uh and then and then the
question you have to ask is aren't we aren't we just too entangled with China in the entire Western World I I believe in free trade I I'm not in favor of tariffs but uh I would make an exception for you know our one massive geopolitical and ideological rival all right um our home state California your homes your native state my home state now the resource curse I'm just going to quote from Wikipedia here's the resource curse the resource curse is the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of Natural Resources such as fossil fuels having less
economic growth less democracy or Worse development outcomes than countries with fewer resources close quote you spoke recently at the national conservatism conference in Miami I think about the resource curse in California explain that well if we if we say that uh Tech is the oil of the of the 21st century um there is this strange juxtaposition where California has been you know it has these gusher-like companies that just generate you know enormous wealth enormous profits you know a decent number of quite well-paying jobs and then they're combined with this um you know rather bad form
of social political governance uh where you'd never do anything anything like this and it's it's that juxtaposition I was I was I was trying to make sense and there's like a San Francisco version of it where it's you know on a per capita GDP it has to be one of the wealthiest cities in the world and then it's it's completely discovered and somehow these things are it's not a paradox but these these things are actually deeply deeply connected so you you made the point but I would yeah the one thing I would quibble with on
the definition is um California is not poor it's it's it's still fantastic you know it's 40 million people in California it's 82 million in Germany 125 million in Japan today the California GDP is roughly the same as Germany or Japan the average person in California makes twice as much money as the average person in Germany three times as much as the average person in Japan so there's something about it that's that's worked quite well from a macroeconomic point of view and then it's worked catastrophically from a governance point of view of public schools that don't
work you know um you know all these sort of government worker Rockets you mentioned you mentioned a couple I mean you've worked quite well it's worked historically well there's never been any massive creation of wealth over for so much wealth and so short of time as far as I if we value it by GDP it's still working quite well yes if we evaluate it by the quality of government you know it's right it's quite screwed up by the the you know the the resource course analogy I used is you know if we compare it to
oil countries it's not the worst it's not the best it's not as good as Norway it's not as bad as Equatorial Guinea I think you should think of it as roughly on par with Saudi Arabia you know Saudi Arabia has a crazy crazy wahhabi ideology California has a awoke ideology wahhabism to Saudi Arabia is roughly like wokism to California you mentioned that one aspect of the misgovernance is inflated real estate values explain how that works you have to think of it as uh you have to think of the curse of an oil state or a
tech State as uh you have this enormous gusher of wealth and then it gets redistributed very inefficiently and and one inefficient vehicle is towards overpaid government workers the average California government worker gets paid twice as much as the average private sector work in California is by far the highest ratio in the US I mean Texas Florida the average government work gets paid 10 15 percent more than the average private sector worker in California it's twice as much including you know including the very generous uh retirement benefits they get and then the second way um that
the tech wealth gets very inefficiently redistributed is through all these sort of crazy zoning laws where you know if if you're living in San Francisco or Silicon Valley you're not in the tech industry but you know your landlord bought some apartment and you make sure the zoning laws never get changed nothing new ever gets built and you know enormous amount gets uh gets us shifted into into the sort of you know very quasi governmental real estate sector overall the cost of living in California is some 40 percent higher than in the rest of the nation
and the cost of real estate is a hundred percent higher what does that mean once again I'm quoting you basically you have to replace the middle class meaning they just move out sure sure there was I believe it was Carol Quigley the Georgetown historian who uh circa 1960 said that the you know the Republicans are the party the middle class the Democrats of the party of everybody else and um and probably the most middle class constituency left in California are government workers and if you think of teachers or people like that it's not natural Republican
voters um if that's the you know the microeconomic or political economy of California something like that it's no wonder that it's a d plus 30 State it's not I mean it shouldn't be surprising at all right um so this brings us to politics you argue that the Golden State poses a problem for each of the two parties Democrats and Republicans Democrats first quoting you on the Democratic side my read is that they have all know they the Democrats have no alternative but to somehow pretend they can make the California model work for the country as
a whole but it won't it's just like you know if you were to it's I know I'll go back to the Saudi Arabian algae if you were to say is the is the key to solving all the problems throughout the Islamic World they just need to be like Saudi Arabia that's preposterous because it's not the wahhabi ideology it's the oil money right and in a similar way if you know if California if it's if it's somebody like I don't know Newsom or Kamala Harris saying that it's some you know hyper-woke identity politics political correctness to
the nth degree that's not what makes California successful it's the it's the big tech companies they're at the scale that they're at you know you can't scale them by a factor of eight to the country as a whole so it doesn't scale uh the leading Democratic presidential candidates unpredicted as we speak you've got Joe Biden Kamala Harris Gavin Newsom quoting Peter Thiel California is strong enough to crush everybody else in the Democratic party you're assuming that Joe Biden won't run right California is strong enough to crush everybody else in the Democratic party which means you've
got two Californians on top Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom but it's probably not strong enough to be a very compelling agenda for the country as a whole yeah you've just articulated my whole argument I don't much don't have much to add to that but I I think yes well I think the alternatives to California if we were to enumerate them it is it is something like um okay it is um Elizabeth Warren you know the university the crazed University Professor who is like you know is like a bad Puritan Minister from the 17th century that's
not going to work it is um you know it's Tim Ryan the fake blue collar guy from Ohio where no one cares about blue collar workers so there's a Midwestern thing that's not going to work there's probably you know some kind of crazed socialist thing all of Bernie Sanders or AOC that's Dead on Arrival and uh and so yes there's somehow there's some sense in which California is is working the best and so it will beat everything within the Democratic party and then my speculative predictions when you get to the country as a whole it
will be found shockingly wanting problem I'm quoting you once again probably the Temptation on the Republican side is that they'll think it's good enough to say simply that they're not California this nihilistic negation is probably not enough well let's qualify that again and this is speculating on 2024 politics which is quite far in the future it's so far in the future and so far in the future but uh but I think uh I think it is it is probably if it's not enough for the Democrats it is probably enough for the Republicans to win um
the elect the presidential election in 2024 I would like them to do more I would like them to um to win on substantive grounds where you don't just have a you know a tactical win you don't just have another one-term president um but uh but I can understand that the Temptation is not even to try that to just go with you know we're not going to allow this Californication of the rest of the country to happen and uh maybe that's enough but I I would like more but I'm I'm not even completely questioning the the
Tactical judgment so let's talk for a second if we could about what that more should be here when I was in college let me take you let me take you on a little travel log here when I was in college we were worried about getting jobs and there were both sessions in the dorm rooms about the Soviet Union about how Vietnam went wrong and so forth Ronald Reagan gets along and gets elected in 1980 and both problems get solved an economic expansion begins and it takes place takes continues with a few setbacks but it fundamentally
continues for 25 years and we win the Cold War and so from my generation there's a I think a perfectly understandable impulse to say wait a minute why don't we try that again but in the younger generation Ross Dow that has this phrase that he keeps using zombie reaganism so I hear that and I say of course principles that have to be adapted to the issues of the day but is there an extent to which the rising generation on the right and center right is just sick of hearing about Ronald Reagan the way Democrats in
the 60s got sick of hearing about FDR is it purely generational or is there some sense in which tax cuts lower regulation stronger defenses somehow are ill-fitted to the circumstances of the day well I I think I would like to get back to growth and I would like to get back to growth that is you know not inflationary that's not cancerous and that's not uh you know apocalyptic in the sort of bad Tech version and this is this is much easier said than done but that's that's what I think you know we should figure out
how to do how to do this in a detailed way and there certainly is there probably are some tax cuts that are part of it there's a lot of deregulation that's that's part of it um and it is a it's a fairly hard thing to do there's um you know there certainly are ways that I would like us to take the uh the challenge of China more seriously uh but it's it's not like this this super simple thing you know there was there's a way that the Soviet Union was motivational in a way that China
was not because the Soviet Union even in The Darkest Hours the Cold War 79 Carter malaise most of us thought we were eventually going to beat the Soviet Union and uh the China piece it's it's it's it's harder to see how to do that it's it's not entirely up up to us part of it you know uh depends on other countries working with us part of it part of it uh will be helped by you know China just uh going completely berserk internally um and uh and so I'm not I'm not sure that the exact
same formula will work okay so we do first what we know how to do but look look I'm I'm quite open I don't I don't know I don't know exactly what you're supposed to do in terms of having a more concrete agenda I thought you were gonna no I think of a blank page here where you were going I think I think you know I think we have to look I think you know I always I always think the uh you know the uh the the the the right broadly is uh it's a very ragtag
Rebel Alliance it's like it's like we have diversity on our side it is like it's like Star Wars It's Chewbacca and Princess Leia and we have you know some asperger-like C-3PO people the rebel alone Han Solo it's the whole it's the Rebel Alliance and you know the other side is in lockstep they're the Imperial Stormtroopers and uh there are a lot of disadvantages to the Rebel Alliance but uh one one advantage is we yeah we don't have we don't have to have all the answers right now we can admit we haven't figured it out and
we're gonna we're gonna have a vigorous debate in the next few years to figure it out we're talking a couple of weeks before the election this will Air a day or two after the election may I ask you you supported your friends Blake Masters now running for the senate in Arizona by the time this series will know the outcome and JD Vance now running for the Senate from Ohio by the time this errors will know why those two is there you know them they're friends that's one element I'm of I assume but was there something
distinctive about do they look to you like the future in some specific way of that the Republican Party ought to pursue sure there's a generational component they would be the first they would be the first uh Millennial Republican Senators there's a there's a way in which they've thought very deeply about these issues there's a way in which I think they're not excessively dogmatic you know I often I often think we have you know often say like to say we have two parties in this country there's the evil particle Democrats and the stupid party the Republicans
and I I like both uh um JD Manson Blake Masters because they don't squarely fit into either of those two parties all right a couple of quotations here just to pursue that what what is to be done and take it up to one maybe a higher notch or two one or one or two conceptual notches up two quotations Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Dineen quote liberalism has failed he's speaking here of Classical liberalism the liberalism of individual liberty liberalism has failed not because it fell short but because it was true to itself it has failed
because it has succeeded the founders failed to foresee that their atomistic philosophy would act as a solvent on our Civic institutions that's quotation one here's quotation two Author George will the proper question for conservatives what do you seek to conserve the proper answer we seek to conserve the American founding George Will let's get back to the founding principles Patrick Dineen let's refound the country let's overturn the original founding they both strike me as to a little bit too abstract you know there's there's things about them that sound correct as observations or critiques but how to
concretize it I don't know how we go back to the founding if there's going to be a new founding that's even more you know ambitious the majority of six conservatives or originalists on the Supreme Court um sure but mostly they're just they're mostly just keeping things the status quo the way it is so so it's uh yeah it's better than the alternative um look look danine is is right that in some sense Classical liberalism has failed I always like to say that a classical liberal in 2022 is like a Marxist prop in 1982 where you
have these profs who were 40 years ago were saying you know true communism has never been tried and uh it's equally wrong when the classical liberals in 2022 say that true liberalism has never been tried and there's some some kind of a um Golden Age we can go back to and even even if we did wouldn't we just cycle and repeat it would and it would just you know if we went back to the 50s we got 68 again and uh and so there was something wrong in the 50s or there was something wrong with
the founding if it went if it went this wrong so that's that's why I'm more on the danine side than the George Wills side um I I do think uh you know the the place I always come back to is I think we have to think very hard about these questions of technology and science um because they are such such big big drivers of modernity I don't think we can turn our back on them we have to figure out some way uh to keep going on this trajectory um and and not to go crazy not
to atomize the whole society not not to self-destruct it but I don't I don't think you can go back on Science and Technology but that's the that's the uh those are the sets of questions I would I would ask a lot more about and where I suspect both danine and Will are are weak on the details okay um February 1946 Diplomat George Cannon then stationed in Moscow sends a telegram of some 5 000 words to the state department known in history ever since it was The Long Telegram there we are just after the end of
the second world war just at the very Inception of the Cold War and Canon gets everything in those five thousand words the nature of the Soviet Union where it's strong where it's weak and then he lays out the policy of containment That Remains the fundamental American policy some presidents are true Ur to it others attempt to depart from it but it Remains the fundamental policy for all four and a half Decades of the Cold War why hasn't there been a Long Telegram about China why questions are always so hard to answer uh but but I
when I will speculate that if it hasn't we haven't gotten the memo it's been lost or it's it's not going to be coming anytime soon and my theory on why there hasn't been one and there won't be one is that um is that people don't have a good great long-term strategy for the U.S of how do you you know how do you accelerate things how do you overtake China they don't know how to fill out the details you know maybe maybe setting China aside maybe maybe you know a correct broad strategy for the U.S is
um is to have a gradual you know withdrawal from from the world and uh and you could never articulate that if that's the correct strategy because the retreat becomes a route and so if the correct strategy is for the U.S not to be overextended over committed to the sort of uh World Empire that we're we're committed to um articulating you can't actually articulate that ever hard to pursue a policy when you can't talk about it to each other and if you can't talk about that's that's maybe even worse so it's uh but I I think
there's I think my my placeholder is that uh there's something about the the best policy um that if it's articulated the articulation itself will stop us from from executing it properly and maybe there's some way to to contain China and um and and probably um you know we're best just figuring out a way to do it without articulating it yeah all right um I heard you the other day you said that we now find ourselves between Silla and keryptus narrow Greek mythology narrow straight Cilla is a six-headed monster over here and coryptus is the whirlpool
over here in the Greek in Greek myth you had to navigate between these two Each of which was deadly you described Ursula and Caribbean actually and you here's what you said in a recent paper that you wrote the stable deterrent structures of the Cold War look much shakier as more countries acquire nuclear weapons it seems far easier now than at any time since World War II to sleepwalk into an all-out conflict so the prospect of Armageddon let's call that Cilla and here's kryptus an endless stagnation and quoted from the same paper we have grown attached
to our soft comfortable ways but we do not want to name what they are protecting against how bad of course what I have in mind is the war in Ukraine how bad is the prod is the Cilla the prospect of Armageddon um well the the thing I want to say that's always nuanced and complicated is that it's it's it's quite bad but uh we have to also weight it against the alternative and the extreme alternative is is the sort of soft totalitarianism a society that's con that simply is locked down or nothing happens um you
know if you were to use the you know the um you know the the the biblical terminology it's it's the Antichrist the One World totalitarian state and um and there's always a sense where I think we should be at least as scared of the Antichrist as of as of Armageddon and uh and then and then certainly my contrarian intuition is that people are far more worried about Armageddon than they are worried about the One World state and uh I would I would at least like us to worry about them equally to worry both about Priscilla
and charybdas Okay so elaborate a little bit uh well well I I think they're all these different versions but there's you know there's a recent paper by just the Armageddon we sort of talked about at the opening well the one again is we pursue science and we pursue technology and it could all blow up in a nuclear and then let's yeah let's let's elaborate it yes so if you if you don't if if we're going to stop that you can't just stop it locally you have to stop it globally you have to make sure that
all scientists stop it you have to make sure that they're being policed all over the world if there's some small piece of computer code that can lead to a runaway AGI we need to have surveillance technology installed on every single laptop to make sure that people aren't typing in keystrokes to code up the AGI that's going to destroy the world or if you can you know um you know the nuclear weapons issue already from the 50s and 60s what came with you know this multinational atomic energy agency that was going to International atomic energy agency
is going to sort of monitor all these countries and you needed a supranational structure with real teeth and you know the practice we end up with something in between we ended up with you know some kind of global super state it wasn't never quite that much it was not maybe not quite enough to fully stop Armageddon it was never quite enough to be totalitarian but those have been those have been the uh the bad alternatives for for 77 years and uh we need to find some way in between okay and the lockdown We Fear them
are getting too much so we only talk about yeah it strikes me we almost only talk about the Armageddon and stuff and we we never talk about the uh the um the sort of regulatory political uh lockdown that's that's the uh the Practical alternative where everyone yeah everyone's just scared of their own shadow so if we put it I'm trying to bring growth back into this growth to pursue growth means in one way or another to have the courage to risk a certain degree of new innovation we uh we unleash technology and science again to
produce growth correct yes all right so and why do we you and I uh because we have known each other a long time and think alike in some pretty basic ways we both say growth and assume that that's a good but let's make That explicit why do we need growth what does that do for American society and what why is the Americans what happens or the other way around what happens to us in the absence of growth well um we had you know the club the club of Rome uh wrote this book called the limits
to growth 1972. that was exactly 50 years ago and uh and it basically said that you know um growth couldn't continue and so we had to get used to a zero growth world first world of zero population growth and a world of zero economic growth and um and there are all these ways that their agenda broadly has been implemented over over the last 50 years and um and you know it has in some ways perhaps stabilized the world but it's also been profoundly destabilizing um to you know it's it's led to a world that's extremely
nihilistic um it's it's led to the sort of cultural disintegration of the middle class where you think of the middle classes the people who think their their children will do better than themselves um and and there's sort of all these ways the 0 growth world hasn't worked out that well and uh and so yes my and my intuition is that it's not simply stable this is where I disagree with the doubt that it's not simply decadent or simply stable um it's not simply entropic it's it's it's ultimately you know there's ultimately a catastrophe on both
sides so and there's a there's an Armageddon catastrophe if you have unconstrained Tech and science that where no one's paying attention and people just pushing buttons and seeing what happens but there's also um always a risk of a centralizing totalitarian catastrophe on the other on the other side which is uh which is the natural Solution on how do you you know how do you stop all Science and Tech is you need a one world state with real teeth which is within our grasp the humanities grasp says AI emerges well it's it's it's it's it's already
it's an answer to the nuclear problem it's an answer to the environmental challenges it's an answer to the AI challenge which is and I would I would just submit it's it's not a good answer all right so sticking with growth just for one more moment if we close our if I were to close my eyes and just listen to listen to the dulcet tones of Peter Thiel a Republican pro-growth president gets elected in 2024 what's different what's different about it growing and what's different about The Temper or mood of the country could we hope that
economic growth would soothe the bitterness of our politics is that what happens sure I I think I think if you had growth it was non-inflationary non-cancerous non-apocalyptic it would solve all our problems and it would now you know I don't know how realistic it is or how easy it is to get there but but certainly um you know the extreme sort of malthusian zero-sumness of the stagnation extreme polarization I'm not sure it would fully evaporate but uh you know it would be it would be lessened significantly and without growth I I'm certainly very convinced the
negative version of this where without growth you're not going to solve the polarization you're not going to solve the nihilism the anger any of those things at all okay last question although it'll take me a moment to set it up Franklin Roosevelt we have a rendezvous with Destiny John Kennedy we will bear any burden oppose any foe again and again and again in American history we have found ourselves required to display courage as as Citizens and as a nation because there really has the choice has been be courageous or lose all right George Cannon this
is 1953 at the outset of the Cold War I mentioned kenon a moment ago is the author of The Long Telegram this is from a book he wrote early early in the Cold War 1953 the thoughtful Observer of russian-american relations will find no cause for complaint in the kremlin's challenge he will rather experience a certain gratitude to Providence which has made our entire security as a nation dependent on our pulling ourselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended us to bear well what do you think can there be
in this if this is the moment in which we find ourselves there's Armageddon and there's stagnation and creeping world government and we have they're there we have no choice but but to be courageous can there be something ennobling about this can we pull ourselves together again well it's I feel adventurous well it is uh it is um certainly something like this Frame is correct it matters what we do it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a world in which yeah we need courage we need um we need some kind of agency the choices we make
really matter you know it's you know I I I don't think you know yes Armageddon and the world government are exclusive exclusionary possibilities they're not exhaustive I do I do think there's some you know some narrow or you know not terribly broad way in between but it's it's but there's a way and uh and uh there's a lot for us to do there it matters what we do yeah obviously it matters a lot Peter Thiel thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music]
