YTread Logo
YTread Logo

Cardinal Conversations: Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on "Technology and Politics"

Jun 06, 2021
Welcome, good night. I am the chancellor of Stanford University and I am here on behalf of myself and President Tessier Levine to welcome you to the Cardinal Conversations last fall and asked several thought leaders at the University, along with student leaders, to They will organize a series. of the discussions we ask that these discussions advance commitments at the heart of Stanford's research and education mission our commitment to the free expression of ideas and our commitment to fostering an inclusive culture on campus students and thought leaders were asked Let them decide the format of the events, the discussion topics and the guest speakers and in just a few moments you will see the fruits of your collaboration, so tonight I am pleased to welcome you to the first event in this new discussion series.
cardinal conversations reid hoffman and peter thiel on technology and politics
The initiative is very important both for me and for marking it. It's important that we're actually doing a balancing act to participate. I usually teach a physics class from 6:30 to 8:30 on Wednesday nights. Mark is currently teaching my physics class for me. He has a degree in physics, so I can open the series after my remarks. I will return to my classroom and Mark will join you for the conversation in a few minutes. Mike McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, will describe how he and Neil Ferguson Hoover gathered a group of students and worked with them to start this series. and he will outline his plans for the future, then Neil will moderate a discussion on the topic of

technology

and

politics

between well-known entrepreneurs and Stanford alumni, Reid Hoffman and Peter Teal, so I have to start by thanking Mike Neil and the student leaders from a wide range of organizations across the political spectrum for hosting the series and I have to thank Reid and Peter, of course, for agreeing to be our first participants in the Cardinals

conversations

and I know everyone here is eager to hear your opinions.
cardinal conversations reid hoffman and peter thiel on technology and politics

More Interesting Facts About,

cardinal conversations reid hoffman and peter thiel on technology and politics...

The goal of

conversations

about the Cardinals is to value the free expression of diverse points of view to stimulate critical thinking by considering opinions beyond our own and engaging in civilized and intellectually rigorous conversation. So why is this initiative such an important priority for Mark and me? Well, first, we believe that progress is made in both research and education. and understanding come not from considering a limited range of familiar ideas, but from considering a wide range of ideas, including those we might find objectionable, and rigorously testing them through analytical conversations and debates. Secondly, our strengths at Stanford derive from our diversity, diversity of backgrounds, religions. nationalities races genders sexual identities ages physical abilities political views and ways of thinking we only succeed as an intellectual community when our discussion benefits from the full range of diverse perspectives present on our campus and we ultimately feel that it is the responsibility of all of us, not only that we ensure that the expression of a diversity of viewpoints is not just a possibility, but that we also work to make it a reality at Stanford, both in the classroom and outside of it, and one way to do that is to ensure that the diverse perspectives. at Stanford, so it is in this spirit that tonight's conversation we hope that the upcoming carnival conversations will help open all of our minds to diverse opinions and that we will all commit to intellectually rigorous and respectful dialogue across differences, Whether in the classroom, in the dorm, or on social media, whether as a student, scholar, or global citizen, as everyone knows, we can't demand respectful disagreement, but we can model and encourage it, and I thank you all for being there. here tonight as ambassadors of that cause.
cardinal conversations reid hoffman and peter thiel on technology and politics
Thank you very much and now I would like Mike McFaul to come and make some comments. Thank you. Hello everyone, thank you for coming. I'm Mike McFaul. I am the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, a professor of political science, and a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution. It's great to see so many people here tonight. I call it thought leaders, since the Provost draw I don't know if I'm a thought leader, but I'm a professor and advisor to Cardinal conversations and it's a real thrill and a privilege. To do that, I want to add three points to what our rector just said first.
cardinal conversations reid hoffman and peter thiel on technology and politics
I want to congratulate the students and faculty members for the idea of ​​this program and thank President Tessier Levine and Provost Drell for supporting and supporting this novel idea. we have thousands of speakers at Stanford all the time sometimes I feel like all I do is provide entertainment to the people at FSI and sometimes here at Hoover we have secretaries of state we have national security advisors in my field I work in international security we have ambassadors, we have senators, we have had presidential candidates, she came to Stanford twice and we have had presidents. President George W.
Bush has been here twice in recent years and President Obama has been here twice in recent years. in fact, I'm working on bringing it back a third time. Imagine Obama unhinged, but he promised me we'll see if he's true about that, but there's something significantly different, two significantly different things about what we're trying to do here tonight, first in a A somewhat dangerous experiment: we're matching speakers, not just giving them a podium alone and not just giving them a podium with a safe at La Couture like I have done with some of those other people, today we have Neil Ferguson as the moderator and the second students are at the forefront of what we're doing here, at least as far as I'm concerned, considering the topics, the speakers and also the participation, it's fantastic to see so many students in this room today, there are probably more students in this room today than ever before. that's exactly what we want second point Cardinal's conversation is an experiment in the vernacular tonight is a start as such it's an imperfect product and we want to improve it in the future I'm excited about some of the speakers we've lined up already and Appelbaum christina summers Cornel West just confirmed Wendy Sherman fareed zakaria and many others, but as we move forward we want to increase the diversity of speaker perspectives and topics, including in the fall, in my view, more attention to foreign policy and international issues. and then thirdly and finally, the best way to increase that diversity is to have more of you involved in it, both faculty here tonight but also more students, so I encourage you to send us your ideas.
I encourage you to join our small committee. I encourage you. participate and help form a conversation with Cardinal as we move forward, it's a pretty good product right now, but it'll be better if you interact with us, but if you're going to launch a product, I'm told I'm sitting in the back with some of the people who have done that and in a way that I haven't, they should start with a bang, they should start with a fantastic program and that's exactly what we have tonight, so now let me hand it over to my colleague Neil Ferguson and introduce you to our fantastic conversationalist. and start this program, thank you all for coming, the wind of freedom is blowing.
Stanford's motto de lucify is on the tree or on top of the tree on the university seal and I think Cardinal's conversations are about letting that wind of freedom blow in establishing this series. of conversations to affirm this University's commitment to free speech, we, Mike McFaul and I, along with the eight members of the student steering committee, all agree that tonight we wanted high-profile public intellectuals, not politicians nor professional provocateurs, when we launched conversations about Cardinal. I'm extraordinarily fortunate to have two of Stanford's most successful alumni, but they're both public intellectuals just as a hobby, which is pretty annoying for those of us who do it for a living, but because their day jobs, like You probably already know, they are

technology

.
Entrepreneurs and investors I'm not sure you need a presentation for this audience, but I'll do it anyway. Reid Hoffman to my left and right is the co-founder of LinkedIn, the professional network you'll be on if you're not. He is already a partner at Greylock Partners. He currently sits on the board of directors of Airbnb Modo Convoy Block Stream. He could go to Mozilla Corporation. He is also the host of Masters of Scale, a podcast series that I highly recommend and which actually gave me the idea for this opening event. It's a really extraordinarily good introduction to the world of technological entrepreneurship and you have a book about to be published and not the first because your startup and the Alliance already exist.
The new book focuses on what Reed calls lightning scaling based on the Stanford course that was called that. He also has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, but here he specialized, he has a bachelor's degree with distinction in symbolic systems to my right and to your left Peter Thiel started PayPal along with Reap they were once on the same team in the 1990s. Peter led PayPal as CEO and took it public in 2002. In 2004, as you no doubt know from the movie The Social Network, made the first outside investment and a small Harvard company called Facebook.
He is still a director of that company that same year he launched Palantir Technologies, he is a source of a partner in the founders' fund, which is the venture capital firm that funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. Peter also started the Teal Scholarship which encourages young people like many of you. To put it, as he says, learn before you go to school, he's another author, which is infuriating for those of us who only write books. His zero-to-one book on startups was a New York Times bestseller and also started as a Stanford course, so he's really the only one.
You'll see tonight on this stage who hasn't taught a course at Stanford here studied philosophy and law as an undergraduate founded the Stanford Review, which still runs, gentlemen, we're here to talk about technology and

politics

and I want to ask you nicely. From a simple opening question for the two of you, let me start with you reading what you think are the lessons of 2016 for Silicon Valley, so Slocum Valley generally looks at politics and the political sphere as a kind of rugby scrum that moves very slowly, they don't really adopt a coherent vision of the future and generally figure out how we build technologies and technology companies that have enormous influencing effects, so I think, generally speaking, in Silicon Valley, in general, the kind of commitment to politics is saying, well, you know, just maintaining a friendly relationship while we go out and build the future and I think the shock and the fact that we were definitely like an area out of touch with what was happening like we were shocked is like a cyclical action, in fact, if you come to a movement that wants to enshrine the past against the future that actually has a set of areas where a lot of pain is felt, whether it's your economic future, opioid epidemics and other types of things that say look , they weren't, we're not I'm not convinced that this future is going to be good for us or for our children, so I think one of the things that Silicon Valley learned in general terms was: oh, we have to focus on that now , in addition to the future.
I think part of that is also a move from challenger to incumbent, which is part of how the competition between companies, technologies and startups, because there are thousands of startups, is so fierce that there's this focus on kind of like, it's Well, I'm young, I'm small. building and that includes all the way up to what our current giants, whether it's Facebook, Google, etc., still feel that if you look at the companies' cards, you know from day one, you know the kinds of things that change from what that we are building something new. and we are on that path towards, in fact, we are part of the middle, in fact we are part of what is fundamental to how information flows in society and that changes the sense of responsibilities, and you know, one of the things that I have What I've been saying for the last year has been that we need to get to the Spider-Man ethos, which is that with power comes responsibility.
We are now in a position where we have the mandate and the power and we need to take that responsibility and we need to figure out what is the right dialogue for what is the society that we all want so that in terms of inventing the future there is a conversation about it. I think that's, broadly speaking, what I think the valley has learned. There are different differentials. levels along that curve there are differential levels of response, but I think it's that feeling of oh, we were out of touch with the now and we have to do that too as we continue to try to build the future, soparticipate in the course of this conversation. to what that great responsibility might look like now that you guys have realized that you have great power, but let me turn to Peter, you played a prominent role, more prominent than what I read in 2016, looking back, what do you think is the significance of that year's political events have been for Silicon Valley.
Shopping? Read the story that there has been a kind of shock awakening that there are forces out there that don't want Silicon Valley building the future. Well, I partially agree with that, but I said, I guess my impression is that if you define lessons learned as places where people actually changed their minds, there were very few lessons learned because I think people in Silicon Valley didn't change. of opinion about many substantial things at all, in the same way. I would slightly rephrase the question Reid posed: how should we think about the nature of technological and scientific progress and how it is happening?
There are a lot of different ways to describe this, but I would suggest that you can have a sort of basic tripartite divide that part of it is accelerating, which is the official Silicon Valley kind of thing, which is Google propaganda, technology is accelerating, it's going. faster, science is great, it's progressing at an incredible rate, there's a version of inequality that you know we're in, you know this is leading to kind of a more unequal world, but there's also a version of stagnation which is that the future it's not happening at all and I think there's some truth to all three as well, you know, the acceleration of inequality. and stagnation, but I think the issue of stagnation is an issue that we don't think about enough in Silicon Valley, where we tend to have this debate which is a narrow debate between inequality and acceleration and the way I would describe what that is.
What's been happening is that we've had sort of a narrow cone of progress around computers, IT, the Internet, the world of gambling, the world of atoms has seen a lot less progress and so when we were undergraduates at Stanford in the late '80s, you know, the only good field to study would have been computer science, almost all the engineering fields that people studied at that time were bad fields that they didn't want to major in electrical engineering, you know , the aerospace sector was catastrophic, I no longer want to say anything by then people realize that they should not do nuclear engineering and you go down the list and discover that we were in a world where there was not much progress in the world of atoms , only in the world of bits, and that this type of stagnation that is very Very contrary to this, you know, the official acceleration propaganda that dominates Silicon Valley is reflected in stagnant wages, is reflected in the way in which the millennial generation has lower expectations than their baby boomer parents and I think this is a, you know, this is a It's a big part of the story that we have to talk about and if you knew, even if you think about more local policies like The state of California is close to bankruptcy as a state, so it's amazing that we have this amazing technology.
It's happening in Silicon Valley and if you go east, right into the East Bay, across the Bay Bridge or the Dumbarton Bridge, you're in this basically failed state, this failed state that you know in the next recession is probably going to go bankrupt. And so there's kind of a question about how to scale this. I think, in the rough political mapping that I would give of this tripartite division, you know that the centrist establishment in this country is accelerating. I'm Clinton, that would be you. you know the Bush family, you know Obama was generally in that camp, there's kind of the non-establishment left that would be the Sanders line and then, then you know the non-establishment right that Trump represented were the things that are stagnation, so do it.
America is great again is very offensive to Silicon Valley because you're telling people in Silicon Valley that it's not like that, that the future is not progressing, and suddenly the substantive question arises that I think it would be good for us. finding a way to discuss more is whether the future is progressing rapidly, you know, whether it's progressing in a positive direction, how much is this actually happening and it's not showing up in the macroeconomic data, it's not showing up in the productivity numbers and that's. I think it's kind of the kind of thing that you know we need to get more involved in, you know, but by the way, Tyonna echoes with the wood, you know, all the speakers at the beginning said about the importance.
In having these debates and conversations, I think there's always a tendency for us to reduce the other side to a caricature of itself, and of course there's a way that this can be done a lot in American politics right now, in in a way straw man the arguments you pick the weakest point you make fun of it and what I think we should always try to do is find ways to steal the man's arguments I was the opposite of the straw man we should take the arguments from our opponents and we try to give them the strongest structure possible so that we understand them as best as we can and I think you know the left will be able to win again at some point, but it has to start with Steel Manning, sort of making America again. big means what it means in terms of this question about gridlock and you have to have arguments that are more than just telling Trump voters to know to hurry up and die, what did they say about characterizing things in essence, saying that Silicon Valley had broken away from that part of the country that voted for Trump and in your characterization Peter, that's where the stagnation was happening where the acceleration just wasn't noticeable and I think in the same way your identification of a part of the country that was I'm not interested in the future of Silicon Valley in the same way, the same way to make a similar point.
Just a few years ago, people in Silicon Valley seemed very confident in what they were doing for politics. I'm going to quote a book that Eric Schmidt wrote. With Jared Cohen just a few years ago, the current network technology of the new digital age that they wrote about really favors citizens. In a 2010 article, they predicted quite accurately regarding North Africa in the Middle East that authoritarian governments would be caught off guard when large numbers of their citizens armed with virtually nothing but cell phones took to the streets so cheerful and confident morning back then they said the internet is good for democracy somehow that story seems less plausible in 2018 so how do we think about the politics of a networked world when some authoritarian regimes seem to know exactly how to use these tools , Reid, so I think the optimism comes from people saying, well, if you don't count the bad actors, you don't count the attempt to interfere with other people and say we have this. people empowerment that encompasses the fact that you have a minicomputer you have access to information you can learn things you can communicate with a wide variety of people those are all the things that we are talking about Eric and Jared, they are It's still definitely true, but part The transition from challenger to incumbent is when you begin to have a means of communication, a means of transaction, a means of interaction, a means of political decision, then that becomes something in the struggle of human tribes. that then becomes manipulable, corruptible, you know, you fool the bull in various ways and, by the way, businessmen do it too, like they figure out how to fool, you know, you know, the kind of virality and other types of things, this It's actually not completely new.
What is new is that the scale is now in a kind of realpolitik and the politics of Nations and you know, a microcosm of that could be the witness of Peter Gabriel who used to distribute video cameras to say film atrocities against human rights because they bring those movies then shed You know some light on them and now, of course, what we have is that there are authoritarian regimes that look at social media to say who was at the protest to try to locate them and their families, which is a kind of alternative way. one way to do it, I think the general problem with many people's reactions is that they say there was a failure in the technology, that we can't really discern the truth among the fake news, we can make it so that the Russians don't do cyber hacking, but that they essentially do it. social meme hacking and that that's a problem and that it should go backwards and in fact the usual answer is to move forward, the usual answer is that we should figure out what to do about it and we should evolve the system in the right way and so I go on you know , somewhat optimistic, but not utopian, and in the technological possibilities, but what it means is that you have to look, when you think about it, it's like an example when we get to PayPal to a certain size, you have to start thinking that there are criminals using it. and other things and then you have to start building against that as part of what you're doing and I think that's part of what's happening with information flows, rely on their influence within a sort of democratic political system, let me continue with that point because you mentioned the issue of fake news, which is very present in people's minds, also the role of Russia.
Your next book, a quick escalation in my reading, says that these are problems that can be solved, but we have to move on, we can't hire an army of facts. -The inspectors, yes, or the retired newspaper editors talk a little about how that is done and how they imagine it works well, so part of, I mean that part of what can be done, so that people imagine that an AI can be made to verify the truth. That's right, I think there is a way to do it. I think it's fictitious, however, what you can do is, for example, because we already do this with PayPal credit systems, etc., you can do identity verification, you can do things that have a way of saying "you are good". information like you can have an example in the registration of information, say that these are sources of information that have been registered for journalistic responsibility, like they can question or attack me for not verifying the facts because I do not believe that alternative facts exist and that kinds of things can actually be built into the platform, it's not so much about whether X is true but what is the best source of identity and provenance of the information and where to go to verify or verify.
Let's say there is someone who defends this and says this is really true and I followed a journalistic process and I think you can see more of that type of thing and, by the way, you already see some of this, for example, in what happens in the search. quality results, as part of the overall emphasis on search quality, meaning that it's actually accurate information about this query and you're basically trying to bring that kind of thing to the search for information on these platforms. Peter, let me ask this question in a slightly different way to you, the Internet, network platforms have altered the nature of politics itself, in other words, will we still have left and right debates like you had when you were student?
I had it when I was a student in the 1980s, or is there? there's going to be a different type of politics it's going to be a foritarian versus democratic it's going to be establishment versus populist growth believers versus stagnationists how do you think about the new terminology even of politics? It's always hard to say because I think naturally these technologies don't always map in a very precise way, so making predictions was a treacherous business for Eric Schmidt and it probably is for us today and in 2018 as well, you know. , that access that catches my attention. kind of a central hub versus decentralization, so I think as you read, you just represented the question of centralization, where everything happens in one place and then it has to be curated in the right way so that you know that you have a you know .
You have a good debate, but within the right limits, within the right limits and that's the kind of question that happens in a massively centralized context, in a more decentralized context, that maybe wouldn't happen in the same way, for example . You know, one of the two areas of technology that people are very excited about in Silicon Valley today are cryptocurrencies on the one hand and AI on the other, and while I think these things are underdetermined, I think these two maps, you know. in a very strict political way with this question of centralization, decentralization, Kryptos decentralization, AI is centralizing or, if you want to frame it, you know more ideologically, you could say that cryptocurrencies are libertarian and AI is communist and, for Of course, we always only listen to the first half because we are biased to the left, but you know that AI is communist in the sense that it is about big data, it is about big government controlling all the data knowing more about youthan you know about yourself, so the baroque rat and Moscow could, in fact, set potato prices. in Leningrad and you know the whole system together and you know that if you look at the Chinese Communist Party, you know that they love AI and they hate cryptocurrencies, so it's actually going to fit in pretty well at that level and I think that's kind of the case. a purely technological version of this debate and I think that yes, you know, I think there are probably ways that AI could be libertarian and there are ways that cryptocurrencies could be communist, but I think that's harder to do if all the cryptocurrencies are mined. in China and Russia they might think they are trying to stop it, even at this point I can follow the implications of that because I suppose in Reed's world not necessarily the AI ​​but some authority that authenticates or validates what is good news, but there are authorities . that will give the Good Housekeeping seed seal of approval for some sources, while a new, more libertarian model presumably through some decentralized blockchain architecture we will be able to differentiate the fake from the true, which is always fine in a world centralized.
A question arises and a decentralized one doesn't come up as well, so yes, of course, the larger platform companies have a challenge along the lines that Reid describes and it is, uh, I would describe it as a two-front. In the war that they have to fight, they have to fight, on the one hand, against hate speech, fake news, you know, that whole set of things, and then they also have to fight against people who want to limit speech in too limited speech in the In the name of fighting fake news and because it is a war on two fronts, it is much more complicated than simply fighting on one front.
Can we talk about it? a little bit in the decentralized world it's a lot harder to set up, like you know it's interesting to say it's libertarian versus communist, you could say it's libertarian versus rule of law, right, it's a lot harder to set up. kind of yes, exactly, yes. It's actually much harder in the decentralized system to set rules and regulations as for example one of the things that is a big problem in the community crypt right now is that it makes Gamergate look relatively tame in the way it works. who treats women. in terms of public discourse, etc., there are a lot of problems that need to be solved there that are much more difficult to solve in that area.
That said, we both think that the invention of cryptocurrency is an important type of innovation along with the Internet to allow a lot of applications to be developed within the type of Internet of money, the value of the Internet as a way to do that, so None of us are negative about cryptocurrencies or at least we are not negative in the same way. but that is one of the virtues of the type of legal systems, well, but this is always how you could say. I would say that AI is a much more transparent world and then the search, but the centralized world is more transparent and then the question.
You can always ask what's the opposite of transparency, is it criminality or is it privacy, and you know, from the point of view of a centralized state, the opposite, you know, yeah, you always know why you want to have secrets, why don't we know? . who you are and what you are doing why do you need privacy if you are doing everything if you are behaving perfectly you have nothing to hide and then but and you are a criminal not just a criminal doesn't want I have transparency but I think it can really be beneficial in both senses.
I want to come back to this topic of the relationship between China and a particular big data company because I think it's very important before we get there, let's talk a little bit about the inequality that emerged. I mentioned it at the beginning of our discussion, but I think it's pretty central to what Silicon Valley is doing, perhaps unintentionally, and you know, even if you just look at the cryptocurrency case, it seems like another case of smart people They thought about them for the first time and became spectacularly rich and then the fools like me who were late to the game having ignored their teenage children through the bubble and at the top got crushed in the stock market yeah, well, this already existed before, but that's what surprises me about Silicon Valley economics is that the winner takes all and you put this point on the lightning scale like Peter does in his book from zero to one, that's great for the winner and you can see the winners in this area and their Teslas, but don't you? a sense in which, from the point of view of the losers, this is deeply alienating and it seems as if every new innovation is a fast track to wealth for a group of intelligent, well-educated young people with inside information and everyone else is only users who provide their data. free, well what I would say is a couple of things, so one is okay, you're not giving your data away for free that often, that comment is like Google did it for me, a well provided search, for For example, you know, free information, free access to a whole bunch of videos, a bunch of other things, so you know, apps, I mean a bunch of services, like what they did for me, well, that's what that the data exchange that Monty Python, the sketch, did, yes, the Romans, in addition to the roads, are education, etc.
I'm glad we have lovers of the Google Roman Empire analogy, so I think the problem of inequality, yes, but the unintended consequence of all this innovation seems to be amplifying an inequality that was already quite advanced in the 1990s. 1990 and that has only increased. worse and a big part of what drives it are these extraordinary roots credible returns to the lightning scale as the winners, so I think that at most moments in human history, you are the historian, there has been a divergence and wealth, whether it is the financial systems, whether you know the aristocracy and the landowners, etc., and there is nothing that you know, actually, in technology, generally speaking, it is a characteristic of human society , it's not a mistake and I don't know, so he knew.
I think what's characteristic of today is like, for example, you're mentioning that cryptocurrency is something that Silicon Valley is getting rich off of. In fact, I think the cryptocurrency that most people were getting rich outside of Silicon Valley was the most adopted and there are a couple of good companies here, but as a general range of cryptocurrency mining from the first operations as if to Silicon Valley It took him a couple of years to realize that cryptocurrencies were happening, it was one of those things that was more like the person I refer to as patient zero for Bitcoin in Silicon Valley is an Argentinian Entre named Wences Casares, who He's in Patagonia now, but you know he usually lives in Woodside, you don't know him very far from here, so I think the notion that the incentive is for the creation of something new. that it could actually have a global impact and that the benefit of that global impact for some people is not necessarily a bad thing.
I think the important thing is to make sure that the majority of people have a sense of meaning and progress. in their lives and include and one of the things where overfocus comes in, this is a little bit like, for example, what Peters was saying about the stuck point is not paying enough attention to what happens when we have free encyclopedias for everyone and free learning materials for everyone and free entertainment for everyone and a bunch of other things that come with the kind of quality of life and the only measure of human progress is not the relatively arcane measure of GDP, but also various types. of quality of life measures and I think those things are happening and what I think I would feel fair saying is if this person created a cryptocurrency or this group of people create a cryptocurrency and made a lot of money and everyone else loses if they don't There are other ways to win so that would be a problem.
In fact, I think one of the good things is that if I had to make a prediction, I think I would say that within five to ten years there will be at least 50% additional large technology companies, etc., they will not shrink, They will grow in terms of the number of different options and where they fit into the world in life and what I would like to see from them. it's more capability because, for example, a centralized platform is a good thing if it creates generativity if it allows a lot of people like, for example, take Airbnb or eBay, say I can actually increase my income.
I can be a micro-entrepreneur on this platform I can make more things happen. I think we want to see more of those to allow more people to say well I don't have to be a coder, I don't have to be a tech entrepreneur and I can still progress in my life and I think that's what we need to focus on more as we We figured out how to be inclusive. Do you think conventional economics actually underestimates the benefits of the Internet? Do you think conventional economics actually underestimates the benefits of the Internet? First, this inequality thing, right?
No, I don't think so, I think maybe we should start by talking a little bit about where inequality is actually experienced and let them know that Silicon Valley is, in some ways, a very unequal place when people leave Silicon Valley. It's not because there isn't economic opportunity, it's because real estate costs too much and there are some studies I've seen where almost all of the increase in inequality in the last 20 or 30 years is simply an increase in inequality in land ownership. . If you were a Stanford graduate 50 years ago, you worked, you got a job at Hewlett-Packard, you could have gotten a three-bedroom starter home when you were 22 in Palo Alto, so you know on some level that this is something like that.
This is how stagnation in land prices manifests itself as a venture capitalist. I often think that almost all of the venture capital money I'm investing goes to urban slumlords in the form of incredibly onerous commercial leases and Of course, the high Perrolli salaries you have to pay people in Silicon Valley, which then they have to pay to rent from all their landlords, and this is what you know, maybe this is loosely related to technology because we are a networked economy and it is very difficult to do things outside of Silicon Valley and cities network like New York or London for finance, but I think that's where the problem is and then the you and then the remedy in my opinion would be that you I know how to seriously think about changing zoning laws or things like that.
There's an economist I always like to refer to in the late 19th century, Henry George, who had this theorem that I think Stiglitz actually proved about a hundred years later. theorem that says that in a certain type of urban area where not enough new things can be built, all the value is captured by the owners, so you know Reid says you know you're saying that the value is captured by a few entrepreneurs technological. laugh it's this consumer surplus that is captured by everyone and I think the question we have to ask ourselves is that maybe a large part of it was captured by the owners, it's not the people who capture it, you know, I put it in magazine covers, but that's how inequality runs extremely deep and I think if you solve the zoning problem, I don't think people will have a problem with some people making more money than others in cryptocurrencies or Google or something like that, You know, it's just the line usage problem.
I guess it's a little hard for me to believe that there is some hidden place in these neighborhoods where the landlords make more money on rent than you charge, they collect less, but overall it's much more distributed. but yeah, it's been a phenomenal bull market in land prices, you know, Mike, my parents, uh, you know, I got a house in Foster City when just north of here for $120,000 in nineteen seventy-eight today it's worth two. million and a half and you know, if you were of the older generation in the US and you got a house in a major urban center, you could retire;
If not, you couldn't save for your retirement, so if you're a young person, it's almost impossible to even get started. It was a student of Henry George who invented, if I remember correctly, the game Monopoly and I can't resist asking them both about monopoly, since there is a In the sense that their books, in their different ways of celebrating Monopoly and conventional economics, they said that monopoly was not a good thing and would certainly tend to be rent-seeking on the part of the monopoly owners. all kinds of companies that are produced on a lightning scale it is simply inherent in the nature of the business that there will be, if not monopolies, then things that look a lot like them, yes, I mean, we often refer to them as if the winner wins. runs most of the business versus all of it, but you know. this is and when people talk about network effects that's the kind of thing they're talking about this is a yes as a pointed way of saying it is a you know, Peter thinks it's a classically misleading way of saying it, what's the reason I hate zero to one andI try to say it like you know, no, this is actually just a monopoly.
I think the key question is what happens if there is a centralization of a platform. It is about many virtues and the centralization of zuv platforms that can create enormous generativity, can create many things, for example, you have an iOS platform, Android can create many applications in addition, you have an open platform like the Internet, you have a large number productivity, that kind of thing, I think. There's a lot of value in having those platforms and the platforms are more about the broader base that you have in terms of your ability to build business on them, which customers you have communications with, you transact, etc., it's part of the reason why it's just There are a few that you know relatively.
Few like credit cards etc. because once they are processed like this, should I accept this new random card or should I accept a Visa or MasterCard? Well, I'll take Visa MasterCard more easily and it makes the whole system work. more efficiently, the key thing to consider is whether you accelerate the right kind of opportunities, futures and innovation and build towards the future or block the future, so the classic concern that people have around monopolies is that they try to enshrine the past versus the future and they're going well I just couldn't get paid to run so I'm not going to make anything up because I can I can sit on my monopoly to collect rents that's obviously a problem that's obviously bad that's the kind of thing you should be against act now Peter and I have been on stage before talking about monopoly with zero to one in his book and you know in part if they are really in dispute, even if they are very they are profitable and they are actually reinvesting their profits to compete with each other and trying to bring products and services to the world often in modern cases, free products and services, you know it's not clear that it's actually not. a substantial societal benefit in terms of how it's developing and that's why I like some of what I look at and say, well, which way should we try this?
The technologists and inventors of the future say we're going to create pathways through which people can not only find information, communicate, be entertained or educated, but also create things through which people can create work for themselves, create economic opportunities, that's part of the reason why you know. airy and be and eBay are simple examples of this kind of thing and he said: well there is a market that has natural network effects, they tend to be dominant, that's where the trade is done, that's fine if you're actually allowing a lot of business in Creation can also be good before it reaches you, Peter.
I just want to point out to the audience that we will answer your questions, but being close to Silicon Valley, we will not do it in any way. old school with microphones or pieces of paper, God forbid, no, we will use a slide, oh and you will be with the help of your electronic device, not so bad if you didn't bring a wearable one. your questions through slides. Oh, and then they will be moderated by our undergraduate committee and I will get the winners and this is how we will do Q&A tonight and we will tell you this now so you have time to follow the instructions.
I hope you have now appeared upon us and figured out how to go online to swipe and ask a question. I hope this works because if it doesn't we will have to use pieces of paper and it will certainly be a huge embarrassment. For me, Peter, well, while everyone's working out the slide and preparing devastating questions, the conventional response to any mention of monopoly was always antitrust, and I guess for someone who was in law school here, you're the right person to ask: This is coming? eventually, suppose there is a shift to the left and American politics maybe the next populist is Bernie Sanders, does antitrust finally show up in Silicon Valley and say break up the naughty monopolies?
Will it be like Standard Oil? Well, antitrust is always It's an extremely crazy weapon, you know, and it's not very clear, you know when it's used, when it's used in different contexts, you know by the way, I'm not just Pro Monopoly. I'm going to be very clear in that distinction that I always make. It's between dynamic monopolies where people invent things and that's where we also protect those in our society, we protect those with patent copyright laws, so if you have a dynamic monopoly, that's a good static monopoly, it's more like an EA for hire, like an owner or a you know. maybe a harvester troll attacks the bridge or something, those are the most problematic and the question is what types of monopolies do we really want to encourage, since our service is analog type II and which ones are more static and problematic and which ones are subject to the bankers and that's why it's a complicated question because in fact there are good monopolies and bad monopolies, the way it allows it I say the more you know the more general question is just do you know how much of a you know how much regulation is getting closer to technology companies in Silicon Valley.
This again is a bit difficult to predict. What catches my attention is how and what worries me is how badly the big tech companies are playing. of the political game that they're supposed to play and you know, we had in 2008, we had a huge financial crisis, you know, where I think the banks are still worse actors than the technology companies. and the banks got relatively light regulation after 2008 because they were kind of two-party, they supported both parties, and the kind of thing that's maybe idealistic or maybe stupid or maybe just wrong is that Silicon Valley is a one-party state. unique, it's all in one party and that's when you get into political problems in our society, when everyone is on one side, the other side doesn't care about you and your side doesn't care if you, at the end of the day, why not?
It's not necessary and so what you know is you said regulation is going to come from the left, it's very possible it's going to come from the Republicans, right now they can start with the Republicans, but you're really in trouble when the Republicans want to regulate. How could they do that? I can't imagine the Republicans making a move that they began to rely on. Well, you know there are many. I'm not going to try to give you ideas, but here we go. Could you know? You may really be in trouble when you get conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats to agree, and the concern I have is that the response to Silicon Valley's one-party culture is, "You know we'll never get you" versus "We No".
We don't really have you anyway, so we don't need it and both sides end up chasing you. Bebo, expand on this a little bit because actually one of the mistakes that I think is made a lot and thinking about this is that we are moving away from the hyperpolar US and therefore everything that is discussed here assumes that the United States United is the world and everything else is a shadow, so I really believe that we are already in a place where really what you are seeing with monopoly antitrust and so on is actually a return to nation-state competition, so that's part of the reason why Europeans combine some legitimate social concerns with the fact that we're not happy with the fact that we don't have as strong a tech industry as we'd like to impose some regulation and really focus on Silicon Valley without realizing that China is moving forward, you know, full steam ahead and I don't think China is going to dismantle its monopolies because I think it understands that, in fact, creating industries of the future is really important and so I think that the interesting question is that people say, well, we should slow down, we should consecrate them to the past.
You know, I'm pretty sure I'll be participating from then on. Peter's already given the left a chance, you know, and he's pretty sure we want coal mining jobs to come back in great abundance and quantity because it's the right job in history for the future for us, so basically I think the question is you have to say look what are the industries of the future that we want to be there and be a part of and because they are political struggles and internal struggles, that is precisely where you start to see, you know, the decay of evil, it's as if nothing had happened. the rest matters, it's just infighting, so okay, we're Republicans, we think the tech industry is progressive and it's not for us, so we're going to regulate it and that will be, you know, not an America First policy. be a late US policy, so I'm starting to get questions through the slider.
I really have to say it's working and I can't help but go to one of them now because it somehow fits with the conversations we've had. So far Randi asks, "You've agreed more than disagreed on what it is that you don't agree with, and I'm guessing, from what's being said right now, that this administration might be the answer to that question. Well, In fact, I created a card game." I was hoping you had a card called invented cards which is a model of cards against humanity and just for entertainment, one of the cards in that deck I give to Peter, one of the first decks is Peter Teal, which is actually one of the cards in the deck, so there would be one more pizza from the more fun areas, so America First could end up being America Last if Republicans simply go after Silicon Valley out of sheer political spite, not a plausible scenario from your point of view.
There are a lot of ways that the Trump administration could do things wrong and, you know, there are a lot of things that, of course, are very broken in Washington DC in general, so I think it's a mistake to just blame anyone. person in I I would say yes. You always think there are some very real problems that Trump has pointed out that we should take more seriously. You know, the one that, from an elite point of view, is the craziest. is that you should be more amazed by the restrictions, that always seems like a not really crazy vision that Trump doesn't have and the restriction is not clear, this is a good idea, on the other hand, there is obviously something that you know is deeply screwed in the business relationships you have.
In a globalized and healthy globalized world, capital should flow from the developed world to the developing world because there are higher growth rates in developing countries in the developed world, that is a kind of convergence theory of globalization. This was the United Kingdom in nineteen. hundred had a current account surplus of four percent of GDP and money flowed if you look at our planet from outer space, money flows in the wrong direction, it flows from a fast growing China to a slow growing United States or you say poor peasants. in China they are saving money to invest in the US and it's because that's just the other side of these incredible trade deficits and so if you believe in globalization we should have trade surpluses and that tells you there's something wrong with trade agreements, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to be protectionist or that you want to create national champion companies or anything like that, but at least it's a question that one should raise very seriously.
You know, is there something wrong with the relationship between the United States and China when all they seem to want from us are McDonald's hamburgers? Well then you can blame us because we are not building anything and you can blame China, at least it's a question we should ask, let me follow up on China. Ravi asks what the rise of China means for the future of Silicon Valley and technology in general. You alluded to it. Tell me a little more about this. This is what is fascinating for Europeans. ruined this, they are nowhere, they don't really have any major tech companies, the Chinese perhaps as much by accident as by design kept American tech companies on Bain, allowed their own so-called bat companies Baidu Alibaba 10 Center to prosper and Now these are the real rivals of Silicon Valley companies and yet their relationship with governments is completely different from the relationship we have been talking about in the United States, it is far from the hostile relationship that we see today between Silicon Valley and Washington. in glove, so talk a little bit about what you think China's success in technology means for Silicon Valley: the future maybe there instead of here, well, it's very underrated in Silicon Valley and I think Alibaba is intense and in particular particularly in At some point they will try to expand outside of China.
I guess they're going to try to do it in a pretty aggressive way and I think people in Silicon Valley are probably pretty short-sighted about it, maybe in the U.S. in the U.S. In general and certainly the question of do you know where year China surpassed the US? This was a very important question that people asked, said in 2005, 2006, 2007, you know, it's worth 13 years closer to that than in 2005 and it seems like we're wondering. The question ismuch less today than 13 years ago, although we are presumably 13 years closer to when that happens and it's almost as if we stopped thinking about it as the date approached.
My calculation would be if you look at it on a PPP basis, China is set to surpass the US GDP, it's like 2030, if you average purchasing power parity and GDP, which I think is a better measure than either one alone, you'll get to about 2020, it'll happen in three years, three, four years and that's barely, that barely registers as a conversation here, Reid, so since it was a request for Peter and I disagree, the specific thing I would disagree with Peter on is that I actually don't think Silicon Valley is blind to China. I think Silicon Valley is well aware that around the world the shape of the technological future the biggest contender is China.
They are concerned about the protected Chinese market. There are a whole variety of Silicon Valley companies they can't play with. in China they are worried about more government support, from data to labor laws in general, they are worried about the fact that there is a city in China that graduates a million engineers every year, let alone the whole thing, and that is part of the reason why Silicon Valley tends to be a big proponent of, you know, especially high-level emigration, although everything to a certain extent fairness, but that's the question, you know, how do we play against that and you know , part of when I find myself.
With several European government officials I tell them, well, you are really focused on Silicon Valley, but what worries us is what the future will be like Pisa V China and there are all these problems and I think that if you went and talked to everyone single law, you know, medium and large company in Silicon Valley, everyone is thinking about what the China market is like, what the competition with China is like, it seems like 10 cents Alibaba Baidu are highly innovative companies, there are a lot of interesting things they are doing. things that we have now, you know, ideas and copies of startups here that are ideas that are made in China, and then there are a lot of these things happening, so the specific disagreement is, in fact, that Silicon Valley deals with this . as a very serious threat and you know it's healthy competition, which I think Peter thinks is an oxymoron or a contest for the future, so you're the perfect people to ask a follow-up question about this.
I was just a couple of weeks ago in Hangzhou, which is the headquarters of Alibaba, but you don't have to just go. there you can go anywhere and you will see that in financial technology China is far ahead, why don't we pay for everything with PayPal, but the Chinese pay for everything with Ali Pay or WeChat Pay? that you don't see a credit card and when the Chinese come to the United States they laugh, that is our old-fashioned behavior. You guys were way ahead of China in coming up with an online payment system and yes, from where I'm sitting, you've completely surpassed it.
Now I would love to know why you think it is because the only thing I see when I go to China are ubiquitous online payment systems that have become all this, it's not just payments, there are all kinds of places where, if you're an underdeveloped country , you can go straight to the technological frontier, whereas if it's reasonably developed maybe the Delta isn't as big and therefore it's slower to adopt things, so you'll find the same goes for mobile payments in the world in general development. versus the developed ones wouldn't pay, so you know e-commerce is much higher in China as a percentage of trade because people never built big retail stores.
I think Japan has the most elaborate retail industry and that's probably the country where you have the smallest percentage of e-commerce and it's not because you know Japan is unusually backward, but because Japan's old economy actually worked reasonably well and the US payments system is not perfectly efficient, but it works reasonably well, it is not trivial to start a new payments company, you always have to know how to find something where there is a big delta that you know can really generate an intense need for adoption and to have something. that's a little bit better for a lot of people is often a very unwieldy technology Jacmel said something in Davos last week that really caught my attention, namely that the Chinese model would work better in emerging markets around the same time. reason you just gave and that left me wondering if essentially companies like Ali Baba will be able to implement their platforms very easily in emerging markets and Silicon Valley companies can be left with just the developed world.
That's a scenario you think is plausible. One of the things they've been saying for a few years is that three internets are the English internet, the Chinese internet and everything else and where the real combat will be is everything that's out there and who do you think will win in that contest? It is conceivable that, in fact, Chinese companies, but be an idiot, that rat could beat Fang. Very conceivable, what do you think? Yes, but I still don't agree with Reed that this is generally understood in Silicon Valley because big Chinese companies dominate China to such an extent that you know the people.
In Silicon Valley they don't even believe they can break into China so much when they don't believe they can break in, they don't think much about it and, therefore, one of the benefits for China of this type of State. The proponents of the Chinese firewall is that there is no incentive for us to think so much about what is happening in China because it has become very difficult to do anything and that is why I think that whenever China starts aggressively doing things outside of it, we will not be paying. as much attention as we should to the questions that are coming to several of them about American politics and I want to get to them in a minute, but there was one big question that Ben asked: American democracy in Christ and whether big tech companies have any moral responsibility to preserve or defend American democracy 3 Does this seem like a crisis of democracy to you?
I think it is unquestionably a crisis of democracy. I think the notion of political polarization where legitimate news organizations are called fake news and institutions are attacked where the question of foreign government interference within our democratic political process has a weak answer. I think all of those things lead to unquestionable turmoil and challenge. I think technology companies have a responsibility, as do I think citizens and other businesses and the government to try to do things about it. I think, you know, people say, well, Facebook should have known that its Russians are going to try to hack it socially and that's legitimate for a company to say, look, we didn't think. that was our thing, we were a company, we do business, we're not trying to be, you know, in the game between nation states, but now that you know, it raises the question of how services are provided well, fortunately.
I think the people you know really care and are trying to figure out how to learn the right lessons and how to be good citizens in this, but I think it's unquestionable that our democracy is in crisis. You know, you can agree that things are more polarized than in the past, the trend of polarization, I would say, did not start with the Internet, although there may be things about Internet communication technologies that are in use, you know, it creates an unfair, crazed intensity where you have sort of a daily hate minute on Twitter, yeah or those, or you know, these kind of virtual mobs on the internet where you just have random people and that's what you know, so over there.
There are aspects that you know may be contributing to polarization, but that doesn't mean that's the main thing that's causing, I would say, polarization in the US has been increasing since the late '60s and I would date it to about the period in which growth slowed and we have been in an era of relative economic stagnation since the 1970s and that is why I believe the main cause of polarization is its economy. stagnation because in a world without growth it is not clear and we are not in a strict democracy where a kind of representative or constitutional republic we are an indirect democracy and that is what you know, the democracies modified with the Republic, the relics modified by the Constitution, but even that system doesn't work as well without growth because the way our system of government works is you have a group of people sitting around the table and a state legislature or legislature and they make laws where there's more for you and more for you. and read the difficult person is no longer there to read and when a pie is growing it is relatively easy to create legislation in which everyone wins when the pie is not growing, you know that everything becomes zero sum, it becomes much more hostile, there are a loser for every winner and I think that's the dynamic that, you know, I would say is 80% of the problem with polarization and you know, maybe the technology, maybe the way the message is formed is 20%. , I don't want to minimize that 20.% but we shouldn't make it the scapegoat for all our problems in our society, did you think polarization would have happened anyway even if none of this had been invented oh, whatever it takes with television and newspapers?
I don't know, yeah, you know one of my favorite Fox News, you know, or various forms of Tosh, they show you what they stick to the state, exactly visionaries like Sean Hannity, who you know, you know who I hang on every word and , therefore, look. I think polarization is okay, interestingly speaking, what Peter and I agree on is, in fact, growth is a very important non-zero sum psychology where you say "hey, look, we can keep playing because even if you know Peter gets more from this hand and Anil.” it becomes less, we play again and see where we end up, that's an extremely important part and I think it's a contributing part to this and I didn't mean to say that I think technology was a unique contributor to polarization as much as I do.
Part of what has happened is that now there are these new media, these new ways of sharing information and we have to come to some sort of how we get to the collective truth and in fact I think we should focus on how. Can we get to real news instead of labeling things as fake news? Well, that's true Q. It's always a two-front war, so there's a war on fake news and real news. I don't know how you can get to real news without tagging it. By the way, things are fake news, because the way you sound makes it seem like there are two categories, but the other front is that there are all these people who also want to fight, you know, over certain types of news in the name of excluding things and so it's always a two front war, that's what makes it complicated if it was just good, you know, anyone who complains about certain types of speech will listen to them and get rid of that speech because it's not true either it's offensive or something that's very problematically weaponized and you don't end up in a good equi Librium that raises a question that's been on my mind for a while and was brought to the surface by what happened after the events of Charlottesville and is the possibility that, without us even realizing it, Internet companies will begin to censor the public sphere and the exclusion process that you just alluded to will receive much less attention but could actually be a bigger problem insidious, it is the front that one speaks of that we should worry more about well, I won't, I'm not going to try to offend hate speech at all and that's not like that, I don't think that's what we are, that's what we're about speaking, I think that's where the line is drawn that seems to be problematic who decides what is hate speech on the Internet well, that's right.
I think it's always this two-pronged issue so I mean there are certainly certain categories of speech that are hate speech that you know if I think we could all agree that I don't think that's what that is. I don't think that's where you know the really problematic aspect of this debate is that it's not about it's not about hate speech, it's about you know, it's about things that aren't true or that aren't important, either. You know, or distracting, all these varieties of fake news, but not the hateful versions of it, they're just a small subset, press both of you a little bit on this topic because I think it's very important. and a number of questions have alluded to that and this really has to do with the fact that Silicon Valley itself has not become polarized.
I mean, if there was some polarization here, the same could be said for the universities, but there is an almost complete lack of In fact, it has a very liberal culture, as several questioners point out a very liberal culture and one question comes from the eyes. There are very liberal cultures in technology companies. It is a cause for concern. I thought it would be a question for Peter. Well, Peter and I thought. we met in '87 and philosophy in the manner of a tea and we met as university students and a kind of classic argument we hadwas that the university was left-wing biased and ideologically narrow and part of the argument that I use and I think there is truth on both sides of this, which is the argument that I would use, in fact, if you have a group of people who are seeking the truth and they all end up in sort of a group of views that can be an argument for versus an argument for bias in terms of truth seeking and then, you know, I think one of the points that Peter raised and this is one of The things I like about having these kinds of discussions were that, in general, more people on the right can You are the smart points from the point on the left and vice versa, and I think it's important for people and progressives to be able to do that , so Peters, opening remarks, sir, if you're a village atheist in a small town. in Alabama you can probably make a better case for the other side too, so yeah, but the kind of context we're in in places like Stanford, places like Silicon Valley, it's largely an excuse one way, so I think yeah , I think if you are a conservative or libertarian student at Stanford you will get a much better political education than if you are a liberal student.
If you're a liberal, your views are just going to be reinforced and you can be in this kind of epistemic closure for four years for the rest of your life and and so I think it's, I think it's not even good for your side when it's, it's always straw. Manning never steeled Manning, so that was the point where I was essentially building as to what the challenger would think. within Silicon Valley is that I think we need to have a better theoretical debate about what a good society is, you know, what are theories of human nature and so on, and not resort to a certain ideological position and I think that active discussion It's very important, so that's one of the things that I think is a problem, but I think it's not a problem, it's a sense of well-being, in fact, we have a sense of broad social good.
I know he parodied someone for the Silicon Valley TV show and in a good way he says, "You know, okay, what's that feature that we're building toward and that we're actually trying to build things that allow us to have optimism that there will be There are technologies we can build and this is like going back to I don't think people in Silicon Valley think we're actually stagnant and they think Merrick America is great again is a problem because we're stagnant I think they think it's the issue of inequality and I would say that I think what they really learned to focus on is what is happening and I think they say, well, sure there is slower progress and Adams with bits now infecting the whole world of atoms, from robots and manufacturing everything else, so we're seeing a amount of progress as I think they countered the kind of initial argument, I think that kind of optimism about the future that a broad type of liberal can have. the ideology behind it is a good thing, so those are the two in the discourse, well, you know there is, I think it's at least ambiguous, so you know if you have network effects, if you quickly get to know if they are more efficient , then you say Silicon Valley. it's an efficient place, we get to the truth very quickly, you quickly figure out what the right companies are, what the future is going to be, and then the downside of an overly connected context is that you get bubbles, you get epistemic closure, and you get insanity. of crowds and that is also a great danger in our universities and in these types of networked economic centers and I believe and I believe that it is always difficult to know exactly where you are.
When drawing that line, my own feeling is that it is tremendously on the wrong side, so the question about networks versus the madness of crowds, you know, one way to ask this question is: are we in some ways at the end of history, which is a kind of liberal vanity where we know all the basic answers we know what is right there are few people who are backwards they are bad they are going to die soon and the previous characters say well you are making my point it is as if network economies are like saying hurry up you can die but then versus there are many things that we just don't know and so there's a lot of issues on which these debates are still open and I think I think that's the mistake. in my opinion it would be that we were constantly, you know, arriving at, you know, there is a right answer, and you arrive at the right answer very quickly and very efficiently, you don't waste time on things, that's what Silicon Valley grants and And my opinion would be that on many issues the answers are not clearly correct, they are not clearly correct in terms of globalization, they are not clearly correct on any of these issues, so I think that to get to the The truth is that we need a broader debate because I think we are more wrong than we think.
Here's a question for you, Reid, so I mean, to be precise, I think there is precisely that lack where there is the kind of cult of efficiency. and efficiency and technodeterminism is the answer that should be there and I think it is too simple and should include a discussion about what a good society is, human nature, etc., and that needs more contrasting points of view, and not it is. just contrasting left-right, it's actually more historical knowledge, more philosophical knowledge. I think that kind of stuff, I mean, it's entertaining to be a part of conversations that are things like, okay, we'll just upload ourselves or robot and you.
Well, you know what, how do you know what that means, what exactly that is and what kind of things they are? I think it's important, so it's a kind of cognitive diversity to think about the good society in the future. I think the notion that, in fact, by being very optimistic, we can do very big things, I think action is an important thing and I don't think it's ambiguous. I want to ask the doctor just one point about this heterodoxy. I might leave it, I think that's unusual. I think there's a sense in which I would say that science, philosophy, religion, are much more important than politics, so heterodoxy in those fields, having genuine debates in those fields, is much more important than diversity. in politics, but politics is simple if you can't even have diversity of views in politics, that tells you that you are in an incredibly unhealthy society, if that is where you know that the average person is capable of participating in political debates, we do not.
Expect them to participate in these other debates, but it would be nice if people could participate more in these debates if you can't even participate in a political debate if you can't even have different points of view on it, that means there is no diversity of points of view on all these other topics, which I believe are many more and clearly it has been heterodox thinkers in those other fields who have been the pioneers? Certainly pioneers in the fields of science and philosophy in the 18th century, we are not. surrounded by like-minded people, since there was a big difference between good science and great science and I think that the good thing, the good version that they teach you programmatically is that somehow you know how to connect the dots and you simply know how to copy. things that other people have done and I think big science has always had a much more unorthodox feel to it, so Hagen has asked a really nice question that relates to his friendship.
I don't think we need to ask a question about what do you think about Trump's first year to establish that you have different political views? Several people wanted me to ask that, but you know what I think is pretty obvious, you're not going to give the same answer to that question, but hardly to these questions. How much of your friendship is attributed to the fact that you met in the benign environment of the University? Would you still be friends if you met today? That is a very good question. I think if we had the context to figure out what we did.
Find out at Stanford what the truth is, the speech is very important. Expanding your thinking by talking to super smart people who disagree with you is valuable and that question is really a discourse on what the aspirations of humanity are. are the ways of trying to get to the best version of ourselves, which are essentially many of the different ways or arguments that Peter and I had, if we could have those discussions and discover that attribute of each other, then I think the answer would be yes, now obviously part of the challenge is in the fact that I'm concerned that the current state of the Republic is a sort of decline of Rome as a way of doing it, could we see - those virtues unless that would be the challenge , but I think if we could see that it's not so much benevolence but discovering the importance of truth, the importance of what is best, the way we can evolve our humanity. better then I think the answer will be you, your views when you were a student were certainly not his on a wide range of issues and yet you were friends, in fact you were describing me in the green room campaigning for the Union of Students. together let's talk a little about that relationship that in some way could transcend fundamental differences of political ideology well, I think we've already alluded to this in many different ways tonight, there are many open questions there are many things to try to resolve it is that you learn by understanding the other party's arguments, which are strongest, not at their weakest point, yes, I think you know, I can't, I can't Answer your question counterfactually: Would we still be friends?
That's like an almost crazy counterfactual question. I think I like it, but you know that. I think I think there's probably something about the time when you're at Stanford, where it's a It's a little bit easier to do this, then, then, then, then, then, and it's definitely an opportunity that people shouldn't miss this kind of thing. from networking points that you already know, from your readings, but I think networks are always the wrong words. the best words are things like friendships, things like that and this is a good time to build real friendships. The most succinct way to put it is the time to understand each other.
That was what was not a benevolent environment. the time to understand each other and that was very valuable, we are moving towards clothing. I have a question here from Natalie, which I think is good to point us to a conclusion, as was discussed tonight, she says Silicon Valley is out. of contact with large areas of the United States, what do you both believe is the way forward to reconnect with the people? Rena, you're going on one of those 50-state tours, meeting people in Wisconsin. Look, I think while, and it's really fun to say it like that. way look, I think that's how it was, I think those tours were very well intentioned because if you say look, how do I understand people, let me go, at least talk to some of them, let me meet people and I think having the conversation is extremely important?
I think that's kind of challenging. I think the thing is that the problem has come to me as if there was a sense in which the whole geeky, nerdy nature of Silicon Valley also meant that something I was a little less socially friendly about. adept a little less like well how do we have this conversation as a tribe or something? So I think probably the bridge is understanding what those challenges are and then addressing them in some way as engineering on how we build solutions and I think that can be helpful, that was part of the reason why the kind of things that I do or there are products coming out of Silicon Valley who say that, in fact, this can help people build meaning and businesses, work and generate economics. in their lives those kinds of things and can we create a kind of growth psychology not only for our industry but for other industries as well?
Those kinds of things I think can create a lot of value and can close the current gap, Peter, you were an outlier in 2016 in Silicon Valley, how did you manage to establish that connection with the rest of the country with the elevated states in the center of America, whatever you want to call it, doesn't it seem like it's obviously connected to the people of rural Wisconsin? and yet somehow you caught that signal of deep frustration with the status quo tell us a little about how you did it so well. I've been making the stagnation argument that I tried to outline here for the better part of a decade and And you know, it's kind of a huge pushback in Silicon Valley, part of it is for good reasons, part of it is more reasons why the people you know want to think that everything they're doing is great and so if this was this was a pivot that was that was that was that was very important was one that was if it was going to be a very big blind spot, You know, the advice that I had given to the Republicans I agree with the advice that I gave to all the candidates is that they needed to have someone who was more pessimistic, they were not pessimistic enough and you needed to be pessimistic because if you were optimistic that just showed that you were out of touch and optimism can be a good trait if you're a tech entrepreneur, it's a somewhat good trait as a politician, but too optimistic is toxic, you know, and this was the main mistake.
You know, people likeRomney made people like Jeb Bush think that it is fundamentally a progressive narrative in which things fundamentally work. You know, I always thought it was very difficult to run a candidate who was pessimistic enough because you are too pessimistic and you will demotivate your own voters. You know that everything is going to hell in a basket that is not. That encouraging political framework, but if there was some way to be extremely pessimistic and motivating, that was a super powerful combination that I think people were very underestimating, you know, I think the question I would ask.
What I would like to leave for people here is to return to this question of the nature of scientific and technological progress. It is an issue that I believe is a cultural, social and political issue of utmost importance. What is the truth about it? Are we indeed? In a society with a few Eric, some exception signals are largely stagnant, you know? Are the economists right? No productivity gains or Google type of propaganda is the most correct view of the world and that's a question I think. We should try to get involved, by the way, it is very difficult to do so because it is the nature of late modernity that science and technology are specialized, they are the domain of specialized experts and that is why they tell us that we cannot think about this. not like the 18th century, where a well-educated person understood something about everything and that is why physics is progressing, string theory represents a great progress in physics and sir, you don't know, there are quantum or quantum computers just around the corner. corner, I don't know. and when the answer to each of these questions is that we don't know this very important question about the nature of our society's progress, we have a kind of learned helplessness about it, we have to find some way to be able to think about these things in more effective way.
I'm not going to try to delve into each of those topics right now. That's the sheet because we only have one minute, but the political layer on it is that. I suspect that extreme specialization leads to an incentive in which experts in each of their designated fields congratulate themselves and so string theorists will talk about how wonderful they are. Cancer researchers will say, "You know we're on the cusp of a cure." Cancer is around the corner, yes, that's what we've been saying for the last 50 years, but this time we tell you the truth and we go on and on and you know there is a technological version, there is a I largely agree the importance of being future-oriented and saying: look, how do we have as much scientific progress as possible, I would say in the sense that we have an extremely short time;
The fact that today we have applications on our mobile phones that can recognize skin cancer that may be present in seven billion people is, in fact, a sign of progress. I would rather have a cure for cancer. It seems that the time has come to start this wonderful conversation. We are too close. Our next conversation with the Cardinal, which is a pretty good departure from what Peter had just said, will take place at the same place at the same time on February 22nd. and will feature Francis Fukuyama and Charles Murray discussing populism and inequality. I just have to say some very quick thanks.
I want to thank the amazing Hoover event staff, Alexander Bradley, Chris Dodd, Deniz Elson, Shanna Farley, Linda Hernandez, Jeff Jones, Justin Petty, Janet Smith and Aaron Tillman and Magdalena Fittipaldi from FSI many thanks to the students who made this possible Stephanie Chen Kartini Christos McRib Asst Anna Mitchell as well as tension Palmer Ravi Jake's Antigone's Annapolis and Rory Arrieta Kenna however, thank you very much and they will Should be for our extraordinary guests in this first conversation with the Cardinal. Please join me in thanking Reed Hoffman a Peter Teal.

If you have any copyright issue, please Contact