Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”

welcome to uncommon knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, I was born in Germany. Peter Teal moved to the United States with his family as a child, graduated from Stanford and then Stanford Law School, and after deciding not to practice law, co-founded PayPal and Palantir made the first outside investment in funded companies. by Facebook, like SpaceX and LinkedIn, and started the Teal scholarship that encourages young people to leave college to start their own businesses. Teal remains a very active technology investor now residing in Los Angeles. Peter, welcome, thanks for having the show, we'll get to technology and politics and all the current affairs you're involved in in a

moment

, first deep into the substratum of your Thinking about an essay you wrote early in the 2000s, speaks of a stalemate and writes about the Enlightenment tradition that we in the United States have inherited as a kind of treaty or agreement after decades of religious war in Europe. major strategic setback if the only way to stop people from killing each other over religious issues involved a world where no one thought much about it then the intellectual cost of stopping thinking that way seemed a small price to pay the question of nature was abandoned human close quote you are famous for being a contrary there could be almost nothing more contrary than saying that the Enlightenment represented a retreat explain yourself very well if you want to use an atomistic category you can distinguish the intellect in the will in the medieval people they believed in the weakness of the will , but in the power of the intellect and moderns tend to believe in the power of the will, but in the weakness of the intellect, so yes, I use a slightly different metaphor.

If you have an evangelical Christian, I will study what he looks outward. that people are moral and that they are good Christians, the internal thing is that you are a sinner and if you say well, I mean this Bible study did not discover that I am a very good person, somehow not quite I understood the message now, yes We transfer this to a modern rationalist meeting, the external thing about modern rationalism is that you are more rational and more able to think about things than other people. You're one of the brilliant ones, just like I think Dawkins liked him.

To put it, what's looking inward is that you're not able to think that basically your mind is full of spaghetti codes, you can't believe how badly people are thinking about things and that's what I think the scene went on like sort of enlightened rationality at this point and we see in all sorts of ways that we no longer trust people's ability to think about things in the 21st century. I think it is a cultural aside, you could say the mania we have for the artificial. Intelligence is because it represents the proposition that humans are not supposed to think: we want machines to think, but it is because we are in a world where individuals are no longer supposed to have intellectual agency of any kind. . rely on rationality maybe we can believe in the wisdom of crowds we can believe in, you know, big data and big data we can believe in some kind of mechanistic process, but we don't believe in the mind, okay , continue in your essay to write about the German jurist Karl Schmitt mmm Karl Schmitt has a checkered record, you better say it, but that's not what you're talking about here, you're talking about a particular point that he makes, offers As an alternative to all Enlightenment thinkers, he admits that there will never be any agreement on the most important things in matters of religion and virtue in the nature of humanity, but Schmitt responds that it is part of the human condition to be divided by such questions and take sides politics is the battlefield on which that division occurs in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies quotes thus the life well lived the truly human life fully human life requires politics and politics requires making decisions and choosing sides well, that's pretty good, that's putting words, that's what Schmidt would say, that's not necessarily what I would say, that's fine, what I would say is that there is something in politics that is deeply adversarial, which is to say that you are almost reductively adversarial if you listen. to a political speech and this is the feeling that I think Schmidt is right that if you listen to a political speech the applause lines are never the positive ways that positive things are going to work the applause lines are always the way that We're going to fight those on the other side, how we're going to unite against the other side, how terrible they are and we're going to stop them and that's kind of like this dynamism of politics and then as someone who is generally libertarian.

I'm always very complicated. I would like to live in a world that is less political, where there is less politics, but I would also like us to be honest about how terrible politics is. I guess I suspect we can't avoid it completely, but that's the way it is. it's a no it's a no it's not a nice thing it's not a nice thing okay, so one more step in this part of the impact is like I think we should I think we should always resist this kind of naive use of politics Politics is just, you know, kind of against some kind of mechanistic process where we do a survey and we all come up with a sugary answer that everyone can agree with and that's not what politics is about at all, okay, I'm still quoting from his essay, the entertainment world represents the culmination of the move away from politics, the Enlightenment says, well, we've had all these years of war over religion, we'll stop asking important questions and all these decades, these centuries after the Enlightenment, here it is. the world we have arrived at this is how I read you can correct my reading but let me finish quoting you instead of violent wars there could be violent video games instead of heroic deeds there could be exciting attractions in amusement parks instead of serious thoughts There could be intrigues of all kinds in a soap opera.

It's a world where people spend their lives partying themselves to death. Close appointment. That is a devastating indictment of much of contemporary America. Right, well, I mean, I think this has been the trend of modernity now, not that politics has disappeared, although it's often just displaced in various ways, but yeah, I think there's this incredible degree to which we've replaced these realities of politics. sort of increasingly fictional worlds and it's probably very, very unhealthy. There's a slightly different kind of framing that I've often given about this is that in the last 40 or 50 years there's been a shift from the exteriority that I, you know, do things in the real world to the kind of interior world that is , in a way, you can think of this also in the shift from politics to entertainment or something like that and that of a dr.

Phil, the powerful framework I give is that it was almost exactly 50 years ago today and you know that in July of 1969 men landed on the moon and three weeks later Woodstock began and in retrospect we can say that that was when progress ended and when the hippies they took over the country or something and then we had this incredible shift towards inland tea in the decades since. I would include things like the drug counterculture. It would include video games, you know, maybe a lot of entertainment. More generally, you know there are parts of the Internet that can go both ways, but certainly there are all these things that we've moved into the world of yoga meditation, there's a world of inner culture that and just a kind of super looking inward, okay or if you want, if you want to frame it theologically, you could say it's like it's always been that way.

I always like the quote from Milton and Paradise Lost where the mind is its own place and by itself it can make a hell out of heaven and a heaven out of hell and this is what you're supposed to be skeptical of that's what Satan says when he sends him to hell, I say well, just my opinion if I changed my mind, you know that, right? I can change where I am and that's not entirely true, you know there's an external reality, but somehow the temptation to turn everything into something therapeutic, something meditative psychological, has been very powerful in post-1960s America. , okay, this is fascinating, although I "I should just stipulate that it's going to be frustrating because these are profound thoughts and you've read and written and Carl Schmitt is an important and here we're reducing it to the size of a bullion bucket, but That's television and now me." I'm about to do it all over again because from Carl Schmitt to someone who is one of your favorite thinkers and was a friend of ours, we both knew this man until his death a few years ago René Girard René Girard is difficult to summarize, but a The aspect Central to his thinking is the so-called scapegoating mechanism in primitive societies.

Conflicts were often resolved by sacrificing a single individual or scapegoat whose death would reunite, calm, reunite the community. We see murders like this in myths and sacrificial practices in the classical world and so on, well, again, Peter Teal, for Gerard there is still a denial of the fundamental role of violence caused by the human mother, so that human desire of imitating each other is the source of many problems in their thinking and therefore a systematic underestimation of the extent of apocalyptic violence and if mimesis is encouraged to imitate each other drives others to acquire nuclear weapons for the prestige conferred by the world that best describes this unlimited apocalyptic violence is terrorism close quote there is a lot there but but René Girard somehow addresses an aspect of human nature well, it is good it is precisely what the Enlightenment says no, no, not even think about those things, right, yes, well, the Enlightenment always whitewashes violence, it is one of the In many things we cannot think of an enlightened reason, but one is certainly violence itself and, if we look at The anthropological myth of the Enlightenment is the myth of the social contract, so what happens when everyone is everyone else's throat?

The Enlightenment says that everyone in the middle of the crisis sits down and has a nice legal chat and draws up a social contract and that's maybe that's the founding myth, the central lie of the Enlightenment, so to speak, and what Gerrard says , there must be something very different. happened and when everyone is on everyone's neck the violence doesn't resolve itself and maybe is channeled against a specific scapegoat where the war of all against all becomes a war of all against one and then somehow gets resolved , but in a very violent way and so I think you know what Gerrard and Schmidt or Machiavelli or you know, the Judeo-Christian inspiration has in common is this idea that human nature is problematic, it's violent, it's, you know, not is simple in Everything you do with this is not simply utopian or where we can say that not everyone is fundamentally good, something that someone like Gerard and Schmidt disagree on is that Gerard believes that once he describes it, he has this dissolution effect, which makes violence a scapegoat.

It only works if you don't understand what you're doing, so if we say well, we have a crisis in our village and we're going to have a witch hunt so everyone can get all their negative energy out. and you know, it's going to focus on this older woman which only works if you don't think of it as a fake psychosocial thing. Once you think about it in those terms, it stops working and then there's a sort of feeling that it's too late. In modernity, where this collapse has been something ambiguous for Gerard, both things are bad because they are these cultural institutions that were the only way we had to work and they are falling apart, but it is also inevitable that we cannot. somehow put the genie back in the bottle and then Rorion's criticism of Schmidt would be that somehow when Schmidt says that politics is about friends and enemies, he is being so explicit that Schmidt thinks that by being explicit he is strengthening the politics, but perhaps it has this effect. to undermine it and this is, I think there are elements of this that you see in the contemporary scene in the US where you know there's something about it that's super intense but you also know it's super fake at the same time, that's kind of like what people would do, what people see and and it doesn't quite work when you're just going to fake Peter Thiel.

I am quoting it again, we are at a stalemate, on the one hand, we have the new project of the Enlightenment, which perhaps always had too high a price of self-brutifying the Haitians again, the Enlightenment analyzes three centuries of religious war in Europe and he says we can just dismiss those questions as out of order, stop asking them, and Peter Teal and Carl Schmitt say yes, but that leads to a small, narrow life. Well, on the other hand, we have a return to the old tradition. Now in another part of your essay you are talking about terrorism in the third world and Islamic radicalism.

We have a return. to the oldest tradition, but thatreturn is plagued by too much violence, that is, places in the world where they ask first things first, for first principles, human nature, the nature of God, there seems to be violence involved, so we are at a stalemate, now soluble or insoluble, it is always easier to describe problems than to solve them, this is it. This is certainly an example of that, so yes, the impasse if you frame it in more scientific or technological terms, the impasse is that weapons have technologies such that you know we could probably destroy the world many times over and there is some in that it sort of breaks down, you know, maybe World War I didn't make much sense, people still thought it made sense before World War I, they still thought there was a winnable war, arguable in the cases of the First World War. and World War II, but you certainly know that when you get to say 1970 and you have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over, it no longer makes any sense and I think you know, I've talked.

A lot in different contexts about the kind of technological stagnation that we have reached in the last 50 years, but one way to relate technological stagnation to this topic is that I just wasn't motivated anymore, you know if you can. Think about the Manhattan Project, the Apollo space program had a military motivation, maybe the space program ended in 1975 when we had the docking of the Apollo Soyuz. We'll just be friends, why do you have to work 80 hours a week? You know, 24 hours a day and and in a sense I would like us to accelerate technological and scientific innovation, you know the pace at which these things progressed in the first half of the 20th century, but you can't motivate it by building, you know? more advanced weapons systems and then it's not clear that we've found a substitute for that, okay, now you taught a course here at Stanford.

No, I'll hang in there for a

moment

because, of course, you taught here at Stanford last year and I have a couple of college friends who took notes and passed me their notes and then I reviewed the syllabus. There is a reading that you gave to the children that fascinates me. I'm not sure you presented it this way, but it almost seems like it. like there's an underlying suggestion that it's the way out of the dead end or it's a way out of the dead end now, but my hopes are high, Peter, don't do it, if you... they'll just let me down. kindly please, so here is the technology you need. i used the 2006 speech in Regensburg by pope benedict , makes a couple of claims, the first concerns the reasonableness of religious beliefs and cites an exchange between a 14th century Byzantine emperor and his Muslim captors in which the emperor tells them that they were wrong to impose religion by force Benedict XVI in the speech that asks is the conviction that acting without reason contradicts the nature of God simply a Greek idea or is it always and intrinsically true modifying the first book of Genesis the first book of the entire Bible John the Apostle John begins the prologue of his gospel with the words at the beginning was the logos John thus pronounced the last word on the biblical concept of God and in this word all the often tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis close quote very well there is a great quantity but the fundamental The idea is that faith properly understood is reasonable is not simply the idea that faith is reasonable is not simply a cultural construction that belief belongs to a place or time is intrinsically faith is intrinsically reasonable the Enlightenment he was wrong about that and we need some How or another way to recognize the reasonableness of the first questions that will allow us to ask them again?

Well, there are many things we could do. I'll just let you take a look at what can be unraveled in total. Of this, I would say the Sun, although wouldn't it? It's wow, this is like this is a more difficult interview that I expected much more difficult than I expected uh, I think I think it's a little complicated to say both that it's you don't want faith to be unreasonable, you don't want it to be just reasonable. because then you could just use reason, so it's always a bit of a tricky question how to get faith, Nathan and reason to work together.

Naturally, I'm quite sympathetic to Benedict's position on a correct approach in many ways and yet, from a literary point of view, what was so interesting about reading the Regensburg speech where it was, you know, who's using this Byzantine from the 14th century. The Emperor, perhaps as a spokesman for the reason we know what happened to the Byzantine Empire, crumbled to the ground shortly afterwards and the suspicion one has is that perhaps the Byzantine Emperor in the 14th century should not have simply been presenting reasoned arguments, but he should also have been getting some weapons and protecting himself from what was, you know, the disaster that was about to befall the Byzantine Empire and then the thought I had when watching the speech from the point of view of 2019 that I'm wondering about is was there anything in this that was somehow prophetic that something was wrong with a kind of rationalist conservative Catholicism where you know Benedict is like the 14th century Byzantine emperor and maybe even I'm pro reason and I think we live in a society where people didn't respect reason enough, somehow believed in it too much and then you know I'm not Catholic like you and I always have.

I always have a two-word refutation of Roman Catholicism for all my conservative Catholics. Folks, it's just Pope Francis and there was something about you could say that now if I start with that, I just add 10,000 years just to my time in purgatory, I just have them back in your program, yeah, exactly, okay , okay, so that's it. It's a fascinating speech, but you operate on all these levels. I read RET Regensburg's speech in your syllabus and thought: "Ah, Peters offers this is the way out of the impasse" and you say no, not exactly. I take it as a warning to put too much faith in the reasonableness of faith or irrationality itself and ten years later everything you stood for will be erased.

Well, I think he looks, I think we always have to try to go. Going back to intellect, mind, rationality as fundamental values ​​and there are ways in which we have strayed too far from them, but at the same time I also think there is something to be said, it can't just be where Terry or T should be too, already you know, acting in our world, we should be, we should be, you know, we shouldn't be in this kind of psychological meditative yoga retreat and that's MN and then there's and then there's all these ways. where science and technology, you know, was the kind of there was a big driver of progress for centuries, there are so many parts of it that no longer feel positive to people and that feels like a retreat.

I'll give you a Silicon Valley version of this, you know, I was involved in the early 2000s and a lot of the futuristic AI initiatives that you invested in there's a Singularity Institute where we're kind of all these groups and we have the basic premise correct. Did you know AI is going to happen? It will be if it happens. It's this neighborhood. Better to grab you just for the spectators. You better explain to us. Give us a two-sentence definition. Yes, it means all these different things, but the context in which they were used. It was kind of a science fiction version of AI, so SuperDuper intelligent computers can do anything and they will be very powerful, so sad that they will look human or maybe even smarter than humans and it is very important whether they do or No.

Are we friendly or unfriendly and this was a major problem that we needed to solve and around 2003 it seemed like it was okay, we don't know which way it's going to go and we have to work on it and if you have a score, circuit 2019 is um, it's a lot more pessimistic and the People now think they know what's going to happen at the singularity that Dai is going to kill every human being on this planet, that's what people really believe, and including you, well, we can be skeptical about how it happens. fast, you know, but no, that's the general zeitgeist, even in Staten Valley, okay, Vanessa talks about that, certainly anyone who watches a science fiction movie believes that and your point is that this value that used to be bright and hopeful has turned very dark.

So maybe for an AI researcher you should work on it very, very slowly and you'll be a little bit less motivated to work on it and it has a very different feel and so on. Even even this kind of quite theoretical part of computer science, which is more in the world of bits than the world of atoms, has moved towards this much more apocalyptic direction that you know we're in, you know, 2003 2004, it was necessary to move forward like as fast as we can and now it's kind of like the precautionary principle and maybe you know we should be afraid of our own shadow and be very, very slow and that's happened even in computer science, this is one of the healthiest fields yet twenty years ago, okay, contemporary politics, the issues of the day, China, what went wrong, allow me a simple quote from the late economist and foreign policy analyst, my colleague here at the Hoover Institution , Harry Rowan, Harry Rowan, by the way, was a charming, humane and very intelligent man.

I say this because I'm about to read a quote of his that suggests that he was simply wrong, he wasn't always wrong. He wrote this in 1996, When will China become a democracy? The answer is around the year 2015. This prediction is based. about China's steady and impressive economic growth, which in turn fits the pattern of how freedom has grown in Asia and other parts of the world. Economic growth was supposed to lead to democracy in China and that was not crazy; there was the example. in South Korea they first got rich and then became democratic and in Taiwan they got rich and then became democratic and you could argue that the American foreign policy establishment has wasted a quarter of a century waiting for things to turn out well in China and not they have done.

No, how come? Well, I think these things, you know, are always some that would determine, but maybe if I were to think about one simple mistake that people made, it was too deterministic a view of history, there's nothing automatic about it. the way history can happen and it's not that you get to a GDP per capita of $8,000 and you automatically become a democracy, these things can go in many different directions, there is a huge contingency and if I were to choose About You a little, Peter, here it would be that you know there is that speech that you helped the ghostwriter break down that wall, sir.

Gorbachev, yes, yes, and it was effective and the Berlin Wall fell in '89 and communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, stop there, but we can't stop there because there were other people who paid attention to this and there are people in China and East Asia who paid attention to this and drew very different lessons and the lesson they learned was that we have to make sure that we keep the Leninist part of the state running very strongly. perestroika you can have a restructuring but you can't have glasnost and we're going to decouple them and we're going to learn the opposite lesson because yes, you open things up too much and things fall apart and then I think Yes, I think that, you know, 28 years, it's at least 89 until 2017, basically in the West we read the events of 89, that was inevitably going to happen in the East, mhm, and China read them, it won't happen because we will learn.

We're going to learn from history, we're going to make sure it doesn't happen here and the exact same events were interpreted in different ways and probably weren't going to happen because China wasn't going to allow them and we didn't realize it. This is because we were so convinced of the determination of the story, you know? The Rif I always have about this is that 2017-2018 is the year G became president for life and that is the year the end of the Fukuyama story came to a definitive end. final, but you know there are all these reasons why you could have said you know well, there was a lot of evidence before that things were going well in your book zero.

I'm quoting all kinds of things, at least I get high marks for doing so. my homework, the quotes are accurate, it's fine in your book, quote zero to one, China is the paradigmatic example of globalization, its 20-year plan is to become like the United States is today, close quote, so China, this is another one, I think it's old-fashioned thinking, but I'll let you tell me that China can only copy it, it's incapable of true innovation on its own, and as long as the United States remains innovative, we hope to be one or the other. two steps ahead of them.

Yes, I agree with that, but I don'tI would read a little differently, so I think the West is still much more innovative than China, but if you're just one or two steps ahead, that's not much, and therefore if things are copied very quickly, then maybe you don't need to innovate at all, you can outsource all the hard R&D work to the West, you have a lot of deadweight economic costs associated with that, and then if you can just steal all the intellectual property, it might even be like that , You know? aMore efficient way to innovate here, maybe you're six months late, but not that long, so I think that's, more or less, the way of thinking in a lot of the kind of contemporary racist technology, you know, ya You know.

If there is innovation in AI and I think most of the advances or almost all of the advances, I think, have happened in the West, but they are transmitted to China within six to twelve months, and that is not another origin for us. We, yes, are innovating, but that doesn't give you much now that you've said it. Actually, this is something else I have here, but I'm not going to take the time to go back and find out that one of the six paraphrased you. He said one of the Trump administration's most notable achievements is making everyone reconsider reassessing China.

How come Trump? We have several different ones. What is attracting all the attention is the trade policy that imposes tariffs. The Wall Street Journal takes a swipe at after another argued that we are hurting our sabab zelich in this morning's paper argued that we are doing much more harm to ourselves and our own trading partners than to China, so you also have, I think that you would know. More on this than me, but I think there are also intensifying intelligence efforts and law enforcement efforts around technology transfers, just kind of an open question: How is the Trump administration doing in terms not just of waking everyone up about the danger? of China, but the actual implementation of a specific policy.

Well, I think this is all still a work in progress. I think there has been a radical change in perception with China and in some ways in the way I think. American politics is sadly tribal, it's too polarized most of the time we have this trench warfare with the two parties fighting each other, no one makes much progress, when you really win on issues is when you get the other side to agree with you and me. I think that on the China issue, the Trump administration has gotten the entire center left to agree with it. I think maybe Biden is still the only pro-China candidate running and that looks like a catastrophic albatross for him in this year's Democratic primary.

I think everyone else is probably as anti-China or as tough on China as the president is, maybe they'll be even tougher if they come in because to some extent the Trump administration's policies are still moderate because we're trying to don't do it. hurt American businesses and I suspect the Democrats will be less concerned about businesses, I get that, but I think there's been a sea change in that, yeah, and of course the free trade theories are correct in theory. They are all kinds of things, but in the real world things are always very complicated and if you are negotiating a free trade agreement you want the person who negotiates it not to be a person who is a doctrinaire free trader because the doctrinaire free trader will believe that the worse It's the work you're shading, the better the work they're doing because if you know, even if you concede everything and get nothing on the other side, there are still gains from trade and that's what the free trade doctrine teaches.

He always tells you that you don't need to work very hard on these trade agreements and the United States. is really the only country in the world that believes you know you know Western Europe Japan has in effect much higher you know it has barriers to trade you have tariffs in the form of VAT taxes you know different is the percentage correct or across the board on products in Western Europe, Japan and, you know, there's a yes, if we got rid of all that, maybe it would be a more efficient kind of world, but obviously we've gotten to a very, very unbalanced point. you know the other thing, the other metaphor that I always give about this is that you know the basic flow is that we have, you know, five hundred billion dollars that we import from China, one hundred billion a year that we export to China and, in fact, four hundred $1 billion of cash flows uphill by being saved by poor Chinese farmers and invested in low-yielding US government bonds, so if you look at this from outer space, that alone tells you it's a Completely crazy regime, but that's a good thing.

What if they want their farmers to finance our government debt? Why not write the free trade argument correctly? But if we believed in globalization, yes, the way globalization is supposed to work is that less developed countries are supposed to converge, converge, grow faster, therefore get a higher return by investing in them and, Therefore, capital should be exported from developed countries to developing countries, that is the direction capital flowed around 1900, just when the UK had a current account surplus of four percent of GDP and the additional capital was we invested in Argentine bonds and Russian railways and all those different things and you know, globalization ended badly in 1914 at the end of the 19th century, but that at least made sense, yes, the money flowed in the right direction, this Maybe we are in a much crazier situation.

Chinese farmers should not save money and low-yielding US government bonds or negative-yielding European bonds, there should be an investment in China, where they should get a higher return. And so should we be okay? I want to come back to Trump in a moment, but first it's kind of a summary question about China's population of 1.3 billion people, the intense work ethic, the ability to deploy capital and infrastructure. Everyone says, including you, I've been told this. to China and the airports are stunning and the trains run fast and they are clean and efficient and of course they are now in the habit of rapid economic growth and in the long looming contest between the United States and China, what if we had democracy? free press innovation that keeps us six months ahead.

Are you optimistic? Well, it's very difficult to score. I'd say my pessimists are hoping you'll cheer me up on this. My neutrally pessimistic description is that you know if you wrote it down. I think both sides. I think they are going to lose. I think the United States thinks yes, it's kind of a declining power, but China doesn't think it's going to win. You know, you have a demographic collapse. Know? Anyone who makes money tries it. to get their capital out of the country, people are still, you know, if possible, trying to get out of China, and so, if you tried to do that, you know psychologically to qualify the two sides and say who believes in them.

They actually both think they're going to lose and, you know, even if you think you're going to win it doesn't mean you're going to win, although I think if you think it's a better way to do it. go to the life you think you're going to lose you'll see anyone if you think you're going to be on a test don't always get an A if you think you'll get an F you always get enough, okay And what's so confusing is I think both parties think they are going to lose. I told a lie. One more question about China.

A moment ago you said that much of the technological progress occurred in the 50s and 60s. was indeed driven by the Cold War by the clear military need to develop technology, which reminds me once again. I can't quote this, I can only paraphrase it, but there is something about George Kennan, one of the important diplomats and writers of the time, quite early. The Cold War, quite early on, George Kennan, in which he wrote that he welcomed the long coming struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union because it would bring out the best in the United States.

We had nothing to fear from this as long as we lived. Even our best traditions he hoped would be an invigorating struggle between China and the United States will help us technologically will it be good for our character? Well, the Cold War, you know, we won the Cold War, but there are a lot of modern ways that it could have been so I'm not really sure I'd rather not totally I'm not totally convinced of that but I think I do I think I think I think I think the future the future version of you know I think that the future that China represents is not a particularly desirable future.

I was surprised by this when I was in Western Europe a few months ago, I think I believe that the future is something that always has to happen. it has to be thought of in relatively concrete terms and it has to be different from the present and only something that is different from the present and very concrete can have any kind of charismatic force and looking at Western Europe I would say there are basically three plausible futures that are offered are : Number one is Islamic Sharia law and if you are a woman you can wear a burqa.

Number two is totalitarian China ai Allah, where computers track you in everything you do all the time and that's a little creepy. the Eye of Sauron, he's the Lord of the Rings reference, watching you at all times and then the third one is hyper-environmentalism where you drive a nice scooter and you recycle and even though I'm not, you know, I'm not a radical environmentalist. Think that if those are the three options, you can understand why the green movements won because those are the three visions of the future that we have well and the challenge on the conservative or libertarian side is to offer something that is a picture of the future that is different from these two very distant and one somewhat stagnant one is fine a note from a friend of mine young friend of mine who took this is a note he took in your class so this is not in your syllabus it is something you said in class that if you have economic growth you can solve most problems this brings us to Donald Trump, we have economic growth now 3% seems to have cooled down as we sit here talking maybe it will average this year it's something between one point eight two point four something like that but it's economic growth maybe we all relax well Reagan we got 6% growth in 83 84 85 we got something like 6% growth almost three years in a row so yeah 2 or 3% is definitely better than nothing.

The question about the Trump administration is: can we continue this for the next decade? And I think, in some ways, the president will be re-elected if people believe that this kind of growth thing is going to be sustainable for the next decade that's the future that he offers and that's it, you know, it's not that exciting. like Reagan, but it's still at 23% for a decade, we'll graduate, things will gradually get better. better, we will get through a lot of these challenges and from time to time the worry is if it's just this temporary problem driven by too much debt, too many things like that, then then Joe Biden or Elizabeth Sanders. begins Elizabeth Sanders by Elizabeth Warren, they might as well be Bernie, nor Elizabeth Sander are starting to look good, the socialists are right, you know, they shouldn't be underestimated, I mean, it's, you know, it's, there's a Marxist theory you know the marks of the time. because communism would come when interest rates would reach zero because the zero percent interest rate was assigned the capitalists no longer had any idea what to do with their money and therefore there were no good investments left, that's why the rates are zero and therefore all that could be done at that time was to redistribute capital, so I know that does not mean that percentage rates will lead us to socialism, but it is always something that I find alarming that the rates are so low. as they are the latest question about Donald Trump, do you expect to endorse him?

Yeah, I mean, I certainly won't endorse any of his opponents. Okay, a couple of final questions. We became friends while you were still a student here at Stanford. Imagine Imagine a young Peter Teal listening to us now. Peter Teal is a Stanford student at Stanford Law School, he practiced law at a big fancy firm in New York for seven months and then he said this is horrible, he came here and started investing in technology, but now Peter himself Thiel has the teal scholarships that are meant to attract really bright kids out of college and you just sat here telling us that the valley you returned to from New York and started investing in is not the valley of today, the Things have been going dark, so what path would you recommend to an 18 or 20 year old now?

Wow, you know these are always tough questions for UM to answer and I think even if I knew all these things, I'm not sure what I would have done. Of course, it's a bogus thought experiment. You know, the question, looking back, would be when I graduated in 1989. What are some of the different choices I would have made? Well, I think I should take the advice he would give. my old self from thirty years ago would be something like just thinking a lot more about the future not thinking about theeducation as a substitute for what you already know to try to think concretely about what you want to do and there is something in that type of the traced educational system that again presents itself as a way of thinking, but it is a substitute for thinking, it is a substitute for the future and yes, you have to, you probably don't want to do things that are hyper-competitive. that you know everyone is doing, you know, and I think there's always a question, do you know where the frontier is, where are some pockets of innovation where you can do some new things and not be and you know, in a competition? crazy, that was a hard question to answer, so I think it's harder now, but I think it's still the right question, okay, it's always the money, it's always the opposite intellectual question, tell me. something that's true that yeah, yeah, this is your favorite question, you know what's a good career that other people don't pursue, you know the politically incorrect career, engineering careers, petroleum engineering, so it's super lucrative and they're just um, ya you know, ideological reasons, there aren't enough people doing this, okay, that's a simple ideological answer, okay, so here's the last question, Peter, you're still investing but you're teaching at Stanford, you're answering phone calls. of the White House at this stage in your life, what are you trying to accomplish?

All your stuff, you're famous for saying you have a plan, you might not follow the plan, but having a plan is better than no plan, what are you thinking about the next five? years or ten years for you, well, you know, this is always, this always sounds too ambitious or too grandiose, but you know, I would like our society, our society, to go back to the future, to go back to a society is progressing in all these important dimensions and there is a very local way to do that, which is to invest in a futuristic technology company, so that is a small and manageable way to do this. and then there are our broader conversations, like the one we're having today, where we're trying to get people to think about this issue, but yeah, we should, we have to think about it, you know, the future will come.

We will be different from the present and if we don't think about it, it is much less likely to be a good future than if we work to create it. Peter Thiel. Thank you for your uncommon insight, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson. you