YTread Logo
YTread Logo

Peter Thiel, Leader of the Rebel Alliance

Mar 07, 2024
business figure and thinker author and ajo provocateur Peter Thiel of fieszole Italy uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I am Peter Robinson Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford and then from Stanford Law School a few months after joining one of the most prestigious law firms in New York decided not to practice law, returned to California and soon co-founded a tech startup after selling that startup PayPal. He became an investor and made the first outside investment in Facebook. Since then, he has invested in companies such as LinkedIn palantir and SpaceX. Peter Thiel has also become a public intellectual Peter welcome Peter thanks for having me things slowed down in the last quarter century of economic growth in the United States has slowed real wages have remained largely stagnant Moore's law of that computing power per dollar would effectively double 18 every 18 months have not been applied for years, instead we have a kind of Moore's law parity in the law of rooms, which is written more backwards and which with every new biography, the price of a new biotechnological drug doubles every seven years and in one field after another even Theoretical progress seems to have slowed down physics in the last 50 years, nothing comparable to the enormous creativity of the first half of the 20th century , from Einstein's general relativity in 1916 to the landing of a man on the Moon in 1969, just over half a century after the last time we put a man on the Moon in 1969. a man on the moon half a century ago Peter Thiel they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters what happened well I think you just gave a very, very good summary of what happened that somehow, um, we know that we had We had that kind of multifaceted progress and multidimensional in the first half of the 20th century where, if you define technology in the late 1960s, it would have meant rockets and aerospace and the Green Revolution and agriculture and you know, computers and new medicines and all kinds of things, whereas today , perhaps in the last quarter of a century, world technology is synonymous with information technology, that is, we have had continuous progress in this world of bits, Internet, computers, mobile Internet, maybe it even slowed down during the last decade or has at least become much less charismatic um but uh but there has been a sort of general feeling of stagnation, it's always a pretty complicated thing to talk about because you have to evaluate all these different things to know how to wait. um um, the smoothness of your iPhone versus the lack of a flying car, how do you measure and quantify all of these things?
peter thiel leader of the rebel alliance
I think the difficulty of quantifying it is one of the reasons we haven't talked about it enough. and that this has taken us so long to realize that we've actually been stuck that, you know, we think we've been an enchanted forest but we've been wandering in the desert for 40 or 50 years or something. So since you brought it up, how do you handle the counterargument, which is perfectly simple? Look, progress occurs and adjusts and begins, it is not fluid and continuous in all the fields through which it jumps and we have had a communications revolution, which if in this period of time we did well, we did not get cars flying ones, but we did get Dick Tracy watches, we got iPhones, we have the Internet, which means that here in Italy we are connected, you get the idea, that's the counterargument, well, well, again.
peter thiel leader of the rebel alliance

More Interesting Facts About,

peter thiel leader of the rebel alliance...

I think the challenge is to try to somehow quantify all of these things, how big they are, how significant they are, and I would say that at the level of politics, culture, macroeconomics, there is a deep sense of stagnation. Deep sense that the younger generation will not fare better than their parents. There is a kind of generational pact that has been broken. We still have progressivism in politics. We still have it as a word, but it's like we don't have it in anything. in other parts of our society and then I think even you know, I think the computer revolution, uh, Internet, was the one big exception and it's surprising how uncharismatic that has become in the last six or seven years, where, you know, even in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, um, the felt sense is that most people are somehow being left behind and it's not this utopian inclusive future at all, um again, I'm quoting you, this It's something you mentioned the other day, there's a feeling. that science and technology are a trap that humanity is setting for itself, there is always a question: do you know why the slowdown has occurred and I always hesitate to answer the question of why because these things are so overdetermined and can be things from sclerosis and excessive government regulation to, you know, the ways of educational institutions have been disrupted.
peter thiel leader of the rebel alliance
It may have become more difficult to discover new things in certain areas, and even if we build new particle colliders in physics, how many new particles are we finding? and so, um, these kinds of components are a wide range, but if I had to know if I had to anchor it in a single narrative, the one that I have come to firmly believe is that there is something about Science and technology are very dangerous and They feel like a trap in which many of these technologies have a very dark, violent and even apocalyptic dimension. The paradigmatic example is probably nuclear weapons or weapons that you know haven't made progress.
peter thiel leader of the rebel alliance
It didn't stop immediately after 1945, but it was kind of a quarter-century delayed reaction where, say, 1,970 people woke up one day and realized that we can blow up the entire world, 20 times over, that we're sending people to the moon to build these intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear thermonuclear bombs to the Soviet Union even faster and at some point what's the point and then I think what happened to nuclear technologies in so many other areas, you know, there's a question about AI is a fundamentally dangerous apocalyptic technology, there is a left-wing version of this with climate change, but perhaps you can generalize this with various other forms of environmental degradation.
I suggest you know that we should have a ticker parade for the scientists who invented the mRNA vaccine, so we're going to tell you about an impressive breakthrough in biotechnology and I think we're uncomfortable giving you a ticker tape because it's immediately adjacent to the mRNA vaccine. mRNA. It's um, we're immediately reminded, since we have that ticker-tape parade or if we were to have it, of the kind of gain-of-function research that was going on in the Wuhan lab and that's kind of an Orwellian word, maybe for uh for a biological weapons program and all of these things are deeply adjacent so the idea is that each of these technological and scientific advances that we used to get so excited about is a double edged sword at least at least it has and it's at least double-edged, you know, doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
I'm still, I'm still in the camp, you know, I'm still in the accelerationist camp. I'm still in deregulation. I still think it's a catastrophe that things have slowed down, but it's not just a failure, it's also what people have done because you know the alternatives were quite dangerous. and quite scary. I wish there was everything you know: we have made very little progress in cancer research. I wish there were more advances in biotechnology, but perhaps if we had had many advances, there would have been some. There are dangers with that and people were very afraid of those dangers.
There is a debate about nuclear power plants in Germany. You know, why did the nuclear power plants close? It's the dumbest thing ever, but there are so many of these nuclear power plants. you know they're dual use you know you create plutonium and then you can build you can build bombs and it's not that easy to separate the civilian uses from the military so the idea here is that we've slowed down for all sorts of little reasons that We can see an increase in regulation, this is fine, but there is a deep reason, almost at the level of the reptilian brain, something so deep that we do not often talk about it and we are not even aware of it.
Technology and science are terrifying. so if you're happy it slows down if you watch, you know, I used to when I was a teenager. I loved science fiction. I haven't read much science fiction in decades because it's all just dystopian. and depressing and maybe that's a reflection of our culture, but maybe it's also telling us something about the logic of science and technology that many of the paths to the future are extremely dangerous. You know, if you had a warp drive like they have in Star Trek, you know, you could send weapons at warp speed and then they would hit you faster than the speed of light and you wouldn't even see them? before they hit you, so it's all these kinds of plot holes in the original Star Trek universe that over time people discovered: "we'll go back to that China," wrote the late foreign policy analyst Henry Rowan in 1996 that year. important quote from 1996: when will China become a democracy?
The answer is around the year 2015. This prediction is based on China's continued and oppressive economic growth, which in turn fits the pattern of how freedom has grown in Asia and other parts of the world. cite economic growth first that democracy, it is not a far-fetched suggestion, worked in South Korea and then it worked in Taiwan, but of course the prediction that China would become a democracy in 2015 seems absurd today. Why didn't it work in China? You know, it's uh. It's again why questions are always difficult to answer. You know, one of the things I always have about China was that they learned from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and that they were going to have a perestroika without glozenus, they were going to have a certain liberalization of the economy without becoming a kind of free society. and open. um there were certainly a lot of indications well before 2015 that it wasn't trending that way. a big firewall around China where the big US internet companies had no effective presence in China 2010 2005 2000 it was pretty well walled off and you know if you ask people in Silicon Valley Around 2005 In 2010 it still existed a Fukuyama law of inevitability that, you know, China would have to open up to American tech companies.
It wasn't obvious why that was true even in 2005 or 2010, but yeah, but I think I think in some ways there's always a question about how much of these things are personal or structural, so there's a personal version where you can say that there's something you know unusually crazy about G, which is the second coming of Stalin or Genghis Khan or something like this, and then there's maybe, but maybe it's maybe it's not personal to you, maybe it's just structural, which China could be moderately free, not completely totalitarian, as long as the economy grew eight percent a year and when that slowed down and all things exponential eventually slowed down.
You actually had to clamp down a lot more than once China grows at three or four percent a year and the growth is uneven, it will actually become more authoritarian, more totalitarian, something like that, let me try two quotes about you. , the historian. Stephen Cotkin, whom he meets when asked to name his main find after a lifetime studying Soviet archives. he cites that they were communists. close appointment with President Xi Jinping of China. 2019 and which, from what I can see from looking at the Internet, American analysts discovered in 2020. Xi Jinping in 2013 in the Central Committee, there are people who believe that communism is an unattainable hope, but the facts have repeatedly told us that the Analysis of Marx and Engel is not obsolete capitalism is destined to become extinct close quote so in the conflict with China to what extent are we facing another great power struggle but this was always the question with the Soviet Union right, oh, it's just another big no, aren't they? they are different because they are communists, same question for China, yes I would agree with that that we should take it more seriously at face value, right, they say they are communists, we should take that same argument, should we?
I should take that at least at face value, there are probably many sub-questions one can ask, so maybe not strictly Marxist but strictly Leninist, so it's a kind of one-party totalitarian structure, maybe there are elements which are also fascists, you know, the Prague Spring was communism with a human face and maybe China is fascism with a communist space or something, um and then of course there are some ways in which it is also different from fascism and communism in early 20th century forms or both fascism and communism were fundamentally youth movements um uh and uh and then China is a kind of gerontocracy and therefore it's a kind of distinctive.
I don't know, it's some kind of half gerontocracyfascist half communist uh, it's um, you know, it's, it's strange, it's strangely much less idealistic or ideological, I think, than the Soviet Union. It strikes me that people probably don't really believe in any of these ideas. I certainly have it forced in a very strange way, so there are certainly a lot of things that are unique and different, but, still, taking it as a communist country at face value, we could do a lot worse than that, oh, okay. Great strategy since at least during the Civil War, the United States relied on superior material.
Grant simply collapsed during World War II. We produced thousands of airplanes, tanks and ships. The Kaiser Shipyard in Oakland was producing one ship per day. If that doesn't work against China, we can't produce them, we can't spend them. Our only hope is that the argument is to out-innovate them. I've even heard historian Andrew Roberts say that the future of civilization will be decided in Silicon Valley, so on the one hand, in the next conflict with China, we need innovation. There is at least one argument that I find compelling, but we ourselves have, to some extent, as you just suggested, blocked innovation.
This is a serious problem. um, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of There's a lot of different ways you can describe it. I'm concerned that if you frame it as just a conflict between the United States and China that's almost counterproductive, where you probably know that China has four times the population, so we'd have to really out-innovate them and they'd have to block them from stealing. none of our innovations to win a conflict in which the population is so unbalanced four to one. You probably already know a big part of the question for the next few decades is more or less how the strategic map of the world is formed and, you know, you know, maybe China can beat the United States, but it probably can't beat the whole world and there's kind of a question about whether if there's something about, you know, communism in China, which is, you know, it's very, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's , it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, in a certain way, it is a nationalist type of socialism, true, and uh, and it is extremely racist, it is extremely xenophobic. and there's something about that that I don't think they can beat the whole world.
Well, in the form of the conflict it is correct to identify China as the adversary. China is the enemy, but it is not just the United States. We really have no choice. We have to think in terms of the West or in terms of as many allies as we can bring together. How do you describe it? I think it's both. You know that they are unilateral and multilateral. I think the Trump Administration was right that we had to try to do things unilaterally because multilateral approaches were too slow. I think the Biden Administration is right that at some point you know you also have to try to do things more multilaterally, but I think there's some kind of logic to this and, you know, if you look at the Ukraine conflict with Russia, there was obviously an incredible mistake that Western Europe made to get tangled up like that. closely with Russia, you know, with the pipelines, with denuclearization in Germany, and so, then, the question you have to ask is: Aren't we too entangled with China throughout the Western world?
I think in free trade. I'm not in favor of tariffs, but I would make an exception because you know, our only massive geopolitical and ideological rival, okay, our home state, California, your homes, your home state, my home state, now the resource curse . I'm just going to quote from Wikipedia here is the resource curse the resource curse is the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources, such as fossil fuels, having less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries. countries with fewer resources. close quote in which he spoke recently at the national conservatism conference in Miami I think about the resource curse in California, I explain that well, if we say that technology is the oil of the 21st century, there is a strange juxtaposition where California has been, You know, it has these jets. -like companies that just generate, you know, enormous wealth, enormous profits, a decent number of pretty well-paying jobs and then combine it with this, you know, pretty bad form of social political governance, where you would never do anything. like that and it's that juxtaposition I was I was I was trying to make sense and there's like a version of San Francisco where you know that in terms of GDP per capita it has to be one of the richest cities in the world and then it's it's completely discovered and of In some ways these things are, it's not a paradox, but these things are actually deeply connected, so you made the point, but I do, the only thing I would object to the definition with is that California is not poor, it is, is.
It's still fantastic, you know, there are 40 million people in California, 82 million in Germany, 125 million in Japan today, California's GDP is about the same as Germany or Japan, the average person in California earns the double that of the average person in Germany, three times more. Like the average person in Japan, there's something about this that worked pretty well from a macroeconomic standpoint and then worked catastrophically from a governance standpoint of failing public schools. Of the Rockets government workers that you mentioned, you mentioned a couple, I mean, you've worked pretty well, it's worked historically well, there's never been massive wealth creation for so much wealth and so little time, as far as I value it, if you do.
We value by GDP. It's still working pretty well, yeah, if we evaluate it by the quality of the government, you know, that's right, it's pretty screwed up, you know, the resource course analogy that I used is, you know, if we compare it to the oil countries, It's not the worst. It is not the best, it is not as good as Norway, it is not as bad as Equatorial Guinea. I think you should consider it more or less on par with Saudi Arabia. You know, Saudi Arabia has a crazy, crazy Wahhabi ideology. California has a woke ideology.
Wahhabism for Saudi Arabia is More or less like Wokism in California, you mentioned that one aspect of bad governance is inflated real estate values. Explain how it works. You have to think about it like you have to think about the curse of an oil state or a technological state. huge gush of wealth and then it is redistributed very inefficiently and one inefficient vehicle is to overpaid government workers. The average government worker in California makes twice as much as the average private sector job in California is by far the highest ratio in the US, I mean. Texas, Florida, the average government job is paid 10 to 15 percent more than the average private sector worker in California, it's twice as much, including the very generous retirement benefits that they receive and then the second way, um, that Technological wealth is redistributed very inefficiently. it's through all these kinds of crazy zoning laws where you know if you live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley and you're not in the tech industry, but you know that your landlord bought an apartment and you make sure that the zoning laws never change.
Nothing new is ever built and, you know, an enormous amount leads us to a quasi-government type of real estate sector. Overall, the cost of living in California is about 40 percent higher than the rest of the nation and the cost. real estate is one hundred percent higher, what does that mean? Again, I'm quoting you, basically, you have to replace the middle class, which means they just move out, sure, I think it was Carol Quigley, the Georgetown historian who, around 1960, said. which you know, the Republicans are the party of the middle class, the Democrats are the party of everyone else and, um, and probably the most middle class electorate left in California are government workers and if you think about teachers or people like that , are not natural Republican voters. um, if that's the microeconomic or political economy of California, something like that, it's no surprise that it's a d plus 30 state, it's not, I mean, it shouldn't surprise us at all, um, so this brings us to the politics. , you argue that the Golden State poses a problem for each of the two parties, Democrats and Republicans.
Democrats first quote it from the Democratic side. My reading is that everyone knows that Democrats have no choice but to somehow pretend that they can make the California model work for the country. as a whole, but it won't, it's like you know, if you do, I know I'll go back to Saudi Arabia algae if you said it's the key to solving all the problems in the entire Islamic world, I just need to be like Saudi Saudi, that's absurd because it's not the Wahhabi ideology, it's the right of oil money and similarly, if you know if California, if it's someone like I don't know Newsom or Kamala Harris saying it's someone you already know. hyper-woke identity politics political correctness to the nth degree that's not what makes California successful, it's big tech companies, they're at the scale they're at, you know, you can't scale them by a factor of eight to the country as a whole, so it doesn't escalate to the major Democratic presidential candidates in an unforeseen way as we speak, you have Joe Biden Kamala Harris Gavin Newsom quoting Peter Thiel California is strong enough to crush everyone else in the Democratic party, you're assuming Joe Biden won't run well.
California is strong enough to crush everyone else in the Democratic Party, meaning you have two Californians at the top, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, but it's probably not strong enough to be a very compelling agenda for the country. Yes, you just articulated my entire argument. I don't have much to add to that, but I think that yeah, well, I think the alternatives to California, if we were to list them, it's kind of like, um, okay. It's Elizabeth Warren, you know, the college, the crazed college professor who's like, you know, a bad 17th century Puritan minister who doesn't go to work.
It's, you know, it's Tim Ryan, the fake blue-collar guy from Ohio, where no. you care about blue-collar workers, so there's a Midwest thing that's not going to work. You probably know some kind of crazed socialist thing like Bernie Sanders or AOC who is dead on arrival and so, yeah, somehow, in some sense, California is doing better and will therefore outperform everything within the Democratic Party. and then, my speculative predictions, when it hits the country as a whole, it's going to be surprisingly deficient. I quote again, probably the temptation on the Republican side is that they will think it's good enough to just say they're not California, this nihilistic denial probably isn't good enough, let's qualify that again and this is speculating on 2024 politics, which is pretty far in the future, it's pretty far in the future and so far in the future, but I think I think it's likely that if it's not enough for the Democrats, it's probably enough for the Republicans to win the 2024 presidential election.
I wish they did more. I would like them to win for substantive reasons where you don't just have a tactical victory, you don't just have another one-term president, but I can understand the temptation is to not even try that. To go with you, you know we're not going to let this Californication of the rest of the country happen and uh, maybe that's enough, but I'd like more, but I'm not even completely questioning the tactical judgment, so come on. talk for a second if we could about what should be more here when I was in college let me take you let me take you on a little travel log here when I was in college we were worried about getting a job and there were both sessions in the dorms about the Soviet Union about how Vietnam went wrong and so on Ronald Reagan gets along and gets elected in 1980 and both problems are solved an economic expansion begins and it goes on it continues with some setbacks but fundamentally it continues for 25 years and we win the Cold War and then in In my generation, I think there's a perfectly understandable impulse to say, wait a minute, why don't we try that again, but in the younger generation, Ross Dow, he has this line that he keeps using zombie Reaganism, so I hear that. and I say, of course, principles that must be adapted to the problems of the moment, but to what extent is the new generation of the right and center-right tired of hearing about Ronald Reagan in the same way as the Democrats of the 60s?
I'm tired of hearing about FDR, is it purely generational or is there some sense in which tax cuts reduce regulation, stronger defenses somehow don't fit the circumstances of the moment? Well, I think I would like to get back to growth and I would like to get back to growth, I mean, it's not inflationary, it's not cancerous and that's not, you know, apocalyptic in thekind of bad tech version and this is a lot easier said than done, but that's what I think we should figure out how. to do this in detail and certainly there's probably some tax cuts that are part of this there's a lot of deregulation that's part of this um and it's a pretty difficult thing to do there's um you know there's certainly ways that I would like to see We would take China's challenge more seriously, but we don't, this super simple thing, you know, there was a way that the Soviet Union was motivating. in a way that China wasn't because the Soviet Union, even in the darkest hours Dark Cold War 79 Carter Malaise, most of us thought we were eventually going to beat the Soviet Union and, uh, the China piece is, it's, it's harder to see how to do it. which is not entirely up to us part of this you know uh depends on other countries working with us part of this part of this uh will be helped by you know China is just going completely crazy internally um and uh and so I'm No, I'm not I'm sure the exact same formula will work well, so first we do what we know how to do, but look, look, I'm pretty open.
Don't know. I do not know exactly. what you're supposed to do in terms of having a more concrete agenda I thought you weren't going to think about a blank page here where you were going I think I think you know I think we have to look I think you know that always I always think that, ya You know, the right in general is a very heterogeneous Rebel Alliance, it's like we have diversity on our side, it's like it's Star Wars, it's Chewbacca and Princess Leia and we have, you know. some people C-3PO looking like Asperger's, the

rebel

just Han Solo, it's the whole, it's the Rebel Alliance and you know the other side is in unison, it's the Imperial Stormtroopers and there are a lot of disadvantages for the Rebel Alliance, but one a advantage is that yes, we don't have, we don't have to have all the answers right now, we can admit that we haven't figured it out and we're going to have a vigorous debate in the years to come.
To understand it, we are talking a couple of weeks before the elections. This will air a day or two after the election. Can I ask you? Did you support his friends Blake Masters who is now running for the Senate in Arizona for when this series is known? result and JD Vance is now running for the Ohio Senate for when these bugs will know why those two are there, you know them, they're friends, that's an element of who I am, I guess, but was there something distinctive about whether they seem like you? they like the future in some specific way that the Republican Party should pursue, make sure there's a generational component, they would be the first, they would be the first, uh, millennial Republican senators, there's a way that they've thought very deeply about these issues. .
There's a way that I think they're not overly dogmatic, you know, I often think that we have, you know, I often say that we have two parties in this country, there's an evil particle, the Democrats and the stupid party, the Republicans. and I like it. both uh um JD Manson Blake Masters because they don't fit neatly into either of those two parts okay a couple of quotes here just to follow what needs to be done and take it to one maybe a higher level or two. or one or two conceptual points above two quotes Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Dineen quotes liberalism has failed he is talking about classical liberalism here the liberalism of individual freedom liberalism has failed not because it fell short but because it was true to itself it has failed because it has succeeded the founders could not foresee that their atomistic philosophy would act as a solvent in our civic institutions that is quote one here is quote two Author George will be the right question for conservatives what are you looking for to preserve the answer Adequately we seek to preserve the American founding?
George Will let's go back to the founding principles Patrick Dineen let's recast the country, let's revoke the original founding. They both seem too abstract to me. You know, there are things in them that sound right like observations or criticisms, but how to nail it down. I don't know how we get back to the foundation if there's going to be a new foundation that's even more ambitious, you know, the majority of six conservatives or originalists on the Supreme Court, um sure, but they're mostly just, they're mostly just keeping things the way they are the way they are so it's uh yeah it's better than the alternative um look look danine is right that in a sense classical liberalism has failed.
I always like to say that a classical liberal in 2022 is like a Marxist supporter. in 1982, where were these professors who 40 years ago said that they knew that true communism has never been proven and it is equally wrong when classical liberals in 2022 say that true liberalism has never been proven and that there is a kind of um Golden Age which we can go back to and even if we did, wouldn't we just cycle and repeat? And just, you know, if we went back to the 50's we'd get 68 again and then something was wrong in the 50's or there was something wrong with the foundation if it went that wrong then that's why I'm more on Danine's side than the George Wills side um, I think uh, you know, the place I always come back to is me.
I think we have to think a lot about these issues of technology and science, because they are great drivers of modernity. I don't think we can turn our backs on them, we have to find some way to move forward with this. trajectory um and and not going crazy, not atomizing the entire society, not not self-destructing it, but no, I don't think you can go back in science and technology, but that's the uh, those are the sets of Questions that I would ask about , would do a lot more and where I suspect both Danine and Will are weak on the details.
Well, February 1946. Diplomat George Cannon, then stationed in Moscow, sends a telegram of about 5,000 words to the State Department known to history. Since The Long Telegram came out, we are right after the end of World War II, right at the very beginning of the Cold War, and Canon understands everything in those five thousand words, the nature of the Soviet Union, where it is strong, where is weak and then exposes the policy of containment that remains fundamental American policy. Some presidents are faithful to it. Others try to move away from it, but it remains the fundamental policy during the four and a half decades of the Cold War.
Why hasn't there been a long telegram about China why are the questions always so difficult to answer, eh, but, I'll speculate that if not, we haven't received the memo, it will have been lost or it won't arrive soon and my theory The question of why there hasn't been one and there won't be one is that, um, people don't have a good long-term strategy for the US, how do you know, how do you speed things up, how do you get ahead? China they don't know how to fill in the details, you know, maybe leave China aside, maybe you know that a correct broad strategy for the US is to have a gradual withdrawal from the world and you could never.
Articulate that if that is the right strategy because withdrawal becomes a route and therefore if the right strategy is for the United States not to overextend itself and to commit to the kind of global empire that we are, we are committed to articulating that you can I can't really express that it's hard to follow a policy when you can't talk about it with each other and if you can't talk about it, maybe it's even worse, so it is, but I think there's, I think my placeholder is that, there's something about the best policy, um, that if it's articulated, the articulation itself will prevent us from executing it properly and maybe there's some way to contain China and, um, and probably, um, you know, we're better off just finding a way to do it. that without articulating it yeah, okay um I heard you the other day you said that we are now between Silla and keryptus narrow greek mythology narrow straight Cilla is a six-headed monster over here and coryptus is the whirlpool here in Greek in Greek myth: you had to navigate between these two, each of whom was mortal.
You described Ursula and the Caribbean, actually, and this is what you said in a recent article you wrote. The stable deterrence structures of the Cold War appear much more unstable as more countries acquire nuclear weapons. It seems a lot easier now than at any time since World War II to sleepwalk into all-out conflict, so the prospect of Armageddon, let's call it Cilla and here's Kryptus, endless stagnation and quote from the same newspaper we've become attached to in our soft and comfortable ways but we don't want to name what they are protecting against how bad of course what I have in mind is the war in Ukraine how bad the push is Cilla the prospect of Armageddon um well what I mean is that it's always nuanced and complicated is that it's pretty bad, but we also have to weigh it against the alternative and the extreme alternative is the kind of soft totalitarianism, a society that's just locked down or nothing happens, you know, if you were to use , you know, um, you know, the biblical terminology, it's the Antichrist, the totalitarian world state and um, and there's always a sense where I think we should be at least as afraid of the Antichrist as we are of Armageddon and uh. and then, certainly, my counterintuition is that people are much more worried about Armageddon than they are about the One World State and, uh, I would like us to at least worry about them equally, to worry about both Priscilla and Charybdas. . elaborate a little uh well well I think it's all these different versions but there's a recent article about Armageddon that we talked about in the opening well the other one is we look for science and we look for technology and everything could explode in a plant nuclear and then, yeah, we're going to elaborate on it, yeah, so if you don't, if we're going to stop that, you can't just stop it locally, you have to stop it globally, you have to. make sure all the scientists stop it, you need to make sure they are being watched around the world, if there is any small piece of computer code that can cause a runaway AGI, we need to have surveillance technology installed on every laptop to do I'm sure that people are not typing keys to code the AGI that is going to destroy the world or, if you can, you know, you know the nuclear weapons issue of the '50s and '60s, what came with this multinational atomic energy agency that was going to the international atomic energy agency was going to monitor all these countries and a supranational structure with real teeth was needed and you know, practically we ended up with something in between we ended up with, you know, some kind of global super state.
It was never that much, maybe it wasn't enough to completely stop Armageddon, it was never enough to be totalitarian, but those have been the bad alternatives for 77 years and we need to find some way. between good and lockdown We're afraid it's getting too much so we just talk about yeah, I'm surprised we almost only talk about Armageddon and stuff and we never talk about the uh, um, the kind of regulatory political blockade, uh, that's . the practical alternative where everyone, yes, everyone is afraid of their own shadow, so if we say it, I'm trying to bring growth back to this growth, pursuing growth means, in one way or another, having the courage to risk a certain degree of new innovation, uh, we unleash technology and science again to produce growth, right, yeah, okay, and why us, you and me?, uh, because we've known each other for a long time and we think alike in some pretty basic ways, we both say growth and assume that's good, but let's make that explicit why we need growth, what effect that has on American society and why is that what happens to Americans or the other way around? , what happens to us in the absence of growth, well, we already knew the club.
The Club of Rome wrote this book called The Limits to Growth in 1972. That was exactly 50 years ago and it basically said that growth couldn't continue and so we had to get used to a world of zero growth. of zero population growth and a world of zero economic growth and um and there are all these ways that his agenda has been widely implemented over the last 50 years and um and you know in some ways maybe it has stabilized the world but it has also been profoundly destabilizing, um, you know, it has led to a world that is extremely nihilistic, um, it has led to a kind of cultural disintegration of the middle class where you think about the middle classes, the people who think that their children will do better than themselves, um and and there are a lot of ways in which the 0 growth world hasn't worked as well and so, yeah, my intuition is that it's not just stable.
This is where I disagree with the doubt that it's not just decadent or just stable, um. It's not just entropic, it's that ultimately you know ultimately there's a catastrophe on both sides, so there's an Armageddon catastrophe if you have unfettered technology and science where no one pays attention and people just push buttons. and see what happens, but there is also always therisk of a centralized totalitarian catastrophe on the other side, which is, uh, what is the natural solution. How do you know how to stop all science and technology? It's just that you need a world state with real teeth, that is. within our reach the understanding of the humanities says that AI emerges well it is already an answer to the nuclear problem it is an answer to environmental challenges it is an answer to the challenge of AI that is and I would simply say that it is not a good answer, so stick with growth just for a moment more if we close ours if you were to close your eyes and just listen listen to the dulcet tones of Peter Thiel a pro-growth Republican president will be elected in 2024 what's different about what's different about growing and what's different Depending on The Temper or the mood of the country, could we hope that economic growth will ease the bitterness of our politics is what happens for sure?
I think that if it had growth it would be non-inflationary, non-cancerous, non-apocalyptic, it would solve all our problems and do you know now? I don't know how realistic it is or how easy it is to get there, but certainly, you know the extreme kind of Malthusian zero-sum of stagnation and extreme polarization. I'm not sure it would evaporate completely, but uh, you know, it would shrink significantly and no growth. I'm certainly very convinced of the negative version of this in which without growth you're not going to solve polarization, you're not going to solve nihilism, or anger. one of those things is good last question, although it will take me a moment to prepare it Franklin Roosevelt we have an appointment with Destiny John Kennedy we will bear any burden we will oppose any enemy again and again in the history of the United States we have met It requires showing courage as citizens and as a nation because really the choice has been to be brave or lose.
George Cannon it is 1953, at the beginning of the Cold War. I mentioned Kenon a moment ago he is the author of The Long Telegram. This is from a book he wrote at the beginning of the Cold War, 1953. The careful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's defiance; rather he will experience a certain gratitude toward Providence, which has made possible our security as a nation. We depend on us to come together and accept the responsibilities of moral and political

leader

ship that history clearly intends us to carry out well. What do you think might be in this if this is the moment we're in?
There is Armageddon and there is stagnation and a world that drags on. government and we have they are there we have no choice but to be brave can there be something ennobling in this? Can we recover again? Well, it's, I'm feeling adventurous, well, it's, uh, it's certainly something like this. The frame is correct. It matters what we do it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's a world in which we do need courage we need um we need some kind of agency the decisions we make really matter you know it's you know I I don't think you know yeah Armageddon and The World Government are exclusive exclusive possibilities, they are not exhaustive.
I think there are some you know, some narrow or not very wide, in the middle, but there's a way and, uh, uh, there's a lot to do there. It matters what we do, yes, obviously, it matters a lot Peter Thiel, thank you for the rare insight into him, the Hoover institution, and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.

If you have any copyright issue, please Contact