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The Portal Episodes List

2020-02-24T15:57:32Z

Jmank88: update episode 0 link

[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal The Portal Podcast Homepage]

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! # !! Guest !! Title
|-
| 22 || Greenfield, Ben || [[22: Ben Greenfield - Wheat From Chaff in Human Fitness]]
|-
| 21 || Mathews, Ashley (aka Riley Reid) || [[21: Ashley Mathews (aka Riley Reid) - The mogul and brains behind America's Sweetheart]]
|-
| 20 || Penrose, Sir Roger || [[20: Sir Roger Penrose - Plotting the Twist of Einstein’s Legacy]]
|-
| 19 || Weinstein, Bret || [[19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC]]
|-
| 18 || || [[18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020]]
|-
| 17 || Khachiyan, Anna || [[17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”]]
|-
| 16 || Cowen, Tyler || [[16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized]]
|-
| 15 || Lisi, Garrett || [[15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself]]
|-
| 14 || Tsai, London || [[14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians]]
|-
| 13 || Kasparov, Garry || [[13: Garry Kasparov - Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics]]
|-
| 12 || Buterin, Vitalik || [[12: Vitalik Buterin - The Ethereal Prince and His Virtual Machine]]
|-
| 11 || Harris, Sam || [[11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends]]
|-
| 10 || Lindahl, Julie || [[10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree]]
|-
| 9 || Callen, Bryan || [[9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise]]
|-
| 8 || Yang, Andrew || [[8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore]]
|-
| 7 || Easton Ellis, Bret || [[7: Bret Easton Ellis - The Dark Laureate of Generation X]]
|-
| 6 || Willink, Jocko || [[6: Jocko Willink - The Way of the Violent Intellectual]]
|-
| 5 || Wolpe, Rabbi || [[5: Rabbi Wolpe - “So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast...”]]
|-
| 4 || Kuran, Timur || [[4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception]]
|-
| 3 || Herzog, Werner || [[3: Werner Herzog]]
|-
| 2 || || [[2: What Is The Portal?]]
|-
| 1 || Thiel, Peter || [[1: Peter Thiel]]
|-
| 0 || || [[0: Welcome to The Portal]]
|}

{{stub}}

Welcome to The Portal

2020-02-24T15:56:54Z

Jmank88: Jmank88 moved page Welcome to The Portal to 0: Welcome to The Portal: was inconsistent with others

#REDIRECT [[0: Welcome to The Portal]]

0: Welcome to The Portal

2020-02-24T15:56:54Z

Jmank88: Jmank88 moved page Welcome to The Portal to 0: Welcome to The Portal: was inconsistent with others

The Portal is hosted by Eric Weinstein. Subscribe in iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/2d9b9c66-5288-4643-afa4-55e68dd570f0 Listen to Episode 0] [[ep1 | Next Episode]]

[[All Episodes]]

0: Welcome to The Portal

2020-02-24T15:55:35Z

Jmank88: initial version

1: Peter Thiel

2020-02-24T15:55:02Z

Jmank88: add prev button

Welcome to The Portal. Episode 1 is a conversation with Peter Thiel. Please subscribe to The Portal anywhere you listen to podcasts, and leave us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts.

[[ep0 | Prev Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/6740c1c3-c9d2-4ecc-a3df-0ed32f0ddba0 Listen to Episode 1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Watch Episode 1] [[ep2 | Next Episode]]

[[All Episodes]]

== Introduction ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello and welcome to The Portal's first episode. Today, I'll be sitting down with Peter Thiel. Now, if you've been following me on Twitter, or perhaps as a podcast guest on other podcasts, you may know that I work for Thiel Capital. But one of the things that people ask me most frequently is, given that you are so different than your boss and friend Peter Thiel, how is it the two of you get along? What is it that you talk about? Where do you agree and disagree? Now, oddly, Peter and I both do a fair amount of public speaking. But I don't believe that we've ever appeared in public together and very few people have heard our conversations. What's more, he almost never mentions me, and I almost never mentioned him in our public lives.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So hopefully this podcast will give some indication of what a conversation is like with somebody who I find one of the most interesting and influential teachers of our time; somebody who has influenced all sorts of people in Silicon Valley involved with technology and inventing tomorrow, and who is often not seen accurately, in my opinion, by the commentariat and the regular people who opine as pundits in the world of science and technology.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I hope you'll find Peter as fascinating as I do. Without further ado, this is the first episode of The Portal. Thanks for joining us.

== Personal Backgrounds ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello and welcome. You found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I think this is our first interview show to debut, and I'm here with my good friend and employer, Mr. Peter Thiel. Peter, welcome to The Portal.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, Eric, thanks for having me on your program.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, this is a great honor. One of the things I think is kind of odd is that lots of people know that I work for you and many people know that we're friends, but even though we both do a fair amount of public speaking, I don't think we've ever appeared any place in public together. Is that your recollection as well?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I can't think of a single occasion. So this proves we're not the same person.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' We're not the same person, yeah. You are not my alter ego. But on that front, I think it is kind of an odd thing for me. I mean, we met each other, I think when I was in my late 40s, and if you'd ever told me that the person who would be most likely to complete my thoughts accurately would be you, I never would have believed it, never having met you. We have somewhat opposite politics. We have very different life histories. How do you think it is that we've come to share such a lot of thinking? I mean, I have to say that a lot of my ideas are cross pollinated with yours. So you occur in a lot of my standard riffs. How do you think it is that we came to different conclusions, but share so much of a body of thought?

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I'm always hard pressed to answer that, since the conclusions all seem correct to me. And it's always mysterious why it feels like we're the outliers and we're among the very few people that reach some of these conclusions about the relative stagnation in science and technology, the ways in which this is deranging or culture, our politics, our society, and then how we need to try to find some bold ways out; some bold ways to find a new portal to a different world.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think there are different ways the two of us came at this. I feel like you got to some of these perspectives at a very early point, sort of the mid 1980s, that something was incredibly off. I probably got there in the early, mid-90s, when I was from this track law firm job in New York city. And somehow everything felt like it was more like a Ponzi scheme. It wasn't really going towards the future everyone had promised you, in the elite undergraduate and law school education I had gone through.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, yeah. So I think there was sort of a point, we got to these insights. But it's still striking how out of sync they feel with so much of our society, even in 2019.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, I mean, that's a very striking thing for me. And it's also something that's frustrated me. Sometimes, when I look forward to you being interviewed, it often feels to me that so much time is spent on the initial question,"Are we somewhat stagnating in science and technology," that rather than assuming that as a conclusion - which I think we can make a pretty convincing argument that there has been a lot of stagnation - it seems to me that a lot of these conversations hang at an earlier level. And so one of the things that I was hoping to do in this, which is, I think, your second long form podcast. You did Dave Rubin's show sometime ago ... Is to sort of presuppose some of the basics that people will be familiar with who've been following either one of us, or both of us, and to get to the part of the conversation that I think never gets explained and discussed, because people are always so hung up at the initial frame issue.
What is the dominant narrative?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So with your indulgence, let's talk a little bit about what you and I see, and any differences that we might have, about this period of time that we find ourselves in, in 2019. What would you say is the dominant narrative before we get to what might be our shared counter narrative?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, you know, the dominant narrative is probably fraying and has been fraying for some time, but it is something like we're in a world of generally fast scientific and technological progress. Things are getting better all the time. There's some imbalances that maybe need to be smoothed out. There's some corner case problems. Maybe there's some dystopian risks, because the technology is so fast and so scary that it might be destructive. But it's a generally accelerationist story. And then there's some sort of micro-adjustments within that, that one would have to make.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There's are all sorts of ways that I think it's fraying. I think 2008 was a big watershed moment, but that still what's largely been holding together. And then there's sort of different institutions. You can look at the universities where there's a tracked thing. It's costing more every year, but it's still worth it. It's still an investment in the future. And this was probably already questionable in the 1980s, 1990s. College debt in the United States in 2000 was $300 billion. Now it's around in $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. And so there's a way in which the story was shaky 20 years ago and today is much shakier. It's still sort of holding together somehow.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So in this story, in essence, the great dream is that your children will become educated, they will receive a college education, they will find careers. And in this bright and dynamic society, they can look forward to a future that is brighter than the future that previous generations look forward to.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, so I think ... Now again, I think people are hesitant to actually articulate it quite that way, because that already sounds not quite true to-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, to your point, they've been adding epicycles for some time.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so it's a ... Maybe it's a bright future, but it's really different from the parents, because we can't quite know. And they have all these new devices. They have an iPhone and they can text really fast on the iPhone. We can't even understand what the younger generation is doing. So maybe it's better on ... But "better" has sort of an objective scale. Maybe it's just different and unmeasurable, but better in sort of an unmeasurable way.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So there sort of are ways it's gotten modified but, that would still be a very powerfully intact narrative. And then that there are sort of straight forward things we can be doing. The system's basically working, and it's basically going to continue to work. And they're sort of a global version of this. There's a US version. There's an upper middle class US version. There's a lot of different variations on this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So it always strikes me that one of the things that you do very well is that you're willing - and you know, you're famously a chess player - you're willing to make certain sacrifices in order to advance a point. And in this case, I think you and I would both agree that there's certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story more than the general economy, and that you have to kind of give those stories their due before you get to see this new picture. Where do you think the future has been relatively more bright in recent years?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, again I sort of date this era of relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970s, so I think it's been close to half a century that we've been in this era of seriously slowed progress. Obviously, a very big exception to this has been the world of bits: Computers, internet, mobile internet, software. And so Silicon Valley has somehow been this dramatic exception. Whereas the world of atoms has been much slower for something like 50 years.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And you know, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, almost all engineering disciplines, in retrospect, were really bad fields to go into. People already knew, at the time, you shouldn't go into nuclear engineering. AeroAstro was a bad idea. but you know, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, all these things were bad fields. Computer science would've been a very good field to go into. And that's been sort of an area where there's been tremendous growth.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So that's sort of the signature one that I would cite. There are questions about how healthy it is, at this point, even within that field. So, you know, the iPhone is now looking the same as it did seven, eight years ago. So that's the iconic invention. Not quite so sure. And so there's been sort of a definitely a change in the tone even within Silicon Valley in the last five, six years on this. But that had been one that was very, very decoupled.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The decoupling itself had some odd effects, where if you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of bits, then the people who are in those parts of the economy that have more to do with atoms will feel like they're being left behind. And so there was something, there was something about the tech narrative that had this very ... Didn't necessarily feel inclusive, didn't feel like everybody was getting ahead. And one of the ways I've described it is that we live in a world where we've been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive, we don't have the transporter, we can't re-engineer matter in sort of this cornucopian world where there is no scarcity. And how good is a society where you have a well-functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, that's incredibly juicy. I mean, one of the ways that I attempted to encode something, which, in part I got from you, was to say, "Of course your iPhone is amazing. It's all that's left of your once limitless future," because it's the collision of the communications and the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue. And I date the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972, '73, '74. It's really quite sharp in my mind. Is it that way in yours?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I'd say 1968, people still ... The narrative progress seemed intact. By '73, it was somehow over. So somewhere in that five-year period. The 1969 version was we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and you know, Woodstock starts three weeks later. And maybe that's one way you could describe the cultural shift. You can describe it in terms of the oil shocks in 1973 at the back end. With the benefit of hindsight, there were things that were already fraying by the late 1960s, so the environment was getting dramatically worse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You have the graduate movies, you should go into plastics. I think that was 1968 or '69. So there were sort of things where the story was fraying, but I think it was still broadly intact in 1968, and somehow seemed very off by '73.

== Nature and Culture ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Actually I'm scanning my memory and I don't know that we've had this conversation, so I'm curious to hear your answer. One of the things that I found surprising is that I think I can tell a reasonably decent story about how this is a result of a scientific problem rather than the mismanagement of our future. Do you believe that if we assume that there was this early 1970s structural change in the economy, that it was largely a sort of manmade problem? Which is what we seemingly implicitly always assume. Or, might it be a scientific one?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And let me give you the one iconic example that really kind of drives it home for me. I think quarks were discovered in 1968. And to find out that the proton and neutron are comprised of up and down quarks is an incredible change in our picture of the world. Yet it has no seeming implications for industry. And I started thinking about this question: Are we somehow fenced out of whatever technologies are to come - that we sort of exhausted one orchard of low hanging fruit and haven't gotten to the next?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think one way to parse this question of scientific, technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture. Did the ideas in nature run out? Or, at least the useful ideas. Maybe we make some more discoveries, but they're not useful.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Or the easily useful.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Easily useful. So it's a problem with nature. And then the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful, but somehow the culture had gotten deranged. And I sort of go back and forth on those two explanations. I think it's very complicated. Yeah, I think in physics you'd say ... I mean, probably even the fundamental discoveries stopped after the mid 1970s, but certainly the translation didn't happen. Quarks don't matter for chemistry, and chemistry's what matters on a human level.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I would say there was a lot that happened in biochemistry. You know, not chemistry down, but sort of chemistry up; the interface between chemistry and biology. And that's where I would be inclined to say there's a lot more that could happen and has not quite happened, because maybe the problems are hard. But maybe also the cultural institutions for researching them are restrictive. It's too heavily regulated in certain ways and it's been just somewhat slower than one would have expected in the 1970s.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So maybe it's really just a constant dialogue between nature and culture.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, obviously. Because obviously, if nature has stopped, then the culture is going to derange. So there's a way in which culture is linked to nature. And then if the culture deranges, it also will look like nature stops. There are probably elements of both.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I am always optimistic in the sense that I think we could have done better. I think we could do better. It's not necessarily the case that we can advance on all fronts in every direction, but I think there's more space on the frontier than just in this world of bits. So I think there are various dimensions on atoms where we could be advancing and we just have chosen not to.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Why do you think it's so hard to convince people that ... Because both of us have had this experience where we sit down, let's say to an interview, and somebody talks about the dizzying pace of change. And both you and I see almost ... I mean, it's almost objectively true. I have this test, which is: go into a room and subtract off all of the screens.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' How do you know you're not in 1973 but for issues of design? There aren't that many clues.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, there are all sorts of things one can point to. I mean I always point to the productivity data in economics, which aren't great. And then you get into debates on how accurately are those being measured. You have the sort of intergenerational thing where our generation, Gen X, has had a tougher time than the Boomers. The Millennials seem to be having a much tougher time than either us or the Boomers had. So there seems to be this generational thing. So there are some of these sort of macroeconomic variables that seem pretty off.
Hyper-specialisation

'''Peter Thiel:''' The direct scientific questions, I think, are very hard to get a handle on. And the reason for this is that in late modernity, which we are living in, there's simply too much knowledge for any individual human to understand all of it. And so in this world of extreme hyper specialization, where it's narrower and narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are, the string theorists talking about how great string theory is, the cancer researchers talking about how they're just about to cure cancer, the quantum computer researchers are just about to build a quantum computer, there'll be a massive breakthrough. And then if you were to say that all these fields, not much is happening, people just don't have the authority for this. And this is somehow a very different feel for science or knowledge than you would've had in 1800 or even in 1900. In 1800, Goethe could still understand just about everything.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' 1900, Hilbert could still understand just about all of mathematics and so this sort of specialization, I think, has made it a much harder question to get a handle on. The political cut I have on the specialization is always that if you analyze the politics of science, the specializations should make you suspicious, because if it's gotten harder to evaluate what's going on, then it's presumably gotten easier for people to lie and to exaggerate, and then one should be a little bit suspicious. And that's sort of my starting bias.
Sanity of Institutions

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And mine as well. And I think perhaps sort of the craziest idea to come out of all of this - and again you met your version of this in a law firm, which is predicated upon the idea that a partner would hire associates and the associates would hope to become partners who could then hire associates. And so that has that pyramidal structure. And in the university system, every professor is trying to train graduate students to become research professors to train graduate students. And I think that the universities were probably the most aggressive of these things I've called embedded growth obligations. But the implication of this idea that we structured almost everything on an expectation of growth, and then this growth that was expected ran out - it wasn't as high and stable and as technologically-led as before - has a pretty surprising implication. Which is, I mean ... Well let's not dance around it. It feels like almost universally, all of our institutions are now pathological.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or sociopathic, or whatever you want to call them. Yes. Yes, I suppose there's sort of two ways one could imagine going, if you had these expectations of great growth - Great Expectations was the Charles Dickens novel from the 19th century.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' We had Great Expectations. And then you can try to be honest and say the expectations are dialed down, or you can continue to say everything's great and it just happens not to be working out for you, but it's working out for people in general. And somehow it's been very hard to have the sort of honest reset. And the incentives have been for the institutions to derange and to lie. There's probably a way the universities could function if they did not grow. You’d be honest, most people in PhD programs don't become professors. Maybe you'd make the PhD programs much shorter. Maybe you'd be much more selective; you'd let fewer people in. There would be some way you could sort of adjust it, and the institutions could still be much healthier than they are today.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But that's not the path that seemingly was taken. And something like this could have been done in a law firm context. Maybe you still let the same percentage of people become partner, but the partners don't make quite as much money as before, or something like that. So that there would have been ways when one could've gone, but those are generally not the choices that were made.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I wonder if that's even possible. Because if you had a law firm that was honest or university that was fairly honest and you had one that was dishonest, it seems to me that the dishonest one could attempt to use its prestige to out compete the honest one. And so that would become a self-extinguishing strategy, unless you somehow have a truth-in-advertising program.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, I don't know. I do think the truth, when it breaks through, you're better off having told it than not not having. And so it's always ... As long as everybody was dishonest, it could work.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Look, it's mysterious to me how long it worked. We had these crazy bubble economies in the ... You know, we had the tech bubble in the 90s, the housing bubble in the 2000s, what I think is a government debt bubble this last decade. And so if you've had this sort of up-down bubble, that's sort of harder to see than if things were just flat. So if the growth in 1970, things had just flat-lined, and you had 40 years of no growth, that would have been problematic. And you might have noticed that very quickly.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But in a sense, simplifying a lot, you could say the 70s were down, the 80s were up, the 90s were up, the 2000s were down. So two down, two up, net flat, but it didn't feel that way internally.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' With lots of excitement.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There was a lot of excitement, a lot of stuff happened. And California was like a even more extreme version of this. You know, the last know the last three recessions in California were much more severe than in the country, as a whole. The recoveries were steeper, and so California has felt incredibly volatile. The volatility gets interpreted as dynamism. And then before you know it, 30 or 40 years have passed.
Individual and Collective Incentives

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One thing that I'm very curious about is how this discipline seems to have arisen, where almost everyone representing the institutions tell some version of this universal story. Which, I'll be honest. To my way of thinking, can be instantly invalidated by anyone who chooses to do so. It's just that the cost of invalidating it is quite high. You know, Paul Krugman wrote this column called A Protectionist Moment, where he said, "Let's be honest. The financial elite's case, for ever free-er trade, has always been something of a scam.".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And so you had people who were participating in this who seem to have known all along that there's no way of justifying this on paper, but yet were willing and able to participate with seemingly very few consequences to their careers. It didn't give opportunities to people who were heterodox and saying, "Hey, aside from a few bright spots, more or less, we've actually entered a period of relative stagnation." How did this happen?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think the individual incentives were very different from the collective incentive. The collective incentives, in which we have an honest conversation and level set things and get back to a better place. I think the individual incentives were often, you pretend that it's working great for you. The 20,000 people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars, about 20 of them make it. And so you could say, "Well, it's been really hard. Nobody wants to hire me. This is a terrible city." Or you could say, "You know, this has been wonderful, and that all the doors are being opened to me." And the second one is more fictional. But that's sort of the thing you're supposed to say if you're succeeding. And I think there's a way this is how we've been talking about globalization, a weird sort of a glib globalization. It's working great for me, and I'd like to have more people, more talented people come to the US. I'm not scared of competing with them. And on and on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or academia. If you're a professor in academia, so the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I think there is sort of like this individual incentive where you're if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.
Official and Unofficial Narratives

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I used the word kayfabe for the system of nonsense that undergirds professional wrestling, and you've taken to using LARPing, live action role playing. It strikes me that we have two separate parallel systems. Now, this podcasting experiment that you and I are now part of provides for a very unscripted, out of control narrative. And then there's this parallel institutional narrative that seems to exist in a gated form where the institutions keep talking to each other and ignore this thing that's happening that has reached more and more people, so that you effectively have multiple narratives. (One of which, I think almost no one needs to believe. It's just that the institutions need to trade lies and deceptions back and forth amongst themselves.) How is it that these two things can be kept separate? It's like a real wrestling league and a professional wrestling league, side by side, where somehow they just don't come into contact with each other.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think if they came into contact, then they wouldn't both be able to exist. So I think that's not surprising that they can't come to contact.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I don't think it's ultimately stable. So I think ultimately our account is going to prevail. The institutional account is so incorrect that it will ultimately fail. I've probably been more hopeful about how quickly truth prevails than than it has.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's taken forever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I would still be very hopeful that our account is really going to break through in the next few years. I've been talking about this, the tech stagnation problem for the better part of a decade. And I think when I was talking about this in 2008, 2009, 2010 this was still a fringy view. It was very fringy within Silicon Valley. And I think even within Silicon Valley, there's sort of a lot of people who've come around to it, who've partially come around to it. There's a sense that tech has a bad conscience. It feels like it's not delivering the promises. Google had this propaganda about the future and it's now seen as .... The self-driving cars are further away than people expected. And so I think there is sort of a sense that things have shifted a lot over the last decade.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But even five years ago. I moved out to work with you in 2013, and I had never seen a boom before. I mean, this was one of the things that was really important to me, is that being an academic ... The academy had been in a depression since this change around 1972, '73. And seeing a boom and seeing people with flowers and dollar signs in their eyes, talking about a world of abundance and how everything was going to be great, it seemed like everybody was the CEO or CTO of some tiny company.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And then very, very quickly, it all started to change, and I felt like a lot of people moved back into the behemoths from their little startup having failed. A lot of the ideology felt poisonous, like, "Don't be evil," was not even something you could utter without somebody snickering behind your back. There's a self-hating component, where the engineers have been recruited ideologically and are not actually there to do business.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sure.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' How did this happen so quickly?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Am I wrong about that?

'''Peter Thiel:''' No, it's striking how fast it's happened. It's striking how much it's happened in the context of a bull market. So if you describe this in terms of psychology, you'd think that people to be as angry in Silicon Valley as they are today, the stock market must be down 40% or 50%. It's like people in New York city were angry. In 2009, they were angry at the banks. They hated themselves. But the stock market was down 50%, 60%, the banks had gotten obliterated. And that sort of makes sense psychologically. And the strange thing is that in terms of sort of the macro economic indicators, the stock markets, the valuations of the larger companies, it's way beyond the .com peaks of 2000, in all in all sorts of ways. But the mood is not like late '99, early 2000. It has this very different mood.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And the way I would explain this is that, for the people involved, it is sort of a look ahead function. Yes, this is where things are, but are they going to be worth a lot more in five years, 10 years? And that's gotten a lot harder to tell.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so there's been growth, but people are unhappy and frustrated because they don't see that much growth going forward, even within tech. Even within this world of bits, which had been very, very decoupled for such a long time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is, is that when we talk like this, a lot of people are gonna say, "Wow, that's a lot of gloom and doom. So much is changing so much is better." And yet, what I sense is that both you and I have an idea that we've lived our entire life in some sort of intellectual Truman Show, where everything is kind of fake, and something super exciting is about to happen. Do you share ... Is that a fair telling?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there's been the potential to get back to the future for a long time. And there have been breaks in this Truman Show at various points. There was a big break with 9/11. There was a big break with the 2008 crash. You could say some sort of break with Brexit and Trump.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And the last few years, it's still a little bit undecided what that all means. But I think there were a lot of reasons to question this and reassess this for some time. The reassessments never quite happened, but I would say I think we're now at the point where this is really gonna happen in the next two years to five years to decade. I don't think the Truman Show can keep going that much longer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And again, I've been wrong about this, so-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Me, too.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I've been very wrong.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I've been wrong. I've called it earlier.

'''Peter Thiel:''' We had an offsite when I was running PayPal in spring of 2001. The NASDAQ had gone from 2,000 to 5,000 back to 2,000, the .com bubble was over. And I was explaining, we were just battening down the hatches. At least one little company has survived, and we're going to survive. But the sort of insanity that we saw in the .com years will never come back in the lifetimes of the people here, because psychologically, you can't go that crazy again while you're still alive.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The 1920s didn't come back until maybe the 1980s, or something.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The lessons of the depression were long lived.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So it was generationally over. And yet, already in 2001, we had the incipient housing bubble, and somehow some other shows kept going for 20 years, 25 years.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' With a crazy narrative. The whole narrative behind the Great Moderation. I mean, I remember just clutching my head, "How can you tell a story that we've banished volatility?".

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I always think of the 1990s narrative was the new economy, and you lied about growth. And then the 2000s narrative was the Great Moderation, and you lied about volatility. And maybe the 2010s one is secular stagnation, where you lie about the real interest rates, because the other two don't work anymore. In sort of a complicated way, these things connect.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes, new economy sounded very bullish in the '90s. Great Moderation was still a reasonably long stocks, but sounds less bullish. And then secular stagnation - in the Larry Summers forms, to be specific to what we're talking about - means again, that you should be long the stock market. The stock market's going to keep going up because things are so stagnant. The real rates will stay low forever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So they are equally bullish narratives, although they sound less bullish over time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So that effectively we need ... What happened with the Roaring '20s followed by the depression was that there was a general skepticism, and here the skepticism seems to be specific to something different in each incarnation. You keep having bubbles with some lie you have yet to tell.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And of course, I think the crazy cut on the '20s and '30s was that we didn't need to have as big of a crash. You could've probably done all sorts of interventions. Because the 1930s was still a period that was very healthy in terms of background scientific, technological innovation. If we just rattle off what was discovered in the 1930s that had real world practical things, it was: the aviation industry got off the ground, the talkies, the movies got going. You had the plastics industry, you had secondary oil recovery, household appliances got developed. And as you know, by 1939 there were three times as many people who had cars in the US as in 1929. There was this crazy tailwind of scientific and technological progress that then somehow got badly mismanaged, financially, by whoever you blame the crash on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, I think that's what actually happened in the '30s, and then we tried to manage all these financial indicators much more precisely in recent decades, even though the tailwind wasn't there at all.
Physics, Biology, and Polymaths

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, let me focus you on two subjects that are important for trying to figure out the economy going forward. I'm very fond of perhaps over-claiming, but making a strong claim for physics. That physics gave us atomic devices and nuclear power, and it ended World War II definitively. It gave us the semiconductor, the worldwide web, theoretical physicists invented molecular biology, the communications revolution. All of these things came out of physics, and you could make the argument that physics has been really underrated as powering the world economy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' On the other hand, it's very strange to me that we had the three-dimensional structure of DNA in '53, we had the genetic code 10 years later, and we've had very little in the way of, let's say, gene therapy to show for all of our newfound knowledge. Now, I have no doubt that we are learning all sorts of new things - to your point about specialization - in biology, but the translation hasn't been anything like what I would have imagined for physics.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, it feels like somehow we're in a new orchard, and we're spending a lot of time exploring it, but we haven't found the low hanging fruit in biology, and we've kind of exhausted the physics orchard, because what we've found is so exotic that, you know, whether it's two black holes colliding, or a third generation of matter, or quark substructure, we haven't been able to use these things. Are we somehow between revolutions?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'd be pessimistic on physics generally, so that sort of be my bias on that one.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Me as well.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Biology, I continue to think we could be doing a lot more, we could be making a lot more progress. And you know, the pessimistic version is that no, biology is just, is much harder than physics, and therefore it's been slower going.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The more optimistic one is that the culture is just broken. We've had very talented people go into physics. You go into biology if you're less talented. You can sort of think of it in Darwinian terms. You can think of biology as a selection for people with bad math genes. You know, if you're good at math, go to math, or physics, or at least chemistry, and biology we sort of selected for all of these people who are somewhat less talented. So, that might be a cultural explanation for why it's been been slower progress.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But, I mean, we had people from physics, we had, like, Teller, and, Feynman, and Crick. There's no shortage of, to my earlier point, molecular biology, anyway, was really founded by physicists more than any other thing, I think. Why is it that in an era where physics is stagnating, we don't see these kinds of minds? Like, I'm a little skeptical of that theory.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'm not so sure. Like, if you're a string theory person, or even sort of an applied experimental physicist, I don't think you can that easily reboot into biology. I mean, these disciplines have gotten sort of more rigid. It's pretty hard to transfer from one area to another.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, when I was an undergraduate, you still had some older professors who were polymaths, who knew a lot about a lot of different things. This is, I think, the way one should really think of, you know, Watson and Crick, or Feynman, or Teller. They were certainly world-class in their field, but also like incredible in a lot of different fields.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They were highly transgressive.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, you know, the cultural, or institutional, rule, is no polymaths allowed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Wow.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, you can be narrowly specialized, and if you're interested in other things you better keep it to yourself and not tell people, because if you say that you're interested in computer science and also music, or studying the Hebrew Bible, wow, that's just, that must mean you're just not very serious about computer science.
Polymaths in Universities

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so I totally want to riff on on this point, because I think you've hit the nail on the head. To my way of thinking, the key problem is, if you go back to our original contention, which is, is that there is something universally pathological about the stories that every institution predicated on growth has to tell about itself when things are not growing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The biggest danger is that somebody smart inside of the institution will start questioning things and speaking openly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The polymaths would be the people who could connect the dots and say, you know, there's not that much going on in my department, and there's not much going on this department over here, and not that much going on in this department over there, and those people are very, very dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of my friends studied physics at Stanford in the late '90s. His advisor was this professor at Stanford, Bob Laughlin, who, you know, brilliant physics guy, late '90s he gets a Nobel prize in physics, and he suffers from the supreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel prize he has total academic freedom and he can do anything he wants to. And he decided to direct it at, you know, I mean, there are all these areas you probably shouldn't go into, you probably shouldn't question, climate science, there are all these things when one should be careful about, but he went into an area of far more dangerous than all of those.

'''Peter Thiel:''' He was convinced that there were all these people in the university who were doing fake science, who were wasting government money on fake research that was not really going anywhere, and he started by investigating other departments, started with the biology department at Stanford university. And you can imagine this ended catastrophically for Professor Laughlin, you know, his graduate students couldn't get PhDs. He no longer got funding, Nobel prize in physics, no protection whatsoever.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Julian Schwinger fell out of favor with the physics community despite being held in its highest regard and having a Nobel prize, and he used the epigram in a book where he wanted to redo quantum field theory around something he called source theory, he said, "If you can't join them, beat them." And I think it comes as a shock to all of these people that there is no level you can rise to in the field that allows you to question the assumptions of that field.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. It's like, you know, you're sort of proving yourself, you're getting your PhD, you're getting your tenured position, and then at some point you think, you would think that you've proven yourself and you can talk about the whole and not just the parts, but you're never allowed to talk about more than the parts.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, like the person in the university context, or the class of people who are supposed to talk about the whole, I would say, are university presidents, because they are presiding over the whole of the university and they should be able to speak to what the nature of the whole is, what sort of progress the whole is making. What is the health of the progress of the whole? And, you know, we certainly do not pick university presidents who think critically about these questions at all.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, I remember discussing, with a president of a very highly regarded university, he came to me, he said, "Can you explain how your friend Peter Thiel thinks? Because I just had a conversation with him, and I could not convince him that the universities were doing fantastically, and this university in particular, like how does he come to his conclusion?".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I said, "Well look, Peter doesn't come, you know, with a PhD, but let me speak to you in your own language," and I started going department by department talking about the problems of stagnation. It was very clear that there was no previous experience with any kind of informed person making such an argument. I mean this was a zero day exploit.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's all, yeah, but in some sense, if you're a president of a university, you probably don't want to talk to people that dangerous. You want to avoid them, and you don't want to have such disruptive thoughts because you have to convince the government, or alumni, or whoever, to keep donating money, that everything's wonderful and great.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think one has to go back quite a long time to even identify any university presidents in the United States who said things that were distinctive, or interesting, or powerful. You know, there was Larry Summers at Harvard a decade and a half ago, and tried to do like the most minuscule critiques imaginable, and got crucified. But, you know, I don't think of Summers as a particularly revolutionary thinker.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, he was possessed of an idea that the intellectual elite, in which he undoubtedly saw himself a part of, had the right to transgress boundaries. And I think what's stunning about this is the extent to which this breed of outspoken, disruptive intellectual has no place left inside of this system from which to speak.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's not that surprising. In a healthy system you could have wild dissent and it's not threatening because everyone knows the system is healthy. In an unhealthy system, the dissent becomes much more dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's not that surprising. There's always one riff I have on this is always, if you think of a left wing person as someone who's critical of the structures of our society, there's a sense in which we have almost no left wing professors left.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's right. Like Noam Chomsky is still there as sort of a last remnant of some clade that no longer exists.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Left-wing in the sense of, let's say, just being critical of the institutions they're a part of.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And there may be some that are much older, so if you're maybe in your eighties we can pretend to ignore you, or you know, this is just what happens to people in their eighties. But I don't see younger professors in their, let's say, forties, who are deeply critical of the university structure. I think it's just not, you know, you can't have that.

== Student Debt ==

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's like, again, if you come back to something as reductionist as the ever escalating student debt, you know, the bigger the debt gets, you can sort of think what is the 1.6 trillion, what does it pay for? And in a sense, it pays for $1.6 trillion worth of lies about how great the system is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, the more the debt goes, the crazier the system gets, but also the more you have to tell the lies, and these things sort of go together. It's not a stable sequence. At some point this breaks. You know, again, I would bet on a decade, not a century.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this is the fascinating thing, you, of course, famously started the Thiel Fellowship as a program which, correct me if I'm wrong on this, 2005 is when student debt became non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. The Bush 43 bankruptcy revision. If you don't pay off your student loans when you're 65 the government will garnish your social security wages to pay off your student debt.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. This is amazing that this exists in a modern society. And of course, well, so let me ask, am I right that you were attacking what was necessary to keep the college mythology going, and you were frightened that college might be enervating some of our sort of most dynamic minds?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there are sort of lot of different critiques one can have of the universities. I think the debt one is a very simple one. It's always dangerous to be burdened with too much debt. It sort of does limit your freedom of action. And it seems especially pernicious to do this super early in your career.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, if out of the gate you owe $100,000, and it's never clear you can get out of that hole, that's going to either demotivate you, or it's going to push you into maybe slightly higher paying, very uncreative professions of the sort that are probably less good at moving our whole society forwards. And so I think the whole thing is extraordinarily pernicious.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I started talking about this back in 2010, 2000, it was already like controversial, but it was not, you know... younger people all agreed with me.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The younger people did?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's a decade later, it's a lot crazier, we haven't yet completely won, but I think there are sort of more and more people who agree with this. I think at this point the Gen X parents of college students tend to agree, whereas I would say the baby boomer parents, you know, 15 years ago, would not have agreed.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The 2008 crisis was a big watershed in this too, where you could say the tracking debt, you know, roughly made sense as long as everything, all the tracked careers worked, and 2008 really blew up, you know, consulting, banking, you know, sort of a number of the more track professions got blown up, and so that was kind of a watershed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean this is incredibly dangerous, but also, therefore, quite interesting, if you imagine that the baby boomers have, in some sense, in order to keep the structure of the university going, have loaded it up with administrators, have hiked the tuition much faster than even medical inflation, let alone general inflation, this becomes a crushing debt problem for people who are entering the system.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I saw a recent article that said that the company that, I think it's called Seeking Arrangements, which introduces older men and women with money to younger men and women with a need for money for some sort of ambiguous hybridized dating, companionship, financial transfer. And the claim was that lots of students were using this supposed sugar daddy-ing and sugar mommy, I don't know what the terminology is, in order to alleviate their debt burden.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost as if the baby boomers, in so creating a system, are subjecting their own children to things that are pushing them towards a gray area a few clicks before you get to honest prostitution.

'''Peter Thiel:''' No, look, I don't want to impute too much intentionality to how this happened.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no, it's somewhat emergent.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think a lot of these, it was mostly emergent, mostly these things people, you know, yeah, that we had sort of somewhat cancerous, we don't distinguish real growth from cancerous growth, and then once the cancer sort of the metastasizes at a certain size, you know, you have, you sort of somehow try to keep the whole thing going, and it doesn't make that much sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes, I think one of the reasons, one of the challenges in, on our side, let's be a little more self critical here, on this, is that the question we always are confronted with, well, what is the alternative? How do you actually do something?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's not obvious what the individual alternatives are. You know, on an individual level, if you get into an elite university, it probably still makes sense to go, you know, it probably doesn't make sense to go to number 100 or something like this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, I think that's right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There is sort of a way it can still work individually even if it does not work for our country as a whole. And so, there are sort of all these challenges in coming up with alternate tracks.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think in software there's some degree to which people are going to be hired if they're just good at coding, and it's not quite as critical that they have a computer science degree. You know, can one do this in other careers, other fields? I would tend to think one could. It's been slow to happen.
Political Solutions for Students

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so you and I have been excited about a great number of things that have been taking place outside of the institutional system, but one of the things that I continue to be mystified by is that we are somewhat politically divided, where you are well known as a conservative and I really come from a fairly radical progressive streak. So, we have this common view of a lot of the problems, but sometimes we come to very different ideas about how those problems should be solved.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Do you want to maybe just try riffing?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sure.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Like, assume that we somehow found ourselves in possession of some degree of power, with an ability to direct a little bit more than we have currently. What would you do to create the preconditions - so not necessarily picking particular projects - but what would you try to do to create the preconditions where people are really dreaming about futures, both at a technological level, family formation, making our civil society healthier. Where would you start to work first?

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'm always a little bit uncomfortable with this sort of question, because-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You can turn it on me, too.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... because I feel like, you know, we're not going to be dictators of the United States, and then, you know, there all sorts of things we could do if we were dictators. But certainly, I would look at the college debt thing very seriously. I would say that it's dischargeable in bankruptcy, and if people go bankrupt then part of the debt has to be paid for by the university that did it. There has to be some sort of local accountability. So, this would be-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Love that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... that would be sort of a more right wing answer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The left wing answer is we should socialize the debt in some ways, and the universities should never pay for it, which would be more the, you know, Sanders-Warren approach. But so, that would be one version.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think one of the main ways inequality has manifested in our society in the last 20, 30 years - I think it's more stagnation than inequality - but just on the inequality side it's the runaway housing costs, and there's sort of, there's a baby boomer version where you have super strict zoning laws so that the house prices go up, and the house is your nest egg. It's not a place to live, it's your nest egg for retirement. And I would, yeah, I would try to figure out some ways to dial all that stuff back massively.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And that's probably intergenerational transfer, where it's bad for the asset prices of baby boomer homeowners, but better for younger people to get started in sort of family formation or starting households.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do you think about the idea of a CED, a college equivalency degree, where you can prove that you have a level of knowledge that would be equivalent, let's say, to a graduating Harvard chemistry major, right? Or a fraction thereof, where you have the ability to prove that through some sort of online delivery mechanism, you can-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Great idea. I love it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think it's very hard to implement. Again, I think these things are hard to do, but great idea.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But look, we have all these people who have something like Stockholm syndrome, where they, you know, if you got a Harvard chemistry degree, and if you suspect that actually the knowledge could be had by a lot of people, and if it's just a set of tests you have to pass, that your degree would be a lot less special, you'll resist this very, very hard.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if you're in an HR department, or in a company hiring people, you will want to hire people who went to a good college because you went to a good college, and if we broaden the hiring and said we're going to hire all sorts of people, maybe that's self-defeating for your own position. So, you know, I think one should not underestimate how many people have a form of Stockholm syndrome here.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I should've said earlier that the Thiel Fellowship, for those who don't know, is a program that has historically, at least began paying very young people who had been admitted to colleges to drop out of those colleges. So, they got to keep the idea that they'd been admitted to some fairly prestigious place, but then they were given money to actually live their dreams and not put them on hold.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, it has been an extremely successful and effective program. It's not scalable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, we had to hack the prestige status thing, where it was as hard, or harder, to get a Thiel fellowship than to get into a top university. And so, that's part that's very hard to scale.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' When I was looking at that program for you, one of the things that I floated was the idea that if you look at every advanced degree, like a JD, or an MD, a PhD, none of them seem to carry the requirement of having a BA, which is quite mysterious.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And if you fail to get a PhD, let's say, there's usually an embedded master's degree that you get as a going away present. And therefore, if you could get people to skip college, if you give them, perhaps, four years of their lives back, and you could use the first year of graduate school, which is very often kind of a rapid recapitulation of what undergraduate was, so everybody's on a level playing field, and then, worse comes to worst, people would leave with a master's. They would, in general, get a stipend, because a lot of the tuition is remitted to them in graduate programs. Is that a viable program to get some group of people who are highly motivated to avoid the BA entirely as sort of the administrator's degree rather than the professor's degree?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Let me see. There are all these different subtle critiques I can have, or disagreements, but yeah, I think the BA is not as valuable as it looks. I also think the PhD is not as valuable as it looks.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, you know how to hurt a guy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I sort of feel it's a problem across the board. It strikes me that what you're proposing is a bit of an uphill struggle, because at the top universities the BA is the far more prestigious degree than the PhD at this point. So, if you're at Stanford or Harvard, you know, it's pretty hard to get into the undergraduate, and then you have more PhD students than you have undergraduates.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There are all these people who are a very questionable track. They've made questionable choices. And they probably are going to have some sort of psychological breakdown in their future. You know, their dating prospects aren't good. There are all these things that are a little bit off.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So yeah, in theory, if you had a super tightly controlled PhD program, that might work, but you have to at least make those two changes. As it is, the people in graduate schools, like, it's like Tribbles in Star Trek. We have just so many, and they all feel expendable and unneeded, and that's not a good place to be.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, whereas I think the undergraduate conceit is still that it's more K-selected instead of R-selected, that it's more that everybody is special and valuable. You know, that's often not true either.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'd be critical of both, and I think, but yeah, if we could have a real PhD that was the required, you know, that was much harder, and that actually led to sort of an academic position or some other comparable position, that would be good.
Teleology

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of the questions I always come back to in this, is what is the teleology of these programs? Where do they go? One of the analogies I've come up with, is I think elite undergraduate education is like junior high school football.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Junior high school football. I did not see that coming.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Playing football in junior high school is probably not damaging for you, but it's not going anywhere-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Ah, I see.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -because if you keep playing football in high school, and college, and then professionally, that's just bad. And the better you are, the more successful you are, the less well it works.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the question is what's the motivational structure? And when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s there was still a part of it where you thought the professors were cool, it might be something you'd like to be at some point in the future, and they were role models, just like in junior high school football an NFL player would have been a role model.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But now it just looks like brain damage in both sides.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And now we think it's, yeah, you're just doing lots of brain damage, and it's a track that doesn't work, and therefore the teleology sort of has broken down.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So undergraduate, part of the teleology was that it was preparing you for graduate school, and that part doesn't work, and that's what's gotten deranged. Then graduate school, well, it's preparing you to be a postdoc, and then, well, that's the postdoc apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it, postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Postdocalypse?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You heard it here, folks, postdocalypse.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But just at every step, I think, the teleology of the system is in really bad shape. Of course, this is true of all these institutions with fake growth that are sociopathic or pathological, but at the universities it's striking as very bad.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think this was already true in important ways back in the '80s, early '90s, when I was going through the system. And when I think back on it, I think I was most intensely motivated academically in high school, because the teleology was really clear. You were trying to get into a good college. And then, by the time I was at Stanford, it was a little bit less clear, by the time I was at law school, really unclear where that was going. And by the time I was 25 I was far less motivated than at age 18, and I think these dynamics are just more extreme than ever today.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What I find so dispiriting about your diagnosis is first of all that I agree with it. Second of all, if we don't train people in these fields, if we don't get people to go into molecular biology, or bioinformatics, or something like that, we're never going to be able to find the low hanging fruit in that orchard. So, it seems to me that we have to find some way that it makes sense for a life to explore these questions.
Conformity and Malthus

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things that I don't understand, and I don't know if you have any insight, is it feels to me that almost all of our institutions are carbon copies of each other at different levels of quality. And that there are only a tiny number of actually innovative institutions. It used to be that, you know, Reed college was sex, drugs, and Goethe, and you had St. John's with the great books curriculum that didn't look like anything else, or Deep Springs, and the university of Chicago was crazy about young people, but the diversity of institutions is unbelievably low. Is that wrong?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's fair, but I would say the bigger problem with a lot of these fields is, yeah, I think we have to keep training people. I think we need to keep training people in physics or even these fields that seem completely dead, you know?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That’s super important.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I think the question we have to always ask is how many people should we be training-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Way fewer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -and my intuition is you want the gates to be very tight.

'''Peter Thiel:''' One of my friends is a professor in the Stanford economics department, and the way he describes it to me is they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics at Stanford every year. It's six to eight years to get a PhD. At the end of the first year, the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students, where they’ve sort of agreed who the top three or four are. The ranking never changes. The top three or four have, are able to get a good position in academia, the others not so much.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, you know, we're pretending to be kind to people and we're actually being cruel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Incredibly cruel.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, I think that if there are going to be - you know, it's a supply demand of labor - if there are going to be good positions in academia, where you can have a reasonable life, it's not a monastic vow of poverty that you're taking to be an academic, if we're going to have that, you don't want this sort of Malthusian struggle. If you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry lab, and you have to have a fistfight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker, and you know, and if some somebody says one politically incorrect thing, you can happily throw everyone, them all out of the overcrowded bus. The buses still overcrowded with nine people on it. That's what's unhealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, yes, it would be mistake to say we should dial this down and have zero people in these fields.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. But this is what's scary to me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's not what I'm advocating, or what was being advocated here, but there is a point where if you just add more and more people in a starvation Malthusian context, that's not healthy.
Power Laws

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this gets to another topic which, I think, is really important, and it's a dangerous one to discuss, which is it seems to me that power laws, those distributions with very thick tails where you have a small number of outliers that often dominate all other activity, are ubiquitous, and that particularly with respect to talent, whether we like them or not, they seem to be present, where a small number of people do a fantastic amount of all of the innovation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do we do, if power laws are common, to make people more comfortable with the fact that there is a kind of endowment inequality that seems to be part of species makeup? I mean, I don't even think it's just limited to humans.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'm not convinced these sort of power laws are equally true in all fields of activity. You know, the United States was a frontier country in the 19th century, and most people were farmers, and presumably some people were better farmers than others, but everyone started with 140 acres of land, and there was this wide open frontier. Even if you had some parts of the society that had more of a power law dynamic, there was a large part that didn't. And that was what, I think, gave it a certain amount of health.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And yeah, the challenge is if we've geared our society saying that all that matters is education, and PhDs, and academic research, and that this has this crazy power law dynamic, then you're just going to have a society in which there are lots of people playing video games in basements or something like that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, that's that's the way I would frame it. But yeah, I think there definitely are some areas where this is the case. And then we just need, you know, we need more growth for the whole society. If you have growth, you'll have a rising tide that lifts all boats. So, it's the stagnation, is the problem.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I've joked about this as we are not even communistic in our progressivism, because the old formulation of communism was from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, and the inability to recognize different levels of ability. I mean, almost every mathematician or physicist who encountered John von Neumann just said, "The guy is smarter than I am." He's not necessarily the deepest, or he did all of the great work, but you know when you're dealing with somebody who's able to employ skills that you simply don't have. I mean, I know I'm not a concert pianist, and-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. Look, I don't know how you solve the social problem if everybody has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist. I want a society in which we have great mathematicians and great concert pianists. That seems that that would be a very healthy society. It's very unhealthy if every parent thinks their child has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist, and that's the kind of society we unfortunately have.

== Automation ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, this is why I try to sell you sometimes on a more progressive view of the world, which is I want deregulated capitalism. I want the people who have the rare skillsets to be able to integrate across many different areas, and to be honest, this is the thing that I wish more people understood about what you bring, which is that you're able to think in, I don't know, 15 different idioms that most people only have one or two of. So, whatever it is that you're doing to integrate these things as an investor and to direct research and direct work is really something that I've watched firsthand for six years. The problem that I have is, we are going to have to take care of the median individual. And I less think that the median individual is going to be reachable by the market over time, as some of these things that are working in Silicon in terms of machine learning-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, but then you're being more optimistic on progress in tech than is... Because look, I think, yes, if we have runaway automation, and if we're building robots that are smarter than humans and can do everything humans can do, then we probably have to have a serious conversation about a universal basic income or something like that, and you're going to end up with a very, very weird society. I don't see the automation happening at all, and I think the question of automation in my mind is identical to this question of productivity growth. We've been automating for 200, 250 years, since Industrial Revolution, agriculture and manufacturing, and the sort of society we have in the early 21st century is one in which most jobs are non-tradable service sector jobs that are not easily automatable.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, it's like a waiter in a restaurant. It's a yoga instructor. It's a nurse. It's a kindergarten teacher. That's what most jobs in our society are, and because they've been so resistant to automation, that this may be one of the reasons why the productivity numbers are slowing down, even if we're still innovating as fast in manufacturing, and even if we're still agriculture, they're a smaller and smaller part of the economy. So, even 5% a year productivity growth in manufacturing, that means a lot more if manufacturing is 60% of the economy, than it does when it's, say, 20% of the economy. So, that's roughly what I think would happen, and if you just look at the current dynamic in the US as we have unemployment, like 3.6%, 3.7%. It's super low, and still, there doesn't seem to be that much wage pressure. There doesn't seem to be that much growth. The productivity numbers still aren't great. You'd think there'd be enormous incentives to increase productivity.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's quite confusing to me. Yeah.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I think, again, my read on it is just the automation story has been oversold.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I agree that the automation story has been oversold.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's possible it's going to happen. It's possible it's just around the corner, and it's about to happen. That's what we've been told in a lot of these areas over the last 40, 50 years.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, I have a couple questions about this. One is sort of, if I think about how common retail occupations are, is there something about retail that is resistant to Amazonification, if you will, where people actually want to go shop in a physical place and are willing to pay a premium that we have just to have human contact? Maybe there's some information exchange. Maybe there's a recreational aspect that's bundled. That's one of my two questions, and the other one surrounds the idea that we've always focused on when is AGI coming, and the robots that will do everything? Part of the lesson for me about machine learning is how many things humans were doing that don't require anything like artificial general intelligence. Just some specialized neural net seems to be good enough to do the job. So, those would be two questions in my mind as to how-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, but I think all these things you have to concretize, and yes, I think retail is a sector that's under quite a bit of pressure, and is going to stay under quite a bit of pressure. That's the top one I would come up with is-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, it's looks vulnerable to me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Amazon is the most threatening of the big tech companies in that it's threatening a lot of other companies elsewhere in the industry and disrupting them and making things more efficient, but probably with a lot of sheer forces at work in that process. So, I agree that that's a candidate for automation or productivity improvements or things like that. I'm still not convinced that it's in the aggregate shifting things that much, and then you can go through all sorts of individual job descriptions where people used to have secretaries because typing was a skill, and with a word processor you don't quite need this. You can do short emails. You don't quite need a secretary. People still have executive assistants that sort of somehow do slightly different set of responsibilities, but it's not clear we have fewer executive assistants than we used to have secretaries.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, when one actually concretizes it, it's not quite clear how disruptive the automation that's happening really is. Again, it's a version of the tech stagnation thing. It's always the last 40, 50 years, things have been slow. We're always told it's about to accelerate like crazy. That may be true. In some ways, I hope that's true, but if one was simply extrapolating from the last 40 to 50 years, perhaps the default is that we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, that's really interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Again, I think if we had this sort of runaway automation, you could get to 3%, 4% GDP growth, and at 3% to 4% GDP growth, we can solve these problems socially.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You would be willing to have... This thing that I've been talking to Andrew Yang about has been the idea of hyper-capitalism, which is a deregulated hyper-capitalism where you can do more experimenting, more playing, coupled to some kind of hyper-socialism where you recognize that the median individual might not be able in the future to easily defend a position needed for family formation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, let me rephrase this a little bit. You're not going to get a conversion experience on your first podcast here, Eric.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You're going to make me wait for the next?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Maybe, or maybe even a little longer than that too. But I would say if we can get the GDP growth back to 3% a year on a sustainable basis-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Without fudging.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... without fudging, without lying about productivity numbers, et cetera, then there will be a lot more room for various social programs. I wouldn't want them to be misdirected in all sorts of ways, but there would be a lot of things that we could do. And I would be very uncomfortable starting with the social programs without the growth. That's the sort of conversation that I often see happening in Silicon Valley, where we start with UBI, because we're lying about automation. If automation's happening, then we'll see in the productivity numbers, and then eventually, maybe we need something like UBI. If automation is not happening and you do UBI, then you just blow up the economy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. I should say, and you've come somewhat towards-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Doing them in parallel, I'm okay with that. I'm not not okay with starting with the socialism. Even a Marxist wouldn't believe this. Even a Marxist thinks you have to first get the capitalists to do things before you can redistribute stuff.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. I know.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You can't start with the redistribution before we've done the automation.
Redistribution

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm not even a Marxist, Peter, but the thing that I was going to say is that as you talk about the fact that we can solve some of these problems socially, I want to talk about from the progressive side, I'm not interested in using social programs where markets continue to function. I mean, the idea of making people personally accountable for their own happiness and their own success and path through the world is incredibly liberating, and I view markets as providing most of the progress that we now enjoy. So, there is something that's very weird and punitive about the desire for redistribution. I mean, there's almost a desire to tag the wealthy that has nothing to do with taking care of the unfortunate, and what I really am talking about here is how do we get a conversation between left and right, which isn't cryptic, which isn't-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Of course, I have a much more cynical view of this where I think the redistribution rhetoric, it's mainly not even targeted at the wealthy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, it's targeted at the sub-wealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's targeted at the lower-middle class, at the deplorables, or whatever you want to call them, and it's a way to tell them that they will never get ahead, nothing will happen in their life and, and that's actually why a lot of people who are lower-middle class or middle class are viscerally quite strongly opposed to welfare, because it's always an insult to them. It's always heard as an insult. I'm not sure they're wrong to feel that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, and I feel that a lot of the talk about redistribution is actually families of high eight through eleven figures trying to figure out how to target families of six-figure through low eight-figure wealth as the targets of the redistribution, that the very wealthy will be able to shelter assets and protect themselves or maybe even switch nations, whereas people who are dentists and orthodontists and accountants are going to be the ones viewed as the rich, who are going to be incapable of getting themselves out of the way.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, I think that partially, what good faith conversation between left and right opens up is that we have a shared interest in uncovering all of the schemes of the people who enjoy pushing around pieces of paper and giving speeches in order to engineer society for their own reasons.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. So, one way I would restate what you just said would be that redistribution from the powerful to the powerless, from the rich to the poor, is like from the powerful to the powerless, and so using power to go after those with power, and that's almost oxymoronic.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost oxymoronic.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's almost self-contradictory. So, there may be some way to do that. I think most of the time you end up with with some fake redistribution, some sort of complicated shell game of one sort or another. I know the causation of the stuff is much, much trickier, but if we look at societies that are somehow further to the left on some scale, the inequality, you have to go really far to the left, and maybe just destroy the whole society, before you really start solving the inequality problem.

'''Peter Thiel:''' California, when I first moved here as a kid in 1977, would have been sort of a centrist state in the US politically, and was broadly middle class. Today, California's the second most democratic state. It's a D plus 30 state. It's a super unequal, and at least on a correlated basis, not causation, but at least on a correlated basis, the further to the left it's gone, the more unequal it's become, and there is something pretty weird about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There is.
Political Violence

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Something that sort of fits in here is that, in part I've learned from you, and you can tell me whether you recognize this formulation or not, is start with any appealing social idea. That's step one. Step two, ask what is the absolute minimal level of violence and coercion that would be necessary to accomplish that idea. Now add that to the original idea. Do you still find your original idea attractive? This flips many of these propositions into territory where I suddenly realized that something that people see as being very attractive actually can only be accomplished with so much misery, even if it's done maximally efficiently, that it's no longer a good idea. This has been very influential in my thinking, and what I've-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, look. The visceral problem with communism is not its redistributed tendencies. It's the extreme violence. It's that you have to kill tons of people. One of the professors I studied under at Stanford, René Girard, was a sort of of great philosophical, sociological, anthropological thinker, and he had this observation that he thought communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable. You could date it to the year 1953, the year Stalin died, and the reason was they were not communist in spite of the millions of people being killed. They were communist because of the millions of people who were being killed. As long as you were willing to kill millions of people, that was a tell, a sign that you were building the utopia, you were building a great new society, and when you stopped, it was just going to be like the lethargy of the Brezhnev era or something like that, and that that was not inspiring. I mean, people shifted from Stalin to Mao or Castro, but the violence was charismatic, very charismatic, but then also, if you think about it, it's very undesirable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's so fascinating that we actually finally get to something like this. I think that that is a correct description of part of the communist movement, but not all of the communist movement. There were a lot of people, I think, and just my own family was certainly involved in far-left politics, and some of it probably dipped into communism. What my sense of it was is that there was a period in the '30s where people realized that there had to be coordinated social action, and that there were people who were too vulnerable, and that that somehow got wrapped up in all of the things that Stalin was talking about that sounded positive if you didn't know the reality.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, for example, Paul Robeson, a hero of the left, was extolling Stalin's virtues openly. My guess is that he didn't fully understand what had happened, that he had gotten involved in an earlier era, and that as things became known and progressed, there was a point at which many people suddenly opened their eyes and said, "I've been making excuses for the Soviet Union," because at least it had the hope... I mean, there were American blacks, for example, who moved to Moscow because of the hope that it was going to be a racially more equal society. My own family, I would say, was talking about interracial marriage and open support of homosexuality, female access to birth control. Those things were associated with the communist party, and a lot of those ideas are now commonplace, but we forget that once upon a time only the communists were willing to dance with these things.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I don't want to make this too ad hominem, but I want to say that people like your family, were likely very intelligent people, were somehow still always the useful idiots, and there was no country where the communists actually came to power where people like those your family actually got to make the decisions.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Somehow, maybe there were indirect ways that it was helpful or beneficial in countries that did not become communist, but in countries that actually became communist, it didn't actually ever seem to work out for those people.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I definitely think that there was some sense that they were fooled and duped in this situation, but by the same token, not wanting to make this too ad hominem, as a gay man, I think that a lot of your rights would have been seen much earlier by the communists who were earlier to that party. I think that to an extent, some of the things that we just take for granted as part of living in a tolerant society were really not found outside, and so if you were trying to dine in a la carte, maybe you could take something from the commie buffet, you could take something from the anticommunist buffet, and you could steal a little from regular party politics. Of course, the Dixiecrats were not exactly the most racially progressive group in the world. Things were very different, and there was no clear place to turn.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, it's always easy for us to judge people in the past too harshly, so I think that's a good generalization. I would say that there's something about the extreme revolutionary movements that always seem to be... From my point of view, the violence was always too much, and it's a package. It's a package deal, but I don't like the violence part of the package, and that's the part that, at the end of the day, makes me think the package would not have been worth it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, what I would like to do is to take a quick break, and I would like to come back on exactly this point, because it's the point where I feel that perhaps you are least understood by the outside world in terms of what we've been talking about, both growth and progress on the one hand, and violence on the other. So, when we come back, we'll pick it up with Peter Thiel. Thank you.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Thanks.

[break]

== Growth vs Violence ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Welcome back to The Portal. I'm here with my friend and employer, Peter Thiel, for this, our inaugural interview episode, and we've just gotten to a point which I hope people who've been tracking your career, your books, your thought process are going to find interesting, because I think it's the thing that if I had to guess, would be the thing that people least understand about you, or maybe they have wrong the most. Ever since I've known you, your focus has weirdly been reduction of violence across a great number of different topics at a level that I don't think has leaked out into the public's understanding of you and what causes you to make the choices you make. How do you see growth as attached to reduction of violence?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think that it's very hard to see how anything like the kinds of societies we have in Western Europe, the United States, could function without growth. I think the way sort of a parliamentary republican democracy works is you have a group of people sitting around the table, they craft complicated legislation, and there's a lot of horse trading, and as long as the pie's growing, you can give something to everybody. When the pie stops growing, it becomes a zero sum dynamic, and the legislative process does not work. So, the sort of democratic types of parliamentary systems we've had for the last 200, 250 years have mapped on to this period of rapid growth. We had sort of a very bad experiment in the 1930s where the growth stopped, at least from the economic sense, and the systems became fascist or communist. It doesn't actually work.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I suspect that if we're in for a period of long growth [Ben: I think Peter here means “a period where growth is a long way away”], I don't think our kind of government can work. I think there is a prospect of all sorts of forms of violence, more violence by the state against its citizens. There may be more zero sum wars globally, or there may be other ways things are super deformed to pacify people. So, maybe everyone just smokes marijuana all day, but that's also kind of deformed. But I think a world without growth is either going to be a much more violent or a much more deformed world. And again, it's not the case that growth simply solves all problems. So, you can have very rapid growth, and you can still have the problem of violence. You can still have bad things that can happen, but that's our only chance. Without growth, I think it's very hard to see how you have a good future.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You have to know that there is a version of you that exists in the minds of pundits and the commentariat that just loves to paint you as if you were a cartoon villain, and I always think that for those people who are actually confused about you, as opposed to those who wish to be confused about you, it says, if you're looking through a window and they're looking at the reflection in the window, not understanding what it is that you're focused on, why do you think it is that almost nobody sees your preoccupation with violence reduction?

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's hard for me to come up with a good answer to these sort of sociological questions. I think people generally don't think of the problem of violence as quite as central as I think it is. I think it's a very deep problem on a human level. If you think of sort of this mimetic element to human nature where we copy one another, we want the things other people want, and there's a lot of room for conflict, and that if it's not channeled very carefully, a violent conflict in human relationships, in human societies, between human societies, and this is sort of, I think, a very deep problem. It’s sort of Christian anthropology, but you also have the same in Machiavelli or... There are sort of a lot of different traditions where human beings are, if not evil, they're at least dangerous. I think the sort of soft or anthropological biases that a lot of people have in sort of late modernity or in the enlightenment world are that humans are by nature good, they're by nature peaceful, but that's not the norm. So, that might be sort of a general bias people have, is that people can't be this violent. It's not this deep a problem. It's a problem other people have. There's some bad people who are violent, but it's not a general problem.
Jewish Culture in Germany

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I didn't know you when I was young, and this feels like a lifelong friendship that got started way late in my life. One of the things that that kind of was surprising to me is that my coming from a Jewish background, your coming from a German background, I think both of us were sensitized by the horrors of World War II, which obviously, the problem for the Jews is very clear, but the fact that Germany never really recovered its proud intellectual traditions that had gotten bound up in a level of mechanized and planned violence is a decimation of a great intellectual tradition.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things we've talked about in the past is whether the twilight of living memory of the Holocaust should be used for some more profound German/Jewish reconciliation, that these are two communities that have held somewhat similar thought processes from the perspective of mimetic competition. Maybe there was a problem, that they were doomed to run into each other, but that in some sense, there are two wounds that need to be healed now that all of the original participants are either quite elderly or gone. Do you think that that is informing our conversation?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there's certainly an element of that between the two of us. I think that there's probably a degree to which the history was so traumatic that that people still understate this aspect. There was something about late 19th century, early 20th century Germany where the Judaism was better integrated into the society than in many other places, and there was something very synergistic, very generative about that, and then getting at all these ways that it was lost are very, very hard to do.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's the sort of social democratic response to the Hitler era and the Holocaust was sort of radically egalitarian. It's everybody's equal, you shouldn't kill people, everybody's equally valuable, and yet, in some ways, Hitler killed the best people. So, there's a way in which the social democratic response to what happened doesn't even come up to the terrible thing that happened. So, in an egalitarian society, well, we don't have quite as many people. We're all equal. Nothing's really changed, but, well, maybe you have no Jewish people left in Germany, and there's a lot less dynamism in the society as a result, and that's something that people still can't say in Germany because that's-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Is that right? You feel like it's...

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if I say it, people won't contradict it or anything, but it's sort of profoundly uncomfortable. So, I think there is a sense that there's sort of all these strange ways that Germany is still under the shadow of Hitler. Even the ways that people are trying to exercise Hitler, in some ways, have deformed the society where you can't go back to the things that worked incredibly well in pre-World War I Germany. There was probably a lot that was unhealthy and wrong with it, too, but yeah, there's a sense that something very big has been lost, and there probably are a Jewish version of this that one could articulate as well, but yeah, I think there's something about the synergy that's very powerful and that's quite missing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, from my side of the fence, I was just listening on NPR to a description of Fiddler on the Roof being put on by Joel Grey in Yiddish, and the sound of Jewish Middle High German, there's something about it that is shocking in today's era. So, there's been a Jewish loss. I felt this a couple of times. I avoided, to be honest, going to Germany because I didn't want to run into old people and wonder where they had been, but eventually, at Soros’ invitation, found myself at a conference in Berlin, and when I checked in to the hotel, I heard my last name pronounced in impeccable German, and it was both a horrible feeling and a wonderful feeling, like somehow, weirdly, something was home. I went to a restaurant near Checkpoint Charlie with my wife, and I was missing a fork, and the person spoke no English, and I remembered from some old story of my father, and I asked for a gopl, which I guess is the Yiddish for fork, and it was close enough, and somebody brought me a fork. By uttering a word that I-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Gabel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Gabel? Okay.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' By going through that exercise, I found that when this fork was brought to me, I realized that there was some part of my experience, in fact, that was missing, that this uncomfortable relationship, which my grandfather, when we went through Israel, driving north to south, was singing Leider. I mean, German was the language of the culture. It was the language of the intellectual, and that never left him. So, I think that weirdly, this is the first time, because I think it'll be too late if we wait for 20 more years, because there will be no one to remember, but that there is some opportunity to recognize a dual wound.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. No. Yeah. I think the challenge on the Germany side is that it's sort of... I had somewhat of a idiosyncratic background here where I was born in Germany, but we emigrated when I was about a year old, and we spoke German at home and lived in Africa, in Namibia were I went to a German-speaking school, but it was very different, I think, from the general post-World War II German experience, and so there are all these things that I can see from the outside looking into Germany that I think are... I still have a connection to it in sort of all of these ways, visited it as a child many times, and it's something that I connect with, and then it's obviously super different, and the contrast of Germany and California I always like to give is that California is optimistic, but desperate, and Germany is pessimistic, but comfortable. But from a Californian perspective, the incredibly deep pessimism is really, really striking, and even on that one dimension, I think Jewish culture is super different.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I feel like Jewish culture is, in part, starting to attenuate that we don't feel... I mean, this is crazy talk, but we never thought that there was anything positive about antisemitism, and obviously it's not a positive thing, but there were positive externalities in that it allowed us to push ourselves very, very hard because we always knew that we weren't going to get a fair shake and that at any moment you might need to flee to someplace that was less dangerous, and I feel that as we've become comfortable, we've lost some of the dynamism, which is a hard thing to admit, but I do think that that is in part true, and I see this in Germany. Germany's intellectual contribution was so profound that nothing post-World War II seems to suggest the same nation. I think that that loss is a profound loss, not to Germany, but to the entire world.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, and of course, one of the challenges is we can sort of describe these things, we can speculate on some of the causal things. I think it's somehow, we don't want to go back. We can't go back-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Can't, and don't want to. I agree.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, yeah, there is a history, and I think something's been lost in both Germany and in Jewish culture, and how one reconstitutes this is... Even if we can convince people of the causes and the losses, what you actually do about it is, is super hard to say and that's, that's sort of always the strange dynamic of this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Something I'd be open to us working on at some future point if we can find the time, but let me switch gears slightly and come back a little bit to the violence point.
Preference Falsification

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But one of the things that I think has become kind of interesting in our relationship is that a certain class of theories that are not popular in the general population are traded back and forth between us, partially around the idea of how do we restart growth, how do we avoid violence?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I wanted to sort of alert people who are interested in the portal concept to this idea of orphaned or unpopular theories that are traded among a few but maybe not are among the many. So if we could go through a few of these, one of them has to do with how you and I both, we're much more, I think we believe that Trump was much more likely to get elected, than the general population did.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And this has to do with the theory of preference falsification, that people will broadly lie about what their true preferences are, so they'll keep one set of public preferences, but a hidden set of private preferences. And then in our culture it gets revealed every four years where you kind of have a Schrodinger's cat experiment, you find out where the country actually is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, I felt this was a dynamic that was going on in all these strange ways in 2016 there was a dinner I had in San Francisco about a week before the election with a group of center right people. One of them was a very prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, and he said, you know, I'm voting for Trump in a week, but because I'm in Silicon Valley, I have to lie. And so he was unusually honest about lying. And the way I lie is that I tell people I'm voting for Gary Johnson.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So he couldn't say that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Like the facial muscles wouldn't work or something would go wrong. But Gary Johnson was sort of the lie that you could tell. And then if you actually look at what happened in the month before the election, the Gary Johnson support, you know, collapsed from I don't know something like six to two percent or whatever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And as far as I can tell, all of that went to Trump. And the question one has to ask is were these people, you know, lying all along? Were they lying to themselves? Did they sincerely change their mind in the last month? Or some combination of that. But yeah, one sort of vehicle for this preference falsification was that you had a third party candidate who was sort of a gateway to the transition, this is what happened with Ross Perot, where the people went, you know, eventually went to Clinton in '92 or John Anderson in 1980. So that's been a sort of repeated and that's, I think that was one element of what was going on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But then I think there were also all these aspects of, of the Trump candidacy, that people were super uncomfortable about polite society. And so one would, you know, that the preference falsification was somehow perhaps much greater than in many other past contexts. And so, you know, even the day of the election, the exit polls suggested that Trump was going to lose. And so there were still a two to three percent effect like this, literally the day of the voting.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I voted for Bernie in the primaries and I felt that both you and I had realized that the Clinton neoliberal story was a slow-motion, one-way ticket to disaster if it kept going on election after election. So that both of us recognized that we had to get off the trigger.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Of course, one of the complicated questions in all this is, you know, did people actually already sense this? And were they lying about this? So, like everybody was saying all the way throughout 2016, most of the people were saying, well, there's no chance that you know, Trump's going to win. This is absolutely impossible.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I didn't really connect this before the election, but with 2020 hindsight, I wonder was the fact that everyone was clicking on the Nate Silver 538 statistical polling model site a few times a day, to reassure themselves that Hillary Clinton was still ahead, was going to win. Was that some sort of acknowledgement that on some, maybe subconscious or barely conscious level, people sensed that it wasn't really as done a deal as they were constantly saying.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, there's even a version of that question that I wonder about. You know, because there was something about the polling that took on this unusually iconic role in 2016, it was so important and there was no truth outside the polls. I remember there's, you know, one of the Democrat talking heads saying something like, you know, Republicans don't believe in climate change. They also don't believe in polls. That's why they're going to lose. And generally polls are right, but there was something about how all-important they were in 2016 that might've, been a tell that something was a little bit amiss.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I think people knew, to my way of thinking. I think people knew that there was something very bizarre about this election. I think that the Bernie scare, that if the Democratic party hadn't ... been so skillful, in sidelining Bernie and where the party regulars were, you know, clearly backing Clinton, my sense is that it could well have been Bernie versus Trump and that would have been enough to say the neoliberal story is over.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think there was that fear that this was coming to an end. My sense of it was that the major reaction to Trump was sort of a class reaction. That it was you're rejecting the entire concept of an educated group that knows the right things to say. And you know, you're clearly sort of not the kind of person who should be in the Oval Office, much more than the issue of whether or not Trump was going to be a warmonger or turn the U S into a police state, which of course doesn't seem to have happened as of this moment in 2019.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But I guess what my sense of it was is that people really were shocked. I was, because I live in a left-of-center universe, the day after-

'''Peter Thiel:''' They certainly pretended to be shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, there's no-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Look, I'll concede your point. They were pretty shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They were pretty shocked.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But you know, if, but I still have my question, why were they clicking on the Nate Silver site just a few times a day?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One version of it was, let's say even if Hillary trounced Trump, but it wasn't enough. That would be a scary thing, given what Trump had been built up to, which is a, you know, orange Hitler. You know, if you imagine that your country is supporting somebody who thinks all Mexicans are rapists and is going to take the country back to, you know, to the Middle Ages, it would be very disconcerting if such a person could get 20 percent of the vote.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think that the poll had its own significance. However, you know, I think that one of the things about preference falsification is that when you start to believe that this is a robust phenomenon, that all of the economic models that assume that your private preferences and public preferences are the same, you start to see the world very differently. And so this is one of the portals into an alternate way of seeing the universe so as not to get surprised by revolutions.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, it's always this question, in my mind, this question of preference falsification, the Timur Kuran theory is tightly coupled to this question of, you know, how intense is the problem of political correctness, where, you know, how much pressure is there on people to say things they don't actually believe?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I always come back to thinking that the problem of political correctness in some sense is our biggest political problem. That, you know, we live in a world where people are super uncomfortable saying what they think, that it's sort of dangerous. And to use the Silicon Valley context, it's a problem that Silicon Valley has become a one party state. But there are two different senses in which you can be a one party state. One sense is that everybody just happens to believe this one thing, which you know ... is one thing.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the other one is in which 85 percent of people believe one thing and the other 15 percent pretend to. And you know, sort of like, it's a dynamic with super majorities where you know, in a democracy, we think 51 percent of people believe something, they're probably right if 70 to 80 percent believe something, it's almost more certainly right. But if you have 99.99 percent of the people believe something, at some point you shifted from a democratic truth to North Korean insanity.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so there is, you know, there's a subtle tipping point where the wisdom of crowds shifts into something that's sort of softly totalitarian or something like that. So in my mind, it maps very much onto this question of, you know, the problem of political correctness. It's always hard to measure how big it is, you know, in a politically correct society. Of course, you know, we're just saying what we think. We all love Stalin, we all love Chairman Mao and, and maybe, you know, we're just singing these songs because we're all enthusiastic about it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think, my read on it is that problem has gotten more acute in a lot of parts of our society over the last few decades.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think that's gotten, well, as you know, I started this whole intellectual dark web concept in part to create kind of a broad based and bipartisan coalition of people who are willing to speak out in public and take some risk. Speaking for a large number of people, I would never have understood how many people feel terrified to speak out if I hadn't done that. Because people come up to me all the time and say thank you for saying what I can't say at work. And then when I asked them, well, what is it that you can't say at work? It's absolutely shocking. Completely commonplace things, things that are not at all dangerous, not scary or frightening.
Distraction Theories

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things I believe, and I don't know whether you're going to agree with this, is that, you start to understand that a lot of the people who are enforcing the political correctness suspect that they are covering up dangerous truths. So for example, if you believe that IQ equals intelligence, which I do not, I mean, let's just be honest about it. You're going to fear anything that shows variation in IQ between groups. If you don't believe IQ equals intelligence, if you believe that intelligence is a much richer story and that no group is that far out of the running, you're not terribly frightened of the data because you have lots of different ways of understanding what's happening. And also you generally find that the truth is the best way of lifting people out of their situation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I secretly suspect to be blunt about it, and this is kind of horrible, that a lot of Silicon Valley is extremely bigoted and misogynistic and it can't actually make eye contact with the fact that it's secretly thinks women aren't as good programmers. Where I happen to think, you know, fisherian equivalence suggests that males and females one protein apart, SRY protein, are not likely to be. I mean they might have different forms of intelligence and different forms of cognitive strengths, but if you don't actually worry too much about an intellectual difference, you'd be willing to have an intellectual conversation that was quite open about it. So maybe I can turn that around.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, let me see. There's sort of a lot of different things I want to react to there. Yeah, I suspect that it's a distraction of sorts. You know, I think, I mean on this very superficial layer, we want to have debates, want to have debates on a lot of areas, a lot of, you know, hard questions and questions in science and technology and philosophy and religion, there're all these questions that I think it would be healthy to debate.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And there's a way in which political debates are sort of a low form of these questions. And there's one sense in which I think of these political questions as less important or less elevated than some of these others, but there's also a sense in which these questions about politics are ones that everyone can have access to. And so if you can't even have a debate about politics, you can't say you know, I like the man with the strange orange hairdo or I like the mean grandmother. If you can't even say that, then we've sort of frozen out discussion on a lot of other areas. And that's always one of the reasons I think that political correctness starts with correctness about politics. That when you aren't allowed to talk about that area, you've implicitly frozen out a lot of others that are maybe more important and you know, and where we're certainly not going to have a debate about string theory if we can't even have a common sense debate about politics or something like that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I'm very sympathetic to this sort of distraction theory that, you know, that what's going on our society is like a psychosocial, magic, hypnotic magic trick where, you know, we're being distracted from something very important and political correctness, identity politics and maybe American exceptionalism, these various ideological systems, are distracting us from things. The thing I keep thinking of, the main thing it's distracting us from, is the stagnation and it's that there are these problems that we don't want to talk about in our society. It's possible it's also a way to distract us from bad thoughts that we have about people with the sort, you said.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But the one I would, I would go back to first is just that it's distracting us from dealing with problems. You know, the reason we have a newspeak, this sort of Orwellian newspeak in politics with these zombie politicians, you know Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever it might be, is that we're not supposed to talk about the real issues and maybe they have a bad conscience and they think they're bad people, but it's just, I think the primary thing is just too dangerous to talk about what's actually going on. They don't know what to do about it and better not talk about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think there's another take on it, which you know, if I'm honest about it probably originates from my side of the aisle, which is that I have a sense that if you believe that productivity and growth is over, you don't want to emphasize issues of merit because you don't really think that the merit is going to translate.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And so therefore all you can focus on, like you know, a board of a company, is just a bunch of slots at a trough. And so you have to make sure that every group has its slots at the trough, because it doesn't actually matter. The board isn't doing anything to begin with. And so it's only a question of receiving the wealth that is already there. And so I worry that that is, you know, I guess where I break with a lot of progressives is that I believe that most progress comes from progress, which is technologically led and informationally led, that the more we know and the more we can do, the more we can take care of people.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. So, I mean, again, this is always maybe naive hope on my part or something like this. But I always think that when we can't talk about things, we can't solve them-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Exactly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... and that this is so, you know, maybe these are the calculations you make and this is, you know, this is the way we pat people on the head, even though they're never going to get ahead or something like that. But you know, it's never going to work. It's-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well at least let's go down swinging.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... and eventually, and people aren't that stupid and they will eventually figure it out. And so that's sort of why I'm undermotivated to play that game.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, and I have to say that one of the things that I've learned from you is that it's one thing to have a contrarian position. It's another thing to hold it when the whole world starts hating on you.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' For example, I watched the world go from viewing removing Gawker as removing a nuisance, or worse that was threatening people selectively, to a concern, you know, about like First Amendment rights and silencing, you know, free speech. And you know, I do have the strong sense that people are willfully misinterpreting these actions that are necessary to sort of self correct in our society and are not being terribly honest. There's a lot of bad faith acting in our system at the moment.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But, I'm always like this, where I'm always quite hopeful that people realize there's a lot of bad faith acting and they discount this accordingly.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They grow out of it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I don't know how many of the people disagree with me on the support for Trump will be more open to it in five years or 10 years, and we'll see. On the Gawker matter, you know, I'm going to win that one. I think people understand that, when it gets criticized by people in the media who themselves are up against super challenged business models where they have to act in sociopathic ways to get clicks by their readers, that this is just the game they have to play. There's more of an understanding of this than you think, and therefore, you know, it's not quite what it looks.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I was extremely disturbed by Gawker a decade, decade and a half ago because I think it was a really powerful thing at the time where it worked because people didn't understand how it worked. It was this hate factory, the scapegoating machine, but people didn't see it as such. And because of that it was super powerful. Once you see how it works, once you understand it, it is less powerful. So, you know, even had I not succeeded in the litigation against Gawker, I think it would be a weaker version of that today. There are of course equally nasty things on the internet, but they're not as powerful because-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Or as well organized.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ...there's more transparency into the bad motives and people get it, and the hate factory only works when it's not perceived as such.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I think that there is a way in which some of this stuff is slowing down because people are getting tired of the constant state of beheading, figuratively, of people via their reputation, that we've moved from honest physical violence into reputational and economic violence against people that are considered undesirable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But I think that like there's a story with both Gawker and Trump, which the rest of the world will never see. And I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been working with you. In the case of Gawker, I don't think anybody even knows the story about how much you sweated the ethics internally of: How do I do this right? How do I make sure that I don't hurt anybody that I shouldn't be hurting? How do I make sure that this represents something narrow and not something broad? Which is a story so far as I know that hasn't been told.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And then there's the story with Trump where, I don't know if you remember this, when Trump won, you had a gathering at your house and you did not invite me, and I was so pissed at you that even though I was tooth and nail against Trump, and I remain really pretty close to a never Trumper. I knew why you did what you did. I knew that you felt that it was a reduction in violence and I think that you had theories that nobody believed at the time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' If I look out at this world, out through these windows, Trump has not changed mostly day to day life except for the phenomena of Trump, but it's not, there isn't you know a policeman on every street corner with an automatic rifle. We're not in some sort of siege from the White House. And you said, I think much less is going to happen than people imagined and I think we're going to be in a much less interventionist mode than we were previously. And whether or not you were right or you're wrong. So far, I think you've been borne out to be right on both of those points. I knew that you had an idea that we had to shake things up or we were going to be in some very dangerous situation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I had two speeches in 2016, one was at the Republican convention, one was at the Washington Press Club about a month before the election. And in both speeches, I underscored the ways in which I think Trump would represent a break from the interventionist, neoconservative, neoliberal foreign policies, that Bush 43, that Obama still continued and that Hillary was likely to, would have been likely to continue. And I still think that that's roughly what's happened. It's not been, you know, it's not been ... as far away from interventionism as I would like. But it's directionally, directionally that's happened.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think that, you know, I do think we're not going to go back to that on the Republican side, which is like a very important thing. We're not going to go back to the Bush foreign policy ever. That was an important thing. In the primaries, when, the republican primaries, when Trump spoke out against the Iraq war. That was, you know, that was a very important moment from my point of view. And I think, you know, we always think of the, I think one way to think of the President of the United States is that you're sort of the mayor of this country, but you're the dictator of the world because in the US your power is very limited. Outside the US you can do, you know, a great number of things. And that's why I think these foreign policy questions are actually, are very important ones in assessing the president.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well I guess my take on the great danger of Trump was that there were certain sorts of standards and agreed upon cultural aspects, which I've likened to the Oral Torah of the United States where the Constitution is our Written Torah. And my concern is that Trump has had an effect on degrading certain expectations where it does matter how one comports oneself as a president, maybe not as much as some of my friends would like to think.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I do think that we needed some dynamism, but my concern is that it's going to be very difficult to recover from the kind of damage to our sense of what can and cannot be said and done. I did think that we needed to break out of our Overton window, if you will, on many topics. I would just, the way that Trump touched those was not comfortable for me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, I agree. There are certain ways in which president Trump does not act presidential in the way in which the previous presidents-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I agree that he's breached things that needed to be said.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... but then maybe there's some point where it was too much acting and the acting was counterproductive. I think there is something extraordinary about how it was possible for someone like Donald Trump to get elected. And probably a useful question for people on both the left and the right would be to try to think about, you know, what the underlying problems were, what some of the solutions to that are. And you know, it's, I think the left or the Democrats, you know, they could, they can win. They can win in 2020 but they have to have more of an agenda than just telling the Republicans to hurry up and die, it has to be more than that, you know?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is the thing that convinced me that I didn't get the Trump thing, which was, I was convinced that Trump was going to be such a wake up call that the Democratic party was going to, you know, go behind a closed door and say we cannot let this happen again. We have to look honestly at how he got beat, what this represents, what it means and what we're going to do next time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And the idea that we were going to double or triple down on some of the stuff that didn't work never even occurred to me. I had no idea that that party was so far gone that it couldn't actually, you know, if you imagine that he's orange Hitler, you would think orange Hitler would be the occasion to think deeply and question hypotheses. And I really have been shocked at the extent to which that didn't happen. So maybe I got my own party wrong on that front. I didn't know that we were this far gone, but.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think there's still a lot of time to do that. And I keep thinking that, you know, we are at some point where the distractions aren't going to work as well. You know, I think the big distraction on the left over the last 40, 50 years have been forms of identity politics where, you know, we don't look at the country as a whole. We look at parts of it and it's sort of been a way of, you know, I think obscuring these questions of stagnation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Fair enough. And on the right?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I would say the right, the right wing distraction technique has been, I would say something like American exceptionalism-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That’s interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -which is this doctrine that the US is this singular exceptional country. It's so, so terrific, so wonderful. It does everything so incredibly well that you shouldn't ask any difficult questions, any questions at all. I think it, in theological or epistemological terms, you can compare it to the radical monotheism of the God of the Old Testament where it means that God is so radically unique that you can't know anything about him. You can't talk about God's attributes, you can't say anything about him whatsoever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And if the United States is radically exceptional, then in a similar way you can say nothing about it whatsoever. And there may be all these things on the ground that seem crazy, where, you know, we have people who are exceptionally overweight. We have subway systems that are exceptionally expensive to build. We have universities that are exceptionally sociopathic. I mean, you don't have the student debt problem in any other country. You know, we have trade regime that's exceptionally bad for our country, like no other country-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Firearms.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... is as self destructive as this. There are all these things that we somehow don't ask. So I think exceptionalism somehow led to this country that was exceptionally un-self aware. And-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's very interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... that's and so, you know, there's greatness is adjacent to exceptionalism, but it's actually still quite different because many countries can be great and great is more, it's more a scale. And there's something you measure it against-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's multi-variate.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... whereas exceptional, it's just completely incommensurate with anything else. And I think that's gotten us into a very, very bad cul de sac.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think that there's a way in which that sort of exceptionalism has ended on the right. And there's been, we've moved beyond that. And I'm hopeful that in a similar way, the left will move beyond identity politics even though, right now it feels like the monster is flopping about more violently than ever, even though I think it might be its death throes, but maybe not.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. And it could be that it's gotten very strong or it could be on its last legs and it might as well go for broke.

== Girard’s Mimetic Theories ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So let me return back to the line of inquiry. I mean, sorry, just enjoying so much hearing what you have to say. Some of it's new to me. The theories that might be portals into a different way of looking at the world.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of them that you brought into my, I've never heard of before was Girard's various theories. And I wonder if you might say, you've often credited success in business to how you understood and you applied Girard. I mean obviously he didn't have this kind of level of business success. So can you talk a little bit about your personal relationship to Rene Girard's theories as a portal into a different way of seeing the world?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well let's say a little bit about the theory. So it's, it was sort of this theory of human psychology as deeply mimetic where you sort of, you copy other people.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, so just for the folks at home mimetic as in mime rather than memetic is in meme.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Well they're probably closely related. But you imitate people but that's how you learn to speak as a child. You copy your parents language, that's how, but then you also imitate desire and then there are sort of all sorts of aspects of mimesis that can lead to sort of mass violence mass insanity. So it has, it's both what enables human culture to function, but it also is quite, quite dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And you know, when I came across this sort of constellation of ideas as an undergraduate at Stanford, you know, my biases were sort of libertarian, classic liberal, only individuals exist. Individuals are radically autonomous, can think for themselves. And so this was, it was sort of a powerful corrective to that intellectually. But then it also worked on an existential level where you sort of realize, wow, there are all these ways that I've been hyper mimetic, I've been hyper tracked, why am I at Stanford, why does this matter so much? Why, you know, why am I doing all the things I'm doing?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And that's, it's a prism through which one when looks at a lot of things that I found to be quite helpful over recent decades. I think the preference falsification you can think of in mimetic terms where, you know, everybody goes along with what everybody else thinks, and then you can get these sort of chaotic points where all of a sudden things can shift much faster than you would think possible because there are all these dynamics that are not, you know, not simply rational. It's not quite correct to model people as these sort of classical Adams or something like that, it's much more entangled.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What would be a good way for a people listening at home to start to get into Girard's philosophy if they were interested?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well there are, you know, it's, there's sort of a number of different books that Girard wrote. I think the magisterial one is probably Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. So it's this truth of mimesis and violence and the ways. So it's sort of part psychology, part anthropology, part history.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All portal, I should point out because they're all hidden.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's, you know, it's a portal onto the past, and to human origins. It's our history, it's a portal onto the present, onto, you know, the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It's a portal onto the future in terms of, you know, are we going to let these mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence where, you know, even the entire planet can no longer absorb the violence that we can unleash or are we going to learn from this and transcend this, in a way where we get to some very different place.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so it has a sense that, you know, of both danger and hope for the future as well. So it's, it is sort of this, you know, panoramic theory on a lot of ways. Super powerful and just extraordinarily different from what one would normally hear. You know, there's sort of like almost a cult like element where you had these people who are followers of Girard. And was sort of a sense that, you know, we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did and that was generative and very powerful.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, you know, it's always, there are parts of it that are unhealthy, but it was, you know, it has sort of an incredible dynamism. And then it just, you are aware that, you know, maybe things are so different from how they appear to be that, you know ... there may be a portal out there, there may be, you know,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What was shocking to me. I mean, the first time I heard about it, you invited me to a conference that you were keeping quiet and I was in the news and there was quite a lot of anger and furor that I had done something wrong. And you waited a few days to give a talk and you talked about scapegoating and the mechanism by which violence that might be visited upon the many is visited upon the one. And then you also started talking about the King as if he is sort of scapegoat in waiting, so that the King is not necessarily something that one would want to be.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I found it absolutely fascinating because it turned so many ideas on their heads that I got angry at you. Why hadn't you told me this earlier when I'd been through three sleepless nights before I'd heard the theory. So I found it instantly applicable, particularly if you're the sort of person who's likely to get scapegoated by not taking refuge in the herd. Do you think it has more relevance to people who are struggling to break out as individuals because of the possibility of being picked off?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think it has universal ... I think it is broadly true, and so it has some sort of universal relevance. I think the problems of violence and scapegoating are universal problems. It's probably the case that there are certain types of people who are more likely to become scapegoats, but it's not an absolute thing. So there's always, you could say there's an arbitrariness about scapegoating because the scapegoat is supposed to represent, to stand in for everybody. So the scapegoat has to be perceived as someone who's radically other, but then also has to somehow emerge from within the group. There are times when the scapegoat is the sort of outlier, extreme insider, extreme outsider, king/criminal or whatever personality.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's probably a dangerous sort of thing. It's like Abraham Lincoln, the incredible orator who also grows up in a log cabin, these extreme contrasts are often people who are at risk of this maybe more than others. And then at the same time, because these are mob-like dynamics, there is sort of a way in which it's not like anyone's really safe from the violence ever. No one's completely safe.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I think that's quite true.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes. There is a thought that one of the history ideas that Girard had that is that there's a dynamic to this process where scapegoating, it only works when people don't understand it. As you understand it better, it works less well or it has to get displaced into other dimensions. If you have a witch hunt, say, we need to find a witch to bring back peace to the community, that's a psychosocial understanding of what you're doing is actually counterproductive of the witch hunt itself. The witch hunt is supposed to be a theological epiphany that God's telling you who the witch is. If you think of it as some sort of psychosocial control mechanism, then it won't work any more.

'''Peter Thiel:''' A metaphor that Girard uses is that the sacred is like phlogiston and violence is like oxygen, but it only works in a world where it's misunderstood. So if you understand scapegoating, you end up in a world where it works less and less well, and the kind of political and cultural institutions that are linked to it will tend to unravel. I think one of the ways in which this has happened a great deal in modernity is that we scapegoat the scapegoaters, go up one level of abstraction.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That always, it makes it a little bit more complicated. If we go after the people who were the historical oppressors, the historical victimizers, that's often a super powerful way, and it's slightly too complicated. There was a Bill Clinton formulation of this, "we must unite against those who seek to divide us", which is on some level itself contradictory, but then it's a little bit too hard for people to fully disentangle.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's very funny.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's one way that I think it still works even though it's, again, when everyone sees these moves, when everyone understands them, it just doesn't work that well any more.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So it's like saying, "Would you like me to prescribe you a placebo?".

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. That probably does not work very well.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But then the other part of it that I find terrifying which is, but also interesting, is that implicit in this framework is that there is a minimal level of violence needed to accomplish an end, and that the scapegoating mechanism while entirely unjust has the virtue of being minimal in this, that horror is visited upon the individual.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, yes. Or the theological terminology Girard would use would be that scapegoating is satanic and that archaic cultures were a little bit satanic but not very. They were sort of satanic in an innocent way because the violence was actually a way to limit violence, that violence is both the disease and a cure for the disease. We need violence to drive out violence. This is how our societies work. And then it's not quite clear how things will continue to work. You could always say that there is a sense in which - and this is super broad brush stroke-type argument - there's a way in which you can say that the Left is more focused on the unjustified nature of violence, and the Right is more focused on how a certain amount of violence is needed for society. There are ways in which they're both right, and then there are ways in which they're both deconstructing each other.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You could say a nation state contains violence in both senses of the word contain.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh that's good.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Because it contains it as it limits it, it channels it in certain ways, but then it's also part of its very being. You get into all these questions. When it's appropriate, when it's not. That's why I don't like violence. I think it's a very serious problem, but-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You also recognize its instrumental nature.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you said, "We're going to get rid of all violence tomorrow. It's going to stop-"

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You'd be talking about nothing.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or I think-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There's no way in which that can-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, that might require a tremendous amount of violence to enact or if we're going to have no more violence at all, maybe you'll have just total chaos and a lot of violence in that form. It's an interesting problem to... all these interesting descriptors, but then how to practically translate into action, very, very tricky.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think that one of the things on the Left that people don't get right, and I don't know whether you'll agree with me or not, is that I think we on the Left are somewhat divided between two camps. One camp is quite open about wanting to end oppression and the other camp is cryptic about wanting to reverse it. In other words, you've oppressed for long enough. It is your turn to be oppressed by us and we are actually envious of oppression. There is something of a civil war. I mean I would say this is the way in which the IDW's left wing or left flank is misunderstood, which is that almost none of the left wing members of the IDW are interested in oppressing anybody. So there's going to be no payback period that sounds like fun to us.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things I hadn't understood until it was said to me quite starkly, progress is messy and you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. There is this just tolerance bordering on excitement about the opportunity to stick it to those who have stuck it to you, from your perspective, that this is an aspect of justice. Whereas the cessation of oppression is interesting to another part of that group.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The disturbing thing is that it's, of course, much less exciting and much less energizing.
Motivating Stories and Science

'''Peter Thiel:''' I often think if you listen to a political speech, the applause lines are always the ones, "We are going to go after the other side. We're going to go after the bad people. We're going to stop them." If you try to construct a political speech in which it was, "We're going to unite people. We're going to get everybody onto this goal and there were no bad people." It's almost impossible to have a speech that has any energy at all.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take issue with that slightly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' As a political speech.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understood exactly what you said. I don't think I'm going to mischaracterize it. I think that the problem is the reason I pour energy into trying to stop the political correctness and the rules about what can be said, mostly has to do with the fact that I'm incredibly excited, except I'm excited about something non-political. If what I'm excited about is pursuing technological progress, scientific progress, more people being able to form families, et cetera, that's where the excitement is. It's not coming from the politics. It's coming from what the politics facilitates. So I think that the problem with these speeches is: if you don't believe that there is something that we're keeping this space clean for, we might as well riot or something because at least that's exciting and that's got some energy behind it. Then it's my team versus your team.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean look, at some level anybody who's focused on technology as you are is a progressive in the sense of caring about what is actually progress. I think that the danger comes from when politics becomes your entertainment. You read very correctly, and I learned this from you, that when you look at a bunch of candidates debating on a crowded stage, look at where the energy is. The energy is something that is not, in my opinion, a good indicator - it's not a good approximate for the ultimate that I care about.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Look, I'd like it to be just the way you describe. I just-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no. I understood what you-

'''Peter Thiel:''' ...want to report it often is not. Scientific, technological progress, in a way, the hope is it can lead towards a more cornucopian world in which there's less Malthusian struggle, less violence, and then at the very same time, an honest account of the history of these things is that a lot of it was used to develop more advanced weapons. It was in the pursuit of violence. One account of the tech stagnation, the scientific tech stagnation, is that the breakthrough thing was the atom bomb and then you built the rockets to deliver the bombs more quickly. By 1970 we had enough bombs and rockets to destroy the world 10 or 20 times over or whatever, and the whole thing made no more sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If one of the big drivers of scientific and technological progress was actually just the military dimension, when that became absurd did the whole thing slow down to the space age? Not in 1972 when Apollo left the moon, but was the key moment 1975 when you had the Apollo Soyuz docking? If we're just going to be friends with the Russians, does it really make sense for people to be working 80 hours, 100 hours a week around the clock? And again, I don't think it's all that, but I think one of the challenges, that we should not understate how big it is in resetting science and technology in the 21st century is, how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice, incredibly hard work, deferred gratification for the future, that's not intrinsically violent? It was combined with that in all these powerful ways.
Fears of Progress

'''Peter Thiel:''' A lot of people deny that there's a tech science stagnation going on, but then one of the other things one hears is, "Well, maybe it's not progressing as fast, but do we really want it to progress as fast? Isn't it dangerous? We're just going to build the AI that's going to kill everybody or it'll be biological weapons or it's going to be runaway nanotechnology." I don't think we should dismiss those fears completely.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, the fear is that it's going to make these things cheap and easy. Whereas right now you still need a state to do a lot of this work. I mean, Elon Musk is one of the first private individuals with a space program.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's a version of it, but I think in general it's just that somehow you will lose control over the violence. You think you can control it. Maybe it's a large state. Maybe it's autonomous AI weapons, which in theory are controlled by state, but in practice, not quite. There's all these scenarios where the stuff can spiral out of control. I'm more scared of the one where nothing happens. I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to apocalypse. I'm much more scared of that, but we have to understand why people are scared of the nonstagnant world.
Climate Change

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean, boy, there are a couple of threads here that are super important, one of which is that one thing that I sense that both of us get frustrated with is that if you think about growth as necessary to contain certain violence, and you think about growth as largely also being how much fossil fuels you're able to burn, climate is not paired with a reduction in opulence. It's paired on the other side with war. If you over-focus on climate and you result in a situation in which growth is slowed to a halt ... Now, growth doesn't need to be the amount of fossil fuel you burn, but it has largely been that up until the present. You actually see that the trade-off that you're facing is very different than the one that's usually portrayed by either side. Somehow we never get around to that conversation, which would be, if we were very serious about climate, would we be plunged into war?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Obviously you can't have an economy without an environment, but it may also be the case that you can't have an environment without an economy. And then if both of those statements are true, maybe the set of best solutions looks really different than if you just focus on one and not the other.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is why it's so important for me to have environments in which people who don't agree on things, but agree on what constitutes a conversation, can sit down with an idea that nobody's going to leave the table with their reputation in tatters to the extent that they can't find a job on Monday to support themselves. It's that you have to actually weigh both of these things simultaneously. The great danger is people trying to solve either problem in isolation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, if one goes with the general climate change narrative that it's anthropogenic, it's CO2 levels are rising in a way that's dangerous and has a serious risk of some kind of big runaway process, I think always the political question in my mind is, what do you do about China and what do you do about India? Because these are the countries that are trying to catch up to the developed world. They have a enormous way to go to catch up and-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's a logical consequence.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think Europe has something like 8% of the carbon emissions in the world. Then we have to have more than just the magical political thinking where it's something like we're going to have a carbon tax in California and this will be so charismatic and so inspiring that people in China and India will copy us and follow suit. They're not willing to actually say that literally because it sounds so absurd-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It sounds crazy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But if you say that that's not the way things actually work, then somehow you need to do some really different things. We need to find energy sources that are not carbon dioxide intensive. Maybe we need to figure out ways to engineer carbon sinks. I mean there's all this crazy geoengineering stuff that maybe should be on the table. Maybe we should be more open to nuclear power. It was like a range of very different debates that pushes you towards-
Transparency and Privacy

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take a slightly different tack. Two statements that I found later in life unfortunately, but have both been meaningful to me. One is Weber's definition that a government is a monopoly on violence. And the other one, it's a guy I can never remember who said, I think it was a French political philosopher who said, "A nation is a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common." If you put these things together, if you imagine that somehow we've now gone in for the belief that transparency is almost always a good thing and that what we need is greater transparency to control the badness in our society, we probably won't be able to forget anything in common. Therefore, we may not be able to have a nation, and therefore the nation may not be able to monopolize violence, which is a very disturbing but interesting causal chain. Can we explore the idea of transparency, given that people seem to now associate certain words with positivity, even though normally we would have thought about privacy, transparency, trade-offs, let's say?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Well, I always do think there's a privacy-transparency trade off. One thing that's always confusing about transparency to me is there's transparency in theory, which is like this panopticon-like thing where the entire planet gets illuminated brightly and equally everywhere, all at once. So that's in theory. But then in practice is often it sounds more like a weapon that will be directed against certain people where it's a question of who gets to render who else transparent, and maybe it's even a path-dependent sequencing question where if you do it first-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' First strike transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' First strike transparency is very powerful. So you have to think about Mr. Snowden against the NSA, and then the NSA trying to expose Mr. Snowden's Swedish sex cult, whatever you want to describe it as. I think a lot of it ends up having that kind of an-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You mean Assange's.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sorry, Assange. Assange's Swedish sex cult, Assange against the NSA, NSA against Assange's Swedish sex cult or something like that. I think in practice full transparency, it assumes people can pay attention to everything at once or equally. That seems politically incorrect. Then even if you had this much greater transparency in all these ways, there are all these ways that that would seem creepy totalitarian. If you stated in terms of the problem of violence, you can think of the trade-off between transparency and privacy as transparency is we're looking at everybody and therefore they can't be that violent, but the state may be very violent in enforcing all this transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Privacy is you get to have a gun and you get to do various dangerous things in the dark and no one knows what they are. So there's probably more violence on the individual level, but then less control on the state. It's, again, this question of are you more scared of the violence of individuals or more scared of centralized violence? Probably one should not be too categorical or too absolute about this, but it can show up in both places and that's why it's a wickedly hard problem. Wickedly hard.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It does seem to be. I have to say I've started to hate the transparency discussion, because if you'll notice there's a vogue in 2019 for simply saying, "Well, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant," as if that constituted an argument. Now, first of all, one thing that people don't understand is that there are infections, like brucella, that are actually accelerated by sunlight, so it's comical. It's not even true. Bleach is probably a better disinfectant. But the idea that that constitutes an argument in our time, to me, speaks to the fact that we're living in a very strange moment where if you go back to Ecclesiastes and the inspiration for Turn Turn Turn, there was an idea that there was a purpose to everything and inclusion or exclusion were both needed. "A time to kill, a time to die, time to refrain from killing."

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There does seem to be an absolutist mania in which it would be hard to imagine writing a song about a time to kill in the modern era. And likewise, I'm not positive that people recognize how imperative it is for a well-functioning government to have places where it doesn't have to constantly account for itself.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you have no back room deals, maybe that's less corrupt, but maybe nothing gets done.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Not functional.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The US Supreme court still doesn't televise its hearings. I suspect that's the right call. I think part of it is that if you know that everything is going to be transparent, you will censor yourself and you won't say things. So it's not like the same thing happens in a transparent way. Maybe it just stops happening altogether. If you're a politician or an aspiring politician, you're not going to engage in bold ideas. You're not going to experiment with different ways about thinking about things. You're going to be super conventional, super curated.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's not like we get all the benefits of transparency with none of the costs. They come with a very, very high cost. I do wonder if one of the strange dynamics with the younger generations in the US is that there's a sense that you're just constantly watched. There's this great Eye of Sauron, to use the Tolkien metaphor, that's looking at you at all times. It would be good if you could act the same way and if something bad happened, we could take care of you. But if you're always being watched, I suspect it really changes your behavior.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's interesting, in a moment where I wanted to make sure that my son didn't misbehave, I toured him around our neighborhood and pointed out all of the cameras that would track anybody on the street where we live. I had never noticed them before, but sure enough there they were in every nook and cranny that we don't realize that if it has to be stitched together, there's an incredible web of surveillance tools that are surrounding us at all time.
Excitement and Nihilism

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Are you familiar with the theory of Jennifer Freyd's called Institutional Betrayal?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I know you've mentioned it to me, but I don't know all the details. So tell me a little bit about it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I don't know all the details either. But I think what she isolated was that people who have been betrayed by institutions that have a responsibility of care, like a hospital for example, or if you trust a sense-making organ like your newspaper, and then you find that you've been betrayed by that institution that had something of a principal-agent problem where you had to trust your agent in order to take care of you, that the quality of trauma is in fact different and that it leads to a universal fear of the infrastructure of your society. That's sort of what I picked up.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What I was going to ask you about is, given our central belief that there was something about growth that led to universal betrayal by institutions, which has compromised experts in the minds of most of people, do you think there's a preferred way of waking up as a society out of a kind of universal institutional betrayal? (If we're excited about the next chapter, what I'd love to talk to you about in a future episode is what we're excited about, about what comes next.) Is there a way of waking up from this most gracefully?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Don't know about that. It strikes me that there are ways we don't want to wake up. We don't want to wake up in a way where it de-energizes us and demotivates. I think one of the ways I think these institutions worked was they took care of people, but it was also motivational. You study. You get good grades. You'll succeed in our system. One way, when you deconstruct these institutions, there's one direction that I think is always very dangerous, that it just shifts people into a much more nihilistic, very low energy mode where it's just, "Well, there's no point. Nothing can be done." That's the way that I definitively do not want to wake people up.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I think it has to always be coupled a little bit to... There are these paths that aren't really going anywhere and you shouldn't go down these paths. But then there's some other paths here that you need to take. There's a portal here that you need to look at. If we are just saying all the paths are blocked, I think probably the risk is people just sit down where they are and stop moving altogether. That feels like the very wrong way to wake people up.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That sounds very wise. Let me just ask, since you've been attached to some of the highest energy ideas, whether it's crazy-sounding stuff like seasteading or radical longevity or some other ideas from your background in venture capital and as a technologist yourself, what are the things that you're most excited if we could move them back into the institutions where they probably have belonged all this time? What are the first subjects and people that you would move back into institutional support to reenergize our society? People or programs.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I do think there is something about basic science that doesn't all have the for-profit character. Some of it has this nonprofit character. We're building up this knowledge base for all of humanity. I don't yet know how we do basic science without some kind of institutional context. That's one that would seem absolutely critical. I'm super interested in the problem of longevity, radical life extension. My disappointment in the nonprofit institutions and nonprofit world has directed me more and more over the years to just invest in biotech companies and try to find these better-functioning corporate solutions. And then I always have this worry in the back of my head that maybe there are these basic research problems that are being sidestepped because they're too hard. So I think basic science is one that you'd have to do, but you have to somehow also reform the institution so that you don't have this Gresham's law where the politicians replace the scientists.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That sounds like a great one. I was very surprised to see that your friend, Aubrey de Grey, who you funded to get the radical longevity thing, was in the news for having solved a hard math problem in his spare time that nobody even knew he was working on. So it seems like even though people would treat him as crazy, he certainly has a lot on the ball and probably is exactly the kind of a person who might energize the department even if he might infuriate it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you can get him back in. If you were able to get him back in, I think you'd be able to solve a lot of problems.
End

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, Peter, it's been absolutely fantastic having you. Thank you for a very generous gift of your time, and I hope that you will consider coming back on The Portal to talk about some of the specifics about the things that you and I are most excited about doing next.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Will do. Thank you so much.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All right, Peter. You've been watching The Portal with Peter Thiel. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. Thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe to the podcast, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below on YouTube. Thanks.

1: Peter Thiel

2020-02-24T15:51:00Z

Jmank88: add watch/next buttons

Welcome to The Portal. Episode 1 is a conversation with Peter Thiel. Please subscribe to The Portal anywhere you listen to podcasts, and leave us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts.

[https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/6740c1c3-c9d2-4ecc-a3df-0ed32f0ddba0 Listen to Episode 1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s Watch Episode 1] [[ep2 | Next Episode]]

[[All Episodes]]

== Introduction ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello and welcome to The Portal's first episode. Today, I'll be sitting down with Peter Thiel. Now, if you've been following me on Twitter, or perhaps as a podcast guest on other podcasts, you may know that I work for Thiel Capital. But one of the things that people ask me most frequently is, given that you are so different than your boss and friend Peter Thiel, how is it the two of you get along? What is it that you talk about? Where do you agree and disagree? Now, oddly, Peter and I both do a fair amount of public speaking. But I don't believe that we've ever appeared in public together and very few people have heard our conversations. What's more, he almost never mentions me, and I almost never mentioned him in our public lives.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So hopefully this podcast will give some indication of what a conversation is like with somebody who I find one of the most interesting and influential teachers of our time; somebody who has influenced all sorts of people in Silicon Valley involved with technology and inventing tomorrow, and who is often not seen accurately, in my opinion, by the commentariat and the regular people who opine as pundits in the world of science and technology.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I hope you'll find Peter as fascinating as I do. Without further ado, this is the first episode of The Portal. Thanks for joining us.

== Personal Backgrounds ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Hello and welcome. You found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I think this is our first interview show to debut, and I'm here with my good friend and employer, Mr. Peter Thiel. Peter, welcome to The Portal.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, Eric, thanks for having me on your program.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, this is a great honor. One of the things I think is kind of odd is that lots of people know that I work for you and many people know that we're friends, but even though we both do a fair amount of public speaking, I don't think we've ever appeared any place in public together. Is that your recollection as well?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I can't think of a single occasion. So this proves we're not the same person.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' We're not the same person, yeah. You are not my alter ego. But on that front, I think it is kind of an odd thing for me. I mean, we met each other, I think when I was in my late 40s, and if you'd ever told me that the person who would be most likely to complete my thoughts accurately would be you, I never would have believed it, never having met you. We have somewhat opposite politics. We have very different life histories. How do you think it is that we've come to share such a lot of thinking? I mean, I have to say that a lot of my ideas are cross pollinated with yours. So you occur in a lot of my standard riffs. How do you think it is that we came to different conclusions, but share so much of a body of thought?

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I'm always hard pressed to answer that, since the conclusions all seem correct to me. And it's always mysterious why it feels like we're the outliers and we're among the very few people that reach some of these conclusions about the relative stagnation in science and technology, the ways in which this is deranging or culture, our politics, our society, and then how we need to try to find some bold ways out; some bold ways to find a new portal to a different world.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think there are different ways the two of us came at this. I feel like you got to some of these perspectives at a very early point, sort of the mid 1980s, that something was incredibly off. I probably got there in the early, mid-90s, when I was from this track law firm job in New York city. And somehow everything felt like it was more like a Ponzi scheme. It wasn't really going towards the future everyone had promised you, in the elite undergraduate and law school education I had gone through.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, yeah. So I think there was sort of a point, we got to these insights. But it's still striking how out of sync they feel with so much of our society, even in 2019.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, I mean, that's a very striking thing for me. And it's also something that's frustrated me. Sometimes, when I look forward to you being interviewed, it often feels to me that so much time is spent on the initial question,"Are we somewhat stagnating in science and technology," that rather than assuming that as a conclusion - which I think we can make a pretty convincing argument that there has been a lot of stagnation - it seems to me that a lot of these conversations hang at an earlier level. And so one of the things that I was hoping to do in this, which is, I think, your second long form podcast. You did Dave Rubin's show sometime ago ... Is to sort of presuppose some of the basics that people will be familiar with who've been following either one of us, or both of us, and to get to the part of the conversation that I think never gets explained and discussed, because people are always so hung up at the initial frame issue.
What is the dominant narrative?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So with your indulgence, let's talk a little bit about what you and I see, and any differences that we might have, about this period of time that we find ourselves in, in 2019. What would you say is the dominant narrative before we get to what might be our shared counter narrative?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, you know, the dominant narrative is probably fraying and has been fraying for some time, but it is something like we're in a world of generally fast scientific and technological progress. Things are getting better all the time. There's some imbalances that maybe need to be smoothed out. There's some corner case problems. Maybe there's some dystopian risks, because the technology is so fast and so scary that it might be destructive. But it's a generally accelerationist story. And then there's some sort of micro-adjustments within that, that one would have to make.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There's are all sorts of ways that I think it's fraying. I think 2008 was a big watershed moment, but that still what's largely been holding together. And then there's sort of different institutions. You can look at the universities where there's a tracked thing. It's costing more every year, but it's still worth it. It's still an investment in the future. And this was probably already questionable in the 1980s, 1990s. College debt in the United States in 2000 was $300 billion. Now it's around in $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. And so there's a way in which the story was shaky 20 years ago and today is much shakier. It's still sort of holding together somehow.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So in this story, in essence, the great dream is that your children will become educated, they will receive a college education, they will find careers. And in this bright and dynamic society, they can look forward to a future that is brighter than the future that previous generations look forward to.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, so I think ... Now again, I think people are hesitant to actually articulate it quite that way, because that already sounds not quite true to-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, to your point, they've been adding epicycles for some time.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so it's a ... Maybe it's a bright future, but it's really different from the parents, because we can't quite know. And they have all these new devices. They have an iPhone and they can text really fast on the iPhone. We can't even understand what the younger generation is doing. So maybe it's better on ... But "better" has sort of an objective scale. Maybe it's just different and unmeasurable, but better in sort of an unmeasurable way.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So there sort of are ways it's gotten modified but, that would still be a very powerfully intact narrative. And then that there are sort of straight forward things we can be doing. The system's basically working, and it's basically going to continue to work. And they're sort of a global version of this. There's a US version. There's an upper middle class US version. There's a lot of different variations on this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So it always strikes me that one of the things that you do very well is that you're willing - and you know, you're famously a chess player - you're willing to make certain sacrifices in order to advance a point. And in this case, I think you and I would both agree that there's certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story more than the general economy, and that you have to kind of give those stories their due before you get to see this new picture. Where do you think the future has been relatively more bright in recent years?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, again I sort of date this era of relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970s, so I think it's been close to half a century that we've been in this era of seriously slowed progress. Obviously, a very big exception to this has been the world of bits: Computers, internet, mobile internet, software. And so Silicon Valley has somehow been this dramatic exception. Whereas the world of atoms has been much slower for something like 50 years.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And you know, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, almost all engineering disciplines, in retrospect, were really bad fields to go into. People already knew, at the time, you shouldn't go into nuclear engineering. AeroAstro was a bad idea. but you know, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, all these things were bad fields. Computer science would've been a very good field to go into. And that's been sort of an area where there's been tremendous growth.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So that's sort of the signature one that I would cite. There are questions about how healthy it is, at this point, even within that field. So, you know, the iPhone is now looking the same as it did seven, eight years ago. So that's the iconic invention. Not quite so sure. And so there's been sort of a definitely a change in the tone even within Silicon Valley in the last five, six years on this. But that had been one that was very, very decoupled.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The decoupling itself had some odd effects, where if you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of bits, then the people who are in those parts of the economy that have more to do with atoms will feel like they're being left behind. And so there was something, there was something about the tech narrative that had this very ... Didn't necessarily feel inclusive, didn't feel like everybody was getting ahead. And one of the ways I've described it is that we live in a world where we've been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive, we don't have the transporter, we can't re-engineer matter in sort of this cornucopian world where there is no scarcity. And how good is a society where you have a well-functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, that's incredibly juicy. I mean, one of the ways that I attempted to encode something, which, in part I got from you, was to say, "Of course your iPhone is amazing. It's all that's left of your once limitless future," because it's the collision of the communications and the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue. And I date the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972, '73, '74. It's really quite sharp in my mind. Is it that way in yours?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I'd say 1968, people still ... The narrative progress seemed intact. By '73, it was somehow over. So somewhere in that five-year period. The 1969 version was we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and you know, Woodstock starts three weeks later. And maybe that's one way you could describe the cultural shift. You can describe it in terms of the oil shocks in 1973 at the back end. With the benefit of hindsight, there were things that were already fraying by the late 1960s, so the environment was getting dramatically worse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You have the graduate movies, you should go into plastics. I think that was 1968 or '69. So there were sort of things where the story was fraying, but I think it was still broadly intact in 1968, and somehow seemed very off by '73.

== Nature and Culture ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Actually I'm scanning my memory and I don't know that we've had this conversation, so I'm curious to hear your answer. One of the things that I found surprising is that I think I can tell a reasonably decent story about how this is a result of a scientific problem rather than the mismanagement of our future. Do you believe that if we assume that there was this early 1970s structural change in the economy, that it was largely a sort of manmade problem? Which is what we seemingly implicitly always assume. Or, might it be a scientific one?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And let me give you the one iconic example that really kind of drives it home for me. I think quarks were discovered in 1968. And to find out that the proton and neutron are comprised of up and down quarks is an incredible change in our picture of the world. Yet it has no seeming implications for industry. And I started thinking about this question: Are we somehow fenced out of whatever technologies are to come - that we sort of exhausted one orchard of low hanging fruit and haven't gotten to the next?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think one way to parse this question of scientific, technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture. Did the ideas in nature run out? Or, at least the useful ideas. Maybe we make some more discoveries, but they're not useful.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Or the easily useful.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Easily useful. So it's a problem with nature. And then the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful, but somehow the culture had gotten deranged. And I sort of go back and forth on those two explanations. I think it's very complicated. Yeah, I think in physics you'd say ... I mean, probably even the fundamental discoveries stopped after the mid 1970s, but certainly the translation didn't happen. Quarks don't matter for chemistry, and chemistry's what matters on a human level.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I would say there was a lot that happened in biochemistry. You know, not chemistry down, but sort of chemistry up; the interface between chemistry and biology. And that's where I would be inclined to say there's a lot more that could happen and has not quite happened, because maybe the problems are hard. But maybe also the cultural institutions for researching them are restrictive. It's too heavily regulated in certain ways and it's been just somewhat slower than one would have expected in the 1970s.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So maybe it's really just a constant dialogue between nature and culture.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, obviously. Because obviously, if nature has stopped, then the culture is going to derange. So there's a way in which culture is linked to nature. And then if the culture deranges, it also will look like nature stops. There are probably elements of both.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I am always optimistic in the sense that I think we could have done better. I think we could do better. It's not necessarily the case that we can advance on all fronts in every direction, but I think there's more space on the frontier than just in this world of bits. So I think there are various dimensions on atoms where we could be advancing and we just have chosen not to.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Why do you think it's so hard to convince people that ... Because both of us have had this experience where we sit down, let's say to an interview, and somebody talks about the dizzying pace of change. And both you and I see almost ... I mean, it's almost objectively true. I have this test, which is: go into a room and subtract off all of the screens.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' How do you know you're not in 1973 but for issues of design? There aren't that many clues.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, there are all sorts of things one can point to. I mean I always point to the productivity data in economics, which aren't great. And then you get into debates on how accurately are those being measured. You have the sort of intergenerational thing where our generation, Gen X, has had a tougher time than the Boomers. The Millennials seem to be having a much tougher time than either us or the Boomers had. So there seems to be this generational thing. So there are some of these sort of macroeconomic variables that seem pretty off.
Hyper-specialisation

'''Peter Thiel:''' The direct scientific questions, I think, are very hard to get a handle on. And the reason for this is that in late modernity, which we are living in, there's simply too much knowledge for any individual human to understand all of it. And so in this world of extreme hyper specialization, where it's narrower and narrower subsets of experts policing themselves and talking about how great they are, the string theorists talking about how great string theory is, the cancer researchers talking about how they're just about to cure cancer, the quantum computer researchers are just about to build a quantum computer, there'll be a massive breakthrough. And then if you were to say that all these fields, not much is happening, people just don't have the authority for this. And this is somehow a very different feel for science or knowledge than you would've had in 1800 or even in 1900. In 1800, Goethe could still understand just about everything.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' 1900, Hilbert could still understand just about all of mathematics and so this sort of specialization, I think, has made it a much harder question to get a handle on. The political cut I have on the specialization is always that if you analyze the politics of science, the specializations should make you suspicious, because if it's gotten harder to evaluate what's going on, then it's presumably gotten easier for people to lie and to exaggerate, and then one should be a little bit suspicious. And that's sort of my starting bias.
Sanity of Institutions

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And mine as well. And I think perhaps sort of the craziest idea to come out of all of this - and again you met your version of this in a law firm, which is predicated upon the idea that a partner would hire associates and the associates would hope to become partners who could then hire associates. And so that has that pyramidal structure. And in the university system, every professor is trying to train graduate students to become research professors to train graduate students. And I think that the universities were probably the most aggressive of these things I've called embedded growth obligations. But the implication of this idea that we structured almost everything on an expectation of growth, and then this growth that was expected ran out - it wasn't as high and stable and as technologically-led as before - has a pretty surprising implication. Which is, I mean ... Well let's not dance around it. It feels like almost universally, all of our institutions are now pathological.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or sociopathic, or whatever you want to call them. Yes. Yes, I suppose there's sort of two ways one could imagine going, if you had these expectations of great growth - Great Expectations was the Charles Dickens novel from the 19th century.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' We had Great Expectations. And then you can try to be honest and say the expectations are dialed down, or you can continue to say everything's great and it just happens not to be working out for you, but it's working out for people in general. And somehow it's been very hard to have the sort of honest reset. And the incentives have been for the institutions to derange and to lie. There's probably a way the universities could function if they did not grow. You’d be honest, most people in PhD programs don't become professors. Maybe you'd make the PhD programs much shorter. Maybe you'd be much more selective; you'd let fewer people in. There would be some way you could sort of adjust it, and the institutions could still be much healthier than they are today.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But that's not the path that seemingly was taken. And something like this could have been done in a law firm context. Maybe you still let the same percentage of people become partner, but the partners don't make quite as much money as before, or something like that. So that there would have been ways when one could've gone, but those are generally not the choices that were made.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I wonder if that's even possible. Because if you had a law firm that was honest or university that was fairly honest and you had one that was dishonest, it seems to me that the dishonest one could attempt to use its prestige to out compete the honest one. And so that would become a self-extinguishing strategy, unless you somehow have a truth-in-advertising program.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, I don't know. I do think the truth, when it breaks through, you're better off having told it than not not having. And so it's always ... As long as everybody was dishonest, it could work.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Look, it's mysterious to me how long it worked. We had these crazy bubble economies in the ... You know, we had the tech bubble in the 90s, the housing bubble in the 2000s, what I think is a government debt bubble this last decade. And so if you've had this sort of up-down bubble, that's sort of harder to see than if things were just flat. So if the growth in 1970, things had just flat-lined, and you had 40 years of no growth, that would have been problematic. And you might have noticed that very quickly.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But in a sense, simplifying a lot, you could say the 70s were down, the 80s were up, the 90s were up, the 2000s were down. So two down, two up, net flat, but it didn't feel that way internally.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' With lots of excitement.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There was a lot of excitement, a lot of stuff happened. And California was like a even more extreme version of this. You know, the last know the last three recessions in California were much more severe than in the country, as a whole. The recoveries were steeper, and so California has felt incredibly volatile. The volatility gets interpreted as dynamism. And then before you know it, 30 or 40 years have passed.
Individual and Collective Incentives

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One thing that I'm very curious about is how this discipline seems to have arisen, where almost everyone representing the institutions tell some version of this universal story. Which, I'll be honest. To my way of thinking, can be instantly invalidated by anyone who chooses to do so. It's just that the cost of invalidating it is quite high. You know, Paul Krugman wrote this column called A Protectionist Moment, where he said, "Let's be honest. The financial elite's case, for ever free-er trade, has always been something of a scam.".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And so you had people who were participating in this who seem to have known all along that there's no way of justifying this on paper, but yet were willing and able to participate with seemingly very few consequences to their careers. It didn't give opportunities to people who were heterodox and saying, "Hey, aside from a few bright spots, more or less, we've actually entered a period of relative stagnation." How did this happen?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think the individual incentives were very different from the collective incentive. The collective incentives, in which we have an honest conversation and level set things and get back to a better place. I think the individual incentives were often, you pretend that it's working great for you. The 20,000 people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars, about 20 of them make it. And so you could say, "Well, it's been really hard. Nobody wants to hire me. This is a terrible city." Or you could say, "You know, this has been wonderful, and that all the doors are being opened to me." And the second one is more fictional. But that's sort of the thing you're supposed to say if you're succeeding. And I think there's a way this is how we've been talking about globalization, a weird sort of a glib globalization. It's working great for me, and I'd like to have more people, more talented people come to the US. I'm not scared of competing with them. And on and on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or academia. If you're a professor in academia, so the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I think there is sort of like this individual incentive where you're if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it.
Official and Unofficial Narratives

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I used the word kayfabe for the system of nonsense that undergirds professional wrestling, and you've taken to using LARPing, live action role playing. It strikes me that we have two separate parallel systems. Now, this podcasting experiment that you and I are now part of provides for a very unscripted, out of control narrative. And then there's this parallel institutional narrative that seems to exist in a gated form where the institutions keep talking to each other and ignore this thing that's happening that has reached more and more people, so that you effectively have multiple narratives. (One of which, I think almost no one needs to believe. It's just that the institutions need to trade lies and deceptions back and forth amongst themselves.) How is it that these two things can be kept separate? It's like a real wrestling league and a professional wrestling league, side by side, where somehow they just don't come into contact with each other.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think if they came into contact, then they wouldn't both be able to exist. So I think that's not surprising that they can't come to contact.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I don't think it's ultimately stable. So I think ultimately our account is going to prevail. The institutional account is so incorrect that it will ultimately fail. I've probably been more hopeful about how quickly truth prevails than than it has.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's taken forever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I would still be very hopeful that our account is really going to break through in the next few years. I've been talking about this, the tech stagnation problem for the better part of a decade. And I think when I was talking about this in 2008, 2009, 2010 this was still a fringy view. It was very fringy within Silicon Valley. And I think even within Silicon Valley, there's sort of a lot of people who've come around to it, who've partially come around to it. There's a sense that tech has a bad conscience. It feels like it's not delivering the promises. Google had this propaganda about the future and it's now seen as .... The self-driving cars are further away than people expected. And so I think there is sort of a sense that things have shifted a lot over the last decade.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But even five years ago. I moved out to work with you in 2013, and I had never seen a boom before. I mean, this was one of the things that was really important to me, is that being an academic ... The academy had been in a depression since this change around 1972, '73. And seeing a boom and seeing people with flowers and dollar signs in their eyes, talking about a world of abundance and how everything was going to be great, it seemed like everybody was the CEO or CTO of some tiny company.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And then very, very quickly, it all started to change, and I felt like a lot of people moved back into the behemoths from their little startup having failed. A lot of the ideology felt poisonous, like, "Don't be evil," was not even something you could utter without somebody snickering behind your back. There's a self-hating component, where the engineers have been recruited ideologically and are not actually there to do business.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sure.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' How did this happen so quickly?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Am I wrong about that?

'''Peter Thiel:''' No, it's striking how fast it's happened. It's striking how much it's happened in the context of a bull market. So if you describe this in terms of psychology, you'd think that people to be as angry in Silicon Valley as they are today, the stock market must be down 40% or 50%. It's like people in New York city were angry. In 2009, they were angry at the banks. They hated themselves. But the stock market was down 50%, 60%, the banks had gotten obliterated. And that sort of makes sense psychologically. And the strange thing is that in terms of sort of the macro economic indicators, the stock markets, the valuations of the larger companies, it's way beyond the .com peaks of 2000, in all in all sorts of ways. But the mood is not like late '99, early 2000. It has this very different mood.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And the way I would explain this is that, for the people involved, it is sort of a look ahead function. Yes, this is where things are, but are they going to be worth a lot more in five years, 10 years? And that's gotten a lot harder to tell.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so there's been growth, but people are unhappy and frustrated because they don't see that much growth going forward, even within tech. Even within this world of bits, which had been very, very decoupled for such a long time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Now, one of the things that's interesting to me is, is that when we talk like this, a lot of people are gonna say, "Wow, that's a lot of gloom and doom. So much is changing so much is better." And yet, what I sense is that both you and I have an idea that we've lived our entire life in some sort of intellectual Truman Show, where everything is kind of fake, and something super exciting is about to happen. Do you share ... Is that a fair telling?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there's been the potential to get back to the future for a long time. And there have been breaks in this Truman Show at various points. There was a big break with 9/11. There was a big break with the 2008 crash. You could say some sort of break with Brexit and Trump.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And the last few years, it's still a little bit undecided what that all means. But I think there were a lot of reasons to question this and reassess this for some time. The reassessments never quite happened, but I would say I think we're now at the point where this is really gonna happen in the next two years to five years to decade. I don't think the Truman Show can keep going that much longer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And again, I've been wrong about this, so-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Me, too.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I've been very wrong.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I've been wrong. I've called it earlier.

'''Peter Thiel:''' We had an offsite when I was running PayPal in spring of 2001. The NASDAQ had gone from 2,000 to 5,000 back to 2,000, the .com bubble was over. And I was explaining, we were just battening down the hatches. At least one little company has survived, and we're going to survive. But the sort of insanity that we saw in the .com years will never come back in the lifetimes of the people here, because psychologically, you can't go that crazy again while you're still alive.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The 1920s didn't come back until maybe the 1980s, or something.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The lessons of the depression were long lived.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So it was generationally over. And yet, already in 2001, we had the incipient housing bubble, and somehow some other shows kept going for 20 years, 25 years.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' With a crazy narrative. The whole narrative behind the Great Moderation. I mean, I remember just clutching my head, "How can you tell a story that we've banished volatility?".

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I always think of the 1990s narrative was the new economy, and you lied about growth. And then the 2000s narrative was the Great Moderation, and you lied about volatility. And maybe the 2010s one is secular stagnation, where you lie about the real interest rates, because the other two don't work anymore. In sort of a complicated way, these things connect.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes, new economy sounded very bullish in the '90s. Great Moderation was still a reasonably long stocks, but sounds less bullish. And then secular stagnation - in the Larry Summers forms, to be specific to what we're talking about - means again, that you should be long the stock market. The stock market's going to keep going up because things are so stagnant. The real rates will stay low forever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So they are equally bullish narratives, although they sound less bullish over time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So that effectively we need ... What happened with the Roaring '20s followed by the depression was that there was a general skepticism, and here the skepticism seems to be specific to something different in each incarnation. You keep having bubbles with some lie you have yet to tell.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And of course, I think the crazy cut on the '20s and '30s was that we didn't need to have as big of a crash. You could've probably done all sorts of interventions. Because the 1930s was still a period that was very healthy in terms of background scientific, technological innovation. If we just rattle off what was discovered in the 1930s that had real world practical things, it was: the aviation industry got off the ground, the talkies, the movies got going. You had the plastics industry, you had secondary oil recovery, household appliances got developed. And as you know, by 1939 there were three times as many people who had cars in the US as in 1929. There was this crazy tailwind of scientific and technological progress that then somehow got badly mismanaged, financially, by whoever you blame the crash on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, I think that's what actually happened in the '30s, and then we tried to manage all these financial indicators much more precisely in recent decades, even though the tailwind wasn't there at all.
Physics, Biology, and Polymaths

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, let me focus you on two subjects that are important for trying to figure out the economy going forward. I'm very fond of perhaps over-claiming, but making a strong claim for physics. That physics gave us atomic devices and nuclear power, and it ended World War II definitively. It gave us the semiconductor, the worldwide web, theoretical physicists invented molecular biology, the communications revolution. All of these things came out of physics, and you could make the argument that physics has been really underrated as powering the world economy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' On the other hand, it's very strange to me that we had the three-dimensional structure of DNA in '53, we had the genetic code 10 years later, and we've had very little in the way of, let's say, gene therapy to show for all of our newfound knowledge. Now, I have no doubt that we are learning all sorts of new things - to your point about specialization - in biology, but the translation hasn't been anything like what I would have imagined for physics.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, it feels like somehow we're in a new orchard, and we're spending a lot of time exploring it, but we haven't found the low hanging fruit in biology, and we've kind of exhausted the physics orchard, because what we've found is so exotic that, you know, whether it's two black holes colliding, or a third generation of matter, or quark substructure, we haven't been able to use these things. Are we somehow between revolutions?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'd be pessimistic on physics generally, so that sort of be my bias on that one.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Me as well.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Biology, I continue to think we could be doing a lot more, we could be making a lot more progress. And you know, the pessimistic version is that no, biology is just, is much harder than physics, and therefore it's been slower going.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The more optimistic one is that the culture is just broken. We've had very talented people go into physics. You go into biology if you're less talented. You can sort of think of it in Darwinian terms. You can think of biology as a selection for people with bad math genes. You know, if you're good at math, go to math, or physics, or at least chemistry, and biology we sort of selected for all of these people who are somewhat less talented. So, that might be a cultural explanation for why it's been been slower progress.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But, I mean, we had people from physics, we had, like, Teller, and, Feynman, and Crick. There's no shortage of, to my earlier point, molecular biology, anyway, was really founded by physicists more than any other thing, I think. Why is it that in an era where physics is stagnating, we don't see these kinds of minds? Like, I'm a little skeptical of that theory.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'm not so sure. Like, if you're a string theory person, or even sort of an applied experimental physicist, I don't think you can that easily reboot into biology. I mean, these disciplines have gotten sort of more rigid. It's pretty hard to transfer from one area to another.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, when I was an undergraduate, you still had some older professors who were polymaths, who knew a lot about a lot of different things. This is, I think, the way one should really think of, you know, Watson and Crick, or Feynman, or Teller. They were certainly world-class in their field, but also like incredible in a lot of different fields.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They were highly transgressive.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, you know, the cultural, or institutional, rule, is no polymaths allowed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Wow.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, you can be narrowly specialized, and if you're interested in other things you better keep it to yourself and not tell people, because if you say that you're interested in computer science and also music, or studying the Hebrew Bible, wow, that's just, that must mean you're just not very serious about computer science.
Polymaths in Universities

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so I totally want to riff on on this point, because I think you've hit the nail on the head. To my way of thinking, the key problem is, if you go back to our original contention, which is, is that there is something universally pathological about the stories that every institution predicated on growth has to tell about itself when things are not growing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The biggest danger is that somebody smart inside of the institution will start questioning things and speaking openly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The polymaths would be the people who could connect the dots and say, you know, there's not that much going on in my department, and there's not much going on this department over here, and not that much going on in this department over there, and those people are very, very dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of my friends studied physics at Stanford in the late '90s. His advisor was this professor at Stanford, Bob Laughlin, who, you know, brilliant physics guy, late '90s he gets a Nobel prize in physics, and he suffers from the supreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel prize he has total academic freedom and he can do anything he wants to. And he decided to direct it at, you know, I mean, there are all these areas you probably shouldn't go into, you probably shouldn't question, climate science, there are all these things when one should be careful about, but he went into an area of far more dangerous than all of those.

'''Peter Thiel:''' He was convinced that there were all these people in the university who were doing fake science, who were wasting government money on fake research that was not really going anywhere, and he started by investigating other departments, started with the biology department at Stanford university. And you can imagine this ended catastrophically for Professor Laughlin, you know, his graduate students couldn't get PhDs. He no longer got funding, Nobel prize in physics, no protection whatsoever.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Julian Schwinger fell out of favor with the physics community despite being held in its highest regard and having a Nobel prize, and he used the epigram in a book where he wanted to redo quantum field theory around something he called source theory, he said, "If you can't join them, beat them." And I think it comes as a shock to all of these people that there is no level you can rise to in the field that allows you to question the assumptions of that field.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. It's like, you know, you're sort of proving yourself, you're getting your PhD, you're getting your tenured position, and then at some point you think, you would think that you've proven yourself and you can talk about the whole and not just the parts, but you're never allowed to talk about more than the parts.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, like the person in the university context, or the class of people who are supposed to talk about the whole, I would say, are university presidents, because they are presiding over the whole of the university and they should be able to speak to what the nature of the whole is, what sort of progress the whole is making. What is the health of the progress of the whole? And, you know, we certainly do not pick university presidents who think critically about these questions at all.

'''Eric Weinstein''': Well, I remember discussing, with a president of a very highly regarded university, he came to me, he said, "Can you explain how your friend Peter Thiel thinks? Because I just had a conversation with him, and I could not convince him that the universities were doing fantastically, and this university in particular, like how does he come to his conclusion?".

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I said, "Well look, Peter doesn't come, you know, with a PhD, but let me speak to you in your own language," and I started going department by department talking about the problems of stagnation. It was very clear that there was no previous experience with any kind of informed person making such an argument. I mean this was a zero day exploit.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's all, yeah, but in some sense, if you're a president of a university, you probably don't want to talk to people that dangerous. You want to avoid them, and you don't want to have such disruptive thoughts because you have to convince the government, or alumni, or whoever, to keep donating money, that everything's wonderful and great.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think one has to go back quite a long time to even identify any university presidents in the United States who said things that were distinctive, or interesting, or powerful. You know, there was Larry Summers at Harvard a decade and a half ago, and tried to do like the most minuscule critiques imaginable, and got crucified. But, you know, I don't think of Summers as a particularly revolutionary thinker.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, he was possessed of an idea that the intellectual elite, in which he undoubtedly saw himself a part of, had the right to transgress boundaries. And I think what's stunning about this is the extent to which this breed of outspoken, disruptive intellectual has no place left inside of this system from which to speak.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But it's not that surprising. In a healthy system you could have wild dissent and it's not threatening because everyone knows the system is healthy. In an unhealthy system, the dissent becomes much more dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's not that surprising. There's always one riff I have on this is always, if you think of a left wing person as someone who's critical of the structures of our society, there's a sense in which we have almost no left wing professors left.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's right. Like Noam Chomsky is still there as sort of a last remnant of some clade that no longer exists.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Left-wing in the sense of, let's say, just being critical of the institutions they're a part of.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And there may be some that are much older, so if you're maybe in your eighties we can pretend to ignore you, or you know, this is just what happens to people in their eighties. But I don't see younger professors in their, let's say, forties, who are deeply critical of the university structure. I think it's just not, you know, you can't have that.

== Student Debt ==

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's like, again, if you come back to something as reductionist as the ever escalating student debt, you know, the bigger the debt gets, you can sort of think what is the 1.6 trillion, what does it pay for? And in a sense, it pays for $1.6 trillion worth of lies about how great the system is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, the more the debt goes, the crazier the system gets, but also the more you have to tell the lies, and these things sort of go together. It's not a stable sequence. At some point this breaks. You know, again, I would bet on a decade, not a century.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this is the fascinating thing, you, of course, famously started the Thiel Fellowship as a program which, correct me if I'm wrong on this, 2005 is when student debt became non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. The Bush 43 bankruptcy revision. If you don't pay off your student loans when you're 65 the government will garnish your social security wages to pay off your student debt.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. This is amazing that this exists in a modern society. And of course, well, so let me ask, am I right that you were attacking what was necessary to keep the college mythology going, and you were frightened that college might be enervating some of our sort of most dynamic minds?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there are sort of lot of different critiques one can have of the universities. I think the debt one is a very simple one. It's always dangerous to be burdened with too much debt. It sort of does limit your freedom of action. And it seems especially pernicious to do this super early in your career.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, if out of the gate you owe $100,000, and it's never clear you can get out of that hole, that's going to either demotivate you, or it's going to push you into maybe slightly higher paying, very uncreative professions of the sort that are probably less good at moving our whole society forwards. And so I think the whole thing is extraordinarily pernicious.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I started talking about this back in 2010, 2000, it was already like controversial, but it was not, you know... younger people all agreed with me.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' The younger people did?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's a decade later, it's a lot crazier, we haven't yet completely won, but I think there are sort of more and more people who agree with this. I think at this point the Gen X parents of college students tend to agree, whereas I would say the baby boomer parents, you know, 15 years ago, would not have agreed.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The 2008 crisis was a big watershed in this too, where you could say the tracking debt, you know, roughly made sense as long as everything, all the tracked careers worked, and 2008 really blew up, you know, consulting, banking, you know, sort of a number of the more track professions got blown up, and so that was kind of a watershed.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean this is incredibly dangerous, but also, therefore, quite interesting, if you imagine that the baby boomers have, in some sense, in order to keep the structure of the university going, have loaded it up with administrators, have hiked the tuition much faster than even medical inflation, let alone general inflation, this becomes a crushing debt problem for people who are entering the system.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I saw a recent article that said that the company that, I think it's called Seeking Arrangements, which introduces older men and women with money to younger men and women with a need for money for some sort of ambiguous hybridized dating, companionship, financial transfer. And the claim was that lots of students were using this supposed sugar daddy-ing and sugar mommy, I don't know what the terminology is, in order to alleviate their debt burden.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost as if the baby boomers, in so creating a system, are subjecting their own children to things that are pushing them towards a gray area a few clicks before you get to honest prostitution.

'''Peter Thiel:''' No, look, I don't want to impute too much intentionality to how this happened.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no, it's somewhat emergent.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think a lot of these, it was mostly emergent, mostly these things people, you know, yeah, that we had sort of somewhat cancerous, we don't distinguish real growth from cancerous growth, and then once the cancer sort of the metastasizes at a certain size, you know, you have, you sort of somehow try to keep the whole thing going, and it doesn't make that much sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes, I think one of the reasons, one of the challenges in, on our side, let's be a little more self critical here, on this, is that the question we always are confronted with, well, what is the alternative? How do you actually do something?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And it's not obvious what the individual alternatives are. You know, on an individual level, if you get into an elite university, it probably still makes sense to go, you know, it probably doesn't make sense to go to number 100 or something like this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, I think that's right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There is sort of a way it can still work individually even if it does not work for our country as a whole. And so, there are sort of all these challenges in coming up with alternate tracks.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think in software there's some degree to which people are going to be hired if they're just good at coding, and it's not quite as critical that they have a computer science degree. You know, can one do this in other careers, other fields? I would tend to think one could. It's been slow to happen.
Political Solutions for Students

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, so you and I have been excited about a great number of things that have been taking place outside of the institutional system, but one of the things that I continue to be mystified by is that we are somewhat politically divided, where you are well known as a conservative and I really come from a fairly radical progressive streak. So, we have this common view of a lot of the problems, but sometimes we come to very different ideas about how those problems should be solved.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Do you want to maybe just try riffing?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sure.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Like, assume that we somehow found ourselves in possession of some degree of power, with an ability to direct a little bit more than we have currently. What would you do to create the preconditions - so not necessarily picking particular projects - but what would you try to do to create the preconditions where people are really dreaming about futures, both at a technological level, family formation, making our civil society healthier. Where would you start to work first?

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'm always a little bit uncomfortable with this sort of question, because-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You can turn it on me, too.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... because I feel like, you know, we're not going to be dictators of the United States, and then, you know, there all sorts of things we could do if we were dictators. But certainly, I would look at the college debt thing very seriously. I would say that it's dischargeable in bankruptcy, and if people go bankrupt then part of the debt has to be paid for by the university that did it. There has to be some sort of local accountability. So, this would be-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Love that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... that would be sort of a more right wing answer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The left wing answer is we should socialize the debt in some ways, and the universities should never pay for it, which would be more the, you know, Sanders-Warren approach. But so, that would be one version.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think one of the main ways inequality has manifested in our society in the last 20, 30 years - I think it's more stagnation than inequality - but just on the inequality side it's the runaway housing costs, and there's sort of, there's a baby boomer version where you have super strict zoning laws so that the house prices go up, and the house is your nest egg. It's not a place to live, it's your nest egg for retirement. And I would, yeah, I would try to figure out some ways to dial all that stuff back massively.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And that's probably intergenerational transfer, where it's bad for the asset prices of baby boomer homeowners, but better for younger people to get started in sort of family formation or starting households.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do you think about the idea of a CED, a college equivalency degree, where you can prove that you have a level of knowledge that would be equivalent, let's say, to a graduating Harvard chemistry major, right? Or a fraction thereof, where you have the ability to prove that through some sort of online delivery mechanism, you can-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Great idea. I love it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think it's very hard to implement. Again, I think these things are hard to do, but great idea.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But look, we have all these people who have something like Stockholm syndrome, where they, you know, if you got a Harvard chemistry degree, and if you suspect that actually the knowledge could be had by a lot of people, and if it's just a set of tests you have to pass, that your degree would be a lot less special, you'll resist this very, very hard.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if you're in an HR department, or in a company hiring people, you will want to hire people who went to a good college because you went to a good college, and if we broaden the hiring and said we're going to hire all sorts of people, maybe that's self-defeating for your own position. So, you know, I think one should not underestimate how many people have a form of Stockholm syndrome here.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I should've said earlier that the Thiel Fellowship, for those who don't know, is a program that has historically, at least began paying very young people who had been admitted to colleges to drop out of those colleges. So, they got to keep the idea that they'd been admitted to some fairly prestigious place, but then they were given money to actually live their dreams and not put them on hold.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, it has been an extremely successful and effective program. It's not scalable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, we had to hack the prestige status thing, where it was as hard, or harder, to get a Thiel fellowship than to get into a top university. And so, that's part that's very hard to scale.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' When I was looking at that program for you, one of the things that I floated was the idea that if you look at every advanced degree, like a JD, or an MD, a PhD, none of them seem to carry the requirement of having a BA, which is quite mysterious.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And if you fail to get a PhD, let's say, there's usually an embedded master's degree that you get as a going away present. And therefore, if you could get people to skip college, if you give them, perhaps, four years of their lives back, and you could use the first year of graduate school, which is very often kind of a rapid recapitulation of what undergraduate was, so everybody's on a level playing field, and then, worse comes to worst, people would leave with a master's. They would, in general, get a stipend, because a lot of the tuition is remitted to them in graduate programs. Is that a viable program to get some group of people who are highly motivated to avoid the BA entirely as sort of the administrator's degree rather than the professor's degree?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Let me see. There are all these different subtle critiques I can have, or disagreements, but yeah, I think the BA is not as valuable as it looks. I also think the PhD is not as valuable as it looks.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, you know how to hurt a guy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I sort of feel it's a problem across the board. It strikes me that what you're proposing is a bit of an uphill struggle, because at the top universities the BA is the far more prestigious degree than the PhD at this point. So, if you're at Stanford or Harvard, you know, it's pretty hard to get into the undergraduate, and then you have more PhD students than you have undergraduates.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There are all these people who are a very questionable track. They've made questionable choices. And they probably are going to have some sort of psychological breakdown in their future. You know, their dating prospects aren't good. There are all these things that are a little bit off.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So yeah, in theory, if you had a super tightly controlled PhD program, that might work, but you have to at least make those two changes. As it is, the people in graduate schools, like, it's like Tribbles in Star Trek. We have just so many, and they all feel expendable and unneeded, and that's not a good place to be.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, whereas I think the undergraduate conceit is still that it's more K-selected instead of R-selected, that it's more that everybody is special and valuable. You know, that's often not true either.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I'd be critical of both, and I think, but yeah, if we could have a real PhD that was the required, you know, that was much harder, and that actually led to sort of an academic position or some other comparable position, that would be good.
Teleology

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, one of the questions I always come back to in this, is what is the teleology of these programs? Where do they go? One of the analogies I've come up with, is I think elite undergraduate education is like junior high school football.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Junior high school football. I did not see that coming.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Playing football in junior high school is probably not damaging for you, but it's not going anywhere-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Ah, I see.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -because if you keep playing football in high school, and college, and then professionally, that's just bad. And the better you are, the more successful you are, the less well it works.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the question is what's the motivational structure? And when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s there was still a part of it where you thought the professors were cool, it might be something you'd like to be at some point in the future, and they were role models, just like in junior high school football an NFL player would have been a role model.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But now it just looks like brain damage in both sides.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And now we think it's, yeah, you're just doing lots of brain damage, and it's a track that doesn't work, and therefore the teleology sort of has broken down.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So undergraduate, part of the teleology was that it was preparing you for graduate school, and that part doesn't work, and that's what's gotten deranged. Then graduate school, well, it's preparing you to be a postdoc, and then, well, that's the postdoc apocalypse, or whatever you want to call it, postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Postdocalypse?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Postdocalypse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You heard it here, folks, postdocalypse.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But just at every step, I think, the teleology of the system is in really bad shape. Of course, this is true of all these institutions with fake growth that are sociopathic or pathological, but at the universities it's striking as very bad.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think this was already true in important ways back in the '80s, early '90s, when I was going through the system. And when I think back on it, I think I was most intensely motivated academically in high school, because the teleology was really clear. You were trying to get into a good college. And then, by the time I was at Stanford, it was a little bit less clear, by the time I was at law school, really unclear where that was going. And by the time I was 25 I was far less motivated than at age 18, and I think these dynamics are just more extreme than ever today.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What I find so dispiriting about your diagnosis is first of all that I agree with it. Second of all, if we don't train people in these fields, if we don't get people to go into molecular biology, or bioinformatics, or something like that, we're never going to be able to find the low hanging fruit in that orchard. So, it seems to me that we have to find some way that it makes sense for a life to explore these questions.
Conformity and Malthus

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things that I don't understand, and I don't know if you have any insight, is it feels to me that almost all of our institutions are carbon copies of each other at different levels of quality. And that there are only a tiny number of actually innovative institutions. It used to be that, you know, Reed college was sex, drugs, and Goethe, and you had St. John's with the great books curriculum that didn't look like anything else, or Deep Springs, and the university of Chicago was crazy about young people, but the diversity of institutions is unbelievably low. Is that wrong?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think that's fair, but I would say the bigger problem with a lot of these fields is, yeah, I think we have to keep training people. I think we need to keep training people in physics or even these fields that seem completely dead, you know?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That’s super important.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I think the question we have to always ask is how many people should we be training-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Way fewer.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -and my intuition is you want the gates to be very tight.

'''Peter Thiel:''' One of my friends is a professor in the Stanford economics department, and the way he describes it to me is they have about 30 graduate students starting PhDs in economics at Stanford every year. It's six to eight years to get a PhD. At the end of the first year, the faculty has an implicit ranking of the students, where they’ve sort of agreed who the top three or four are. The ranking never changes. The top three or four have, are able to get a good position in academia, the others not so much.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And, you know, we're pretending to be kind to people and we're actually being cruel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Incredibly cruel.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, I think that if there are going to be - you know, it's a supply demand of labor - if there are going to be good positions in academia, where you can have a reasonable life, it's not a monastic vow of poverty that you're taking to be an academic, if we're going to have that, you don't want this sort of Malthusian struggle. If you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry lab, and you have to have a fistfight for a Bunsen burner or a beaker, and you know, and if some somebody says one politically incorrect thing, you can happily throw everyone, them all out of the overcrowded bus. The buses still overcrowded with nine people on it. That's what's unhealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so, yes, it would be mistake to say we should dial this down and have zero people in these fields.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. But this is what's scary to me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's not what I'm advocating, or what was being advocated here, but there is a point where if you just add more and more people in a starvation Malthusian context, that's not healthy.
Power Laws

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, this gets to another topic which, I think, is really important, and it's a dangerous one to discuss, which is it seems to me that power laws, those distributions with very thick tails where you have a small number of outliers that often dominate all other activity, are ubiquitous, and that particularly with respect to talent, whether we like them or not, they seem to be present, where a small number of people do a fantastic amount of all of the innovation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What do we do, if power laws are common, to make people more comfortable with the fact that there is a kind of endowment inequality that seems to be part of species makeup? I mean, I don't even think it's just limited to humans.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I'm not convinced these sort of power laws are equally true in all fields of activity. You know, the United States was a frontier country in the 19th century, and most people were farmers, and presumably some people were better farmers than others, but everyone started with 140 acres of land, and there was this wide open frontier. Even if you had some parts of the society that had more of a power law dynamic, there was a large part that didn't. And that was what, I think, gave it a certain amount of health.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And yeah, the challenge is if we've geared our society saying that all that matters is education, and PhDs, and academic research, and that this has this crazy power law dynamic, then you're just going to have a society in which there are lots of people playing video games in basements or something like that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, that's that's the way I would frame it. But yeah, I think there definitely are some areas where this is the case. And then we just need, you know, we need more growth for the whole society. If you have growth, you'll have a rising tide that lifts all boats. So, it's the stagnation, is the problem.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I've joked about this as we are not even communistic in our progressivism, because the old formulation of communism was from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, and the inability to recognize different levels of ability. I mean, almost every mathematician or physicist who encountered John von Neumann just said, "The guy is smarter than I am." He's not necessarily the deepest, or he did all of the great work, but you know when you're dealing with somebody who's able to employ skills that you simply don't have. I mean, I know I'm not a concert pianist, and-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Right. Look, I don't know how you solve the social problem if everybody has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist. I want a society in which we have great mathematicians and great concert pianists. That seems that that would be a very healthy society. It's very unhealthy if every parent thinks their child has to be a mathematician or a concert pianist, and that's the kind of society we unfortunately have.

== Automation ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, this is why I try to sell you sometimes on a more progressive view of the world, which is I want deregulated capitalism. I want the people who have the rare skillsets to be able to integrate across many different areas, and to be honest, this is the thing that I wish more people understood about what you bring, which is that you're able to think in, I don't know, 15 different idioms that most people only have one or two of. So, whatever it is that you're doing to integrate these things as an investor and to direct research and direct work is really something that I've watched firsthand for six years. The problem that I have is, we are going to have to take care of the median individual. And I less think that the median individual is going to be reachable by the market over time, as some of these things that are working in Silicon in terms of machine learning-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, but then you're being more optimistic on progress in tech than is... Because look, I think, yes, if we have runaway automation, and if we're building robots that are smarter than humans and can do everything humans can do, then we probably have to have a serious conversation about a universal basic income or something like that, and you're going to end up with a very, very weird society. I don't see the automation happening at all, and I think the question of automation in my mind is identical to this question of productivity growth. We've been automating for 200, 250 years, since Industrial Revolution, agriculture and manufacturing, and the sort of society we have in the early 21st century is one in which most jobs are non-tradable service sector jobs that are not easily automatable.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, it's like a waiter in a restaurant. It's a yoga instructor. It's a nurse. It's a kindergarten teacher. That's what most jobs in our society are, and because they've been so resistant to automation, that this may be one of the reasons why the productivity numbers are slowing down, even if we're still innovating as fast in manufacturing, and even if we're still agriculture, they're a smaller and smaller part of the economy. So, even 5% a year productivity growth in manufacturing, that means a lot more if manufacturing is 60% of the economy, than it does when it's, say, 20% of the economy. So, that's roughly what I think would happen, and if you just look at the current dynamic in the US as we have unemployment, like 3.6%, 3.7%. It's super low, and still, there doesn't seem to be that much wage pressure. There doesn't seem to be that much growth. The productivity numbers still aren't great. You'd think there'd be enormous incentives to increase productivity.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's quite confusing to me. Yeah.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But I think, again, my read on it is just the automation story has been oversold.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I agree that the automation story has been oversold.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's possible it's going to happen. It's possible it's just around the corner, and it's about to happen. That's what we've been told in a lot of these areas over the last 40, 50 years.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, I have a couple questions about this. One is sort of, if I think about how common retail occupations are, is there something about retail that is resistant to Amazonification, if you will, where people actually want to go shop in a physical place and are willing to pay a premium that we have just to have human contact? Maybe there's some information exchange. Maybe there's a recreational aspect that's bundled. That's one of my two questions, and the other one surrounds the idea that we've always focused on when is AGI coming, and the robots that will do everything? Part of the lesson for me about machine learning is how many things humans were doing that don't require anything like artificial general intelligence. Just some specialized neural net seems to be good enough to do the job. So, those would be two questions in my mind as to how-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, but I think all these things you have to concretize, and yes, I think retail is a sector that's under quite a bit of pressure, and is going to stay under quite a bit of pressure. That's the top one I would come up with is-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, it's looks vulnerable to me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Amazon is the most threatening of the big tech companies in that it's threatening a lot of other companies elsewhere in the industry and disrupting them and making things more efficient, but probably with a lot of sheer forces at work in that process. So, I agree that that's a candidate for automation or productivity improvements or things like that. I'm still not convinced that it's in the aggregate shifting things that much, and then you can go through all sorts of individual job descriptions where people used to have secretaries because typing was a skill, and with a word processor you don't quite need this. You can do short emails. You don't quite need a secretary. People still have executive assistants that sort of somehow do slightly different set of responsibilities, but it's not clear we have fewer executive assistants than we used to have secretaries.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, when one actually concretizes it, it's not quite clear how disruptive the automation that's happening really is. Again, it's a version of the tech stagnation thing. It's always the last 40, 50 years, things have been slow. We're always told it's about to accelerate like crazy. That may be true. In some ways, I hope that's true, but if one was simply extrapolating from the last 40 to 50 years, perhaps the default is that we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, that's really interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Again, I think if we had this sort of runaway automation, you could get to 3%, 4% GDP growth, and at 3% to 4% GDP growth, we can solve these problems socially.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You would be willing to have... This thing that I've been talking to Andrew Yang about has been the idea of hyper-capitalism, which is a deregulated hyper-capitalism where you can do more experimenting, more playing, coupled to some kind of hyper-socialism where you recognize that the median individual might not be able in the future to easily defend a position needed for family formation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, let me rephrase this a little bit. You're not going to get a conversion experience on your first podcast here, Eric.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You're going to make me wait for the next?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Maybe, or maybe even a little longer than that too. But I would say if we can get the GDP growth back to 3% a year on a sustainable basis-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Without fudging.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... without fudging, without lying about productivity numbers, et cetera, then there will be a lot more room for various social programs. I wouldn't want them to be misdirected in all sorts of ways, but there would be a lot of things that we could do. And I would be very uncomfortable starting with the social programs without the growth. That's the sort of conversation that I often see happening in Silicon Valley, where we start with UBI, because we're lying about automation. If automation's happening, then we'll see in the productivity numbers, and then eventually, maybe we need something like UBI. If automation is not happening and you do UBI, then you just blow up the economy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. I should say, and you've come somewhat towards-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Doing them in parallel, I'm okay with that. I'm not not okay with starting with the socialism. Even a Marxist wouldn't believe this. Even a Marxist thinks you have to first get the capitalists to do things before you can redistribute stuff.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right. I know.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You can't start with the redistribution before we've done the automation.
Redistribution

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I'm not even a Marxist, Peter, but the thing that I was going to say is that as you talk about the fact that we can solve some of these problems socially, I want to talk about from the progressive side, I'm not interested in using social programs where markets continue to function. I mean, the idea of making people personally accountable for their own happiness and their own success and path through the world is incredibly liberating, and I view markets as providing most of the progress that we now enjoy. So, there is something that's very weird and punitive about the desire for redistribution. I mean, there's almost a desire to tag the wealthy that has nothing to do with taking care of the unfortunate, and what I really am talking about here is how do we get a conversation between left and right, which isn't cryptic, which isn't-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Of course, I have a much more cynical view of this where I think the redistribution rhetoric, it's mainly not even targeted at the wealthy.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh, it's targeted at the sub-wealthy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's targeted at the lower-middle class, at the deplorables, or whatever you want to call them, and it's a way to tell them that they will never get ahead, nothing will happen in their life and, and that's actually why a lot of people who are lower-middle class or middle class are viscerally quite strongly opposed to welfare, because it's always an insult to them. It's always heard as an insult. I'm not sure they're wrong to feel that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, and I feel that a lot of the talk about redistribution is actually families of high eight through eleven figures trying to figure out how to target families of six-figure through low eight-figure wealth as the targets of the redistribution, that the very wealthy will be able to shelter assets and protect themselves or maybe even switch nations, whereas people who are dentists and orthodontists and accountants are going to be the ones viewed as the rich, who are going to be incapable of getting themselves out of the way.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, I think that partially, what good faith conversation between left and right opens up is that we have a shared interest in uncovering all of the schemes of the people who enjoy pushing around pieces of paper and giving speeches in order to engineer society for their own reasons.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. So, one way I would restate what you just said would be that redistribution from the powerful to the powerless, from the rich to the poor, is like from the powerful to the powerless, and so using power to go after those with power, and that's almost oxymoronic.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's almost oxymoronic.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's almost self-contradictory. So, there may be some way to do that. I think most of the time you end up with with some fake redistribution, some sort of complicated shell game of one sort or another. I know the causation of the stuff is much, much trickier, but if we look at societies that are somehow further to the left on some scale, the inequality, you have to go really far to the left, and maybe just destroy the whole society, before you really start solving the inequality problem.

'''Peter Thiel:''' California, when I first moved here as a kid in 1977, would have been sort of a centrist state in the US politically, and was broadly middle class. Today, California's the second most democratic state. It's a D plus 30 state. It's a super unequal, and at least on a correlated basis, not causation, but at least on a correlated basis, the further to the left it's gone, the more unequal it's become, and there is something pretty weird about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There is.
Political Violence

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Something that sort of fits in here is that, in part I've learned from you, and you can tell me whether you recognize this formulation or not, is start with any appealing social idea. That's step one. Step two, ask what is the absolute minimal level of violence and coercion that would be necessary to accomplish that idea. Now add that to the original idea. Do you still find your original idea attractive? This flips many of these propositions into territory where I suddenly realized that something that people see as being very attractive actually can only be accomplished with so much misery, even if it's done maximally efficiently, that it's no longer a good idea. This has been very influential in my thinking, and what I've-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, look. The visceral problem with communism is not its redistributed tendencies. It's the extreme violence. It's that you have to kill tons of people. One of the professors I studied under at Stanford, René Girard, was a sort of of great philosophical, sociological, anthropological thinker, and he had this observation that he thought communism among Western intellectuals became unfashionable. You could date it to the year 1953, the year Stalin died, and the reason was they were not communist in spite of the millions of people being killed. They were communist because of the millions of people who were being killed. As long as you were willing to kill millions of people, that was a tell, a sign that you were building the utopia, you were building a great new society, and when you stopped, it was just going to be like the lethargy of the Brezhnev era or something like that, and that that was not inspiring. I mean, people shifted from Stalin to Mao or Castro, but the violence was charismatic, very charismatic, but then also, if you think about it, it's very undesirable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's so fascinating that we actually finally get to something like this. I think that that is a correct description of part of the communist movement, but not all of the communist movement. There were a lot of people, I think, and just my own family was certainly involved in far-left politics, and some of it probably dipped into communism. What my sense of it was is that there was a period in the '30s where people realized that there had to be coordinated social action, and that there were people who were too vulnerable, and that that somehow got wrapped up in all of the things that Stalin was talking about that sounded positive if you didn't know the reality.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, for example, Paul Robeson, a hero of the left, was extolling Stalin's virtues openly. My guess is that he didn't fully understand what had happened, that he had gotten involved in an earlier era, and that as things became known and progressed, there was a point at which many people suddenly opened their eyes and said, "I've been making excuses for the Soviet Union," because at least it had the hope... I mean, there were American blacks, for example, who moved to Moscow because of the hope that it was going to be a racially more equal society. My own family, I would say, was talking about interracial marriage and open support of homosexuality, female access to birth control. Those things were associated with the communist party, and a lot of those ideas are now commonplace, but we forget that once upon a time only the communists were willing to dance with these things.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I don't want to make this too ad hominem, but I want to say that people like your family, were likely very intelligent people, were somehow still always the useful idiots, and there was no country where the communists actually came to power where people like those your family actually got to make the decisions.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Somehow, maybe there were indirect ways that it was helpful or beneficial in countries that did not become communist, but in countries that actually became communist, it didn't actually ever seem to work out for those people.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I definitely think that there was some sense that they were fooled and duped in this situation, but by the same token, not wanting to make this too ad hominem, as a gay man, I think that a lot of your rights would have been seen much earlier by the communists who were earlier to that party. I think that to an extent, some of the things that we just take for granted as part of living in a tolerant society were really not found outside, and so if you were trying to dine in a la carte, maybe you could take something from the commie buffet, you could take something from the anticommunist buffet, and you could steal a little from regular party politics. Of course, the Dixiecrats were not exactly the most racially progressive group in the world. Things were very different, and there was no clear place to turn.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, it's always easy for us to judge people in the past too harshly, so I think that's a good generalization. I would say that there's something about the extreme revolutionary movements that always seem to be... From my point of view, the violence was always too much, and it's a package. It's a package deal, but I don't like the violence part of the package, and that's the part that, at the end of the day, makes me think the package would not have been worth it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, what I would like to do is to take a quick break, and I would like to come back on exactly this point, because it's the point where I feel that perhaps you are least understood by the outside world in terms of what we've been talking about, both growth and progress on the one hand, and violence on the other. So, when we come back, we'll pick it up with Peter Thiel. Thank you.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Thanks.

[break]

== Growth vs Violence ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Welcome back to The Portal. I'm here with my friend and employer, Peter Thiel, for this, our inaugural interview episode, and we've just gotten to a point which I hope people who've been tracking your career, your books, your thought process are going to find interesting, because I think it's the thing that if I had to guess, would be the thing that people least understand about you, or maybe they have wrong the most. Ever since I've known you, your focus has weirdly been reduction of violence across a great number of different topics at a level that I don't think has leaked out into the public's understanding of you and what causes you to make the choices you make. How do you see growth as attached to reduction of violence?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think that it's very hard to see how anything like the kinds of societies we have in Western Europe, the United States, could function without growth. I think the way sort of a parliamentary republican democracy works is you have a group of people sitting around the table, they craft complicated legislation, and there's a lot of horse trading, and as long as the pie's growing, you can give something to everybody. When the pie stops growing, it becomes a zero sum dynamic, and the legislative process does not work. So, the sort of democratic types of parliamentary systems we've had for the last 200, 250 years have mapped on to this period of rapid growth. We had sort of a very bad experiment in the 1930s where the growth stopped, at least from the economic sense, and the systems became fascist or communist. It doesn't actually work.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, I suspect that if we're in for a period of long growth [Ben: I think Peter here means “a period where growth is a long way away”], I don't think our kind of government can work. I think there is a prospect of all sorts of forms of violence, more violence by the state against its citizens. There may be more zero sum wars globally, or there may be other ways things are super deformed to pacify people. So, maybe everyone just smokes marijuana all day, but that's also kind of deformed. But I think a world without growth is either going to be a much more violent or a much more deformed world. And again, it's not the case that growth simply solves all problems. So, you can have very rapid growth, and you can still have the problem of violence. You can still have bad things that can happen, but that's our only chance. Without growth, I think it's very hard to see how you have a good future.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You have to know that there is a version of you that exists in the minds of pundits and the commentariat that just loves to paint you as if you were a cartoon villain, and I always think that for those people who are actually confused about you, as opposed to those who wish to be confused about you, it says, if you're looking through a window and they're looking at the reflection in the window, not understanding what it is that you're focused on, why do you think it is that almost nobody sees your preoccupation with violence reduction?

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's hard for me to come up with a good answer to these sort of sociological questions. I think people generally don't think of the problem of violence as quite as central as I think it is. I think it's a very deep problem on a human level. If you think of sort of this mimetic element to human nature where we copy one another, we want the things other people want, and there's a lot of room for conflict, and that if it's not channeled very carefully, a violent conflict in human relationships, in human societies, between human societies, and this is sort of, I think, a very deep problem. It’s sort of Christian anthropology, but you also have the same in Machiavelli or... There are sort of a lot of different traditions where human beings are, if not evil, they're at least dangerous. I think the sort of soft or anthropological biases that a lot of people have in sort of late modernity or in the enlightenment world are that humans are by nature good, they're by nature peaceful, but that's not the norm. So, that might be sort of a general bias people have, is that people can't be this violent. It's not this deep a problem. It's a problem other people have. There's some bad people who are violent, but it's not a general problem.
Jewish Culture in Germany

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I didn't know you when I was young, and this feels like a lifelong friendship that got started way late in my life. One of the things that that kind of was surprising to me is that my coming from a Jewish background, your coming from a German background, I think both of us were sensitized by the horrors of World War II, which obviously, the problem for the Jews is very clear, but the fact that Germany never really recovered its proud intellectual traditions that had gotten bound up in a level of mechanized and planned violence is a decimation of a great intellectual tradition.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things we've talked about in the past is whether the twilight of living memory of the Holocaust should be used for some more profound German/Jewish reconciliation, that these are two communities that have held somewhat similar thought processes from the perspective of mimetic competition. Maybe there was a problem, that they were doomed to run into each other, but that in some sense, there are two wounds that need to be healed now that all of the original participants are either quite elderly or gone. Do you think that that is informing our conversation?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think there's certainly an element of that between the two of us. I think that there's probably a degree to which the history was so traumatic that that people still understate this aspect. There was something about late 19th century, early 20th century Germany where the Judaism was better integrated into the society than in many other places, and there was something very synergistic, very generative about that, and then getting at all these ways that it was lost are very, very hard to do.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's the sort of social democratic response to the Hitler era and the Holocaust was sort of radically egalitarian. It's everybody's equal, you shouldn't kill people, everybody's equally valuable, and yet, in some ways, Hitler killed the best people. So, there's a way in which the social democratic response to what happened doesn't even come up to the terrible thing that happened. So, in an egalitarian society, well, we don't have quite as many people. We're all equal. Nothing's really changed, but, well, maybe you have no Jewish people left in Germany, and there's a lot less dynamism in the society as a result, and that's something that people still can't say in Germany because that's-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Is that right? You feel like it's...

'''Peter Thiel:''' You know, if I say it, people won't contradict it or anything, but it's sort of profoundly uncomfortable. So, I think there is a sense that there's sort of all these strange ways that Germany is still under the shadow of Hitler. Even the ways that people are trying to exercise Hitler, in some ways, have deformed the society where you can't go back to the things that worked incredibly well in pre-World War I Germany. There was probably a lot that was unhealthy and wrong with it, too, but yeah, there's a sense that something very big has been lost, and there probably are a Jewish version of this that one could articulate as well, but yeah, I think there's something about the synergy that's very powerful and that's quite missing.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, from my side of the fence, I was just listening on NPR to a description of Fiddler on the Roof being put on by Joel Grey in Yiddish, and the sound of Jewish Middle High German, there's something about it that is shocking in today's era. So, there's been a Jewish loss. I felt this a couple of times. I avoided, to be honest, going to Germany because I didn't want to run into old people and wonder where they had been, but eventually, at Soros’ invitation, found myself at a conference in Berlin, and when I checked in to the hotel, I heard my last name pronounced in impeccable German, and it was both a horrible feeling and a wonderful feeling, like somehow, weirdly, something was home. I went to a restaurant near Checkpoint Charlie with my wife, and I was missing a fork, and the person spoke no English, and I remembered from some old story of my father, and I asked for a gopl, which I guess is the Yiddish for fork, and it was close enough, and somebody brought me a fork. By uttering a word that I-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Gabel.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Gabel? Okay.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' By going through that exercise, I found that when this fork was brought to me, I realized that there was some part of my experience, in fact, that was missing, that this uncomfortable relationship, which my grandfather, when we went through Israel, driving north to south, was singing Leider. I mean, German was the language of the culture. It was the language of the intellectual, and that never left him. So, I think that weirdly, this is the first time, because I think it'll be too late if we wait for 20 more years, because there will be no one to remember, but that there is some opportunity to recognize a dual wound.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. No. Yeah. I think the challenge on the Germany side is that it's sort of... I had somewhat of a idiosyncratic background here where I was born in Germany, but we emigrated when I was about a year old, and we spoke German at home and lived in Africa, in Namibia were I went to a German-speaking school, but it was very different, I think, from the general post-World War II German experience, and so there are all these things that I can see from the outside looking into Germany that I think are... I still have a connection to it in sort of all of these ways, visited it as a child many times, and it's something that I connect with, and then it's obviously super different, and the contrast of Germany and California I always like to give is that California is optimistic, but desperate, and Germany is pessimistic, but comfortable. But from a Californian perspective, the incredibly deep pessimism is really, really striking, and even on that one dimension, I think Jewish culture is super different.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I feel like Jewish culture is, in part, starting to attenuate that we don't feel... I mean, this is crazy talk, but we never thought that there was anything positive about antisemitism, and obviously it's not a positive thing, but there were positive externalities in that it allowed us to push ourselves very, very hard because we always knew that we weren't going to get a fair shake and that at any moment you might need to flee to someplace that was less dangerous, and I feel that as we've become comfortable, we've lost some of the dynamism, which is a hard thing to admit, but I do think that that is in part true, and I see this in Germany. Germany's intellectual contribution was so profound that nothing post-World War II seems to suggest the same nation. I think that that loss is a profound loss, not to Germany, but to the entire world.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, and of course, one of the challenges is we can sort of describe these things, we can speculate on some of the causal things. I think it's somehow, we don't want to go back. We can't go back-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Can't, and don't want to. I agree.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, yeah, there is a history, and I think something's been lost in both Germany and in Jewish culture, and how one reconstitutes this is... Even if we can convince people of the causes and the losses, what you actually do about it is, is super hard to say and that's, that's sort of always the strange dynamic of this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Something I'd be open to us working on at some future point if we can find the time, but let me switch gears slightly and come back a little bit to the violence point.
Preference Falsification

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But one of the things that I think has become kind of interesting in our relationship is that a certain class of theories that are not popular in the general population are traded back and forth between us, partially around the idea of how do we restart growth, how do we avoid violence?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I wanted to sort of alert people who are interested in the portal concept to this idea of orphaned or unpopular theories that are traded among a few but maybe not are among the many. So if we could go through a few of these, one of them has to do with how you and I both, we're much more, I think we believe that Trump was much more likely to get elected, than the general population did.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And this has to do with the theory of preference falsification, that people will broadly lie about what their true preferences are, so they'll keep one set of public preferences, but a hidden set of private preferences. And then in our culture it gets revealed every four years where you kind of have a Schrodinger's cat experiment, you find out where the country actually is.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, I felt this was a dynamic that was going on in all these strange ways in 2016 there was a dinner I had in San Francisco about a week before the election with a group of center right people. One of them was a very prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, and he said, you know, I'm voting for Trump in a week, but because I'm in Silicon Valley, I have to lie. And so he was unusually honest about lying. And the way I lie is that I tell people I'm voting for Gary Johnson.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So he couldn't say that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton. Like the facial muscles wouldn't work or something would go wrong. But Gary Johnson was sort of the lie that you could tell. And then if you actually look at what happened in the month before the election, the Gary Johnson support, you know, collapsed from I don't know something like six to two percent or whatever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And as far as I can tell, all of that went to Trump. And the question one has to ask is were these people, you know, lying all along? Were they lying to themselves? Did they sincerely change their mind in the last month? Or some combination of that. But yeah, one sort of vehicle for this preference falsification was that you had a third party candidate who was sort of a gateway to the transition, this is what happened with Ross Perot, where the people went, you know, eventually went to Clinton in '92 or John Anderson in 1980. So that's been a sort of repeated and that's, I think that was one element of what was going on.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But then I think there were also all these aspects of, of the Trump candidacy, that people were super uncomfortable about polite society. And so one would, you know, that the preference falsification was somehow perhaps much greater than in many other past contexts. And so, you know, even the day of the election, the exit polls suggested that Trump was going to lose. And so there were still a two to three percent effect like this, literally the day of the voting.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I voted for Bernie in the primaries and I felt that both you and I had realized that the Clinton neoliberal story was a slow-motion, one-way ticket to disaster if it kept going on election after election. So that both of us recognized that we had to get off the trigger.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Of course, one of the complicated questions in all this is, you know, did people actually already sense this? And were they lying about this? So, like everybody was saying all the way throughout 2016, most of the people were saying, well, there's no chance that you know, Trump's going to win. This is absolutely impossible.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I didn't really connect this before the election, but with 2020 hindsight, I wonder was the fact that everyone was clicking on the Nate Silver 538 statistical polling model site a few times a day, to reassure themselves that Hillary Clinton was still ahead, was going to win. Was that some sort of acknowledgement that on some, maybe subconscious or barely conscious level, people sensed that it wasn't really as done a deal as they were constantly saying.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, there's even a version of that question that I wonder about. You know, because there was something about the polling that took on this unusually iconic role in 2016, it was so important and there was no truth outside the polls. I remember there's, you know, one of the Democrat talking heads saying something like, you know, Republicans don't believe in climate change. They also don't believe in polls. That's why they're going to lose. And generally polls are right, but there was something about how all-important they were in 2016 that might've, been a tell that something was a little bit amiss.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I think people knew, to my way of thinking. I think people knew that there was something very bizarre about this election. I think that the Bernie scare, that if the Democratic party hadn't ... been so skillful, in sidelining Bernie and where the party regulars were, you know, clearly backing Clinton, my sense is that it could well have been Bernie versus Trump and that would have been enough to say the neoliberal story is over.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think there was that fear that this was coming to an end. My sense of it was that the major reaction to Trump was sort of a class reaction. That it was you're rejecting the entire concept of an educated group that knows the right things to say. And you know, you're clearly sort of not the kind of person who should be in the Oval Office, much more than the issue of whether or not Trump was going to be a warmonger or turn the U S into a police state, which of course doesn't seem to have happened as of this moment in 2019.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But I guess what my sense of it was is that people really were shocked. I was, because I live in a left-of-center universe, the day after-

'''Peter Thiel:''' They certainly pretended to be shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, there's no-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Look, I'll concede your point. They were pretty shocked.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They were pretty shocked.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But you know, if, but I still have my question, why were they clicking on the Nate Silver site just a few times a day?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One version of it was, let's say even if Hillary trounced Trump, but it wasn't enough. That would be a scary thing, given what Trump had been built up to, which is a, you know, orange Hitler. You know, if you imagine that your country is supporting somebody who thinks all Mexicans are rapists and is going to take the country back to, you know, to the Middle Ages, it would be very disconcerting if such a person could get 20 percent of the vote.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I think that the poll had its own significance. However, you know, I think that one of the things about preference falsification is that when you start to believe that this is a robust phenomenon, that all of the economic models that assume that your private preferences and public preferences are the same, you start to see the world very differently. And so this is one of the portals into an alternate way of seeing the universe so as not to get surprised by revolutions.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, it's always this question, in my mind, this question of preference falsification, the Timur Kuran theory is tightly coupled to this question of, you know, how intense is the problem of political correctness, where, you know, how much pressure is there on people to say things they don't actually believe?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I always come back to thinking that the problem of political correctness in some sense is our biggest political problem. That, you know, we live in a world where people are super uncomfortable saying what they think, that it's sort of dangerous. And to use the Silicon Valley context, it's a problem that Silicon Valley has become a one party state. But there are two different senses in which you can be a one party state. One sense is that everybody just happens to believe this one thing, which you know ... is one thing.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And then the other one is in which 85 percent of people believe one thing and the other 15 percent pretend to. And you know, sort of like, it's a dynamic with super majorities where you know, in a democracy, we think 51 percent of people believe something, they're probably right if 70 to 80 percent believe something, it's almost more certainly right. But if you have 99.99 percent of the people believe something, at some point you shifted from a democratic truth to North Korean insanity.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so there is, you know, there's a subtle tipping point where the wisdom of crowds shifts into something that's sort of softly totalitarian or something like that. So in my mind, it maps very much onto this question of, you know, the problem of political correctness. It's always hard to measure how big it is, you know, in a politically correct society. Of course, you know, we're just saying what we think. We all love Stalin, we all love Chairman Mao and, and maybe, you know, we're just singing these songs because we're all enthusiastic about it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think, my read on it is that problem has gotten more acute in a lot of parts of our society over the last few decades.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think that's gotten, well, as you know, I started this whole intellectual dark web concept in part to create kind of a broad based and bipartisan coalition of people who are willing to speak out in public and take some risk. Speaking for a large number of people, I would never have understood how many people feel terrified to speak out if I hadn't done that. Because people come up to me all the time and say thank you for saying what I can't say at work. And then when I asked them, well, what is it that you can't say at work? It's absolutely shocking. Completely commonplace things, things that are not at all dangerous, not scary or frightening.
Distraction Theories

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things I believe, and I don't know whether you're going to agree with this, is that, you start to understand that a lot of the people who are enforcing the political correctness suspect that they are covering up dangerous truths. So for example, if you believe that IQ equals intelligence, which I do not, I mean, let's just be honest about it. You're going to fear anything that shows variation in IQ between groups. If you don't believe IQ equals intelligence, if you believe that intelligence is a much richer story and that no group is that far out of the running, you're not terribly frightened of the data because you have lots of different ways of understanding what's happening. And also you generally find that the truth is the best way of lifting people out of their situation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So I secretly suspect to be blunt about it, and this is kind of horrible, that a lot of Silicon Valley is extremely bigoted and misogynistic and it can't actually make eye contact with the fact that it's secretly thinks women aren't as good programmers. Where I happen to think, you know, fisherian equivalence suggests that males and females one protein apart, SRY protein, are not likely to be. I mean they might have different forms of intelligence and different forms of cognitive strengths, but if you don't actually worry too much about an intellectual difference, you'd be willing to have an intellectual conversation that was quite open about it. So maybe I can turn that around.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, let me see. There's sort of a lot of different things I want to react to there. Yeah, I suspect that it's a distraction of sorts. You know, I think, I mean on this very superficial layer, we want to have debates, want to have debates on a lot of areas, a lot of, you know, hard questions and questions in science and technology and philosophy and religion, there're all these questions that I think it would be healthy to debate.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And there's a way in which political debates are sort of a low form of these questions. And there's one sense in which I think of these political questions as less important or less elevated than some of these others, but there's also a sense in which these questions about politics are ones that everyone can have access to. And so if you can't even have a debate about politics, you can't say you know, I like the man with the strange orange hairdo or I like the mean grandmother. If you can't even say that, then we've sort of frozen out discussion on a lot of other areas. And that's always one of the reasons I think that political correctness starts with correctness about politics. That when you aren't allowed to talk about that area, you've implicitly frozen out a lot of others that are maybe more important and you know, and where we're certainly not going to have a debate about string theory if we can't even have a common sense debate about politics or something like that.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I'm very sympathetic to this sort of distraction theory that, you know, that what's going on our society is like a psychosocial, magic, hypnotic magic trick where, you know, we're being distracted from something very important and political correctness, identity politics and maybe American exceptionalism, these various ideological systems, are distracting us from things. The thing I keep thinking of, the main thing it's distracting us from, is the stagnation and it's that there are these problems that we don't want to talk about in our society. It's possible it's also a way to distract us from bad thoughts that we have about people with the sort, you said.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But the one I would, I would go back to first is just that it's distracting us from dealing with problems. You know, the reason we have a newspeak, this sort of Orwellian newspeak in politics with these zombie politicians, you know Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever it might be, is that we're not supposed to talk about the real issues and maybe they have a bad conscience and they think they're bad people, but it's just, I think the primary thing is just too dangerous to talk about what's actually going on. They don't know what to do about it and better not talk about that.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think there's another take on it, which you know, if I'm honest about it probably originates from my side of the aisle, which is that I have a sense that if you believe that productivity and growth is over, you don't want to emphasize issues of merit because you don't really think that the merit is going to translate.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And so therefore all you can focus on, like you know, a board of a company, is just a bunch of slots at a trough. And so you have to make sure that every group has its slots at the trough, because it doesn't actually matter. The board isn't doing anything to begin with. And so it's only a question of receiving the wealth that is already there. And so I worry that that is, you know, I guess where I break with a lot of progressives is that I believe that most progress comes from progress, which is technologically led and informationally led, that the more we know and the more we can do, the more we can take care of people.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. So, I mean, again, this is always maybe naive hope on my part or something like this. But I always think that when we can't talk about things, we can't solve them-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Exactly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... and that this is so, you know, maybe these are the calculations you make and this is, you know, this is the way we pat people on the head, even though they're never going to get ahead or something like that. But you know, it's never going to work. It's-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well at least let's go down swinging.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... and eventually, and people aren't that stupid and they will eventually figure it out. And so that's sort of why I'm undermotivated to play that game.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, and I have to say that one of the things that I've learned from you is that it's one thing to have a contrarian position. It's another thing to hold it when the whole world starts hating on you.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' For example, I watched the world go from viewing removing Gawker as removing a nuisance, or worse that was threatening people selectively, to a concern, you know, about like First Amendment rights and silencing, you know, free speech. And you know, I do have the strong sense that people are willfully misinterpreting these actions that are necessary to sort of self correct in our society and are not being terribly honest. There's a lot of bad faith acting in our system at the moment.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But, I'm always like this, where I'm always quite hopeful that people realize there's a lot of bad faith acting and they discount this accordingly.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' They grow out of it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I don't know how many of the people disagree with me on the support for Trump will be more open to it in five years or 10 years, and we'll see. On the Gawker matter, you know, I'm going to win that one. I think people understand that, when it gets criticized by people in the media who themselves are up against super challenged business models where they have to act in sociopathic ways to get clicks by their readers, that this is just the game they have to play. There's more of an understanding of this than you think, and therefore, you know, it's not quite what it looks.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I was extremely disturbed by Gawker a decade, decade and a half ago because I think it was a really powerful thing at the time where it worked because people didn't understand how it worked. It was this hate factory, the scapegoating machine, but people didn't see it as such. And because of that it was super powerful. Once you see how it works, once you understand it, it is less powerful. So, you know, even had I not succeeded in the litigation against Gawker, I think it would be a weaker version of that today. There are of course equally nasty things on the internet, but they're not as powerful because-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Or as well organized.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ...there's more transparency into the bad motives and people get it, and the hate factory only works when it's not perceived as such.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I think that there is a way in which some of this stuff is slowing down because people are getting tired of the constant state of beheading, figuratively, of people via their reputation, that we've moved from honest physical violence into reputational and economic violence against people that are considered undesirable.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But I think that like there's a story with both Gawker and Trump, which the rest of the world will never see. And I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't been working with you. In the case of Gawker, I don't think anybody even knows the story about how much you sweated the ethics internally of: How do I do this right? How do I make sure that I don't hurt anybody that I shouldn't be hurting? How do I make sure that this represents something narrow and not something broad? Which is a story so far as I know that hasn't been told.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And then there's the story with Trump where, I don't know if you remember this, when Trump won, you had a gathering at your house and you did not invite me, and I was so pissed at you that even though I was tooth and nail against Trump, and I remain really pretty close to a never Trumper. I knew why you did what you did. I knew that you felt that it was a reduction in violence and I think that you had theories that nobody believed at the time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' If I look out at this world, out through these windows, Trump has not changed mostly day to day life except for the phenomena of Trump, but it's not, there isn't you know a policeman on every street corner with an automatic rifle. We're not in some sort of siege from the White House. And you said, I think much less is going to happen than people imagined and I think we're going to be in a much less interventionist mode than we were previously. And whether or not you were right or you're wrong. So far, I think you've been borne out to be right on both of those points. I knew that you had an idea that we had to shake things up or we were going to be in some very dangerous situation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I had two speeches in 2016, one was at the Republican convention, one was at the Washington Press Club about a month before the election. And in both speeches, I underscored the ways in which I think Trump would represent a break from the interventionist, neoconservative, neoliberal foreign policies, that Bush 43, that Obama still continued and that Hillary was likely to, would have been likely to continue. And I still think that that's roughly what's happened. It's not been, you know, it's not been ... as far away from interventionism as I would like. But it's directionally, directionally that's happened.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think that, you know, I do think we're not going to go back to that on the Republican side, which is like a very important thing. We're not going to go back to the Bush foreign policy ever. That was an important thing. In the primaries, when, the republican primaries, when Trump spoke out against the Iraq war. That was, you know, that was a very important moment from my point of view. And I think, you know, we always think of the, I think one way to think of the President of the United States is that you're sort of the mayor of this country, but you're the dictator of the world because in the US your power is very limited. Outside the US you can do, you know, a great number of things. And that's why I think these foreign policy questions are actually, are very important ones in assessing the president.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well I guess my take on the great danger of Trump was that there were certain sorts of standards and agreed upon cultural aspects, which I've likened to the Oral Torah of the United States where the Constitution is our Written Torah. And my concern is that Trump has had an effect on degrading certain expectations where it does matter how one comports oneself as a president, maybe not as much as some of my friends would like to think.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I do think that we needed some dynamism, but my concern is that it's going to be very difficult to recover from the kind of damage to our sense of what can and cannot be said and done. I did think that we needed to break out of our Overton window, if you will, on many topics. I would just, the way that Trump touched those was not comfortable for me.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, I agree. There are certain ways in which president Trump does not act presidential in the way in which the previous presidents-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I agree that he's breached things that needed to be said.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... but then maybe there's some point where it was too much acting and the acting was counterproductive. I think there is something extraordinary about how it was possible for someone like Donald Trump to get elected. And probably a useful question for people on both the left and the right would be to try to think about, you know, what the underlying problems were, what some of the solutions to that are. And you know, it's, I think the left or the Democrats, you know, they could, they can win. They can win in 2020 but they have to have more of an agenda than just telling the Republicans to hurry up and die, it has to be more than that, you know?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is the thing that convinced me that I didn't get the Trump thing, which was, I was convinced that Trump was going to be such a wake up call that the Democratic party was going to, you know, go behind a closed door and say we cannot let this happen again. We have to look honestly at how he got beat, what this represents, what it means and what we're going to do next time.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And the idea that we were going to double or triple down on some of the stuff that didn't work never even occurred to me. I had no idea that that party was so far gone that it couldn't actually, you know, if you imagine that he's orange Hitler, you would think orange Hitler would be the occasion to think deeply and question hypotheses. And I really have been shocked at the extent to which that didn't happen. So maybe I got my own party wrong on that front. I didn't know that we were this far gone, but.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think there's still a lot of time to do that. And I keep thinking that, you know, we are at some point where the distractions aren't going to work as well. You know, I think the big distraction on the left over the last 40, 50 years have been forms of identity politics where, you know, we don't look at the country as a whole. We look at parts of it and it's sort of been a way of, you know, I think obscuring these questions of stagnation.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Fair enough. And on the right?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I would say the right, the right wing distraction technique has been, I would say something like American exceptionalism-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That’s interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' -which is this doctrine that the US is this singular exceptional country. It's so, so terrific, so wonderful. It does everything so incredibly well that you shouldn't ask any difficult questions, any questions at all. I think it, in theological or epistemological terms, you can compare it to the radical monotheism of the God of the Old Testament where it means that God is so radically unique that you can't know anything about him. You can't talk about God's attributes, you can't say anything about him whatsoever.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And if the United States is radically exceptional, then in a similar way you can say nothing about it whatsoever. And there may be all these things on the ground that seem crazy, where, you know, we have people who are exceptionally overweight. We have subway systems that are exceptionally expensive to build. We have universities that are exceptionally sociopathic. I mean, you don't have the student debt problem in any other country. You know, we have trade regime that's exceptionally bad for our country, like no other country-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Firearms.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... is as self destructive as this. There are all these things that we somehow don't ask. So I think exceptionalism somehow led to this country that was exceptionally un-self aware. And-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's very interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... that's and so, you know, there's greatness is adjacent to exceptionalism, but it's actually still quite different because many countries can be great and great is more, it's more a scale. And there's something you measure it against-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's multi-variate.

'''Peter Thiel:''' ... whereas exceptional, it's just completely incommensurate with anything else. And I think that's gotten us into a very, very bad cul de sac.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And I think that there's a way in which that sort of exceptionalism has ended on the right. And there's been, we've moved beyond that. And I'm hopeful that in a similar way, the left will move beyond identity politics even though, right now it feels like the monster is flopping about more violently than ever, even though I think it might be its death throes, but maybe not.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. And it could be that it's gotten very strong or it could be on its last legs and it might as well go for broke.

== Girard’s Mimetic Theories ==

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So let me return back to the line of inquiry. I mean, sorry, just enjoying so much hearing what you have to say. Some of it's new to me. The theories that might be portals into a different way of looking at the world.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of them that you brought into my, I've never heard of before was Girard's various theories. And I wonder if you might say, you've often credited success in business to how you understood and you applied Girard. I mean obviously he didn't have this kind of level of business success. So can you talk a little bit about your personal relationship to Rene Girard's theories as a portal into a different way of seeing the world?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well let's say a little bit about the theory. So it's, it was sort of this theory of human psychology as deeply mimetic where you sort of, you copy other people.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So, so just for the folks at home mimetic as in mime rather than memetic is in meme.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Well they're probably closely related. But you imitate people but that's how you learn to speak as a child. You copy your parents language, that's how, but then you also imitate desire and then there are sort of all sorts of aspects of mimesis that can lead to sort of mass violence mass insanity. So it has, it's both what enables human culture to function, but it also is quite, quite dangerous.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And you know, when I came across this sort of constellation of ideas as an undergraduate at Stanford, you know, my biases were sort of libertarian, classic liberal, only individuals exist. Individuals are radically autonomous, can think for themselves. And so this was, it was sort of a powerful corrective to that intellectually. But then it also worked on an existential level where you sort of realize, wow, there are all these ways that I've been hyper mimetic, I've been hyper tracked, why am I at Stanford, why does this matter so much? Why, you know, why am I doing all the things I'm doing?

'''Peter Thiel:''' And that's, it's a prism through which one when looks at a lot of things that I found to be quite helpful over recent decades. I think the preference falsification you can think of in mimetic terms where, you know, everybody goes along with what everybody else thinks, and then you can get these sort of chaotic points where all of a sudden things can shift much faster than you would think possible because there are all these dynamics that are not, you know, not simply rational. It's not quite correct to model people as these sort of classical Adams or something like that, it's much more entangled.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What would be a good way for a people listening at home to start to get into Girard's philosophy if they were interested?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well there are, you know, it's, there's sort of a number of different books that Girard wrote. I think the magisterial one is probably Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. So it's this truth of mimesis and violence and the ways. So it's sort of part psychology, part anthropology, part history.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All portal, I should point out because they're all hidden.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's, you know, it's a portal onto the past, and to human origins. It's our history, it's a portal onto the present, onto, you know, the interpersonal dynamics of psychology. It's a portal onto the future in terms of, you know, are we going to let these mimetic desires run amok and head towards apocalyptic violence where, you know, even the entire planet can no longer absorb the violence that we can unleash or are we going to learn from this and transcend this, in a way where we get to some very different place.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so it has a sense that, you know, of both danger and hope for the future as well. So it's, it is sort of this, you know, panoramic theory on a lot of ways. Super powerful and just extraordinarily different from what one would normally hear. You know, there's sort of like almost a cult like element where you had these people who are followers of Girard. And was sort of a sense that, you know, we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did and that was generative and very powerful.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So, you know, it's always, there are parts of it that are unhealthy, but it was, you know, it has sort of an incredible dynamism. And then it just, you are aware that, you know, maybe things are so different from how they appear to be that, you know ... there may be a portal out there, there may be, you know,

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What was shocking to me. I mean, the first time I heard about it, you invited me to a conference that you were keeping quiet and I was in the news and there was quite a lot of anger and furor that I had done something wrong. And you waited a few days to give a talk and you talked about scapegoating and the mechanism by which violence that might be visited upon the many is visited upon the one. And then you also started talking about the King as if he is sort of scapegoat in waiting, so that the King is not necessarily something that one would want to be.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And I found it absolutely fascinating because it turned so many ideas on their heads that I got angry at you. Why hadn't you told me this earlier when I'd been through three sleepless nights before I'd heard the theory. So I found it instantly applicable, particularly if you're the sort of person who's likely to get scapegoated by not taking refuge in the herd. Do you think it has more relevance to people who are struggling to break out as individuals because of the possibility of being picked off?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I think it has universal ... I think it is broadly true, and so it has some sort of universal relevance. I think the problems of violence and scapegoating are universal problems. It's probably the case that there are certain types of people who are more likely to become scapegoats, but it's not an absolute thing. So there's always, you could say there's an arbitrariness about scapegoating because the scapegoat is supposed to represent, to stand in for everybody. So the scapegoat has to be perceived as someone who's radically other, but then also has to somehow emerge from within the group. There are times when the scapegoat is the sort of outlier, extreme insider, extreme outsider, king/criminal or whatever personality.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's probably a dangerous sort of thing. It's like Abraham Lincoln, the incredible orator who also grows up in a log cabin, these extreme contrasts are often people who are at risk of this maybe more than others. And then at the same time, because these are mob-like dynamics, there is sort of a way in which it's not like anyone's really safe from the violence ever. No one's completely safe.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I think that's quite true.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But yes. There is a thought that one of the history ideas that Girard had that is that there's a dynamic to this process where scapegoating, it only works when people don't understand it. As you understand it better, it works less well or it has to get displaced into other dimensions. If you have a witch hunt, say, we need to find a witch to bring back peace to the community, that's a psychosocial understanding of what you're doing is actually counterproductive of the witch hunt itself. The witch hunt is supposed to be a theological epiphany that God's telling you who the witch is. If you think of it as some sort of psychosocial control mechanism, then it won't work any more.

'''Peter Thiel:''' A metaphor that Girard uses is that the sacred is like phlogiston and violence is like oxygen, but it only works in a world where it's misunderstood. So if you understand scapegoating, you end up in a world where it works less and less well, and the kind of political and cultural institutions that are linked to it will tend to unravel. I think one of the ways in which this has happened a great deal in modernity is that we scapegoat the scapegoaters, go up one level of abstraction.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's interesting.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That always, it makes it a little bit more complicated. If we go after the people who were the historical oppressors, the historical victimizers, that's often a super powerful way, and it's slightly too complicated. There was a Bill Clinton formulation of this, "we must unite against those who seek to divide us", which is on some level itself contradictory, but then it's a little bit too hard for people to fully disentangle.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That's very funny.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's one way that I think it still works even though it's, again, when everyone sees these moves, when everyone understands them, it just doesn't work that well any more.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So it's like saying, "Would you like me to prescribe you a placebo?".

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. That probably does not work very well.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' But then the other part of it that I find terrifying which is, but also interesting, is that implicit in this framework is that there is a minimal level of violence needed to accomplish an end, and that the scapegoating mechanism while entirely unjust has the virtue of being minimal in this, that horror is visited upon the individual.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes, yes. Or the theological terminology Girard would use would be that scapegoating is satanic and that archaic cultures were a little bit satanic but not very. They were sort of satanic in an innocent way because the violence was actually a way to limit violence, that violence is both the disease and a cure for the disease. We need violence to drive out violence. This is how our societies work. And then it's not quite clear how things will continue to work. You could always say that there is a sense in which - and this is super broad brush stroke-type argument - there's a way in which you can say that the Left is more focused on the unjustified nature of violence, and the Right is more focused on how a certain amount of violence is needed for society. There are ways in which they're both right, and then there are ways in which they're both deconstructing each other.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You could say a nation state contains violence in both senses of the word contain.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Oh that's good.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Because it contains it as it limits it, it channels it in certain ways, but then it's also part of its very being. You get into all these questions. When it's appropriate, when it's not. That's why I don't like violence. I think it's a very serious problem, but-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You also recognize its instrumental nature.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you said, "We're going to get rid of all violence tomorrow. It's going to stop-"

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You'd be talking about nothing.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Or I think-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There's no way in which that can-

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, that might require a tremendous amount of violence to enact or if we're going to have no more violence at all, maybe you'll have just total chaos and a lot of violence in that form. It's an interesting problem to... all these interesting descriptors, but then how to practically translate into action, very, very tricky.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah. I think that one of the things on the Left that people don't get right, and I don't know whether you'll agree with me or not, is that I think we on the Left are somewhat divided between two camps. One camp is quite open about wanting to end oppression and the other camp is cryptic about wanting to reverse it. In other words, you've oppressed for long enough. It is your turn to be oppressed by us and we are actually envious of oppression. There is something of a civil war. I mean I would say this is the way in which the IDW's left wing or left flank is misunderstood, which is that almost none of the left wing members of the IDW are interested in oppressing anybody. So there's going to be no payback period that sounds like fun to us.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' One of the things I hadn't understood until it was said to me quite starkly, progress is messy and you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. There is this just tolerance bordering on excitement about the opportunity to stick it to those who have stuck it to you, from your perspective, that this is an aspect of justice. Whereas the cessation of oppression is interesting to another part of that group.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The disturbing thing is that it's, of course, much less exciting and much less energizing.
Motivating Stories and Science

'''Peter Thiel:''' I often think if you listen to a political speech, the applause lines are always the ones, "We are going to go after the other side. We're going to go after the bad people. We're going to stop them." If you try to construct a political speech in which it was, "We're going to unite people. We're going to get everybody onto this goal and there were no bad people." It's almost impossible to have a speech that has any energy at all.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take issue with that slightly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' As a political speech.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understood exactly what you said. I don't think I'm going to mischaracterize it. I think that the problem is the reason I pour energy into trying to stop the political correctness and the rules about what can be said, mostly has to do with the fact that I'm incredibly excited, except I'm excited about something non-political. If what I'm excited about is pursuing technological progress, scientific progress, more people being able to form families, et cetera, that's where the excitement is. It's not coming from the politics. It's coming from what the politics facilitates. So I think that the problem with these speeches is: if you don't believe that there is something that we're keeping this space clean for, we might as well riot or something because at least that's exciting and that's got some energy behind it. Then it's my team versus your team.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean look, at some level anybody who's focused on technology as you are is a progressive in the sense of caring about what is actually progress. I think that the danger comes from when politics becomes your entertainment. You read very correctly, and I learned this from you, that when you look at a bunch of candidates debating on a crowded stage, look at where the energy is. The energy is something that is not, in my opinion, a good indicator - it's not a good approximate for the ultimate that I care about.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Look, I'd like it to be just the way you describe. I just-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no. I understood what you-

'''Peter Thiel:''' ...want to report it often is not. Scientific, technological progress, in a way, the hope is it can lead towards a more cornucopian world in which there's less Malthusian struggle, less violence, and then at the very same time, an honest account of the history of these things is that a lot of it was used to develop more advanced weapons. It was in the pursuit of violence. One account of the tech stagnation, the scientific tech stagnation, is that the breakthrough thing was the atom bomb and then you built the rockets to deliver the bombs more quickly. By 1970 we had enough bombs and rockets to destroy the world 10 or 20 times over or whatever, and the whole thing made no more sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If one of the big drivers of scientific and technological progress was actually just the military dimension, when that became absurd did the whole thing slow down to the space age? Not in 1972 when Apollo left the moon, but was the key moment 1975 when you had the Apollo Soyuz docking? If we're just going to be friends with the Russians, does it really make sense for people to be working 80 hours, 100 hours a week around the clock? And again, I don't think it's all that, but I think one of the challenges, that we should not understate how big it is in resetting science and technology in the 21st century is, how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice, incredibly hard work, deferred gratification for the future, that's not intrinsically violent? It was combined with that in all these powerful ways.
Fears of Progress

'''Peter Thiel:''' A lot of people deny that there's a tech science stagnation going on, but then one of the other things one hears is, "Well, maybe it's not progressing as fast, but do we really want it to progress as fast? Isn't it dangerous? We're just going to build the AI that's going to kill everybody or it'll be biological weapons or it's going to be runaway nanotechnology." I don't think we should dismiss those fears completely.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, the fear is that it's going to make these things cheap and easy. Whereas right now you still need a state to do a lot of this work. I mean, Elon Musk is one of the first private individuals with a space program.

'''Peter Thiel:''' That's a version of it, but I think in general it's just that somehow you will lose control over the violence. You think you can control it. Maybe it's a large state. Maybe it's autonomous AI weapons, which in theory are controlled by state, but in practice, not quite. There's all these scenarios where the stuff can spiral out of control. I'm more scared of the one where nothing happens. I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to apocalypse. I'm much more scared of that, but we have to understand why people are scared of the nonstagnant world.
Climate Change

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean, boy, there are a couple of threads here that are super important, one of which is that one thing that I sense that both of us get frustrated with is that if you think about growth as necessary to contain certain violence, and you think about growth as largely also being how much fossil fuels you're able to burn, climate is not paired with a reduction in opulence. It's paired on the other side with war. If you over-focus on climate and you result in a situation in which growth is slowed to a halt ... Now, growth doesn't need to be the amount of fossil fuel you burn, but it has largely been that up until the present. You actually see that the trade-off that you're facing is very different than the one that's usually portrayed by either side. Somehow we never get around to that conversation, which would be, if we were very serious about climate, would we be plunged into war?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah. Obviously you can't have an economy without an environment, but it may also be the case that you can't have an environment without an economy. And then if both of those statements are true, maybe the set of best solutions looks really different than if you just focus on one and not the other.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' This is why it's so important for me to have environments in which people who don't agree on things, but agree on what constitutes a conversation, can sit down with an idea that nobody's going to leave the table with their reputation in tatters to the extent that they can't find a job on Monday to support themselves. It's that you have to actually weigh both of these things simultaneously. The great danger is people trying to solve either problem in isolation.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, if one goes with the general climate change narrative that it's anthropogenic, it's CO2 levels are rising in a way that's dangerous and has a serious risk of some kind of big runaway process, I think always the political question in my mind is, what do you do about China and what do you do about India? Because these are the countries that are trying to catch up to the developed world. They have a enormous way to go to catch up and-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's a logical consequence.

'''Peter Thiel:''' I think Europe has something like 8% of the carbon emissions in the world. Then we have to have more than just the magical political thinking where it's something like we're going to have a carbon tax in California and this will be so charismatic and so inspiring that people in China and India will copy us and follow suit. They're not willing to actually say that literally because it sounds so absurd-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It sounds crazy.

'''Peter Thiel:''' But if you say that that's not the way things actually work, then somehow you need to do some really different things. We need to find energy sources that are not carbon dioxide intensive. Maybe we need to figure out ways to engineer carbon sinks. I mean there's all this crazy geoengineering stuff that maybe should be on the table. Maybe we should be more open to nuclear power. It was like a range of very different debates that pushes you towards-
Transparency and Privacy

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take a slightly different tack. Two statements that I found later in life unfortunately, but have both been meaningful to me. One is Weber's definition that a government is a monopoly on violence. And the other one, it's a guy I can never remember who said, I think it was a French political philosopher who said, "A nation is a group of people who have agreed to forget something in common." If you put these things together, if you imagine that somehow we've now gone in for the belief that transparency is almost always a good thing and that what we need is greater transparency to control the badness in our society, we probably won't be able to forget anything in common. Therefore, we may not be able to have a nation, and therefore the nation may not be able to monopolize violence, which is a very disturbing but interesting causal chain. Can we explore the idea of transparency, given that people seem to now associate certain words with positivity, even though normally we would have thought about privacy, transparency, trade-offs, let's say?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Well, I always do think there's a privacy-transparency trade off. One thing that's always confusing about transparency to me is there's transparency in theory, which is like this panopticon-like thing where the entire planet gets illuminated brightly and equally everywhere, all at once. So that's in theory. But then in practice is often it sounds more like a weapon that will be directed against certain people where it's a question of who gets to render who else transparent, and maybe it's even a path-dependent sequencing question where if you do it first-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' First strike transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' First strike transparency is very powerful. So you have to think about Mr. Snowden against the NSA, and then the NSA trying to expose Mr. Snowden's Swedish sex cult, whatever you want to describe it as. I think a lot of it ends up having that kind of an-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' You mean Assange's.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Sorry, Assange. Assange's Swedish sex cult, Assange against the NSA, NSA against Assange's Swedish sex cult or something like that. I think in practice full transparency, it assumes people can pay attention to everything at once or equally. That seems politically incorrect. Then even if you had this much greater transparency in all these ways, there are all these ways that that would seem creepy totalitarian. If you stated in terms of the problem of violence, you can think of the trade-off between transparency and privacy as transparency is we're looking at everybody and therefore they can't be that violent, but the state may be very violent in enforcing all this transparency.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Privacy is you get to have a gun and you get to do various dangerous things in the dark and no one knows what they are. So there's probably more violence on the individual level, but then less control on the state. It's, again, this question of are you more scared of the violence of individuals or more scared of centralized violence? Probably one should not be too categorical or too absolute about this, but it can show up in both places and that's why it's a wickedly hard problem. Wickedly hard.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It does seem to be. I have to say I've started to hate the transparency discussion, because if you'll notice there's a vogue in 2019 for simply saying, "Well, I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant," as if that constituted an argument. Now, first of all, one thing that people don't understand is that there are infections, like brucella, that are actually accelerated by sunlight, so it's comical. It's not even true. Bleach is probably a better disinfectant. But the idea that that constitutes an argument in our time, to me, speaks to the fact that we're living in a very strange moment where if you go back to Ecclesiastes and the inspiration for Turn Turn Turn, there was an idea that there was a purpose to everything and inclusion or exclusion were both needed. "A time to kill, a time to die, time to refrain from killing."

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There does seem to be an absolutist mania in which it would be hard to imagine writing a song about a time to kill in the modern era. And likewise, I'm not positive that people recognize how imperative it is for a well-functioning government to have places where it doesn't have to constantly account for itself.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you have no back room deals, maybe that's less corrupt, but maybe nothing gets done.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Not functional.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The US Supreme court still doesn't televise its hearings. I suspect that's the right call. I think part of it is that if you know that everything is going to be transparent, you will censor yourself and you won't say things. So it's not like the same thing happens in a transparent way. Maybe it just stops happening altogether. If you're a politician or an aspiring politician, you're not going to engage in bold ideas. You're not going to experiment with different ways about thinking about things. You're going to be super conventional, super curated.

'''Peter Thiel:''' It's not like we get all the benefits of transparency with none of the costs. They come with a very, very high cost. I do wonder if one of the strange dynamics with the younger generations in the US is that there's a sense that you're just constantly watched. There's this great Eye of Sauron, to use the Tolkien metaphor, that's looking at you at all times. It would be good if you could act the same way and if something bad happened, we could take care of you. But if you're always being watched, I suspect it really changes your behavior.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's interesting, in a moment where I wanted to make sure that my son didn't misbehave, I toured him around our neighborhood and pointed out all of the cameras that would track anybody on the street where we live. I had never noticed them before, but sure enough there they were in every nook and cranny that we don't realize that if it has to be stitched together, there's an incredible web of surveillance tools that are surrounding us at all time.
Excitement and Nihilism

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Are you familiar with the theory of Jennifer Freyd's called Institutional Betrayal?

'''Peter Thiel:''' I know you've mentioned it to me, but I don't know all the details. So tell me a little bit about it.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, I don't know all the details either. But I think what she isolated was that people who have been betrayed by institutions that have a responsibility of care, like a hospital for example, or if you trust a sense-making organ like your newspaper, and then you find that you've been betrayed by that institution that had something of a principal-agent problem where you had to trust your agent in order to take care of you, that the quality of trauma is in fact different and that it leads to a universal fear of the infrastructure of your society. That's sort of what I picked up.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What I was going to ask you about is, given our central belief that there was something about growth that led to universal betrayal by institutions, which has compromised experts in the minds of most of people, do you think there's a preferred way of waking up as a society out of a kind of universal institutional betrayal? (If we're excited about the next chapter, what I'd love to talk to you about in a future episode is what we're excited about, about what comes next.) Is there a way of waking up from this most gracefully?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Don't know about that. It strikes me that there are ways we don't want to wake up. We don't want to wake up in a way where it de-energizes us and demotivates. I think one of the ways I think these institutions worked was they took care of people, but it was also motivational. You study. You get good grades. You'll succeed in our system. One way, when you deconstruct these institutions, there's one direction that I think is always very dangerous, that it just shifts people into a much more nihilistic, very low energy mode where it's just, "Well, there's no point. Nothing can be done." That's the way that I definitively do not want to wake people up.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So I think it has to always be coupled a little bit to... There are these paths that aren't really going anywhere and you shouldn't go down these paths. But then there's some other paths here that you need to take. There's a portal here that you need to look at. If we are just saying all the paths are blocked, I think probably the risk is people just sit down where they are and stop moving altogether. That feels like the very wrong way to wake people up.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That sounds very wise. Let me just ask, since you've been attached to some of the highest energy ideas, whether it's crazy-sounding stuff like seasteading or radical longevity or some other ideas from your background in venture capital and as a technologist yourself, what are the things that you're most excited if we could move them back into the institutions where they probably have belonged all this time? What are the first subjects and people that you would move back into institutional support to reenergize our society? People or programs.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, I do think there is something about basic science that doesn't all have the for-profit character. Some of it has this nonprofit character. We're building up this knowledge base for all of humanity. I don't yet know how we do basic science without some kind of institutional context. That's one that would seem absolutely critical. I'm super interested in the problem of longevity, radical life extension. My disappointment in the nonprofit institutions and nonprofit world has directed me more and more over the years to just invest in biotech companies and try to find these better-functioning corporate solutions. And then I always have this worry in the back of my head that maybe there are these basic research problems that are being sidestepped because they're too hard. So I think basic science is one that you'd have to do, but you have to somehow also reform the institution so that you don't have this Gresham's law where the politicians replace the scientists.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That sounds like a great one. I was very surprised to see that your friend, Aubrey de Grey, who you funded to get the radical longevity thing, was in the news for having solved a hard math problem in his spare time that nobody even knew he was working on. So it seems like even though people would treat him as crazy, he certainly has a lot on the ball and probably is exactly the kind of a person who might energize the department even if he might infuriate it.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If you can get him back in. If you were able to get him back in, I think you'd be able to solve a lot of problems.
End

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, Peter, it's been absolutely fantastic having you. Thank you for a very generous gift of your time, and I hope that you will consider coming back on The Portal to talk about some of the specifics about the things that you and I are most excited about doing next.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Will do. Thank you so much.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All right, Peter. You've been watching The Portal with Peter Thiel. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein. Thanks for tuning in. Please subscribe to the podcast, and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below on YouTube. Thanks.

Ep2

2020-02-24T15:49:03Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 2: What Is The Portal?

#REDIRECT [[2:_What_Is_The_Portal%3F]]

2: What is The Portal

2020-02-24T15:45:17Z

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== Description ==

What is the portal?

[[ep1 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/1827a29a-6050-4229-88ef-79df38791b76 Listen to Episode 2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E9tNJlY1LQ Watch Episode 2] [[ep3 | Next Episode]]

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2: What is The Portal

2020-02-24T15:43:03Z

Jmank88: initial version with basic summary and links

== Description ==

Episode 3 of The Portal is with film director Werner Herzog.

[[ep1 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/fc8934df-0bbe-48c0-aed1-25a0c3674712 Listen to Episode 2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eua5iPUKw6Y Watch Episode 2] [[ep3 | Next Episode]]

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3: Werner Herzog

2020-02-24T15:38:35Z

Jmank88: add prev/next buttons

== Description ==

Episode 3 of The Portal is with film director [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog Werner Herzog]

[[ep2 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/fc8934df-0bbe-48c0-aed1-25a0c3674712 Listen to Episode 3] [https://youtu.be/Eua5iPUKw6Y Watch Episode 3] [[ep4 | Next Episode]]

[[All Episodes]]

== Transcript ==

This transcript was auto-generated and needs to be cleaned up considerably. Feel free to edit this page and fix things.

00:00:03Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein in this will be our second interview episode 2 be released. I think we have something really remarkable for you today because we have a human being who is little life that even though he makes movies that are fictional. I would say that his actual non-fiction life is more interesting than any movie. He's ever made. This is a person who has been shot on camera, a person who has stolen was forged his taught other filmmakers to steal into Forge.

00:00:32Person I'm talking about is Verner hertzog. Now. I first became aware of Verner hertzog when I was 16 and just entering University of Pennsylvania and a friend of mine said you've got to see this movie fitzcarraldo. I said, what is it scroll? He says if nothing else it's a story about a man. So possessed by an easy fix that he drags a boat over a mountain in the jungle in order to somehow build an opera house the whole thing sounded incredibly mad. And in fact, what was so interesting about this film was that the director actually had to do in real life with the crazy fictional character did inside of the story.
00:01:14This led me to a fascination with the today's interview subject Verner hertzog. This is a man who has lived. So richly and so profoundly that I actually started to get a different idea about what he was doing as a filmmaker the idea that I could not Shake was his did Verner hertzog needed to live so deeply and so profoundly that he had to make movies simply to justify what it meant to be Verner hertzog. I've often asked myself this question. What is it the great generals do between Wars it's hard to imagine. Let's a patent or MacArthur in normal times. Do they just sit around and open dry cleaners? Do they write essays for their local newspaper? What is a Winston Churchill do if there is no World War?

00:02:03In such a situation. I think it's very hard to come up with an answer. But I think that the best answer that I have is that these people would make movies.

00:02:16Following interview was recorded in front of a live audience. We join the conversation in progress.

00:02:22May I just asked first of all before I try any theories of the kind do you see any clear organizing principle that unifies your output that is sort of subtle and non-obvious to your audience. Yes. I do believe so people are quite often puzzled about the range of the subject said that they'd have attracted take me to answer of welds Champions ski flyer from Switzerland in the Paleolithic cave and there's a man who moves to ship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle and there's a film on the internet and there's a film or you just name it. So it's looks perplexing at First Sight, but I do understand although I don't like to look back at my films to off my I to understand that there's some sort of an architecture.

00:03:22I'll shove Concepts in that sir. You would immediately understand there's a commonwealth of you very much is about the worldview and you could probably spotted very very quickly if you walked into a room and the TV was playing and there was a film within and you didn't see any credits probably within 2 minutes. You would understand. This must have been by film.

00:03:54People see the understanding how they do it. I don't know and how I do create this coming worldview. I don't know either but it doesn't really matter. No one of the things that I've been very struck by which is what we all get wrong about Venta hertzog and because many of the stories that come out of these films in these undertakings involve tremendous seeming danger physical risk. Chaos Madness is all the things that are usually associated. I was trying to figure out what it was that those stories might cover up as if sort of cheap icing on a very rich cake and one of the things that I saw was what and correct me if I'm wrong. It seems like you have tremendous concern for the people that you bring out onto these crazy projects for their safety and well-being. Am I getting that wrong?

00:04:54Waste any time of what some people get wrong about me doesn't really matter let them be wrong. But one of the things set comes up quite often seems to be an identification of the creator of Astoria create a character named Lee me with the quality set. The Creator automatically has to have in other words. If I do a film like I carry the wrath of God about A demented crazed a conquistador 1560s in the Peruvian Amazon people fight off. Mommy's lead to point out hearts of must have these qualities obsessive and demented and borderline paranoid. And so now they think I understand them, but they are not my quality say invention.

00:05:54You picked an actor in Klaus Kinski who might I mean I would venture to say did have some of those qualities is that wrong? I think you actually have to be handed a pot of of being an actor who was really under the grace of creation to two to make things that we have not seen before or after my screen. So otherwise she was the mildest who takes price would be he was the ultimate pestilence. He was also distracted if he would destroy a sect he would say when we had a we actually had two plane crashes on Fitts characters small aircraft and we didn't know what had happened. We had a very sketchy and shortwave radio connection with a ketose about 1,500 kilometers away in garbage messages with Camille.

00:06:55Play nice town in 10 with desperately tried was it nearby could be send out a search party or what who was important what had happened and we had a happy camper Sometimes some days my route stops in the afternoon and shoot into the night breakfast would be served from Hawks to have to hurt inside with the last hats would have it cold coffee this morning by Queen. Sedan. Kinski was the last hot and I heard it from from Henry 50 yards away screaming out. I mean at the complete no. Just a tantrum. It was it was just an outburst of Rage because his coffee was lukewarm and he stormed at the place where we were checking on on the radio in trying to figure out and he kept screaming and screaming I could not calm him down. I could not get him away. I try to tell him there's a plane down you have to keep quiet.

00:07:55Must listen to too much has happened. It wouldn't help at all. It would scream and he would scream he could scream of a gas into a liquid shatter a glass of wine glass and the only way I could often an hour and a half when he had already Frost hard and prophetess at his mouth. I went to my heart rate. I hit a little piece of Swiss chocolate left, which I treasure in our camp and I stepped in front of him intimidate this chocolate in dead silence thermostat. That was something which was standing and you knew you intuited that this would have that effect. I should have intuition after 5 minutes it took over an hour.

00:08:55So that probably makes it quite often qualities of the characters in my films have been superimposed on my on my own. Karaoke. Frank said life acted in some Hollywood films in some Independent films Jack Reacher, for example, and I'm playing the real real dangerous badass bad guy and I am very very dangerous and I had to and I'm on arms and I have no fingers left and I am blind on one eye and yet I had to spread Terror from the screen and I did it so well, I did it sell well that my reviews were much better than the reviews for Tom Cruise.

00:09:44I know it's true. It's I'm not exaggerating. I was good, but it not that I can say this kind of bile dangerous character is really in me.

00:09:58Really easy? I did it. I'm creepy have you seen and I have learned that so when we did Fitzgerald in the first round of shooting that was Mick Jagger in the sidekick of the leading character in Django spent six weeks with us in the jungle Resort have the film had to stop because the leading character became ill we had to send him to the states and the doctors wouldn't allow him to return to the Jungle. So I knew I had to start all over again and don't check his contract. There was no time enough left, but doing the whole feeling Moldova. I shot the film actually wanted a half times.

00:10:40Into what what what is strange about this recasting and in restarting the whole thing? I knew if I did not find a necktie quickly in such a case. I had no alternative but playing the part made myself because I would have been incredible and I would have been good not as good as let's say Mick Jagger and Jason robots okinsky and I learned one thing from from Mick Jagger which astonished he took me once backstage when they were recording.

00:11:23Enter have a say I am to intybus arguing with somebody about some totally trivial things completely and utterly trivial things and also known I said he was arguing about the mineral water about the per diem or something and I said to him make the camera is rolling and he looks at me and he sees we are already doing it in his steps three steps in front of the camera and we simply three steps. He becomes a demon.

00:12:00Trivial trivial little Pickering mediocre kind of character is steps in front in the he's a demon and index in a in a way. I learned that from him and I didn't prepare myself when I stepped in front of the camera. I knew there was only one thing.

00:12:24Be calm and be frightening and I can do it only because I knew I could do it. So you're really not the ultimate badass.

00:12:37Because I tried. Maybe I am but unbeknownst to me. Okay, it feels to me. Like I was just watching video of you video of you being interviewed by the BBC and then probably your shot in the abdomen while being interviewed and you seem to be so much hype somewhat irritated that the interviewer is treating this as a big deal and I think otherwise it how would I know that you wear Paisley underwear me and you you take your your pants down cuz I go to to CTI meeting. It's it's not that big of a bullet that's that was your attitude. Actually. I said something we're beautiful I said, this is an insignificant to take note perforated everything you played through. My check is in the catalog in the pocketed everything but didn't perforate into my intestines. So that was insignificant, but
00:13:37I think they immediately hit the hit the ground like a camera flat and I have the feeling stay. Let's finish at least two sentences great video. I mean foot damage was great video, but what I'm trying to suggest sir is that you are the unreliable narrator you are actually I'm the one who makes sense. I'm the one who puts order into a chaotic situation. That's what you did. But when I'm what I'm saying is that when your autonomic nervous system is is triggered it barely registers. You've been shot in the abdomen stretches that it's hurt each other yet because I was laughing hard. It was still hurting UT Dallas service, but that's very unusual. These are real Statics part of being a good soldier of Cinema that I tried to be with a sense of unity.

00:14:37You have to be reliable. You have to hold an outpost state of a safety pin up its loyalty. It's in his loyalty to the entire crew that was yet. However, they they argue that we should call the police right away. And I said let's not do it because three of them to spend the next six hours in the in a police station to file charges. And do you want to see a helicopter circling there? And do you want to see a SWAT team in ten minutes flat? Right. Do you want to see that? My answer is no but it's okay. Let's move out of the danger zone because of the demand with a with a rifle was still somewhere hiding on the Terrace in hiding inside the building can't get out of there. But let's continue. Let's continue this all your team has come from from the UK and you have to return tomorrow. Let's

00:15:37Beethoven music

00:15:39Texas sense of beauty I appreciate it very much. But tell me what you're talkin about is the highest levels of discipline and military style leadership that goes far beyond yes, but you should be careful about Mitch confusing it with military discipline where there's some sort line deterrence to give an order. I like to think I do think what I'm doing and I do not ask anyone to do blindly something in front of the camera. There's a safety. Margin whenever things are difficult in let's say borderline dangerous. I would always do it myself first for the actor.

00:16:25I would go through the Rapids with a small raft to see that's a raft to survive these three consecutive Rapids very simple single Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn replace a a german-born Navy pilot who is shut down in 40 minutes to his first mission over Vietnam War Laos. He would actually was the only American pows who managed to escape from a potted Flower and Gift Card in captivity an incredible story into Christian Bale who plays the part of human they're starving to death almost starving to death and they get some food that is Infested by hundreds and hundreds of wriggling maggots.

00:17:19And we use maggots its native people to eat, but they would roast them not not alive in and still wriggling selling. I said to Christian books Dieter dengler. The real character told me they had to do whatever nutrients and lots of nutrients in these maggots ate it and I said to let you know about give me the plate and give me a spoon. I'm I'm going to eat a few spoonfuls which I did and he said I'll come on stop it stop it. I'm let's roll the camera and I'm going to get over it quickly. So he did and in that was one of the very very few moments of controversy between the two of us because I told him and he didn't hear it. Apparently. I told him Christian, you know, what you stop eating when you really have when you had it.

00:18:19And you keep eating eating eating until the plate is empty and then I say cut and he said why didn't you say cat before by but what happened in the set Christian you are the one who should have cut set cats, but you didn't hear it and it was kind of miffed.

00:18:37But but those those moments say they do have men to end in the unexpected on the set. That's movie. Yeah.

00:18:53Right, I guess those moments do happened. So it does strike me though that I tested it first, but you said would do that always test it first seems like that unit is Raley's have a theory of leadership, which is called follow me where they take the highest value person on the team that the general is the colonel and he goes into Danger first because the morale of the troops he has so much heightened when they when you see a leader saying I will actually take that kind of a risk that seems to be a part of how you guess the great for example always on foot with his soldiers. He would not ride on his horse. It would be on foot mm of Miles. He would be the first to climb the ramparts on the leather. He would be the one who been the first student and almost dying from first one soldier collected.

00:19:53Image full of water pitch by pitch drop by drop intent, when when the first was it is worse. This foot foot man comes in steps in front of Alexander and says save this for you drink this and Alexander looks it even spells it away. And he says too much for one too little for all in March is so that's leadership or anybody who crossed the Alps with elephants. He would sleep with his soldiers at The Outpost wrapped in his in his coat and he would lose an eye Crossing an ice-cold River South of the Alps and he would do things that nobody else in his army, whatever to
00:20:47Do you feel that this aspect of leadership of putting oneself in the greatest situations of risk and harm is of course, but do you eliminate arm before I Tema Pierce?

00:21:03You see you have to be prudent and then any kind of business including the business of warfare, you have to evaluate the situation and you have to try to to avoid the danger for anyone the leader in in the troop. You better stay out of it and you would you use all sorts of military tricked trickery deceit you use and bushes you use the so-called cowardly things into before you really put anyone into very grave danger eliminate, whatever you can sometimes you can't eliminate everything but sheet shorts. Of course, I buy a Jesse Ventura used to be a bodyguard of the
00:22:03Rolling Stones by the way into used to be a studio wrestler play the the bad guy by the way in the completely stylized and he became governor of Minnesota and I always liked him for his down-to-earth approach and he said once about his time in the ring is as a wrestler it's as one of these WrestleMania people and he said to win if you can

00:22:35Lose if you must but always cheat really like him for that.

00:22:45Yeah, so this is one of the things that I found most endearing about your approach is that you teach film in this completely different fashioned. It's it's let's be honest, you're an outlaw before you're a filmmaker and you say to your students. You have to be prepared to Steel to forge to pick locks to do whatever it takes for each documents. Steel. UCI. I wouldn't say steal I have stolen once in awhile but expropriation than stealing then sift. Like my first camera was expropriated TriMet institution, but I do anything that's outside of the legal Norms as long as it as it does not hurt anyone into foraging a shooting permit in a country that has a military dictatorship ship is something fine and you should do with you forever.

00:23:45Forage you must yeah.

00:23:49So you have to do it. Sometimes I try this at home countries as a student visa that my severely punish you if they found out that you were filming you did this in China in China filming in the westernmost part Costco near kashgar weather is extremely high military and police presence and I was filming with Michael Shannon, but we had no shooting. / let me know why can't I make with just went out to a local market a very traditional Market of week were tribesmen the cattle market and that was that the real obvious thing. It was that we had a Contraption built on the body or Michael Shannon a tripod.

00:24:49The tell the camera in front of his face when he walks into a crowd everybody who walks by with inevitably turn around and look after him. I wanted to fix everybody staring at him once he's moving through a crowd and he said to me what I'm going to do it as long as you're around next to me because if I get arrested you should be arrested as well. And I said fine, let's do it and in because it was so Brazen. It was so Brazen that nobody actually has stopped us. It was a lot of police and and when you have one or two police people, then it's dangerous because they go to the restaurant they would stop you at least in check you out but if you're 17 18 20 of them.

00:25:42That's a strange psychological reflex. Everybody thinks I have the other one will stop you and you walk straight through the middle weather and I keep saying we're the enemy comes at its thickest walk straight through there and I look it into some sort of a vague distance is if I had spotted a friend 50 yards away and I walk with his gaze upon them. And while I possibly may say something in my the variant dialect I say what's doin hectic saying have you seen my friend heart and they step aside and I'm out. So you have to you have to understand the hearts of men and you have to understand the the way police which would react Tintin. What would they do it? So Brazen that nobody of the Chinese in Chinese release with ever since

00:26:42We will have walking without any permits. It's on.

00:26:48Yeah, now in our time there's this Mania for truth than authenticity and for acknowledging that is always the group and never the individual that matters. They did the so-called great man. Theory of history is certainly at its cultural low and yet here you are talking to us about the need to deceive to break the law and to affirm the violent Act of Creation in a very strong leadership context in which you're taking on all of this additional risk just too and impart Inspire and and protect your people. Even if you seem to be a man completely out of out of time with with the curanderas did the team suit you find it that wrong notary. I need a few of us, but I wish there were more

00:27:44But of course what what we are doing in filmmaking is not always based on Board Room decision the baby shaped the dialogue today in in the Hollywood industry is determined by poetry of decisions. And that's why movie making has become so stale and so uninteresting and so predictable. So if you do the the most the wildest of the stories and that's always said Council seat. I do not step outside the boundaries of legality that has to do with the with a caliber of your quest with the tips of your story with a vision that you are pursuing if that has real real tips, and you know it is
00:28:32Endearing Dex then you have you have to tossed in the beauty to do the things that are necessary. As long as I said, if you do not damage or hurt anyone that would you are taking a fair amount of responsibility. We had the Jim Watson come to this office and he's a CD the co-discoverer of the three-dimensional structure of DNA of Watson and Crick, but he he said something which was you know, I I found very disturbing but also very sensibly said you're giving about five opportunities to really level up in your life. This is how you saw it. And he said you have to take each one of those even though sometimes each of them comes with an opportunity where somebody may be put at risk or hurt and I was curious you have a very strong relationship with risk where you're both putting people at risk.

00:29:32And trying to make sure you put them at risk as little as possible. If both of those are true. Do you believe that that's a Watson was correct that you have to take these opportunities even if they do put others at risk or do you really have no harm, but I think it's more than five opportunities for I have seen a hundred times at least it's in risk-taking Percy has no it's no Great Value. It's it depends on what you're doing. And in what kind of purpose it serves and it's not a quality per se to take risks. I try to to avoid risks in and you see my proof that I have been prudent circumspect and well-organized is that in over seventy films not a single one of my exes.

00:30:32If I was hurt. When I was hard sometimes sometimes it has some very close collaborator physically next to me like a cinematographer. We say yeah, 20 kilo a handheld camera at that time heavy flies through the air the dictates of a ship that bangs into into the Rock. And yes, and we were flying some 10 meters in the bangs with his hand on on the on the deck in the cameras placed his hand apart. So yes, it happens in didn't he didn't mind by the way where you volunteered read my rights Christ. You said she said he was coming with me. Nobody has to actually this case when we went with cameras through the Rapids and we had shot that the sequence with cameras on on the snow real sore spot in the rocks on eyes.

00:31:32Sites of these Rapids pushed by some collaborators. We should have a camera on board. I said really? Yes. Of course. I see that. But we do not know what's going to happen Mason what happened send it the ship probably is not going to sink because we established it with a lot of very very solid. Chambers in Dad's probably wouldn't have sunk even bother the worst of case scenarios. Let me ask him very very difficult question assume that you were trying to make fitzcarraldo in which you drag this steamer over a mountain.

00:32:16It's not the year 1982 but it's some year maybe around now maybe a few years in the future where it's possible to do this completely with computer-generated imagery so that you could do it in CGI. Now my question would be this would if it produced the same visual effect.

00:32:36As you didn't fit scroll de would it be worth doing if it could be done cheaply and safely the five year old 6 year old shot Vue has now eat this was a teacher to defect and and you will always know it. I don't think the digital effects will ever create some sort of equal experience maybe to some degree visually, but you see it moving a ship of remount means exposing yourself to sing set Unsinkable and unexpected you incorporate in your approach did the totally unknown in the totally unknown invade seu in the unexpected in the unsinkable invade seu every, Iowa
00:33:35And you create something and authenticity of story not only visual effect. You create an authenticity of event that is unparalleled and its unparalleled by anyone who is sitting in the car on the computer and creates steam boat moving up on a on a hill. It does not and it is not so do so in the future if you're quite confident because the experience of Route 8 in in reality cannot replaced. It can be substituted. It can be somehow paralleled in that way by buy an artificial go out by digital effects until today. I would I would still insist I should if it's me who does it. I should move the ship.

00:34:35It is in one piece 360 x right let the other students stuff and it will be inferior to mine.

00:34:45Well, this is this is just it I mean you either you mentioned professional wrestling in Jesse Ventura and
00:34:53you know that there is a theory amongst our group that may be professional wrestling is a lot more real than anyone really wants to believe that it's commonly thought to be fake one interpretation of your work sir is that you are making many more documentaries than you claim to be because in fact in something like fitzcarraldo, it's a fictional story about a man moving a ship over a mountain made by a real man who moved a real ship over a real mountain and I remember when it came out in 1982 Mike. I was in college. We were electrified by this concept that if you'd been done in CGI and we had known that it would been in CGI. We would not have been that interested in the story, but it was the fact that there was an insane man moving a ship over a mountain in reality. She did Nicki say no and clinical. She's already there. I don't want to know what is a studious person but but functionally sir, it's it it is a crazy Quest and you said you spoke about it and turned it snow.

00:35:53Responsibility to let's say go to Mars in spending half a year on Mars in coverage and in getting footage you you will fail it's not going to work and we will see the technological Utopia is coming to an end in our very Centre will be like we saw social Utopias coming to an inevitable end of the last century companies in Paradise on Earth not season a master race dominating the planet and on so we will see to do the two of them to the table and I knew it was too because I had figured out how to move a very very heavy object in one piece.

00:36:53On top of the hill Frisch's. I'm trying to figure out the how the Ancients movies that you saw that is a puzzle searching a line of Brittany Furr completely different movie and I end up at night when it was already dark at Karnak. It's 4000 the slabs of stone erected in parallel lines Phillip Hill downhill uphill town. It's it's stunning and what I saw in the headlights was standing and I slept in the car and next morning. I I I see there's a little kiosk they sold to pursue it and in the pursuer it's written that this couldn't have been done by linear Lasik people that didn't have any technology. Yes. I had the rope and seems like this. It could have been the only alien astronauts.

00:37:49And I saw that one sheet I can let I will not move from this place until I nearly sick person could do it. So what I would do is let's assume I have the rock already 3 400 tuns. I would need disciplined men to build a ramp but maybe 1 km ramps which has hardly any inclination which is almost flat at the end. It would end up in a 10 meter high hill and I would create two whole into the hill and then I would move then I would move the the stone on Oak trunks on hardy oak trunks. It is very easy to move it either with the turnstiles in throat swell by pushing it in the way with levers and at the end.

00:38:49Into the crater hole and then you would have it erect with a heavy apart up and then it would remove the hill until let's say the sticking out into two medians of of grounded Harden the crowd so you would have it directed at night. I kept dreaming about
00:39:11what is Mania the heaviest ever 1,100 tonnes heavy near the Coastal Place lock Mariah Carey not too far from, in this Stone to slap has broken into four pieces in the major the biggest of all pieces at least six seven hundred tons heavy what's a lined in One Direction in the little bit further out. The rest of the fragmentation was perfectly aligned in one line. So why does this happen before if that stone falls and breaks it will align the fragments but it didn't so I think what has happened is that they moved the stone dropped it into a hole and it broke it broke at the rim. And in the in the smaller fragments aligned in thousands of years later.

00:40:11Trevor Rosen some of these men. Yes falling over top of the top until they look different in the wrong direction 7 accident the Neolithic accident which must have spoke to Macy as if it was proof of my way out how I would do it and that's how I move the ship over the mountain.

00:40:35And I knew it was to happen if it was doable for nearly sick people 7000 years ago. I can do the same thing as well.

00:40:47I have no doubt whatsoever and Indian an ideal case, you would say according to a primitive laws of physics. You could have one single child pulling it over the mountain that say you wouldn't refuse to put a system of 10,000 filter returns you put on a string of five miles until the ship moves 50 yards in the child could pull it over Mountain.

00:41:19You have to think you have to sync the Bold ideas, but also that was sitting outside the common Trend it pin only has been the the alien astronauts.
00:41:37I showed you because I'm very proud of you. You should try to get hold of it because it's very interesting. It's called The Vanishing area Paradox. I keep it in my agenda all the time and it was published in the Scientific American.

00:41:56Ing, it's very strange to have you have a configuration of elements of of pieces. And when you rearrange the configuration of these all of a sudden, there's an empty space or something that is filled out the entire space without a millimeter in between and I kept thinking about it because it defies all my experience with reality So within my reality it is Unthinkable. It is impossible. So and I kept thinking about it and and I was misled the whole thing is a hoax turns out it's a hoax it's fraudulent and it gives citizen veracity because it's must post this Vanishing area Paradox the Christmas Post in the Scientific American you do not feel
00:42:56Dave Chappelle cheating you and they treat you and what what what is happening you swim when you look at it very very precisely the area where all of a sudden in the middle. There's some empty space high speed artificially made slightly larger by giving slight slight more Angus in in the in the Striped lines in summing-up creates a little empty space. I solved it myself because I thought I cannot solve it because it defies my sense of reality in the sense of reality of everyone around me. Something is wrong. What could be wrong.

00:43:44What could be wrong and I started to check in one of the questions I ask myself. Could it be that this is a hoax that this is a fraud and if it's a fraud, how do they treat you? How do they treat your senses senses of observation? In this case? It fascinated me. There's a quote of yours were apparently you were facing a booing audience booing at you. And you had the sense to say to them you are all wrong and Deborah all wrong. They were all wrong. What is it in you that has the courage to stand up to seemingly, I don't know arbitrary levels of negativity need to problems of that other people think are insoluble where they have to invoke Ancient Aliens. There's something so disagreeable about your personality that you're capable of.

00:44:44Putting an idea through that much negativity. What what what traded that
00:44:50Well, it wasn't specific case when I was filming the the fire seem cool bite in the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein's retreating Army set every single oil while on fire and I filmed it in a way that it looks as if it was shot on a like a science-fiction film it cannot be our planet and yet we know it must have been filmed on our planet and it's highly aesthetic highly stylized in in the immediate outcry was a steady sizing of the horror at but it wasn't really hard to find a human being. Nobody got burnt. Of course. It was a crime against creation itself obscuring the sky for wide wide area and inside
00:45:50Something that should not happen not only are.

00:45:55Describe against the human race. It was a crime against creation and intend in the screaming and people actually suspected me when I walk through the central island. It's about rainforest by resolved and I I stepped up in that said to contain his Inferno histon exactly the same you're going to mooseport. She has done exactly the same in his hellish business and go disastrously like a God has done the same thing and and and and and then the end I said, did you out all wrong? So do we have to burn the book The Divine Comedy now, do we have to
00:46:41Of course, we don't amount of certainty in me that and it's not really anything that I can say was but it was totally natural to say that.

00:46:58Yeah, I've had to me. It's sort of strikes me is we need people to inspire Us by showing us that it's not only possible that it's necessary to stand up to large numbers of people inside of a crowd one of the things that the entire crowd at the center of the island that probably was an amount of well wishes and the masked a few dollars and some Applause. It it was overwhelming and it was so overwhelming that Samsung very credible reviews like a Muskogee who wrote for the Village Voice describes the scene described it so it's not a figment of my fantasy.

00:47:49You know that there's a very strange story with the reviewer Joe Morgenstern when he first saw Bonnie and Clyde he gave it a terrible review because the violence was so disturbing and it was set to up-tempo happy music. He said will this is an Abomination and then strangely a week or two later. He said I have to review this film again. I was totally wrong. The film is a masterpiece because it took a while to just understand that that wasn't an error, but it was actually a brilliant artistic Choice. Do you find that somebody hit the nerve in the guts in the caliber to declare himself wrong and taking a new Fresh located?
00:48:37So yeah, you hardly see it at all. So I would love to ask you one final question before opening it up to the audience. You've spoken quite a lot for a filmmaker about the importance of reading and the written word you written obviously beautifully and then some of your thoughts and in this guide for the perplexed and you you have previously spoken about how television was turning us into idiots and dumbing us down in the reading would be that the key quality that determine who would inherit power in the in the in the future world. What do you see in the 21st century is having changed in this equation with television haven't gotten much better in the internet having seemingly gotten us into a state where we weren't even be able to get there with with the the idiot box as a segment. Yes in this long.

00:49:37Liberty tribe lives many season of big story set all of a sudden you can decorate large large expansive forms like War and Peace to all of a sudden became create Dostoevsky on a TV screen on Netflix screens or whatever of Christ said the situation is becoming more precarious Sea Adventure of the internet, but of course at the forces that I've started way before the internet, we cannot blame it all free shampoo people who would reads have the numbers have declined considerably since 50 years or so and intraday in universities evening Humanities II Men Classics Department. The weather should reach ancient Greek and Latin.

00:50:35They do not read anymore and I have a hard time and I've witnessed it. I've witnessed it in in person that they are not even capable of writing three career in science and expressing 1/2 year and brief argument and that's alarming that's alarming into and that's why I still young aspiring filmmakers. Yes watch films and do whatever you need to learn in technical terms that read read read read read read. If you don't treat you will be a filmmaker Pat mediocre-at-best.

00:51:14If you really want to to become somebody of significance and everyone who is around at this time of significance is reading that all read everyone and you are not and it's not only for filmmaking. It's probably in your profession the same thing that you cannot lose yourself in in algorithms.

00:51:40Indian in the software questions and an articulating of things without conceptually being up to to a to a very high standard of evolution of not only technology but civilization per say we have a very very deep task and in Reading in my opinion. This is the thing that is absolutely need it and what I keep saying sometimes but nobody will understand it but I say it anyway traveling on foot and irrespective of the distance and I've done very long distance traveling on foot gives you an insight into the world itself and I can say that lean addictive my life repeated its before the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

00:52:40Nothing else. This is such Clarity in such transparence. Nothing nothing and get nobody Travis and foot. It doesn't matter stay while you are about to I just say this as a sign of help if you really want to understand the real world and also conceptually where we are standing is human beings at this very moment in history traveler on foot and read.

00:53:10Fantastic advice. Let's see if we can anybody can follow it and I would love to open it up to questions. What questions do we have for dinner tonight?

00:53:21If there is a one Buck or two bucks you would wish for this generation to read what will baby. I don't want to give you one or two books because you receipt down into you would read them. And you think yeah, you have done it. So you should not read two books. Mm books I give you for those who are into creative things in tinting shooting.

00:53:52That would say including even created forms of mathematics. It's a it's a book written by an obscure British writer published in 1967. And it's called the Peregrine about watching its Diaries watching peregrine falcons in a time when the Falcons were almost extinct. J a baker. I think we now only after a few decades me even know what j&a stands for I even don't know what his first names when his middle name and it tastes gross that we have not seen since since Joseph Conrad and it has Precision of of observing a small segment of the real world with a precision and also with an emphasis in the in the passion that is unprecedented in literature. So in whatever you are doing whether you are musicians filmmaker,
00:54:52to mathematics sign into computers this kind of very very deep Relentless passion for what you are doing very specific and it's a it's a great wonderful book and
00:55:10what else where to buy that many but I have a list of mandatory books for my rogue film schools in Kerala style and kisses to film schools and there's five or six books. What comes to mind is the Austin Castillo the discovery and conquest of New Spain that the original title is much much longer. He was a footman of car test and when he was told he wrote from his apparently some Diaries and reminiscences he writes down an incredible story incredibly rich in details and insight into the into the hearts of men.

00:55:59And anything else we treat the Russians?

00:56:03Rita Italian in Christ determines Schnur also determine Hemingway reads Joseph Conrad the short stories in particular.

00:56:19true
00:56:20But it's but don't don't don't believe that this would make you into a man into a different person needs its the permanence of reading the insistence of freezing.

00:56:36Is it worth appealing to you to expose people to Nuance with a buffer for extremes for the reverse?

00:56:49Is it more important to expose people to Nuance or Giants never asked myself this question is desinfectar in my in my work.

00:57:11I found a very very clear Vision. I see a film very very clearly. And of course it has it takes a big story and Extremes in it and detest nuances in and of course, I would never want to touch the story that was snowed really big when I was convinced. This is bacon to eat a successes in detest all sorts of things at the same time that the real life the real life comes from the New York and from the details so that it says I cannot even separated. I cannot give you a satisfying juxtaposition of BIOS.

00:57:56Batter hits it it doesn't it doesn't function in in the way I make my films.

00:58:06I heard you like carrying bolt cutters those ever gotten you in trouble.

00:58:17Olds Cutlass Ciera, I have to take metaphorically. I have a whole list of things to see anyone have the the book a guide for the perplexed just because I in CT on the can you give it to me, please? Thank you a guide for the perplexed and we spoke about before the tightly. So beautiful. I had to steal it from my monat is the great Jewish philosopher middle-aged Spain at 6. If I don't even remember Pat anyway end in t i t on the back end. By the way, it's a real bad snow Photoshop my wife who sits back there to this photo and I don't know how it was put together but it's it gives it seems a lot of things that always taken it is speaks of bolt cutters always take the initial.

00:59:17There's nothing wrong with spending a night in the jail cell if it means getting the short e umeed send all your dogs and one might return with pray never wallow in your travels to spam must be kept private in brief learn to live with your with your mistakes expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature old in modern that role of an expose solenoid you have in your hand might be the last in existence. So do something impressive with it laptops in front of you may be the last one in existence to something good in depressive with it. That's never an excuse not to finish the film cap carry bolt cutters everywhere Swartz institutional cavities.

01:00:11That's too much institutional cavities in the film industry. And and I do believe the the computer industry and software on cell has his Bolder Boulder designs. I think that's not too much institutional cavities. It comes after things like Facebook has been established. How do we stop excessive on Facebook? How do we stop excessive on Instagram? Do we show do we have to stop a real beheading of a hostage in real time or do we not do it? So the the institutionalization of of content is coming past restroom after it has been normally but in the film industry for example, the institutional cavities
01:01:11I comes before you even make a move. They ask you. Do you have that do you have for example, you know Insurance do we have how do you call it to some sort of insurance with the completion Bond?

01:01:34No, I don't and I make a film anyway, and that was in that case. I had to finance it it out of my own pocket and
01:01:45Can I move in a wild way back to the very early question about something that is fabricated likes WrestleMania has a lot of troops bruises and dislocated elbows. The last film I made is a feature film.

01:02:06Called family romance. LLC romance is a business in Japan in the Japanese language where you can hire a missing friend or a family father of a family during the wedding ceremony because her real father allegedly suffers from epilepsy in truth. He's an alcoholic and cannot be shown to the groom's parents and family and that's an interesting thing that happens to men who actually in reality founded this company family romance who sends out 1600h instant access to help you in to feel less Lonesome and replace a family member. He was filmed by Japanese television, they interviewed him in the interview with one of his clients who had rented in the Sun.

01:03:06If you'd had rented a friend and he's in the in the field mice when it turns out that the client was actually not a client. He was also the rent member from family romance poster put in front of the NHK cameras NHK apologized profusely in credits and on the air in the founder of family romance. Say something very very significant about he says I do believe that
01:03:43The Imposter
01:03:48That was sent out from my pool affect us tells you more of the truth than the real one. The real one would lie to the cameras because it in Japan Inn in their society. You have to keep face and you cannot admit that your life is miserable and you will not win some and you were crying at Helmand your pillow. And so this person the real person would not say that he would lie to the camera. But Mike my man who was put in front of your camera, my name who is standing 200 times comforting solitary people. He tells you the gist the real truth about what is going on and I think he's right.

01:04:34I'm sure he's right.

01:04:36Yeah, she thinks I'm supposed to have some more truth in him. Then the real person who wants to keep her for sage of what a well-behaved behavior in in public.

01:04:56We have some other question.

01:04:58Bernat if you could make a film about our generation to generation at 6 in this room, what do you think the log line would be?
01:05:07I wouldn't know any logline, but I have I've done a film on the internet lowing behold witch has appealed very much to do that to your generation. I am the younger ones you are already a veteran. It's a 15 year olds who who probably come up in and have to to teach you that the 35 year old son a 25 year old no way. I wouldn't know a logline but I have made a lot of film sets apparently well for a general audience when I made them 40 years ago 45 years ago the Enigma of kaspar Hauser all of a sudden I get emails of fifteen-year-olds young kids from Missoula Montana because today they can have access to the film by
01:06:07Streaming other ways through the internet piracy for example, which is a successful distribution system in 2 pints and all of a sudden. It's a very very young respond to my feelings and it's not

01:06:26It not foreign to me that I have always made films for that was so mentally active went into a turmoil in 2 hours looking out for organizing their lives psiphon responding in a way. I've been young and now the film in Japan this is a return to the times when I was 23, 24 25 when I met. Gary the wrath of God, you wouldn't know what's would come after the next Bend of the river. But that begin with. The Rapids are not so this kind of Readiness to to face whatever is going to be thrown at you. When did you just say sit in your deal with it?

01:07:18Actually in terms of the generation that is is might now be rediscovering your films. Do you have any thoughts about the way in which we are going back in re-evaluating cinematic work based on our new feelings about the directors? I'm thinking of Tarantino who put Uma Thurman at breasts at risk in Kill Bill, which I thought was a fantastic film that Woody Allen, of course with his difficulties having his work re-evaluated are we how do you feel about bodies of work being reprocessed through the lens of the alleged failures of the creators?

01:08:01I think that will be a very nice and send receipt already for example classical music all of a sudden. I just read yesterday or today has seen the new platform something tonight. It's all spirits to us mainstream pop all of a sudden you can access it. For example emovies the Criterion Collection, which is a very very fine collection of films had disappeared and reappeared apparently as it's either independent streaming label or within Amazon. I have to find out that don't know yet. But all of a sudden these things affect and the 15 year olds from Missoula Montana is it's not just that case. It's just emerging. So now I have no doubt that we are going to see Film Center outside.

01:09:01Outside of the the regular mainstream but have debts and vision and wonderful story said will not disappear. The shallow will disappear the shallow of of yesterday when you locate talk show so that it pop shows of the 1960s is it's just stunning how how shallow they aren't they disappear very quickly.
01:09:31If some of the questions, what do you think that looks like or perhaps what occupies the minds of men next midnight speaking about technological Utopias. It inevitably will come to an end. I what comes to mind is immediately space space colonization. Not only is it an obscenity. It's also and durable send it to you because it's hints at us the human race like locusts raising our planet empty and then moving on and we can move on to Mars for example, but it it should be contained and it's doable for a few scientists a few astronauts who have a small tiny little habitat, but I have enough
01:10:31Drinking water in a shelter against radiation and did not fit to breathe. Yes, we can create that. We will not put 1 million humans on planet Mars. It's not going to happen. It's technically technically not really do a blind and wise and a part of Mars. We cannot reach anything outside of our solar system because it's simply too far it would take you a hundred ten thousand years to reach the next one, which is only three and a half of four and a half light-years away. We just won't be able to do it. It's. And in this kind of Illusion this kind of Utopia technical Utopia will come to a fairly quick and in our Centre what other Utopias it come to mind immortality, of course, we can
01:11:31A child longevity to a certain point but that's about it that we are going to die. That's what the entire creation everywhere and not a planet everywhere points to the same thing that there's an impermanence of of what is around everywhere. So that says it's one of the things I have to think about other Utopias tech technical you tell PS but you are much closer to the approaching technical Utopia Senayan.

01:12:09So you have to find out what we should doing what we should not do and what is in the Utopia and what is within the within realities of human beings.

01:12:24Your time for one or two last questions.

01:12:27I'm sorry. I was late to ask. Can you speak up?

01:12:35Changes a real situation the way in which you know, you talked about the real world when you eject camera into it how it affects perception people.

01:12:46You are wearing them cameras.

01:12:50Yeah, I tailed philosophical question are the physical question of how deep do you insert your camera on your position is open and some of servant that's it change the reality that's out there. Hopefully it does because I'm a Creator. I'm not an observation camera in the bank that waits for 15 years and no bank robber baby shows up. So we are not we are not the fly-on-the-wall. I want to insert myself. I want to create I want to mold. I want to influence my story even the documentaries and I I do change facts and I'm quoting now all day sheets the French writer who said I change facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality and it's a wonderful way to say it.

01:13:50And you see that you are too if you are seriously asking the question with an indignant and the town. I it means that you're very much text oriented, which I don't believe in your case. But many people are true fact oriented and Cinema and does not have to be even documentaries have to only partly be perfect oriented because the facts do not equal truth that do not end. It's the same thing like with family romance. Am I wish that gives you a deeper truth in the real person and my simplest of all explanations is and I have used it many types of if you have heard it from me my apologies.

01:14:41Mikelangelo creating the sculpture of the pieta Jesus in the arms of Mary Sue face is a 33 year old man. And when you look at Mary, she's 17. His mother is 17.

01:15:01So of course, it's not factually correct, but he didn't want to cheat US Ally to us or whatever. He just wanted to point out an essential truth or something that resembles my truth because I do not know what truth is not do mathematicians. I think I only have deeply religious people know what it is.

01:15:26So they that have fun on easier life than that was so I'm not religious.

01:15:34We have the last question.

01:15:38I worked years ago was David Blaine in Army Carina Circle vertigo and how they happy watching film for The Passion of the woodcarver Steiner do they do with the passion of the woodcarver Steiner and there's a scene at the end of the poem The Raven and that they wanted you very much to focus on that and I will do the Raven was in a place like we couldn't really find them and implication being that Raven maybe was real in your self-worth. So I guess I waited while ask you this but was great in Freeland this matter and with all these questions about truth. Are there any things in documentary film? They would be for both like God example of party Scorsese was recently accused of putting a fake character in is Bob Dylan.

01:16:33Is there any thing that wouldn't be? Okay in the popular documentary? Congratulations to Scottsdale AZ who is normally cowardly when it comes to expanding forms. He follows the following was very much the norm. He's a wonderful filmmaker, but but not really extravagant leave courageous in into creating new things, but I have not seen the pop Dylan film, but I welcome but you are saying what you're saying about how many Koreans David Blaine the magician he seems I don't like they be playing at all.

01:17:15This is his repulsive in everything is doing and what seems to be significant is he tries to see you started as an Illusionist doing card tricks and Illusions. He seems to be moving away from The Illusionist into trying to straighten his body to its utmost limits to the brink of test, which is stupid. It's outright stupid to immerse yourself in the water tank for a whole week becomes get any more stupid than that went and he says he's just making a living out of something that is definitely obscene certain do not have a cactus needle stuck in your knee cap nasty in my knee. Maney send you a jump drive cost of midgets.

01:18:15I made the film me even dwarfs started small and in one of their bus run over by a car. It was driving is coming in circuits when caught fire inside at the end. I said so yourself on a midget to put out the fire and then because everybody else was supposed to be looking at like it a Christmas tree burning and emptied the first thing you to throw yourself on him and extinguish the guy I didn't smell that. He didn't squishy don't you come out unscathed at the end of the the movie I'm gonna from this ramp. I'm going to jump into this field of cacti and you all have your at that time 8 millimeter cameras and your photo cameras in New York. You can take you a picture and I take off and I leapt into yes, right some some of them got stuck in my ignition using and they can't get out easily would be an honor.

01:19:15Where to take you to lunch with David Blaine to work this thing out. I would like to have a dinner with him. I do not want to ruin my appetite but I would gladly take him to the men's room or two to fight it out there to take him to the parking lot asked her and settle this. However, you must be asked about nice to Step Into Obscurity and just let us sort it out. I tell you.

01:19:53Your life has been an inspiration to me since I was 16 and it doesn't even feel like you can meet over in hertzog in real life does a very special day in my life. I want to thank you for coming bringing your stories your wisdom your views on arts and your admonitions which no one is following. I think they'd probably their seminar audience were going to make a special note that this is this is the advice is the tide to get my knife steel. You don't need to listen to me. You you will find you will find your own guidance and your vision best of luck to all the best of luck to all of you so it can you change it for Verner hertzog beautiful.

Ep3

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4: Timur Kuran - The Economics of Revolution and Mass Deception

2020-02-24T15:37:29Z

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== Description ==

What if everything we are taught in economics 101 is not only wrong, but may even be setting us up for populism, dictatorship or revolution? On this episode of the Portal, Eric is joined by renegade Economist Professor Timur Kuran whose theory of Preference Falsification appears to explain the world wide surge towards populism, and is now threatening to rewrite the core tenets of modern economics. This could well be the most important economist you've never heard of.

[[ep3 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/fac49501-d33b-47ef-8d83-f70ed5683fd1 Listen to Episode 4] [https://youtu.be/xzjqjU2FOwA Watch Episode 4] [[ep5 | Next Episode]]

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Ep4

2020-02-24T15:36:36Z

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5: Rabbi Wolpe - “So a Rabbi and an atheist walk into a podcast...”

2020-02-24T15:36:13Z

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Beyond New Atheism: is a constructive adult relationship possible between atheism and religion?

On this episode of The Portal, Eric hosts leading conservative rabbi David Wolpe and explores the possibilities for, and problems with, a new synthesis of atheism and religion in our modern era that avoids special pleading.

[[ep4 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/953c0dfb-2d12-4743-ae19-e2e5f5922fe9 Listen to Episode 5] [https://youtu.be/3mSxiFUzZ-Q Watch Episode 5] [[ep6 | Next Episode]]

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Ep5

2020-02-24T15:35:23Z

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6: Jocko Willink - The Way of the Violent Intellectual

2020-02-24T15:34:55Z

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== Description ==

Jocko Willink is a man who radiates decency. He is also part of a community of warriors drawn to test themselves in the crucible of deadly combat against an evil and implacable foe. Eric sits down with Jocko Willink to learn how this cerebral Navy SEAL and hero of the battle of Ramadi against ISIS managed to bring military discipline home to the fight for personal freedom in peacetime writing kids books that teach ‘extreme ownership’ and radical accountability to children.

Give warriors a chance, and then subscribe to The Portal to be sure to catch our next and future episodes when they drop.

[[ep5 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/d028d8c0-4b39-49a9-9649-bbde98b88c80 Listen to Episode 6] [https://youtu.be/Lmv_5I4WcNk Watch Episode 6] [[ep7 | Next Episode]]

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Ep6

2020-02-24T15:34:04Z

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7: Bret Easton Ellis - The Dark Laureate of Generation X

2020-02-24T15:33:38Z

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== Description ==

Eric sits down with Bret Easton Ellis; the two Gen X’ers graduated from rival high schools in a disaffected 1982 Los Angeles that inspired Ellis’ first novel “Less Than Zero”. In this conversation, they reflect on LA, Generation X, and the different notions of childhood held by Gen X and Millennials.

[[ep6 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/b51bf85d-b4b0-4920-a3c6-d08d8291c178 Listen to Episode 7] [https://youtu.be/bkAWAJyX0fM Watch Episode 7] [[ep8 | Next Episode]]

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Ep7

2020-02-24T15:32:44Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 7: Bret Easton Ellis - The Dark Laureate of Generation X

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8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate the Media Wants You to Ignore

2020-02-24T15:32:18Z

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== Description ==

In this episode of the Portal, Eric checks in with his friend Andrew Yang to discuss the meteoric rise of his candidacy; one that represents an insurgency against a complacent political process that the media establishment doggedly tries to maintain. Andrew updates Eric on the state of his campaign and the status of the ideas the two had discussed as its foundation when it began. Eric presents Andrew with his new economic paradigm; moving from an 'is a [worker]' economy to a 'has a [worker]' economy. The two also discuss neurodiverse families as a neglected voting block, the still-strong but squelched-by-the-scientific-establishment STEM community in the US, and the need to talk fearlessly - and as a xenophile - about immigration as a wealth transfer gimmick.

[[ep7 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/5e00578a-102a-4824-87f6-7a12294fd1ec Listen to Episode 8] [https://youtu.be/Sa2f0r9W2Mg Watch Episode 8] [[ep9 | Next Episode]]

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Ep8

2020-02-24T15:31:17Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 8: Andrew Yang - The Dangerously Different Candidate The Media Wants You To Ignore

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9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise

2020-02-24T15:30:23Z

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== Description ==

Eric sits down with friend, philosopher, comic, actor and fighter Bryan Callen for a wide ranging conversation on camaraderie, conflict and comedy. Over the course of 2+ hours, the two discuss difficult topics like the holocaust, gender dynamics and the legacy of the enlightenment on the eve of the 2020 presidential election. Bryan and Eric oscillate between levity and intensity as they navigate these hard-to-broach topics. Hilarity and good insights ensue.

[[ep8 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/9cbd969b-c24d-4c9c-a048-c0d2ce5dfb4c Listen to Episode 9] [https://youtu.be/PzqPV6BWVm4 Watch Episode 9] [[ep10 | Next Episode]]

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Ep9

2020-02-24T15:29:29Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 9: Bryan Callen - Cracking Wise

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10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree

2020-02-24T15:28:53Z

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== Description ==

Eric sits down with Julie Lindahl, author of "The Pendulum". What happens when an ethnically German girl growing up in Brazil gets curious to finally make sense of her family history to stop the cycle of dysfunction? Julie Lindahl’s new book "The Pendulum" shows us what it can take to find a portal out of inter-generational trauma. Eric welcomes his house-guest Julie Lindahl to tell her extraordinary story on this episode of The Portal. The episode is raw and recorded at home on a hand held device; there will be no video.

[[ep9 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/6a7f2132-e11d-4e06-8169-348cbb489d6e Listen to Episode 10] [https://youtu.be/d2UXrr1oFS0 Watch Episode 10] [[ep11 | Next Episode]]

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Ep10

2020-02-24T15:27:59Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree

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13: Garry Kasparov - Avoiding Zugzwang in AI and Politics

2020-02-24T15:26:27Z

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== Description ==

In this cordially combative episode, Eric sits down with Russian chess legend, multiple-year champion and (inarguably) one of the greatest players of all time, Garry Kasparov. The two discuss transcending AI-induced demotivation, AI brilliancy (and lack thereof), the perilous time for global democracy in Russia, America and globally and Garry's penchant for risking his life for what he believes in. Beyond Chess, Garry is an active political dissident and truth seeker; founding the Russian "United Civil Front" and speaking out against Putin since his retirement from the game in 2005, he's an ardent defender of democracy in Russia and abroad. 1997 was also a watershed year for Garry; it was the year that AI - in the form of IBM's Deep Blue - was able to beat the best chess player in the world (Kasparov). Since then, Garry's been thinking deeply about the role of a newly positioned mankind in the world of a rising AI. From tech displacement to political unrest, please enjoy this wide ranging episode covering some of the most crucial issues of our time.

[[ep12 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/18c7a9b0-14e9-405e-adaa-babe36c5b96d Listen to Episode 13] [https://youtu.be/vpQTqhs9xmA Watch Episode 13] [[ep14 | Next Episode]]

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== Transcript ==

Ep13

2020-02-24T15:25:26Z

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14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians

2020-02-24T15:24:17Z

Jmank88: add prev/next buttons

== Description ==

What happened to the Mathematical and Scientific art movement after MC Escher? It went underground.

In this episode of the Portal, Eric begins tracking down the leaders of this hidden movement; one that is smuggling higher level science into transcendent art forms. Eric had to coax one the movement’s foremost members, London Tsai, to come out of obscurity where he had been preserving his mathematical art in sarcophagi of unopened bubble wrap sitting for decades in various New York City studios.

London is just the first of these New Escherians we’ll be profiling. These modern day Prometheans are stealing higher level mathematics from the professorial priesthood replacing the Seraphim and Cherubs of antiquity with topological paintings, protein sculptures, and light symphonies that speak to our hearts, minds and desires for transcendence. The podcast will be released later with video showing a taste of Tsai's groundbreaking work.

[[ep13 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/a2cbf04a-a382-4a9f-a0eb-074c328ccd21 Listen to Episode 14] [https://youtu.be/pVYCqK19-ww Watch Episode 14] [[ep15 | Next Episode]]

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Ep14

2020-02-24T15:22:54Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 14: London Tsai - The Reclusive Dean of The New Escherians

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15: Garrett Lisi - My Arch-nemesis, Myself

2020-02-14T15:23:06Z

Jmank88:

Garrett Lisi, the so called "Surf Bum with a Theory of Everything (or T.O.E.)", is a PhD theoretical physicist who has refused to be captured by the theoretical physics community. By making shrewd investments, he has avoided holding meaningful employment for his entire adult life. Instead, he lives in Maui and travels the world chasing the perfect wave.

In this episode Garrett and Eric sit down to discuss the current status of Garrett's ideas for a final theory based on a mysterious object called E8, perhaps the oddest of mathematical symmetries to be found in the universe.

Garrett and Eric have held each other in mutual “contempt” for over a decade. By vacationing together and staying in each others' homes, they had hoped to hone and deepen their mutual disgust for each other's ideas. However, as the theoretical physics community moved away from actually trying to unify our incompatible models of the physical world, it became intellectually unmoored, and drifted toward a culture of performative Cargo Cult Physics. The antagonists were thus forced by necessity to develop a begrudging admiration for each other's iconoclasm and unwillingness to give up on the original dream of Einstein to unify and understand our world.

The discussion is rough but a fairly accurate depiction of scientific relationships belonging to a type that is generally not shown to the public. This may be uncomfortable for those who have been habituated to NOVA, The Elegant Universe, or other shows produced for mass consumption. We apologize in advance.

[[ep14 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/34b7e123-41aa-4bf3-8c35-2e34d2226cd2 Listen to Episode 15] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_uiqjO1IEU Watch Episode 15] [[ep16 | Next Episode]]

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== Video ==
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_uiqjO1IEU

== Relevant Tweets ==
* [https://twitter.com/garrettlisi/status/1203461064932806657 I fell into The Portal! Got harassed by Eric for two hours. Didn't particularly enjoy it, but others might.]

== References in the Episode ==

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw YouTube: Sidney Coleman, Quantum Mechanics in Your Face (1994)]

== Transcript ==

About Garrett Lisi:

Papers: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Garrett+lisi&searchtype=all&source=header

00:00 =

ERIC WEINSTEIN - Hello you're queued up to enter the portal but I thought I'd say a few words before this episode in general

When we present science in front of the public we do it in one of two ways. Either we talk in an incredibly hand-wavy way about very speculative ideas like string theory, or we have a sort of a corpse of previous scientific thought that has been specifically arranged for public viewing.

It's not really science the way we do science, it's kind of a denatured version to make sure that we don't lose anybody because the public is famously supposed to be squeamish about anything involving equations, abstractions or jargon. In this episode we try to well do something different.

I'm actually having a conversation with [[Garrett]] here he's updating me on where his thinking has gone with respect to unifying physics

now it's very unusual for anyone to try to unify physics and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Garrett even though I don't think his theories are going to work I make no secret of this I'm not saying anything behind his back but he is in some sense Theodore Roosevelt's man in the arena he actually is trying to take on the general problem of the cosmos and even though I don't think he's succeeding he has my profound admiration for simply suiting up and trying.

most people, in fact almost everyone I know, does not attempt to do what he is doing and for that he has my admiration and respect now with that admiration respect comes a desire not to be mean but to actually push him on his theory because I don't want to see him wasting his time and I feel that when you're outside of the university system there's almost no one who takes your research seriously. So while there is an aspect of tongue-in-cheek with respect to us being each other's arch-nemesis there's actually something quite serious about it

I don't necessarily like the path that he's going down and I don't know that I really believe that he's going to get anywhere productive but I do think that he's an inspiration to us all simply for trying in an era where everyone else seems to have given up.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you understand that it is an experiment. I'm trusting you guys to listen in on something which is much closer to actual science than what usually presented with I hope you like it

0:02 =

WEIN - you found the portal I'm your host Eric Weinstein and I'm here today with my arch-nemesis physicist Garrett Lisi

Garrett, welcome to the portal

GARRETT LISI - thanks for having me on Eric you're a brave man

W - well I would say you're a brave man coming into the lion's den so thank you for coming by for those who don't know who you are or what this issue of being arch-nemesis is about what what could you do to inform our listeners and viewers about who you are and what our relationship might be

LISI - all right well we have a many disturbing similarities in that we did fairly well in school we got our PhDs but then we left academia and but maintained an interest in fundamental physics and kept pursuing this on our own however there are some distinctions in that you went into the finance world and I went into being a surf bum

W - yes that's not that similar also you are you have a PhD in physics proper whereas I have one in mathematics so I would say advantage Lisi but then I have one from a more typically powerhouse school you have one from one that's a little bit off of that main corridor that maybe got up caught up in string theory and the the fads that propel the field but I think what's been very interesting to me is that in all of theoretical physics which everyone is quite interested in - you still find people publishing books on quantum theory and all of the spookiness weirdness and beauty that constitutes theoretical physics - it feels to me that almost no one is pursuing actual theories of everything. We talk about theories of everything all the time but that the courage to actually put forward anything that even remotely resembles the theory of everything, almost nobody is willing to do that would you say that that's a fair statement

L - yeah it's a very first team and the the main reason for that is because it's such a hard problem that you pretty much have to be a megalomaniac just to tackle it or to think you have a chance of succeeding at it

W - well I think that's a weird statement. Like if you're doing if you're going to throw away your life on issues of theoretical physics what is it that you would imagine people would think that they were doing like if you're not going for the brass ring why enter that field well

I think that a lot of people in physics are doing the usual thing where they encounter a problem and try to solve it and try to proceed incrementally and that's how actually I got wrapped up in this is I identified a problem with electrons in their description in fundamental physics it was something about it that really I didn't like it just didn't just didn't feel right to me and I got wrapped up in solving that, you know, one aspect of this big picture I didn't go off trying to think "oh I'm really going to tackle this problem of coming up with a theory of everything" because you you you have to be somewhat of a lunatic to take that on it's like you know I trying to prove some theorem in mathematics it has been stagnant for hundreds of years it's just you know you're probably not going to succeed and you'd probably just be frustrated with the attempt.

You have to have huge ego to even think about it, right, and also there's a lot of discouragement. Students are actively discouraged from tackling such problems because the professors who came before them and know a little bit more about the field know just how hard it is to make progress even on small problems and that making progress on a huge one is just insurmountable, so they try to actively discourage their students from from going into fundamental problems in Physics because they they haven't had success themselves so they're they're trying to be protective of their students that way.

W - so maybe just to set this up and I should say to regular listeners and viewers of the portal this is intended to be something of a transitional episode. So that the entire podcast is an experiment and you know other other people have shows and there's a concept of professionalism. I don't think that's what we're striving for here at the portal, this is really untested. We're going to experiment with our advertising models. We're going to experiment with what the traffic will bear when it comes to intellectual discussions without spoon-feeding everything to the audience, realizing that some people may get left behind. In fact the host may get left behind, we don't know.

I hope not

W - but no it's quite possible and what we've done is we've done a series of interviews to begin the podcast to just establish that we can have conversations that people want to tune into and get great guests in that chair where people may not have even heard of the person before but hopefully walk away feeling enriched. However that's not really the point of the podcast. The point of the podcast is to explore new territory intellectually and it may be an academic level outside of traditional channels and it has to do in part with my belief that we don't really understand how much idea suppression has been going on for a very long period of time within the standard institutions. In fact I've I've created this thing I've called the DISC - the distributed ideas suppression complex - and its purpose is to make sure that ideas do not suddenly catch fire and up end and disrupt previous structures. So for example I would claim that [[String Theory]] which is absolutely dominated theoretical physics since what 1984

L - yeah since about then

W - so, it's about 35 years. It artificially consolidated the field around a complex of ideas that did not have a huge signal coming from experiment you know to just to try to steal home base

L - I mean to understand that you have to understand the (as I'm sure you do) the the culture of particle physics at the time when string theory started to grow which is you know up until you know up through the 70s there had been steady experimental results coming in from particle accelerators where it was like, a new particle every week that theorists were having to really cooperate on as a community to jump in on try to figure it out and exchange ideas very

W - it was more than 50s and 60s

L - it was but it continued all the way through the 70s and and from that culture of, you know, community working together on information that's coming in a steady stream right, you got this culture of like "yeah no don't go do the other thing it's a waste of time" you really want to be working on what's hot, right? because there's new information coming in all the time and this is where the culture of string theory started I was also more involved in the in the culture of [[General Relativity]] and [[Gravity]], okay, which is a very different culture. It's much more slow-paced, you don't have new results coming in all the time everything's very is much more

W - do you mind if I set this up a little bit for our audience and you critique it if I do a poor job (L -sure) in essence the two great idea complexes in fundamental physics - not condensed matter physics or astrophysics - but like whatever ground reality physics *is*, is the General Relativistic complex around the ideas of [[Einstein]] and then there's the sort of quantum field theory ([[QFT]]) a complex or the Quantum complex around the ideas of [[Bohr]] - sort of fair enough? - and [[planck]] ona I don't mean to slight [[Dirac]] and others but just to keep it simple the children of Einstein and the children of Bohr

L - right and the the the boring people went into particle physics

W - the boring people?

L - well you said they're the children of Bohr's

W - hahaha okay

L - so they're so they're in this culture that's a very rapid fire you know moving moving things along as part of a community whereas genre relativity the people from the Einstein community were more exploring different possibilities at their own pace and there is more of an exploratory culture and that's the culture that turned into [[Loop Quantum Gravity]] so that

W - so first of all I'm just gonna I'm gonna begin arguing with you there to me yeah the issue was is that Einstein put much more of the general relativistic picture in place, so there was less to do for the descendants of Einstein and because the quantum was considerably less tied up there was much more work and so through a system of selective pressures the more successful community in some sense left fewer descendants and they were less capable because it was less for them to do and then you had the quantum communities start to attract the real brains because there was lots of work for a period of time to go back and forth between [[theory]] and [[experiment]]

L - that's right

W - okay

L - and and but what happened was that when they when you think about it as a whole - that gravity has to be quantized. So there are two ways of getting there - you can either start from Bohr's children and and quantum field theory and try to get from there to a quantum theory that encompasses gravity or you can start from the gravitational side in [[Geometry]] and try to somehow get [[quantum mechanics]] to play nice with this essentially [[classical geometric theory]] and there were two very different approaches and two very different cultures

W - I still have some disagreements but I don't think I necessarily want to to derail us so all right so

L - so anyway my the the point I started with was that the the string theory came out of the particle physics community

W - and when we say string theory, we mean the cultural explosion that happened in 1984 rather than the original string revolution of let's say [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriele_Veneziano Veneziano] which was much earlier okay

so that in in the mid-1980s there was a discovery called the [[anomaly cancellation]] where two very improbable things canceled each other and the theory was suddenly there was a theory that was given a green light that was highly restrictive as to what could... what could go in that spot and that result the anomaly cancellation gave birth to a cultural phenomenon which was the sort of takeover of theoretical physics by string theory

L - right I mean it looks so promising at the time in the 80s I mean they thought that "yes it naturally encompasses gravity" and all we need to do is find the right you know [[high dimensional manifold]] to attach to for our strings to vibrate in and will immediately recover all the properties of the particles of the standard model we just have to find the right one we'll probably get this done by lunchtime wrapped up

W - I don't believe that story

L - well it didn't happen

W - I don't think that's a even what actually happened. I was in college during this period and even though that's the story that I would agree is told inside of the community. yeah I'm not sure that I fully believe it if I go back to my own memory is something very different happened

L - well it took a while to get everybody on the bandwagon

W - I think something's still different happened I think that [[Ed Witten]] showed up and that there was one human being

L - Right, he's his own anomaly he wasn't

W - he was absolutely an anomaly he came to Penn in I don't know whether it was 83 or 84. I left in 85 and he started talking about what the world was in a way that none of the physicists could actually follow, because he was using ideas from from differential geometry and from higher mathematics in ways that most of the community couldn't track. He was saying things like the reason we have three copies of the kind of matter that makes up our world comes from the characteristic numbers of a six dimensional [[complex manifold]] found at every point in space and time and these things were so mind-blowing. I mean if the if our listeners can't exactly follow it they were in the same shoes as many people in the community. Tthere was a voice that was clearly coming from another planet

L - right

W - undoubtedly the most brilliant person I've ever met in my life - the one person who continues to make me tremble when I hear his name or his voice and this person signed on big-time to [[string theory]] in a way that was very coercive and seductive so that even though that the community understood why he was signing on, it was in part Witten's endorsement that really started to move the needle in my opinion

15:00 =

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17:30 =

well the the String Theory unification program - the idea that this description of all [[fundamental particles]] and gravity - in our entire universe - would come from a model based on strings vibrating and other higher dimensions. I mean that this unification program has failed. The vast majority of the high-energy physics community has been working on it for over 30 years and they've utterly failed to deliver on that promise despite the high hopes and promises

W - well, and this has to do - and again we can sort of do a small synopsis of the field - the idea was the original hopes had been built around an idealized [[point particle]] concept where hard little balls were kind of the naive model of particles then you had to smear them out and do waves on waves from that point particle concept called [[second quantization]] or [[quantum field theory]] and string theory said no the fundamental unit should never have been a hard little ball to begin with it should have been modelled by something that was an "as if string" obviously and it wasn't string made out of atoms it was some sort of mathematical version of

L - right it's an abstract mathematical description of a surface inside another surface essentially

W - right and so that this this thing had a peculiar appeal to the children of Bohr that was not that appealing to the children of Einstein would that be a fair description of it that

L - it is for pretty subtle reasons specifically anomaly cancellation and also the ability to produce what appeared to be [[particle excitations]] within from the string model

W - right now that thing - that sudden shift in the community from regular quantum field theory, from a plurality of different approaches; whether some of them had names like [[Technicolor]] or [[grand unification]] or [[supersymmetry]] all of this seemed to get subsumed in this - I don't know - fad what it was hard to

L - like agiant rolling what kind of [[Katamari Damacy|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy]] where it's just collecting everything that it touches and making it part of itself

W - that's right and in fact the claim was if we find something that isn't strain theory we'll just find some way of including it and call it string theory

L - right

W - so this was a bizarre you know there was it was a sociological phenomena it was a we would say the political economy of science was involved where who could get a job for their students, whether or not the newspapers were gonna challenge this or go along with it. So you had reporters who had no idea what was going on publishing these glowing pieces about the string theorists and how they were gonna wrap it all up (L -yeah) and in essence you know we have this concept in evolutionary theory called [[interference competition]] where one animal will attempt to out-compete the other by keeping it away from like a watering hole.

So nobody else could afford to get nourished because the string theorists we're saying all the smart people are in string theory, "it's the only game" in town was the famous phrase

L - I certainly encountered a lack of nourishment when I graduated in the 90s and I wasn't interested in strings but I was interested in high energy physics

W - well I think almost everybody was in that position that that is really the Founding crime for me in the string revolution. It was the desire to say that everyone who is not part of us as an idiot

L - yeah yeah. That's above and beyond normal physicist arrogance

W - above and beyond normal physicist arrogance and I want to say also why I think I'm so focused on [[theoretical physics]] as the most important endeavor that humans are engaged with I think there are three components to it and just see whether whether it resonates with you

1) one is that this is the closest we get, responsibly, to asking why are we here what is it that we're made of. It is the thing that would best substitute for a religion if you were able to understand what it was.

2) the second thing is is that it appears to be the secret powering our economy that very few people have really fully understood. It gave us the [[World Wide Web]] the [[semiconductor]] the [[electron shells]] the generated [[chemistry]], (L - [[nuclear power]]), nuclear power, [[nuclear weapons]], communications technology - electromagnetic, you know, [[Wi-Fi]] what have you. If you want it invented - theoretical physics - more or less created [[molecular biology]].

L - that's probably a bit of a stretch but the other certainly aren't so yeah

W - if you look at the [[RNA tie club|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_Tie_Club]], you know the people and it word [[Teller|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller]] [[Feynman|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman]], [[Crick|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick]], people trained in physics, so in this telling of the tale its second major feature of importance is that it sort of created our modern economy and I don't think people have understood the extent to which all of these things for you know - the web, semiconductors and even molecular biology - really came out of theoretical physics because of the third issue which is I think, even though I'm a mathematician or trained in mathematics, I could make a pretty decent argument that

3) this was the world's most impressive intellectual community ever

L - it certainly it seems to attract some of the greatest minds

W - well I would say I would go even farther I would say that because of the interplay between the most beautiful mathematics even according to mathematical standards and experimental discipline. So you have this this thing that's forcing you to go back and forth between the purest of pure theory and the the dirt and intuition and messiness of experiment I don't think anything else had that property so that it wasn't necessarily even that it just attracted the best people, but it it actually rewarded human intellectual achievement like no other subject ever.

L - all right it's also on touching on something that's a little bit different socially which is the type of people who are attracted to really, you know, hard problems in fundamental physics and and modeling and really trying to get as you say the source code of the universe. These often aren't very skilled "people people", they're not very socially oriented people for the most part

W - some are some aren't yeah

L - but for for the real intellectual heavy-hitters you're talking about people who sort of I mean walk among us as aliens you're talking about think that they're not extremely social they're not very focused on issues with other human beings and physics - this understanding of our universe through mathematics is really otherworldly pursuit, right? it's not like law where laws are made up by humans and discussed in front of humans compat in front of humans it's I mean that has its own intricacies and difficulties and puzzles but theoretical physics you're getting you're working at something that's not related to humans directly.

I mean any intelligent beings in this universe that advanced to a certain state are gonna be involved in studying physics and it's gonna be the same physics, right? with some of the same mathematics and the same mathematical tools. It's something that exists independent of humanity so if you're if you're not a huge fan of human beings and but you you really like puzzles and you're good at math, physics is very attractive because it's a it's a it's the greatest puzzle there is in our universe and it exists completely independent of humanity and yet humans have be able to work on it and make progress which is frickin amazing.

It's amazing the degree to which humans have understood our reality and and I think we're getting close to having a complete picture of it

W - yeah, I would say that's one of the three classes of greatest puzzles. I mean if I could I could tell a story that biology is the greatest puzzle because without something to care about the universe in which it lives this is all completely sterile to begin with

and I can also make a different case for mathematics which is that physics is but one example of a universe we don't know if there are other universes that can could be (conceived)

L - so so biology I mean it's it's I I agree it's intricate and and it can be a pure pursuit but it's not pure in the sense that so much of the foundations of biology are somewhat arbitrary like whether it you know DNA helixes gonna spiral to the left or the right and and and what its chemical components are precisely that might vary other planets you know other civilizations by oh geez give me different

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27:00 - Eric Playing "We Soldiers Three"

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28:00 =
(you can) make a decent argument that systems of selective pressures as described by Darwin and Wallace there might be conserved even if you had didn't have carbon baseline

L - there will be convergent evolution of course sure but but the details will be slightly different so if you're studying biology by the time you get up to something like cells or animals it's gonna be wildly different in different different places in the in the galaxy alright whereas whereas physics is the same everywhere okay it's it's independent of biology and it's independent of humanity and it's III think and then when you go to mathematics mathematics the pursuit of mathematics like how things get proved and how structures get built up through axioms that are then proved it's a it's a larger playing field than physics. So within that huge arena of possible mathematical structures okay we see appear to live in one mathematical structure, so I mean a physicist only has to focus on the the mathematics that we that describes reality

W - and I by the way sure your intuition then in a certain sense this is the best and most interesting place to play in part because there's this very weird feature that we've seemingly unearthed about the physical universe which is that it unexpectedly has this bizarrely good taste (L - yeah) about what to care about within it's as if you let it loose in the mathematical jewelry store in it it selects only the finest pieces

L - yeah yeah and we have to wonder if that's you know is that just our human take on it because our human aesthetics have evolved within this beautiful world in the universe so, is it that I mean [[Douglas Adams]] described the [[anthropic principle]] as a puddle of water right and thinking it's like wow this "this this hole I'm in is just perfectly formed to my shape alright isn't it wonderful how it just fits me so perfectly and it's so comfortable here just like it was made for me". Well, it's like, no the puddle got there and filled the shape of the the hole I mean the water got there and filled that shape and as humans we ended up here and we filled this niche and our aesthetic taste was shaped by what's around us including the the mathematics that underlies the physics of this universe and so when we look at the universe you might say "oh no maybe it's just our tastes evolved within this universe, so this is why we find physics aesthetically pleasing"

W - do you actually believe what you're saying right now

L - no I think it's wrong

W - I mean I think this is so cowardly

L - I know I agree and that and right like I have to wonder about it I have to I mean I understand every lip service you know that's not just lip service I think about this I mean I think I mean is it really my proclivities have been shaped by my environment in order to think this because I have to question everything all the time (W -sure) mostly cuz I don't talk to enough other people but but also it's because you know yeah when you're questioning things and you're delving with fundamental building blocks you want to make sure as you build things up that you have things right and in looking at the fundamental pieces of physics you know the fundamental mathematical physics I really think that the mathematical pieces as you say are the ones that are extraordinarily beautiful and it's not just my aesthetic taste has been shaped by evolution that causes me to think that I really think objectively these are very pretty mathematical objects underlying our physical reality

W - yeah I think we just lack the courage to say what this appears to be which is there is something that we do not understand about the universe in which it is selected for the most mysterious, most beautiful stuff with which to write what we - I mean - with the closest thing we have to [[source code]] we don't we're not at the source code yet we're not quite at that layer

L - but you can smell it can't you

W - well I mean yes and no

L - it feels close

W - I think it's almost provably close but but the there's a caveat to that which is I think we're almost at the end of this chapter and it does feel like it could easily be the final chapter and by the way we should be we should clarify that when we see when we talk about a [[theory of everything]] we don't mean a theory that once understood could explain everything you see in your daily universe

L - right I mean love is still gonna be a mystery of course

W - oh god you really did that

L - of course I did but yeah nobody's...

W - Ladies form a single-file line

L - ...there's evidence I mean there in our in our understanding of physics as we've learned more particles yeah the fundamental particles we've learned about appear to be filling out a complete set. I mean we've, you know, when you when you predict that a [[Tau quark]] should exist all right know that a [[Tau Lapton] should exist, yeah, or you figure out that you know it completes this that there's this third generation - it's complete right so we seem to be completing our set a fundamental particles

W - SO we have three sets of Lego yeah right the first generation, second generation and third generation of matter and all the pieces in each generation are mirrored in the other two generations just a different mass scales. So far that's what it looks like

L - well it's not just so far it's like whether we have we have reasons to know that there aren't there aren't more from from how the [[Big Bang]] sent matter loose in the universe, we know that there aren't more than three generations up there certain very high energy

W - well we've known a lot of things Garrett that have turned out to be wrong

L - well but this is really filling out a pretty complete pattern

W - I don't dispute but I just accept

L - except for this minor point of dark matter still being completely unknown for the most part

W - yeah I mean I guess my discomfort with this comes from the fact that knowing the history, I know how we've been wronged and I also know how we haven't had the courage of our convictions and one of the things that really you know occupies my mind is why we're not more definite about things that I think we have very good good reason to believe and we're so definite about things that sort of scare me where we say I know that it can't be other than this and yet it has we've been we've been shown up multiple times that we've got two different directives telling us to be both more confident and more humble

L - right

37:00 =

!!Spinors

W - the thing that has affected both both you and myself most profoundly is the existence of something called [[spinors]] at the core of our understanding of matter do you want to say a little bit about what that is Wyatt you think it's affected you and and and me as well and why perhaps it hasn't had the same emotional and intellectual impact on the community

L - right I mean when you're... basically when physicists more or less completed that what's called the [[standard model of particle physics]], right, you have you have the the known forces in physics like the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the strong force as well as the force of gravity and then you have the the matter particles which are [[electrons]] and [[quarks]] and [[neutrinos]] and and other generations of these that form you know what are called the [[fermions]] okay and these are called the [[matter particles]] and then they have mass because of the interaction with the [[Higgs boson]] right which is sort of...

W - what's not going to make sense to people

L - it's not alright but anyway the the force particles behave differently as elementary particles under rotations than the matter particles all right. so these matter particles, they you have to basically rotate them 720 degrees to return them to their original state. Whereas most objects you rotate it and you rotate it 360 degrees and get back to where you started all right but spinors are different right and they they behave in a very specific way and there's a there's a very specific way of describing them mathematically but it's described in an unusual way. It's described as a as a column of [[complex numbers]] or a [[column matrix]] if you like that's acted on by a [[rotation matrix]] that tells you specifically how these particles transform under rotation

W - honestly that wouldn't make any sense to me and I don't think I can help all of my audience together

L - this is the thing so so this is the way physicists are introduced to a description of electrons

W - well look I just try to play with something well we're talking about this is this way..

L - why you can't can I hand it off to you in about 10 seconds

W - no you finish it out

L - all right so I found this description to be incredibly unsatisfying all right because the rest of physics is not described this way right you don't introduce a fundamental field that transforms a certain way under rotations.That's not how you know why would the universe do that it's not elegant it's not it's not geometric all right it seems sort of arbitrary, why would the universe have spinors in it? well it turns out that because if you if you describe General relativity as curving [[four-dimensional space-time]] describe gravity and you just describe forces as [[gauge fields]] right with both of those they're very geometric descriptions they're very elegant mathematically when you describe, physically, the fermions as spinors, it looks like a [[kludge]] it just it doesn't fit with the other theories but that's why I left physics, to solve this problem I wanted to know "why spinors geometrically?" and no one else was interested in the problem no one else thought it was a problem they're like yeah they transform this way and and maybe it comes from strings and that's all you get and it's like no that's totally unsatisfying.

If gravity is described geometrically and are all our other forces described geometrically the [[universe]] is just one thing it's right there in the name I mean "uni" is one, "verse" is turning we have we have this "one-turning thing" we call the universe and it's just one mathematical object and if this if we have different particles they have to be aspects of this one mathematical object why would this mathematical object have spinors as an aspect of them it was a huge mystery to me I want to go solve it no one else even acknowledged it was a problem and you also tackled this this also bothered you

W - well there was a so this is the very difficult part of what the portal is supposed to be and I have the feeling that we've probably left a lot of our listeners behind but I've said that we're going to have to take some risks and this is going to be one of them, so the way I see it some some of our listeners are also viewers right and we have in studio these beautiful [[Klein Bottles]] from [[Acme Klein bottle]] and [[cliff Stoll]] out of Oakland I guess these objects that I'm holding up or you can look up Klein bottles on the on the web have this very odd property that they are covered if you will by the surface of a doughnut if the surface of the doughnut wraps around this object twice and we call this a [[double cover]]. Now the idea that you have some very strange object with no inside and outside called a Klein bottle but that it's wrapped twice by some object which has different properties namely the surface of a doughnut called a [[torus]], the rotations of our [[three-dimensional space]], bizarrely have some object that covers them twice, just as a doughnut covers a Klein model twice so when we talk this crazy language about you have to rotate an object more than 360 degrees for it to come back to itself, this is somewhat of garbage language that we've taught people to understand, when we're not really showing them what's behind the curtain.

We're not showing them that there are the rotations of a rigid three-dimensional space and then there's this thing that covers those rotations twice called the [[spin group]] and that spin group is the thing that has the property that it acts on these things called spinors so this is a hidden level of structure that you would not know was there just from three-dimensional space there's some secret trapped in three-dimensional space that is very well hidden, and if we weren't at a very high level of mathematics or physics you would never know that spinors even exist to play with

L - right I mean it comes out of [[representation theory]] but that once again that's a fairly high level of mathematics you have to get to to even see that these things exist

42:00 =

W - and for all of the other basic kinds of symmetries we don't have these hidden representations we don't have these hidden spaces that have these bizarre properties it's only for these things called [[orthogonal groups]] so it's a very special property of real [[Euclidean rigid space]] that spin0rs are there to be found and not only does nature find them, she bases all of matter around the hidden object that can't easily be seen or deduced which is a total mind job right? and the math community has in fact sort of split between people who think hey we can describe these things mathematically so our work is done versus other people who believe there's something about spinors that just it continues to surprise us we don't understand where they came from there a hidden feature of the universe and they keep giving in this very mysterious fashion

43:30
L - yeah and the most of the general relativists who came at this problem um just would not want to touch it because it's too far into them and the people came into it from the particle physics side thought it wasn't a problem - it's this field transforms a certain way it seems perfectly well described

W - that doesn't this doesn't make sense to me at all

L - so it didn't make sense to me either, Eric...

W - Let me give an argument as to why this is a real really serious problem. If I take two kinds of thing that might one might hope to find in the Universe an [[electron and a [[photon]] okay? so the idea is that I've got stuff that orbits around [[atomic nuclei]] (electrons) and I've got light and it's relatives that carry the [[electromagnetic force]] in the photon. If I don't know how to measure [[length]] and [[angle]] I can still talk about the objects that are photons, we call them [[spin one particles]], but if I don't have length and angle I don't have any way of talking about spinors.

In other words, if there isn't a ruler and a protractor, which is effectively what Einstein used to define space-time I don't have an ability to talk about spinors and that's a big problem because if you're...

L - It's not just a problem, it's a huge clue it says the spinors have to be intimately related to gravity and general relativity

W - and gravity so spinors are over on the quantum side of the equation all right the quanta in the children of Bohr it's really more their object than the children of Einsteins. The children of Bohr claim "we have to quantize gravity and make everything quantum" so it's sort of an imperial belief that the people who study the [[standard model]] should extend their techniques to cover gravity so that all can be won yet if it turns out that they're we don't know how to measure length and angle between measurements because in quantum theory you get something very different when when things when a field is propagating versus when it's measured - all of the probabilistic stuff we talk about is happening when there's a quantum measurement. If you don't know where length and angle are while something is propagating then you don't even know where where the electrons can be a disturbance if electrons are waves they have to be waves in some kind of a sea.

You know with photons that you can't tell exactly where the wave is but you know where the sea is

In the case of electrons if you don't know where the the [[metric]] is, you can't even say where the sea is that the electron would be a wave in (L - that's right) and it's a very convoluted thing but it's a big difference

L - yeah and it's I mean I can almost describe it in extremely simple terms which is, most people most physicists who think about it, think of [[gravitational charge]] as being [[mass]] but gravitational charge is really [[spin]]

W - well you we're getting pretty we're getting pretty far afield

L - all right so to speak :)

W - so to speak so let's imagine that maybe our listeners haven't understood exactly what we're saying but that there is some special problem about spinors and how they're tied to the structure of space-time that is different where you can describe things like photons in some sense without knowing how length and angle are measured, whereas length and angle are essential if you're ever going to talk about spinors.

Now you and I have two very different points of view and the reason that that I consider you an arch-nemesis is that I think your theory based on e8

Which is depicted in this crystal block for those who are viewing on YouTube (NOTE: Probably looks something like [[this|https://bathsheba.com/crystal/e8/]])
L - Thanks for bringing your Kryptonite to the show

W - your approach to this is to say let's start out with some object that is mathematically distinguished and very peculiar effectively like a [[platypus]] of the mathematical world and let's try to distill from this thing that has to exist for reasons of logical necessity and may be the most complicated naturally occurring object, arguably, that you could pick and let's find the richness of our natural world as distilled from this bizarre, freakish occurrence in the laws of mathematical necessity is that a fair telling?

L - um from a top-down perspective it is but the way I got there is by describing spinors and seeing that spinors is part of this one beautiful mathematical object naturally and it's it's unique to the [[exceptional Lie groups]] to to these this class the small class of objects

W - when you say exceptionally groups what you mean is (L - platypi) continuous symmetries that only occur once that they don't fall into some regular pattern

L - and spinors are naturally a part of their geometry and there and there and there their intricate beautiful objects they have spinors naturally as part of their geometry and that if you dissect them you can see all the other parts necessary to particle physics and gravity and this was just stunning to me and at this point I'm like alright I've built up from the ground up from from particle physics and from gravity and from spinors. I've built the structure up in seeing how it's all interconnected and I found that they're all part of this small class of mathematical objects that are that are unique in their intricacy and beauty for finite dimensional objects and that's why now I appear to have adopted more of a top-down view where it seems like oh I started with this pretty object I said oh look it explains everything but it's it's nowhere near like that how I actually got to there all right.

The truth is I'm building up and the truth is the next object is going to be higher dimensional objects that include E8 like this one as a subgroup

W - so the way I'm hearing you Garrett and, again, you know this is like one of the most obscure

L - this is going to lose so many of your listeners, but I'm happy to talk I

W - Well, I'm trying to, we're trying to describe this. I would like to describe this a little bit as as if we were taking somebody to an opera in a foreign language so that they can follow the plot even though they can't follow line by line, OK?

The way I see what you're saying is is that there is a usual kind of symmetry which we would associate with [[bosons]] that is the force particles of the universe and what makes these very strange objects that you've you've referred to as in referring to [[exceptional lie groups]] is that you appear to take something from the fermionic universe that is this [[spinorial universe]] where the spinors come from and you adjoin it in some sense to the [[bosonic]] to get more symmetries

L - yes yeah that's very clear

W - okay there's a huge problem with the strategy

L - we'll wait but this but you're forgetting the part where this structure exists as part of these exceptional objects

51:00 =

W - I'm not. You've correctly described how these objects occur in nature that there is some regular kind of typical symmetry, a [[bosonic symmetry]] then you you take some of these spinors that are related to that symmetry and you fuse them together to get an even more beautiful, weird, symmetric object but the problem with that strategy is is that we know that nature has these two very different recipes for how she wants to treat these things quantum mechanically

L - right

W - one of them goes into the name of [[bosonic quantization]] and the other sort of goes under the name sometimes of you know [[Berezin|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berezin_integral]]([[Felix Berezin|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Berezin]] theory right and

L - anti commuting numbers. number were A times B times equals negative B times A

W - a parallel totally different treatment and the way you've done it you've really taken the [[fermions]] that is the matter part the the spinors that we've been discussing you've lumped them together with the [[bosons]] and now they're fused in a way that it's going to be almost impossible to treat the spinors in a manner befitting [[fermionic quantization]]

L - yeah no, it's very straightforward though the the fermions just end up being along directions [[orthogonal]] to [[space-time]]

W - I don't see that that actually works. I mean this is my great... my criticisms of your theory which - we've known each other now for 11 years and this is the basis of our antagonism - is that on the one hand you ingeniously saw, and give you your credit, that he E8 the largest of these objects, a 248 dimensional behemoth, carried some numerology surrounding three copies of The spinors that are present, which looked like, in some sense could be confused for, maybe related, to three copies of matter.

53:00 =

L - it was about that hand-wavy yeah

W - okay so, all the honor to you. That's not an obvious feature. Most people who barely know what the exceptional lie groups are and most of them don't know that it has to do with this property called [[triality]]

!!Eric's Objections to Garrett's Theory

1) okay that was... that was true but there really wasn't, in my opinion, enough room to pack the particles that we currently see into this group structure with three generations. That was one issue

2) Second of all because of the unit of the particular way in which bosons and fermions, matter and force, were fused together it really pushed everything towards the bosonic side; that is the force side of the equation, so you're gonna now have to be in some kind of technical debt where you would have to figure out how to get the fermions back into a matter framework because you would actually push them too far, through unification, into a union with force. That was another basic concern and..

3) my last concern was that because of the properties of this object you didn't have any room for what we call [[chirality]] in which the universe that we've seen so far appears to have a left-right asymmetry to it - it's as if it has a beauty mark - and any object that you derive from E8 is gonna be very hard to get it to have a beauty mark because E8 doesn't have a beauty mark itself, so these were three things that you're going to have to pay back (L - right) if you were going to connect this to the world that we see and that might - my irritation with you was that I brought this up with you in 200? remind me? 2008, not 2009, when we met at the [[Perimeter Institute|https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca]] and I tried to warn you about these things I felt like you never took me seriously.

L - No, I did take you seriously. I've taken all these problems seriously and they're discussed in subsequent work and the way I've been resolving them is by tackling a larger, unspoken problem which is how to have a quantum description of this sort of geometry, right?

Because our universe is a quantum universe and E8 tis a finite dimensional object and you have to have multiple states, multiple numbers of particles be able to occupy every state so if you have a full quantum description of a theory you need an infinite dimensional geometry to do it.

W - well I always thought your your goal was to take a finite object and then take waves on that finite object to create something that was going to be infinite dimensional I didn't see that it's a problem

L - but that's not good enough

W - say more

L - because when you talk about waves on geometric object those act as different representations mathematically, the [[Peter-Weyl Theorem|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter–Weyl_theorem]], but when you when you do that that's not enough to give you all the structure you need for quantum field theory ([[QFT]]) you really need a fundamentally [[infinite dimensional geometric object]] to describe quantum field theory and by looking at what sort of objects you need, that include exceptional lie groups, but are infinite dimensional geometries that can correspond to quantum field theory - that's how you tackle the three problems you discussed...

You can have more space to handle the three generations of particles, you can have the [[anti-commuting]] fermions in them so that they behave like from yan should like matter particles should and it's also you know large enough to give you the sort of dynamics you need for quantum field theory. So that's why I've I've in the intervening ten years since we've had a deep discussion about this, I've now started looking at generalized infinite dimensional geometries which are infinite dimensional generalizations of Lie groups which at which solve these problems and that's that's why I've been...

W - You really believe that you've solved these problems?

L - I think I have a really good description that goes a long way

W - Garrett, here's the thing: if I just think about where we are with the standard model right you've got four dimensions of space and time, right, then you've got an extra eight dimensions coming from something called [[su(3)]], three dimensions from something called [[su(2)]] and one extra dimension coming from something called [[u(1)]]. That's the basic data (L - right) that occurs.

L - and gravity, people leave out gravity

W - you can put in six dimensions for something called [[spin(3 1)]] okay but the point is I can add those all up and I'm gonna get some number probably, you know, in 20 some odd dimensions whatever that finite thing generates the infinite dimensional world of quantum field theory

L - but wait a minute. Quantum Field Theory - there we have a way of mapping between those the base geometry and then going to quantum field theory right then you have [[Fock Space|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fock_space]] right and you have [[occupation numbers|https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/occupation_number]] for all the different possible States

!!(Some of) Eric's Objections to String Theory
W - do it my point is you're working on a problem that has certain foreseeable problems as part of the challenge and unlike your detractors from the more standard community I'm not I'm not telling you that you're dead on arrival just because certain problems can be seen. That would be unfair and then by the way that's what you know there's lots of problems that can be seen from the string theory community where let's say

59:00 =

# you know the the number of dimensions it wants to play and it doesn't seem to be the right number or
# that they thought there were only a finite number of theories it turns out that there's a continuum of theories or
# the vast majority come out with right and I get very irritated that somehow the string theory community is entitled to make all these mistakes and anybody outside if they say one wrong thing or one seemingly wrong thing they're excommunicated it's a ridiculous standard okay that's not what I'm trying to do to you I'm trying to say something very different which is you're going to be up against the fact that if your initial data comes from this most beautiful and most bizarre of all objects E8 and that doesn't contain

L - as I said I'm now work it's generalizations to infinite dimensions but there's an issue of intellectual [[check-kiting|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting]] like I don't mind the idea that you recognize the debts that you're in and then you say I think I have a way of getting this thing to close off (L -right) but there is a question of well now that you've recognized am i right I mean am i right yeah yeah right i right that the issues that I raised with you initially turned out to be really serious problem

L - of course I mean and you

W - but you didn't know that then

L - I did they were there in the paper there in the original paper saying that the the description of three generations was very hand wavy and unsatisfactory that's in the original paper

okay my recollection was that when I tried to explain to you why people were going to have the objection about the two different quantization schemes that that was not handled correctly

right I handled that in a paper in 2010 or so (in ...group? cosmology)

okay so that all right that was one of the the issue yeah then there's gonna be an issue that you weren't able to bring the left-right asymmetry out of the initial data there wasn't enough and that was a fair description

absolutely

okay and then you're saying that the I ceded to you that you were making a connection between the mysterious appearance of three copies of matter and something called triality which was not manifest obviously inside of E8 but to the few people who actually care about this structure it it definitely is there in a very profound way

it relates to rotations in 8 dimensional spaces

yes but you also haven't taken an interest in what is E8 if not the the wellspring for the source code of the universe like if it isn't the universe

I think it's a piece of it but I'm not religious Eric I mean I'm I'm gonna explore whatever seems most promising to explore

okay and well have you changed your your sense of the status of E8 tis a candidate for the unified theory in the fashion that you were originally seeing

absolutely

you have changed your

yes

can you talk about that

right so it was in tackling quantum field theory and how to describe it geometrically which as far as I know nobody has done I mean whenever whenever you start with as you say you want an su 2 su 3 and you go through this quantization procedure for its field so you don't filter or if you're dealing with strings right you have this model of vibrating strings and higher dimensions then you go through this quantization procedure to get a quantum theory of strings (W - okay) right we have we physicists have this toolkit for quantizing things but that's utterly the wrong way to look at reality if if the universe is just one thing which it is then it's one mathematical object

I mean you're making a point that is very well understood I believe in the right standard theoretical physics community which is that if the world starts off as quantum (L - right) you should talk about classical izing pieces of it rather than quantizing the classical pieces that appear to exist

L - yeah that's exactly right so so what's a quantum geometric object look like it's in you know with with all these infinite dimensional Fox space and the creation and annihilation of elementary particles people possible

people at home won't know what a fox bases box space is effectively where the states of the system can live when you have multiple particles in a situation and you can change the number of particles that you have just the way a photon can break into an electron and a positron pair that would be possible in a fock Space not possible in a simpler quantum so (that's right) so effectively a fox base is just a large place to play where the number of particles in the system can change

up to infinity (W - keep going) so in order to describe this as one geometric object you're stuck with a generalized Li group infinite dimensional generalize Li group (W - yes) and in order to describe spinors it's going to be an exceptional generalize Li group yeah

01:04 =

W - I don't think I don't think you're adding anything I think that the problem here is is that E8 is an exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally interesting object. It did have the properties that you were talking about in that it unifies standard symmetries with these spinors to form new symmetries

that's right

But it's inadequate

it's not only inadequate, it would push them into a universe of pure force rather than a universe divided between force and matter you're actually the problem is is the kind of unification it would create would be completely force unification with an absence of metod you'd be dragging matter if you will spinor

W - you're focusing on a problem that that that was you know they're solved in a paper in 2010 but it's very simply that fermions are orthogonal to space-time whereas you know the force fields of boson fields are along space-time. In the same way the the same way if you have to force fields that are along space-time but in different directions they would anti commute right so you're doing is you're using space-time if you will which is again kind of a classical Einsteinian concept to break apart a unified system which was the intention in unification to begin with and then you're going to try to treat these two things naturally according to two totally different prescriptions that's like you're violating I mean in some sense any kind of naturality that you just picked up in the unification to begin with

L - um in a sense yeah but the symmetry has to break somehow

W - does it do it and in natural I mean this doesn't feel this feels we know

L - it allows it it doesn't seem completely natural but it does allow it

W - well but the whole point of the thing I thought was to take the naturality and what we had understood about the nature of these exceptional objects and to say hey these things actually unify beautifully inside of these very unusual elegant mathematical structures

L - they do but it was it was too small as you said it was too small because it didn't correctly contain three generations of matter and because it can't correctly portray quantum field theory but once you go to the larger generalised Lie groups it can

W - well you know if this was a start-up what you're saying is that the business is going great but it's just run out of money and I needed a fresh injection of cash... ...it does! This is sounding like intellectual check its round be funding

Series B

I see, err, is it cash flow positive

not yet I haven't even put the paper out yet

W - okay so the there's I mean I look it's not a question that I I need to see the paper or that you're not allowed to take out more loans but are you getting more I mean I know you to be look I've. I hate to say this but I have defended you to the regular community with some frequency because I have viewed you as an honest broker for your own stuff. I don't think you're trying to get away with something I think (L -thank you) what you try it what you're trying to do is you're trying to say I need to take some advances which I think and I hope I can pay back which i think is an admirable and honorable way to do physics. Are you worried about your own theory? are you worried that you're going to infinite dimensions in the way that you've been forced to modify on several previous occasions and that in fact this is not going to close ?

L - I am unusually confident that I'm on the right track with this one
W - really... Oy

L - there are too many things matching up in the right way

W - this doesn't sound good Garrett I gotta be honest with you

L - but it's see I will put a paper out yeah yeah okay and you know people may not find it interesting or they might find it really interesting

W - well I wish you the best of luck but I have to tell you that I do think that the problems in this program.. I mean again I should just be honest about it... I thought that the choice of E8 was so natural that there really one of two choices that I can see is being the way to go if you're going to avoid the the usual paths in research into into fundamental physics.

One is that you start with the most beautiful intricate object you can find and then you find the intricacies of the natural world somehow living inside of the intricacies which occurred naturally.

L - that would be that's a top-down view and it's quite nice to look at that

W - the bottom-up view is that somehow you start with something that's practically lifeless which I've analogize to a fertilized egg and somehow it bootstraps itself into this weird intricate and baroque world that we find ourselves in and it sort of... the universe Auto catalyzes from almost nothing and these are the two basic approaches that I can imagine that would not strain the concept of a theory of everything

L - right well then we both engage in both of these. Once you've used this bottom-up approach right starting with your fertilized egg and getting up into more and more complexity, then you start to see a complete object after you've expanded it out

W - sorry you view yourself as exploring the concept of

L - going from the bottom up

W - what is it that you've done that that has that character

L - starting from gravity and particle physics and how they can be matched up together and in a in a way that brings about natural

W - okay that's that's not very simple at all well I know rabbity gravity is already you know you're talking about the curvature of a space-time manifold

L - that's beautiful stuff that I love it

W - no it's absolutely gorgeous I don't think we're divided by that but when it comes to you know breaking up this object called the curvature tensor into three different pieces throwing one of the one of them away called the [[Weyl curvature]] and then fine-tuning the other two to be equal to the matter and energy in the universe there's a lot of stuff that's going into that story that isn't and that's an intricate story and then the other story is even worse and (L - right) here der yeah so you know you're smuggling in a ton of complexity when I say fertilized egg I'm thinking at the level of cytology but you know at the level of the actual DNA that's incredibly rich so you when I you know maybe it's a bad analogy because it's not bootstrapping itself out of nothing (L - right) you're smuggling in a ton of intricacy

L - but you have to look in both directions you have to look from the bottom up and then once you can see the larger picture then you have to look again from the top down and if going that way from the top down doesn't match up very well with with what you did to get there then you have to go further and so you can get a different bigger picture it's the only way forward

W - Garrett but I'm gonna be honest I feel like you know this is something is run into a wall and there's the sense that like how could this beautiful structure not be not be right it doesn't feel to me like...

L - it's insufficient yeah yeah and there but there there's there larger structures that are not finite dimensional but there's still Lee groups and exceptional Lee groups they're just generalized infinite dimensional Lee groups that contain E* a substructure and they're beautiful they're just as beautiful if not more so

W - I really don't I think that the problem is is that you know we have this mutual friend [[Sabine Hossenfelder|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder]] when Sabine has this very strange feature of her personality that she needs to tell the truth at scale

L - well sabina is a scientist and scientists you know engage in the truth at all costs yes but serve our modus operandi

W - well I find it very interesting that almost no one has followed Sabine's lead

L - I think it's a bina Sabina yeah (NOTE: it's not)

W - okay from her perspective Beauty has led theoretical physics astray (L - right) now I've I've tangled with her. My claim is is that the the string theory community which has generally hoovered up the most brilliant minds but turned them into kind of almost cult-like members which are exploring some structure but I just don't it's it's similar to e8 in the sense that I'm not positive that it's the structure of our world. It has some beauty and some consistency but I'm not positive that that's its reason for being and because that argument has been so abusive and it's it's just been... it's been abused against other people that our work is beautiful then when those Outsiders look at it doesn't look like what you're doing is that beautiful at all. She's gone against beauty as a means of trying to figure out what's true and what what isn't. I'm concerned that you're falling prey to the siren of beauty where you're not coupling you're not... things that are beautiful that there are many things that are beautiful that don't exist to do what you think they're there to do

L - right well that's definitely true. I'm definitely inspired by beautiful mathematical objects. When I start exploring an area of mathematics and I start to see its intricacies and it's connection to fundamental physics I am led to think that there might be something there based on aesthetics

W - well and I and I've also discussed this with sabina (sabine) who i think is great in her points are wonderful but i would be lost if I didn't have this aesthetic sense as a guide

L - well let's take an example like the hydrogen atom so you've got one proton at the center of a hydrogen atom and you have all of the electron shells in quantum theory that are generated by the Coulomb potential that comes off of that nucleus right okay. That story of chemistry as just being these perfectly spherical electron shells works pretty well

well you've got the other orbitals - p orbitals, s orbitals, d orbital orbiting over all these things

W - yeah yeah in terms of the representation theory of something we'd call spin 3 that gives the symmetries of the system that story is not it is absolutely beautiful and it works pretty darn well but it starts to fall apart the larger the atoms are and the more neutrons and protons are stuck together in the in the nucleus

L - it gets much more subtle yeah

W - well it's it's a perfectly beautiful story that isn't the right story it's not the true story it's very close to a true story it's suggestive it's indicative but it isn't actually the true story itself so you have to be very careful in my mind that you you don't fall into the trap of thinking that the hydrogen atom sort of generalizes it's perfection is simply the story of chemistry

L - right of course they're much more complex elements and then grouped into molecules and there's all sorts of things that go into that sort of chemistry

W - well but you don't you have the same situation in theoretical physics where you have certain kinds of beauty that are incredibly pure that actually kind of fall apart under scrutiny and you have other kinds of beauty that seemed to fall apart but actually go the distance. I'm thinking about Dirac's discovery of antimatter is the corresponding solutions to the matter solution

L - Right, and then he originally think that was that the anti electrons were that were actually protons

W - because they only knew of those two particles and then Heisenberg tried to pop his bubble and said you know

L - you actually have a new particle here

W - well no he said that the proton was way too heavy to be the anti particle mirror of the electron and I think direct sort of recanted but Dirac should have had the courage of his convictions and said I predict that there will be two new particles an antiproton and an anti Terron which was called the positron and both of those things turned out to be true

L - yeah and that's considered a victory for the aesthetic of beauty in mathematical physics

W - yes but there was an intermediate there what situation in which the beauty led Dirac astray because he wanted to shoehorn his theory into the pre-existing world that was understood

L - that's right so it's important to be cautious but and careful (W - yeah) but not too cautious so if you're if the mathematics is actually telling you something you want to listen to it

W - what's the mathematics telling you

L - it's telling me that I think I've got the first handle on a geometric description of quantum field theory

01:18 =

W - Garrett, I say this out of love and I hope not Envy I'm super concerned that you can see the problems from here and that rather than just going to infinite dimensions and saying that quantum field theory requires a jump from finite to infinite dimensions you can say look I I am fighting the fact that the the beautiful unification that I found actually is going to be challenged at the quantum level where that beauty becomes my enemy

L - I would never put it that way

W - I know because what you did is you took a theory I mean, to be honest, there's a different set of objects called the [[exceptional isomorphisms]] which aren't the [[exceptional lie groups]] that have the exact same property that you found where you take something from the force universe let's say there's some object called spin(6) which by an exceptional isomorphism is equivalent to some other object, surprisingly, called su(4) and you can take the spinors of spin six and find out that they are just the four dimensional object from su(4) right and smush them together and you get an analogue of E8 (L - yeah) there's also probably not used by the physical universe in any way that we think of as being important I don't think that that feature is what you think it is

L - right but there world of mathematical possibilities out here and I think we need more people

W - I totally agree with you that we need more people fanning out and trying things that look like they won't work

L - so we need a more exploratory culture

W - we need a more exploratory culture and we need to be forgiving what we don't need to do is to fool ourselves when we start getting the sense that maybe this stuff doesn't actually work I mean I it just like it feels to me like I can sort of see what the next set of problems are gonna be and it would be I would be remiss if I didn't say them at the beginning

L - sure but you know you can't really dig into this stuff until you see the mathematical details of it

W - and this gets back to an issue of the question of how science should be organized. So we've talked about how difficult it is to do science inside of the institutions because there is such a pressure economically to do whatever's fashionable to get lots of results, to publish continuously; can we talk a little bit about what happens when we try to do science outside of the institutions. Both of us have and I think people will be very surprised to hear it been rather critical of how hard it is to do science when you're not part of the standard community

L - right I mean I think in some sense it is essential to say to stay connected with the scientific community even when you're exploring out almost entirely on your own you one thing that has to happen is you have to have an extreme set of internal checks on your own progress and because it science is extremely frustrating to work on most of the pathways you follow end up being dead ends and it can be really frustrating. So in doing that, if you're gonna work outside academia you also need a extremely strong support system and a healthy life independent of the science you're working on. So you need to have good support from friends and family, good relationships. You need to have confidence and your ability to support yourself and and that frees up your time if you're really gonna work on stuff outside of academia on your own. I've been fortunate enough to build into and to have those things. I feel really lucky to be able to do that and I think I've had a really good life that way but if you can do that, you need to be really careful about it Because if you if you if you just abandon everything else because you have this idea in science that you want to pursue and you abandon everything else you'll be totally out of balance in your life and if you hit some frustrating item and what you're researching, it'll be crushing because the main thing you're working on focused on stop working when really what you wanna be able to do is, like, oh I've got other stuff going on that's keeping me happy this thing didn't work out I just have to wipe the board clean and start fresh and that's not devastating to do because the rest of your life is good. You have to do that otherwise you just won't be healthy as a human being

W - okay and you have created something that you think might be an intermediate between being in total isolation and being hooked up to the community that lives within it's it the standard institutional structures

L - right that's right I mean I have I came to this idea when I was wandering from friend's house to friend's house after getting my PhD I would basically go hang out with a friend I haven't seen in a while and if it had extra space I'd spend time in their house while I worked on theoretical physics and enjoyed the local environment and I thought was great to be able to do this cuz you're not worried about you know having a roof over your head, you have company to interact with and you have a good environment to play in. I wanted to have a network of such places but I had a hard time getting friends to give me other houses to use for this so I ended up getting the resources together to buy a house in Maui and and to start bringing friends and visiting scientists in. And I've called this the [[Pacific Science Institute]] and currently it's basically my house with delusions of grandeur because what I also have is is a beautiful piece of property that's 15 acres that I bought 10 years ago because I like doing things slowly mm-hmm so I've been growing the community of the Pacific Science Institute by having friends come in and and stay at my house including you, my arch-nemesis

W - I had a great time despite the obvious antagonism...

L - and and for you specifically I tried to kill you in several different ways and shark-infested water yeah sure it's great (W - And rought corals) but but yeah basically I've scientists visit and take people out to have fun around the island and really enjoy a good environment where they're free to explore ideas that might be a little bit on the dangerous side to work on while they're in the confines of academia and among their normal colleagues it's a it's a place where you can explore a little bit wilder ideas and I'm really excited to grow this community by by starting to design things to build on the 15 acres I've got that's really in a nice location. So I've been growing things slowly up here and I'm really looking forward to some more progress with it and and growing this community it's in its it's also been a nice balance against working on physics directly because it's it's guaranteed success I mean when you when you have a place in Maui for scientists to come hang out and have a good time that's that's going to happen and also keeps me entertained to have good people coming through

W - that's fantastic so yeah can you just I'm curious from your perspective how do you see the two of us as being divided in our approaches to the community I would definitely say that I I seem to be more connected to the sensibilities of the 'elite science community' I know that I can get their noses out of joint but I'm attracted them very carefully

L - yeah you had a lot fights with those guys (W - okay) yeah whereas I I didn't so my our academic lineages are quite different I mean I went I went to a smaller school I went to [[UC San Diego]] I didn't go to [[Harvard]] but my advisor they're in particle physics was [[Roger Dashen|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dashen]] but he he passed away well as a graduate student and I finished up my my dissertation under under [[Henry Abarbanel|https://www-physics.ucsd.edu/Directory/Person/1]] who also had a background in particle physics but it changed into [[non-linear dynamics]].

W - but in some sense you were a self advised PhD

L - yeah so I was very much self-directed. Henry gave me the freedom to go explore whatever the heck I wanted I had an extraordinary extraordinary amount of freedom as a graduate student and I hit this problem with spinors and that's what I wanted to tackle. I want figure out what they were geometrically and no one else was interested in that problem. But through academia I was a straight-a student you know I did really well I never had any big conflicts

W - was it easy for you?

L - yeah it was I spent a lot of the time surfing I was living on the beach in La Jolla is beautiful is the greatest time in my life okay you know people talk about you know a small you know being in a small pot big fish in a small pond and going to a bigger pond you feel humbled I never really had that experience that was it I was pretty pretty close to the top of my class and really happy about it how everything was going everything was great I got my PhD but there was no way I was going to get a job trying to understand the geometry of spinors when everybody else was doing string theory

W -so you had already accepted that you were unemployable

yeah that's totally unemployable but I invested in Apple stock in the 90s so I had a FU money so I said see you guys let me go surf in Maui and work on the stuff on my own whereas you had a very different experience so you were in Harvard in the math department but studying mathematical physics and as far as I know you were making some really unusual breakthroughs that were very ahead of their time but you weren't welcomed by the the head of the PETA they had people there and so you say you had a conflict from the get-go

W - well I had a very had a very serious dispute about something in mathematics which were called the self-dual equations [[self-dual yang-mills equations]] which were related to the regular [[yang-mills]] equations which are the equations of force in the standard model but the self-dual yang-mills equations were sort of a square root of those equations and they were very difficult to work with and to solve and I was very confused as to why people were investing in this particular form of these equations when it felt to me that we hadn't asked what constellation of equations these new equations belong to and I'd proposed again spinors as a means of changing the equations and was told that if I mean the exact quote was something like "if spinors had anything to do with the story Nigel who was (Nigel Hitchin) would have told us" like it was just completely (L - yeah) it was bananas and then I got into this issue that well you know spinors have to be quantized as fermions that is they have to be treated as if they were matter inside of quantum field theory but this was not like we weren't doing quantum field theory we were just doing classical geometry of a kind and so none of the arguments I put forward the set of equations which later got recognized and completely changed the field which came through ed Witten and this guy called [[Nati Seiberg|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Seiberg]] both of them now professors at 'the Institute' ([[The Institute for Advanced Study|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study]]) and there was just no room to question why everybody was struggling with these almost intractable equations and just you know getting great results but with so much effort and work so that was like a very weird story whereby you know I think that by 1994 the Harvard Department had woken up to the fact that it was not using the right equations and I'd been actually proposing several sets of different equations but that you know what when this all you know came about late late 80s early 90s there was just no way to to have a productive conversation about it

L - right so you found yourself at odds with the the people you were talking with and you decide to go into finance instead or how'd that happen

W - no I mean I I wanted I was trying to get back to physics and the I was proposing I'd propose three sets of equations

1) one of which had turned out to have been done by somebody else in some place that I didn't know anything about
2) one of which later gets done by Seiberg Witten and then
3) another set of equations that I wanted to connect to the actual standard model and the department was just very concerned that this didn't really have anything to do with actual physics, it was sort of a coincidence in their mind that something that was vaguely physics-y was having great topological results and so there was this you know this fear and I was sent to a guy named [[Sidney Coleman|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Coleman]] it was a great quantum theorists and he was much more encouraging than the Harvard math departments any

L - Sidney Coleman was a great guy

W - I mean an unbelievable human being I had two memories of him one of which was that he had all the time in the world for people who had no idea what they were doing and the other was that he didn't suffer fools gladly and then I realized that those are two contradictory images. I unearthed old footage of him he gave this brilliant lecture called [[quantum mechanics in your face|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtyNMlXN-sw]] ([[Transcript|https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/for-the-weekend-quantum-mechanics-in-your-face.html#comment-6a00e551f08003883401b8d2944173970c]]) to try to make the quantum have you ever seen this thing I've know it's a work of art you'd love it and it turns out both of these things were really true about him - that he he had if you were full of yourself and you were wrong he would just cut you up into little pieces but if you said "I don't quite understand this" he had all the time in the world to be the greatest of teachers

L - no I mean one of the marks of a good scientist is humility

W - y... No

L - No?

W - No, one of the marks of a good scientist is a dialectic between arrogance and humility if you don't have that's a more subtle and accurate way of putting it yeah well no I just I worry about us extolling the virtues of the humble the mean right the self-effacing and it's just like that's not where the magic happens yeah yeah but

L - you have to have had the arrogance to tackle hard problems right and made some progress but then been kicked back by something that didn't work right and after enough of that you develop some humility but stuff to maintain the arrogance to get anywhere

W - so how do you feel currently about about the community like the professional community you have to know that they regard you with very I mean well I know what's going on I mean there's I got a lot of contempt from strength theorists for getting attention - for putting forward a mathematical model of reality that wasn't strings. And it wasn't complete. It was it had is a model that was proposed that had problems with it and I was forthcoming with the problems in it but I was still saying yeah this is this seems like it's making progress towards the description of reality and has nothing to do with strings and that said alarm bells off all over the place it set off alarm bells for either it's a threat or this guy's a complete crackpot which is more likely and and I got criticisms from but for both

W - I don't think if I were to steel-man their perspective and again you know that I don't share it and I'm willing to fight them and I as I did when you first encountered when I called their immune system in a gentleman known as [[Jacques Distler|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Distler]]. I'm willing to stand up for what it is you're trying to do but I do think that we have to give them their due before we say what's wrong with their perspective. Their perspective is there are lots of constraints that one learns are very difficult to evade when you immerse yourself in standard [[quantum field theory|QFT]] like they know what it is that is demotivating them it's all the no-go theorems and the the intricacies and the reason they got crazy about string theory. First of all I'm convinced that it was a way of evading the real problems in physics that gave them something to do. It's like like wargames

L - it's an amazing creative piece

well yeah it gives you something to do to keep your chops up that is different from the thing you're supposed to be doing and what they were objecting to is to say "this guy doesn't understand all the things that have to go right in order to do have an improvement on the theory from our perspective. How dare he blithely saunter forth? if we ignored all the constraints on us, we could have fun proposing all sorts of things that also won't work. That was really the responsible version of their critique. Now the irresponsible version of their critique is "hey we have something that isn't working very well how dare he takes something that isn't working very well and get attention"

L - right

W - and maybe funding or maybe destroy the sense that there's only one game in town right and, you know, I was separately lobbying you and them for different things. I wanted you to just say the words like "I understand these are the constraints that will have to be satisfied and I don't have answers and I don't know how difficult they'll be to find but I don't want to be demotivated from the get-go, so please don't immediately tell me all the [[no-go theorems|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-go_theorem]] because any successful theory willl probably have to have a period where it's flying in the face of no-go theorems" you know so that's what I wanted to hear from you right

L - I believe I said those things scattered over several interviews at the time

W - somewhat but I think that what they don't Intuit is that you understand how how significant the negative results are the no-go theorems, as they're called, are pretty profound.

L - right I mean there's a theorem called the [[Coleman-Mandula|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman–Mandula_theorem]] theorem that prohibits the unification of gravity with the other forces I just blew right through that because it didn't seem to apply in what I was doing

W - well I mean really it prohibits naive unification of matter and force and there's a way of evading it using this thing called [[supersymmetry|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry]] and supersymmetry is this very weird thing that doesn't have that much mathematical beauty behind it, so the mathematicians know about it they study it a little bit but they're not bananas over

L - yeah I'm not either

W - the natural world doesn't seem to use it in the expected way but it does so much for theoretical physics that, despite the fact that math is just kind of ho-hum on it, and that the natural world doesn't seem to be using it, it doesn't stop the theoretical physics community from embracing that because it evades this dreaded no go

L - it stopped me from from embracing it I never embraced supersymmetry I never I never liked it

W - but you didn't evade the problem with it either

1:38 =

L - I mean it got around it

W - you think you really got around it?

L - the Coleman-Mandula thing? yeah, it requires as one of its axioms that you have to have you know certain it talks about properties of the scattering of particles and you have to have a spacetime of which the scattering occurs and in the theory I put forward the space-time comes out after the symmetry breaking between gravity and forces, so it's only after the symmetry breaking happens when the unification is no longer there...

W - yeah I'm sure...

L - ...that you have a space-time and then, in that context, the theorem applies but before the breaking, it doesn't

but my guess is that - I could be wrong about this because I haven't studied exactly what you're talking about - that what's gonna happen is that even with how you claim this arises in your theory they're gonna say in whatever approximation is going to be applied to relatively flat space times close to Minkowski space (L - yeah) that if you've really evaded it in some super-meaningful way you should be able to tell us some theorems about good old quantum field theory and relatively flat space-time

L - right, well I mean it evades it by not satisfying the axioms of the theorem

W - do you know what I'm trying to get at?

L - it's not evading it in some fantastic way

W - you should be able to tell us something really new if you've if your underlying theory (L - mmm...) truly unifies force and matter (L - right...) it would be the case that the approximation of it that is found in ordinary regions that look close to flat, where quantity usual rules of quantum field theory apply it should be telling us something wildly new about that. Can you tell us a new theorem about how it would appeared to unify force and matter in a region that looks close to classical quantum field theory to the standard quarter

L - well, I mean, once the theories advanced to the stage where you can get that description (W - yeah) then now it happened but in the initial stages all you can see for certain is that it's not violating the theorem

W - I don't know enough about all right how

L - we can talk about it after this ok

W - so those were my I had these wishes for you, and then I had a the wishes for the community, which is that they would stop being pricks about the whole thing and that they would say "look, we can't keep telling everybody who's not a string theorist, that their theory is dead on arrival and keep saying well we know that our theory doesn't appear to be living in four dimensions and appears to have a bunch of stuff that we don't want and not necessary all the stuff that we do want and maybe there's a huge landscape of different theories that would..."

L - yeah at this point I don't think string theories living at all, I think it's an ex-Theory. I think it's [[pining for the fjords|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciwwsvNcc]]. I've seen nothing but decline since I left this train wreck in progress.

W - well this is the problem - is it refuses to take stock of itself and it took a lot more minds than one

L - I think that's happening yeah it's certainly the graduate students who are coming up are seeing what's going on with string theory and they're taking stock of the field and they're going in other directions

W - so where where do we go next like (L - well...) is there any way, I mean I actually view it as highly demotivating then in essence every new theory is dead on arrival because of the number of things... I mean can we agree that physics has gotten incredibly difficult

L - it has. It's difficult by virtue of being so successful I mean that this that

W - you can smell that we're almost at the end, at least of this chapter, and we've exhausted everything that we know that has worked previously which is like to vary the assumptions a little bit on everything and that's been spectacularly successful and now it doesn't work anymore and it hasn't worked for almost 50 years

L - Right it's incredibly frustrating. I think that's why most people are wise to stay the hell away from it and I think a lot of the smarter minds are going into [[machine learning]] or even [[biophysics]] or just into other fields or even [[condensed matter]]

W - how do you feel about that?

L - um I feel like I'm out in an island in the middle of the Pacific watching it all unfold from afar while I work on the puzzle myself my own different way

W - you're having fun

L - yeah that's that's my prime directive, is to have fun

W - is having fun. And do you think that inducing other people to do this is kind of like maybe the big programs fall apart and we start just becoming individuals trying crazy strategies that probably won't work?

L - yeah I mean there there are undergraduate textbooks and undergraduate courses on string theory (L - yeah) okay and people from undergraduates there's and and there's this culture of arrogance saying string theory is the pinnacle of physics (W - right ) and people are coming up to that and they're becoming and if you're really working on fundamental physics and and the the whole area of string theory has gotten so large in the amount of research done (W - sure) that it just takes an enormous amount of intellectual effort to consume it and to get up to speed to what the current status is of the field and by the time you're there you're so invested then of course what you want to do is go and continue a postdoc in string theory when you graduate. And they're there hundreds of students who are coming up this way and when they get there they go to [[HEP-Th|https://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th]] (of [[arxiv|https://arxiv.org]]) like I did this morning you look at...

W - HEP-TH being the high-energy physics theory section where of this thing called the 'archive' (NOTE: which is written [[arxiv|[arxiv|https://arxiv.org]])where all the new papers are found every day

L - yeah and and and the this high-energy physics archive also has a postdoc and job posting board and just just for giggles I wouldn't say okay how many opportunities does the rising string theorist have now and I went and looked and there are all these subfields of physics the condensed matter is a big party because it's so incredibly vibrant and (W - right) and productive right now and you go into high-energy theory and okay there are 30 positions open in North America (W - okay) all right and some of them are open to string theorists, ok, but out of those 30 positions how many of them actually actively want a string theorist and are looking for a string theorist? there's one! One, Eric. So you've got these hundreds of people groomed up saying drink there is the pinnacle of what you can be studying and there's nowhere for them to go well but the field is dying

W - well because it was a baby boomer phenomenon we treated it as if it was an intellectual phenomena but it was actually this weird generational phenomena that this took hold. You know this is a very weird feature of 1951 where [[Frank Wilczek|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wilczek]] and Ed Witten - two great physicists, born in the same year - Wilczek is effectively like the last guy to make the train for real physics

L - he's an amazing guy yeah

W - and then Witten born later that year probably more powerful than anyone else alive in terms of his mental abilities, hasn't had a trip to Stockholm because he hasn't been able to make contact with the physical world and almost certainly in any era that wasn't this one this guy would have been to Stockholm once or more

L - yeah and it's in my mind it's a cultural problem we're stuck in this culture of particle physics where we have everybody in the same community studying the same popular direction in full force as if there was lots of data coming in supporting that, and there's not. So what it is is they're going full-bore, full self-supporting force, along direction that in my mind just doesn't describe our universe and what we need is an exploratory phase with physicist students coming up and picking up stuff that they think is interesting and following that direction on their own - branching away from the main herd and by having more explorers going different directions you're more likely to find something good and I guess my hope is that you know some graduate student will listen through this incredibly long and detailed podcast and go look at stuff and say "well that's kind of interesting, maybe I want to learn more about that".

W - do you have any ideas or.. the Pacific Science Institute - is is there any way that our listeners can support it (L - yeah) are you are you a non-profit?

L - I'm a 501c3 nonprofit, I'd be very happy to take donations and put those donations to use supporting scientists (W - to diversify. okay...) and these aren't just it's not just supporting physicists. The idea is that, as you said, Science has supported our economy to incredible degree and I don't think scientists have been sufficiently personally rewarded for that. So basically what I want to do is you know give them a nice place to hang out and Maui, enjoy the environment, and work and think on whatever they want undirected while they do it

W - so it's a place to fight groupthink, effectively, with the field

L - while still having community support well solving community support. The problem is I've very limited resource right now I'm basically running this out of my house right I have a big piece of land I have dreams for what I want build on you and

W - I've been there and it's it's incredibly generous that people can hang out and just actually fulfill the promise of dreaming about our world and trying things that they wouldn't feel comfortable trying under the watchful eyes of a departmental chairman is telling them what they need to do to get chair tenure or to win grants do you have any sense of what we should be directing people to do if they're in a position to change the culture of the field. I always want to think like we still have a few old great people that everybody looks up to and they refuse to say something really provocative like - here's the thing that I dream about: we get all of the negative results they're incredibly demotivating. Allow your young people to violate several of them without being string theorists and then insist that they try to pay that back once they've been exploring a theory that in a previous era would have been dead on arrival because somewhere we have to go backwards to go forwards. We have to question something that is rock-solid in all of our minds but isn't actually right. I mean yeah...

L - this is totally right and this sort of cultural inertia that's holding things back is... it's in biology, it's in computer science it's in it's in all fields of science. So I would say just - I mean it's almost the best thing to do just to find people who are really freaking smart and want to work on stuff on their own give them money and support and let them do it

W - I'm on record as saying that we have too much oversight too much transparency and too much accountability it's strangling us

L - yeah it's absolutely true that's absolute true

W - well Garrett I really appreciate you sitting down. It's a hell of an experiment to just even try to have conversations about, you know, what might be the path towards final theories of everything

L - and I'm actually really worried that we hurt most of your listeners

W - well but I do that if we use this at all I'll try to say something at the beginning of the program to try to say what it is that people are listening to so they'll have an idea they're not just gonna stumble in on a podcast and hear people talking about bosons, fermions, E8, quantization and have no idea what's going on. The fact is very few people are invested in this like this but this is the fabric of reality ultimately in a question but how we go about trying to probe whatever's next

L - yeah I think it's amazing I think it's the most significant and intricate and difficult puzzle there is right now for anybody to tackle and to immerse themselves in and I also think it's potentially incredibly rewarding but it's also where the hardest things you can is

W - yeah probably the hardest thing has never been harder yeah

L - that's almost as far as learning to surf

W - okay, well, you've been through the portal with Garrett Lisi here from the island of Maui my arch-nemesis you're welcome to come back anytime and if you're interested in the Pacific Science Institute - its Garrett's attempt to try to figure out how to move science outside of the direct institutional control - you can find him on [[Instagram I think is Garrett Lisi|https://www.instagram.com/garrett.lisi/?hl=en]] and on [[Twitter as Garrett Lisi|https://twitter.com/garrettlisi?lang=en]].

L - Not hard to find

W - all right thanks for joining us

L - thank you Eric

Ep16

2020-02-14T15:21:23Z

Jmank88: Changed redirect target from 17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique” to 16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized

#REDIRECT [[16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized]]

Ep16

2020-02-14T15:20:43Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”

#REDIRECT [[17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”]]

16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized

2020-02-14T15:20:10Z

Jmank88:

In this episode, Eric sits down with Tyler Cowen to discuss how/why a Harvard educated chess prodigy would choose a commuter school to launch a stealth attack on the self-satisfied economic establishment, various forms of existential risk, tech/social stagnation and more. On first glance, Tyler Cowen is an unlikely candidate for America's most influential economist. Since 2003, Cowen has grown his widely read and revered economics blog Marginal Revolution with lively thought, insight and prose resulting in a successful war of attrition against traditional thinking. In fact, his well of heterodox thinking is so deep that there is an argument to be made that Tyler may be the living person with the most diverse set of original rigorous opinions to be found in any conversation. The conversation takes many turns and is thus hard to categorize. We hope you enjoy it.

[[ep15 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/1fd40423-883e-4a63-9822-9e6620105e3b Listen to Episode 16] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP27fJ6Trbg Watch Episode 16] [[ep17 | Next Episode]]

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== Transcript ==

''Incomplete/WIP.''

'''Eric:''' Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with one of my favorite conversationalists, Tyler Cowen, who's here from George Mason University where he's a professor of economics. Tyler, welcome to The Portal.

'''Tyler:''' Thank you Eric.

'''Eric:''' When we were talking about what topics we could begin with, I didn't want to begin with economics, and you suggested “the Apocalypse” is a great place to start. The great benefit of this is that if we get past it, the rest of the conversation will be post-apocalyptic.

'''Tyler:''' The Apocalypse itself is economics of course, but I was just thinking that virtually any good theory of politics needs some notion of the Apocalypse. Let’s say you thought the time horizon for the universe or a human civilization were potentially infinite. You would then be so concerned with minimizing existential risk, that nothing would get done. Whereas if you think “well, you know mankind has another 800 years left on earth on average and by that time probably will have blown ourselves up or an asteroid will come”, then you think “what glorious things can we do with those 800 years”, and it's quite a difference in perspective. So an infinite time horizon might actually choke off rational thought about political decision-making.

'''Eric:''' So is there any possibility for keeping the apocalypse exactly 800 years away, like a donkey with a carrot dangled in front of it at a fixed distance?

'''Tyler:''' That would be the Straussian view; that you always think it's 800 years away. But think of it as like a problem from finance: you're writing a naked put on a security. Well, it's going to bankrupt you at some point, but any given month, any given day, the chance of that happening is probably quite small. So the Apocalypse may be like the proverbial naked put. It's out there, the chance is very small, the optimists always sound like they're right – in the sense they are right as Steven Pinker would claim – but at the end of the day, if the clock ticks for long enough, it’s boom and bye. But in the meantime let's do something grand and glorious.

'''Eric:''' Now Tyler, you have a sort of a portfolio of different ways of communicating with the world. Have you ever dragged Steven Pinker onto a podcast – which you do under “Conversations with Tyler” – or have you discussed his bizarre notion of optimism, on your famous economics blog “Marginal Revolution” which you do with your colleague Alex?

'''Tyler:''' My podcast “Conversations with Tyler” has an episode with Steven Pinker, and I sat him down in a chair the way you did with me and I said: “Steven, the cost of destroying the world by pressing a button is falling all of the time, every year. At some point it will only cost, say, twenty thousand dollars to take out a major city. How long do you think the world is actually going to last, given that the demand curve slopes downwards – when prices fall, people do more of things, destructive weaponry is becoming cheaper – how can you be optimistic?”, I asked him. No good answer. I would say evasion. He said “well, my theory is not predictive, it's just a way of thinking about it [and so on].

'''Eric:''' So, it instantly falls apart.

'''Tyler:''' It falls apart. I don't know if it falls apart instantly, because weaponry has spread more slowly than we might have thought. So you read nuclear theorists in the 50s and 60s, they think a third world war might be coming quite soon… they were wrong. You read worries about proliferation from the 80s and 90s, they sound horrible. I wouldn't say it's been great. North Korea, no one's happy about that. But at the same time the weapons have not been used, so there's something fundamental about the models we don't understand. You can ask the question: why didn't Al-Qaeda hire a bunch of stooges to go into a Tyson's Corner shopping mall with submachine guns and just cause some terror? That didn't happen, so the logic of choice of wielding destructive power is one of the issues in social science we understand least well, I would say. And there is perhaps some hope of salvation. So I'm not sure Pinker falls apart instantly, but I didn't feel Pinker defended Pinker very well. And on my blog Marginal Revolution I did review his book, and my worry is that there's an observational equivalence with how you look at the data. So you could say “well, deaths in wars have been going down, will continue to fall” – that's possibly true. But another model is: the more destructive the weapons are, the less frequent the wars. Things will seem great for quite a while, but the next war when it comes will be quite a doozy.

'''Eric:''' So in some sense this is the Great Moderation, which last time was about market volatility, and here it's about the volatility of human violence.

'''Tyler:''' Great Moderations ''maybe'' contain the seeds of their own destruction. Again, I would want to be cautious there, because we don't understand destructive decisions very well. Like why did Hitler invade Russia? We know a lot about it in the documented sense, but I don't feel it's understood very well.

'''Eric:''' Agreed. And I agree that we don't know why so few reservoirs have been poisoned with relatively low-tech options. The Las Vegas shooting for example showed what a small level of innovation in mass killing can do to really amp the body count, if that's what somebody is trying to optimize. I think that there is a huge mystery, but I don't think that Pinker – from what I understand of his basis for optimism – is really getting at that. People who listen to this podcast and have heard me elsewhere, have heard me complain that it's as if he's neglecting a potential energy term, but for violence. And so, the realized violence as you were pointing out has gone down – but the potential for violence is enormous, and as the cost falls, the access to violence of this particular nature seems to put it within reach of far too many hands.

'''Tyler:''' One of our saving graces could be that the contagion effects for methods of violence seem pretty strong. We're in a time where in the U.S. shooting up schools is the thing to do. It happens more often by some metrics than it used to. In the 1970's being a serial killer was somehow like the thing to do. So if you're inspired by what people have done just before you, and you're not very innovative, it could be that violence and lack of innovation are somehow correlated, and contagion effects mean you'll kill a terrible number of innocent people, but it still will quite limit how much damage you do to the world as a whole.

'''Eric:''' Well, in terms of R&D; thinking about terror innovation is quite interesting. It seems to me that it's hard to remember that there is no known linkage between suicide bombing and Islam before the the Beirut barracks bombing, if I'm not mistaken.

'''Tyler:''' It came from Sri Lanka, in the approximate sense the idea, from the Tamil Tigers. They're not the only ones who've done it, but…

'''Eric:''' Didn't they really perfect it after the Beirut barracks bombing, and then it sort of came back to the Middle East, do I have that wrong?

'''Tyler:''' I'm not sure on the timing.

'''Eric:''' But there are very few groups that have been using suicide bombing in the modern era.

'''Tyler:''' Yes.

'''Eric:''' Maybe the Kurds, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and various muslim violent movements; jihadi movements.

'''Tyler:''' The striking thing about 9/11 is how innovative it was. That's what really ought to scare us, but it does seem also such innovations are pretty scarce.

'''Eric:''' Well, in some sense Afghanistan was like an R&D lab for Al-Qaeda, and one of the things I believe I remember was that there was a taped conversation within Al-Qaeda that had leaked, in which various groups were trying to decide whether this was the greatest thing they'd ever done, or whether it was a terrible move because it was gonna cause them the loss of their R&D lab.

'''Tyler:''' You know, Karlheinz Stockhausen – the German composer – he said, well, it was such a wonderful work of art, and obviously he got pilloried for that comment. I'm not sure what he meant by it. It's a terrible thing to say. I wouldn't say it. But it's still getting at some aspect of 9/11 that was quite different, that it was an attempt to innovate.

17: Anna Khachiyan - Reconstructing The Mystical Feminine From The Ashes Of “The Feminine Mystique”

2020-02-14T15:18:27Z

Jmank88:

Somewhere on the road between Stalingrad and Forever21, something essential got misplaced amidst the bathos. Eric works through a bottle of Red wine on air with social, literary and artistic theorist Anna Khachiyan (co-host of the explosive and popular Red Scare podcast) to find out what is brewing on the anti-woke Left among the intellectual daughters of Camille Paglia. Anna takes us through her project of the reconstructed feminine combining irreverent intellectual dominance with a return to valuing motherhood informed by her claims on Soviet & American heritage. The intellectual foundation of the intersectional “oppression Olympics” and reparations discussion is further dissected amidst the twin specters of the Armenian & Jewish genocides which mysteriously appear not to register at all with today’s progressives.

No puppies were eaten during this podcast, but an ambient trigger warning is otherwise in order for those with exquisite sensitivities. Caveat emptor and welcome to the Grand Finale of the inaugural year of “The Portal.”

[[ep16 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/bca03ae9-f954-4937-9bc0-ac5b0c911a33 Listen to Episode 17] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8NGrWs3mc Watch Episode 17] [[ep18 | Next Episode]]

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Ep18

2020-02-14T15:07:40Z

Jmank88: Redirected page to 18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020

#REDIRECT [[18: Slipping the DISC: State of The Portal & Chapter 2020]]

19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC

2020-02-14T14:59:48Z

Jmank88:

All of our Mice are Broken. On this episode of The Portal, Bret and Eric sit down alone with each other for the first time in public. There was no plan.

There was however, a remarkable story of science at its both best and worst that had not been told in years. After an initial tussle, we dusted off the cobwebs and decided to reconstruct it raw and share it with you, our Portal audience, for the first time. I don't think it will be the last as we are now again looking for our old notes to tighten it up for the next telling. We hope you find it interesting, and that it inspires you younger and less established scientists to tell your stories using this new medium of long form podcasting. We hope the next place you hear this story will be in a biology department seminar room in perhaps Cambridge, Chicago, Princeton, the Bay Area or elsewhere. Until then, be well and have a listen to this initial and raw version.

[[ep18 | Previous Episode]] [https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/7591b76e-f107-4cba-beff-f5ec3f5da2f2 Listen to Episode 19] [[ep20 | Next Episode]]

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== Participants ==

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Weinstein Eric Weinstein]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein Bret Weinstein]