Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== 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.