Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== 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.