1: Peter Thiel: Difference between revisions

'''[[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:''' 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.

'''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.

'''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:''' 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:''' 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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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?

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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.

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

'''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.".

'''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.

'''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.

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

'''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.

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

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

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

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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.

'''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.

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

'''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-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' There is.

'''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-

[break]

'''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:''' 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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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:''' 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.

'''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:''' Firearms.

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

'''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.  

'''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.

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

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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.

'''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:''' 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-

'''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?

'''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.

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

'''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.