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.

'''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:''' 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:''' 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-

[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?

'''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.