Russell Berman:
My name is Russel Berman, I’m the faculty at Stanford. I’ve been asked to introduce Peter, it’s a privilege to introduce Peter Thiel. A privilege, but also a considerable challenge to introduce someone as well known as Peter, a leading entrepreneur with a high public and political profile. He’s surely familiar to very many of you. PayPal, Palantir, Facebook, Founder’s Fund. Suffice to say that Peter Thiel is one of the leaders of the private sector in the United States today. In another era, one might have said a captain of industry, I wish the academic world would have more dialogue with the private sector.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, he moved with his family to Ohio, then to South Africa, and then Southwest Africa and then to California. He graduated valedictorian near here from San Mateo High School in 1985 and proceeded to Stanford where he majored in philosophy. That was the era of the controversy over the western culture curriculum, in response to which Peter co-founded the conservative student newspaper, the Stanford Review, which still thrives. And you heard from the current editor Mimi St. John. Mimi St. John. I’m proud to say an advisee of mine has…
I’d be remiss also in omitting another aspect of Peter’s Stanford trajectory, his encounters with the late Rene Gerard, then a member of the departments of French and comparative literature and Gerard’s accounts of religion, competition and scapegoating in my point of view, a big piece of what goes on in cancel culture events has to do with that logic of scapegoating. Add to Peter’s profile his attending school of law where he received his degree in 1992 before launching his storied career in technology, entrepreneurship, politics, and the public sphere.
Let me end with a quotation that would frame Peter’s work from a student. I’ve been fortunate to be able to teach several seminars with Peter where we’ve had to limit enrollment and ask for students to apply for admission. Here’s what one student wrote:
“I can’t wait for the opportunity to interact with and learn from Peter Thiel. I admire Mr. Thiel for helping found the modern financial payment system with PayPal and for supporting and inspiring hundreds of entrepreneurs through the Founder’s Fund and the Thiel Scholarship. As someone interested in deep tech, Palantir has always fascinated me for its use of AI techniques on massive amounts of data. I admire Mr. Thiel’s integrity to stand by his ideas and believe that this course will add unparalleled breadth to my Stanford education.”
That’s what the student said and I’m sure that Peter will not disappoint us in his comments today. Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel:
Russell, thank you so much. It’s always hard to live up to such a flattering introduction. I’m going to try to cover a lot of different, somewhat disjointed ideas today and then try to make it interactive and make it as much of a conversation as possible. But maybe a question I always like to start and frame is, what is the antonym of diversity? The placeholder answer I would give for an antonym for diversity, the antonym of diversity, is university. And in some ways what I gather we’re trying to come to terms with are all these ways that the university as a place where we search for truth, where there’s a certain amount of freedom, civility, a certain canon, is being threatened by the amorphous thing that somehow the anti-university, that is the postmodern multiversity, that is maybe somehow in some parts nihilistic and some parts relativistic and some parts totalitarian. And it probably would take more time than I have to unpack all of those paradoxes.
And then of course, it’s the problem of the university in the larger context of the questions of classical liberalism, which seems to have be failing and in trouble in a lot of different ways, and that we should also think about. I’ve been involved in these campus wars, culture wars debates for something like 35 years. We started the Stanford, and I’ll just recount one story from 35 or so years ago, around the time we started the Stanford Review in 1987. The live issue was the debate about Western Culture, the freshman core curriculum program. And it was going to be sort of phased out. The ’88-’89 school year was the first year where the first of the new experimental culture ideas and valleys. It was the first program to replace Western Culture. It’s framed as multicultural. And I thought we should do an expose on the first class.
And it was a tendentious Marxist professor. It was not really about non-Western cultures, it was all sort of these various anti-Western writers, of one sort of another. And so I went to the Stanford bookstore and just started reading through the books to, and of course I was sort of man with a hammer, tries to find a nail everywhere and was just trying to find the most tendentious things that were, you know. And they all were on different dimensions, but then I finally stumbled on one book that was just the perfect book that encapsulated everything that was preposterous about it, it was I, Rigoberta Menchu.
And it was a set of interviews with the Guatemalan peasant Indian woman who had been oppressed in every vector of oppression. It was like a perfect pastiche. She was oppressed as poor and as there was a racial war and there was a war and she was an orphan and on and on down the line. And then you have these chapters, Rigoberta renounces marriage and motherhood. Rigoberta makes plans for the May Day parade. So it has sort of a somewhat communist undercurrent.
And as so many of these debates, the Western culture debate was somehow very important, was on one level about this freshman course at one elite university, Stanford. But then in some sense it was a debate about our whole culture. And so it kicked up all these bigger things. And as a 20-year-old senior, I managed to convince the editors of the Wall Street Journal to reprint some of these excerpts and did a long, long excerpt on this Europe and the America’s class.
When Dinesh D’Souza wrote his book on Illiberal Education in 1991, the Stanford chapter was entitled Travels With Rigoberta. So this was sort of got this iconic framing. And then fast-forward to the fall of 1992, I’m clerking for a judge in Atlanta. I’m driving to the office in the morning, have the radio on and well there’s a new, someone’s been selected for the Nobel Peace Prize. No one’s ever heard of this woman. It’s Rigoberta Menchu.
And there’s always this legal concept of the difference between proximate causation, which is like I punch you or something versus, but for causation. I was not the proximate cause of her getting the Nobel Peace Prize, but I was a but for cause, but for me she would not have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize. And sort of the scales fell off my eyes at that point and I realized, I thought that I was fighting in some sort of cosmic struggle and the forces of good and evil. And actually I was just like, what I really had been doing was I was some two bit actor in a left-wing psychodrama where I completed her victimization. The one group she had not been victimized by were white Republican conservatives in the United States. I completed her victimization and guaranteed her Nobel Peace Prize.
There’s a whole postmortem to the story where it’s apparently much of the book was too good to be true. It was sort of semi-fictionalized. There was an attempt to get the Nobel Prize rescinded, but they can never revisit these things. And so it’s still quite disputed. But I think so many of these debates have this kind of quality. There’s a way that you know you can, it’s shooting fish in a barrel. The arguments are super powerful on our side. It is like screaming into a hurricane. It often does not matter. And there sort of is always this worry that we are somehow, those of us who are conservative, libertarian, classical liberals, are just somehow fighting the long defeat. And that is, that’s sort of the vibe of what’s going on and the challenge with the classical liberalism broadly.
And so rather than go through a whole set of these sort of semi-pornographic stories, which I could entertain you with the whole morning long, I wanted to try a somewhat different approach. And I think it’s always important not to straw man our opponents, not to take the most ridiculous version of it and make fun of it. We should always try to steel man people, to try to understand the arguments as best as they’re possible. I wanted to, it’s a little bit complicated, but what I want to do is I want to give you the best argument, against the best argument, against the best argument, against the best argument, against classical liberalism, against the classical universities. And so four steel man arguments, and if you counted it, there are four. So if you do a double negative is a positive, a quadruple negative, still positive. So the four best arguments add up to a sort of argument for classical liberalism. But we’re going to let me, and this is the way I’ve come to think of what the real nerve of so many of these debates is and how we should think about it.
Let me start by framing. If you talked during the western culture debates in the 1980s at Stanford, if you talked to the university president Donald Kennedy or the senior leadership at Stanford, alumni went to complain. And there were always some radical, crazy people who said crazy things, but the standard answer was something that was sort of technocratic. Shakespeare doesn’t matter, the humanities aren’t that important, we have the sciences, we’re making enormous progress in the sciences. We’re building a particle accelerator, slack, et cetera, et cetera. We have, you have all the cutting edge scientific research and that fundamentally is what the university’s about. That’s what shows it’s on track, that shows what it is valuable. And there is some way that we have to always ask this question about the sciences and the technologies, how they are doing. And the version of the question that I have come to ask over the last 15 years, about is the universal question is about the progress of all these things.
How fast are science and technology as a whole progressing? Is the sort of propaganda, the STEM propaganda, accurate? That we have just sort of expiating progress, runaway progress, things are getting sort of, it’s just dizzying how fast things are improving, or is it perhaps quite the opposite? And so if one could show that the science and technology areas are actually pretty weak, that the so-called crown jewels of STEM are not actually delivering the goods, this strikes me as a decisive, crushing blow. Like yeah, humanities we all know are ridiculous, STEM, but if STEM is ridiculous, there is just nothing left at all.
And this is the idea that I’ve explored in sort of a variety of formats over the last 15 years, there’s sort of a , it’s very, let me say it is very hard to evaluate this stuff in general because one of the other problems of the postmodern university is that it’s extremely compartmentalized. It’s extremely specialized, and you’re supposed to only be able to comment on these things after half a lifetime of study. And so we have ever narrower sets of guardians guarding themselves to use the sort of corrupt Platonic metaphor.
So you have the string theory people telling us how wonderful string theory people are, and how everybody else just has bad math genes and can’t talk about it. We have the cancer researchers promising us that they will cure cancer in five years, which they’ve been doing for the last 50. We have on and on, in all these sort of hyper-specialized areas. And then the question is how much progress is actually happening? The sort of indirect intuitions I have on where it seems very, very slowed are things like if you look at things like the economy, the standards of living among younger people, the younger generation doesn’t seem to be doing better than their parents.
This is very odd in a sort of context of massive generalized progress. There is, there’s sort of a question, how big are the breakthroughs that are really, really happening? There’s the definition of technology. We say technology is the thing that is changing and in let’s say the 1960s technology meant computers but also rockets and supersonic aviation and the green revolution, agriculture and underwater cities and new medicines. It was like a lot of things. And when we use technology today, it just means information technology. And I think that’s kind of a tell that we have a narrow cone of progress around the world of bits, computers, internet, mobile internet. It’s generated some great companies but it’s not quite been enough to take our civilization to the next level. We had a tagline on my venture capital site. “They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.”
Not an anti Twitter argument, not an argument against Twitter as a company. It can work as a company, it can work with 8,000 people. I think it’s going to be about half after Elon’s done today, but even those 4,000 people can just still go to the office and smoke pot all day and earn decent paychecks. So it works on that level. It doesn’t quite work on the level of taking our civilization to the next level.
When I was, I think that these things were not that obvious in the past. When I was at Stanford in 89, in retrospect, the only subject matter you were supposed to study was computer science. That’s what really worked. It wasn’t even an engineering field, it was sort of, I always think whenever people say science, I’m in favor of science but not “science” in quotes. And when people use science, it’s a tell that something isn’t a science. Like political science or climate science and computer science, is sort of like that. It’s for the people who are not very good at electrical engineering and they sort of flunked out into computer science even though that turned out to be the one thing that worked.
All the engineering fields did not work. I think electrical engineering sort of worked for maybe another decade after, I was a class of 89, certainly mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, like my dad did. All of these were terrible things. We lived in a world where there was nothing you could do in the world of atoms. By the eighties it was already clear you should not go into nuclear engineering, AeroAstro engineering, and we are just not allowed to do stuff in the world of atoms. It is massively, massively slowed. And I think this is one kind of a framing I would give that we’ve had this incredible stagnation for the last 50 years and then we have unbelievable amounts of propaganda that this is not true.
And that I’ll do one other sort of thought experiment on why the question of technological progress, however hard it might be, can’t be avoided because, and let’s do one more as a thought experiment. If you want to solve our macroeconomic problems in the United States, you could solve every problem in our society if you got to 4% GDP growth. You’d grow your way out of the deficits, you’d have enough growth for everybody to do better. And how do you get to 4% GDP growth? Well, you could do something like, one version would be you could change, get rid of all the environmental rules, all the immigration rules. You could get rid of all these rules where you would never get elected, and you can probably have too much cancerous growth, but there’s certain ways you could do it politically, completely and feasible.
And the other way I’ll sort of do this as a thought experiment would be you appoint a commission on accelerating technological change and it would try to measure how fast the technological change has been happening. And you’d have some crazy techno utopian person, probably from Silicon Valley, you put them on the commission and they would come back with a result that, yeah, it looked like we had 2% growth and 2% inflation. But really we have 4% growth and 0% inflation because the qualitative technological improvements are greater than they look. And if you could just lie about technological progress, you could save trillions and trillions of dollars.
I don’t go into all the details. This is basically what happened under the Clinton administration, the 1990s with the Bostrom Commission. They sort of lied about all these hedonic adjustments and that was a key thing to balancing the budget. As a libertarian, I’m actually quite sympathetic to this because I want the welfare state to be dialed back. And so if you exaggerate technological progress, this is the way to do it. As an intellectual, I don’t like lying, and I think we should try to figure out, we should try to figure out the truth of these things. And probably if we say that the flatness of the new iPhone is such a large hedonic adjustment that grandma should be happy to eat cat food, there’s probably something about that that’s wrong.
And these sorts of questions cannot be avoided. So the question of generalized technological progress cannot be avoided, go into a lot more detail, but it has for a whole set of reasons slowed down. So that’s the basic counter argument is don’t look at the humanities, look at the sciences, they’re great. The counter counter argument they may be as defective or more so than the humanities. Humanities we can sort of evaluate. You can evaluate Rigoberta Menchu, you can’t evaluate string theory. And so it’s sort of, I don’t know, government analogies. It’s like do you think the DMV or the CIA are better run? And it’s obviously the DMV is better run since people can see what they’re doing. And that’s probably the political intuition we should have about the sciences versus the humanities. The polemical version of it that I had once was that I think that it’s better for undergraduates to major in the humanities rather than the sciences.
Let’s set computer sciences aside as the one thing that sort of works. But everything else because in the humanities you at least know you’re not going to get a job, you’ll be unemployable. Whereas in the sciences you have people who are so deluded as to believe they’ll be taken care of by the natural goodness of the universe. And it is just Malthusian competition nature bear it red and tooth and claw, it’s 10 grad students in the chemistry lab fighting each other for bunsen burners and beakers. And if one person says one wrong word, they get thrown off the overcrowded bus and it’s a relief and it’s sort of cycle and repeat.
Now the question people always ask me is why? Why did this stagnation, why did the shift happen in the seventies? And I normally try to just avoid the question, say I don’t like answering why questions. They’re overdetermined and there’s sort of a lot of different kinds of things one can point to. Everything from extra government regulation to some of the low hanging fruit was picked, it’s gotten harder to find new things. That’s sort of the Tyler Cowen argument, sort of strange ways. The culture has changed. The younger people have anxiety attacks and don’t want to do anything anymore, and they’re sort of hiding in their basements, which is probably maybe not that compatible with rapid technological progress.
But if I had to give a single again steel man idea, the best argument for why this has been so slowed for the last 50 years and that I think we have to somehow engage with and take more seriously, is that there is something about science and technology that has taken a very dystopian, very destructive turn in the 20th century. And it is not, we’re not in the 18th century, 19th century, rationalist enlightenment age where it seems to be simply making everything better in every way all the time.
Already the two world wars certainly, certainly the nuclear weapons on some level suggested that the sort of, I don’t know, the rhetoric of Rousseau or Voltaire about the natural goodness of man was starting to run a little bit thin by the fifties and sixties. And the kind of history I would tell it’s not perfect, but of the last 70, 75 years is this gradually seeped into society. It sort of manifested in different ways. You have a crazy person like Charles Manson. What did he see when he was overdosing on LSD? He saw that there was going to be a thermonuclear war and then he decided to become some sort of anti-hero from Dostoevsky and start killing people because everything was permitted in this world that was headed towards the apocalypse. And there was something like this that seeped in and this was what gave the environmental movement so much force in the seventies.
It’s like we have to just slow this down, we have to put some brakes on. And it is just the way in which so many of these technologies have this dual use component. I always like to argue rhetorically in favor of more nuclear power plants. I feel that’s like arguing for the gold standard. It’s so far outside the Overton window. And I think the history is that it’s hard to avoid the dual use nature of these technologies. And the turning point with nuclear power was not Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, it was 1975 when India got the bomb. We had transferred the nuclear technology to India. We believed that it was not dual usable. There was a certain way it could be used for only peaceful nuclear power. It easily got weaponized. They got a nuclear bomb. We can’t give nuclear power plants to everybody in the world because everybody will have nuclear bombs and that’s sort of profoundly unstable and will blow up the world.
And something like this dual, this dual nature of technology runs through so much of this stuff’s. There’s obviously an environmental version on the left that I would say is on some level more powerful than people on the right often like to admit. There is even the kinds of breakthroughs that we had in recent years, the mRNA vaccines, and again the polemical version I have is why can’t we have a ticker tape parade for the scientists who invented the mRNA vaccine? And well we don’t celebrate individuals, that’s too dangerous in the 21st century. So no longer have ticker tape parades for individuals. But I think the deeper reason is people are really uncomfortable with the mRNA vaccine because it is, it’s very adjacent. It’s one toggle switch away from this thing that was going on at the Wuhan lab called gain of function research, which we suspect is sort of an Orwellian word for a bio-weapons program.
And then this is, so it’s again, there are these things that could potentially be big breakthroughs. So many of them are adjacent to something that is quite dystopian. I used to love science fiction. It is, and I think it would be sort of an interesting survey course that one could do on trying to understand why it is all so drably dystopian at this point. I mean there’s still, maybe you can do the retro Star Trek stuff from the sixties, but anything that’s been published in the last 40 years, it just sort of shows this futuristic world where nothing works. And the question you have to ask, is this a deep law of nature? Is this a deep truth that if there is more progress, things will just break down? Or is it somehow a reflection of this very dystopian culture we’re in where we just can’t imagine anything getting better?
Now I think that this sort of dystopian limit of science and technology where it’s lost energy because you’re just sort of building the machines that will destroy the world, has even at this point seeped into the, has even seeped into the computer world where the futuristic technology on the computer side is AI, AGI, artificial general intelligence. I always hate the word because sort of this catchall word that can mean everything and therefore nothing.
But I was involved peripherally with some of these sort of east bay rationalist futuristic groups. There was one called the Singularity Institute in the 2000s. And the self understanding was building an AGI, it’s going to be the most important technology in the history of the world. We better make sure it’s friendly to human beings and we’re going to work on making sure that it’s friendly. And then the vibe sort of got a little bit stranger and I think it was around 2015 that I sort of realized that they didn’t seem to be working that hard on the AGI anymore. And they seemed to be more pessimistic at where it was going to go. And it was kind of, it sort of devolved into sort of a Burning Man, Burning Man camp that was sort of had gone from trans-humanist to Luddite in 15 years, and something has sort of gone wrong.
And it was finally confirmed to me by a post from MIRI, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the successor organization in April of this year. And this is again, these are the people who are, and this is sort of the cutting edge thought leaders of the people who were pushing AGI for the last 20 years. And it was fairly important in the whole Silicon Valley ecosystem title, MIRI announces new Death With Dignity strategy. And then the summary. “It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem.” I.e., how is AI aligned with humans. “Or even try very hard or even go out with much of a fight. Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with slightly more dignity.”
And then anyway it goes on to talk about why it’s only slightly more dignity because people are so pathetic and they’ve been so lame at dealing with this and of course you can, there’s probably a lot you can say that was somehow, this was somehow deeply in the logic of the whole AI program for decades that it was potentially going to be very dangerous. If you believe in Darwinism or Machiavellianism, there are no purely self-interested actors. And then if you get a superhuman AGI, you will never know that it’s aligned. So there was something, there was a very deep problem. People have had avoided it for 20 years or so at some point one day they wake up, and the best thing we can do is just hand out some Kool-Aid, Allah, people’s temple to everybody, or something like this.
And then I think lest we just dismiss this sort of thing as just the kind of thing that happens in a post COVID mental breakdown world. I found another article from Nick Bostrom who’s sort of a Oxford academic and most of these people are, I know there they’re somehow they’re interesting because they have nothing to say. They’re interesting because they’re just mouthpieces, it’s like the mouth of Sauron. It’s just sort of complete cogs in the machine. But they are, they’re useful because they tell us exactly where the zeitgeist is in some ways.
And this was from 2019, pre-COVID, the vulnerable world hypothesis. And that goes through a whole litany of these different ways where science and technology are creating all these dangers for the world and what do we do about them. And it’s the precautionary principle, whatever that means. But then he has a four part program for achieving stabilization. And I will just read off the four things you need to do to make our world less vulnerable and achieve stabilization in the sort of, we have this expiating technology where maybe it’s not progressing that quickly but still progressing quickly enough. There are a lot of dangerous corner cases.
You only need to do these four things to stabilize the world. Number one, restrict technological development. Number two, ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives. So that sounds like a somewhat incompatible with the DEI, at least in the ideas form of diversity. Number three, establish extremely effective preventive policing. And number four, establish effective global governance, since you can’t let, you know, even if there’s like one little island somewhere where this doesn’t apply, it’s no good.
And so it is basic and this is the zeitgeist on the other side. It is the precautionary principle. It is, we’re not going to make it for another century on this planet and therefore we need to have, we need to embrace a one world totalitarian state right now. And so third and fourth counter arguments, the third, okay, just to repeat. The first argument, first counter argument is science is great, it’s [inaudible 00:31:14] you don’t even pay attention to the humanities, counter argument, no, it’s not. Third main counter argument. Well science is too dangerous. We have to slow it down. So it’s good that it’s not so great, we’re slowing it down. We need to slow it down even more. And then the counter counter argument, and this is where I would return to classical liberalism, is that however dangerous, however dangerous science and technology are, it seems to me that totalitarianism is far more dangerous. And that whatever the dangers are in the future, we need to never underestimate the danger of a one world totalitarian state. Once you get that, hard to see when it ends.
There’s always sort of the frame where I think it’s in first Thessalonians five, chapter three. The political slogan of the antichrist is peace and safety. And I think what I want to suggest is that, and you get it when you have sort of a homogenized one world totalitarian state. And what I want to suggest in closing is perhaps we would do well to be a little bit more scared of the antichrist and a little bit less scared of Armageddon. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:
And I write your point that 4% growth is the key to solving all problems about once a week. So I’m glad you brought that up. I don’t think you hit it quite hard enough, it almost sounds like you were sympathetic with the dual use criticism of technology. But I think it’s important to bash that, if you were bashing it super hard and if you weren’t bashing it, I get to disagree with you. We could have abundant essentially free energy right now if the anti-nuclear movement hadn’t stopped it in the US. It wasn’t about India, Pakistan, the reason of the nuclear regulatory commission hasn’t certified a single nuclear power plant since 1975 in the United States has nothing to do with that.
We could have breeder reactors now. The danger is much less than the danger of burning coal, even if you include the three-mile islands. It isn’t because of dual use that every airplane down at the Palo Alto Airport uses an engine designed in the 1950s. It’s the FAA. The reason that roads, the high speed train cost us a hundred billion and therefore will never be built. That subways cost 4 billion a mile and never be built. I think the thesis of growth comes from technology, but the thesis that we are not growing because government regulation is in the way I think is one that we need to take more seriously. And it’s a leftist cause.
Peter Thiel:
I’m sympathetic to that. I would disagree with the nuclear history where I think it was fear of nuclear war that was conflated with nuclear power plants and that turned people against them. So we, and we could spend a long time going through that history. I agree with you on all the micro regulatory stuff. There is, the regulations are stupid, I’d get rid of them. I’d want to roll them back. And then at the same time there is this cultural backdrop where there are some things that have gone wrong, thalidomide that empowered the FDA to become far more Draconian. I think the FDA overreacted to the thalidomide disaster. But there’s something in our society where some of these risks were able to be weaponized in a very drastic way.
And I think this is where the simple naive libertarian arguments, they just never carry the day. Even though, yeah, if I could do it in every civil instance, it’d push a button and deregulate, but it’s not been working. And the nuclear power thing is a striking one where it’s obvious we should be doing this. And it is, it’s been completely stuck for 45 years. It’s not like it’s a little bit outside the Overton window. It’s way, way outside the Overton window.
Dethia:
Hello. So my name’s Dethia. I’m a undergraduate student studying philosophy and political science here at Stanford. Write for the review. One of my, so my question is, there’s this quote I remember, I think it’s from Adorno, Theodor Odorno or maybe some anti-colonial scholar commenting on him, something like that. It goes, “The only way to gain progress is to stop talking about it.” And his argument essentially, if I recall correctly, is that the more we talk about progress, the more it gives leeway to sort of totalitarian and colonialist structures, imperialist structures, that allow you to oppress people who are behind. So the west is better or more farther in progress than the east or something like that. If we sort of invert that argument, it seems like the language of progress in many ways motivates the DI officers to progress by perhaps expanding access of education to minorities.
We’re learning new things about equity and fair freedom and equal, all these values which we didn’t have before. Therefore we should impose them on the sort of loser reactionaries who are convening at a conference, to talk about academic freedom. So basically my question is why not adopt this sort of motto of we will continue to progress and pursue progress, but we frame it all in a language of return. The same way a lot of, I think religious reactionaries like myself and others on the Stanford are trying to do. So we still want progress, but we don’t sound like we do.
Peter Thiel:
I’m somewhat confused by exactly what that means, but I would agree with you that there’s something about progress that’s been hijacked. We still have people who call themselves progressives, it’s much less clear how you quantify what they are progressing on. And then if we frame it in terms of science, technology, per capita GDP, number of nuclear power plants, if we try to quantify these things. It seems like we are, we’re not actually that progressive on a lot of dimensions. And I think one way, and this is sort of just a narrow political framing, but one way to describe the decline away from progress, which I think still had this more general sense of not just a political word, but also a science word and also a societal word in the 1930s, 1950s, sixties, to today is that is the way that we have, instead of using the word progress, we use the word change.
And the Obama 2008 campaign, the initial slogan was Hope and Change, which was, and then they changed the slogan in the course of the campaign to “The change we need”, which if you think about it, is the exact opposite of the first one. The first one was as much change as possible. The second one was as little changes as absolutely necessary. And it was because the word change poll tested very badly, because people sensed that when you talk about change, you’re not talking about progress. And in fact, most of the time you talk about change when it’s non-progressive change i.e., it is regressive and it’s change for the worse.
So I think it is all a very paradox. I don’t think we can, I don’t think we can simply go back to the past. I don’t think we completely, I think we should try to reclaim this question of progress. We should be asking where’s the growth, how will the next generation do better than the current ones in any of a number of different dimensions of what counts as better. And I think the fact that the left no longer believes in these things means there should be some opening to reclaim this ground. But simply going back to the past can’t work because then we’re just going to cycle and repeat. I mean there has have to been something that didn’t quite work with classical liberalism, even if it was a golden age of classical liberalism past, we ended up here today.
This is always, I don’t know if this is too polemical, but it’s sort of like in the eighties when I was at Stanford, you saw these Marxist professors and the sort of line was true Marxism has never been tried, they always said, and I often wonder that if someone calls themselves a liberal, a classical liberal today, are they like a Marxist professor from 1985, where true liberalism has never been tried? I think it’s tried, it hasn’t quite worked, we have to be a little bit critical of it to figure out where it went wrong and then how to progress into something that combines the best elements of classical liberalism with something else for the future.
Hollis Robbins:
Hi, Hollis Robbins, I’m Dean of Humanities at University of Utah and I certainly like the idea that I can tell people who say “Why humanities?” Well, Peter Thiel says you should study humanities. I know that you didn’t exactly say that, but I’ll use it for my own answer.
Peter Thiel:
It was a relative argument.
Hollis Robbins:
It was a relative argument. But I’m interested in listening to you trying to figure out the ad mixture of optimism and pessimism. Because on the one hand, the past isn’t enough, but we should study it. On the other hand, we have to be looking toward the future, but can’t be too optimistic, we have to be realistic. So I suppose I want to ask just a simple question, especially in the midst of this discussion that is up to this point been very pessimistic, is what does success look like?
Peter Thiel:
Well, I always dislike that question a lot. I tend to think I dislike psychology. We have too, we’ve overdosed on psychology. It’s just we’ve overdosed on therapy. All this nonsense, and optimism and pessimism are just, I think, bad forms of psychotherapy. They are in some sense, at the extreme limit case, they’re the same thing. Extreme optimism. It’s like, “Okay, you just need to sit back and watch the movie of the future unfold and eat some popcorn. You don’t need to do anything, the singularity is near.” It’s that Ray Kurtzweil type thing. That’s extreme optimism. Extreme pessimism is, die with dignity or not very much and nothing you can do. And it’s because extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. Extreme optimism is denial, extreme pessimism is acceptance, but they both sum up to sloth. It is, they’re both forms of extreme laziness where you’re not going to do anything.
And so if you had to give an accurate picture, I’m not sure it’s true, but the healthy one is we’re somewhere in between. It is not destined that this planet is going to self-destruct, it’s not destined, that it’s going to become a totalitarian one world state. There is some path in between. It’s hard. We shouldn’t accept totalitarianism or destruction. You have to fight, you have to work on it. And that’s sort of where I always get back to some form of individual human agency, the indomitability of the human spirit. But it can’t be guaranteed if you’re, as soon as you make it too optimistic or too pessimistic, that is, that’s, you’re lost.
Rick Schrader:
Peter, I’m Rick Schrader, I’m a cultural anthropologist and cultural psychologist at the University of Chicago. First of all, thank you for that utterly engaging and provocative talk. Everything is the state, nothing is outside the state, nothing is against the state. Something like that was Mussolini’s definition originally of fascism. How far down that road do you think we have gone in this society?
Peter Thiel:
Oh, that’s a dangerous question. I never know how to think about that. I think it’s way further than I would like. On the other hand, we can have conferences like this, we can talk about things, a lot of things you get in trouble for, but you can still talk about them in small groups, anonymously. They’re parts of the internet that have been taken over by the state, but the internet still is in some ways more free than it was, it was 20 years ago. So I don’t know. I think it’s uncomfortably, there’s sort of uncomfortable elements that are that way.
There’s an uncomfortable entanglement that the US has with China. Where we’re rivals, but the danger’s always, you know, you have to choose your enemies well because you’ll soon become just like them. And are we going to copy the kind of surveillance totalitarian AI that China has and impose that in the US? So there are, I think there are all sorts of ways where I think it’s been pushed too far, but it’s still, I don’t know, I’d still much rather live in the US than China. So all these ways, we shouldn’t be too extreme on it.
Peter Blair:
Peter Blair from Harvard and Hoover. Peter, when you opened the talk, you said that the antonym of diversity is the university. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about during my time at Hoover is the ability of universities to cultivate human potential. For the past 12 years through the Teal Fellows program, you’ve encouraged people to drop out of the university. What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned through the Teal Fellows program about how to cultivate human potential? Especially given that in a sense the Teal Fellows program is operating as kind of the antonym to the university for the cultivation of human potential?
Peter Thiel:
Well, I’m always hesitant to do too much of a pitch for these various programs. In some sense, it was a very narrow program. It was 20 students a year. We’ve done about 10 classes at this point, a little bit over 200 people. It’s been very uneven. But even the median I think has been quite successful. I think about a quarter, they can always go back to college, so we never say it’s dropout because the colleges always want, they want to have high graduation rate. And so if you stop out, we always use the word stop out. If you stop out, you can always still come back 10 years later because the universities are so corrupt, they’re just trying to rig all their numbers.
It’s one sense in which it was a very narrow program. And what should be so shocking about it that you could have 20 people a year in the US who could do better than going to a university, or in the world, it was mostly US programs. But then it obviously triggered all these larger debates about our general society where there’s sort of, too much of the tracks are just not going anywhere. And even though I can’t accept that many people in our program haven’t figured out how to scale it, there is this very broad anxiety that the colleges are not teleological, they’re not leading to something better. I think Stanford is a little bit healthier than most places because people figure out you’re supposed to study computer science. It’s a little bit narrow. But I would say there only are there only two majors that translate into reasonably well paying jobs outside the universities, computer science and petroleum engineering.
And so there’s some way that even on the elite university level, there’s some way this whole elite formation thing has badly broken down. It’s not all the university’s fault, but I wonder whether the sort of extreme egalitarianism of elite universities is a kind of defense mechanism to avoid dealing with the ways in which they’re betraying their students. And so if you tell your students, check your privilege, you know, you shouldn’t expect to do more than the average person. That’s a way for the university to absolve itself of the responsibility to see to it that its students become the leading members of our society. So egalitarianism is sort of the excuse for a failed elitism. Thanks.