Peter Thiel on Political Theology

Tyler Cowen

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Hello, Peter. Thank you for doing this. Hello, Tyler. Now, the title of this conversation is political theology. That was a phrase I think first used by the russian anarchist Bakunin to mock the italian nationalist Mazzini.

German legal theorist Carl Schmitt then picked it up and said, it's something that everyone needs. They all need a political theology. What does the term mean to you? Well, it's a bit of a fuzzy, broad concept, but maybe sort of to motivate it as a contrast, I think that in late modernity, we're often living in this world of hyper specialization where you can't think about the big picture. And it's sort of like, I don't know, it's like Adam Smith's pin factory on steroids is sort of our world.

Peter Thiel

And I think there is some way that we have to try to integrate all these different facets of our life to try to make progress. That's what political philosophy does. That's what political theology does. The reasons these sorts of things were abandoned, you know, I think maybe it's already was like the enlightenment sort of abandoned it from, you know, and one type of reason it was abandoned was because it's too hard to figure this stuff out, or it's just a sort of fool's errand. I'm inclined to think the other reason was it was often seen as too dangerous, too divisive.

You're not supposed to have debates about religion. We settled that in 1648 of the Treaty of Westphalia. Going to forget about it and not talk about these things. But, and I think that might have been a reasonable compromise in the 18th century. It's my view that when you fast forward to the 21st century, it's maybe more dangerous not to think about things, and it's again, more dangerous to go into, become it for us to become ever smaller cogs and ever bigger machine, you know, a la.

The Adam Smith pin factory, and then the, you know, the political dimension on it. Just to say one thing on that is there's always sort of a question. If we're trying to figure out something about the whole. About our whole world, do you start on sort of a human scale, or do you start on sort of a microscopic, telescopic, atomic, or cosmic scale? There's probably some way these things are related.

But the political theology, political philosophy, debate frame, I think this was also a socratic idea. We start with sort of turn to common sense, human the world around us, questions about politics, economics, society, culture. And that's sort of actually this important way to get access. You know, there's some deep link between the university and the universe. There's some deep link between the failing multiversity and the crazed multiverse.

The sort of political orientation I have is you're never going to solve these things. You have to start with the university or whatever that's gone wrong if you're ever going to make sense of the universe. And there's some analog to that that motivates all these things. Let's say I'm trying to make sense of your political theology. So I recall you saying in a recent talk you consider yourself religious but not spiritual.

Tyler Cowen

And that strikes me as quite a calvinist point. So if you put aside predestination and think of Calvinism as insisting we know nothing about heaven, so it's an aggregation of man's power to claim to know about heaven that's related to your critique of the left, the notion that we don't know anything about heaven. It also means you can't really be spiritual. That's also a kind of arrogation. Isn't the consistent Peter Thiel really a calvinist thinker?

And Calvinism, it's quite concrete, it's quite serious. It takes governance and authority very literally. Why aren't you just a calvinist man? Look, I'm still, like, mostly a libertarian, Tyler, but you can be bothered, you know, I mean, I think probably. They're probably redeeming things I can find in Calvinism.

Peter Thiel

It's probably, you know, it's so anti utopian that it's probably helpful in the battle against communism. You know, I don't know if that's the only way to be anti communist, and I don't know if you do. Five point Calvinism. It's, you know, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. I don't know if I agree with even one out of those.

Those five things. I would say, you know, a girardian anthropological frame is that, you know, there is this deep link between gods and scapegoats, and we tend to always, we have these scapegoats, we turn into gods, we project our violence onto them. And this is what, you know, archaic religion does. This is in some ways what atheist liberalism does. You blame everything on Mister God, isn't Calvinism just an extreme form of scapegoating where Mister God did everything, he determined everything.

He's why you're wearing that blue jacket, and it's why everything you did wrong, it's all Mister God's fault. We should be deeply distrustful of scapegoating Mister God for everything like that. So that's an anthropological argument against Calvinism. And then the intellectual reason I'm not calvinist is that I think we should be trying to make sense of the world. And if you're so depraved that you can't even think, which is sort of, I think, a core calvinist thing, we shouldn't be having a conversation.

So if I were a real Calvinist, we wouldn't even be able to have a conversation here. And, you know, there's a tomistic distinction between the intellect and the will. And the medievals believe in the power of the intellect, the weakness of the will. The moderns, it's sort of in some ways reversed. But if you sort of take a effective altruist East Bay rationalist, these people, they're much closer to Calvinism.

They claim to be rationalists. But if you're in a rationalist Bible study equivalent, and the outward facing thing is that you're rational and you're pure in your thinking, the inward facing thing is it's all just spaghetti code. You can never be right about anything. Maybe you can be a little bit less wrong. And so I'm against both Calvinism and so called rationalism.

Tyler Cowen

But here's then the puzzle I'm faced with. Let's take all of that at face value. Why is it you just don't slide into Catholicism or eastern orthodox belief in free will? There's some middle position. And why is your middle position stable?

You could either be Catholic or for that matter, Mormon, where there's plenty of room for free will. Right? Well, again, these aren't. They're certainly not all the alternatives. It's always a little bit of a cheap shot.

Peter Thiel

My two word rebuttal to Roman Catholicism is Pope Francis. And, you know, we were talking a little about, you know, the, you know, the, you know what? You know, I grew up as a Lutheran. You know, there were probably all these things that are problematic about Luther. There are things that were good about him.

But, you know, I think the, you know, the one, the one part of it that if we judge him by the standards of the 16th century, you know, I don't know. I think the reformation had to come from the outside, it couldn't. It was not actually possible for it to. To start from within. And there is a way that, you know, the lutheran piece, it was the less globally centralized church.

It was going to be a less centralized church. And there's probably still some part of the protestant political project that lines up more closely with a libertarian view. What is it from the Hebrew Bible, or one could say Old Testament that you've incorporated into your own political thought? I think my views on this are pretty fairly orthodox Christian in that there's some continuity between the old and the new. You know, there's some sense, it's sort of hard to define where you.

Maybe the Christian God is the original progressive, where the new is better than the old. I think it's the first time where the new is simply better than the old just by virtue of being new. If you exaggerate the difference too much, that ends up being problematic. And that's sort of a where you end up saying that the Old Testament God is maybe just a different God from the New Testament God. Sort of all the extremely progressive forms of higher criticism, things like this in the 19th century, they were all deeply anti semitic.

So I think if you're too progressive, you end up becoming an anti semite, and then you have to somehow say there's some progress. But the girardian intuition I would have is it's just always this reversal in perspective where the Bible takes things from the side of the victim. It's already in the book of Genesis, where it's the story of Cain and Abel. The founding of the first city in the history of the world, is a parallel but opposite story to the story of Romulus and Remus, the founding of the greatest city. Where Romulus and Remus stories told from the point of view of Romulus, the Cain and Abel stories told from the point of view of Abel or the Israelites coming out of Egypt that would normally be told from the point of view of the Egyptians, where you had these troublemakers and we got rid of them, and you have this sort of inversion of perspectives throughout the Old Testament.

I would say, is it possible that. We can read the Old Testament, conclude, essentially, history is something really bad? That's the central message of the woke. And then just say, the woke basically are correct, we should side with the woke. They have all these excesses.

Tyler Cowen

Those are terrible. But they're, in a way, a method of advertising the fundamental conclusion that history is bad. And they're the ones who make us deal with that. And thus you and I should be woke. What's wrong with that line of reasoning?

Peter Thiel

I think you have to, you have to say that the history was. Yes, I think the history was very bad. I think it's always a mistake for conservatives or anti woke people to whitewash it too much. And so if we say that, you know, yeah, there used to be slavery, but the slaves were all happy people. They were all happy slaves.

That is a loser argument, and you shouldn't do this. What I would say the, the, again, the sort of rough christian frame on this is somehow the history is really bad. And I think Christianity probably it is much worse than Islam or Judaism on this because I don't know, you know, Islam and Judaism, it would be inconceivable that you could murder God, you know, in the form of a person. If someone claimed to be God and he got killed, that would just prove that he's not God. So, yeah, so sort of the original sin, the violence, in some senses, far greater in a christian context.

But then there is some way that we're all part of that matrix. And you also need to have, you know, you need to have forgiveness. So if you want to maybe outline three, three rough possibilities, there's this, you know, hard to define Christian in between one, which is the history is terrible and it's awful, but we need to try to find a way to forgive people. And then there is a, let's say a woke version where the history is terrible, but we're going to forget about the forgiveness part. And then there is, I don't know, maybe sort of a right wing nietzschean, bronze Age pervert alternative, which is we're going to forget about the history.

It's kind of oppressive. I'm sick of the skill trip and don't hear anything more about the history. And somehow the sort of in between christian one, I think, is, is the most tenable, even though there are all sorts of tensions in that. There was a recent Harvard talk you gave where, if I understand you correctly, you suggested the left needed to learn how to relativize its victimhood. What did you mean by that and how does it relate to what you just said?

The context was, you know, how much victimhood is unhealthy for people to have. And there are all these ways where you can identify yourself as a victim. I don't want to have sort of blanket rule where you can never say that you weren't a victim. You know, I don't know. I sometimes like to joke that I'm a poor and persecuted Peter person, and that's maybe there are elements of truth to that.

Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's very exaggerated. But if I absolutize that too much, it's probably unhealthy and sort of a christian division that I suggested at the Harvard talk was that it's okay to say you're a victim. It's okay to do these things up to a certain point. You can't say that you're a greater victim than Christ. Once you do that, you've probably lost perspective.

Tyler Cowen

Are there other holy books besides the Bible that you draw ideas and inspiration from? And what would those be? In some sense, it's all the great books were these sort of. I know they're not quite at the scale of these holy books, but there was a way that we treated, I don't know, Shakespeare or Cervantes or Goethe as these almost semi divine writers. And I think that's the sort of attitude one has to have to read any of these books appropriately and seriously.

So the western canon would be your. Answer, so to speak, something like the western canon. I don't think that the great books are quite as holy as the Bible. As a result, I don't read enough of them. But, yes, that's the closest approximation.

And it includes science fiction. Yes or no? I read a lot as a kid. I read so little of that nowadays. It's all too depressing.

Last week I was teaching my graduate class, and a bunch of them asked me, why is it we keep on hearing about Carl Schmitt now? And I tried to explain that to them, but why do you think there's now a resurgence of interest in Carl Schmitt? And for you, what are the valuable insights in Shmit? Carl Schmitt was one of this group of thinkers who came to prominence in the 1920s in Weimar Germany. And there was obviously a lot of things that went very haywire with many of these people that sort of.

Peter Thiel

In some ways, Schmidt got somewhat entangled with the Nazis. He distanced himself a few years later. But there was some very bad judgment in certain ways. The thing that I think is interesting, dangerous about looking at the Weimar thinkers, somehow it was in the aftermath of World War one, Germany had lost. You couldn't go back to sort of the throne and altar empire of the Hapsburgs.

We didn't really want to go forward with liberal democracy. And so there were all these people had these fairly deep critiques, and in some ways, it was going back to these questions of political theology, political philosophy that had been sort of whitewashed and set aside since the enlightenment. And there were, again, there were things about it that were dangerous. One way to think of the Weimar period was, I know it's like the dwarves in Moria, where they dwell too deep. And finally they awakened the nameless terror of the Balrog.

I think there are, and again, I don't think we're ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the US in the Germany in the 1920s, where liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window. What is it you think that Schmidt missed? That's very important?

I'll just sort of do one insight that I think is powerful and then sort of what's wrong about that? One of his books was the concept of the political and sort of what defines politics. And it's sort of this. It's some of this division of friends and enemies then that somehow is really foundational. And you shouldn't get sidetracked with all these other things.

And then all these interesting ways you could apply this. There's sort of a 1980s Reagan coalition question I always like to ask people where you had this. The Reagan coalition was somehow the free market libertarians, the defense hawks and the social conservatives. And so if you ask, what does the millionaire and the general and the priest, what do they actually have in common? We just sort of imagine these three people are seated at a dinner table and they're having dinner, and what do they actually talk about?

It's really hard to come up with an answer. And yet the coalition worked incredibly well. And the answer, I submit that they have in common is they're anti communist and they have a common enemy. And that was incredibly powerful. It was, in some ways, my formative political idea as a teenager, junior high school, high school, late seventies, early eighties, was anti communism.

And then there was a way that when the Berlin Wall came down in 89, this seemingly incredibly powerful political constellation disintegrated. And there's sort of a natural schmidtian analysis of this. That's sort of where I find Schmidt quite powerful as a thinker. The place where it probably tends to always go haywire is there's always a question whether politics is like a market, or is it a sort of thing where if you understand it better, it works better? Or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don't look into the sausage making factory?

And so if you say, we're having a lot of conflicts in our village, and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft. So that will achieve some psychosocial unity as a village. This sort of thing doesn't really work if you're that self aware. And so there was sort of, you know, Schmidt had this, you know, in a way, had this optimistic, enlightenment rationality to it, where if we just describe politics as, you know, the arbitrary division of the world into friends and enemies, then this will somehow strengthen the political. And it probably actually, in some ways, accelerated its disintegration instead.

Tyler Cowen

Is Schmidt missing out on a certain possible cyclicality in history? So the notion that liberalism will collapse in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, obviously that was the correct prediction. But if you reappear in West Germany of 1948, it was a completely incorrect prediction. And just as well, liberalism had collapsed leading up to World War one. It tends to come back.

Why isn't the cyclical perspective the correct one? Man, that's a big question, but I don't know. I think you can stress the aspects that are timeless and eternal. I prefer to stress the aspects that are one time and world historical. I think that in some sense, every moment in history only happens once.

Peter Thiel

And, you know, I think there is some kind of a meaning to history. I think it has a certain type of linearity to it. I think that is sort of the, let's say, the judeo christian view of history as distinct from, let's say, the classical greco roman one. I don't know if you can have a concept of history that's cyclical. I don't know if you look at Thucydides, where it's this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta.

So the periclean age, some of them gives way to this great conflict. And then people came back to studying Thucydides right after World War one, because there's some certain parallel 100 years of peace between the napoleonic wars, and then it led to this great conflict. But there's nothing particular in the history. None of the details matter in Thucydides. He makes up all the speeches and so on.

And then, you know, you contrast this with something like the book of Daniel in the Bible, where it's a succession of four kingdoms, and it is a one time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated in. And there's sort of a sense in which I would say the real first historian was Daniel, and Thucydides isn't even close. And then, yeah, we talked off the settle. But what about the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire? And isn't the European Union sort of like the Roman Empire?

And then I don't know. My response is, well, we have nuclear weapons today, and they didn't have those even in 1900. And so even just on the science and tech arc, things are so different. And I would not trivialize the importance of science and technology. So you think now the stakes are too high for the cyclical version of history to work, because at some point it's just not possible to come back.

It's just that the science and tech has a progressive character. And so it is. Yes, there are elements, I think, that are probably quite apocalyptic about our time. But I just start by saying they're very different, and we're in a very different world than we were in 1900. And I don't know how you go, I don't know how you unlearn all the knowledge we've gained, even since 1900.

Tyler Cowen

Do you think we're entering a new age of millenarian thought, somewhat akin to the english 17th century, whether everything was very fertile? There's a scientific revolution. Tech, you could say, is revitalized again. A lot of people went crazy. Highly diverse theologies.

They execute a king. Many strange things happen. But in many ways, we're living in the world of the english 17th century, right, with constitutions, political parties, central banks. Is this the new? This is again like an absurdly cyclical frame you're putting on things.

Peter Thiel

It's just. No, I don't think any moment ever repeats itself. It is just radically different. Of course there are things that are apocalyptic about our world. We have all these kinds of dangers that, unlike the 17th century, they seem to come from this place that's very nonreligious.

It's like science. Technology was nuclear weapons after 1945. Maybe it's environmental degradation, climate change. We can debate about various forms of the environment. There certainly are fears people have about bioweapons.

We can ask what really happened with the Wuhan lab. There are apocalyptic fears around AI that I think deserve to be taken seriously. So if it's millenarian or apocalyptic, it has a very, very different feel. It's sort of a apocalyptic violence that comes from a purely human source. It's not really being orchestrated by God.

One of the points that Rene Girard always liked to make was that in the catholic church, it was, I think, the sort of, during the Advent season, you'd often have these sort of sermons on the end times and the terrible things that happened at the end of the world. And Girard is telling the church, stop those sermons after 1945, because people needed to be reassured that the nuclear weapons had nothing to do with Armageddon or fire and brimstone or anything like this, even though, of course, there are all these slight mythic elements. The first nuclear test was called Trinity, or you named it after all these greek gods, the Saturn, Jupiter, Zeus, whatever. There are elements of that that I think are very true. But if I had to do my anti millenarian frame, or maybe it's not a protech argument, this is sort of an anti anti tech argument, is that if we again talk about all these existential risks today, nuclear weapons, climate change, biotech, nanotech, killer robots, the AI that's going to turn everyone to a paperclip or whatever, I always think you should at least include one more kind of existential risk if we're going to throw it in.

In my mind, one other existential risk is a one world totalitarian government. And I find that at least as scary as the others. In sort of a biblical, eschatological context. You're supposed to worry about Armageddon. You're also supposed to worry about the Antichrist.

Maybe you're supposed to worry more about the Antichrist, because the Antichrist comes first. And so if we're going to find a pathway through this apocalyptic age, you have to sort of navigate between the scylla of all these existential risks that are and the charitas of this sort of political, totalitarian catastrophe. If I had to do sort of a more literary version on this, you know, it's very hard to write sort of a literary account of the Antichrist. But there were sort of the two good Antichrist books that were written. The two best fictional ones in my mind were pre World War one.

There was 1908, Robert Hugh Benson, sort of a catholic book, Lord of the World. There was a 1901 by Solovyev, progress in the end of history. They both had these sort of accounts of this future totalitarian world dictator who took over the whole world. And both of them, it's kind of a demonium ex machina. It's really unclear how the Antichrist takes over.

It's like it gives these hypnotic speeches, and no one can remember a word he says, but they all just sell their souls for no apparent good reason whatsoever, and he just takes over the world. But it seems to me that if we were to write. If one were to try to write a novel like this, post 1945, it's very straightforward. It'd be like one world or none. This is a short film by the nuclear scientists after 1945.

If we don't give the nuclear weapons to the one world government, it's going to blow up the whole world. And basically, the literary version would be that the Antichrist comes to power by constantly talking about Armageddon and constantly telling us scary millenarian stories. And so that's sort of my complicated, nuanced answer, is there's a lot of truth to these existential risks. I don't want to completely dismiss them. That's also how we're going to get this totalitarian state.

If you look at all these versions, I can go down, but it's like, do you want to worry about Doctor Strangelove or Greta? It seems like Doctor Strangelove's more dangerous. But if everyone's going to have to ride a bicycle, that's not just going to happen on its own. And that requires some real enforcement of this stuff where there's a short bostrom, there's a Bostrom essay from 2019 on how to stop all the AI risks. And it's basically, maybe we can change the culture so that nobody will have heterodox ideas anymore.

And so a few different ideas like this. But then what you really need is really effective global government and really effective policing because you have to have some kind of global compute governance. That sounds to me at least as scary as the AI. But isn't the much greater risk a collapse into a kind of disorderly feudalism? So where in Florida, the United States seems to be becoming more federalistic.

Tyler Cowen

It's very hard for me to imagine China, say, taking over India. You can look at the Balkans. It's even a word, Balkanized. Look at the Middle east. If it goes very badly, it's hard to see any single power just ruling any substantial part of the Middle east.

It's easy to imagine it being in a kind of chaos. Why think there's so much scale that that kind of totalitarianism would be possible? Man, I don't know. There's so many different versions of this. But just if we think about the version of this, I would have been more on your side.

Peter Thiel

Let's say, post 911. You know, it was, you know, wow, aren't we just gonna have all this chaotic terrorism all over the world, and we didn't get that much terrorism, and we instead got, you know, the patriot act, you know, incredible tracking of, you know, money flows, incredible monitoring of people. And of course, you know, there's still. There still are things that can go wrong, but the political slogan of the Antichrist. First Thessalonians five, three, I think, is peace and safety.

It seems that we've gone far more in the peace and safety direction than the global chaos direction. I don't know. I think it's hard to even have an illegal swiss bank account, and that's like a really modest way. It's hard to exit. It's much harder to exit the United States than it was 2030 years ago.

Tyler Cowen

Let's say you're trying to track the probability that the western world and its allies somehow muddles through and just keeps on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch? I don't think it's a really empirical question. Yes.

Peter Thiel

If you could convince me that it was empirical and you'd say, these are the variables we should pay attention to. If I agreed with that frame, you've already won half the argument. And so it'd be like, variables? Well, you know, the sun has risen and set every day, and so it'll probably keep doing that. And so we shouldn't worry or you about, know, the planet has always muddled it through.

So Greta's kind of wrong, and, you know, and we shouldn't really pay attention to her, and I'm sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don't think this is a great argument or, you know, this is, of course, if we think about the globalization project of the post Cold War period, where in some sense it's, you know, globalization, it just sort of happens. There's going to be more movement of goods and people and ideas and money, and we're going to sort of become this more peaceful, better integrated world. And you don't need to sweat the details. We're just going to kind of muddle through. And then what?

You know, in my telling, there are a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. You know, one simple version is the US China thing hasn't quite worked the way people in Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. And I think one could have figured this out much earlier if we had not been told you're just going to muddle through, the alarm bells would have gone off much sooner. Maybe globalization is leading towards sort of a neoliberal paradise. Maybe it's leading to the totalitarian state of the Antichrist.

I'd be. Let's say it's not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn't ask questions about muddling through I'd be so much like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you stopped asking questions about muddling through, I'd be so much more assured. So are you so much more hopeful? Are you saying it's ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question? I don't think it's metaphysical, but it's somewhat analytic and moral even.

Tyler Cowen

It's that you're laying down some duty by talking about muddling through. It does tie into all these bigger questions. So I think, I don't think if we had a one world state that this would automatically be for the best. And so there are, I'm not sure that if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be maybe the absolute power that a one world state would have would corrupt absolutely. I don't think the libertarians were critical enough of it last 20 or 30 years.

Peter Thiel

So there was some way they didn't believe their own theories. They didn't connect things enough. And I don't, I don't know if I'd say that's a moral failure, but there was some failure of the, of the imagination. So this multi pronged skepticism about muddling through, would you say that's your actual, real political theology? Like, have we gotten to the bottom of this now?

You know, it's, it's, it's whenever people think you can just muddle through. Yeah. That you're probably set up for some kind of disaster. That's, that, that's fair. I mean, it doesn't, it's not like, not as positive an agenda, but, but I always, I always think, you know, I know as a, you know, it's one of my chapters in the zero to one book was, was, you know, you're not a lottery ticket.

And sort of like the, the basic advice is if you're, if you're an investor and, you know, you can just think, okay, I'm just muddling through as an investor here. I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people, I don't, I can't pay attention to any of them. I'm just gonna write checks to everyone, make them go away. I'm just going to set up, you know, a desk somewhere here on South beach, and I'm going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk, or, you know, not everybody, but I'll just, it'll, it's just, I'm writing lottery tickets, and that's just a formula for losing all your money.

The, muddling the, the place where I react so violently to the muddling through, it's just, it's. Again, we're. We're just not thinking. And this is like, it can be calvinist, it can be rationalist, it's anti intellectual, it's not thinking about things. So the muddling through view and the calvinist view, in your opinion, they have the same flaw, actually.

It's a distrust in human agency, a distrust in human thought, a distrust in our ability to make choices. Now, for months I've been asking myself why you and also Shmi are so interested in this catacon idea, which is also from the Bible. You can explain that to us in a moment. But am I correct in now thinking? It just occurs to me that the catacomb is, in a sense, your substitute vision for what, for me, is muddling through.

Tyler Cowen

So you're not willing to believe in muddling through. But things haven't collapsed now, not here. So you need something else holding the finger in the dike. And that's catacon or no. Well, it's a very mysterious idea, and there's always a question why the Antichrist hasn't taken over yet.

Peter Thiel

And it's this mysterious force that holds back this restraining force that. That holds back, you know, the totalitarian one world state. You know, I don't necessarily put too much stock in it because on its own terms, it's somewhat unstable, it's provisional. It has these sort of archaic sacred elements. It can.

It can work for a while. You can't identify it with an institution. And again, the shemidian view is there were all these different things that played the role of the catacomb at various points in time. You're not supposed to immanentize the eschaton. You're also not supposed to immanentize the catacon.

If you identify too much as one thing that can go very wrong, if you think of the catacon as the thing that restrains the one world state or that restrains the Antichrist, anything that's sort of like the opposite, this is sort of a girardian cut, is always going to be mimetically entangled, and so it's going to have sort of this parallelism. And so there's always a risk that the catacon becomes the Antichrist. The original anti. The proto Antichrist was Nero. Claudius, the good emperor, was the catacon.

He was restraining Nero. But then at some point, you know, Nero's the opposite of Claudius, but they're both roman emperors. Or, you know, you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, I don't know, from, let's say, 1949 to 1989. I would identify the catacon as anti communism. I would identify communism as the ideology of the Antichrist in the 20th century.

And anti communism was this, you know, it was not. What stopped communism was not, you know, the United States couldn't have done it. It was not just one country. It was not like some libertarian debating society was, you know, something was, like, pretty violent, pretty. Pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian that sort of had this unifying effect.

And then the way it morphed would be in 1989, something like anti communism morphs into neoliberalism. And that's actually, you know, if you're anti communist, you're not aspiring for world control. You're just trying to stop the communists from getting world control. Once you've defeated the communists, what are you supposed to do? And, like, maybe you can just go home and forget about all of what you did.

But in practice, these things have a tendency to perpetuate themselves. And it was like Bush 41. Anti communism became the new world order, and we're now going to just govern the world in the name of anti communism. And so there's something about it that's always misleading or even what I said about the Antichrist and this apocalyptic thing. Doesn't the Antichrist just come to power by acting as a catacomb?

This is what Greta says she's doing. She is the catacomb stopping climate change. And so it's. Yeah, it's a, it's a somewhat useful concept, but I wouldn't put too much weight on it. So at the macro level, all the weight you're putting on human agency, is that really so compatible with Lutheranism?

I'm not a perfect Lutheran. Not a lot. There's a lot that was, if you look at all these people, one would judge very differently in retrospect, if you. Look in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, and you think about all the christian thinkers who believed in some form of predestination, or Moses was chosen and the like, Abraham was chosen, what is it in the Bible that points you in the direction of so much belief in human agency being so important? There's sort of a lot of different levels on this, but certainly, if you, if you think of it as this, this shift away from sacrificing individuals, sacrificing people, there, there is sort of an anti, the anti sacrificial theme.

And, you know, we can, you know, you can always say, how is, you know, modernity or enlightened values, how are they tied with this? But certainly the. The idea I would have would be something like the idea of the individual came out of this, this context where, you know, the state was not absolute, it was not sacred, you know, was not necessarily providential. Girard liked to always say that Christ was the first political atheist, because on the level of the political order, Christ says that he's the son of God, son of the father. There's a way you can go into trinitarian metaphysics, but the political interpretation of this is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, somehow that's not exactly the son of God.

And the Roman Empire is not simply divinely ordained, and then that somehow, you know, opens a space for a less unitary system that, you know, takes, you know, many, many centuries to develop or something like this. But this is where, I don't know, I think of, you know, I think of even Ayn Rand is like a pretty good christian in this way. I know that would probably be really. I wonder what scandals you would say to that. But it's just, it's at least, you know, yes, it's jewish and atheist and shrill and crazy, but it's just, you can't sacrifice the individual.

You shouldn't sacrifice your mind, you shouldn't sacrifice your reason. It's just that you can't sacrifice that. You've been quoting the tempest lately in some of your talks. How is it you think the shakespearean political vision differs from the christian? It's always hard to know what Shakespeare really thought.

You certainly have different characters. You have someone like Macbeth, I think, says, life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So that doesn't sound like a particularly christian worldview. But maybe that's just what Macbeth says. It's not what Shakespeare says, so it's always very hard to know.

Or maybe it's a sort of a christian nihilistic view of the world or something like that. But I think the contrast I always frame is that the way I understand Shakespeare is always in contrast with someone like Karl Marx. Marx believed that people had battles over differences that mattered. It was the different classes, and they had objectively different interests. And this is what led to the intensity of the struggle.

And there's something in Shakespeare that's sort of proto girardian or very memetic, where people have conflicts over the conflicts are the most intense when they don't differ at all. And so it is, you know, it's the opening line of Romeo and Juliet. It's the Capulets versus the Montagues. Two houses alike in dignity. They're identical, and that's why they hate each other so much.

Or it's at the end of Hamlet where Hamlet says, you know, to be truly great, you must stake everything for an eggshell, because an average person would fight over things that mattered, but a truly great person would fight over things as ephemeral as honor or an eggshell or something. Something like this. And, of course, you know, Hamlet's problem is he doesn't really believe all the, you know, the sort of insane revenge drama he's. He's supposed to be in. So I think.

I think there is probably a place where I would say, yeah, Shakespeare would probably be very distrustful of extreme ideological differences today. That would probably, in some ways, also be a kind of political atheist. I find the play Julius Caesar very interesting because there's no catacon, there's no muddling through. So they sacrifice Caesar. There's a civil war and a lot more people dying, and no end to that in sight.

Tyler Cowen

It's the pessimistic scenario of the telemental universe, I think it is also, in. Some ways, there's sort of a strange way where they're all going back and thinking they're reenacting things, right? So it's, you know, the way Brutus gets pulled into the conspiracy in Julius Caesar is that he gets reminded or that, you know, his ancestor, another person named Brutus, had overthrown Tarquin, the last of the kings of Rome, in 509 BC. And so he thinks he's. He's just, you know, reenacting that murder.

Peter Thiel

And then I think. I think there is some part in the play where Shakespeare has the actor say, you know, I'm gonna get. Get this slightly garbled, but it's something like centuries hence, there'll be people reenacting this on a stage in front of an audience. And this is what motivates Brutus to do it. It's like the future.

Applause in the Shakespearean theater. And then, of course, the crazy, literal reenactment of it was John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in 1865, where Booth was a shakespearean actor. And then it was six semper tyrannis was what he said. It was like he thought he was reenacting the Brutus Caesar thing. And then you can.

You can look at the. I think it's 1838 Lincoln speech, the young men's Lyceum address, where Lincoln sort of portrays himself, sort of in a somewhat coded way, as sort of a proto Caesar, where, you know, they're. And he sort of tells the audience there are people in this country who wouldn't be happy to be. You know, there are all these. Some people are, like, really ambitious, but no one could be like a founder, because that was in the past.

And the most you can now be is a president. But there are people for whom being president is not enough. And there's some people who, if you didn't stop them, they would keep going until they enslaved all the white people or freed all the slaves. This is Lincoln talking about himself and saying that he has the ambition to be like a Caesar or Napoleon or something like this. But, yes, there's a bit of a roundabout answer.

So, yes, so there are ways we can see it as a cycle, but surely that's what we want to transcend. It was a bad idea for Brutus to think he was reenacting the Caesar thing. And somehow there is something about the John Wilkes Booth story that's pretty sad, too. For our last segment, let's turn to artificial intelligence. As you know, large language models are already quite powerful.

Tyler Cowen

They're only going to get better in this world to come. Will the word cells just lose their influence? People who write, people who play around with ideas, pundits, are they just toast? What's this going to look like? Are they going to give up power peacefully?

Are they going to go down with the ship? Are they going to man off nuclear bombs? I had this riff where I think, again, sort of the. One of the things I'll say, the AI thing, broadly, the llms, it's a big breakthrough. It's very important, and it's striking to me how bad Silicon Valley is at talking about these sorts of things.

Peter Thiel

And there's sort of all kinds of. The questions are either way too narrow, where it's something like, you know, we're gonna have, you know, is the next transformer model gonna be improved by 20% on the last one, or something like this, or they're maybe too cosmic, where it's like we go straight from there, we go straight to the simulation theory of the universe. And surely there are, you know, a lot of in between questions one. One could ask. Let me try to answer yours.

My intuition would be it's gonna be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people. And what people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit. There's sort of a longer history I always have on the math versus verbal riff, where if you ask, when did our society bias to testing people more for a math ability, I believe it was during the french revolution, because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families. Math ability was sort of distributed in this sort of idiot savant way throughout the population.

If we prioritized math ability, it had sort of this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society. And then I think by the time you get to the Soviet Union and soviet communism in the 20th century, where you give a number theorist or chess grandmaster a medal, which was always a part I was somewhat sympathetic to in the Soviet Union. Maybe it's actually just sort of a control mechanism where the math people are singularly clueless. They don't understand anything. But if we put them on a pedestal and we tell everyone else, you need to be, like the math person, then it's actually a way to sort of control, or that the chess grandmaster doesn't understand anything about the world.

That's a way to really control things. And if I sort of fast forwarded to, let's say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it's way too biased towards the math people. I don't know if it's a french revolution thing or a russian sort of straussian secret cabal control thing where you probably tries it, but that's the thing that seems deeply unstable. And that's what I would bet on getting reversed, where, you know, it's like the place where math ability, like, you know, it's sort of. It's the thing that's the test for everything, right?

It's like, if you want to go to medical school, okay, we weed people out through physics and calculus. And, like, I'm not sure that's really correlated with your, you know, I don't know, your dexterity as a neurosurgeon. I don't really want someone operating in my brain to be, you know, doing prime number of factorizations in their head while they're operating on my brain or something like that. In the late eighties, early nineties, I had sort of a chess bias because I was a pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was, you should just test everyone on chess ability, and that should be the gating factor.

Why even do math? Why not just chess? And that got undermined by. By the computers in 1997. And isn't that what's going to happen to math?

And isn't that a long overdue rebalancing? Of our society? And how is manual labor going to do in this world to come? There'll be a lot more new projects. Right.

Tyler Cowen

If you're a very good gardener, carpenter, will your wages go up by five x? Or is there something else in store for us? It's, it's hard to say, but I, let me just not give the answer, but let me sort of suggest some of the questions. I'd like us to focus on more with the. I.

Peter Thiel

So I think, yeah, I think one question is, you know, is it going to, how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality? And probably it does. Does some of both. Is it a very centralizing technology? That's another question I'd like to get a better handle on.

I had this riff five, six years ago. If crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist? And one of the things that I'm still probably a little bit uncomfortable about it is that it seems to lead to these incredible returns to scale. Man, I thought San Francisco had at least committed suicide and we could move on from San Francisco. The returns to scale on AI are so big that maybe even San Francisco will survive with the AI revolution.

And there are benefits to this, but it also leads to this kind of a, a set of centralization questions, or the geopolitical question. If it is as big a technology as you and I think it is, what is it going to do to the China US rivalry? Will it? And what do you think? I don't actually.

I'm just saying it would be good if we just at least ask the right sorts of questions. I don't have answers to all these. I'll do. The pro China argument is they will not hesitate to use the AI and train it on all their people. It'll be more quickly implemented.

The pro US argument is that we are probably ahead of China. Maybe the large language models are not really communist. Maybe if you can't ask the large language model, who winnie the Pooh is, nerf it so badly that it doesn't even work or something like that. So I think there's sort of a, there's an intuition that the effect of altruists are not just fifth columnists on the part of the CCP where they're trying to sabotage us, but where they actually simply are doing what the CCP wants, which is actually to stop the llms, and that it's very disruptive. To the extent.

I think that the second one, that it probably helps the US more than China, is that actually massively destabilizing where China was this sort of low volatility plan to victory, where they were just going to slowly beat the western world. If you now have this volatility increasing technology that China cannot match, does that just accelerate China's timetable? And has China become sort of like Russia, where, you know, you're ultimately going to lose and you have to, you know, maybe you have to invade Taiwan in the next year or two, and you can't wait for another decade. Final question. What is the next thing you will choose to learn about?

Man, this is always, these are all these questions, you know, this is all these projections of your personality, Tyler. You know, it's like, and it's the Isaiah Berlin thing where, you know, you have this sort of the hedgehog who knows one thing, the fox who knows many things, you know, so many different things. You're interested in so many different things. You know, I'm just. I don't know.

It's just sort of a few core ideas I come back to. And it's something like this, you know, wonderful and terrible history of the world that we're living through as Christianity's unraveling our culture, and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side. And I think that's what's going to keep me busy for a long time. Peter Thiel, thank you very much.

Tyler Cowen

We now have time for questions. Yes, hello. It's kind of a basic question, maybe to you, but to me, I'm wondering your opinion. You have this dystopic view of, like, one world order, which I totally understand. And I know that founders Fund has invested in cryptocurrency and made money on it.

Peter Thiel

But do you view crypto, or bitcoin in particular as something that could put. Power back in the hands of the people or something that's likely to catalyze more and more centralization of power in. This one world order in the future. I'm still hopeful that on net, bitcoin is on the anti one world order side, just based on all the people who are against it. But maybe that's a little bit too of a simplistic schmidtian analysis.

The questions are, you know, the sort of questions would be, do you have genuine anonymity, genuine pseudonymity? And probably there are certain ways in which, you know, if we want to have decentralized things where you use money for questionable purposes, you know, maybe. Maybe physical cash is still better than bitcoin. And things have not gone quite the crypto anarchist utopia that people were fantasizing about in the late nineties. On the other hand, I think it probably is still, if you're just thinking of it as a one time way to get money outside of the control of a particular government, it's probably still extremely good for that.

Thank you. So you can hodl until you need it. Next question. So Nick Bostrom and communism both sort of start out with a very different premise, end up in the same place. We need a one world government.

Tyler Cowen

Do you think that there's some sort. Of metaphysical reason for that, some kind of attractor? Well, there, there's a certain rationality to it. If we maybe just enlightenment rationality where if we say that there's some set of things that make sense that are good, and then it's probably, there's some kind of a way you should have world order. It sounds more peaceful in both cases than having a divided world.

Peter Thiel

But yet there's probably just some kind of irrationality where if you had one modality of governance, if it's the best, that would make for the best possible world, you should have that everywhere. And then if you have, it's only you have some very deep concerns about maybe human nature or the people who run the government or things like that, that you start to second guess that they're probably both somehow pretty optimistic about human nature. Thank you. If one extra year at the end of your life was for sale, what. Would you be willing to pay for it today?

Man, I don't agree with hypothetical questions where I don't believe in the premise. I would probably not pay the person who asked me that anything because I think they were just ripping me off since it's. I don't, you know, I hope to live for more than just one more year. By the time I needed to collect on that extra year, I think that person will be long gone. Very cool.

Thanks. What are the straussian messages of the Bible and what do they tell us about political theology? Simple questions tonight. Oh, boy. Strauss was this political philosopher who's, you know, I wouldn't describe as christian, was probably sort of very classical.

But the place where I'd say both, let's say someone like Strauss and Girard agreed on was that there's certain ways of understanding the world that have this disruptive way. And you don't want enlightenment. Simply that if you just tell people the secret messages, it has this sort of unraveling effect. And so the. I don't know.

I'm not sure it's esoteric, but it is. The book of revelations is the apocalypse because, you know, apocalypse in Greek means unveiling. And if you unveil the social order, you might end up, you know, deconstructing and destroying it. And, you know, this is, you know, Girard's book was, I see Satan fall like lightning. And it's sort of to see Satan is to see Satan fall.

So the only time Satan appears in the Bible is at the very end of the world. Every other time it's maybe he's talking to God or he's talking to Christ in the desert, but no human being ever sees Satan simply because to see Satan is to see Satan fall. You know, it's sort of the, you know, there's sort of the libertarian. You know, another libertarian cut on Christianity is that, you know, when Christ is tempted in the desert and Satan says, just worship me, and you can have all these kingdoms in the world, it's. It's somehow saying that all the governments are more satanic than divinely ordained, and then people don't understand that.

They think governments are somehow divinely ordained. And so once you see how satanic the government is, how satanic taxes are, other things besides the governments do, it will have this unraveling effect. Thank you. Hi. A big part of the thesis of the sovereign individual is that the defenders will be able to have an advantage over offense, and that that's the way that violence and the exertion of force is going.

I'm interested to if you still think that to be the case, particularly with companies like Anduril, where the thesis is kind of, there is no inherent properties of a smaller weapon that a smaller state can easily have, but rather the proliferation of those is simply a tactic that larger states need to use to evolve their strategies. Yeah. So I was extremely influenced by the Reese Mach Davidson book, 1997, the Sovereign Individual, where the thesis was, let's say the computer technology information age was trending in this very deeply decentralizing libertarian way. And that seemed, that seemed very true in 1999, and then certainly by the end of the would have said that there's something about a lot of information technology that seemed maybe centralizing, maybe the opposite. There's always a riff I have in this where if we look at, there's a, you know, Star Trek or, you know, the world of 1968, people also thought 2001, space Odyssey is IBM is Hal.

Peter Thiel

You know, it's sort of, you're gonna have one big supercomputer that's gonna run a planet or the planet beta. And one of the early Star Trek episodes where there's one big supercomputer that runs the planet. The inhabitants are sort of these docile robot like people who've been living peacefully but uneventfully for 8000 years. And then of course as always these the Star Trek people don't follow the prime directive and blow up the computer and then leave the planet. But that was the future of the computer age in the late sixties, was highly centralized by the late nineties, was very decentralized by the late 2010s maybe crypto accepted it was again seemed to be pushing back to centralization.

My intuition is these things are not absolutely written in stone and it's up to us to work on, you know, making the technologies having to push in one way or the other as a follow up not quite that predetermined. Would you bet on open source AI? If decentralization is great it should have more dynamic properties, should innovate more, should be safer as many other virtues. I don't quite know if that's the main variable that's going to push the centralization or decentralization with it but yeah, there probably some version of it that would be helpful. I don't know.

The Linux versus Microsoft precedent not sure that changed anything that much on the. On the level of the operating system. Thank you. When do you think humans are going to destroy themselves and do you think AI is going to do it? I don't think these things are written in stone.

I'm not a calvinist. I'm not a p doom Ea East Bay rationalist. I think it's, it's up to us. But as I said, I'm much more worried about the humans trying to stop the AI than the AI destroying us. A force that's powerful enough to stop the AI is probably a force that's powerful enough to destroy the world too.

So I want to worry more about the humans that are trying to stop the AI. Ayan Hirsi Ali recently converted to Christianity but it seems mostly for utilitarian reasons. Something like for the great civilizational war because secularism doesn't provide a good enough answer. Do you see religion as mainly a. Utility in the postmodern world you can have utilitarian elements.

I don't think one can ever stress those too much and so my bias is always to focus more on questions of truth. You mentioned Lincoln's lyceum address where he talks about that towering genius figure and I'd never heard before that he thought. Did you think at the time he thought he was the towering genius? And do you approve of Lincoln's political religion? Or view for America?

Well, I think it's a very. It's a very fascinating speech because he references some. Some Caesar, Napoleon like figure who will enslave the white people or free the slaves. And so that seems like. It seems plausible to think that he was thinking of himself.

I have a question about your personal. Life, if I may, and if possible, if you could give your answers a story that'd be a lovely. Obviously, you feel a great sense of personal responsibility, indeed, responsibility to history. How did that sentiment begin? How has it evolved?

Sort of. What have you found to be the more fruitful and less fruitful avenues for expressing it?

I'm always so bad at doing a self psychoanalysis or something like that. I don't know. There were sort of all these ways. I was, you know, I was like incredibly competitive and tracked as a kid. My 8th grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, I know you're going to get into Stanford in four years.

I got into Stanford and I went to Stanford and I went to law school. I ended up at a top law firm in Manhattan. From the outside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get in. On the inside was a place everybody wanted to get out. And so, yeah, I sort of had some kind of a quarter life crisis in my mid twenties.

Unclear what to do. But somehow you have to try to avoid the worst memetic entanglements, the worst forms of mimetic competition possible. I don't think psychology really works. I don't think sort of awareness of these things is quite the way to do it. But, yeah, there was some part of that that was very important for me.

Thank you. To that point. To get people off of the mimetic track. I think, you know, the Teal fellowship was really amazing and has had tremendous success. Have you thought about trying to scale that in a way that might be profitable or could make a larger impact than, say, 20 folks a year and maybe 20,000 eventually?

Peter Thiel

We've thought about scaling it a lot of times. It's probably quite, quite hard to scale. It's always sort of the paradox of something like the Teal fellowship or my zero to one book or any sort of self help thing is like, you know, it's always bad to sort of give advice where, okay, these are the things you're supposed to do. I worry that trying to scale things, the only way you can scale things is by somehow automating them, mechanizing them, turning them into more of a cookie cutter type process. And then I always worry that deranges at scale.

So somehow it's. I don't have like a. I can't give people a formula what to do. It's something like, well, you should think for yourself and figure it out. But then if I try to scale that, it's like, I don't know, it's like some kind of maoist little red book or something you're producing, and it's quite the opposite.

Thank you, Peter. My question is about diversity, equity, inclusion. DeI has become very prevalent in corporate. America, and I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you're seeing this in. Some of the early stages, stage companies.

Also, like the companies that founders Fund is investing in. And what are your thoughts? Do you think this is something positive? Are you neutral or you think this has gone a little over the top? Would love to know your views on that.

Peter Thiel

I'm very against it. I don't always know if it's the most important issue either. So somehow, you know, I wrote a book through my undergraduate years entitled the Diversity Myth, and it was sort of focusing on. On a lot of the craziness, the campus wars, culture wars that were taking place at Stanford in the late eighties, early nineties. There are parts of it that seemed very prescient, and it sort of described a lot of things that eventually spread to the broader culture.

On another level, it was like a completely ineffective book where the arguments didn't matter. What drove these things somehow was on a very different level. If we think about the woke corporation in Silicon Valley, it seems unhealthy if a company is leaning too much into. Into the Dei narratives. But, you know, there always are.

There probably are machiavellian ways where this can also work, where it sort of just distracts people. So there's, you know, I don't know. Walmart was sort of the proto woke company in the two thousands, and they were constantly being attacked by the labor unions because they were. They weren't paying their workers enough, and then they could pay their workers more, or they could rebrand themselves as a green, environmentally friendly company. And that turned out to be a very cheap way to split up the left wing anti Walmart coalition.

And so that was a version of it, I don't know, as this sort of capitalist conspiracy against it. And then there are cases where that can work and cases where it can go wrong. For the most part, I think that it's just a distraction from more important things. And so there's, you know, there's one level on which I find the issues very silly. There's another level where.

Where it's evil, because it's stopping us from paying attention to more important things. And it, you know, it's things like the economy, like science and tech, or even these, these broader religious questions that we've, we've, we've talked about today. People always talk about it in terms of cultural Marxism, but I think a real marxist would be much preferable to a diversity person. Rosa Luxembourg, who is sort of this crazed communist from the early 20th century. It was like, you know, I think one thing she said was, there can be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker, that nobody can be more revolutionary than a proletarian.

And so a diversity officer in a university or corporation, what would Rosa Luxembourg think of this? It would be in the same category as a bank robber or a prostitute, as someone who's just an extremely corrupt form of crony capitalism. Thank you so much. There's a fair amount of variation in regulation on biotech. You know, there's prospera.

You funded some sea setting places. What's your sense for why there aren't crazy, cool, ambitious bio hacking things going on? Where are the gene edited babies? The only one that we know about happened in China, and that guy went to jail. What's.

Why isn't there more crazy stuff happening in different jurisdictions? My sense is, yeah, the FDA has a global stranglehold on everything. It is because there are a lot of different reasons. In practice, most governments are not willing to have looser regulations than the FDA. There is less regulatory arbitrage than it looks.

Peter Thiel

And then secondarily, the US pays a lot more for this than other countries. And we can go into all these debates about whether we're paying too much in the US or whether the rest of the world should be peanut penalized butter for free riding off of it. But if you develop a biotech drug and if you can't sell it in the US, the economics are much less good. And so in practice, it tends to be us robust. Do you think that technology will eventually render a larger proportion of the human population unproductive or unable to contribute to the economy?

And if so, what should those unproductive people do with themselves? Well, I think. I think the Luddites have always. They've been wrong for a long time. There are certainly ways you could probably scare me some with AI.

Peter Thiel

But even if you convinced me that the Luddites were right about AI and that it's actually going to just replace people without, you know, if you were a Luddite, you know, in the mid 19th century, you said, you know, the machines are going to replace the humans, and that was, well, that would be such a relief because there's so much work for people to do and they would just free them up to do other things. And so maybe less complimentary, more game of substitution date. Even if you could convince me of that, I'm still in favor of the AI because my default is muddling through isn't good. My default is, you know, the default is really bad. And so, you know, we're not, you don't get to muddle through with Greta on her bicycle.

Thanks for coming. You've alluded to a lot of the forces between decentralization and centralization, particularly around AI, with forces that's around the individual. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more, describe what you think the forces could be that stop AI development, particularly as it relates to the state's role, or how a politician or another entity could co opt that force for their own benefit versus the benefit of many. But maybe the premise of your question is what I challenge, it's why is AI going to be the only technology that matters if we say there's just, there's only this one big technology that's going to be developed and it is going to dominate everything else that's already, in a way, conceding a version of the centralization point. So, yeah, if we say that it's all around the next generation of large language models, nothing else matters, then you've probably collapsed it to a small number of players.

Peter Thiel

And that is, you know, that's a, that's a future that I find, you know, somewhat uncomfortably centralizing, probably. But, you know, this is, you know, the definition of technology. In the 1960s, technology meant, you know, it meant computers, but it also meant new medicines and it meant, you know, spaceships and supersonic planes and the green revolution agriculture. And then at some point, technology today just means it and maybe, you know, going to narrow it even further to AI. And it seems to me that this narrowing is sort of a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation that we should be trying to get out of.

Earlier you mentioned that tech might end up saving San Francisco from itself. AI specifically. Yeah, sorry. AI. AI specifically.

How do you evaluate the efforts of places like Miami and Austin to present themselves as alternative tech hubs? And has that appeared changed over the course of the last two years? I'm still very pro Miami. I think the Miami story has been more of an anti New York story. So it's a tale of Two Cities and the finance part of the economy doesn't have to be centered in New York.

Peter Thiel

That alone, I think, explains a great deal of Miami's success. I think the tech, again, it's somewhat, we're in a very different place from what people were focused on even two, two and a half years ago. But two and a half years ago, there was sort of much more of a crypto story. And, you know, crypto is a decentralizing technology. But also the companies that were doing crypto were decentralized, not just in the US.

There's a decent number of them outside the US. And so crypto was going to be a big part of the future tech tech story. That would have been a naturally decentralizing from Silicon Valley narrative. Silicon Valley had really missed out on the crypto thing in a relative sense. And then consumer Internet.

A lot of this happened in Silicon Valley for all sorts of complicated reasons. It's supposed to get rid of the tyranny of place, but it all happened in one place. And then the AI piece seems to be even more centralized in Silicon Valley. So again, if we say that the next decade or two decades are just going to be doubling down on AI, that probably suggests that San Francisco and Silicon Valley will maintain or even gain power. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you for coming out and doing this event.

It's been wonderful. I have a silly question, and I'm going to bring Star wars into it, since we were talking Star Trek, but when you. This concept of the world Order, it's the first time I've really delved into it. And thinking about it, I'm wondering, do you envision a world order that's just like totalitarian dictatorship or just the, similar to, like there's just too much information, too many countries, too many people trying to vie together, and that everything just kind of gets lost, and that the power isn't really about the people, but that kind of world central. I mean, a global central.

Like, what is that that you envision? Well, I'd like to avoid the first type. Yeah. The of second one, I will concede it's a little bit more confusing. I would like to have a libertarian world order of many nations, and you can move between them.

Peter Thiel

There's some transnational thing. You're not completely stuck in a particular country, but then the transnational thing can't be so powerful that it actually controls all the nations. And these are, these are sort of, maybe this is just a sort of a paradox of globalizations. Like hegelian thought is always, you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Even if you agree this is the correct framing, the problem is people always confuse the synthesis with a superposition of the thesis and antithesis.

So if we say globalization, some global world order is the final synthesis, is globalization, as it's described today, just a superposition of slightly unstable global market but no global government, and then can that really be maintained? Yeah, so I think there probably are, you know, some paradoxes in my. My picture of a desirable world order that, you know, one could. One could unpack some more. But, yeah, if.

If we have too concrete a picture of exactly what the world order looks like, that's probably really bad. Thank you. A bit of a follow up to the gentleman two before me. I understand you've spent a little bit of time in Miami, so kind of coming down from the macro level to the street level, local governance, almost like an economy economist getting lunch perspective. What is Miami doing well, and what does Miami need to improve upon?

Well, there are a lot of things. I've been here the last four winters, so it's been two, three months each winter here. Yeah. There are a lot of things that I think are going incredibly well. I'm always into these sort of Georgist real estate theories, where if you're not very careful, all the value in a place gets captured by this sort of corrupt real estate group of people.

And there's sort of. Henry George was this late 19th century economist who was sort of like, sort of socialist then today seen as sort of libertarian, which probably just tells something about how our society's changed. The worry in Miami is that is it. Have we really escaped the Georgia disaster? That is San Francisco, that is New York, that is London, where even though there's been a tremendous increase in GDP, it's not good if 100% of it gets captured by slumlords or something like that.

Thanks. Last question. Thanks. So, question about AI and theology. Voltaire had this great quote.

If God didn't exist, we would need to invent him or her or whatever the pronoun is. Do you find this view of, like, super intelligence AI, which might be in the near future, as a kind of deity, as a kind of machine God? Is that useful? Is there leverage to that? And could it even be more than just a heuristic, some kind of substantive statement?

Peter Thiel

It's sort of a purely theological question. I want to focus more on the political theology question, which would be something like, you know, if it's a centralizing AI that's controlled by communist China, will it just be very good at convincing people that the party is God or that the wisdom of crowds or, you know, whatever the consensus is the truth. And then, yeah, there are these metaphysical questions where it doesn't seem like it's exactly, you know, I don't know, a transcendent, traditional, monotheistic God, but I would. I would go to more of the political questions than the, you know, the metaphysical ones. And probably the, you know, the risk, danger is that there's something.

Something about the sort of telescopes even more the sort of consensus truth wisdom of crowds. You know, I think probably all the models will tell you that there's no particular religion that's more true than any other one. Is that really what the models generate, or has that been hardwired? And those are the questions I'd be more curious about. Thank you all for listening to conversations with Tyler at the Mercatus center.

Tyler Cowen

Most of all, thank you. Peter Thiel. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show on Twitter. I'm Tylercowen and the show isowandconvos.

Until next time, please keep listening and learning.

Peter Thiel on Political Theology

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1: Introduction to Political Theology

2: Critique of Calvinism and Rationalism

3: Relevance in the 21st Century

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