Sept. 12, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:10:54
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Joining me today is an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist, an author, the co-founder of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook, the founder of Palantir, and Silicon Valley's ultimate contrarian thinker, Peter Thiel. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| David, thanks for having me on the show. | ||
| It's good to be here with you. | ||
| I normally don't have this many cards for a guest, but I've got a lot of cards for you today. | ||
| Are you ready to roll? | ||
| Ready to go. | ||
| Alright, so we have to start obviously. | ||
| Rogan had Elon Musk on last week and they smoked a joint. | ||
| So do you want me to put the joint on the table right now or how are we doing this? | ||
| My number one rule is never to compete with Elon on anything. | ||
| I would never bet against Elon. | ||
| It's been like this. | ||
| Close partner of his at PayPal in the late 90s, early 2000s. | ||
| After PayPal, Elon set out to start both the rocket company and the electric car company, SpaceX and Tesla. | ||
| I think the conventional wisdom on Elon was that these were both completely harebrained projects. | ||
| If one of them had succeeded, that you have to sort of question it. | ||
| And when both of them succeeded, it suggests that he knows something other people don't. | ||
| All right, well in that case-- | ||
| It can't be a matter of luck. | ||
| I'll keep the joint right here for now. | ||
| But I don't compete with Elon. | ||
| All right, but that's a good place to start because first, it's interesting | ||
| because we've gotten to know each other a little bit in the last couple years. | ||
| And it seems to me that the person that I know privately is sort of different than the way the media portrays you. | ||
| So I thought maybe at the beginning, let's just do a little history about you, and then we can get to some of the controversies and some of the ideas that you're really interested in, and things like that. | ||
| So let's start with PayPal, since you mentioned it already. | ||
| Where did the idea of PayPal first come from? | ||
| Well, you know, when you start one of these companies, it's typically not the case that you get the whole idea fully formed instantaneously. | ||
| There was this incredible internet boom going on in Silicon Valley in the late 90s. | ||
| It felt that there was sort of this Open frontier, open gold rush. | ||
| One of the natural things to look at was, you know, was finance. | ||
| I was sort of very interested in the cryptocurrency. | ||
| Could there be new forms of money? | ||
| There's always something, you know, super mysterious, powerful, important about money. | ||
| And it was a way that this was going to change. | ||
| So I think we had this general idea to do something with security, with money, with | ||
| payments from very early on of the founding of the company. | ||
| And then you iterate a lot on how to get the idea out. | ||
| And the critical question for any consumer Internet product is always not what the idea | ||
| is, but how do you get it out? | ||
| How do you get the distribution out? | ||
| And we spent-- there have been a lot of payments companies, Internet payments companies, that | ||
| had already started and failed by 1998. | ||
| There was one called-- well, it was Cyber Cash. | ||
| There's sort of a variety of these different ones that try to create these comprehensive currency schemes, and they would work if everybody used them, but you could never get even the first person to start. | ||
| The challenge was how to make it viral. | ||
| How do you get something to work where it's good for the first person, for the 10th person, for the 100th person? | ||
| Once you have millions of people, you have a network, you have network effects, And that was sort of the chicken and egg problem. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So how did you guys overcome that hurdle? | ||
| Well, we eventually stumbled on this idea of linking money with email because there were already 300 million people in 99 that had email accounts. | ||
| And so if you could send money to an email address, You know, I'd send it to your email, and then you'd get an email saying you've received cash, and then you'd obviously click on the links and do the work necessary to get the money out. | ||
| And so you didn't need both counterparts to a transaction to be part of the PayPal network. | ||
| Only the sender could be part of it, and then the recipient would sign up as they took the money out. | ||
| And then we started with the 24 people in our office. | ||
| Those were the first 24 customers. | ||
| and they sent money to friends and to other people. | ||
| We gave these referral bonuses. | ||
| We gave you $10, you signed up, and $10 you got someone to sign up. | ||
| And it just grew exponentially. | ||
| It grew about 7% to 10% compounding daily. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And even if you start with a small number, if you can get 7% to 10% daily compounding, | ||
| after about a month you're at 1,000 people. | ||
| That was mid-November of 1999. | ||
| By end of December of 1999 it was at 12,000. | ||
| By February 3rd 2000 it was at 100,000. | ||
| By mid-April 2000 it was up to a million. | ||
| by February 3rd, 2000, it was at 100,000. | ||
| By mid-April, 2000, it was up to a million. | ||
| So what did you do in terms of getting people to understand the way you could work with money differently? | ||
| 'Cause I actually remember the first time I used PayPal. | ||
| I think it was in 2001. | ||
| I was a struggling comic. | ||
| I had moved into a roommate's little apartment because I didn't have much money, but I had to pay him a couple hundred bucks or something a month for rent, and I was going to give him a check. | ||
| He said PayPal me, and just the idea that I was somehow linking my bank account to something on the computer. | ||
| We didn't even have I don't know. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken, I think I was still using dial-up. | ||
| I don't even know that we had Wi-Fi or anything like that. | ||
| But it's about an idea that this can even happen. | ||
| How did you train people to realize that this is something that's real and you can use it? | ||
| Normally, to get people to start doing something like this, it has to be something where there's an intense need. | ||
| And maybe it's not too dangerous. | ||
| And so one of the natural places it started was on the eBay auction site, where | ||
| you had small dollar transactions, maybe $40 for the typical amount. | ||
| And if you send check across the country, that's like a seven to 10-day delay. | ||
| It's slow. | ||
| Most people aren't set up to process credit cards. | ||
| Your roommate probably couldn't process credit cards. | ||
| But since you could make PayPal payments with a credit card, you could in effect send a credit card payment to 300 million people, whereas there are only something like 3 or 4 million that are set up to process There were like 150 million people with emails | ||
| in the US at the time. | ||
| There may be three million that were set up to process credit cards, small businesses, | ||
| things like that. | ||
| So we expanded it by 147 million. | ||
| Do you remember what it felt like as it started compounding the way you're talking about? | ||
| Like what it felt like as it was growing and you realized like, wow, we really have this thing now. | ||
| You're at the forefront of some sort of revolutionary thing. | ||
| It's incredibly exciting and it's incredibly scary. | ||
| It's like we're going to take over the world or we're all going to die. | ||
| You move several times between those two, several times a day. | ||
| Was there any bizarre pushback from banks or anyone that was doing financial transactions traditionally? | ||
| There were certainly more than our share of challenges. | ||
| You had an enormous problem of fraud, where people just figured out ways to hack the system and steal money. | ||
| And you can't simply get rid of fraud, because you can always get rid of fraud if you make it cumbersome. | ||
| But if it's easy, then it's also easy to defraud. | ||
| So the challenge was, how do you get it to be easy to use, but hard to defraud? | ||
| And that took some time. | ||
| There are certainly banks didn't like it, there were all the incumbent players that | ||
| didn't like something new. | ||
| And then of course it was sort of in this strange regulatory zone where it was a new | ||
| form of payments, a new form of moving money. | ||
| And the way I often thought of it at the time was that we were in a race between technology | ||
| And, you know, the politicians didn't like us, but if we got the system, the PayPal network, to be big enough, it would sort of overwhelm the regulators and they'd have to accept it as a fait accompli. | ||
| So the Libertarian Party, you must have loved that concept. | ||
| Like, you were actually doing something that Libertarians are supposed to do. | ||
| In an early 2000 conversation, one of the execs at PayPal said that we need to hire | ||
| a whole bunch of lawyers to tell us what we can do or can't do. | ||
| No, we're not going to hire them. | ||
| They'll tell us what we can't do. | ||
| So we have to just go ahead and not hire the lawyers and just do it. | ||
| I do not know if a company like PayPal could have been started even two, three years later. | ||
| In the aftermath of 9-11, we got the Patriot Act in the U.S., and that attached much more regulatory scrutiny to financial transactions, to payments. | ||
| The know-your-customer rules became much trickier. | ||
| And so I do think that there's a weird way in which there was an opening to start a business like PayPal in 1999, 2000, even three years later, I think it might not have been possible. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so cool to me just knowing a lot of your ideology and the libertarian ideas you care about and just going ahead and building what you wanna build instead of waiting for other people to do it. | ||
| I mean, you actually did it, and that's a pretty great thing. | ||
| Well, it was sort of the sense that we were gonna change the world, | ||
| we're gonna give people more control over their money. | ||
| We had all these ideas about getting rid of central banks and creating a new currency. | ||
| We never quite got to the Bitcoin stage of it. | ||
| We'll get to that later. | ||
| But certainly these ideas were incredibly motivational in doing it. | ||
| And it is always a little bit of a contrast from, I always have this view on politics | ||
| where it's both incredibly important and then in many ways incredibly frustrating | ||
| because it's so... | ||
| It's like the air we breathe. | ||
| It permeates our whole system. | ||
| And then it's also so hard to ever change. | ||
| As a college student, I started this conservative libertarian newspaper at Stanford, the Stanford Review. | ||
| And it's important to have debates, to discuss things. | ||
| And then it's often so hard to change things. | ||
| And the PayPal hack was, in a way, we were going to change the world. | ||
| We weren't going to ask for permission. | ||
| We were just technology over politics. | ||
| Well, speaking of changing the world, let's flash forward a couple years. | ||
| So we're just doing some business background first before we get to a lot of your ideas of the day. | ||
| You were the first outside investor in Facebook, 500 grand to this Zuckerberg guy. | ||
| Did you know him well before that? | ||
| Had you guys communicated a lot? | ||
| How did that even come to pass? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| It was literally the first day we met. | ||
| We told him to leave for an hour. | ||
| We came back and we gave him the term sheet about an hour later. | ||
| So it was a fast decision. | ||
| I think people always have this sort of shark tank image of these things with some sort of super sophisticated pitch and you say just the right things. | ||
| That's what works. | ||
| It was nothing of the sort. | ||
| Kind of introverted 19-year-old, you know, sophomore, between sophomore and junior year, summer of 2004. | ||
| And the main thing I was going for was it was just growing fast. | ||
| They were at something like 20 college campuses. | ||
| They had about 100,000 people on the network. | ||
| And they just needed more money for computers because there was such demand for the product as they were going to launch it at more colleges in the fall. | ||
| So is that what appealed to you more than the product itself, just that you saw engagement with people? | ||
| It was already working. | ||
| But I would say the other part of it was that there was like a prehistory to it. | ||
| So one of my good friends from PayPal, back from Stanford, this guy named Reid Hoffman, He started LinkedIn later years, and he'd worked with me at | ||
| PayPal in the late '90s, early 2000s. | ||
| But before that, he had started a social networking company back in 1997, seven years before Facebook. | ||
| And they already had, you know, they had SocialNet was the name of the company. | ||
| So they had social networking in the name of the company seven years before. | ||
| And there were all these things that they had thought about doing, so it was going to | ||
| be... | ||
| The 1990s version of social networking was we were going to have these avatars in cyberspace, and I might be a cat and you might be a dog, and I'd be a virtual cat and you're a virtual dog, and we'd have to figure out how we relate. | ||
| And it turns out people weren't really interested in that. | ||
| They weren't really interested in some sort of fictional online persona. | ||
| It was much more about real identity. | ||
| And somehow Facebook was the first one to crack the problem of real identity, where, you know, even though it's always a little bit curated, certainly, for the most part, people on Facebook are who they say they are. | ||
| Yeah, for the most part, at least. | ||
| So am I mistaken? | ||
| You're the only person who's been on the board of Facebook the entire way out, except for Mark, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Since the beginning, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| What can I ask you about that that Facebook won't get too angry about if I ask you? | ||
| Well, just what's the experience like of being a part of a board from the beginning of really the thing of the Internet? | ||
| What seems to drive conversation the most on the Internet? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, there's... | |
| It's been sort of like this incredible trajectory, where it's gotten probably much bigger than I would have thought possible at the time, even though I was incredibly optimistic and bullish on it, certainly back in 2004, 2005. | ||
| I think that one kind of perspective for a lot of the world-class entrepreneurs is they're not specialists. | ||
| They're something close to polymaths. | ||
| So if you have a conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, he'd be able to speak with a surprising amount of understanding about a lot of things. | ||
| He could speak about the details of the Facebook product. | ||
| He could talk about The way people think about social media, the psychology, the way the culture is shifting, the management of the company. | ||
| He has ideas on that. | ||
| He has ideas on how this fits into the bigger history of technology. | ||
| Whereas an academic view is often that you're a narrow expert on one thing, and that's what you do. | ||
| And what it is about, it's much more this polymath-like intellect to understand all these different things. | ||
| The kinds of board conversations we've had over the last 13, 14 years have, | ||
| it's just been this crazy range. | ||
| Yeah, it must be particularly interesting for you, though, as sort of the outsider in Silicon Valley, | ||
| and we're gonna talk about you, why you moved down to LA and all that stuff, | ||
| that you've been there the whole time. | ||
| For all the reasons that Silicon Valley may be what it is, you weren't ever booted off the board or anything like that. | ||
| They've let you be the contrarian guy there. | ||
| So that actually must, That's a good thing about Silicon Valley, I suppose, or at least within the little microcosm that you sit in, right? | ||
| You know, I don't experience a great deal of hostility to me personally. | ||
| You always, you know, it sort of manifests in all sorts of other ways. | ||
| So I do think Silicon Valley at this point has a bit of a conformity problem. | ||
| It has a bit of a way in which people are too much all thinking the same way. | ||
| It's like there was the Apple. | ||
| I saw this meme on the internet the other day where it was sort of the Silicon Valley | ||
| 1997, colon, think different. | ||
| And the Silicon Valley 2018, colon, think the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so there is something that's gone a bit wrong even though, you know, I'm hard pressed to cite things where, you know, it's really affected me personally. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, I was actually going to push that to a little bit later, but let's just stay with that for now then. | ||
| Do you remember moments, did you see some markers along the way where you realized some of this groupthink was affecting the actual products? | ||
| Where the actual ability to create new technologies or new products, where that was actually causing stagnation? | ||
| Because I sense it's been sort of a long road to get here, but you have sort of been talking about this for a while now, and I think there's a direct connection to the diversity myth, which we'll also talk about, which you wrote, you know, 20 years ago. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, I do think Silicon Valley has shifted a lot over the years. | ||
| When I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, Stanford was sort of a Very liberal, politically correct place. | ||
| But the Silicon Valley surrounding, not so much. | ||
| It was vaguely libertarian. | ||
| It was a moderate Republican congressional district. | ||
| And then sort of by the late 90s, I would say it had shifted to being sort of a moderate Democrat, which was around the time I started PayPal. | ||
| And if you fast forward another 20 years, it's sort of a pretty hard left. | ||
| Yeah, so what do you think happened there? | ||
| Because it seems to me that if I was taking the people that I wanted to be the most creative, the most outside the box, the most to look at the system and go, how do we fix the system from the outside? | ||
| You'd want a lot of libertarian thinkers. | ||
| That's the way I would at least look at it. | ||
| So you'd think that everyone in Silicon Valley would be pretty libertarian. | ||
| They want to do things on their own. | ||
| And yet somehow in those 20 years, - It became the opposite. | ||
| Well, it's like when you ask the question, why is it so left-wing? | ||
| I think these things are, they're somewhat over-determined. | ||
| So I would say part of it is that it's probably the most educated part of the country | ||
| in terms of how much time people spent in college. | ||
| And I think one of the downsides of too much education is that you get the most brainwashed. | ||
| And so it's the most educated can also mean that it is the most brainwashed. | ||
| You know, this is perhaps not so true of the founders, but certainly of many of the rank and file people | ||
| who are, you know, If you're a really good engineer or really good at some specific thing, your education typically does not involve you thinking that much about politics. | ||
| It's not necessarily from deep ideological conviction. | ||
| It's often more as a fashion statement than as a question of power. | ||
| And so one of the things that's always a little bit hard to score is that even if you took a survey in Silicon Valley, it comes out as quite far to the left, weirdly uniform, weird sort of group think. | ||
| It's super hard to know whether people really believe this or whether they're just going along. | ||
| So, I think it's pretty liberal, but of course not as liberal as it looks, and that's in a way worse, because it means people are too scared to articulate things. | ||
| There was a dinner I had at my house a week before the 2016 election with a group of sort of center-right Silicon Valley people. | ||
| One of them is a very prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley, and he said, You know, I'm voting for Trump in a week, but because I live in Silicon Valley, I'm lying about it. | ||
| Meanwhile, he's saying this to you. | ||
|
unidentified
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12 people up there. | |
| You're like, I'm the guy that just spoke at the convention. | ||
| He was honest about lying. | ||
| It's unusual. | ||
| It's a little bit unusual. | ||
| And the way I lie is I tell people I'm voting for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian. | ||
| You couldn't quite get away telling people that he was voting for Hillary Clinton because your facial muscles wouldn't work. | ||
| Small lie, Gary Johnson. | ||
| That was sort of what you could do. | ||
| You know, if you sort of look at what happened in the weeks before the election, the Gary Johnson support sort of collapsed. | ||
| It all went to Trump. | ||
| And the question you have to ask is whether did those people just change their minds at the last minute? | ||
| Or were they lying all along? | ||
| Or were they lying to themselves? | ||
| And so I think the sort of political Correctness. | ||
| You know, it's always bad for thought, but it always makes things appear more uniform than they are, even in Silicon Valley. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, I think you know this. | ||
| I said I was going to vote for Gary Johnson, and I did vote for Gary Johnson. | ||
| And as I always say, I should be judged accordingly. | ||
| But here we are. | ||
| So this is actually a perfect segue, then, to the diversity myth, because 20 years ago, you're at Stanford. | ||
| And you saw a lot of the problems that we are talking about today over and over again. | ||
| I told you a couple months ago I was listening on C-SPAN to a talk you gave about the diversity myth and again it's from about I think at that point it was like 18 years ago or something and I was listening to it and David walked into the room and he said who is that talking because it was all true and it was he thought it was somebody I He thought I was listening to the news of today, like somebody laying out what's going on today. | ||
| But you saw this issue with multiculturalism, with faux diversity, the focus on equality of outcome, not opportunity. | ||
| You saw all this way before seemingly anyone did. | ||
| How did that come to be? | ||
| Well, there was certainly quite a wave of this stuff in the late 80s, early 90s on a number of college campuses, and for a variety of reasons, a lot of it crystallized at Stanford. | ||
| There was this super intense debate about Western culture, which was both a freshman, one year long, | ||
| freshman sort of general humanities course, where you learned about Western culture history, | ||
| Western civilization. | ||
| But then it was of course, and there was Jesse Jackson showed up at campus one day | ||
| and sort of led this chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's gotta go." | ||
| And people were talking about both the course and of course the whole society and culture | ||
| that was represented by that. | ||
| that was represented by that. | ||
| And so there were a lot of these different debates that got sort of thrown up. | ||
| And so there were a lot of these different debates that got sort of thrown up. | ||
| So it was concerned about racial discrimination, gender discrimination, other kinds of people | ||
|
unidentified
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So it was concerned about racial discrimination, and of course, the whole society and culture | |
| who were victimized. | ||
| And then in many cases, it felt like it was this incredible overreach where people were in some sense | ||
| using their victim status as a stick with which to beat other people up | ||
| or something like that. | ||
| Or we're going to now victimize the victimizers. | ||
| And it's going to be sort of something like that. | ||
| And so multiculturalism and political correctness were somehow very linked. | ||
| The multiculturalism part was where we were going to give special privileges | ||
| to disadvantaged people, or we were going to somehow correct | ||
| these injustices of the past. | ||
| And the politically, the intolerant politically correct part was where we're going to go after their oppressors, whether they were real or imagined. | ||
| And in many ways it felt like, you know, incredible overreach. | ||
| You ended up with these draconian speech codes on campus. | ||
| And with sort of the humanities, in a sense, effectively got gutted in the late 80s at Stanford, even though, of course, it took many years for that to fully play out. | ||
| And then, of course, one of the buzzwords then as now was diversity. | ||
| I think diversity is a good thing, especially diversity of ideas is to be valued, but you don't have real diversity when you just have a group of people who look different and think alike. | ||
| It has to be more than just having the extras from the space cantina scene. | ||
| or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that's always, so it's always like an internal critique. | ||
| The diversity myth is that it's not about diversity at all. | ||
| It's about conformity. | ||
| Was that the first time that you had really staked out what is seemingly an unpopular position, | ||
| although I think actually, especially in 2018, is quite a popular position, | ||
| even if it's thought of as out there? | ||
| Was that the first time you went publicly? | ||
| Because nobody wants to be the guy that says this stuff and then immediately is going to be called a racist and a bigot and a homophobe, all those things. | ||
| Had you ever done anything like that before? | ||
| You know, it's a... | ||
| It's hard to know how far to go back in the pre-autobiographical history or how good I am at this, but probably already in a junior high school, high school, I would take the positions that I believed in and they wouldn't necessarily be the majority positions. | ||
| And so it was, you know, in junior high school, I was totally against drug legalization of | ||
| any sort, and that was a minority view. | ||
| Or I supported Reagan in 1980 and we were sort of in a relatively liberal area and that was against sort of a minority view. | ||
| So I think I would have had I wouldn't say like extreme outlier positions, but I've always thought that it was important to think for yourself. | ||
| Yeah, so when you wrote the book and then started talking about these issues, what kind of pushback did you get? | ||
| Because that, I think, is the core issue that most of my viewers are identifying with these days that they're taking positions that are true that don't mean that they're racist or bigots or homophobes but that they mean they care about more about diversity of ideas than diversity of skin color those things and and they're scared to say those ideas and yet you were doing it a long time ago | ||
| Well, it's always a very tricky thing. | ||
| On some level, the way we've just been talking about it, there aren't that many people who will go out of their way to disagree with us. | ||
| I mean, there are some people, but most people won't say. | ||
| We'll find out. | ||
| We don't want any different views or we need to suppress views. | ||
| Some people say that, but not Not really that many. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, they mask it in other ways, right? | ||
| No one's going to outright say that. | ||
| But then in practice, you end up with this incredible conformity, even though that's not in theory what people want. | ||
| One of the professors I studied under at Stanford is Rene Girard, who's sort of this cultural critic, philosopher, literary Theorist is really really guy. He sort of always had this | ||
| memetic theory that people imitate each other. They copy each other. They're sort of | ||
| They're much more prone to fashion and things like this and and one of them he was from France | ||
| And so one of the one of the metaphors he had for a lot of the sort of more politically correct professors at Stanford | ||
| Was that they all thought they were in the French resistance | ||
| But if they had lived in Vichy France, they would have all been collaborators. | ||
| And so the self-understanding people have is that they're super courageous, independent thinkers, and that's why they And that they would have been in the resistance in France. | ||
| But then, in reality, if you ask them what the views are that they have, it's the same as everybody else around them. | ||
| And you have to always ask. | ||
| If everyone has the same views, it can mean one of two things. | ||
| It can mean that you've reached the absolute truth, or it can mean that you have this sort of incredible conformity. | ||
| Yeah, well it's so interesting because he was talking about the resistance in France and now we have a group of people in America that think that they're part of the resistance and I suspect that if they were in power they would be treating the people who were the resistance of them much worse than they're being treated right now. | ||
| Well, I thought that the Girard critique could also apply to them, that by identifying yourself as part of some mob-like resistance movement You're suggesting the exact opposite. | ||
| Political views, I respect. | ||
| I think there are people who can have sincere views even if they're in the overwhelming majority. | ||
| But it's impressive if you're in the minority. | ||
| So if you're speaking out against President Trump in your small town in Alabama, I tend to think that's a sincere person. | ||
| If you're in San Francisco or Manhattan and you're part of the resistance, I suspect something very different is going on. | ||
| So that's really interesting to me. | ||
| A different way of getting at this is, in a democracy, we always think the majority is right. | ||
| So it's 51, 49, 51 is probably right. | ||
| If it's a big majority, it's even more right. | ||
| So 70, 30. | ||
| Even more right. | ||
| But if it's 100 to 0, 99 to 1, that's where we start to suspect that we're not in a democracy but we're in North Korea or that something's gone wrong with the voting machine or something like this. | ||
| And so when we have these sort of hothouse environments at places like Stanford or Silicon Valley where you have this complete Yeah, and this seems to be directly linked to what's going on on our campuses today, right? | ||
| It's not the wisdom of crowds. | ||
| It's not that everyone's figured out the truth. | ||
| It's a madness of crowds. | ||
| It's some psychosocial insanity. | ||
| Yeah, and this seems to be directly linked to what's going on on our campuses today, right? | ||
| I mean, if 20 years ago, you had been thinking these things, | ||
| do you think your prediction would have been, oh, we'll be able to break these ideas enough | ||
| so that the class of teachers and professors may not be so addicted to the thing? | ||
| Yeah, no, it seems to, It seems to have come back with a vengeance on college, or even radicalized further. | ||
| But again, you don't want to always psychologize people you disagree with, but the question when you look at | ||
| what's happening on campuses or in various places is always, is | ||
| this really what people think or is it just, are they just under, you know, | ||
| incredible peer pressure to fit in? Yeah, do you see that as a bizarre direct | ||
| connection to the way many other institutions seem to be crumbling now? | ||
| The way people don't trust the media the way they used to. | ||
| The way that we're just seeing sort of a new, you know, Ilana and Rogan last week. | ||
| You're sitting here today. | ||
| The way that people want different conversations. | ||
| We're gonna sit here for as long as it takes to do all of this. | ||
| People can see through it. | ||
| They can see through uh... the manufactured consent they can see they can uh... you know it's it's if you have conformity and it and it looks real that's powerful if it if it's conformity and people sense that it's forced that's that's a lot shakier and so there's it's it's sort of like i know it's like the i'm not sure what the right metaphor is but it's like maybe maybe it's like you know the wizard of oz where you have the man behind the curtain and we're looking at the man behind the curtain on the internet and uh... | ||
| and that it doesn't quite work. | ||
| I think our sort of media political machine, maybe it always worked when people didn't understand how it | ||
| works. | ||
| So if you sort of see what's going on in the sausage-making factory, | ||
| you might not want to eat as much sausage anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, all right. | |
| Well, this is clearly going to be a theme to almost everything else we talk about, so let's sort of catch up to where you are today, and then we're going to go back to some of that stuff. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about Palantir. | ||
| Well, this was another company I started in 2004. | ||
| It was sort of the big picture of PayPal was sort of revolutionized money and payments. | ||
| The big picture for Palantir, in the wake of 9-11, a few years after that, was could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be tough on terrorism and things like this. | ||
| And the sort of sense I had was that the way we were going with just ridiculous airport security checks and super intrusive surveillance all the time wasn't really making us safer. | ||
| Yeah, so this was sort of your answer to the Patriot Act, in a way. | ||
| In a way, this was sort of, you know, it was like, you had the ridiculous lines at airports, you'd been, you know, through all the ways that, you know, the response, and there was a question, was there some way Was there some technological fix? | ||
| You know, one of the ways I often think of technology is that it's a way to do more with less. | ||
| And so, you know, you can get more energy for less money. | ||
| That's like an energy innovation, or cleaner energy for less pollution. | ||
| More energy that pollutes less. | ||
| That would be like a technology innovation in clean energy. | ||
| And in the security space, the doing more with less is something like more security with less intrusion on people's civil liberties. | ||
| And that's kind of the trade-off that you want. | ||
| And that the non-technological debate that we had in the U.S. | ||
| in 2004, in many ways that we still have in 2018, It's always you do more with more versus less with less. | ||
| So you can have the neocon Cheney version, let's say, would be that we're going to have more security with more civil liberties violations. | ||
| And then you can sort of say that the equally Luddite ACLU would say something like we're going to have fewer civil liberties violations and we're going to have less security. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's kind of the way the ideological debate gets framed. | ||
| Now I'm sympathetic to the ACLU on civil liberties but I think they will always lose that debate because the way you preserve civil liberties is not to have terrorist attacks because when you get a terrorist attack you get the Patriot Act And if the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even want to think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack. | ||
| And so you have to prevent it to stop more erosion. | ||
| What Palantir does is it sort of is a way for for patterns and data to be visualized | ||
| through a combination of computers and human analysts. | ||
| And then in a way that doesn't simply scour the planet and get all the information about everybody. | ||
| So it's just, if there's something suspicious, then you look some more. | ||
| And so there's sort of a, there's a natural predicate you build | ||
| before you investigate people. | ||
| And in that sense, it's way less intrusive. | ||
| Is this a tough position to hold just because people seem all too eager | ||
| to give up their civil liberties. | ||
| Like, we always want easy answers, so that's why I think the Patriot Act passed with two dissenting votes, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| That people don't really, we act so emotionally all the time, and especially after a time like September 11th, we were really, I think, out of whack individually and collectively, that you can come in with a more sane answer and say, I understand civil liberties and I don't want big government, but I want us all to be safe. | ||
| And that almost doesn't ring for people because they just want the easy answer. | ||
| They want the bumper sticker answer. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, I think it's not the easiest sell, but I think there is certainly a lot more awareness today about how much civil liberties have been eroded, how we're living in this quasi-surveillance state all the time, and how deeply uncomfortable that is on so many levels. | ||
| I think that the way, you know, I think certainly if it worked, if the Luddite heavy-handed | ||
| approach has actually worked, then I think people would be more tolerant. | ||
| And then there's sort of a sense that they don't even work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is it hard to define what work even means? | ||
| Because something could say, work for three years, make sure everybody's safe, even if it's violating all sorts of personal privacy and all that. | ||
| But then if there's an attack, then you go, well, it doesn't work. | ||
| Well, work means you prevent terrorist attacks from happening in that narrow context. | ||
| So it's just about the window that it works, basically. | ||
| Because the second it doesn't work, it doesn't Well, it's how many you prevent that would have otherwise happened. | ||
| So, I mean, if it works perfectly, we prevent all of them. | ||
| If it works pretty well, prevents most. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| So this must be a little bit of a tricky situation for you because you obviously have to work with the government on some of this stuff, right? | ||
| And I'm sure that that's probably not thrilling for you at some level. | ||
| Well, look, I believe that I believe you can be both a libertarian and work with the government, or even work for the government, or work in the government. | ||
| And even if you believe that there should be a much smaller, much less intrusive government, you can still try to work to make it function better. | ||
| And so there's both an outside and inside game. | ||
| There are all these versions like this. | ||
| It's like if you're a libertarian, should you refuse to take a social security check? | ||
| Well, you can be against social security and still personally collect a check. | ||
| I'm pretty sure Ayn Rand took social security. | ||
| If you're a libertarian, should you refuse to be a public school teacher because you're working for the government? | ||
| Well, maybe it's actually better to be a public school teacher rather than the socialist person who will otherwise get it by default. | ||
| I think we can have certain kinds of principles and then act in pragmatic ways, and this isn't necessarily hypocrisy. | ||
| You once said to me, and I'm sure you've said it to other people, that I wouldn't be a libertarian if it worked. | ||
| Do you sort of picture a moment, or do you remember a moment, where you think it, I guess basically big government, stopped working? | ||
| Because it did work for a while, basically, right? | ||
| Not in our lifetimes, or not very well in our lifetimes. | ||
| I would say it's easier to see with the benefit of hindsight, but I think Yeah, I used to think, you know, when I was in college in the 1980s, I used to think that libertarianism was a timeless and eternal thing. | ||
| It was just these absolute truths for all time, all places, and all times. | ||
| And I've now come to think that it can be sort of, there's certain contexts where it's more true or less true. | ||
| And so if you have incredibly well-functioning government, political institutions, there's sort of, you know, less of a need for libertarianism. | ||
| So, you know, in the 1950s or 1960s, when the state of California had first-rate public schools across the board, and if you said, well, the government can't do anything, the public schools can't work, there might have been problems with them, but that argument would have gotten a lot less traction than it would today in 2018. | ||
| Right, because you'd be the utopian person at that point, right? | ||
| Yeah, or you'd be too pessimistic, because obviously things weren't that bad. | ||
| Horseshoe theory on that one, yeah. | ||
| And certainly, or in the military context, we had the atom bomb, we had the Manhattan Project, we had the Apollo space program in the 1960s. | ||
| where you've got a man on the moon. | ||
| So if you said the government can't do anything, that felt somewhat wrong. | ||
| Now I think the thing, if we're honest, and this is always the somewhat disturbing thing, is that our government works much less well than it used to. | ||
| So that's my question. | ||
| Do you look at a moment where that? | ||
| Yes, so I think libertarianism started probably failing in the 1970s. | ||
| in a serious way, maybe building up in various ways, but, and libertarianism, the libertarian party in the US | ||
| started in the early 70s, and it sort of makes sense because there was sort of more of an opening. | ||
| And so it was more true than it had been before. | ||
| And I would argue that it is much more true in 2018 than it was 30 years ago. | ||
| You know, when the Ayn Rand books were written in the 1950s... | ||
| It was like it felt like it was crazy When I first because it's like so bleak so pessimistic things were so you know so So busted so broken you when when I first read them and like the late 80s It still felt pretty crazy. | ||
| And then the last decade, it's in many ways felt much more correct. | ||
| In Atlas Shrugged, they're trying to find who is John Galt. | ||
| The clues eventually take them to the state where everything has gone haywire. | ||
| It's the state of Michigan. | ||
| And there's this great company, the 20th Century American Motor Company, which is sort of a thinly disguised General Motors, that had just gone bankrupt. | ||
| And it was because it had been completely mismanaged along these sort of socialist kinds of principles. | ||
| And Detroit was sort of falling apart. | ||
| Someone was farming in the middle of the city. | ||
| And this was like 1957. | ||
| It was just sort of a crazy thing. | ||
| And then it's disturbingly more true today. | ||
| Yeah, well, Yaron Brook, who used to be the head of it, ARI, Ayn Rand Institute, who I've had on the show many times and I do some speaking events with, he always tells me that when he travels internationally now, that it's the countries that are sort of worse off at the moment that are just trying to reset that find those ideas the most interesting because they're just desperate for ideas. | ||
| So in a way, it almost sounds like you're calling libertarianism almost a course correction for when either capitalism or, not necessarily capitalism, for when big government just gets out of control, libertarianism can come in and kind of unfurl some of it. | ||
| Well, that's the hope. | ||
| I mean, certainly a lot of these sort of bad bureaucratic things. | ||
| Don't self-correct that much. | ||
| And it is probably very hard for there to be incremental reform from within, and that's why something like sort of a libertarian shock therapy may be what you actually need. | ||
| But one way to think about what's happened in the U.S. | ||
| is you had sort of institutions set up, and then over time they sort of ossified and degraded. | ||
| So, you know, when NASA was started in the 1950s, you had, you know, great scientists that were driven, | ||
| motivated, and then eventually it became sort of more and more bureaucratic, | ||
| and somehow the politics replaced the science, and we can't reset it. | ||
| You know, in a private— I think something like this happens, by the way, in a lot of the private sector, where big companies become bureaucratic and less functional. | ||
| But in the private sector, you can have new companies get started, and if big companies are too badly run, they go broke. | ||
| And in the government thing, for government to go broke, it has to be incredibly bad. | ||
| And the tricky question is always, how do you course correct before you get there? | ||
| Right, so do you have a general prescription for how government and private enterprise can work together? | ||
| Is there a general view on when it is right? | ||
| That seems to be what a lot of people are talking about right now, because I do sense that there's a, as I would call it, sort of a classical liberal movement happening right now, or a libertarian movement, and the question always is, well, when then is the right moment for government to do more, or do less, depending on which way you look at it? | ||
| You know, I don't know if I have a formulaic general answer. | ||
| My ideological bias as a libertarian is that we should have a smaller government that's less intrusive, less regulatory, mostly across the board. | ||
| I don't think I have to tell you exactly how small it should be. | ||
| It should just be, it should do less. | ||
| We don't have to talk about, you know, do we have to privatize roads or, you know, all the sort of crazy libertarian projects. | ||
| Right, that's where everyone goes. | ||
| You can have driver's licenses. | ||
| You don't have to set all the boundaries. | ||
| There's a lot of room to go big picture. | ||
| And then I think in terms of the details, there are, of course, always these ways that you can try to reform things, try to make things work better, recognizing that you often have a super-entrenched bureaucracy. | ||
| So if you can shift from public schools to charter schools, that's sort of a way to change the bureaucracy, if you could shift things | ||
| where you could fire people or you could shut down agencies, that would probably reform things quite a bit, | ||
| even though that's seemingly a very hard lift. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanted to hold Trump a little bit longer, but I feel like this is the right segue | ||
| because there's an interesting piece of Trump that I think a lot of people, a lot of libertarians | ||
| are happy with when it comes to cutting taxes, cutting regulation, which he's done a ton of, | ||
| and a few other things in that regard. | ||
| And then on the other hand, it seems that there is a piece of him that's more than happy to do as many things by his executive action as they'll allow him to do. | ||
| And maybe in some cases, he would try to do things that they wouldn't allow him to do. | ||
| So you supported the guy. | ||
| So let's just start there. | ||
| When it was bubbling up in your head that you were gonna support him, or at least, or you gave his campaign money, all of that, What kind of internal discussion were you having with yourself, or were you having it with friends and colleagues and things like that? | ||
| Well, one of the things that I would say is, I think, a super important issue for me, and I think should be for libertarians generally, is foreign policy. | ||
| And I believe that the U.S. | ||
| should have a less interventionist foreign policy. | ||
| I believe that we've gotten into too many stupid wars. | ||
| over the years uh... and that uh... uh... you know that sort of these questions of if the government can kill you or that's maybe one of the most intrusive forms of government action. | ||
| We should think really hard about you know how often uh... we we we do that and uh... and that there was some there was some need to to reset that and i think uh... | ||
| And so, from my point of view, if you got someone who's not great on a lot of issues but was libertarian on foreign policy, that would count for a lot. | ||
| And if you had one who was good on a lot of other issues but bad on foreign policy, that would actually erode it in a lot of ways. | ||
| And I think, you know, the Bush 43 administration was also sort of lower tax, anti-regulatory, | ||
| but then because you had the insane war in Iraq, and you had to have all these deficits, | ||
| then you do congressional log rolling, and so then you end up with no child left behind, | ||
| you end up with the Medicare Part D, the whole, you know, all the sort of crazy expansion | ||
| of the welfare state as part of the log rolling exercise for the foreign wars. | ||
| So if we're going to do the anti-Bush 43, if we actually have a smaller government, maybe the sort of Archimedean lever for moving that is foreign policy and is for us to be less engaged. | ||
| And I think that is, you know, and it was, and this was the place where Trump broke the most sharply from Republican orthodoxy in the primaries. | ||
| You know, the person he was sort of most opposed to was, you know, Jeb Bush, who was somehow represented, you know, just a continuation of the war strategy. | ||
| And you had these devastating questions like, you know, Was the Iraq war a bad idea? | ||
| Jeb had never thought about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So something like that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Getting roughly. | ||
| And it was, and they had never thought about it because you had this Washington, D.C. | ||
| pro-war foreign policy bubble. | ||
| And it was the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama had maybe moderated a little bit, | ||
| but still, we got pulled into Syria, we sort of messed up Libya even more | ||
| than it had been before. | ||
| And I think Trump represented a really big break a really big break. | ||
| I gave two, I did, I spoke at the convention in 2016, and I also spoke in the fall at the Washington Press Club. | ||
| In both speeches, I stressed this foreign policy theme, and so it was that should we How aggressively should the U.S. | ||
| be involved in Syria and risk a confrontation with Russia? | ||
| And I think Trump's instincts continue to be much less in this sort of superpower confrontation. | ||
| And if you look at where the opposition to President Trump comes from, the most deranged part of it is from the neoconservative Republicans. | ||
| because this is where he's broken the most with orthodoxy. | ||
| I think the Russia debate is a completely insane debate that we | ||
| have like this where I think Trump has been consistent for 30 years. We should | ||
| not have a, you know, even if Putin's an evil man it doesn't | ||
| mean that we should be risking a nuclear war with Russia. | ||
| That used to be a position of the left, by the way. | ||
| As recently as 2012, when Romney was hawkish on Russia and Obama said, the 80s are calling. | ||
| it's 2012 when Romney was hawkish on Russia and Obama said the 80s are calling. | ||
| And so there's something about it that's just incredibly crazy how tribal it is. | ||
| Well, it's so interesting because that moment in the debate between Romney and Obama, if the left was being consistent about this, they'd be looking at Obama now and going, man, you must have been the worst president of all time because you misjudged that and then that led us to our Russian puppet president or something. | ||
| But you don't see that side, you don't see that sort of consistency out of anyone these days, I suppose. | ||
| Yes, it feels incredibly deranged, but certainly the intuition is that we shouldn't be this fixated on escalating these potentially military conflicts with places like Russia. | ||
| And to the extent we have that as the focus, it distracts us from a lot of other things. | ||
| It distracts us from the very real economic competition we have with China, which I think is something we should be taking more seriously. | ||
| And then, of course, even more importantly, maybe distracts us from solving some of the problems at home. | ||
| So I do think having a less aggressive foreign policy, that's maybe the preliminary step to getting, to then really | ||
| fixing on solving our own problems. | ||
| Does that show you how deranged the conversation has gotten? | ||
| Because if you listen to conventional thinking on this, most of, I think, Trump's critics will say, look, he's saying all these things about North Korea, or he's making all these threats about Syria, or we dropped the mother of all bombs, or all of these things. | ||
| But you're actually making the reverse argument. | ||
| I mean, they're trying to argue that he's really the warmonger. | ||
| He's the one that's gonna lead us to World War III. | ||
| And really, your argument is he's the one doing the reverse of those things, at least for now. | ||
| Yes, I mean, look, I think there is, we have a certain type of military-industrial complex, and so there are parts of this that are sort of almost on autopilot. | ||
| But certainly, I think all of President Trump's instincts are to You know, it's like, you know, if we have to rethink NATO, we have to, you know, rethink, you know, how much we should really be committed to Afghanistan. | ||
| We have to, you know, we shouldn't be escalating like crazy with Russia. | ||
| So, you know, yeah, the North Korea dictator's a genocidal maniac, but we'll talk to him. | ||
| So I think the instincts are very powerfully in the de-escalatory side. | ||
| What is it about Trump that made you think this is the guy who could do that? | ||
| Because as I was hearing you say that, you could have said, well, Rand Paul, he's doing a pretty good job on that stuff, right? | ||
| He's been talking about getting out of these wars for a long time. | ||
| You could have been like, all right. | ||
| Even when I would watch the debates, I'd be like, this poor guy, he's on the stage with the wrong group of people. | ||
| He's making a lot of sense to me, but this isn't the crew. | ||
| I did support Ron Paul in both 2008 and 2012. | ||
| I think in some ways Rand Paul was sort of making those arguments. | ||
| I actually think Trump made them more powerfully in the 2015-2016 primaries than even Rand Paul. | ||
| I had to critique Rand Paul a little bit on this. | ||
| He was sort of making this judgment call that his dad hadn't been able to get enough votes, and so he had to be a little bit less dubbish on foreign policy, had to be a little bit more agreeable. | ||
| And of course, he ended up doing much less well than his dad, because he sort of, in a way, downplayed what might have been one of his best issues, and then Trump just articulated it far more powerfully. | ||
| So what is that X Factor thing with Trump? | ||
| Obviously, this was starting to be like a runaway train and all the momentum was there, all the media attention was there. | ||
| It takes us kind of back to the beginning of when we sat down, the way you described PayPal, when it started really getting into that growth phase. | ||
| So you must have seen that too and thought, all right, the right ideas are kind of here, but really what I'm seeing is... | ||
| Well, you're at least talking about some things. | ||
| You're talking about some of the important substantive things that we should be talking about. | ||
| The negative part is that it's a contrast to how bad a lot of the other people were. | ||
| I met a number of the different Republican candidates running in 2016 in small one-on-one meetings, and they were like zombies. | ||
| You know, and it was just, you know, you had sort of the ideological talking points. | ||
| It was sort of not fluid, very hard to get off script to say anything. | ||
| And that somehow wasn't quite what was called for. | ||
| And of course, you know, there was something else about Hillary Clinton that was very much like this. | ||
| And I think, you know, I think the revisionist You know, sort of history people like to now say is that Hillary Clinton was this terrible candidate. | ||
| And I think she was the best candidate the establishment could put up. | ||
| It was just the ideas were wrong. | ||
| They didn't make sense. | ||
| Hillary Clinton thinks she should run again in 2020. | ||
| And in a way she's right because From her point of view, I can understand why she thinks that, because she's smarter than the other Democrats, she has more experience, and within the zombie establishment, it still makes more sense for it to be Hillary than someone like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris. | ||
| But the ideas had just become You know, completely ossified. | ||
| What does it say about sort of the state of the West that when things are basically pretty good, not to say they're perfect, but basically pretty good, that there's always this feeling that the establishment has to be destroyed or washed away? | ||
| Well, that's a big question, but I think there's something that goes back in our There's something about Western civilization that is perhaps unique. | ||
| It's open, it's self-referential, self-critical, and you don't have this sort of internal self-criticism in other societies and other cultures. | ||
| There's always an argument that ours is an extremely racist, sexist, Society that discriminates in all kinds of ways. | ||
| Without challenging that for now, you can also say that ours is a society that cares a lot about racism, sexism, that cares a lot about injustices, the ways things are not working. | ||
| And so I think the establishment has not gotten a free pass in our society for a very long time. And you can say that's | ||
| unhealthy and it makes us weak or divided, but I think that's part of the motor that drives | ||
| our civilization. And maybe it goes back to the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or the Greco-Roman or | ||
| Judeo-Christian traditions. | ||
| But when Jesus Christ says that he's the Son of God, you can describe that as a metaphysical | ||
| religious statement, but you can also describe it as a politically atheist statement. Because | ||
| Caesar Augustus was the emperor, and Caesar, his sort of adopted father, had been divinized. | ||
| And so Caesar Augustus also claimed to be the son of God. | ||
| And so when Jesus Christ says that he's the son of God, that is a challenge to the establishment. | ||
| That's an act of political atheism. | ||
| The state is not divine. | ||
| The establishment is not divine. | ||
| And I think that's just been part of our civilization, and I'd be much more worried if people stopped Yeah, so for the people that are watching or listening to this right now that still have all the concerns about Trump that you may or may not have or that you feel maybe are somewhat deranged in terms of the conversation. | ||
| You've met the guy, obviously, a bunch of times. | ||
| You know, there's that one video when you guys had that slightly awkward handshake. | ||
| Is there anything... Well, first, I guess I have two parts to this. | ||
| One is, do you have any regrets about supporting him or speaking at the convention? | ||
| And I want to talk a little bit more about that in a minute also. | ||
| But also, is there something that you can impart on us that maybe we don't know or that's not being told, you know, just from sitting down with the guy? | ||
| Is he more stable than the way the media would portray it or something along those lines? | ||
| He's certainly-- - Or less. | ||
| He's certainly very smart. | ||
| And it's sort of a common sense intuitive thing. | ||
| And so there's sort of a way that he can X-ray people and can get an immediate read on somebody | ||
| that's incredibly impressive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think there's a risk in that also, always relying on that instinct as opposed to maybe-- | ||
| Well, it's, well, there always are risks with these things, but that's, you know, | ||
| it's a powerful ability. | ||
| Uh, and-- | ||
| And then there is a degree to which he has his ideas. | ||
| He's thought these things through for himself and the evidence that he's not as conformist is that the ideas are actually pretty different. | ||
| He's broken with the Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy. | ||
| There's rethinking the immigration question, rethinking the free trade questions. | ||
| These were not mainstream views at all pre-2016. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there is a way in which, you know, what I think has been even more impressive than I would have expected is the degree to which the debate has shifted. | ||
| And so if we take the debate about free trade, you know, the consensus in 2015 would have been free trade is simply good in all times and all places. | ||
| And if you don't understand that, then you didn't study Econ I and you're a low IQ person, end of argument. | ||
| And at this point, you know, it's much closer to, you know, there's obviously something just very, very wrong with a lot of the trade arrangements in the world. | ||
| It's like, you know, we import $475 billion a year from China, we export $100 billion a year to China, and it's completely unbalanced. | ||
| And this is actually not, if we had a genuinely globalizing world, that's not the way it would look at all. | ||
| In a globalizing world, the less developed parts of the world would grow faster. | ||
| And therefore, capital should flow to those parts. | ||
| And therefore, we should have a trade surplus with China so that we get extra capital that we then export. | ||
| So in a weird way, you're almost making a globalist argument for him, | ||
| even though he's always against the globalists, let's say. | ||
| No, no, no, I would say this a little bit differently. | ||
| So I would say that the incredible trade imbalances tell us that something's completely wrong with the | ||
| sort of Pollyannish globalization story we're told. | ||
| You have Chinese peasants Saving money, and it's being sent upstream into the slower-growing U.S. | ||
| and the even slower-growing Japan and Western Europe. | ||
| And all the money is flowing in the wrong direction. | ||
| And that tells us some things. | ||
| And then we can debate, what do you do about it? | ||
| Do you escalate in order to de-escalate? | ||
| How do you rethink these things? | ||
| But it's all been opened up. | ||
| The prediction I would make is that whoever the Democratic nominee in 2020 is, they will not disagree with Trump on the trade issue. | ||
| They won't admit that Trump changed their mind. | ||
| But this is one of the ways you win debates, is that people come around to your side and they still say they never, and it wasn't because of you. | ||
| That's how you really win. | ||
| Yeah, was that his really clever move during the primary still, where he kept saying, oh, look how unfairly the DNC is treating Bernie? | ||
| Because basically, he was hinting to all of those people that were so frustrated with the system, when they screw him over, Guess what, I'm your guy, it's not Hillary. | ||
| So it was a pretty clever little tip of the hat to them. | ||
| There are all these things like this, but I think it is just these other debates where the country, I think the question about NATO is on the table now. | ||
| And once you put it on the table, why should the U.S. | ||
| be paying the lion's share when we're actually mostly defending these other countries? | ||
| It's not like NATO's on the southern border defending us from Mexico. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And if you listen to the way the mainstream media focuses it, it's always, well, Trump wants to blow up NATO, but that's not really what he said. | ||
| He said he wants other countries to pay their fair share. | ||
| Those are very, very different things. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, they're linked because you might say, you know, if you don't, you know, we're, we might be willing to pull out if you don't pay your fair share. | ||
| So it's not, it's not like we're, Never going to change, but certainly nobody would disagree that everyone should pay their fair share. | ||
| When I talk to people in Germany, which is maybe the most egregious offender of all, nobody disagrees on this behind closed doors. | ||
| So do you have any regrets? | ||
| I don't have any regrets about it. | ||
| I would say that it certainly has been a crazier two years than I would have thought, and I underestimated how intense some of the feelings people have about politics are, but no regrets. | ||
| Yeah, what do you make of just the general tenor then right now that we sort of are between a rock and a hard place where it's like you've got Trump and he's not going to change his tactics and you know I think I've been very fair to him and that's why I get a lot of criticism on that front and then you've got the the resistance or whatever you want to call it that seems to be doubling down on a lot of the bad ideas that got them there in the first place, and that both sides now are just splitting and splitting, and we're losing where I think most people are, which is within some sort of basically free society, libertarian, live and let live thing. | ||
| I really believe that's where most people are, but we seem to be being pulled in opposite ways. | ||
| Well, the way I would frame it a little bit differently, I would say we're, We're moving past the Bush-Clinton duopoly, which was not exactly libertarian. | ||
| It was a pretty narrow zone. | ||
| There wasn't very much debate. | ||
| All the smart people supposedly agreed on everything. | ||
| And it didn't work all that well at the end of the day. | ||
| We had sort of one fake bubble in our economy after another and it sort of got us into a lot of things that were not optimal. | ||
| So I think for the Bush, Clinton, maybe also Obama years, those 24 years, the debate, I would say, was too narrow. | ||
| And I think within that sort of super narrow center to center left debate in this country, you're not going to find the solutions to our problems. | ||
| It's going to be way outside of that. | ||
| And I think we will not go back. | ||
| We're not going to go back to Hillary Clinton in 2020. | ||
| We're not going to go back to Jeb Bush. | ||
| It's going to be a more wide-open debate. | ||
| There are parts of it that I don't like. | ||
| I think the socialist question is going to be on the table in ways that it hasn't been for a long time. | ||
| I suspect the Democratic Party is going to move much further to the left. | ||
| That's gonna be a debate we're gonna be having for the next decade. | ||
| I think they're wrong. | ||
| I think that's not gonna work. | ||
| But it's, again, it's the Clinton, the narrow Clinton stuff, not going back to that. | ||
| Okay, so one more thing on Trump for now. | ||
| When you finally then came out, so to speak, and said, all right, I'm gonna support Trump, Just personally, do you feel like it cost you anything? | ||
| Just, you know, friends, family, like, or did you even care if that was gonna be the case? | ||
| Because a certain amount of people are gonna go, no matter what you just said here about all the legitimate issues related to trade and government and all that, they're gonna go, he's racist, so now Teal's racist, or something along those lines. | ||
| You know, it didn't cost me any friendships. | ||
| But there probably were some set of people that, you know, where they were mad at me that had not been mad at me | ||
| before. | ||
| You know, that's unfortunate. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I don't... | ||
| You know, I didn't think it was that controversial. | ||
| In one way, it was one of the least contrarian things I've ever done. | ||
| It was like half the country. | ||
| It's not that contrarian. | ||
| Right, I've heard you say that before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's kind of funny. | |
| Silicon Valley felt really contrarian. | ||
| That's sort of why, if you're doing something that half the country agrees with you on, It's kind of weird for that to be beyond the pale. | ||
| Maybe it is. | ||
| That's actually hilarious. | ||
| Supporting Trump was your least contrarian move of the last 20 years. | ||
| It was in a way the least contrarian thing I've done. | ||
| But there is something about the politics that's intense. | ||
| It's felt zero-sum for a long time. | ||
| It is polarized. | ||
| It's extreme. | ||
| We don't know what the answers are. | ||
| And so there are ways that it's been weaponized that are— that are not always healthy. | ||
| So I don't think we're going to go back to the status quo ante, | ||
| fortunately or unfortunately, that's just gone with the wind. | ||
| We're not going back. | ||
| And it's quite possible we're going to have ever more intense politics for quite some time. | ||
| One of my colleagues coined this term about a decade ago. | ||
| I think it was Jim Cramer, the crazy person on CNBC. | ||
| He has this line where there's always a bull market somewhere. | ||
| You have to just look for it. | ||
| You have to know where to find it. | ||
| And then the bull market, my colleague suggested, this was around 2008 that was getting started, was a bull market in politics. | ||
| And which is not necessarily a place where you want there to be a bull market. | ||
| But I think we are in a sort of bull market in politics and it still has no end in sight. | ||
| And we're gonna be looking for options that are further outside the box, and the debate may be even more intense in the years ahead than it's been before. | ||
| All right, I think that's enough about Trump for now. | ||
| I have a feeling he'll probably appear again, but let's talk about sense-making, because Eric Weinstein, who I guess is the architect of the intellectual dark web, who is the, what is his title? | ||
| He is the managing director of Teal Capital? | ||
| Man of many hats. | ||
| A man of many hats. | ||
| Okay, so one of the ideas that he has discussed many times in this very studio is that what's happening right now is that our sense-making, our communal sense-making in America is just failing. | ||
| That our ability to trust the media or CNN or New York Times or the rest of it has failed to the point that this intellectual dark web, this crew of about 20 or so people, are the last bastion of our ability to just make sense of things, or at least try to make sense of things. | ||
| So I have a couple questions on this, but first, Eric works for you. | ||
| You guys have major disagreements. | ||
| He was a Bernie guy. | ||
| You obviously supported Trump. | ||
| I'm sure he's been on these shows and talked about probably policies that you don't agree with and things like that, yet you let this guy do whatever he wants. | ||
| I think that's a great credit to you, but why do you do it? | ||
| I mean, why do you let this guy run around and do whatever he wants to do, even when it's in conflict with what you believe? | ||
| I don't think most people would do that. | ||
| Well, I'm interested in ideas always, and I don't think all the ideas are just the conventional ideas. | ||
| find new ideas new ways of approaching the world thinking about it and uh... and eric is certainly you know absolutely first-rate heterodox thinker and uh... and you know i i don't think and i think all of our politics are somewhat eclectic and somewhat complex and uh... you know eric's more on the left i'm more on the right but uh... but uh... we're both interested in ideas we're interested in figuring out how to make sense of our world and uh... | ||
| And that unites us, and it's always surprising how that's a pretty unusual place to be. | ||
| Much of it's not about ideas. | ||
| As we said earlier, it's about power or fashion or something like that. | ||
| But most guys in your position wouldn't be allowing one of their top people to be out there, often taking positions that are against them. | ||
| There's something about you that's allowing you to do that, right? | ||
| I know you don't want to sit here and pat yourself on the back, but I think it's an important piece of something. | ||
| I think, and I'm not sure I'm right about this, but let me be a little bit more modest on this, but I think most of my peers in Silicon Valley think that the ideas are more set. | ||
| We sort of know all the right answers, and it's inefficient. | ||
| It's a waste of time to be exploring outside of that. | ||
| And so the substantive question you have to ask is, Are the ideas right or you know, should we have more exploration? | ||
| So it's like, you know, you take the take the climate change debate. | ||
| Mm-hmm There's there's a view that you know, we know what's happening here. | ||
| We go to you know, we know that it's a runaway problem and and and if we we can't we can't even pause and think about it because we know all these things we have to just focus all our energy on on solving them and so if those things are true Then that might be reasonable. | ||
| If they're not entirely true, maybe it's more methane than carbon dioxide, in which case maybe eating steak is worse than driving a car. | ||
| So maybe climate change is a problem that's a little bit different from the way we think it is. | ||
| And so if these things are not true, then we need to have much more of a debate. | ||
| And so the kind of question that's very hard that you have to make some judgment on is, do we more or less have the truth about everything? | ||
| Or don't we? | ||
| And my view is that we're really far off. | ||
| And I think a lot of my peers think, you know, we're kind of at the end of history. | ||
| We've sort of figured everything out. | ||
| We don't want to be long ideas. | ||
| We don't want to be, you know, interesting, weird ideas are just wrong, and they're just a waste of time. | ||
| And that's sort of their bias. | ||
| Mine's the opposite. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that this set of people, and I think I would include you in that in a broader sense. | ||
| I mean, now you're sitting here and doing this. | ||
| Do you think we have a chance of resetting some of this stuff? | ||
| I mean, I think that just if you look in the last week, I mean, Ilan going on, Rogan, you sitting down here, again, without patting myself on the back for a moment, I view that as a landscape change of the way people that are our influencers, our visionaries, are reacting to media. | ||
| Yeah, look, I think the boxes are too narrow. | ||
| It's like the baby boomer since 1968. | ||
| They've been relitigating 1968 for 50 years. | ||
| It's the same fights, they're getting kind of old, but it's been Groundhog Day for 50 years. | ||
| And maybe there's something past Groundhog Day. | ||
| And that's the bias you have, that's the bias I have. | ||
| And I think part of it is, it's not just talking about talking about ideas, | ||
| it's bringing forth some specific ideas. | ||
| These are things that are different, that are changing, that are, you know, that the world may look very different | ||
| in the future from where it looks in the present. | ||
| But I think we're not at the end of history. | ||
| We're not at a time where ideas don't matter or where people can't do things. | ||
| I think the future will be very different from the present, maybe it's gonna be better, maybe it's gonna be worse, | ||
| it's up to us. | ||
| And so I'm super long having a very broad conversation about things. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the baby boomers for a moment, | ||
| 'cause it does seem like that partly what's happening here is that they're at their last grasps of controlling things. | ||
| And in an odd way, Gen X, my generation, got, which I think you're probably at the right around | ||
| a little bit ahead of me on Gen X, Yes. | ||
| we sort of got lost. | ||
| And then it's almost like we handed everything off to the millennials, but we didn't give them | ||
| any of the tools to be able, they were too young and didn't have the tools or the financial instruments | ||
| to be able to make any change. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Well, there are a lot of strange generational dynamics one could talk about. | ||
| I've been very struck in recent months in thinking about this, how there is something very odd | ||
| in terms of what happened to Gen X, which is people born, say, 1965. | ||
| Those are the birth years. | ||
| Boomers were sort of 46 to 64. | ||
| And somehow, you know, the boomers dominated things like crazy. | ||
| And we were sort of like in the shadow of these people in all sorts of different contexts. | ||
| Gen X was probably the first time that you had a generation that was smaller in numbers than the one that came before us. | ||
| You know, it sort of coincided with an era of slower growth, slower progress, so there were sort of fewer opportunities to rise. | ||
| You know, baby boomers held on to their positions. | ||
| And in some ways, you know, it was like when I started working at a law firm in Manhattan in the early 90s. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't thinking of it consciously this way, but it was the baby boomer partners. | ||
| They just become partner. | ||
| and they were sort of pulling the ladder up behind them. | ||
| And it was going to be much harder for people, my generation, our generation, to do the same things, | ||
| to go down the track in the same way. | ||
| And so there is something very weird about how Gen X has been sort of sidelined by the boomers for so long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the, you know, the rap on us is always that we're, you know, we're too young or too old. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so we were, you know, in the 90s when Gen X was starting the tech companies, we were seen as too young. | ||
| We needed adult supervision. | ||
| We needed the baby boomers to run the companies. | ||
| and that's, and almost every Gen X founder, and some exceptions, but overwhelmingly, | ||
| the boomers took over the companies. | ||
| There was a version of this with Yahoo and eBay, Netscape, even Google, which was the biggest | ||
| of the Gen X companies. | ||
| You know, you got a 10 year period where Eric Schmidt, the baby boomer, took over Google. | ||
| Whereas, you know, the boomer companies, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, | ||
| Um, you know, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. | ||
| Microsoft and Amazon were just the same people, got to run them the whole time. | ||
| And then Apple's a little bit more chaotic. | ||
| Facebook, millennial company, they got to run it. | ||
| Gen X, not so much. | ||
| And tech is meritocratic. | ||
| It's not supposed to be about culture and voting and stuff like this. | ||
| And then I think on a political level, it's striking how underrepresented we are. | ||
| You know, 2020 should be a prime year for a Gen X presidential candidate on the Democratic side, someone born between 1965 and 1980. | ||
| And I challenge you to name me a single plausible Gen X Democrat. | ||
| Don't pick a loser like Cory Booker. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| Well, I think there's several reasons for that on the Democratic side. | ||
| But it's somehow the boomers, they're more of them. | ||
| And so they look like it's truth in numbers. | ||
| And the baby boomer bubble, in a way, has always been that the numbers make it right. | ||
| That if you have a lot of people, it's true. | ||
| And that's kind of what worked. | ||
| And so, you know, the boomers were this unusually big generation, and it was just about them, it was just about getting consensus, and then you could overwhelm things, and that's what you had to do. | ||
| And I think that's sort of coming to an end slowly. | ||
| I wonder, do you think there's also just a flat-out technological component to this? | ||
| That we in Gen X, we're the last generation that grew up without all of this tech. | ||
| So I don't know what the exact connection is, but I remember Being in college, I think my freshman year, I remember some kid down the hallway screaming, I'm on the internet. | ||
| And I went into his room, I've told the story a couple times, I went into his room and it said, Yankees, three, Royals, one, and it had two pictures of the logos, and I swear on my life, I remember thinking this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. | ||
| Like, we did not grow up with the phones in our pockets. | ||
| We didn't grow up connected, all those things. | ||
| So it almost seems to me there's some connection to that, where then the Millennials came in. | ||
| They were so connected to all of this. | ||
| Then the media, because the media wants clicks and everything, paid so much attention to them that that maybe pushed out Gen X a little bit more. | ||
| Do you think there's... I'm just, I'm just doing this... You know, like, this sort of cultural history, it's always... | ||
| Many variables, super over-determined. | ||
| I do think there's something about the millennial vibe that feels more conformist, and Gen X feels less conformist. | ||
| And so one of the You know, good and bad things about being overly connected, overly technologically connected, is, you know, you get to know the score right away, you get the answer right away, you know you're supposed to be scared of climate change right away, and that's good if it's true, and it's bad if it's a shortcut. | ||
| And so our generation, you could say, was the last one that didn't take shortcuts. | ||
| And most of the time, the boomers learn to take shortcuts. | ||
| We didn't take as many shortcuts. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Millennials know to take all the shortcuts. | ||
| And it's a good idea to take shortcuts in a world where nobody takes shortcuts. | ||
| In a world where everybody takes shortcuts, you know, you have to actually figure out | ||
| maybe the shortcut isn't going to work and you're actually better off figuring out the | ||
| other thing. | ||
| Yeah, oh I love that. | ||
| So one way to frame this would be in the boomer era, the boomers who figured out how to take | ||
| shortcuts, so the shortcut in politics is I'm not going to figure out what I think about | ||
| the issues, I'm just going to look at the polls. | ||
| And the pollster is the one who's really running for president. | ||
| We're just listening to the pollster. | ||
| And that was an effective boomer technique for many years, that you just look at the polls. | ||
| And if you had a better pollster, you could more quickly get to where the puck was going, where the crowd was going. | ||
| and you didn't need to think, you didn't waste time thinking about stuff. | ||
| And so, in a world where very few people are doing it, that could be a very good strategy. | ||
| By the time you get to something like the millennials, where everyone's been trained to do shortcuts, | ||
| that somehow doesn't quite work. | ||
| It vaguely maps onto the tracking, because you can think of tracking in school, tracking professionally, as a way to, it's like a shortcut to a successful career. | ||
| And so the baby boomers who stayed on track did quite well. | ||
| So you didn't, you know, tune in and drop out in the late 60s and just went to law school and you became a partner at a law firm. | ||
| that the tracks worked. | ||
| By the time we get to the Millennials, they know all the tracks you're supposed to do. | ||
| Tracks work less well when everyone knows and everyone's doing the same thing. | ||
| So it has, there are these similarities between the Millennials and the Boomers, | ||
| but they're really different in practice and it's working really differently. | ||
| So the things that would have worked perfectly for you as a boomer are deadly if you're a millennial. | ||
| Yeah, so okay, so hearing that and knowing that our sense-making is breaking down and our ability, even our ability to just get away from all this, what you said before about, you know, paying that much attention to politics and all that, everyone asks The whole IDW crew constantly. | ||
| Well, what are you guys going to do? | ||
| And you just said something about, you know, we shouldn't just talk about these things. | ||
| We got to do things. | ||
| Do you see either a technological answer here or a business answer here or? | ||
| Something, and we've talked about this a little bit privately before, and we've kind of bounced it around, but like, everyone wants some answers to what's going on here with the media and everything else, and the pipes, you know, that Google owns all the pipes, and all of that stuff. | ||
| And I think a lot of people, the default position is, well, Teal will fix it, because it's like there's only a couple people that actually could. | ||
| Well, I don't actually quite know what one does to fix the media industry. | ||
| I would say the thing that I'm always super fixated on is the business model questions. | ||
| In my zero-to-one book, the main motif is always that you shouldn't compete, you should try to have a monopoly, you should try to do something that you do so well that you have no competition. | ||
| Good and bad things about monopoly, but from the inside, you generally want to have a monopoly. | ||
| It gets a little bit bad if you become too fat and lazy, and if you then ever have competition, you're really in trouble. | ||
| In a way, the business history, I would tell, of the mainstream media is that they used to have great monopolies. | ||
| The newspapers had local content monopolies, and they got local monopolies on advertisers | ||
| because the only way you could advertise was through a classified section of newspaper or news magazines or, | ||
| you know, all these sort of media monopolies. | ||
| And what technology, what the Internet has done, is it's opened things up in ways that are good for | ||
| information, for learning things, but it's very bad for their business models. | ||
| And I think this is something they never really understood. | ||
| And so if you were at the Washington Post in the 1990s, if you sort of imagine what the holiday party would have been like, the owner of the Post would have said something like, We're all getting paid. | ||
| We're doing great. | ||
| Business is doing great. | ||
| We have all these talented people that are writing great stories. | ||
| And so the narrative would be that it was a great business because of the great work the people there were doing. | ||
| And the true story was something like, no, you're working for a utility company and it doesn't matter what you do because we're going to make these monopoly profits year after year after year. | ||
| And then when the monopoly story started to break, The story was not the monopolies going away because they can't talk about that right right, but the story was rather We don't We don't know anything about the internet or something like that right And so I think I think the the challenge that a lot of the media old media businesses have haven't even been described correctly mm-hmm, and then you know and then it's | ||
| But then it sort of plays out, and you have to figure out some new ways to get distribution channels, some new ways to monetize. | ||
| I think there will be models for doing that, but that's the question of how to do it. | ||
| You can't go back to the old monopolies, though. | ||
| Yeah, we need some answers. | ||
| Alright, let's shift a little bit to some of your history, because I think a lot of people, or a certain set of people, probably only know you through the Gawker prism. | ||
| And every time I read anything about Gawker or what happened with you or Hulk Hogan, it always seems so distorted the way they present it, which is probably very obvious to you. | ||
| To me it was like, because people will say, well, Teal hates the media. | ||
| He sued a publication. | ||
| He obviously hates the media. | ||
| It's like, actually, you were defending the right to privacy, which is something that the media should be doing in and of itself. | ||
| What made you want to get involved in this? | ||
| You had your own history with Gawker, obviously, before Hogan and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It is, you know, there are all these elements of the story that are, of course, | ||
| you know, sort of a little bit larger than life, where you have sort of the sociopathic | ||
| Manhattan media company, and I think that's a too kind of characterization. | ||
| Our internal code name for Gawker was the MBTO, the Manhattan-based terrorist organization. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Well, you've likened them to Al Qaeda before, right? | ||
| And then, yeah, it was a crazy story in '09 where they completely distorted things. | ||
| And I was speaking to a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, and like, what do you think of them? | ||
| I said, oh, the Al Qaeda of Silicon Valley? | ||
| And, oh, can I say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, you can. | |
| Of course you can. | ||
| Of course you can. | ||
| But the, the, the, uh, uh, and so I think they were sort of this, uh, and it was in some ways, um, there are all sorts | ||
| of things you can say about it that were kind of crazy. | ||
| It was super destructive. | ||
| Mostly they didn't go after people like myself. | ||
| They went after people who were relatively powerless, often just average people, not public figures in any sense of the word. | ||
| You know, Hogan was sort of an in-between person. | ||
| He'd been like a very high-profile celebrity, but it was definitely beating up on a weaker person in the context in which they did it. | ||
| And so it had this sort of heroic underdog fighting this sort of hate factory, this hate factory machine. | ||
| That's the right way to describe it. | ||
| They could sort of get targeted at various at various people. | ||
| We have a First Amendment and I believe in freedom of speech. | ||
| And you have to of course always, the Hogan trial, the jury trial. | ||
| In a jury trial, you can always argue the law, or you can argue the facts. | ||
| So the Gawker side argued the law, which is, you know, there's a First Amendment, and it's sacred, and we're journalists, and we get to do whatever we want. | ||
| That was roughly their argument. | ||
| The Hogan side of it was, you published a sex tape that was secretly taken in the privacy of a bedroom. | ||
| And those are the facts. | ||
| That has nothing to do with the First Amendment. | ||
| It might have something to do with the Fourth Amendment, which is against unreasonable search and seizure, not just by government but also by private people obviously. | ||
| And so, can there be a conflict between freedom of speech and right to privacy? | ||
| Probably there are cases where in theory there can be conflict, but this was one where it was simply a violation of privacy, and I would say it wasn't speech at all. | ||
| And then, you know, all sorts of like super egregious facts that came out in trial. | ||
| You know, one of the reporters, the editors who had posted the sex tape, he had a deposition with the It was a one-day long deposition, a few years before the trial. | ||
| So you have a lunch break, you come back after lunch, and A.J. | ||
| DeLaria came back reeking of marijuana. | ||
| Which, I'm not against it, but I wouldn't do it on your show. | ||
| I wouldn't do it in the middle of a legal deposition either. | ||
| And then the lawyer on our side asked DeLaria, is there any sex tape you wouldn't publish? | ||
| I said, well, I guess it would involve a child. | ||
| And it was like, what age child? | ||
| A four-year-old. | ||
| And so when you show that to the jury, that's pretty devastating. | ||
| And so it was one of these things where, you know, I thought that if Terry Bollea, Hulk Hogan, if he ever had his day in court, it was going to be a runaway effect. | ||
| It was going to be completely runaway. | ||
| And that's in effect what happened. | ||
| The last day of the trial, Charles Harder, he thought the largest amount of money he could ask for with a straight face was $100 million. | ||
| And then after seven hours the jury comes back with $115 million. | ||
| And so it was just, it was just, it was just a runaway thing. | ||
| And it was, you know, maybe it was, you can argue that it was too much for this one person, but in some ways it was, it was, you know, it was a million posts they published over the years that were, that was what was really at stake. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, I think a lot of people, the people that like you and defend you on this, will say, well, this was a defense, actually, of free speech. | ||
| It was a defense of just the media coming after everybody, finding out anything you've ever done, finding out any access to any picture you've ever sent or any of that. | ||
| And we see the way this is sort of infecting everything in society right now. | ||
| Not that simple argument to make, but the way I would argue this is I think we need to have vigorous debate. | ||
| We need to have people with heterodox views be able to articulate things. | ||
| And you can silence people by not letting them speak. | ||
| But you can also silence them by, if you say something that's even slightly out of line, we are going to send the hate mob after you, and we're going to make up stories about you and personally destroy you. | ||
| And in a way, that was the logic of the hate factory, the scapegoating machine that was Gawker. | ||
| In some ways, the victims were picked at random. | ||
| And in some ways, they were not at random. | ||
| In some ways, they were the non-conformists. | ||
| They were the people with views that were sort of heterodox. | ||
| I suspect that's one of the reasons they targeted me. | ||
| And again, I was not targeted more than some other people heard even more than I was. | ||
| But it was very often people who said things that were just a little bit outside the zone, and then they were destroyed. | ||
| And the lesson was one of silencing. | ||
| Yeah, so we should talk a little bit about them targeting you. | ||
| So they, in effect, they outed you, right? | ||
| I mean, is that, were they officially the ones that outed you? | ||
| You know, I think even that history can be sort of contested. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, I mean, I know you were out privately and all that, so it's hard to say. | |
| I think it was in a somewhat in-between zone. | ||
| They targeted me repeatedly over years. | ||
| It was that, it was various other articles. | ||
| On the, And it was, of course, if we talk about outing, it's never a simply factual thing. | ||
| It's never, oh, Peter or David are gay. | ||
| FYI. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's more like Peter Thiel is gay and we have no idea why he didn't want us to talk about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And maybe it's because his parents don't know and they'd be embarrassed. | ||
| Or maybe it's because he's trying to get money out of Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Gotta be those two. | ||
| We don't really know why. | ||
| And so outing is always, the way it worked, I think it happens actually much less, but the way it worked always involved a description of someone's sexual orientation and a description of how psychologically messed up they were because they didn't want you to write the article. | ||
| And the way I think our society has progressed is that the word we have for outing today is something like bullying. | ||
| And the question has shifted from the psychology of the person being written about to the psychology of the writer. | ||
| And the question is why would you do something as nasty as this? | ||
| So that's a pretty powerful thing. | ||
| There's been a very big cultural shift. | ||
| So in 2007 when they When they went after me, outing was still acceptable. | ||
| In 2015, they went after the CFO of Condé Nast. | ||
| And you know, again, sort of, who knows if the story was even true. | ||
| But the response was, "Well, it's an incredibly vicious thing." | ||
| Why are your reporters so vicious? | ||
| Why are they so hateful? | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| It was sort of linked to bullying, high school bullying, all these kinds of phenomena. | ||
| So I think we have actually progressed. | ||
| Transparency doesn't always mean that you make things better. | ||
| It's-- | ||
| Sometimes it's just an excuse for attacking people. | ||
| Do you think that in your case that it was also directly linked to your politics? | ||
| Because if you had been the exact same person you are, with the exact same resume, and had created the exact same companies, but you had been a lefty, you had been playing ball the way that they want you to play ball, why would they try to harm you? | ||
| I mean, in effect, they were trying to harm you one way or another. | ||
| I think that's why they do these things. | ||
| That's why the label bully is applicable here. | ||
| That to me, it's like, well, he's the libertarian. | ||
| He's some scary anti-government guy. | ||
| So how can we get him? | ||
| Let's out him. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| It's probably a factor. | ||
| I think on some level they were just trying to get page clicks. | ||
| It's just something. | ||
| I think you're being too charitable to them in a way because you're giving them an ideological motive and you're saying, okay, they were these principled left-wing people who went after the bad right-wing power structure. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not necessarily principled, but yeah. | |
| And I think They were more nihilistic than liberal or left wing. | ||
| And you could dress up the nihilism. | ||
| We're going to blow somebody up. | ||
| We're going to do some crazy attack on some random person. | ||
| And we're going to try to give it some thin ideological gloss. | ||
| But I think it was just, it was just, you know, it was run as like this crazy sweatshop where, | ||
| you know, the people were paid very little and they were paid based on how many clicks they got. | ||
| And so you had to come up with crazy sensational headlines and then stories that sometimes had a relationship with the truth and sometimes didn't. | ||
| Yeah, and that has really permeated the internet altogether. | ||
| I mean, if I look every week, you know I'm on tour with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| It's like every morning I wake up and it's like somebody writes something awful about him that I know is not the truth and it's like they have every interest in doing it because he will defend himself, thus driving clicks. | ||
| I will still say that I think Gawker was In some ways, a singularly sociopathic bully. | ||
| And it is true that there's a lot of stuff like what you characterize. | ||
| I think people discount it more. | ||
| It has less impact. | ||
| I think in its heyday, Gawker had impact because they were sociopathic, they were bullying, and people didn't see it yet. | ||
| And that's the devastating kind. | ||
| If you try to bully someone and everybody says right away, you're a bully, you might still be a bully but you're not going to be that effective. | ||
| If you're bullying people and say, oh this is just the internet, this is tech, this is the future. | ||
| You're gonna have carte blanche. | ||
| And so Gawker had carte blanche for many years to destroy people in a way that I think has gotten much less effective. | ||
| I mean, it still happens. | ||
| There's still, you know, you can have the hate mob form on Twitter. | ||
| There's sort of still versions of this, but it's much less generative. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about sexuality for a little bit, because this isn't something that you talk about that often. | ||
| We've talked about it privately a little bit. | ||
| Well, first off, you're married. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| You got married in the last year. | ||
| How much of your sort of contrarian view of the world, just the way you see things differently, do you think is linked to being gay? | ||
| Because before just the last couple years, where I think being gay has been so attached to leftism, Gay used to mean fun, or different, or politically incorrect, and making edgy jokes, and being at subversive clubs, or all of these other things, whatever it was. | ||
| And gays were really about the individual. | ||
| That was the whole point. | ||
| You now are sort of, as I said at the top, kind of the ultimate contrarian, and I wonder, is there a link between that and sexuality, do you think? | ||
| I wouldn't want to exaggerate any such length. | ||
| I'm always bad at autobiography, so I'll stop that as a qualifier, but I always think of myself as somehow I was both a total insider and a total outsider. | ||
| Straight A student on the elite university, elite law school, elite law firm track. | ||
| I was a bit of a nerd. | ||
| I was born in Germany. | ||
| of a nerd. I was born in Germany, immigrant to the U.S., the gay thing. So all these ways | ||
| that I was both an outsider and insider and probably there's some way. | ||
| Yes some way all this stuff. | ||
| You know summed up to to Make me less less prone to just believing in the received wisdom mm-hmm But I would certainly not want to say anything remotely like that gay people have a privileged access to the truth or anything like that. | ||
| That seems kind of crazy. | ||
| Okay, so a couple years ago, you go to the Republican National Convention and you talked about being gay, which had always been anathema over there. | ||
| What was the exact line that you had said? | ||
| Well, it was, I'm proud to be gay. | ||
| I'm proud to be a Republican. | ||
| Most of all, I'm proud to be an American. | ||
| And so I think it functioned in both a way that every American has an identity. | ||
| It's not something we should ignore or totally diminish, and we should not make it all important. | ||
| And it was sort of trying to steer a certain middle course on identity politics. | ||
| I think it's very easy to go too far in one direction or another. | ||
| You can say that all identity is fake, it doesn't matter, it's all made up, and I think that's wrong. | ||
| I think there's an African American experience, there's a female experience, there's a gay experience, and they are different. | ||
| And then, of course, there's an equally bad mistake of making it all important, where that's all there is, that's what defines you, and then it ends up becoming more of a straitjacket. | ||
| The gay metaphor that I've used is that you can be in the closet, you can be in the ghetto, and they're mutually exclusive, but I hope they're not exhaustive. | ||
| That there's something in between. | ||
| Right, because those two are pretty exhausted, actually. | ||
| But something that's neither, neither of those two. | ||
| Yeah, so when you said that line. | ||
| I don't wanna be in the closet, I don't wanna be in the ghetto. | ||
| Yeah, so when you said that line, and then got that ovation, first off, were you nervous to say that line? | ||
| Because that's no small feat, just to have it in the speech, and ready to go, and land it. | ||
| You were nervous to speak, you know, it was just, you know, it was like, speaking to 15,000 people, or whatever, it's kind of a strange, you know, super adrenaline, Yeah, but that particular line, I mean, when you got the applause on that, there must have been some part of you that was like, it worked, or something has changed, or something like that. | ||
| Yes, well, again, I don't think the Republicans are that anti-gay. | ||
| I don't think they're that anti-gay. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think so either. | ||
| And, I mean, I think maybe they were in the past, but it was clear that this was not the issue, this was not the hill they wanted to die on in 2016, and so somebody had to say it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it must be, you know, it felt a little bit risky, but I don't even want to exaggerate that. | ||
| I think it would have been a very crazy thing to say 20 years earlier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's shift to some new ideas. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Let's do some new ideas. | ||
| So seasteading is one of the things that you've been interested in for years. | ||
| This idea that we're going to basically create, in effect, states that are going to be on platforms in the sea that I think are sort of going to be libertarian utopias, or at least that would be the The general idea. | ||
| Seems like it had a lot of momentum behind it for a while, then kind of went away. | ||
| I think there's some renewed interest in it now. | ||
| What got you interested in this, and where is it at now? | ||
| Well, it was Milton Friedman. | ||
| I sort of knew Milton Friedman a little bit. | ||
| His grandson, Patrick Friedman, I sort of got in touch with, and he was super, he sort of spearheaded this seasteading idea probably about a decade ago now. | ||
| And it was sort of a creative, different, interesting idea. | ||
| I gave it a small amount of funding. | ||
| It wasn't one of the things I did that much with, but it somehow hit an incredible nerve. | ||
| And it hits such a nerve because this idea of starting a new country or doing something new, It reminds people that if we had to design a country from scratch, if we designed the state of California from scratch, it would be so different. | ||
| There's all these super corrupt governance institutions we'd clean out. | ||
| I'm not sure I'd call it utopian, but it's a thought experiment that energizes people and gets them to think about things. | ||
| I spoke at this free market university in Guatemala years ago. | ||
| They told me that they had free speech on everything, but the one thing that you weren't allowed to speak about were things like seasteading or starting new countries. | ||
| And the reason you weren't allowed to speak about them was that if you started, people wouldn't want to talk about anything else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's because it's always such a powerful hook. | ||
| And there are questions about whether it will be allowed, so you have to sort of get There's probably some local permission. | ||
| There's a question on how technologically feasible it is. | ||
| There's sort of a pilot program that they're working on with French Polynesia and starting. | ||
| It's still somewhere in the intermediate stage. | ||
| But yeah, if you can get political autonomy, the assumptions you would do, things are very different. | ||
| You might do medical tourism. | ||
| There might be all sorts of offshore banking you could do. | ||
| There'd be all kinds of things that one might be able to do differently. | ||
| And the link to technology, you'd let a lot of these different microstates bloom and you'd sort of see what would come out of it. | ||
| But the specific technological, scientific technological thing that I think could come out of some new political arrangements at some point is always this question whether we could get new medicines, new drugs, you know, could you have something where, you know, you use psilocybin or MDMA as a antidepressant drug, or can you get new | ||
| Can you get new medical treatments through where you sort of break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide? | ||
| So basically you would see all of these different units sort of having different rules that they live by kind of as an experiment to see what would work, is that...? | ||
| That's one level, but then the specific thing that I would... | ||
| So yeah, that's the general abstract. | ||
| The specific thing that I would hope would come out of it would be more scientific and technological progress that's too heavily regulated by the heavy hand of our existing state. | ||
| And that there are all these things we can't do. | ||
| So there's all sorts of things in governance that might be better. | ||
| You might have a different penal system where you don't have millions of people who are incarcerated. | ||
| There are all sorts of things one might do very differently. | ||
| The specific one that I That I'm probably most attracted to is this question of whether we can do new biomedical things. | ||
| Yeah, so we could do three hours just on this, but it's only one more question on this, which is, how do you decide who gets in on this? | ||
| How do you decide who can live there, who can be part of this? | ||
| I mean, is this purely a financial move? | ||
| If you've got enough money, you're good to go? | ||
| Or are you trying to build a society and picking all sorts of other people and all of those things? | ||
| Well, you get to make all these decisions. | ||
| You get to make these decisions. | ||
| You get to make these decisions, and that's But I think that's always one of the foundational decisions in a society. | ||
| Who's part of it? | ||
| How do we define it? | ||
| And it can be unfair and oppressive if you have just one society, and if you're not in it, you're nowhere. | ||
| But if you have many of these places, that's very different. | ||
| Yeah, and so the pushback on this is then that somehow this means you don't like America or something like that, which is... No, but I certainly think that if we have competition governance, we would do a lot better. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right, let's move then. | ||
| So, flying cars. | ||
| Alain is against them now. | ||
| He's building an underground tunnel in this very city. | ||
| Where are you at on the flying cars these days? | ||
| It was a tagline we had on our venture capital website. | ||
| They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. | ||
| We've got 280 now. | ||
| We've got 280 now. | ||
| All right, we've got up to 280. | ||
| And so it was more a commentary on technology, that we were promised these massive breakthroughs that would transform | ||
| the way the world works, and then that we got sort of incremental communication | ||
| technologies, but not world transforming. | ||
| And so I do think flying cars would be I think Elon's objection was they were too noisy, and then | ||
| of course the question is can you design them so they're not so noisy? | ||
| What are the actual limits on the technology? | ||
| But they're sort of iconic for can we have a Jetsons future? | ||
| Can we have a future where things look really different? | ||
| And the striking thing is that we live in a world that doesn't look that different from | ||
| Again, we're looking at screens, we're distracted by our iPhones all the time, but the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from the way in which our environment strangely hasn't changed. | ||
| We're maybe riding on a hundred-year-old subway in New York City, or the zoning laws mean that the city's Like San Francisco, look like they haven't changed in 50 years and are not that technologically advanced. | ||
| San Francisco is getting so expensive, you had to leave. | ||
| I mean, that says something. | ||
| Not the precise reason, but it basically, it's sort of like, can we have more technological progress than we have? | ||
| And, you know, it's the sort of iconic image I always have of this. | ||
| You have the two Back to the Future movies. | ||
| The first one, they went from 85 to 1955. | ||
| And things have changed a lot from 1955 to 1985. | ||
| The second one, they went from 1985 to what they thought 2015 would be like. | ||
| And you were going to have like, I mean, it was going to be like this crazy different world. | ||
| And I think the reality is the world of 2015 looks, you know, much less different from the world of 1985 than 85 was from 55. | ||
| I'm still waiting for that hoverboard. | ||
| What happened to the hoverboard? | ||
| All these kinds of things, yes. | ||
| And so there is sort of this, and I think that one of the ways our society works, one of the ways liberal democracy or representative government works, is that you have a scientific technological progress going on in the background. | ||
| You have growth. | ||
| The pie is growing. | ||
| If the pie grows, we can find creative ways to shift the pieces so that everybody gets more. | ||
| When the pie stops growing, when there's no progress, then you end up with this polarized world with these zero-sum politics. | ||
| For every winner, there's a loser. | ||
| anyone who succeeds is suspected of being part of some kind of a racket or something. | ||
| And so I think there is actually a pretty, there's a link, a pretty deep link between | ||
| this, the question of scientific and technological progress and the health of our sort of representative democracy. | ||
| Yeah, so that's a good segue to AI, because we've talked about this a little bit, and you told me something once that I'm actually not sure if you've said publicly, but I think it's pretty on point. | ||
| That basically, if you're an authoritarian, you should be for AI, and libertarians are sort of against AI. | ||
| Am I getting that roughly correct? | ||
| I think you did it a little better than that. | ||
| The soundbite was on Bitcoin, so it was, if crypto is libertarian, then AI is communist. | ||
| So everyone thinks of crypto as libertarian because you have all these ideas about decentralizing money and things like this. | ||
| Nobody says AI is communist. | ||
| And that's because we're sort of, we're more conscious of people with different views like libertarian and we're less conscious of people with collectivist views because that's sort of the, that's more the zeitgeist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But yes, I think AI, and the crypto versus AI dichotomy goes to the sort of question about what's the future | ||
| of the computer age going to look like? | ||
| And is it going to be more centralized or more decentralized? | ||
| We have, if you think about the history, we've had these very different pictures. | ||
| So, you know, in the late '60s, the early Star Trek episodes, | ||
| you had maybe, there was one planet they got to where there was one big computer that ran the whole planet, | ||
| had been running it for 8,000 years. | ||
| And, you know, people didn't have any thoughts. | ||
| They were all sort of docile, kind of happy. | ||
| Nothing ever happened. | ||
| And that was what people thought the future would be in the late '60s, | ||
| it was gonna be centralized big computers. | ||
| The late '90s, it was going to be crypto, it was going to be decentralized. | ||
| The internet was going to split up all these sort of structures. | ||
| If you, and it was like 1998, let's say. | ||
| So let's say 68 was centralized, 98 was decentralized. | ||
| 2018, in some ways, the pendulum has swung back to centralized. | ||
| It's big governments, big databases that can monitor and survey people and know more about you than you know about yourself, or things like that, sort of creepy Big Brother type thing. | ||
| But I think since the pendulum has swung back and forth so much over the last 50 years, there's no reason that that's the future. | ||
| It's actually a choice. | ||
| Do we want it to be centralized? | ||
| Do we want it to be decentralized? | ||
| And what I think, again, AI can mean many different things, but if it means that you have large databases that are controlled by, let's say, a large government that can monitor people more effectively, It's something that could make communism maybe more effective, certainly more scary, more totalitarian than it ever was in the 20th century. | ||
| I do think it's not a coincidence along these lines that the Chinese Communist Party hates crypto and loves AI. | ||
| And again, AI means something a little bit different from what it means in a Silicon Valley context, where in Silicon Valley, AI often just means a super smart computer that will leave all the humans behind. | ||
| In China, it means a really smart computer that helps a few humans control the rest. | ||
| Yeah, so it almost seems like we're gonna splinter off into two versions of this, where we'll have these two tracks that'll be side by side. | ||
| Half the people are really gonna be into this sort of centralized idea of things and the ease that AI will allow you to get products or whatever else it is. | ||
| And then you'll have this other group of people who maybe, who are into all the cryptocurrencies and all that, who are just sort of, I don't know, I suppose operating outside of the system or something like that. | ||
| Well, it's, you know, I think it's, It's possible these things can be overlapping, but it's also possible it can go much more one way or the other. | ||
| That it can be ultimately, that the future can be more decentralized or more centralized. | ||
| It can be more capitalist, more communist, more libertarian, more totalitarian. | ||
| So I think it can go in a lot of different ways. | ||
| And this is why these debates are important. | ||
| Because it's up to us to decide which technologies do we push. | ||
| and which ones are we maybe going to be a little bit more careful. | ||
| I don't think you should outlaw AI or regulate it, but I think that there certainly are other | ||
| technologies that I would like to do better. | ||
| So I know you're not in the ... Well, what are some of those technologies? | ||
| Well, again, something like ... | ||
| So crypto being the main one. | ||
| Yeah, so I know that a huge percentage of my audience, just because they know of all the craziness I've been through with demonetization and I'm always complaining about the algorithm and our videos not going to feeds and all of these things, and that we've just sort of, we just don't know what's going on, you know? | ||
| And you know my feelings on this about, I don't want the government telling these companies what to do. | ||
| But I would like a little more transparency out of the government. | ||
| I'd like to know what's kind of going on with the algorithms and things like that. | ||
| Is there any way we could know more about these algorithms and things that are giving us all this information, or is that just, there's reasons why we can't know all of that? | ||
| I'm not even sure if I framed that question correctly. | ||
| You know, look, I've always had to be careful here since I'm on the Facebook board, and I, I certainly think that, in my judgment, Facebook has been given a bit more of a bum rap than it deserves on many of these scores. | ||
| But I would say that I think this question is going to continue. | ||
| Does Silicon Valley discriminate against certain voices? | ||
| Are the algorithms in fact neutral or are they coded to discriminate against conservative libertarian voices that are a little bit outside the mainstream? | ||
| I think Silicon Valley is making a mistake if it thinks that that question can be sort of swept under the rug and is going to go away. | ||
| I think the question is going to be asked with more intensity in the years ahead and I think people are going to have to answer it. | ||
| Yeah, alright. | ||
| So, two more for you. | ||
| Did you ever think if 20 years ago someone would have said to you, you know, Teal, in 2018, you're gonna leave Silicon Valley, and not only are you gonna leave Silicon Valley, you're gonna go to L.A. | ||
| for freedom. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're gonna go to L.A. | ||
| to escape, to find some free thinkers. | ||
| Now, there's something interesting happening in L.A. | ||
| right now, and it goes to something that you referenced earlier. | ||
| Politics and media are sort of becoming one thing, and there is suddenly this new home here of kind of free thinkers that are interested in politics and all that. | ||
| But the fact that you ended up here, of all places, where this is thought of as Hollywood and the liberal lefty elite and all that stuff, does that seem crazy to you, that of all places you're going to end up here? | ||
| I don't think I would have predicted it 20 years ago, certainly. | ||
| I think there's sort of a lot of different reasons one chooses to live in a place. | ||
| I probably like bigger cities. | ||
| I think there's sort of a lot of things you can do in big cities you can't do in smaller places. | ||
| One of the things that however is a very different feel between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley is that Los Angeles is, it is a weirdly, it is the big city that is weirdly decentralized. | ||
| It doesn't have a center. | ||
| People always complain about how bad the traffic is, but one of the virtues of it is it somehow | ||
| isn't like this intense manic bubble like Manhattan or like San Francisco and Silicon | ||
| Valley have become. | ||
| The super intense network effects you have in Manhattan and in Silicon Valley can be | ||
| very positive because it's like you communicate things, you get ideas, but then at some point | ||
| you get a tipping point, it gets crossed, where it becomes more negative. | ||
| It becomes groupthink, lemming-like behavior, the madness of crowds. | ||
| And my judgment is that somehow Silicon Valley's, you know, jumped the shark just a little bit over the last few years that the very things that were positive got pushed so far till they actually became poisonous. | ||
| Yeah, do you think you get more support privately from some of your colleagues than maybe publicly on something like that? | ||
| Like were people, other CEOs calling you and going, you know, I get it too. | ||
| I'm having trouble hiring qualified people because of all of... | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of reasons. | ||
| The reductionist economic reason that things have gotten less desirable in Silicon Valley is it's gotten too expensive. | ||
| If it's $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment, maybe that's like a boom town and that's showing things are going well. | ||
| If it's $4,000, that's like just a crazy tax that maybe you should think twice about paying. | ||
| Yeah, even on the nuts and bolts, if you're starting a new company, you know, five, six years ago it was clear in tech that Silicon Valley was the right place to do it because of all the network effects and you had more capital and more talent and that sort of helped. | ||
| Today I think it's much more ambiguous. | ||
| It doesn't mean it's all going to move to L.A. | ||
| or all going to move to some other place. | ||
| I think it's going to be much more decentralized. | ||
| It is actually one of the very strange ironies or paradoxes of the internet age, that the internet was supposed to eliminate the tyranny of place, and that almost all of it happened in this narrow Silicon Valley area. | ||
| I remember there was a talk I gave at Stanford University, a panel discussion back in 2005, and one of the questions was, Where will we find the next Google? | ||
| So it was a student audience, the student union at Stanford, and so they were interested in working for the next Google company. | ||
| So it was a search problem. | ||
| They're searching for the next Google. | ||
| Can't type it into the Google search engine, but it's really valuable to figure it out. | ||
| And I sort of thought, the sort of clever, slightly cryptic answer I gave was, you know, I think there's a 50% chance the next Google is within a five mile radius of this room. | ||
| So I'm narrowing the search problem. | ||
| Five mile radius was about maybe roughly a millionth of the surface area of the Earth. | ||
| So I was reducing it by a factor of a million, the search problem. | ||
| Still pretty hard. | ||
| A lot of garages and things you have to look at within a five mile radius. | ||
| And I think that was actually right. | ||
| It was that concentrated. | ||
| So, you know, the next Google was Facebook. | ||
| And it was 1.8 miles from that room. | ||
| And so I didn't realize it at the time, but it was correct. | ||
| If I had to give the same speech today, it would be way less than 50% within 50 miles. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And so I think it is going to be much more decentralized. | ||
| So yeah, the consensus is total centralization. | ||
| And just as with AI and crypto, I'd be more in the crypto than the AI side. | ||
| In general, I'd be much more in the decentralization than centralization side. | ||
| So I know you haven't been here for that long, but do you think that there's been any costs that you maybe didn't expect? | ||
| Like that there's something going on there still? | ||
| There's still some spark of something that maybe you won't have access to enough or be around as much or something like that? | ||
| You think there's any risk there? | ||
| You know, I think I'll have access to the same set of things. | ||
| But I think it's just getting a little bit... The outsider perspective is healthy. | ||
| When we initially set up my office, we were in San Francisco, which was a little bit outside of Silicon Valley for many years. | ||
| So I always think you want to be You know, you want to be not in the middle of the insanity. | ||
| You don't want to be totally in the boonies. | ||
| You want to be somewhere in between. | ||
| And I don't think L.A. | ||
| is totally in the boonies. | ||
| Well, where I live might be, you know, alright. | ||
| Okay, so one more for you. | ||
| So you know I've been on this tour with Jordan Peterson for the last couple months. | ||
| It's so interesting because I go online all day and there's people yelling at each other and seemingly hating each other, and then I spend my nights with thousands of people who are coming together over ideas, who may disagree on this or that, but really want to find some answers. | ||
| So as someone, one of the few people now that I think is trying to find answers, that is actually making sense, that really wants to look at different ways to solve the problems of the day, For the young people that are watching this, you know, take anyone under 30 that's watching this and wants to feel hopeful because that's the other part that I think is changing. | ||
| There's a huge amount of people that don't feel hopeful for the future. | ||
| They feel our political establishment is just at odds. | ||
| They feel this constant hate online. | ||
| For those people that want to feel hopeful, what can you give them that they can look to for a hopeful future? | ||
| Well, it's always really hard to give generic advice. | ||
| I'm not going for generic advice. | ||
| I always feel there's so many things you can say that just sound like BS in a way, and that's why this is actually a simple but difficult question, a very hard question in a way. | ||
| I think the autobiographical part that I tell about my history was that I was I was super tracked. | ||
| You know, it's like eighth grade, junior high school yearbook when my friend says, you know, you're going to get into Stanford in four years. | ||
| Four years later, I get into Stanford. | ||
| I get into Stanford Law School. | ||
| I end up at a top-tier law firm in Manhattan. | ||
| And it was, you know, one of these places on the outside everybody wanted to get in, on the inside everybody wanted to get out. | ||
| And the sort of a quarter-life crisis, I never had a mid-life crisis, but maybe a quarter-life crisis in my mid-twenties, and the quarter-life crisis was, you know, why did I end up in this? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| And I think it was that I just followed the track and I wasn't thinking about, you know, why I was doing things, what I was doing. | ||
| And I think that's the generic advice, is that the tracks are not working. | ||
| I think they worked better in the past. | ||
| They had problems, but they worked better. | ||
| They stopped working for Gen X. They're working even less well for Millennials or Gen Z or whatever's next. | ||
| And so it's more important than ever to think for yourself, to find something. | ||
| You're good at, you're interested in, you're motivated at, and do it. | ||
| Again, the generic, cross-the-board advice I always have is not to be overly competitive. | ||
| The tracks force you to compete. | ||
| You compete, you win, you cycle, and repeat. | ||
| You need to find something where you're not always just looking at the people around you, and you have some other reference point. | ||
| You know, this is sort of more of a religious cut on this, but I'm always struck by how, you know, the Ten Commandments, they're sort of, they're kind of, the first and last in some sense are maybe the important ones, the end ones. | ||
| The first one is you should only look to God. | ||
| There's only one God and you should worship Him. | ||
| And then the last one is you shouldn't covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. | ||
| And so that you shouldn't look at the people around you too much. | ||
| And so we need to find some way to look up and not to look around because when we look | ||
| around it's not that we figure out what to do. | ||
| It just ends up being the hyper copycat, mimetic, crazed environment. | ||
| So it's always, there needs to be more of a, you need to find some transcendence. | ||
| I think this is what's powerful about the Peterson message. | ||
| It can't just be fashion. | ||
| It can't just be what everybody thinks because that's just, you're just going to be competing with people like crazy. | ||
| Yeah, there's a literal metaphor here in that we're always looking down on our phones while you're telling us to look up. | ||
| We're looking too much at the people around us. | ||
| And it can be efficient, it can be a shortcut, and then at some point it can just be a trap. | ||
| There's a business school example I often give where you think of Harvard Business School or any of these business schools as hot house environments in which you have a bunch of people, they have no transcendent reference point. | ||
| They have no idea what they want to do. | ||
| They're all sort of extroverted. | ||
| They all spend two years talking to each other about what to do. | ||
| They don't have any ideas. | ||
| And there's almost a dynamic where you end up with the most faddish and the most wrong idea being the consensus choice for so many of these people. | ||
| And that's always a dynamic to try to avoid. | ||
| I don't know how to end an interview better than that. | ||
| I'm so glad that we finally got to do this. | ||
| You know, I was thinking before I sat down with you, where do I point people to with Peter Thiel, and I could point them to your companies and everywhere else, but then I thought, you know what, the guy's only tweeted once, and that's probably the best place I could point people to, because these days everyone's fighting on Twitter, and you only tweeted one time, so I'll look at the camera, follow Peter on the Twitter, at Peter Thiel, unless you want me to point them somewhere else. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's okay, that's okay. | |
| It's been a pleasure, my friend. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
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