March 5, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:09
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Those parts where there was still progress and where things were still getting better also were somehow distracting us from the lack of progress everywhere else, the ways in which we're not a progressive society. | ||
| We use the word progressive, it gets used all the time, but it doesn't stand for actual progress. | ||
| And, you know, I always say, you know, the iPhones that, you know, distract us from our environment. | ||
| Also distract us from the way it's strangely old. | ||
| So you're looking at an iPhone while you're riding a hundred-year-old subway that's completely busted in New York. | ||
| And so there's something about, we have some elements of progress, but they've been distracting | ||
| us from the lack of progress or even the outright decline. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, live from the local studio here in Miami, and joining me today is the | ||
| founder of the Thiel Foundation, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. | ||
| I could have given you, like, a whole bigger intro there. | ||
| Anything else you want to throw in yourself? | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| Generally, the shorter the intro, the more flattering it is. | ||
| You have super long, you have a 20-page resume for people who've never done anything. | ||
| I was going to say Renaissance man, disgruntled libertarian something. | ||
| The longer the intro gets, the more it suggests that you're not really doing anything at all. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| Well, you are doing a lot. | ||
| I actually have notes. | ||
| I never have notes when I do a show, but I was like, I want to cover some new ground and not just get into the political thing that we're always fighting with everybody about. | ||
| But I thought I'd start because we are here in Miami. | ||
| You famously left San Francisco. | ||
| moved most of the operation to Los Angeles. | ||
| You do have a place in Miami. | ||
| How do you feel about this sort of movement of people across the country right now and sort of watching people migrate to different places to live very, very different ways? | ||
| Well, it's surely a very healthy thing. | ||
| It's in retrospect, it's amazing that people were as stuck as they were in the places they were in for such a long time. | ||
| The history of the U.S. | ||
| was that this had always been a society where people moved a lot between places, and the physical mobility had actually gone down probably a lot for the last 40 or 50 years relative to the You know, 200-year history before that. | ||
| And so, you know, it's probably the jury's still a little bit out whether this is a temporary or permanent feature, but it's surely a healthy recalibration. | ||
| It's sort of this idea you can always start over in this country, and one of the ways you start over is you move to a new place. | ||
| Were you kind of patting yourself on the back that you were the first guy out of San Francisco? | ||
| And my audience is well aware, as I've posted some videos from a recent visit to San Francisco, the way that place has just collapsed under progressive policies is absolutely insane. | ||
| I'm guessing you don't have any employees that are wishing that you guys had stayed, although you still do have some people there, right? | ||
| There still are some people. | ||
| Not very many that still are living in San Francisco proper, and yeah, it is really extraordinary. | ||
| I lived in San Francisco from 2003 to 2018, and it never quite got better, but it took a while for the idea to sneak up on people, that it was actually on the slow decay deterioration thing. | ||
| The homelessness was always a chronic problem. | ||
| Circa 2014, 2015, you start to realize, you know, it's actually getting worse. | ||
| And they're never gonna, it's not just that this is this fake problem that they're taking a long time to fix, | ||
| it's they are, it's a fake problem they use to distract from everything else, they're never gonna fix it. | ||
| So when you're hearing about it. | ||
| And it's also a real problem. | ||
| Well, it's also, right, it's clearly a real problem, but something that they either don't seem interested | ||
| in fixing, well, what do you think is the answer to that? | ||
| Is it that they're not interested? | ||
| There are a lot of problems that are both real and fake. | ||
| So the homeless problem is, you know, yeah, it's an incredible problem. | ||
| But it's also, you get a sense that it never gets fixed. | ||
| And so if you talk about a problem that you're never gonna fix, then you can avoid talking about | ||
| all the other problems like, let's say, cost of living for out of control rents for people | ||
| with homes, or broken schools, or, you know, crime, or, you know, there's sort of are probably half a dozen | ||
| other issues that move to the bottom of the queue as long as we talk about an unsolvable problem. | ||
| When you were there, were you trying to talk to them about those things and say, guys, like, look at what is happening here and the state of the decay? | ||
| Well, on the city level, it felt like Exit is much more powerful than Voice. | ||
| I'm not sure it's super corrupt, but San Francisco is super ideological in this very left-wing, very unreformable way. | ||
| I always have a schizophrenic view about getting involved in politics, where it's super important and super toxic, but getting involved in San Francisco City politics, that would be absolutely an insane thing to do relative to just moving. | ||
| You're not enough of a masochist for that. | ||
| Heroism's good. | ||
| Martyrdom, not so good. | ||
| And yeah, the relative sanity of getting involved in local politics or just moving out of San Francisco. | ||
| You should always move. | ||
| So to that point, one more thing on this. | ||
| So now you're here in Florida. | ||
| For the winter. | ||
| So you're split in time and obviously you also have your place in LA. | ||
| But do you feel a real tangible difference when you're here? | ||
| I mean, you know, I left a year ago and it's like I have not looked back and I'm loving it here and I see something so incredibly powerful and flourishing here. | ||
| Do you feel that when you're here? | ||
| Well, there is just an extraordinary difference if you're in a place where you just feel it's growing versus not. | ||
| And there's a sense in which Florida, Texas have this dynamic of where it's just growing. | ||
| Every storefront is full. | ||
| There are no empty stores. | ||
| I'm not sure it's quite booming, but it feels healthy and growing. | ||
| And then, you know, much of California does not quite have that feel, even though, of course, you know, Silicon Valley's been this odd place where it was a, you know, gold rush and everyone was depressed. | ||
| Even so, for the last decade. | ||
| So, Silicon Valley had a very odd dynamic, where it was a crazy boom. | ||
| That didn't actually feel that way if you walk down the street. | ||
| And then certainly with the COVID shock the last few years, it's quite different. | ||
| I still think California is probably somewhat healthier than New York or completely bankrupt states like Illinois or non-states like Puerto Rico. | ||
| Why do you think healthier than New York? | ||
| I think there are ways that the finance industry that New York is centered on is more movable than the tech industry in California. | ||
| And probably the very big tech companies like Google and Apple It's hard to picture them actually moving out of California, whereas you can picture the big banks gradually moving out of New York, and there's something about finance that's been a little bit more movable. | ||
| It also paradoxically makes it more dangerous for California, because if things ever go wrong They will be so bust. | ||
| It'll be like Detroit, which thought that it had these captive big three car manufacturers and could get away with very bad policies in Michigan, Detroit, for decade after decade. | ||
| And then when that industry finally went south, it was... | ||
| It was just unfixable. | ||
| New York's in a worse shape right now because relatively more people are leaving. | ||
| It's easier for the businesses to leave. | ||
| And then maybe California, if it's not careful, it will at some point really go off the cliff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you find that these things sort of happen slowly and then very quickly? | ||
| So something like California, it's like, you know, Cali's lost almost a million people in these last three years, and a lot of them are high earners. | ||
| I mean, these are people who are paying into the system that's ever growing. | ||
| At some point, somebody has to look at numbers, right, and be like, none of this works. | ||
| Or I guess maybe not, right? | ||
| It just continues somehow, I suppose. | ||
| I don't know how many of them were the highest earners in California the last few years. | ||
| I think New York was a little bit more that effect than California. | ||
| But yes, these things, you know, we have these odd dynamics where things go on for a very long time. | ||
| They're not ultimately sustainable, but, you know, there's some way I often think that much of the 2000s and 2010s were this weird continuation of the 1990s. | ||
| You know, the decades, there were things that happened. | ||
| You know, you had 9-11, you had the global financial crisis, Trump election, Brexit. | ||
| There were some events that happened in those 20 years, but it was surprisingly little. | ||
| December 2019, I was reflecting on the 2010s, and I realized there'd been no retrospectives on this decade. | ||
| What actually happened in the 2010s? | ||
| You know, we had marijuana legalization, we had Game of Thrones, and people fell into their iPhones. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then it was somehow just this thing that was sort of a stretched, exhausted version of the 2000s, which themselves were a stretched, exhausted version of the 90s. | ||
| And then I want to say that in some sense, you know, March 2020, when COVID hits, we finally, you know, a lot of these things finally accelerate and, you know, and we're finally in the 21st century. | ||
| So that's actually a great segue to sort of where I wanted to start today because years ago once, off camera, you said to me, I wouldn't be a libertarian if any of it worked. | ||
| And I just thought that line pretty much captures so much of what's happening even right this moment. | ||
| You referenced the last three years of COVID where it seems like nothing really works anymore. | ||
| Our government kind of doesn't work. | ||
| Our educational institutions don't seem to work. | ||
| The medical field doesn't seem to work. | ||
| Is it all, is it sort of obvious that they were all not going to work at the exact same time? | ||
| Or how did this happen? | ||
| Well, I'm tempted to say the rot has been building up for a long time, and if you define technology as doing more with less, so many of these institutions, educational, even healthcare, are kind of the opposite, where you get the same for more, or you get less for more. | ||
| So it's the anti-tech definition. | ||
| I think of the public schools, probably. | ||
| In some sense, the quality of the education is way lower than it was 50 or 60 years ago. | ||
| The costs are way higher. | ||
| And so, it is you're getting less for more. | ||
| And then there are versions of this with healthcare where maybe people are getting a little bit | ||
| better healthcare than they were 30 years ago, but at double the cost. | ||
| So it's again, a lot of...it's sort of like an 80% socialist healthcare system that we | ||
| have. | ||
| Not 100%, but 80%. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff that's screwed up with that. | ||
| So yeah, I think there are a lot of things that had not been working for quite some time. | ||
| And maybe the interesting question is why people weren't noticing it or something like | ||
| Yeah, so what do you think that is? | ||
| Is that just our modern lives? | ||
| We're staring at our phones all day? | ||
| We're watching TV shows and we're just not paying attention to what's going on? | ||
| There were still some parts of our society where things were progressing. | ||
| There was certainly some, maybe narrow, cone of progress around computers, software, internet, mobile internet. | ||
| And then those parts where there was still progress and where things were still getting better also were somehow distracting us from the lack of progress everywhere else, the ways in which we're not a progressive society. | ||
| We use the word progressive, it gets used all the time, but it doesn't stand for actual progress. | ||
| And you know, I always say, you know, the iPhones that, you know, distract us from our environment. | ||
| also distract us from the way it's strangely old. | ||
| So you're looking at an iPhone while you're riding a hundred year old subway that's completely busted in New York. | ||
| And so there's something about, um, we have some elements of progress, but they've, uh, they've been, uh, distracting us from, you know, the lack of progress or even the outright decline. | ||
| And then, um, and then, yeah, there was some kind of crazy crystallizing event like, like COVID where, you know, you have, No science, no rationality. | ||
| It takes a long time to even get the vaccine approved. | ||
| The FDA is just a blocker. | ||
| All these things don't work that well. | ||
| They still work relatively better in the U.S. | ||
| than many other countries, but all sorts of things are really off. | ||
| So as the guy that was the first outside investor in Facebook and sort of at the beginning of the tech boom 20-something years ago, Were you thinking about some of that then? | ||
| Or was anyone talking about the fact that we might all get distracted by so much information and so much nonsense and scrolling and all of this stuff that everything else will just kind of slide away and we won't even know? | ||
| Like, was there any inkling of some of that? | ||
| I think it's always a little bit unfair to put too much of the blame on Silicon Valley for this. | ||
| There was some innovation in Silicon Valley. | ||
| There was a sense in which it probably was not quite enough. | ||
| There was this manifesto that my venture capital fund put out. | ||
| Back in 2011 where the tagline was, you know, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters And that wasn't it wasn't meant as an anti Twitter argument per se like Twitter It's a good business. | ||
| It's good for the Several thousand people that work there. | ||
| Maybe there were slightly too many, but for at least several thousand that are left, it's a good business. | ||
| And you know, it somehow was transformative in some way, but it wasn't enough to, you know, take our whole civilization to the next level. | ||
| And this was, so I think Silicon Valley was doing some things, but it was not enough. | ||
| And then, you know, there were arguments that, you know, it didn't have to all be in Silicon Valley. | ||
| You know, they weren't building flying cars in Silicon Valley. | ||
| They weren't building flying cars anywhere else. | ||
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Right. | |
| So since you mentioned Twitter, let's just do an Elon thing for a second. | ||
| As you watch the guy buy this thing, obviously you guys did PayPal together and everything else. | ||
| Do you think he realized what a freaking headache this thing was going to become and how crazy the product under the hood actually was? | ||
| There was probably... There was probably... I haven't talked to him about the Twitter acquisition. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| Or just broadly speaking, finding that so many of these things are sort of broken under the hood, in a way. | ||
| I think he had some idea, but probably not the full extent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There was probably, you know, probably the fact that they were willing to sell Twitter to him should have told him. | ||
| They were just, I mean, it was just, it was just, you know, Jack Dorsey, all these other people, it was, you know, they were just these figureheads and it was, I mean, the inmates were running the asylum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was probably on some level You know, there was some part of it that was somewhat ideological. | ||
| There was a way that Elon felt like the wrong person ideologically to take over Twitter. | ||
| But, I mean, after a decade of the stock going nowhere, they were just completely exhausted. | ||
| Yeah, you can only lose money for so long. | ||
| They don't know that much about business. | ||
| They didn't lose money, but they didn't... if you look at the Twitter price, the day At the end of the first day of trading so, you know price the IPO it closes on day one and I forget what the exact number was Oh, I think it was it was roughly the same, right? | ||
| It's roughly the same as at the point where Elon offered to acquire it So it had gone nowhere in a decade in a context where a lot of tech stocks had gone up So I think they were they were just completely exhausted and it was sort of a plea for help and then Elon probably on some level realized it and on some old I didn't realize quite how, you know, please take this company from us. | ||
| And, you know, you can hear that as, Elon, you're wonderful, you can do a great job, or we're just really, really exhausted. | ||
| It probably was some combination of both. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So, all right, so let's shift a little bit. | ||
| I want to talk to you, one of the things that we've covered an awful lot on my show in the last two months is a lot of the globalist stuff. | ||
| I always try to say when I'm doing these things on the show, it's like I don't have a full sense of how much influence these organizations actually have versus just they give these crazy speeches, we all kind of freak out about it, but what are actually the the policies and then on the other hand, | ||
| you see someone maybe like a Justin Trudeau, who seems like he really is incorporating | ||
| a lot of the policies of the WEF. | ||
| So as someone that you've been to some of these things over the years, right? | ||
| Like, what do you make of what actually goes on there? | ||
| I assume you're usually kind of on the outside, even if you're there, | ||
| just because of your political leanings. | ||
| I went to the WEF three times, 2008, 2009, 2013. | ||
| So I haven't been in about a decade. | ||
| It is, I mean, there's things about it that are maybe talking about globalism generally. | ||
| It's a good thing. | ||
| It is somehow this official ideology. | ||
| It's in some ways very exhausted. | ||
| So I think the tide is going out. | ||
| The high watermark year was probably 2007, and it's been going out in some way for 16 years, but it's been going out very, very slowly. | ||
| And there are sort of ways that it is, you know, in theory, you know, a borderless, more integrated, more peaceful world is a good world for the 21st century. | ||
| Theory, sure. | ||
| That's good globalization. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there are all kinds of versions of it that are kind of bad where it just ends up being, you know, a racket for You know, dictators stealing money and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts, which probably were Davos, you can think of as a sort of reputation laundering operation or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or there are all sorts of versions of it that are, you know, deeply, deeply unhealthy. | ||
| And I think it has been. | ||
| On this this kind of autopilot where it just keeps going even though it's very exhausted. | ||
| I think it's been exhausted for for 15 years. | ||
| Is that why in some ways the the rhetoric seems to ramp up where you know they really are making it sound like we control you and we are the gods and it's sort of like hysterical because perhaps there actually isn't. | ||
| I mean that would be I would love that as the takeaway here. | ||
| Yeah there probably are all these Different vectors of globalization. | ||
| There's, you know, trade is the movement of goods, movement of people is sort of immigration policy, movement of money is banking and finance, and then movement of ideas is the internet. | ||
| And so there's sort of a, you can sort of analyze it in terms of these different sectors. | ||
| And there were, in theory, all these ways these things should work. | ||
| In theory, you know, free trade is a positive sum exercise where both sides benefit. | ||
| You know, I think it was, you know, Adam Smith who said, you know, why would anybody ever | ||
| throw rocks in their own harbor? | ||
| And then, you know, being able to move, you know, between countries and places is also | ||
| something that you might expect to see in a dynamic healthy world. | ||
| So there are sort of all kinds of ways these things are in theory pretty good, and then in practice they went very haywire. | ||
| The movement of money piece was in some ways the global financial crisis, where people were sending the money to all these different places all over the world. | ||
| where they had no local knowledge and it was badly invested and then the banks blew up. | ||
| So you can think of 2008 as the financial part of globalization kind of blew up. | ||
| And then one version would be, well, it's going to just stop and we're going to stop | ||
| sending the money. | ||
| And it sort of got replaced by governments. | ||
| So if you think about Europe, sort of a mini-globalization in the form of the European Union, the EU, and basically in 2007 German savers were voluntarily buying Italian bonds, and sort of this international financial flows. | ||
| After 2008, nobody wanted to do that anymore, but the Northern European government stepped in and started doing it, and somehow kept that game going for another decade or so. | ||
| But, yeah, my intuition is that it's very exhausting. | ||
| There's obviously a China version of this, where, you know, in 2007, people still talked about globalization as, you know, all the developing countries, and they were going to converge with the developed world, and it was a sort of convergence theory of history. | ||
| And in some ways, that story got dominated much more by China. | ||
| And there are ways in which China has been growing, but it's actually not been globalizing, if globalizing means becoming a A Western liberal democracy. | ||
| And so China is actually, you know, this place that hasn't been following that script terribly well. | ||
| And if the biggest country in the world doesn't fit the picture of globalization, at some point it should tell you, you know, the theory is wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So the end of history theory was a version of globalization. | ||
| And I always say that, you know, in 2000, you know, the end of history itself Was obviously over, ended in 2017 when Xi becomes dictator for life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think, I think Blake, Blake Masters, who you co-wrote Zero to One with, I think his line on China was, we thought that we would make China more like us, basically, by by having a conversation with China about what's going on with the world. | ||
| And instead, we became more like China. | ||
| So I take it you probably agree with that premise generally. | ||
| It's a very, it's a You know, it has a great deal of very disturbing truth to it, and where, yeah, there's sort of all this, you know, social credit scoring, centralized control. | ||
| Obviously, we're still very far ways off from China. | ||
| You know, I wouldn't want to move there. | ||
| China is a lot worse than China was 10 years ago. | ||
| I mean, you know, I think, you know, I think it was, you know, it was a one-party communist state in 2012. | ||
| But I don't think it felt as heavy-handed and as totalitarian as it does now. | ||
| There's, I don't know what the right metaphor is, it's like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica where they've just been, the tech is just, it's like all the surveillance tech, everyone's being monitored at all times and all places now in a way that they were not a decade ago. | ||
| So is the white pill version of that that it just can't sustain itself long enough? | ||
| If you surveil people constantly, if you control everything constantly, eventually you cannot maintain that level of control? | ||
| Something to that effect? | ||
| There are stories we like to tell where it's just going to collapse. | ||
| I think those are too optimistic. | ||
| And then I think there are ones that are overly pessimistic, where China is just going to take over the whole world, and somehow it's more efficient, or things like that. | ||
| And I think both the extreme optimistic and extremely pessimistic stories are probably wrong, somewhere in between. | ||
| We should not assume it's going to collapse on its own. | ||
| We need to think very hard about how we rise up to the challenge that China represents. | ||
| And it has all these dimensions, military, technological, economic. | ||
| It's sort of much more multifaceted than the challenge the Soviet Union was, which was much more military and ideological. | ||
| When you say we, is it our political establishment that we are the ones that are going to have to deal with this? | ||
| That's a good catch. | ||
| We is always a very ambiguous word. | ||
| It means we conservatives, we libertarians. | ||
| it means we Republicans, we Americans, and we the Western world, | ||
| or we all the countries that are not China. | ||
| Yeah, or maybe we. | ||
| Or maybe the two of us. | ||
| Right, but what do you mean by that? | ||
| Like in a sense of like if you were- All of the above. | ||
| Yeah, it's all of the above. | ||
| You know, there probably is, you know, there's always a debate between, | ||
| let's say, you know, the President Trump's policy It was somewhat of a unilateral, anti-tough-on-China policy. | ||
| And there's obviously a sense where a multilateral approach to China is more powerful and better. | ||
| It's also hard to pull off. | ||
| And so multilateralism, in theory, is good. | ||
| In practice, you have to always worry that that's almost like a Chinese communist decoy | ||
| tactic where they're intentionally encouraging us to be multilateral because they know that | ||
| will go super slow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Basically, like having the UN do anything at this point. | ||
| Or the WTO or all these multinational agencies that have been, you know, semi-hijacked. | ||
| So yeah, but I think there are ways in which one should start with rethinking it on a U.S. | ||
| level and then it's definitely something we need to bring our allies into. | ||
| Do you think we have enough sort of... | ||
|
unidentified
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Bye. | |
| Not mental acumen, but do we have enough juice left in America to tackle things properly? | ||
| I think that's what a lot of people are feeling right now, that the incompetency is so across the board and Biden is so either mentally compromised or has the wrong ideas or is staffed the wrong way or whatever you want to call that, that we just don't have enough left to do the right thing in the world. | ||
| And at least as it stands now. | ||
| There's always worries that we have that we're exhausted, but I kind of wonder whether this is just sort of the baby boomer narrative where, you know, the boomers were this very big generation and then the country was always defined by the age the boomers were. | ||
| So the 1950s was this innocent childhood time because the boomers were 10 years old. | ||
| And the late 60s was this great youth movement because the boomers were all in college. | ||
| And the 1980s, the boomers were yuppies. | ||
| And now the boomers are all retired and angry old people. | ||
| And then- Or hanging on. | ||
| And then that somehow is the template for the whole US. | ||
| So I think the complicated answer is, there's some truth to it | ||
| because the boomers have dominated our society. | ||
| And they're sort of in a strange place right now as a generation. | ||
| Um, But they're not the whole society. | ||
| We're not all boomers. | ||
| Do you think that's a little bit of because people are living longer and medicine has been good and technology has enabled people to be sort of Functional longer that now we're ruled by octogenarians who, you know, basically should, you know, when you see Nancy Pelosi up there, it's like, go, go with your grandchildren, go play with your grandchildren. | ||
| You don't have to be out there still. | ||
| Or Biden, you know, it's like they can't let go because science in some ways has kept them going. | ||
| It hasn't, it hasn't changed it. | ||
| It's been frustratingly slow. | ||
| I mean, we've had some, some extension of life expectancy has actually reversed the last few years with COVID and the opioid epidemic, et cetera. | ||
| But no, I think the main dynamic was you never had a generation like the Boomers. | ||
| I'm Gen X, there are Millennials, and there's some generational sensibility you can tell, or silent generation, some generational story you can tell around other people, but the generation with a really strong identity is the Boomers, and I think there were just so many of them. | ||
| It was like in 1946, there were 20% more kids born than 1945 or something. | ||
| It was like a step function up. | ||
| And then you get the birth control pill in the early 60s and you have fewer babies. | ||
| And so it was just a lot of people. | ||
| Where does that put us, the Gen Xers, that seemingly should be doing the thing right now, and I suppose in some cases we are, but really are the missing generation in an odd way. | ||
| We focus on boomers and then millennials or zoomers or whatever it is. | ||
| We've sort of missed the people that are between, say, 40 and late 50s. | ||
| Yeah, I have all these resentful Gen X things I can say. | ||
| There's probably some narrative where it's a smaller group, and so there's a risk that you end up being sort of left out. | ||
| I mean, I think there's some things where we did perfectly fine. | ||
| We had our share of Olympic gold medalists, because you get those at a certain age, and we were at the right age at a certain point. | ||
| You know, we had 28 years of boomer presidents, and I sometimes wonder whether we're ever going to have a Gen X president. | ||
| It's not enough. | ||
| Maybe you just skip to the millennials. | ||
| So, you know, the Silicon Valley story in the 1990s was the internet companies were started by Gen X people and then somehow bought out, taken over by boomers. | ||
| That's sort of what happened. | ||
| Almost all the companies in the 90s and then the boomers probably had a healthier relationship with Millennials where it was those were the Millennials were their kids and so they were they were a little bit nicer to the Millennials than they were to us. | ||
| We were sort of more their competitors. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So when PayPal got acquired by eBay in 2002 and it was sort of this boomer company and we were this Gen X company. | ||
| One of my friends, David Sachs, said, you know, if it would be a movie, we'd call it Meet the Parents. | ||
| This stodgy, older people company was going to clearly not be fun when they took over. | ||
| But actually, you need sort of a word for people who are half a generation older, not related to you, and are going to be a lot less nice to you than your parents. | ||
| We do need a word for that. | ||
| So I think that it would be more like, I don't know, Meg Whitman would be like more, | ||
| meet the evil young stepmother. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So actually, since you mentioned Sachs, do you find it interesting | ||
| if you were to look back 20 years ago, and boy, Elon's doing everything he's doing now, | ||
| you've done incredible things, Sachs is becoming an outspoken political voice, | ||
| really anti-war, he's one of the people leading that thing, that this crew of, the PayPal mafia, so to speak, | ||
| you guys are all still in the mix in an odd way. | ||
| Is there something special about what was going on there 20 years ago? | ||
| Or it's more than 20 years at this point? | ||
| You know, it's always hard to tell the story. | ||
| I don't think we really appreciated the time, but it was a phenomenal group of people. | ||
| There's always a sense where PayPal didn't really succeed in that big a way. | ||
| It was a successful exit in 2002. | ||
| It was a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay, but it didn't Did you feel that at the time? | ||
| to run the business on our own. | ||
| It made sense to combine it with eBay for all sorts of reasons. | ||
| It was, you know, in some ways a depressing but a very rational thing to do. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Did you feel that at the time? | ||
| That maybe you wanted to hold on a little bit longer or something like that? | ||
| We didn't see... | ||
| It was hard to see a path to an independent business where, you know, eBay had the store | ||
| and we were running the cash registers and the people running the store were trying to | ||
| figure out how to get their own cash register machines to work and figured out one time | ||
| we'd be sort of out of business. | ||
| And then there were ways you could gradually diversify away from eBay, but it took like a decade in practice. | ||
| So I think the combination made a lot of sense, but then it somehow short-circuited the business, whereas so many of the Other tech companies just scaled and scaled and scaled, like the Google history or something like that. | ||
| that would have been a far more successful version, but probably would have done less. | ||
| If you'd gotten on board the Google rocket at the right time, you should have just never gotten off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you see the frustrations that people have with these things, you know, the sort of lack of trust in these things, you know, is the government working to silence you on Twitter? | ||
| Or how is Google manipulating the search results or all of these things? | ||
| Do you also see those as inevitable problems that were going to happen with these things? | ||
| The reason I ask is I heard you give a talk at NatCon. | ||
| You gave the keynote speech last year. | ||
| One of the things you said was that nobody represents the individual at these big conferences. | ||
| And I sort of think that's the same problem that we have with tech. | ||
| Nobody represents the individual anymore. | ||
| We just have these giant corporations that, or these giant tech companies, that make decisions. | ||
| You cannot get somebody on the phone. | ||
| You can't actually communicate as yourself. | ||
| There's a business version of it, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, there probably are. | ||
| All kinds of ways they have biases in that direction, you know. | ||
| There's always Noam Chomsky, the communist MIT professor, and I always like to quote him on this, where he says that, you know, the Republicans are the party of business, but the Democrats discriminate. | ||
| The Democrats are the party of big business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And there's sort of like a center-left... Look at you quoting a communist. | |
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every now and again. | |
| I'm not entirely wrong about things, you know. | ||
| But there's sort of a central left sensibility where, you know, basically big businesses can be regulated. | ||
| They'll follow all the rules. | ||
| Small businesses, you know, they often make a little bit more money by being in a gray area, not following the rules to the letter. | ||
| And so there is probably just this structural anti-small business bias that's You know, political, regulatory, cultural, partisan, that's very deep. | ||
| Were you shocked how obvious that became during COVID? | ||
| I mean, where, you know, Target could stay open for, you know, the big box store, but the mom and pop that was selling the exact same thing next door got closed. | ||
| That shows the bias right there, right? | ||
| The system just kind of eliminated a certain set of people. | ||
| Yes, I think. | ||
| I mean, I think it was. | ||
| Yeah, it was, I mean, a dramatic shift in terms of the power of big relative to small businesses. | ||
| And it probably, I don't know, I think in some ways COVID surfaced all these realities that had been there for a long time. | ||
| And yeah, this was the institutional center-left establishment in this country. | ||
| You know, it's good with big business. | ||
| It's very anti-small business. | ||
| How did you fight some of that with your businesses during COVID and figuring out, you know, were people going to work from home or just all of the nonsense that everybody dealt with? | ||
| Did you try to give as much power to your employees and say, do what you got to do? | ||
| Well, you know, most of the... Because even now, a lot of the people still don't want to come back. | ||
| That's one of the problems that Elon's having. | ||
| Most of the tech companies were pretty well positioned to adapt to COVID where there were | ||
| sort of ways you could do the remote work. | ||
| You could remotely do things like that. | ||
| And it seemingly didn't hurt the business too much. | ||
| And then of course, there was a way where COVID shifted a lot to the internet. | ||
| So a lot of the tech companies in which I'm involved got a big temporary boost from COVID | ||
| even though maybe they actually got more bloated, less well managed in the last two, three years. | ||
| That's what I worry about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was actually sort of a windfall for them. | ||
| And then the question is just, did they really take advantage of it or did they get even | ||
| Even more dysfunctional in various ways Do you think more people in the tech world or maybe even in the political world actually think like you to some degree but because of the way we the hive mind is or the globalist movement or whatever it is they just sort of always go to that but I think you know if you privately sat down with these people about what their real beliefs in the individual are in capitalism and these things. | ||
| Directionally, yes, but I always wonder if it actually works if you can't say it. | ||
| So, yes, surely it's almost the definition of political correctness that it distorts things. | ||
| All sorts of people who are, people are less politically correct than they appear to be because political correctness is about appearances. | ||
| And then the reality is always that people are going to think it's a little bit crazy. | ||
| You know, there probably are a lot of parents who think the schools went very crazy. | ||
| But, um, but then if you feel like you can't talk about it or articulate it, it's, it's not going to be that well formed of view at all. | ||
| And so that's, and so I, I think the political correctness, Is real to the extent it just stops people from from saying things you you don't actually get to a very considered Non-politically correct opinion, right? | ||
| It's interesting because that also then gets to the stagnation part that you're talking about if people can't talk about what the actual issues Are you then you really don't have to wonder why we're so stagnated and why we got? | ||
| 140 characters instead of flying sure there's probably some way all these things. | ||
| Yeah, all these things are are linked but but Yeah, I think I think if we live in a society where there are an awful lot of topics that are somewhat off limits, you know, and if we think about science, let's think about sort of freedom of speech or debate in the area of science, and I always think you can describe science | ||
| as involving a two-front war in theory. | ||
| It should be a two-front war against excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. | ||
| So excessive dogmatism in the 17th, 18th century context is like the Catholic Church or it's the sort of decayed Aristotelianism and, you know, a scientist, you know, needs to think for themselves and challenge the sort of ossified dogmas or ossified metaphysics and just do an experiment you think for yourself. | ||
| But then you also can't be a scientist if you're too skeptical. | ||
| So if I don't think you exist, I think you're just a simulation or it's everything's fake. | ||
| Nothing's real. | ||
| I'm just in a brain being, you know, I'm just a brain in a bat being manipulated by a mad scientist. | ||
| That's not a good world for science either. | ||
| So you can't be Too dogmatic, you can't be too skeptical. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And sort of a probably healthy version of science cuts against both excess dogmatism and excess skepticism. | ||
| But my scoring is it's all anti-skepticism at this point. | ||
| The scientific establishment, it's all circling the wagons, and we have a climate change skeptic, we have a, you know, you can't be a vaccine skeptic, you can't be a skeptic of anything, and so it's all against skepticism, which is of course the exact opposite of, you know, let's say a children's science book would be that a scientist thinks for themselves and is is against dogmatism. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| What do we do to break out of that? | ||
| It's 80% anti-dogmatism, 20% anti-skepticism. | ||
| That's healthy science. | ||
| We're in a world where it's 100% anti-skepticism. | ||
| And that's a tell that it's hyper dogmatic and that the scientists, you know, the scientists can't talk freely about the science. | ||
| And if you have, you know, if you have, if you have dissenting views, you better keep them to yourself or your government funding will get cut off. | ||
| And they're, you know, they're all in the sort of government welfare or something like that. | ||
| I mean, look at the last three years of COVID and I think you pretty much get your answer. | ||
| Yeah, there's a shockingly narrow range of discourse allowed in science. | ||
| Was there a moment during COVID? | ||
| Other science and scare quotes. | ||
| So was there a moment during COVID where you realized how dysregulating that effect was, | ||
| that you couldn't get a counter? | ||
| I mean, I saw you a couple times during COVID for dinners and things, and it was like, we weren't wearing masks and we were sitting there. | ||
| I don't even know if you were allowed to have people at your house, like, but, but humans continued. | ||
| And yet the machine just kept telling, you know, stay in your house and wear the masks and get the vaccine. | ||
| I had had a lot of skepticism about all these things before, I would say, or the excessive dogmatism of science. | ||
| And I think that had, but yes, it was still striking. | ||
| It was like you had these, I don't know, you had these public health officials, all these people were, it was just, again, the opportunity to really, to push it in a conformist, standardized way. | ||
| It was extraordinary about it. | ||
| Wasn't just the dogmatism and the uniformity, but it was the Orwellian character | ||
| where we pivoted radically from black to white, A to not A. | ||
| And so, you know, it was, I'm not gonna get, the history was so, it was so many twists and turns, | ||
| it's hard to even keep it straight. | ||
| But I believe October, 2020, it was still Kamala Harris saying | ||
| that she would never take a vaccine, a Trump vaccine. | ||
| And then, you know, and then when I- That you literally shouldn't trust the agencies | ||
| because he has something to do with it. | ||
| That's what she said. | ||
| And then a year later it's like you're a really crazy person if you don't get one. | ||
| So we had these sort of Orwellian twists in the narrative. | ||
| There was the thing where originally the masks didn't work because they were trying to lie Save the masks for the hospital workers or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you pivoted on that. | ||
| There was, you know, anyway, there were all these crazy twists and turns. | ||
| There was, you know, there was the initial, the very initial one where, you know, it was just, we shouldn't shut the border because that's anti-globalist. | ||
| And then when Trump, you know, and then when President Trump wasn't restrictive enough, then somehow it all shifted into the sort of puritan nanny state. | ||
| Yeah, so it seems like it all flipped almost, I think this is what you're saying, it happened so quickly that we almost couldn't react. | ||
| Like, so the same people who were saying, my body, my choice, were the same ones yelling at you that you must be injected with the thing I want to inject you with. | ||
| And I think that was so dysregulated. | ||
| It was like, you know, the sky is blue, but no, they were saying the sky is green and then the sky is orange and then the sky is yellow. | ||
| So it was, it was, it was, it was just this dizzying shift in the dogmas. | ||
| It wasn't like the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages where at least the dogmas stayed the same for a few hundred years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They didn't change them like every six months. | ||
| So what does that tell you? | ||
| I guess this is a little bit of what you're doing at Stanford now. | ||
| What does that tell you about people's belief systems and how they operate? | ||
| Well, it is... Because they seem to believe anything on any given day. | ||
| You could almost, depending on who was president and what their, you know, party was, you could get virtually anyone to say almost anything. | ||
| Yeah, I would say, I mean it's hard to do sweeping generalizations about our society, but it's striking how many things are not very well thought through at all. | ||
| And there are, I think there are some set of things where things are doctrinaire and dogmatic. | ||
| And then there are all kinds of issues that barely even register as problems and we don't even talk about. | ||
| So I think there's this official ideology, but it's almost like a magic show, | ||
| hypnotic trick where it redirects our attention from other things. | ||
| So people have very weird ideas. | ||
| What are you thinking about that maybe the average person isn't thinking about? | ||
| But then if we talk about a topic like tech stagnation, or how fast are we developing vaccines generally, | ||
| how fast are we curing other diseases besides COVID, that's something people don't even think about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| What are you thinking about that maybe the average person isn't thinking about? | ||
| Like if we were to get to the other side of the stagnation, and let's say we start breaking through some of this stuff, | ||
| which we will eventually, society has to, I think, to some degree, what should we be thinking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there are a lot of different topics one could. | |
| I mean, there's some that I've thought about. | ||
| about. | ||
| Probably a small number that I always keep coming back to. | ||
| I got one I want you to come back to, I'll tell you in a second. | ||
| The big one is always just, you know, I don't think our society is progressing that quickly in that many dimensions. | ||
| Why has it slowed? | ||
| What's gone wrong? | ||
| Why has that happened? | ||
| And that's probably the big topic question theme that I've come back to over the last two decades over and over again and And then there are yeah, there's all sorts of different answers one can get to There probably are good reasons for us to be So slow, but I think it pushes you to ask a lot of deep questions about our society that would be good for us to think about more | ||
| So the one that I don't know if you're thinking about at all anymore, I suspect you are at least at some level, is you were really interested in seasteading a couple, probably what, 15 or so years ago. | ||
| This idea that there could sort of be these libertarian utopias, sort of international waters where people could do experimental medication and operations and things of this nature. | ||
| To me it feels like so many people have such a lack of faith in the system. | ||
| That there's an opportunity there again. | ||
| Is that registering with you at all? | ||
| Do you feel like the operation is gone? | ||
| Has someone else picked up maybe where you left off? | ||
| They are still trying to do it in various ways. | ||
| It's not that easy to do. | ||
| Some of our technological issues where it's not that cheap to build. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| And then there are all these reasons where, you know, you have to sort of, if you do that, you have to, if you have something that's floating, what if, you know, you have a freak storm once every 20 years, how do you model that? | ||
| And if you have a ship, you can move it out of the way, but Seastead, not so much. | ||
| So it turns out to be, you know, it turns out to be all Quite hard. | ||
| But it was sort of the small side project I started with Milton Friedman's grandson, Patrick Friedman, who pitched us on it in, I think it was 2007, 2008. | ||
| And what was surprising to me was how much it caught fire, not as a technology, but just as a thought experiment. | ||
| Because even if these seasteads are very hard to build, it was obvious that if we could redesign our society, if we could somehow start over, we would do it so differently. | ||
| And there are all these legacy structures that are very hard to undo. | ||
| So is there a way to do that? | ||
| total revolution, but there are all these ways that we're in a place that no one would, | ||
| if you looked at it from first principles, no one would build a society like we have today. | ||
| So is there a way to do that, maybe just not doing it by building a structure | ||
| in the ocean, like finding some land in the middle of the country | ||
| and just trying it at sort of a micro level? | ||
| Yeah, well, there's obviously this sort of movement between different parts of the country | ||
| that has been accelerated or restarted post COVID that I think is very important, very healthy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then there are still all sorts of things you can do on a city, county level. | ||
| There were also reasons it was non-trivial. | ||
| There are a lot of A lot of cities are unusually dysfunctional, but they also are very powerful economic networks. | ||
| And so there's sort of a reason, you know, in a place like San Francisco, you know, I lived there for a long time. | ||
| It was very dysfunctional on a governance side, but it was, you know, it was also in the middle of this gold rush tech boom. | ||
| And then it actually, it wasn't that it was that you had, you had this bad governance Sort of in contradiction of the tech boom, it was almost like the bad governance came with the tech boom. | ||
| It was like people were fine paying this tax because they were doing so well. | ||
| And so there sort of are these natural network effects, these natural economies of scale that come with cities, but that also paradoxically, if you're not very careful, lead to extremely bad governance. | ||
| And so, you know, there are a lot of relatively unregulated states, but there aren't any people Not enough people there. | ||
| So it's sort of, you know, there's a way that Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire, they're all fairly unregulated, but to the extent that what we do as human beings has a social component, this sort of networked component. | ||
| You could never get the critical mass of people to move there to make it work. | ||
| Do you sense that the states will just continue to go their separate ways? | ||
| That we'll just sort of see that and that will be a natural, that it'll actually kind of be okay as long as they agree not to go to war or something like that? | ||
| I think there's some of it. | ||
| I wish there were more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think that's probably what's still You know, very healthy about the U.S. | ||
| is that it's still somewhat of a federalist system. | ||
| There still is, you know, some degree to which the states are genuinely different places, and you have these 50 different experiments, and it's not all about politics and voting. | ||
| It's also about, you know, economics and exit. | ||
| What do you make about what's going on culturally in the country in terms of, you know, the Super Bowl was a couple weeks ago. | ||
| I watched, like, I'm watching the commercials. | ||
| They didn't feel, I didn't feel any attachment to any of the cultural references. | ||
| The halftime show, like, as Breitbart said, you know, politics is downstream from culture. | ||
| It seems like we don't have a culture that's unifying us in any way now. | ||
| Yeah, it's always so hard to know exactly what's going on. | ||
| If there was something that would be unifying, I don't know that we would like it that much. | ||
| It would be like a crazy woke religion. | ||
| You know, I'm always hopeful that the insanity, you know, has crested and is receding. | ||
| And so, yes, if we had something that would be unifying, it would be the woke religion on steroids shoved down everyone's throats. | ||
| And it's probably, the fact that it has this sort of not very strong, slightly nihilistic feel | ||
| may actually be relatively healthy. | ||
| Right, that's the white bullet. | ||
| It may be relatively healthy. | ||
| So in terms of better things for people to believe in, so you are, can I say teaching this course? | ||
| Are you actually teaching this course at Stanford? | ||
| What do you consider? | ||
| I've co-taught, yeah, courses at Stanford occasionally over the years. | ||
| It's always, yeah, a lot of work, but sort of fun process to think about things. | ||
| Yeah, so what are you doing now? | ||
| Because obviously you don't need the gig, obviously you're doing this because you enjoy it. | ||
| We're just doing Forbidden Topics, and this quarter we're doing Political Theology, which means basically, what does politics tell us about God, and what does God tell us about politics? | ||
| And they're both these deeply transgressive, forbidden questions. | ||
| I'm starting to wonder if these questions of religion are I'm not saying they're necessarily the most important, but they are the most transgressive. | ||
| They're the ones that somehow we can't ask at all. | ||
| And there's something very generative in looking at that prism through a lot of different lenses. | ||
| What is the religion in our society? | ||
| What is it that people Yeah, so what would you say is the sort of broad answer to that? | ||
| What is the religion of the people here, from an American perspective right now, in a system that seems to be very obviously shaking to most people? | ||
| Again, it's always hard to do these sweeping generalizations, but it is, you know, it's in some sense, you know, it's in some sense, I think, I think of it, I think of the, the woke liberal religion as a kind of antithesis, but also a kind of intensification of the Judeo-Christian tradition, where both Judaism and Christianity look at it from the side of the victim. | ||
| The Jewish people are the victims in the Old Testament. | ||
| Pharaoh is the oppressor. | ||
| There's a way in which Christ is the victim in the New Testament, and there's something that's very true and very powerful about this, you know, reorientation towards the victim, towards, you know, justice against oppression. | ||
| Well, that's interesting. | ||
| So you think over the course of thousands of years, basically, the victim idea was just baked in. | ||
| So, so wokeness is just an extension of that in some ways. | ||
| And then in some weird way it went into hyper overdrive. | ||
| The Christian version always ends up becoming this competitive thing where people try to be more Christian than the Christians. | ||
| You know, the poor shall inherit the earth, sermon in the mount, and then Tolstoy remarks, the 19th century, it's, you know, we need to actually intensify that and we need to have a violent communist revolution and accelerate that process. | ||
| in this world. | ||
| And then I think sort of a lot of the woke religion can be thought of as this incredible intensification of this. | ||
| And of course, you know, there are all these paradoxes where people use their victim status as a stick with which to beat other people over the head. | ||
| So there's sort of all these dynamics about it. | ||
| It's obviously not particularly Christian in that, you know, you still have this This great sense of historical injustice, but there's no forgiveness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, right. | |
| There's a lot of revenge there. | ||
| But it's always this revenge in the name of wronging and justice. | ||
| How do you find teaching a course at or co-teaching a course at Stanford? | ||
| I mean, you are one of the guys that said, hey, you don't have to go to college. | ||
| As a matter of fact, my producer here, I was having dinner at your house once and I was like, I really want to hire this guy. | ||
| He wants to go back to college. | ||
| And you were like, you got to tell him don't go back to college. | ||
| And it all worked out. | ||
| But but so there's a little bit of a tension. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There are all these things I do that are somewhat self-contradictory, but I don't know. | ||
| I'm against Social Security, but I'm going to get a Social Security check if it's still around. | ||
| If I could take advantage of diversity in hiring, I would definitely Use diversity quotas to help myself. | ||
| So even so I think I think there's nothing there's nothing hypocritical about is that just the honest version of all that I mean I always felt that that was Trump's honest version of all that they'd be angry at Trump over taxes and it was like well Don't blame me blame you guys who created all these stupid rules. | ||
| I think I think it's always complicated There are all these yeah, there are all these different dimensions going on. | ||
| But I think look I think I think the I think that there is a way that teaching a course is a terrific forcing function for me, personally, to think about a lot of topics. | ||
| I get a lot out of doing it. | ||
| I don't read enough books. | ||
| It's a way to force me to do that. | ||
| On the other hand, in the same breath, I can also say that this doesn't happen in most other college courses, that most of it is Is sort of this debt driven racket that's gone very out of control, whereas 300 billion in student debt in 2000 up to 2 trillion in 2020. | ||
| And, and, yes, in the context of this, of this larger system, that's, that's very, very broken. | ||
| So, so I think, and then I think, you know, there are, there are sort of You know, there's always this duality between exit and voice. | ||
| And so there is, you know, there is a version where, yeah, it would be good for fewer people to go to college and for people to vote with their feet. | ||
| And then at the same time, there's always something we said for still trying to do, you know, to fight the fight, you know. | ||
| And, you know, I went to Stanford, so I have a certain A certain attachment to that university and want to still try to do something on the ground to make it a better place. | ||
| Maybe it's like fighting the San Francisco City Board or something like that, Board of Supervisors. | ||
| Right, although I've told you many times it's a lot more fun to be in Florida fighting for something than always fighting against something, which is what I was doing in Cali, which I would imagine there's probably a time for both of those, right? | ||
| Yeah, but I think we should always... There's a trade-off between exit and voice, but you want to think of both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think about that? | ||
| I mean, just in general, you can do whatever you want. | ||
| If you wanted to disappear altogether and go to Galt's Gulch... It's not that easy to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but roughly... It's at Ouray, Colorado. | |
| Yeah? | ||
| That's the spot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not supposed to say it. | |
| No, that's the town, Galt's Gulch. | ||
| Oh, right, of course, of course. | ||
| There's an actual town. | ||
| in Colorado. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, do you ever think like- It's about a thousand people live there. | ||
| I've thought of just buying a bunch of real estate there, but I'm not quite sure. | ||
| Let me just ask you one or two other things, just circling back to some of the things we covered. | ||
| So we talked a bit about the globalist stuff and WF and all that stuff. | ||
| When you see this sort of like wide variance, I think, between say someone like you and Elon, | ||
| who I think are mostly lined up together, let's say, and then how that seems so starkly different | ||
| than someone like Bill Gates, and yet you guys all seemingly came out | ||
| of something roughly similar. | ||
| Does that seem bizarre to you, that people evolve so differently? | ||
| Is that the right way to frame the question? | ||
| You know, I, man, I... | ||
| Man, I never want to even compare myself to Elon. | ||
| That's always a dangerous thing where you always end up losing to Elon. | ||
| I would say I am. | ||
| Well, you guys are seemingly fighting for the same thing. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I am. | ||
| I'm always disturbed by the degree to which tech has become the sort of San Francisco, Silicon Valley is close to a one party state. | ||
| And, you know, there's a way in which, you know, Elon is a dissident from that at this point. | ||
| You know, I've been I've been a dissident for for for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, and then what this sort of strange conformity means. | ||
| I can come up with sociological explanations. | ||
| I'm tempted to do something like, the people were somehow narrowly trained in computer science, which was Very important and very useful, but then they never actually thought about most of these broader social, political, cultural issues much at all. | ||
| And I don't know Bill Gates terribly well, but I... | ||
| I think he's probably a fairly high IQ, smart person, but I think he never really thought about this stuff very much and then just somehow went with the wisdom of crowds, went with the liberal consensus. | ||
| Right, because it's bizarre. | ||
| That's my sociological explanation because I can't actually... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I can't come up with an explanation how a person would sort of rationally really get to these answers. | ||
| Well, because I think then you see people seeing him on TV all the time, and it's like, he's the largest farm landowner in the United States suddenly, or farm owner in the United States. | ||
| And, you know, he has all this stuff to do with the vaccines and all these things. | ||
| And I think most people are like, wait a minute, weren't you a programmer 30 years ago? | ||
| Like, what happened here that got you to think you can sort of be, you know, king of the world, something like that? | ||
| Well, there are, there are, there are, I mean, there are all sorts of ways you should probably | ||
| You know, try to sort of steel man what Bill Gates is doing. | ||
| I mean, there was some place where he made a lot of money at Microsoft and probably was not entirely satisfied with that. | ||
| Certainly not with where it was reputationally for him at the end, where it was sort of this, you know, cutthroat monopolist charges. | ||
| And then there was, you know, this attempt over the last Decade and a half to reinvent himself as this sort of a leading philanthropist. | ||
| And so I think you can, I know, and then there are versions where this was sincere, there are versions where this was just some sort of rebranding exercise. | ||
| I think was probably more sincere than just a rebranding. | ||
| But obviously, it had elements of all these things. | ||
| And then I think there are probably ways one can also be critical where my guess is that he did | ||
| more good for the world at Microsoft, even though it was in many ways, all these things | ||
| were problematic about it as a business. | ||
| But Microsoft did more good for the world than the Gates Foundation has done. | ||
| And that's a very odd thing. | ||
| That's not what Gates expected. | ||
| That's not what Gates expected. | ||
| But there's something about the consensus sort of center-left establishment that is | ||
| just really exhausted and would have been good if he'd thought about these things with | ||
| a little bit less of a doctrinaire mindset. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| So then to ask you one more question, not about Bill Gates, but about yourself related to all that. | ||
| You've been early on a lot of things. | ||
| You were early on getting out of San Francisco and seeing what was going on there. | ||
| You were early on Trump. | ||
| You've been early on Plentygate. | ||
| You were early on Facebook. | ||
| All of these things. | ||
| Right now, do you feel hopeful? | ||
| Do you feel that we can fix a lot of the things that we've talked about here and get through the stagnation and get to a place where we can trust some people again and that the system will start working right? | ||
| Is that a ridiculous exercise? | ||
| I mean, your general state of like belief in the thing? | ||
| Well, I always think extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are both equally wrong because they're both excuses for laziness, for not doing anything. | ||
| I think the answer is always in between. | ||
| As a venture capitalist, I still, most of my focus is on individual companies, and I think there are a lot of companies that can do quite well, even if our whole society isn't progressing as quickly as I would like. | ||
| I think the broader political, social questions, it's very hard. | ||
| It's just going to be, I think, a crazy intense fight for The next decade. | ||
| My sense is that we're on the side I'd want to be on. | ||
| I'm not sure our side's going to win, but it's going to be much easier to be on our side than defending all this stuff. | ||
| There's so much surface area. | ||
| That they have to defend. | ||
| Right, and that does seem like why it gets increasingly hysterical, because they can't defend it anymore, so it's constantly, the litany of lunacy is just... You have to, you know, if you're going to have these massive lockdowns in society, you also have to lock down debate, you have to lock down speech, and you have to... | ||
| And that there's probably some version of it where it's very unhealthy. | ||
| You know, I always, you know, if you sort of personalize it in the person of the president, sort of somehow always a crystallization of where a society is at, you know, there are all these questions about, you know. | ||
| You know, you know, Biden's, you know, mental acuity and, you know, maybe never had that many marbles to start with. | ||
| But, but, but, but, you know, the version of it I often wonder about is whether, you know, his inability to address these questions or speak with them, is that actually a feature more than a bug? | ||
| Because if you had, if you had sort of a very sharp, Liberal person. | ||
| Like, I don't know, like Pete Buttigieg. | ||
| It would just look ridiculous. | ||
| Like, we'd expect some answers, we'd expect explanations, he'd be trying to give us explanations, and they would look so absurd. | ||
| Right, and now all we ask is that he doesn't, you know, explode. | ||
| If Biden is just relaxing in a basement, that's very protective, maybe. | ||
| You've given us the best they can do. | ||
| I guess that's the white pill, right? | ||
| It's like our enemies aren't that great. | ||
| I think, you know, I think, look, I think, I think there, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, | ||
| it's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, I think there's a, there's a lot of room for things to get | ||
| You have to keep doing the good work you're doing, David. | ||
| Well, as always, it's a pleasure to talk to you. | ||
| And I do want to, you know, we do this usually off camera, but I do want to publicly give you a thanks for something. | ||
| Because about three years ago, as we sit here in the local studio now, I got on a Zoom call with you and my partner in Locals, who's sitting in the other office right there. | ||
| And we had an all cash offer to buy the company. | ||
| And you basically said to us, and I said, Peter, it's life changing money for me. | ||
| Do you think I should do this? | ||
| And you said, Basically, you said, if you believe in it and you get distribution, you have a much bigger opportunity here. | ||
| And we waited it out. | ||
| We did not take the offer. | ||
| And then, obviously, everything happened with Rumble. | ||
| So I owe you on that front. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| How about that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very good. | |
| Good to see you, my friend. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| If you're looking for a more unfiltered lens into the world of tomorrow, check out our tech playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a wide variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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