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Dec. 12, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:27:48
20241212_peter-thiel-on-trump-musk-technology-and-god
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
The Death of Wokeism 00:08:29
The center-left zombie establishment no longer believes in reason, in making arguments, in convincing people.
The ancien regime that is liberalism is really exhausted.
Has the president-elect offered you a job yet?
I think politics is very important.
I would find it deeply frustrating.
I'd go out of my mind.
I still believed science would fail unless it physically resurrected all the debt.
We should, need, can work on this radical project, and then we have to somehow be honest and say that it has gone extraordinarily off track.
Do you want to freeze yourself just in case?
Maybe the way you achieve mastery over death is that you don't invest in new medicines, but you invest in eugenics.
Do you know how much you're worth?
You know, I don't know.
Probably more than 10 billion, less than 20.
Elon knows something about risks, the rest of us don't.
If I was to get hold of Elon, a billion dollars each to charity, one game of chess, I would win, assuming he didn't find a way to use an AI to cheat or something like that.
Peter Thill is a billionaire Titan of tech, brilliant and terrifying, according to New York magazine, uniquely influential and polarizing, says the Washington Post.
There is, however, no disagreement over his profound influence on 21st century science, culture and politics.
Thill was the first and only major figure in Silicon Valley to openly support Donald Trump back in 2016.
Many more have since followed him, of course, and his mentee, JD Vance, is about to become vice president.
The man himself rarely gives interviews, but I'm delighted to say he's agreed to go uncensored with me.
Now, Peter Thill, welcome to Uncensored.
Thanks for having me.
I remember back in 2016, I wrote a column on the day that Trump did his announcement he was going to run in 2015, actually.
And I said then he has a habit of having the last laugh.
But from the moment he did that announcement that he's going to run for president, all hell broke loose.
And it's fair to say most people in your world at the time ran a mile from even hinting they might want to support him or endorse him in any way.
You showed a lot of personal courage in doing that.
What do you feel today, given he's just had this extraordinary win, a complete sweep across the board, given this enormous mandate, do you feel a sense of vindication that what you saw in Trump eight years ago is now what so many Americans see?
Well, I always think that there are, I feel a sense of relief.
I would be extremely unhappy if the other person had won.
I think my expectations are somewhere properly intermediate.
They're not that we're going to solve all the problems we have.
But yes, I think there is a way that the ancien regime that is liberalism is really exhausted.
The 1990s are over.
The 20th century is over.
The 2020 election was not a return to normalcy, but it was in retrospect, you know, a last stand for the ancien regime with its very ancien president.
And I think that's kind of what's over.
And so these elections in many ways are more framed by the negatives.
And so if you ask me to make a whole bunch of pro-Trump arguments, that's a Democratic question.
I can make anti-Harris arguments.
The Democrats are good at making anti-Trump arguments.
And I think there was a way that this center-left consensus had just gotten very exhausted and wasn't working on many, many different levels.
And in some ways, I sense that was already true in 2016.
And it is even more true today.
Yeah, I mean, I felt this election in the end came down to cost of living, no question.
Americans were feeling the pinch in their wallets, and they backed Trump better than Harris to sort that out.
I felt the immigration crisis on the border was clearly a massive issue for many people.
But I also felt that it signified, and I think he was kind of hinting at this a bit, it signified the death of wokeism, of what your friend Elon Musk calls the woke mind virus.
It was almost like the third part of the equation here was a repudiation of so much of what the woke movement stands for, which has often been based not on common sense or reality, but just a kind of nonsensical, you know, when I hear them talking about my truth, for example, over the truth, stuff like that, or when they try and say that, of course, it's fine for trans athletes to compete in women's sport, et cetera, et cetera.
When we saw the effectiveness of Trump's campaign ad of Kamala's for they, them, Trump's for you.
You put all that together.
Did you feel that the kind of the woke mind virus, for want of a better phrase, is not been killed off, but has certainly been massively put back in its box?
One can hope that that is the case.
Certainly there are ways in which the identity politics as a political issue seems exhausted.
It is, you know, Trump gained among both Jews and Muslim voters.
That's extraordinary.
And then there are ways that, you know, 7% of the voters in the United States are African-American women, and maybe more of them voted for Harris, but 93% of the voters are not.
And there's a way that perhaps identity politics only worked in a pre-internet world.
The 2008 Obama election was the last pre-internet election where the internet, and what happens in the internet is you can't micro-target voters.
So in 2008, Obama could still tell the black voters they should vote for him because he was black.
He could tell the white voters they should vote for him because he was post-racial, and people didn't notice that there were these two radically different messages to different sets of voters.
By the time you get to Hillary Clinton in 2016, this sort of 1990s style micro-targeting doesn't work.
She can't tell the women to vote for her because she's a woman and the men to vote for her because she's post-gender.
That looks ridiculous.
And then by the time Kamla tries to even have slightly different accents with different audiences, it all looks completely absurd.
So I think that's one of the things that feels very different from 15, 16 years ago.
Another way to articulate this, if we look at it from the vantage point of 2016, if you had sort of a demographic determinism, you would have said that the Republicans were never going to win another election because the Republicans were old and white and the Democrats were young and diverse.
And eight years from 2016 and 2024, a lot of the Republican voters were going to be dead.
And because the demographics determine the way people vote, it would be impossible for Trump to even do as well as in 2016.
He would do much less well and the Republicans were never going to win another election.
And so to win in 2024, there were millions and millions of people you had to actually convince to change their minds.
And this was, you know, it was Jewish voters and Muslim voters and Latino voters and women voters, African-American voters, young voters.
There were all sorts of people where you had to make an argument and you had to get people to change their mind.
And in some very odd sense, the center-left zombie establishment no longer believes in reason, in making arguments, in convincing people.
And it just sort of gave away the whole playing field on that dimension.
And again, as you alluded to earlier, there were these fairly straightforward arguments about inflation, immigration, I would also say incompetence.
Critiquing the Elite Universities 00:13:08
Those were the three I's.
And they were not engaged in.
They were not rebutted in any way whatsoever.
There's also, I think, with Trump, I watched him at the Notre Dame reopening in Paris.
And I was very struck by every single head turned to stare at Trump when he came in in a room full of huge public figures from around the world.
He was by far the biggest star, even bigger than our own future king, Prince William, and so on.
And they're all desperate to hug him and shake his hand and be around him and so on.
And it just reminded me that what Trump brings with him is he brings a swagger.
And I've always felt that America is actually at its best when it has that slight swaggering confidence.
And it's at its worst when it looks like it's having a crisis of confidence.
And I did feel that Joe Biden, in his increasingly kind of degenerative state, was exuding an air of a shambolic America where the president couldn't even stand on his own two feet.
I mean, do you feel that?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot one can say about this.
There's something about the United States that is still this, I don't like the word exceptional country, but there is still something about it that is singularly important.
You know, there's some sense in which the president is the mayor of the U.S., but the dictator or leader of the world.
And it matters maybe even more to the rest of the world who's president than to the people inside the country, which is much easier to do things outside the country than inside the country in a lot of ways.
And so it was, it's in some ways important to the whole world who's president.
There are, you know, there's sort of all these different dimensions where this is likely to manifest.
Probably the free speech standards that get pushed or the censorship standards.
So many of these were pushed by center-left elements of the U.S. deep state.
And, you know, you had the Brazilian judge who banned Twitter.
Was he really acting on his own volition or was this through a center-left U.S. State Department-affiliated NGO?
And there's a sense that all of these things might come to a dramatic end.
So I think in all sorts of different dimensions, it has repercussions for the entire world that are maybe even bigger than for the United States.
And so, yeah, in a European context, nobody really cares who's the president of Europe.
Right.
Even though in theory, it would seem like that's in theory pretty important.
It's not.
Most people wouldn't have a clue who that is.
Certainly not in the United States.
Yeah.
It's interesting when I've looked back at your, say, the last 25 years, quite hard, and probably deliberately hard from your point of view, to pigeonhole you into any classic political box.
I mean, I don't think you're a classic Republican or a classic Democrat or any of these things.
It seems to me you like to sing from your own song sheet to a degree.
I would say that Elon's quite similar like that.
Joe Rogan is another one I would say is quite similar.
Trump himself has flirted around really in the political edges in that way.
Do you want to be pigeonholed?
I mean, do you like to see yourself as a Republican?
Or do you prefer to be an individual who decides when you see a leader you like?
Well, I don't think either of those are necessarily, you know, it's not, you don't simply want to be somebody who falls in line in a regimented way.
I don't think there's necessarily anything especially virtuous in being some eccentric individual.
But what I try to do, what I aspire to do is to think for myself through these various issues.
And then there are places where I've come to question the consensus and then that leads me to what's seen as an eclectic set of views.
But I try to approach things from a first principles point of view, think things through very rigorously.
I've known Elon for, I don't know, quarter century since 2000.
And I think he's a very thoughtful person.
For a long time, I would have placed him as more of a not doctrinaire liberal, but certainly Tesla was an electric vehicle company, and it was more aligned with the Democrats and with people who believed in climate change than with these retrograde Republicans.
And so, yeah, Elon is sort of an extraordinary instance of someone who at some point decided he was going to start thinking for himself.
And in some ways, he was singularly important in what happened the last few years in the United States.
But then he was also representative of a lot of people.
But I think there's some sense in which what the experts tell us, what the consensus tells us, has been shockingly incorrect.
I don't think it's just the COVID crisis, but there's a way these things have come to a head in the last four or five years where we have a sort of crisis of legitimacy.
Who do we believe in the United States in the Western world?
Do we believe the scientists, the experts, the deep state actors?
And I think there's an opening, an openness to rethinking these things that has not existed in a very long time.
Well, I think you and Elon are kind of their nightmare, really, because you've come along and you obviously have bigger brains than most of them put together, which must be terrifying if you're them on the receiving end, because you have this forensic laser way of analyzing stuff, which I see all the time from the stuff that you talk about and posts and so on, both of you.
I want to play a clip.
I don't like, you know, I mean, this is very, very, Piers, this is a very flattering description.
And I don't want to say that I'm that much smarter than other people or anything like this.
I think there are, you know, there are certain kinds of questions I've been asking for a long time.
I know, just give one example where I've been on this for maybe 16, 17 years now, is this, is this question, this big picture question about the nature of science and technology?
And is it progressing as quickly as advertised?
Or is it actually stagnant, slow down on many dimensions where we still have had progress around the world of bits, but not so much in all these other Adams dimensions?
And that was in some ways a straightforward kind of a question to ask.
It was a very big picture question.
But if you said that we were stagnating on many dimensions, then you would conclude that maybe we can't just do business as usual.
If you do business as usual, you're saying that the younger generation should expect to have lives less good than their parents.
You'd expect that the whole sort of middle class compact in our societies in which young people are expected to do better than their parents is breaking down and there's sort of a way that our institutions will not work and will derange.
And so I had this idea that something has gone very wrong with progressivism in the science sense, progressivism in the technology sense, that things are not progressing as advertised.
And this is not a, there's obviously normative implications, but to start with, this was just a descriptive question.
How fast is science progressing?
The tagline we came up with was they promised us flying cars.
All we got was 140 characters, not to downplay the importance of Twitter, and maybe you had to free up Twitter and change it into X to have any chance of getting back to flying cars.
But things were stalled on all these areas.
And that itself was a, felt like a very taboo question to ask for a long time, because if these institutions were not working, that was a big deal.
And this is always a kind of perspective I have on the, let's say, the woke issues, the culture war issues, and things like this.
I wrote a book in the 1990s, David Sachs, my friend David Sachs, and I wrote this book, The Diversity Myth, and was sort of an updated version of a Buckley God and Man at Yale, sort of a critique of multiculturalism and the politics of intolerance at Stanford University and sort of what had gone wrong in these college campuses.
And we were focused on all these identity politics, political correctness, culture wars issues from three decades ago.
And there's a way in which it was prophetic, and there's a way in which you don't want it to be prophetic.
You want people to listen to you.
Peter, I have a clip.
They didn't listen to us.
And then we had these warnings.
Yeah, I've got a clip of you talking about that.
Let's take a look.
I'll tell you what the problem is with looking for racism everywhere.
Because when you start looking for racism everywhere and you start finding racism everywhere, it's only a very small step to finding racists everywhere.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that if those racists are really out there.
But I'm going to suggest to you that they really aren't.
The problems of racism, sexism, other forms of oppression have been vastly exaggerated.
And as a result, people get unjustly accused.
A culture of complaint leads to a culture of blame.
I mean, apart from the fact you've aged incredibly well, because that's 30 years ago, what do you think when you look back at that Peter Teal?
Because you would bang on.
Well, again, I'm always a little bit more self-critical.
I think I was right about everything, but then I also think I wasn't wrong, but there was a way in which I was not even wrong.
And so the question I was not asking was this question I just alluded to about, let's say, scientific and technological progress.
There was a way the question of the universities was focused on the humanities, not on the sciences.
And maybe one needed to have this much broader critique of what had gone wrong.
For example, we just had in the last year and a half, we had two, the university presidents, both Harvard and Stanford, were fired.
Claudine Gay, the Harvard one, was the sort of diversity plagiarist black woman.
And there's sort of a very straightforward conservative critique you can have of Claudine Gay.
But I think equally important was the Marc Tessier-Levine firing at Stanford, who was an old white male neurobiologist, neuroscientist, who, as far as I can tell, had basically engaged in completely fraudulent scientific research, falsified his data, stole tens of millions of dollars from the government.
And so the Harvard one was humanities fraud.
The Stanford one was science fraud.
And I'm not saying the science fraud was more important than the humanities fraud, but they were in some ways different sides of the same coin.
And the way the universities often would deal with the question, why are we not studying Shakespeare, why are we not reading the great books, is, well, we're doing science.
The science is more important than the humanities.
And the broader critique I would have is that it has failed across the board.
And that even these areas of science that were sort of a big part of the early modern project, the atheist liberal project of early modernity, have gotten exhausted and have failed.
And this is sort of the extraordinary crisis that we're at.
And then, of course, yeah, there are all these different versions of this one could describe.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting when you talk about the flying cars and things.
I mean, I'll give you one example where we clearly haven't moved on.
Risks in AI and Mars 00:15:57
In fact, we've gone backwards fast.
And that would be transatlantic travel.
I knew the great Sir David Frost, who was the Frost mix in fame.
And when he was doing a transatlantic show, one in London, one in New York, he used to get Concorde.
It used to take two hours, 58 minutes to get from London to New York.
He'd have breakfast in London, and he'd arrive in time to have breakfast in New York.
It now takes me seven hours to do the same journey.
And that's 50 years later.
And that's just one little example.
That's an example of what you're talking about, right?
Sure.
Perhaps one of the paradigmatic variations of accelerationism was just faster travel.
And it was probably, it went faster every decade from 1500 onwards.
It was faster sailing ships.
And then, you know, in the 19th century, it was faster trains, then faster cars, and faster airplanes and jet planes by the 50s and 60s.
And then you get the Concorde by the early 70s.
And now that's regressed.
And in some ways, if you include all the low-tech airport security measures and all these things, it's probably significantly slower than it was in the 1960s.
So yeah, it's a very dramatic illustration of where things have actually regressed.
But I think something like this is true of most areas of what we call science and technology.
When I was an undergraduate at Stanford, I was class of 89, undergraduate, late 80s, in retrospect, it wasn't obvious at the time, but in retrospect, almost all engineering fields were bad ones to go into.
You should not have gone to chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, aeroastroengineering.
There was not going to be that much innovation in that area.
You certainly shouldn't have gone into nuclear engineering.
I think people had gotten the memo on that by the 1980s.
And this world of bits was just not progressing.
In electrical engineering, there was still some progress in semiconductors, but really the only field that worked in retrospect was computer science, which in the 1980s was, by the way, a very strange field.
Computer science was something people studied who flunked out of physics and math.
And you have to, you know, whenever people use, I'm in favor of science.
I'm not in favor of science in scare quotes.
And so computer science was like political science or social science or climate science, where the people teaching it had an inferiority complex and called it science because it was not.
It was sort of this, and then it was this very strange thing that this was actually the one field where there was progress, but it was this narrow cone of progress around computers, software, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, maybe AI at this point.
And there were some great companies that could be built.
People could have successful careers in these areas.
It was probably not quite enough to take our civilization as a whole to the next level if we measure it in terms of these day-to-day things like the Concorde travel or if we measure it in terms of per capita GDP or things like that.
Yeah.
You mentioned computer science there.
So Google have just announced this willow quantum chip, which they claim can solve puzzles that would take the fastest supercomputer today 10 septillion years, a number that actually exceeds the age of the universe.
I can't get my head around that, can you?
Well, it's, I don't know, there are sort of a lot of different things one could say about computer science.
It is an area where there has been some progress.
I think we probably shouldn't just dismiss AI.
So it's often, like in some ways, it's a symptom of our stagnation that when we do have progress, we can't even believe that it's real.
And so there's probably, so I'm not saying that there's been none, but if one asks what the significance of this is, there's a way in which you can try to frame it in terms of this sort of narrow technical question, or we can frame it metaphysically, maybe tell us something interesting about the nature of the universe.
But the intermediate question that I would always like to ask is sort of the social, political, cultural, or even just economic question.
How does this translate into higher per capita GDP?
How does it translate into better standards of living for people?
And that part is, you know, maybe there's some way it does, but it's pretty attenuated, pretty weak.
That's the suspicion one has.
Is AI going to change the world fantastically well in the end?
Or is it potentially?
I interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking before he died, who said that the biggest threat to mankind, he believed, was when AI learns to self-design, it's all over.
Do you share that fear, or do you think it's an exciting, brave new world that will enhance everything?
Well, I suppose utopia and dystopia aren't the only options.
I think It is an area where there has been real progress.
It is, you know, there's a dimension of it that's quite extraordinary.
It's, you know, if we had, if we had defined the holy grail of computer science for 70, 80 years, it was passing the Turing test.
And the Turing test is where you have a computer that can pretend and can fool you into thinking that it's a human being.
And it's a little bit of a fuzzy line, what the Turing test represents, but it was basically passed by ChatGPT in late 22, early 23.
And so that is, you know, that is a very, there is something probably surely very significant about that.
And it has all sorts of repercussions we should think about.
I don't know if it straightforwardly leads to utopia or dystopia.
The negative way I would frame it is there isn't much going on outside of AI, outside of even, let's say, the internet and computers for the last 50 years.
And so if we don't get extraordinary progress out of AI, we're not going to get it by recommissioning the Concorde or anything like that.
And so probably too much is freighted on AI.
And so the way, maybe one way to think about something like the Hawking or all these people, the way they talk about it, it's they are silently admitting that there's nothing else going on.
So if we need AI to lead to utopia or dystopia, that's sort of boatsha.
You're admitting there's nothing else going on.
I want to play a clip.
This is of Elon Musk talking about you.
Yeah, we've had our disagreements, but we are friends.
And I would say for 95% of the time we've known each other, we've been friends.
I bet that 5% was rough though, knowing both.
It was a little rough.
Yeah, things were a little bumpy at one point.
And I think I have more tolerance for risk than Peter does.
So I was sort of maybe more kind of pedal to the metal and Peter was like, well, let's be a little cautious here.
He may have been right, actually.
A, is that characterization correct?
Do you think he is a bigger risk taker than you?
And B, is he also perhaps right that your way is probably more sensible?
I think I certainly would never want to bet against Elon.
I would never want to compete head-on with Elon.
And that's, yeah, and probably a lot of what he says is correct.
Certainly the Silicon Valley perspective on Elon in the 2000s was that he was starting these two crazy companies.
There was Tesla, the car company, and SpaceX, the rocket company.
They both sounded super crazy.
If only one of them had succeeded, one might still have said that it was just extraordinarily lucky.
The fact that to first approximation, both have succeeded, have wildly succeeded, I always want to say it tells us something that Elon knows something about risk, the rest of us don't.
So there's some way it looks like it's this high wire, crazy risk-taking act, and somehow he, you know, it's somehow, you can't have two companies succeed in such an extraordinary way without actually really not taking as many crazy risks as it looks.
And so I don't know.
The conversation I've had with Elon is, you know, what did you know about, how do you understand risk in ways that the rest of us don't?
And then I think there's something he understands about it we don't.
It's hard to articulate.
I don't know if he can articulate it, but that's sort of where I'm at today.
He has like, I mean, I met him for the first time in France this summer, and he did a little QA on a boat for about 15 of us, and then I had about an hour with him afterwards.
Utterly fascinating just to be exposed to his brain close up like that.
He was talking about colonizing Mars and why we had to do this and how it would be done.
He talked about Neuralink, he talked about humanoid robots.
It was just one after another of these enormous big picture things.
All of which I concluded as I was hearing them, he comes from a place, it seems to me, he just wants to save the planet from itself, really.
And he kind of has a brain that can get his head around this big picture stuff.
But in relation to the risk, it just strikes me he's just prepared to back himself in a way with sort of chilling self-confidence, the like of which actually, I mean, Trump is one of the only people I've seen who has a similar sort of unbelievably thick skin and self-confidence to do that, which is what you need because there are so many people out there when you do this stuff who want to knock it out.
Yes, that's certainly correct.
And there probably are all sorts of ways that one can critique Trump or one can critique President Trump or critique Elon.
There are all sorts of things where it seems hard to know how to get it to work.
And the anti-arguments are probably pretty good arguments, but they're also disabling and they mean you will never do it.
So the challenge with going to Mars or even to the moon is that you have to make sure in some ways you're creating an escape valve for humanity.
There's some way if we completely mess up this planet, we'll have a backup.
And then, of course, the risk is that you will just replicate all the bad governance structures we have on this planet elsewhere.
And if you think only about the science and the technology, you will maybe not straightforwardly solve this political problem that he's in part thinking about.
So there's sort of all sorts of critiques one can have like this.
There was a conversation Demis, the deep mind AI person, had with Elon back in 2013 where Demis told Elon, I'm working on the most important problem in the world.
I'm building a superhuman AI.
And then Elon responded, well, I'm working on the most important problem in the world.
I'm turning humanity into interplanetary species.
And then Demis responded, well, my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.
And then in some ways, Demis won that particular exchange.
And I want to say there's something important about the argument, but then on some level, it can't just be on that level.
And you actually just have to do things and make things happen and build things.
And that's the orientation Elon always has.
What do you make about him and Vivek Ramaswamy getting stuck into government bureaucracy and waste?
Well, you know, The strong consensus view in the DC establishment is that this is going to go nowhere, that it's just absolutely impossible to fix things, and this is going to be sort of a very frustrating dead end.
And again, maybe, I'm not sure it's a contrarian view, but the alternate view I would say is you should never bet against Elon.
And isn't there, we all know there's an extraordinary amount of waste, and it is unsustainable.
And the 6% of GDP deficits that the U.S. has cannot be sustained.
They probably cannot even be sustained for even the rest of this decade.
And if this election stands for the proposition, there are two ways to resolve them.
You can cut spending and cut waste, or you can raise taxes massively.
I take this election in the U.S. for standing for the proposition we're not going to go the European-style socialist route of having massive tax hikes.
And then that suggests you need to try something like the Doge thing.
And that's actually what is going to happen.
And again, maybe we're in a very different moment from five years ago pre-COVID.
I think the statistic is something like 94% of the federal government workers are working from home.
And what people learned in Silicon Valley, where you had remote work for one or two years, was remote work was not working.
When people didn't come into the office, they weren't working.
And initially, it was a sign of how powerful the workers were.
They could insist on not working.
And then after two years, the companies just fired a bunch of these people and reasserted control because you realized, wow, there are all these people we hired, and they're not working, and it doesn't matter, and we can just get rid of them.
And isn't that the lesson that we should draw from these four or five years of the government workers not working?
That, you know, not that they have to necessarily come back to the office, but maybe we don't need them altogether.
Remote Work Failures 00:02:51
And so I think we sort of knew this was the case in 2019.
We really know it in 2024.
And so there is sort of a natural rationality to what Elon is doing.
And it's at the point where it's obvious to you and it's obvious to me and it's obvious to lots of people and it's obvious to all of us that it's obvious to everybody else.
At some point you can get a preference cascade and maybe something can really break here.
He hinted that you and he had largely had a pretty good relationship, but it had its odd wobble.
You've got him and Trump, obviously two gigantic figures with healthy egos.
A lot of people thinking this can't last.
They're bound to fall out.
There's going to be a clash.
What do you think?
What's your read of that relationship?
I don't know.
Again, yeah, there are all these ways.
You're tempted to read it in these sort of soap opera terms where we're focused on the larger than life personalities and how is there room for two of these people on the same planet.
You can ask all these sorts of questions.
But I think if we take a non-soap opera view and go back to the substance and the real problems we have, there is plenty of work for them to do.
There's plenty of them to focus on.
They are, in some sense, they both have a common enemy in the zombie establishment, the stagnation, the sense that nothing's been working for quite some time.
And I don't think that enemy is going to go away anytime soon.
Has the president-elect offered you a job yet?
I'm not able to, I'm not going to do anything on a full-time basis.
One can do things like what Elon is doing.
You can't go full-time into government if you've been in. in a tech position like I have.
It's just the sort of things you have to be realistic about what you can and can't do.
But is there an Elon signal?
Look, it's just not my area of comparative advantage.
I think politics is very important.
It's also, I would find it deeply frustrating.
I'd go out of my mind if I spent all my time doing about it.
So I think it's super important.
I enjoy going on your show, thinking about it every now and then.
If I spent my whole life thinking about this, man, I'd be depressed and crazy.
A Quarter-Life Crisis 00:04:06
Do you know how much you're worth?
Probably roughly, I don't know.
Yeah, roughly.
It's hard to say.
I've read so many different figures.
I mean, what would be the rough ballpark if you would have added all up?
I don't know.
Most of it is in illiquid private tech companies.
So, you know, I don't know, probably more than 10 billion, less than 20.
I mean, that's a staggering sum of money.
When do you look at that footage of you 30 years ago?
Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that one day you would be worth around $15 billion?
Yeah, it's...
Maybe I imagined that when I was 10 years old or 12 years old, probably not when I was 25.
You knew by then that you were onto stuff that was going to be wildly successful?
No, I think, I don't know, as a young person, you can be very ambitious.
And I was extraordinarily ambitious in some ways, or had extremely high hopes as a, I don't know, teenager, middle school, high school student.
And then probably, by the time I was 25, I had some kind of a, I'd gone to law school, worked in a big law firm, and probably had a serious quarter life crisis by my mid-20s where the expectations were so reduced from where they were when I was, say, 16 or 17 years old.
Really?
That's fascinating.
So when you were late teens then, what was the big dream?
It's complicated.
I think, I don't know, I'm always bad at introspection, autobiography, but it would be something like I was incredibly tracked.
And my junior year, eighth grade yearbook, my best friend, wrote in it, four years from now you're going to go to Stanford.
And then I went to Stanford and I got into Stanford Law School and I got into top law firm in Manhattan.
And then from the outside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get in.
From the inside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get out.
And there was some way that Maybe it's a harsh way to put it, but that I was too caught up in the status, the prestige of these conventionally tracked careers.
And then at some point, I, in my mid to late 20s, shifted back to Silicon Valley, became an investor, entrepreneur, and was able to somehow restart my life.
But yeah, there's, I don't know, I have all these, you know, I have all these crazy critiques of the universities, but I think the critique of the elite universities, you know, the Stanfords, the Harvards, the Oxbridge ones in the UK, is that they are really short-changing the elite.
And if you look at your average Stanford student, how ambitious they are the day they get in, and how ambitious they are two, three, four years after they graduate, so six to eight years later, it is a catastrophic decline.
And what's basically beaten into you in these places is a loss of agency, a sense that you can't do anything.
The Fractal Nature of Wealth 00:07:08
The kinds of things people are taught to aspire to are especially bad, dead-end careers.
So it's probably somewhat reduced, but there was always sort of this prestige of becoming a professor.
And then you get caught up in, I don't know, this crazy sort of Malthusian world where even the winners are kind of loserly.
So yeah, I think there's something about the socialization of these institutions that's really destructive of ambition and that has really not served our societies well.
Best and worst thing about being extremely rich.
Again, I'm not good at it.
I'm so bad at this introspection stuff.
But it is, you know, one always has the illusion that money can solve all problems.
And obviously it can't.
And then there are, you know, there's sort of all these ways that it's probably, in some ways it's a good thing to have money.
In some ways it's socially isolating.
In some ways you don't, you know, one doesn't even want to be fully aware of how much it's changed, how much it changes the relationships with people.
And so yes, there are all sorts of things about it that are extreme and strange.
But I try, you know, and there's sort of no, there are no straightforward ways to deal with it.
If you just become sort of a paranoid, rich person where you don't trust anybody, that seems like a high cost.
And then I sort of probably err in the direction of being an unself-aware, rich person who wants to pretend that nothing has changed at all.
And I'm self-aware enough to know that that's not correct, but I'm not self-aware enough not to do that.
I heard somebody, it was a celebrity, a big actor, I can't remember who it was, and they said when you get really famous, it's not you that changes.
It's everybody else in your world changes, because they find it really hard to adjust to suddenly you being very famous.
Is it the same kind of thing when you get very rich, it's like, I'm very successful?
Is it not really about you?
It's more about everybody around you.
Yeah, that's always what people say.
I don't know if we should trust them.
Probably a bit of money.
Yeah, that's obviously what the celebrities would say about fame and what the billionaires would say about money, that it's always about other people.
But it's probably, yeah, it's probably always not about just other people or about yourself, but it's always this complex social relationship.
You sold your Facebook shares.
You were obviously on the board there for many, many years.
You're one of the first investors.
You sold your shares for $638 million in 2012 when the IPO came up.
Had you stuck with them, you would have made another $2 billion.
Does that eat away at you, or given that you've got another 15, does it not really touch the sides of your sleep pattern?
Yes, I think one of the things that was very hard to gauge on the big tech companies.
And there was a way I understood it in a way I did not, was just how they were going to scale and scale and scale.
And how the returns to scale were so enormous.
And I don't know, you could think of it in almost a fractal sense where you add one digit to the market capitalization of a company.
And how hard is it to add a digit?
How hard is it to go from a company worth $10 million to $100 million?
Facebook was worth $5 million in 2004.
It was worth $85 million in 2005, 525 million in 2006, 15 billion in 2007.
It went a little bit sideways, was worth still around $10 billion in 2009, around 100 billion at the IPO in 2012.
Today it's 1.5 trillion.
And probably the incorrect view I had back in 2012 was that it was fractal up to 100 billion.
And so you could go from 10 to 100 million to a billion to 10 billion to 100 billion.
And those were each difficult, but each equally difficult steps.
But somehow going from 100 billion to a trillion was maybe much, much harder.
And maybe in retrospect, going from 100 billion to a trillion was actually the easiest of the orders of magnitude, because once you were at 100 billion, in some sense, you'd gotten to a big enough scale that was relatively easy to do the next order of magnitude scale.
Nobody thought people were going to do it.
So it was somehow both, you know, as an investor, you always want to invest in things that are true and contrarian.
So somehow going from 100 billion to a trillion was the easiest.
People thought it was the hardest.
And so that combination suggests that that was actually sort of the, yeah, in some sense, the lowest risk order of magnitude to scale.
And that's certainly something I did not conceive of back in 2012.
Was that your biggest mistake as an investor?
Getting out of Facebook too early?
Man, there probably are all sorts of mistakes, but it's you don't, you don't stress about them that much.
Martin Zuckerberg doesn't tease you about them.
You know, it's the biggest, the biggest mistake people make is never making mistakes.
Yeah.
You know, and if you, if you, and so, I don't know, I've probably made a lot of mistakes.
Living Without Mistakes 00:02:47
There are a lot of things I've gotten wrong conceptually.
You know, there are ideas I have that they're not always correct.
You know, and there are all sorts of things where you, and, you know, I'd say the, I don't know, I think the, this is a little bit too abstract, but probably the big mistake I feel that I've not made is living a life of making no mistakes ever.
Yes.
That reminds me of my favorite quote, which was Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian ice hockey genius, who said, you'll miss 100% of the shots you never take.
Yes.
That's really what you're getting at, right?
Yes.
And it's, yes, something like that.
And it, yeah, no, it is.
It's, I don't know.
It's, I think that, yeah, I don't know.
There's always, you know, one of the questions I always get asked is, you know, do you consider yourself lucky?
And I always like to deflect that question because it's kind of, it always feels like a trick question to me where if I say that I'm, if I say I'm not lucky, that sounds like I'm really, you know, being dishonest.
If I say I'm lucky, that sounds too self-deprecating.
And so the way I deflect it is I consider myself to be very fortunate, where fortune is something that you participate in making and luck is more something that's outside of you.
So I consider myself not lucky, but very fortunate.
How much did fatherhood, and has fatherhood, changed you as a man?
It certainly gives you a very different perspective.
It pushes you to ask questions you weren't asking before.
There's something about kids that's always extraordinary where in some ways you see yourselves in them.
There are ways in which they each are their own unique individual person.
There's something extraordinary about how a three-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old experiences the world for the first time and there's a sort of sense of wonder and there's a way you get to vicariously or you get to participate in that sum as a parent.
Religion and Scientific Failure 00:13:55
So there's sort of a way that there's obviously a lot of complexity around children and there are a lot of different ways in which people find it hard or choose not to have children, but there is sort of a way in which as an adult, there's always a risk that you get caught up in this sort of adults only world that has sort of a groundhog day quality to it.
And there's a way in which children bring one back to reality.
And of course, It gives you some very different perspectives on the future.
My oldest will be 81 years old in the year 2100.
And man, I wasn't sure that the world was going to last until 2030 before I had her.
And I'm still not sure, but we're going to have to somehow figure out a way to make it through the 21st century.
There's a lot of rumors that you are dedicated to living a very long time and defying the aging process, that you're quite obsessed about it all, and you have all sorts of weird little routines and potions and stuff.
Any of that true?
You're looking extremely good, Nick.
I don't know if I have any particularly strong insights into it.
I do think that one of the great projects of early modernity was the radical life extension project.
There was a personal immortality version of it.
There was sort of, or at least this idea that all sorts of diseases would be cured.
I still believe in that project as something that we should be working on very hard as a society.
I can at the same time believe that that project has gone very sideways.
And there are ways in which we're really not succeeding at it.
And there's sort of all sorts of ways where it's somehow, the descriptive level and the normative level can be very disconnected.
And so it's, I don't know, it's...
And then we can go into all sorts of specifics, but it's sort of like Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971.
It was going to be, the goal was to cure it by the U.S. bicentennial by 1976.
So we're now 53 years in, and it feels like it's way more than five years away.
And so there's sort of, it would be desirable for us to cure it.
And then at the same time, we're in this world of too much science propaganda that hasn't quite worked.
I think there's something extraordinary about the failure to make progress on things like dementia.
And so there are all these different areas where we could be making much more progress.
If you do a bigger cultural history on this, you could say early modernity in the 17th, 18th century forms.
The mainstream scientists believed in the radical life extension project.
It was Sir Francis Bacon, it was Condorcet, it was Benjamin Franklin in the United States.
And then by the 19th and 20th centuries, this becomes, maybe it becomes more of a fringe science view, but it's still sort of a part of it.
There's sort of religious dimensions to all this stuff where in some ways it's downstream of Christianity.
In some ways it's Christian.
In some ways it's anti-Christian because Christianity tells you that death is not natural and that we can all have hopes to be physically resurrected.
And then if science was either downstream of Christianity or competing with Christianity, science had to also solve this problem.
And so this was one of the things that science had to do.
And one of these fringier things that still had a decent number of adherents was early 20th century Russian movement that was sort of adjacent to communism was this thing called a cosmism.
And the cosmists in the 1910s, 1920s argued that science would fail unless it physically resurrected all the dead.
And because it was directly competitive with Christianity, but then in some ways Christianity also set the normative standards that death should not be natural, death should be fought, death was fundamentally wrong and evil, not natural, not what the classical world thought.
And then the communist slogan was Workers of the World Unite, the cosmos was dead of the world unite.
And then of course by the time you get to the 1930s and Stalin and you're not actually making progress on radical life extension and you're just killing tens of millions of people in the gulags, it's not quite working as advertised.
And then perhaps the place where it's culturally collapsed more recently is I often think that maybe the baby boomers, were the last generation in the United States in which radical life extension was not a mainstream belief, but even still a fringe belief.
So in 1999, I don't know, this was an internet bubble event we did in Silicon Valley, but one of my PayPal co-founders had this idea that we should take the whole company to a freezing party.
And it was like a Tupperware party is a party where people sell Tupperware.
A freezing party was one where they sold cryonics policies.
And it was a little bit disturbing because they couldn't get the dot matrix printer to work to print out the policy.
So there was sort of some concern about how well the cryonics would work if you couldn't get the printer to work.
But there was still a fringe belief among mostly boomer people.
We can criticize them for being this narcissistic, selfish generation.
But in 1999, there was still some boomer belief that if you worked hard enough, you personally could live forever.
And then there are strange ways in which that's gotten exhausted.
So I don't know, this is the slightly, yeah, the slightly complicated thing I would articulate is that I still believe we should, need, can work on this radical project.
And then we have to somehow also be honest and say that it has gone extraordinarily off track.
And there are very strange ways that it goes off track.
It's sort of when if science promises mastery over death, and if that's one of the things science sets as its goal, and then as science fails to do that, maybe the way you achieve mastery over death is that you don't invest in new medicines, but you invest in eugenics or things like that, where if you're not going to live forever, you can be like Denethor,
the mad steward and Lord of the Rings, where you can light your own funeral fire and set the hour of your death.
And so you can think of, it's a complicated debate about the pros and cons of the means.
I'm more sympathetic to the Catholic view on it.
But on a descriptive level, The fact that we're having a debate about euthanasia is a tell of how much the modern science project has gone off, where all that they can do in hospitals is kill people instead of focusing on helping them live forever.
Yeah, that's really interesting, because that's a big debate in the UK.
In fact, the parliament here has just voted at the first stage to bring in effectively legalized euthanasia, where if you get two doctors and a judge to agree and you're in the last six months of terminal illness, you can be put to death.
And that's just past the first stage, so it's likely to become law here.
My views on this would be pretty close to the Catholic Church's views, which would be quite skeptical of this and think there's something very, very off with this.
But then probably the two layers I would add to it would be something like this, science and tech, what does it tell us about science and technology?
It tells us, man, we're really not making much progress.
And then maybe there's always an economic set of questions that I would also zero in on where if you have a socialized healthcare system like you have in the UK, does that always, does that often have a tendency to end up with what Sarah Palin described in the US?
People thought she was crazy, but it always ends with rationing and death panels.
And so is this just the logic of the NHS that if you have to socialize the costs, you need to ration them.
And then if the science can't come up with a cheap immortality pill, the rationing means that you want people in the NHS system or whatever the socialized healthcare system is to encourage patients to maybe take the exit option rather than taking an expensive surgery.
What do you want to do when you die?
Do you want to freeze yourself just in case they find a way of reviving you down the road?
I would like to, again, I don't think it's inconsistent for me to be both Christian and to believe in a personal resurrection Christianity and to push science at the same time.
And I used to always feel a little bit guilty about it, like you're hedging your bets or like you don't really believe in one or the other if you believe in both.
But then I think, I don't know, modern atheism has collapsed where they believe in neither.
They believe in neither science or religion.
And so...
Yeah.
I mean, I'm a Catholic, but I agree with you.
Why wouldn't you make every, you know, I hope that I'm right, that there's a God out there and there's a life after that's fantastic.
I hope that's right.
But I mean, I don't see any reason why you couldn't, just on the, as a side bet, freeze yourself.
Sounds to me like you might consider it.
Sure.
Sure.
I think I'm actually signed up for, yeah, I'm signed up for a cryonics policy.
Again, I don't particularly think this works, but it was, again, more just almost an ideological statement that I want to do more and we should be trying to do more in all of these different dimensions.
But yeah, look, I think the way I would relate it to Christianity is that perhaps there is no rational way to think about one's mortality.
And so if you are an atheist who believes that this is the only life you have and then it will be over, But the way you deal with it is not rationally by thinking about it.
If you think about it, you will go insane.
You deal with it by avoiding it, by not thinking about it.
And then this sort of psychological avoidance mechanism, one of the things it results in is you don't even do the science anymore.
At some point, it's like to actually work really hard on the science.
Yeah, rationally, you're correct.
You should be working on the science in order to live forever.
But you'd have to think about your death too much to work on the science, and that would disturb you so much.
So I think the atheists are not even able to work on the science anymore.
So I assume you believe in God, do you?
I would describe myself as a Christian, yes.
I always think God is, I believe in Christ.
I think God is a...
We don't know that much about God.
The Christian view is you can only have knowledge of God through Christ.
If you're strictly monotheistic in Judaism, Islam, you end up, you have a certain picture of God, but it's very, very fuzzy.
And God is not, in a deep sense, not knowable.
So I'm Trinitarian, Christian, and that's how I would anchor my knowledge on God.
Motives Behind Violence 00:14:55
Do you pray?
So it's not belief about God that matters.
What we need is knowledge about God.
Right.
But do you pray in that case or not?
Not as much as I should.
Right.
I wanted to talk to you about two stories in the news this week, one of which you got dragged into just by circumstance.
But the first one was the incident on the subway with this Marine veteran who restrained somebody who then sadly died.
He'd just been acquitted.
What did you think of that story?
Because it seemed to me if we went back 20, 30 years, this guy would have been immediately lauded as a hero.
And yet there was a concerted effort on the left to paint him immediately as a white supremacist, a villain, a criminal, a murderer, and so on, from people like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and right the way down.
What did you make of that story?
Man, I always don't know enough about the particulars of these stories, and then it somehow matters.
It matters the specifics matter a great deal.
But yes, my so with the caveat that I don't know that much about the particulars on it, my instincts are that if we don't have people like that standing up against crime in a sort of citizen's capacity, I don't think of him as a vigilante.
I think of him as a crime stopper.
And you'll have a far more violent world if you stop people like that than if you don't.
And so that's where, yeah, I think the intuitions seem very, very wrong.
And then I don't, man, I don't, the AOC thing seems so crazy.
It's almost like you want to create more crime, you want to create more chaos or something like that.
And I don't know if it's fully that intentional, but that's what...
I just found it extraordinary that a Democratic congresswoman would go on record as calling it immediately murders, which she did.
And you think, what message are you sending to people who are on a subway that is already crime-ridden?
And you see something like this happen, you see women and children terrified.
Nine out of the 11 witnesses all said it was the most terrifying thing they'd ever been exposed to on the subway.
And you get this one guy who intervenes and stops what may have been a horrific incident.
And he's branded a murderer by a lawmaker in America.
And you just think, well, what message are you trying to send to people that you can never intervene to try and protect women and children on a subway?
Is that really what you want to say to Americans?
I just found that the most baffling part of it.
Yeah, I...
I always, I always, it's probably incorrect to impute too much intentionality to it.
I always wonder whether it's a crazy version of liberal elitism, a la, you know, the ridiculous Mayor Bloomberg of New York and things like this, where it's sort of like, why it serves people right for riding the subway.
Why do these people need to ride the subway?
And maybe they should be.
And then this is what happens to people who...
And so there's always something about liberalism that I think in both its environmental forms and in its anti-crime forms that's extraordinarily elitist because the elite liberal answer is it doesn't affect you if you're not on the subway or if you're in a nice secure building in Manhattan.
And so it's a way to increase class differences.
And this is the way, this would be like, I don't know, a conservative or even a Marxist critique of AOC is that she's sort of like an extreme upper class elitist thing in a way for her to say.
I completely agree.
The other big story, of course, has been the murder of the healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.
And you were dragged into this, like I said, through no fault of your own, but the alleged killer shared a video which featured you.
Let's take a look at this.
I think there's this very strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where a lot of the most talented startups, a lot of the great startups, seem to be run by people who are suffering from a mild form of Asperger's.
And I think we need to always turn this fact around and view this as an indictment of our whole society.
Because what does it say about our society when anyone who does not suffer from Asperger's, who is socially well adapted, will be talked out of all of their original creative ideas before they're even fully formed, who will sense this is a little bit too weird, that's a little bit strange, that sounds a little bit crazy, people are looking at me in a weird way.
And I think this is something that we must all realize is sort of a deeply endemic problem.
When you heard that he'd done this, this shooter, alleged shooter, Luigi...
Actually, I've not heard, this is the first time I'm hearing, Pierce, this is the first time I'm hearing this.
So can you explain to me what the link was?
Yeah, so the person who is alleged to have shot and killed the healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Luigi Mangioni, on his social media feed, amongst many things, he retweeted stuff by Elon and others, but also by you, including that video clip of you.
He just happened to post it and urge his followers to listen to it.
So your name just got pulled into it purely by that reason.
What's your reaction to that?
Man, it's, I don't know, there's always a part of me that thinks articulating certain views is always very dangerous.
And it can, you know, obviously there are all these anti-free speech arguments that we should restrict speech because it's going to trigger people in all kinds of crazy ways.
But I would have never thought that saying something like that would be that triggering.
And, you know, it was not, by the way, a pro-Asperger's comment.
It was more a commentary on how there's something that's gone very haywire in a lot of the socialization processes that we have, where if people pick up on social cues, they somehow end up going down these very conventional career tracks, becoming MBAs, going down these very, very track jobs.
But man, I do not straightforwardly understand how that's connected to what he did.
Well, I don't think it is, actually, to be fair.
I think it's one of the things that he posted.
So in fact, thanks to Elon, initially his X feed was deleted by someone at X, but Elon made them put it back.
So you can see all the stuff he'd been posting.
And this happened to be one of the things that he had posted.
And so it pulled you in purely in that regard.
But there is a big debate raging about this incident, which is that a lot of people on the left have been expressing, I have one on, Taylor Lorenz, who's a former Washington Post journalist, came on my show on Monday and said she felt joy when she heard that this healthcare executive had been gunned down and murdered.
That she was pleased it had happened because she held him accountable for denying cover for, I think it's 30% of all claims.
And separately, you've seen a very weird, quite twisted thing developing on social media where he's been described as a hot assassin because he's a good-looking guy, as if somehow that's an appropriate way to respond.
What do you make of this?
I don't think that I don't think one should ever glamorize murder.
And man, it probably just tells us more about how crazy some of these people are who are saying these things.
I don't think it tells us that much about this case, but it tells us, man, we're in a really crazy society where people...
And it's all sort of fake, right?
It's like, I don't think Taylor Lorenz is willing to do this herself or whatever, right?
And so it's just this weird, fake, left-wing aesthetic of violence.
And so it's just, yeah, there's probably some very strange things you can say about this.
But it's, I don't know, in some ways, isn't this what the left was on some level doing with Trump for eight years, where it was, this is the second coming of Adolf Hitler and anything is justified to stop him.
And then again, I think people are free to say these things.
I believe we should have maximal freedom of speech.
And then at the same time, there's a level on it that the thing that I find amazing is that it took them eight years to get one person in a country of 330 million people to try to assassinate Trump.
Again, I'm not in favor of... of violence or anything like this, but perhaps the shocking thing is how poorly this rhetoric translates or how low testosterone the left actually is.
There's all sorts of ways you can connect these things, but if this is what they thought and what they've been telling people about the healthcare industry and the insurance industry and things like that, in some ways it's remarkable it's taken this long.
Peter, we are...
Sorry.
I always think that there are ways in which the 2020s in the U.S., we need to rethink things.
There are ways it resembles Weimar Germany in the 1920s where a lot of the conventional ideas had failed and you need to look outside the Overton window and things like this.
But one way in which we're very different from the early 20th century, from 1920s Weimar, is that fascism and communism at the end of the day were youth movements and they were movements of violent young men.
And there was probably a lot wrong with youth movements and of those sorts of youth movements.
But if we look at the 2020s, I don't think our fundamental problem is that we're going to have communism or fascism.
And even with this dramatic healthcare killer and he shouldn't have killed the CEO, I don't think that's actually the mainstream.
The risk in our society is that we are a gerontocracy with an inverted demographic pyramid in which the values are set not by loser, 20-something high-testosterone men, but it's all being driven by 70-something grandmothers who don't want to take any risk whatsoever.
And that's what I think the political challenge in our society is.
It's the gerontocracy much more than some Gen Z rising tide of fascism and communism.
They're not enough Gen Z people for this to ever be anything more than a super liminal movement.
So yeah, I want to condemn the person for who, again, you have to assume he's innocent, presumed innocent until proven otherwise, but it doesn't look good.
I would condemn him for doing it.
But I wouldn't anchor on that as the paradigm of really what our society is headed towards.
The risk in our society is that we're a society where people are scared of their own shadow and we're going to vote for this ever bigger nanny state to protect people's pensions and whatnot.
And that's the gerontocracy is the risk.
And to those who think this shooter is a hero because he did it because he said this healthcare executive was presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover, what would you say to them?
It's I don't know what to say.
I still think you should try to make an argument.
And I think this is, you know, there may be things wrong with our healthcare system, but you have to make an argument and you have to try to find a way to convince people and change it by that.
And this is not going to work.
Chess as Healthy Downtime 00:04:28
But I don't know.
It's, yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of things one could say about it, but I don't think...
And again, I think the motives feel...
I don't want to go into all the particulars here, but I don't think there's anything heroic about him.
I completely agree.
I wanted just to end by, what struck me is quite an amusing little story about you and Elon, which is that you were a US-ranked master chess player, but Elon dismissed chess.
He said it was understandable when we all had to play with, all we had to play with was squirrels and rocks.
Sort of dismissed chess.
Is that because he isn't any good at it?
Have you ever played him?
I don't think I have ever played him.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, there are all sorts of things one could say about this.
It's probably, I don't know.
The ad hominem argument I would have made in the 1990s was that this was just something someone said who wasn't very good at chess.
And then, yeah, there are ways in which I think it's a great game.
I enjoyed it a lot.
And then like all these things, there are points where it probably gets quite unhealthy.
And you don't just want to escape into this alternate chess universe.
And there are probably, if I reflect on my life, there are probably points where I played way too much, way too much chess.
And it had an escapist quality.
I can argue we all need downtime.
And maybe chess is a reasonably healthy form of downtime.
But yeah, they're both good and bad things about it.
I was my school, when I was 13, school chess champion at 13, loved the game.
If I was to sort out, get hold of Elon, say, look, let's just settle this once and for all, a billion dollars each to charity, one game of chess.
Peter Thiel, the Elon Musk, you up for that?
Yeah, well, I would win, assuming you didn't find a way to use an AI to cheat or something like that.
I would obviously beat him.
And there's nothing random.
There's very little random about chess.
There are probably some elements of it that can be, but it has very, very little randomness.
And so it's very predictable that I would win.
And so therefore, it's not the kind of game you would play.
You could do backgammon or you can do poker.
Those are the games where you have high stakes, because even though people are better or worse at them, there's enough randomness that even a very bad player can occasionally be a very good player.
And then that's where people are willing to bet a lot of money.
Chess is too predictable.
It's too predictable who the stronger players are.
And that's why it's one of the strange reasons why there's so much less money in chess.
So yeah, maybe Elon would be willing to do it if it was some game involving randomness.
I would not.
But then, yeah, that's sort of why your hypothetical is probably not correct.
Peter, it's been absolutely fascinating.
I've wanted to interview you for years.
It didn't disappoint.
Thank you very much for all the time you give me.
And my apologies for my constant.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me.
I've coughed my way through it.
I've got bronchitis, but nothing was going to stop me from doing the interview.
So my apologies for all the spluttering.
Awesome.
Well, terrific.
And to be continued.
Honestly, I'd love that.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
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