In this episode, I sit down with Peter Thiel to talk about his vision for the future of technology and AI, and why courage is in short supply in the modern world. Peter Thiel is a billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and venture capitalist. He s been around for a long time, and is one of the most influential people in the world in terms of venture capital and venture philanthropy. He has invested heavily in venture capital, and has been a regular contributor to The New York Times, Forbes, and The Huffington Post.
00:01:38.120Questions about the future are really hard for people to answer.
00:01:40.740My thesis that I've articulated in various forms over the last 15, 20 years is that as regards questions of technology and science,
00:01:56.960we've been in a relatively stagnant period for something like 40 or 50 years, since maybe the 1970s.
00:02:05.840That, you know, there is a tremendous amount that's happened in the world of bits around computers, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, maybe now AI.
00:02:19.340But many other things that would have been called technology in, let's say, 1967, the year I was born,
00:02:25.720like rockets, supersonic aviation, underwater cities, the green revolution, agriculture, new medicines, have really stagnated.
00:02:37.060And this sort of world of adepts has seen dramatically less progress.
00:02:42.380And this is sort of a thesis that I've articulated about, and it's about the present and maybe the last 50 years or so of our past.
00:02:53.760People don't, you know, agree with it.
00:02:55.180It's very hard to figure out because it is perhaps also a feature of late modernity that things are extremely specialized.
00:03:04.600And so, you know, who are you to say that there's no progress in string theory?
00:03:09.980It takes half a lifetime of study to even, you know, get a handle on it or what's going on in quantum computers or cancer research.
00:03:17.520And so it's extremely hard to get a handle on these things.
00:03:22.440But my sense is that in many areas of the sciences, many of these STEM fields have been quite corrupted, politicized, bureaucratized,
00:03:34.860you know, de-risked, where people aren't willing to have bold ideas take risks.
00:03:39.240And we have this sort of incrementalism and snail's pace type of a progress.
00:03:45.200And it shows up in a lot of different ways.
00:03:48.960But economically, it shows up in these sort of stagnant living standards in, you know, governments that have ever-rising debt because, you know,
00:03:59.200it's okay to have debt and borrow from the future if you have a lot of growth.
00:04:03.040And if you don't have growth, it's very, very dangerous.
00:04:06.520And it shows up in sort of a variety of different ways.
00:04:11.940And that's what I think has been the story for some time.
00:04:16.340And probably if one were to extrapolate my median case is that that's what continues.
00:04:23.520We continue to have, you know, a certain powerful progress in the world of bits and continued regulation, stagnation, sclerosis,
00:04:36.300whatever you want to call it, in the world of atoms, which is, in my judgment, the more important part because, you know,
00:04:41.140we're physically embodied beings and, you know, we don't just want an app that tells you that you're going to get dementia.
00:05:06.840Well, there sort of are a lot of different applications of it.
00:05:14.460But it's, you know, it's, you know, I often I often have said that, you know, our greatest political problem, in a sense, is the problem of political correctness, of the sort of conformity of thought.
00:05:30.240And then, you know, if we're, and the question is always, you know, in order to get fresh new ideas and, you know, a larger surface area of discussion and debate, do we need, do we need great genius?
00:05:44.720Or is it just like some sort of courage of going against certain kinds of social norms and things like that?
00:05:57.560And, you know, and, you know, my intuition is the problem of political correctness, you know, is, is, is very great.
00:06:03.700The pressures for conformity, you know, in some sense are, and people don't get sent to the gulag, but they, they, they somehow the felt sense is, is that these pressures are extremely high.
00:06:15.320And that's why, you know, even a, you know, a little bit more courage would probably do a lot of good.
00:06:19.780Peter, isn't genius a combination of the two, because you need to have the brilliant idea, but you also need to vocalize the idea.
00:06:27.400And then you also need to implement it.
00:06:29.500And if you think about the geniuses, and we can mention right the way through history, practically every one of those ideas was controversial.
00:06:37.880And in some time, and at some points, even it could have ended the life of the person who vocalized it.
00:06:44.740Yeah, that, that, that surely is, is correct.
00:06:50.640I think I was using genius, you know, in a more narrow sense of someone who has just a very high IQ, which would probably be, you know, the, the sort of IQ mania, Silicon Valley perspective where, you know, people talk, you know, Google tries to give people quasi IQ tests and these algorithm tests when they hire people.
00:07:08.360And, and, and, and, and then, and so I do, I do think you, you, in some sense get people who are very intelligent in, in, in some sort of definition, but, but end up being not very creative, not very impactful in, in all these other ways.
00:07:25.580And it's, it's quite strange that, you know, the, the academia version of it would be, you know, there was, there was a type that was already going extinct when I was in college in the 1980s, which I would describe sort of the, the, maybe the brilliant, but eccentric, the eccentric professor type who had, you know, was somewhat of a polymath, had ideas about a lot of different, different subjects.
00:07:46.500And, and, and that type has, has, has, has basically gone extinct, whereas you probably still have a lot of people in academia still who would score reasonably highly on an IQ test.
00:07:59.420But that's a very interesting point. Can you blame people for not having courage when they're incentivized to conform? Because, you know, we can, we talk about Google. Google don't want people challenging.
00:08:12.580Google don't want people who are, you know, so creative that they're difficult to control. They want people to come in to do the job and then leave.
00:08:21.700Well, you can, you can, you know, it's a great deal. This is surely done at the margins. And so, you know, yeah, I'm not encouraging people to be foolhardy or to be martyrs or to be suicidally insane or anything like that.
00:08:42.580But, you know, like that, but, you know, at the margin, I think it would do a lot of good if people had just a little bit more courage in all of these cases.
00:08:50.160There, there are probably ways you can, you can blame people for putting themselves into these contexts.
00:08:57.280So if, you know, if someone goes into academia and thinks that they will, they'll have this sort of creative intellectual career, you know, at some point, they should figure out that the pressures are enormous and militate against that in very powerful ways.
00:09:16.360And, you know, they should try to figure out a way to do something creative outside of academia because they will not be able to do inside.
00:09:24.420So, so yes, I think, I think there's a way in which if you look at it locally, it's always not your fault.
00:09:29.460You know, you're going to Google that day and, you know, you don't want to create a hostile work environment or something by, by articulating some heterodox view on gender relations or something like that.
00:09:40.020But then if you, if you widen the aperture, I think you can blame people a little bit more for, you know, having made the decisions to put themselves in these situations, not thinking about the social context enough and, you know, having, having had the blinders on in some sense.
00:09:54.420Do you think that's one of the reasons why there's so many autistic people who go on and found big companies or in these huge level entrepreneurs because they see the world in a different way and they're not as connected to wanting to be part of a group as much as neurotypical people are?
00:10:15.160Yeah, it's, it's, it's probably, probably if someone's fully autistic, there, there, there probably are ways that that's, that's pretty not helpful in, in all sorts of ways.
00:10:26.720But, but yes, certainly there are probably people who are very mildly on the spectrum where, where it's, it's strangely been, been helpful and there probably are a number of people in tech where, where something like that is, is true.
00:10:40.960Um, but then I, I think this is, this is not a pro Asperger's, this is, this is a, this is more a commentary on, uh, wow, our society is really insane and deranged.
00:10:51.300Well, in a, in a, in a, you know, in a, in a healthy society, uh, someone who, who had Asperger's would, would be a less functional person and would be able to get less done.
00:11:00.780And, uh, we must be just in an incredible social pressure cooker society where, you know, an average person with a pretty good social EQ just picks up on all these pressures and, uh, um, you know, uh, knows to censor and get rid of every heterodox idea they ever had.
00:11:21.100Hmm. Well, very much on the point of society being deranged, I want to come back to the idea of the future. And I, I, I understand perfectly well what you say, making predictions, especially about the future is a bad idea, as they say.
00:11:32.880However, in your career, the thing that many people will know you for is making investments or making moves that were visionary. That's why that I introduced you the way I did. I wasn't sucking up to you. It's just an observation of your trajectory through life.
00:11:48.000So I would be curious, if you don't mind, just finding out what you see coming down the pipe. And, and we're not going to say, you know, Peter Thiel in 2024 predicted this and now he's an idiot because it didn't happen. I guess we're just curious of what you might see as the things that are likely to occur.
00:12:04.780Well, I'm always, I'm always extremely hesitant with, um, the categories, the buzzwords. And, uh, so, you know, if, if, if we, you know, there's, in Silicon Valley tends to, you know, traffic in, you know,
00:12:18.000mobile internet or cloud computing or big data machine learning, you know, the, the current one is AI, which, you know, people have been overusing for a long time and has gone completely into, into overdrive. And, you know, as a, as a venture capitalist or investor, you know, I, I want to invest in successful businesses. And, uh, you know, I think, I think the, the really successful businesses, um,
00:12:47.140have to, um, have to do something that's unique, you know, it's, um, you know, uh, they have a moat or dare we, dare we say even a monopoly, um, you know, around, around the business, they're, they're doing something that, um, isn't just this commodified, uh, competition. And so, you know, there, there, there are, and I always think of a restaurant as the, uh, as the sort of paradigmatic example of a bad business. If you want, um, you know, if you want, you know, um,
00:13:15.140nature bared red and tooth and claw, uh, bloody competition, you should open a restaurant. And, uh, I always, you know, my one heterodox idea I have is that competition and capitalism are opposites. In a competitive world, you compete away the profits and you do not accumulate, uh, capital. Competition is for losers. You want to find, you want to find, uh, something where you're doing something that's unique.
00:13:40.140You have a significant head start. You're, you're, you're ahead of people. And so, so I don't know, on a technology side, I would, I would, I would say that I think the AI breakthroughs are important. They're going to, they're going to have an enormous impact on our, our society in, in, uh, in very different ways. Uh, but, um, as investments, they're very, very treacherous at this point. And I think it's roughly, I mean, the rough analogy is that AI in 2024 is like,
00:14:10.120like the internet in 1999, it's clearly going to be important, big, transformative, have all kinds of interesting social, you know, political effects, maybe even effects about how humans think about themselves. Uh, but, uh, on a business level, it's very, very treacherous because there were, you know, there were a lot of different internet businesses that failed and even the ones that succeeded.
00:14:32.120It was, you know, it was quite a rollercoaster. You know, Amazon was the leading e-commerce site in 1999. It was $113 a share on a free, on a pre-split adjusted basis on a, in terms of the price of the time in December of 1999.
00:14:46.120By October of 2001, it was five and a half dollars. You know, you had to wait till the end of 2009 to get back to the 99 level. And then it went up, you know, it went up 25 X from there.
00:14:56.120So if you'd held it from December 99 to today, you would have made 25 times your money, but you would have first lost 95%. And then if you'd bought it in October, 2001, you would have made 500, 500 times your money or so.
00:15:07.120And, um, and so, so in some sense, Amazon was, was the obvious internet company to invest in. And even that was, you know, quite, quite a rollercoaster.
00:15:17.120And my, my suspicion is that's, that's roughly where we are in AI. It's, uh, it's correct as a technology, but then, uh, you know, extremely, uh, bubbly and crazed as a, you know, as a company building thing or as a, as a sector to invest.
00:15:33.120A lot of people are very concerned about AI from the perspective of the things that you mentioned, which is the impact it's going to make on human beings, the way we relate to each other, whether we have jobs to go to, which have been the source of not just money, but meaning and purpose to a lot of people over time, the source of social connections where you meet, you might meet your spouse.
00:15:55.120I mean, the, the, the, the, the things that people think might happen as a result of AI could potentially transform humanity in a way that will be extraordinarily significant. Do you see that happening?
00:16:10.120Well, um, you know, I, I suppose there are, uh, there are a range of dangers and risks. Um, there is, yeah, there are questions how it affects the labor market, whether is it fundamentally a compliment to human labor that makes humans more productive or, or is it a substitute for human labor where, uh, human workers will get paid, paid less at the end of the day? Uh, you know, most, you know, the history of the industrial revolution,
00:16:39.120was that, uh, you know, most of the time the Luddites have been wrong. Machines, you know, didn't really replace people altogether. They freed people up to do more productive things and, um, in some sense increased the GDP per, per human being. And, uh, and my intuition is that that's, that seems like the far more likely outcome with these AI technologies that is, was, you know, also what computers did and, you know, in some sense, what, you know, what has been happening.
00:17:08.120Since the industrial revolution, um, I think there are, you know, there are complicated distributional questions. Will, will a lot of the gains be captured by a few big tech companies? Will it be more, um, more evenly distributed in our society? I don't think people have particularly good models on that. And of course you have, you know, and of course you have also, uh, all these, uh, scarier existential risks where, you know, maybe, I mean, you know, I, I don't, I don't really believe the science fiction version where the AI
00:17:38.100AI becomes, you know, um, you know, um, you know, a superhuman godlike being and decides to destroy the world. Why not? Uh, I, I think, I think well before you get to that point, um, it can be weaponized by humans in a military use, which is probably also just as scary.
00:17:55.500And so, um, you, um, there's sort of all, so there are all sorts of, you know, there are all sorts of intermediate scenarios that are dangerous. But I, I, yeah, look, I, I would concede that it is a, you know, it's a fairly, uh, there are, there are some great dangers in the technology.
00:18:10.380And I understand why people are nervous or scared about it. Um, I, however, the, the place where I do strongly come down on the opposite side of the precautionary principle and the effective altruists and the East Bay rationalists and the, you know, Eliezer, Bostrom, Cabal of, of, of people is that, uh, you know, if we, if we talk about different, you know, different kinds of existential risk in the world, you know, in the, you know, nuclear war,
00:18:40.360there's the, uh, the, the AI that kills everybody, maybe dangerous biotech, maybe, uh, you know, um, maybe climate change or various types of, um, environmental factors.
00:18:53.360And parenthetically, it's always interesting that the, the people who talk about these things, uh, are always just focused on their own one.
00:18:59.360And so you can, you know, I always think there's a critique of someone like Greta that she's insufficiently apocalyptic in her thinking because she's not worried about AI and she's not worried about nuclear weapons.
00:19:08.360And then the AI people that aren't worried enough about climate change and maybe we should get them all in a room and have them fight it out first.
00:19:14.360But, uh, the existential risk that I always want to also put into the hopper, if, if we, if we were to have a comprehensive discussion of these risks is, um, is the risk of a totalitarian one world government.
00:19:27.360And I think, uh, and I think, uh, and I think that, um, the answer, the implicit answer to so many of these existential risks is a totalitarian one world government.
00:19:36.360And so, you know, Greta thinks climate change is the biggest problem. Everybody should ride a bicycle.
00:19:41.360I would submit that, uh, the way you would actually do this would be, uh, would be, um, you know, going from the frying pan into the fire of, of, of this.
00:19:50.360And in a similar way, if we, um, if we were to really regulate and, and stop, um, AI from a precautionary principle, you would need something like global compute governance or, or something like this.
00:20:04.360Um, which, uh, would have to be pretty heavy handed because, you know, anyone can program a computer and it can done on this very local level.
00:20:11.360So it has to be, you know, much more heavy handed than, you know, the international regulatory bodies that regulate, let's say nuclear weapons proliferation, where, you know, it's, it's hard to build a nuclear, nuclear weapon.
00:20:22.360And so you, you don't need necessarily a super, um, heavy handed one world government to stop it.
00:20:29.360And so, uh, a lot of it, uh, has the, you know, has the character where I think that that risk is, is much greater than, um, you know, the risk people want to talk about.
00:20:38.360And then if I, if I had to do the sort of the, I don't know, the, not sure, the contrarian take or the, you know, if you held a gun to my head and said, which do I think we're going to get?
00:20:45.360Are we going to get, you know, this dangerous AI that disrupts our society and maybe, you know, it becomes this dangerous weapon?
00:20:53.360Or are we, are we likely to get, uh, the one world nanny state that, uh, stops it from being built?
00:20:59.360Um, since people are worried about the former and not the latter, that tells you, you should worry about the latter and not the former.
00:21:04.360It's interesting you say that because you well know a Harari who's a very interesting thinker who identifies many of the, uh, global threats, the ones that you describe.
00:21:14.360He's open in terms of calling for global coordination in order to deal with them.
00:21:20.360Is your concern about that based on the fact that no one else is concerned about it?
00:21:25.360Or are you saying you see steps being taken towards that outcome, the global government outcome?
00:21:32.360Uh, I, my, my intuitions are that a, a true global government would be, uh, would be quite bad.
00:21:42.360It would be, it, it, uh, it would have a totalitarian character.
00:21:48.360It would have a character that there could be no escape from it.
00:21:51.360Um, you know, my classical liberal intuition would be that the marginal tax rates would, um, be somewhere between 95 and 100%.
00:22:07.360With the, you know, what, uh, I don't know what, um, what Corbyn would set the tax rates in the UK if, uh, if you could actually prevent people from leaving.
00:22:14.360But what I'm asking is Germany, if you built a wall to stop people from leaving.
00:22:18.360But what I'm asking is Peter, do you see things that are currently happening that are taking us in that direction?
00:22:25.360Do you see people, you know, coordinating in the shadows, so to speak, to make that world government a reality?
00:22:31.360Well, I think, I think that is, I think in a way that is the, the implicit answer to all these, all these existential risks.
00:22:38.360Do you think that's why they are being talked about so much?
00:22:41.360Um, I, you know, I, I think there are, there are good, there, look, there always are true believers.
00:22:50.360There are, uh, people who are in part of a racket.
00:22:53.360And so, you know, is, is environmentalism.
00:22:56.360Are there people who genuinely believe it's a problem? Yes.
00:22:59.360Are there people who are useful idiots and, uh, just tools for others' agendas? Yes.
00:23:05.360And are there people who are part of a corrupt racket? Yes.
00:23:08.360It's, and it's always, these things always have elements of all three.
00:23:11.360If it was, if we could just collapse it to one of them, they, uh, they wouldn't be as, as, as powerful as, as they are.
00:23:17.360But I think, um, but I think, um, but yes, I, my, my, my, my sense for it is that, uh, you know, a number of these things, the, the implicit answers, uh, require this sort of, uh, supranational coordination in a, in a very deep way.
00:23:35.360And, and then my sort of political philosophy, uh, sense is that that kind of coordination, um, you know, would, it would, it would be very non-democratic.
00:23:45.360You'd have, you know, you'd be deferring even more to experts, even more, um, even more to, um, you know, extremely large centralized, uh, structures.
00:23:55.360So it would be very non-democratic, very bureaucratic, uh, probably fairly high taxes.
00:24:01.360It's, you know, in some ways the, the kind of transformation that you've had in the, you know, as, um, as Europe has turned into the EU.
00:24:08.360You know, it was in some ways the, the common market was envisioned in, you know, in 1979 by, by Thatcher when she was pro EU in 1979, because it would be, you know, you'd have this level playing field and you have, you'd have this, this market and it would be a way to, to weaken the unions and all these things.
00:24:27.360It would sort of be push things in a more capitalist direction.
00:24:30.360But then as, um, you know, as the, as the common market got created, it came with, you know, this bureaucracy in Brussels that regulated the size of bananas and everything else you could think of.
00:24:40.360And, uh, that's not in the econ one textbooks that you have free trade.
00:24:44.360The trade always comes with, um, a super national bureaucracy that regulates it and standardizes and things like this.
00:24:51.360And, and, uh, yeah, my, my judgment is that, uh, that trade off, uh, would be, uh, you know, maybe it's still okay on the level of Europe because, you know, one can still leave, one can still leave Europe.
00:25:03.360Um, but, uh, on the level of the world, uh, it would be quite another matter.
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00:26:07.360Are you optimistic, Peter, about the future of the United States or are you one of those people who looks at it now and sees that we're in a period of steady decline?
00:26:21.420I am, I always, I always dislike the, you know, frames of extreme optimism or extreme pessimism because, you know, in some ways, you know, my question about the future, you know, maybe the place where I should disagree with the whole premise of your question is, it's not like the future is, you know, written out there somewhere.
00:26:44.880And it is that all we have to do is, you know, and it is that all we have to do is, you know, sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold.
00:26:52.760You know, my, my bias, it always comes down to individuals or small teams of people and that the question of agency is extremely important.
00:27:00.400And, you know, and, you know, and we get to decide in part what kind of a future we want to build.
00:27:05.800And, and, and if you, if you are extremely optimistic or extremely pessimistic, I think they both end up, both of those attitudes lead to, lead to a kind of, you know, lead to a kind of passivity.
00:27:24.000Extreme pessimism, there's nothing that can be done.
00:27:26.600Extreme optimism, there's nothing that needs to be done.
00:27:29.340And so I think of both of them as sort of code words or euphemisms for sloth and laziness in practice.
00:27:36.100And so, you know, probably a healthier attitude is moderate optimism, you know, moderate pessimism, where, you know, at the margins, you know, a lot can be done.
00:27:46.700So with that, you know, big qualifier, yes, you know, there are all sorts of places where one can have very serious concerns about the United States.
00:27:57.820You know, the deficits are out of control.
00:28:00.500There's sort of all sorts of things that seem to be on a deeply unsustainable trajectory.
00:28:06.280The, the thing that I think is very paradoxical about it is that, you know, maybe we have absolute stagnation or even, maybe even decline.
00:28:17.760But on a relative sense, there's just this felt outperformance.
00:28:22.560And I, I've started to wonder whether the, you know, the absolute crisis and the relative outperformance are somehow very deeply linked.
00:28:31.380Because if someone who, you know, is somewhat pessimistic lists all these places where the U.S. has very deep problems, the rebuttal from people like you coming from the U.K.
00:28:44.300will always be something, well, do you want to move to the U.K.?
00:28:47.960And, and then that's very hard to answer.
00:28:51.060And somehow, maybe, maybe, maybe it's a, yeah, it's a, there are these problems in the U.S.
00:28:56.660And it's, it's coupled with a sense that there are, there are really no other places that are doing better at all.
00:29:04.360Or that these, that the problems are maybe even more acute.
00:29:07.820And, you know, the demographic crisis is more acute in Europe or the, the sort of tech stagnation is even more felt.
00:29:14.880We, we at least have, still have the tech piece, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the IT computer piece is still working in the United States.
00:29:21.080So, Peter, what are the things that you would change about this country in order to make it more effective, work better?
00:29:30.580And I think one of the things that we can all agree on is tackling that deficit.
00:29:35.340Because I'm no economist and I'm not a numbers guy, but I look at the numbers and I'm like, I'm pretty worried.
00:29:44.160Well, it's always, you know, yeah, in theory that if you could wave a magic wand, there are all kinds of things you would, one would try to do.
00:29:53.440You know, my, you know, probably my, my policy intuitions are, are still broadly quite libertarian in terms of what one should do.
00:30:04.580And so, I think, I still think there is a lot that one could do by deregulating, having, you know, a less severely regulated economy.
00:30:15.880I mean, everything from, you know, the zoning laws here in Los Angeles, you know, if you look out, you look out the window, we have all these skyscrapers, you do not, you don't, you don't see a single construction crane.
00:30:26.300And that, you know, that tells you, that tells you something about, you know, an incredibly, you know, bad regulatory regime where it's very, very hard, very expensive to build, to build new buildings.
00:30:41.760And, and, and there's, and, and so I, yeah, my intuition would still be that there's, you know, a lot that one can do on the regulatory side.
00:30:51.880You know, I think, I think the, the answer that the left has is that you have to raise taxes like crazy.
00:30:59.080I, I don't think that's the one we should try to do.
00:31:03.660It's, you know, the, the Republicans probably don't have a great answer to this right now.
00:31:08.380And, and I think they're, they're implicit answers.
00:31:10.420We're just going to keep borrowing money indefinitely.
00:31:14.040And I worry that that's not going to be adequate at the end of the day.
00:31:18.520And we will eventually get sort of a, you know, a, a very big move to the left if we, if we don't figure out some way to get back to growth.
00:31:27.820Can I just ask on this point, I've been wondering later, Peter, and feel, obviously, you feel free to disagree with me entirely.
00:31:33.400But it seems to me people often talk about political polarization, and it's tangible, of course, in both our countries.
00:31:40.420But the one thing that I'm wondering is, is the inability to deal with the deficit a reflection of that polarization?
00:31:48.660In other words, if you were running a small company and you had 40 employees, let's say, and you hit tough times, and you said to all your employees,
00:31:57.240guys, look, in order for us to survive as a business, and for all of us to keep our jobs, we all got to take a 10% pay cut, you're going to get less money, I'm going to get less money, you're going to have less money to spend on your family, you're going to have less money for social benefits, you're going to have less money for healthcare.
00:32:11.480But that's how we're going to make it, as we're a team.
00:32:15.740That works if you feel that you're one team.
00:32:19.040But if you've got a society in which half the country, suspicious and hateful, you might argue, of the other, that seems to me to be the position where you might struggle to tackle something like, effectively, what we're doing is spending more money than we have, right?
00:32:34.740Do you think that these things are connected?
00:32:36.240They are somehow connected, but probably the causation is very different from the way you're articulating it.
00:32:41.660The way I would articulate it is that maybe a sort of representative democracy, sort of a constitutional Republican government of the sort the U.S. has, it always works.
00:32:56.440You know, you have a lot of checks and balances.
00:32:58.420The decision-making process isn't fast.
00:33:01.860It requires a lot of complicated compromises to make decisions.
00:33:06.960And perhaps it works best when you have a lot of growth going on in the background.
00:33:12.600And so if you have an ever-growing pie, then, you know, there's always some question, how do you divide up this growing pie?
00:33:18.280And if you're, like, a very difficult, obnoxious political actor, you don't get a bigger piece of the pie for yourself, and that sort of a person doesn't do well.
00:33:29.880But then if the pie is not growing and it becomes this very brutal zero-sum thing where there's a winner for every loser or something like that, you know, I would expect the politics to have, you know, a much nastier sort of edge.
00:33:44.700So I, again, my, you know, sort of a man with a hammer sees a nail everywhere, but I would say that the sort of relative stagnation that we've had, you know, I think of the polarized and nasty politics as downstream from that.
00:34:00.660And then, you know, and then probably, you know, the kind of bad compromise you always end up with in that is, well, we just keep borrowing money because that way, you know, we can sort of pretend that we have growth.
00:34:12.780And the future will take care of it, even though it obviously won't if the growth doesn't arrive.
00:34:19.040Because it all comes down to a weakness of leadership, in my opinion, Peter, in that we are a society that seeks comfort.
00:34:28.540And everything has been tailored to our own comfort.
00:34:32.340So why are our politicians going to make us feel discomfort?
00:34:35.960And that discomfort that we feel is just going to make, it's going to be even more shocking because we've done our, we've spent our whole lives avoiding it.
00:34:47.600Yeah, surely there are, there are elements of all of these things that are correct.
00:34:52.040But it's, you know, it is, it is, it is sort of unclear what kind of leadership one is likely to get in a, you know, in a deeply stagnant zero sum world.
00:35:03.320And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's likely to be, you know, very polarized and not very charismatic and not very unifying.
00:35:13.540So, Peter, that being the case, effectively feels like every rock we lift with you, stagnation is under it.
00:35:21.880Is there a way for, for our, it almost doesn't feel like you're just talking about the West.
00:35:26.900You're talking about the entire world really at this point, right?
00:35:29.520It's, you know, there's a, there's a way that the crisis takes different forms.
00:35:34.820But, you know, I would say in the, the developed countries, I always think the progress requires us to do new things.
00:35:42.680And, and so it, if the younger generation will do better than their parents, we have to have some kind of innovation.
00:35:49.900You know, there, there may be other ways to do it, but, but, but technology, I think is, is this incredibly technological progress, scientific progress.
00:35:59.520Are these incredibly vectors for the developed world.
00:36:02.520You know, for the developing world, um, there probably is some kind of globalization story where, you know, China maybe does not need to invent anything new.
00:36:12.260If they just copy or steal or whatever, all the intellectual property from the West, maybe they can just catch up to our, to our living standards.
00:36:20.400And, uh, and, uh, and then we can get into questions, you know, whether, whether, um, globalization without technology can work or how well that's going to work.
00:36:29.320But there, there is, there seems to be, there's some kind of globalization convergence story that one can tell for, um, you know, um, the, um, the, the less developed countries.
00:36:39.920But I always think, uh, yeah, if we divide the world, you know, and again, if we went back to the fifties and sixties, you would have divided the world into the first world and the third world.
00:36:48.200The first world was the part that was technologically advancing.
00:36:51.140The third world was just sort of messed up and stuck.
00:36:53.340So it was a pro tech, uh, story, but a non globalizing thing.
00:36:59.340And now we divide it into the, uh, developed and developing worlds, which is, um, a pro globalization story because it's a story of convergence.
00:37:06.900The developing countries will become developed, but then it's also, uh, implicitly a story of stagnation where the developed world is that which is done, finished.
00:38:00.380It's, um, well, I, I, I certainly think it, it can help and it's something that should be, that should be pushed.
00:38:08.500But this is again where I, I, I would come back to the, um, the, um, the internet circa 1999, which, um, you know, it led to a lot of great companies.
00:38:17.980Um, it, uh, it probably did increase the GDP, you know, some, it did increase productivity some, but, um, you know, in a sense, when this was the only new thing that really happened in the last quarter century, um, it, it, it probably was not enough to, you know, transform the living standards.
00:38:38.740We had, we had this manifesto we wrote, uh, for my venture fund back in 2011, where we had the tagline, you know, they, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.
00:38:48.560And, uh, and it was not meant, you know, it was, you know, in some ways there's all these ways you can make fun of Twitter or I guess, uh, now, now X and, uh, you know, where, uh, but, but it, it worked on the level of a business, right?
00:39:01.660It was, you know, a few thousand people, they had very cushy jobs, um, they could work from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and smoke marijuana at the office or whatever they were doing.
00:39:12.080And so it, it, it worked on the level of the business, but it wasn't necessarily enough to, you know, increase living standards across the board for our society.
00:39:21.220And then that's, you know, that, that I, I, my sort of placeholder would be that AI is something like the internet.
00:39:28.720It will, you know, you know, yeah, there are all sorts of places where you can, you know, ring efficiencies out of the system.
00:39:35.780Um, but, uh, but I, I don't know if it will be as, um, as economically transformative.
00:39:41.220And you mentioned, as, as we need, you mentioned social media.
00:39:45.600Um, I think a lot of people, well, I'm certainly one of them, rather than saying a lot of people, I'll say, I am concerned about the impact social media is having on our brains.
00:39:54.820Uh, not only young people, but the way we relate to each other.
00:39:58.120And increasingly, um, I see with younger generations, we've had numerous people on the show where from younger generations where it's clear, we all know because we grew up without the internet,
00:40:09.020that most of the way the conversations are had online is bullshit, but younger generations don't.
00:40:15.320Um, are you worried about what social media is doing to us?
00:40:19.200You know, I, I always think it's too easy to turn social media or various other Silicon Valley, uh, tech companies into, into the scapegoats for all of our problems.
00:40:28.860And, uh, surely the, the, the bigger problem, you know, maybe, you know, surely the bigger problems are things like, um, the failure of, of the schools, the wokeness of, you know, K through 12 schools, the, uh, derangements of the universities.
00:40:49.220The, the, the, the, the, something that's gone really haywire on the educational thing.
00:40:53.440Um, and then there probably are, there are ways in which, um, you know, I, I, I think a lot of younger people don't know what they should be doing with their lives.
00:41:03.480Uh, and this, this again would be more, more of the stagnation than that you're spending too much time on, on TikTok or, or something like this.
00:41:12.260Um, and you know, uh, there are things I, I, I don't, I don't like, I don't like all these things that push us towards conformity.
00:41:20.200I think, you know, the critique of social media that I would, the political critique I would have would not be that it's polarizing our society, that actually that it's homogenizing our society.
00:41:28.700Um, there's, there's less heterodox thinking, but, uh, but again, if, if you think of it as a compliment or alternative to the mainstream media, um, we probably had still have a wider range of ideas.
00:41:42.260That you can explore on the internet than you could before.
00:41:44.680So, uh, so yeah, there's probably, I don't know, there's something probably wrong with radio and television and, and all these forms of media also, you know, in some ways made people dumb.
00:41:53.260In some ways, uh, you know, people shouldn't be working all the time, you know, that you have some downtime, some entertainment.
00:41:59.660And, uh, if you, if you, if you think of it as a, you know, is it, is it really, is it really worse than television was for people?
00:42:09.920I mean, I mean, so people would actually argue that social media is a pipeline.
00:42:14.080I mean, if you think the wokeness, let's compare it to a virus.
00:42:16.960I mean, that's the standard, uh, metaphor.
00:42:20.540It's really the, the, it's, it's how it's, how it transmitted really into everybody's brain.
00:42:27.080It started at the university and then it went into, yeah, it leaked out the lab into Twitter, into Facebook, into Instagram.
00:42:36.300And that's when it started to proliferate.
00:42:41.700Yeah, but I, I, um, I still, I, I still think that was not, again, we can, it's very hard to know these, these cultural arguments, but I don't know.
00:42:52.460I, I, I'd be open to sort of a religious interpretation that it's, um, it is, you know, it is, uh, Christianity, the, you know, the main religion of the Western world, uh, you know, it always takes the side of the victim.
00:43:05.360And, uh, and there's something where, um, it is like some kind of deformation or intensification.
00:43:13.080And maybe you should think of wokeness as ultra Christianity or hyper Christianity.
00:43:17.960It's, uh, it's just like a extreme intensification.
00:43:21.500And, uh, and, you know, it's maybe there's no forgiveness.
00:43:24.120And so it's sort of, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's, you still have original sin and you have all these bad things that happened in the past.
00:43:30.220The past is terrible and you can never overcome it, but, uh, but there's, there's surely is a religious interpretation of this is sort of, you know, what, what, what happened is, um, as let's say the church lost a certain amount of authority, but people didn't become, you know, rationalist, atheist people.
00:43:45.700They, uh, they, uh, they, they, they went into the sort of, uh, woke, uh, religion, which, you know, has to be, which I would interpret as, as, you know, a certain, you know, extreme form of Christianity.
00:43:59.440Yeah, because, you know, there's a religious interpretation, there's, you know, there's an economic one, you know, it's, uh, there's a, um, there is a, uh, there is a, uh, there's an educational one.
00:44:10.440And then, you know, there's obviously some technology piece, but, uh, but that was, you know, it, I don't know, it was probably channeled by, you know, I think, I think the liberal, the bad liberal idea has been channeled by Hollywood for decades.
00:44:22.660Hmm. And because it's, it's an interesting point about the, you know, you were saying about bad Hollywood ideas, because it, it seems to me that we were sold a lie with, with the whole new atheism movement, where it was kind of said, we don't need religion anymore because we have rationality.
00:44:41.140We have science, we have facts, science, rationality, and facts.
00:44:45.580I mean, great, but they're not going to fill that particular part of you that needs filling that religion does so beautifully.
00:44:52.120Well, it, you know, it's, it's, you know, I, I, I always, I always think one should try to steal man.
00:44:58.620So there are all these things I disagree with, the new, disagree, disagreed with the new atheists on.
00:45:03.700But if I had to steal man, new atheism circa 2005, um, you know, I think it was a very politically correct way to be anti-Muslim.
00:45:13.880You sort of grouped all these religions together, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, a bunch of others, and then, uh, they're violent and intolerant, and they just randomly kill people, and, um, and it was a problem with Islam, or maybe fundamentalist Islam, or, or, or something like this.
00:45:31.760It was sort of a politically correct way, um, to be, and, uh, to be opposed to that.
00:45:36.900And there was surely some, some need for that.
00:45:41.300Maybe there still is today, if you look at, you know, um, you know, the, um, the sort of, uh, I don't know, um, murderous insanity of the Hamas, uh, people in Gaza, and things like that.
00:45:52.680Um, and then, um, and then the, um, the sort of geopolitical way in which it lost its way is, at some point, um, you know, the crisis, the, the, the danger to the world.
00:46:06.900The, the, the, the West is surely more, uh, from communist China than it is from, um, you know, um, medieval Islam, or something like this.
00:46:17.380And, uh, and I think the new atheists did not have anything to say about communist China, which is, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a consensus theory of truth.
00:46:28.440It's, uh, you know, it's a social theory of truth.
00:46:30.660It's the wisdom of crowds or the wisdom of the communist party, which somehow distills the, the collective.
00:46:36.120It is, uh, it claims to be scientific.
00:46:38.740You know, it's probably not, but of course the word science always gets misused.
00:46:42.420It's almost always, whenever people use the word science, it's almost always a tell that it's not science.
00:46:46.560So it's, you know, we don't call it physical science or chemical science, um, but it's social science, political science, climate science.
00:46:55.480I'm in favor of, I'm in favor of science, but I'm not in favor of, uh, people using the word science most of the time.
00:47:00.500And, uh, and, uh, and so it's scientific socialism and, uh, the new atheists were, were, were, um, you know, they, they were, they were good at, um, you know, um, explaining why bin Laden was a bad person.
00:47:15.520They were a lot weaker when it came to Xi Jinping thought.
00:47:18.520Because what the new atheists did is they took away the idea of religion.
00:47:23.920The flaw with the new atheists is they didn't really know how to replace it.
00:47:29.220And what you created was a vacuum and something is going to fill a vacuum.
00:47:34.360Uh, yeah, I mean, there's sort of a lot of different levels.
00:47:37.160I, I, I, I sort of, I, I don't really like going as much as you're going into the sort of, uh, spiritual, moral, life, life direction.
00:47:45.780Uh, uh, I, I think it's, if you say it's a, a critique of things that, uh, yeah, it's, it's a critique of societies that are organized in a certain way.
00:47:56.200Um, and I, I think it was important to have a critique of a medieval Islamic society that, that was, that, that, that, that, that there were a lot of things that were not desirable about that.
00:48:06.900Um, I think it is perhaps equally important to have a critique of a totalitarian communist society.
00:48:14.320Um, and I think that, in my judgment, that is a greater threat.
00:48:18.120And, um, and that's, that's one where, um, there's something about the methodology and the approaches, you know, they, they weren't able to say.
00:48:25.940Right. Yeah. And so, yes, you know, maybe, maybe, uh, religion sometimes brings very bad things out of people and we should find a way to criticize religion when it does, does that.
00:48:35.220Uh, but the, the notion that only religion brings bad things out of people, you know, maybe you can defend this in 1780 before the French revolution, but surely that's been, that's been out of date since 1789.
00:48:48.180Right. Well, it's interesting that you mentioned, um, how you see comparatively the threat of communist China and the threat of Islam, because, uh, as I'm sure you're well aware, uh, certainly in Europe, particularly on the right, the concern about the demographic dimension of that, the concern about the fact that European societies are failing to integrate their Muslim populations.
00:49:12.560Well, certainly less well than the United States is now giving rise to very strong sentiments about immigration generally, but about Muslim immigration in particular.
00:49:23.420And a lot of people in Europe would say, actually, you know, Muslim terrorists are way more likely to have a, a, a material impact on my life or a grooming gang in England or whatever versus communist China way far off in the distance.
00:49:36.620It's not really affecting me personally. How do you see those two threats and why do you say you're more concerned about China?
00:49:42.560Um, yeah, well, they, they, look, they, they, um, there probably are, are ways that one has to be able to talk about more than one thing at a time.
00:49:54.020But, uh, and I, I, there, there, there, there probably are all sorts of things that, uh, where people were, you know, too cavalier about these things.
00:50:08.880Uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the number, the number, the demographic number that I've, I've seen, um, is, and if you look at continental Europe, so not the UK and not, um, not Russia, Soviet Union.
00:50:21.200But, um, um, in 1930, um, had something like 10 million Jewish people and something like 5 million Muslims, mostly like in the Balkans.
00:50:33.000And, uh, today it's something like, uh, maybe less than 2 million Jewish people.
00:50:38.600Uh, so there's a Holocaust and then a lot of Jews left, uh, and something like 50 million Muslims.
00:50:44.960And so the ratio of Jews to Muslims went from twice as many Jews to 25 times as many Muslims, you know, less than a hundred years later.
00:50:53.060And if you have a 50 to one demographic change, surely that's, that's something, you know, one, um, one, one, one, one should have thought about what that, what that meant.
00:51:04.220And then people were, you know, too cavalier about, it doesn't matter because the education institutions work great.
00:51:11.300And people, all these people will become, you know, um, modern liberals and productive members of our society.
00:51:18.660And so it was, it was, it was, yeah, there were, there were demographic questions people didn't want to talk about.
00:51:23.020There were educational things people didn't want to talk about.
00:51:25.280And they, they were, they were, they were all linked to the, uh, the, you know, the, the, the way I see the China one is, um, sort of qualitatively quite different is that it is, you know, it is in some.
00:51:38.940Um, it is in some zero, you know, it is, it is determined to beat the West, to catch up to the West in these, you know, questions of science and technology.
00:51:53.060And then, uh, you know, in some ways, uh, to, you know, exert some, some leverage through that where, where it can, you know, it can dominate the planet.
00:52:03.540And, uh, why do you say that, Peter, what's your evidence for that?
00:52:05.620You're, you, you're someone in, in the public space who seems to be uniquely vocal about this.
00:52:36.620Let's, you know, so it's, it's, it's always, you know, you have these sort of questions about the, the, the, the, the Thucydides trap, the, the rising power meets the, the great existing power.
00:52:49.180And, and, and I think in the Western world, you know, we've, uh, people have generally looked at this, you know, rather optimistically.
00:52:58.560I don't, I don't really think that's the way people in, in China think of it.
00:53:02.940They, they, they think of themselves as, you know, on an, on an ever greater collision course with, with the West.
00:53:09.280And then, you know, that on some level, maybe it leads to armed conflict over Taiwan.
00:53:14.280Maybe, maybe it leads to some sort of, um, really violent decoupling in, in, in, in different ways.
00:53:20.960Um, and, uh, and then that's something, you know, that I think, you know, we, we have to think about very hard.
00:53:28.100Peter, there are people who, sorry, there are people who go, look, the threat of China has been wildly, you know, blown out of all proportion.
00:53:37.140And they'll point out to the fact of, you know, the demographic problem that China has with the old people, which is due to the one child policy.
00:53:44.540They'll look at the fact that the economy is not doing particularly well.
00:53:49.040In fact, some people are predicting it to go into recession in the next couple of years.
00:53:54.200So we're overstating the threat of China.
00:53:57.360You know, where would you push back on in those points?
00:53:59.700Well, I, I certainly think we understated it for a very long time.
00:54:04.120And so, uh, and there was probably, I don't know, there's sort of always, I think, a prehistory where, uh, in, uh, in 19, uh, 1989, you would have, you know, I always think, you know, we had, you had Tiananmen in June of 89, the Berlin Wall comes down in, uh, November of 89.
00:54:21.300If it had been reversed and Tiananmen happened in June of 1990.
00:54:24.300So in summer of 89, Brent Scowcroft, the Bush 41 national security advisor, flies to Beijing, reassures them, we don't care about all these people who are killed in Tiananmen because you're anti-Soviet.
00:54:36.620Um, and if it happened the other way around, maybe we would have, uh, we would have rethought the China thing back in 1990 or, or something like this.
00:54:45.480And, and there were, yeah, there were surely, um, a lot of, you know, very dubious decisions.
00:54:52.300There was the decision to admit China at the WTO there, um, and, and sort of to, you know, to hollow out, you know, a great deal of the, of, of, of, of, of the economies of, of the Western world.
00:55:03.280Um, and, um, you know, maybe it doesn't matter if we're, if we're only concerned about, you know, how much it costs the consumer to, you know, to buy, you know, to buy, uh, to buy an electric car.
00:55:12.440But if, if, if these things have a military dimension, um, and, uh, you know, you no longer have a shipbuilding industry in the UK, uh, and then you will not have a Navy and you will not, and the UK will not have a role to play in protecting Taiwan.
00:55:25.180And, uh, and so, so, you know, there were, there were sort of these, these, uh, these, um, these, uh, these questions that one should have thought about.
00:55:33.780Uh, and so I think there was, there was a great power version of this.
00:55:37.900And then, uh, I think there was also an ideological version of this where, uh, where maybe, you know, maybe there was a way to, to, um, manage the rise of China.
00:55:48.540If it had been, uh, if it had been transformed into a liberal Western democracy, you might've still had rivalry, might've still had, it was, you know, it was, it was non-trivial to have the handoff from, you know, the British empire to this American centric world.
00:56:02.260But there was a way, there was a way that could work.
00:56:05.560Uh, and then, uh, and then there was some sense in which China was just not becoming a liberal democracy.
00:56:11.500And this is sort of where the, you know, Fukuyama end of history thing was, uh, has been, has proven to be comically wrong.
00:56:18.460And people should have figured that out much earlier, you know, and I think they would have figured it out in June of 1990 if Tiananmen had happened one year later.
00:56:26.680And, but for the, because of that one year delay, it was something like, you know, maybe that maybe took until the Trump presidency that this even, you know, this even started to, to, to register, uh, to register as an issue.
00:56:40.620Um, and yes, I, I, I, I, you know, I'm not, I don't, I don't think we should go to war with China.
00:56:48.240Um, I don't think, um, but I think, I think, I think we should be very realistic about how, how deeply misaligned we are.
00:56:57.840Uh, how, um, you know, how the, uh, sort of totalitarian ideology, uh, is deeply incompatible with our values and, and all these ways where, uh, where, um, you know, in some sense, China wants to become America and, and, uh, that's, you know, wants to become the leading power.
00:57:21.240And that's, that's a, you know, that's a setup for, for a very, very difficult thing to manage.
00:57:25.860Peter, it's been, let me ask, actually, a couple more, uh, we've got a little bit of time.
00:57:31.060Uh, on geopolitics, Peter, you mentioned totalitarian ideology.
00:57:36.760We have Iran, we have China, we have Russia, all making moves, to put it mildly, around the world.
00:57:45.100How do you see the geopolitical situation?
00:57:47.180Well, they are, there's, there's some way where they are, they're all entangled.
00:57:57.920You know, they're all, they're all entangled with each other.
00:58:03.940There are all these things one has to, you know, one has to think of, of separately.
00:58:08.980Um, it's, uh, I don't know, there's a lot of things one could say about, about each of them.
00:58:17.280You know, probably, um, there probably are, it's, it's probably, there, there's probably a way that, uh, um, the Middle, Middle Eastern policy of, of, of the US, of the Western world should be focused extremely squarely on Iran and the Iran problem.
00:58:35.720And I think there are critiques one can have of the neoconservatives, of Obama, of all, all these different people the last, uh, 20 years where the focus was on Iraq or on, um, on all these different, all these different things.
00:58:49.060And it ended up being a distraction from Iran.
00:58:51.580And the reason I would say Iran is the most important one is, uh, you know, if, if they, if they achieve a nuclear weapon, um, I think that has the effect of radically destabilizing the Middle East.
00:59:03.800I don't think they would use the nuclear weapon, but it, it would mean that they could, um, they could, uh, support Hezbollah, Hamas, other things with far more impunity.
00:59:12.840And you'd, you'd get sort of a violent regional war.
00:59:16.360You know, the Korean war starts in 1950, one year after the Soviet Union gets the bomb.
00:59:20.780Vietnam war starts 1965, one year after China gets the bomb.
00:59:24.300And, um, because the bomb means that we can't really, um, we can't really hit back at the, the people who are supporting the North Koreans or the North Vietnamese.
00:59:35.900And so you get a very nasty regional war.
00:59:38.560And that's, that's, that's why, uh, I think you want to, you want to do a lot to prevent the Iranian, uh, the Iran from getting the bomb.
00:59:46.100And that's, that's, that's, you know, that's the Middle East focused that, you know, there's, there's a, there's a great deal that one, you know, that one can say about, uh, about, about Russia.
00:59:57.240Um, I think I was probably in 2016, I, you know, I gave two, two speeches, uh, uh, for Trump at the, one of the convention and one of the Washington press club.
01:00:08.280I was not pro-Russia, but I was, I was sort of anti-anti-Russia involved that this was not the battle we have.
01:00:15.200You know, we have a bigger crisis with China and it's, it's a distraction from that.
01:00:19.520Um, and, uh, you know, the, the, the place where I'm a little bit more confused on that at this point is that, uh, I, you know, I think in some sense, uh, I think of Russia as, as a, you know, the, the Ukraine-Russia war is almost already a proxy for the conflict over Taiwan.
01:00:36.940And in some ways, um, Russia is a, is a Chinese client state of sorts.
01:00:41.660It's like North Korea or, or something like that is very different, but, um, but, uh, and then, uh, and then, and then the real China.
01:00:49.520One of the challenges is China, which, uh, in some ways, um, you know, uh, um, I mean, maybe the broader Chinese playbook is to sort of, uh, you know, uh, organize the developing countries against the developed world.
01:01:07.900And this is sort of, you know, Iran is, you know, this poor country in the Middle East versus the wealthier Saudi Arabia or something like this.
01:01:17.100And, and then Russia is the, you know, the former Eastern bloc country against Western Europe.
01:01:22.600And then there's a version of that, of that playbook in, in many other parts of the world that China wants to play.
01:01:28.000That's, yeah, that's, that's where the, the problem of, of, of, of these is, is, is the way that they're all entangled with each other.
01:01:34.760You know, I was, I was going to actually ask because we've touched on it, but we haven't spoken about it, which is Taiwan.
01:01:42.160Taiwan, I mean, how do you see that situation evolving?
01:01:51.640It's, um, man, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it is a, it's quite a big black box.
01:02:03.240I, I don't, I don't know if we're capable of defending Taiwan.
01:02:08.480And so I think we have to somehow be realistic about what our actual, uh, military capabilities are.
01:02:15.820And, um, um, but I, I think if, you know, if the, if the Taiwan crisis comes to head, I don't know if we end up with a, with a, uh, you know, a full scale war with China.
01:02:27.380I think you end up with, you know, with extreme economic decoupling.
01:02:31.700So, uh, you know, uh, I, I still don't think TikTok will be banned until 24 hours after China invades Taiwan.
01:02:39.360And, uh, and, you know, you got the, you know, you got the Nord Stream pipeline between, uh, Russia and Germany, and we have the equivalent of a hundred pipelines between China and the West and the pipelines.
01:02:51.340They will all blow up the day of the, of the Taiwan invasion.
01:02:55.620And then, um, and then I think, um, we would be well advised to, uh, think about the decoupling to prepare for the decoupling in advance and, uh, not have this fake notion that the coupling somehow creates stability.
01:03:11.340In the case of the Nord Stream pipeline, the coupling of Germany and Russia led to instability because it made Putin think you could invade Ukraine and Germany would not go along.
01:03:20.240And then the Germans didn't understand anything about energy.
01:03:22.880And so they, they, they were actually tough on Ukraine, but it almost blew up the whole economy.
01:03:27.940And, uh, you know, I think the China, Taiwan thing, you have to think of the 100 pipelines between the West and, um, and China will blow up.
01:03:37.380And, uh, surely it's better if that happens on our timetable than theirs.
01:03:42.120Well, hey, at least there won't be a global government, right?
01:04:06.120Man, it's, it's just, it's, it is, it is just always this, this crisis of the West, how we get back to the future that we've been going through.
01:04:14.580And then that, that, that's, that's surely, uh, you know, how do, you know, how do, how do, how do we create a, a better world for the young generation in, in, in, in these Western societies?
01:04:27.380It's, uh, it's, uh, it's, you know, I, I, I think so much, the, I, I, I always say the paradoxical answers, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'll disagree with the premise of the question, you know, undercut this interview too much.
01:04:40.700It's, it's, it's always the, the, the UK bias is too much on the level of speech, too much on the level of, you know, sort of some Oxbridge, uh, rhetoric, debating society, uh, and the UK.
01:04:58.760You're, you're fantastic at, at, at that, that sort of a thing.
01:05:01.720And then, um, but, you know, uh, the sophists, what they have in common with the biblical God is they believe in the omnipotence of speech and, uh, and it's also, we just, you know, we need to act and we need to do things.
01:05:14.660And, uh, and, uh, you know, I, I, I, you know, I, I think talking about it is perhaps necessary, uh, but it surely is not sufficient and, uh, we need to actually act on things and, uh, and build the future.
01:05:27.840As a great philosopher once said, uh, a little less conversation, a little bit more action, please.