Peter Thiel on Political Theology

26:47Man, I don't know. There's so many different versions of this. But just if we think about the reverses of this, I would have been more on your side. Let's say post 9 -11. You know, we're just going to have all this chaotic terrorism all over the world. And we didn't get that much terrorism, and we instead got the Patriot Act, incredible tracking of money flows, incredible monitoring of people. And of course, there's still things that can go wrong, but the political slogan of the Antichrist, first Thessalonians 5 -3, I think, is peace and safety. It seems that we've gone far more in the peace and safety direction than the global chaos direction.

27:30I don't know. I think it's hard to even have a legal Swiss bank account. And that's like a really modest, modest way. It's hard to exit. It's much harder to exit the United States than it was 20, 30 years ago. Let's say you're trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddles through and just keeps on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch? I don't think it's a really empirical question. Yes, if you could convince me that it was empirical and you'd say, these are the variables we should pay attention to.

28:09If I agreed with that frame, you've already won half the argument. And so it would be like variables, well, the sun has risen and set every day, and so it will probably keep doing that. And so we shouldn't worry. Or the planet has always muddled through, so Greta is kind of wrong. And we shouldn't really pay attention to her. And I'm sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don't think this is a great argument. Or this is, of course, if we think about the globalization project of the post -Cold War period, where in some senses, globalization just sort of happens. It's going to be more movement of goods and people and ideas and money.

28:49And we're going to sort of become this more peaceful, better integrated world. And you don't need to sweat the details. we're just going to kind of muddle through. And then what, in my telling, there are a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. One simple version is the US China thing. Hasn't quite worked the way people in Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. And I think one could have figured this out much earlier. If we had not been told, you can just go into muddle through. You know, the alarm bells would have gone off much sooner. You know, maybe globalization is leading towards, you know, sort of a neoliberal paradise.

29:32Maybe it's leading to the totalitarian state of the anti -Christ. I would be, yeah, I'd be, let's say it's a not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn't ask questions about muddling through, I'd be so much, like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you, stopped asking questions about muddling through, I'd be so much more assured. So we're so much more hopeful. Are you saying it's ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question? I don't I don't think it's metaphysical, but it's it's somewhat analytic. It's more or even. It's that you're laying down some duty by talking about muddling through.

30:08It does tie into all these these bigger questions. So I think I don't think if we had you know a one -world state that this would automatically be for the best. And so there are, you know, I'm not sure if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be, you know, maybe the absolute power that a one -world state would have would corrupt absolutely. I don't think the libertarians were critical enough of it the last 20 or 30 years. So there was some way they didn't believe their own theories, they didn't connect things enough. I don't know if I say that's a moral failure, but there was some failure of the imagination.

30:46So this multi -pronged skepticism about muddling through, would you say that's your actual real political theology? Like if we got into the bottom of this now? You know, it's whenever people think you can just muddle through, yeah, you're probably set up for some kind of disaster. That's fair. I mean, it doesn't, it's not like not as positive an agenda, But I always think, you know, as one of my chapters in the zero to one book was, you know, you're not a lottery ticket. And it's sort of like the basic advice is if you're an investor and you can just think, okay, I'm just muddling through as an investor here.

31:22I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people. I can't pay attention to any of them. I'm just going to write checks to everyone, make them go away. I'm just going to set up, you know, a desk somewhere here on South Beach. and I'm going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk or not everybody, but it'll just, it'll, it's just writing lottery tickets and that's just a formula for losing all your money. The modeling, the place where I react so violently to the modeling through is it's just, again, we're just not thinking and this is like it can be Calvinist, it can be rationalist, it's anti -intellectual, it's not thinking about things.

32:02So the muddling through view and the Calvinist view, in your opinion, they have the same flaw actually. It's a distrust in human agency, a distrust in human thought, a distrust in our ability to make choices. Now for months I've been asking myself, why you and also Shamee are so interested in this Catacombe idea, which is also from the Bible. You can explain that to us in a moment, but am I correct in now thinking? It just occurs to me, that the Catecon is in a sense, your substitute vision for what for me is modeling through. So you're not willing to believe in modeling through, but things haven't collapsed now, not here.

32:40So you need something else holding the finger in the dike, and that's Catecon or no. Well, it's a very mysterious idea. I'm just always a question why the antichrist hasn't taken over yet, and it's this mysterious force that holds back, this restraining force that holds back, the totalitarian one -world state. I don't necessarily put too much stock in it, because on its own terms, it's somewhat unstable, it's provisional, it has these sort of archaic, sacred elements, it can work for a while, you can't identify it with an institution. Again, the Schmitty and View was all these different things that played the role of the Catecon at various points in time.

33:23And if you're not supposed to eminentize the Eschaton, you're also not supposed to eminentize the Catecon. If you identify too much as one thing that can go very wrong, if you think of the Catecon as the thing that restrains the one -world state or that restrains the Antichrist, anything that's sort of like the opposite, this is a Gerardian cut, is always going to be mimetically entangled, and it's just going to have sort of this parallelism. And so there's always a risk that the Catecon becomes the Antichrist. This is the original anti -christ was Nero, Claudius, the good emperor was the Catechon, he was restraining Nero, but then at some point Nero is the opposite of Claudius, but they're both Roman emperors.

34:04Or you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, let's say 1949 to 1989, I would identify the Catechon as anti -communism, I would identify communism as the ideology, the Antichrist in the 20th century. And anti -communism was this. It was not, what stopped communism was not, the United States couldn't have done it. It was not just one country. It was not like some libertarian debating society. It was something that was like pretty violent, pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian that sort of had this unifying effect. And then the way it morphed would be in 1989, something like anti -communism, morphs into neoliberalism.

34:51And that's actually, you know, if you're anti -communist, you're not aspiring for world control. You're just trying to stop the communists from getting world control. Once you've defeated the communists, what are you supposed to do? And like maybe you can just go home and forget about all of what you did. But in practice, these things have a tendency to perpetuate themselves. And it was like Bush 41. Anti -communism became the new world order. And we're not gonna just govern the world in the name of anti -communism. And so there's something about it that's always misleading, or even what I said about the antichrist in this apocalyptic thing, doesn't the antichrist just come to power by acting as a catechon?

35:27Like, this is what Greta says she's doing. She is the catechon, stopping climate change. And so it's, yeah, it's a somewhat useful concept, but I wouldn't put too much weight on it. So at the macro level, all the weight you're putting on human agency, Is that really so compatible with Lutheranism? I'm not a perfect Lutheran. There's a lot that is. If you look at all these people, one would judge very differently in retrospect. If you look in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, and you think about all the Christian thinkers who believed in some form of predestination or Moses was chosen and the like, Abraham was chosen, what is it in the Bible that points you in the direction of so much belief in human agency being so important and there's sort of a lot of different levels on this.

36:17But certainly if you think of it as this shift away from sacrificing individuals, a sacrificing people, there is sort of an anti -sacrificial theme and you know you can always say how is you know modernity or lightened values, how are they tied with this. But certainly the idea I would have had something like the idea of the individual came out of this this context where you know the state was not absolute, it was not not sacred, it was not necessarily providential. Gerard liked to always say that Christ was the first political atheist because on the on the level of the political order Christ says that he's the son of God, son of the father.

37:01There's a way you can go into trinitarian metaphysics, but the political interpretation of this is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the Divinized Caesar, is somehow that's not exactly the son of God, and the Roman Empire is not simply divinely ordained, and then that somehow, you know, opens a space for a less unitary system that, you know, takes, you know, many, many centuries to develop or something like this. This is where I don't know. I think of even Iron Rand is like a pretty good question. And that's why I know that if I really... I want to say that. But it's just, it's at least, you know, yes, it's Jewish and atheist and shrill and crazy, but it's just, you can't sacrifice the individual.

37:48You shouldn't sacrifice your mind, you shouldn't sacrifice your reason. It's just that you can't sacrifice that. You've been quoting the tempest lately in some of your talks. How is it you think the Shakespearean political vision differs from the Christian? It's always hard to know what Shakespeare really thought. You certainly have different characters. If someone like Macbeth, I think, says life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound, fury, signifying nothing. So that doesn't sound like a particularly Christian worldview, but maybe, you know, that's what Macbeth says. it's not what Shakespeare says, it's always very hard to know, maybe it's a sort of Christian nihilistic view of the world or something like that.

38:30But I think the contrast I always frame is that the way I understand Shakespeare is always in contrast with someone like Karl Marx. Marx believed that people had battles over differences that mattered. He was the different classes and they had objectively different interests and this is what led to the intensity of the struggle. and there's something in Shakespeare that's sort of proto -Jerardian or very mimetic where people have conflicts over the conflicts of the most intense when they don't differ at all and so it is you know it's the opening line of Romeo and Juliet. It's the capulet's versus the monogues, two houses alike in dignity.

39:08They're identical and that's why they hate each other so much or I think it's at the end of Hamlet where Hamlet says you know to be truly great you must stake everything for an egg shell because an average person would fight over things that mattered, but a truly great person would fight over things as a femoralist, honor, or an egg shell, or something, something like this. And of course, you know, the Hamlet's problem is he doesn't really believe all the, you know, the sort of insane revenge drama he's supposed to be in. So I think there is probably a place where I would say, yes, Shakespeare would probably to be very distrustful of extreme ideological differences today that would probably in some ways also be kind of politically at least.

39:51I find the play, Julia Caesar, very interesting because there's no catechon, there's no muddling through, so they sacrifice Caesar, there's a civil war and a lot more people dying and no end to that insight. It's the pessimistic scenario of the teal mental universe, I think. It is also in some ways, you know, there's sort of a strange way where they're all going back and thinking they're reenacting things, right? So it's, you know, the way Brutus gets pulled into the conspiracy in Julius Caesar is that he gets reminded, or that, you know, his ancestor, another person named Brutus, had overthrown Tarkwyn, the last of the kings of Rome, 509 BC.

40:30So he thinks he's just, you know, reenacting that murder. And then I think there is some part in the play where Shakespeare has the actors say, you know, I'm going to get this slightly garbled, but it's something like centuries hence the people reenacting this on a stage in front of an audience. And this is what motivates Brutus to do it. It's like the future applause in the Shakespearean theater. And then of course, you know, the crazy literal reenactment of it was John Wilkes Booth shooting being Abraham Lincoln in 1865, where Booth was a Shakespearean actor and then it was Sixth Sember Taranis, was what he said, he thought he was reenacting the Brutus Caesar thing.

41:09You can look at the 1838 Lincoln speech, the Young Men's Lyceum address, where Lincoln portrays himself in a somewhat coded way as a proto -seaser. He tells the audience their people in this country who wouldn't be happy to be. You know, there are all these, there's some people are like really ambitious, but no one could be like a founder because that was in the past And the most you can now be as a president, but there were people from being presidents not enough And there's some people who if you didn't stop them They would keep going until they enslaved all the white people or freed all the slaves It's a sort of Lincoln talking about himself and saying that he has the ambition to be like a Caesar or an Napoleon or Something like this, but yes, so there's a sort of a roundabout answer So yes, so there are ways we can see it as a cycle, but surely that's what we want to transcend.

41:58It was a bad idea for Brutus to think he was reenacting the Caesar thing and somehow there was something about the John Wilkes Booth story that's pretty sad too. For our last segment let's turn to artificial intelligence. As you know large language models are already quite powerful. They're only going to get better. In this world to come, will the word sales just lose their influence? people who write, people who play around with ideas, pundits. Are they just toast? What's this going to look like? Are they going to give up power peacefully? Are they going to go down with the ship? Are they going to have some kind of nuclear bombs?

42:32I had this riff where I think, again, sort of the one of the things, I'll say the idea, I think, broadly, the LLMs, it's a big breakthrough, it's very important. And it's striking to me how bad Silicon Valley is talking about these sorts of things. and there's sort of, you know, there's sort of all kinds of, the questions are either way too narrow, where it's something like, you know, we're gonna have, you know, is the next transformer model gonna improve by 20 % on the last one or something like this? Or there, maybe too cosmic, where it's like we go straight. From there we go straight to the simulation theory of the universe.

43:08And surely there are, you know, a lot of, in between questions one could ask. Let me try to answer yours. My intuition would be it's gonna be quite the opposite where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people. And what people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US math Olympiad problems. That would shift things quite a bit. There's sort of a longer history I always have on the math versus verbal riff where, if you ask, when do our society bias to testing people more for a math ability? I believe it was during the French Revolution because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families.

43:47Mathability was sort of distributed in the sort of idiosomount way throughout the population. If we prioritized mathability, it had sort of this meritocratic, but also a egalitarian effect on society. And then I think by the time you get to the Soviet Union and Soviet communism in the 20th century, where you get a number of theorists or chess grandmaster or medal, which I was always a part, I was somewhat sympathetic to in the Soviet Union. Maybe it's actually just sort of a control mechanism where the math people are singularly clueless. They don't understand anything, but if we put them on a pedestal, we tell everyone else, you need to be like the math person, then it's actually a way to sort of control, or that the chess grandmaster doesn't understand anything about the world.

44:27That's a way to really control things. And if I sort of fast forwarded to, let's say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it's way too biased towards the math people. I don't know if it's a French Revolution thing or a Russian sort of Straussian secret cabal control thing where you have to probably try to... but that's the thing that seems deeply unstable and that's what I would bet on I'm getting reversed where you know it's like the place where math ability like you know you know it's sort of it's the thing that's the test for everything right it's like if you want to go to medical school okay we weed people out through physics and calculus and like I'm not sure that's really correlated with your, I don't know, your dexterity as a neurosurgeon.

45:13I don't really want someone operating on my brain to be, you know, doing prime number of factorizations in their head while they're operating on my brain or something like that. In the late 80s or early 90s, I had sort of a chest bias because I was a pretty good chest player and so my chest bias was you should just test everyone on chest ability and that should be the gating factor. Why even do math? Why not just chest? And that got undermined by the computers in 1997 and isn't that what's going to happen to math and isn't that a long overdue rebalancing of our society. And how is manual labor going to do in this world to come?

45:46There will be a lot more new projects, right? If you're a very good gardener carpenter, will your ages go up by 5x or is there something else in store for us? It's hard to say, but let me just not give the answer. Let me sort of suggest some of the questions I'd like us to focus on more with you. So I think one question is, is it going to, how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality? And probably it does some of both. Is it a very centralizing technology? That's another question I'd like to get a better handle on. I had this ref five, six years ago. If crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist?

46:26And one of the things that I'm still probably a little bit uncomfortable about it is that it seems to lead to these incredible returns to scale. Man, I thought San Francisco had at least committed suicide and we could move on from San Francisco through returns to scale on AI are so big that maybe even San Francisco will survive with the AI revolution, but then there are benefits to this, but it also leads to this kind of a set of centralization questions or the geopolitical question. If it is as big a technology as UNI think it is, what is it going to do to the China -US rivalry? Will it, you know?

47:08And what do you think? I don't actually, I'm just saying it would be good if we just at least ask the right sorts of questions. I don't have answers to all these. I can do the Pro -China argument is they will not hesitate to use the AI and train it on all their people. It will be more quickly implemented. The pro -US argument is that we are probably ahead of China. Maybe the large language models are not really communist. Maybe if you can't ask the large language model who we need to poo is, the nerd gets so badly that it doesn't even work or something like that. So I think there's an intuition that the effective altruists are not just fifth columnists on the part of the CCP or the China sabotages, but where they actually simply are doing what the CCP wants, which is actually to stop the LLMs and that it's very disruptive.

47:57To the extent, I think the second one that it probably helps the US more than China, is that actually massively destabilizing where China was this sort of low volatility plan to victory where they were just going to slowly beat the Western world. If you now have this volatility increasing technology that China cannot match, does that just accelerate China's timetable and just China becomes sort of like Russia where you're ultimately going to lose and maybe you have to invade Taiwan in the next year or two and you can't wait for another decade. Final question. What is the next thing you will choose to learn about?

48:35This is always, you know, all these questions, you know, this is all this projections of your personality, Tyler, you know, it's like, it's the Isaiah Berlin thing where you have the sort of the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things, you know so many different things, you're interested in so many different things. You know, I'm just, I don't know, it's just sort of a few core ideas I come back to and it's something like this, you know, wonderful and terrible history of the world that we're living through as, you know, Christianity's unraveling our culture and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side and that's what's going to give me busy for a long time.

49:14Peter Teo, thank you very much.

49:21We now have time for questions. Yes. Hello. It's kind of a basic question maybe to you, but to be I'm wondering your opinion, you have this dystopic view of like one world order, which I totally understand. And I know that Founders Fund has invested in cryptocurrency and made money on it. But do you view crypto or Bitcoin in particular as something that could put power back in the hands of the people, or something that's likely to catalyze more centralization of power in this one world order in the future. I'm still hopeful that on net Bitcoin is on the anti -wond world order side just based on all the people who are against it.

50:02But maybe that's a little bit too of a simplistic schmitty and analysis. The questions are, the sort of questions would be, Do you have genuine anonymity, genuine pseudonymity? And probably there are certain ways in which, you know, if we want to decentralize things where you use money for questionable purposes, you know, maybe physical cash is still better than Bitcoin and things have not gone and quite the crypto anarchist utopia that people were fantasizing about in the late 90s. On the other hand, I think it probably is still, If you're just thinking of it as a one -time way to get money outside of the control of a particular government, it's probably still extremely good for that.

50:49Thank you. So you can hobble until you need it. Next question. So Nick Bostrom and Communism, those sort of start out with very different premise and up in the same place we need a one -world government. Do you think that there's some sort of metaphysical reason for that? Some kind of a tractor well there. There's a certain rationality to it. If we maybe just enlighten rationality, where if we say that there's some set of things that make sense that are good, and then it's probably there's some kind of a way you should have in a world order. It sounds more peaceful in both cases than having a divided world.

51:27But yeah, there's probably just some kind of a rationality where if you had one modality of governance, if it's the best that would make for the best possible world, you should have that everywhere. And then if you have, it's only you have some very deep concerns about maybe human nature, where the people would run the government, or things like that, that you start to second guess that. They're probably both, you know, somehow pretty optimistic about human nature. Thank you. If one extra year at the end of your life was for sale, what would you be willing to pay for it today?

52:06I don't agree with hypothetical questions where I don't believe in the premise. I would probably not pay the person who asks me that anything because I think they were just ripping me off since it's a... I hope to live for more than just one more year. By the time I needed to collect on that extra year, I think that person would be long on. There you go. Nathan. What are the Straussian messages of the Bible and what do they tell us about political theology. Simple questions tonight. Oh boy. Strauss was this political philosopher who's you know I wouldn't describe his question was probably sort of very very classical but the the place where I'd say both let's say someone like Strauss and Gerard agreed on was that there's certain ways of understanding the world that have this disruptive way and you know you don't want enlightenment simply that if you if you just tell people the secret messages, it has this sort of unraveling effect.

53:05And so the, I don't know, I'm not sure it's esoteric, but it is, it's the book of revelations is the apocalypse because, you know, apocalypse in Greek means unveiling. And if you unveil the social order, you might end up, you know, deconstructing and destroying it. And you know, this is, you know, what Gerard's book was, I see Satan fall like lightning. And it's sort of to see Satan is to see Satan fall. So the only time Satan appears in the Bible is at the very end of the world. Every other time it's maybe he's talking to God or he's talking to Christ in the desert, but no human being ever sees Satan simply because to see Satan is to see Satan fall.

53:46There's sort of the libertarian, another libertarian cut on Christianity is that when Christ is tempted in the desert and Satan says, just worship me and you can have all these kingdoms in the world, it's somehow saying that all the governments are more satanic than divinely ordained. And then people don't understand that they think governments are somehow divinely ordained. And so once you see how satanic the government is, how satanic taxes are, other things besides the governments do, it will have this unraveling effect. Thank you. Hi. I'm a big part of the thesis of the sovereign individual is that the defenders will be able to have an advantage over offense.

54:24and that that's the way that violence and the exertion of force is going. I'm interested if you still think that to be the case, particularly with companies like Andero where the thesis is kind of there is no inherent properties of a smaller weapon that a smaller state can easily have but rather the proliferation of those is simply a tactic that larger states need to use to evolve their strategies. Yeah, so I was extremely influenced by the Reese Mark Davidson book, 1997, The Sovereign individual where the thesis was, let's say, the computer technology information age was trending in this very deeply decentralizing libertarian way.

55:02And that seemed very true in 1999, and then certainly by the end of the 2010s, one would have said that there's something about a lot of information technology that seemed to maybe centralizing, maybe the opposite. There's a Star Trek or the world of 1968, people also thought 2001 space Odyssey's IBM is how, you know, it's sort of you're going to have one big supercomputer that's going to run a planet or the planet beta and one of the early Star Trek episodes where there's one big supercomputer that runs the planet. The inhabitants are sort of these a docile robot -like people who've been living peacefully but unabentfully for 8 ,000 years and then of course as always the Star Trek people, you know, don't fall the prime director and block the computer and then leave the planet.

55:51But that was the future of the computer age in the late 60s was highly centralized. By the late 90s was very decentralized. By the late 2010s, maybe crypto accepted. It was again, seemed to be pushing back to centralization. My intuition is these things are not absolutely written in stone. And it's up to us to work on making the technologies to have the push in one way or the other. As a follow -up point, that predetermined. Would you bet on open source AI? If decentralization is great, it should have more dynamic properties, should innovate more, it should be safer, as many other virtues. I don't quite know if that's the main variable.

56:30It's going to push the centralization or decentralization with it. But yeah, that there are probably some version of it that would be helpful. I don't know, the Linux versus Microsoft precedent. Not sure that changed anything that much on the level of the operating system. Thank you. When do you think humans are going to destroy themselves and do you think AI isn't a do it? I don't think these things are written in stone. I'm not a Calvinist. I'm not a P -Dume, a E -A, East Bay rationalist. I think it's up to us. But as I said, I'm much more worried about the humans trying to stop the AI than the AI destroying us.

57:15You know, like a force that's powerful enough to stop the AI is probably a force that's powerful enough to destroy the world too. So I want to worry more about the humans that are trying to stop the AI. Ion Horsi Ali recently converted to Christianity, but it seems mostly for utilitarian reasons, something like for the great civilizational war because secularism doesn't provide a good enough answer. Do you see religion as mainly utility in the postmodern world? You can have you can have you tell Terry and elements. I don't think one can ever Stress those too much and so my my bias is always to focus more on questions of truth You mentioned Lincoln's Lyceum address where he talks about that towering genius figure and I'd never heard before that He thought did you think at the time?

57:58He thought he was the towering genius and do you approve of Lincoln's political religion or view for America? Yeah. Well, I think it's a very fascinating speech because he references some Caesar and Napoleon like figure who will enslave the white people or free the slaves. And so, that seems plausible to think that he was thinking of himself. I have a question about your personal life in I may, and if possible, if you could give your answers a story that would be lovely, obviously you feel great sense of personal responsibility, indeed responsibility to history. How did that sentiment begin? How is it evolved?

58:36What have you found to be the more fruitful and less fruitful avenues for expressing it? I'm always so bad at it. Doing a self -psychoanalysis or something like that. I don't know. There were all these ways. I was incredibly competitive and tracked as a kid. In my eighth grade, junior high school, yearbook one of my friends said, I know you're going to get in the Stanford for years. I got in the Stanford and I went to Stanford. I went to law school. I ended up at a top law firm in Manhattan from the outside. It was a place where everybody wanted to get in. On the inside it was a place everybody wanted to get out.

59:14And so I sort of had some kind of a quarter -life crisis in my mid -20s unclear what to do. But somehow you have to try to avoid the worst of medication tangles, the worst forms of a medication competition possible. I don't think psychology really works. I don't I don't think sort of awareness of these things is quite quite the way to do it But yeah, there was there was some part that was very important for me Thank you to that point to get people off of the magnetic track I think you know the Teal Fellowship was really amazing and has had tremendous success Have you thought about trying to scale that in a way that might be profitable or can make a larger impact than say 20 folks a year and maybe 20 ,000 eventually we've thought about scaling a lot of times It's probably quite hard to scale.

1:00:03It's always the paradox of something like the Teal Fellowship or my Zero to One book or any sort of self -help thing. It's always bad to give advice where these are the things you're supposed to do. I worry that trying to scale things, the only way you can scale things by some out automating them, mechanizing them, turning them into more of a cookie cutter type process. And then I always worry that that do ranges at scale. So somehow, you know, it's like, I don't have like a, I can't give it people a formula what to do. It's something like, well, you should think for yourself and figure it out.

1:00:40But then if I try to, to scale that, it's like, I don't know, it's like some kind of, I don't know, this little red book or something you're producing. And it's quite the opposite. Thank you. Peter, my question is about diversity, equity inclusion. D .E .I. has become a very prevalent in corporate America. And I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you are seeing this in some of the early stage companies also, like the companies that found this fund is investing in. And what are your thoughts? Do you think this is something positive? Are you neutral? Are you think this has gone a little over the top?

1:01:16Would love to know your views on that. I'm very against it. I don't always know if it's the most important issue either. So somehow, you know, I wrote a book from my undergraduate years entitled The Diversity Myth and it was sort of focusing on a lot of the craziness, the campus wars, culture wars that were taking place at Stanford in the late 80s, early 90s. There are parts of it that seemed very prescient and it sort of described a lot of things that eventually spread to the broader culture. On another level it was like a completely ineffective book where the arguments didn't matter, what would drove these things somehow was on a very different level.

1:01:55If we think about the woke corporation in Silicon Valley, it seems unhealthy if a company is leaning too much into the DEI narratives. But there are probably our Machiavellian ways where this can also work, where it distracts people. I don't know. Walmart was the proto -woke company in the 2000s. and they were constantly being attacked by the labor unions because they weren't paying their workers enough. And then they could pay their workers more, or they could rebrand themselves as a green environmentally friendly company. And that turned out to be a very cheap way to split up the left -wing anti -Wall -Mart coalition.

1:02:36And so that was a version of it, I don't know, as this sort of capitalist conspiracy against it. And then there are cases where that can work in case where it can go wrong. For the most part, I think that it's just a distraction from more important things And so there's you know, there's one level on which I find the issue is very silly There's another level where where it's evil because it's stopping us from paying attention to more important things And it you know, it's things like the economy like science and tech or even these these broader religious questions We've we've talked about today People always talk about it in terms of cultural Marxism But I think a real Marxist would be much preferable to a diversity person.

1:03:15Rosa Luxembourg, who is a crazed communist from the early 20th century, it was like, you know, I think one thing she said was, there could be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker, nobody could be more revolutionary than a proletarian. And so a diversity officer in a university or corporation, what would Rosa Luxembourg think of this? It would be in the same category as a bank robber or prostitute as someone who's just an extremely corrupt form of crony capitalism. Thank you so much. There's a fair amount of variation in regulation on biotech. You know, there's Prospera, you've funded some C setting places.

1:03:53Once your sense for why there aren't crazy, cool, ambitious biohacking things going on. Where are the genentative babies? The only one that we know about happened in China and that I went to jail. What's, why isn't there more crazy stuff happening in different jurisdictions? My sense is the FDA has a global stranglehold on everything. It is because there are a lot of different reasons. In practice, most governments are not willing to have looser regulations than the FDA. There is less regulatory arbitrage than it looks. And then, secondarily, the US pays a lot more for this than other countries.

1:04:26And we can go into all these debates about whether we're paying too much in the US or whether the rest of the world should be penalized for free writing off of it. But if you develop a biotech, drug and if you can't sell it in the US, the economics are much less good And so in practice it tends to be US or bust. Do you think that technology will eventually render a larger proportion of the human population Unproductive or unable to contribute to the economy? And if so, what should those unproductive people do with themselves? Well, I think the Luddites have always been wrong for a long time. There are certainly ways you'd probably scare me some with AI.

1:05:04But even if you convinced me that the Luddites were right about AI and that it's actually going to Just replace people without you know if you're a Luddite, you know in the mid 19th century You said you know the machines are gonna replace the humans and that was well that would be such a relief because there's so much work for people to do They would just free them up to do other things and and so maybe Less complementary more game of substitution. They even if you could convince me of that I'm stone favorite of the AI because my default is muddling through isn't good. My default is, you know, the default is really bad.

1:05:40And so, you know, we're not, you don't get to muddle through with Greta on our bicycle. Thanks for coming. You've alluded to a lot of the forces between decentralization and centralization, particularly around AI with forces that are around the individual. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more describe what you think the forces could be that stop AI development Particularly as it relates to the state's role Or how a politician or another entity co -op that force for their own benefit versus the benefit of many But maybe the premise of your question is what I'd challenge is it's why is AI going to be the only Technology that matters and so if we say there's just There's only this one big technology is going to be developed and it is going to dominate everything else.

1:06:25That's already in a way, you know, conceding a version of the centralization point. So yeah, if we say that it's all around the next generation of large language models, nothing else matters, then you've probably collapsed it to, you know, a small number of players and that is, you know, that's a future that that I find somewhat uncomfortably centralizing probably. But the definition of technology, in the 1960s technology meant computers, but it also meant new medicines and meant spaceships and supersonic planes and the green revolution agriculture. And then at some point technology, it just means IT.

1:07:09And maybe we're going to narrow it even further to AI. and it seems to be that the scenario is sort of a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation that we should be trying to get out of. Earlier you mentioned that tech might end up saving San Francisco from itself. AI specifically. How do you evaluate the efforts of places like Miami and Austin to present themselves as alternative tech hubs? And has that opinion changed over the course of the last two years? I'm still very pro Miami. I think the Miami story has been more of an anti -New York story. So it's a tale of two cities of and the finance part of the economy doesn't have to be centered in New York.

1:07:54That alone I think explains a great deal of Miami's success. I think the tech, again, it's how we're in a very different place from what people were focused on even two, two and a half years ago, but two and a half years ago, there was sort of much more of a crypto story. And, you know, crypto is a decentralizing technology, but also the companies that were doing crypto were decentralized, not just in the US. There's a decent number of them outside the US. And so crypto was going to be a big part of the future tech story that would have been a, you know, naturally a decentralizing from Silicon Valley.

1:08:30And Silicon Valley had really missed out on the crypto thing in a relative sense. And then consumer internet, a lot of this happened in Silicon Valley for all sorts of complicated reasons. It's supposed to get rid of the tyranny of place, but it all happened in one place. And then the AI piece seems to be even more centralized in Silicon Valley. So again, if we say that the next decade or two decades are just going to be doubling down on AI, that probably suggests that San Francisco and in Silicon Valley will maintain or even gain in power. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you for coming out and doing this event.

1:09:05It's been wonderful. I have a silly question and I'm going to bring Star Wars into it since we were talking Star Trek. But when you, this concept of the world order, it's the first time I've really delve into it and thinking about it, I'm wondering, do you envision a world order that's just like like, totalitarian dictatorship or just the similar to like, there's just too much information, too many countries, too many people trying to vie together and that everything just kind of gets lost and that the power isn't really about the people. But that kind of world central, I mean, a global central, like, what is that that you envision?

1:09:48Well, I'd like to avoid the first type. Yeah, the second one I will concede it's a little bit more confusing. I would like to have You know a libertarian world order of you know many nations and you can you can move between them There's some Transnational thing you're not completely stuck in a particular country But then the transnational thing can't be so powerful that it actually controls all the nations and this is now And these are maybe just sort of paradox of globalization. Like a Gaelian thought is always thesis and synthesis synthesis. Even if you agree this is the correct framing, the problem is people always confuse the synthesis with a superposition of the thesis and the synthesis.

1:10:33So if we say globalization, some global world order is the final synthesis. His globalization has described today just a superposition of a slightly unstable global market, but no global government. And then can that really be maintained? Yes, so I think there probably are, you know, some paradoxes in my picture of a desirable world order that one could unpack some more. But yet, if we have too concrete a picture of exactly what the world order looks like, that's probably really bad. Thank you. A bit of a follow -up to the gentleman too before me. I understand you've spent a little bit of time in Miami.

1:11:11So kind of coming down from the macro level to the street level, local governance, almost like an economist getting lunch perspective, what is Miami doing well and what does Miami need to improve on? Well, there are a lot of things I've been here the last four winters, so two, three months each winter here. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I think are going incredibly well. I'm always into these sort of georgist real estate theories where if you're not very careful all the value in a place gets captured by the sort of corrupt real estate group of people and their sort of a Henry George with his late 19th century economist who is sort of like sort of socialist then today he seems sort of libertarian if I just tell something that our society has changed.

1:11:57The worry in Miami is that have we really escaped the Georgia's disaster that is San Francisco, to go that is New York, that is London, where even though there's been a tremendous increase in GDP, you know, it's not good if 100 % of it gets captured by Islam Lords or something like that. Thanks. Last question. Thanks. So question about AI and theology. Walter had this great quote, if God didn't exist, we would need to invent him or her or whatever the pronoun is. Do you find this view of like super intelligence AI which might be in the near future as a kind of deity, as a kind of machine god, is that useful?

1:12:40Is there leverage to that? And could it even be more than just a heuristics and kind of substantive statement? It's sort of a purely theological question. I want to focus more on the political theology question, which would be something like, you know, if it's a centralizing AI that's controlled by communist China, will it just be very good at convincing people that the party is god? or that the wisdom of crowds or whatever the consensus is the truth. And then, yeah, there are these metaphysical questions where it doesn't seem like it's exactly, you know, I don't know, a transcendent traditional monotheistic God.

1:13:21But I would go to more of the political questions than the metaphysical ones. and probably the risk danger is that there's something about telescopes, even more, the sort of consensus, truth, wisdom of crowds. I think probably all the models will tell you that there's no particular religion that's more true than any other one. Is that really what the models generate or has that been hardwired in? Those are the questions I'd be more curious about. Thank you all for listening to Conversations with Tyler at the Mercatus Center. Most of all, thank you Peter Tio. Thank you.

1:14:07Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convuse. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.