Peter Thiel: Zero to One

Welcome to Socrates in the City. First of all, it's always touching and wonderful to see so many old friends and new friends in the room, also a handful of pseudo-friends. You know who you are. It's very important to be honest about that. I hate you. I hate you. You don't fool anybody. And sadly, a few former friends as well. But you know, once I get the money back, we'll talk. We couldn't have done this for the last 20 years if not for the generosity of a number of you in the room. I want to particularly thank David and Laura Thayer. I saw David is here. There are a number of you who've been generous in helping us do this. Tonight, the big question that we are daring to ask is, how much money does Peter Thiel really have?

I mean, really. I mean, really. Of course, I'm joking. But the reason we do have Peter here tonight—I want to know, it's my question—what is Elon Musk really like? I hope you don't feel used, but that's just the way it is. We've got a number of special guests here tonight. I won't point you out unless you're Ann Coulter, who's sitting right over there. She's here with her boyfriend, Jimmy 'J.J.' Walker from Good Times. Kid Dyn-o-mite is in the house. I'm sorry, am I embarrassing you? Have you put on weight? What the hell happened? Unbelievable. Wow. I'm thinking, you got a boyfriend, you could eat. I mean, come on. Anyway, I'm so grateful that Ann still might be my friend. And following tonight's conversation, Peter and I are going to have a conversation up here. I think most of you know Peter has to leave immediately.

I guess he's catching a bus at the Port Authority or something like that, which is very impressive. I mean, even if I had a million bucks, I wouldn't go to the Port Authority. So I just got to say, that's kind of amazing. In any event, he cannot stay around, so we have to let him sneak away. And the Union League Club has a couple of housekeeping things I should cover. Number one, anybody here wearing a catheter? Actually, you don't have to tell me, but I'm trying to join the club too—not the catheter club, the Union League Club—because they don't let you do events anymore. They have let us for 20 years, but unless you're actually a member. So I'm joining the club, and I just want to get all the rules right.

So let me just say, so I've said it: if you're wearing a catheter, you need to register with the club, let them know. And that's... I've done my part, OK? I've done my part. But you don't want them. It's very embarrassing if they catch you with an unregistered catheter. I don't know why I bring up catheters. I guess it's because I'm looking at my friend Rich Egan. I always think of catheters when I think of Rich. And I know you've registered anyway. All right, now I'm going to introduce Peter Thiel. We'll get on with it. Now, I guess it's such an awkward thing. I realize Peter's sitting here wondering what he's gotten into. And I guess, just to be honest, Peter, I know you're probably a little intimidated by me.

And let me just say I get that, OK? My intellect, my accomplishments, whatever it is, my heart toward others, perhaps. But a lot of times, guests are intimidated by that kind of stuff. But I just want you to know, or I'm just letting you know, that I put my legs on two pants at a time, just like everybody else. I'm no different. Now I'm going to tell you who Peter Thiel is. Now, I guess the problem with certain people is you already know who they are. So what am I going to tell you? In case you just stumbled in, Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor, probably most famous for having started PayPal in 1998, at which point he led it as CEO. And then he took it public in 2002 and got really, really rich.

It's unbelievable. He made so much money that in 2004, he made the first outside investment in Facebook. Did you know that? Some of you knew that. And in making that investment, he helped to accelerate the establishment of a global bank, one-world government, and the coming of the Antichrist, which is really... He didn't mean to do that. I want to be clear. But you've got to be careful where you invest, because you didn't—yeah. OK. I gave $20 to the breeding of a red heifer. I don't know if you know about that. So hey, man, we're equal. Peter has written a number of books. The one we're going to touch on tonight is called Zero to One. I think a lot of you are familiar with that. And I have by now for sure gone on too long and embarrassed Peter too much.

So ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Peter Thiel. It's such a joy to have you here that I joke. Joking is my love language, so don't feel bad. You asked me upstairs where we're going to start, and I said, "I don't know," because a lot of the folks here don't realize that we were together last evening, and we had a conversation, and I realized we could just talk about anything. You say we, meaning human beings, are the only ones who can invent new things. Talk a little bit about that idea. If people have read the book, they know it. But the vertical and the horizontal that you refer to in the book as a principal thesis of entrepreneurship.

Well, I believe I sort of outline two basic ways that we have progress as a society. And one is what I describe as horizontal or extensive growth, which involves copying things that work. And this is most evidently seen through globalization in the last 40, 50 years. And then the other one is sort of intensive or vertical progress: doing new things. And this is sort of iconically seen in technology or new inventions or things like that. And I think these are two sort of modalities of progress that I contrast. And I think for those of us living in the United States, Western Europe, in the advanced countries, my claim is that the second is much more important than the first. Globalization is perhaps good if you're in Burkina Faso or in China or places where you have a lot of catching up to do.

It's not how we're going to improve living standards in the West.

Now, when you say globalization, just to be clear, when I read that in the book, it wasn't immediately clear to me what you meant. And in case there's anybody not getting that, you mean, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong, just to sort of spread what we have, right? In other words, not—to take what we have in the West and the best of the West and to get it into every corner of China or any part of the world. That's what you mean, effectively.

Yeah, I mean in the standard sense. I mean, it means all these different things. But it's basically sort of homogenization of the world, convergence, things becoming the same. When you describe the world as the developed and developing world, that is a globalization narrative. The developing countries are the ones that are going to become developed by copying and converging. And then it's also an anti-tech narrative, because the developed world is a place where nothing new is going to happen. It's developed, it's done, it's finished. And this is very different from the way we would have described the world 50 years ago, when we would have described it in terms of the First World and the Third World.

And the Third World was permanently screwed up, and the First World was the one that was technologically advancing. And so we're living in a world that is extremely pro-globalization, that has bet everything on globalization, and that is not at all that excited about progress in other forms. And my underlying thesis is that we've had relatively little progress in technology broadly defined in the West in the last 50 years. There's perhaps been a narrow zone of progress around the world of bits, computers, Internet, mobile Internet. Even that, we can get into debates as to whether it's positive or negative, that you sort of alluded to a little bit in the intro. And I'm not sure I'm going to take you up on that, but certainly.

I just said that because I don't care. Certainly, most engineering fields were bad fields for people to go in in the Western world in the last 40 or 50 years. If you didn't want to become a mechanical engineer, chemical engineer, electrical engineering was already on its way out when I was at Stanford in the late 80s. And certainly, if you're so stupid as to become an aero-astro-engineer or nuclear engineer, that was a bad idea, a full stop for the last 40, 50 years. And I do think that a lot of the challenges and problems we have in our society is that we are no longer progressing as fast as we're often told.

You make this case really strongly. And I was just staggered by—I don't mean to cut you off, but you just make this statement in the book that, in a way, since 1970, we haven't progressed much. And when I read that, I thought, that's the first thing I want to ask you. In other words, when you're talking about not much happening in 50 years, I sort of get it. Tell us what you mean by that, and at some point you can bring up Apollo 11 and Woodstock as you did last night, because it was a very fascinating way of framing the whole thing, I thought.

Well, I'm not saying there's been zero progress in the last 50 years, but outside of the world of computers, there's not been much. The main function of our iPhones seems to be to distract us from the way in which we're in subways that are 100 years old and the ways in which nothing in the rest of the world has changed or progressed very much. And if you look at cars or houses or things like this, they haven't changed that much in the last 20, 30 years. Maybe the '70s were still a little bit different. But it's not progressed very much at all. I think there's a meta-level question you could ask, which is that in science, we measure Avogadro's number, the fine-structure constant in physics, to many, many significant figures.

But the question of the progress of science, how fast it is progressing, is it accelerating, is it decelerating, is it relatively stagnant, never gets asked. And if it gets asked, we get nothing but short propagandistic answers from, let's say, university presidents who will tell us, using adverbs as a substitute for thought, that clearly and demonstrably, science is progressing faster than ever before. And I think it is instead rather stuck. And we can go through sort of any of a number of places where things have fallen way short of expectation. Nixon declared war on cancer in 1970. It was going to be defeated by the Bicentennial, by 1976. So we fast-forward 50 years. We're presumably 50 years closer to curing cancer than we were 50 years ago.

But the expected time has gone up quite a bit.

You can't forget that. LBJ declared war on poverty in 1965. So that was really meant mainly as a joke. When you say that, Nixon, I really have to say, I'm hugely fascinated by—I mean, you are a science guy. And so I want to hear more from you about this. Because when we think of—we were talking about this last night—the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Project, put a man on the moon, those were times when people came together and accomplished extraordinary things. There's just no way around it. And obviously, since then, you're right. We don't seem to have done anything like that. But is there really nothing we can think of? I mean, would the Human Genome Project at least impress you a little bit?

A little bit, although I'd say it fooled me a lot since I thought it would translate into all sorts of cures by now, 20-plus years later. And so there's always sort of a question how this actually translates. And we can... You know, I think even if we say that things are progressing at roughly the same rate, I think that they're slower. They're objectively slower. Life expectancy is not going up anymore. This would be like—one way to measure progress in medicine is how fast is life expectancy going up. Last three years, it's actually been going down, which is, you know, like, even someone as pessimistic as me would have never predicted that it actually would go backwards because surely, you know, we might progress more slowly.

It's scary to hear that. I think one of the things—the failure, the question, why has this happened, what changed, what went wrong—is always a little bit overdetermined. But certainly one cut on it is that Big Science is something like an oxymoron. And when you make it big, it stops being science. And we have probably about 100 times as many people today in the world or in the United States who have PhDs in the sciences as in 1920. If progress was happening still at the same rate as in 1920, you would infer that the productivity of the average scientist is 99% less than it was 100 years ago. And I think it's even worse than that. So one partial history I would tell of what happened is that we had sort of a decentralized, healthy, scientific world

before the New Deal. And it was heterodox; it was science as discovery, not science... I always think you have science as discovery, which is sort of the science one now only reads about in children's books on Einstein—sort of like a creative person thinks of new things. And then there's science as governance, where it's sort of you're a robot in a lab and that's what you do. And most of science is science as governance, not science as discovery. And so part of my history of what happened is that in the 1930s, with the Manhattan Project, it was possible to take this preexisting healthy system and accelerate it one time only. The New York Times—I'm gonna paraphrase this, but this was about four or five days after the Hiroshima bomb—the op-ed in the New York Times was,

"You know, hopefully this will silence the sort of conservative and libertarian people who said that the Army could not ever direct scientists and just tell them what to do because the Army has proven all these people wrong. And hopefully they will now be quiet because they were able to get a new invention to the world in three and a half short years—of the bomb—that, if you'd left these prima donna scientists to their own devices, might have taken them 50 years." Wow. Now, I will say the New York Times doesn't write editorials like that anymore today. And I think part of the history is you were able to accelerate science one time by pouring money into it and scaling it, but then it came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions.

It still worked with NASA and Apollo, but at this point, it is all just a slow bureaucracy. It's peer review, never have any heterodox ideas. And you have sort of a—you've created a very large monoculture, which is pretty unhealthy. So that's sort of one cut of what happened. The government was able to accelerate it, and then at the price of destroying it forever.

There's so much here. But the basic thesis, I have to say, it startled me. I thought, 'Huh, I haven't thought very much about this.' I think you mention in the book that jetliners—in the '60s, everybody can jump on a jetliner and we can go 650 miles an hour, and today, if anything, we're going slower. But we're certainly not going faster. And for sure, as a kid, I was sure that we would have flights to the moon or at least that planes would be able to go 2,000 miles an hour or something like that. So I get it when I begin thinking about it. But I guess my question is, is there anything we can do? Is this the same problem we have with growing government? Is this just part of what happens in a free culture?

Entropy causes you to become less and less free unless people are really vigilant about understanding how freedom works.

Well, I think, let's see, I'm pessimistic in the sense I think we've had stagnation. I don't think it's a problem of money, which is one of the liberal explanations. If we had Larry Summers here, he might say there's stagnation. 'Oh, yeah, we need more money, sure. We're not spending enough money.' So I don't think it's a shortage of money. But I also don't think that it's a natural problem. I don't think it's the case that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and there are no new ideas, there are no new discoveries that we could make. So I actually think it's more of a cultural problem, which is better than nature, but still hard to change. And there's sort of a series of cultural things that are wrong about the nature of science.

We're not willing to take risks. There's too much conformity of thought. But I think we could be making progress in all these areas. There's no reason we couldn't cure cancer. There's no reason we couldn't cure Alzheimer's.

And when you say that, right, why do you think that's the case? Because I think those of us who've lived, it was kind of like growing up with the Soviet Union. You sort of just assume it'll always be there. You just assume we'll always be dealing with cancer. When people talk about a cure for cancer, why should we assume that that's possible?

It's always a question: who has the burden of proof in doing these things? And I think that I would say the burden of proof is still on the side that—if you say it's impossible, there's no mathematical proof that it's impossible. We don't know enough about biology to say this stuff doesn't work. I think one cut I always have on biology is it's sort of the field that people with lower IQs went into. It's sort of like people who had bad math genes went into biology. Any biologists in the room? One, two? I think there probably are some cultural interventions that could improve it quite a bit. Physics might be harder. We seem to not be making progress on string theory. And maybe we're not going to make a lot of progress there because you've had smart people working on that.

So that's one. I'd be a little bit more agnostic on what you could do. But biology, I think you could do a lot better. And I think the explanation that it's in the nature of the world that you can't change this, you have to always think of this as a baby boomer scientist who's failed. And we're talking to an imaginary conversation with a baby boomer cancer researcher. First thing is, "We're making so much progress. We're going to cure cancer in the next five years." "But you've been saying that for the last 50 years." "Well, we don't have enough money." Second line of defense, response: "You've been getting more money every year for 50 years." And then third line of defense is, "Well, it's an impossible problem, and we're doing the best we can."

And so if you think of these as the excuses that are made, the natural excuses by a generation of scientists who failed to do things, we should take the contrarian view, the minority view, is that, yeah, it's stagnant. It wasn't about the money. And it's the culture. And therefore, these things could be fixed.

But you're not suggesting, I don't think, that they don't want to cure cancer. In other words, I would assume that anybody working in a lab any place, it would be their dream to get on the map to have done that. So what do you think is the issue?

You know, I'm not really sure what I would say they want to do. I think they want to get money from the government to keep whatever research they're doing.

So is this like welfare? They're disincentivized because they're happy?

Certainly, questions about this do not get asked. One of the people I know at Stanford is this guy Bob Laughlin. He got a Nobel Prize in physics in the late 1990s. And Professor Laughlin believed that once he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he would have complete academic freedom. He could do whatever he wanted. So he was an extremely delusional person, as you can tell. And then the area he decided to go after was not something like climate change or evolution or topics like this that are pretty dangerous. He went after something far more dangerous than those topics. He was convinced there were all sorts of other scientists—and he started with the biology department at Stanford—that were basically stealing money from the government and engaged in semi-fraudulent research.

And you can sort of imagine how this movie ended. And Professor Laughlin promptly got defunded. And so the questions about the integrity of the process are ones that nobody can ask. We have a replicability crisis in science. People are starting to talk about that. But the politically correct way to talk about it is always in broad statistical terms.

What do you mean, replicability crisis?

Well, there are all these experiments that can never be replicated. And so I think psychology, something like 80% of the psychology results can't be replicated.

Is psychology a science?

Well, it claims to be doing experiments that, in theory, you should be able to replicate. And then the replicability crisis suggests that, yeah, there's something between lying and fraud and self-delusion. And there's something very weird going on in a lot of these fields. And you can talk about that. You can't, of course, you can't name names. This particular scientist, the results can be replicated. That gets to be very problematic. So yes, I think it's a pretty corrupt system at this point.

I read earlier today, I got my Discovery Institute newsletter in the mail, and they were talking about James Tour. He is a nanoscientist in Houston at Rice University. Are you familiar with him at all? He really seems to be doing some truly groundbreaking things. The kinds of things that you're saying aren't happening very much. Ironic, or at least funny, that he is very outspoken about his Christian faith. I mean, clearly one of the greatest scientists of our time is very outspoken about his Christian faith. But you can't argue with these kind of results. I don't think there's a nanoscientist in the world who really could touch him. You know, he's the best. So there are things happening, and I guess I wonder—I wish he were here, he could answer the question—but I wonder if there are places where the culture is different than what you're describing it?

I think if it's messed up in the United States, we should assume it's worse in most of the rest of the world. The United States is the country on the frontier. It's the country where we do new things. And so if it's gotten very hard to do new things in the US, you're not going to be saved by science in Western Europe, or Japan, or China, or any of these places. So this is our area of comparative advantage as a country. We're a frontier country. We're the place where you should be able to do new things. And even in the United States, it's very challenged. It's likely to be that way in most other places.

Although, I mean, I guess you'd say that we are still doing new things because China is still ripping us off. They're not doing new things. In other words, globalization for them means stealing our technologies. But it is interesting to me that we still...

They haven't quite gotten the memo that we're not doing that much. So they're still trying to steal a lot. But I'm not sure they've figured out that there isn't that much left. Right.

Well, when you talk about us being the only ones who can invent new things, obviously—well, I should say, you seem to be alluding to the idea in that statement in your book that we are unique. We're created in the image of God, obviously. There's something there. I want to know if we could explore that a little bit, because it's a concept. I mean, the idea that anyone would be able to do what you describe in your book, to come up with something completely new and suddenly go vertical in that way, it sounds miraculous, right? Like, why should we be able to do anything like that?

Well, there's a lot of different threads here. I think that one of the healthy modalities of progress, of thinking about the future in business, or in politics, and culture, and science, is that you have some sort of definite goal, and you have agency, and it's directed towards that goal. And that you have agency, and you design, you create the future. And I think I often contrast this to the sort of view of the future as just a fundamentally unknowable random process. And so if we say that it's just completely random, completely unknowable, that's sort of an abdication of agency. The powerful images of the future are concrete, they're specific, and they're things we can work towards and we can build towards.

I think one of the things that's gotten very unhealthy in the Western world is we no longer have an idea of the future that's powerful. We don't have an image of how it's going to look different in 10, 20 years that will be generally better. I've sort of come up with an illustration for this in Western Europe, where if you ask, what are the actual pictures of the future people have in Western Europe that are different from the present? Because if it's just Groundhog Day, if it's an eternal Groundhog Day, that's not charismatic. That's politically weak. And I believe there are three pictures that people have. Behind door number one is Islamic Sharia law. And if you're a woman, you'll be wearing a burqa.

So that's a very different picture. Behind door number two is the Chinese Communist AI that will be monitoring you all the time in every way possible. It's sort of the Big Eye of Sauron, to use the Tolkien reference, that will be looking at you at all times and all places. And behind door number three is Greta Thunberg. And you'll be puttering around with an e-scooter, and you'll be recycling everything. And those are the only three doors. There are no other doors available. And I didn't want to make a pro-Greta argument, but I actually can understand why she's relatively more charismatic than the Big Eye of Sauron and the ISIS Sharia law. And you have to understand that if you're going to create an alternative, you have to have an alternative specific picture of the future.

"You have to have an alternative of what the future can look like. And until you have that, she's going to win." "You mean Greta?" "Yes." "Wow. She's just a kid. I feel so sorry for her."

"Actually, given those three choices in Europe, I don't even blame them." "Right." "I just feel so sorry for her. She's a kid. My gosh, it's so insane that her parents are allowing her to do this. Yeah, when you're talking about Europe like that, it is interesting because I always think of America. I'm certainly not alone in this. And you have to really go back to the '60s, as you say. But we really believed you can put a man on the moon, you can do these things. The reason—and we were talking about this last night, so we can go back to this—where the reason it seems to me, or the reasons that we don't have that view of the world anymore, one of them, and I've never heard anyone say this before, but I literally thought of it last night: if there were a place near the moon, a little farther away,"

we would have gone there next. But the next place we could have gone is Mars. And it's so far away, we just kind of sank into the beanbag chairs and started playing video games because we went to the moon. We're done. That was it. So that's one really practical thing, that when you achieve something like that, once you climb Mount Everest, you have climbed the highest mountain. You are done with that. You can't really—there's not a way to do that again.

Well, but I think there were a lot of things you could do that were not in outer space. There were a lot of things you could do on this planet here on Earth. There were a lot of things. And of course, this was not the only thing that went wrong. People were expecting to go to Mars. But Apollo 11 landed on the moon in July of 1969. And three weeks later, you had Woodstock. And I think in some ways, there was a cultural shift. And it was the shift from thinking about sort of an exterior world that we were going to change and improve and explore to an interior world of psychedelic drugs and yoga and meditation and video games in a basement. And I think this shift from exteriority to interiority is something that's characterized the last 50 years.

Let's talk about that, because when you say interiority, we have to say that all interiority isn't bad, right? In other words, if I am not, you know, taking acid or wasting my life in my parents' basement playing video games, there are a number of things that I could be doing that are somewhat interior, if I'm using the term right, that are good things. I could be reading great books. I could be thinking about great ideas. So I know you don't mean to be denigrating that. And then when you talk about exteriority, if that was the term, if you really have gone to the moon, what do you mean? If there isn't another mountain to climb, that—I guess the point is that there's something about reaching the moon that really is hard to top.

It doesn't mean that there aren't other things to do. But it seems reasonable to me that once you reach the moon, it's hard to come up with a second act.

Well, we can debate about how the history, how many choices there really were and what the counterfactuals were. And yes, we have not yet sent a man to Mars. That still is probably quite a ways off. There's something about space that has lost a lot of its magic and its appeal. But I think there were many... There were many other things that we could have done where we could have progressed. And I think on some level, it's not, again, this is the question, is it nature? Is it just too hard to get to Mars? Or is it the culture that we're not reaching, we're not trying?

Well, one example of this that I've noticed for years is that I thought since I was a kid, nothing has gotten better in the sense that there are no new bridges or tunnels. They were all built before I was born or around the time I was born. I mean, the idea of building another bridge across the Hudson or another tunnel. And I thought, what a wild idea that they were doing this. They were doing plenty of this in the earlier parts of the century. And then it just stopped completely.

The number I've seen is that in Manhattan or New York City, in inflation-adjusted dollars, it costs about 50 times as much to build a mile of subway in real dollars as it did 100 years ago.

Why?

I mean, we know 50% of that is the unions. Well, it's a corrupt government. It's environmental rules. It's all sorts of things. But yes, if you define—one economic definition of technology is doing more with less. And there are a lot of these profoundly diseased, sick institutions, including the city of New York, which are characterized as very anti-technological. We're doing less and less with more and more. This is true of education. It's true of probably significant parts of our health care system, where it's costing more and more to at best stay in place.

Since we're leaping around, let me just pick up on something you've touched on here. You mentioned in our previous conversation that universities today, the level of corruption in academia is similar to the corruption of the medieval church, and that we need some kind of reformation. Can you expand on that? Because I think for sure most people in this room know that something is very, very wrong with the academy. But when you talk about it as corruption, talk about that, because it's at the center of a lot of what we're talking about.

Well, the basic analogy is that if you think of the eve of the Reformation 500 years ago, you had sort of runaway indulgences, which are like the runaway tuition costs. You had this sort of priestly class that often had sort of tenured sinecures, which are sort of like the professors. And the universities, they even have a sort of soteriology, a theory of salvation, where if you get a diploma, you're saved. And if you do not have a college diploma, you end up in a bad place. You go to Yale or you go to jail, that sort of thing. And so I think we should think of the universities as, in a sense, the successor to the Catholic Church. It is the atheist church.

You mean the bad Catholic Church. I just want to be clear. I'm not Catholic, but I'm a pro-Catholic, non-Catholic.

Even most Catholics like this because they think the Catholic Church is pretty screwed up. And so if the universities are as bad as the Catholic Church, maybe the Catholic Church isn't as bad as people often think.

OK, but to talk about the Catholic Church pre-Reformation, there's no question that what was going on there was bad. I mean, I think that many people like Erasmus and Francis, who never would dream of leaving the church, they knew it was bad and it needed reformation.

So we're... And the Reformation had to come from without. These institutions, they are not reformable from within. That's the main point of the analogy I would give. So what do we do with universities? What do you mean? We just try to get people out of them. We try to, you know... You know, one of the... One of the things I tried to do years ago, I had this fantasy of starting a new university that would be sort of a better version, sort of an all-around good liberal arts education with less political correctness, less thought control. And one of the people who worked for me spent about a year looking at all the universities that had been started in the preceding 100 years, 1907 to 2007, when we were looking at this.

And it was a sorry tale of donor intent betrayed, wasted money, just all the stuff had not worked. And you got the sense that there's something about this setup that's really bad. There's sort of a mathematical description you can give of this where corporations are mortal beings. And over time, corporations get worse and worse. And then if they're sort of very corrupt, they sort of go out of business. And universities tend to be immortal. They last forever. And the top universities, the most prestigious ones in the US, are the ones that were here 17th, early 18th century. And so we're sort of dealing with the corruption of something that's a quasi-immortal being. I mean, I don't think it's omnipotent.

I don't think they're omnipotent. I'm glad to hear that. But it's gotten dramatically worse than they were 30 years ago. I mean, demons are immortal beings. They're dramatically worse than they were 30, 40 years ago. And it's still very hard to come up with alternatives. There's still some sense in which Harvard is at the top of the pecking order. But yeah, I think we have to try to find just ways to exit the system altogether. There's no way to sort of co-opt it, to change it from within. Those are all, I think, complete fool's errands.

But I guess my question would be, don't you have a situation where Harvard and Yale or The New York Times, to skip over to another kind of institution, they're institutions that have value because people say they have value. It's that simple. Having been to Yale, I can say that it has really, really minimal actual value. There's no question in my mind that the value that it has is...

But I think when you're saying things like this, you're not even supposed to say this. Why? Well, because if people say they have value, then if someone like you says the things you're saying right now, that's undercutting what other people are supposed to say.

Right. Well, that's the whole point of this. That's why we're here. I don't mean to freak you out, but that's exactly what I want to talk about, because it's... You realize this is true, right? There are people who are unwilling to say that, or unwilling to see that they've become politically correct asylums. There's pure madness and their kids, you're spending all this money so really so that your kid can catch this virus and have a messed-up worldview forever. And once people realize that, once people stop giving money, once people stop saying, I want my kid to go to that place, those places won't any longer be able to have the value that they're seen to have.

I'm slightly more passive. I mean, I think they are very robust. They're not going to go away that quickly. The analogy I would have for Yale or Harvard is it's like a Studio 54 nightclub, which is probably bad for the morals of the people, and maybe it's good for their status. And we can sort of debate which is more important, which is less important. But these institutions are remarkably robust. If you were a university president at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, one of these places, and you had some secret fantasy of getting lynched, and you wanted a coalition of alumni, students, faculty to come after you, you'd give a speech saying, 'We are giving such a great education that we're going to increase the enrollment.'

We're going to let more people in. We're going to double or triple our enrollment over the next 20 or 30 years. Since we're serving the whole world, in 1970, there were 200 million people in the US. Now there are 8 billion in the world. It's 40 times as many people. We're just going to double our enrollment. And you would get lynched, because people understand it is a zero-sum tournament. It's not a positive-sum education. It's not about education. It's a Studio 54 nightclub you're running. For what that is, it can be pretty robust for a long time. There's probably some point where it gets so deranged that we're effectively there.

I honestly have to say that where we are now, there's a brilliant novel out. I've interviewed the author on my radio program, Scott Johnston. It's called Campusland. And it is brilliant. It's a brilliant criticism, lampooning of the whole world of Ivy League culture, but generally higher ed. You see that it eats itself at some point. We're kind of at that point. How long can it sustain itself? I mean, again, I say the same thing about The New York Times. The New York Times has value because people say it has value. But when you really look at these places, at some point, the word has to get out to the alumni, to the parents. It's not as good as it used to be. It's not what it once was. Somehow, that happens.

You have to allow that it's possible to have that kind of a—we could call it a market correction. It has to be possible.

And I would have predicted it 30, 40 years ago. So it's been harder. I'm not saying, like, next decade—I'm, you know, I think they may finally break this decade. But there's probably something about the student debt that's unsustainable. And we had $300 billion in 2000. It's up to $1.7 trillion today. So I think there are certain trends that I can't see going on for another decade even. And so I think something is going to break. But isn't it a little bit like the Soviet Union? The top colleges, not so clear.

Isn't it a little bit like the Soviet Union? I mean, at some point, it has to break down. At some point, the truth will out. So the fact that it could go on for seven decades is horrifying, but it did end. And I guess I wonder, because I wouldn't have said that, 100 years ago, Yale and all these places were corrupt, lost, leading young people astray. I don't think it was true. I think it's something that's more recently true, or it's a kind of a flower that has finally come to bloom. We know that Yale was going, a lot of these schools were going in those directions already in the '20s and the '30s, but it didn't really come into the mainstream so that you have the madness that you're seeing until now.

So I guess it seems to me that it will take a while, but it has to fall apart. In other words, I'm not sure how they can sustain it.

I think the overall system can't be sustained because of the runaway debt. The top parts of it, it's possible it can just keep going because it's exclusive, and this is what drives it. I have this sort of theory that one of the reasons Republican political leaders, senators, congressmen, governors, aren't going after the universities more is because they still just want their kids to go to the top schools. So if you were a senator or— Some of those people are in this room, by the way. And, you know, we had this crazy college admissions thing where it was, you know, people can get in through the front door or the back door or the side door. And, you know, I think all these places, there's probably some number even at Harvard or Stanford where if you make this number, your kid can get in no matter how unqualified your child is.

I think it's something like $25 million. I think it would be helpful to publicize these things, but the fact that there are people who are doing this suggests it's going to keep going for some time.

I know what you mean and I fear you may be right, but I'm still thinking that because we're talking about this, people hadn't been talking about this. It seems we've arrived at a point where it's possible some people will see this. And if you see what is happening at these colleges, it's dramatically different. I mean, when I was at Yale in the '80s, it was hard for the alumni to know the lunacy of political correctness that we were living out. It was hard for them to get it. But now, because of the way the world is, because of social media—I don't mean to bring up a sore subject, but we have to talk about social media—but it seems to me that people can see things that they wouldn't have been able to see even 30 or 40 years ago.

But that's a larger conversation. I do want to talk to you a little bit about social media. And yesterday, our genius friend Ann Coulter was saying that you, Peter Thiel, ought to create a social media platform that will not kick people off if they have the, quote-unquote, wrong views. Will you?

Look, I think that there is sort of a question how... I'm on the board of Facebook, so I have to always be very careful what I say here. I'm not planning— You're on the board of Facebook? I am on the board of Facebook. Holy cow. And so I'm not going to... I have to be somewhat careful what I say in these contexts. But I think that... Look, I think there are obviously all these questions about the homogenization of thought, the way in which these institutions channel thought and do not allow as wide a variety of views to be heard, and that sort of the Overton window seems to always get narrower and keep shifting to the left on the discussions we have in our society. You know, there was a hope in the late 1990s that the internet was going to be like the Gutenberg press, that it was fundamentally this technology that would widen debate, and that it would be sort of Protestant.

It would be sort of somewhat schismatic. You'd be able to dissent from views, and that it would have the effect of undermining the monopoly of the large, old-media-type companies. If I had to give a reading of the landscape in 2020, I think it's certainly not as libertarian as people thought it was going to be in the late '90s. I would still defend the Silicon Valley companies partially in the sense that I think there still are more views that can be broadcast on the internet than you get in the New York Times or the Washington Post or things like this. Could you set a lower bar? Well, that is the alternative. I know, I'm teasing you. That is the alternative. That is the alternative. I'll pick a little bit on Twitter since I can focus on that one.

You're not on the board of Twitter?

If you want to understand the political dynamic in Silicon Valley, it was in 2015, 2016, everybody at Twitter wanted Sanders to become president. That would probably be the person that the median employee at Twitter would have liked. And they're sort of smoking pot and not doing much work, but the business just sort of runs itself. But it dawned on them one day that they were actually just working for Mr. Trump every day that they came to work. He's the most effective user of their platform. And that leads to a really extreme amount of cognitive dissonance and a lot of derangement. But I certainly think that Twitter was more helpful to the Republicans in 2016 than to the Democrats. That's clear.

And I think something like this is probably true of Facebook and of Google and of all these platforms because the mainstream media had a super narrowly controlled narrative and we were able to get other ideas out. There was a question whether... The mainstream media talked about President Trump's tax returns. It never talked about Hillary Clinton's health. Hillary Clinton had her 9/11 on September 11, 2016, where she had her fainting spell in Brooklyn. And there were these other channels through which you could get questions out about her health and have a debate. You could have a sort of a two-way discussion like this. And I think there's obviously some attempt to rein this in, to get it even more controlled in 2020 and 2024.

And we have to push back. But I would say at this point in time, it's still better than the alternative. If you shut down the internet, that would help the left.

Part of what we're talking about, you know, it touches... When we're talking, let's say, about Google, for example, you're talking about companies that... I mean, we have the advent now of these companies that aren't really American companies, and so they don't... really, or at least they don't feel that they have to answer to anyone. They can prostitute themselves completely. They don't have to think about, is this right or is this wrong? If they can make more money, they can do whatever. When you see this happening for the first time, I mean, whether it's the NBA or Nike or Google, that they don't seem to understand what freedom is, what has allowed them to become who they are. And so they're going to places like China...

And they seem to me at least partially to be selling their souls to get more money. And I think in their defense, they seem genuinely to be ignorant of what American-style freedom is or what a virtuous free market is. They really don't seem to get that. One of the reasons that I've supported this president, and I know that you have, is because he sees some of this. And he sees that there are values that we should uphold. And he sees that China presents a particular threat to us and temptation to others. So what are your views, I guess, on what I've just said, and particularly with regard to China?

Well, look, I think the sort of geopolitical rivalry between the US and China are going to be the defining one for this country for the next few decades. It is amazing that it took us this long to focus on it. I think that there was somehow we had, you know, the zombie years with the Bushes and the Clintons and the Bushes again and Obama. We had sort of, you know, it was like, I understand why Nixon and Reagan were pro-China, because it was seen as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. But after '89, there should have been a reassessment. And Bush 41, he was in cahoots with China. The Clintons, they campaigned to be tough on China, and then that changed about two years into the Clinton administration in 1994.

Bush 43, again, no pushback on China. And then Obama, just nothing at all. So the hour is very late, but I think there is sort of a recognition that we are... we have very radically different views of the world, of the future of the world, and we need to take this stuff seriously on many levels. I think within, you know, one of the things I've criticized Google for is, and again, it's sort of like a narrow thing, but in some ways illustrative of sort of the insanity of Silicon Valley, where you sort of have to think of the crown jewels of Google's research are sort of its AI research. And they sort of pulled out of a contract with the military, Project Maven, where they were going to help the military with some of their AI technology.

And then at the same time, they continue to transfer to various Chinese research institutes, which are, of course, linked to the Chinese military, because everything in China is sort of one giant Borg-like thing. And this is, to my way of thinking, something that is absolutely extraordinary. It never happened in the Cold War that a company the scale of Google would not work with our government and would work with our geopolitical rivals. And I think this was genuinely surprising to Google when I pointed this out and that maybe they were doing something wrong or something like this.

I gave a speech last summer. And then there's always some sort of pushback. But I think the self-understanding at a place like Google is that it's cosmopolitan, and it's universal, and it's sort of multicultural, and it's global. It's open to the whole world. And then I think the reality is that it's not cosmopolitan at all. It's incredibly parochial. It's designed to have the look and feel of an inward-facing college campus that's completely unaware and completely clueless about the rest of the world.

Well, everything you've just said, though, really, to sum it up, is that those people who think that way, and certainly they think that way in most of the cultural elites in the West today, think along the same lines. And you could boil it down to the phrase anti-Americanism. Fundamentally, they have an animus toward the United States of America, toward what we have been, toward what we've represented. I mean, you saw that in Obama to some extent, a kind of a sense of shame for our greatness rather than a pride in our greatness. And I feel like unless you're teaching people why America is great, what has made her great, how can you expect people at places like Google? I mean, we should have assumed that.

Why would we ever think that they would be proud to help America, whether it's against China or just to help us in general? I wasn't surprised. I was horrified.

But I wasn't surprised. It is, after all, it is mainly an American company. And you'd think that there would be some sort of rational self-interest where they would help us even if they didn't really believe it.

But it's not like saying that Yale is an American university. They couldn't be more anti-American. They just can't say it. But their worldview is very hostile to what we think of as America.

Yeah, I'm not going to disagree with you. I can't quite explain it. I think the way in which Silicon Valley is a one-party state—you can ask questions why it has gotten as extreme as it has. And I think certainly a part of it links back to the university discussion, where Silicon Valley has the most educated workforce in the country, with the largest percentage of people went to these top elite universities. And so somehow the Yale problem is a Silicon Valley problem at this point. They're the same thing. And from my point of view, what's going on in these places is not that people are getting educated. They're just getting brainwashed.

Yeah, well, there's no doubt about that. So my question then sort of touches on Trump. It has thrilled me to see him, after decades of presidents ignoring these things, really shamefully ignoring a great threat, to see him deal with China and, in a way, seem to get that we need to deal with Google and others. Is that one of the reasons? Did you see any of that early on? Is that one of the reasons you supported Trump as publicly as you did?

Well, I certainly think that the whole globalization project isn't quite working the way it's supposed to anymore. And you can sort of think of globalization on, I always think of it as, there's a lot of different ways to cut it, but one way to think of the globalization project is on four separate metrics. You have the movement of people, which is immigration policy. You have the movement of goods, which is trade. You have the movement of money, which is banking and capital markets. And you have the movement of ideas, which is the internet. And for a variety of reasons we can go into, we've sort of been invested in this globalization project, hook, line, and sinker as a country for many decades. And there are sort of all sorts of ways it hasn't quite been working for quite some time.

In at least the first two and maybe all four of these. And that perhaps the thing that the United States should do is that it should become the center of the resistance to the one-world state. This is the country where the one-world state stops. And I can understand that there were libertarian, there were conservative reasons to believe in supranational structures at different times. Margaret Thatcher, as late as 1979, still was pro-EU because she thought that the bureaucracy in Brussels would help her smash the labor unions in the UK. And this is why Jeremy Corbyn today is still a closet Brexiteer, because he's still stuck in the 1970s, and he still thinks that these supranational institutions are somehow capitalist or something like this.

But we need to update our thinking, and we need to realize that 2020 is not 1980 or 1970, and that these sort of supranational institutions are actually not working in the interests of the United States. I think there was a New Dealer conceit like this in the late 1940s, that you were going to have these global institutions that would help the United States run the planet. And at this point, it semi-worked in the 1950s. In the 1950s, even the United Nations was a pro-American institution. And then we can sort of date at what point did these various institutions get hijacked and taken over. I think the UN was somewhere in the 1960s. The WTO was probably certainly by the time China entered in 2001.

At this point, most of these supranational institutions are anti-American. And probably instead of trying to work inside them, we should withdraw. We should resist. And the US should be the center of the resistance to the one-world state. I heartily agree.

I'm looking through my notes. There's a quote that you did an interview with The New Yorker magazine in 2011. And you said that you believe, oh, here it is. You said, "I believe Christianity to be true. I don't feel a compelling need to convince other people of that." I think that's somehow, at least somehow, self-contradictory. Because I think it's at the heart of believing that Christianity is true that you would feel that compulsion to convince other people of that. So what did you mean by that? Or do you mean the same thing by that? Do you feel the same way as you did then? Or can you expand on that idea?

Well, maybe that was not as artfully worded as I would have worded that today.

Were you afraid The New Yorker would call you out on your Christianity?

No, I think that in certain contexts, like in New York City, perhaps just saying that you're Christian is enough courage for people to have.

It does enough good.

I think there was this whole doctrine where you were not supposed to sin against the Holy Spirit. If you denied the Holy Spirit, you couldn't be saved. There was all these debates in the third, fourth century about that. And we're probably not... It's probably not quite as bad as the Roman Empire under Diocletian or something like that. But one gets the sense that it's a decent amount of courage to just say that you're Christian. And so maybe not in a small town in Alabama. Maybe you have to do more there. But if you're in Manhattan and that's all you say, in my book, that's plenty.

Would you agree that by following up, by saying that you believe Christianity to be true, if that takes courage, would you say by saying, 'I don't feel a compelling need to convince other people of that,' that you have reduced the amount of courage?

Sure.

I will concede I would not word it quite the same way today. Well, of course, this is 2011. We were just kids then, I know. But when you say you think Christianity is true, what do you mean by that, if I can ask a really open question?

Well, I think it says... I think that, well, I believe in the resurrection of Christ. I think that— The bodily resurrection. The bodily resurrection of Christ. So I think that's the central miracle. And I think that there is a way in which it gives us an understanding of the world. I think that it is, you know, I studied under René Girard, who's this professor at Stanford who I think was one of the greater Christian thinkers of the 20th century. And I think that there's an anthropology in Christianity. There's an understanding of human nature where we're in the image of God. We're mimetic. We try to... and we need good role models. The only good role model for us is Christ. All other role models lead to interpersonal conflicts of one sort or another.

And so I think there are a lot of things about it that are true. There are ways we can offer an apologetic for it. But it is, on some level, I often think that if you go back to the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, I often think that the two most important ones are the first and last on the list, the first commandment and the tenth. The first one is you should only worship God. You should look up to the one true God. And then the tenth one is you should not look around at your neighbor. You should not covet the things that belong to your neighbor. And when... when you do not have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And I think that is sort of the problem with our sort of atheist liberal world, that it is just the madness of crowds.

It's not reason. It's not rational. It's just mass insanity.

Does that tie into your idea in the book?

I always think if you sort of contrast evangelical Christian Bible study where the outward-facing thing is often the people are somehow more moral or better, and then the inward-facing thing is that you're kind of sinful and there's a lot of stuff you fix. If you were in the Bible study and said, 'You know, I figured out everything's perfect in my life,' you probably haven't quite gotten the message. But whatever the sort of paradoxes and contradictions around that are, I think there's sort of a strange contrast with what I sort of describe as the atheist-rationalist sort of group, where the outward-facing thing is that you're more rational than people, and the inward-facing thing is that you're not capable of thought at all.

It's just spaghetti code, and the mind is not capable of thought. And to use the sort of Thomistic medieval distinction, the medievals believed in the weakness of the will, but the power of the intellect. And the moderns believe in the power of the will, but the weakness of the intellect. And so I think, yes, I think faith and reason are compatible. And in fact, in fact, when you get rid of faith, you end up in a world where there's no reason either. And we're living in a much less rational world than we lived in 100 years ago.

When you talk about coveting, in your book, *Zero to One*, you talk about... how when you're trying to build a company, and when they get stuck on competing with Hertz, Avis, whatever it is, when they get stuck on competing, they lose sight of the larger goal, which is not just to defeat the other guy, but to do something greater or whatever. Do those ideas tie together, or am I just making that?

Sure, sure. If you're too focused on your enemies, your rivals, your competition, it becomes very hard to form a team that's going to work on some transcendent goal or transcendent purpose. If you categorize it in terms of the seven mortal sins of medieval Catholicism, I always think you can sort of debate which ones are the worst. Officially, pride is supposed to be the worst. I always think you can use *Gilligan's Island* as sort of a mnemonic for this, where the Professor is pride, and the Skipper is anger, and Mr. Howell is greed, and Mrs. Howell is sloth. That's why she married Mr. Howell. Ginger is lust. Gilligan's always eating food. He's gluttony. And Mary Ann? Mary Ann's envy. She wants to be Ginger.

And I think in some ways, that's the one I'm most worried about, the Mary Anns in our society. And that's, I believe, that's the... Envy is, it is the one mortal sin that is still completely taboo. All the others can be turned into something positive. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko, whatever. There's ways you can flip all the others around. You know, envy is the one we still don't talk about. And as a result, I suspect it's the one that's somehow still sort of pervasive and the most destructive.

To bring things to a shallower level briefly, I should point out that in 2006, we did a Socrates in the City event around C. S. Lewis. And my friend, the film director Norman Stone, is here. He had directed a film about C. S. Lewis. And who showed up with a friend to that event, to my shock, but—I have a picture—Tina Louise, who played Ginger. Just so we know that that really happened. That really happened. Well, you talk about in the book, and it's all related. I mean, it's interesting to me. But you say that we've given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered. So to go back to the beginning of the conversation, the idea that we could wipe out cancer or Alzheimer's or anything like that.

So two questions. First of all, why are you hopeful, if you are hopeful? And also related to the sense of wonder and the secrets left to be discovered, I think somehow I would argue, and maybe this goes against this interiority idea of yours, but that God, faith in God, is an endlessly self-revealing secret. In other words, that as we pursue God, we are inescapably pursuing a kind of science, because to know God is to become more and more grounded in the reality of His creation, and that those things... So the first question was, why are you hopeful if you think we've given up our sense of wonder and secrets left to be discovered?

Well, I don't think we're at the end of history. I don't think we know everything. I certainly refuse to believe that everything has been discovered that's going to be discovered. And I think there are all sorts of contexts where we can still come to understand new things. Just to push back a little bit on sort of—I don't think there's anything wrong with Christian interiority the way you describe it, but I always think it would be somewhat inadequate if it was just that and nothing more. When I was an undergraduate, the sort of the Campus Crusade idea was still always God has a plan for you and for your life, and you can figure it out, but then it would translate into a vocation, to something you were supposed to do.

We don't talk like that anymore—as a culture, not just Christians.

As Christians, we don't talk like that anymore. And it's sort of much more sort of pop psychology, à la Jordan Peterson or something like that. And I think it has to be more than just psychological.

You refer in the book—we've just got a couple of minutes left here, but somebody call Peter's plane and hold that bus. I know you have to get out of here, but I just want to say, I want to say that when you talk about this, I think of people like William Wilberforce, who saw the slave trade as an abomination and spent his life effectively, because he was a Christian, crusading against that. And that seems to me to sum up the kind of thing you're talking about. In other words, our faith has to be translated into action, if I had to sum it up.

But let's go in a slightly different direction with this. If we think about, what are the real challenges in our society? What is at the core of, let's say, atheist liberalism today? And I always think there are two different kinds of arguments; it's worth differentiating. One is sort of a metaphysical set of arguments: God doesn't exist, the Bible's not true, sort of a set of arguments like that. But there's a second, which is something like, 'The Christians aren't Christian enough.' And I think that we have to think of what we're struggling against as hyper-Christianity, ultra-Christianity, something like that. It is sort of an extreme deformation of it. And I think there are all sorts of forms that this takes.

And so I think it's not... that there's a shortage of morality. I think there's too much morality. I mean, Greta is so moral, she wants to shoot everybody—line them up against the wall and shoot them if you're not as committed to climate change. Or if you think about sort of medieval Christianity, the two most important attributes of Christ were his divinity, and the second most important one was that he was poor. Anyone you saw who was poor might be Christ in disguise. But then in the 19th century, you have people like Tolstoy or Marx that sort of pushed this in a hyper-Christian direction. And we had to do more than the Christians. We had to have a violent revolution. We're going to do more for the poor in this world right away.

And that's what I think the contrast always is. And so I think the... I think the Christian alternative to this is always to come back to see that we're in this context, that it's only if you realize that you're in a context where things are pretty screwed up that you have any chance of moving beyond it. The two vignettes I always give on this are—you know, they're sort of examples of the alternative to hyper-Christianity. What would the alternative look like? In the Ethiopian Coptic tradition, Pontius Pilate is seen as a saint. And the reason is that you can't expect more from a politician. You can't expect more from government. Because after all, he almost listened to his wife, and he had this dream, and he had some misgivings.

And you just can't expect more. And it's not that if you had lived in the time of Christ, you would have done better, which was the cause for medieval anti-Semitism—'You should go after the Jews because they'd killed Christ. If we'd lived in the time of Christ, we would have done better.' Or the modern liberals who say they would have been more tolerant in the Middle Ages, whereas it's the people who style themselves as being part of the resistance—that very fact often tells you that they would have just been collaborators, or something like that. And the second vignette on this that I always give is—I'm not Catholic, but I think there's something about the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation that's always super humbling, where it's literally the body and blood of Christ, and you are still no better than a cannibal, and it's a cannibalistic meal.

And, still, the problems of human nature, the problems of violence are continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better is to realize that we're still continuous with the entire human past. And when we think we've set that behind us, we've transcended it, we're much better, we're hyper-Christian, we're communist, we're the tolerant people who would have been super tolerant in the Middle Ages, that's when you're simply worse.

I have to say, you're a pretty sharp guy, Peter. I don't know what Anne was thinking about when she said you weren't. I think that everybody here would disagree, would say that you're a pretty sharp guy. And I think most of us would also say, and I, at the head of the pack, that we're just so grateful to you for coming here, being a part of our little group called Socrates in the City. I know you didn't do it for the money.

You're making all sorts of assumptions about how much money I have.

Yeah. And no, no, no. It's because of how little we pay. That's what I meant. You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet. That was, I think actually that was my final question. It was, given your tremendous wealth, how can you help me specifically? I'm going to leave it at that. I really will let you go, but not before I say again how genuinely grateful I am, Peter, for much of what you do, but specifically for just coming here and being willing to submit to the petty humiliation of being introduced by me and then submit to the freeform nature of the conversation. I'm just really, really grateful to you. And we're going to let you go, but before that, I'm going to give you copies of my new books.

Here you go. And I know Bonhoeffer was a little heady for you. And I just thought, maybe you'll like these. But we really do want to say thank you. So folks, as Peter leaves, how about a rousing Socrates in the City thank you.