The 2021 Atlas Society Gala: Peter Thiel's Speech

Thank you so much.

Well, Palmer, Jennifer, it's always, I shouldn't have asked you to do this. You're such a hard act to follow, you know? And Jennifer, I thought you were a libertarian or a Randian. I didn't realize you were working for the Chinese surveillance state and monitoring me in all these ways. It's really scary, but really impressive at the same time. Um, I want to sort of maybe, yeah, build on this theme of, of freedom in all these different ways. I was, I was, you know, reflecting a little bit on, you know, the difference between a libertarian and Ayn Rand, uh, fan, and, um, I was, I was talking to Jennifer earlier tonight and saying, you know, two reasons I always think of myself, describe myself as libertarian: one, one is good and one is bad. And the good reason is I believe in all this stuff, I believe in all these values of freedom and

individual rights. And the bad reason is that it's often sort of a cowardly thing to say, because if you tell people you're a libertarian, you're saying you're not a Republican, you're sort of signaling you're a loser, you're never actually gonna win. And then I think somehow, and so somehow saying you're a libertarian is always a socially safe way to say, safe thing to do, but saying you're, you're a crazed Ayn Rand follower, that's always dangerous. That's never a socially acceptable thing to do. And it's a really hard question. What's the actual difference between an Ayn Rand person and a libertarian? And I would say it has something to do with this question of social acceptance. And the thing that's so admirable about Ayn Rand is the way in which it was

It was just the individual against the collective. The individual was right. The fact that everybody believed in something doesn't make it right. It's a question of truth, a question of reason, a question of individualism that always dominates. I first read *The Fountainhead*, *Atlas Shrugged* when I was an undergraduate, late '80s, and to be honest, at the time, I thought it was a little bit too negative, a little bit too pessimistic about the way things were going. It was sort of, you know, when Ayn Rand wrote *Atlas Shrugged* in 1957, and you try to find John Galt, and you have this chase throughout the US, and the clues finally take you to the state where everything's gone haywire, the state of Michigan, where there's this company that's gone bankrupt, the 20th Century American Motor Company.

And in 1957, that was a crazy thing to say. The per capita income in Detroit in 1957 was 40% higher than in New York City. And when I read it in the late '80s, it still felt like a crazy thing to do. And then after 2008, when General Motors went bankrupt and, you know, sort of reorganized according to principle, "from each according to their, you know, ability, to each according to their needs," or whatever, the 20—it was all, you realize it was all in Ayn Rand in 1957. And it was... You know, so it sort of really has grown on me over the years as just an incredible thing. It's, of course, it's, and I always, I always am very uncomfortable with these sort of categories of, you know, extreme optimism, extreme pessimism.

I think those are somehow the wrong categories. I think extreme because, and I think they're actually weirdly the same. You know, extreme optimism is, is says that you don't need to do anything. The movie of the future will happen on its own. It's sort of automatic, accelerating progress, and all you have to do is, uh, sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. And then extreme pessimism is that, uh, you know, um, you know, nothing you can do can make a difference. And, and the truth is always, I think, somewhere in between, or it's at least, uh, best for us to, to believe that it's somewhere in between, and that instead of being an emotive denial that everything's great or acceptance that everything is awful—and both denial and acceptance are code words for laziness, for not doing anything because there's nothing you can do, nothing you need to do.

It's best to be somewhere in between and to think it actually matters. Things are always up for debate, and we should be fighting, and we should be figuring out how to continue to have this healthy and free country in which we live. Now, there's sort of many different dimensions of freedom I could talk about. Certainly, we've had the freedom of guns that Palmer alluded to that I think should not be underrated. There's all sorts of freedoms articulated in the Bill of Rights. But one that I'm probably always very partial to—it may not be the most important freedom—is freedom of ideas, freedom of thought, and the importance. We're not at the end of history. We don't have all the answers. You can't just look them up on the internet.

And it's not whatever everybody believes that is simply the truth. You know, in a democracy, what 51% of the population believes is probably better, and there's a certain bias towards majoritarianism. And if you have 70% of the population believe something, it's even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99.99%, you've gone from a democracy to North Korea. And it's this very important question that one needs to always come back to, sort of like, where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? And where's that dividing line between majoritarian democracy and where, where do you get to sort of the totalitarianism of North Korea? And it's hard to define where that line is, but I want to suggest that in all sorts of contexts, we're far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.

And I want to maybe... to reflect on a few instances that I've been thinking about this last 20 months of total insanity where our science institutions, our sense-making institutions have just deranged in all sorts of ways. Maybe one anecdote to start with is a friend of mine from my undergraduate years at Stanford, Jay Bhattacharya, who's class of 1990, one year behind me. And he ended up—it was sort of insane, but he decided to pursue this academic career. He went on from Stanford, got an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford. Ended up getting to be a tenured professor at Stanford, which is an impressive thing to do if you're not a communist. And basically spent decades plugging away in the wilderness, sort of working away at these various health policy things, all sort of different variations on why socialized medicine doesn't work.

But then really found his voice in the last year and became sort of a, you know, I would say sort of a, sort of an alternate voice on the COVID insanity, on the COVID echo chamber. And it started with sort of question, you know, just these questions about, you know, what was the infection rate? And Jay argued that maybe the infection rate was a little bit higher and therefore the mortality rate was lower and therefore people were overreacting. And that, you know, it was not the case that Dr. Fauci was wrong. Millions of people were not likely to die in the U.S. And then of course, just asking all these cost-benefit questions about what the trade-offs were between, between, you know, maximizing things on COVID prevention and, you know, was this actually working?

How about, was this even working as a health thing? So maybe we could stop COVID, but then lots of people would die from cancer because they can get to the hospital. And then of course, cost benefit even more broadly for society as a whole. But the thing that got him into really bad trouble, and you know how this movie's gonna end already, but it was saying, quote, there is no high quality evidence that wearing masks prevents COVID, unquote. And perhaps even the fact that it was a nuanced and qualified statement made it even more outrageous. So high quality evidence, the notion that you have high quality evidence as a differentiator from just evidence or quality evidence, These would seem to be the kinds of nuances that science is supposed to be involved in.

But, of course, that was probably a trigger word of sorts. And, you know, the way the movie ended was, of course, you had posters plastered all over Stanford University campus with his picture on it. Not exactly clear why. It was probably kayfabe or LARPing, but maybe there was some chance that somebody would man up and beat him up on the spot if they ever saw him or something like that. That was probably the hope that the Left had. There was a petition circulated among the Stanford faculty asking the university to stop this person from talking. It was just so terrible for Stanford to have anybody affiliated with it who was saying things that might be endangering public health like this. We just had to stop this person from talking.

I think that finally got derailed when someone asked the university president whether there was still a First Amendment at Stanford. The answer is obviously no, but you can't say that on the record, and that was a good way to derail that particular thing. And of course, we've had all these derangements of science where, you know, in the name of science, we've done these rather unscientific things. And I often think that there is always—that when people use the word 'science,' it's often a tell of the opposite. So that when we—that the things that are actual science, like physics and chemistry, you don't need to call them physical science or chemical science because you don't need to protest that much, like, you know, Lady Macbeth.

But when you call things climate science or political science, that's sort of a tell that they're not quite scientific. And there is sort of this very strange derangement that's happened in science. I studied philosophy of science as an undergraduate. I've come to think that one way to think of a healthy science is that it has to fight a two-front war against excessive skepticism and against excessive dogmatism. So excessive skepticism is if you can't believe in anything: 'I don't believe I'm here. I don't believe the audience is here. Nothing is real. Everything's imaginary.' That's probably not an attitude that's conducive to science. And of course, excessive dogmatism at the other end of the spectrum is

is, you know, the 17th-century church telling you that the Aristotelian view of the universe was correct and therefore the Earth couldn't possibly be moving, and that's excessive dogmatism, and that's also very bad for science. And if we probably gave sort of a history of science, the sort of 17th and 18th century was certainly much more focused on fighting excess dogmatism, where you had these sort of self-styled Deists and rationalists and freethinkers, and you're breaking with the shackles of the medieval church. And it is some sort of strange but crazed paradox where you sort of have to choose your enemies very well because you will soon become just like them. And in some sense, science has become this crazed dogmatic church where

Where they have become what they hate, and it has become sort of ossified in an extremely dogmatic way. We don't have a problem of excess skepticism. We have a problem of excess dogmatism. It is extremely far in that direction. And probably... probably a sense in which it's less healthy, or at least more transparently deranged, let me put it that way, than the medieval church, is that the dogmas are shockingly unstable. So if we're going to be insanely dogmatic, you know, maybe you could at least try to be consistent. You can be consistently wrong, just be consistently wrong. And so, you know, we were just, again, just staying on this narrow COVID issue. In the last 18 months, you know, it started with, you know, you weren't supposed to wear a mask because I think they had a shortage.

And so you weren't supposed to wear a mask, then you had to wear a mask. Then it was, of course, Kamala Harris. October of 2020, it was still, "I will never take a Trump vaccine." The vaccines were political. They were a Trump plot, and they shouldn't be allowed, and they shouldn't be approved, and you shouldn't take them. And now, of course, everyone has to take a vaccine. And then, of course, we had the whole very strange pivot on the, on the origin of the virus, where it was originally the food market and then became—and now, I think, I'm not sure the Wuhan lab's not yet fully accepted, but it's sort of trending in that direction. And we've had these sort of 180-degree hairpin turns in the dogma, and they tell us that, that this stuff is, is, is, is both, you know, overdone and, and, and shockingly unstable.

Now, I think this kind of a problem of, and you can sort of map it as, you know, excess of dogmatism, excess of centralization, you know, is a problem of the Ministry of Truth versus, let's say, decentralization is misinformation. And we are, you know, we're far too much in this sort of collectivist, Borg-like, everyone thinks alike context. And I'll give... And I think there's sort of many contexts where this is happening. But one very dramatic one from the last few months has been the crazed collapse of the sort of center-left Afghanistan project. I feel it's actually almost unfair to blame President Biden too much. I think most things, Biden doesn't get blamed enough. But I think maybe on Afghanistan, it's the one thing where he gets blamed too much.

And you blame him too much if you say it was a failure of military strategy, and they didn't protect the Air Force base, and there were all these sort of things they did wrong. But if you say that the actual problem was 20 years of lies, in which people just told one another all these lies about what they were doing, and then the lies were, you know, the lies were, you know, all sorts of different lies. We can start with the comic and go to the bigger ones. We had sort of a president in Afghanistan, the last one who got a PhD in Columbia on, I think it was on something like, reducing corruption in emerging market countries. It's like an Onion joke type thing, you know? And it was still convening strategy meetings 72 hours before the Taliban took Kabul on how to digitize the Afghan economy.

Again, sort of, you know, nothing wrong with that, but it was obviously just an absurdist joke. But there was a lot of competition for that. I spent some time digging down the rabbit hole on the internet, and I think these things were very real. And we spent two trillion dollars in Afghanistan the last 20 years, and it's all funneled through these crazy left-wing NGOs and whatnot. But one BBC interview that you can find if you want to look it up is an art education discussion on Duchamp's toilet. It was sort of this nihilistic art exhibit about 100 years ago where the artist just put a toilet in a museum and said, "That's art, because I get to say what's art." It's all sort of postmodern, nihilistic.

And there was sort of an NGO that had been funded to educate people in Afghanistan about why the toilet was art. And you had sort of a Pashto translator, and he translated it and explained it, and you had all these people who were clueless and didn't know what was going on. But of course, the problem wasn't the toilet art, or it wasn't the... It wasn't just a country where you're doing well, the corruption was 98%, i.e., only 98% of the money was stolen. But it was just the general set of lies about we were building this great liberal democracy and everything was somehow trending and nobody could ask any questions that were different from the consensus. So my first sort of individualist contrarian person was Jay Bhattacharya.

The second one who, you know, I think there are all these obvious critiques one can make of, but our former President Trump did have, and this was, maybe the hour was already too late, but, you know, a year, two years ago, he had a description of what was going on in Afghanistan. It was, I believe, was fundamentally correct, you know, very accurate, and I will quote him. It was, Afghanistan was, quote, 'a shithole country,' unquote. And now, you know, that was perhaps not a rigorous scientific description. It was perhaps, you know, it was certainly not a very nice thing to say, but when you limit yourself to saying things that are very nice, you can't actually talk about anything at all. And so, again, my question would be, if that was too rude a thing to say, was there a nicer way one could have said anything to actually ask these questions and to have a real fundamental debate about what was going on there?

My sort of limited imagination is that, uh, no, there wasn't, and, um, anything that was nicer was just a way to sort of go along with, uh, go along with the Borg in, in one way, one way or another. Now, you know, I, I, I worry that even talking about COVID in Afghanistan, you know, these are, they're, they're important issues in some ways, but they're also in some ways just distractions where, um, you—we're talking about this weird disease in these faraway places, when the reality is that something like what I am describing, I think, is going on across the board in all of our institutions in our society. It's the universities. It's in a governmental context. It's in all these different contexts. The institutions are deranged by a sort of totalitarian conformity that's preventing us from asking critical questions.

It's preventing us from course-correcting, from fixing problems before it is too late. And maybe my friend Jay Bhattacharya was, I think, mostly right about COVID. It was too late. I think President Trump was... maybe too late, mostly right about Afghanistan. Um, but let me, let me end with a third, uh, slightly more positive example of, uh, of, of one where, um, where I think we have an institution in crisis, and I think, um, I think, uh, the, um, the dissenting voice may, may actually, uh, may actually, um, prevail, not just intellectually, but, uh, but, but more fundamentally. And, uh, I am thinking of our most sacred deep state institution of all in the United States, uh, the Federal Reserve, um, and, um, and it is, um, and we are now at a point of absolute epistemic closure. We have, you know, we have, uh—

You know, the notion that the inflation is temporary is, of course, fully ingrained just as it is accelerating on every dimension. Of course, nobody knows exactly what's going on precisely. You know, there's a semiconductor chip shortage. I'm from Silicon Valley. I don't know anything about semiconductors. So I don't know if that's temporary or permanent. Of course, nobody knows about any of these dimensions. But you have sort of an endless array of rising shortages that every single person can sense is real. We have a Modern Monetary Theory, so we even have sort of some theory that everyone has gravitated to at probably precisely the moment when it needs to be questioned and challenged. And there's one level on which, of course, this is just common sense, and everybody can notice the inflation is coming, but to sort of

Put it in a very specific context. I think the single thing that is telling us that the hour is late for fiat money and for the central banks is cryptocurrency, and I would say Bitcoin in particular. Bitcoin at $60,000 a Bitcoin—don't know if you're supposed to invest, don't know if it's gonna go a lot higher, but surely, surely, it is a canary in the coal mine, and the most honest market in the world, the crypto market, the least manipulated market, is telling you that the hour is very late, and sort of my candidate for a third individual hero against the collective is someone like Satoshi Nakamoto. Now, as we sort of look at all these, at this sort of failed collectivization that's happened in all these different contexts, I'm always struck how much the center-left establishment has—it's no longer an elite, it's no longer a group of individuals, it is just a collective.

I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos the last time in 2013. And of course, they have the same ideas as the mob. In some ways, it is a mob. And people are there only in their capacity as representatives of corporations, or of governments, or of NGOs. It really hit me: there are simply no individuals. There are no individuals in the room. There's nobody there who's representing themselves. It's this notion of the future I reject. It's this picture of the future where the future will be a world where there are no individuals, there are no people with ideas of their own. There's nobody to say, "This is wrong, this doesn't make sense, and I'm going to think differently. I'm going to think for myself."

You know, just to make a brief note on the big U.S. geopolitical rival is China. And I think China, even though there's a lot that's screwed up and wrong about it, one thing they have is they have come up with a word to describe the derangement that's going on in our society: baizuo, which is "white left." And it is sort of a description. And it's basically—a baizuo is a crazy, politically correct white person who does things that are completely against their self-interest. You can sort of manipulate them. You can take advantage of them. And it's this sort of radical conformity of thought that we have. And of course, in some sense, when China makes that description, it has, I think, a not inaccurate insight into our society, but it also, in some ways, is a reflection of their own.

And one of the things that is striking about what has gone, you know, in China—sort of gone from bad to worse, from a communist to a worse communist country in the last, in the last decade—is there are simply no individuals allowed. Anybody who deviates the slightest bit from the party line gets crushed and destroyed. And, and I think, I think there is still some sense in which the U.S. is a—the U.S. has this very fundamental choice. Are we gonna become like China? Are we gonna become a society in which we have some sort of fake totalitarian efficiency that dominates things, in which we crush all individuals in this Borg-like way? Or will we find a way to go back to really celebrating individuals? And let me sort of end with a,

Building on some of the earlier threads, on a fantasy of what I think a celebration of individuals might look like. And I sort of imagine that we could go back to having a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, in New York City, but not for some sort of socialist collective like the healthcare workers or something like that, a ticker-tape parade for an individual. And we haven't had, you know, we haven't had a ticker-tape parade for an individual in the 21st century. There hasn't been a single one for an individual. And then, and then, of course, even if you go back into the '80s and '90s, they were mostly like maybe occasionally some sports hero, or it was some person who wasn't even American. So that was sort of a safe individual, like Nelson Mandela or maybe the Pope.

But could we have a ticker-tape parade for an individual who might be an American? Maybe we should do it even if they don't show up, if he doesn't show up. And again, there are probably many candidates for it, but in the spirit of fighting the collective at its strongest and beating it at the center of its power, my candidate would be Satoshi. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Peter Thiel. Ladies and gentlemen, dinner will now be served. Please enjoy your meal, and we will resume the program shortly.