Peter Thiel Speaks at Brain Bar

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Brain Bar, and thank you so much for joining us tonight. First of all, I would like to welcome on stage and introduce to you your host, your moderator, one of our returning speakers, Professor Steve Fuller. I founded Brain Bar a little bit more than three years ago to inspire my generation, but also the younger ones, by bringing the most interesting, most inspiring, and most challenging people to Budapest. And thanks to my really marvelous team, we have achieved some modest success. This time, it's still different. Following his life for more than a decade, and carefully reading every single piece by and about him, what I can tell you is that the arrival of this guy, quite simply, is the defining moment of Brain Bar's history.

Thank you, Peter. Okay, first of all, thanks to everyone for showing up to this. This is going to be a momentous event, and this is a great place for it to be here, because this is the festival of the future for Europe. So Peter, why don't you take it away with your opening statement?

Well, Steve, when one talks about the future and the future of technology, it's always hard to know where this is going to go, where it's going to happen. I think rather than start with the future, maybe it's worth just reflecting a little bit on the past and how people thought technology and computers were going to develop in the past. And I think, um, if we look over the last, uh, 60, 70 years of the computer age, there were very different visions people had of how it would develop. And if you sort of go back to say the late 1960s, people had a view of computers as being the sort of powerfully centralizing force, that you'd have sort of large computers, large databases that would run the planet. This was sort of the science fiction movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You have sort of a computer that's running it. It's a little bit too powerful. It's HAL or IBM, one letter different from the computer in Space Odyssey. There's an early Star Trek, original Star Trek episode where they come to this planet, Vaal, where there's a computer that's been running the planet for 8,000 years, and it sort of runs the whole planet. The people are kind of peaceful but boring. Nothing ever happens. And as usual, the Star Trek people, they don't follow the Prime Directive, and they sort of convince the computer to destroy itself, and then history begins again. But that was sort of the future circa 1968. It was that the computer age would be massively centralizing. And then if we fast forward to the late 1990s, people thought of computer technology as powerfully decentralizing, that the information age would break down very large structures.

And this was certainly linked to the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissemination of information. There wouldn't be a single centralized source of truth. It would be much more diffuse, and that you'd have sort of this very decentralized, crypto-anarchist future. And that was sort of the future of the world circa 1998. And if you then fast forward to 2018, somehow we're back to 1968. We're back to thinking that the computer age means ever more centralization in the form of, you know, large companies, large governments, large databases. But what I think this history tells us is that we should at least, since the pendulum has swung so wildly from one end to the other, we should at least be open and we should ask this question: Is it really going to be ever more centralization, or could it also go the other way?

And certainly, if I was betting on it, my sort of contrarian bias at this point would be to bet on decentralization, because the pendulum is so far in one direction, I tend to think it can only go the other way. And you can sort of frame this in terms of specific technologies. So I think that in some ways, AI, artificial intelligence, which is this very ambiguous word, it means all these different things, but it certainly stands for more centralization. It stands for the computers, the databases, knowing more about you than you know about yourself. It's like the God of St. Augustine. It's completely inside you. It's completely outside you. It knows more about you than you know about yourself.

And that's sort of this powerful centralizing vision of the future. But then I think the alternate technology would be something like crypto and all these technologies that suggest there will be more room for privacy, for individual sovereignty, for things going very much the other way. If you want an ideological formula, if crypto is libertarian, which is the way it often gets described, then we should also say that AI is communist. And the easy way to see this is the Chinese Communist government loves AI, it hates crypto, and it's because it understands that the future is open, it's a choice, and these different technologies can push it very much in one direction or another. But I think this general theme of—

—"Are we heading towards more centralization or decentralization?" is one that it's worth thinking about a lot. Let me give a more concrete version of this in terms of starting tech companies, building new businesses. And there's a centralized version of this where tech is somehow centered on Silicon Valley. It's something that happens there. There was a talk I gave about 13 years ago in 2005 at Stanford University in Palo Alto. And the question that was raised at the time was, "Where will we find the next Google?" Which was interesting. It was mostly a student audience at Stanford University. And people were interested in joining the company that was going to be the next Google. It's a search question, but you can't type it in on the search engine.

So it's a very important question, but you couldn't type it into Google and get the answer. And the answer I gave at the time was that I thought there was a 50% chance that you would find it within five miles of the room we were at, or eight kilometers. So it was still like, you had to still search that area, but that was one-millionth, one one-millionth of the surface area of the planet was within eight kilometers of that auditorium at Stanford University. I think the correct answer in some ways turned out to be Facebook, and it was actually about three kilometers from where we were at the time. 2.8, 2.9 kilometers by bike, three kilometers by car, something like that. And now if you had to fast forward to 2018, if I had to give the same talk, I think it's a much less than 50% chance that it would be within 50 miles, within 80 kilometers of Silicon Valley.

I think it is going to be much more decentralized. These things can happen in many different places. The knowledge of what it takes to build companies is much more diffuse. And even though there are these network advantages that you have in a place like Silicon Valley or that you have in the big cities, they also have some costs and some disadvantages. And one way to articulate this in the context of Silicon Valley is that even though you have network effects, you have other people who've done it, you have capital, you have all this institutional history that's very helpful, you also have a tax that comes with it. It's gotten very expensive to live there. There's a certain conformity of thought that is helpful up to some point, and then beyond that point gets to be very counterproductive.

And so if I had to bet on where it would happen, I think we have to look far more all over the world. And I think there have been some early signs of this in recent years, that it's going to happen outside of Silicon Valley. The crypto phenomenon has been very diffuse. That's happened in many places outside of Silicon Valley. It's something Silicon Valley's largely missed. The Chinese internet, which again has all these political dimensions, that happened in China, not in Silicon Valley. And I think over the next decade, it will be much more decentralized in various ways. And so I think that's this very big trend I would point to.

Okay. Well, thank you very much for that, Peter. And I was wondering, given what you said, that the fact that you've recently, at least in this year, moved to Los Angeles, is that some indication that, in a sense, you're leading by example in moving away from Silicon Valley?

I don't want to exaggerate any of these things, but yes, I think there were tremendous advantages to being in Silicon Valley for a very long time. And at this point, I think it's quite a bit more ambiguous. It's not just myself. If you look at something like Y Combinator, the most prominent of the Silicon Valley accelerators, four or five years ago people would come from all over the U.S., all over the world to Y Combinator. It was a three- to six-month program and then you'd stay there and you'd build your company. Today the pattern is much more you go there for three to six months and then you come back to where you were from. It's gotten much less expensive to build companies outside of the

outside of the megacities. We've been in this age of globalization where we're told that the future is in the big cities. There's no future outside the big cities. So it's New York or Silicon Valley, London in Europe. And I think we're headed towards a time where it's going to be a little bit more balanced.

Now, this distinction that you've raised between AI versus crypto, which I think people who followed your work know about, and it kind of tracks a sort of general trajectory in the way in which you might even say civilization develops, right? We go from centralized to decentralized, and since information technology is the primary form of technology driving everything, we have this pattern there too. Do you see, I mean, the way you've presented it in your introductory remarks is that you make it seem like it is a kind of cyclical thing, but is there anything in the middle that's stable?

So I think it's always a question of human choice, human agency, what choices we make. We talk ourselves into these stories that it's going to be centralized or decentralized. Today, the dominant story is one of further centralization, and I think it's a much more open question. We're not at the end of history.

No, no, I understand that. And in fact, I guess... Okay, so let's accept for the moment this kind of fictional narrative that it is somewhat cyclical. Do you think that people now should be aiming for more decentralization? So, for example, in Europe we've got this General Data Protection Regulation that's just been imposed, right, which in a sense is an attempt, I guess, to re-regulate stuff that in a sense had been deregulated. I mean, I take it this is something that you would oppose?

Yeah, although I am sympathetic to a lot of the concerns about privacy. And certainly, I would describe the GDPR as, even though it's an EU-level regulation, it is in a sense, it is a move away from the global internet. If you sort of think of globalization, I've often thought there are these different dimensions of globalization. It's a movement of peoples, immigration policy. It's movement of goods, trade policy. Movement of money, bank regulation, and then movement of ideas, which is the internet. And without commenting on the desirability of it, the tide on this is just going out. The tide is going out on globalization. And if I had to rank these four types of things, I would have thought the hardest one to regulate, the hardest one to be against globalization was in the free movement of ideas.

And so you could sort of say that the EU, with the GDPR, it's building a wall greater than any wall President Trump is building. It's more extreme than anything that you're doing, because building a wall to stop people is much easier than building a wall to stop ideas. But they're setting out to do it. China succeeded in doing it with the Great Firewall of China. And so there's nothing about the future that's set in stone where these things can't happen.

No, no, look, I understand exactly what you're saying. I think, though, if I may play devil's advocate from the EU standpoint, and this is kind of the way the European Union normally thinks about itself, it sees itself as actually a vanguard of a certain kind of globalization, right? A globalization that will allow protection of privacy, that will allow free everything, right? I mean, that's been the standard way in which the European Union—the idea is all these countries getting together would actually set a standard for a greater sense of globalization, but you're presenting quite an opposite story in terms of how the EU narrative is going. You're seeing it as ultimately a protectionist organization.

Well, again, I have an American Silicon Valley bias on this, but certainly from the point of view of Silicon Valley, it looks very much like it's targeted against the sort of globalized big Silicon Valley internet companies and that Europe is saying there are different sets of rules apply in Europe from elsewhere in the world. And certainly, Europe would like its rules to apply to the whole world, but as a starting point, it's building a wall on the internet and separating Europe from America. I'm sympathetic to a lot of the privacy concerns, but it's so much at odds with this narrative that we have that all the walls are going away.

No, no, no, I agree. I mean, I think this is a real interesting kind of issue with regard to how the EU defines itself, whether it sees itself as a very global universalizing thing or whether it's going to be protectionist because it's afraid about China or the US or somebody like that. I want to ask you a little bit about China for a moment, okay? Because in a sense, China—I mean, at least in terms of how you presented this initially, China is setting a certain kind of standard with regard to its own protectionism, with regard to the internet and so forth. And I'm just wondering, how do you see China figuring in the long term in terms of, you know, given that China is now already the second leading economic power, who knows, it may be the leading one before we know it.

I mean, what do you see the role of China ultimately, and how should people in Europe respond to that?

Well, it's, again, it's hard to—I can sort of, depending which day you ask me, I have these very different views where China's gonna take over the world or it's gonna collapse from its own internal contradictions, or maybe both. I think there's, again, something about a certain story we have about how history is going. And there was the Fukuyama version, where we can end with liberal democracy. And when President Xi was made president for life in China earlier this year, from a libertarian or democratic perspective, that's not a good thing. From an anti-history-is-determined perspective, it was the definite end to the end of history. And so we live in a—for better and for worse, we live in a time when history has not ended.

And so I don't think there's anything determinist about what's going to happen. And it's certainly not the case that the Western EU-Brussels understanding is automatically going to win.

Okay, so, because you know, one of the ways in which people thought Fukuyama's *The End of History*—by the way, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about here, Fukuyama in 1992, *The End of History and the Last Man*—the idea was liberal democracy was gonna triumph over everything because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And usually the way people talk about that story falling apart is because of terrorism and 9/11, right? And the idea of Islamism and all that kind of stuff. But here you're talking about a different kind of way in which the end of history story ends, which has to do with the fact that maybe we weren't—that the world wasn't all that committed to democracy in the first place.

And so I'm wondering, you know, when you look at—somebody, you look at the way in which China is organized, where we do have a kind of president for life kind of situation going on in a very advanced economy. What do you see the fortunes for democracy, generally speaking? Should China be, in some sense, be used as a kind of model or example? Because I think in this part of the world—and I mean in this part of the world, Eastern Europe—there's a lot of questions up in the air about just how valuable democracy is, especially parliamentary democracy.

Well, I think one of the questions is just what kinds of things are charismatic? What kinds of things are futures that are likely to happen? And so there is a narrative about China taking over the world, so it has a certain power. There is a narrative about AI taking over the world and replacing human beings. I think there are a lot of other—a lot of other possibilities about that. But certainly it's not automatic. It's not just one thing. And we live in a time when I think these things are going to be more open-ended. Certainly I much prefer living in a Western American or European context. It would be very uncomfortable living in the sort of panopticon-like society that China has. But just because it's undesirable doesn't mean that it can't be powerful or that it can't last for a very long time.

Okay, so let me ask you this question, if I may. You and I agree that freedom is a really important thing and that people should have it and so forth. But do you think that time has passed when parliamentary democracy is the best vehicle for delivering that?

I don't know what the alternatives are. So I do think—I think—I think there are ways in which, you know, our Western governments are not working that well. There are all these things. They're, you know, they're not—they're not very competent. There's sort of—there's sort of corruption. There are all these things. Sure, they're not doing well. But, but it's still like the Churchill question: what's, you know, what is the better?

Yeah, yeah.

Sure. You know, certainly in a—in a United States context, there's been, you know, as a libertarian, I'm always sort of anti-government, anti-the-state, but there's also been an extraordinary decline of competence of the US government. And so, you know, we couldn't do the Manhattan Project anymore in the US. I don't think they could send someone to the moon. I'm not even sure they can rebuild the Pentagon office building in Washington, D.C. No, I understand.

And this has been a very constant theme in your thinking, that the state doesn't work, just generally.

But it's declined, that it has actually declined in the Western world. Where I live in San Francisco, in the backyard, you have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was built in three and a half years in the 1930s. And then there's an access road to the bridge that cost more in inflation-adjusted dollars to build and took eight years to build. And so that sort of is, again, this extraordinary decline in competence that's happened. And we shouldn't gloss it too ideologically. So it's not—the libertarian gloss is all governments in all places don't work.

Well, this is why I want to know, Peter, what would it take for states to demonstrate that they are working?

I think the sort of question in a developed Western context would be that people think the future's getting better. There's always this survey: does the young generation think they will do better than their parents or not? And in the US, the majority of young people think they will be less well-off than their parents. In Western Europe, it's an even smaller minority that thinks they will be better off than their parents. And so that's—I would say that's sort of an indicator of that we're broadly not progressing in the right direction. And certainly the governments, the not-that-well-functioning governments, are a part of that lack of progress. There's always a way the technology story gets—gets portrayed as, you know, accelerating technology.

It's getting faster. Things are changing at a dizzying speed. And then you have sort of utopian versions, which is sort of the Google propaganda of self-driving cars and, you know, space elevators and things like that. And then there's the dystopian version, which is the Hollywood science fiction movies where the robots kill everybody or the whole world self-destructs. But both the accelerating and dystopian story is that things are happening so fast. And the concern I have on the technology side is that things are not happening quickly enough, and that there certainly are certain verticals. The computer piece is one where there has been a lot of change, but the cell phones, the new cell phones that we have—

distract us from our environment. For the most part, distract us from how our environment has not changed. If you're in London or New York City, you're riding on subways that are 100 years old. And so I worry that the debate isn't really about utopian acceleration or dystopian apocalyptic technology destroying itself, but that the general stagnation is something we need to try to break.

Peter, I can agree with you more, but then I wonder, why do you call yourself a conservative if what you're worried about is stagnation and the failure to progress and the lack of acceleration? I mean, why? Because, you know, for example, in a lot of the news reporting about you, like when you moved to Los Angeles, it's always said... because you're a conservative. And I'm saying, when I read your stuff or listen to you, it's hard to actually see what's so conservative about you unless you mean conservative as a sort of synonym for libertarian.

Look, I think these political labels are always more misleading than helpful. But certainly, what I would say, if we frame this in terms of Western civilization since the Enlightenment, it was a civilization in which every generation was better off than the generation that was before. And so that has been the way our societies have worked for at least 250 years, maybe even longer. And so the change towards stagnation, that is a change from, there's a certain way you can organize a society if it's progressing, if it's growing, if the economy grows two, three, 4% a year, you can solve a lot of problems. That's the way our parliamentary democracies work. The way our democracies, our parliaments work is you have a growing pie

And so everybody agrees, and we figure out new ways to divide up the growing pie. If the pie no longer grows, then I can only gain something by taking something from you. It becomes this sort of zero-sum game. It becomes more of a racket, and then our whole system does not work very well. And if you look at the decades, the 1930s were sort of a bad decade for growth and for parliamentary democracy in the Western world. And so I would say that our system only works with growth. If you try to have a zero-growth society, maybe that works if you have something feudal, maybe it works if you have something that's completely totalitarian, but it would represent a tremendous break from our past.

Again, I couldn't agree with you more, but I think the word 'conservative' is very misleading under those circumstances. It's a kind of failed progressivism, a failure of progressive people to actually deliver on their promises, and you want to see progressive people deliver on their promises, basically.

Okay. Well, look, why don't we turn now and look at some of the audience's questions? I mean, because we've got eight questions, and we can return to some of the themes that we've discussed earlier. But I want to make sure, because people have taken a lot of trouble to submit questions and so forth, and we've talked about which ones to go through. So the first one is: why hasn't Europe produced successful tech companies on the scale of Facebook, Apple, or Google?

Well, I'll give you what the standard answer to that question is, and then I'll give you sort of my somewhat different answer. So I think the standard answer is always that Europe is too conservative, to use your terminology. It's too risk-averse. People are too scared of failure. It's the fear of failure that dominates Europe. And certainly there are elements of that, even though I never actually think that a celebration of failure is that good of a thing. And so there's sometimes in Silicon Valley, there's almost like this pornography of failure where you talk about all your failures. This somehow means that you're going to succeed if you've failed at a lot of things. And so that's sort of the way it typically gets described.

The somewhat alternate answer I would give, which I think is at least as important, in a European context is what I would describe as not a fear of failure, but a fear of success. That in the sort of social democratic European societies, it's acceptable to be moderately successful. It's not acceptable to be wildly successful. And so if you have a successful company that's starting to grow, it will get short-circuited and you will sell the company at some point. And maybe that's the right answer, but you will never get to an enormous company if you sell it along the way. The Facebook anecdote on this that I always tell is I think the single most important decision in the history of Facebook: summer of 2006—it was two years into the company—we got an acquisition offer for $1 billion from Yahoo to buy the company.

And so there were three of us on the board: Mark Zuckerberg, myself, another venture capital investor. And we had a Monday morning board meeting to decide, should we take the billion dollars or not? And the two of us, the two investors, probably thought, 'It's probably a lot of money. We should maybe take it.' Mark sort of started the board meeting and said, 'You know, this is just a pro forma thing. We're just going to talk about this for 10 minutes because we have to have a quick board meeting to turn it down. Obviously, we're not taking it.' And then the two of us said, 'Well, you know, maybe we should. A billion dollars is a lot of money. You're 22 years old. You'll get 250 million. There's a lot you could do with 250 million dollars.'

And then Mark sort of went, 'Well, I don't actually know what I would do with the money. I'd probably just start another social networking company, but I already have one, so why would I sell it?' And anyway, it took more than 10 minutes. We went back and forth like this for about eight hours. But at the end of the day, the decision was not to sell the company. And I would submit that any super successful, super big tech company is one where you've—you've been offered multiple times, people have offered to buy it, and you—you've chosen never to sell it. You're not that afraid of success. And I think—I think in Europe, the answer is to check out sooner rather than later, to go back to having—back to your—to the, you know, decade-long vacation that people are on in Europe. And that's sort of—that's—that's the answer people are given.

Okay, well, look, I didn't realize you were gonna give such a deep answer, which leads me then to ask a follow-up question, and it's in connection to the fear of success and how not to be fearful of success. And it's this idea that you're obviously quite successful at thinking with money, okay? And so you've just given a kind of scenario about when you hold on, when you give away, and all the rest of it. And I'm just wondering, generally speaking, given that you are this wealthy person, you're someone with an enormous amount of vision. I mean, do you have a general kind of view about how you think with money? Because you invest in certain things and not other things, and you think certain other kinds of investors are investing in the wrong things.

I mean, can you give a general kind of view about that? Because obviously you're successful at what you're talking about here.

Well, it'll sound like the wrong thing to say, but there is a sense in which money is somewhat overrated. It's incredibly charismatic, it's incredibly powerful. When I pitched PayPal, I used to—let's see if I can, I'll do this as a prop, I don't have my wallet on me, but I used to always hold up a $100 bill, and it was like this hypnotic effect. Everybody would—would look at it, and then, why would—why do you want it? And so there's something—um, there's something where we think of money as the answer to all our problems. If we have money, you can—uh, you can—you can—um, you can figure out what to do with it. There are all these—all these problems you can solve. Um, but what I think is at least as important, or more important, as actually having some ideas or some concrete instantiations.

And in the sort of over-financialized world we live in, money is pure optionality. If you have money, you can do anything with it. But if you have no ideas, you will just leave it in cash. And again, to pick on Europe a little bit here, you know, the most extreme versions, you know, you have negative interest rates in Europe and it's because people want money so badly and they have so few ideas, they're willing to keep it in a checking account that earns negative interest rates. They lose a little bit of money every year, but that somehow is preferable to having concrete ideas. I think we live in this over-financialized world where we think money is the answer to everything, and yet the negative interest rates tell us that we're in a world with way too much money and way too few ideas.

Well, that may be true, actually. And I just want to step back a little bit because, of course, in the 20th century, one of the things that was very noticeable was the way in which a lot of people who made a lot of money through industry in various ways ended up putting their money in philanthropic foundations. So we talk about Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, all these guys, Sloan. And in Germany, Siemens, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen. In Britain, we have Wellcome and Nuffield. We have all these different sorts of industry-based foundations that actually did a lot in terms of shaking up the academic establishment with regard to the way science and technology goes. Now, I take it that that kind of model is not really appropriate for the 21st century, at least based on the way you do your investing.

You don't think the foundation model is really appropriate?

Well, it's definitely something that people do. I've done my share of it. And at the same time, it's amazing how ineffective most nonprofits seem to be. And there's something I find almost emotionally exhausting, talking to nonprofit people. It's sort of like if you're investing in a business, you know, it's like there's your business, we're on other sides of the table, but once I invest, we're both partners and then we're on the same side and it's sort of this healthy relationship. Whereas if you have a nonprofit and if I give you some money, then, you know, you come along and you'll want even more money the next year.

And so it's just this sort of super adversarial, emotionally exhausting relationship. Parasitic.

And then, you know, sort of the very low standard that I've started to have for nonprofits is I'd like to give money to nonprofits where the people I give money to won't hate me afterwards. And that sounds like a ridiculous standard, but it's actually not that low a standard because it's like you'll then get annoyed at me because somehow you have this dependency on my money and then you start hating me because I'm giving you money. I mean, it's all like incredibly screwed up beyond belief. And so I've come back to thinking that corporations are underrated because so many of these other institutions do not work. It's one of the things that's endlessly frustrating to a lot of the very successful people in Silicon Valley.

They've had these corporations that have transformed the world. And then there's always a thought that the next step is to then do something with a foundation or on a nonprofit side that will be even bigger than the company they built, even more impactful than the company. And without naming names or going into particulars, the rule seems to be that they did 100 times as much with their company than they will ever do with their nonprofits.

So, in this video that we played for you in the beginning where you were seen as the John D. Rockefeller of our time, is that kind of mistaken or do you resonate to that in any way?

Well, I'm not as successful as Rockefeller was, so that's not fair. Okay, let's take that off the table. But again, I think Rockefeller was successful for building the Standard Oil Company. You should not take that away from Rockefeller. Counterfactual question is always: if you didn't do it, would it have happened anyway? And I think a lot of the great companies, if they hadn't been built, they would not have been built. On the philanthropy side, I would submit that a lot of it would happen anyway. And this is always my sort of contrarian question, where it's always: what business is nobody building? What ideas do you have that nobody agrees with you on? What's the unique edge? What's the unique insight?

The nonprofit version of the question is—what great nonprofit—that I always have is, what great nonprofits is nobody supporting? I don't want to support nonprofits that everybody supports because they presumably have enough money. I want to support nonprofits that are unfashionable, that nobody supports. And in the nonprofit world, even more than in the corporate world or the world of ideas, fashion is all-important. And it's so dominated by fashion, by fitting in, by doing things that everybody would do anyway, that as a result, you end up making very little of a difference. And so I think if Rockefeller hadn't done it, Carnegie would have done it. They were all doing roughly the same things.

And this is still the very same problem. So the nonprofit version I have is, you know, if you give money to a nonprofit cause, you should be willing to do it anonymously. And you should ask the question, you know, are you doing it just to get social status, respect, recognition, or are you doing it because you really believe it?

Look, I actually agree with the general sentiment here. And we're going to have to move on to the other seven questions, I'm afraid. But one thing I would say to you and to the audience is, actually, this plays to something you're concerned about very much, which didn't come up in the questions. And that is the rigidity of universities in terms of how they motivate their academics. And one of the things that the Rockefeller Foundation—and this is how we got molecular biology—it was basically breaking down disciplinary boundaries that were otherwise not obviously going to be broken down, just left to the devices of academia. So I would say that the Rockefeller Foundation was very innovative in that regard, innovative with regard to a rigid academia, which of course plays to your argument about why academia is such a problem.

But we don't have to talk about that anymore, but I just want you to think about that for the future, because I know you have a lot of problems with the university, and I share them, and it has to do with this issue. I know we can talk about the universities for a few hours. The second question that was asked was, how much do you trust your instincts instead of mathematical business plans?

Well, I'm always a little bit bad at these sort of general psychological questions, but, you know, what struck me about that question is how it's set up as though it's instinct versus mathematical science. And even though they might be exclusive, surely they're not exhaustive. And there's a lot that's in between. There's common sense. There's local knowledge. There's logical reasoning. There's sort of all these other sort of intermediate forms of approaching things that I think are actually very underrated. And so I think we live in a world that overrates instinct and mathematical science and that underrates everything else. And the problem with instinct is, you know, it's just so irrational, it doesn't actually...

Maybe it works in some cases, but probably way overrated. The problem with mathematical science is that most of our world can't be reduced to math. And if you only work on problems that can be mathematically described, maybe you should be a math professor. But you're going to end up distorting the world in very big ways. And I think there's this large range of intermediate things. And so if, as a venture capitalist, if I'm investing in another company, you know, there's, you know, if you went just with instinct or just with mathematical science, I mean, you'd lose all your money so quickly. And if I said, "Oh, I'm only going to invest in companies that the supercomputer generates, that the mathematical model says are good," well, that doesn't work.

There's no supercomputer for that. And if it's all instinct, if it's just, "Well, I'm just going with a five-second impression," it's like, you know, five seconds. I'm not going to, I'm only going to talk to you for five seconds at a time. The longer I talk to you, that interferes with my instincts. And then you'll convince me of things I shouldn't believe and I should just go with my instincts, it'd be like 10 seconds, 20 seconds, but 20 minutes is worse than 20 seconds. That's probably a little bit wrong too. So I think that I would go with all the things that are in between.

So I take it that when you give this kind of answer, you're actually describing your own practice.

Okay, okay, just to be sure. No, just to be sure, and that's what I thought. I think it's clear for the audience to realize that you've got to know both in some sort of way.

Well, but it's also all the stuff that's not covered by both.

No, no, of course, of course, and also the stuff not covered. But, no, that's very good. Okay, so do you have people in your life who question your ideas other than the media?

You do. No, I think... Of course, and I think we all have enormous numbers of people who question our ideas. The thing I would push back a little bit on is there is always a point where it's good to have questioning and then there is, there is some point where it's too powerful. So if every time you have a half-formed idea that's a slightly different idea and immediately you have 15 people who shoot it down, "Oh, that's too crazy, it's too different, you shouldn't think that, nobody thinks that, that must be wrong." That's a way things can go wrong. So you have to always realize that there are two kinds of ways things can go wrong. One is for ideas never to be questioned, and then the other one is for them to be questioned too quickly, for them to always get shot down, for them to always get distorted and mischaracterized in one way or another.

And I tend to think that the world we live in is one where heterodox ideas are questioned too aggressively. You know, they always get mischaracterized. They get sort of turned into a straw-man version. And what would be healthier would be not immediately distorting someone's ideas into some soundbite that you can tweet and say, "Well, they're a terrible person because they think this." But instead of always straw-manning ideas and being quick to debunk them, to tear them down, it would be actually much more generative for us sometimes to do the opposite. Let's call it steel-manning ideas. Make them even stronger than they are. Yes. So you have an idea, it's not very coherent, it doesn't totally make sense, but I'll work with you and I'm going to try to strengthen your idea so it's even stronger, so that the other 19 people who are going to tear it down won't be able to do so quite so quickly.

Again, I couldn't agree with you 100% more than that, no. So I don't disagree with you on this one.

Good, okay. Peter, why do you think Silicon Valley is such a left-leaning place?

These political questions are always difficult. You know, I do think the first part is that it's always hard to score what people really think. So it's probably not as left-leaning as people say. And, of course, this is part of the problem of political correctness, is that people don't always articulate their views. And so it's not quite as uniform as people make it out to be. But I think it is sort of a combination of different things that have come together. There certainly is a K-through-16 education. It's the most educated part of the U.S. And the education tilts people in a certain way. There's a version where it's not—it's not really, the politics of Silicon Valley aren't radical left, it's sort of establishment center-left, and there's a sense things have worked, and for the people for whom things have worked, they generally think everything is working pretty well, and it's sort of less critical in that sense.

So I think it's a combination of these different factors.

So, and the next question is, why did you support Trump, and what's his best and worst decision so far?

We're not getting away from politics here.

Well, this is what the audience wants.

Well, you know, it was in some ways both my least contrarian decision ever, since about half the people in the U.S. did it, and of course within a Silicon Valley context, it felt very contrarian. I think that—I think that a lot of the political debates had gotten too sterile in the U.S. Somehow it was the Wall Street left-liberalism versus the zombie Reaganism. It was Clinton versus Bush. We had the same two families battling it out for the last 25, 30 years. And it's like something out of Shakespeare: the Clintons versus the Bushes. It's like the opening line of *Romeo and Juliet*, the Montagues versus the Capulets. And the Shakespeare play starts with "two houses alike in dignity." And so they hate each other, but they're identical.

There are no differences between the Bushes and the Clintons. And somehow that's perfectly fine if they'd been doing a good job running the country, if everything was going well. But my judgment was that there were too many questions that were being left unasked, unanswered, that the solution for a lot of our political, cultural challenges isn't going to be in a very narrow zone. We have to sort of widen the range of debate, widen the range of discussion. There are all sorts of things one can say about President Trump where it's, you know—you know, it's not too impolite. There are all these things that he's done that are very controversial. But I think it has blown open the debate in a very powerful way.

And I think the U.S. and the Western world is better for that.

Let me ask you a question, because I speak as someone who actually supported Hillary Clinton even when she was running against Obama. So I'm really behind the wave on this one. But the thing I would say about Trump, and I'm just wondering whether you would agree, is that given the kinds of decisions, the kinds of judgments he's been making, when he makes them and so forth, is, I would say, and you can disagree, that this is a guy who actually has pretty good political judgment.

Well, it's definitely been underestimated all the way through. So it was assumed that he would get badly defeated in the Republican primary. It was assumed he would never win the general election. It was assumed that he would be impeached within a year or so. And so, no, I think... you know, has a very good feel for what is going on. And I think the, you know, the thing that Trump understands, that President Trump understands in a way that, let's say, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush in the US did not understand was that things weren't quite right in the country. Things were kind of... you know, going the wrong way. You can say that the, you know, the Trump slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' is in some ways—it's the most pessimistic, negative slogan any major presidential candidate in the U.S. has had in decades because it's like things are really off track.

It's perhaps why he's so offensive to Silicon Valley because the Silicon Valley self-understanding is, 'We've been doing everything great, we've been making the country, the world, a better and better place.' And so if you have someone come along and say, 'Well, in some ways, things were better in the past,' that's an incredibly, incredibly jarring thing to say. But yes, I think in some ways, of course, President Obama also, you know, stood for change. At least that's what he campaigned on. Now, at the end of the day, he did not change things all that much. But certainly, you know, the original Obama slogan in 2008 was 'Hope and Change.' So it was sort of expansive. Things weren't on the right track.

We need to change things a lot. That's what people thought they were voting for with Obama in 2008. And in that sense, I would say President Trump is actually a continuation of some of the things people thought they were getting with Obama.

Oh, that's very interesting, actually. Now, you know, Trump in the last week has signed this Right to Try legislation, which actually allows people who have incurable diseases to be able to use various kinds of treatments that haven't yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States. And I take it you're very sympathetic to that? Yes. I mean, for those of you who don't know, I mean, this is quite interesting, because this goes against the sort of precautionary aspect of government that has been very dominant for a long time. And so, in a sense, Trump is kind of allowing the government to open up people to do stuff they weren't allowed to do previously.

Well, Steve, you and I have talked about this in the past, but there's always this precautionary principle that we have to be very scared about all the possible things that can happen, that can go wrong with technology, that can go wrong with, with experimental drugs or experimental medical treatments. And then I always think sort of the counterpoint to the precautionary principle—I think you have the proactive— Proactionary, yeah. —the proactionary principle. But sort of the counterpoint to it is always that we're not living in a perfect world. If we live in a world where nobody ever got sick or died, maybe a precautionary principle would be a good thing. If we're living in a world with terrible, incurable diseases, maybe we want to actually disrupt that.

We want to try some things that are very different. And so I think a lot of the, again, using conservatism in your sense, a lot of the sort of techno-, anti-technology, anti-science, "we should not change the world," it sort of has this implicit assumption that things are actually pretty good, that they're better than people think. And the assumption I have, and maybe the two of us have, is that things are actually a lot worse than people think. We don't realize how terrible it is to be sick. The people who are talking on stages like this are always healthy, and so we don't understand what it's like to have a terrible, incurable disease, because if we did, we'd be in a hospital in bed, and we wouldn't be lobbying for these medical treatments.

And so I think we should always try to overcome this overly precautionary bias that we have.

This is a really good point. I hope people pay attention to this. Now, we've got these last two questions, and they are the deepest questions. And one of them has to do with the future of Christianity in the era of digital technology, and also, why should we live longer if we're destroying the earth?

So you can take these really small questions here.

Take them as you wish. But we've left enough time, I think, for you to deal with them.

Well, I... know, I think the, um, there's there's always a sense that, um, the the future of technology and science and the modern world is that, uh, you know, religion is going to disappear, Christianity will disappear, it'll sort of get successively, uh, debunked, um, you know, it's it's like just one fairy tale among many, and that, uh, you know, this is like, I remember there's a sort of Soviet-era thing where they had a cosmonaut in outer space, and then the headline was, 'God does not exist. We went to outer space and we didn't see, there's no God in heaven, there's no God on earth.' And so there's always sort of a debunking of the metaphysics of it in a way. But the question I think is more interesting about Christianity or religion is perhaps not the metaphysical question but more the political, ethical, cultural question.

And I think one of the things that I take, maybe this is sort of like a contrast I would say between the Enlightenment view and, let's say, what I'll call the Christian view is sort of, the Enlightenment view is that people are reasonable, and the more people you have believe something, the more reasonable it gets. And this is sort of the, you know, you sum up what people think and you sort of converge to the truth. And then there's sort of a Christian counterpoint that if everybody thinks something, that doesn't make it more true, it makes it more suspicious. It's Joseph against his 12 brothers, or it's Christ is right, but then the crowd is wrong. And so I think one of the questions always worth asking is, when is the Enlightenment view right?

When do we have the wisdom of crowds? And when is what I'll call the Christian view right? When is it the madness of crowds? And what I would submit is that this is not an easy question to answer, and that we should always keep both possibilities in mind. If you go back to the Malcolm Gladwell book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which people always cite as a simple thing to refer to, and this is why crowds are smart, and the bigger the crowd, the smarter it gets. What the book actually says is you can trust crowds to be wise when every single person is making a rational decision not influenced by anybody else, and then, of course, and then when you sum up all those rational decisions, you get to an even better sort of collective result, um, and, uh, when does that happen? You know, maybe it happens if we had a glass of marbles, you know, estimate how many marbles are in it, but it, it often does not. There's so many other things that are more fashion, they're more mimetic, it's more these crowd contagion effects that are very powerful, uh, you know, the the political version of this would be...

In a democracy, we believe in the wisdom of the majority. So if you have a 51-49 majority, that's probably more right than wrong. If it's a 70-30 majority, well, that's even better. It's even wiser. But if you have a 99-1 or 100-0 majority, you're in North Korea. And so there is some point where you go from, you know, the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds. And then, you know, just to come back to the question I always formulate is, what do you believe to be true that nobody agrees with you on? That is sort of this, that's this individual question. The truth is not... at the end of the day is not with a crowd, it's with the individual. There's always space for individual thought. Maybe the crowd will be correct if we're at the end of history, we've discovered everything, you have some crazy new idea because we've already figured everything out.

The crowd should just go ahead and lynch you and throw you out of your university position. But I don't think we're at the end of history. I think there's still a lot of things we don't know. And so we will have to have a lot of space for individual thought, for some time to come. And so we have to always have this wisdom of crowds, but heavily counterbalanced by an awareness of the madness of crowds. Network effects aren't always positive. Network effects can be negative. They can be points where you get lemming-like behavior, you get crazy financial bubbles, you get sort of mass insanity of one form or another, and that's something we should always keep an eye on.

Yes, and I think what you're saying to me resonates very much with a very particular understanding, a very strong understanding of Christianity that we're fallen creatures. And in a sense, we should always operate on the assumption that we are fallible, that we are wrong. And so if a lot of people who are fallible believe the same thing, it doesn't follow that therefore it's going to more likely be right. It could just be wrong. And so therefore the idea of someone challenging that might be quite an acceptable thing to do.

It doesn't even have to be fallen, it's just that we're wrong about things, not even about moral things.

No, no, no, I'm just saying, trying to put it into a Christian context, because one of the motivations for the experimental method was that we're fallen, and so therefore we have to try extra hard to get over our biases, right? To counteract our biases, to counteract the crowd effects. And that was kind of how science got off the ground, was by individuals saying, we're fallen, but we can rise above it. But part of what we have to rise above is the crowd.

I think you agree with that. Yes, and when we, and, and, and maybe there are times where the crowd is wise, but if we're too quick to defer to the crowd, that's where things are likely to go especially wrong. You know, there's always this, um, there's always this weird terminology in science where, you know, I like science as, as, you know, an objective thing, as something that's true. I don't like science as something where you're simply deferring to the crowd too much, which is also phenomenologically a lot of what happens. So science gets used in both senses of the word. And the way one of my colleagues always likes to put it is that he likes science, but he doesn't like things that are called science. And so we don't call things physical science or chemical science.

We just call them physics or chemistry because there's nothing controversial. Social science, political science, we use the word science because these fields are not scientific, and we're trying to imbue them with this authority so that we don't ask too many questions.

Well, now, immortality, because this is the final thing that was raised here, and we're running a little bit out of time, and I just want you to say something about your interest in immortality, especially given all this environmental stuff. You know, everybody's saying that humanity is the worst thing on the planet, we're going to destroy the Earth, and now you want people to live forever.

You know, these two things aren't that closely linked. I mean, I think if we're about to destroy the world, we should figure out ways to stop it. If it's desirable to live forever, we should figure out ways to live forever. So I do think of these as two fairly discrete problems. What's striking is that they're so easily linked. And, you know, on the... The thing that's always striking to me is not that I care about life extension or people having longer and better lives, but it's how other people don't seem to care about this. Why is this not something people are alarmed about everywhere? And I think one of the psychological ways that we deal with mortality is through some combination of extreme optimism and extreme pessimism.

Extreme optimism: you know, we're not going to die soon, so we're in denial. No need to worry about it. Extreme pessimism: there's nothing you can do, you should accept it. So it's a combination of denial, which is extreme optimism, and acceptance, which is extreme pessimism. And extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are opposites in some ways, but they're both equally fatalistic. No need to do anything, no ability to do anything, it sums to you do nothing. And I think sort of a healthier attitude would be somewhere in between, that it's not certain that we can do things, that we can solve this, but between denial and acceptance, there's something called fighting. We should be fighting a lot harder.

Life expectancies have been going up by about two to two and a half years a decade in Western Europe for the last 150 years. I'd like it to go up by 10 years a decade, but still I'll take two and a half years. And it's been this long debate between the biologists and the mathematicians. The biologists always say there's a limit, it can't go much further. The mathematicians say, no, it's just a straight line, it's been going for, it's been a straight line, it's been going for decades. And I would—this would be one case where I would at least take some guidance from the mathematicians. But it is striking. When you talk about these things, there are all these objections people have to longer life.

So one's the environmental objection. Maybe people will be bored. Maybe people are bad, they don't deserve. Spoke to Woody Allen a few years ago, and it was one moment where it sort of shifted to, all of a sudden, it was like he was playing a role like he was an actor in a Woody Allen movie. And it was like this existential negative philosophy. We were talking about one of these books, Our Final Century. I think it was Sir Martin Rees, the British astronomer, who said that there's a 50% chance humanity won't survive the next 100 years. And Woody Allen said something like—it started with something like, 'Well, I don't think we'll make it.' And then sententiously added, 'And I don't think we deserve to, because people are so bad.'

And, um, and that's not your view, and my view is the—op—so my view is the—or, you know, my view is the opposite. Um, you know, we should, we should, um, you know, if, uh—you know, if we don't deserve to, we should maybe change our behavior, and we should try to act in better ways. You know, one of my other friends, this older professor—had a conversation with him a few years ago. He was like, "Well, I don't really know if there's an afterlife or not, but I certainly hope there isn't because I don't want to run into my ex-wife." And so what I would say is maybe we should change it so that when you run into your ex-wife, it won't be that bad, so that the future won't be that bad. So the way I would connect it with the ethical thing is I want to live forever, and I want to make a world where it's worth living forever, too.

Well, look, Peter, we're going to have to stop here. I really want to thank you. This was a fabulous discussion. Thank you. And thank you, everyone. Thank you.