Peter Thiel: The Star Trek Computer Is Not Enough - National Conservatism Conference

Our opening conference keynote speaker is Peter Thiel, the celebrated venture capitalist, social visionary, and all-around polymath. He is this evening's third Stanfordian, having earned a BA in philosophy and a law degree there. Peter is proof that one can be an immigrant Silicon Valley icon and a conservative libertarian intellectual, both a global cosmopolitan and an ardent American nationalist. History will someday come to grips with the fact that the most stirring address at the 2016 Republican National Convention was delivered by a founder and a director of Facebook. A similar example of Peter's combining mind is his profound 2014 book, Zero to One, which is a work of philosophy masquerading as how-to-succeed business advice.

A nation that markets original Nietzsche-esque social theory at airport bookstands has just got to have a big future. Please, please read the book. But right now, please warmly welcome Peter Thiel.

Well, Chris, thank you so much for that gracious introduction. It's a tremendous privilege to be here this evening, and I'm going to try to kick this evening off in the spirit of what I think we're trying to accomplish, which is widening the Overton Window for discourse, widening the range of perspectives as we grapple with some of the very real challenges the United States is going to face in the decade ahead. I think that if we want to start, it might be good to start with articulating what the other perspective, what I take to be sort of the opposite of National Conservatism in a way, is. And I think that it's a powerful perspective. It's one that sort of has fixated the Overton Window in a certain way.

And it perhaps can be summarized with a picture. And the picture I have in mind, we've all seen it, is from 1972 when the Apollo 17 astronauts came back to Earth. It was lit up from behind them by the sun. You had the whole picture of the Earth. It's the only time that was ever taken. We haven't actually been back out in space that far since 1972. But, you know, from a distance of 30,000 miles, you know, nations' boundaries don't exist. The only boundary that's real is the one between this planet and interplanetary space. And somehow, you know, it was a long time ago, but, you know, 1972 was so long ago, that was the year Joe Biden first ran for Senate. You know, more significantly, 1972 was also the year where Nixon went to China, and in some way, this current era of globalization began in earnest, and the sort of increasing integration of the world started to happen and accelerate in the decades ahead.

And it is a very powerful picture. It tends to push one. You can contemplate it from a point of view of solipsistic individualism, à la Immanuel Kant, or you can contemplate it from the point of view of sort of planetary collectivism à la Karl Marx. But it is a picture that sort of excludes the middle. It excludes the city. It excludes the nation. It excludes the political. And I think that these sort of questions that the picture obscures are ones that we come back to. And I want to maybe start by just tackling a few of these questions that come to the fore if we focus on the United States. I'm going to focus on four questions. Is Big Tech good for the United States of America? Is free trade good for the U.S. of A.?

Is college good for the U.S.? Is war good for us? And I think as we tackle these questions, the opposite of the sort of abstract globalist perspective where it's sort of like John Lennon's 'Imagine', Earth Day, you know, all sort of abstracted away—it's not to give sort of abstractions of nationalism or sort of the opposite abstractions. It is somehow to deal with very specific, very concrete particulars. And so I'm going to try to do it in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, but drill down into some of the particulars. So if you ask Big Tech what it is doing, if you ask—and I'll pick on Google a little bit here for reasons you might understand—if Google is asked what are they doing, I think sort of one of the kinds of answers they've had is that they're building the Star Trek computer.

So it's sort of not exactly a United States entity. It's sort of an interplanetary, interstellar federation. And what the Star Trek computer can do is it knows everything. It can answer all your questions. It can be a little bit creepy at times. Sometimes it answers your questions before you even ask them. But that's sort of the self-understanding, sort of organizing all of the world's information. And then when you ask the question on the level of the United States, the question of scientific technological progress, I think it comes to the fore in the question of, are people's living standards improving? Are per capita incomes going up? Is productivity going up? Do people think the future is better than the past?

And somehow, the Silicon Valley story is very much at odds with what people actually experience on the ground. And one of the ways I've described it is that we've had in the last 40 or 50 years, we've had a lot of innovation in the world of bits, computers, Internet, mobile Internet, things like that. Much less innovation in the world of atoms. And when I was at Stanford in the late '80s, it would have been a major mistake to go into just about every single engineering field. I mean, nuclear engineering, aero-astro engineering, people knew those were pretty bad. Chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, anything that actually involved building things, changing the world, turned out to be sort of a dead-end career.

And so we had this sort of narrow cone of progress around bits, much less in atoms, and you could sort of summarize it that we, maybe we've built the Star Trek computer, but we don't have anything else from the Star Trek universe. We don't have, we certainly don't have warp drive, we don't even have the Concorde anymore. We don't have, we don't have sort of the matter transporter technology that can rearrange matter and create sort of cornucopia. And instead, we've sort of experienced a few decades of relative stagnation where for the first time in the history of the United States, the younger generation is finding it to be quite a struggle to live up to the standards of their parents, of the Baby Boomers, and people who came before them.

And this is sort of a shocking, shocking disconnect. Silicon Valley is sort of a very insular place. This has sort of only barely started to dawn. It's something I've been on a crusade about for probably the better part of a decade. We sort of wrote a manifesto in 2011 where we sort of summarized this by saying, 'We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters,' which is not meant to be a critique of Twitter or of specific Silicon Valley companies. I think as companies, they do quite well. But they are not proxies for the whole. They do not stand for the sort of progress of the whole. And I think that even with all its sort of campus-like insularity, one can say that in 2019, Silicon Valley is getting a little bit of a bad conscience.

It has gotten a sense that there's a disconnect between its propaganda and reality. The Google propaganda isn't quite working anymore. They're not even talking about self-driving cars that much anymore. has faded a bit. Now I think it's still very preliminary, the bad conscience hasn't, it's mostly sort of manifesting in insane left-wing politics, sort of I think almost of a self-hating variety, sort of a random factoid as of June, about a month ago I was looking at this last, the single candidate that Google employees are donating more to in the presidential cycle than anybody else is Elizabeth Warren, which is sort of like a bad conscience that's sort of directed in a semi-masochistic way, but has not yet led to some of the sort of introspection that one might want or that might help us push in a different direction.

Let me sort of suggest one particular line where this should go. And it's not the only one, but it's one that's sort of shocking and glaring in how disconnected it is from the national interest. So let's take Google at its word. It is building the Star Trek computer. It is building this artificial general intelligence in the form of the DeepMind effort that they have at Google. Is this a military weapon? AI is presumably at least a dual-use weapon. And we've been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the nuclear physicists were in the 1940s. There was a real debate between Teller and Oppenheimer. We've not had any debate about this whatsoever. But I think there are some questions that we should be asking.

And from a national US perspective, let me suggest the following three questions that should be asked of Google. Number one: you know, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI? Number two: does Google senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence? Number three: is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they've engaged in this seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military? Because they figure that if the technology—because they are making the sort of bad, short-term rationalistic calculation that if the technology doesn't go out the front door, it'll get stolen out the back door anyway.

Now, I think whatever bad conscience they have, they are not asking these questions; they're not about to answer them. I think the questions need to be asked on a federal level of the United States. They need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA, and I would—I'm not sure quite how to put this—I would like them to be asked in a not excessively gentle manner. Let me mention sort of one other—there's many—aspects of the tech propaganda that I think we should push back on. But one other one that I always find sort of egregiously off is the story of runaway automation, that we're just going to automate away all the jobs. This is great. People will be put out to pasture. They'll get some universal basic income.

Maybe they'll play video games in the basement. But we have this runaway automation, which of course doesn't show up in the unemployment rate in the US. It doesn't really show up in the productivity numbers. The fundamental thing that I think is going on, in a way, is that most of the jobs that could be automated were automated a long time ago. And our economies—most of the jobs that are left are weirdly immune to automation. So we have an economy that has lots of yoga teachers and kindergarten instructors and nurses and waiters in restaurants whose jobs are not that different from what they were 50 or 100 years ago. And the real worry is that we're going to automate them far too slowly and that we're going to be stuck with low productivity growth for decades to come.

Now, I think this sort of narrative of runaway automation, though, plays an important deflecting role. And the way to sort of get at this is through a thought experiment. Even though I'm sort of pro-technology and pro-innovation, if you told me, 'We're going to build some robots that look just like you. They can do everything you do. They'll be smarter than you. They'll work for free,' you know, I'd actually, at that point, I would get a little bit nervous. Sort of like—it's the reason people are nervous about cloning, not just the bioethics reasons, it's sort of the economic reason. If you have 100 people who are identical to you, you sort of get a sense this might not be that good for your wages.

And so something like those robots in a technological context, that's somewhere between science fiction and science fiction fantasy. It's nowhere close to happening, but if you sort of transpose it, you can say that, you know, human beings who are treated like robots and paid very little, well, that's actually what's going on in India and China. And maybe this whole conversation about automation is just sort of a displaced way to talk about some of the problems of globalization. You know, we tend to use technology and globalization synonymously, except when we differentiate them very sharply, when we end up turning, you know, technology into the scapegoat for the globalization problems we do not want to talk about. This sort of brings me to the second big theme, which is the question of free trade and...

And I think this has been the signature achievement of the Trump administration, has been to reopen this question. And it is one where, in theory, in a world of Ricardo and rational actors and everyone being treated the same, we should have free trade, everyone will be better off. It all sort of makes sense. And yet, I think even if you look at this planet from outer space, you can tell that we are incredibly far from a functioning free trade regime. The U.S. exports $100 billion a year to China, we import $500 billion a year, and in a globalizing world, you'd expect convergence. You would expect the capital to flow to the higher growth regions. You would not expect Chinese peasants to be saving money to invest

in low-yielding U.S. government bonds. And the fact that the money is flowing uphill tells you that something is insanely wrong with the entire trade picture. And it's probably massively overdetermined. You know, it's not just that you have sort of weird restrictions on business and import restrictions in China and unfair double standards in taxation. You probably also have intellectual property theft, all sorts of cyber warfare directed against U.S. corporations. And then, you know, there are probably, you know, I think even from outer space, you could see that China is sort of an unusually dirty country that's dirtying up the whole planet. And maybe we should reframe the 25% tariffs as a carbon tax.

And it's a country where—and if we reframe it as a carbon tax on the country that's dirtying up the planet, maybe the 25% is a floor and not a ceiling. The one sort of very specific recommendation I would have on the free trade side is—that one general recommendation is that you don't want people negotiating trade treaties who dogmatically believe in free trade, because the worse they are at negotiating, the better a job they think they do. It doesn't matter how much the other side rips us off, the better—the more we get ripped off, the better a job we're doing. And we should know things are off enough that we want people who are a little bit distrustful, who are a little bit skeptical, who don't have John Lennon's 'Imagine' playing in the background as they're negotiating a trade treaty or anything like that.

There's a specific problem of political economy that I think is quite severe in the United States and is sort of generally true of the Anglosphere. And you can always, you know, there's always sort of parts of the country that stand for the whole. The 1950s version of this was that there was sort of a GM executive said, 'What's good for General Motors is good for America.' Not precisely correct, but it was approximately correct. And there certainly are some companies that stand for the whole. One case where this is definitely not the case that I want to underscore is, I think, money-center banks do not stand—they are orthogonal; they're negatively correlated to the interests of the United States when it comes to trade.

And the way to articulate this is as a very straightforward accounting identity. If you have a current account deficit, you need to sterilize the current account deficit with capital inflows into the US. The bigger the capital inflows, the capital inflows go through the money-center banking system. The bigger the flows, the more profits the banks make. And there's a long history one could go into on this, but the biggest current account deficits the United States had were in 2006, 2007. They were around $800 billion, roughly 6% of GDP. And the sort of role of the money-center banks was to sterilize these deficits by concocting $800 billion worth of lies about how great the money could be invested in subprime real estate and all these sorts of things.

And every time the current account deficit comes down in the US, we have a banking crisis. We had one from '87 to '91 when the deficit went from minus three and a half to zero. And you had 2,000 S&Ls go broke and Michael Milken went to jail. We had it again from '06 to '09 when it went from minus six to minus three. We stayed at minus three for the last decade. And what obviously has to happen is the current account deficit should go from minus three to zero. But a byproduct of that happening is that we are going to have banking crises, and, you know, at best we can have a sort of a controlled crash landing for the banks. And so my one very specific recommendation is that we know that anybody who works at a Wall Street bank will fight tooth and nail against any sort of sensible trade policy, and we need to keep them away from the negotiating table.

You know, it's—I'm not against, not against the banks categorically, but, but the over-financialized economy that we have in the US, as well as other Anglosphere countries, is not doing us, not doing us any good on this. Let me move on to, let me move on to the, the college topic. And I think, you know, what I think one way to maybe set this up is, I'm always, uh, I think there are all these sort of, you know, ways we fact-check politicians, the ways, things they say that are not precisely accurate. There sometimes are some pretty big untruths they tell. There was the Bush 43 one about the WMD in Iraq. There was the Obama one about, you know, 'If you like your doctor, you can keep him.' But I feel that in some ways, even the big ideological lies aren't that problematic because there's always sort of a partisan dissent to them.

And the lies that we should care about the most are the really big lies that are so big that there's almost nobody at all who calls them out. And one sort of category of these big lies are the nearly universal lies that get told about the universal knowledge that our universities are supposed to provide about the universe, and there's just almost nobody on the outside. I'm going to pick on our... This is my sort of candidate for the biggest lie told in the last decade, the most pernicious lie that almost no one ever, wasn't really called out. And I'm gonna do this as an equal-opportunity one; I'm gonna pick on both Michelle Obama and her husband, Barack Obama. So we'll be equal-opportunity here.

And I'm gonna read this part since I don't wanna be fact-checked, so I wanna make sure I get the quote exactly right. So we'll go ladies first, start with the Michelle Obama lie. Quote: 'The one thing I've been telling my daughters is that I don't want them to choose a name. I don't want them to think, oh, I should go to these top schools. We live in a country where there are thousands of amazing universities. So the question is, what's going to work for you?' Now, in her defense, a few months later, their daughter chose to go to Harvard University. And I would actually be very disturbed if they had actually sent her to the number 1,000 school or something like that. So in their defense, they don't actually believe it.

But it is a lie that they do not tend to get called out on. Sort of the mimetic competition with Barack Obama in an even shorter quote where he gets two lies into one. So he's sort of trying to beat his wife. And 2016, Barack Obama, quote: 'Just because it's not some name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn't mean that you're not going to get a great education there.' So let's enumerate the lies. Number one: if it is not a name-brand, famous, fancy school, you're not going to get a great education there. If you're at number 1,000, you're not getting a great education. The diploma is just a dunce hat in disguise. You're just telling people that you couldn't get in anywhere else. But the second lie is, of course, that if you do go to a name-brand, famous, fancy school, that you're going to get a great education there.

That's also not exactly true. And I think one of the sort of directions that our criticisms have to always take is the other side always deals in abstractions. These abstractions like free trade, like the Star Trek computer, like free trade, like college or universities. And we have to start by sort of disentangling them. And there probably are two different kinds of things, at least, one could say. And so, starting with the weak part. The weak part is to go after the long tail of fraud that is university education in America, the runaway student debt bubble, 300 billion in 2000 up to 1.6, 1.7 trillion now, not dischargeable in bankruptcy. If you borrow too much and you can't pay off your debt when you're 65, the government will garnish your Social Security wages.

And that is sort of like one very large class of things. I'm very optimistic this is coming to an end. It should have ended two or three decades ago. It's not sustainable for even another decade. We are on the winning side of history on this one and we need to just keep pushing back. And then we also should always attack at the strongest point because, because, you know, we should not have this sort of inferiority complex. And I think the strongest point the elite universities have is something like STEM education at Stanford or Harvard or Yale. That, you know, the science, technology, engineering, math, this is sort of advancing the frontier. It's doing all these things. As far as I can tell, it is in much worse shape than even tech innovation.

Science is technology's older brother who's fallen on hard times, or maybe older sibling, whatever you want to call it. And if you actually were to, again, concretize this, I believe the only two scientific or technical fields that it actually makes sense to study are computer science and petroleum engineering. Everything else has actually been sort of a bad cul-de-sac. And we can talk about the string theorists, the cancer researchers who've made very little progress in 50 years. Nixon declared war on cancer. Quantum computing. You can go down a long litany where even at the top schools, even the narrative, the story they tell about themselves in terms of advancing science, even that's not true, and we should not be so intimidated by their prestige as to, as to not call them out. And so, you know, sort of my, my sort of modest, modest sort of a concluding proposal would be, you know, for the, for the bottom thousands of universities, you know, we just need to stop it. We need to stop the student debt. We need to start criminal investigations into these places, into what's going on there.

And then for the Harvard or Stanfords, where the business model's a tournament, it's sort of a Studio 54 nightclub, which is, you know, it's probably good for the prestige of the people who get in, it's probably bad for their morals, but whatever you think of the Studio 54, Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale nightclub, it is not deserving of a nonprofit tax-exempt status, and we should get rid of that. I could perhaps have given a whole speech on the sort of war question of how much the US should engage in these things. The basic perspective of a National Conservatism, I think, would lead to just asking the question in all foreign entanglements: do they help the US? Does it make sense for the US?

And I suspect we would be less entangled. I suspect we would be entangled in a different way. We wouldn't be engaged in utopian nation building or things of that sort. And sort of one, one way to sort of illustrate how radically different this perspective is, it's not just a rational cost-benefit calculation, but one of those reductionist things you do is: does this make sense? Do we come out ahead? There was a sort of crazy left-wing conspiracy theory description of the Iraq War that we were doing it just to get the oil. And I think it is sort of an indication of how crazy things are in this country that that was not even remotely true. You know, and, you know, shouldn't American companies have gotten the oil fields or at least have gotten the automatic contracts for rebuilding them?

And perhaps, you know, if we had done that calculation, you'd conclude, well, it's actually not worth that much, and maybe then you'd sort of have a reassessment of the whole thing altogether. I think it is—one of the signature achievements of the Trump presidency has been to not get us into all these insane foreign entanglements and to dial this back. And this is the thing I always... A lot of my libertarian friends always criticize me for supporting the president, but I think on this one most important point, he's been more libertarian than even Ron Paul would have been. And I think it's been a very healthy reassessment. Now let me, you know, I think one of these sorts of questions and these kinds of answers strike me as very straightforward.

And I think, you know, people will be tackling these things in other ways in the rest of this conference over the next couple of days. The thing I want to sort of conclude, the thing that's odd though about it and I want to sort of maybe conclude with is why these questions have not been asked, and what is it about our society, about the United States, that's been so deranged where these obvious questions can't be asked, or even these obvious answers can't be given, and where, you know, it's taken 47 years since '72 for us to have this conference, or to come back to asking some of these questions. And I think this is always a little bit over-determined. It is striking how the US is sort of incredibly out of kilter on this.

And I'm going to sort of give one left-wing answer and one right-wing one. So on the left, I think the kind of psychosocial, hypnotic magic trick that's been played on the population to distract us from these questions is identity politics. And identity politics started in the 1970s, the sort of cultural Marxism identity politics, started at the same time that all these questions became more urgent, and it has been this phenomenal way to distract from asking these questions. I think that's the main thing identity politics does. You can sort of debate the merits or demerits, the mural in San Francisco with the communist artist that they're trying to erase or whatever, and maybe they should do it, maybe they shouldn't.

But the main thing is identity politics is an insane distraction. You know, the word identity means that which makes you identical and that which makes you unique—it's your ID. And if you start with A and not-A, you can prove anything, and it's an endless distraction factory. I always have—I always have this hope that it's about to end in some sort of paroxysm of insanity and that the identity politics monster is, you know, going to get a heart attack from flopping its tail about as wildly as it is. But I have to confess that there's no empirical evidence this is about to happen. And for this reason, I think a left-wing or progressive discussion of what's good for the United States, what's good for America, is still not going to happen.

And this is a conversation that can only happen on the right. And it would be nice if the left were able to participate, but they have to get over that issue, and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Now, I do think there's also been something on the right that's distracted us from having these kinds of conversations in the United States. And the single thing I would zero in on, on the right that's distracted us from this over the last few decades is the doctrine of American exceptionalism. This doctrine that the United States is exceptionally different, not commensurate with any other country, can't be compared. And it's one that sort of has, maybe was sort of incarnated in the sort of insanities of the millenarian Bush 43's second inaugural.

The exceptionalism obscured everything. If you want sort of a theological or epistemological analog, I think it is roughly similar to the problem of what one can know about the God of the Old Testament or the God of the Quran. If God is radically singular, radically different, can you know anything about him? It's the same as the medieval problem of the attributes of God. And if you sort of think of the United States as so exceptional that we can never talk about it, that is going to obscure and obfuscate a lot of the kinds of questions that I've been discussing today. What I think has happened in practice is that exceptionalism, the doctrine of exceptionalism, has led to a country that's exceptionally overweight, that's exceptionally addicted to opioids, that has an exceptionally dysfunctional public infrastructure where it costs ten times as much to build a mile of subway as it does in socialist Western Europe.

That is, in short, exceptionally unself-aware, exceptionally unself-critical. And what I think we should always underscore on the nationalist side for the United States is that nationalism has nothing to do with this sort of exceptional unself-awareness, that nationalism is not—it's not blind patriotism. It's not "my country, right or wrong" without any questions. Nationalism is going to ask hard questions. It's going to ask, how does our country stack up against other countries? How does it compare? And it may find it very wanting. It's going to be extremely critical. It's not going to be unreflective. I think that on the—and I think whatever else the Trump presidency stands for, it stands for a move beyond exceptionalism, beyond those dogmas.

They are not coming back on the Republican side. They are over. It is long past time for us to grow out of exceptionalism, and I think we should settle for greatness. Thank you very much.

Do you see any opportunities for a convergence between National Conservatives and anybody on the left? Any kind of social democratic criticism of libertarianism or something?

I think there are. Look, I think all the questions that I've identified are ones that, in theory, could also be tackled by the left. There are some difficult questions about Big Tech, difficult questions about the nature of the free trade regime. Warren and Sanders have talked about the runaway debt problem. They want to socialize it, whereas I think I want to stick the colleges with the bill. And so I think on all these issues, there's, in theory, there should be some ability to work across party lines. I do think one of the challenges for the left is they are captured by the institutions, and the institutions in our country are corrupt and sociopathic. And that's why if part of the critique of universities is a critique of the corruption of the Studio 54 Harvard nightclub, that's one that's existentially tough for Elizabeth Warren to do.

I'd welcome her doing it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Peter, thanks for doing this. My name is Michael Maybach. In 1983, I was hired by Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore to start their government affairs department at the Intel Corporation, which was a very small company at the time. And the first thing they told me—they're both engineers—is, "We're only going to speak on issues about our company, our technology, and nothing else. We don't have positions on the Panama Canal, et cetera." What I see in the Silicon Valley today is these CEOs have an opinion on virtually everything that has nothing to do with their business directly. Can you comment on what's happened in the companies out there?

Well, I obviously have to slightly disagree with this, otherwise I shouldn't have said anything tonight, probably. So I have to push back a little bit on that. My own sense is that, of course, there's always a focus. You focus on things you're expert on. It is part of the nature of political discourse that we assume that it's not the monopoly of experts. I often think that the greatest problem in our society is the problem of political correctness. And it's not because politics is the most important thing. I think science, technology, philosophy, religion are more important categories. If you can't even have debates about politics, then you're not allowed to think about anything at all in our society.

If you can't have an average person, you can't talk about, you know, "I like the man with the strange hairdo," or "I like the mean grandmother." If you can't have that discussion, you can't talk about anything. And so my read on Silicon Valley is that it has much more the feel of a one-party state where everything is regimented and everybody has to follow a particular party line. And the problem is, is not that, you know, the unanimity is not a sign that you've just converged on the truth. In a democracy, we believe 51% is generally right, 70 to 80% is even more right, but when you're at 99.99%, no, you're in North Korea. And the problem is that there's some sort of soft totalitarianism that's creating an incredible conformity.

So I think people have... have short bullet-point answers on things, but they have actually not thought about them. And I would say that's the problem.

Peter Thiel, deep thanks. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our dinner program. We convene right here in this room at 9 o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. Please take the credentials that you have been given and bring them with you. That will be your pass for getting into the room. Good evening. We will see you in the morning.