A Conversation with Peter Thiel: Culture, Religion, and Technology

Lincoln Network is the organization that I co-founded with Aaron Ginn. We're excited to have you here. We're excited to be in Miami. As I mentioned earlier, this event would not be possible without our generous sponsor. So really quickly, Freddie Figgers, Figgers Communications. Thank you, Figgers Wireless. Thank you for being here. Jeffrey Meyerson with Software Engineering Daily. Someone raise your hand, Jeffrey, if you are here. All right, somewhere in the room. Thank you for being here.

And then Sumit with Original Capital.

I know your team is here, but thank you for your support. Introducing Peter and Bambi will be a friend of Lincoln. He is a serial entrepreneur, a prolific angel investor, seed investor, and a friend of Lincoln's from the great state of Pennsylvania. Paul Martino, I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you, Garrett. As Garrett said, my name is Paul Martino. I am losing my voice a little bit. I run a fund out of Silicon Valley called Bullpen Capital. I've recently been in the news a lot because I had this crazy idea about getting K-through-12 kids back into school in spite of COVID. It's made me a lot of friends. We run a PAC called Back to School PA. So I've not been afraid to be at the intersection of politics and technology, which can sometimes be dangerous. Part of the reason I was invited here is Bambi and I have hosted Peter for multiple events in the past, and I'm holding her book, which I highly encourage you to read. Because this conversation you're gonna hear now is, I think, going to be very unexpected if you usually come to a tech event.

Bambi's book is a highly personal description of what it's like to grow up as a Christian conservative in Silicon Valley and be part of a modern-day mixed marriage. Her husband Ezra, who is here, is the liberal of the crew. The book is a bit of a didactic about how to get along, how to listen to what the other person is saying, something that we don't have a lot of in this modern day. The book specifically is called Unequally Yoked, and the yoke refers to, in many ways, the social contract under which all of us have with one another and the current culture wars which are trying to upend that social contract. So I highly encourage you to read it. This is, as I said, the fourth or fifth time I've had the pleasure of hosting Bambi and Peter at an event.

If you saw the promo materials for this particular event, there was this nice picture of Bambi sitting with Peter next to a plant. I was the emcee of that event, and I can tell you it is a very thankless job to have to speak after Peter. So I'm very pleased that I get to speak before Peter this time. And I think what's important to understand is that this conversation is about the intersection of politics, technology, and, perhaps most surprisingly, religion. In order to actually understand Peter's philosophy and the so-called Thielists that now follow, you can't understand it unless you understand that he's a deeply Christian person, and that's one of the things that he is going to spend quite a bit of time talking about with Bambi.

And so by having Bambi, who's written a book about a modern-day mixed marriage, who's a deep Christian herself, interview Peter, I think you're going to hear something very different than what you're used to hearing at an event of this kind. So this isn't going to be the story about, tell me about the first time that you met Mark Zuckerberg, or tell me what it was like when you wrote a check to so-and-so. This is going to be about who Peter is, what drives him, and how he thinks. And I got to tell you, Peter is not just one of the great business minds of our time, but he is one of the great contrarian and deep thinkers, a real student of human nature. So it is my pleasure to be able to introduce Bambi and Peter.

And I got to tell you, buckle up. This is going to be awesome.

That's your prop, so you don't have to wear a mask.

This is my prop, so we wouldn't have to wear a mask. We were coming from California, so we weren't sure of the protocol. So we wanted to make sure that just in case we wanted to walk around, we just have a cookie, because then you have COVID immunity. That's actually not my idea. Apparently, college students are walking around on college campuses without masks, but they have to have a cookie. Then they get a free pass. We're not going to talk about COVID. We're going to talk about something less controversial: religion. So first, I want to thank Paul. I also want to thank Lincoln for hosting this, and everyone here for wanting to hear this discussion, and of course, Peter for wanting to have this discussion with me.

Now, it's always tough to talk about religion. It's really fraught with risk that we are possibly going to offend someone, or maybe unquestionably we will offend someone tonight. But we have to talk about it because our Judeo-Christian foundation is what underlies our culture, our morality. And if we want to steward this country well, we have to understand the lineage of our beliefs. But unfortunately, society has become desensitized and sometimes hostile to our spiritual heritage. And a lot of that is due to our quest and our craving for rational and scientific explanations for our beliefs. And that's had profound impacts on our culture, whether it's how we understand the human condition, to how we define our identity, to how we define our relationships with one another, our social contracts.

And Paul mentioned my book, Unequally Yoked. It is about our yokes we have with each other. And we're all yoked together in different ways: man to society, parent to child, teacher to student, manager to worker. And all of these yokes are beautiful gifts. They're beautiful gifts that bring us together in this sort of combined and unified journey to build something greater than ourselves. See, our identity is more relational than we know. It's not that individualistic. But these yokes, for so many people these days, are starting to feel like burdens. And I think, as Paul mentioned, everybody wants to rip off their yokes. Everyone wants to tear apart these social contracts and start anew. And this is the culture war we live in.

And in my book, I talk about how some people, or half the country, see this painting of the world they know and it's fading in the past, fading away. And the other half sees this painting and they think it's a fake and it's not fading fast enough. So what about technology? What does technology do? Well, history has shown that technology has often made sweeping changes to our social order. And so, just as an example, in the 1500s to the Enlightenment, we had the Industrial Revolution. We had the printing press. We had the steam turbine. We had knitting machines. And all of this enabled the division of labor, expanded trade, made everyone more informed. And what happened was we went from a feudal system to a capitalist system.

Now, you heard the last panel talk about all these new technologies. We are venturing into space. The virtual economy was birthed in 2020 in earnest. And how is that going to change our social order? How is that going to change? Will we move from a capitalist system to something different? Um, so we're going to unpack that. And of course, Peter will be no less than profound, I'm sure. Um, but first we're going to start off talking about freedom because we are here. Of course, Peter and I traveled here from California. Um, it feels a little bit freer. Um, you know, let me start off with a quote from a very, very well-known philosopher. And let's see, where is he? Oh, yeah. His name is Draymond Green.

Okay. He said, you say we live in the land of the free. Well, you're not giving anyone freedom because you're making people do something that goes against everything America supposedly stands for. Green, of course, is referring to the vaccine mandates that's taking away the freedom from basketball players to play basketball in New York unless they get mandated. Of course, we have the Pharisee who lives in the governor's mansion in New York, who is invoking God and imploring all her apostles to spread the good news. And it's not the gospel, it's the vaccine mandates. And of course, in New York City, there's no freedom for children to pursue straight A's and be recognized. In Virginia, there's no freedom for parents to have a say in their kids' education.

And not only should parents have a say, they have an obligation. And so, as I mentioned, we flew here from California and California is the first state to have K-through-12 mandates for vaccine mandates. And so that's one of the reasons why we're here. It's one of the freer states, as many of you heard in our last panel. So the first question I want to ask Peter is, you know, how do you define freedom in Miami and how do we maintain it? And I think Helen brought up a great point is that unfortunately, great people create these societies and attract all these parasites and then it degenerates. So how do we keep it free?

Well, this is sort of so multifaceted, it's hard to know where exactly to begin. But obviously we have, you know, freedom has sort of many different dimensions. There's sort of an annoying regulatory version that's somehow been hit home really hard with all the insanity of of the last 20 months with COVID. There's freedom from excessive taxation, which I'm really into. Of course, you have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, you have freedom, the right to remain silent and not to answer questions from everybody in the media, yourself accepted. So there are all sorts of different dimensions of freedom one could talk about. Probably one that I keep circling back to, and I'm not sure it's the most important, but it's something like freedom of thought.

I never liked the word contrarian because that always just sounds like you're just attaching a negative minus sign to what everybody else thinks, but it's really the freedom to think for yourself, the freedom for some kind of some kind of independent thought, and that feels under assault in an extreme way in California, the United States, the Western world, many other places. There's of course even less than in America or in Florida. And that's sort of a constellation of things around that I've often thought the biggest political problem we have is the problem of political correctness, of the sort of incredible sort of homogenization, standardization, where everybody in society thinks the same way, is not allowed to think differently.

It's in some ways an odd juxtaposition with the Judeo-Christian history because one would have said maybe in the 17th or the mid-18th century it was sort of the people who styled themselves as Deists or rationalists or freethinkers were the anti-church people. The church was accused of being excessively dogmatic and somehow the heterodoxy was, you know, where people style themselves in opposition to that. And what's very odd is that somehow if you fast forward from, let's say, 1750 to 2021, it is, you know, it's probably quite the opposite where I think, again, it's hard to know how one would measure these things, but if one spoke to people who are, you know, relatively orthodox Christians, they are probably the most heterodox independent thinkers left in this country.

And that's sort of an interesting, you know, sociological thing and an interesting, just an interesting fact. I was catching up with one of my friends that is a tenured professor at Stanford. He's, I think he's one of, he's one of the anti-restriction COVID health economists and has sort of been, you know, persecuted or, you know, sort of just, you know, don't want to exaggerate it, but, you know, deplatformed, not allowed to speak on campus. You know, there's sort of, I think he was describing, there was somebody who put up posters of him and DeSantis all over campus. And there was a petition by the faculty where they tried to get him, you know, not to say anything anymore. And it was just, you know, it was just these sort of basic cost-benefit calculations of, you know,

You know, do the restrictions work? You know, how many people are dying because they can't get other healthcare? You know, maybe the COVID epidemic is actually just an obesity epidemic, which is much worse. So even if you just analyze it simply as a health thing, because health is the absolute—he was just asking a bunch of questions like this. And he was telling me, you know, it would have been really tough to get through the last 20 months if he didn't have some kind of transcendental faith in something, he would have just had to sort of cave in, cave in to the crowd. You know, I always think there are, you know, sort of think of the Ten Commandments, something about maybe the first and last being the most important.

And the first commandment is always, you know, you should worship God and nobody else. And the tenth commandment is, you know, you shouldn't covet, you shouldn't want too much of the things that the people around you have and want. And you can think of them as sort of The first one says you should always look up. And the tenth is you shouldn't look around too much. And there's something about, you know, when you stop looking up, when you stop having some kind of transcendent frame of reference, you get caught up too much in looking around and it's too much of this, you know, sort of mob consensus. epistemically closed fake system. That would be sort of like the first 10th commandment way of putting it.

Let me try one other big-picture framing of this, where in a democracy we broadly think that 51% of the population is more right than wrong, and then, of course, you know, if you get up to 70%, that's even more accurate. But if you get to 99.99% agreement, you're not in a democracy; you're in North Korea. And so there is sort of this question: where do you sort of transition from, let's say, the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? Where is that breakpoint? And I think sort of the two big traditions of the Western world—one is sort of the classical rationalist tradition, and that always says that you should believe in, you know, the wisdom of crowds, that there's some sort of community of intelligent people, what they think is probably true, and you should always lean into that.

And then I do think the Judeo-Christian tradition is always sort of the more, is the opposite of it, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I believe every single occasion in the Bible where there's unanimity, it's always, the unanimity is always wrong. It's always wrong, whether it's Tower of Babel or, you know... you know, various stories of, you know, everybody abandoning Christ. Um, you know, so, so reason tells us you should believe in wisdom of crowds and, uh, revelation tells us, um, you should be aware of the madness of crowds. And there's always a question, you know, where does, where does reason end and where does revelation begin? And I think we're, you know, we're, we're in a world that's, that's leaned a little bit too far into the wisdom of crowds and any corrective that would be, would be very healthy indeed.

And we're just getting started, and it's great to have this forum because I see a lot of writings about Peter. I'm gonna mention a couple here. And sometimes I look at them and it's like reading a profile about Jesus written by the Romans. They just don't understand at all. So we're gonna try to get, tease that out of Peter here. Because there's been a lot written about Peter, particularly his influence in Silicon Valley and how that will carry over to the country. So here's one from the New York Post. Thiel is, quote, 'almost impossible to understand.' May 2021 in the New Yorker says Thiel and the Thielists are a through line from the party's recent past to its likely future. So basically it's the future of the party.

If Silicon Valley culture that you shaped is the future of the GOP party, then you talked a little bit about freedom, but what are your thoughts about freedom and democracy?

Again, this feels like a sort of question that would take me an hour to try to unpack, so I don't even know where to begin there. I certainly think that, and I'm always bad at answering these sort of self-psychoanalysis-type questions, but I think in some ways I'm a Silicon Valley insider, in some ways I'm also an outsider and a critic. And probably, certainly, one of the themes that I've spoken about for 13, 14 years now, very consistently, I think it's very simple and very basic, is just this question about the nature of technological progress. How much is happening? How fast is it happening? Very complicated questions about how one measures it. But what can we say about the progress of the whole?

Is it happening at this sort of dizzying speed and, you know, are we accelerating towards utopia or dystopia? Sort of, you know, Ray Kurzweil, 'The Singularity Is Near,' and all you have to sit back and, you know, eat your popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. Or is it sort of, you know, and then of course there are sort of a whole range of sort of much more dystopian versions. And the sort of, I think, somewhat unfashionable view that I have articulated is that it seems to me there isn't as much progress happening as advertised, and that rather than racing towards utopia or dystopia, the much bigger problem is one of relative stagnation. It is, you know, it sort of manifests economically in that, you know, for the first time we have a younger generation that's, you know, not clearly doing better than their parents.

I mean, all sorts of complexities and measurement we could go into. We sort of came up with a tagline for this about a decade ago where, you know, in a manifesto we wrote for Founders Fund, they promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters, which again is not an argument against Twitter as a company. On some level, it's a phenomenally successful company. You have very cushy jobs for thousands of people. They can go to work or they can smoke marijuana all day. It doesn't really matter. It's fantastic as a company, but the larger sociopolitical question is how does this take our society, is this actually really transforming our society and taking it to the next level, even though obviously it's the communications technologies.

Culturally, they can be transformative, but how much are they delivering economically? And is this really as dramatic a future as, say, going from the horse to the car or indoor plumbing? If you had a choice of getting rid of jet travel and going back to horses and carriages, and getting rid of indoor plumbing, and you match that against getting rid of, let's say, the internet, my guess is most of us would keep the first three, and that tells us something about—the internet's not a small invention, but it's not been quite as big as advertised. I think that's sort of a framing that I've had. There are all sorts of ways this is very difficult to articulate in Silicon Valley, because the propaganda of Silicon Valley is to talk about—the Google propaganda, or whatever you want to call it, is to talk about how great Silicon Valley is and how wonderful it is.

And there's sort of a lot of things that one could say pro or anti-President Trump, but I thought if you think about his slogan, "Make America Great Again," there's one version of it where it's a ridiculous thing, it's never going to happen. But I think of it as somehow the most honest and pessimistic slogan of any presidential candidate in 100 years because it's saying we're no longer as great a country as we claim to be. And then it's, of course, taken extremely personally in a place like Silicon Valley where people think they're building a great future, and you have to sort of understand the slogan as having been sort of a direct existential challenge. And in a way, you know, people were offended in New York or Los Angeles, but nobody on Wall Street or Hollywood really believes they're making the country a better place.

And so it was much more offensive to Silicon Valley. But I think that, you know, I think instead of simply being offended, you know, it would be constructive to try to actually ask the question, you know, what parts of technology are actually accelerating and progressing really quickly, what parts are transformative, and then, you know, where are we stuck? And, you know, I can sort of riff on that a lot more, but— Yeah.

No, I want to talk about technology and innovation, but I want to also stick with democracy and freedom, because you talked about stagnation, and in some ways maybe we could be afraid or maybe we could be okay that we're just stagnating, because, as Helen mentioned, it could get worse. But I want to read this quote: "From our recent experience, it is clear that the traditional liberties of speech and opinion rest on no solid foundation. Time and energy that should go to building and restoring are instead consumed in warding off the pinpricks of prejudice and fighting a guerrilla war against misunderstanding and intolerance." That's very appropriate for today, isn't it?

Yeah, so look, there's a lot that we can say about democracy. I always think it's somewhat of a loaded word. I'm probably mildly anti-democracy in all these ways. But, of course, the point you could say in the U.S. is we're not supposed to be a democracy. We're supposed to be a republic, and then not even a pure republic, but we're supposed to be a constitutional republic. And so there's always some distrust of simply having sort of voting plebiscites in this country. There was sort of a somewhat healthy distrust of the mob. That being said, the thing that I think is an important function of democracy and of voting generally is as a sort of check on our elites. And the question, you know, one has to ask is, you know, how good a job the elites have been doing.

And I think that's what a lot of, you know, the debates about, you know, how much democratic participation, how much are average people supposed to participate in the larger debates in our country? The inverse side of that is this question about how good a job our elites have been doing. And I, again, sort of come down on the side that they've done a pretty bad job. And democracy obviously doesn't mean just voting for the Democratic Party. It also shouldn't just mean something simply political where you get to choose, do you like... Do you like the angry grandma or do you like the man with the strange hairdo in 2016? If it's just these sort of simple political things, that's like, you know, there's sort of all these other topics that the question is, should average people

Should the broad public be allowed to have debates not just about politics but also about things that are more important, like technology or religion or philosophy or science? And that's, of course, one of the kinds of questions that came into very sharp relief in the last 20 months, where the conceit was that—that something as elevated as science should definitely be left out of reach of our average citizens. They shouldn't be able to think about these things. And I guess my, at least mildly pro-democracy, thing is that I think the experts were pretty bad and found to be pretty wanting. And that it's probably healthy not to—maybe you can be pro-science, but you should definitely not believe in Science with a capital S.

Right. And there's a criticism of democracy, too, that—and by the way, that quote that I quoted was from 1922, so it's 100 years old, and that was Walt Lippmann. And so his critique on democracy is, and as you were talking about, you know, are people well-informed or is it, are they hearing propaganda? And that's Walt Lippmann's problem with democracy is that it's not really—it can't be a democracy if people aren't well-informed because the news is all propaganda.

But again, I think if we set the debate too much in those terms, then you are simply going to let the elite, the administrative state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, it will be allowed to do whatever it wants. And so I don't know if I care whether people are that well-informed. I want them just to be able to have some kind of basic check. I want them to be able to say, you know, the people in charge aren't—don't seem to be doing that well, let's vote them out, let's replace them with other people. At least that sort of a level of dissent, I think, is what we want. You know, obviously there's a big issue of, let's say, misinformation, fake news. We're in this sort of weird, postmodern world where

it's very hard to figure out what's really going on. And yet, it seems to me that the much greater problem would be to try to, you know, the solution to solve the problem of misinformation with some kind of centralized Ministry of Truth. It seems so much—that seems like, you know, whatever the SAT word is, it's a cure that's worse than the disease. And, but then again, this goes to sort of this question we started with, which is, you know, what is the nature of misinformation? You know, what is the nature of the problem? Is it that people are, you know, that they are too, too credulous and too likely to believe fake things? Or is it that people are too skeptical of the official stuff or, you know, the philosophy-of-science way to frame this?

Is that I often think you could think of the self-understanding what science was supposed to do was fight a two-front war against excessive dogmatism and against excessive skepticism. So you can only have science if people are too dogmatic and say, you know, 'The Earth is flat, can't ask any questions.' Excessive dogmatism is bad for science. And then if you have excessive skepticism, which is you can never know anything, don't believe anything, you know, 'How do I even know you're sitting there, Bambi?' If you have a world of excessive skepticism, that also doesn't work. Somehow, skepticism and dogmatism are two opposite things. To do science well, you have to somehow find this middle course between, let's say, the Charybdis of dogmatism and the Scylla of skepticism.

Of course, the problem, if I had to riff on this a little bit more, the history is that, of course, in its 17th- and 18th-century forms, science was articulated as against dogmatic central authorities in the form of, let's say, the Catholic Church or things of that sort, the monarchy, things of that sort. And that's, of course, still the way scientists style themselves. But if you look at it, it seems to me that it's—it's completely the opposite at this point, and it is just an all-out war against dissent, against skepticism, against heterodoxy. You can't question climate change, you can't question, you know, that vaccines are simply good, that there are no cost-benefits to vaccines. So there's a whole set of things where it's anti-skepticism and therefore it's way too far on the side of dogmatism.

And so, I don't know, you know, it's a choice between misinformation and a Ministry of Truth. I think we would be in a much healthier society if we had somewhat more skepticism, somewhat more misinformation, somewhat more crazy conspiracy theories. All that stuff would be such a healthy corrective to the sort of centralized totalitarian one-world state.

Another way you frame this, and we've talked about this before, is this is the woke culture. It is, and part of it is this willful distorting of reality, this constant willful distorting of reality. Actually, it's one of the reasons why I also wrote my book, Unequally Yoked, because I felt like there's just such misunderstanding around this one view, which is more of a conservatism, it's more of a Christian worldview. And I—you put the book out there, had a lot of really good examples of where you could see two different interpretations of facts, and there is just no changing minds. It is a dogmatism, I believe, on that side. I'm going to start with what is the woke culture? Everybody here has a definition.

It's much worse, of course, than what you're saying. It's dogmatic, but people have changed their minds so much. I mean, it was Kamala Harris one year ago, 'I will never take a Trump vaccine.' Or a year and a half ago, you didn't need to wear a mask because there was a shortage of masks—'We need to lie to people about it.' Was it the food market or the Wuhan lab? It seems to have shifted more to the Wuhan lab, but that was just... It's very dogmatic, but we've had these hairpin-loop, 180-degree turns, so it's been dogmatic in an unbelievably incoherent way. But yeah, I think one way of getting at it is always this question of whether, you know, whatever you want to call this new culture. Is it, you know, is it sort of, again, is it excessively skeptical, or is it excessively dogmatic?

And the excessive skepticism thing would be that it's, let's say, relativistic. It's a form of—and moral relativism would be sort of the ethical expression of excessive skepticism. You can't know anything, and maybe... And then, and then, the excess of dogmatism gets expressed politically or ethically as a sort of totalitarianism. And this is why, even though there's probably some very interesting link between a relativistic questioning of all truth and a sort of totalitarian dogmatism, it seems to me we should always frame it as much more totalitarian than relativist, much more dogmatic than skeptical. There's always sort of a question of how to link it historically. I think people have often described the woke thing as a kind of religion.

And I think we should be much more specific. And this is where... maybe we disagree a little bit on this, but I think of it as actually a specific form of Christianity or maybe a specific, maybe you could call it a Christian heresy—that's maybe too strong, but it's sort of a, a very specific sort of thing that can only happen in a, you know, very sort of Christian society where, you know, if you lose faith in Christ and the resurrection of Christ, in one sense, in theory, everything goes. I mean, you can become a Nietzschean Superman. You can, you know, you can sort of become, you know... A relativistic person just plays video games in a basement. In theory, everything goes. Ayn Rand, all these different things.

In practice, the overwhelming tendency seems to be towards something like politically correct wokeness, you know, hyper-Christianity, communism, different things like this. And I would suggest that there's nothing that new about it. I think it was the Social Gospel in the early 20th century. I think it was communism in the 19th century. And, you know, maybe Marcion in the second century. And what was always what animated these things was always some idea like, "We're going to be more Christian than the Christians," if you sort of had to articulate it as one way. Communism is an illustration. It would be that maybe in the Middle Ages, two most important attributes of Christ were divinity. Maybe the second most important was that Christ was poor.

And any time you saw a poor person on the street, it might be Christ in disguise. And how you treated that person, you'd be held to account at the Last Judgment. And then, you know, in some sense, the move that, you know, Marx and Engels and Tolstoy and people like that made, you know, in the 19th century was, you know, the Christians aren't doing enough for the poor and we're going to do even more. And we're going to have, you know, we're going to have heaven on earth and we're going to be prepared to kill millions of people to show how serious we are. And we're doing more. And then I think there's a Social Gospel version of this, and probably, you know, there's something about the Judeo-Christian tradition in history where it always takes the side of the victim.

You know, it's Cain and Abel versus Romulus and Remus, same story, different perspective. You know, Genesis, in the Book of Genesis, you take the side of Abel against Cain and the whole community. In the Romulus and Remus story, you know, the founding of the first city in the history of the world versus the founding of the greatest city of the ancient world. Case of Rome, it's Romulus is right, Remus gets killed, the city is right, the individual is wrong. So there is sort of a way in which I think of Judaism and Christianity as the anti-mythology. The standard mythology would be told from the perspective of Egypt. We had these troublesome people and the troublemakers were finally driven out.

But it's told from the point of view of the Jews. And of course there's a New Testament version of this too. And so there is something... that is, you know, I think essentially Christian about this concern for victims. And then there is something about that can get weaponized and radicalized. And that's why I think something like the woke thing won't happen in, you know, it doesn't happen in, let's say, I don't know, I'm not sure there really are any parts that haven't been impacted by Christianity, but it's harder to be woke in, let's say, Saudi Arabia or in maybe Japan is the developed country that's sort of the least Christian. So it's kind of hard to be woke in Japan or in Saudi Arabia where you haven't been influenced by these ideas for centuries to quite the same intensity.

Yeah, no, this is where Peter and I somewhat disagree, but maybe it's just nomenclature, but I do believe it's recurring. Like you said, we've seen this movie before, but I believe that it's very anti-Christian. So you see, and we're talking about the woke religion or woke culture, so it certainly has lots of roots in Marx and historical materialism. You know, Marx believes that matter is primary, consciousness is secondary. So everything starts from a material base, and how we create that material base is based on economics, so how we structure ourselves in society around the production of goods. And that in and of itself is an ideology. And those in the ruling class create that ideology. Those in the ruling class create that morality.

So to me, I see whoever's in the ruling class, again, this is the Marxist view, is the class that creates that morality. So it's very malleable. In the woke culture, they also believe that the human condition is inherently good. So that's very Freud, very Rousseau. It's not about—it's about the systems. It's about the parents. It's about anybody but yourself. If we change the economic structure, then you could be a good person. But for Christians, we're inherently broken. We're inherently broken. Evil lives inside of us. It does not exist outside of us. And so to me, I see this woke culture and religion as extremely anti-Christian.

Sure, sure. All of those... Well, it can both be anti-Christian and hyper-Christian or an intensification of certain Christian ideas. And so I think, as Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil doesn't run between classes or parties or groups of people, but it runs through every single human heart. And that... And so certainly if you say that we're all prone to doing evil things, that none of us are perfect, that leads to a very different perspective where evil is just attributed to certain classes or certain groups. In that sense, the woke thing is anti-Christian. I would say it is an intensification, though, because so much of the language is this highly moralizing language. And, you know, maybe it's a hypocritical form of Christianity, it's virtue signaling, but it is, you know, and of course, I think something like this happened with, you know, mainline Christianity in the 20th century where, you know, the mainline churches in the U.S. basically, you sort of think they traded theology for politics and, you know, nobody would go to church, but, you know, they would sort of feel, you know,

that they take over the government or something like that.

You know, you touched on earlier what you said. It is Christian in a way that it's, well, you didn't say it was dogmatic, but it is dogmatic, but it also embraces victimhood because Christ was the one who introduced that and Christianity is anti-mythology, as you spoke of. I want to talk about victimhood culture, and I think everyone's aware that we live in this victimhood culture. In 2015, The Atlantic wrote an article, "The Rise of the Victimhood Culture and the Ascendancy of This New Moral Code." You know, I think you've talked about how something happened in the '60s. Everybody became hippies. Yes, there was a sexual revolution. There was a counterculture, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But I trace this back to something more simple.

I'm sure many of you disagree with me, but I trace it back to taking prayer out of schools in the '60s. Here's what that prayer was. It was very innocuous: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon our parents, our teachers, and our country." Super simple. But what we did with the kids was we gave them a sense of safety, right? Somebody great was actually watching over them. And we also gave them a sense of gratitude, right? And we took that prayer out of school, and now they're getting kids to meditate and have prayer and gratitude journals. Gratitude is actually really good. It releases all this oxytocin, the feel-good hormone. So when we took kids out of school—and this goes back to your thinking, too, about once we took this transcendent—I'm sorry, kids out of school, God out of school,

When we take God out or this transcendent...

That's happening, too.

Our school is okay, thank goodness. No mandates, thank goodness. But when we took God out of the school, we took this prayer, then all of a sudden we left kids to compare themselves to others. We left them to focus so much and obsess about their own identity, which is a bad thing. Um, when we taught them to understand good and evil, um, the yardstick would be people in front of them or things, um, and groups. And so then we saw this creation of safe places because, well, you had to be saved from some evil outside of you because it didn't exist inside of you. And of course, um, these people have grown up. I think Helen touched on this a little bit, but you know, Jonathan Haidt wrote about this in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

The safetyism culture, what we call these bubble-wrap children. Now they've grown up because Jonathan Haidt wrote about them. They were in college, 2010. Now they're in college, and now they're working in the workforce. Now they're in government, and now they're trying to create safe places everywhere, right? They want to be safe, want to save people from eviction. We want to save people from the unvaccinated. So we have the safetyism culture now, and it comes back from taking prayer out of school.

Well, let me not go on that topic, but let me try taking this in a slightly different dimension where I... There is obviously one way we can describe Marxism or wokeism as somehow reductionist and materialist. But I think we should also think of them as in some ways ideological or spiritual or something like this. And one of the ways I always think of this is that in July of 1969, we landed on the moon, and then three weeks later we had Woodstock, and with the benefit of hindsight, that's when technology stopped and progress slowed down and the hippies took over the country. And the shift, and I think there was a way in which the sort of technical scientific impetus—there was something about the Apollo space mission that was probably somehow more materialistic about rockets and fuel and getting the calculations right, not making any mistakes, making sure there was enough oxygen in the spacesuit.

And there was something about the hippies that was actually this weirdly anti-materialist move. Or to put it in another dimension, it was a shift from exteriority to interiority. And that, you know, I think there's sort of all these different ways that we've moved into ourselves in the last 50 years. And it's certainly true of, you know, yoga and meditation. And there's probably a version, you know, there probably are all kinds of, you know, psychological, psychopharmacological, psychedelic, parapsychological types of interventions. You know, the line I always like to quote is from Milton's Paradise Lost. It's, 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.'

And this is, it's what Satan says when he gets sent from heaven to hell: 'It doesn't matter. It's just a state of mind.' And then probably the thing that one should ask is, is that actually true? To what extent is the mind its own place, and to what extent is the external reality the much more important thing? And I tend to think there's something about the sort of shift to interiority as something that's been sort of both overrated, you know, unhealthy, crazy in all these ways. I had a set of conversations with Jordan Peterson a few years ago where I always thought he was way too psychological, and it was... Maybe a way to talk about psychology is that psychology was developed in the early 20th century.

If you don't have external things—maybe an external thing is God or religion or something like that—if you don't have external things that encourage people to be good, how do you create internal mechanisms to make people good, or to, for people to control themselves, or to be controlled? And I think of psychology as something like that. And then we can get into a much longer discussion: you know, does it work at all? Or, you know, if it works, you know, is it more good than bad? And I think it's sort of like an interesting, complicated history where it probably always gets advertised as personal transformation. You go see a psychologist and it will be a way for you to personally transform yourself.

So you don't believe in religion anymore, but the psychologist will do this. And then I think sort of this is sort of like maybe a common pattern would be that after years of therapy, you're just really exhausted, you're sick of spending all this time, wasting all this money. You kind of dislike your therapist, you're bored with him. And it sort of crashes from self-transformation into self-acceptance. And after years and years of therapy or psychedelic drugs or whatever, you know, the equivalent of meditation or yoga or breathing exercises, after years of this, you conclude everything's fine and you don't need to change at all. And maybe that's true, but it's just very odd where its marketing was 180 degrees the opposite of

you know, of what ultimately happens. So I think psychology is another version of this, and there's probably a whole set of phenomena like this that I would loosely wrap under the shift from, you know, exteriority to interiority. And again, there's some version of interiority that, you know, is maybe good. I think we've gone way too far.

I think on that note, I was going to bring up mental health because that's the area I'm interested in, digital health, lots of investments going in there. I do see a silver lining that we're putting so much, so much money behind this around digital therapeutics, behavioral therapies, you know, we're moving away from—well, psychedelics, I guess, is, that's pretty popular, but psychotropics—we're moving away from psychotropics, which have so many side effects. So I see a silver lining there, but here's something that someone Jordan Peterson quotes often, Carl Jung, and his dictum is, 'With a little moral awareness, we wouldn't need psychotherapy.' So it's really interesting that we're moving in this direction that people are focused on mental health.

I spoke to someone now who said, 'Well, 2020 was a boom for mental health.' Yes, for mental health companies. But what I'm concerned about is our approach. Are we doing it the right way? If we are just applying positive psychology and this Freudian view of the world or Nietzschean view of the world, which is rise above it, right? And not this other view of this world, which internalizes your inherent brokenness. And so I'll give you an example. I spoke with the head of innovation at the American Psychiatric Association, and I said, 'If everyone just understood that they were broken, would we have fewer mental disorders?' And she said, 'Yes. The people can't get around that.' And so I'm wondering, even though we're focused on it now, we have this whole industry focused on it, and many of you probably know Lyra Health was $4 billion in March, and January was $2 billion.

People are throwing money at this space, but are we even answering the right questions and approaching it the right way?

Well, look, I think there's always the questions about specific interventions, whether there probably are versions of them that are, you know, better than nothing. You know, there probably are things that are halfway between, you know, psychology and religions. I know something like Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, is that—I think we have to concretize this to talk about this more coherently. We don't really know what to do about alcoholism. Very severe problem for people who have it. Very hard to change. I don't think Alcoholics Anonymous works that well. It probably does work better than most of the other stuff we've come up with since the 1930s. Maybe it's too psychological. Maybe it's still somewhat religious.

Maybe you can't do it yourself. You have to have a higher power. But it is, yeah, I think it's just in general, this mess where these things are very hard to do. I think probably, you know, my—a speculative theory on this—is that anything for transformation to really work, you have to actually believe that it's possible. And if it's just a purely internal drama, there's some kind of a look-ahead function you have where it's not quite going to happen. And so I suspect a lot of these things, you know, they're... You know, you're trying to simulate a religious conversion and it's, you know, yeah, probably a religious conversion is a way that you really are able to change. But a psychological simulation, you know, might get you some stuff, probably doesn't work in many cases.

But I think, yeah, I think there's sort of our, you know, our versions like this. I think sometimes this stuff can be very powerful and, you know, and very bad too. I've invested in some psychedelic drug companies. I think there probably are specific interventions to addiction where we just don't know what works, and there's something where maybe taking these things once, you know, in a controlled setting, you know, jars people and they get some perspective and that's very helpful. There probably are, you know, a lot of ways this stuff can, you know, go very haywire where you can think of MKUltra or the Manson Family where, you know, they just gave people LSD and told them, you know, the world was coming to an end and so they might as well go out and kill a bunch of people.

And so there is sort of a complicated question, you know, what messaging, what the package is that gets put in. This is again probably way too polemical, but I think of maybe the paradigmatic version of psychology gone berserk in the 20th century was Nazi Germany, where you can maybe describe Nazi Germany as a psychological event from beginning to end. It was in many ways similar to communism, but it was also, you know, it was a somewhat different phenomenon where it had more of a spiritual dimension. You know, the propaganda thing was important in a way that it wasn't in the Soviet Union. It was sort of a Goebbels-type figure. You had nothing equivalent to that in Stalinist Russia. So there was this sort of incredible, you know, psychological or psychopharmacological dimension to it, and it somehow started with convincing everybody that you're going to take over the world, and then at some point everyone

became convinced that they all deserved to die, and they both were sort of partially self-fulfilling prophecies. So it was powerful, but definitely more evil than good.

So I was going to go back to the victimhood culture to really just wrap that up, but since we're talking about technology and we probably have to touch on this, but you sort of touched on it, which is sort of this misinformation. Now, just disclaimer, Peter is on the board of Facebook, so he can't really answer any questions about Facebook, but there's a lot of censorship lately. YouTube took down 130,000 videos. Obviously, there's many people being canceled. So I guess the question is what can companies do and how do we, and this is the company side, not the government, what can companies do to resolve misinformation because clearly we have different versions of truth out there, which everybody is aware of.

How do companies do that then?

Obviously, if you could answer this question, you'd solve problems for a whole bunch of the big tech companies right now. Look, there are all these places where I would, you know, I don't fully agree with everything that, you know, all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley have done, to put it mildly, including Facebook, and I think there's probably some degree to which they've systematically gotten this balance wrong. Again, the two-front war: too much against misinformation, not enough fighting excess dogmatism, and it's sort of like what the scientists do, it's what the universities do, it's what the sort of screwed-up elite consensus in our society does. And in some ways, you know, they're...

sort of very, very deeply linked to it. You know, if I had to defend them, you know, the partial defense I would give is that I do think it's a little bit unfair to turn single companies into the scapegoat for this whole thing, because I think it's, you know, it is equally, let's say, a problem with our government, with our deep state, with the media companies, the mainstream media. It is also, you know, I think a problem with the universities. And then somehow it's always a little bit too easy to just blame the tech companies. Certainly five years ago, in a context relative to the rest of our society, so relative to the other elite institutions, let's say universities, administrative, governmental,

And let's say mainstream media, I think the range of debate, the range of discussion on the internet was way wider than it was allowed in all these others. It has been dialed back. I think that's very unfortunate, very bad. I think it still is wider than these other institutions allow. And that is part of the reason these companies—there are two different, the conservatives attack these companies, you know, not allowing enough freedom of speech. And, uh, the, the left attacks them for still allowing way too much. And they're, they're still allowing way more than all these, these other institutions. So it's, it's, it's, you know, it's the politics that are very tricky to navigate, but I would say it's just, again, it's just in the context of, of this sort of shift towards a one-party state in our whole society across the board.

Well, that's, you know, the problem is... Yeah, there are things we can say that are screwed up at Google or Facebook or these individual companies, but it's probably, you know, much, you know, and maybe there's a problem with Big Tech. You know, I think a lot of the problems are functions of an even bigger government and an even bigger state that is using these companies to channel things. You know, for example, if, you know, as a libertarian, if the tech companies were simply opposed to our government, maybe that's not a healthy thing, but it would be a type of check and balance, and that would be good. In practice, they end up under pressure from a whole bunch of different state actors in the US, other countries, to skew things towards the governmental line.

And the technological, the sort of example of a dissenting technology, where I think it is purely anti-governmental, and in a way that's very different from, let's say, Big Tech, is something like crypto. I think there's always this question about why is Satoshi's identity unknown? And it's because, well, if we knew who it was, the government would arrest him and maybe some very bad things would happen to him. And I have a whole speculative history of that. E-gold was the precursor to Bitcoin. E-gold was the sort of encrypted, anonymous gold certificates that you could trade. They had servers distributed in Dubai and Iceland, all over the world. But it was a company with officers based in Southern Florida.

And we made them interchangeable. I met them on the beach in Anguilla in February of 2000. And it was, "We're beginning the revolution against central banks on the beach in Anguilla. We're going to make PayPal interoperable with e-gold. And we're going to blow up all the central banks starting right now." Three months later, there was a lot of fraud. We disconnected e-gold. They sued me for libel. It was sort of an adversarial relationship. We settled. You never negotiate with terrorists, except in every specific instance. We gave them some money and made them go away. That was 2002. Fast forward to 2008, and the people got arrested. I think they didn't go to jail, but they agreed to just not do this anymore, to shut down the company and go away.

You know, my sort of theory on Satoshi's identity was that Satoshi was on that beach in Anguilla and he saw e-gold, and Bitcoin was the answer to e-gold, and Satoshi learned that you had to be anonymous and you had to not have a company. Even a company was, even a company, even a corporate form was too governmentally linked and gave the government too many hooks, and so you had to have an algorithm that was not a corporation and you had to have a person who was completely unknown. And it's even the same—it's a computer word and a money word: Bitcoin, e-gold. Anyway, but that's what I think technology that really challenges the state would look like, and certainly the Big Tech companies don't quite look like that.

Well, we talked about Big Tech and misinformation, but there's also, um, government, which I think, um, I think there's a lot of, I think you're right that there's a lot of demonization around these Big Tech companies. It's really around capitalism. And we've had a lot of those accusations around Big Pharma. We've had a lot of those accusations around tobacco companies. But with Big Tech now, it's misinformation. And I actually like sometimes some government intervention in some cases. Like if you guys are from New York City, do you remember Bloomberg kind of banned those big sodas? I thought that was pretty good for kids. But largely, I don't really like government intervention. And in this case, I think it's actually

not a good idea because, as you mentioned, it would be sort of a form of Ministry of Truth. And so with regards to misinformation, I'm not quite sure we should have government regulation, even though some people are calling for it.

Yeah, again, I won't repeat what I said before, but, yeah, it's just Ministry of Truth sounds much worse than, you know, a problem of some misinformation. I will take all the, you know, QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories every day over the Ministry of Truth. Let me see what else, yeah. But I think that, not sure I have that much more to say on that. Let me say one thing on the, you know, it does. There's always a question of how one diagnoses these things. There is some kind of pushback to socialism, a push against capitalism in our society. There's some sense that the capitalist things... I think we have to maybe be a little bit nuanced and say there are all these ways that the capitalist stuff

has not been working quite as well. And this is again where I probably disagree some with sort of the happy-clappy libertarians who just want to say that everything is wonderful and getting better all the time. And if the truth is that we've had this period of relative stagnation where there's been relatively little progress, it's not totally zero-sum, but it's more—you know, it's more zero-sum than is desirable, and, you know, in that sort of a world, you know, there's a loser for every winner, and there's some kind of a dynamic where tech has been the only game in town, it's been somewhat positive-sum, but it's also to some extent come at the expense of everybody else, and that's the unhealthy broader dynamic that I see playing out.

It is a feeling of relative stagnation, and this is, again, I don't think it justifies it, but this is sort of, for example, why I think the media is naturally opposed to Big Tech, because there is a part of the tech thing that undercut the business models of the old monopoly media companies. And they don't like it, and I think there were all sorts of things that were wrong about them, and they're resentful people, and they should probably just do something else instead of stewing in their resentment all the time. But it is also a structural problem, and we should acknowledge that.

So, yes, we're probably seeing economic stagnation, but maybe cultural and political stagnation, maybe not. There are a lot of people who... Well, first of all, we talked about guilt quite a bit. We talked about victimhood, and we talked about a little bit of guilt, I think. We talked about guilt. But the... One of the reasons why we would have guilt, and this comes from Nietzsche, is because we don't have a God, and without a God, there's guilt. And Nietzsche also said that without a God, we would be either closer to hopeless nihilism or totalitarianism. And I talked to a lot of people on sort of the left-of-center who would say that we're nowhere even near totalitarianism on the left, AOC is just a fringe character, and that's just a fantasy.

So, where do you think we are?

Well, I always go back and forth on this because there is certainly a part of all the, you know, tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying not very much, that is, you know, the hate factory that is much of, you know, let's say, the internet. I'm probably, if you held a gun up to my head, I always tend to say that it's not quite as real as it seems, that most of the time what happens on Twitter stays on Twitter. It's just, yes, this crazy hate factory, but it's sort of, you know, it's mostly kayfabe, it's mostly LARPing, it's mostly, you know, you have, it's like in Orwell's 1984, you have your Two Minutes of Hate at Twitter, and if you want the sort of elite conspiracy theory, Twitter's an elite conspiracy to keep the workers in their boring jobs, and so they have two minutes where they get really angry on Twitter, and then they go back to their boring jobs, and it's sort of a social control mechanism, or something like that.

So that's what I'm inclined to believe, that most of the time these things are, let's say, substitutes for actual revolutionary political action, rather than complements, to use the economics terminology. However, just to take your side of it, the other side, there is some chance that I'm wrong about this. And if I'm wrong, you have to do something earlier rather than later. And probably the lesson I take from the 20th century is that, you know, if we're going to use a precautionary principle, you know, we should, you know, it often gets used with AI or with climate change or all these things where, you know, there's a chance something's going to go really haywire and you have to stop it before it becomes real.

I think if there's a place for the precautionary principle, it's—I would put the number one place for it—incipient totalitarianism. Because once these things really snowball, they can't be stopped. This is like, I don't know, this is again, I'm hesitant to use the Nazi analogies because I always feel they're sort of overwrought. You know, 1933, it's simply too late. And then, you know, 1923, you know, Mr. H has just, you know, a few followers, has a ridiculous-looking mustache, everyone thinks it's silly. And, you know, 1923 was your last chance to stop it. And so there is probably, there is something where I am in favor of a very intense fight against all forms of incipient totalitarianism because—

It's hard to know exactly what the odds are of it snowballing. Once it snowballs, it's simply too late.

I'm seeing these incipient signs in education. We saw that now the FBI is investigating parents, calling them domestic terrorists for getting involved in schools or their kids' education. As I said, I feel like it's a parent's obligation. I would probably really like to see prayer back in school, but that's probably dogmatic, though it would do wonders for character building, I believe. But short of putting prayer back in schools and having some sort of monolithic educational program, it seems like we have to—your idea is to expand choice, maybe give vouchers to people to determine where they want to send their kids. What should we do with the education system?

Well, again, look, I'm always much better at analyzing problems and telling you what to do about them. And I feel like I've been guilty of this all afternoon here in some ways. So maybe just acknowledge—no, look, the school system is bad. It's been bad for a really long time. Maybe it's healthy that all this stuff is happening now because it's more transparently bad. It's probably... I know probably critical race theory is silly and ridiculous, but not learning how to read or how to do math was, maybe equally bad, worse, almost as bad, take your pick. And so one of the things that's important is to somehow puncture this educational bubble in any way possible we can, and that's probably the first step towards solving it.

I continue to think that there's one way in which there's a very severe K-12 problem because that's sort of where we can obviously see it—the brainwashing starts, there's all these sort of problems about K through 12 education—I probably still find myself focused, as the core of what I believe to be the enemy, are the universities. And there's a way that it's the dominance of the universities that somehow needs to be broken. And that sort of all the deformations of K through 12 can be thought of as rationalizations or systematizations of just tracking the kids to get into college. And so if you don't change the importance of universities or change the universities or break them, I think the K through 12 thing will always be some sort of a losing battle.

I mean, maybe politically correct woke talk. I don't think it's true, I don't think it's helpful in life, but if all that matters is when you're 18, what college you get into, if that's all that matters in life, then these K through 12 schools are doing their job by not teaching math or reading, but just indoctrinating people in wokeness. So I think the universities are the core problem. The analogy I've used before is that they are in some sense, you know, at this point, as corrupt as the Catholic Church was, you know, 500 years ago on the eve of the Reformation, and you can sort of just transpose, you know, all these theological categories onto the university system where we have a system of indulgences in the form of, you know, exponentially rising student debt—$300 billion in 2000, $2 trillion now—keeps going up very, you know, faster than, you know, nominal GDP or inflation or whatever you want to compare it to.

You have this sort of, you have this clerisy of professors who seem to not do very much, and this sort of corrupt clerical class. You have a theory of salvation. The soteriology is that if you don't get into a good college, you'll end up in a bad place. You go to Yale or you go to jail. So there's sort of a whole theory of soteriology linked to it. And it's, of course, it's universal. It is a single unitary form of truth. And in that sense, it's in some sense the atheist church. It's the successor to the universal Catholic Church in a way. But it's the atheist church. And I have nothing against atheism or the church, but the atheist church is too much.

I think we're at time for Q&A, but you talked about indulgences. I always thought those virtue-signaling signs were a form of indulgence, but anyway, I think we're time for Q&A.

Yeah. Hi, Peter. Marshall from Lincoln Network. I'll start us off. You missed this part of the conversation, but the vast majority of people here have exited in some form. They left the Bay Area, they left New York City, and they're here. How has the last year or so evolved your thinking around exit, voice, and whether or not you can change systems, whether domestically or internationally, based on those choices?

Let's see, I am probably... Yeah, I am... I don't know. I'm probably very schizophrenic on it, to be honest, where on the one hand, I think politics is important. It's like the air we breathe. It permeates everything. And there's some part of that where you want to be engaged. You want to be participating in it. And then at the same time, it also is just extraordinarily toxic in all these ways. I found myself thinking a lot about the exit versus voice dichotomy, and I'm probably about 80% exit, 20% voice camp, which is probably an incorrect number to be like a hundred and zero, but I'm probably 80, 80, 20, um, exit over, over voice. Um, you know, um, I, I did a mild version of this in, uh, 2018 when I moved from San Francisco to, to Los Angeles.

And, um, you know, it felt, it felt, uh, very, very drastic at the time. And then there were all these questions people asked, you know, um, you know, you know, 'What do you—why'd you move to Los Angeles? You know, what was so great about it?' And, you know, and, and, um, and any of those sort of answers I can give, but I think the honest answer is somewhat more negative, and I think we should be willing to simply be negative, which is, I didn't move to LA; I moved away from SF. And again, this is, you know, there are all these pro-Miami, pro-Florida arguments one can give, but I think we should be perfectly fine with a negative argument, which is that we moved away from X and X was a bad place, and it's perfectly sufficient to move away from a bad place.

And I would just like to thank everyone who submitted questions. We have let people know, but hopefully we will have extra time for additional questions.

Hi, Peter. I'm Channing from HardTech Miami, and I'm also a recent Miami, outside-of-SF transplant. So historically, you've been a proponent of libertarian organizations like the Seasteading Institute. But more recently, I've seen Founders Fund taking a bearish stance, citing political inefficacy. With increasing decentralization through technologies like crypto, Substack, or podcasting like Joe Rogan, the unbundling of education, and new political figures like Blake Masters, what technological trends would you like to start or accelerate to change our country's culture for the better? And what existing trends do you worry will change it for the worse?

I could probably spend an hour just trying to answer that question, but I still think there's a lot to be said for just political decentralization, and the thing that I think is—what I still see as the incredible silver lining of this last 20-month crisis is—that people have been able to move. Maybe San Francisco, maybe New York will rebound. I am hopeful that the bubble of the megacities is over. There had been something generative about these places. There had been these positive network effects. But at some point, it went way more from the 51% democracy to the 99% North Korea direction. And at this point, just decentralization is healthy. There were all these versions where, two years ago, it felt literally hard.

It was, you know, the seasteading thing felt hard because, you know, are you really going to get a critical mass of people to move? You know, one of the early seasteading efforts in the 2000s was this Sealand Project, which was a radio tower in the North Sea where, you know, eight very committed people moved into an abandoned radio tower in the middle of the North Sea with no shower and 6,000 square foot of living space in the whole country. And they were sort of cut off from the rest of the world for six months while, you know, it was sort of a stormy weather in the North Sea. And they were extremely committed. But there was something about that that did not feel scalable at this point. At this point, I'm much more hopeful about the decentralization than I was, you know, a few years ago.

Certainly as a venture capitalist, it seems like you can—it's much easier doing things, and there probably are all these versions where it's, yeah, it's simply going to work. You know, the technology question, I guess, you know, one extreme formulation of technology is always, 'Technology's neutral. It's not an intrinsically good or intrinsically bad thing.' I don't—I'm not sure that's quite true. I do think that they have—technologies have a certain valence, and, you know, the extreme—two extreme technologies in my mind are that, you know, I think if we say that crypto is libertarian and that it is fundamentally a force for decentralization, then I think we should also be willing to say that AI, especially in the sort of low-tech surveillance form, is essentially communist.

And so if you want to frame it as a technological race between freedom and totalitarianism, or decentralization and centralization—yeah, I want the crypto, decentralized world to work, and I'd like us to—I'm not sure, sabotage or outlaw AI, that doesn't sound very libertarian, but I would like those people to be less psychologically motivated and to think about how they're working on the technology that's going to destroy the world, and maybe that will demotivate them and they'll work on it more slowly.

Psychological—you know, power of positive thinking doesn't work, but power of negative thinking, I think, does work, so that's a sort of psychological intervention that might work.

You should probably talk about how AI can be complementary too, though. So we can advance AI as long as we can make it complementary to what we're doing. I think that's what you're interested in.

Well, I don't really know how to actually think about it. There was certainly a Silicon Valley debate about AI six, seven years ago, where it was about AGI, you know, artificial general intelligence—some of this superhuman intelligence would be indistinguishable from God for all practical purposes. And I was struck the other day how that debate has actually just disappeared. And, you know, there was an extreme intensity—you know, Elon was, you know, "You're summoning the demon." And then, you know, Larry Page was working on building it with DeepMind at Google. And then, you know, Elon's not talking about it anymore. And Larry's off to Fiji and doesn't seem to be working on it quite as hard anymore.

And then it's sort of an interesting question: why has the AGI discussion completely collapsed? And the speculative answer I would give you is there's always these metaphysical, philosophical questions. Is it possible? Can you actually replace humans with AI? Or is it complementary? Or is it a substitute? What is actually possible? But I think... I think the disturbing thing that's happened is that basically AGI—if we say that we get to this artificial general, maybe it's wrong, it's not even wrong. It's not even wrong because maybe you get to AGI in X years, but on the path to AGI in X over two years, you get to surveillance AI, a communist, totalitarian technology, facial recognition used to control people that will be used by a small number of people to control lots of other people.

And one of the side effects of the surveillance AI is that it will be used to make sure nobody builds the AGI. And so if you're worried about AGI, it's like a—it's a psychological form of displacement, or it's like a magic trick where you're not actually paying attention to the thing that really matters. And I think somehow that's gotten much more into the consciousness on some level over the last six or seven years. And obviously we could speculate maybe there's some pathways to get to AGI that don't go through surveillance AI, where it's complementary or it's somehow orthogonal. It doesn't seem to be that way because there's always this talk about big data, and you get the big data by surveilling all these people and monitoring them and knowing more about them than they know about themselves.

It has a sort of extremely totalitarian, anti-Cartesian kind of a... feel to it. And so if all paths to AGI lead to surveillance AI, lead through surveillance AI, and if surveillance AI will be used by some people to control other people and also used to not build AGI, then maybe all we should be worried about is surveillance AI and not AGI. And I think that's the shift that's happened. There's sort of a rationalist undercurrent in Silicon Valley, which I was peripherally involved with 15, 16 years ago, where a lot of the—one of the core issues was friendly AI, and how do we build this friendly AI? And it sort of struck me, it's all sort of gone from utopian to Luddite. They don't believe in any of this anymore.

It somehow has completely devolved in the last few years. And sort of the speculative geopolitical theory, I would say, was that the atheist rationalists—and there's a computer version, but you could also say Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens or this whole group of people—in 2005, they were a politically correct way to be anti-Islamic. And it was maybe a cowardly way, but it was, you know, you were against this bad, irrational God, and that's sort of against Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It's really Islam that's, in practice, the one you're against, but it sort of was a politically correct way to be anti-Muslim. And there was sort of some need for that in 2005, and it had a certain amount of resonance.

But, you know, the problem in 2021 is not, you know, fundamentalist Islam. The problem is Chinese totalitarian communism. And they have nothing to say to the CCP and AGI. The AGI didn't look like—yeah, AI didn't look like it had something to do with the Taliban, but it does look like it has something to do with the CCP, and that's why, if you're talking about AGI in 2021, you're probably just an apologist for the CCP. That's an ad hominem argument, but I think it still has some legitimacy.

Hi, uh, I'm Erica Gemma. I am—hi, Bambi and Peter, you guys are awesome. Uh, I'm over here. Sorry. Yeah, sure. Okay. Hi, sorry. Hi, everybody. All right, I'm Erica Gemma. I founded the first Bitcoin Center in Miami, and I now have a Miami-based blockchain venture fund. Um, I have two questions. The first is, who do you think is Satoshi, now that you said you know who you think it is? And then the second is, what is the top criteria you use when investing in projects? Are there any specific questions you always ask a startup to gauge if they're a good fit?

I've speculated on who Satoshi is. I just said that I thought that Satoshi had, you know, had been on that beach in Anguilla, and there were like 200 people who were there. So there's one of 200. I haven't gone back and looked at who it was, and that's the direction I would explore if you were to try to figure it out. But I think certainly my libertarian bias is I am pro-Satoshi, and I somehow feel speculating on it more is taking the anti-crypto side, and so I don't actually want to speculate on it too much beyond the basic narrative I gave. I don't know. I'm always anti-formula, anti-system, anti-formula for investing in companies. I think it's Anna Karenina where it's, 'All happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way.'

And I think something like the opposite is true of companies. You know, all great companies are special in a good way. And then, you know, all failed companies somehow are generic and failed. So you have to somehow figure out what's distinctive, what's unique. And if you have too generic a formula, it's going to go haywire. So, you know, there are things about the founders, the market, but I think often the greatest companies don't even—they don't even have a narrative that fits, because even a narrative of what a company's doing is always, 'You're just one of X, one of many.' And so, you know, if you sort of look at Google in 1998 and people said, 'It's just another search engine.' There were many different search engines.

And it was actually, no, it was machine-powered search. So it was unique. They didn't even have that word for probably a decade afterwards. So you're always trying to find, you know, what's essential and unique. And that's, you know, you have to do that on a case-by-case basis.

Hi, Peter. My name's Matt Harder. I run a small democratic innovation firm called Civic Trust. Thanks for being here. It feels like the rising tensions between not just China and the U.S., but the governance models they represent, authoritarianism versus democracy, will characterize the next several decades. I'm sure we're all in the camp that would like to see democracy succeed, but it feels of late like our side is the one in retreat, increasingly struggling to show its value on the world stage and lacking vision and leadership. What do you see as the core tenets of a U.S. strategy to win the soft power war with China in the coming decades?

Man, there's so many different versions of this, but I would say maybe just to disagree with the framing of the question as the first part of a strategy is that if you frame it in overly historicist ways, where if you say that China is destined to win, or it's on the winning side of history, or conversely, it's this completely screwed up system that is just going to collapse under its own weight. I think both extremely pessimistic or extremely optimistic ways of framing it have the same effect of being anti- us needing to do very much. And so extreme pessimism, there's nothing we can do. Extreme optimism, there's nothing we need to do. And maybe they're true, but I am very suspicious of any sort of extreme formulation because it just seems so lazy and seems just to sort of go into this vice of

of not wanting to do things. And so I think my guess is that perhaps the healthier way to frame it, I'm not sure it's totally true, but the healthier way is that it's very close and we shouldn't be in denial or acceptance, we should be in between, we should be fighting, and it's up to a lot of different individual decisions. And even if China is growing faster than the U.S., you know, at the end of the day, it's, you know, it is also a, you know, we're a somewhat autistic country. China is a really autistic country. And it is extremely uncharismatic. And, you know, there is some part where, you know, the strategic landscape is going to be very fluid and it'll be up to what we do. So I would just start by framing it as, you know, a close battle that will go on for decades.

Hi there. Thank you. My name is Robert Winston and I'm here with NetChoice. Do you think politicians are educated on contemporary tech issues enough to regulate them? And what can be done to change that? And should lawmakers wait to regulate until they have a greater understanding, or is the time now, as some people argue it is?

Well, again, not defending Silicon Valley, the Big Tech companies. I think there's just a lot of things that are far from what I would have done or far from what's optimal. And then, you know, at the same time, your question probably answers itself, where, you know, these people just, you know, I think they are, for the most part, still aware enough of how incompetent they are. And so, you know, they're probably, you know, they have all these sort of proposals where, you know, Google should publish changes to the search engine algorithm. And, again, if we had a high-functioning government, maybe you could do something with this. I don't think anyone in the government even pushes that idea because they know they're too incompetent to do it.

And if you do it, it will just show how incompetent the people in our government are. That's all it will make transparent. Again, just another version of some big problems with Big Tech, even bigger problems with much bigger government.

Hi, Peter and Bambi, nice to meet you. I do have this question for the both of you. It's going back to the conversation you were having earlier. So earlier in the conversation, you mentioned how philosophers were deemed the radicals and free thinkers of society, and deep Christianity was the anti-thought. You also mentioned how the pendulum had kind of flipped to where deep Christian beliefs, especially within the last 20 months, is now the leader of free thought and considered the radicals of society—in a good way, of course. With that in mind, one second, what do you think deep Christian parents of this modern society should do to take back control of their children's education? Should we go back to traditional homeschooling model?

And if so, should we as a society also dial back on modern feminism to allow parents to take back control and actually teach their kids?

I have four kids, so I guess I'll start. I think you should take back control, and I think we never should have let control go. I think that now that we've had social distancing and distance learning, I've realized how much I didn't know what my kids were learning, and I was grateful for the opportunity to actually see what they were learning. And I'll give you an example. My son had a—he had a report that he had to write about all of the great leaders in this country. And he's in—he was in third grade, by the way. And so he had a list of the great leaders he could choose from. And those great leaders were Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cesar Chavez. And, and so she said, 'Well, does anyone...' and of course he's on Zoom, so I could hear this.

So, 'Does anybody have any idea, anyone?' And so someone said, 'Abraham Lincoln.' 'Okay, yeah, he's good.' And so he figures—he's actually quite aware, my son—and he said, 'How about Donald Trump?' And she said, 'No, I'm sorry,' kind of shut him down. She said, 'I'll talk to you later about that.' So he insisted, and he said, 'Why?' You know, she said, 'Well, you know, we needed to have people who actually did something for the country, and somebody I know.' And he's like, 'You don't know who Donald Trump is?' And so he ended up having to write—he was able to write his story—and, and basically he wanted to say that, 'Look, school is about giving thoughts, new thoughts. And Donald Trump has done a lot for education.' I guess a lot of it, she basically was saying, she was trying to get out of him writing about Donald Trump.

So it was either somebody who had to support liberty or somebody who had to support education. And so he rattled off all the things that Trump had done for education. So she basically said, 'Okay, you can write about him.' So I think that's one thing is take control. Um, but I think it's also about—we're talking a lot about character building. We talked a lot about that in the beginning. And one of my big things for my kids is to not keep them in safe places. I want to, you know, ennoble them with this sort of mode of being that, that life is suffering. You know, we have, we have this cross, I have this cross. It's about suffering. It's about tragedy. And that's not trying to make my kid live a morbid life.

It's about making my kid understand that, one, he needs forgiveness because he has very much a lot of ethical faults that will get him into trouble; um, that a lot of his circumstances, negative ones, are a lot due to him. So I want to teach my kids a sense of agency. So I think you just, you know, I think you ground them in those truths, those truths that they're pretty responsible for themselves. And so that's what I try to do is just try to give them a sense of agency. And I try to get very much involved in schools. You should get involved with school boards. There's somebody here—Clarice, I don't know where you are, but she's supporting 300 school board candidates. I think you should very much get involved with your school boards and start voicing your opinion, because we do have to educate our kids, and it starts in the home.

We can't have government do it. It's your job. It's our job.

I'm probably still on the 80% exit, 20% voice side. So, yes, I think people should, you know, they should show up at the school board meetings and scream at all these people. And it probably will do some good. And then at the same point, I sort of wonder whether it's really just all permutations of homeschooling that should be done, that anything short of that is not doing justice to the brainwashing and the, you know, sort of egalitarian homogenization that goes on, and the schools are just structurally screwed up. He's sort of an extreme writer, but there's the Rushdoony book from 1963 that I think was his best book, The Messianic Character of American Education. It sort of goes through all these different educational things.

It feels very overwrought, but the kindergarten chapter is like some silly German woman from the early 19th century invented the idea of a kindergarten. It was like this counterfeit Garden of Eden where you get rid of all the adults and you can start all over. And, of course, John Dewey features as the arch-villain with the sort of, you know, socialist homogenization of public schooling and the New Deal in the 1930s. And, yeah, I sort of wonder whether it's, again, you know, yes, use your voice, scream as much as you want, but be ready to exit, too.

You know, Denzel Washington said, teach your kids love, and it doesn't matter what happens around them. So it starts there. Yeah, you can scream all you want, but it starts at home in what you teach your kids.

Hey, Peter. This is Ariel. Over here. This is Ariel de Chapelle. I'm a co-founder with Hydrohost. I was rereading your book, and I was wondering if I could pose you a hypothetical, which is: suppose you had access to a secret, and that secret is that the U.S. dollar hegemony will collapse by the year 2030. What would you do to position yourself to survive and thrive in that kind of timeline?

Well, I suppose you're supposed to just buy Bitcoin, and I feel like I've been underinvested in it, and in part because I thought this was not a secret, but it was known to everybody, and yet maybe it isn't. But yeah, I think I agree with your claim. I still wonder how much of a secret it is, but maybe it still is enough of a secret. If you think of Bitcoin at $66,000, is it going to go up? Maybe, but it surely tells us that we are at a complete bankruptcy moment for the central banks and at some crisis point for them. The Wizard of Oz story was sort of this parable on central banking. The Wizard is an ounce of gold, the yellow brick road, and Emerald City—everything's seen through the prism of money—and the scarecrow is the farmer who has been brainwashed into thinking he doesn't have a brain, so he can't think about monetary policy.

You know, the Wicked Witch of the East is sort of the Wall Street bankers who have extortionate mortgage rates, and so in poetic justice, the house falls on the mortgage banker. But anyway, it's sort of a populist, anti-central banking book. But I've kind of been wondering the last month whether we're just about to have a Toto moment with the Fed where the little dog is pulling away the curtain and you see all the people. And we've had like two governors resign, two more probably aren't going to survive. And it's just, yeah, the sausage-making factory doesn't work when you have YouTube videos of what's going on in the sausage-making factory, and we are at an absolute crisis moment for the Fed.

So I think the answer is probably still to go long Bitcoin, and then my only hesitation is that it seems to me that this is a secret that's already known by everybody, but agreeing with you then, I've been wrong about that for a decade.

Bambi, closing words?

Actually, my closing words was actually going to ask Peter one final question to wrap this up. So I think Peter touched on this before, which is that when I said that the elites are dogmatic, he said not so much because they're constantly changing their minds. And I feel it's because their identity is wrapped up in the narrative, or the identity is their idea, and so they're hyper-dogmatic. It's just not stable. It's unstable, right? Because their identity, you know, it shifts with the narrative, I think. So my question to you is, getting back to religion and, um, and culture, and also sort of understanding your positioning and what motivates you, is, is where do you get your identity? How do you define it?

Well, I'm always so bad at even answering these questions. I think even identity is always this strange word that means two opposite things. It means your identity is that which makes you unique, and your identity is that which makes you identical, the same as other people. Sort of the insanity of identity politics is that you can use identity as meaning same, and you can use it to mean different, and when the word means A and not A, you can go anywhere you want to with it. But, you know, I would say that, you know, I think Christianity for me is the anti-identity. Your identity is in Christ, but it's not in all these other senses of the word identity. And then it's in that context that we can try to figure out things about the world.

We can figure out things about truth. And it's not always just a social construct as it was for... And when Pontius Pilate says, 'What is truth?', it's just a social construct or is it something transcendent? And I think we need to somehow always get back to that.

Great. And I think when I asked you before, sort of, what is your North Star and where do you go to? And that's your go-to. So I just want to make sure people understand that when they try to understand you. And it's pretty deep.

Please join me in thanking Peter and Bambi for a great conversation. If you exit the same door that you came in and go to your left, directly behind us are some great drinks and opportunities to meet each other and continue the conversation. Thank you very much.