Peter Thiel: Political Theology (Conversations with Tyler, 2024)

Hello, Peter, thank you for doing this. Hello, Tyler. Now, the title of this conversation is political theology. That was a phrase, I think, first used by the Russian anarchist Bakunin to mock the Italian nationalist Mazzini. German legal theorist Carl Schmitt then picked it up and said it's something that everyone needs. They all need a political theology. What does the term mean to you?

Well, it's a bit of a fuzzy, broad concept, but maybe sort of to motivate it as a contrast. I think that in late modernity, we're often living in this world of hyper-specialization, where you can't think about the big picture. And it's sort of like, I don't know, it's like Adam Smith's pin factory on steroids. It's sort of our world. And I think there is some way that we have to try to integrate all these different facets of our life to try to make progress. And that's what political philosophy does. That's what political theology does. The reasons these sorts of things were abandoned—I think maybe it was like the Enlightenment sort of abandoned it. And one type of reason it was abandoned was because it's too hard to figure this stuff out.

It's just a sort of a fool's errand. I'm inclined to think the other reason was it was often things too dangerous, too divisive. You're not supposed to have debates about religion. We settled that in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. We're just going to forget about it and not talk about these things. And I think that might have been a reasonable compromise in the 18th century. It's my view that when you fast forward to the 21st century, it's maybe more dangerous not to think about things. And it's, again, more dangerous for us to become ever smaller cogs in an ever bigger machine, you know, à la the Adam Smith pin factory. And then the, you know, the political dimension on it, just to say one thing on that, is there's always sort of a question, you know, if we're trying to figure out something about the whole, about our whole world, you know, do you start on sort of a human scale, or do you start on, you know, sort of a microscopic, telescopic, atomic, or cosmic...

And there's probably some way these things are related, but the political theology/political philosophy debate, our frame—I think this was also Socratic—we start, the sort of turn to common sense, human, the world around us, questions about politics, economics, society, culture, and that's sort of actually this important way to get access. There's some deep link between the university and the universe. There's some deep link between the failing multiversity and the crazed multiverse. But the sort of political orientation I have is you're never going to solve these things by—you have to start with the university, or whatever that's gone wrong, if you're ever going to make sense of the universe.

And there's some analog to that that motivates all of these things.

Let's say I'm trying to make sense of your political theology. So, I recall you saying in a recent talk you consider yourself religious but not spiritual. And that strikes me as quite a Calvinist point. So, if you put aside predestination and think of Calvinism as insisting we know nothing about heaven, so it's an abrogation of man's power to claim to know about heaven. That's related to your critique of the left. The notion that we don't know anything about heaven, it also means you can't really be spiritual. That's also a kind of arrogation. Isn't the consistent Peter Thiel really a Calvinist thinker? And Calvinism—it's quite concrete. It's quite serious. It takes governance and authority very literally.

Why aren't you just a Calvinist?

Look, I'm still, like, mostly a libertarian, Tyler.

But you can be both.

And that's... You know, I mean, I think probably there are things, they're probably redeeming things I can find in Calvinism. It's probably, you know, it's so anti-utopian that it's probably helpful in the battle against communism. But, you know, I don't know if that's the only way to be anti-communist. And if you do five-point Calvinism, it's, you know, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints. I don't know if I agree with even one out of those five things. I would say a Girardian anthropological frame is that there is this deep link between gods and scapegoats, and we tend to always, we have these scapegoats, we turn into gods, we project our violence onto them, and this is what archaic religion does, this is in some ways what atheist liberalism does.

You blame everything on a sovereign God. And isn't Calvinism just an extreme form of scapegoating where a sovereign God did everything? He determined everything. He's why you're wearing that blue jacket, and it's why everything you did wrong, it's all a sovereign God's fault. And we should be deeply distrustful of scapegoating a sovereign God for everything like that. So that's an anthropological argument against Calvinism. And then the intellectual reason I'm not Calvinist is that I think we should be trying to make sense of the world. And if you're so depraved that you can't even think, which is sort of, I think, a core Calvinist thing, we shouldn't be having a conversation. So if I were a real Calvinist, we wouldn't even be able to have a conversation here.

And if I sort of, you know, there's a Thomistic distinction between the intellect and the will. And the medievals believe in the power of the intellect, the weakness of the will. The moderns, it's sort of in some ways reversed. But if you sort of take an effective altruist, East Bay rationalist—these people, they're much closer to Calvinism. They claim to be rationalists. But if you're in a rationalist Bible study equivalent, and the outward-facing thing is that you're rational and you're pure in your thinking, the inward-facing thing is it's all just spaghetti code. You can never be right about anything. Maybe you can be a little bit less wrong. And so I'm against both Calvinism and so-called rationalism.

But here's then the puzzle I'm faced with. Let's take all of that at face value. Why is it you just don't slide into Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox belief in free will? There's some middle position. And why is your middle position stable? You could either be Catholic or, for that matter, Mormon, where there's plenty of room for free will, right?

Well, again, they're presumably not all the alternatives. It's always a little bit of a cheap shot. My two-word rebuttal to Roman Catholicism is Pope Francis. And we were talking a little bit about—I grew up as a Lutheran. There are probably all these things that are problematic about Luther. There are things that were good about him. But I think the one part of it that, if we judge him by the standards of the 16th century, I don't know. I think the Reformation had to come from the outside. It was not actually possible for it to start from within. And there is a way that the Lutheran piece was—it was the less globally centralized church. It was going to be a less centralized church. And there's probably still some part of the Protestant political project that lines up more closely with a libertarian view.

What is it from the Hebrew Bible, or one could say Old Testament, that you've incorporated into your own political thought?

Well, I think my views on this are fairly orthodox Christian in that there's some continuity between the old and the new. There's some sense—it's sort of hard to define—where maybe the Christian God is the original progressive, where the new is better than the old. I think it's the first time where the new is simply better than the old just by virtue of being new. But if you exaggerate the difference too much, that ends up being problematic, where you end up saying that the Old Testament God is maybe just a different God from the New Testament God, and that sort of all the extremely progressive forms of higher criticism, things like this, in the 19th century were all deeply anti-Semitic. So I think if you're too progressive, you end up becoming an anti-Semite, and then if you're

And then you have to somehow say there's some progress. But the Girardian intuition I would have is it's just always this reversal in perspective where the Bible takes things from the side of the victim. And it's already in the Book of Genesis where it's the story of Cain and Abel, the founding of the first city in the history of the world, is a parallel but opposite story to the story of Romulus and Remus, the founding of the greatest city, where the Romulus and Remus story is told from the point of view of Romulus, the Cain and Abel story is told from the point of view of Abel, or the Israelites coming out of Egypt that would normally be told from the point of view of the Egyptians where you had these troublemakers and we got rid of them.

And you have this sort of inversion of perspectives throughout the Old Testament, I would say.

Is it possible that we can read the Old Testament, conclude essentially history is something really bad, that's the central message of the woke, and then just say the woke basically are correct, we should side with the woke, they have all these excesses, those are terrible, but they're in a way a method of advertising the fundamental conclusion that history is bad, and they're the ones who make us deal with that, and thus you and I should be woke? What's wrong with that line of reasoning?

Yes, I think the history was very bad. I think it's always a mistake for conservatives or anti-woke people to whitewash it too much. And so if we say that, yeah, there used to be slavery, but the slaves were all happy people—they were all happy slaves—that is a loser argument, and you shouldn't do this. What I would say, again, the sort of rough Christian frame on this is somehow the history is really bad. And I think Christianity probably, it is much worse than Islam or Judaism on this because, I don't know, Islam and Judaism, it would be inconceivable that you could murder God in the form of a person. If someone claimed to be God and he got killed, that would just prove that he's not God.

And so, yeah, sort of the original sin, the violence, in some sense is far greater in a Christian context. But then there is some way that we're all part of that matrix and you also need to have—you need to have forgiveness. So if you want to maybe outline three rough possibilities, there's this hard-to-define Christian in-between one, which is the history is terrible and it's awful, but we need to try to find a way to forgive people. And then there is a, let's say, woke version where the history is terrible, but we're going to forget about the forgiveness part. And then there is, I don't know, maybe sort of a right-wing Nietzschean Bronze Age Pervert alternative, which is we're going to forget about the history.

It's kind of oppressive. I'm sick of the guilt trip and don't want to hear anything more about the history. And somehow the sort of in-between Christian one, I think, is the most tenable, even though there are all sorts of tensions in that.

There was a recent Harvard talk you gave where, if I understand you correctly, you suggested the Left needed to learn how to relativize its victimhood. What did you mean by that and how does it relate to what you just said?

The context was, you know, how much victimhood is unhealthy for people to have. And there are all these ways where you can identify yourself as a victim. I don't want to have sort of a blanket rule where you can never say that you weren't a victim. I sometimes like to joke that I'm a poor and persecuted Peter person, and maybe there are elements of truth to that. Maybe it's very exaggerated. But if I absolutize that too much, it's probably unhealthy. And sort of a Christian distinction that I suggested at the Harvard talk was that it's okay to say you're a victim. It's okay to do these things up to a certain point. You can't say that you're a greater victim than Christ. And once you do that, you've probably lost perspective.

Are there other holy books besides the Bible that you draw ideas and inspiration from? And what would those be?

Well, you know, I think it's probably all. In some sense, it's all the great books. There were these sort of, I don't know, they're not quite at the scale of these holy books, but there was a way that we treated, I don't know, Shakespeare or Cervantes or Goethe as these almost semi-divine writers. And I think that's the sort of attitude one has to have to read any of these books, you know, appropriately and seriously. So the Western Canon would be your answer, so to speak? Something like the Western Canon. I don't think that, you know, I don't think the great books are quite as holy as the Bible. And, you know, as a result, I probably don't read enough of them. But, yes, that's the closest approximation.

And it includes science fiction, yes or no?

I read a lot as a kid. I read so little of that nowadays. It's all too depressing.

Last week I was teaching my graduate class and a bunch of them asked me, 'Why is it we keep on hearing about Carl Schmitt now?' And I tried to explain that to them, but why do you think there's now a resurgence of interest in Carl Schmitt? And for you, what are the valuable insights in Schmitt?

Carl Schmitt was one of this group of thinkers who came to prominence in the 1920s in Weimar, Germany. And obviously there were a lot of things that went very haywire with many of these people. In some ways, Schmitt got somewhat entangled with the Nazis. He distanced himself a few years later. But there was some very bad judgment in certain ways. But the thing that I think is interesting, dangerous about looking at the Weimar thinkers—it was in the aftermath of World War I. Germany had lost. You couldn't go back to sort of the throne and altar, you know, empire, the Habsburgs, and you didn't really want to go forward with liberal democracy. And so all these people had these fairly deep critiques, and in some ways it was going back to these questions of political theology, political philosophy that had been sort of whitewashed and set aside since the Enlightenment.

And there were, again, there were things about it that were dangerous. One way to think of the Weimar period was, I don't know, it's like the dwarves in Moria where they delved too deep and finally they awakened the nameless terror of the Balrog. But I think there are, and again, I don't think we're ever in a cyclical world, but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where, you know, liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that a democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And, you know, that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.

What is it you think that Schmitt missed that's very important?

Let's maybe, I'll just sort of do one insight that I think is powerful and then sort of what's wrong about that. One of his books was The Concept of the Political and sort of what defines politics, and it's sort of this, it's some of this division of friends and enemies, and that somehow is really foundational and you shouldn't get sidetracked with all these other things. And then there are all these interesting ways you could apply this. There's sort of a 1980s Reagan coalition question I always like to ask people. The Reagan coalition was somehow the free market libertarians, the defense hawks, and the social conservatives. And so if you ask, what does the millionaire, the general, and the priest...

What do they actually have in common? We just sort of imagine these three people are seated at a dinner table and they're having dinner, and what do they actually talk about? And it's really hard to come up with with an answer, and and yet the coalition worked incredibly well, and the answer I submit that they have in common is they're anti-communist and they have a common enemy. And and that was incredibly powerful. It was, in some ways, my formative political idea as a teenager—junior high school, high school, late '70s, early '80s—was anti-communism. And then there was a way that when the Berlin Wall came down in '89, this seemingly incredibly powerful political constellation disintegrated. And there's sort of a natural Schmittian analysis of this.

So that's sort of where I find Schmitt quite powerful as a thinker. You know, the place where it probably tends to always go haywire is there's always a question whether politics is like a market, or is it a sort of thing where if you understand it better, it works better? Or is it something like a scapegoating machine, where the scapegoating machine only works if you don't look into the sausage-making factory? And so if you say we're having a lot of conflicts in our village and we have to find some random elderly woman and accuse her of witchcraft so that we'll achieve some psychosocial unity as a village, this sort of thing doesn't really work if you're that self-aware. And so there was sort of a...

You know, Schmitt had this, you know, in a way had this optimistic Enlightenment rationality to it, where if we just describe politics as, you know, the arbitrary division of the world into friends and enemies, then this will somehow, you know, strengthen the political, and it probably actually, you know, in some ways accelerated its disintegration instead.

Is Schmitt missing out on a certain possible cyclicality in history? So the notion that liberalism will collapse in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, obviously that was the correct prediction. But if you reappear in West Germany of 1948, it was a completely incorrect prediction. And just as well, liberalism had collapsed leading up to World War I, it tends to come back. Why isn't the cyclical perspective the correct one?

Man, that's a big question, but I don't know. I think you can stress the aspects that are timeless and eternal. I prefer to stress the aspects that are one-time and world-historical. I think that, in some sense, every moment in history only happens once, and I think there is some kind of a... meaning to history. I think it has a certain type of linearity to it. And I think that is sort of the, let's say, the Judeo-Christian view of history as distinct from, let's say, the classical Greco-Roman one. I don't know if you can have a concept of history that's cyclical. So if you look at, I don't know, if you look at Thucydides, where it's this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta.

So the Periclean Age, somehow, gives way to this great conflict. And then people came back to studying Thucydides right after World War I because there's some certain parallel, you had 100 years of peace between the Napoleonic Wars, and then it led to this great conflict. But there's nothing particular in the history. None of the details matter in Thucydides. He makes up all the speeches and so on. You contrast this with something like the Book of Daniel in the Bible, where it's a succession of four kingdoms, and it is a one-time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated. And there's sort of a sense in which I would say the real first historian was Daniel, and Thucydides isn't even close.

And then, yeah, we talked off the set a little bit about... Well, what about, you know, the Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire and isn't the European Union sort of like the Roman Empire? And then, I don't know, my response is, well, you know, we have nuclear weapons today and they didn't have those, you know, even in 1900. And so even just on the science and tech arc, things are so different. And I would not trivialize the importance of science and technology.

So you think now the stakes are too high for the cyclical version of history to work? Because at some point, it's just not possible to come back?

It's just that the science and tech has a progressive character. And so it is... Yes, there are elements I think that are probably quite apocalyptic about our time, but I wouldn't, I would just start by saying they're very different and we're in a very different world than we were in 1900 and I don't know how you go, I don't know how you unlearn all the knowledge we've gained even since 1900.

You think we're entering a new age of millenarian thought, somewhat akin to the English 17th century, where everything was very fertile. There's a scientific revolution. Tech, you could say, is revitalized again. A lot of people went crazy. Highly diverse theologies. They execute a king. Many strange things happen, but in many ways, we're living in the world of the English 17th century, right? With constitutions, political parties, central banks.

This is again like an absurdly cyclical frame you're putting on things. It's just, no, I don't think any moment ever repeats itself. It is just radically different. Of course there are things that are apocalyptic about our world. We have all these kinds of dangers that, unlike the 17th century, they seem to come from this place that's very non-religious. It's like science, technology. It was nuclear weapons after 1945. Maybe it's environmental degradation, climate change. We can debate about various forms of the environment. There certainly are fears people have about bioweapons. We can ask what really happened with the Wuhan lab. There are apocalyptic fears around AI that I think deserve to be taken seriously.

So if it's millenarian or apocalyptic, it has a very, very different feel. It's sort of apocalyptic violence that comes from a purely human source. It's not really being orchestrated by God. You know, one of the points that René Girard always liked to make was that in the Catholic Church, I think during the Advent season, you'd often have these sort of sermons on the end times and the terrible things that happened at the end of the world. And in Girard's telling, the church stopped those sermons after 1945 because people needed to be reassured that the nuclear weapons had nothing to do with Armageddon or fire and brimstone or anything like this, even though, of course, there were all these slight mythic elements.

The first nuclear test was called Trinity, or you named it after all these Greek gods, Saturn, Jupiter, Zeus, whatever. But yeah, I think we are... we're sort of, there are elements of that that I think are very true, but if I had to do my anti-millenarian frame, or maybe it's not a pro-tech argument, this is sort of an anti-anti-tech argument, is that if we, again, talk about all these existential risks today, and we can, nuclear weapons, climate change, biotech, nanotech, killer robots, the AI that's going to turn everyone into a paperclip or whatever. I always think you should at least include one more kind of existential risk if we're going to throw it in. And in my mind, one other existential risk is a one-world totalitarian government.

And I find that at least as scary as the others. And in sort of a Biblical eschatological context, you're supposed to worry about Armageddon. You're also supposed to worry about the Antichrist. Maybe you're supposed to worry more about the Antichrist because the Antichrist comes first. And so if we're going to find a pathway through this apocalyptic age, you have to sort of navigate between the Scylla of all these existential risks and the Charybdis of this sort of political totalitarian catastrophe. If I had to do sort of a more literary version on this, it's very hard to write sort of a literary account of the Antichrist. But there were sort of the two good Antichrist books that were written.

The two best fictional ones in my mind were pre-World War I. There was a 1908 Robert Hugh Benson sort of a Catholic book, Lord of the World. There was a 1900 one by Soloviev, War, Progress, and the End of History. They both had these sort of accounts of this future world, totalitarian world dictator who took over the whole world, and both of them, it's kind of a deus ex machina. It's sort of really unclear how the Antichrist takes over. It's like he gives these hypnotic speeches and no one can remember a word he says, but they all just sell their souls for no apparent good reason whatsoever, and he just takes over the world. But it seems to me that if we were to write, if one were to try to write a novel like this post-1945, it's very straightforward.

It would be, you know, it'd be like One World or None. This was a short film by the nuclear scientists after 1945. If we don't give the nuclear weapons to the one-world government, it's going to blow up the whole world. And basically, the literary version would be that the Antichrist comes to power by constantly talking about Armageddon and constantly telling us scary millenarian stories. And so that's sort of my complicated, nuanced answer is there's a lot of truth to these existential risks. I don't want to completely dismiss them, but that's also how we're going to get this totalitarian state. If you look at all these versions of this, I can go down, but it's like, you know, do you want to worry about Dr. Strangelove or Greta?

And it seems like Dr. Strangelove's more dangerous, but if everyone's going to have to ride a bicycle, that's not just going to happen on its own, and that requires some real enforcement of this stuff. There's a Bostrom essay from 2019 on how to stop all the AI risks, and it's basically... you know, maybe we can change the culture so that nobody will have heterodox ideas anymore. And so a few different ideas like this, but then what you really need is really effective global government and really effective policing because you have to have some kind of global compute governance. And that sounds to me at least as scary as the AI.

But isn't the much greater risk a collapse into a kind of disorderly feudalism? So we're in Florida. The United States seems to be becoming more federalistic. It's very hard for me to imagine China, say, taking over India. You can look at the Balkans. It's even a word, balkanize. You look at the Middle East, if it goes very badly, it's hard to see any single power just ruling any substantial part of the Middle East. It's easy to imagine it being in a kind of chaos. Why think there's so much scale that that kind of totalitarianism would be possible?

Man, I don't know. There's so many different versions of this, but just if we think about, I don't know, there were versions of this I would have been more on your side, let's say post 9-11. You know, it was, you know, Why aren't we just going to have all this chaotic terrorism all over the world? And we didn't get that much terrorism. And we instead got the Patriot Act and incredible tracking of money flows, incredible monitoring of people. And of course, there still are things that can go wrong, but the political slogan of the Antichrist, 1 Thessalonians 5.3, I think, is peace and safety. And it seems that we've gone far more in the peace and safety direction than the global chaos direction.

I don't know. I think it's hard to even have an illegal Swiss bank account. And that's like a really modest way. It's hard to exit. It's much harder to exit the United States than it was 20, 30 years ago.

Let's say you're trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddle through and just keeps on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch?

I don't think it's a really empirical question. Yes, if you could convince me that it was empirical and you'd say, "These are the variables we should pay attention to," if I agreed with that frame, you've already won half the argument. And so it would be like variables, well, the sun has risen and set every day, and so it'll probably keep doing that. And so we shouldn't worry. Or the planet has always muddled through, so Greta's kind of wrong, and we shouldn't really pay attention to her. And I'm sympathetic to not paying attention to her, but I don't think this is a great argument. Or, you know, this is of course, if we think about the globalization project of, you know, of the post-Cold War period where, in some sense, globalization just sort of happens.

There's going to be more movement of goods and people and ideas and money, and we're going to sort of become this more peaceful, better integrated world. And you don't need to sweat the details. We're just going to kind of muddle through. And then what... In my telling, there were a lot of things around that story that went very haywire. One simple version is the U.S.-China thing. Hasn't quite worked the way Fukuyama and all these people envisioned it back in 1989. And I think one could have figured this out much earlier. And if we had not been told, "You're just going to muddle through," the alarm bells would have gone off much sooner. And maybe globalization is leading towards sort of a neoliberal paradise.

Maybe it's leading to the totalitarian state of the Antichrist. But I would be, let's say it's not a very empirical argument, but if someone like you didn't ask questions about muddling through, I'd be so much like an optimistic boomer libertarian like you. If an optimistic boomer libertarian like you stopped asking questions about muddling through, I'd be so much more assured. So much more hopeful.

Are you saying it's ultimately a metaphysical question rather than an empirical question?

I don't think it's metaphysical, but it's somewhat analytic. And moral even.

It's... That you're laying down some duty by talking about muddling through.

Well, it does tie into all these bigger questions. So, I don't think if we had a one-world state that this would automatically be for the best. And so, I'm not sure that if we do a classical liberal or libertarian intuition on this, it would be maybe the absolute power that a one-world state would have would corrupt absolutely. I don't think the libertarians were critical enough of it the last 20 or 30 years. So, there was some way they didn't believe their own theories. They didn't connect things enough. I don't know if I'd say that's a moral failure, but there was some failure of the imagination.

So, this multi-pronged skepticism about muddling through, would you say that's your actual real political theology? Like, have we gotten to the bottom of this now?

That would be a, you know, it's whenever people think you can just muddle through, yeah, you're probably set up for some kind of disaster. That's fair. It's not as positive an agenda, but I always think... One of my chapters in the *Zero to One* book was, "You're Not a Lottery Ticket." The basic advice is, if you're an investor, you can just think, "Okay, I'm just muddling through as an investor here. I have no idea what to invest in. There are all these people. I don't—I can't pay attention to any of them. I'm just going to write checks to everyone, make them go away, and I'm just going to set up, you know, um, a desk somewhere here in, on South Beach, and I'm going to give a check to everyone who comes up to the desk." Or, you know, not everybody, but I'll just—it'll—it's just, "I'm writing lottery tickets," and that's just a formula for losing all your money. And, um, and there's some...

There's some—the muddling, the place where I react so violently to the muddling through, it's just, again, we're just not thinking. And this is like, it can be Calvinist, it can be rationalist, it's anti-intellectual, it's not thinking about things.

So, the muddling-through view and the Calvinist view, in your opinion, they have the same flaw, actually.

It's a distrust in human agency, a distrust in human thought, a distrust in our ability to make choices.

Now, for months I've been asking myself why you, and also Schmitt, are so interested in this katechon idea, which is also from the Bible. You can explain that to us in a moment, but am I correct in now thinking, it just occurs to me, that the katechon is, in a sense, your substitute vision for what for me is muddling through? So, you're not willing to believe in muddling through, but things haven't collapsed now, not here. So, you need something else holding the finger in the dike, and that's katechon, or no?

Well, it's a very mysterious idea. It's sort of this, there's always a question why the Antichrist hasn't taken over yet, and it's this mysterious force that holds back, this restraining force that holds back, you know, the totalitarian one-world state. And, and, you know, I don't necessarily put too much stock in it because it's sort of, on its own terms, it's somewhat unstable, it's provisional, it has these sort of archaic sacred elements, it can work for a while, but it's not something, you can't identify it with an institution. And again, the Schmittian view was there were all these different things that played the role of the katechon at various points in time. But you're not supposed to immanentize the eschaton.

You're also not supposed to immanentize the katechon. And so if you identify too much as one thing, that can go very wrong. And then if you think of the katechon as the thing that restrains the one world state, there were various things that restrains the Antichrist. Anything that's sort of like the opposite, this is a Girardian cut, is always going to be mimetically entangled. It's going to have sort of this parallelism. And so there's always a risk that the katechon becomes the Antichrist. The original, the proto-Antichrist was Nero. Claudius... The good emperor was the katechon. He was restraining Nero. But then at some point, Nero is the opposite of Claudius, but they're both Roman emperors.

Or you could say that in the middle of the 20th century, I don't know, from, let's say, 1949 to 1989, I would identify the katechon as anti-communism. I would identify communism as the ideology of the Antichrist in the 20th century. And anti-communism was this, you know, it was not, you know, what, what stopped communism was not, you know, the United States couldn't have done, it was not just one country, it was not, um, it was not like some libertarian debating society, it was, you know, something, it was like pretty violent, pretty, pretty hard to morally justify, not really that Christian, um, but, um, but that sort of had this unifying effect. And then, um, the way it morphed would be in 1989, something like anti-communism morphs into neoliberalism.

And that's actually, well, if you're anti-communist, you're not aspiring for world control. You're just trying to stop the communists from getting world control. Once you've defeated the communists, what are you supposed to do? And maybe you can just go home and forget about all of what you did. But in practice, these things have a tendency to perpetuate themselves. And it was like Bush 41: anti-communism became the New World Order, and we're now going to just govern the world in the name of anti-communism. And so there's something about it that's always misleading. Or even what I said about the Antichrist in this apocalyptic thing. Doesn't the Antichrist just come to power by acting as a katechon?

This is what Greta says she's doing. She is the katechon stopping climate change. And so it's a somewhat useful concept, but I wouldn't put too much weight on it.

So at the macro level, all the weight you're putting on human agency, is that really so compatible with Lutheranism?

I'm probably not. I'm not a perfect Lutheran. There's a lot that was about all these people that one would judge very differently in retrospect.

If you look in the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament, and you think about all the Christian thinkers who believed in some form of predestination, or Moses was chosen and the like, Abraham was chosen, what is it in the Bible that points you in the direction of so much belief in human agency being so important?

There's sort of a lot of different... levels on this, but certainly if you think of it as this shift away from sacrificing individuals, sacrificing people, there is sort of the anti-sacrificial theme. You can always say, how is modernity or enlightened values, how are they tied with this, but certainly the idea I would have would be something like the idea of the individual came out of this context where, you know, the state was not absolute. It was not sacred. It was not necessarily providential. Girard liked to always say that Christ was the first political atheist. Because on the level of the political order, if you say Christ says that he's the Son of God, Son of the Father—there's a way you can go into Trinitarian metaphysics, but the political interpretation of this is that Caesar Augustus, the son of the divinized Caesar, is not...

Somehow that's not exactly the Son of God, and that the Roman Empire is not simply divinely ordained, and then that somehow opens a space for a less unitary system that takes many, many centuries to develop or something like this. But this is where, I don't know, I think of even Ayn Rand as a pretty good Christian, in this way. I know that would probably be a really scandalous thing to say, but it's just, it's at least, you know, yes, it's Jewish and atheist and shrill and crazy, but it's just, you can't sacrifice the individual. And then, you know, you shouldn't sacrifice your mind, you shouldn't sacrifice your reason, it's just that you can't sacrifice that.

You've been quoting The Tempest lately in some of your talks. How is it you think the Shakespearean political vision differs from the Christian?

Well, it's always hard to know what Shakespeare really thought, but I... You know, you certainly have different characters. If you have, you know, I think it's... You have someone like Macbeth, I think, who says, 'Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' So that doesn't sound like a particularly Christian worldview, but maybe that's just what Macbeth says. It's not what Shakespeare says. So it's always very hard to know. Or maybe it's a sort of a Christian nihilistic view of the world or something like that. But I think the contrast I always frame is that I think the way I understand Shakespeare is always in contrast with someone like Karl Marx, where Marx believed that people had battles over differences that mattered.

It was the different classes, and they had objectively different interests, and this is what led to the intensity of the struggle. And there's something in Shakespeare that's sort of proto-Girardian or very mimetic, where people have conflicts over—when they—the conflicts are the most intense when they don't differ at all. And so it is, you know, it's the opening line of Romeo and Juliet, it's the Capulets versus the Montagues, 'two houses, alike in dignity.' They're identical, and that's why they—they hate each other so much. Or it's at the end of Hamlet where Hamlet says, you know, to be truly great, you must stake everything for an eggshell, because an average person would fight over things that mattered, but a truly great person would fight over things as ephemeral as honor or an eggshell or something like this.

And of course, Hamlet's problem is he doesn't really believe all the sort of insane revenge drama he's supposed to be in. So I think there is probably a place where I would say, yes, Shakespeare would probably be very distrustful of extreme ideological differences today, would probably, in some ways, also be a kind of political atheist.

I find the play Julius Caesar very interesting because there's no catacomb, there's no muddling through, so they sacrifice Caesar. There's a civil war and a lot more people dying and no end to that in sight. It's the pessimistic scenario of the Thiel mental universe, I think.

You know, there's sort of a strange way where they're all going back and thinking they're reenacting things, right? So it's, you know, the way Brutus gets pulled into the conspiracy in Julius Caesar is that he gets reminded that, you know, his ancestor, another person named Brutus, had overthrown Tarquin, the—the last of the kings of Rome in 509 BC. And so he thinks he's just reenacting that murder. And then, of course, I think there is some part in the play where Shakespeare has the actors say, you know, I'm going to get this slightly garbled, but it's something like, you know, 'And centuries hence, there'll be people reenacting this on a stage in front of an audience.' And this is what motivates Brutus to do it.

It's like the future applause in the Shakespearean theater. And then, of course, you know, the crazy literal reenactment of it was John Wilkes Booth shooting Abraham Lincoln in 1865, where Booth was a Shakespearean actor, and then it was Sic Semper Tyrannis was what he said. It was like he thought he was reenacting the Brutus Caesar thing. And then you can look at the, I think it was 1838 Lincoln speech, the young men's Lyceum address, where Lincoln sort of portrays himself sort of in a somewhat coded way as sort of a proto-Caesar. And he sort of tells the audience, there are people in this country who, you know, who... wouldn't be happy to be, some people are really ambitious, but no one can be like a founder, because that was in the past.

And the most you can now be is a President. But there are people for whom being President's not enough. And there's some people who, if you didn't stop them, they would keep going until they enslaved all the white people or freed all the slaves. This is Lincoln talking about himself and saying that he has the ambition to be like a Caesar or a Napoleon, or something like this. But yes, so there's a bit of a roundabout answer. Yes, so there are ways we can see it as a cycle, but surely that's what we want to transcend. It was a bad idea for Brutus to think he was reenacting the Caesar thing, and somehow there was something about the John Wilkes Booth story that's pretty sad too.

For our last segment, let's turn to artificial intelligence. As you know, large language models are already quite powerful. They're only going to get better. In this world to come, will the wordcels just lose their influence? People who write, people who play around with ideas, pundits, are they just toast? What's this going to look like? Are they going to give up power peacefully? Are they going to go down with the ship? Are they going to... set off nuclear bombs?

I had this riff where I think, again, one of the things I'll say the AI thing broadly, the LLMs, it's a big breakthrough. It's very important. And it's striking to me how bad Silicon Valley is at talking about these sorts of things. And the questions are either way too narrow, where it's something like, we're going to have, you know, is the next transformer model going to improve by 20% on the last one or something like this? Or they're maybe too cosmic where it's like we go straight—from there we go straight to the simulation theory of the universe. And surely there are, you know, a lot of in-between questions one could ask. Let me try to answer yours. My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people.

And what people have told me is that they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the U.S. Math Olympiad problems. And that would—that would shift things quite a bit. There's sort of a longer history I always have on the math-versus-verbal riff, where if you ask, when did our society bias to testing people more for a math ability? I believe it was during the French Revolution, because it was believed that verbal ability ran in families. Math ability was sort of distributed in this sort of idiosyncratic way throughout the population. And so if we prioritized math ability, it had sort of this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society. And then I think by the time you get to the Soviet Union and Soviet communism in the 20th century, where you give, you know, a

Number theorist or chess grandmaster merit, which was always a part I was somewhat sympathetic to in the Soviet Union, maybe it's actually just sort of a control mechanism where the math people are singularly clueless. They don't understand anything. But if we put them on a pedestal and tell everyone else, 'You need to be like the math person,' then it's actually a way to sort of control, or that the chess grandmaster doesn't understand anything about the world. That's a way to really control things. And if I sort of fast-forwarded to, let's say, Silicon Valley in the early 21st century, it's way too biased towards the math people. I don't know if it's a French Revolution thing or a Russian sort of Straussian secret cabal control thing where you have to prioritize it, but that's the thing that seems deeply unstable, and that's what I would bet on getting reversed where, you know, it's like...

Isn't it like the place where math ability, like, you know, it's sort of—it's the thing that's the test for everything, right? It's like, if you want to go to medical school, okay, we weed people out through physics and calculus, and like, I'm not sure that's really correlated with your, you know, I don't know, your dexterity as a neurosurgeon. I don't really want someone operating in my brain to be, you know, doing prime number factorizations in their head while they're operating on my brain or something like that. And so, you know, I, you know, in the late '80s, early '90s, I had sort of a chess bias because I was a pretty good chess player. And so my chess bias was you should just test everyone on chess ability.

And that should be the gating factor. Why even do math? Why not just chess? And that got undermined by the computers in 1997. And isn't that what's going to happen to math? And isn't that a long overdue rebalancing of our society?

And how is manual labor going to do in this world to come? There'll be a lot more new projects, right? If you're a very good gardener, carpenter, will your wages go up by 5x? Or is there something else in store for us? It's hard to say.

But look, I think—it seems to me the kinds of—let me just not give the answer, but let me sort of suggest some of the questions I'd like us to focus on more with the AI. So I think one question is, how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality? And probably it does some of both. Is it a very centralizing technology? That's another question I'd like to get a better handle on. I had this riff five, six years ago where if—if crypto is libertarian, why can't we say that AI is communist? And one of the things that I'm still probably a little bit uncomfortable about is that it seems to lead to these incredible returns to scale. Man, I thought San Francisco had at least committed suicide, and we could move on from San Francisco.

But the returns to scale on AI are so big that maybe even San Francisco will survive with the AI revolution. And there are benefits to this, but it also leads to this kind of a set of centralization questions. Or the geopolitical question: you know, if it is as big a technology as you and I think it is, what is it going to do to the China-U.S. rivalry? Will it, you know... And what do you think? I don't actually... I'm just saying, like, it would be good if we just at least asked the right sorts of questions. I don't have answers to all these. I can do the—I'll do the pro-China argument, is they will not hesitate to use the AI and train it on all their people, and so it'll be more quickly implemented.

The pro-US argument is that we are probably ahead of China. Maybe the large language models are not really communist. Maybe if you can't ask the large language model who Winnie the Pooh is, you have to nerf it so badly that it doesn't even work or something like that. So I think there's sort of a... There's an intuition that the effective altruists are not just fifth columnists on the part of the CCP where they're trying to sabotage us, but where they actually simply are doing what the CCP wants, which is actually to stop the LLMs and that it's very disruptive. And then to the extent, I think, that the second one, that it probably helps the US more than China, is that actually massively destabilizing, where China was this sort of low-volatility plan to victory, where they were just going to slowly beat the Western world.

And if you now have this volatility-increasing technology that China cannot match, does that just accelerate China's timetable? And does China become sort of like Russia—you know you're ultimately going to lose and you have to, you know, maybe you have to invade Taiwan in the next year or two and you can't wait for another decade? Final question: What is the next thing you will choose to learn about? Man, this is always, you know, all these questions, you know, this is all, there's all this projections of your personality, Tyler, you know? It's like, and it's the Isaiah Berlin thing where, you know, um, you have these two, you have these sort of, uh, you know, the hedgehog who knows one thing, the fox who knows many things.

You know so many different things. You're interested in so many different things. You know, I'm just, I don't know, it's just sort of a few core ideas I come back to, and it's something like this, you know, wonderful and terrible history of the world that we're living through as, you know, you know, Christianity's unraveling our culture and we have to figure out a way to get to the other side. I think that's what's gonna keep me busy for a long time. Peter Thiel.

Thank you very much. We now have time for questions. Yes.

Hello. It's kind of a basic question maybe to you, but to me, I'm wondering your opinion. You have this dystopic view of, like, one-world order, which I totally understand. And I know that Founders Fund has invested in cryptocurrency and made money on it, but do you view crypto or Bitcoin in particular as something that could put power back in the hands of the people, or something that's likely to catalyze more centralization of power in this one-world order in the future?

I'm still hopeful that on net, Bitcoin is on the anti-one-world-order side, just based on all the people who are against it. But maybe that's a little bit too of a simplistic Schmittian analysis. But yeah, no, there are... The questions are, you know, the sort of questions would be: Can you, do you have genuine anonymity, genuine pseudonymity? And probably there are certain ways in which if we want to have decentralized things where you use money for questionable purposes, maybe physical cash is still better than Bitcoin, and things have not gone quite the sort of, I don't know, crypto-anarchist utopia that people were fantasizing about in the late '90s. On the other hand, I think it probably is still, if you're just thinking of it as a one-time way to get money outside of the control of a particular government, it's probably still extremely good for that.

Thank you. So you can HODL until you need it.

Next question.

So Nick Bostrom and communism both sort of start out with a very different premise, end up in the same place: we need a one-world government. Do you think that there's some sort of metaphysical reason for that, some kind of attractor well there?

I think there's a certain rationality to it. Maybe it's just an Enlightenment rationality, where if we say that there's some set of things that make sense and that are good, and then it's probably, there's some kind of a way you should have in a world order. It sounds more peaceful in both cases than having a divided world. But yeah, there's probably just some kind of a rationality where if you had one modality of governance, that would... If it's the best, that would make for the best possible world. You should have that everywhere. And then it's only if you have some very deep concerns about maybe human nature or the people who run the government or things like that that you start to second-guess that.

They're probably both somehow pretty optimistic about human nature.

If one extra year at the end of your life was for sale, what would you be willing to pay for it today?

Man, I don't agree with hypothetical questions where I don't believe in the premise. I would probably not pay the person who asked me that anything, because I think they were just ripping me off. I hope to live for more than just one more year, and by the time I needed to collect on that extra year, I think that person would be long gone.

What are the Straussian messages of the Bible, and what do they tell us about political theology? Simple questions tonight. Oh, boy.

Well, I think Strauss was this political philosopher who's, you know, I wouldn't describe as Christian, was probably sort of... very classical. But the place where I'd say both, let's say someone like Strauss and Girard agreed on was that there's certain ways of understanding the world that have this disruptive way. And you don't want Enlightenment simply, that if you just tell people the secret messages, it has this sort of unraveling effect. And so the, I don't know, I'm not sure it's esoteric, but it is, you know, it's the Book of Revelations is the apocalypse because, you know, apocalypse in Greek means unveiling. And it is, and if you unveil the social order, you might end up, you know, deconstructing and destroying it.

And, you know, Girard's book was I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, and it's sort of to see Satan is to see Satan fall. So the only time Satan appears in the Bible is at the very end of the world. Every other time it's maybe he's talking to God or he's talking to Christ in the desert, but no human being ever sees Satan simply because to see Satan is to see Satan fall. It's sort of the libertarian, another libertarian cut on Christianity is that when Christ is tempted in the desert and Satan says, 'Just worship me, and you can have all these kingdoms in the world,' it's somehow saying that all the governments are more Satanic than divinely ordained. And then people don't understand that. They think governments are somehow divinely ordained.

And so once you see how Satanic the government is, how Satanic taxes are, and other things besides that governments do, it will have this unraveling effect. Thank you.

Hi. A big part of the thesis of The Sovereign Individual is that the defenders will be able to have an advantage over offense and that that's the way that violence and the exertion of force is going. I'm interested if you still think that to be the case, particularly with companies like Anduril, where the thesis is kind of there is no inherent properties of a smaller weapon that a smaller state can easily have, but rather the proliferation of those is simply a tactic that larger states need to use to evolve their strategies.

Yeah, so I was extremely influenced by the Rees-Mogg/Davidson book, 1997, The Sovereign Individual, where the thesis was that, let's say, the computer technology information age was trending in this very deeply decentralizing libertarian way. And that seemed very true in 1999, and then certainly by the last, by the end of the 2010s, one would have said that there's something about a lot of information technology that seemed maybe centralizing, maybe the opposite. There's always a riff I have on this where if we look at Star Trek or the world of 1968, people also thought 2001: A Space Odyssey, IBM is HAL... You know, it's sort of, you're going to have one big supercomputer that's going to run a planet, or the planet Beta, in one of the early Star Trek episodes, where there's one big supercomputer that runs the planet.

The inhabitants are sort of these docile, robot-like people who've been living peacefully but uneventfully for 8,000 years. And then, of course, as always, the Star Trek people, you know, don't follow the Prime Directive and blow up the computer and then leave the planet. But that was the future of the computer age in the late '60s was highly centralized. By the late '90s, it was very decentralized. By the late 2010s, maybe crypto excepted, it, again, seemed to be pushing back to centralization. I don't know. My intuition is these things are not absolutely written in stone. And it's up to us to work on making the technologies happen to push it one way or the other.

As a follow-up, would you bet on open-source AI? If decentralization is great, it should have more dynamic properties, should innovate more, should be safer, have many other virtues.

I don't quite know if that's the main variable that's going to push the centralization or decentralization with it. But yeah, that... there probably is some version of it that would be helpful. I don't know, the Linux versus Microsoft precedent—not sure that changed anything that much on the level of the operating system.

Thank you.

When do you think humans are going to destroy themselves, and do you think AI is going to do it?

I don't think these things are written in stone. I'm not a Calvinist. I'm not a p-doom, EA, East Bay rationalist. I think it's up to us. But as I said, I'm much more worried about the humans trying to stop the AI than the AI destroying us. You know, a force that's powerful enough to stop the AI is probably a force that's powerful enough to destroy the world, too. So I want to worry more about the humans that are trying to stop the AI.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently converted to Christianity, but it seems mostly for utilitarian reasons. Something like for the great civilizational war, because secularism doesn't provide a good enough answer. Do you see religion as mainly a utility in the postmodern world?

You can have utilitarian elements. I don't think one can ever stress those too much. And so my bias is always to focus more on questions of truth.

You mentioned Lincoln's Lyceum Address, where he talks about that towering genius figure. And I'd never heard before that he thought... Did you think at the time he thought he was the towering genius? And do you approve of Lincoln's political religion or view for America?

Well, I think it's a very fascinating speech because... he references some Caesar- or Napoleon-like figure who will enslave a free people or free the slaves. And so that seems like, it seems plausible to think that he was thinking of himself.

I have a question about your personal life, if I may. And if possible, if you could give your answer as a story, that'd be lovely. Obviously, you feel a great sense of personal responsibility, indeed responsibility to history. How did that sentiment begin? How has it evolved? What have you found to be the more fruitful and less fruitful avenues for expressing it?

I'm always so bad at doing a self-psychoanalysis or something like that. There were sort of all these ways I was incredibly competitive and tracked as a kid. My eighth grade, junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, 'I know you're going to get into Stanford in four years.' I got into Stanford, and I went to Stanford, and I went to law school. I ended up, you know, the top law firm in Manhattan. From the outside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, it was a place everybody wanted to get out. And so, yeah, I sort of had some kind of a quarter-life crisis in my mid-20s. And... it was unclear what to do, but somehow you have to try to avoid the worst mimetic entanglements, the worst forms of mimetic competition possible.

I don't think psychology really works. I don't think awareness of these things is quite the way to do it, but there was some... some part of that was very important for me.

Thank you.

So to that point, to get people off of the mimetic track, I think the Thiel Fellowship was really amazing and has had tremendous success. Have you thought about trying to scale that in a way that might be profitable or can make a larger impact than, say, 20 folks a year and maybe 20,000 eventually?

We've thought about scaling it a lot of times. It's probably quite... quite hard to scale. It's always, you know, the sort of the paradox of something like the Thiel Fellowship or my Zero to One book or any sort of self-help thing is like, you know, it's always bad to just sort of give advice where, okay, these are the things you're supposed to do because it's sort of like, and so, you know, I worry that trying to scale things, the only way you can scale things is by somehow automating them, mechanizing them, turning them into more of a cookie-cutter type process. And then I always worry that that deranges it at scale. So somehow, I can't give people a formula what to do. It's something like, well, you should think for yourself and figure it out.

And then, but then, if I try to scale that, it's like, I don't know, it's like some kind of, I don't know, Maoist Little Red Book or something you're producing, and it's quite the opposite. Thank you.

Peter, my question is about diversity, equity, inclusion. DEI has become very prevalent in corporate America. And I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you're seeing this in some of the early-stage companies also, like the companies that Founders Fund is investing in. And what are your thoughts? Do you think this is something positive? Are you neutral? Or you think this has gone a little over the top? Would love to know your views on that.

You know, I'm very against it. I don't always know if it's the most important issue either. So somehow, I wrote a book after my undergraduate years entitled The Diversity Myth, and it was sort of focusing on a lot of the craziness, the campus wars, culture wars that were taking place at Stanford in the late '80s, early '90s. And there are parts of it that seemed very prescient and it sort of described a lot of things that eventually spread to the broader culture. On another level, it was like a completely ineffective book where the arguments didn't matter and what drove these things somehow was on a very different level. I think the—and, you know, if we think about the, you know, woke corporation in Silicon Valley.

It seems unhealthy if a company is leaning too much into the DEI narratives. But there always are, there probably are Machiavellian ways where this can also work, where it sort of distracts people. So there's, I don't know, Walmart was sort of the proto-woke company in the 2000s, and they were constantly being attacked by the labor unions because they weren't paying their workers enough. And then they could pay their workers more, or they could rebrand themselves as a green, environmentally friendly company. And that turned out to be a very cheap way to split up the left-wing anti-Walmart coalition. And so that was a version of it as, I don't know, as this sort of capitalist conspiracy against it.

And then there are cases where that can work and cases where it can go wrong. For the most part, I think that it's just a distraction from more important things. And so there's one level on which I find the issues very silly. There's another level where it's evil because it's stopping us from paying attention to more important things. And it's things like the economy, like science and tech, or even these broader religious questions that we've talked about today. I don't know. People always talk about it in terms of cultural Marxism, but I think a real Marxist would be much preferable to a diversity person. Rosa Luxemburg, who is sort of this crazed communist from the early 20th century, it was like, I think one thing she said was, there can be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker.

Nobody can be more revolutionary than a proletarian. And so a diversity officer in a university or corporation, what would Rosa Luxemburg think of this? It would be in the same category as a bank robber or a prostitute, as someone who's just an extremely corrupt form of crony capitalism.

Thank you so much.

There's a fair amount of variation in regulation on biotech. You know, there's Próspera. You funded some seasteading places. What's your sense for why there aren't crazy, cool, ambitious bio-hacking things going on? Where are the gene-edited babies? The only one that we know about happened in China, and that guy went to jail. Why isn't there more crazy stuff happening in different jurisdictions?

My sense is the FDA has a global stranglehold on everything. And it is because... There are a lot of different reasons. In practice, most governments are not willing to have looser regulations than the FDA. So there's less regulatory arbitrage than it looks. And then secondarily, the U.S. pays a lot more for this than other countries. And we can go into all these debates about whether we're paying too much in the U.S. or whether the rest of the world should be penalized for free riding off of it. But if you develop a biotech drug and if you can't sell it in the U.S., the economics are much less good. And so in practice, it tends to be U.S. or bust.

Do you think that technology will eventually render a larger proportion of the human population unproductive or unable to contribute to the economy? And if so, what should those unproductive people do with themselves?

Well, I think the Luddites have always been wrong for a long time. There are certainly ways. You could probably scare me some with that, with AI, and there are versions of it where you could, but even if you convinced me that the Luddites were right about AI and that it's actually going to just replace people without—if you were a Luddite in the mid-19th century, you said the machines are gonna replace the humans. And that would be such a relief because there's so much work for people to do and it would just free them up to do other things. And so maybe it's less complementary, more game of substitution. Even if you could convince me of that, I'm still in favor of the AI because my default is muddling through isn't good.

My default is, you know, the default is really bad. And so you don't get to muddle through with Greta on her bicycle.

Thanks for coming. You've alluded to a lot of the forces between decentralization and centralization, particularly around AI with forces around the individual. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more, describe what you think the forces could be that stop AI development, particularly as it relates to the state's role, or how a politician or another entity could co-opt that force for their own benefit versus the benefit of many.

Maybe the premise of your question is what I'd challenge. It's why is AI going to be the only technology that matters? And so if we say there's only this one big technology that's going to be developed and it is going to dominate everything else, that's already, in a way, conceding a version of the centralization point. So yeah, if we say that it's all around the next generation of large language models, nothing else matters, then you've probably collapsed it to a small number of players and that's a future that I find somewhat uncomfortably centralizing probably. The definition of technology: in the 1960s, technology meant computers, but it also meant new medicines, and it meant spaceships and supersonic planes, and the Green Revolution in agriculture.

And then at some point, technology today just means IT, and maybe we're going to narrow it even further to AI. And it seems to me that this narrowing is sort of a manifestation of the centralizing stagnation that we should be trying to get out of.

Earlier you mentioned that tech might end up saving San Francisco from itself.

AI specifically, yeah.

Sorry, AI specifically. How do you evaluate the efforts of places like Miami and Austin to present themselves as alternative tech hubs, and has that opinion changed over the course of the last two years?

Well, I'm still very pro-Miami. I think the Miami story has been more of an anti-New York story, so it's a tale of two cities, and the finance part of the economy doesn't have to be centered in New York, and that alone, I think, explains a great deal of Miami's success. I think the tech, you know, again, it's how we're in a very different place from what people were focused on even two, two and a half years ago. But two and a half years ago, there was sort of much more of a crypto story. And, you know, crypto is a decentralizing technology, but also the companies that were doing crypto were decentralized, not just in the US, there's a decent number of them outside the US. And so if crypto was going to be a big part of the future tech story,

that would have been a naturally decentralizing-from-Silicon-Valley narrative. Silicon Valley had really missed out on the crypto thing in a relative sense. And then consumer internet—a lot of this happened in Silicon Valley for all sorts of complicated reasons. It was supposed to get rid of the tyranny of place, but it all happened in one place. And then the AI piece seems to be even more centralized in Silicon Valley. So again, if we say that the next decade or two decades are just gonna be doubling down on AI, that probably suggests that San Francisco will maintain, and Silicon Valley will maintain or even gain in power.

Hello. First and foremost, I just want to say thank you for coming out and doing this event. It's been wonderful. I have a silly question, and I'm going to bring Star Wars into it since we were talking Star Trek. But this concept of the world order—it's the first time I've really delved into it. And thinking about it, I'm wondering, do you envision a world order that's just like totalitarian dictatorship, or just similar to, like, there's just too much information, too many countries, too many people trying to vie together, and that everything just kind of gets lost, and that the power isn't really about the people, but that kind of world central—I mean, a global central? Like, what is that that you envision?

Well, I'd like to avoid the first type. And then it's always, yeah, the second one, I will concede it's a little bit more confusing. And so yeah, I would like to have a libertarian world order, many nations, and you can move between them. And so there's some transnational thing. You're not completely stuck in a particular country, but then the transnational thing can't be so powerful that it actually controls all the nations. Maybe this is a sort of paradox of globalization. Like Hegelian thought is always thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Even if you agree this is the correct framing, the problem is people always confuse the synthesis with a superposition of the thesis and antithesis. So if we say globalization, some global world order is the final synthesis, is globalization as it's described today just a superposition of the slightly unstable global market, but no global government, and then can that really be maintained?

Yes, I think there probably are some paradoxes in my picture of a desirable world order that one could unpack some more. But yeah, if we have too concrete a picture of exactly what the world order looks like, that's probably really bad.

A bit of a follow-up to the gentleman two before me. I understand you've spent a little bit of time in Miami. So, kind of coming down from the macro level to the street level, local governance, almost like an economist getting lunch perspective, what is Miami doing well and what does Miami need to improve upon?

Well, there are a lot of things. I've been here the last four winters, so it's been two, three months each winter here. Yeah, there are a lot of things that I think are going incredibly well. I'm always into these sort of Georgist real estate theories, where if you're not very careful, all the value in a place gets captured by this sort of corrupt real estate group of people. Henry George was a late 19th century economist who was sort of socialist then, today seen as sort of libertarian, which probably just tells something about how our society's changed. But the worry in Miami is, have we really escaped the Georgist disaster that is San Francisco, that is New York, that is London, where even though there's been a tremendous increase in GDP, it's not good if 100% of it gets captured by slumlords or something like that?

Last question. Thanks. So, question about AI and theology. Voltaire had this great quote: 'If God didn't exist, we would need to invent him'—or her, or whatever the pronoun is. Do you find this view of superintelligent AI, which might be in the near future, as a kind of deity, as a kind of machine god—is that useful? Is there leverage to that? And could it even be more than just a heuristic, some kind of substantive statement?

It's sort of a purely theological question. I want to focus more on the political theology question, which would be something like, if it's a centralizing AI that's controlled by Communist China, will it just be very good at convincing people that the party is God, or that the wisdom of crowds or, you know, whatever the consensus is, is the truth? And then, yeah, there are these metaphysical questions where it doesn't seem like it's exactly, you know, I don't know, a transcendent, traditional, monotheistic God. But I would go to more of the political questions than the, you know, the metaphysical ones, and probably the, you know, the risk, danger is that there's something about it that sort of telescopes even more the sort of consensus, truth, wisdom of crowds.

I think probably all the models will tell you that there's no particular religion that's more true than any other one. And then, is that really what the models generate, or has that been hardwired in? Those are the questions I'd be more curious about.

Thank you all for listening to Conversations with Tyler at the Mercatus Center. Most of all, thank you, Peter Thiel.

Thank you.