What the Trump Administration Must Do Instead of Revenge | Peter Thiel

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rubin Report – "What the Trump Administration Must Do Instead of Revenge | Peter Thiel"

Introduction and Relationship Background

In this engaging episode of The Rubin Report, host Dave Rubin welcomes Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and prominent tech investor, to discuss a range of contemporary political and technological issues. Their conversation dives deep into the shifting political landscapes, the state of elite institutions, and the future of technology under the Trump administration.

Shifts in Silicon Valley and Political Alignments

Thiel reflects on the significant political transformation within Silicon Valley, noting how the tech community's stance has mirrored broader national shifts. He observes that the support for figures like Donald Trump in the 2024 election was unexpected given the region's previous liberal dominance. Thiel attributes this change to “the sheer number of people who had to change their minds” (03:50), emphasizing that it wasn’t simply a matter of shifting demographics but a genuine persuasion through reasoned arguments rather than identity politics.

Evolution of Political Figures: J.D. Vance and Others

Discussing political endorsements, Thiel highlights his early support for J.D. Vance, crediting his thoughtful approach and willingness to rethink Republican priorities. He remarks, “I found him to be very thoughtful, interested in trying to figure these things out” (04:07). Thiel expresses surprise at Vance’s polished demeanor and growth into a significant political figure, underscoring the potential for strategic evolution within political candidates.

Critique of Elite Institutions: Harvard and Universities

A substantial portion of the conversation critiques elite educational institutions, particularly Harvard University. Thiel argues that universities like Harvard have become “robots” (27:58), failing to foster independent thought and innovation. He asserts, “If you're not allowed to articulate these ideas, it suggests to me, as a shortcut, it's probably directionally very true” (49:58), indicating that institutional rigidity hinders progress. Thiel further contends that the decline in academic rigor and the overemphasis on political correctness have stifled intellectual diversity and critical thinking.

The Issue of Gatekeepers and Echo Chambers

Thiel and Rubin explore the concept of gatekeepers in media and academia, debating whether the absence of traditional gatekeepers leads to a lack of consensus or fosters a more open discourse. Thiel posits that society suffers more from “too much dogmatism” than from excess relativism, stating, “the problem was way more on the totalitarian side than the relativist side” (46:21). He believes that dismantling overly rigid structures can reclaim a balance between skepticism and dogmatism, allowing for healthier debates and innovation.

The Role and Philosophy of Palantir

The discussion shifts to Thiel’s company, Palantir, where he likens its mission to the "palantir" from Lord of the Rings—a tool meant to enhance understanding while acknowledging its potential dangers. Thiel explains Palantir’s foundational goal: “to try to find some way to solve the terrorism intelligence community problem” (55:48). He emphasizes the importance of balancing security with civil liberties, arguing that Palantir aims to provide more transparency and accountability within government operations to prevent abuses of power.

Discussion on Identity Politics and Its Modern Evolution

Identity politics is scrutinized, with Thiel critiquing its effectiveness in modern politics. He suggests that the Internet has exposed the pitfalls of micro-targeting based on identity, leading to fragmented and ineffective political strategies. Thiel asserts, “intersectionality...didn't work” (72:10), highlighting the challenges of appealing to overly specific identity groups in a diverse electorate. He believes that the failure of identity politics strategies has necessitated a reevaluation of how political messages are crafted and delivered.

Views on AI and Existential Risks

Towards the end of the episode, Thiel addresses the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence and its associated risks. While acknowledging the potential dangers of AI, he remains cautiously optimistic, stressing the importance of human agency in guiding technological advancement. Thiel warns against both extreme optimism and pessimism, advocating for a balanced approach: “gray pill sounds kind of bland, but it's definitely better than happy, clappy optimism or... pessimism” (81:37). He underscores the need for responsible innovation to ensure that AI contributes positively to human flourishing.

Concluding Thoughts: Gray Pilled Optimism

The episode concludes with Thiel advocating for a "gray pill" perspective—a balanced outlook that recognizes both the challenges and opportunities ahead. He emphasizes that progress requires active engagement and thoughtful decision-making, rather than passive optimism or defeatist pessimism. Thiel states, “It's up to us to do these things. It's not... up to humans, it's up to the choices we do” (80:45), encapsulating his belief in the power of human agency to navigate complex societal and technological landscapes.

Notable Quotes:

• Peter Thiel [03:50]: "If you believe in demographic determinism... there's an enormous shift... because the Republicans should never have won another election."

• Peter Thiel [04:07]: "I found him to be very thoughtful, interested in trying to figure these things out."

• Peter Thiel [27:58]: "You don't have to believe that the systems are working, but we need these ideas to keep going forward."

• Peter Thiel [46:21]: "The problem was way more on the totalitarian side than the relativist side."

• Peter Thiel [55:48]: "Palantir... the genesis of the company we founded over 20 years ago was to try to find some way to solve the terrorism intelligence community problem."

• Peter Thiel [72:10]: "Intersectionality...didn't work."

• Peter Thiel [81:37]: "Gray pill sounds kind of bland, but it's definitely better than happy, clappy optimism or... pessimism."

Conclusion

This episode of The Rubin Report offers a profound exploration of the intersection between technology, politics, and societal institutions. Peter Thiel provides critical insights into the transformations within Silicon Valley, the decline of elite universities, the complexities of identity politics, and the nuanced challenges posed by artificial intelligence. His "gray pill" philosophy advocates for a measured and proactive approach to navigating the intricate landscape of modern governance and technological advancement.

Transcript

[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

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[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

I think the somewhat, somewhat obnoxious suggestion I had was that we need something like a truth and reconciliation commission, which was set up in post apartheid South Africa where, you know, as long as we got to the truth and we figured out what had happened, there can be reconciliation. But the first step is we need to come clean. We need to have some accountability for what happened. And so I want, yeah, I want us, I don't want, I don't want us to have lots of arrests. I don't want lots of people to just get prosecuted, but I do think we need to have a lot more transparency into what exactly was going on in the sausage making factory. And my suspicion is that, that, that sort of transparency will very much discourage a repeat of this behavior.

[Dave Rubin]

All right, Peter Thiel, Last time we did this was about a year and a half ago, pre Trump reelection, I would say the world was a little different. The first time we ever Sat down was 2018. The world was very different. We, we started to get to know each other in about 2016. That feels like a different world altogether. So my first question to you is, you used to be the counterculture tech bro, now everybody has come around to your positions, it seems, but as a guy that likes being in the opposition, just personally, how do you feel about that?

[Peter Thiel]

I feel a lot better about it. So, no, I don't think there's any virtue in being in the opposition of one for the sake of that or anything like that. So no, it's quite strange how much Silicon Valley shifted. And of course, in some ways even the Trump election in 2024 feels almost miraculous on some level. If you look at the total votes, wasn't that enormous a shift. But if you believe in demographic determinism, it's an enormous shift because the electorate's different in 2024 from 2016. The Republicans in 2016, one would have said, were old white people and eight years later, a lot of them would not be alive and they would be replaced by a younger, more diverse electorate. And so the Republicans should never have won another election. If you believed in the sort of demographic determinism of identity politics where you do not Vote based on reason or argument, but you vote on subrational factors like your gender or your race or your sexual orientation or other things like that. And for Trump and J.D. vance to win, there were millions and millions of people who had to change their minds. And that's what I think was so impressive and so hopeful that somehow there was an argument that was made. It convinced people it worked, and we have another chance in this country.

[Dave Rubin]

What did you see in JD Early? Because you were basically his first backer, and I think the first real show that he did, like, primetime show online was my show. And it was because you said to me at lunch one day, you were like, why don't you chat with this guy? And you could see how rough he is in that. And now he's just become perfectly polished.

[Peter Thiel]

I would say, man, I, I always, I didn't want to exaggerate my, my abilities in these, these things, but I, I think I, I, I had, I, for a long time, I had a keenly felt sense that there was some need to rethink Republican priorities there. We needed to somehow move on from, you know, the, the Rhino Republicanism of, of the Bush years and even the zombie Reaganism of, of the 1980s. And, and there were elements of these things that could, could be kept, but then you really needed to update it in various ways. And he was, I always found him to be very thoughtful, interested in trying to figure these things out. And, and then somehow, yeah, it all, it all came together.

[Dave Rubin]

Were you even surprised the way he is so stepped into this thing? I mean, I think to me, it started at that debate. Suddenly it was like, oh, he was ready to level up. And now you see it in these speeches he's given all over the world at this point.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah, I don't know, I don't know what the right euphemism is, but I, I always thought he had a high ceiling.

[Dave Rubin]

Fair enough. Why, why do you think you were sort of first in? I mean, I know you're a contrarian thinker in general, but when it comes to all of these tech guys that are now part of the administration, many of whom, and David Sachs guys that you started PayPal with 20 plus years ago, you were really the outsider on all of these guys.

[Peter Thiel]

And maybe I, maybe I was out of my mind. I had no idea what I was doing in 2016. It was, I, I had this, I had this naive idea in 2016. You know, outside of Silicon Valley, it's like, you know, roughly half the people vote for one party, half vote for the other. And so on some level, I thought supporting Trump for president in 2016 was the least contrarian thing I'd done in my life. You know, if you're just doing what half the population's doing, there's nothing in that world.

[Dave Rubin]

It's a pretty insular world. And you still lived there at the time.

[Peter Thiel]

And I thought even with respect to that world, you know, they were, most of them were in the Democratic Party. They were having these intra Democratic fights. And I wasn't fighting over, you know, was it going to be, you know, Hillary or Bernie Sanders or, you know, there was, I thought, yeah, you could have intense fights there. And then, you know, on the Republican side was just this, this, this diff. Different thing. And yet there was some way where it got weaponized and it was dangerous in ways that were greater than ever before. I mean, obviously there were ways people were very anti Bush or there were probably a lot of Republicans who were very deranged about Clinton in different ways. But certainly the way it happened with Trump was, I think, quite unprecedented. I think the, I think the. And then, of course, I, I was in a, you know, I was not in an sort of executive CEO role at, at one of these companies where you are in sort of a much higher pressure position. I, you know, I was maybe a board member.

[Dave Rubin]

But you were still on the board at Facebook, right?

[Peter Thiel]

I think that is, in, in some ways that is a, you know, it's a, it's a much less, it's a much less public role than if you're a senior executive or CEO at one of these companies. And there was, yeah, the felt sense of pressure on these people was extraordinary. It's always sort of a question. I think to some extent people changed their minds and shifted. I've known someone like Elon is sort of like, in some ways, he's one of a kind. In some ways he's paradigmatic for a lot of these things. I've known Elon since 2000 and for the first 20 years, I wouldn't call him a conventionally liberal person. But, you know, I think at the, I would, I would think that it, it was a little bit more on the, you know, liberal, vaguely libertarian side. You know, he was, Tesla was a flagship company and it was always the Republicans didn't really believe in climate change. And, and so it was more naturally, it felt like the Democratic Party was naturally friendlier to Tesla than the Republican Party. And that was roughly where Elon was. And then for a variety of reasons, he really shifted a lot. And then I think there are different stories like this for a lot of people why they shifted that are interesting. So I think my story in a way is, is not quite as interesting because I've had a lot of these beliefs for a longer period of time. The thing that's interesting is, you know, why, why did, why did so many of these other people change?

[Dave Rubin]

So you think, so you think it's possible if you had had a leading position at one of these companies that the pressures would have been different on you? And I think it would have been.

[Peter Thiel]

I think they would have been extraordinary. And there was, yeah, it's always, there's always sort of a question, you know, why was Silicon Valley, why were the big tech companies so liberal, so left wing? And one version was, you always say as well it's because of, and it's because of the, you know, it's the CEOs or sort of these woke billionaire types or communist billionaires or something weird like that. Then there's maybe it was the snowflake millennial workforce sort of this bottom up pressure. But I think the factor that was much bigger than those two was this top down governmental regulatory pressure. And if you're a big company, there's a lot of surface area, there's a lot of areas where you're in, possibly regulated, you're in a regulatory gray zone of sorts. Maybe it's especially true if you're doing some kind of new technology where people don't quite know what, what should be done with it. And so there was an incredible amount of pressure that came from the government. It tended to come much more from the left than the right on these companies. And, and yeah, it felt very, very dangerous to, to go too much against that.

[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

I think it matters a lot. I think it's. It's always hard to know exactly why. It's probably over determined. But yeah, I think, I think, I think there's a part, part of it is in Elon story where if Elon can get away with this much, maybe I can get away with a little bit less.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Peter Thiel]

And you're sort of, you know, what's the Viking term? You're drafting behind Elon.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. He's basically the rabbit and the dogs are all chasing.

[Peter Thiel]

Drafting behind Elon. Yeah, I think. But then I think, I think there's also, you know, it's always if you, if you do a certain policy like wokeness or feminism or liberalism or socialism, and it doesn't work, this is a very ambiguous thing and it can mean one of two things. It can mean you need to do more or you should just maybe stop doing it altogether. And I think for a lot of Silicon Valley, for many years, there was sort of this intensification of the politics that happened in the 2010s and went in some ways into overdrive during COVID and 2021. And, and it was, well, maybe we're not doing enough. We need to do, we need to pay more taxes, we need to do more dei, more wokeness. And at some point it dawns on people it's just not working altogether. And then you don't shift back a little bit at that point, maybe you shift quite a lot. And I think something like that is what has happened in so many of these places. And I've, I have a decent number of conversations with tech CEOs and what they tell me one on one, again, maybe it's very biased because they know what my perspective is, but what they tell me one on one is, I mean, they aren't fully supportive of Trump, but they are so against the political correctness and all the ways in which this stuff is just damaged. They're companies. The companies don't work.

[Dave Rubin]

I think I know you well enough to know the answer to this, but as you watch, a lot of these people Come to the positions that you were seeking out when they were not popular to have. Just on a personal note, do you ever feel like the apology or just some sort of acknowledgement would be nice? Because you've been hit very hard in the media over the years and it turns out that the culture actually did shift your way. I know there's, nobody gets the apology or something, but sometimes there's something nice about someone else's evolution when it comes.

[Peter Thiel]

With that, you know, I, I, yes, that would be nice, but I, I.

[Dave Rubin]

You don't have time.

[Peter Thiel]

I'm, I'm, I, I think, I think if, if someone says that they, they come around agreeing with me. That's, that's a pretty big apology right now.

[Dave Rubin]

That's good enough.

[Peter Thiel]

That's, that's good enough for me.

[Dave Rubin]

What would you say to the people that right now are freaking out who are just like, wait a minute, you've got all of these tech bros and they built these companies, particularly PayPal, 20 years ago. They've done all these things, they own all these companies, they have so many interests all together. And, and that's too much concentrated power. And that, you know, that argument which we're hearing a lot of right now.

[Peter Thiel]

Man, I don't, I don't even, I don't even know what that means. Like where, where are people using this power? How, you know, how are they using it?

[Dave Rubin]

And I'm not making the argument, I'm.

[Peter Thiel]

Just, yeah, and this is again too psychological. But so many of these things I always think are, are projections where there were so many critiques people had, the left had of President Trump. You know, it was sort of like, you know, maybe he didn't have all his marbles and it was like, well, this is, no, this was a sort of projection of, it turned out for the person who came after Trump, right. Or there were all these ways that, that he was this fascist who is threatening democracy in all these ways. And you know, it, I mean, man, so much of the stuff that we has come out with USAID and all these ways that, you know, this, the center left establishment, you know, you know, is doing the exact opposite of, or was doing the things it was accusing the other side of. And so, I don't know, I think, I think there was, you know, I always, the sociology of it, I always think of our side. We're this ragtag rebel alliance. The people are, they're not natural. You know, they don't, they don't, aren't naturally synced up in, in the sort of Robotic way.

[Dave Rubin]

And we're like, right, this alliance makes no sense.

[Peter Thiel]

In some sense, in some way, it's very heterogeneous. You know, it's, it's. You have the, you know, autistic C3PO policy wonk person and you have the teenage Chewbacca person and you have the.

[Dave Rubin]

They're all autistic. I know.

[Peter Thiel]

They're all authentic. And, and that's sort of our, that's, that's, that's sort of what our side looks like. And, and the other side was, it was synced up. They were, you know, they were robotic. Ditto heads. You know, just. Do you have stormtroopers or whatever?

[Dave Rubin]

You know, do you have like, just like a fundamental aversion to that thing? Like when you just see a whole bunch of people agreeing on something, the way that the left has just fallen into lockstep and they had no ability to argue with each other or, or just counter ideas does is that something that just automatically goes off in your head?

[Peter Thiel]

Yes, it, it's, it's a very subtle thing. There's obviously some point where consensus tells you that we have the truth. And then there's some point where consensus, a too powerful consensus, tells you that you have something totalitarian going on. And so, yeah, if you have 51 democracy, you think the 51% are more right than 49. If you had 70%, that's even better. And if you're at 99.99% on one side, maybe you're in North Korea. And so there is some point where the wisdom of crowds gives way to the madness of crowds. And my intuition is always that this happens way sooner than you think. And again, this is very hard to quantify, but I think one of the other dynamics in this last election yet would be how bad was the echo chamber on both sides. And so, you know, there's a right wing echo chamber where people talk to themselves and, you know, listen too much themselves. And there was some critique of Twitter or X.com that, yeah, if you were on there, you saw all these other people saying things that agreed with you and this wasn't necessarily reflective of the larger society. And then I think there was also an incredible sort of center left establishment echo chamber where, you know, you had to, you had to say that everything was great with Biden, and then overnight everything was, he had to go. And then, and then somehow you had to move in locks. If you moved so quickly to Kamala Harris, you couldn't possibly have thought that decision through. And then she was, you Know, she got branded as, you know, the 60 year old person who should be a grandma gets rebranded as a 17 year old teenager who's from an ABBA disco concert and is the youngest, most dynamic person you can imagine. And somehow it was this incredibly forced, incredibly fast consensus that served them catastrophically. There were parts of it that worked, there were parts that were effective. There was part of the resistance in Trump 1.0. That was the Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper kind of getting all the magnet files in lockstep or whatever, you know, however you want to describe it, filings in lockstep was powerful and this time around it's gone very haywire. And maybe, maybe this is where, you know, the left immediate. It hasn't even helped the left. It was and I think that's not coming back.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, the meme that they started doing after the election was, oh, we not, we need our own Joe Rogan. And it's like you guys had Joe Rogan. It's because you were so hysterical.

[Peter Thiel]

He was a, that you created all of us. He was a Bernie Sanders. Right, right.

[Dave Rubin]

So you've got to kind of admire their ability to purge people and put us all together.

[Peter Thiel]

But as we had, I mean, I don't know, they had rfk, they had Tulsi, they had, you know, they had all these people. Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

And somehow they've all come around to largely your.

[Peter Thiel]

And I think, I think, you know, again, I think there were very different stories for all of them in terms of where the shifts happened. But again, one of them was probably at some point the need to be in lockstep was too much. You know, it's, if you have to have a full frontal lobotomy to stay, remain a good Democrat in good standing, it's too much. You know, one of the other, one of the other changes that's happened that's, that's, I think quite, quite extraordinary. Is, is the only, you know, the only party, the only group that still believes in the elite universities in a way are the conservative Republicans. And so if President Trump were here, he would tell you that he went to Penn, Ivy League school. Only very smart people, David, go to Penn. And he talked about that for quite a while. And J.D. vance went to Yale Law School. It's the top law school in the country. And at the margins there are other reasons we think he's good, but this is a credential we like about him. And any sort of elite credentialing has collapsed on the left. It was, you know, Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, Yale law. Hillary Clinton was Yale law. Obama was Harvard Law. I think Kerry was Harvard undergrad. And there was some way the Democratic Party used to be more elite. And then when Biden said he was a transitional candidate, it wasn't a transition. He was not going to have a sex change operation, but it was transitional. From smart to dumb, from elite to very non elite. And, and then, you know, Kamala was even, even, you know, Howard was not Harvard in the, you know, you couldn't even point this out. This is probably a racist thing to say or something. And then, and then by the time you get to waltz, it is, it's way worse. The credentials are even dumber than Kamala's. There are no smart people left. And it's like a generational, it's a generational change. I think Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, they were talented people. Very, in some meritocratic sense, were very impressive, are very impressive. And then there's not one younger Democrat who's in, in that league. I know Gavin Newsom, University of Santa Clara. You know, Shapiro was probably too smart to put on the ticket, but you know, it's Georgetown Law School.

[Dave Rubin]

He was also too Jewish to put on the ticket.

[Peter Thiel]

Well, maybe that too, but Georgetown Law School is like number 14. So even, even Josh Shapiro is so far below what you had with, with someone like, like, yeah, like, like Clinton or Obama. And, and so I think, and then, and then, you know, I don't know how much one should read into it, but I'm tempted to say they don't want people who are smart. They don't, you know, being the, the elite thing used to be okay, you could think for yourself a little bit. You were part of this club where, you know, behind closed doors we could have a conversation and we have somewhat dissenting views and we could hash things out. I don't think any of this goes on anymore. And no, we just want these NPC robots. Real businesses rely on Spectrum business for.

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[Dave Rubin]

How much of that do you think is connected to Harvard as an institution? I've been to plenty of dinners at your places and Harvard comes up an awful lot. Just what's gone on there, the rot, how it's changed, the endowment, all of these things that I don't come from that world. So I don't think I ever fully understand. I would always think why is everyone so obsessed with what's going on at Harvard? But when you describe what you just described there, that the elites in their own way could do the behind closed doors thing and agree to disagree and have conversation, yet they created a system that churned out robots, it seems that Harvard is, is Harvard the epicenter of that? And what is that?

[Peter Thiel]

Harvard is somehow. Harvard is. Yeah, there are a number of these schools. There's some way where Harvard was the first among equals. And you know, it was, there was part of, it was an exclave of Washington D.C. you have the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Economics Department used to have a tremendous say in economic policy. And so yeah, and then, and then there was, you know, there's probably some Harvard, Massachusetts thing with, you know, I don't know, Kennedy, McGovern was from Massachusetts. You have, you know, you have. There was a way that Dukakis was Massachusetts, Kerry was Massachusetts, Obama was Harvard. So it was this very, very conserved power structure. I think there were only two Democrat presidents that Carter pretended to be allied with the Northeast establishment and then he sort of double crossed them halfway through his term and replaced them with all these Georgia people. But then they got back at him and primaried him with Ted Kennedy who was Harvard person. And then I think Clinton was arguably the one person who, I mean it was Yale, but who somehow managed to outflank the Harvard people. But maybe almost going back to jfk, it's been an incredible part of the power structure. And then I think in a strange way it's gone. I think if you were a liberal student, let's say a liberal white male at Harvard, there's no longer any. Maybe there's still some way you can get a track towards a good job on Wall street or in Silicon Valley, but it no longer seems to track into the center left establishment. When Alan Bloom spoke at Harvard in the late 1980s, this sort of obnoxious way he started his speech was my fellow elitist. Because it was, it was, you know, it was like everybody at Harvard was really elitist. They pretended not to be.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, you today, you could never, you.

[Peter Thiel]

Can even, you know, they, they would. No, they, they, they, they all say no. We're all so egalitarian. And then if you're a Harvard student, you shouldn't expect anything more from that. And you should, you know, you're not special because you're here. And so somehow, yeah, you had this egalitarian rhetoric for a long time, but it's been. It's somehow. The form is the same, but the substance has changed.

[Dave Rubin]

So as a guy that has encouraged an awful lot of young people to not go to college, and I'm very happy to say that virtually everyone I've hired is now a college dropout. It's become a running joke around here. I only hire college dropouts. And it works every time. I mean, do you take some. Some sort of, like, personal pleasure in that, that these institutions that churned out the robots actually are in this decline now?

[Peter Thiel]

You know, I'm never sure quite how quickly it reverses, but it's. I think there has been a very big decline, and it's very hard to track. You know, Harvard's probably still, in some sense, the first among equals. They still have a $50 billion endowment. They can keep going for a very long time. But, yeah, these things can go bad without. Without people being able to correct it or notice it. So there's. There's a. There's a. You know, I. I always think that cities are very different from companies. Companies normally have a finite lifespan, and companies. There's a limit to how bad the politics in a company can get, because if it gets too messed up, the company just goes bankrupt. You go out of business in a city. You know, the average city that exists that ever was founded still exists in the world today. And your average city is an immortal being. It lasts forever. And at some point, you can mess it up so badly it goes broke, you know, or it gets destroyed. Carthage gets destroyed. Maybe Detroit is, you know, past the point of no return. But the network effects in cities are so powerful that there are a lot of these in between cities where they can be extremely bad, extremely dysfunctional, and can persist for a long time. And I think if you modeled it, universities are actually closer to cities than companies. The top universities in the country were the ones that have been around for close to 400 years at this point. Harvard, Yale, Stanford was the big top university west of the Mississippi. So there's something about them that's very durable. But, yeah, if an immortal being goes bad, it can go very bad for a long time.

[Dave Rubin]

Does that tell you that we need institutions in some sense, even if they have largely been rotted out, that something about the continuum from generations, like, we sort of need these ideas, even if they're not really what we think they are?

[Peter Thiel]

I don't know exactly what it says. It tells you that there's not necessarily a straightforward mechanism for replacing Harvard. It also tells you that maybe Harvard can be a lot worse than it looks based on its endowment or the fact that it's still attracting all these talented people. It can tell you that it's extremely hard to reform internally. Maybe it tells you it's important to keep trying, you know, so I, I, I don't disagree with conservatives who try to influence these things and you know, try to keep, you know, try, try to figure out a way to, to do it. You know, I'm probably a little bit black pilled on, on, on, on doing it myself. It does tell you it's probably quite hard to come up with. Al. But yeah, that's, but then at some point, at some point you have these occasional points where you have these phase shifts and people realize they're working so badly and maybe the Democratic Party has realized that nothing's coming out of Harvard and so we shouldn't particularly privilege these people.

[Dave Rubin]

So one of the lines, they're not.

[Peter Thiel]

Learning anything when you talk to these.

[Dave Rubin]

Places or they're learning all the wrong things.

[Peter Thiel]

I think they're learning very little. It's, it's, I was, I did this function at Yale, spoke at the Yale Political Union last September. You talked a bunch of the students and it's like every class, there's not a single class that's as hard as any class they had in high school.

[Dave Rubin]

Wow.

[Peter Thiel]

It's, it's just again, this is maybe more on the humanity side, but it's, it's unbelievably easy. You get an A in every class.

[Dave Rubin]

Did you feel that you were teaching at Stanford, weren't you to do.

[Peter Thiel]

It's I, I think, yeah, I think there's all these complicated things, but all these ways the motivational structure isn't great. People, you know, it's not clear where, where it leads. It's, yeah, there's sort of all the, all these ways these institutions have, have gotten, gotten pretty, pretty bad. They've persisted for a long time. Maybe they'll continue doing so, maybe they won't. You know, there's always, there's, I think it's the, what is it? The Public Lies Private Truths book. Timur. Timur Quran I believe. And the thesis is that you have a revolution when not when everybody knows that the government's lying, but it's when everybody knows that everybody knows the government's lying. And then all of a sudden at one point it's like the emperor has no clothes, and everybody can see the emperor has no clothes, and everybody knows that. Everyone knows the emperor has no clothes, and. And then things can happen. And so maybe that's. Maybe we are at that point with these universities for where they were kind of off. A lot of people kind of knew it. We're now at a point where just about everybody knows that. Everybody knows it's similar to what is going on with Doge and the government employees.

[Dave Rubin]

Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. So that must be. I mean, there's a line that you said to me years ago that I say on this show probably once a week, which is that you said, I wouldn't be a libertarian if any of it worked. And to me, that distills it down perfectly, that if the system, whatever the system is, if it roughly worked, then you wouldn't need to be a libertarian because you'd say, okay, I can give in to this thing because it kind of works.

[Peter Thiel]

And it, and there were ways it used to work better than it does now. I mean, public, public schools in the US were pretty high functioning the 1950s and 1960s, and they've declined massively. Or. And then, yeah, probably, you know, there was a way that the, it's, it's hard to imagine this, but there was a way that the, you know, in the 1930s, when the new Dealers took over, the government was meritocratic and you had the best and the brightest people worked there, and they were still, it was still very talented in the 50s and early 60s. And, you know, NASA had the most talented rocket scientists, you know, in the US and the whole world. And you could, you could, you could do things. And then, and so, yeah, there's, there's sort of a, there's a way that there's been a real decline in these institutions. And this is where I always think of libertarianism, classical liberalism. They're not necessarily timeless and eternal truths, but I think they are more true now than they were 60 years ago.

[Dave Rubin]

Ah, that's interesting. So do you think that if Doge keeps uncovering stuff and we keep cutting the waste and finding the fraud, sure.

[Peter Thiel]

There is, there's more justification for a much smaller government. There's much less of a need for a big government than in the past in all sorts of ways. I don't know. There's one of the parts of academia that I've always thought is as rotten as the humanities is the sciences. And the, you know, the thought experiment I always give is, you know, if you Think about the government. You have the dmv, the post office, the nsa. What's, what's the most messed up government agency? It's obviously the NSA because we have no idea what's going on there. Whereas, you know, post office and a dmv. You go in, you can see no one's working, you can't get a pen.

[Dave Rubin]

But you have a sense of what they're doing.

[Peter Thiel]

So, so there's actually a little bit of accountability when it's so transparently incompetent. Right. And, and, and then I think the humanities, you can, you can tell that it's obviously woke ridiculousness. No one's reading books anymore or anything. The science is very, very hard to know. We have, you know, we had a tale of these two university presidents that got fired in the last year, couple years. There was the Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sort of the plagiarizing DEI woman, but, but then you had the Stanford president, Mark Tessi Levine, where it was basically fraudulent dementia research. He was a neurobiologist, probably stole tens of millions of dollars, engaged in fraudulent research. And the conservatives, it's much easier for us to critique Claudine Gay than Mark Tessier Levine. And that makes me think, yeah, maybe there's a complementarity between the rot in the humanities and the rot in the sciences, but probably the rot in the sciences is even worse. And at some point we figure out we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't be funding this anymore. It is, and, and it, it's really unstable. It can change a lot.

[Dave Rubin]

The Glycerin 22 is built to unlock that run forever. Feeling optimized for soft landings and powerful.

[Peter Thiel]

Toe offs at every point of every step.

[Dave Rubin]

How two types of nitrogen hydrogen infused cushioning seamlessly tuned into one experience. Softness has never been this powerful.

[Peter Thiel]

Let's run there.

[Dave Rubin]

Learn [e-mail] in some sense, do you think that this moment that we're at, where we now are resetting some of this and Doge is coming in and we're on this incredible moment with AI and I want to talk about Palantir a little bit and all these things. Do you think we sort of, there was no other way that history could have gone than to have gotten to this point, that things were going to work for a while as you just described, and scientists would want to go to NASA and we needed a state. And then over time the blows just got bigger and bigger and there was really no way around that. It's sort of a function of our success. And then it led us to the strange moment we're in and maybe the. The sort of upward move that we could be on right now.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah, I'm always. I. I resist overly determinist historical theories. You know, there's probably some, you know.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Thiel]

It feels like there's some natural entropy where, you know, these organizations become more bloated and bureaucratic over time, and there's some sort of entropic drift like that. I don't like being too determinist. I always think there's room for human agency. I don't think it had to happen this way. But given that that's what has happened, that there has been an extraordinary decline, the natural thing at this point is probably to downsize things significantly, to rationalize things, and that's. And. And maybe there's an opening for that happening much more than there was even nine years ago. I don't know. The crazy thing, I kind of wonder is, is whether this would have even been possible four years ago if Trump had gotten reelected in 2020. I somehow think we weren't quite ready to do this, and maybe. I don't know, this is too pessimistic a thing to say, but maybe we needed the four Biden years.

[Dave Rubin]

No, I don't even think that's pessimistic. I think that's realist.

[Peter Thiel]

They were educational and it was. It was just, you know, it's. It was an ancient regime with a, you know, way past. With a. And then some of Biden encapsulated this, you know, ancient regime that was way, way past its sell by date, and we needed. We needed. It took a while to educate enough people about that.

[Dave Rubin]

It's interesting. Why. Why do you think that would be a pessimist way of viewing it as opposed to just.

[Peter Thiel]

I'd like.

[Dave Rubin]

Because you'd like to think we could just.

[Peter Thiel]

I would. I. I was hoping we could do all this stuff in 2017.

[Dave Rubin]

So. So you saw the chance to fix these things, and that was sort of your cash.

[Peter Thiel]

Sure, sure. I thought there was a lot that was wrong in this country. You know, I thought. I always thought Make America Great Again was the most pessimistic slogan. A Republican incentive was, we are no longer a great country. And. And it. We were. And then finally, Trump was going to be the forcing function. President Trump's going to be this forcing function where we'd be able to talk about all these problems. And by and large, I don't think people were ready for this in 2017. It was much more shooting the messenger than listening to this very disturbing message that he had. Yeah.

[Dave Rubin]

That is why I'm sympathetic to the determinist argument, because it sort of feels like he had to lose to get us here.

[Peter Thiel]

I think, again, I don't think. I don't think one should be Pollyannish about everything getting fixed, but I think there's an opening now that did not exist eight years ago.

[Dave Rubin]

So having.

[Peter Thiel]

And still up to. It's up to the people in the Trump administration. It's up to people like you to keep pushing. It's gonna still take a lot of human agency to get this country into a better place, back on track.

[Dave Rubin]

You once said to me that you would never bet against Elon Musk as you see him get involved in this thing. Having started. Started a company with him, and now so many other guys that, that you guys have worked with are part of this operation. I mean, do you see this as sort of like the best case scenario? What's happening right now? That there are these great people involved and that they really are doing the things that. That we need to be done. And, and it's not just with the little scalpel, but it is with the sledgehammer. And that's probably the only way.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah, I. I don't know. It's. It's. Look, I mean, there. It's so hard. It's so hard to judge this. I. I would never bet against Elon. I think. I think he will. You know, we shouldn't be too determinist the other way, though. We shouldn't just assume that Elon will solve all the problems for us and Elon will be much more likely to succeed if, you know, all of us do our share in trying to articulate this. We don't just, you know, counting him to do everything right.

[Dave Rubin]

Have you gotten a call to do something?

[Peter Thiel]

Since our whole crew, I've tried to encourage them to bring on board as many of the good people I know as possible. I feel, again, there's so many more people in this administration that I think are really first rate. Yeah, I think it's off to a much stronger start than eight years ago.

[Dave Rubin]

What do you make of the collapse of the gatekeepers? Because that seems to be the other story here. There's sort of the obvious story in that we're fixing government and it's becoming more transparent. But that's all to the backdrop of nobody is buying the BS that we've talked about here anymore and that cable news is in the tank and people are watching this Instead of that and all of those things, are you concerned that with no gatekeepers, that where does that actually spin us off into? Do you have any concerns around any of that? That we won't agree on anything at some point?

[Peter Thiel]

Yes, but it's, it's always, it's, it's always, it's always what's the problem? You know, I don't know if you frame it morally. Is the problem that we have too much relativism or too much totalitarianism? And I think the, the problem was way more on the totalitarian side than the relativist side or you can, in the philosophy of science, I always think you can just, you can think of science as fighting a two front war against excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. And so if you're a good scientist, you can't be too dogmatic. And a lot of early modern science was, you know, against the excess dogmatism of the, you know, Catholic Church and the decayed Aristotelianism, all this stuff. And that's, you know, what 17th, 18th century science fought against excessive dogmatism. You had to think for yourself. You couldn't just be a dogmatic scientist, but you also can't be too skeptical if you're a scientist, scientists. So if I don't believe my senses, I don't think you're sitting in front of me. I might be, you know, in a simulation or who knows, I don't know, you know, I might, you know, everything might be an illusion. That's not a good attitude for science. So there's some balance between anti dogmatic and anti skeptical. You want to fight, you have to fight both. And so yes, on an abstract level, you're right that if you are just anti dogmatic, which is, you know, and we, you know, the, the gatekeepers preserve the dogmas and we're just fighting the gatekeepers and we're just, if we were pure anti dogmatic, that wouldn't be healthy because then we're too skeptical and there needs to be some balance. But my intuition is, you know, the problem in our society is, is not too much skepticism and too little, you know, if you ask where's that balance between too much dogmatism, too much skepticism or dogmatism is like totalitarian skepticism, is like nihilistic relativism and we're way too close to the excess dogmatic side. And so, for example, to use the science example of this, you know, there are all sorts of places where science today fights skepticism. You're not supposed to be a climate Skeptic. You're not supposed to be vaccine skeptic. You're not supposed to be a stem cell skeptic. You're not supposed to be a Darwin skeptic. So all sorts of place where if you're too skeptical, you can't be a scientist. They're fighting skepticism all the time. I don't think if you asked any scientist they could even name a thing where science is too dogmatic. And so if they are always fighting skepticism, never. They can't even mention one place where science is too dogmatic that's telling you it's incredibly dogmatic and we need to be a little bit more skeptical.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. That seems to be shifting now.

[Peter Thiel]

At least I think it has shifted some. But this is where, man, the gatekeepers were wrong and they shouldn't be believed. And yeah, look, there are, there probably are some point where people believe in too many conspiracy theories. They believe in too many, too many crazy things. But directionally, people believe in way too few conspiracy theories. Twelve years ago, way too few.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. Where now we could veer into everyone believing everything. And that creates another problem.

[Peter Thiel]

But basically I think we're not even close. We're still not even close to that.

[Dave Rubin]

So that's interesting. So you're basically, you're okay with sort of that pendulum swinging as long as I'm okay. As long as we don't end up in the multivers while it swings, you.

[Peter Thiel]

Know, I'm okay with Joe Rogan and the UFOs, ancient civilizations. And it is, it's, you know, I don't have to agree with it, but I think it's a very healthy corrective to the, to the zombie dogmatic, you know, establishment that we had that just blocked all questions and blocked so much stuff that made sense. It's like, I don't know, it's, it was, it was, it was wrong on so many things. Again, the COVID thing was like this watershed moment. And if they were so wrong about COVID so wrong about it was the food market or the Wuhan lab and you couldn't ask questions. And they didn't just block things that were wrong, they blocked a lot of things that were, I think, correct.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Peter Thiel]

And then, you know, why shouldn't we also rethink the climate science narrative and you know, all these other things.

[Dave Rubin]

Do you see climate as the big next one that people are going to really start challenging more outwardly? Because that seems like the major one that we still aren't quite addressing. Although there's a few more people online Willing to.

[Peter Thiel]

I think there are a lot of versions. The big meta narrative on science, the big meta narrative, I would say, is people claim there's a lot of science going on and the science is very healthy. And my skeptical view of science in general is I think most of these people are not scientists. They're not doing much work, they're not making any interesting new discoveries. They're just politicians getting money from the government. One of the people I know is this guy, Bob Laughlin, who's a physics professor at Stanford. He got a Nobel Prize in Physics 1998, and he suffered from the extreme delusion that once he got a Nobel Prize in physics, he would be free to look at anything he wanted to. And the area of science that he went after was he was convinced that most of the scientists, even at a place like Stanford, weren't really doing very much work, weren't doing very much science, were stealing money from taxpayers, and they.

[Dave Rubin]

Weren'T too thrilled to hear that.

[Peter Thiel]

And you can imagine this was a more taboo question, more taboo topic than just going narrowly after climate science or any of these things. And obviously he got promptly defunded and his grad students couldn't get PhDs anymore. And then my, you know, my sort of hermeneutic of suspicion is that if there's a topic you can't discuss, if there's ideas you aren't allowed to articulate, my shortcut is they're just true. You just know they're true. So if you're not allowed to articulate this idea that the universities haven't been doing much science, that the fraud that happened at Stanford, where the President engaged, wasted tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent dementia research that is par for the course. That's what most of these people have been doing. This is why our society is stuck. And the fact that you're not allowed to articulate that, that suggests to me, as a shortcut, it's probably directionally very true. And there's a lot of room to revisit this. So, yeah, I think, yeah, obviously there are some narrow fields like climate science or Covid science or they weren't so narrow that are important. But I would generalize it to all of science is string theory. In physics, it's cancer research, where they promised us they'd cure it in a few years, for the last 50 years, it's always around the corner. It's.

[Dave Rubin]

So what is that rodeo? Do you think it's because that there's so many people that are just kind of grifters or in over their head, or is it because most of us have no knowledge of any of this stuff? So if I was to sit down with the leading string theory expert, I would have no idea what they're talking about. And I would have to nod.

[Peter Thiel]

Yes, I think there is a hyper specialization of late modernity that we have ever narrower groups of experts telling us how great and wonderful they are. And yeah, so there's something about that that makes it very hard to evaluate the experts. And then there's some layer. The political intuition I have is we should actually be very skeptical of what they're saying, because the fact that it's so hard to evaluate the string theorists means we should be especially skeptical of it. And this is sort of a. Yeah, so there's this hyper specialization feature of. Of late modernity. There are probably ways that the peer review process was used for so much of the evaluation of what got published and what got funded. And this was not necessarily a process that worked that well. It led to consensus. And then if the consensus was wrong, or maybe you just funded very boring things, things were very incremental. And so, yeah, I think there are maybe a lot of different reasons that it's sort of developed in this way. But yeah, the sweeping claim I would make is we should be skeptical of the scientific enterprise in its totality. Almost all of it is way exaggerated. And this would be the really tough critique of universities. It's sort of a debating point. There's always, I think there always are two different ways you can go after an opponent in an argument or something, you go after the opponent or in a military campaign or whatever, you go after your opponent at the weakest point, you're most likely to score at least, you know, a tactical win. Get, you know, get a point. If you go after your opponent at the opponent's strongest point and you're able to win, it's hard. But if you're able to go beat them at their strongest point, that's game, set, match. And the university's weakest points in some ways are, you know, let's say all the nonsense in the humanities. And you can. But then you know what they tell their donors as well. You know, the humanities don't really matter. What's really going on is the sciences.

[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

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[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

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[Dave Rubin]

Square off at one of the greatest events in sports. It's tennis magic you need to see to believe.

[Peter Thiel]

The BNP Paribas Open, live on Tennis Channel and streaming on the Tennis Channel app. If we can show, let's say, I don't know, I'm not sure physics and string theory are the pinnacle. But if you could, if you could show that that's been a cul de sac where there's been no progress for 40 or 50 years, then maybe by transitivity, if the string theorists are the smartest physicists and the physicists are the best scientists, and if they haven't done anything, maybe we should assume nobody's done very much. And there is again this wholesale revaluation that needs to happen.

[Dave Rubin]

It's part of it also that even if people found out that some of that was complete nonsense and you really poked a hole in some of their, you know, most precious things, that a certain amount of this is just like, it's just sort of social behavior that people are just like, oh, we donate to the same things, we circulate in the same things. So like everyone's willing to kind of look away at the bad stuff because that's what their whole sort of world is about in some sense.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah. So I probably, if we, coming back to the critique of the universities, if we critique them, I think you should try to critique them both at their weakest point and their strongest point. But we shouldn't let them just hide behind the science. What's that silly 80s song? You know, she Blinded Me with Science.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah, right, right, right, exactly.

[Peter Thiel]

They blinded you with science.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah. Which that does not quite work anymore. I said, well, so you must be thrilled about Bobby, I assume, because he basically coming in with that skepticism. I mean, that seems to be the driving point behind the entire movement.

[Peter Thiel]

Yes. And then there's a critique of Bob. He's too skeptical. And how can you be against vaccines? I don't think he's categorically against them. But yes, my directional bias is we've had way too much of this totalitarian, top down dogmatism. It's more corrupt than the Catholic Church was 4, 500 years ago. It's more dogmatic. You know, I think there were more divisions, there was more natural debate. You know, I don't know, the Dominicans and the Franciscans and the Jesuits, they weren't all the same. And there was natural heterogeneity within the Catholic Church. And this is, this is way more. Everybody is in lockstep. No interesting differences, no real debates.

[Dave Rubin]

Let me ask you about Palantir, because it's come up a couple times on the show we've played a bunch of videos of Alex Karp, who I think is one of the great thinkers these days. And also he looks like the guy who, from Ready Player One, who created the virtual world. But I had Joe Lonsdale sitting in that seat just a couple weeks ago and we talked a bit about Palantir and he smiled when I asked him. But I feel like everybody asked the same question. What is Palantir? That was the same smile he gave me.

[Peter Thiel]

Well, I'm always tempted to do the literary answer from Lord of the Rings where it's this, this seeing stone, which is very powerful. It helps you understand the world better. It was originally created by the elves. It was meant to be used for good purposes. It is potentially very dangerous technology. It's very powerful. It's. It ends up playing a very important role in, in, in, in the way the, in the way, in the way the series goes. Because anyway, I can go.

[Dave Rubin]

We can do the entire Lord of the Rings thing. I know you love the references.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah. And basically there, there are. And, and it ultimately, it ultimately gets used for good. Even in the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn shows Sauron the sword Andoril, the sword that was reforged, with which the One Ring was cut off, Sorin's finger in the palantir, and he retakes the palantir for good. And then Sauron is fooled into launching a premature attack. And then that's how the hobbits get to Mount Doom in Mordor and destroy the One Ring. And so, yeah, there's sort of all these. So the Palantir ultimately does get used for good. It was the, you know, the genesis of the company we founded over 20 years ago was to try to find some way to solve the terrorism intelligence community problem. And the, and you know, if you define technology as doing more with less is. We needed, we needed to have more security with fewer violations of civil liberties, fewer intrusions of privacy. And I felt that the low tech debate version of this was sort of a Luddite ACLU versus, you know, a heavy handed, you know, dumb airport security where, you know, one silly shoe bomber makes everyone take their shoes off for two decades after that. And that was, you know, that's, that's sort of, that was the initial, that was the initial goal. And then there's. Yeah, there are all these ways that you want to sift through data to try to have a, you know, and, and you know the, yeah, the libertarian idea was we could not afford to have more terrorist attacks because when, if you have a terrorist attack and you don't have a high tech solution, you will always get the heavy handed, low tech stuff that we got after 911 with the Patriot act and all those things. And, and then, and then of course there is, yeah, there's some software layer to you know, to not just for the intelligence community but for the, for the military, for the defense capabilities generally where we need to be able to, you know, coordinate resources and coordinate all these things much better. And yeah, I'm, I don't want to propagandize this too much. I'm always bad at doing this. But I think, yeah, I think Palantir was, you know, what is sort of a, is the right way to do this is the best solution. It's extremely hard to start defense related tech companies. It's again this very locked in, frozen, hard to change system. That's the glass half empty version. The glass half full version is there's also some room for something that can be massively improved and at some point that matters.

[Dave Rubin]

I don't know how.

[Peter Thiel]

That's the rough story of the company.

[Dave Rubin]

So I don't know how much you're doing with the day to day there but I know, love the philosophical debates behind that between privacy and liberty and all of those things. I mean is there that constant debate between okay, we have to work with these governments and sort this information but we don't want to step on these rights. And probably it's different in every country. So there must be just like an endless amount of just purely philosophic debate beyond just the tech stack that you guys are building to help countries make sure that things aren't blowing up. Basically.

[Peter Thiel]

Yes, but I, I also, I, I think there are, you know, I, I do think, look there, there are a lot of debates we have at, you know, at the end of the day we, we are very pro the Western world. We want to work with Western, Western allied governments. We, we believe that you know, in some sense our side is still better than the, you know, the, the other, the other side on, on, on these things. And then I, I think there are a lot of ways that, that something like Palantir ends up being also constrained on government action where if you know, a lot of the abuses, a lot of the most extreme sort of overreach happened in contexts where people thought there would be no accountability ever inside the Government. So, you know, if, if, and this was, you know, probably like something like the Guantanamo stuff in, in, in, in Bush 43, nobody knew what was going on. You know, if, if nobody knows, it can go really crazy. And then of course, you know, at some point, and at some point people know and the inmates take over the asylum and sort of went probably too much the other way. But there probably were a lot of deep state excesses that happened where if Palantir had been used, there would have been more of a record of what people were doing. The NSA has not worked with Palantir and all these different suspicions. You know, one version is just, they had a, not invented here bias. But I think another version was there were probably a lot of things at NSA where it was too entangled. The FISA courts were way out of control. And if you had this outside software system where you actually tracked how often this stuff was used, there'd be a much more risk this would have gotten exposed and would have, there would have been a track record, much, much tighter track record of these things and it actually would have limited it. So my, you know, my, yeah, my, we somehow got blocked at NSA very early on. And I, I tend to think that the explanation Alex and I are sympathetic to was that the, the people at NSA believed that whatever power the software gave them, it also limited their power because there would be more accountability.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. It would basically sort of end up with a USAID situation on some sense.

[Peter Thiel]

At some point you have a line item tracker, you know exactly where the money's going. Like the USAID thing worked because I believe you have like a level, there's a, I think the technical government thing on USAID is you have a Level 5 description, which is the line item description. And then there was a Level 4 description, which is how you sort of group these things together. And I believe the level four, what was reported to the Trump political people and then the level five and level four were wildly divergent. This was, by the way, I believe something like this is what Oliver north was charged with in the 1980s. It was sort of that he engaged in fraud because he had mischaracterized various payments. And so I think so many of these, I suspect if we want to be aggressive, so many of the people working at USAID could be charged with fraud. Like Oliver north was charged with fraud for mischaracterizing these things. And then this is the sort of thing that was far more possible in this sort of paper, pencil, non transparent world.

[Dave Rubin]

In a way, it ends where it Begins.

[Peter Thiel]

Very insightful.

[Dave Rubin]

Thank you for sharing this Red Baron with us, Linda. It's so tasty. It makes me want to share something of my own.

[Peter Thiel]

I didn't actually read the book. Me neither. I watched the movie last night. I judged it by its cover. I haven't read a book since middle school.

[Dave Rubin]

I'm secretly seeing two other book clubs that I can't even read.

[Peter Thiel]

I'm not really Gary.

[Dave Rubin]

He just paid me to be here. Sharing Red Baron pizza can lead to more sharing. What do you think the healthiest thing is to happen to some of these people, like, as we uncover the fraud? You know, I'm not a huge fan of just starting to arrest people and people get caught up in things, and that's not a defense of anyone. And clearly there's been criminal abuse and fraud and all those things. But I think once we start arresting people, it puts us in sort of this cycle where we'll just all do it to each other. What's your general philosophy around that?

[Peter Thiel]

I think, I think the somewhat obnoxious suggestion I had was that we need something like a Truth and Reconciliation commission, which was set up in post apartheid South Africa, where, you know, as long as we got to the truth and we figured out what had happened, there can be reconciliation. But the first step is we need to come clean. We need to have some accountability for, for what happened. And so I want, yeah, I want us, I don't want to, I don't want us to have lots of arrests. I don't want lots of people to just get prosecuted. But I do think we need to have a lot more transparency into what exactly was going on in the sausage making factory. And my suspicion is that, that, that sort of transparency will very much discourage a repeat of this behavior. I think the FISA process was completely out of control. The, the Russia conspiracy theories, 2016, 2017, it was completely insane, contrived in some ways, extremely malicious.

[Dave Rubin]

Yeah.

[Peter Thiel]

And, and, you know, we, we, we should, we should come clean and we should, we should, we should publicize every single FISA investigation that was made. And, and we should, we should discuss who are the people who drove these investigations. And, and then again, I, you know, I'm not sure they should go to jail or get fired, but it should be at least, you know, part of their, part of their record in their career at these, at these departments.

[Dave Rubin]

Right.

[Peter Thiel]

I don't know if you saw it. Look, I, and I think, I think there's a, the part where I'm sort of hopeful is I think we're already at a point where the FISA process is way less out of control than it was eight, nine years ago, because people are at FBI, and I say they are more hesitant to do this because they kind of worry there might be accountability at this point. But I also suspect it was really out of control in the recent past. Identity politics calls us always to relitigate the ancient past, the sins of our forefathers. And what I think the Trump administration should be investigating is not the distant past, but the recent past. It's more important to look into COVID 19 and Fauci and all these people, then into 16, 19. And then my suspicion is that there was a lot of abuse, There was a lot of crazy stuff that happened because. And this again, is from an obnoxious comparison. I think there was something about the Biden thing that was crazier than Apartheid South Africa, because apartheid South Africa, by the 1980s, they knew they were on the wrong side of history. They knew their days were numbered. The Biden people, they were the Obama Biden people, they were so delusional. They thought they were on the right side of history and, you know, they were going to be the winners. They would always get to rewrite the rules. It was like. It was, again, it was like the ancien regime, pre revolutionary France. They thought it would go on forever. And so if you're in a world where you think you're on the winning side, you will always be able to get to rewrite the rules. You know, upon one analysis, how many, you know, how much will you push the envelope? How much will you bend these rules? And so I think there was a lot, a lot. And there's. And there's a lot that can. There are a lot of strings that can be pulled, and if we pull enough of them, the fabric of the ancien regime of liberalism will, you know, completely unravel.

[Dave Rubin]

It does tell you something beautiful about our. Our mechanism to reset to truth. Right, that, that they couldn't do it this time. I mean, the day before the election, Obama was on stage doing the very fine people hoax, and nobody bought it. And it was like, man, the gall of this guy to put that lie out there when it's been debunked a jillion times.

[Peter Thiel]

So remind me, what was that?

[Dave Rubin]

The very fine people, you know, the Charlottesville, that there were very fine people on both sides, meaning the white supremacists versus the, the others. And it's like, wow, you really thought you could still do it. But enough of us have had the reset that they, that they just couldn't do it anymore.

[Peter Thiel]

Well, it's, it's. Yeah, there are a lot of variations on this one. You know, again, one, one, one hopeful thought I've had is that maybe, maybe identity politics was simply something that was a pre Internet phenomenon politically. And because identity politics or the politics of identity politics of politics of identity works by telling different people different messages, you can micro target them, nobody notices it. And I believe the last presidential election that was truly a pre Internet election was 2008, when Obama got elected president. It was not. And he could tell different things to different people. It was like Mark Penn was sort of the micro targeting Clinton 90s person. But the basic version for Obama in 2008 was you told black people to vote for him, vote for me because I'm black. And he told white people, vote for me because I'm post racial. And by the time you get to 2016 with Hillary Clinton, it doesn't work anymore. You can't tell women to vote for you because you're a woman and men to vote for you because you're post gender.

[Dave Rubin]

Right, right.

[Peter Thiel]

And, and then, and then, you know, by, by 2024, I don't even, it.

[Dave Rubin]

Just made no sense.

[Peter Thiel]

I don't even think Kamala was nearly as bad as Hillary or Barack Obama were in, you know, eight and 16 years earlier. But even the smallest things where she, you know, had the fake accent and changed a little bit from one setting to another, it doesn't work anymore. And so, yeah, there's, there's sort of a, you know, if, if you say, you know, intersectionality, I don't know, maybe 7% of the population are black women. And so it means that the black women are supposed to vote for you. And does, does that mean the other 93% of the people are going to move to the back of the bus or going to get off the bus.

[Dave Rubin]

Right.

[Peter Thiel]

And should take a hike and.

[Dave Rubin]

Right. You go to them and you see black women. Or you'll think they'll literally be like, black lesbians are the backbone of the economy. And then other people hear that and they're like, okay, well so that micro targeting, basically because the Internet has exposed the intersection.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah. People, people in 2020, it seems delusional what they were thinking, but some of the intersectionality was it was the union of blacks and women and all, all these people. It didn't work. You know, on some level, I think the Democrats vaguely intuited it because you went with Joe Biden in 2020, who was the old straight white male even older than Mr. Trump. And, and so it was like this retro non DEI person. And, and then the promise was he was going to be the last one ever. And then we, and then, you know, after this we'd have a diverse person. And in the abstract, yeah, there are, there are more people who are not old straight white men than who are. Yeah, but, but you don't have an abstract diverse person. It's always, you know, is it a white woman? Is it a, you know, is it a black, trans, you know, woman, girl, whatever. And, and in practice, you know, it's always too specific. And, and maybe, yeah, maybe it, they already knew in 2020 that it was, it was somehow now not quite going to work. And maybe that's why they were stuck with Biden for so long because they knew whatever, that the post had to be a specific diverse person and then that would offend more people than it would include. Exclude more than it would include. Again, it was in this Internet, in this Internet world where it's transparent enough and right.

[Dave Rubin]

They set their own trapdoor. In essence. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

[Peter Thiel]

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[Dave Rubin]

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[Peter Thiel]

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[Dave Rubin]

Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Let me ask you one other thing and then we can continue this over dinner separately. It's interesting because it seems to me that you're quite white pilled at the moment in some sense. Like even when you're talking to me now, there's a smile, there's like, you seem very hopeful and you usually are the contrarian. So this is I suppose a big thing to end with. But we haven't really talked about AI. I know you're a sci fi guy. I'm a big sci fi guy. In all the sci fi stories, we're about to set the biggest trap ever for ourselves. And humanity is about to basically hand over all of its, all of its individuality to the machine. And whether it's the Matrix or Terminator or whatever. Are you, where are you? I know you're not overly deterministic, but just sort of like kind of blank slate. Like as we enter this phase of AI and as we, as we're about to cross this horizon, do you feel that we will be able to do it in a way that will allow humans to flourish for the most Part or do you, or are you more worried about the other part? Or is it something that you're just going to kind of punt because you're not overly deterministic?

[Peter Thiel]

Let me start by saying I may be relatively more white pilled than I have been at various points in the past. I still think there's an enormous array of incredible messy problems. We didn't talk about all the foreign policy, the crisis in the Ukraine and Iran, even bigger, the Taiwan crisis. That's probably going to come to a head at some point in the next few years. There are all sorts of ways. It's going to be very hard for the Trump administration to square the circle economically. You have to somehow figure out ways to extend the tax cuts. But we can't really borrow that much more money. The deficits are out of control. It's not that easy to cut the spending. You're not supposed to hike the taxes. You can't keep borrowing money. So there are sort of a number of, of, you know, extraordinarily difficult challenges.

[Dave Rubin]

I like how you just spit the white pill out right there.

[Peter Thiel]

That's at least a little bit of a qualifier here. I think the, one of the ways I always think of the AI problem or the existential risk problems that we have all these different existential risks and there's nuclear war, there are bioweapons, there are killer robots, you know, and then all sorts of ways the AI technology can be, you know, quite, quite, potentially quite dangerous and quite scary. And I've always thought that, you know, one of the other existential risks though, and you have maybe climate change, maybe various environmental forms. And a part of me thinks these are real problems when you find a way to, to talk about them. A lot of the people who are apocalyptic are probably not apocalyptic enough. Greta's only worried about climate change. She's not worried enough about AI and nuclear war and all these other ones. So maybe you should just get all these.

[Dave Rubin]

She's mostly worried about Gaza now.

[Peter Thiel]

Yeah, she's moved from the planet to the Palestinians, really jump the shark or whatever. I don't know what the right metaphor is, maybe Pastor Saul by date or something. But the, the, but I think, I think one of the risks that's also very big is that if, if, if we don't get science and tech to work, if we don't have some sense of progress, all the, all the, the ways our society, our society works by progressing, you know, it's not, you know, the middle class are, are the people in, in the US The Middle class I define as people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And, and this generational compact, it somehow broke down between the boomers and the millennials. And you know, we have this society where the younger people are in many ways not expected to do as well as their parents. And, and so the sort of no growth, zero growth stagnation, this society is going to derange, it will derange our institutions. It's not going to work. And so any default where there's no innovation and there's no progress, that's not idyllic. If everyone's riding your bicycle a la Greta, you're probably in North Korea. And, and so I think the way I would articulate the worry that I have about AI, yes, I have some worries about the technology and you don't want to downplay them. I have even more worries about going from the frying pan into the fire of worldwide totalitarian control, of regulating it and stopping it. And the Rand Corporation, which used to be sort of a techno optimist thing in the 60s and 70s, has basically been taken over, over by the EA people. Jason Matheny, sort of this bureaucratic guy who runs the Rand Corporation and he is basically one of the things they're pushing for is something called global compute governance, which is basically totalitarian, one world government, control of the whole world to maybe in the limit case monitor every keystroke on every computer to make sure nobody can program a dangerous AI. And that seems to me far worse than the alternative. And this, this was, you know, on some level, if again think about the politics, the Biden administration was leaning very hard into this totalitarian EA direction. We're going to have this Luddite heavy handed, you know, slipping towards totalitarian and controls of technology. And then I think the Trump administration is this very needed corrective. It's going to be dangerous, it's going to be risky, but it's far safer to try this than to lock it down.

[Dave Rubin]

So what do we title this episode? Gray Pilled Peter Thiel.

[Peter Thiel]

I, I, I always, I always say, I, I, I always think we, we need to, you need to be, you know, look, it's, it's up to us to do these things. It's not, these things aren't, these things are not inscribed. We have, you know, we have to make it work. We have to, we have to work. It's up, it's up to humans, it's up to the choices we do. If we're, if we're, you know, if you're, if you're too. I, I don't like. I, I, I think some, if you have to have an attitude, it's, you can be a little bit optimistic, a little bit pessimistic. Extreme optimism, extreme pessimism. They both tell you you don't need to do anything or you can't do anything. And they're both, they converge to laziness. And so gray pill sounds kind of bland, but it's definitely better than happy, clappy optimism or, you know, hiding in a basement. Pessimism.

[Dave Rubin]

Good to see you, my friend.

[Peter Thiel]

All right.