Peter Thiel On The Diversity Myth - 30 Years Later | Pirate Wires Podcast #24 🏴‍☠️
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Hi guys. Welcome back to the pod m. Happy thanksgiving. We've got an interesting one for you today. I wanted to share interview I did with Peter tio little bit earlier this year about his book to diversity myth.

H, this is a really fast in conversation about manually the past, but I think more importantly in the future, you know, what have we not been focusing on while we've been focusing on the domes clowned ship possible? Uh, technology, religion, politics is a good conversation, an important conversation. And i'm proud I got to sit there and listen to IT so uh, showing you we can now have a great thanksgiving and enjoy the weekend with your family.

If the smartest people in the world are the physicists, they're just going to build bombs to block the world. Maybe it's Better if they spend their lives puttering around with d grants and diversity sort of seems kind of pathetic, but at least are not going to blow up the world.

You and I met fifteen years ago now, and back then, when we first met, think after the first meeting, I went and I bought your book. I read the whole thing covered to cover the diversity myth and try to talk about IT with you in our next kind of coffee when we're hanging out. I think it's very funny.

Now looking back, you just I mean, you didn't want to talk about IT all with my sense, and I felt almost like silly for having brought IT off. You just seemed completely over for IT. This was in like two thousand and eight.

I think when this was happening, in my sense, was that you thought everything that you had written about maybe just didn't really pan out maybe a year after I started at founder fd twenty twelve, let's say, early kind of signs of everything that you went to written about. We're there again. And by twenty fifteen, I would say workers or di, whatever we're onna call IT had pretty much taken over every single institution in the county which makes the diversity.

Mth, I think.

to my knowledge, the only book that accurately predicted basically the last ten years of america. And so here we are today, thirty years later, to do a kind of retrospect active on that work and maybe have the conversation that we could ahead. I think fifteen years ago, and I first asked you about IT.

I I was in college late eighties. Early nineties was involved in all these campus wars, culture wars. Some of them seem to be just these crazy people doing silly things.

Some of them seem to involve cosmic battles. The resume a big battle in the late eighties at stanford university over the core western culture program rally, hey, hoho, western cultures GTA go. And there was, in some ways, a debate about this one, a Mandatory class that all freshman had to take.

And another level IT, was this much bigger debate about our whole civilization had to be, you thrown out. And then, you know, my friend David X, I published this book, the diversity math, back in one thousand ninety five, shortly after we're out of college and and sort synthesizing a lot of these kinds of arguments we it's all focused on on happening at stanford. And you have to somehow you have to make some kind of argument that what you're talking about matters to other people, to the whole country.

And the somewhat contrived argument we made was that ideas have consequences, that what happens, that these illegals will eventually spread into the broader society? IT IT was a somewhat contrived argument, and probably by the time we met in two thousand and eight, IT already felt what was just embarrassing, an embarrassing away where I turned mohl into a mountain or or something like that and and certainly even five four, five years after I wrote the book one thousand nine hundred ninety nine, two thousand during the paypal years. Um IT IT was just not ni tem IT was not something anybody ever asked me about.

I was never asked to explain things in the book. I was never asked you explain my passed to sort of a righting campus libertarian and type person. The vibe of the, I don't know, one hundred ninety nine dot com internet was profoundly a political, optimistic and so incredibly disconnected from from these craze cultural wars.

And then when you forward to the silicon valley of um the last the last few years, even though in some sense is done so incredibly well as a financial or economic matter, the body is sort of angry, pessimistic, you know endless endless culture wars um hyper political. Something like the diversity that has resonates in a very different way and yeah now feels prophetic you know I I suppose i'm kind of proud that I wrote that I can say was right about everything in some ways. No IT. Maybe I rather live in a world where, you know, i've been i've been less right about things. And then, of course, I think there are probably are things that I miscall dated .

and also got wrong. K, there's a question of terms, I think is IT weakness, is a diversity, is A D I. Exactly where we're talking about? I think it's important because one thing that happens again and again is you asked while talking, trying to talk about this abstract thing that seems to be sort of pervasive.

You ask was IT even real if you can't to find IT does the same even exist? IT seems like you know it's you've made IT up, but IT is amount. They've made IT up a model there.

There's nothing going on here. Well, there there is something very slippery about all, all the words I think the late eighties, early nineteen one was multi cultural ism much on a little bit out fashion, more more weakness, a diversity feels like it's been a quasi permanent word for for thirty years as why not the worst one to focus on um but yes there is something about um the seeming slippers of IT that's a an an important feature um and in some ways one of the things that I think a has held up extremely well is the title of the book, the diversity math and it's an ambiguous title and you you can think of in one of two ways.

If you put the stress on the word diversity, then and then then there's this sort of natural critique that follows where you don't have genuine diversity on a college campus. If you have a group of people who look different but think that diversity, you know intellectual diversity should mean more than hiring the extras from the space canteen and scene and star wars or something like this, this is sort of um and then this was sort of the idea of, you know, people talk about diversity all the time, but on a lot of important dimensions they don't really habitants it's through a powerful internal critique but then the the second uh meaning puts the stress on the word myth and and under this meaning diversity is kind of it's a poorly defined word, is something we tell stories about it's a kind of shibli. It's a false scope um that were worshipping and then the kind of questions that that leads to us and may maybe diversion from things that are more important and and if we serve all and camped at the ultra of the diversity god, what are we not paying attention to in this sort of where i've described that as a kind of um hiphop um performance or a magic show in which your quatia hnidy zed you can't pay attention, orange role jumping up and down the back of the stage or something like that.

And we have and maybe maybe the question to ask is not sort of specifically where when is you? We're certain some of the people anti diversity arguments are are correct. But um what are the things that is distracting us from? What is a diverting our attention away from whereat, redirecting our attention? That's a set of question that i've come to think are very important and that that didn't even register when I wrote the book.

So I think I think the specific arguments adverse of that, I stand by the vast majority that I think I think they were they were right. The people who were argue you against the wrong. But then there are all these ways where I think about David tax, we're not even wrong know? We were we have took these arguments at face valley. We said these were the important debates and we we didn't we had no sense of this this bigger map and how um there were other things going on on the map. There were far more important.

I do want to just sort of get right into basically what you've got wrong. And this will be, I think, the premise of the entire discussion. I say not not even wrong, not even wrong, right? Not even aware of the question, the right question asked maybe.

But first, I mean, the book wasn't just quickly. The premise of the book IT was not what was going on of the stanford campus. That was sort of the background. What was the thesis of the diversity myth?

There was a fault line around this debate about the west, western civilization. There was one way in which the multi cultural ism diversity arguments were that we need to study other cultures and other countries.

And then the argument we wanted make was that IT wasn't really sort of, uh, interested in diversity in that sense, but IT was more you still had all these authors that were riding in a western tradition, but they were sort of anti western. So IT wasn't non western, but anti western. So I was sort intellectual framing in terms of what was going on.

IT was not about learning from other cultures, but he was about no tearing our own culture in our own society, our own own history. Down there was this no incredible intensity around identity politics, and there was already a lot of of craziness about these questions of identity there. There was always something paradoxically about the way the word you know identity means to dietrick opposite things.

Your identity can be that which um makes you unique or different, or your identity can be that which makes you identical or the same and then you know um you have all the people in group s their identities that their identical to the people in group acts and somehow completely different from the people in group. why? And then that sort of the paradoxically definition of identity politics for you, you start with meaning both the same and different. If you start with the word that means a na, you can do a lot of this chiff. And so there's a lot about, yeah I sort of the paradoxes, m and sanities of identity politics.

See, you were pretty focused.

There were speech codes at stanford where you there were sort of increasing restrictions on what you could say. There were sort of a lot of informal speech codes where people, for the most part, the speech was just the type of the ice cream. Then people knew you weren't supposed to say things that you get in trouble.

See, you were focused on essentially the subject of what was happening.

But you just all, all these sort of camps, wars.

You related to the fact that the real story was what we were not paying attention to because of IT. What are they? Let's just take IT just a brief of list before we take him a part.

I think one by one, well, prior different one could come up with. But four things, I would say, are bigger than D. I.

And the D. I. Today or even back then, we know is distracting us from. The first one would be that in the campus context, there's all this focus on the insanities and the humanity, but somehow the sciences were more important.

And this, I came to the in the year, senses that we have lived in an era of general stagnation in science and in much of technology out outside the computer context, and that in some ways, all the craziness and the humanity served administrators well, because they stopped people from asking questions about the crown jewels, which were the sciences. And if the sciences were corrupt, this was, in some ways, as a much bigger indication of what's going on in a much bigger crisis for us to deal with. And these sort of intense campus wars were actually a very comfortable way to avoid this.

This much bigger question about the sciences. There's a mark sister libertarian critique of all the sort of campus culture wars that they distract us from economics, from the real economic relationships and Marks, this would say distracts us from inequality, a libertarian from economic growth. How how to build a more more prosperous world and I I think there's you know there's something to both of those critics where you know we have this extraordinary situation where um in the us.

The western worlds hold the Younger generation for the first time is doing less well than their parents has reduced economic expeditions. That's a that's an extraordinary development. We should be thinking really hard about how to fix that, how to correct that.

And I think and in some ways, as as long as we get caught up in these in these craze battles about personal identity or these culture wars, we will never on tackle these bigger economic questions. The third one may be ready, elude to IT, where as diversity as as a false scope or a false idle, in some ways functions as a substitute or distraction from you, from religion in the western context, from judeo Christian D O. Christian tradition.

And I don't know what is little, but polymict what you say that, you know, god is the biggest thing that we could possibly be talking about in in the in the universe if you're distracted from god, that has be the biggest distraction imaginable and and so there is something um very strange where I think it's distracted us from that religion or squeeze out certain certain religious questions. And then you know what the fourth dimension would be. You know, if you think of, you know, maybe science and economics and religion are in some sense more important than politics, but maybe there also distractions from politics.

And then the rif I always like to have is maybe it's just a distraction. The ideology of political correctness is, by the one nine hundred and eighties, early nineteen, political correctness. This was a term that conservers used describe intolerant liberals. Go back to the one thousand nine and seventies. IT was a term liberals used to describe themselves. If you go back to the one thousand nine and fifties, if we actually had a very specific meaning and IT was you were a politically correct person, if you where card Carrying member of the communist party and you took orders directly from stolen and in moscow and you just followed the party line and I sometimes wondered whether um whether IT is um it's still just a distraction from communism in the context of twenty twenty three from um the C C P and that whenever people use the word they should just think C C P we can drill on all these a little .

bit more yeah in terms of science specifically, IT seems that this is always the robot IT seems like there's a lot going on. There's like the the new molecule and there's, I don't know, rocket ships that land. What what about what about sciences is really broken.

Well, can you always start with a meta question, which is how how how fast is signs progressing generally? How do we measure IT? How do we know whether it's healthy or broken? If you talk to the scientist, uh, IT always gets framed and these sort of breath less terms.

You know, we are five years away from curing cancer. Nuclear string theories, a theory of everything. We're really close to understanding everything about the universe.

And there are all all these, you know, breathtaking developments around the corner. And maybe, maybe accelerating too fast. It's a diseas Epace. We should slow IT down. Those are sort of the the narratives you get and then and then it's actually very hard to know how you would actually drill down into IT know know um i'm not expert on string theory or you know what do I know about quantum computing or cancer?

The the argument that in a lot of these areas things are stalled and slowed is a difficult one to make because in practice you run up against all these um sort of self congratulation experts on these guardians guarding their narrow, disappointed, telling us how how great they are. The sense that IT has slowed. There's an economic sense that some of all this progress has not translated into, you know, Better living standards for people.

There is a, there is a sense that a if we just think about, you know, the way the world changed in, you know, are, I know my grandparents generation for me of one thousand hundred to nineteen eighty, one thousand nine hundred and ninety, that was a world where went to car, from horse buggies to cars to, you know, supersonic airplanes, you landed on the moon. And then the last fifty years, there's a felt sense that things have changed in computers and and all these things, but almost all the other dimensions feel, feel, feel less that way. I was undergraduate at stampede in the late eighties.

I always think that with with hindsight, all the engineering fields were bad ones to go into. You didn't want to go to mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these things were sort of not really progressive quickly. They weren't really dynamic.

Arastra was a bad idea. Nuclear engineering, people really knew, was a very bad idea. I think electrical engineering still had a good decade or two, but the only roughly good field was was computer science, which was this, uh, not very chAllenging field for people weren't that good in math.

Always, I always have this right for things that call themselves science. Our feels with inferiority complex. And computer science was sort of like climate science or political science.

IT was not a science at all. And and then that turned out to be a jacket to the internet. This one sector that was going to boom in the next next thirty years.

Yeah, all the hard core engineering fields went haywire. You know there was the founders fund. No uh, sound by if we had on our manifest in back in twenty eleven, they promise to swine cars. All we got one hundred forty characters. And so there is some things and we don't have quite the jetsons are back to the future, future.

We have two eighty characters. And now you can post entire essays .

on twitter course complicated the ways. And there always twitter is important culturally and politically. And there are ways that it's you know, it's a it's a terrific business. And then there's probably still some sense where that by itself is not enough to take our civilization of the next level.

But is your sense on the college campus something happened that inhibited progress in the certainly .

sort of the the basic research part of science, the the hard core part of science um was in some ways that was not all on campuses, but love that was a Jason to the universities. There were government programs or some some large corporations that were funding at and something started to go wrong in that culture. You in the in the seventies and and eighties and IT was hard to see at the time.

It's sort of more obvious in retrospect. IT became IT became reoccur. Zed, there's something that the peer review process where people couldn't do break through science, there's buy something about, you know the signature achievements that loss aleo s and Apollo had this sort of a military thing.

So if if if the smart st. People in the world are the physicists, they're just going to build bombs to block the world. Maybe it's Better if they if they would spend their lives puttering around with di grants and diversity. Sort of seems kind of pathetic, but at least they not onna blow the world. And so I think I think there's some way that it's overdetermined a lot of different things that went wrong, but I think IT IT generally slow down a lot .

in the eighties. I mean, you just you mentioned the exception to that general trend, which was computer science in the varity complex in all of that. What exactly is the reason for that? Is, is just the absence of the other science department pressures or maybe the degree didn't matter at all. And I mean, the sciences that I guess the tech was built outside of academy plea.

If it's the kind of thing where you don't need A P H D, let's say you don't need a post doc role degree or PHD, then is the kind thing where you can get to the frontier pretty quickly. And then once you're at the frontier, you can start doing new things. And so yeah, it's if you're bill gates remark success, you drop out of college, yours soft more year, and you you know enough computer science to to start building a great company in those spaces.

And then probably you know a lot of the other feels um like even something like biotech by by the late eighties, early nineties, which was one of things I I thought of going into at first I already had this very illogical thing. You know you at least get a PHD to have sort of a basic entry level credential. And that was maybe in some ways a symptom of a field where the frontier was very far away. And then know once you got to the frontier, um maybe turned out not as much as happening there as as would .

IT seem to you that college still is not really playing much of a role in development, let's say, in technology rather than science. So for example, computer scientists is IT seem IT does seem like there in more people are giving this degree. It's still the only real outlier IT seems like in our economy nother's artificial intelligence has the trend sort of kept that you don't really need A P H, D to progress in the field.

I think it's certain ly maintained for all the fields outside of computer science where I think in in the one thousand nine hundred eighty he was he was not clear that the college thing was not working. When I was an undergraduate at stanford I would say two thirds of um the students entered up in consulting, law, medicine or um investment banking.

And you know medicine get md while you get A J D banking you get A M B A, which sort of these professional post undergraduate um degrees and and probably all of those things have decade quite a now the hard core science and engineering fields have decade a lot more. I think electrical engineering still felt like a very, you know hard and valuable thing in the late eighties. That's that's that's turned out to be much more chAllenging. And then I think there were all these other things that people still would have thought of as potentially adjacent. And they were, they were really on the way out.

When was IT working? I mean, would have been an example of this in the age before distractions, let's say, in the sciences and technology. When was college really sort of coupled in an important way in amErica with progress?

It's always a question whether ever IT ever worked, you know, as the only engine. But certainly early to mid two of the century, you know, amErica there was was way, I would say, science and technology were progressing on, you know, many, many different fronts. And think there was a lot of IT happened outside of a college context.

I know, you know, how would you started building airplanes? And they built the planes before they figured out all the other dynamic rules. And you just built the planes, they saw which ones flu and which ones crashed.

And and then you sort of retroactively figured out the airspace theory. And so I think there was a lot of things that happens sort of outside of college. But then there were also all these ways that a college was IT was more Jason to industry in all these ways.

IT had more a translation function. Your original silicon valley was, you had you, I think you had a lot of, in a very hard core electrical engineers that had fairly intense education and then also got applied. IT was a lot more applied. There was probably something about the cold war context where um you you always want to figure out ways to apply the science at least to military applications. And then IT was IT was really a sort of in the end of the cold war, in the aftermath that spiral into these these fields that were truly an earth.

Typically, though, will talk about in in the past. And if you talk about decline and now we're talking about the sixties and the fifties, IT seems like IT began, you know, long before the brilliant wall and the distractions that you've written about in the eighties. Was there some shift that took place in in the sixties of the seventies with the social distractions maybe present on campuses then as well, in a way, is actually not the second wave of d is like the third of the fourth.

I think these things were very overdetermined. Certainly one, you know, one underrated part of the story, I think, is that a lot of science and technology was linked to the militari. And then at some point this became deeply problematic. He was ready. Problematic world war one would just like all this car age and then certainly world war two and the meat aftermath where you know um you know do we really need to go from an adam bomb to a hydrogen en bomb and you know and and is a scientist who's working on that like doctor teller really just a doctor, strange love.

And by the time you get to charley manson in the late sixties and you know he's over dozing with his groupies on l city, but it's and what they see is that the world's headed towards you know thera nuclear warn and then it's probably doesn't logically follow that. Therefore you can be a dust f skin anti hero and just go around Randy, killing people because everything promoted, because going to be destroyed. But, but I think, I think IT eventually LED to this very crazy me.

But I tend to think there was something about there was something about the nuclear weapons that uh had the effect of undercutting the entire utopian science project of the journal of in four hundred years, starting in sixteen seventeen th century. And then in my time he was IT was something like a twenty five year delayed reaction. And in really kicked in the late sixties and seventies, the really reversions. But I really kicked .

in them in sort of related to this entire conversation with that of academia and the sciences is obviously just college in general. And also around the time that I match you, you created this program, the two hundred and twenty. But the premise was you are going to pay, I think, twenty kids to stop out of college just leave school.

And people lost their minds. IT was seen as incredibly controversial. But now I think it's pretty obvious that you were right.

This was a major problem. College debt is the that entire conversation is just like tape sticks. Anytime you're talking about college, what would you say kind of reflecting back on that? You know, today.

ten years later, IT already felt very late to me. I I had thought these institutions had gotten more ridiculous, more racket like more corrupt for for decades. I think that already in twenty ten, IT was kind of more I was more like the little kid saying the amp has no clothes.

And so ah nobody was saying IT IT was in some times controversial but there was surprising a little push back. And then of course, you know the colleges you know IT was just an autopilot and you know IT kept going for for another decade. And you a student det with three hundred billion dollars in two thousand, it's now two trillion dollars. So in some sense, you know um there was enough of that was just on autopilot. People, you didn't really know what else to do the anti college thing IT was the winning side in twenty ten and it's even more sunday and yet .

people are still IT seemly like people are still going.

My guess that covered was somehow a big accelerant and a big point where we we ask some very hard questions about these institutions. And man, that the charges went even, even crazier in in, in that period. And from my perspective, I think, yeah they just finally jump the shark but i've thought that for decades. I think I think IT is just as ridiculous intern like a chAmber where they they don't realize how I must stop.

It's gotten, but probably there's still are a few that it's worth sending your kids to, not oh, you you're completely you're over that as well.

I'm not sure you know it's it's I think the elite colleges in eighties IT was definitely still a good thing to get into a elite college like stanford. And then there's you know there's there's some point where just from a point of view of, you know I know child teenage development is if if your entire you know life gets tracked into doing all these, you know filling out college applications, activities and you never develop in the interest or any passions because is just this completely contrived resume that you're building, there's some point where that's that has to be more about a liability. And my senses that um even for the the kids to get into the the Ellie colleges at this point, it's like you ve passed some Mandarin examination in in um china but you're just so exhausted you're never going to do anything more thrust of your life. Burned out at eighteen .

just the other day while was preparing for this interview. The starbucks union, they're contemplating going on strike and they're not going on strike for more pay or time off for anything like that. They're going on strike because they want to make sure that they're allowed to put L G, B, T, Q decorations in the stores. And that struck me as like, just kind of hilarious. And the context of unions, right? You have these famous unions in the twenty the century fighting, changing, transforming entire countries um for economic power of the working classes and its super markey and in a way, here we are in this sort of weird space that supposed to be leftist and the diversity stuff which is framed as left this seems like this weird subversion of the core thing .

that is where, you know, I don't exactly believe this, but I am open to even something like the conspiratorial marxist theory, ala nm. Chomsky I, where obviously the starbuck's union is just a fake construct that's been invented by the management and their sort of distracting the workers and they're stopping them from really organizing for the things that matter and they would hurt the starbuck shareholders, which be paying them a living wage or something like that.

In some ways, it's always what's very ambiguous about uh, the woke corporation more generally is IT is IT a feature or a bug? Is know is that just a form of mass and sanity for companies too woke because eventually just going to self destruct and sometimes yes. And or or is IT more feature where um is just a very a very clever way to make the workers forget about their economic interest for their class interests and to divide them by gender and race and pay them less.

I think sort of a proto wk corporation that did this pretty well as walmart in the mid two thousands there were all these left wing groups, unions and ridiculous people with walmart to paid solar licking ford shop at walmart. Of all these um stories are made a pretty good, pretty good case on some level. The walmart plan was to um reinvent itself as a Green corporation um as as part of having these sort of eco friendly shopping centers and then that sort of split the anti left wines got walmart out of the dog house and IT was much, much cheaper than paying the workers more.

I think they are yeah the sort of our versions where is the sort of mockery an racket and in their versions where you know it's a it's a crazy ideology and in the world corp, it's probably has elements of both. IT wouldn't work if he was just iraq and wouldn't work. He was just an ideology, and he needs some combination of true believer s and useful idiots and sort of mckEllen people taking advantage the whole thing, probably the economic dimension.

I I think there's a tendency to focus too much on esg and corporations as sort of the the main vector. I I I think perhaps the uh the bigger vector, bigger economic vector um where there are distortions and where on diversity woke ideologies distracting from realities is something like real state um and this is where I am sympathetically of the Georgeous um economic analysis which is that if you have distortions in real state, they lead to forms of economic injustice and and can lead to to really, really creates society that way. I would tell tell us the sort of somewhat strange story would be that you know if we were sitting in 3Frances go or manhattan back in two thousand seven， and I was said, while the rent is so high in these places is so ridiculous, and.

Um obviously people this can't go on. People just gonna ve finds some other more reasonable, more fordable place in this country to live if you had told me, well, no, in fifteen or sixteen years the rest will actually be doubled um um you know, I wouldn't believe you, but if you say, tell you you back from the future and the rents of doubled, while there must have been some extraordinary ideological superstructure that came with that, and people must have head but some kind of stock home syndrome. And they must be brainwashed in a really crazy way. And and the sort of identity politics store I want to tell you would be like if you if you're gay, you were told that a few know if you ever left manhadoes. If you made IT even to hoboken, you get beaten up right away or you know you were you if you are women living in a routine fester department and Cameron esco and your daydreaming about a nice suburban house, you could have an reno, a va of for the same same Price um you know you'll be told that you'll be change your bed and be forced to Carry a baby to term uh or something like that and so there there is some way where um if you think IT is uh there some of trillions of dollars at stake for these urban slum words and know the zoning and the the ideology doubled up to to keep IT going. That's the Georgeous uh real state story that I think of what was really going on.

So the main beneficiaries of this are no political candidate. It's it's just landlords.

it's something like landlord's or you know it's it's it's older people who own the houses. Um if the real state Prices went up. So correlation is not always prove causation, but if the trillions of dollars a stake, we should at least ask the question. So if the run doubled and you had and correlated with people going crazy on identity politics and some people made trillions of dollars from that, um we should at least ask this sort of economically caul .

story in a conversation on the sort of failure of progress uh now in the economic dimension it's a little nerve action to be talking so much about Marks you've previously mentioned. There's a libertarian component to this as well. How exactly I mean, what they what do they both get, right? That has sort of been subverted in the sort of age of social distractions.

Well, there's always some question about, you know how how do how do you grow an economy? I think this is a sort of I basic across a lot of different, different theories. If if you want to have non inflationary growth, you need you need productivity.

And in some ways, that's a question around science and technological progress. How much how much were happening. And if if if you don't have productivity growth, you could have more inequality or the inequality gets felt more severely because has a very zero some aspect to IT.

Um but generally you end up with just digging ation. I think if you're if you're on the left to stress the the um the inequality, if if you're on the right you stress the stagnation. But yeah you end up with something that's definitely not progressive society in any economic sense.

It's not one where people are getting more prosperous and wealthier over time. I often to find the middle class is the people who think that their children will do Better than themselves. And so the sort of society we have is no longer a middle class society in that sense. Forgotten extremely hard to to believe that about once once children.

Last question on the economics piece. How does this all play out in there? Have you seen this all play out in the context of companies? Um IT seems maybe I mean, now text seems to be entering or is seems to be in this kind of bear market.

Um we've just had a series of high profile reckonings with a this sort of political language in the office. In some cases, it's not allowed d at all anymore. Um what what was that that phenomenon that we just sort of watched happen in which politics became in the central part of the workplace. What is your sense of why that happened and and why is IT ending? Or do you maybe disagree that it's ending at all?

It's hard always hard to know what's going on in the moment where in but but the other is something about um the politicization and the densification in the tech industry was somehow I want to say I was some of the tech was not enough anymore or you know the product you're building or the company are building was not enough and um you needed something extra and IT was somehow um even though you attack was still in some broad boom and the companies were on the whole doing very well.

Um I I don't think IT felt that way. You know the average person and google felt like they were you know an every smaller cog in this ever bigger machine um and then there were sort of ways where even if you were at on the top tech companies ah the housing was more and more unaffordable in in silicon valley. And so um so even for a for a the people at the cutting edge of tech and silicon valley IT didn't feel like I was IT was IT was translating individually as as well that should have and then IT Christal zed into this very, very different direction you know I think there was obviously there was a way that IT coincided with the trump phenomenon politically but I intended think that was more IT was more structural. People were prime to be angry for lots of other reasons.

Was IT possibly that there was some sort of distraction? I mean, in the context of monopoly, for example, you've talked previously about how people will try and distract from the fact that they are amenability. We talked about google in um there also you know they have x labs and there are you know doing uh a million different sort of crazy science size fy moon shots and things like this was maybe this was just .

like this of al version of that yeah I think I think he worked on all these different levels at different places but um if one were to pick on google there was something about the um the moon shot science programs uh that was much less charismatic in twenty twenty and twenty fourteen thousand twenty five years IT was all about the self driving car. And then you know ten years later, we've kind of gotten there.

But it's IT doesn't really capture people's attention anymore. The rule doesn't get a lot of credit for a it's not what google wants to talk about. And um and then when they you know when when they lost the brand or the um or the cash around and around being the sort of place of intense innovation, know maybe maybe maybe I was too much for brand and not enough of a reality along. But at some point um the time ran out they hadn't delivered on IT. Then somehow I was harder to resist the opening of of of the workforce.

Religion is, I think, a pretty interesting one. It's also may be while the most unpopular of the four categories, the most obvious and talked about because weaknesses ses sort of constantly preferred to um as religious in nature. What is your sense of how IT Operates in that way? Well going .

to be that may be concretizing in terms of Christian specifically. As for a hard core unreconciled, I I always I always think of, you know what is unique about Christian and and in the ideal Christian tradition, it's this story that gets told from the side of the victim. It's know, can enable abbe's blood cries out from the ground IT is moses lead the jews out of, out of egypt is the sort of oppressive slave society in some sense. Chrystal is the victim of the mob of punches, pilot of the authorities and the and the innocent victim.

And then this is, this is always a contrast with, you know, most of mythology, which tells IT from the point of view of the persecuting community so though the romans story of romulus and readers it's like the can enabled story um but it's told from the point of view of rome as um the founder of rome um where's the canendesha ies not told in point of can said to be the founder the first city the first city has dw, the world first is the greatest city of the ancient world. Same story, different, different perspectives. If he sort of map the vogue religion into this, into this, into the sort of Christian context, IT is not, it's not wildly divergent from Christiana is IT is just like one task, switch away.

IT is something like also very concerned for victims and and IT is, there's a long history, Christian I, where there were all these people who said that, you know, they were more Christian than the Christians, and we know that was Marks or toll story in the sixteen century was a Christian, I promise. You know, the poor til in here the earth, we're going to have a communist revolution. And the poor will get the earth right now in the here and now and we're going to be more Christian than the Christians and it's not to be this a this long, long story of redemption.

Um it's going to be it's going be a revolution that were going to do do right now you know that sort of the the history which I I see IT so it's somehow dealing for lot of the same themes and then and then of course, IT you know IT escalates them in some ways to where by having this concern for for victims, maybe you end of victimizing other people or there is you know there is a lot of bad in history and people did a lot of bad things in the past. But um you know if if you get rid of forgiveness, that that's a that's an important deviation that doesn't work. So I think but I think of IT is as basically something like a you know I know Christian Harris y sounds to a old fashion, but but it's it's something very, very adjacent to .

Christian and is that the primary difference would be the lack of forgiveness within the context of .

this sort of sure. But it's also it's also that somehow we have an absolute sense of who the victims are um you know I think I think Christ gan I will always say that some ways um we're all part of the you know none none of us are pure victims.

The only pure victim was Christ know the way medieval anti semitism worked was the people said, you know the medieval Christian said if we had lived in the time of china we wouldn't have been like those bad who killed him um and then of course that in a sense a lack of Christian awareness because would you supposed to understand us if you'd lived in that thing you would you would have been just as bad as Peter who is the. Disciple betrayed quest to everybody, betrayed Christ. IT wasn't just know the bad jews who have the bad romans, he was everybody.

And then this is about, I don't know, a modern liberal atheist in the twenty first century would say that if we lived in middle ages, we would have been tAllant unlike those bad medieval Christians. And and there's probably some way where if you say that you would have been different, you would have known Better. The Christian ji is that's always like a sign that you don't know Better.

There's no chance you would be Better. Your only chance to realize that you have just the same. And if if you think you're going be much Better, if you have no chance. So but so there's something like that is probably the animating idea.

But then the sort of question, what do you do you know, what do you do with all this bad history? And I think I don't know there, there's I would say maybe maybe outlining the three kinds of response as there's kind of, you know I don't know, a niche on bronze age pervert bp type thing the that I find emotionally very tempting, which is, you know, the history wasn't that bad and I don't want to feel guilty about IT and not i'm done feeling guilty about the history. You know, there is sort of the, say, a woke words in the history, words extremely bad.

And we need, we need to punish all the bad people, need to separate the good people from the bad people. And so it's a bad history without forgiveness. And then no, in some sense the uh I would say the orthodox Christian version is that the history was was bad and then you need to find some way to uh forgive and then obviously this all gets sort of web ized and turn into something ideological where if you if you're too much into forgiveness, you are some certain evil reactionary person who wants to downplay the history. And if you're you if you're too much into the history, then then you the swow Christian but but there's some kind of bounds that I think um or the Christian tries to .

strike in terms of the broader conversation on distractions. This one reminds me a little bit of science and that IT does seem like the the decline, let's say, the decline in religious observers in amErica started a long time ago and it's just been getting worse and worse and worse. Is your sense that at this sort of new social religion, is the reason that religion is declining or has IT replaced this this vacuum left by a trend perhaps caused by something we don't really understand?

Yes, it's it's always hard to know exactly exactly what's what's going on sociologically. But I I would say that if orthodox Christianity declines um I and IT loses institutional power or things like that my bet would be that that something like the work religion will be stronger than the bp religion um and and because the vote religion is at least right on the on on you know just the problem of violence in the past on the topic of religion there really .

hasn't such a tremendous decline a lot of people are going to have a hard time caring and um what one just even easy sort of obvious question is what are the kind of rotten fruits of of a decline in religion? What are what is the evidence of that as a problem?

I think there are a lot of different reasons that um institutional Christians in trouble is very hard to know how to reverse IT. Um I I think these I think these things can always change. People can always you know, it's these things are not, you know abou lute laws of history that are are are writing out. But I I think you know I think the the basic problem you can't it's it's unlikely that you go to a sort of niche, an island rational e spatial st thing that somehow an unstable half house or it's an it's maybe an insane ym for a small number of people there's too much the need for meaning for things like this. And and and I think I think, guy, I I want to say the work religion filled fill the vacuum and then it's I think I think I think it's worse than what IT replaced um and but that's not enough to reverse that.

Signs itself is often framed and to a certain that I would say technologies often framed as in some sense at odds with religion. And so the decline both seem strange. And because the opposite would imply they both were before the decline.

There were some golden age when they were both at their height. How do they how do you as sort of, I guess, one of the more famously outspoken Christians in tech, how do you reconcile the two? Because IT seems like many people see them is just completely .

at odds and then there so many different layers that question is obviously there's obviously A A history where they were institutionally at odds and there was no something about um you know early modern science that want us to resist the arista anim of the of the catholic church. And so there are some historical debates and context in which in which these things Operated.

But but but when you when you fast forward um to our world, I do think of the decline is much more correlated in some sense, both both science and Christian. Or concerned about the truth, then there could be conflicting truth in the ways that could be attention. That was a common value and then and then we have somehow moved away from that. And maybe um maybe that was already implicit in the whole project but the sort of ways IT has IT IT has manifested more and more as line obama like to cite, quoting Martin luth a can you know sound like the art of the universe is long and IT bends towards justice for the moral art of the universe is long and IT bends towards justice and I think that are in some sense the the world in that sense the people no longer believe exists, is the universe.

And just as this would be like our physics ref but uh the universe um if the universe is one thing, then um IT leads to certain questions like, you know, was there something that created the universe? Is not the universe something like god or something like this? And somehow it's a jay and to the god question and then you can always say, well, IT doesn't doesn't point to god is just a fact, there's no explanation for the universe, but then then the universe points to a limit on science.

So either points to god or points to question science can answer. And so somehow the idea of the universe um is somehow this intersection, I would say, of of of this question of, let's say, science and and and religion and then and then the way we pivoted away from the universe in the last twenty years is to the multiverse, where we can know anything about the multiverse as a as a whole because we're in some completely unrepresented tive subsection of IT. And then um you can't do induction, you can't reason about the whole, you can't know anything about the whole and that's why um i've often said that I think the multiverse has actually become a kind of gateway drug. I don't mean I mean is actually almost non metaphorical sense, become a gateway drug to the simulation to bolster brains to uh to are the matrix to um you you're just a brain and the that being manipulated by mad scientist or you're just uh this sort of disembodied ind being um manipulated by dyk ards demon and then it's become the gateway drug to um sort of a world of Cosmos that we can make no longer make any sense of at all and you can't make sense of you know the whole Cosmos maybe you can really make sense any part of IT either but this this is certainly not the way the early science project thought of itself in the seventeen eighteen th centuries but some of that in the twenty first century um I I want to see some of the abandonment of religious truth and the abandonment of scientific truth seemed to me to be both symptoms of this, uh, very unhealthy postmodern world world we live in just different uh, subjective fictions.

Seems like I mean, you saying is the red pale was a mistake. You should not in this ism, the don't take the I don't .

think I don't think we're in the metrics. I don't think. I don't think we're in the multiverse. I know i'm not just a scientific with the sort of a scientific thing has been reframed as as as an escape from the theistic or scientific questions. The universe of point, youtube.

They're really compelling ideas that are almost impossible to get out. I M, the matrix is one, obviously, the multiverse is another simulation matrix obvious slated to the simulation theory. Uh, once you kind of start to think about them, there's no looking away. What do you think this is about them that makes them so attractive?

Well, that's a that's a different questions. There are ways to uh to avoid these ultimate questions and and were where in the world that um you know if if you want to have a living in from the ultimate question, that's that's um that's what you that's what you get with with those those things.

But I I think I think the Price seems very high and the Price seems to be that you just can't know anything and you you have to sort give up on ultimately knowing anything about the world. And my intuition is that that's probably correlated very negatively with a technological progressing society. If if you're trying to figure out things about the world, you're trying to find out things about parts the world, that's the world where you're tinkering, you're improving, you're making IT Better.

These people are asking the question, I mean.

I don't I don't think I just feel on this. I don't I don't think they're pretending to ask. I don't think they really are okay. And they ve ve asked him away where its design never to get to answers. You know, if you ask a question away where it's designed that you can never get to an answer, I think that's that's actually way to avoid a question or avoid a different question.

So politics in some sense IT seems all roads kind of lead here. This is the the central piece of IT. All, I mean, it's right there in the automotive gy, as you mentioned at the top of this thing, politically correct, is dei a plot by A C, C, P. To take over silicon valley?

Divil question answer, I don't want to go down the full conspiracy theory.

and of course, go and take a trip down.

I think IT is not the most important question. What the man's aria of these people are, are they? Are they truly card Carrying members of the communist party? Are they getting instructions from beijing? Or are they just useful idiots?

You know it's sort of in the intelligence community context, it's sort of the um the difference tween an agent and an asset. An agent in an agent is um. Is someone who has full mens rea, full full knowledge, full intentionality and acid can be just the useful city of one sort or or another.

You could similar arly ask the question whether is bill gates china's top agent or china's top asset? And um IT seems to me um if it's either of them, that's interesting enough. And we don't need to we don't need to if we disagree that he's one or the other, that's that's pretty interesting in .

terms of politics. What have we been distracted for? You're saying it's it's communism specifically and .

it's a threat from china in particular yeah on some level that is a way of china as a massive geopolitical rival to the us you know IT is china gets to have a bigger GDP in the us um you know does this manifest to some you know great power competition? All know Victoria in britain against wilhelm in germany before world were one.

And then you know in some ways IT seems far worse than these historical and analogs because um IT is um IT is IT is being driven by a you know a total arian ideology and I would say londoners sort debate how Marks that is but certainly IT is sort of a totalitarian one party control and is IT seems me yeah the stakes are are very high and uh and it's a very important think first to think about and what we do about IT and it's it's hard and you know that sort of you know who was like we have a little bit of this with with the germany, russia stuff in the ukraine war. We had this one pipeline and this somehow was maybe a bad idea to have the pipeline because you're entangled with this bad government. Maybe um people were somehow naive about these things automatically working.

And the U. S. China relationship IT seems to me we have we have one hundred pipelines connecting us with china and we're sort of entangled in this in this very bad way. So it's a very unhealthy form of global ization. IT depends on certain um certain unhealthy differences remaining where you know we have a lot of trade as long as the worlds have a sleep, have free. And so yeah, I think there are all sorts of extremely big important questions about um about how I should manage the relations, china, what's going on and and um anything that distract us from that is is very bad um and which we suspect that functionality is doing the job of the communist party and this is they want to be distracted for surely targets. Tic.

to go back to the bill gates thing you're saying, IT doesn't really matter if we've distracted at ourselves or for being distracted perhaps by them. I mean, if this is some kind of actual sign up.

the talking points of the big bill gates, the gates fdc, are completely and sink with with the C, C, P. On, covered on, you know, on foreign globalization, you know, all, all, all, all these sort of things. And so, you know what exactly motivates them is almost the secondary question.

Do any of these distracting forces actually work against, I mean, do you think they might work against china to some degree? For example, religion. I mean it's an atheist country.

They how are they progressing? Um I mean they seem way more distracted from religion mabe. Then we are we at .

least have weakens. Will they have gigi thought.

is that their version .

of IT is I don't know, it's it's probably a lot I take woener over that any day. But yeah, no, there probably are different ways this, this, this manifests over there. There are I don't know.

There are a lot of things are very crazy about china. There are lot of reason to think that is IT will not ultimately quite succeed. But but I also think we shouldn't tell ourselves that they're automatically gonna destruct.

You know, there's so I think there's so these these two narrative we generally tell about china, one is that are going na take over the world. We should just accept IT and the other is that um you know no one is having kids. The whole society is going to is going to self destruct and we don't need to take this seriously.

We can ignore IT. And so it's acceptance or denial. The truth probably is is probably healthier to think that the truth is somewhere in between.

And what we need to do is actually you think really hard through how do you how do you block and tackle what you what you do about semiconductor policy with china? It's very complicated. You need to figure IT out.

And you know, what do you do with trade? Where's IT okay to trade? Where's IT not OK to trade? You know where? Where do you where do you push back? Where do you not push back? But it's it's, it's a very hard fight we have on our hands.

We are distractions from science, academics, economics and religion. Seem sort of ambiguous. It's hard to put down when exactly the decline began IT clear that di, the sort of broad, multicultural m, whatever, the sort of distracting social stuff that you've talked about, has a huge role there.

Politics seems more obvious. IT seems like the fall of the brilliant wall was pretty much the moment that the distractions began once russia was gone and there was no longer a serious threat or no longer perceived as a serious threat to us. Um we stopped thinking about about this. I wonder what is IT about china that makes IT so hard to care? Um as opposed to the U S S R.

Well I mean that I mean there's all sorts of different answers. There's obviously there's the end of the cold war history in the seventies and eighties where um even anti communist like nicks on and reagan, the strategy was um to ally with the weaker china against the more powerful soviet union was the kiser opening to china in thousand thousand and seventy two IT was IT was a in some ways the regan administration continued this um and um you know even even when they killed all those people on time and square and june of ninety nine within a month and scope rop the pushed forty one national security devisers in beijing saying we don't care because your anti soviet you know berlin wall dyn come down till six months later and I I sometimes think if the history had been the opposite of tina man had happened a year later, then maybe we could reacted very differently.

But there was away in the seventies and eighties where china was seen as a and I will be at a crazed communist one against a more powerful soviet union, certain real politic and then some way that needed to be updated and IT wasn't and then, and then I think the the berlin wall coming down was, you know, IT was basically, he got interpreted in two very different ways, in china and in the west. In the west, we interpreted as, wow, these systems will collapse under their own weight, and we just need to wait them out and um and something like the berlin wall will eventually come down. And you know all these other places um china, vietnam, north korea, places like that.

On the other hand, in china IT got interpreted as well. Well, we have to really learn from what happens, so you avoid making those mistakes. And you know, gorby job had paradoxical economic restructuring.

She's good, but laws, political opening, that's bad. And we will do IT with historic about no claws and oust and and we will learn from IT. And if we learn from IT, we can avoid that from happening.

And so the downside of the brilliant wall coming down in this almost miraculous way in commission, collapsing in this maculate Wayne eastern europe in the late eighties, early nineties, was that we thought I was going be too easy with china. And then in fact, china learned lessons on how to how to show up their system. And and and then we are where we are today.

IT does kind of seem at this point that all of the social distractions are kind of at an end or at least they're not at the peak. IT feels like the peak was something like twenty. It's been getting a little more open since then.

At least in the context of tech, there's all sorts of push back that's allowed now. And like I said IT earlier, a lot of the stuff is not even been allowed in in inside of your workplace. Um love these conversations are not able to happen.

And probably there's something about the um ignoring the china chAllenge has also got ten a lot harder. This probably you know probably is close to bye partisan consensus that you need to do something. I think they're sort of a lot of other countries that have you are coming around to the U S, U S.

View on this. And um you know obviously are still all these you know all these people in our society that have benefited ted you as hollywood, the universities of wall streets. So there are these institutions somehow were were long the the bilateral thing with china.

There were some how long these pipelines, but but they all feel like they're on the losing side. It's sort of the the d coupling, the d risking the train is leaving or has left the station. And it's not a good idea, not even in your economics self interest, to be in just picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer.

That's sort of what you're doing and where you know I I don't know just to pick on the um the squair venture capital form would be IT seems to like a very clear calculation that okay, the trains leave in the station. We just decoupling the radical, decoupling the radical, spinning off all the different all the different funds. And then you know we're sort of in this world, if you track at relative to statements they were making um you know of beds that mike Morris was writing in the financial times three, four years ago. Well, it's it's it's hard. They sound like there are one hundred years ago.

So we are in this I mean, a date for sure, but then we are in this moment that's diverging from the previous five years, six years, seven years trend. I never thought that this stuff would come back the way that I did. I didn't even really have a sense of IT in the early nineties at all. Do you agree that it's a kind of less distracted moment? And then I guess the next question is like if this is just a dei winter, what does IT looked like when IT?

I think people are aware of the science stagnation away. They were not ten years ago. I think they're aware of the economics stagnation and and so all these things, the kicking the can and down the road doesn't doesn't work as well.

More I think the china they are aware of, you know I think even even the the Christ jeanty pieces, you know it's somehow you know IT is IT is something to say that um anti gian penthouse and the new atheists I always think in in the in the mid two thousands, you know new atheism was just IT was a politically correct way to be anti muslim and that seemed very. Desirable in some ways at at at the time and um was uh if you fast forward IT to twenty twenty three, I am not i'm not scared of islam. I'm not I don't even feel anything that bad about islam anymore.

It's clear the enemy is is is um js hotel italian china, it's atheist st. And you know the espace rationalists have lost their way because they had a lot to say about islamic fundamentalism. They have nothing to say about the group. Think that is reaching pink hot.

I feel like we should end on something positive and I don't know what if that could possibly be after this sort of like a Harrison .

ying spectre of communism. Well, you know if we there lot of reasons the the the tech stuff didn't happen. If people were scare the military um IT was hard to come up with new ideas.

People are too risk averse um but there was also also just a lot of regulation and we we just wanted to and stringing and and stop IT. If you look at the large language model breakthrough on on with A I that seems like a big deal. It's a it's a big thing that happened is hard to know all what that means.

It's disorient all these ways. But my my hopeful model is that done is there's going to be way less push back honor then um then they will say on the big consumer internet companies and um even though you know um D I might be dangerous, that might be disruptive or destructive to to various jobs, the thing is going against is so exhausted. And the thought experiment sort of have is that you have little you have a politically correct english P H D person who at the end of her PHD is in a dead end job working as a break start starbucks, and and now is being told that the AI is going to disrupt everything.

And then do you fight the A I, or do you fight to preserve your dead and job? And I think I think there's no energy left to fight the AI. And so we're sort of in a moment where the willingness by the the wake left, where everyone called to fight the future, I think is much weaker.

Don't need them in hatton project. I don't need a government project. You don't need universities do IT.

It's just happening. And all you need to do is for IT not to be stopped and IT doesn't stop. The future will happen. And I think that the men were in.