Peter Thiel: What Do We Not Want to Talk About?

Peter Thiel’s talk at the National Conservatism Conference is chock full of hard questions, well-reasoned thoughts and dry humor. Absolutely worth watching, though probably easier to stomach if you lean libertarian.

Investment takeaway: Avoid Wall Street banks if you think the US trade deficit will shrink. Peter brought up an interesting point: balancing trade will be bad for Wall Street banks. Specifically because a current account deficit means the US will have a capital account surplus, and that means cash will be flowing through the Wall Street money-center banks and supporting their profits. A decreasing current account deficit means less cash will be flowing through money-center banks.

What I like about Peter Thiel’s talk is he asks tough questions, ones that make us feel uncomfortable and tears away some of the obfuscation that permeates our discourse and thinking. He throws hard questions at Google, the higher education-complex, “Harvard Stanford Yale Studio-54 night clubs,” the Obama’s, George W, international “entanglements,” the Left, identity politics, the Right and American Exceptionalism. Something for everyone to feel offended. (Ha!) You can find some gems (excerpts) below, but the whole talk is well worth it. Enjoy!

On Big Tech:

“Let’s take [Google] at its word. It is building a Star Trek computer. It is building this artificial general intelligence in the form of the deep mind effort that they have at Google. Is this a military weapon? A.I. is presumably, at least a dual-use weapon.

We’ve been a lot more dishonest about that in Silicon Valley than the Nuclear Physicists were in the 1940s. There was a real debate between Teller and Openheimer. We’ve not had any debate about this, whatsoever.

I think there are some questions we should be asking. From a national US perspective, let me suggest the following three questions that should be asked of Google:

1. How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for A.I.?
2. Does Google senior management consider itself to have been fully infiltrated by Chinese intelligence?
3. Is it because they consider themselves to be so infiltrated that they’ve engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military? Because they are making the bad short-term rationalization that if the technology isn’t going out the front door it will go out the back door.

These questions need to be asked on a federal level, they need to be asked by the FBI, by the CIA. And I’m not sure how to put this, they need to be asked in a not-so-gentle way.”

“My read on Silicon Valley is it has much more the feel of a One-Party state where everything is regimented and everybody has to follow a particular party line. The problem is unanimity is not a sign that you’ve just converged on the truth. In a democracy, we believe 51% is generally right, 70-80% is even more right, but when you’re at 99.95%, no, you’re in North Korea. And the problem is there’s some sort of soft totalitarianism that is creating an incredible conformity. People have short bullet point answers on things, but they have actually not thought about them. I’d say that is the problem.”

On Trade:

“We tend to use technology and globalization synonymously, except when we differentiate them very sharply, when we end up turning technology into the scapegoat for the globalization problems we do not want to talk about.”

“The fact that money is flowing uphill [to low-yielding US Treasuries rather than faster growth elsewhere] tells you something is insanely wrong with the entire trade picture. It’s probably massively over determined. It’s not just that you have weird restrictions on business and import restrictions in China and unfair double standards in taxation. You probably also have intellectual property theft, all sorts of cyber warfare directed against US corporations.”

“Maybe we should reframe the 25% tariffs as a carbon tax … and maybe the 25% is a floor and not a ceiling.”

“You don’t want people negotiating trade treaties who dogmatically believe in free trade because the worse they are at negotiating, the better job they think they do. It doesn’t matter how bad the other side rips us off, the more we get ripped off, the better job we’re doing.”

“The way to articulate this is as a very straight forward accounting identity. That if you have a current account deficit you need to sterilize the current account deficit with capital inflows into the US, the bigger the capital inflows, the capital inflows go through the money-center banking system, the bigger the flows the more profits the banks make.”

“Every time the current account deficit comes down in the US we had a banking crisis. We had one from ’87 to ’91 when the deficit came down from minus-three-and-half to zero and you had 2000 S&Ls go broke and Michael Milken went to jail, and we it again from ’06 to ’09 when it went from minus-six to minus-three and it’s stayed at minus-three for the last decade.”

“What obviously has to happen is the current account deficit should go from minus-three to zero [percent of GDP]. A byproduct of that happening is we are going to have a banking crisis. At best we can have a sort of controlled crash landing for the banks.”

“My one very specific recommendation is that we know that anybody who works at a Wall Street bank will fight tooth and nail against any sort of sensible trade policy. And we need to keep them away from the negotiating table.”

“I’m not against the banks categorically, but the over-financialized economy that we have in US as well as other Anglo-sphere economies is not doing us any good on this.”

On Education:

“I believe the only two scientific or technical fields that it actually makes sense to study are computer science and petroleum engineering.”

“For the Harvards or Stanfords where its business model is a tournament, it’s sort of a Studio-54 night club. You know, it’s probably good for the prestige of the people who get in, it’s probably bad for their morals. But whatever you think of the Studio-54, Harvard or Stanford or Yale night club, it is not deserving of a non-profit tax-exempt status. We should get rid of that.”

“Warren and Sanders have talked about the runaway debt problem, they want to socialize it, I want to stick the colleges with the bill.”

On War:

“Just asking the question, in all foreign entanglements: Does it make sense for the US? Does it help the US? I suspect we would be less entangled. I suspect we’d be entangled in a different way, we wouldn’t be engaged in Utopian nation building and things of that sort. 

One reductionist thing to do is say ‘Does this make sense? Do we come out ahead?’

There was this crazy left-wing conspiracy theory on the Iraq war that we were just doing it to get the oil… I think it is sort of an indication of how crazy things are in this country that that was not even remotely true. Shouldn’t the American companies have gotten the oil fields or at least have gotten the automatic contracts for rebuilding them? And perhaps, if we had done that calculation, you’d conclude well it’s actually not worth that much and maybe you’d have a reassessment of the whole thing altogether.”

“One of the signature achievements of the Trump Presidency has been to not get us into all these insane foreign entanglements and to dial this back.”

On American Politics / Identity Politics / American Exceptionalism:

“The thing that’s odd and I want to conclude with is, Why haven’t these questions been asked? What is it about our society about the United States that has been so deranged that these obvious questions cannot be asked or that these obvious answers cannot be given? It’s taken 47 years, since ’72 to have this conference, or to come back to asking some of these questions. 

It is striking how the US is incredibly out of kilter on this. I’m going to give one left-wing answer and one right-wing one. 

On the left, I think the kind of psycho-social hypnotic magic trick that has been played on the population to distract us from these questions is identity politics. Identity politics started in the 1970s, the sort of cultural Marxism identity politics started at the same time as all of these questions have become more urgent and it’s been this phenomenal way to distract from asking these questions. I think that’s the main thing identity politics does. 

You can sort of debate the merits and demerits, the mural in San Francisco with the Communist artists that they are trying to erase or whatever. And maybe they should do it and maybe they shouldn’t. There’s always a merit and demerit debate, the main thing is identity politics is an insane distraction. The word identity means that which makes you identical and that which makes you unique. If you start with A and Not A, you can prove anything. It’s an endless distraction factory. 

I always have this hope that it’s about to end in some sort of paroxysm of insanity. And that the identity politics monster is going to get a heart attack from flopping its tail about wildly as it is, but I have to confess that there’s no empirical evidence that this is about to happen. 

For this reason, I think a left-wing or progressive discussion of what’s good for the United States, what’s good for America, is still not going to happen. And this is a conversation that can only happen on the right, it would be nice if the left could participate, but they’d have to get over that issue and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

I do think there’s also been something on the right that’s distracted us from having these  kinds of conversations in the US.

The single thing I would zero in on that’s distracted [the right] over the last few decades is the doctrine of American exceptionalism. This doctrine that the United States is exceptionally different, not commensurate any other countries, can’t be compared. It’s one that’s sort of incarnated in the insanities of the millenarian Bush 43 second inaugural. The exceptionalism obscured everything. 

If you want a theological or epistemological analog, I think it is roughly similar to the problem of what one can know about the God of the Old Testament or the God of the Qu’ran: if God is radically singular or radically different, can you know anything about him? It’s the same as the medieval problem of the attributes of God. 

And if you think about the United States, as so exceptional that we can never talk about it, that is going to obscure and obfuscate a lot of the kinds of questions that I have been discussing today. 

What I think has happened in practice is that exceptionalism, the doctrine of exceptionalism has led to a country that is exceptionally overweight, that is exceptionally addicted to opioids, that has an exceptionally dysfunctional infrastructure where it costs 10 times as much to build a mile of subway as it does in socialist western Europe, that is, in short, exceptionally unself-aware, exceptionally unself-critical.

What I think we should always underscore on the Nationalist side for the United States is that Nationalism has nothing to do with the sort of exceptional unself-awareness. That nationalism is not blind patriotism, it’s not: my country right-or-wrong, without any questions. Nationalism is going to ask hard questions. It’s going to ask how does our country stack up against other countries? How does it compare? And it may find it very wanting. It’s going to be extremely critical. It’s not going to be unreflective. 

I think whatever else the Trump Presidency stands for, it stands for a move beyond exceptionalism, beyond those dogmas. They are not coming back on the Republican side. They are over. It is long past time to grow out of exceptionalism and we should settle for greatness.

On Elizabeth Warren:

“One of the challenges for the left is they are captured by the institutions of our country and the institutions in our country are corrupt and sociopathic. If part of the critique of universities is a critique of corruption of the Studio-54 Harvard night club, that’s one that is existentially tough for Elizabeth Warren to do. I’d welcome her doing it, but I’m not holding my breath.”

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