Peter Thiel joined me for the Grand Old Pod this AM. Here is the audio and transcript of that long conversation. It may be used with attribution:

Audio/Video:

02-15hhs-thiel

Transcript (lightly edited for readability):

HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt and the Grand Old Pod. That man right there is Peter Thiel, legendary tech inventor, investor, and futurist. I really don’t like the term “futurist,” but Peter is also the author of From Zero To One, with Blake Masters. And I am particularly happy to have Peter here on the day after I had a presentation of AI and ChatGPT from my colleague, Professor Mario Mainero at Chapman Law School warning the faculty that ChatGPT and AI generally is going to change legal education, I mean immediately, in things like take home tests and paper requirements, but also profoundly in ways that the legal profession briefs and responds. So my first question, Peter, out of the box, is just a general one. Am I wrong, and I hope you’re my Tom Bombadil here and calm me down. Am I wrong to worry about the rise of the machines in the way that I’m worrying about, that it’s going to really disintermediate people with verbal and literal talent from everybody else, because everyone’s going to have the same set of machines and the same set of capabilities?

PT: I think you’re a little bit wrong to worry about it that much. It is, it is probably somewhat overstated. Everything in Silicon Valley has been overstated for decades where people have been, you know, overpredicting technology in one way or another. But at the same time, this is probably, it’s probably a big event. I think it’s probably the biggest event in tech since maybe the launch of the iPhone back in 2008 or something like that. The media always overstates things. This is perhaps the one time they’re not exaggerating too much. And so it is, somehow we have to calibrate this correctly. It’s a pretty big deal even if you caveat that these things always, they always get overstated. I think one of the things that’s very strange about all the AI conversations is how they always get deranged very quickly. You know, is it going to replace human beings? Is it this weapon that’s going to destroy the world? Is it, what exactly does it mean? And I’m always struck by how quickly they go in a very strange direction. So I think there’s some kind of calibration where it’s a very important, very transformative technology. It’s probably going to be quite valuable as a business. It’s valuable for Microsoft as a corporation. It’s knocked off $150 billion dollars off the market capitalization of Google. So it’s a threat to the search engine for the first time in 20 years to the Google monopoly. So there sort of are business aspects that are important. There are things as a technology that are important. Whether it’s going to be a complete world revolution is probably something that’s on a very different scale.

HH: Now Peter, I’ve got to explain for the audience, Tom Bombadil is a particularly unique character in Tolkien. And you and I are both Tolkien fans. You’ve probably read it double the number of times I have. But early in the book, Frodo and his couple of Hobbits go off, and they’re warned by Tom Bombadil, this ageless character, who’s sort of a god figure, but I’m not really sure who he is, he says you’ll be fine. Don’t go near…okay, so he said don’t go near these mounds. Don’t go into those, because if you do, you’re going to be in trouble. And the first thing they do, they, of course, is they end up doing exactly what they’ve been warned about. So you just gave a very nuanced answer. Don’t do the wrong thing, and we’ll be fine. But there are 330 million Americans who can do whatever they want. There’s Google. There’s Microsoft. There are a lot of smart people who are not responsible. So if you take the worst actors and the best AI, what happens?

PT: I think we really always need to be careful not to overstate and exaggerate these kinds of things. But probably the worst actors are something like, you know, the Chinese Communist Party.

HH: Yes.

PT: And what does China do with it? How does it relate to the U.S? How does it relate as a weapon system? The piece that’s dangerous about AI is that it’s both this powerful technology, but it represents sort of a centralizing version of tech. I’ve often said that if we say that crypto is libertarian – Bitcoin, these cryptocurrencies are a way to decentralize power, you know, to decentralize money and they somehow have this libertarian vibe. Can we also then say that AI is communist, that it’s a technology to centralize data, to monitor data, and that it’s both powerful and potentially dangerous? And so it’s always this very complicated thing about technology, where in some ways, it’s neutral. It’s always a question of how humans will use it. And at the same time, I want to argue that technologies can have a certain valance where something like crypto can have libertarian valance and something like AI can have a communist valance, a sort of centralizing, controlling technology. And that’s the element of it that I think is a little bit scary and dangerous, you know?

HH: Yeah. Earlier this…

PT: The difference is where China has had AI for a decade, and it’s a country that’s been deranged by technology. Everything is monitored at all times in all places. And I don’t know, this is again, you have to be careful not to exaggerate, but it’s like the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica. They’ve been, you know, technology has overrun the country. The sense in which Xi is this communist dictator and there’s a sense in which the computers have taken over the whole country. Everyone is monitored at all times in all places, and it’s, yeah, it’s not even, it’s strangely different from totalitarianism a la Stalin or a la Mao.

HH: Well, we are in an arms race with China on AI, and this very morning spoke with Chairman Mike Gallagher, who is leading the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party about the balloon that lingered over our ballistic missile fields in Montana and elsewhere and the threat that that posed, and whether or not they’re collecting the data that could be used to jam or destroy our ability to respond to a first strike. Am I wrong to worry about that and to jump to that, because you don’t send a balloon over those fields to take pictures that satellites could take. They’re collecting something.

PT: It is, look, we are in a very crazy dynamic with China. It’s been probably understated in strange ways for some time. But yes, I think that we have this rivalry with China that has a military dimension, has a technological dimension, has economic dimensions. And it has been, it’s been understated for quite some time.

HH: Now there’s an interesting bipartisanship here, Peter Thiel. George Soros, of all people, has called Xi “the most dangerous enemy to society.” He did that a good bit ago. I think the recognition is dawning on people.

PT: Yes.

HH: Mike Pompeo told me at the Nixon Library last week [Xi’] got “dead eyes.” And I mean, he’s just an absolute menace. Do you think our country as a whole, the American society as a whole, understands what that new totalitarianism is, and the guy who’s running it?

PT: No, I don’t think that we are really up to speed on it. It is sort of strangely, it’s very different from the Soviet menace, which was only on a military dimension. And this one has an economic dimension. It has this strange technological one where we always think of, we think of communism as somehow technologically backwards, not able to do things with tech. And this has both a tech and an econ dimension. So I think it’s been strangely underestimated. And you know, obviously, there are ways the Republican Party has underestimated it, that if you think of Nixon or Reagan, they were anti-communist. But in the ’70s and ’80s, “anti-communism” meant “anti-Soviet.” And Communist China was both an evil country and a U.S. ally in trying to beat the Soviet Union. And so there’s a way that both Reagan and Nixon were good to be anti-communist, and then there’s a way they were not anti the CCP at all. [W]e need to update from Nixon or Reagan. And I mean, in 1972 when Nixon went to China, China had one-fifth of the GDP of the Soviet Union. So they were sort of a way in which you know, Moscow, the Soviet Union was the thing that Nixon was right to focus on, and same with Reagan. And today China has five, six times the GDP of Russia. So you know, Putin’s a bad guy, but Xi is a far bigger threat.

HH: I see the world organizing, and I’d like your comment on this, into two alliances – China with Russia and Iran backing them up, are the new axis of evil. Iran’s the shock troops. They’ll do anything anywhere. Russia’s the natural resources run by a dictator who’s a paranoid.

PT: Yeah.

HH: And China is a technological competitor of the first order. I don’t know that we think of the world in those terms, or if that’s too simplistic, but that’s how I think of it. What do you make of that model?

PT: I think that’s roughly correct. It is, you know, [Chiba has] four times the U.S. population. And so there’s a sense in which if China just converges with the U.S. technologically, they don’t have to overtake us, if they’re able to just copy the U.S., and if you can get to, you know, the same GDP per capita, if you can get to one-quarter of the GDP per capita, you have the same GDP in aggregate. And then you could in theory have the same percent of GDP goes on military spending, and so you’re a serious, serious U.S. rival. So yeah, there are all these ways. It is at a scale that’s very hard to calibrate. And then there are all these different ways that I worry the U.S. has been, is underestimated, is partially coopted, things like this.

HH: “Partially coopted?” Do you mean in terms of the capitalists who want to make money on the China market and will do whatever they can to do so?

PT: Sure. It is, you know, there are ways in which Wall Street is coopted. There are ways in which Hollywood is coopted. There are ways in which the universities are coopted. You know, if you think of graduate schools and our liberal universities, probably 40-50% of the science students are Chinese, and you can think of it from the university point of view, it’s a form of indentured quasi-slave labor in these graduate students. And so they get cheap grad students as slave labor, and then they don’t question the way in which it’s coopted by China. Or Hollywood gets to, you never have movies in which the Chinese Communists are villains. I think the last year in which they were villains is 1997, Seven Years In Tibet…

HH: Wow.

PT: …or you know, stuff like this. But go back to the last time the Chinese Communists were villains. I think you have to go back something like a quarter of a century.

HH: You know, Peter, a couple years ago, your friend, Mark Zuckerberg, invited a half dozen conservatives over to his house to have dinner. It was a smart idea – listen to the other side, find out what we’re thinking. But he was somewhat taken aback by my question – “Is Facebook” –it was called Facebook at the time, that dates it– “is Facebook patriotic?” And he was kind of stunned. He said “Of course, we are. We work with the Department of Defense!” But I’ve been thinking since then patriotic corporate America in the run up to World War II and throughout the Cold War, they didn’t do anything to help the Soviets. They were aware of the Soviets. They did everything that could help us. I’m not sure Silicon Valley is patriotic in the way, say, Detroit was in the 40s and the 50s. Am I right?

PT: You know, I think Silicon Valley is not the most coopted. So if you look at these companies, I think Hollywood is worse. I think Wall Street is worse. I think the universities are worse. But yes, if you look at the individual Big Tech companies, probably the one that’s problematic is Apple, where you have the iPhones are manufactured in China. And so if you think, Apple is the biggest of the tech companies. And it is, it’s about a two and a half trillion dollars market cap. And somehow, it is this, it’s very dominated by China. I don’t think it’s quite true of the other four Big Tech companies in economic terms. You think of Microsoft, Apple, I’m sorry, Amazon, Google, Facebook is somewhat smaller, they don’t actually get to sell stuff in China. They don’t actually make money, but yes, ideologically, they’re very uncomfortable questioning it or challenging it. And there are no tech CEOs who are willing to really go on record as challenging the CCP, even though they’re frozen out of China. They don’t make money in China. So in some sense, they’re not getting paid off in the way that Hollywood or Wall Street is with, again, the big exception of Apple. But challenging it is something that they’re very uncomfortable doing.

HH: You have gone on the record. I think, and I want to get the quote right, you said about TikTok, it’s “an AI weapon that China has directed at the U.S.” And you did that in a recent speech. Do your colleagues at the summit of Silicon Valley believe that, that TikTok is an AI weapon directed at China? I know you believe it and I believe it, and basically every Republican who’s serious believes it. But do the Silicon Valley executives at the summit understand and believe it?

PT: On some level, people understand that it’s at least a serious business competitor. It’s obviously getting people’s attention. And so in that sense, it is a serious challenge for Facebook. It’s a serious challenge for Google, for companies like that. So I think it’s understood on that level. And then, you know, I don’t know, it’s not quite political correctness, but are you even able to talk about it as this weapon that’s deranging us? That’s quite a bit harder. You know, one of the kinds of critiques that’s been made of Facebook is that it has this deranging effect, that it somehow, and this is, I think this is actually more of a left-wing critique of Facebook, but it sort of polarizes content. It somehow exaggerates the conservative content and deranges it. And I don’t think that’s true of Facebook. I’m more sympathetic to the conservative critique that it’s actually shutting down content and sort of standardizing it. And so it’s the opposite of polarization. But that kind of critique is probably one that one could make of TikTok, that it is somehow, you know, it surfaces content to people that polarizes and deranges them, and in that sense, it’s an AI weapon that’s being targeted at our society.

HH: You know, the CCP is very aware of how we are reflexively defensive. And so as soon as TikTok criticisms began to surface from you and other people who actually understand how it works, they began to call the critics of TikTok racist conspiracy theorists, because they want to shut down the conversation, because nobody in America wants to be called a racist or a conspiracy theorist. So the CCP’s wolf diplomats immediately go out and call everyone who questions TikTok a racist conspiracy theorist. Did you notice that? Do you see what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to delegitimize the conversation about TikTok’s danger.

PT: Yes. Well, we need to figure out the right way to even talk about it, where if you, you know, we can’t quite always just say China, because that already, that immediately falls into the racist trap. And then, but Hugh, I think saying CCP is in a way too mild…

HH: Okay, interesting.

PT: …because that’s like calling it a party, like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. And it’s not just a party, because it’s this party-state fusion that you’re dealing with. And so we need something like it’s like Soviet Union. It’s a communist party fused with a country. And so I think we should be calling it something like Communist China, or maybe Red China, which was, you know, a retro thing to say even for Nixon or Reagan. But I think Red China gets at this party-state fusion problem. And so I if you call it China…

HH: In a kind of retro way, I use the term “ChiComs,” because “ChiComs” used to be the term of art that one used to quickly get to the Chinese Communist Party but separate ethnic Chinese so you weren’t getting into a racial thing. Just call them “ChiComs” to remind people the communists in China are our problem, not the Chinese people.

PT: Exactly. Something like that. It’s some party-state fusion thing, and then this is, look, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is telling you something about, you know, how difficult this is on the U.S. side, where you know, even labeling the enemy is hard to do, because we immediately have to, you know, be careful that we don’t get accused of racism or something like that.

HH: You know, [Congressman Mike] Gallagher is a pretty smart guy, and I enjoy talking to him, even though he’s from Wisconsin. And he’s running this, and the Democrats put their good people on the Select Committee. They’re smart, like Ro Khanna and a couple other people that I know, and they’re smart. Would you appear before the Select Committee? I mean, if they asked you to come, they’re not going to subpoena you, but if they asked you to come, would you got and testify to it?

PT: I think I would. It’s a multidimensional problem. I think it is vitally important for us to think about it in the right way. But it is, yeah, as we said, it’s this multidimension thing, and I think one of the things that’s a challenge for both parties is the way in which we are coopted in different ways. The Democrats are, I think, coopted by Hollywood, by the universities. You know, the Republicans are, to some extent, coopted by all these businesses that are making money on a quarterly earnings cycle, and where you’re not supposed to be rude and question China too much. And the Republican risk is that we become like the Kuomintang, the sort of nominally center-right party in Taiwan that at this point is just this weirdly pro-China party and doesn’t question China, and has somehow been coopted. And so I think this is where I think President Trump was good. And this is where a disturbingly large part of the Republican establishment, both Senate, House, elsewhere, is weirdly coopted.  It’s not a simply partisan thing where I think Biden was in some sense like as close to the Manchurian candidate as we could get in 2020, if you looked at the people in the Democratic primary. It was Biden was the “Manchurian candidate.” Then you know, if Biden wasn’t going to make it, Bloomberg was sort of the default Manchurian candidate. So they were the worst possible people for the U.S. getting tough on China. I mean, even Elizabeth Warren, I mean, all of these people, I think, you know, are in some ways terrible, was tougher on China than Biden.

HH: You know, if every minutes of every Republican primary debate was devoted to China, I wouldn’t be unhappy, Peter Thiel, because it is the overarching number one issue of our time.

PT: Yes.

HH: Are you…

PT: It’s like Iowa. Iowa, if you look at the states in the U.S., Iowa is a state that has, you know, a lot of agricultural exports. And it is relatively coopted by China. So how do you run an Iowa primary? And you know, there’s certain issues that Iowa skews to, but it skews dovish on China. And so there’s a weird challenge with the caucuses in Iowa.

HH: I had not thought about that. You’re right.

PT: On and on down the line.

HH: When we come to China, for the parents out there, Mitt Romney, when I first sat down to interview him, 2005 or 2006, he asked me if I was a grandfather, and I wasn’t, yet. I am now. And the reason he said is because once you become a grandparent, your perspective changes completely. You go from worrying about the next 10 or 20 years to worrying about the next 50 to 75 years. And that has happened to me as I’ve become a grandfather. Are you an optimist about the next 50-75 years? Or are you in the camp of we’re going to get beat, and we’re going to be part of the Middle Kingdom’s, they’re not going to invade anyone. Henry Kissinger told me they’re never going to invade anyone. They’re just going to dominate everyone. He didn’t tell me the latter part. He just said they would never invade anyone. Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the next 50-75 years?

PT: Well, I always think that both optimism and pessimism are somehow incorrect. They’re too ideological, you know, and they’re both modes where you don’t do enough, because extreme optimism means that you don’t have to do anything. You know, we’re sort of on the winning side. Extreme pessimism is defeatist and we’re going to lose. So I always think of extreme optimism as a form of denial, extreme pessimism as a form of acceptance. And what we need to do is somewhere in between. We need to be fighting. And we need, and I don’t think these things are written in the laws of history. They’re up to humans. They’re up to human agency. There’s sort of choice. There’s freedom in deciding what’s going to happen. But I think the truth is somewhere in between. We’re kind of evenly matched with China. We’re kind of going to be evenly matched with them for a long time. And it’s up to us what to do. It is true that China is growing faster than the U.S., and in some sense, if you look at it on a GDP basis, it’s going to overtake the U.S. But it’s not. I don’t think it’s true as a matter of a strategic map, because as China overtakes the U.S. in GDP, I think there’s so many countries that are going to become scared of China and that will naturally ally against China. And so if you look at it versus 20 years ago, Japan was weirdly pro-China 20 years ago. It’s anti-China. Australia has flipped. Vietnam has flipped. India, you know, I don’t think that’s the best ally for us, but they’ve kind of flipped. So there’s sort of our, and I don’t think China will overtake the whole world.

HH: Why is India a bad ally for us, because I’m kind of counting on India as our ace in the hole, because if AI requires people generating information, they’ve got as many people as China. So if they’re on the right team, that helps us.

PT: Man, it is, you know, I’m tempted to say something like “With friends like that, who needs enemies,” but they are a profoundly corrupt society. It is, it’s probably, if you think of it as a place to do business, it’s probably as bad or worse than China. I mean, I think there are ways U.S. companies can make money in China. It’s even harder to do that in India. So it’s deeply corrupt. There are ways in which there’s some good things that came out of the British colonial period. It has some kind of democracy. It has some kind of rule of law. But it’s also just, the whole society is just steeped in anti-Western, anti-colonial resentment. So there are all these ways India is a very, very messed up place.

HH: Interesting.

PT: So you know, I think, I’d rather count on Japan, Australia, even Western Europe, you know, all these other places. We should, you know, UK, France, these are the places we probably need to count on much more in having this anti-China coalition.

HH: You know, Peter Thiel, Ukraine…

PT: Virtually, yeah, you’re right that you know, it’s in India’s interest to be anti-China. They’re sort of natural rivals. But we’d better count on other countries.

HH: The invasion by Russia of Ukraine mobilized a portion of Europe to the reality of the competition that exists for domination in Europe, and perhaps a little bit with China and Iran, because Iran is arming Russia to kill Ukrainians and threaten Eastern Europe. Do you think Europe is awake, yet, Peter Thiel? You are originally a German, and people may not know that. And you’re also a New Zealander. And you’re also an American. And I just wonder about the Germans, whether they have reverted to their historic, and this is history talking, not Hugh Hewitt, they tried to play both sides for as long as we’ve been writing history in Germany since the Frederick the Great or whoever put it together. They haven’t really been a Western country. Do you have confidence in them?

PT: I’m not a German citizen any longer, and there are certainly all these ways it is a deeply messed up country. It is, I think you had the Nord Stream pipeline with Germany and Russia, where it was all this sort of unhealthy, you know, I don’t think interdependent is the right word, this codependence with China. We used appeasement in the 1930s, and the 1970s was détente. And I think this, we need a new word for the unhealthy relationship with China. And it’s something like it’s a codependent relationship. And just like the codependent relationship that Russia had with Germany where this pipeline was this sort of unhealthy codependency, we have 100 pipelines between the U.S. and China, or between Western Europe and China where things are sort of entangled in this codependent way. So I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s very messed up in that way. In the 1930s, Germany was the country that was the subject of appeasement, and now it has become the appeaser-in-chief. So yeah, there’s some very, very strange dimensions about the history. But it is, it’s, in some ways, you can think of Germany, it’s all sort of dominated by these weird corporate interests. If you look at it on a partisan level, you know, you think of a company like Volkswagen, you know, the social Democrats are, it’s sort of a company that’s deeply coopted by China, because you know, half their cars are now made in China and they have to somehow appease the Chinese government. And you know, the social Democrats are the workers at Volkswagen, and the Christian Democrats are the management, and the free Democrats are the shareholders.

HH: That’s smart.

PT: And probably, the Green Party in Germany is the most anti-Communist Chinese, and that’s telling you something about how messed up the politics there are, because your best ally [are the Greens].

HH: Well, let’s focus on how messed up our politics are. America was, until a generation ago, still living on the fumes of having been a frontier and farming country that was also powered by manual labor, and was very resilient. So when we went off to war in World War I and World War II, we were sending people who had grown up under tough circumstances – the Great Depression or industrialization. Is America too soft generally to survive in this cutthroat international environment, Peter Thiel?

PT: You know, I don’t think we’re too soft, but I think it is, look, I think it’s a strange global problem. You know, it’s, we have to find ways to work with all these other countries. There are, yeah, but there are all these ways. I think we’re kind of soft. I think there are ways in which we’re kind of old. We’re not as willing to fight. So I think there are a lot of things that are messed up, but I wouldn’t say we’re way too soft.

HH: Now Peter, I myself pitched you on investing in Spanish language media, because I’m concerned about the American politics being driven by an ill-informed mass electorate that is increasingly disconnected from reality. And I’m wondering, you are obviously concerned about American politics. You’ve backed candidates. You went to the RNC in 2016. You’re concerned. What do we do about American media? It is, it’s fraught with dishonesty and simple incompetence, and uncurious people who don’t even read. What do we do about it?

PT: Well look, I don’t have answers to all these problems. And certainly, look, if you just look at the state of the mainstream media or things like this, you would be completely pessimistic, and you’d say it’s just completely hopeless. And the thing that’s countervailing or at least moderating that is that it’s been in such decline, and it just doesn’t dominate the discourse in the way that it did 20-25 years ago. So yes, it’s very messed up. If it was up to the mainstream media, the country would be completely lost, but fortunately, fortunately, it’s still very powerful. Fortunately, it’s not quite as omnipotent as we sometimes make it out to be. They skew things in a partisan way in this country. On the other hand, you know, they hated Mr. Trump in a completely deranged way, and it was not enough to stop him from winning. So that a manifestation of just how weak the media is that they couldn’t stop Trump in 2016. And look, there’s a way in which the derangement, it always backfires. People know that the media is biased, and they discount it appropriately. They know that they’re deranged.

HH: Before I turn to American politics, I know what the leftist response will be to that exchange. They’ll say “Did you not see the Super Bowl shot that had Rupert Murdoch sitting next to Elon Musk in a box at the Super Bowl – Fox network and Twitter are owned by center-right, perceived center-right people, or conservative people,” and I’m nuts for saying media [is left-wing]. But in fact, journalists themselves, I mean, like 95% of them, are not merely liberal anymore, they’re deranged. That’s a word I think you’ve probably used more than any other word if we put this into the machine. You would use “deranged.” I think they’re deranged about Republicans. They certainly are deranged about Donald Trump. Does that change anytime soon, because the people who go into the business are not, are just not that willing to be persuaded of facts that are contrary to their worldview.

PT: I don’t think it changes. I think if you look at things like, I don’t know, the New York Times or CNN, they were biased in a liberal way already in the 1980s, and they are, they’re a completely one-party state organs at this point. So they’re much worse than they were 30 years ago by any way you try to measure these things objectively. But they’re also somewhat weaker, and they can’t quite control the discourse, because everybody understands that they’re biased. And so they’re constantly, they’re constantly undermining themselves, you know?

HH: Yeah.

PT: It is just, it’s like teenage girls into cutting or something like this. It is just pathologically self-destructive, and so there is something about them that’s, it’s deranged, but it’s also, we shouldn’t exaggerate how powerful they are.

HH: Now CNN is trying to change. Chris Licht is actually trying to change.

PT: They’re not as powerful as the Chinese Communist AI, you know? And even that, we shouldn’t exaggerate. We shouldn’t exaggerate that, and we shouldn’t overstate CNN.

HH: Well, if Chris Licht, the new leader of CNN, called up Peter Thiel and said “What do I do to regain your credibility, to get you to watch again?” What would you tell him?

PT: Well, look, it’s, there’s straightforward things you can do. There’s some way in which you just, it’s you just cover both sides. You let both sides talk. You know, the bias in media is not in how topics are presented. It’s in what topics you even select. It’s how certain things we don’t cover, it’s certain things, you know, you probably, if you cover, if you talk about the question of whether the CCP is a problem for the U.S., just raising the question is almost an answer. And then we end up just not talking about certain types of questions. And so that’s, I think yeah, I think CNN and all these places would correct it if we just had a debate, if we just corrected it, just having the debate, our side will win, you know?

HH: Well, you’re very right. There are some topics…

PT: I don’t think they’re going to do that.

HH: I myself, I’m going to offer myself up as an example of self-censorship. I do not talk about gender fluidity on the radio, because there are children in the car on the way to school, and I don’t want to present the parents with a question that they don’t want their third grader to ask them as they’re getting out of the car as they’re being dropped off at elementary school. So I self-censor the topics that I cover, and something as controversial as gender fluidity has gotten J.K. Rowling basically on a pit barbeque spin in the left wing circles. So self-censorship is almost a necessary ingredient of survival with an audience, because people will turn you off if you make them uncomfortable. So I don’t know how, and this is more of a comment than a question, I don’t know how the media deals with some of these given that people will turn them off if they start talking about it. And I think they might turn the channel if the CCP comes up, because they don’t want to worry about it.

PT: Yes, but look, I think there are, let me just push back a little bit on this, Hugh. I think there are all these debates about diversity, identity politics that are kind of crazy, but I wonder whether they are also distractions from, again, Communist China. Let’s just posit that every single one of these debates is a distraction from Communist China. And so we can have, there’s, I don’t know, there are race problems in this country, and there is a debate we need to have about racism, and there’s something we need to do about the history and overcome that. But if we only talk about that and talk about nothing else, that’s somehow doing the CCP’s bidding. And then I worry that this is, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 80s, and I was involved in all these campus wars, culture wars, I started a conservative student newspaper, the Stanford Review, I wrote an anti-political correctness book in the mid-90s, The Diversity Myth. And I think there was a way in which the conservatives were right about all the issues, and yet I worry that it was somehow the wrong thing to focus on and that we were missing the elephant in the room. I would say at this point is something like the Chinese Communist goal to take over the world or something like that. And so if we’re talking about identity politics, it’s an endless, look, it’s an endless maze. The word” identity” means [both] that which makes you identical, that which makes you the same, and that which makes you unique, that what makes you different. So identity means both “same” and “different.” And so when you start with a word that means “A” and “not A,” you can go in any crazy direction you want. And so it’s an endless maze of derangement.

HH: If I were king of the world, “not queen, not duke, not earl,” all I would do is talk about the Chinese Communist Party. I spent half of the show this morning that I’m talking to you with [Senator] Deb Fischer on our strategic competition weaponry. We’re falling behind their ICBM production, their submarine production. I talked to [Representative] Gallagher about the balloons. I would talk about it all the time, because I agree with you profoundly. But most Americans, and this is not a left-right issue, they don’t want to talk about it or think about it, whereas China controls what their people talk about and think about all the time. So turning, because I don’t want to abuse your time, to domestic politics. You played in the Republican politics generally for the last 10 years. Is the party producing candidates that are serious about the Chinese Communist Party? Jim Banks in Indiana is serious about the Chinese Communist Party. Mike Gallagher is serious about the ChiComs. Generally, is the Republican Party serious about it?

PT: It’s, look, it’s more serious than it was 10-20 years ago, but I don’t know, it’s a very, very slow-moving, I don’t know, supertanker or something. It’s just very slow to shift. And so yeah, we’re getting more serious. I worry that it’s just a very, very slow process. And there are all these ways we can criticize President Trump for being not the best vehicle, but then the alternatives were sort of, I don’t know, there’s a lot that was wrong with Paul Ryan. He was never that critical of China, or if you think of Mitch McConnell as sort of the passive-aggressive nihilism that is Mitch McConnell, that you know, it’s not good on China. So again, if you sort of evaluate some of the alternatives on the China question, they were always quite bad. There are things that are good about McConnell, like he stops tax hikes. And that’s…

HH: Oh, he got the Supreme Court. He saved the Constitution, Peter. You took Con Law at Stanford.

PT: And he’s good…

HH: He saved the Constitution by getting, by holding open the vacancy of Scalia. He got Trump elected by doing so. I always defend Mitch to Donald Trump when [the former president] is on the program, because, you know, [he] wouldn’t have won if [McConnell] had let the Scalia vacancy be filled by Merrick Garland, and we could kiss our 1st Amendment goodbye if the left got control of the Court the way that they wanted to get control of the Court.

PT: Sure, but I would argue that the Supreme Court is still the least important branch of our government.

HH: You’re right.

PT: And you know, it is, and then we need to be doing some legislation and some executive action in dealing with China, and that’s where McConnell’s been quite weak. And that’s where, you know, Paul Ryan was quite weak. And that’s where there still isn’t really an alternative. You know, if you ask what, if you look at, I don’t know, if you look at the 2022 Midterm elections where it was very disappointing how pathetically the Republicans did, and there’s a lot of blame to go around. But I think my critique is we did not run on anything. We did not have a strong agenda. And basically, if the best argument you had was that you’re stopping Biden judicial appointments, that’s not enough to win.

HH: You’re right.

PT: That’s just a weak thing to run on, you know?

HH: Particularly since we own the Court now for 10 years. It’s a conservative majority. That won’t work anymore. Peter, I want to close…

PT: We don’t, and Hugh, we don’t own the Court. It’s just, we have a majority on the Court that is going to block activist liberalism. It’s not activist conservatism. It’s not going to overturn liberal laws. It’s not going to overturn the New Deal. It’s not going to be activist in a conservative way. So it’s not…

HH: You know, I think you might be wrong there on the 5th Amendment. If they simply revitalized the Takings Clause, it will revolutionize America, if they simply go back to “no private property shall be taken without just compensation.” And there are originalists who understand that, and that will radically change the American economy. But I don’t want to go off on that rabbit hole. I want to go back to China.

PT: But Hugh, the Contracts Clause would be the one I would want, but…

HH: Yes. The Contracts Clause. If they resurrect that, and by the way, the left doesn’t even know that that’s on the table, but it is. Who taught you Con Law, by the way, at Stanford?

PT: You know, it was the usual group of liberal law school professors, but when, law schools were relatively healthy, you always had a certain kind of political debate in law that you don’t have in most other academic fields, because it is, it’s deeply connected to the society. So you know, if you study, I don’t know, political science or English as an undergraduate, it somehow can be very decoupled from actual governance. But something like law school, you always have these debates, at least.

HH: You know, Peter, I’ve been talking to you longer than you stayed at [the law firm] Sullivan Cromwell, basically. And so I’ve been always wondering, I’ve never asked you, you spent seven months or eight months at Sullivan Cromwell. I never went to Big Law, because I managed to hideout in the government. Do you regret going to law school looking back now? Because you’re not lawyering at all. I mean, you just left as soon as you got the degree.

PT: You know, it’s always a mistake, I think, to have regrets about things you did. There were a lot of things I learned in law school. I think it was, you know, it’s very important on a lot of levels. It certainly, I think there are a lot of questions why I did it. I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s always unclear what you are supposed to do as an undergraduate or, you know, what you’re supposed to study. So there’s sort of self-critiques I can have of myself. I never had a mid-life crisis, but I had a quarter-life crisis in my mid-20s and trying to figure out what to do. And I think law school was somehow trying to figure out what to do with my life, and it was both in some ways made sense, and some ways, it didn’t.

HH: All right, I’ve got two last questions for you, Peter. The first one, I’m going to finish with crypto, but I want to talk to you about the most dangerous book that anyone ever read in America, which is The End Of History by Francis Fukuyama. And I read it, and I wanted to believe it, and he’s a Straussian, and I did believe it, and he was 100% wrong. What do you read to stay ahead of the information curve on all of these CCP-ChiCom issues? Where do you get it from? Who do you listen to?

PT: Man, it is, it’s surprising how few good books are written, I would sort of describe the Fukuyama book or things like that, you know, we don’t even have books that are wrong in the way the Fukuyama book’s wrong, where it’s like an interesting big picture view of where the world is going that’s not complete orthodoxy. You know, you have, I don’t know, you have, we have sort of these center-left orthodoxy books. I don’t know, it’s Steven Pinker, Our Better Angels…

HH: Yes.

PT: where things are getting sort of less violent and everyone’s becoming a liberal atheist, and this is sort of the way the society’s gradually becoming better. And it’s somehow completely wrong, but it’s the complete conventional wisdom, and there’s nothing on the other side like this. But I just end up, it’s sort of just a lot of articles on the internet. It’s, you know, it’s links people send to me in email. That’s sort of what I end up reading. I find myself not reading probably enough books, but I don’t actually know what I would read that’s been written in the last 20 years as a book that really does a good job at this.

HH: You know, I don’t know if you’ve read this, yet. Pompeo’s memoir, Never Give An Inch, it may be the best book on China I’ve read in 20 years, and not surprising, because he gets it.

PT: Yeah.

HH: Let me close. I originally started to set up this conversation after the crypto crisis of Sam Bankman-Fried. And I know that his father was a good professor of yours, and he profoundly influenced you. I’ve read all that. I don’t want to talk about Sam Bankman-Fried. I want to talk about the danger of crypto not being what you hoped it would be. And so I also don’t want to move markets. The last time I heard you talk about crypto at the Nixon Library to Pompeo and Ambassador O’Brien, you moved markets. What is the deal for dummies like me about crypto? Is it still a thing? Or is it just too dangerous to unleash on the world?

PT: Well, I don’t think it’s too dangerous. It is, you know, in its original form, and we could probably have a whole hour-long discussion on this. Things like Bitcoin, they were “crypto-libertarian, cypher-punk, crypto-anarchist,” you know, anti-Fed, anti-fiat money kind of technology where, I always describe it as in some sense.  Bitcoin was a sort of technological version of gold, where gold is this anti-fiat money, hard money currency. And that’s what was both powerful and potentially transformative about it. It was.

Then the question is “Does it really work in that way?” And when people in the FBI tell me that they would like all the criminals to use crypto, because that way, they can catch them, you know, and I’m not making a pro-criminal argument. But if crypto is a way that the government can monitor everyone’s payments and transactions, is it really this decentralizing technology as advertised? Or is it actually a version of AI, a version of centralized control of the financial system, of the payment system, of things like this?

So it was sort of a revolutionary decentralizing promise of crypto, and then there are all these ways it hasn’t quite been met. And then you know, I think the strange thing about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX and all of that, is that it was this capitalist-communist fusion product.

You know, the Sam Bankman-Fried narrative was that he was going to make a trillion dollars, so he was an “uber capitalist.” And then it was this effect-driven, altruism-communist thing that was fused to it. And “It’s okay for me to make a trillion dollars, because I’m going to give all the money away to left-wing non-profits.” And the sort of social-cultural question we get asked about our society is not “Why was SBF a fraud?” but “Why did you get away with this fraud? Why was it so desired by the media, by the regulators?” And it’s somehow this capitalist-communist fusion product is what they wanted, and that’s unfortunately what a lot of crypto turned into. It was not…

HH: Peel that back. What do you think was the lure to the media? What was the vision? There’s a utopianism there, and I think you’re right, and I agree with you. But I want to hear you tell me what you think drew them into the image of SBF sitting on a stage with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in cargo shorts and fizzy hair talking about making a trillion dollars so he can give it away. What brought, what do you think attracted them? I always thought it was nuts.

PT: I think, I don’t, again, it’s a lot of different things, but I think some version of it is that if crypto worked on its own, it probably would be non-egalitarian. You know, some people would make a lot more money than others. And I think the inequality was deranging, and then you needed a communist offset. Then somehow, SBF was, –it was again, it was this self-contradictory narrative. It’s like this Hegelian “A” and “Not A,” You know, “I am going to make a trillion dollars, and I’m going to give it all away.” It’s logically self-contradictory, but psychologically, it’s what they wanted to hear. And then the regulators and the media didn’t pay [attentioob it, weren’t very critical of SBF or FTX, and they were critical of, I don’t know, the crypto grows that were just in it to make money or something like that. And then the FTX was used to outflank everybody else, and that was the SBF plan. It was, you know, we’re going to do the fake left-wing stuff, and that’s how we’re going to beat everybody else.

HH: That is brilliant. Have I got five more minutes, Peter?

PT: Sure.

HH:  I want to ask you about the drug problem in America, “addicted America.” As a libertarian who thinks about this, I’m sure you’ve driven past homeless encampments in Los Angeles. You and I have been in the same parts of L.A. Those folks are either mentally deranged or they’re addicted. Do we have to go to a Brave New World sort of “Soma for everybody model?” Or is there any fixing this? Or are you despairing of fixing the addiction problem in America?

PT: It’s, again it’s very hard to know what to do. As a libertarian, you know, I am skeptical of the war on drugs, but as a cultural observer, I do think there’s something about all the forms of drug legalization that’s deeply linked to pessimism and hopelessness of our society. So if we don’t talk about it on the individual level, but just the social level, there was something about Prohibition in the 1920s that was wrong as a policy, but it was optimistic in the sense that the 1920s were the last ridiculously hopeful decade where you didn’t have to work so hard, you can’t have a hangover the next day. And then the 1930s, we have the Depression, and then you legalize alcohol. And I think it’s correct to legalize alcohol, but it’s also what you do when everyone’s out of work and they have nothing better to do. And marijuana legalization, you have to think of it [this way]: It was this slow, slow moving thing and the inflection point was 2008 when you have the crash in ’08 and then everyone’s depressed, and we need legalizing marijuana. Post-’08, it was like legalizing alcohol post-1929. As a policy maker, I am sympathetic to the legalization arguments, but I don’t, I really don’t like what it tells us about our society or our culture. And you know, that’s sort of where we’re stuck.

HH: And that’s where we’re going to stop. Peter Thiel, I appreciate the generosity of your time. That was provocative, and I hope everyone starts to think about the “ChiComs” as other than the CCP. If nothing else, we’re going to get out of this more focus back on Xi and his gang, and whether or not they’re ever going to change. And it’s, we’re not doing a very good job, but you’re helping us do the right one. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.

PT: Awesome. Be well.

End of interview.