Peter Thiel x Emmanuel Todd - Japan Talk - AUDIO FIXED + ENGLISH CAPTIONS

I'm hesitant to say anything on the Iran issue since I feel it's very much in progress and given some ways I agree with Professor Todd, my intuitions are against intervention. I don't think the US should have gotten involved in this big war in Ukraine. I'm somewhat skeptical of that by the 24-hour news cycle of these sort of foreign policy. So, in that sense, I directionally agree with Professor Todd. Now, it's hard to know how the history of the 2020s of the 21st century will be written. Maybe these spectacular short-term successes in Iran, Venezuela, even the success in holding pattern in the Ukraine where I think I suspect if we looked at Professor Todd's record on this, he would not have predicted Ukraine would have held up for four years. And maybe it's about to collapse. Maybe not. But you know, in some ways maybe these spectacular successes are part of a catastrophic failure, this catastrophic sort of Spengler-like decline of the West. The place where I would disagree though is, you know, there are a lot of problems with the United States, a lot of challenges. We have to ask, you know, on a relative basis. And on a relative basis, I am not convinced that the US is in decline relative to the rest of the world. It is demographically, people in the US are not having enough children, but we are beating China. China will disappear before the US disappears at the rate things are going. We have too much debt. We have not enough growth in the US economy. But there is still some sense where, you know, the technological future is being built in the US with computers, internet, AI, all these technologies. Maybe it's not enough. Maybe these things are dangerous. But there's sort of a sense in which the US is beating not just let's say Russia and Iran, but countries like France and France is not even on AI. It's not even trying to do something like the Minitel in the 1990s. And so if we do these sort of comparisons on a relative basis, it seems to me that the US is winning against the whole world.

I think maybe Nicholas actually introduced us. He's in the country economist season run through of the audience here. But I am, I don't know. I'm always looking to find some people with interesting heterodox ideas in our world and it's a surprisingly short list and somehow I had already heard of Mr. Todd years before and it was like you need to read some of his books and lineages of modernity and some of these books that he's written over the years that just offer I think very unusual perspective, a holistic perspective on what's going on in the world. I had to say what's positive like, what I really respect about Professor Todd is in late modernity where we find ourselves. You're always told that you are a small cog in a big machine and you're destined to become an ever smaller cog in ever bigger machine. This is where the world is going. And that what you're supposed to do in business or in a university or in government is you're supposed to become an ever narrower specialist and you have spent 20 years studying string theory and nobody can understand what you're doing and it's all these super narrow specialists and specializations. This division of labor is Adam Smith has this description of the pin factory where you have 100 different people working in a pin factory and they're all specialized making a different part of a pin. It's a bullet's pin. And yeah, late modernity is this pin factory on steroids. There's something efficient about specialization. At some point you lose sight, you know, forest for the trees or you're studying the leaves. You lose sight of the trees much less the forest. And there is some need to integrate, to do something holistic and what I greatly admire and think is so important about the work of Professor Todd is it is interdisciplinary in a good way. Combines, you know, anthropology, questions about the family and questions about sociology and history and the economy and religion. It combines all these different things to try to make sense of the big picture. We're in a world where almost nobody is thinking about the big picture and that's why I think it's a great honor to be here with you today. So, yes, all the way around.

My day job is that I've started companies and I invest in companies. Entrepreneur, investor, technology. And then what I always think Silicon Valley does not do enough is to think about what does technology, what does science, what does all mean? Where does it all go in? You know, how does this work in the great history of our time. And I would just, you know, I could probably spend an hour talking about this. I'll try to summarize some of my thoughts on this in a few minutes. You know, for probably for close to 20 years, probably the main theme that I've talked about in science and technology is this question of how fast are science and technology still progressing? Are we, is it growing ever faster and faster every year? Or is it more like an S-curve where great progress happened in the 19th early 20th century, and it has sort of slowed down? And one of the intuitions that I've been articulating for almost 20 years now is that we are in an era of scientific and technological slowdown or even stagnation. Where there's still some progress, it's not zero progress, but it has somehow slowed down. And the areas where there's still a lot that's happening are somehow the exceptions. So, it's things like computer science and software, internet, you know, maybe AI the last few years. But so many other areas have not been good areas to go into. And when I studied at Stanford University in the late 1980s, in retrospect, almost every engineering area you could have gone into would have been a bad nuclear engineering, aeroastro engineering. People already knew these were bad fields in 1980s. My father was a chemical engineer. That would have been a bad field to go into. Mechanical engineering. Maybe electrical engineering still barely worked in the 1980s. But perhaps the only field that was really, you know, with the really high returns was computer science, which is sort of this is actually sort of a fake thing. And you know, the line I always have is I'm in favor of science, but I don't like things that are called science. And you need to think computer science. It's like it's in the same category as political science, social science, climate science. It's people have an inferiority complex. They call it science. It's the people who flunked out of math. And they couldn't do physics or electrical engineering, and they went into this fake field called computer science. So I came out of this general thing where there was sort of a lot of stagnation or slowdown that had happened in many decades. Maybe you could translate that, and then I'll do the second half after.

Now, the question I, and again, I've been spending a lot of time talking about if I'm right in my stagnation thesis, we talk about how to measure it and all these complexities. But let's assume that I'm right. And then the formal question I always get asked is, 'Well, why? Why did things slow down?' And my, the standard way I avoid answering questions that start with the word why is to say that anything that starts with why is overdetermined. There are many different explanations for why. And it could be that it just became harder to discover new things. The low-hanging fruit was picked. So, you're not going to find any new elements in the periodic table. At some point, the field is complete. So, you'll make less progress in chemistry once all the elements have been discovered. And maybe new laws in physics are too hard to discover. So, you build a collider the size of the solar system, size of the galaxy, something like that. Or so there's sort of a natural explanation. It's just about hard. And then there are sociological explanations where maybe something went wrong with the universities or with our society too regulated or there's sort of a range of these cultural explanations that one can get. But the factor that I've come to believe was an extremely important and underrated reason for the slowdown is that there was something very dangerous about science technology. It had sort of a dual use potential. As you built more powerful machines, you also built more powerful weapons. And this sort of dual use problem that I've been building for many centuries, it was, you know, it was already probably Alfred Nobel who might have invented dynamite and paid the Nobel Prize already had some worries what his invention would be used for. And then I think, you know, in some ways World War I machine gun fires on the Western Front, you know, it was sort of a, well, this is not what people, not the utopian view people had of science and technology in the 19th century. And then certainly there was something about Los Alamos and, you know, what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where science took a far more apocalyptic turn. And there is sort of this sense that was, and it didn't happen immediately 1945. In some ways it took several decades to really seep into the society. But with some sense that perhaps science and technology were a trap that humanity was building for itself. And that we had something was an apocalyptic dimension to the modern world. The nuclear weapons, or it could be environmental destruction, climate change, or the other forms of environmental destruction. It could be, you know, the biological research also could lead to dangerous bioweapons. And then of course, there's a discussion about artificial intelligence where maybe there's some potential in this technology that's also very scary. So, my big explanation for the slowdown is that, you know, science and technology became very dangerous and very scary. These are existential risks or apocalyptic risks became more and more obvious to. So, when you translate that, that's sort of a somewhat complex argument that I've been trying to make in this essay, which was again a review of a series of books grappled with this strange predicament of late modernity science itself. Is, you know, it's the, if we're going to talk about existential, these different kinds of risks, I'm not trying to minimize any of, I'm not trying to say these risks are fake, made up. You know, when I've often been very critical of Greta Thunberg, the, you know, the Swedish environmental raising person. And but she's on some level, of course, she's right. We only have one planet. We can't, you know, just get another spare planet easily. But what I always want to stress is that if we're going to talk about all these risks, we should also include one other risk that I think of as a very dangerous, very serious one. And it's what I call the risk of a totalitarian one-world state, which is, you know, somehow a tyrannical single government that controls the entire world. That turns the entire planet into a prison from which there is no escape. Far worse than North Korea, because you can still get out of North Korea. It's North Korea over the whole planet. That's something that I consider to be, you know, a political existential risk or an apocalyptic political risk. And that's one that I think we need to consider very seriously as well. And, you know, there's certainly a certain Christian biblical language where you say it's the Antichrist. It's this mysterious figure in the Bible. It's this, at the end of history, it's this dictator tyrant who rules the entire world. And one of the things that's very mysterious about the biblical question is how does the Antichrist come to power? How does the Antichrist convince the entire world to surrender and let this one world government take over. And I believe we have an answer to that question in late modernity. The Antichrist comes to power by talking about Armageddon non-stop. About talking about existential risk non-stop. And that's sort of how we will, you know, so and in our time, not in early modernity, not in the time of Francis Bacon or 17th and 18th century, maybe you'd use science and technology to take it. But in our time, where people are scared of science and technology, what the one world state with the Antichrist would promise to do is to control science and technology. It's a unified world to stop it, to control. To sort of, many different examples I can give on this, but I'll pick on one in the, I'm going to talk about different versions of this in the discussion, but I'll pick on an AI example as one of the sort of effective altruist people, Eliezer Yudkowsky, maybe you've heard of him, maybe you have not. But it's sort of all the, he wrote this book that was published last fall, fall 2025, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. If anyone builds advanced AI, everybody on the planet will die. And it goes through all these different risks with this technology, it's potentially dangerous. So these technical arguments, they may be right, they may be wrong, 30% right that everyone will be killed by AI, that's pretty scary. And the thing that's where this book, all things like this in my account are weak, is what do you do? You are supposed to surrender to the one world state because if anyone builds it, it gets built. If you outlaw it in the US, it will be built in China. If you outlaw it in China and the US, it can be built in South Africa. So you have to outlaw it, you have to outlaw AI everywhere in the world. And you need, you know, need this incredibly powerful, in my judgment, incredibly dangerous, tyrannical one world state to prevent it. And that's I want to always throw that in as another existential risk. And maybe last point I'll make. It is not, no, I am not a crazy person who's arguing that we should just, you know, I don't know, push the nuclear button and see what happens. Something like that. When I was 20 years old, it was at Stanford, I had dinner one evening with Edward Teller. He was an 80-year-old physicist, the father of the H-bomb. 1987, '88. And he was like, and he was a crazy man. And he was, you know, he was, I knew the literary stuff, that Dr. Strangelove had been based on Teller. Then, you know, art imitates life and after a while life imitates art. So Teller had become more like Dr. Strangelove after he watched the movie 25 years later. So it was, you know, sort of Teller told us, you know, he was not scared of nuclear weapons and it was not enough to contain communism, we needed to roll communism back. And if you put him in charge, he was from Hungary, he would send the tanks into Hungary right away, he's not scared of nuclear weapons. This was 2 years before, you know, the Eastern Bloc fell without firing a shot. So he was like an insane, crazy person. I am not pro Dr. Teller, I'm not pro Dr. Strangelove, none of these things. But the perspective I want to give is that that's not the danger in our society. Edward Teller, Dr. Strangelove, even in 1988, he was talking to me because nobody was listening to him. It, you know, it didn't matter. He was not the threat. The threat is much more someone like Greta or her fellow travelers.