Peter Thiel on Facebook, Technology and the Higher Education Bubble
Reason. TV
Peter Thiel: It would be a lot more screwed up when people weren’t allowed to leave.
Tim Cavanaugh: Hi I’m Tim Cavanaugh from Reason TV we’re here with Peter
Tiel American Entrepreneur and investor thank you for joining us.
Peter: Thanks for having me.
Tim: You were an early investor in Facebook and the Facebook movie has just
come out. I’m just wondering if you could speak about the accuracy of the
movie not just in the story it tells but in the sociological assumptions about
how you know the movie are changing us?
Peter: Well a number of factual inaccuracies about the movies is certainly a
portrays people in the must worse light than I know than having worked
with a number of these people for the last 6 years I think its incredibly
dedicated to awesome team of people that this created tremendous value
for themselves their investors and the world at large.
Well I think the movie is the most wrong is sort of imposing a Hollywood
view of reality. Hollywood is a little bit zero there probably so many
celebrities and everybody sort of is always on trying to edge everybody
else out. Perhaps I think valiant technologies fundamentlally about
creating web where everybody can do better and I think that sort of. It tries
to impose a Hollywood or governmental win/lose mentality on the world
that s fundamentally about winning and winning.
That I think the one very positive thing about he movie is that it is going ot
encourage in spite of the worse intentions of the producers and people
involved in creating it. In spite of the worst intentions it will encourage a
lot of people to go into tech industry. I think on that is a very positive
thing?
Tim: Are we not passed this point of you know technology is going to turn us
all into automatons and its digging away our privacy and all that kind of
meaning sort of fever monger?
Peter: Its hard to judge exactly where we are in society thinking about
technology. My hope is that technology is able to accelerate on and its free
political constraints. I do worry that if we have an up or down boat on a
number of technological areas people would actually just vote against it. I
think the political concerns in society is not very friendly towards
scientific or technological progress and its not what people think of as the
indispensable ingredient for creating more a prosperous world in the
decades.
Tim: Paypal is initially is viewed in sort of you know high utopian maybe not
by you but maybe by the world as sort of you know a possibility of
revolutionizing a whole money system all that kind of thing, does the
actual paypal experience indicate that there is no escape from the
government and from the dollar system?
Peter: Its not easy to escape certainly the regulatory issues surrounding the
payment monitor system are formidable. I would say at the same time that
I think we’re heading towards a world where people have somewhat more
control over their money than they did 30 or 40 years ago and one macro
economic way of describing this is that we’re seeing lower and lower rates
of inflation is getting harder for governments to inflate away I believe
even Zimbabwe in the last year is basically dollarized and so and its no
U.S. Dollars are legal tenders of exchanges in Zimbabwe and even though
we have all sorts of concerns about the dollar being sort of a paper form of
money from a point of view people mean Zimbabwe probably is a big
improvement.
Tim: Which is interesting because its you know everybody knows its not
backed up by anything its just that and you know as far as you can see
authority of the is fastened up but its really the consensus of people in
Lebanon and Zimbabwe and all of these other places where the dollar
basically is the official currency.
Peter: And money is a very strange thing and what creates monetary value is a
very strange thing. Without getting into all the arcane questions about
where money comes from and what really means I think as a first cut
decentralizing that and getting people the choice of which currency to use
is probably an important starting point.
Tim: Dude do those things come about accidentally like if California starts
issuing IOUs is there can you say for another 6 weeks that that’s going on
this is actually a competing currency to the dollar?
Peter: It doesn’t seem like as currently constitute California would be very
competitive currency to the –.
Tim: Not a lot of confidence.
Peter: Not all currency is there especially the IOU version of it.
Tim: Yeah. Talk about the C Setting institute a little bit where are we and whats
your rank are you an Admiral of the Ocean Sea or.
Peter: I don’t believe I have an official rank on that score the goal has been to try
to create some kind of space outside of politics. I think this is very, very
important because I think there’s so much about the political sphere that’s
become just poisonous about people collectively hating other people. Let’s
face it in the politics about its collective hatred and we need to basically
figure out a way to escape from it. I’m personally very interested in trying
to identify some technological means to escape and trying to move on to
the internet question that’s real you can try to move it to outer space others
involved in that being too far away technology not quite working and so
the C setting experiment is a bit of an in between option.
And even if a lot of people do not actually want to live on platforms int eh
ocean or floating ships or floating seas I think the option of doing this, the
option of opting out of politics will make it a lot better. However screwed
up California is it will be a lot more screwed up when people weren’t
allowed to leave and so I think the freedom to leave is one of those
fundamental freedoms.
Tim: Not just are we speaking about political systems or the you know I mean
we’ve seen many some of the normal people who don’t really kind of
think about these things don’t really see but your right of access has vastly
expanded like to get out of a bad marriage your right you know move from
state to state and move from country to country although United States is
actually very punitive about people leaving United States these days.
Peter: United States is not the easiest place to leave and of course we don’t want
to ever have to leave it but in general the countries that are impossible to
leave tend to be the ones you most likely leave so probably one of the
hardest countries in the world to leave will be North Korea and there’s
probably one people or most desperate to leave.
Tim: East Germany it was actually perfectly legal to immigrate from East
Germany ones it turned 65 years old is at that point were seen as basically
a net recipient of state of funding until your 65 you’re basically seen as
being owned by the state and the people who fled to east Germany they
were seen as basically stealing the states property – themselves. And one
of the things that people that you’re saying people should be able to leave
is college?
Peter: I think if we wanted a single discussion where there’s a bubble in the US
citizen education where more and more money is being spent on the same
or maybe less and less and so its some sense of defined technologies doing
more with less. The things that are anti technologic are the ones where
you’re doing less with more or a lot less with the same. There’s been more
place in education than any other sector of our economy over the last 30
years and so its probably the furthest from technology. In practice one of
the problem is that people end up amounts to enormous amounts of debt in
college or graduate school and this tremendously constrains their future on
options. They cannot choose to do things but they really want to do the
things that they really transform to society instead they are basically tied
this incredible amount of debt and I don’t think a society we should
encouraging or fostering it. I think it’s a incredibly mimical to
entrepreneurship is probably more critical than ever in this country.
Tim: If the government went out of that game would by not providing grants
and guaranteeing loans and so forth would we be better off would we’ve
see less inflation?
Peter: We will see very less inflation but its in the game on many levels we’re so
far removed from government being outside of it. It’s hard to ignore what
that would like.
Tim: Right now we’re in a period of – with Obama Care and sort of and
administration that’s really married to a big government idea of how to
sell problems yet we’re also seeing a huge backlash against that in the
streets and so where do you think large terms gong into an understanding
of government and the function of the state?
Peter: I think political debates are we’re surprisingly libertarian moment that’s
more so than I would have thought possible 2 years ago at the same time I
personally remain rather pessimistic about how much hope we have to
nearly political means in a long term. It is usually something very hard
about libertarians being able to win elections and it is not the preferred
choice. It is sort of the last option and maybe it is the last option we’ve left
maybe you know everything else has failed but I think politics becomes
libertarian as an absolute last resort.
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