Built The Diversity Myth.

Transcript context

…Thank you. Peter, my question is about diversity, equity, inclusion. DEI has become very prevalent in corporate America. I wanted to get your thoughts on whether you’re seeing this in some of the early-stage companies also, like the companies that Founders Fund is investing in. What are your thoughts? Do you think this is something positive? Are you neutral, or you think this has gone a little over the top? Would love to know your views on that. I’m very against it. I don’t always know if it’s the most important issue either. I wrote a book after my undergraduate years entitled The Diversity Myth. It was focusing on a lot of the craziness, the campus wars, culture wars that were taking place at Stanford in the late ’80s, early ’90s. There are parts of it that seemed very prescient and described a lot of things that eventually spread to the broader culture. Another level of it is like a completely ineffective book where the arguments didn’t matter. What drove these things somehow was on a very different level. If we think about the woke corporation in Silicon Valley, it seems unhealthy if a company is leaning too much into the DEI narratives. There probably are Machiavellian ways where this can also work, where it just distracts people. Walmart was the proto-woke company in the 2000s. They were constantly being attacked by the labor unions because they weren’t paying their workers enough. They could pay their workers more or they could rebrand themselves as a green, environmentally friendly company. That turned out to be a very cheap way to split up the left-wing anti-Walmart coalition. That was a version of it as this capitalist conspiracy against it. There are cases where that can work and cases where it can go wrong. For the most part, I think that it’s just a distraction from more important things. There’s one level on which I find the issues very silly. There’s another level where it’s evil because it’s stopping us from paying attention to more important things. It’s things like the economy, science and tech, or even these broader religious questions that we’ve talked about today. People always talk about it in terms of cultural Marxism. I think a real Marxist would be much preferable to a diversity person. Rosa Luxemburg, who’s this crazed communist from the early 20th century — I think one of the things she said was that there can be nobody more revolutionary than a factory worker, that nobody can be more revolutionary than a proletarian. A diversity officer in a university or corporation — what would Rosa Luxemburg think of this? It would be in the same category as a bank robber or a prostitute, as someone who’s just an extremely corrupt form of crony capitalism. Thank you so much. There’s a fair amount of variation in regulation on biotech. There’s Prospera. You funded some seasteading places. What’s your sense for why there aren’t crazy, cool, ambitious bio-hacking things going on? Where are the gene-edited babies? The only one that we know about happened in China, and that guy went to jail. Why isn’t there more crazy stuff happening in different jurisdictions?…

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