Peter Thiel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I work for the Indonesian government as an advisor. I have two questions for you. The first is, do you think Indonesia is underrated or overrated, and number two, what would you recommend for my government to fight off terrorism? Because you talk a lot about monopoly in your book. Is it possible for my government to monopolize information security, yet at the same time, respect the individual privacy of our citizens? Wow. Again, I’m not totally sure if I have a great answer on that off the top. I think that I don’t know if the right question for many of these countries is what to do on the level of the country itself. Indonesia has 200-plus different islands, it’s extremely heterogeneous as a place. I think that if things were somewhat more decentralized, that probably would be the direction that one would be tempted to go in. I don’t know all about the details of the terrorism issue in Indonesia; my sense is that a lot of these national security debates have involved these fake tradeoffs in many different places. It’s always you do more with more, or less with less. You have more security with more privacy invasions — a more centralized, powerful state. Versus, you have less security with more privacy. It’s almost like the NSA versus the ACLU, and I think this is a very fake dichotomy. The technological solution I would like is where you do more with less, where we have more security with fewer invasions of privacy and we try to find ways to actually do things that are much smarter. That’s what I would define as actual innovation in a space. We can always do more with more, versus less with less, and that’s the boring ideological debate we’re always stuck with. Why do you have an appetite to live longer, and what’s your life’s mission? Have you fulfilled your life’s mission yet?…

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