Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…How would you evaluate the government of the United States as an investor in innovation and technology? Perhaps you would consider referring to rockets to the moon, the transcontinental railroad, drug development, and solar energy. Or any other innovations you care to stress. These are all obviously quite different. There’s a libertarian perspective which I have, which is that it’s extremely bad, but that’s present tense. I think the nonlibertarian perspective that I think we always should think about a little bit harder is that there’s also also been a tremendous decline. I think in the 1930s and 1940s you had a degree of technocratic competence that was quite significant. Today, a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room. The Manhattan Project would be unthinkable. Apollo would be unthinkable. I think the first signal one that really went wrong was Nixon’s war on cancer. I always do think the 1970s were this decade where many of our institutions, especially our governmental institutions, started to work much less well. That was perhaps the signal one where things went badly wrong. In terms of investing in science and technology, it seems to me that the minimum criterion for doing it is to have some understanding of these things and some ability to evaluate them properly. In a government in which two-thirds of the representatives are lawyers and in which . . . Again, just using the House and Senate as a proxy for our government, by generous count, no more than 35 have degrees in engineering or science or anything like that, or any technical field, very generously defined, both the House and Senate. Perhaps these are not the right people to be driving these investments. I think we, again, should have much more of a focus on substance, much less on process. I always use the Solyndra bankruptcy as an example in this question of what went wrong. There’s a Republican process critique. The process was screwed up. There were kickbacks. Somehow, there was this corruption. They could never quite prove it, but that was the intuition. The Democratic defense was, “We had a process. We had a portfolio, a financial process where we gave money to lots of different things.” You let 100 flowers bloom or something like that. A mathematical objection to it was that a cylinder has 2πr the surface area of a flat panel, which would be 2r and therefore is, by definition, 1 over π as efficient as a flat panel. You could just use ninth-grade, high school geometry to show that this was a demonstrably inferior technology. It was never going to be commercially viable. You have a Nobel laureate, Steve Chu, running the Energy Department who is not allowed to use ninth-grade high school geometry in evaluating what to do. That sort of a society, that sort of a government is one that should not be allowed to make any investments in these areas whatsoever. In the libertarian utopia that you will build, what will you use for money? Will it look more like Bitcoin or more like PayPal?…

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