Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…Isn’t the much greater risk a collapse into a disorderly feudalism? We’re in Florida. The United States seems to be becoming more federalistic. It’s very hard for me to imagine China, say, taking over India. You can look at the Balkans. It’s even a word: Balkanized. You look at the Middle East. If it goes very badly, it’s hard to see any single power just ruling any substantial part of the Middle East. It’s easy to imagine it being in chaos. Why think there’s so much scale that that kind of totalitarianism would be possible? Man, I don’t know. There are so many different versions of this. There were versions of this — I would’ve been more on your side, let’s say post-9/11. Wow, aren’t we just going to have all this chaotic terrorism all over the world? We didn’t get that much terrorism, and we instead got the Patriot Act and incredible tracking of money flows, incredible monitoring of people. Of course, there still are things that can go wrong, but the political slogan of the Antichrist — 1 Thessalonians 5:3, I think — is “peace and safety. ” It seems that we’ve gone far more in the peace-and-safety direction than the global-chaos direction. I think it’s hard to even have an illegal Swiss bank account, and that’s a really modest way. It’s hard to exit. It’s much harder to exit the United States than it was 20, 30 years ago. Let’s say you’re trying to track the probability that the Western world and its allies somehow muddle through, and just keep on muddling through. What variable or variables do you look at to try to track or estimate that? What do you watch?…

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