Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”

Uncommon Knowledge

Hoover Institution

Politics, History, News:politics, Science, News

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Recorded on September 5, 2019. Peter Robinson opens the show by asking Thiel’s views on his own essay “The Straussian Moment.” Thiel responds by saying that people today believe in the power of the will but no longer trust the power of the intellect, the mind, and rationality. The question of human nature has been abandoned. We no longer trust people’s ability to think through issues. Thiel notes that this shift began to take place in 1969, when the United States put a man on the moon; three weeks later Woodstock took place, moving the culture in the direction of yoga and psychological retreat. Thiel further adds that there was still hope that things would open up for the world in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, but that the leaders of China and other East Asian countries did not accept that openness would solve their problems. Instead they learned the opposite lessons from those events: that if you open things up too much, then things fall apart. Thiel ends the interview by noting that there is nothing automatic or deterministic about how history happens, and he expresses his views that economic growth plays a vital role in a country’s future.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Born in Germany, Peter Teal moved to the United States with his family when he was a child.
0:15.0	He graduated from Stanford and then from Stanford Law School and after deciding not to practice law,
0:21.0	he co-founded PayPal and Palantier, made the first outside
0:25.6	investment in Facebook, funded companies such as SpaceX and LinkedIn, and
0:29.8	started the Teal Fellowship which encourages young people to drop out of college to start their
0:36.1	own businesses.
0:37.8	Mr Teal remains a very active tech investor now based in Los Angeles.
0:42.2	Peter, welcome.
0:43.0	Thanks for having the show.
0:46.3	We'll come to tech and politics and all the matters
0:49.7	of current affairs in which you're involved in a moment. First, the substrate of your thinking. In
0:58.6	an essay you wrote in the early 2000s you talk about an impasse and you write about the Enlightenment tradition which
1:06.6	we in the United States have inherited as a kind of treaty or settlement after decades
1:11.9	of religious warfare in Europe. or settlement after decades of of
1:14.0	in Europe.
1:15.0	Quoting you, the Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat
1:21.0	if the only way to stop people from killing one another about religious questions
1:24.6	involved a world where nobody thought about it too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing
1:29.9	such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned."
1:37.0	Close quote.
1:41.0	You're famous as a contrarian. There could be almost nothing more contrarian than saying that the
1:46.0	Enlightenment represented a retreat. Explain yourself.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Hoover Institution, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Hoover Institution and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.