Potential scale. We overvalue its always worth thinking hard about whether youll be able to build a Great Company or might be bert off joining another company doing something great. Host you spend quite a bit of anytime your book on the u. S. Educational system. Is it assisting, is it promoting this type of entrepreneurship . Guest ive been a big critic of the u. S. Education system. Focused a lot of Higher Education where you have this runaway student debt. Over a trillion dollars of student debt. I think we have a bubble in Higher Education, and i think it is i do not think it is actually helping people do more entrepreneurial or more risktaking things when you graduate from college with 100,000 of debt youll take a safe, reasonably well paying job to pay off your debt and you will be much less likely to do something entrepreneurial or creative or artistic, which may pay less but ultimately create more value. I do think that theres a big problem with the debt. Theres a big problem with the way education generally is would overvalued. The analogy ive given is that the colleges today are in a crisis similar to the crisis the Catholic Church faced at the start of the 16th century. Theyre charging more and more, have this priestly or professorial clats distracting a lot of the rent, just like the indull generals the Catholic Church had in the early 1500s, and were told that the only way to go, you go to yale or go to jail, that the basically if you do not get a diploma, youll be saved. If you do not, you will go to hell or something some secular modern equivalent of that. I think thats very wrong, and we need to find a wider range of Different Things for people to do. I think the post education bubble world will be a world in which theres not a single track, not a single path, but many Different Things that different people will be able to do. Host what didlash how significant was the tech bubble of the late 90s, early 00s . Guest well, it was extremely big. It was extremely distorting. I think as so often happens with these things, people learn a lot of things and often learn the wrong lesson. I think the main lessons people learn in the immediate aftermath was to be less ambitious, to try less big projects to get to profitability immediately, and so the aftermath of the tech bubble was to push us even more towards incrementalism, discourage a lot of people from going into technology at all. Business to consumer, business to business where the buzz words in the 9s so, b to b, b to c in the 20,000s b to b was bank to bank. So the aftermath was that people basically went away from tech and you had this enormous misallocation of resources into trebling and then out of tech. We would have been better off with much less volatility on the upside and the downside. Host back to your stanford class. What that done the in the economics department, Computer Science department . Which department . Guest we did it through the Computer Science department. We thought that it would be this would be the best way to reach a lot of those people who are starting these companies. Theres sort of this point a strong bias towards engineering product, at the core of these new tech companies. It was open to people across the board in the university and got a lot of attention far beyond the campus. Host peter thiel, youre quoted in several different places as saying we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters. What does that mean . Guest well, a tag line on our Venture Capital on the web site, and its basically that we that if you think about the promises of the jetsons or the 50s, 60s, all these fantastic ideas people had about technology and theres seasons that twitter is not enough to take our civilization to the next level. I had this view more generally were living in an era of relative technological sag nation. We have hat a lot of info v8 in the World Innovation in the world a bit, computers, internet, much less innovation in the world of at toms, whether its energy, food production, underwater cities, flying cars, super sonic aircraft, the kind of things people would have talk about the 50s and 60s and reflected in a way the word Technology Today doesnt mean rockets or flying cars. It means just information technology. Theres been narrowing of focus. We have had this narrow cone of innovation around this world a bit. But i think really improve the quality of our society we need innovation and all these other dimensions as well, and the hope is well have some widening of this aperture in the decade ahead and once again start innovating in many different areas. Host what is palantir . Guest palantir is a company that i cofounded back in 2004. It is a Data Analytics company, which enables people both in government, large corporations, to analyze a lot of the data, find National Security threats or criminal activity, fraud, helps with cyber security, large corporate context and it basically comes out of this idea we had at paypal that a lot of the problemles in the world are not going to be solved by humans alone or by computers alone and what you really have to do is it figure out ways to get the division of labor to be right between the two of them. And so palantir is a way for human investigators or human lists to work much more effectively with computers to analyze large amounts of data. This is a very underexplored paradigm because the dominant idea that we have in the computer world is that computers are substitutes for people. That computers will replace people in one way or another. The palantir paradigm is much more that computers and humans are compliments. Theyre different, theyre good at very different kinds of things, and the key thing to building a lot of Great Innovation is not figure out how do we get computer to replace bet how do we get computers and people to Work Together more effectively. A general template that can be used in different cop texts . Host have you worked with the federal government on these issues such as cyber security. Guest we worked with a number of the threeletter agencies in d. C. We worked with various law enforcement, various defense organizations in d. C. Its always a very long procurement soil to break into the procurement cycle to break in but palantir has had some traction and impressive results. Host why do you donate to republicans and youre a libertarian . Guest its always hard to fully, whichize ones views plateclysm would say im socially more liberal, fiscally more conservative, which is sort of generally if you have a litmus test of political issues i have come down a libertarian on a lot of things. Im always a little skeptical about how much our political system will fix things. I think its very important and very broken in this country, and so i spend most of my time working on technology, which is a place i think people can really move the dial and make the difference itch find politics incredibly interesting in their and i fine it in practice to be endlessly frustrating which is not a very unconventional view. Host does washington understand Silicon Valley . Does it need to . Does it get in the way . Guest well, i certainly think theres too much regulation of certain areas of technology. I think one of the reasons we have had this tale of two tracks of innovation, with computers, which were relatively unregulate, and slow in other areas. Costs you 100,000 to start a new software company, costs you a billion dollars to get a drug through the fda on average. That tells me well have fewer Biotech Company and more software companies. D. C. Is extremely important for what happens in sill don valley. I think the two cultures are quite different, and that they dont understand each other well. Washington, dc is dominated by lawyers and process, and a certain framework, people with that background bring to ideas. Silicon valley is more dominated by engineering, substance, and you have very different kind of mindset of how to approach things. I would say one general bias people in washington, dc have is that technology is not that important, not something people are experts in. I once looked at the people in congress, 535 senators, congressmen. At a joanous count, maybe 35 of them have a background in science or technology or engineering and the rest of them are really clueless. Wouldnt understand that wind moneys do not work when the wind is not blowing or solar panels dont work at night. Theyre uncomfortable about science and technology, and so in general its something people that want to stay away from here. Host in your book youre critical of the educational testing system. How did you grade your students at stanford. Guest we did have a single test at the end of the course, as well as a presentation people had to give on a company they would try to build. I dont think you can avoid testing. I dont think you can avoid grading. If youre going to have an educational system. I think its become the problem when everyone has to do the same thing, everyone has to is evaluated in exactly the same way, because the end product is not that everyone should be going to the same schools or studying the same subject. So i do think the individual class would agreed people, dont know if we need to be grading people as much in our society and put quite as much weight on s. A. T. Tests, anitude tested used to track people and be homogenous career jazz do you do. Host do you see yourself teaching another class . Guest ive done this every few years so i will do so again at some point in the future. One thing that is always fantastic about teaching is that it does force you to pull together an enormous amount of material and organize it in a way, and you end up you hope the students learn a lot. Certainly a teacher you learn a tremendous amount, and so even though im a critic of the universities, im not at all a critic of learning. I think learning is good. Even if a lot of what is put under this education rubric is more problematic. But im a big fan of people learning in college and life. Host the book is called zero to one. Peter thiel is the author. Thank you. A familiar face to cspan and booktv viewer, ralph nader. Another back out this year, unstoppable. Whats the theme. Guest the theme that is represented in the subtitle, the emerging leftright alliance to dismantle the corporate state. That means theres a lot of areas of agreement between left and right that are never publicized because the powers that be like to divide and rule where the leftright disagree. So i have 24 areas of agreement. For example, theres growing agreement on minimum wage. Comes in at 80 to restore all over the country. Civil liberties. They want to amend the patriot act, and huge invasion of privacy and dragnet snooping by the nsa. Military budget waste and corruption. Want the pentagon to be accountable. Theres no audit of the pentagons budget. We have prison reform. We have reevaluating the war on drugs. But the big one is, leftright alliance against crony capitalism, against washington and wall street like this. Subsidies, handouts, giveaways, wall street bailouts. A huge leftright alliance. The left calls it corporate welfare. The right calls it crony capitalism. A huge diversion of public budgets from the use they should be put to rebuild americas public works, for example. Host who is somebody on the right that you work with . Guest work with grover nordqvist. He doesnt like corporate welfare. He calls it crony capitalism. We work with right groups, even ron paul, very, very critical of the patriot act, which is coming up for renewal next year. Theyd be able to search your home and not tell you for 72 hours. The government can get your Library Records and if the librarian tells you they got a security letter from the fbi the library could be criminally prosecuted. This is not america. Host the book is called unstoppable. Whats next on the agenda as far as books go . Guest well, we have a book on my unanswered letters to president george w. Bush and president barack obama. I want to revive the practice of letterwriting with government officials as a form of communication. It used to be muchmer fertile. As always we appreciate your time. Robert hawse talks about the life and career of leo strauss, considered by some to be the start of the neoconservatism. Im now happy to intro use to our guest speaker. Roberthouse has been a visiting professor at, among other institutions, harvard law school, tel aviv university, the Hebrew University of jerusalem and the university of paris. His books include, the regulation of international trade, the wto system, law, politics and legitimacy, and al outline of a phenomenal of rights. Professor howse has been a frequent consultant or adviseer to agencies including the Interamerican Development bank. Professor howzee is a member of the board of advised years of the nyu center of law and philosophy and serves an the Editorial Advisory Board of the london review of International Law, the journal of World Investment and trade, transnational legal theory, and legal issues of economic integration. He is cofounder of the new york City Working Group on International Economic law, and is a former ihouse resident. Please join me in welcoming him to international house. [applause] thanks very much. Its a pleasure to be here at the university of chicago to talk about my book, leo strauss, man of peace. This is obviously the university where strauss taught in his mature years and where he gave many of his most famous lectures and wrote many of his most famous books. So, a week ago man named tom cotton was elected to the United States senate in arkansas. And cotton is an unreconstructed neocon, and turns out that 19 or 20 years of age he was quoting leo strauss in the Student Newspaper at harvard, the crimson, and so a week later im their try to convince you today that in fact despite attracting latter day accolades like tom cot don, eow strauss was in fact a man of peace, not of war; that he believed that International Law and legality more generally should restrain political violence; that he was critical of imperial amibition and skeptical of any check which would impose on another society a different ideological, political or religious system. So, first of all to give you a sense of what i am doing in the book, i think i should give you an answer as to why i have been able to discover this about strauss, despite the reputation he has, which you can find very easily just by googling, and youll come up with hundreds of references to the neocon liberal leo strauss or leo strauss the inspiration of the neocons or their intellectual inspiration for the iraq war. Why are all those people wrong to characterize strauss in that manner and how am i able to show that thats the misreading of him. Well, i focus on several different features of my own intellectual journey to understanding leo strauss. One advantage that i had, which is a very, very rare one, in north america, much more so in europe or israel, is that i fit encountered strauss law before i met a straussan or ever heard of obviousannism. And it was just a matter of luck. I was doing an independent Research Project on moses when i was in high school, and i came across some of strauss writing on medieval jewish philosophy, and i was quite immediately gripped by it, the sense of tension, intellectual drama, the contest of reason and revelation. But in a sense i heard strauss voice unfiltered by either the straussans or the enemies of the straussans, and i think that over all the subsequent years, something about it stuck with me even is a came to struggle with me experiences in studying with straussians and the kind of orthodox view of strauss and indeed the orthodox view of everything that they tend to want to impose on their students. So thats the first thing. Coming to strauss in a different way from the way that most people do, by studying with a straussian professor, first, second, Third Generation at college. Secondly, and this is a feature of the book thats been widely noted and emphasized, for example, in the wonderful review by yale political theorist, steven smith, i read extensively strauss lectures and seminars. Listened to the recordings, read as many of the transcripts as i could get my hands on, and that was a remarkable entry into strauss voice as a teacher. And there are ways in which it differs from his voice as a writer, and im going to talk a bit about that because, of course, transcripts of classes are a very different kind of source for interpreting a thinker than extremely carefullycraft or artificed books. But cavefully crafted or art fisted books. Lectures and seminars confirmed the interpretations of strauss i was developing, particularly, for example, that strauss did not have a power political interpretation but actually an interpretation that gives a very subtle understanding of the relationship between power and right in international relations, and, for example, strauss in his reading deals with International Law, much more and much more favorably than any other interpretation i know of. Most interpretations place a lot of emphasis on the dialogue where theres the famous power political statement that the strong take what they can and the weak bear what they must. Strauss, however, emphasizes and this comes through even more in his wonderful seminar than in the very short extremely compact or compacted essay on the city of man on the importance of treaties, the importance of treaty law in greece and indeed the importance of treaties to any civilization and, therefore, the importance of trust that the countries or powers that sign treaties will actually obey them. You can see how far that is from the neocon attitude toward International Law. So, the experience with the lectures and seminars was very important and let me give you a few examples of in of those things that strauss says. As i say, give a very different sense of his voice than the sense you would probably get from either his disciples or his enemies. For example, he says in one class on the political write in general, a man who is concerned with power as power is someone whom no one can respect and who cannot respect himself. Again to go back to the seminar, he says that vindictive justice cannot be part of foreign policy, and he says the genuine wisdom always issues in gentleness. So, thats the importance of the lectures and seminars to my evolving understanding of strauss. Third, i have come to a particular view of how strauss actually wrote as well. This is a matter of great controversy because one of strauss most important contributions to scholarship was exploring the idea that thinker inside the past who were subject to the threat of persecution wrote in a hidden or veiled manner in order to avoid oppression by the religious or political authorities. And some people, some of them very friendly to strauss and others very hostile to him, have suggested that strauss himself wrote in that way, and strauss published books are indeed quite difficult, and some of them do have elements of obscurity. So, its not surprising that there would be some interpreters who would read into strauss historical thesis a recommend of how philosophers or thinkers ought to write today, and indeed a clue as to his own manner of writing. Now, in the book, i maintain this is simply not true; that as strauss put it, very famously, he believed that the surface of things is the heart of things, and when strauss said that this manner of writing would intrips cli and its clear from strauss lectures and seminars he did not believe that he was under the threat of persecution in the United States. He referred to the ute in one lecture as a silly little freedom. He said in United States there was virtually complete freedom of expression, and so an essential condition for coming to the conclusion that a thinker is writing between the lines or in a secretive way, according to strauss persecution, and we know very clearly from what he taught and his statements and these classes that he did not regard himself as subject to any persecution and, therefore, based upon strauss own principles, it is simply an error to come to the conclusion that he himself was writingeses sew terribly or between the lights. I if you talk his book, thoughts on machiavelli, a famous but most difficult book, its very clear, after reading five or ten payments of it, its certainly not a conventional work of interpreting an author in the history of ideas. There are some scholars who have written off the book because it seemed removed from the canyon canons of ideas. Historically informed of the thought of the past, nor on the other hand works where he straightforwardly presents his own normative positions on different political and philosophical questions. And so what i believe he is doing, and i explain this in my book, is that hes doing a new kind of philosophizing. He is trying to set up or construct intertemporal dialogues. Dialogues between thinkers of different periods where, for example, aristotle gets the opportunity to reply to or answer macvelaly mark veillys view of the virtue of political life or plato gets to respond to the importance that niche has to suffering cruelty in relation to human greatness. So you have to appreciate that he is in fact doing this new kind of is in philosophizing where we are the judges. We who construct and participate in these dialogues between thinkers of different periods and see how they disagree. And try to undst
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.