#2190 - Peter Thiel

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience. Shredding by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Good to see you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:13)
Glad to be on the show.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
My pleasure.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:15)
Thanks for having me.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:15)
My pleasure. What's cracking? How are you doing?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Doing all right.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
We were just talking about how you're still trapped in LA.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
I'm still trapped in LA.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
I know. Are you friends with a lot of people out here? Have you thought about jettisoning?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
I talk about it all the time, but it's always talk is often a substitute for action. Does it lead to action or does it end up substituting for action?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:40)
That's a good point.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
But I have endless conversations about leaving. I moved from San Francisco to LA back in 2018 That felt about as big a move away as possible.
The extreme thing I keep saying, and I have to keep my talk as a substitute for action, the extreme thing I keep saying is I can't decide whether to leave the state or the country.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:01)
Oh boy. If you went out of the country, where would you go?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:06)
Man, it's tough to find places because there are a lot of problems in the US, and most places are doing so much worse.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:14)
Yeah. It's not a good move to leave here. It's as fucked up as this place is.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:19)
But I keep thinking I shouldn't move twice, so I should either, I can't decide whether I should move to Florida or should move to New Zealand or Costa Rica or something like that.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:31)
Yeah. Go full John McAfee.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:34)
But can't decide between those two, so I end up stuck in California.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:37)
Well, Australia is okay, but they're even worse when it comes to rule of law and what they decide to make you do, and the way they're cracking down on people now for online speech and it's very sketchy in other countries.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
It's, but somehow the relative outperformance of the US and the absolute stagnation decline of the US, they're actually related things because the way the conversations grooved every time I say, tell someone, I'm thinking about leaving the country, they'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse. And then that somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country. And then we can't talk about what's, what's, what's gone wrong in the US because, you know, everything is, everything's so much worse, you know.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:25)
Well, I think most people know what's gone wrong, but they don't know if they're on the side of the government that's currently in power, they don't know how to criticize it. They don't know exactly what to say, what should be done.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:37)
Right.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:37)
And they're ideologically connected to this group being correct.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:41)
Right.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:41)
So, they try to do mental gymnastics to try to support some of the things that are going on. I think that's a part of the problem. I don't think it's necessarily that we don't know what the problems are. We know what the problems are, but we don't have clear solutions as to how to fix them, nor do we understand the real mechanisms of how they got there in the first place.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:00)
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot that are pretty obvious to articulate and they're much easier to describe than solve, like we have a crazy budget deficit.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:11)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:11)
And presumably, you have to do one of three things. You have to raise taxes a lot, you have to cut spending a lot, or you're just going to keep borrowing money.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:22)
Isn't there like some enormous amount of our taxes that just go to the deficit?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:30)
It's not that high, but it's gone up a lot.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:34)
What is it? I thought it was like 34% or something crazy.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:37)
It peaked at 3.1% of GDP, which is maybe 15, 20% of the budget. It peaked at 3.1% of GDP in 1991, and then it went all the way down to something like 1.5% in the mid 2010s, and now it's crept back up to 3.1, 3.2%. And so we are at all time highs as a percentage of GDP. And the way to understand the basic math is the debt went up a crazy amount, but the interest rates went down. And from 2008 to 2021, for 13 years, we basically had zero interest rates, with one brief blip under Powell. But it was basically zero rates, and then you could borrow away more money, and it wouldn't show up in servicing the debt, because you just paid 0% interest on the T-bills.