Peter Thiel

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1,088 appearances 12 recordings 11 series first heard Jul 2024 last heard 15 Jun

Peter Thiel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

But then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons, and that specifically has a very different character. It has a really different character. And probably, I don't know, by the 1950s and 1960s, You know, baby boomers get, you know, you're a kid, you get brought up on Dr. Seuss and not on adventure stories. And it probably changes childhood education.

It changes the way we form and develop human beings. And it leads to a society where, you know, science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence. There's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much science and technology

you know, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West, and were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a compliment? Where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation, and this is sort of a way that it's, You know, it's a fulfillment. Furtherance. A furtherance of this.

Or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God? Radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project. Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life.

And so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence. And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, this is where I think someone like Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist.

And it is, we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress. And then I've had this Bacon discussion with a number of people lately. And they all think, no, no, that can't be right. Bacon was just the somewhat heterodox Christian.

And because in late modernity, where we find ourselves, and again, it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally, but in late modernity, it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point. And so if you think about Hollywood.

Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity. He is like a fossil from before 1789. He's the last of the Enlightenment. He's a fossil from before 1789. And Greta is more representative, or, you know, everything about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary.

And so to the extent, the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's, yeah, it's God's fault, but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place. And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth.

And so in the 17th and 18th century, the Christian God was blamed for slowing down the scientific technological project. In the 20th and 21st century, the Christian God gets blamed for starting it speeding up, keeping it going. And so the invariant is the Christian God always gets blamed, but the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something very interesting about how this is transformed.

The only point I'll make is that we're, again, we're in a very different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th, 18th century. 17th, 18th century, I don't think people would have said, yeah, we're gonna make all this progress and then there's gonna be a lot of pushback and it'll get regulated.

I know the thought was we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will, you know, it'll smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better. And it's going to have this sort of unraveling, accelerating effect.

And then in the 20th, 21st century, we make the opposite argument as there are some things in this project that have gone somewhat haywire.

Well, again, let's start with the early... the early modern history. And I'm always a sort of hardcore Girardian, this great thinker, intellectual, sort of in some ways Christian polymath that I studied under Stanford in the late 80s, 90s, and influenced me tremendously. And

You know, these things are, again, very complicated intellectual history questions, but certainly one intuition that's odd about your telling would be that you would say that we had sort of a law-centered, monotheistic tradition also in Islam, also in Judaism.

And if we say there was something about Christianity where this really came, and it was not in the Islamic world that you got the scientific revolution, for example, It's just that maybe it wasn't just the metaphysics, not just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology.

Girard was fond of always saying that when people focus too much in the Bible on what it tells us about God, there must also be something it tells us about man.

And certainly the Girardian intuition is that one of the things is always that there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating, that in some ways, some sense of Judaism and then Christianity, it's the same story. It's the same story of, you know, sacrifice, but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community. It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim.

And there's a certain way where it sets in process this gradual, this dynamic revelation that has, that leads to the sort of gradual unraveling. And there are, And as you stop believing in scapegoats, you're forced to come up with other explanations, and that includes science. So, for example, you can ask, why did the witchcraft trials come to an end?

And the atheist scientific explanation is, we got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible. And I don't think that's even been proven in 2025 because we don't know everything. Maybe it's a lost art that's been lost. Maybe you can go to a bookstore in Berkeley.

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