Peter Thiel

speaker

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

Well, it is Christ's death is supposed to be the last one. Christ made the sacrifice, so we do not have to make it. And then, yeah, you can say it is a sacrifice of others versus the sacrifice of self. You could say that, but you could say the way Girard would put the stress would be that you refused, it's not there was some virtue in Christ sacrificing himself.

He's not like some, I don't know, some sort of silly hero saying, you know, please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that, you know, giving some sort of dramatic announcement. It said, Christ at Gethsemane, you know, it's still praying, please let this cup be taken away from me. It is, so it is, it's not, you know, this is, you know, a wonderful, necessary thing to do at all.

It's quite the opposite. But you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others that characterizes Christ. Well, definitely that. And we're not willing to resort to violence. You're not willing to use power. You aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion. And so it's a refusal to sacrifice others.

But, and then, yeah, maybe in some contexts, you have to lay down your life, your friends. There are things like that that happen, but I think it's much more, you know, the anti-sacrificial intuition. And you have this already in, you know, a number of the Old Testament prophets. I think it's Hosea, where it's, you know, God desires mercy and not sacrifice. You know, so it's, you know, and...

And then these are sort of, in a way you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws as it's centered on the temple and we have this sort of elaborate set of sacrifices. And then in some sense, Christ replaces it with, love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then pay attention to the moment. And then we could say,

We could say it's, and then he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law. Yeah. But if you do those two things, you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore. Okay, so let's delve into that. You can even eat bacon and pork.

Which was a really, really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law.

And then there's another side... Let me push back on just that description. Is it a sacrificial move or is it a rational move? Because... there's some way in which- I think it's both. It's both. It's rational once you can see the future, right? But it's sort of very, to the extent it's rational, it may not be that sacrificial. You know, you save money in order to buy a house.

Man, this is where I want to push back a little bit. Push away, man. I don't think you tell a two- or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice. No, you probably act it out for them. It's if you don't take turns, something bad happens. You won't have friends. And you won't have friends. Or the other kids tell the kids that. Yeah, there's some very...

pretty fast, immediate consequences to it. And again, you don't say it's rational, but it's sort of, you learn pretty fast to do these things. And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make.

I'm going to give lots of examples, but there's always a question about what should be done about academia. All the conservative academics are being expelled. It's so hard to do this. And there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of

right-of-center people over the last 20 years, where it's, well, we just, you know, we need to just train more people with PhDs, and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system, and have to somehow break in. Yeah, right. And there's sort of a lot of reasons to think that it's hard to do or might not work, but

But the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice. And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made. It's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice confused things.

And then the non-sacrificial move is roughly like what you yourself did with the University of Toronto, wherever you were, where it's, at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia. I'm not sacrificing or I'm not playing by all their silly rules. And I think that was the correct thing to do.

But again, I would describe it as the anti-sacrificial move. The sacrificial move would be, you know, you have a tender position there and you might be unhappy about it, but you know, for the greater good, you have to stay there.

But I would also say that- And I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed. I'm fully on board with that.

I think you made totally the right decision, but I would describe it as, the way I would describe it, and maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing, but I would describe it as you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly, irrational, crazy. In relation to what?

See, that's the issue, because I think that's true, but— In relation to things that, again, maybe can't be fully rationally defined, but in relation to some of the alternatives you could do, in relation to, you know, maybe even something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable, right?

Did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor, or did you find it boring? And it wasn't fun. The boredom wasn't fun. And it's not the only reason to leave. Maybe it's not a sufficient reason, but from my perspective, it's a good partial reason. And there were probably a lot of things like this that added up.

But again, I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you, but I think what you're doing is far better, far more important now.

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