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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel · 24 Apr 2025
podcast
So if you had sacrificed your job and you were completely unemployable, and had no economic prospects, you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself, but if nobody's listening to you, that might be a pretty irrational thing to do, again. And so it was, I think it was a, yeah, it's rational for you to,
focus on reaching a much larger audience for you to do all these things. And I think those were good decisions. You didn't let let's say the moralizing left-wing people in academia get to you, you didn't let their value system control you. Their value system is that, you know, there's nothing more important than academia. This is the world that really matters.
This is where you have to fight the battles. He said, no, you didn't let that morality control you. So I would, yeah, I would describe it as, Christian or maybe Nietzschean, but anti-sacrificial, what you did, in a very good way.
But then the meta layer would be, this is where maybe just the language of sacrifice is often more confusing than helpful.
I want to push back on all of these things. Yes, I will confess to being an unreconstructed Girardian, and there were probably ways Girard modified his views more than I have. And so he probably, towards the end of his life, was more open to sacrifice. And I stick with the Girard of the 70s and 80s, who was more categorically... You know, I think, let me do an alternate cut on one story.
And there's one of these Bible stories. And I always think one needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament. This is sort of, again, a Christian bias I have that it doesn't fully make sense on its own. You need to interpret it in the light of the new.
And so there's a passage in the New Testament, I don't have the verse memorized, but it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child. Mm-hmm. And then there's, it's again, you can think it's like an abstract thing, but maybe it's again, we should always think more concretely.
And the concrete question I would have is, is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as especially noteworthy and worthy of attention? of emulation. And I think there is, in fact, one child whose faith gets described in the Old Testament, and we never seem to talk about it, and it's Isaac.
Because as they're going up the mountain, you know, Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story that maybe God will provide something else and that's what might happen. And then Isaac just believes that. Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice. That's the delusional faith of an adult. who's read too much Kierkegaard or something.
And Isaac's is the true Christian faith that God will figure out a way where the sacrifice doesn't need to happen. God is not a violent God. The violence doesn't come from God. He's a loving God. And there's a way to do this without sacrifice. And I'm always...
Yeah, what I find so odd about the Abraham-Isaac story is that we've written, endless amounts has been written on the faith of Abraham, or Abraham is seen as the iconic person with faith. And it's, again, linked to a certain conception of sacrifice. And yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child. Maybe you can come up with a better example.
I think the concrete one is Isaac.
We get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story. It's all the reviews. When we talk about, you know, whose faith should we emulate? Yeah, the theologians, the philosophers, they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of Abraham.
The way I understand Christ, I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac, which I think is very different and maybe also very different on this question of sacrifice. There always are questions how one interprets sacrifice. the Christian account. I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, both as an event that happened historically, but also as a promise.
And in some sense, following Christ, there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you, but it's a rational trade for saving your soul and for having eternal life. And so if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life, you know, we can call that a sacrifice, but it has a very different character.
But you have to, you know, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in a literal sacrifice, you know, eternal life. That's one sort of thing. If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as a really high value. But that's why I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as
as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial. And maybe, I don't like the word rational, but just you're making a good choice, a wise choice.
Just got started.
Thank you.
Now, so they go up there and they float for like 10 minutes. At least. And then they come down. Let's not minimize this. No, I know.
Showing 261–280 of 1,088 · page 14 of 55
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