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
I appreciate you left. I always have the fantasy that if enough people like you leave, it'll put pressure on them. But it's never quite enough.
March, April, May 2020?
Okay. I got a place in Miami in September 2020, and I've spent the last four winters there, so I'm sort of always on the cusp of moving to Florida. Hard to get out of California. But the thing that's gotten a lot harder about moving relative to four years ago, and I'd say I think my real estate purchases have generally not been great over the years. I mean, they've done okay, but...
Certainly not the way I've been able to make money at all. But with the one exception was Miami. Bought it in September 2020. And probably, you know, fast forward four years, it's up like 100%. Wow. Something like that. And, yeah. But then paradoxically, this also means it's gotten much harder to move there or Austin or any of these places.
If I relocated my office in L.A., the people who own houses – Okay, you have to buy a place in Florida. It costs twice as much as it did four years ago. And then the interest rates have also doubled. And so you get a 30-year mortgage. You could have locked that in for 3% in 2020. Now it's, you know... Maybe 6.5%, 7%. So the prices have doubled. The mortgages have doubled.
So it costs you four times as much to buy a house. And so there was a moment where people could move during COVID, and it's gotten dramatically harder relative to what it was four years ago.
Well, I somehow think Austin was linked to California and Miami was linked a little bit more to to New York. And it was a little bit, you know, all these differences. But Austin was kind of. A big part of the move were people from tech from California that moved to Austin. There's a part of the Miami, South Florida thing, which was people from finance in New York City that moved to Florida.
And the finance industry is less networked on New York City. So I think it is possible for people – if you run a private equity fund or if you work at a bank, it's possible for some of those functions to easily be moved to a different state. The tech industry is – crazily networked on California. There's probably some way to do it. It's not that easy.
Sure. If it wasn't as networked, you could probably just move. And maybe these things are networked till they're not. Detroit was very networked.
The car industry was super networked on Detroit for decades and decades, and Michigan got more and more mismanaged, and people thought the network sort of protected them because the big three car companies were in Detroit, but then you had all the supply chains were also in Detroit.
And then eventually, it was just so ridiculous, people moved, started moving the factories outside of that area, and it sort of unraveled. So that's, you know, it can also happen with California. It'll just take a lot.
Well, it's, look, I think you can, there's always all these paradoxical histories. You know, the internet... The point of the internet, in some sense, was to eliminate the tyranny of place. And that was sort of the idea. And then one of the paradoxes about the history of the internet was that the internet companies were all centered in California. There have been different waves of...
of how networked, how non-networked they were, I think probably 2021, sort of the COVID moving away from California, the big thing in tech was crypto. And crypto had this conceit of an alternate currency, decentralized, away from the central banks. But also the crypto companies, the crypto protocols, you could do those from anywhere. You could do them outside the US. You could do them from Miami.
And so crypto was something where the tech could naturally move out of California. And today, probably the core tech narrative is completely flipped to AI. And then there's something about AI that's very centralized.
I had this one-liner years ago where it was, if we say that crypto is libertarian, can we also say that AI is communist or something like this where the natural structure for an AI company looks like it's a big company and then somehow the AI stuff feels like it's going to be dominated by the big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah.
And so if that's the future of tech, the scale, the natural scale of the industry tells you that it's going to be extremely hard to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Man, I think I should start by being modest in answering that question and saying that nobody has a clue.
You know, I would say, let me do sort of a history. The riff I always had on this was that I can't stand any of the buzzwords. And I felt AI, you know, there's all this big data thing. There were all these crazy buzzwords people had, and they always were ways to sort of abstract things and get away from reality somehow and were not good ways of talking about things.
And I thought AI was this incredible abstraction because it can mean the next generation of computers. It can mean the last generation of computers. It can mean anything in between. And if you think about the AI industry, discussion in the 2010s, pre-OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the revolution of the last two years.
But the 2010s AI discussion, maybe it was, I'll start with the history before I get to the future, but the history of it was it was maybe anchored on two visions of what AI meant. And one was Nick Bostrom, Oxford prof, who wrote this book, Superintelligence, 2014. And it was basically AI was going to be this super-duper
Showing 701–720 of 1,088 · page 36 of 55
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