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
Well, if we had defined technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, the year we were born, And we had a discussion about technology, what technology would have meant. It would have meant computers. It would have also meant rockets. It would have meant supersonic airplanes. It would have meant new medicines.
It would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, maybe underwater cities, you know. It sort of had – because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing. And so there was progress on all these fronts. Today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology.
Technology has been reduced to meaning computers. And that tells you that – the structure of progress has been weird. There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers, and then all the other areas have been relatively stagnant. We're not moving any faster. The Concorde got decommissioned in 2003 or whenever.
And then with all the low-tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly, to get through all of them from one city to the next. The highways have gone backwards because there are more traffic jams. We haven't figured out ways around those. So we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. And then, yeah, and that's sort of the –
And then, of course, there's also a sense in which the screens and the devices have this effect of distracting us from this. So when you're riding a 100-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can look at, wow, this is this cool new gadget. But you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed in 100 years. And...
And so there's a question how important is this world of bits versus the world of atoms. You know, I would say as human beings, we're physically embodied in a material world. And so I would always say this world of atoms is pretty important. And when that's pretty stagnant, you know, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. I was an undergraduate at Stanford late 80s.
And at the time, in retrospect, every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into. You know, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these engineering fields where you're tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck. They were regulated. You couldn't come up with new things to do.
Nuclear engineering, aero-astroengineering, people already knew those were really bad ones to go into. They were outlawed. You weren't going to make any progress in nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that. Electrical engineering, which was the one that's sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay.
And then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot was computer science. And again, you know, it's been very powerful, but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s. In the 1980s, computer science was this ridiculous inferior subject. You know, I always the linguistic cut is always when people use the word science, I'm in favor of science. I'm not in favor of science in quotes.
And when it's always a tell that it's not real science. And so when we call it climate science or political science or social science, you know, you're just sort of making it up. and you have an inferiority complex to real science or something like physics or chemistry. And computer science was in the same category as social science or political science.
It was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and sort of dropped out of the real science and real engineering fields.
It's – well, it's – there's several different things one could say. It's possible climate change is happening. It's possible we don't have great accounts of why that's going on. So I'm not questioning any of those things. But how scientific it is, I don't think – I don't think it's a place where we have really vigorous debates. Maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions.
Temperatures are going up. Maybe it's methane. Maybe it's people are eating too much steak. It's the cows flatulating. And you have to measure how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus carbon dioxide. I don't think they're... I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff scientifically.
I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than anything that's truly science should be. Dogma doesn't mean it's wrong.
Yeah, but no one calls it nuclear science. They call it nuclear engineering. Interesting.
The only thing is, I'm just making a narrow linguistic point.
Well, at this point, people say computer science has worked, but in the 1980s, All I'm saying is it was in the same category as, let's say, social science, political science. It was a tell that the people doing it kind of deep down knew they weren't doing real science.
Yeah. Look, it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways. Right. You know, there's an environmental project, which is, you know, and maybe it shouldn't be scientific. You know, the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet and we don't have time to do science.
If we have to do rigorous science and you can prove that we're overheating, it'll be too late. And so if you're a hardcore environmentalist, you don't want to have as high a standard of science. Yeah, my intuition is certainly when you go away from that, you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological. Maybe it doesn't even work, even if the planet's getting warmer.
Maybe climate science is not – my question is, maybe methane is a worse – is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide? We're not even capable of measuring that.
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