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
And my cop-out answer is always why questions are overdetermined because, you know, it can be – there are multiple reasons. So it could be why it could be we became a more feminized, risk-averse society. It could be that the education system worked poorly. It could be that we were just out of ideas. The easy ideas have been found. The hard ideas, the cupboard, nature's cupboard was bare.
The low-hanging fruit had been picked. So it can be overdetermined. But I think one dimension that's not to be underrated for the science and tech stagnation was that – an awful lot of science and technology had this dystopian or apocalyptic dimension. And probably what happened at Los Alamos in 1945 and then with the thermonuclear weapons in the early 50s
It took a while for it to really seep in, but it had this sort of delayed effect where maybe a stagnant world in which the physicists don't get to do anything and they have to putter around with DEI, but you don't build weapons that blow up the world anymore. you know, is that a feature or a bug? And so the stagnation was sort of like this response.
And so it sucks that we've lived in this world for 50 years where a lot of stuff has been inert. But if we had a world that was still accelerating on all these dimensions with supersonics and hypersonic planes and hypersonic weapons and, you know, modular nuclear reactors, maybe we wouldn't be sitting here and the whole world would have already blown up. And so we're in that...
We're in the stagnant path of the multiverse because it had this partially protective thing even though in all these other ways I feel it's deeply deranged our society.
Oh, Von Daniken. Yes. Yeah. You thought he was too crazy. You like Hancock but you don't like Von Daniken.
In some ways, the one in which we have the best history is the fall of the Roman Empire, which was obviously the culmination of the classical world. And it's somehow extremely unraveled. So I think my view on it is probably somewhere between yours and the— Von Daniken? No, not Von Daniken. I'm more on the— Let me try to define why this – agree on why this is so important today.
It's not just of antiquarian interest. The reason it matters today is because the alternative – if you say – Civilization has seen great rises and falls. It's gone through these great cycles. Maybe the Bronze Age civilizations were very advanced, but someone came up with iron weapons. So there was just one dimension where they progressed, but then everything else they could destroy.
And so – or the fall of the Roman Empire was, again, this pretty cataclysmic thing where there were diseases and then there were political things that unraveled. But somehow it was a massive regression for four, five, 600 years into the Dark Ages. And – And the sort of naive, the progressive views, things always just got monotonically better.
And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history where even the Roman Empire didn't decline. And even, you know, one sort of stupid way to quantify this stuff is with pure demographics. And so it's the question, how many people lived in the past? And...
And the rises and falls of civilization story is there were more people who lived in the Roman Empire because it was more advanced. It could support a larger population. And then the population declined. The city of Rome maybe had a million people at its peak. And then by, I don't know, 650 AD, maybe it's down to 10,000 people or less. You have this complete collapse in population.
And then the sort of alternate... purely progressive view is the population has always just been monotonically increasing because it's a measure of how, in some sense, things in aggregate have always been getting better. So I am definitely on your side that population had great rises and falls. Civilizations had great rises and falls. And so that part of it, I agree with you.
or even some variant of what Hancock or Fundana can say. The The place where I would say I think things are different is I don't think, I don't think, and therefore it seems possible something could happen to our civilization. That's always the upshot of it. If it had been monotonically always progressing, then there's nothing we should worry about. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
And then certainly, certainly the thing, the sort of alternate Hancock, von Däniken, Joe Rogan, history of the world, tells us is that we shouldn't take our civilization for granted. There's things that can go really haywire. I agree with that.
The one place where I differ is I think, I do think our civilization today is on some dimensions way more advanced than any of these past civilizations were. I don't think any of them had nuclear weapons. I don't think any of them had, you know, spaceships or anything like that. And so the failure mode is likely to be somewhat different from these past ones.
I'm not sure I would anchor on the technological part, but I think the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is what motivated them culturally.
Why did they do it?
I haven't studied it carefully enough. I'll trust you that it's very hard. I think the – I would say the real mystery is why were they motivated? Because you can't live in a pyramid. It's just – it was just the afterlife of the pharaoh.
It's a crazy theory. I'm always too fast to debunk all these things. But just coming back to our earlier conversation, it must have been a crazy power plant to have a containment structure much bigger than a nuclear reactor.
But if it takes so much power to put all these rocks on the pyramid, you have to always look at how efficient the power plant is. So it has to be like the craziest reaction ever to justify such a big containment structure because even nuclear power plants don't work economically.
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