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
situation is somehow very, very different from something like, I don't know, an ape-primate hierarchy, where in an ape context, you have an alpha male, you know, he's the strongest, and there's some sort of natural dominance, and you don't need to have a fight to the death, typically, because you know who's the strongest, and you don't need to push it all the way.
In a human context, it's always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male. So it's somehow the culture is more important, you know, if they can talk to each other and you get language and then they can coordinate and they can gang up on the leader and then you have to stop them from gang up on the leader. And how do you do that? And so...
There's some sort of radical difference between a human and a, let's say, a pre-human world.
Yeah, so I find all of that quite plausible, but I think— Both of us can be correct. So there's some... The true story of hominization, of how we became humans, there's a way to tell it where it's continuous with our animal past and where it's just, you know, there's things like this with the chimpanzees or the baboons or, you know, other primates.
And then there is a part of the story that I think is also more discontinuous. And, you know, my judgment is we probably... You know, in a Darwinian context, we always stress the continuity. You know, I'm always a little bit the contrarian. And so I believe in Darwin's theory. But I think we should also be skeptical of ways it's too dogmatic.
And Darwin's theories make us gloss over the discontinuities. You know, the one type of, and this is going to happen overnight, but one type of fairly dramatic discontinuity is that, you know, is that humans have something like language. And even though, you know, chimpanzees probably, I don't know, they have an IQ of 80 or they're pretty smart.
But when you don't have a rich symbolic system, that leads to sort of a very, very different kind of structure. And there's something about language.
uh language and the kind of coordination that allows and the ways that it forces you to it enables you to coordinate on violence and then it encourages you to channel violence in certain sacred religious directions um uh i think uh creates a you know something radically different about human society we're you know we differ you know we we tell humans tell each other stories
A lot of the stories are not true. They're myths. But I think that's some sort of a very important difference from even our closest primate relatives. But this is, again, this is sort of like another way of getting at what's so crazy about chat GPT and passing the Turing test. Because if we had sat here two years ago and you asked me, you know, what is the distinctive feature of a human being?
What makes someone a human? And, you know, how... in a way that differs from everybody else. It's not perfect, but my go-to answer would have been language. You're a three-year-old. You're an 80-year-old. Just about all humans can speak languages. Just about all non-humans cannot speak languages. It's this binary thing.
And then that's sort of a way of telling us, again, why passing the Turing test was way more important than superintelligence or anything else. Yeah, I could see that.
Well, again, let me do sort of a linguistic riff. I think... Aristotelian Darwinian biology, Aristotle, you always differ things by, put them in categories. And man, I think the line Aristotle has is something, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. And I would say that we are these giant imitating machines.
And of course the Darwinian riff on this is, you know, to imitate is to ape. And so we differ from the ape, we're more ape-like than the apes. we are far better at aping each other than the apes are. And that, you know, a first cut, I would say our brains are giant imitation machines. That's how you learn language as a kid. You imitate your parents. And that's how culture gets transmitted.
But then there are a lot of dimensions of imitation that are also very dangerous because imitations, It's not... Imitation doesn't just happen on this symbolic, linguistic level. It's also you imitate things you want. You want a banana. I want a banana. You want a blue ball. I can have a red ball. I want a blue ball because you have a blue ball. And
And so there's something about imitation that, you know, creates culture, you know, that is incredibly important pedagogically learning. You know, it's how you master something, how you... you know, in all these different ways. And then a lot of it has this incredibly conflictual dimension as well. And then there's, yeah, so I think that was sort of core to the
things that are both great and troubled about humanity. And that was sort of, that was in some ways the problem that needed to be solved.
There is some story like – and again, this is a one-dimensional, one explanation fits all. But the sort of – the explanation I would go with is that it was something like our brains got bigger and so we were more powerful imitation machines. And there were things about that that were –
Yeah, that made us a lot more powerful and a lot – we could learn things and we could remember things and there was cultural transmission that happened. But then it also – we could build better weapons and we became more violent and – It also had a very, very destructive element. And then somehow the imitation had to be channeled in these sort of ritualized, religious kinds of ways.
And that's why I think all these things sort of somehow came up together in parallel.
Well, you can always – man, you can always tell these retrospective just-so stories and how this all worked out. But it would seem – the naive retrospective story would be that there are a lot of ways that humans are, I don't know, less strong than the other apes or – You know, all these ways where we're, in some sense, weaker. Physically, at least. Physically.
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