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
But maybe it was just this basic tradeoff. More of your energy went into your mind and into your brain. And then, you know, your fist wasn't as strong, but you could build a better axe. And that made you stronger than an ape. And that's where a brain with less energy was spent on growing a hair to keep warm in the winter.
And then you used your brain to build an axe and skin a bear and get some fur for the winter or something like that.
gone was that there was this dimension of increased imitation. There was some kind of cultural linguistic dimension that was incredibly important. It probably was also, you know, it was probably also somehow linked to, you know, dealing with all the violence that came with it, all the conflicts that came with it. You know, I'd be more open to the stoned ape theory if people
I had this conversation with the other guy, Murorescu, the immortality key guy. And I always feel they whitewash it too much. How so? You know, it's like if you had these crazy Dionysian rituals in which people, you know, there's probably lots of crazy sex. There's probably lots of crazy violence that was tied to it. And so maybe you'd be out of your mind to be hunting a woolly mammoth.
And maybe you can't be completely.
No, but you – I don't know. You went to war to fight the neighboring tribe. It's probably more dangerous than hunting.
Okay. I don't question that at all. I just think they probably – part of it was also – was a way to channel violence. It was probably, you know, whenever, I don't know, was there some degree to which whenever you went to war, you were on drugs?
And, you know, maybe it makes you less... less coordinated or something, but just if you're less scared.
If you're just a little bit less scared, that's probably super important.
Mushrooms, psychedelic drug, historical usage theories, I suspect was very widespread. I just think a lot of it was in these contexts that were pretty transgressive.
I definitely think it shouldn't be outlawed, you know, pretty hardcore libertarian on all the drug legalization stuff. And then I do wonder exactly how these things work. Probably the classical world version of it was that it was something that you did in a fairly controlled setting. You didn't do it every day.
And it was some way, I imagine, to get a very different perspective on your nine to five job or whatever you want to call it. But you didn't necessarily want to really decamp to the other world altogether.
Where do you think that line is? Like, you know, should everyone do one ayahuasca trip? Or if you do an ayahuasca trip a year, is that...
I was very bullish on this stuff happening. And the way I thought about it four or five years ago was that it was a hack to doing a double-blind study. Because the FDA always has this concept that you need to do a double-blind study. You give one-third of the people, you give a sugar pill, and two-thirds, you give the real drug. And you have to
And no one knows whether they have the sugar pill or the real drug. And then you see how it works. And science requires a double-blind study. And then my anti-double-blind study theory is if it really works, you don't need a double-blind study. It should just work.
And there's something sociopathic about doing double-blind studies because one-third of the people who have this bad disease are getting a sugar pill. And we shouldn't even be – like maybe it's immoral to do double-blind studies.
Well, my claim is if it's a – if it actually works, you shouldn't need to do a double-blind study at all. But – And then my hope was that MDMA, psychedelics, all these things, they were a hack on the double-blind study because you knew whether you got the real thing or the sugar pill. And so this would be a way to hack through this ridiculous double-blind criterion and just get the study done.
And then what I think Part of it is probably just an anti-drug ideology by the FDA. But the other part that happened on the sort of scientific establishment level is they think you need a double-blind study. Joe, we know you're hacking this double-blind study because people will know whether they got the sugar pill or not.
And that's why we're going to arbitrarily change the goalposts and set them at way, way harder because we know there's no way you can do a double-blind study. And if it's not a double-blind study, it's no good because that's what our ideology of science tells us. And that's sort of what I think was part of what went sort of politically haywire with this stuff.
Just to articulate the alternate version on this, there's always a – there's a part – let me think how to get this – you know there's there's one There's a question whether the shift to interiority, is it a complement or a substitute? Like what I said about talk and action, is it a complement or a substitute to changing the outside world? So we focus on changing ourselves.
Showing 841–860 of 1,088 · page 43 of 55
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