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
Is this the first step to changing the world? Or is it sort of a hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected to from outer space to inner space. So I don't know, the one liner I had years ago was, you know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. And three weeks later, Woodstock started. And that's when the hippies took over the country.
And, and, you know, and we stopped going to outer space because we started going to inner space. And that's, and so there's sort of a question, you know, how much, you know, it worked as a as an activator or as a deactivator in a way. And there are all these different modalities of interiority. There's psychological therapy. There's meditation. There's yoga. There was a sexual revolution.
Gradually, you have incels living in their parents' basement playing video games. So there's the navel-gazing that is identity politics. There's a range of psychedelic things. And I think all these things, I wonder whether the interiority ended up acting as a substitute. Because, you know, the alternate history in the 1960s is that, you know, the hippies were actually, they were anti-political.
And it was sort of, the drugs happened at the end of the city, at the end of the 60s, and that's when people depoliticized. It was like, I don't know, the Beatles song, if you're carrying around pictures of Chairman Mao, you're not gonna make with anyone anyhow. That's after they did LSD, and it was just, The sort of insane politics no longer matters.
And so you have the civil rights, the Vietnam War, and then were the drugs the thing that motivated it? Or was that the thing where it actually, those things started to de-escalate?
Well, or the part of it that I thought was interesting was the MKUltra.
Where, you know, there was a predecessor version where we thought of, you know, there was a, you could think of it as we had an arms race with the fascists and the communists. And they were very good at brainwashing people. The Goebbels propaganda, North Koreans brainwashing our soldiers in the Korean War, our POWs. And we needed to have an arms race to program and reprogram and deprogram people.
And LSD was sort of the MKUltra shortcut. So I think there was – and then I – yeah, my – it's so hard to reconstruct it. But my suspicion is that the MKUltra thing was a lot bigger. than we realize. And that, you know, it was the LSD movement, both in the Harvard form and the Stanford form. You know, it started as an MKUltra project. Timothy Leary at Harvard, Ken Kesey at Stanford.
I knew Tom Wolfe, the American novelist. I still think his greatest novel was... The electric Kool-Aid acid test, which is sort of this history of the LSD counterculture movement, starts at Stanford, moves to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. But it starts with Ken Kesey as a grad student at Stanford circa 1958.
And you get an extra $75 a day if you go to the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital and they give you some random drug. And, yeah, he got an extra $75 as a grad student in English doing LSD. And Tom Wolfe writes this, you know, iconic fictionalized novel, very realistic, 1968 about this. And Wolfe could not have imagined. that the whole thing started as some CIA mind control project. Right.
The Menlo Park Veterans Hospital that was deep state adjacent. Sure.
Sure, that's even crazier.
The Jolly West guy, yep.
Well, it's the RFK dad assassination in 1960.
Where he, again, maybe you shouldn't believe him, but he claimed that he didn't even know what he was doing. It was some sort of hypnotic trance or whatever. And it was like the assassin in the Manchurian candidate.
Well, it's obviously also convenient.
Man, I probably veer in the direction that there were you know, on the sort of conspiracy theory of history, I veer in the direction that there was a lot of crazy stuff like this that was going on in the U.S. first half of the 20th century, overdrive, 1940s, you know, I mean, you had the Manhattan Project, this giant secret project, 1950s, 1960s, and then...
And then somehow the last 50 years, I think the, I'm not sure disturbing, but the perspective I have is these institutions are less functional. I don't think the CIA is doing anything quite like MKUltra anymore. Why do you think that?
I think you had the church commission hearings in the late 70s and somehow things got exposed and then when things – when bureaucracy is forced to be formalized, it probably becomes a lot less functional. like the 2000s version, I think there was a lot of crazy stuff that we did in black sites, torturing people that the CIA ran in the war on terror. There was waterboarding.
There was all sorts of batshit crazy stuff that happened. But then once John Yoo in the Bush 43 administration writes the torture memos and sort of formalizes this is how many times you can water dunk someone without it being torture, et cetera, et cetera. Once you formalize it, people somehow know that it's on its way out because it doesn't quite work anymore. So by, I don't know, by 2007,
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