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 then maybe you have to – I think you have to have some theory of why is this about to change. And then it's always – I don't know. The abstract mathematical formulation would be something doesn't happen for time interval 0 to t. And time interval T plus one, next minute, next year, how likely is it? And maybe there's a chance something will happen. You're waiting at the airport.
Your luggage hasn't shown up. It's more and more likely it shows up in the next minute. But after an hour. At some point, the luggage is lost. And if you're still waiting at the airport a year later, that's a dumb idea. At some point, the luggage is lost. And like, you know, I don't know, 77 years, it's like maybe it's like 77 minutes at the airport.
At 77 minutes, you should start, you know, I'd start getting very demotivated waiting for my luggage.
Although you could say that's what chat GPT is. It could be. It's like an alien intelligence. I think that's what ultimately they are. But I think – Let me – man, there's so many parts of it that I find – puzzling or disturbing.
Let me go down one other rabbit hole along this with you, which is, you know, I always wonder, and again, this is a little bit too simplistic an argument, but I always wonder, that I'm about to give, but what the alien civilization can be like. And if you have faster than light travel, if you have warp drive, which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances.
You know, what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you see them coming. And there is no defense against a warp speed weapon. And you could sort of take over the whole universe before anybody could see you coming.
By the way, this is sort of a weird plot hole in Star Wars, Star Trek, where they can travel in hyperspace, but then you're flying in the canyon on the Death Star.
Yeah, it's like... And then you're doing this theatrical Klingons versus Captain Kirk at 10 miles per hour or 20 miles per hour or whatever.
It's an absurd plot hole.
It tells us that I think that if you have faster than light travel, there's something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level. And there may be other solutions, but I'll give you my two. One of them is that you need complete totalitarian controls. And it is like it is the individuals, they might not be perfect, they might be demons, doesn't matter.
But you have a demonic totalitarian control of your society where it's like you have like parapsychological mind meld with everybody and no one can act independently of anybody else. No one can ever launch a warp drive weapon. And everybody who has that ability isn't like a mind meld link with everybody else or something like that. You can't have libertarian individualistic free agency.
And then I think the other version socially and culturally is they have to be like perfectly altruistic, non-self-interest, they have to be angels. And so the Pazulka literal thing I'd come to is the aliens, it's not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me.
But it is a very big leap on a, you know, if we say that something like evolution says that there's no such thing as a purely altruistic being. Right. If you were purely altruistic, if you only cared about other people, you don't survive.
Because then beings that are not perfectly altruistic are somewhat dangerous. And then the danger level gets correlated to the level of technology. And if you have faster than light travel, it is infinitely dangerous.
I know that you're trying to be reassuring, but I find that monologue super non-reassuring.
There's so many steps in it, and every single step has to work, just the way you described.
almost otherworldly in its non-selfishness and its non-humanness.
Yeah, but I don't think it's fundamentally about scarcity. Scarcity is what exists in nature. It's fundamentally about cultural, positional goods within society. It's a scarcity that's created culturally. Are you familiar with this 90s spoof movie on Star Trek called Galaxy Quest?
So this was sort of a silly PayPal digression story from 1999. The business model idea we had in 1999 was we used Palm Pilots to beam money. It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999. But we had this sort of infrared port. You could beam people money. And we had this idea in –
around December 99 as a media promotional thing to hire James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek. And he was going to do this media promo event for us. And it was like an 80-something older Scotty character who was – horrifically overweight. And so it's like this terrible spokesperson. Um, and, uh, but our, our tagline was, you know, he used to beam people.
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