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
Now he's beaming something much more important. He's beaming money. And, um, and it was this complete flop of media event, December 99 that, uh, we, we did. Um, it was, um, the reporters couldn't get there because the traffic was too bad in San Francisco. So, you know, the tech wasn't working on a much lower tech level, but, uh,
But anyway, we had a bunch of people from our company and there was one point where one of them – William Shatner played James T. Kirk, the captain of the original Star Trek. He was already doing Priceline commercials and making a lot of money off of Priceline doing commercials for them. And so one of the people asked James Doohan –
the Scotty character, what do you think of William Shatner doing commercials for Priceline? At which point, Doohan's agent stood up and screamed at the top of his voice, that is the forbidden question, that is a forbidden question, that is a forbidden question. And you sort of realized, because the conceit of Star Trek, the 60s show, was that it was a post-scarcity world.
The transporter technology, you could reconfigure matter into anything you wanted. There was no scarcity. There was no need for money. The people who wanted money were weirdly mentally screwed up people. You only need money in a world of scarcity. You know, it's a post-scarcity, it's sort of a communist world. But Galaxy Quest was more correct.
It's a spoof on Star Trek that gets made in the mid-90s. And the Galaxy Quest, sorry, this is a discombobulated way I'm telling the story, but Galaxy Quest is this movie where
You have these retread Star Trek actors and Mr. Spock opens a furniture store or something like this and they're all like – but they all hate, hate, hate the person who played the captain because the captain was a method actor where he just lorded it over everyone. Because even in the communist post-scarcity world, only one person got to be captain.
And so there's a great scarcity even in this futuristic sci-fi world. And that's what we witnessed in 99 because that's the way William Shatner treated the other actors. He was a method actor and they hated him. And that was – and so even in the Star Trek world, the humans, you know, obviously they were just – they were stuck in the 1960s mentally. So that's what you'll say.
I don't think it's that straightforward for us to evolve.
I think artificial life – But then I hear that as we're going to be extinct.
I don't like that.
Man, I let me you know, I keep. I keep thinking there are two alternate histories that are alternate stories of the future that are more plausible than one you just told. And so one of them is it sounds like yours, but it's just the Silicon Valley propaganda story where they say that's what they're going to do. And then, of course, they don't quite do it. Right. And it doesn't quite work.
And it goes super, super haywire. And... There's a 1% chance that works, and there's a 99% chance that ends up ... You have two choices. You have a company that does exactly what you do. and that's super ethical, super restrained, does everything right. And there is a company that says all the things you just said, but then cuts corners and doesn't quite do it.
And I won't say it's one to 99, but that sounds more plausible as that it ends up being corporate propaganda. And then, you know, my prior would be even more likely. This, of course, the argument, the effective altruist, the anti-AI people make is, yeah, Joe, you're The story you're telling us, that's just going to be the fake corporate propaganda. And we need to push back on that.
And the way you push back is you need to regulate it and you need to govern it and you need to do it globally. And this is, you know, the Rand Corporation in Southern California has, you know, one of their verticals, and it's a sort of public-private fusion. But one of the things they're pushing for is something they call global compute governance, which is...
Yeah, it's – the AI – the accelerationist AI story is too scary and too dangerous and too likely to go wrong. And so, you know, we need to have, you know, global governance, which from my point of view sounds even worse.
But that's – that's I think – I think that's the story – that's the story –
Well, to the extent it's driven by the military and other competition with China, you know... Until it becomes sentient. That suggests it's going to be even less in the sort of, you know, utopian, altruistic direction.
I sort of generally don't think we should trust China or the CCP. But probably the best counter argument they would have is that they are interested in maintaining control. And they are crazy fanatical about that. And that's why... you know, the CCP might actually regulate it. And they're going to put breaks on this in a way that we might not in Silicon Valley.
And it's a technology they understand that will undermine their power. That's an interesting perspective.
I don't fully believe them. Right. I know what you're saying. It's sort of... There's sort of a weird way – all the big tech companies, it seemed to me, were natural ways for the CCP to extend its power to control the population, Tencent, Alibaba. And then because it was – but then it's also in theory the tech can be used as an alternate channel for people to organize or – or things like this.
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