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 even though it's 80% control and maybe 20% risk of loss of control, maybe that 20% was too high. And there's sort of a strange way over the last seven, eight years where Jack Ma, Alibaba, all these people sort of got shoved aside for these party functionaries that are effectively running these companies. And so there is something about the big tech story in China
where the people running these companies were seen as national champions a decade ago. Now they're the enemies of the people. And it's sort of the Luddite thing was this, you know, the CCP has full control. You have this new technology that would give you even more control, but there's a chance you lose it. How do you think about that?
And then that's what they've done with consumer internet. And then there's probably something about the AI where it's possible they're not even in the running. And certainly it feels like it's all happening in the U.S. And so maybe it is – Maybe it could still be stopped.
You can get it, but then if you build it, is there some air gap? Does it jump the air gap? Does it somehow—
Or it would spiral out of control. Yeah. But then I think my – and again, this is a very, very speculative conversation. But my read on the – I don't know, cultural social vibe is that the scary dystopian AI narrative is way more compelling. I don't like the effect of altruist people. I don't like the Luddites. But man, I think they are, this time around, they are winning the arguments.
And so my... I don't know, you know, it's mixing metaphors, but do you want to be worried about Dr. Strangelove? who wants to blow up the world to build bigger bombs? Or do you want to worry about Greta, who wants to make everyone drive a bicycle so the world doesn't get destroyed? And we're in a world where people are worried about Dr. Strangelove. They're not worried about Greta.
And it's the Greta equivalent in AI that my model is going to be surprisingly powerful. It's going to be outlawed. It's going to be regulated. As we have outlawed, you know, so many other vectors of innovation. I mean, you can think about why was there progress in computers over the last 50 years and not other stuff? Because the computers were mostly inert.
It was mostly this virtual reality that was air-gapped from the real world. It was, you know, yeah, there's all this... Crazy stuff that happens on the internet, but most of the time what happens on the internet stays on the internet. It's actually pretty decoupled. And that's why we've had a relatively light regulatory touch on that stuff versus so many other things.
Yeah.
But again, they get to regulate pharmaceuticals.
I know, I know. But thalidomide or whatever, all these things that went really haywire, they did a good job. People are scared.
They're not scared of video games. They're scared of, you know, dangerous pharmaceuticals. And if you think of AI as it's not just a video game, it's about not just about this world of bits, but it's going to air gap and it's going to affect you and your physical world in a real way. You know, maybe...
Maybe you cross the air gap and get the FDA or some other – Well, the problem is they're not good at regulating anything.
I don't – I think it's – but I think they have been pretty good at slowing things down and stopping them and – You know, we've made a lot less progress on, I don't know, extending human life. We've made no progress on curing dementia in 40 or 50 years. There's all the stuff where, you know, it's been regulated to death, which I think is...
is very bad from the point of view of progress, but it is pretty effective as a regulation. They've stopped stuff. They've been effectively Luddite. They've been very effective at being Luddites. Interesting.
But, again, these stories are all, like, very speculative. Sure. Like, maybe, you know, the counterargument might be something like, that's what China thinks it will be doing, but it will somehow, you know... Go rogue. Go rogue on them. Yeah. Or they're too arrogant about how much power they think the CCP has, and it will go rogue. So there are sort of... I'm not at all sure this is right.
But I think the... Man, I think the U.S., The U.S. one, I would say, is that I think the pro-AI people in Silicon Valley are doing a pretty... bad job on, let's say, convincing people that it's going to be good for them, that it's going to be good for the average person, it's going to be good for our society.
And if it all ends up being some version, you know, humans are headed towards the glue factory like a horse, man, that sort of probably makes me want to become a Luddite too.
If that's the most positive story you can tell, then I don't think that necessarily means we're going to go to the glue factory. I think it means the glue factory is getting shut down.
The part that – look, there are all these places where there are parts of the story we don't know. Right. And so it's like how did – My general thesis is there is no evolutionary path to this. Maybe there's a guided outside alien superintelligence path for us to become superhuman and fundamentally benevolent and fundamentally radically different beings.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,088 · page 52 of 55
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