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 there's no natural evolutionary path for this to happen. And then I don't know how this would have happened for the alien civilization.
No, but the story you're telling was we can't just leave the humans to the natural evolution because we're still like animals. We're still into status, all these crazy— But those are the things that motivate us to innovate. And if we keep innovating, at some point we will destroy ourselves with that.
No, but the story you were telling earlier was you need to have—
directed in evolution it's like intelligent design it's something it's like there's some godlike being that's actually has to take over from evolution and guide our cultural and political and biological development no and it might not have any use for us at all it might just ignore us and let us live like the chimps do but then and then become the superior force in the planet
I thought it has to – but it has to stop us from developing this.
Yeah, I think there still are... We still have a pretty crazy geopolitical race with China, to come back to that. Sure. You know, the natural development of drone technology in the military context is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed. Sure. And so you need to put an AI on the drone.
And so there sort of are... And all these things, you know, there's a logic to them, but there doesn't seem to be a good endgame.
Man, do you think the— And I think all these things are very overdetermined. Do you think that the collapse in birth rates, you know, it could be plastics, but isn't it just a feature of late modernity?
I'm always – let me think – I think the why, why have birth rates collapsed is it's probably... It's, again, an overdetermined story. It's the plastics. It's the screens. It's certain ways children are not compatible with having a career in late modernity. Probably our economics of it, where people can't afford houses or space.
But I'm probably always a little bit more anchored on the social and cultural dimensions of this stuff. And again, the imitation version of this is – and it's sort of conserved across – people are below the replacement rate. In all 50 states of the U.S., even Mormon, Utah, the average woman has less than two kids. Iran is below that. Italy, way below it. South Korea.
It's all these very different types of societies. And then Israel is still sort of a weird exception. And then if you ask, you know, my sort of... simplistic, somewhat circular explanation would be, you know, people have kids if other people have kids, and they stop having kids when other people stop having kids.
And so there's a dimension of it that's just, you know, if you're a 27-year-old woman in Israel, you better get married and you have to keep up with your other friends that are having kids. And if you don't, you're just like a weirdo who doesn't fit into society or something like that.
And then if you're in South Korea where I think the total fertility rate is like 0.7, it's like one-third of the replacement rate. Wow. Like every generation is going down by two-thirds or something like this. Right. Really heading towards extinction pretty fast. Yeah. It is something like probably none of your friends are doing it.
And then probably there are ways it shifts the politics in a very, very deep way where once you get an inverted demographic pyramid where you have way more old people than young people, At some point, there's always a question, do you vote for benefits for the old or for the very young? Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?
And once the demographic flips and you get this inverted pyramid, maybe the politics shifts in a very deep way where the people with kids get penalized more and more economically. It just costs more and more. And then the old people without kids... just vote more and more benefits for themselves effectively. And then it just sort of, you know, once it flips, it may be very hard to reverse.
I looked at all these sort of heterodox demographers, but I'm blanking on the name, but there was sort of a set of Um, where, you know, it's like, what are the longterm demographic projections?
And there's this, uh, you know, if, if, if, you know, there are 8 billion people on the planet and, you know, if every woman has not two babies, but one baby, then every generation's half the previous than the next generation's 4 billion. And then, and then people think, well, it's just going to, it'll eventually, you'll have women who want more kids and it'll just, it'll
get a smaller population, then it will bounce back. Yeah, one of the Japanese demographers I was looking at on this a few years ago, his thesis was, no, once it flips, it doesn't flip back because you've changed all the politics to where people get disincentive. And so, and then you should just extrapolate this as the permanent birth rate. And if it's
If it's one on average of one baby per woman and you have a having and then it's in 33 generations, two to the 33rd is about eight billion. And if every generation is 30 years, 30 times 33 is 990 years. In 990 years, you'd predict there'd be one person left on the planet. Jesus Christ. And then we'd go extinct if there's only one person left. That doesn't work.
And again, it's a very long-term extrapolation. But the claim is... that just, you know, once you flip it, it kicks in all these social and political dimensions that are then like, yeah, maybe it got flipped by the screens or the plastics or, you know, the drugs or other stuff. But once it's flipped, you change the whole society and it actually stays flipped and it's very, very hard to undo.
Showing 1041–1060 of 1,088 · page 53 of 55
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