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
That makes sense.
But then, you know, always the... But then, you know, the weird history on this was, you know, it was 50 years ago or whatever, 1968, Paul Ehrlich writes The Population Bomb. And it's just the population is just going to exponentially grow exponentially. And yeah, in theory, you can have exponential growth where it doubles. You can have exponential decay where it halves every generation.
And then in theory, there's some stable equilibrium where everybody has exactly two kids and it's completely stable. But it turns out that... that solution is very, very hard to get calibrated. And we shifted from exponential growth to exponential decay, and it's probably going to be quite Herculean to get back to something like stasis.
Yeah, it's always sort of idiosyncratic. There's always things that are idiosyncratic. to the society, so it's extremely polarized on the gender. On the gender thing and, you know, if you get married with kids, you're pushed into this super traditional structure. The women don't want to be in that structure. They opt out.
And so there are sort of idiosyncratic things you can say about East Asia and Confucian societies and the way they're not interacting well with modernity. But then, you know, there's a part of it where I wonder whether it's just an extreme – you know, extreme version of it.
And then, I don't know, you know, my somewhat facile answer is always, you know, on this stuff is I don't know what to do about these things, but my facile answer is always the first step is to talk about them. And if you can't even talk about them, we're never going to solve them. And then maybe that's only the small first step, but that's always sort of my facile answer. I was in South Korea,
year and a half ago, two years ago now, and I met one of the CEOs who ran one of the Chabal, one of the giant conglomerates, and I sort of thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about. And then probably all sorts of cultural things I was offending were saying, obviously, what are you going to do about this catastrophic birthright? That's my opening question.
And then the way he dealt with it was just turned to me and said, you're totally right. It's a total disaster. And then as soon as you acknowledge it, he felt you didn't need to talk about it anymore and we could move on. Wow. So we have to try to do a little bit better than that. Wow.
Because, you know, I think it is always this strange thing where there's so many of these things where we can – you know, where somehow talking about – things is the first step, but then it also becomes the excuse for not doing more, not really solving them.
You know, there's all this, there probably are all these dietary things where you sort of know what you're supposed to do, and then if you know what you're supposed to do, maybe that's good enough and you can still have one piece of chocolate cake before you go on the diet tomorrow or whatever. And so it sort of becomes this
And so somehow figuring out a way to turn this knowledge into something actionable is always a thing that's tricky. It's sort of where I always find myself very skeptical of – of, you know, yeah, all these modalities of therapy where, you know, the theory is that you figure out people's problems and by figuring them out, you change them.
And then ideally it becomes, you know, an activator for change. And then in practice, it often becomes the opposite. The way it works is something like this. It's like, you know, psychotherapy gets advertised as self-transformation. And then after you spend years in therapy, and maybe you learn a lot of interesting things about yourself, you sort of get exhausted from talking to the therapist.
And at some point, it crashes out from self-transformation into self-acceptance. And you realize one day, no, you're actually just perfect the way you are. And so it's – there are these things that may be very powerful on the level of insight and telling us things about ourselves. But then do they actually get us to change?
It's a question, yeah.
Yeah, that's always my excuse. But you have to do that. And I also realize that it's often my cop-out answer, too.
Strategy is often a euphemism for procrastination.
Hello.
Thank you so much for having me here. It's, uh... You know, there's so much I was wrong about in 1999, but I thought I'd reflect on some of the things I was thinking at the time.
And when I was running PayPal, when I was getting it started, the standard way I'd start an investor pitch would, I'd hold up several hundred dollar bills and would always get people's attention. It's kind of hypnotic, you know, even though, you know, it's really weird. What is this? I mean, it's probably not very good as toilet paper. It's not good as wallpaper.
It's sort of this crappy fiat money.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,088 · page 54 of 55
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