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
tell her to put her hand on her tummy and hum to him.
You loved that.
You would have loved this moment.
You can call anytime.
You need my best side?
Can I see another one?
I can play the piano.
I am, I'm absolutely, I'm your mother after all.
Was denkt ihr über die Verwendung von Artificial Intelligence oder Lavender bei der IDF, um Hamas-Targete zu identifizieren? Und zweitens, akzeptiert ihr mit Elon Musk, dass die Bevölkerungsbegründung ein Risiko für die Menschheit ist?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel · 24 Apr 2025
podcast
So this question of, you know, is there really progress? We used to move faster. We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age. There is a dimension of science and technology. It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.
It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it. It's something like the Christian anthropology.
Thank you.
Well, yeah, there are variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point. And of course, there are all sorts of very complicated measurement problems. So how do we compare progress in AI with, let's say, lack of progress in dementia research, curing Alzheimer's? And so all these different complicated ways of how you weight all these different things.
But there was a sense that the West, the Western world was in this fast era of scientific technological progress where it was advancing on many, many different fronts. And in some ways, it started picking up in the Renaissance, early Enlightenment, 17th, 18th centuries, and then probably in important ways accelerated in the 19th, first half of the 20th.
And then in some ways, I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years, maybe 1970 or so is an inflection point one could cite. It doesn't mean it's stopped altogether, One way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits. You know, computers, software, internet, mobile internet, maybe crypto, now AI.
But there's been much less progress in the world of atoms. And if you think about a university setting, most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded. And I was an undergraduate at Stanford late 1980s, class of 89.
And it wasn't quite obvious at the time, but in retrospect, almost anything that was in the world of atoms would have been a bad field to go into. Physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, certainly aero-astroengineering, nuclear engineering, people already knew was kind of outlawed and over by the 1980s.
You could still maybe do electrical engineering, which was sort of the atoms that were used for semiconductors. But basically, the only STEM field that was going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science, which was kind of this marginal, almost fake field. Because I always have this riff where, you know, when you have...
I'm in favor of science, but I'm skeptical when people use the word science. So social science, political science, climate science are called science by people who have an inferiority complex and say, deep down, no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields. And something like this was true of computer science in the original day. It was people who were too dumb at math
to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering, and they sort of flunked out into computer science. And weirdly, this was a field that worked and it had a decent amount of impact. I don't think it was... And then it worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies.
Showing 121–140 of 1,088 · page 7 of 55
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