Peter Thiel

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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 over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel · 24 Apr 2025 podcast

There were certainly some important cultural and social transformations that we had as we moved from the industrial age to the information age. I don't know if it's worked that well on, let's say, a broad economic level of well-being. So even if you measure it in terms of material well-being for people, The millennial generation in the U.S.

is probably in a lot of ways not even doing as well as their baby boomer parents. It's the first time we've had this sort of economic stagnation or even outright decline. And again, the naive view would be that all this progress somehow translates into a more successful economy. It's not the only way to measure things, but it's sort of a straightforward way to measure things.

And then when it doesn't translate, my conclusion is maybe it hasn't added up to as much. One of the reasons it's very hard, by the way,

to have this debate and even figure out what's going on is because one of the features of late modernity unlike early modernity is hyper specialization and we have ever narrower group of experts who are experts in their field so the cancer specialists tell us they will cure cancer in five years they've been telling us that for the last 50 um and um and then the string theorists tell us they're the smartest people in the world and it's very hard to you know evaluate these fields on their own terms which is

It's like Adam Smith had this concept of the pin factory, where you had 100 different people working in a pin factory. You can think of late modernity as the pin factory on steroids. We're so hyper-specialized, it's extremely hard to have a picture of the whole. And so this question of, you know, is there really progress? Is there not? It's kind of a hard one to get at.

But I think if you measure it in economic terms, There's a slowed sense. If you measure it in this sort of intuitive thing, where, okay, we'll just look at a bunch of different fields, like cancer, supersonic aviation, you know, just all these different ways we used to move faster.

We moved faster every decade from, you know, 1500 on, it was faster sailing boats and faster railroads, faster cars, faster planes. We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. So, you know, that's one dimension. And so there sort of is a common sense way that we have stagnation. There is a, There's an economic way to measure it.

And then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too, which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo, that you're not allowed to discuss, my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct. And so the example I always give is Professor Bob Laughlin, who's a Stanford physics professor, I think around 1998, he gets a Nobel Prize in physics.

And he suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize, he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about. There are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences. I mean, question Darwinism or question stem cell research or... question, you know, climate change. These are very dangerous areas.

But he picked one of those even more dangerous than any of those three. He believed that most of the scientists, so-called scientists, were basically stealing money from the government, engaging in borderline fraudulent science, or it was incrementalist, not worth much. You know, his area of special, his area of focus was high-temperature superconductivity.

And he told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written in that area and maybe 25 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all. And, you know, I don't even need to tell you how the, and then, you know, he started by, yeah, it was not just the abstract replication crisis.

He started by talking about naming people and, you know, this person has stole money and this person is a fraud. And I mean, I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended. He promptly got defunded. His students couldn't get PhDs anymore.

And then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science, which immediately gets you deplatformed, that's an idea we should take very seriously. So that's a political intuition I have on this. So I have a few of these different ideas that we've been a lot more stuck. It doesn't mean... It doesn't mean that there's been zero progress.

It doesn't mean that the progress we've had has been uniformly good. It doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are unjustified either. Maybe all these things are actually part of the explanation for why the stagnation has happened. Now, there's a much harder question

And then there's sort of our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated. How causal they were is always hard to say. But if we sort of think of the Apollo space program as this... last great, you know, technological scientific project, there's some sense where July of 1969, where we landed on the moon and Woodstock started three weeks later.

And, you know, with benefit of hindsight, in some sense, that's when progress, scientific technological progress stopped and the hippies took over the country. And you can... describe it in many ways, but in some ways you can describe it as a shift from outer space, from exploring the world outside of us, to inner space. And there were sort of all, you know, all these different transformations.

There was a, you know, and I would describe, you know, yoga, meditation. I would describe, you know, psychedelic drugs. I would describe you know, I don't know, incels playing video games in basements. You know, there was all this incredible, this maybe continued atomization, the navel-gazing, you know, of identity politics in a way. You know, you could say that

People often lump, for example, they often lump Marxism and cultural Marxism together. In my telling, these are opposites, because Marxism at least was primarily concerned about the outside, objective, material, economic realities. And then cultural Marxism was like the shift from Apollo to Woodstock, where you just went into the sort of interior world. You no longer...

We're thinking about this outside world. And in some ways, you stopped asking these questions about economic growth and basic economic prosperity. And then that coincided also with this lack of progress in these things. So I think there were all these kinds of cultural transformations that coincided with this shift. You know, I think the, people often ask why, why this stagnation happened.

My standard, you know, if you agree with this, and of course people can disagree, you know, how much it happened, but if you agree with me that there's been, you know, a slowing down of progress, that, you know, in some sense the singularity was maybe more in the past than in the future. And you always have these questions, why did it happen? And

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