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 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

My cop-out answer is always that why questions are overdetermined. And it could be, you know, it could be sort of our society became risk-averse or too feminized. Or you could say that You could say that there was too much regulation and bureaucracy, which is sort of a libertarian intuition I have.

But I've come to think that one of the bigger factors was the sense that a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous. It had, at least in a military context, had a dual-use character. And this was...

I mean, there was already some relentless acceleration of this stuff in the late 18th, 19th centuries, you know, Napoleonic Wars, Colonel Colt with the revolver, Alfred Nobel inventing dynamite, you know, World War I. you know, was sort of a break point where, you know, the sort of naive progressive narrative really got undercut.

And then somehow you can say that the sort of Baconian science project in some sense ended, were ended in the Hegelian senses, both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos with the building of nuclear weapons. And then, again, it doesn't work perfectly, but my telling would be that it took maybe a quarter century for nuclear weapons to really get internalized by society. And then by the 1970s,

you know, the energy, you know, the energy was, you know, we don't want to be doing this outside world where we're going to build ever more thermonuclear bombs. We want to be, you know, peacing out at Burning Man with psychedelic drugs. We want to... We want to, you know, or you escape back to nature through environmentalism.

You know, we are, you know, we want to be in a world not of change, but of stasis, because a world of change has this apocalyptic dimension. Change is change for the worse. That's the sense that gets, you know, encapsulated in the 1970s. And so there's a way that the sort of progressive version of science, you know, we try to... We try to put the pause button on it.

The places where it's still allowed, you can say, are the most inert. So in a way, the world of bits was seen as incredibly inert because you're not building bombs, you're not building weapons with it. And then, of course, even there, there's some sort of way in which the ideas on the internet, maybe they do translate into reality every now and then.

You know, what happens on Twitter or X doesn't always stay there. Most of the time it stays there, so it feels like it's this extremely angry, intense conversation, but every now and then it still translates to the real world. So the internet, you could say, was allowed because it was sort of a safe space. a place where the sort of violence could be contained.

And then even there, probably not totally, and even there, people felt it was like maybe too much. But yes, the sort of apocalyptic background of late modernity where, you know, you know, every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon is in the background.

And again, I don't like the stagnation and the risk aversion and all these responses, but there's a part of it that I think is understandable.

Well, I would say we are broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago. We are still progressing in some dimensions. There may be still too fast and too scary for people, but the big thing that has shifted vis-a-vis, let's say, the world of 1913, pre-World War I,

is that we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age, that there is a dimension of science and technology that has a dark dimension and it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself. And I don't like Greta and I don't like the full precautionary principle, but her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong.

I don't want to abstract it too much. It is actually, it's the specific nature of the progress that happened. It is, we got thermonuclear weapons. We are powerful enough to affect the environment. I'm not sure whether carbon dioxide is the most important dimension, but the

you know i'm there probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be impacted in very uh very radical ways uh we can probably build very dangerous bioweapons you know maybe that's even what was going on in the wuhan lab we can um you know there are there are dimensions of ai that are you know um potentially violent and very dangerous and you don't have to necessarily believe the the um

all these sort of weird pictures where it's this superintelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet. But there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology that feel... Unsettling. Unsettling. And just a simple example is that we have this drone technology. That's, again, a new form of technology that's...

come to the fore in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine. And you have a human in the loop, but the human can get jammed. And so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems. And that's... Seems inevitable. That seems like the natural, logical thing to do. And then... Even I, as a pro-tech person, have to say I find that somewhat unsettling.

And then in the digital realm, and then some ways, even these escape, weren't full escapes. So AI, yeah, that's a, it seems to be just about bits, not atoms, but then if you combine it with a drone, you know, the AI comes back to the physical world.

Yeah, but the way you're telling the story, it has too much of this timeless and eternal character. This is just what always happens. Yeah, right. Well, that is what I'm wondering. Whereas the story I want to tell has more of a one-time and world-historical character to it, where it is... know there were lots of inventions where people figure out cures for diseases.

That didn't say, okay, now we have to take a step back and cure fewer diseases. That actually encourages you to double down on that and do even more. Or we have all these machines that replace humans in factories. Yeah, there's some downsides to it, and there are labor problems with the Industrial Revolution, and there's a lot of pollution, but on the whole, the good way outweighs the bad.

And there was no big regulatory counter-movement in Victoria.

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