Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund and leads the Thiel Foundation, which funds technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zero to One. https://foundersfund.com https://palantir.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Joe Rogan Podcast.
Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. What's up, man? Good to see you. Glad to be on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. What's cracking? How you doing? Doing all right. We were just talking about how you're still trapped in L.A. I'm still trapped in L.A. I know. You're friends with a lot of people out here. Have you thought about jettisoning?
I talk about it all the time. But, you know, it's always talk is often a substitute for action. It's always does it lead to action or does it end up substituting for action? That's a good point. But I have endless conversations about leaving. And I moved from San Francisco to L.A. back in 2018. That felt about as big a move away as possible.
And I keep – the extreme thing I keep saying – and you're going to have to keep in mind talk is a substitute for action. The extreme thing – I keep saying is I can't decide whether to leave the state or the country. Oh, boy. If you went out of the country, where would you go? Man, it's tough to find places because, you know, there are a lot of problems in the U.S.
and most places are doing so much worse.
Yeah. It's not a good move to leave here. Yeah.
As fucked up as this place is. But I keep thinking I shouldn't move twice. So I should either – I can't decide whether I should move to Florida or should move to New Zealand or Costa Rica or something like that.
Yeah. Go full John McAfee.
But can't decide between those two. So I end up stuck in California.
Well, Australia is okay, but they're even worse when it comes to rule of law and what they decide to make you do and the way they're cracking down on people now for online speech. And it's very sketchy in other countries.
But somehow the relative outperformance of the U.S. and the absolute stagnation decline of the U.S., they're actually related things. Because the way the conversation's grooved, every time I tell someone, you know, I'm thinking about leaving the country. They'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse. And then that somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country.
And then we can't talk about what's gone wrong in the U.S. because everything is so much worse.
Well, I think most people know what's gone wrong. But they don't know if they're on the side of the government that's currently in power. They don't know how to criticize it. They don't know exactly what to say, what should be done. Right. And they're ideologically connected to this group being correct. Right.
So they try to do mental gymnastics to try to support some of the things that are going on. I think that's part of the problem. I don't think it's necessarily that we don't know what the problems are. We know what the problems are, but we don't have clear solutions as to how to fix them, nor do we understand the real mechanisms of how they got there in the first place.
Yeah, I mean there are a lot that are pretty obvious to articulate and they're much easier to describe than solve. Like we have a crazy, crazy budget deficit.
Yeah.
And presumably you have to do one of three things. You have to raise taxes a lot. You have to cut spending a lot. Or you're just going to keep borrowing money.
Isn't there like some enormous amount of our taxes that just go to the deficit?
It's not that high, but it's gone up a lot.
What is it? I thought it was like 34% or something crazy.
It peaked at 3.1% of GDP. which is maybe 15%, 20% of the budget, peaked at 3.1% of GDP in 1991. And then it went all the way down to something like 1.5% in the mid-2010s. And now it's crept back up to 3.1%, 3.2%. And so we are at all-time highs as a percentage of GDP. And the way to understand the basic math is the debt went up a crazy amount, but the interest rates went down.
And from 2008 to 2021, for 13 years, we basically had zero interest rates with one brief blip under Powell. But it was basically zero rates. And then you could borrow way more money, and it wouldn't show up in servicing the debt because you just paid 0% interest on the T-bills. And the thing that's...
that's very dangerous seeming to me about the current fiscal situation is the interest rates have gone back to positive like they were in the 90s and early 2000s, mid-2000s. And it's just this incredibly large debt. And so we now have a real runaway deficit problem. But people have been talking about this for 40 years and crying wolf for 40 years. So it's very hard for people to take it seriously.
Most people don't even understand what it means. Like when you say there's a deficit, we owe money. Okay, to who?
How does that work? Well, it's to people who bought the bonds and it's – A lot of it's to Americans. Some of them are held by the Federal Reserve. A decent amount are held by foreigners at this point because in some ways it's the opposite of the trade current account deficits. The U.S.
has been running these big current account deficits, and then the foreigners end up with way more dollars than they want to spend on American goods or services. And so they have to reinvest them in the U.S. Some put it into houses or stocks, but a lot of it just goes into government debt. So in some ways it's a function of the chronic trade imbalances, chronic trade deficits.
Well, if you had supreme power, if Peter Thiel was the ruler of the world and you could fix this, what would you do?
Man, I always find that hypothetical. It's a ridiculous hypothetical. It is ridiculous. You ask ridiculous hypotheticals, you get ridiculous answers.
I want a ridiculous answer. That's what I like. But what could be done? First of all, what could be done to mitigate it and what could be done to solve it?
I think my answers are probably all in the very libertarian direction. So it would be sort of – Figure out ways to have smaller governments. Figure out ways to increase the age on Social Security. Means test Social Security so not everyone gets it. Just figure out ways to gradually dial back a lot of these government benefits. And then that's insanely unpopular.
So it's completely unrealistic on that level.
That bothers people that need Social Security. I said means tested. Means tested. So people who don't need it don't get it. Right. So Social Security, even if you're very wealthy, I don't even know how it works. Do you still get it?
Yeah. Basically anyone who – pretty much everyone gets it because it was originally rationalized as a – as a as sort of a pension system, not as a welfare system. And so the fiction was you pay Social Security taxes and then you're entitled to get a pension out in the form of Social Security. Right.
And and because it was we told this fiction that it was a form of the pension system instead of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme or something, something like that. You know, the fiction means everybody gets paid Social Security because it's a pension system.
Whereas if we were more honest and said it's just a welfare system, maybe you could start dialing – you could probably rationalize it in a lot of ways.
And it's not related to how much you put into it, right? Like how does Social Security work in terms of –
And then if you put more in, you get somewhat more, and then it's capped at a certain amount. And that's why Social Security taxes are capped at something like $150,000 a year. And then this is one of the really big tax increase proposals that's out there is to uncap it, which would effectively be a 12.4% income tax hike on all your income. Adjust to Social Security?
Sure, because the argument is, the sort of progressive left Democrat argument is that it's, you know, why should you have a regressive Social Security tax? Why should you pay 12.4% or whatever the Social Security tax is? Half gets paid by you, half gets paid by your employer. But then it's capped at like 140, 150K, some level like that.
And why should it be regressive where if you make $500K or $1 million a year, you pay zero tax on your marginal income? And that makes no sense if it's a welfare program. If it's a retirement savings program and your payout is capped, then you don't need to put in more than you get out.
Well, that's logical, but there's not a lot of logic going on with the way people are talking about taxes today. Like California just jacked their taxes up to 14 what? Was it 14.4? Something like that. Yeah.
14.9.
I mean, you want more money for doing a terrible job and having more people leave for the first time ever in the history of the state. Yeah.
Yeah, but look, it gets away with it.
I know.
And so – Well, people are forced with no choice. What are you going to do? It is – I mean there are people at the margins who leave, but the state government still collects more and more in revenue. So it's – you get – I don't know. You get 10 percent more revenues and 5 percent of the people leave. You still increase the amount of revenues you're getting.
It's inelastic enough that you're actually able to increase the revenues. I mean this is sort of the – The crazy thing about California is there's always sort of a right-wing or libertarian critique of California that it's such a ridiculous place. It should just collapse under its own ridiculousness. it doesn't quite happen. The macroeconomics on it are pretty good.
40 million people, the GDP is around 4 trillion. It's about the same as Germany with 80 million or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California. Same GDP means one third the per capita GDP. So there's some level on which California as a whole is working, even though it doesn't work from a governance point of view, it doesn't work for a lot of the people who live there.
And the rough model I have for how to think of California is that it's kind of like Saudi Arabia. And you have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You know, not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything. And then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California. And the oil pays for everything.
And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector. And you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money. And sort of the government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the – the big tech money in California.
And it's not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it's pretty stable. People have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous. It's going to collapse any year now. They've been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that's the way you have to think of California.
Yeah.
Well, the other thing is you're also- There are things about it that are ridiculous, but there's something about it that, you know, it doesn't naturally self-destruct overnight.
Well, there's a lot of kick-ass people there. And there's a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there. And it's too difficult to just pack up and leave.
I think it's something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California.
That's amazing.
It's Google, Apple- Now NVIDIA, Meta. Yeah, I think Broadcom is close to that.
And there's no ideal place to live either. It's not like California sucks. So there's a place that's got it totally dialed in with also that has an enormous GDP, also has an enormous population. There's not like one big city that's really dialed in.
Well, there are things that work. So I looked at all the zero tax states in the US. And it's always, you don't, I think the way you asked the question gets at it, which is you don't live in a, in theory, a lot of stuff happens on a state level, but you don't live in a state, you live in a city. And so if you're somewhat biased towards living in at least a moderately sized city,
Okay, I think there are four states where there are no cities. Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire. There's zero tax, but no cities to speak of. And then you have Washington State with Seattle, where the weather is the worst in the country. You have Nevada with Las Vegas, which I'm not that big a fan of. And then that leaves three zero-tax states.
You have Texas, which I like as a state, but I'm not that big a fan of Austin, Dallas, or Houston. Houston is just sort of an oil town, which is good if you're in that business, but otherwise not. Dallas has sort of an inferiority complex to L.A. and New York. Yeah. Not not the healthiest attitude. And then, you know, I don't know.
Austin's a government town and a college town and a wannabe hipster San Francisco town. So, you know, my books are three strikes. You're you're kind of out, too. And then that leaves that leaves Nashville, Tennessee, which was and then or Miami, South Florida. And those would be my two top choices.
Miami's fun, but I wouldn't want to live there. It's a fun place to visit. It's a little too crazy. A little too chaotic, a little too cocaine-fueled, a little too party, party, party.
I think it's pretty segmented from the tourist strip from everything else. It probably is. There probably is something. A little bit paradoxical about any place that gets lots of tourists where, you know, it's it's it's in some sense of the case. There's some things that are great about because so many tourists go.
But then in some sense, it's it creates a weird aesthetic because the you know, the day to day vibe is that you don't you don't work and you're just having fun or something like that.
Right. Because so many people are going there just to do that.
And that's probably a little bit off with the South Florida thing. But I think it's – and then I think Nashville is also sort of its own real place. Nashville is great. Yeah. So those would be my – those are the top two. I could live in Nashville. No problem. I'm probably always – I'm always too – Fifth grade onwards since, you know, 77, I lived in California.
And so I'm just a sucker for the weather. And I think there is no place besides coastal California where you have really good weather year-round in the U.S. Maybe Hawaii is pretty good.
Coastal California is tough to beat. And you're two hours from the mountains.
Man, it's like, you know, it's mid-August here in Austin. Yeah. It's just brutal.
85?
96.
96? You're proving my point. I do so much sauna that I literally don't even notice it. I'm outside for hours every day shooting arrows, and I don't even notice it. Well, I don't know if you're a representative of the average Austin president. I don't know, but I think you get accustomed to it. To me, it's so much better than too cold. Too cold, you can die.
And I know you can die from the heat, but you probably won't, especially if you have water. You'll be OK. But you could die from the cold. Cold's real. So really cold places, there's five months out of the year where your life's in danger. Where you could do something wrong. Like if you live in Wyoming and you break down somewhere and there's no one on the road, you could die out there.
That's real. You could die from exposure.
Sure. There's probably some very deep reason there's been a net migration of people to the west and the south and the U.S. over.
California, you can do no wrong. As long as the Earth doesn't move, you're good. As long as there's no tsunamis, you're good. It is a perfect environment, virtually year-round. It gets a little hot in the summer, but again, coastal, not at all. If you get an 80-degree day in Malibu, it's unusual. It's wonderful. You've got a beautiful breeze coming off the ocean, sun's out, everybody's pretty.
And then it's correlated with confiscatory taxation.
It's all sort of a package deal.
Well, it's a scam. You know, they know you don't want to leave. I didn't want to leave California. It's fucking great.
I appreciate you left. I always have the fantasy that if enough people like you leave, it'll put pressure on them. But it's never quite enough.
Never quite enough. And it's not going to be. It's too difficult for most people. It was very difficult for me. And I had a bunch of people working for me that were willing to pack up and leave, like young Jamie over there. But we, you know, it was tricky. You're taking your whole business, and my business is talking to people. That's part of my business. My other business is stand-up comedy.
So you left during COVID? I left at the very beginning. As soon as they started locking things down, I'm like, oh, these motherfuckers are never letting us go.
March, April, May 2020?
In May, I started looking at houses. Cool. That's when I came to Austin first.
Okay. I got a place in Miami in September 2020, and I've spent the last four winters there, so I'm sort of always on the cusp of moving to Florida. Hard to get out of California. But the thing that's gotten a lot harder about moving relative to four years ago, and I'd say I think my real estate purchases have generally not been great over the years. I mean, they've done okay, but...
Certainly not the way I've been able to make money at all. But with the one exception was Miami. Bought it in September 2020. And probably, you know, fast forward four years, it's up like 100%. Wow. Something like that. And, yeah. But then paradoxically, this also means it's gotten much harder to move there or Austin or any of these places.
If I relocated my office in L.A., the people who own houses – Okay, you have to buy a place in Florida. It costs twice as much as it did four years ago. And then the interest rates have also doubled. And so you get a 30-year mortgage. You could have locked that in for 3% in 2020. Now it's, you know... Maybe 6.5%, 7%. So the prices have doubled. The mortgages have doubled.
So it costs you four times as much to buy a house. And so there was a moment where people could move during COVID, and it's gotten dramatically harder relative to what it was four years ago.
Well, the Austin real estate market went crazy, and then it came back down a little bit. It's in that down a little bit spot right now where there's a lot of high-end properties that are still for sale. They can't move. It's different. You know, there's not a lot of people moving here now like there was in the boom because everything's open everywhere.
Well, I somehow think Austin was linked to California and Miami was linked a little bit more to to New York. And it was a little bit, you know, all these differences. But Austin was kind of. A big part of the move were people from tech from California that moved to Austin. There's a part of the Miami, South Florida thing, which was people from finance in New York City that moved to Florida.
And the finance industry is less networked on New York City. So I think it is possible for people – if you run a private equity fund or if you work at a bank, it's possible for some of those functions to easily be moved to a different state. The tech industry is – crazily networked on California. There's probably some way to do it. It's not that easy.
Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense, too. It's just the sheer numbers. I mean, when you're talking about all those corporations that are established and based in California, there's so many. They're so big. Just the sheer numbers of human beings that live there and work there that are involved in tech.
Sure. If it wasn't as networked, you could probably just move. And maybe these things are networked till they're not. Detroit was very networked.
The car industry was super networked on Detroit for decades and decades, and Michigan got more and more mismanaged, and people thought the network sort of protected them because the big three car companies were in Detroit, but then you had all the supply chains were also in Detroit.
And then eventually, it was just so ridiculous, people moved, started moving the factories outside of that area, and it sort of unraveled. So that's, you know, it can also happen with California. It'll just take a lot.
That would be insane if they just abandoned all the tech companies in California. I mean, just look at what happened at Flint, Michigan, when all the auto factories pulled out.
Well, it's, look, I think you can, there's always all these paradoxical histories. You know, the internet... The point of the internet, in some sense, was to eliminate the tyranny of place. And that was sort of the idea. And then one of the paradoxes about the history of the internet was that the internet companies were all centered in California. There have been different waves of...
of how networked, how non-networked they were, I think probably 2021, sort of the COVID moving away from California, the big thing in tech was crypto. And crypto had this conceit of an alternate currency, decentralized, away from the central banks. But also the crypto companies, the crypto protocols, you could do those from anywhere. You could do them outside the US. You could do them from Miami.
And so crypto was something where the tech could naturally move out of California. And today, probably the core tech narrative is completely flipped to AI. And then there's something about AI that's very centralized.
I had this one-liner years ago where it was, if we say that crypto is libertarian, can we also say that AI is communist or something like this where the natural structure for an AI company looks like it's a big company and then somehow the AI stuff feels like it's going to be dominated by the big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yeah.
And so if that's the future of tech, the scale, the natural scale of the industry tells you that it's going to be extremely hard to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
When you look to the future and you try to just make just a guess as to how all this is going to turn out with AI, what do you think we're looking at over the next five years?
Man, I think I should start by being modest in answering that question and saying that nobody has a clue.
Right, which is true, which pretty much all the experts say.
You know, I would say, let me do sort of a history. The riff I always had on this was that I can't stand any of the buzzwords. And I felt AI, you know, there's all this big data thing. There were all these crazy buzzwords people had, and they always were ways to sort of abstract things and get away from reality somehow and were not good ways of talking about things.
And I thought AI was this incredible abstraction because it can mean the next generation of computers. It can mean the last generation of computers. It can mean anything in between. And if you think about the AI industry, discussion in the 2010s, pre-OpenAI, ChatGPT, and the revolution of the last two years.
But the 2010s AI discussion, maybe it was, I'll start with the history before I get to the future, but the history of it was it was maybe anchored on two visions of what AI meant. And one was Nick Bostrom, Oxford prof, who wrote this book, Superintelligence, 2014. And it was basically AI was going to be this super-duper
intelligent thing, way, way God-like intelligence, way smarter than any human being. And then there was sort of the, I don't know, the CCP Chinese Communist Rebuttal, the Kai-Fu Lee book from 2018, AI Superpowers. I think the subtitle was something like The Race for AI Between Silicon Valley and China or something like this. And it was sort of it defined AI as it was fairly low tech.
It was just surveillance, facial recognition technology. We would just have the sort of totalitarian Stalinist monitoring. It didn't require very much innovation. It just required that you apply things. And basically the subtext was China is going to win because we have no ethical qualms in China about applying this sort of basic machine learning to sort of measuring or controlling the population.
And those were sort of like, say, two extreme competing visions of what AI would mean in the 2010s and that sort of maybe were sort of the anchors of the AI debate. And then, you know, what happened?
in some sense with ChatGPT in late 22, early 23, was that the achievement you got, you did not get superintelligence, it was not just surveillance tech, but you actually got to the holy grail of what people would have defined AI as from 1950 to 2000. 2010, for the previous 60 years before the 2010s, people have always said AI, the definition of AI is passing the Turing test.
And the Turing test, it basically means that the computer can fool you into thinking that it's a human being. And it's a somewhat fuzzy test because obviously you have an expert on the computer, a non-expert. Does it fool you all the time or some of the time? How good is it? But to first approximation, the Turing test, we weren't even close to passing it in 2021.
And then ChatGPT basically passes the Turing test, at least for like, let's say an IQ 100 average person. It's passed the Turing test. And that was the holy grail. That was the holy grail of AI research for the previous 60 years.
And so there's probably some psychological or sociological history where you can say that this weird debate between Bostrom about superintelligence and Kai-Fu Lee about surveillance tech was like this almost like psychological suppression people had, where they were not thinking, they lost track of the Turing Test, of the Holy Grail, because it was about to happen.
And it was such a significant, such an important thing that you didn't even want to think about. So I'm tempted to give almost a psychological repression theory of the 2010 debates, but Be that as it may, the Turing test gets passed and that's an extraordinary achievement. Then where does it go from here? There probably are ways you can refine these.
It's still going to be a long time to apply it. There is a question. There's this AGI discussion. Will we get artificial general intelligence, which is a hopelessly vague concept, which general intelligence could be just a generally smart human being. So is that just a person with an IQ of 130? Or is it superintelligence? Is it godlike intelligence? So it's sort of an ambiguous thing.
But I keep thinking that maybe the AGI question is less important than passing the Turing test. If we got AGI, if we got, let's say, superintelligence, that would be interesting to Mr. God because you'd have competition for being God. But surely the Turing test is more important for us humans. Because it's either a compliment or a substitute to humans.
And so it's going to rearrange the economic, cultural, political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways. And I think maybe what's already happened is much more important than anything else that's going to be done. And then it's just going to be a long ways in applying it. One last thought. You know, the...
The analogy I'm always tempted to go to, and these historical analogies are never perfect, but it's that maybe... AI in 2023-24 is like the Internet in 1999, where on one level, it's clear the Internet's going to be big and get a lot bigger, and it's going to dominate the economy. It's going to rearrange the society in the 21st century. And then at the same time, it was a complete bubble.
And people had no idea how the business models worked. Almost everything blew up. It didn't take that long in the scheme of things. It took 15, 20 years for it to become super dominant. But it didn't happen sort of in 18 months as people fantasized in 1999. And maybe what we have in AI is something like this.
Figuring out how to actually apply it in sort of all these different ways is going to take something like two decades. But that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal.
It is a really big deal, and I think you're right about the Turing test. Do you think that the lack of acknowledgement or the public celebration or at least this mainstream discussion, which I think should be everywhere, that we've passed the Turing test, do you think it's connected to the fact that this stuff accelerates so rapidly that even though we've essentially breached this new territory –
We still know that GPT-5 is going to be better. GPT-6 is going to be insane. And then they're working on these right now. And the change is happening so quickly, we're almost a little reluctant to acknowledge where we're at.
Yeah. I've often, probably for 15 years or so, often been on the side that there isn't that much progress in science or tech or not as much as Silicon Valley likes to claim. And even on the AI level, I think it's a massive technical achievement. It's still an open question. Is it actually going to lead to much higher living standards for everybody? The internet was a massive achievement.
How much did it raise people's living standards? much trickier question. But in this world where not much has happened, one of the paradoxes of an era of relative tech stagnation is that when something does happen, we don't even know how to process it. So I think Bitcoin was a It was a big invention, whether it was good or bad, but it was a pretty big deal.
And it was systematically underestimated for at least the first 10, 11 years. You could trade it. It went up smoothly for 10, 11 years. It didn't get repriced all at once because – we're in a world where nothing big ever happens. And so we have no way of processing it when something pretty big happens. The internet was pretty big in 99. Bitcoin was moderately big. The internet was really big.
Bitcoin was moderately big. And I'd say passing the Turing test is really big. It's on the same scale as the internet. And because our lived experiences that so little has felt like it's been changing for the last few decades. We're probably underestimating it.
It's interesting that you say that so little – we feel like so little has changed because if you're a person – how old are you? Same age as you were. Born in 1967. So in our age, we've seen all the change, right? We saw the end of the Cold War. We saw answering machines. We saw VHS tapes. Then we saw the internet and then where we're at right now, which is like this bizarre –
moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day. And these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous. Everybody has one. There's incredible technology that's being ramped up every year. They're getting better all the time. And now there's AI. There's AI on your phone. You could access ChatGPT and a bunch of different programs on your phone.
And I think that's an insane change. I think that's one of the most – especially with the use of social media, it's one of the most bizarre changes I think our culture has ever – the most bizarre.
It can be a big change culturally or politically. But, yeah, the kinds of questions I would ask is how do you measure it economically? How much does it change GDP? How much does it change productivity? And – And certainly the story I would generally tell for the last 50 years, since the 1970s, early 70s, is that we've been not absolute stagnation.
We're in an era of relative stagnation where there has been stagnation. very limited progress in the world of atoms, the world of physical things. And there has been a lot of progress in the world of bits, information, computers, internet, mobile internet, now AI.
What are you referring to when you say the world of physical things?
Well, if we had defined technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, the year we were born, And we had a discussion about technology, what technology would have meant. It would have meant computers. It would have also meant rockets. It would have meant supersonic airplanes. It would have meant new medicines.
It would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, maybe underwater cities, you know. It sort of had – because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing. And so there was progress on all these fronts. Today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology.
Technology has been reduced to meaning computers. And that tells you that – the structure of progress has been weird. There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers, and then all the other areas have been relatively stagnant. We're not moving any faster. The Concorde got decommissioned in 2003 or whenever.
And then with all the low-tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly, to get through all of them from one city to the next. The highways have gone backwards because there are more traffic jams. We haven't figured out ways around those. So we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. And then, yeah, and that's sort of the –
And then, of course, there's also a sense in which the screens and the devices have this effect of distracting us from this. So when you're riding a 100-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can look at, wow, this is this cool new gadget. But you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed in 100 years. And...
And so there's a question how important is this world of bits versus the world of atoms. You know, I would say as human beings, we're physically embodied in a material world. And so I would always say this world of atoms is pretty important. And when that's pretty stagnant, you know, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense. I was an undergraduate at Stanford late 80s.
And at the time, in retrospect, every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into. You know, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these engineering fields where you're tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck. They were regulated. You couldn't come up with new things to do.
Nuclear engineering, aero-astroengineering, people already knew those were really bad ones to go into. They were outlawed. You weren't going to make any progress in nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that. Electrical engineering, which was the one that's sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay.
And then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot was computer science. And again, you know, it's been very powerful, but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s. In the 1980s, computer science was this ridiculous inferior subject. You know, I always the linguistic cut is always when people use the word science, I'm in favor of science. I'm not in favor of science in quotes.
And when it's always a tell that it's not real science. And so when we call it climate science or political science or social science, you know, you're just sort of making it up. and you have an inferiority complex to real science or something like physics or chemistry. And computer science was in the same category as social science or political science.
It was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and sort of dropped out of the real science and real engineering fields.
You don't feel that climate science is a real science? It's... It is...
It's – well, it's – there's several different things one could say. It's possible climate change is happening. It's possible we don't have great accounts of why that's going on. So I'm not questioning any of those things. But how scientific it is, I don't think – I don't think it's a place where we have really vigorous debates. Maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions.
Temperatures are going up. Maybe it's methane. Maybe it's people are eating too much steak. It's the cows flatulating. And you have to measure how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus carbon dioxide. I don't think they're... I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff scientifically.
I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than anything that's truly science should be. Dogma doesn't mean it's wrong.
But why does the fact that it's called climate science mean that it's more dogmatic? Because if you said nuclear science, you wouldn't question it, right? No.
Yeah, but no one calls it nuclear science. They call it nuclear engineering. Interesting.
I see what you're saying.
The only thing is, I'm just making a narrow linguistic point.
Is there anything called science that is legitimately science?
Well, at this point, people say computer science has worked, but in the 1980s, All I'm saying is it was in the same category as, let's say, social science, political science. It was a tell that the people doing it kind of deep down knew they weren't doing real science.
Well, there's certainly ideology that's connected to climate science. And then there's certainly corporations that are invested in this prospect of green energy and the concept of green energy, and they're profiting off of it. And pushing these different things, whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is.
Like California, I think it's 2035, they have a mandate that all new vehicles have to be electric, which is hilarious when you're connected to a grid that can't support the electric cars it currently has. After they said that, within a month or two, Gavin Newsom asked people to not charge their Teslas because it was summer and the grid was fucked.
Yeah. Look, it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways. Right. You know, there's an environmental project, which is, you know, and maybe it shouldn't be scientific. You know, the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet and we don't have time to do science.
If we have to do rigorous science and you can prove that we're overheating, it'll be too late. And so if you're a hardcore environmentalist, you don't want to have as high a standard of science. Yeah, my intuition is certainly when you go away from that, you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological. Maybe it doesn't even work, even if the planet's getting warmer.
Maybe climate science is not – my question is, maybe methane is a worse – is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide? We're not even capable of measuring that.
Well, we're also ignoring certain things like regenerative farms that sequester carbon. And then you have people like Bill Gates saying that planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous. That's a ridiculous way to do it. How is that ridiculous? They literally turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. It is their food. That's what the food of plants is.
That's what powers the whole plant life and the way we have the symbiotic relationship with them. And the more carbon dioxide it is, the greener it is, which is why it's greener today on Earth than it has been in 100 years. Sure. These are all facts that are inconvenient to people that have a very specific narrow window of how to approach this.
Sure. Although there probably are ways to steel man the other side too where maybe – Maybe the original 1970s, I think the manifesto that's always Very interesting from the other side was this book by the Club of Rome, 1972, The Limits of Growth. And it's, you can't have, we need to head towards a society in which there's zero percent, there's very limited growth.
Because if you have unlimited growth, you're going to run out of resources. If you don't run out of resources, you'll hit a pollution constraint. But in the 1970s, it was, you're going to have overpopulation. You're going to run out of oil. We had the oil shocks.
And then by the 90s, it sort of morphed into more of the pollution problem with carbon dioxide, climate change, other environmental things. But there is sort of... You know, there's been some, you know, some improvement in oil, carbon fuels with fracking, things like this in Texas. It's not at the scale that's been enough to, you know, give an American standard of living to the whole planet.
And we consume 100 million barrels a year. of oil a day globally. Maybe fracking can add 10%, 10 million to that. If everybody on this planet has an American standard of living, it's something like 300, 400 million barrels of oil. And I don't think that's there. So that's kind of... I always wonder whether that was the real environmental argument.
We can't have an American standard of living for the whole planet. We somehow can't justify this degree of inequality. And therefore, we have to figure out ways to dial back and tax the carbon, restrict it. And maybe that's... There's some sort of a Malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution.
How much of that could the demand for oil could be mitigated by nuclear?
You probably could mitigate it a lot. There's a question why the nuclear thing. has gone so wrong, especially if you have electric vehicles, right? The combustion engine is probably hard to get nuclear to work, but if you shift to electric vehicles, you can charge your Tesla cars at night. And that would seemingly work.
And there's definitely a history of energy where it was always in the direction of more intense use. It went from wood to coal to oil, which is a more compact form of energy. And in a way, it takes up less of the environment. And then if we move from oil to uranium, it's even smaller. And so in a sense, the smaller, the more dense the energy is, the less of the environment it takes up.
And when we go back, when we go from oil to natural gas, which takes up more space, and from natural gas to solar or wind, you have to pollute the whole environment by putting up windmills everywhere. Or you have to cover the whole desert with solar panels.
And that is a good way to look at it because it is a form of pollution. Yeah.
And so there was a way that nuclear was supposed to be the energy mode of the 21st century. And then, yeah, there are all these historical questions. Why did it get stopped? Why did we not go down that route? The standard explanation of why it stopped was that there were all these dangers. We had Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and then the Fukushima one in Japan, I think, 2011.
And you had these various accidents. My alternate theory on why nuclear energy really stopped is that it was sort of dystopian or even apocalyptic because it turned out to be very dual use. If you build nuclear power plants, it's only sort of one step away from building nuclear weapons. And it turned out to be a lot trickier to separate those two things out than it looked.
And I think the signature moment was 1974 or 75 when India gets the nuclear bomb. And the U.S., I believe, had transferred the nuclear reactor technology to India. We thought they couldn't weaponize it. And then it turned out it was pretty easy to weaponize. And then the...
And then sort of the geopolitical problem with nuclear power was you either, you know, you need a double standard where we have nuclear power in the U.S., but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the U.S. gets to keep its nuclear weapons. We don't let a hundred other countries have nuclear weapons.
And that's an extreme double standard, probably a little bit hard to justify, right? Or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one-world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either.
And then sort of the compromise was just to regulate it so much that maybe the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones. Like even China, which is the country where they're building the most nuclear power plants, they built way less than people expected a decade ago because, you know, they don't trust their own designs.
And so they have to copy the over-safety, over-protected designs from the West and the nuclear plants. Nuclear power costs too much money. It's cheaper to do coal. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, I'm not going to get the numbers exactly right, but if you look at what percent of Chinese electricity was nuclear, it wasn't that high. It was like maybe 4 or 5 percent in 2013, 2014.
And the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because, you know, they've maybe doubled the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear. But the relative percentage is still high. It's still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive when you have these over-safety designed reactors.
There are probably ways to build small reactors that are way cheaper, but then you still have this dual-use thing. Do you create plutonium? Are there ways you can create a pathway to building more nuclear weapons?
And if there was innovation, if nuclear engineering had gotten to a point where, let's say there wasn't Three Mile Island or Chernobyl didn't happen, do you think that it would have gotten to a much more efficient and much more effective version by now?
Well, my understanding is we have way more efficient designs. You can do small reactor designs, which are – you don't need this giant containment structure, so it costs much less per kilowatt hour of electricity you produce. So I think we have those designs. They're just not allowed. But then I think the problem is that –
If you were able to build them in all these countries all over the world, you still have this dual-use problem. And again, my alternate history of what really went wrong with nuclear power, it wasn't Three Mile Island. It wasn't Chernobyl. That's the official story. The real story was India getting the bomb.
Wow, that makes sense.
It completely makes sense. Jeez Louise. And then this is always the question about – There's always a big picture question. People ask me, you know, if I'm right about this picture of, you know, this slowdown in tech, this sort of stagnation in many, many dimensions. And then there's always a question, you know, why did this happen?
And my cop-out answer is always why questions are overdetermined because, you know, it can be – there are multiple reasons. So it could be why it could be we became a more feminized, risk-averse society. It could be that the education system worked poorly. It could be that we were just out of ideas. The easy ideas have been found. The hard ideas, the cupboard, nature's cupboard was bare.
The low-hanging fruit had been picked. So it can be overdetermined. But I think one dimension that's not to be underrated for the science and tech stagnation was that – an awful lot of science and technology had this dystopian or apocalyptic dimension. And probably what happened at Los Alamos in 1945 and then with the thermonuclear weapons in the early 50s
It took a while for it to really seep in, but it had this sort of delayed effect where maybe a stagnant world in which the physicists don't get to do anything and they have to putter around with DEI, but you don't build weapons that blow up the world anymore. you know, is that a feature or a bug? And so the stagnation was sort of like this response.
And so it sucks that we've lived in this world for 50 years where a lot of stuff has been inert. But if we had a world that was still accelerating on all these dimensions with supersonics and hypersonic planes and hypersonic weapons and, you know, modular nuclear reactors, maybe we wouldn't be sitting here and the whole world would have already blown up. And so we're in that...
We're in the stagnant path of the multiverse because it had this partially protective thing even though in all these other ways I feel it's deeply deranged our society.
That's a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. It really does. And particularly the dual use thing with nuclear power and especially distributing that to other countries. When you talk about the stagnation in this country, like I don't know how much you follow this whole UAP nonsense. I know we met – what was that guy's name at your place? The guy who did Chariots of the Gods?
Oh, Von Daniken. Yes. Yeah. You thought he was too crazy. You like Hancock but you don't like Von Daniken.
I didn't think he's too crazy. He just willfully, in my opinion, ignores evidence that would show that some of the things that he's saying have already been solved. And I think his... His hypothesis is all related to this concept that we have been visited and that that's how all these things were built and that this technology was brought here from another world.
And I think he's very ideologically locked into these ideas. And I think a much more compelling idea is that there were very advanced cultures for some reason 10,000 years ago. Whatever it was. Whatever the year was where they built some of the insane structures. It's 45, 100 years ago they roughly think the pyramids were built. Like whatever the fuck was going on there.
I think those were human beings. I think those were human beings in that place, in that time. And I think they had some sort of very sophisticated technology that was lost. And things can get lost. Things can get lost in cataclysms. Things can get lost in... They can get lost in disease and famine. There's all sorts of war, all sorts of reasons, the burning of the library of Alexandria.
There's all sorts of ways that technology gets lost forever. And you can have today someone living in Los Angeles in the most sophisticated high-tech society the world has ever known while you still have people that live in the Amazon that live in the same way that they have lived for thousands of years. So those things can happen in the same planet at the same time.
And I think while the rest of the world was essentially operating at a much lower vibration, there were people in Egypt that were doing some extraordinary things. I don't know how they got the information. Maybe they did get it from visitors. Maybe they did. But there's no real compelling evidence that they did. I think there's much more compelling evidence that a cataclysm happened.
When you look at the Younger Dryas impact theory, it's all entirely based on science. It's entirely based on core samples and iridium content and also massive changes in the environment over a very short period of time, particularly the melting of the ice caps in North America and just impact craters all around the world that we know something happened roughly 11,000 years ago.
And probably again 10,000 years ago. I think it's a regular occurrence on this planet that things go sideways and there's massive natural disasters. And I think that it's very likely that –
In some ways, the one in which we have the best history is the fall of the Roman Empire, which was obviously the culmination of the classical world. And it's somehow extremely unraveled. So I think my view on it is probably somewhere between yours and the— Von Daniken? No, not Von Daniken. I'm more on the— Let me try to define why this – agree on why this is so important today.
It's not just of antiquarian interest. The reason it matters today is because the alternative – if you say – Civilization has seen great rises and falls. It's gone through these great cycles. Maybe the Bronze Age civilizations were very advanced, but someone came up with iron weapons. So there was just one dimension where they progressed, but then everything else they could destroy.
And so – or the fall of the Roman Empire was, again, this pretty cataclysmic thing where there were diseases and then there were political things that unraveled. But somehow it was a massive regression for four, five, 600 years into the Dark Ages. And – And the sort of naive, the progressive views, things always just got monotonically better.
And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history where even the Roman Empire didn't decline. And even, you know, one sort of stupid way to quantify this stuff is with pure demographics. And so it's the question, how many people lived in the past? And...
And the rises and falls of civilization story is there were more people who lived in the Roman Empire because it was more advanced. It could support a larger population. And then the population declined. The city of Rome maybe had a million people at its peak. And then by, I don't know, 650 AD, maybe it's down to 10,000 people or less. You have this complete collapse in population.
And then the sort of alternate... purely progressive view is the population has always just been monotonically increasing because it's a measure of how, in some sense, things in aggregate have always been getting better. So I am definitely on your side that population had great rises and falls. Civilizations had great rises and falls. And so that part of it, I agree with you.
or even some variant of what Hancock or Fundana can say. The The place where I would say I think things are different is I don't think, I don't think, and therefore it seems possible something could happen to our civilization. That's always the upshot of it. If it had been monotonically always progressing, then there's nothing we should worry about. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
And then certainly, certainly the thing, the sort of alternate Hancock, von Däniken, Joe Rogan, history of the world, tells us is that we shouldn't take our civilization for granted. There's things that can go really haywire. I agree with that.
The one place where I differ is I think, I do think our civilization today is on some dimensions way more advanced than any of these past civilizations were. I don't think any of them had nuclear weapons. I don't think any of them had, you know, spaceships or anything like that. And so the failure mode is likely to be somewhat different from these past ones.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think technology progressed in a different direction. That's what I think. I think structural technology, building technology had somehow or another achieved levels of competence that's not available today. When you look at the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, there's 2,300,000 stones in it. The whole thing points to do north, south, east, and west.
It's an incredible achievement. The stones, some of them were moved from a quarry that was 500 miles away through the mountains. They have no idea how they did it. Massive stones. The ones inside the King's Chamber, the biggest ones are like 80 tons. It's crazy. The whole thing's crazy. How did they do that? Whatever they did, they did without machines, supposedly.
They did without the use of the combustion engine. They didn't have electricity. And yet they were able to do something that stands the test of time, not just so you could look at it. You can go to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon. It's gorgeous. It's amazing. It's incredible. But I can understand how people could have built it.
The pyramids is one of those things you just look at and you go, what the fuck was going on here? What was going on here? And none of these people are still around. You have this strange culture now that's entirely based around, you know, you have Cairo and an enormous population of visitors, right? Which is a lot of it. People just going to stare at these ancient relics.
What was going on that those people were so much more advanced than anyone anywhere else in the world?
I'm not sure I would anchor on the technological part, but I think the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is what motivated them culturally.
Well, how did they do it physically?
Why did they do it?
Why were you – So why but also how? How is a big one because it's really difficult to solve. There's no traditional conventional explanations. for the construction, the movement of the stones, the amount of time that it would take. If you move 10 stones a day, I believe it takes 664 years to make one of those pyramids. So how many people were involved? How long did it take?
How'd they get them there? How'd they figure out how to do it? How come the shittier pyramids seem to be dated later? What was going on in that particular period of time where they figured out how to do something so extraordinary that even today, 4,500 years later, we stare at it and we go, I don't know. I don't know what the fuck they did.
I haven't studied it carefully enough. I'll trust you that it's very hard. I think the – I would say the real mystery is why were they motivated? Because you can't live in a pyramid. It's just – it was just the afterlife of the pharaoh.
There's some debate about that. Christopher Dunn is an engineer who believes that it was some sort of a power plant. He's got this very bizarre theory that there was a chamber that exists. You see the structure of the pyramid, the inside of it. There's a chamber that's subterranean.
And he believes this subterranean chamber was pounding on the surface of the earth and of the walls of the thing, creating this very specific vibration. They had shafts that came down into the queen's chamber. These shafts, they would pour chemicals into these shafts. And then there was limestone at the end of it. This is all his theory, not mine.
The end of it, there was this limestone, which is permeable, right? So the limestone, which is porous, these gases come through and creates this hydrogen that's inside of this chamber. Then there are these shafts inside the king's chamber that are –
They're getting energy from space, gamma rays and all the shit from space, and then it's going through these chambers, which are very specifically designed to target these gases and put them into this chamber where they would interact with this energy, and he believes it's enough to create electricity.
It's a crazy theory. I'm always too fast to debunk all these things. But just coming back to our earlier conversation, it must have been a crazy power plant to have a containment structure much bigger than a nuclear reactor.
Yeah, well, it's ridiculous. But it's also a different kind of technology, right? If nuclear technology was completely not on the table, they didn't understand atoms at all. But they did understand that there's rays that come from space and that you could somehow harness the energy of these things with specific gases and through some method convert that into some form of electricity.
But if it takes so much power to put all these rocks on the pyramid, you have to always look at how efficient the power plant is. So it has to be like the craziest reaction ever to justify such a big containment structure because even nuclear power plants don't work economically.
Barrel of work. Well, they didn't do a lot of them. They only did this one in Giza. And then there was other pyramids that he thinks had different functions that were smaller. But the whole purpose of it is, or the whole point of it is, we don't know what the fuck it is. We don't know why they did it. We have a group of new archaeologists that are looking at it from a completely different theory.
They're not looking at it like it's a tomb. The established archaeologists have insisted that this is a tomb for the pharaoh. the newer archaeologists, established archaeologists, are looking at it and considering whether or not there were some other uses for this thing, and one of them is the concept of the peril project.
I don't know if this is an alternate history theory, but I'm always into the James Fraser, Golden Bough, René Girard, violence, sacred history, where you have always this question about the origins of monarchy and kingship. And the sort of Girard-Fraser intuition is... that it is something like if every king is a kind of living God,
then we have to also believe the opposite, that maybe every god is a dead or murdered king and that somehow societies were organized around scapegoats. The scapegoats were – there was sort of a crisis in the archaic community. It got blamed on a scapegoat. The scapegoat was attributed all these powers.
And then at some point, the scapegoat, before he gets executed, figures out a way to postpone his execution and turn the power into something real. And so there's sort of this very weird adjacency between the monarch and the scapegoat. And then, I don't know, the sort of riff would be that the first pyramid did not need to be invented. It was just the stones that were thrown on a victim.
And then it somehow – and that's the original form.
The stones that were thrown on a victim.
A community stones a victim to death. A tribe runs after a victim. You stone them to death. You throw stones on the victim. That's how you create the first tomb.
And then – And then as it gets more complicated, you create a tomb that's 2 million – Stones.
And you get a pharaoh who figures out a way to postpone his own execution or something like this. I think there's—I'm going to blank on the name of this ritual, but I believe in the old Egyptian kingdoms, which were sort of around the time of the Great Pyramids or even before, it was something like— In the 30th year of the reign of the pharaoh, the pharaoh gets transformed into a living god.
And then this perhaps dates to a time where in the 30th year of the pharaoh's reign, the pharaoh would get ritually sacrificed or killed. And you have all these... societies where the kings lived, were allowed to rule for an allotted time where, you know, you become king and you draw the number of pebbles out of a vase and that corresponds to how many years?
Was this, Jamie? The Sed Festival. Heb Sed Festival of Tales, an ancient Egyptian ceremony that celebrated the continued rule of Pharaoh. The name was taken from the name of the Egyptian wolf god, one of whom's name was Wipowet. Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. Or said. The less formal feast name, the Feast of the Tail, is derived... Yeah, next paragraph is the one to start.
Okay. That one right there. The ancient festival might perhaps have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively because of age or condition.
Interesting. Interesting. So you can't kill him now.
And then eventually, said festivals were jubilees, several of which were thrown for 30 years. And then every three to four years after that. So when it becomes unthinkable to kill the pharaoh, the pharaoh gets turned into a living god. Before that, the pharaoh gets murdered and then gets worshipped as a... dead pharaoh or distant god.
That's interesting, but it still doesn't solve the engineering puzzle. The engineering puzzle is the biggest one. How do they do that? The one I'm focusing on is the motivational puzzle. Yeah, but even if you have all the motivation in the world, if you want to build a structure that's insane to build today, and you're doing it 4,500 years ago, we're dealing with a massive puzzle.
I think the motivational part is the harder one to solve. If you can figure out the motivation, you'll figure out a way to organize the whole society. And if you can get the whole society working on it, you can probably do it.
But don't you think that his grasp of power was in peril in the first place, which is why they decided to come up with this idea of turning them into a living god? So to have the amount of resources and power and then the engineering and then the understanding of... whatever methods they use to shape and move these things.
Well, this is always the anthropological debate between Voltaire, the Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century, and Durkheim, the 19th century anthropologist. And Voltaire believes that religion originates as a conspiracy of the priests to maintain power. And so politics comes first. The politicians invent religion.
And then Durkheim says the causation is the other way around, that somehow religion came first and then politics somehow came out of it. Of course, once the politics comes out of it, the priests, the religious authorities have political power. They figure out ways to manipulate it, things like this. But I find – You know, I find the Durkheim story far more plausible than the Voltaire one.
I think the religious categories are primary and the political categories are secondary.
So you think the religion came first? But what about if we emanated from tribal societies? Tribal societies have always had leaders. When you have leaders, you're going to have dissent. You're going to have challenges. You're going to have politics. And you have people negotiating to try to maintain power, keep power, keep everything organized. That's the origin of politics, correct?
You know, I think that's a whitewashed, enlightenment, rationalist description of the origin of politics.
What do you think the origin of politics is?
I think it's far more vile than that. What you're giving me is a – Well, it's very vile.
The control and power and maintaining power involves murder and sabotage.
Well, OK. That's more like it. Yeah. But what you gave me a minute ago sounds more like a social contract theory in which people sit down, negotiate and have a nice legal chit-chat to draw up the social contract. That is a complete fiction.
Yeah, I don't think that. I think that there was probably various levels of civility that were achieved when agriculture and when establishments were constructed that were near resources where they didn't have to worry as much about food and water and things along those lines. Things probably got a little bit more civil.
But I think that the origins of it are like the origins of all human conflict. It's filled with murder.
Well, I think at the beginning was madness and murder.