Peter Thiel
Appearances
Candace
New Hacking Blackmail Scandal & CIA Market Control | Candace Ep 192
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?
Search Engine
Genesis
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.
Search Engine
Genesis
You know, would the gentleman in the front row like to have the money? But the distance is a little far.
Search Engine
Genesis
Just somebody come up and get it. But they don't know how to throw it out at people.
Search Engine
Genesis
You know, so if we... This is, by the way, this is... I took this slide from Vitalik himself, so...
Search Engine
Genesis
So this is a... And there's sort of a question, how do we compare and contrast them? And so if we look at the current market caps, $830 billion versus $386 billion of Ethereum...
Search Engine
Genesis
I think the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha is perhaps the most honest and the most direct in it.
Search Engine
Genesis
And we have to just go out from this conference and take over the world. Thank you very much. All right, we're going to have a five-minute break, and then we're going to have an amazing session that's going to be moderated by my friend Alex Basti.
Search Engine
Genesis
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.
The Bulwark Podcast
Anne Applebaum: Planning for a Techno-Oligarchic Regime
The ancien regime that is liberalism. is really exhausted. The 1990s are over. The 20th century is over. The 2020 election was not a return to normalcy, but it was, in retrospect, a last stand for the ancien regime with its very ancien president. And I think that's kind of what's over.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then she goes like this. She goes, I can't believe you'd show up. People have said that they can't come on here because Joe Rogan would get mad at them. I said, that's absolutely ridiculous. Why would I say he doesn't care? He would never care. I said, oh, that's so silly. It's the silliest thing ever. They think we're at war. I just said put out the thing, put out the hour online.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If you can only put out a few minutes on network, fine. But it's wrong to have someone come in and talk for an hour and then not- And then use three minutes. And then use five minutes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's fucked up. So how much did they use? We don't know yet. They haven't put it out. And did they say we can't put the whole hour out? I texted this journalist and she texted me. She goes, I'm pushing for like a long form release. I go- Yeah, man. Just put out the interview.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, we had a conversation about all these things you guys talk about. Yeah, you guys have a website. Then what are we doing? Don't you have a YouTube page?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Put the fucking whole hour out. I go, she goes, what do you think that Joe Rogan should, why is it so popular? I go, well, one of the reasons is he doesn't edit people. They're not edited. They come on, they say what they want to say, and there's no editing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So what's weird about those institutions is they will sit you down for an hour and then I guess cherry pick what they think their audience wants to see.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, she didn't know when she said that. She goes, comedy's right wing. I go, she goes, name left of center comedians. I named literally eight of them, and I said they all are in arenas. I go, what are you talking about? It's so dumb. What are you talking about?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I said there's a lot of Joe's positions, if you look at them, that are left of center positions, and there's a lot of my positions or anyone's positions. I said there's nobody that you can easily put in a box. But they want you to be in that box.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Is there an arm of the Democratic Party? National Committee, and they're an arm of that party.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
All of the old Bush era... neoconservative people who pushed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay and all of this stuff all find homes usually on MSNBC or CNN advocating for war with Iran or an escalation in Ukraine. So it's kind of an establishment. They don't really care about party. Right. And, you know. They're doing better now, though.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. They should. They are. In the world, there are good principled arguments that against right wing things. Yes. You just can't have people who are completely out of it make them. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I could not care less. Because that's the way they operate. You always usually, like, a lot of times you end up accusing people of something you're doing. Right. Because you are familiar with that. So they're like, well, we have a top-down corporate oligarchy telling us what to do. Is that the way it works with you?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Like, no, Joe Rogan doesn't email people at the beginning of the week and go, hey, guys, this is... This is where you can't go. This is the most insane thing ever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It used to have parts unknown on it. The new thing they're doing, this is a very interesting thing that's happening. If somebody says something that they don't like and they can't immediately dismiss it, they go, but the fans of that thing are bad people. This is an interesting attack point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They go, but somebody with a massive audience, if they find a sliver of that audience to be objectionable in any way, they then go, well, the fans of that type of questioning are anti-Semitic or racist or something. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I want more of them. Yeah. So if they're a state-sponsored bot that can jack my ratings up. They can. If they want to come over to me. Do you have anything nice to say about Israel? Any Ukraine. I'm waiting for the money. I texted Barry Weiss. I go, here's the way this game works. I get a little bit of money first. Not I go on and defend whatever the hell you people want to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I'm not going to get my beak wet. If you and I go to Israel, will you slap on the yarmulke? Absolutely. Absolutely. We kiss the wall? Absolutely. Oh, yeah, sure. And my film is greenlit when? Do you have to kiss the wall? Is that the word? No, I don't know anything. Is that the wailing wall? I don't know, but Mike Huckabee's over there like a good Christian. Oh, well, he loves it over there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Because the fundamentalist Christians go hard with the Israel thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. What's very interesting is if Israel said to a fundamentalist Christian, if Netanyahu called Mike Huckabee and said, we're going to have to nuke Iran, he'd go, let's do it. That's what Jesus wants. Let's do it. That's what Jesus would want, a nuclear war. So that's where we've gotten. Jesus wants us to use the nukes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Where we have fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims on the other side, and everybody's playing this weird game. Yeah, there he is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They wear it in Brooklyn. It's that big furry Russian hat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
A bear dick hat. Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty sick hat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think people can't get past the fact that, like... Yeah, look at that hat.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. I like that Kanye West black Klan suit. That's dope. How about his giant swastika in diamonds? Have you seen that? What's funny is a jeweler made that. Oh, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
One Israeli Jewish guy made that. Significant markup. Yeah. Yeah, of course.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I've got to give you a swastika. I would. I would. It's only fair. Yeah, you need a tax. I think it's only fair. If you want a Jewish man to make a swastika, you've got to pay extra. People got to separate, you know, and I think this is not, I think people got to separate like governments from people. intelligence agencies from people. I think that's the whole thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think people are losing the ability to do that in this case, right? Because when you criticize Israel or you criticize something that may or may not have been done by a government or an intelligence agency, you're not criticizing people. Right. You're criticizing a group of people making decisions. I don't think America always does things that are in the best interest of the American people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
very passionately no one is ever questioning anything no one ever no one goes wait a minute like I think it's healthy to every now and then go maybe I'm wrong
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's an interesting case when someone like that in that position... repeatedly lied to people about the origins of that. Yeah. And is allowed to just be free. And faces zero consequences. Meanwhile, they were trying to put Trump in jail because he- Inflated the price of a condo. Yeah. He got an appraisal that was higher, and then they lied.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But these bitches seemed fine, these ladies. Well, for now. It was quick.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, this is what they all do. So I think really the funny thing about all the cases that they brought against Trump, a lot of those cases were rooted in just politicized version of something that's pretty standard that a lot of people have done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Always overvalue properties. And people get away with it. And it's not a crime.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They've got a bunch of morons to sign in on these things. It feels like you have – we're in some kind of cold war between two factions in American politics that are – using courts and lawyers to go at each other. It's not a hot war. People aren't fighting in the streets, but it does seem to be, these parties seem to no longer view each other as different sides of the same coin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There seems to be, especially when it comes to Trump, it seems to be like they cannot see him as anything other than an existential threat that has to be vanquished At any cost.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, it's inspiring. That's what I'm saying. It's inspiring. If a guy who's worth, what, a trillion dollars? Several billion? A hundred billion? Just imagine the conspiracies if they didn't make it. Yeah. Well, Pete, there's already people saying that they faked it, which I think is silly. Well, I love those people. But it's great. Those are the people that think space is fake. That's right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. And you got to win that game. Yeah. If you're playing that game, you're going to win. Yeah. If you do all these things, they have to work. And if Trump gets in office, you're going to have to do all these things. It's a problem. You're fucked. Then it's a problem. You know, it's like with JFK, they got him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You know, obviously not good, but they got him. And then that slammed the door shut. And then all their people came in and kept a cover up going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And there's maybe arguments that we actually didn't have real presidents prior to JFK. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you think that— I think you have these guys right here. These guys that go into the CIA, they learn all about these underground— They have all of these different relationships all over the world, right? Weapons, you know, weapons, drug running, weapons, all of these different, you know, terrorist groups, crime syndicates, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Their job is to know information about every government, all of the, you know, separatist groups that could potentially take over and become the next government. They have all of these connections. And then they either leave the CIA, they retire, or supposedly it never occurs to any of them to make a buck. That's the real question, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It never occurs to any of these people that there might be a great way to make a buck. working with some of these people outside of Congress, the White House, all of that. That's, as it's been explained to me by pretty smart people, that's what you have.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You have a rogue element of people in those agencies that have massive amounts of money and they're very well connected and they're running weapons. And the president has no idea what's going on. Right. And Congress has no idea what's going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They're not briefing a teacher from Georgia who got elected because he promised he was going to bring build a fucking shopping mall in a suburb of Atlanta about what they're doing in Syria. Right. They're not briefing these people. There's nothing democratic about what's happening. And so then you think to yourself, you're like, well, how do we make sure everyone keeps their mouth shut?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
How do we make sure everyone keeps their mouth shut? Cha-ching. Then we go, not only money, but that's when we bring in Ghislaine Maxwell. Ha, ha, ha. That's when we bring in Jeffrey Epstein, right? That's when we bring in people who go, let's all have fun. We've got a great weekend getaway planned.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then we can all be on camera doing something that would get us thrown in jail, have people rightly disgusted and want to kill us. And the worst things ever are now on camera somewhere. Those tapes are somewhere. Now everybody is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
is completely incapable of ever coming out and saying what's going on yeah and you know and then those people are running a a parallel government it's a parallel command structure and that's a huge problem and it was essentially completely in control for four years
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That guy's never really running things. Thousand percent. There's no way they let him. And it's probably still in control to a certain degree now because it's very hard. When you have something like that happening, it is very difficult to completely shut it down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. But there are already people going, well, they faked it. And I'm like, I hope they fake something better than that. I hope. If they're faking stuff, and they probably are faking some stuff, God, I hope they're faking stuff that's better than that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So many of these ex-intelligence chiefs pop up all over the world. They pop up in Dubai. They pop up on MSNBC. They love traveling. They're having meetings with people. They're all over the place. They love people. They love people. They love cultures. They love meeting different cultures. Yeah, the food's great.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And supposedly I heard from someone who's, again, smart and I consider trustworthy that there's actually large sectors of the global economy that are moved more in this direction than you'd think. Like there are tentacles into very large investment banks and private equity companies that a lot of these guys have. Let's put it that way. Obviously, it's not a shocking thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There doesn't seem to be a good answer to any of this. That becomes the real issue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
No, they wanted me to do stand-up at one conference and it wasn't like an Illuminati kind of thing. It was like a... I don't know. It was like some type of low-grade Illuminati.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It actually does sound nice. Maybe. No, I think that like... It does seem weird that a lot of... once you get to a certain level, people take an interest in you that never were interested. You know? For sure. For sure. People are interested. Welcome to my world. Yeah. It is strange that people seem to care about you or what you're saying or people going, I think your read on that is wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And you're like, why do you care what it is? I'm a fucking guy with a talk, you know, microphone once or twice a week. Yeah, but they don't like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, you also have to think about how much easier it is for, let's say, an intelligence community to manipulate them than it is to come in here like a...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But it is funny. It's like, what they'd have to do is pick somebody, have them become a comedian, start a podcast, get an audit. Like, it is difficult, right? Yes. Whereas if you work at a media company- It's very easy to just some new guys there. Yeah. Who's this? Right, right, right. Oh, you know what I mean? Yeah, that's Mike. Somebody just shows up. Hey, Suzanne. Suzanne.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What did he do for Navy Intelligence? Right. Lucky guy. That Watergate thing's so funny because- But I've been here for 30 years, Mike.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Bob's taking this case. Bob's taking down Nixon, who keeps asking questions about what happened to Kennedy. Did you see when Bill Murray was here? I did, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They don't care at all about getting any accurate information.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It was a sloppy burglary where they wanted to get caught. They traced it back to Nixon because Nixon was doing things they hated.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What you've done, I think, ultimately is good for the town. You bring people into the town.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle with that, the idea of that, that they're losing control. I think that seems to be the most – the angriest I've seen people online since the election that have railed against podcasts and they've railed against – they seem to be angry that they no longer have a monopoly on what people can hear. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They went a little higher than that Rocket Man documentary, that guy who shot himself up in a rocket. They went, like, a few feet higher than that guy. RIP that guy who drove by his grave on the way to Vegas when L.A. burned down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yes. Listen, there are a lot of people questioning World War II for not good reasons, of course. It's like people that bring up the age of consent. You go, wait a minute. Hey. What's going on? What are you doing? There are people, I think, that do launder not great reasons for questioning World War II through whatever. No doubt. No doubt. There is a very interesting...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
The teeth really come out, the gnashing of teeth come out in this country when you question at all the American war machine. Yes. And the pageantry of war and the – You know, iconography of the state and of war and of how important it is and how just it always is and how we're always on the right side of it and we're always doing the right thing. And World War Two, we 100 percent were.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But there are a lot of other times when we've made grave errors with our military.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I feel like. It's not good enough for, you can't just point to World War II, which is, again, we were correct. Yes. But I think there is this idea that if you, it's not an accident there's a million movies made about World War II. It's not an accident that there is a lot of pageantry surrounding World War II. Well, also that the World War II movies have heroes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So I think that inspires the idea that a military solution is always correct and that the use of force is always the right way to do it. And that coincidentally makes people lots and lots of money and their children never end up fighting those wars. Yeah. That seems to be a lot of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't people with bad motivations that are genuinely anti-Semitic or that genuinely have fascist inclinations or absolutely are. But I think there needs to be space to criticize the mythologizing of war in general. and the justification for endless wars all the time. Like Iran, I hope Trump does not go into Iran. That seems like a very bad idea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It also seems like a very bad idea for Iran to get nuclear weapons. That seems bad too. Yes, but I think there's ways to prevent that without a regime change war. This is what we have to do. This is what Tulsi Gabbard I think was very attractive about a lot of what she said during her confirmation hearing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
She goes, I understand that there are terrorists out there that are dangerous, but we got to find a way to deal with them without committing troops to stand there in an Islamic country. We've done this. We saw this movie. It doesn't work out. And I think we have to stop thinking that it's going to be better this time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If we decapitate the head of a foreign government and we have American soldiers in an Islamic country trying to set up a provisional government, the nightmare of that during Iraq, Paul Bremer, this weird British looking guy that they sent to stand on that rebel rubble with his boots. And, you know, the mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Like it brings back like, you know, to me, it's like I get flashbacks from it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Was it Ahmed Chalabi? Well, no, that was the guy that fed us all the bullshit to get us in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
By the way, does anyone know what's going on in Iraq right now? Mostly flea markets. If there was a gun to my head, I could not tell you what the state of Iraq was. I know the Taliban are in Afghanistan. What's going on in Iraq?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's a 20-year, you know, commitment. Or it was a very long time. Right. So that's like, I feel like that's the thing. That when you ever try to have a nuanced understanding of what we can and can't do. I don't think it's a great idea that Iran gets nuclear weapons. It seems like there are ways to prevent that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But we need these Houthis. It feels like we need these groups. We had ISIS. We had then ISIL. Now, you know, we had the people in Syria. I forget their names, something. But we need these little groups. And this is what we do. We just choose because all of these groups are not even they're just people hanging out. And then we give them weapons and get them going. They're just guys in a bar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And we show up and we start arming them and giving them stuff. And it's like that Bill Hicks joke where it's like, pick up the gun. Are the Houthis an existential threat to the United States? That feels crazy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
This is the problem. We could get rid of all of these threats in five minutes. But we don't seem to want to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
No, the Houthis are good. If you're doing stand-up, you've got to go once a year. You've got to go once a year, once every 18 months. And I like the Houthis because they feel it's like a new... But they're not sticking. No one's believing it. So now they're back to Hezbollah. Hezbollah wears the fatigues. If you get up Hezbollah, they're scary looking. The Houthis are not that scary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
The Houthis look like a bunch of dudes in a bazaar, like you said, like in a flea market. They're on a boat. They're holding up guns. No one cares. Hezbollah looks genuinely like, okay, let's not fuck with these people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They couldn't do jumping jacks. They couldn't do anything. But that's the whole thing. It's this weird global chessboard of like, you know, as someone said to me once, there's like a dial. You turn it up. You're like, more war, less war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, maybe Zyrtec or something. That's no fun. What is it, the cedar? I don't know what it is. I think people say cedar fever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What a great book. Well, not only the Tom O'Neill book, but then this Dave McGowan book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon. I lived up there when I was living in LA. I lived up there. And I'm telling you, that is the creepiest vibe of any area that I've ever been to in my life. It's a weird vibe. They have that fucking military installation, that lookout mountain. Jared Leto owns that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Okay. He's a good guy. I'm sure he is. I'm not saying it's bad to have a cult.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I lived there for three years. I didn't get one text. I had not one. I used to drive by and point at it and go, look, it's the thing. What do they do? What does Jarrett Little's?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Just a bunch of people eating shellfish in Long Island being racist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you think – you know, I was on the All In podcast the other day, and they were talking about these chips, these NVIDIA chips, and how what's interesting is people are setting up – Because we have these export controls that don't allow us to send certain chips to China because they're able to like manipulate them and then become like the world's largest semiconductor producer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But now all these fun fake companies are starting in like Bhutan or Cambodia and they're buying the chips or Singapore and then they all get back to China.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Whoopsies. And so they were talking about, like, is it better to send them the chips or is it better to, if you don't send them the chips, then it spurs their innovation and they make the chips?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you think some of those drones over New Jersey were theirs?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you worry at all about the tech people being Democrats up until five minutes ago? Yeah, you should.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think the worry is that people don't trust the government, nor should they, but I don't know if they trust these tech guys either.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's the whole thing. I think that people are wary of the tech people because these were the same people that were censoring and kicking people off the internet when the people in the White House were blue. And now that the people in the White House are red, it's swung back the other way. Exactly. So I think people are a little wary of that. They don't know where that goes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, it's being done everywhere, right? So it's being done at the highest levels. And I think people are uncomfortable with, And just losing – even though a lot of them realized that we didn't have a ton of control, they feel like – I think when you head into the world of tech where people just don't even know where this goes, where does it go? Does it go to transhumanism?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Does it go to like AI replacing everybody and then at what point – What do you do with those people that AI replaced? Do you give them all cryptocurrency that's linked to their biological whatever? I've heard all these ideas, right? How do you deal with driverless cars where the entire road is automated? How do you deal with that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think that fills people with an anxiety where they go, what is the plan? And a lot of these tech guys are like, well, we've got to get off the planet. And I think people start going like, wait a minute. That's Weinstein. Eric Weinstein.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. Well, for sure. For sure. Do you think Trump and Musk will have a falling out eventually? I don't know. It's a good question. The media keeps trying to push that they are. It feels like they're just big personalities and that there's an inevitability when you have two guys that are incredibly, you know. Perhaps.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If you get pulled over here, a cop gives you money. They go, Mr. Rogan, here's a check. I mean, there's no way. There's no law that you cannot break here. I'm guaranteeing you. I don't think that's correct. I think you could do a lot. I think they would cover up a murder. That's sweet. If you murdered three people, I think the awesome PD would go, whatever, man. He's doing a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They'd bring that mayor, that guy, and he'd go, what? They'd go, yeah, the suspect's Joe Rogan. He was standing over the bodies. They'd go, are you out of your fucking mind? Drive him home right now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, no, something's up. There's a serial killer. Something's going on. I believe there's a serial killer. What are they doing? They're luring people to that bridge and then- Yeah, it's not hard. People like to go to the bridge.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's so weird. I guess it's such a high to kill someone. To me, I'm like, what do you get out of it? But I guess the people that are doing it like it. They're broken. There's broken people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you ever talk to like, I'm sure you have, this is a stupid question, but like the high level law enforcement guys that have just met these monsters and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And is there, is there, do they believe that it's like, is there any part of them that believe someone's just born? Yes. Interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah stuff like that and then they eventually work their way up to Humans now it seems so much harder to do it because of these phones Surveillance it's it is but it's you can still do it not in Austin. You can get away with you can drown people Why don't you think they'll admit it? They don't want people getting spooked? That's a good question. That's a good question. Maybe I'm wrong.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I mean, one of the biggest things ever in Austin were those crazy yogurt shop murders. HBO just came out with a documentary about them. When was that? It was many years ago. This crazy yogurt shop murder thing. HBO just did a doc. Happened in Austin.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It was like a famous Case and they it's completely unsolved except they put some people in jail for it But then later let one of them at like it was just one of those things where nobody was sure about what happened So they were murdering people that went to the yogurt. It was 1991 and it just South by Southwest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So they all take credit for things they didn't do. Exactly. To just beef up the body count. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you think that there are people... You know, National Park seemed to be like a hotbed of people disappearing. Yeah, Appalachian Trail people, yeah. Yeah, do you think that's people getting you, or is that a lot of it, like, I got lost, I got eaten? You get lost.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I wonder if all of them were, you think they were like prepared to die? No. Katy Perry was prepared to die. In her eyes, something's off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You can't do anything. It just eats you alive. And those woods are so dense in the Pacific Northwest and stuff like that. I mean, everywhere, but... Especially the Pacific Northwest.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
These hippies are really violent. Oh, they get violent once it's money. These hippies are junkies and you know, like this whole hippie thing I think is kind of a lie.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's so funny. It's so funny the weird like marijuana where it's like it's federally still illegal, but like states, it's legal in certain states. Yeah. And there's that gray area where there's just like you have half of that business is like in the shadows and half of it's and people making lots of money. It's strange.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It feels like a lot of the experimental harm reduction policies in places like Portland are going the other way. Well, they went a little crazy in a place that was already crazy. Yeah, they had a woman driving around shooting people up called the stabbing wagon. And she was like, if somebody needed a fix, she'd pull up and give them clean needles and stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, because you're stabbing. And if you're just tweeting. No, this is like a way to help. Oh, Portland.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And people would just be chilling and like, hey, I need a couple of clean needles. So this woman would just show up. There'd be like a bunch of junkies hanging out. She'd show up. She'd hop out of the stabbing wagon with a bunch of clean needles, hand them out. People are like, fuck yeah. Good to see you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And she's like, fuck yeah. I hope you're all doing good. And they're like, well, you know how it is. Oh, my God. And the problem was that didn't work. Not only did it not work, it encouraged people to move there to shoot up. Yeah, actually, that's true. So people started moving there because they're like, this is actually a pretty good deal. They don't care if you live on the street.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And there's this bitch in a van that shows up with clean needles. And they give you money. Yeah, and whatever you need. They give you free money and food. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So at the end of the day, it's like that seems like a good way to combat drug use is to have a van of drugs. That van got a $1.5 million grant.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Get high. They're trying to help people get high in a safe way. Bro, where she parked that van?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I mean, it's a good question. She probably lived in the burbs and then came in and then did what she needed to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, that's a good point. You know those weird Pacific Northwest suburbs? A lot of them aren't. My burbs, the ones that I like.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Those people are- It's different. They're like people that live outside of Chernobyl.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's different. There's not a lot of sun up there. Something's going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What was funny is there was a big article where they were like, yeah, this is actually- What's crazy is you read about those cities, right? Like Portland and San Francisco. They'll do the craziest thing ever, and then two years later, they'll start going like, yeah, this just is not having the results. Yeah. That we thought it would have. Like this is drug use is up. Crime is up. Violence is up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So Santa Monica now is doing a curfew because there's been violent crimes at night. No way. They're thinking about doing a curfew in Santa Monica. So again, because Santa Monica is thinking about doing a curfew because there's like violent crimes. So instead of just going like, hey, we got to throw these people in jail. Like it's nine o'clock. Go home. This is California.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
This is the biggest economy in our country, and they're thinking of having a curb because they're all out of ideas on how to stop people from being victims of violent crime. Bro, I got friends who can't sell their houses there. No, it's bad. I'm glad I sold my house when it did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Nobody wants to buy houses there. They're like, we're getting out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Uber rich people are... a lot of them are just keeping their houses because they can't get the money they want. So like people that are like in Bel Air, those crazy things, right? Right. Beverly Hills, Bel Air, these behemoths.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You also got to hope that they elect Rick Caruso and he goes around California in a tank. With a bunch of guys in bazookas, and it's like the craziest thing you've ever seen, that's all you can hope for. You need like a Rudy Giuliani type character. Yeah, I mean, you need Sergeant Slaughter from the old WWF. You need a fully fascist. You need a guy to run as a fascist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
When they go, are you a Republican? He goes, no, no, no, no, no. I am a fascist. This is a military dictatorship. You need four years of a military dictatorship in California to just turn it around, to just start steering it the other way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, it's going red. There's only so many times you can wake up in a $4 million house with a gun in your mouth. Before you start thinking differently about it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Absolutely. They will always take the side of the people that are trying to destroy civilization. Always.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Now, so they go up there and they float for like 10 minutes. At least. And then they come down. Let's not minimize this. No, I know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think what you have... I don't know if it's a grand plan, but I think what you have is you have two things... They're happening simultaneously. You have the people, the last people that seem to want to be in politics are people that believe in like nothing. They're like empty suit Gavin Newsom types who just really don't seem, they just, whatever room they're in, Wait a minute.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, that proves my point. That proves my point now, right? He's a believer. So now he's like, oh, things are going right. I'll go to the right. Things are going to the left. I'll go to the left. So you have like these people that just don't they will not like Sanders or Trump, whatever you think about them. They're not going to like, quote, stand on business.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They're not going to tell people, here's where I'm at. This is the way I feel. They're just empty vessels. And then at the same time, you have that happening again. You have the craziest people in the world that somehow have gotten a hold of a ton of money and a ton of influence on social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And those empty suit politicians are like scared of these lunatics that believe the craziest things you've ever heard. So these politicians are just like taking edicts from these crazy people online who tell them that we need the stabbing wagon and we need all this stuff. I don't know. how that happened, that somebody should look at that, how that happened and study it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I think it's a lot of these politicians are deeply corrupt. And I think they're terribly afraid of whatever corruption they're involved with coming to the surface. And it could be personal in their personal life. It could be with the state. I think, you know, the mismanagement of money, of resources, all of that stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So if I was a really corrupt politician, I would just do the craziest left-wing shit. so that I could never be accused of anything. Good move. And I would just let them do whatever the hell they want. I'd go, yeah, well, fucking whatever. We got a new law that says they got to draw blood in your house from you before you can defend yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, rappers are honest. A lot of them, even though they might lie about how much money they have and stuff, there's a certain honesty to that genre of music. Clearly, you can go too far like P. Diddy. You can go too far. But he wasn't super honest. He seemed to be concealing a bit. He seemed to be. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If the CIA was like, we can't really, we don't really know anything about like this world of like, you know, that's not what we do. We're like a bunch of Harvard guys and we have these fucking weirdos that we know about how to get in with like our people, but we need someone who was like a black guy to do it. It could have been Pete Diddy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Big, powerful billionaires are- probably they're their own governments. So, I mean, when you run afoul of them, I think there's many ways at which they can get you. Also, they feel like they pay so much money for taxes. I think that's a lot of these intelligence agencies are working for those people. They're not, I think, on their own. There's big money there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
to be made and there's a lot, the people that own these companies and have been rich for a very long time and who aren't, you know, on reality TV and you don't really know who they are but they like, some of them are on the Forbes list, some of them aren't.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Some of them are just incredibly wealthy and they've made their money in ways that you could barely understand and those are people that, you know, are the reason historically that the CIA is going into Latin America and overthrowing government so that United Fruit can, you know, It's true. Have a monopoly. Have a monopoly, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So they're doing things at the behest of these ultra-wealthy families that control huge industries.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And they were trying to replicate a craft that had landed, crashed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And that's the way the whole thing seems to be organized. Yeah, and always has been. We're just learning it now. You know, that's all the difference. But it is falling apart now because some of their kids are doing stand-up comedy. No, literally.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I mean, there are people, they're young in New York and they're just like, their parents are some of the wealthiest people in the world and these kids are like doing stand-up, which is a terrible sign for the empire. That's not a great sign for the empire is that like a guy that would have taken over his dad's business is like doing dick jokes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's right. But we need them doing that. Some of them. Having heart attacks? Yes. Everyone can't be a clown? There is something deeply unhealthy about the Illuminati doing stand-up. I don't love that idea. Well, unless they're using ChatGPT, how good could their material be?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's just funny to meet some of these people, and then you talk to them, and they'll just casually drop that they're like, you know... Their parents are like billionaires. And you're like, that's awesome, man. And they're just doing bar shows. It's kind of interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And they're nice people, but just to pull out and look at it from a sociological standpoint, it says something about people's idea of the future that these people just want to be famous now. How many of them are there? That's more than you'd think. Really? Yeah. And it's a New York thing? Yeah, it's a lot of rich people live there.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I'm talking about mega rich, like not like, hey, my dad's a successful whatever. I'm talking about like, whoa. Billions. Big money. Yeah. Where you go, interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
The kids kind of float around and they're doing, it's just very funny. It's something that makes me laugh. It's just like a billionaire kid on stage looking at someone in the audience going, what do you do for a living?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, what do you do for a living? Maybe this is the first time they've met people that aren't billionaires. That could also be a thing. This might be a way to just socialize Illuminati kids. They've met their housekeepers before. Maybe they asked them, like, what should I talk about on stage? Well, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I mean, they have... And what's funny is, like, they have parties in their big houses and bring their other comic friends who are bums. You know, young comics. I mean, we're all bums. So then, like, the parents are like, hello. And they bring in, like, a bum and they go, this is my buddy. And then... He's stealing from the buffet. He's just, like, staring at them going, whoa, this place rocks.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's like a sitcom. Yeah. And they're like, these are my friends. And I think the parents are kind of like, oh, well, isn't that nice? Maybe it's a phase. I think the parents look at it like they're going through a phase. That's interesting that there's more than one of them doing stand-up. It says something about...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That group of people that used to run everything, they have a dearth of purpose in their life. They're kind of aimless and they float around. I don't mean specifically rich comedian kids. I just mean like that ruling class, what are they doing now? They don't really have a purpose. They kind of float around. They try this new age spirituality bullshit. They travel all over the place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You look at any of these rich kids' Instagrams, all they're doing is traveling. It's all the same shit. We're going to Anguilla. Go here, go there. There's no purpose. You know... I think they don't feel like America has a defining mission. Like if you look at families like the Kennedys, the Bushes, whatever, you think about those families. They served in the military.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What layer of the government do you think is working on projects like that? Like, is it all the DARPA people?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They believed that there was some type of arc of history that they were a part of. I feel like a lot of rich people now just kind of don't believe in much of anything and it's just kind of like, I don't know, bored. They start a fake company. Well, if your whole –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. I think that's one of the big problems now and that's why I think you saw like a lot of like people get crazy on the left and they started instituting like all these like weird virtue things
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
you know, these purity tests and stuff like that is because I think they feel a lack of meaning and they wanted to give them, a lot of them wanted self-flagellation and like, they wanted the tenets of religion, they wanted meaning, they just don't have it. So I think that's what happens with a lot of them. And their kids are nice people, they're not bad people. It's just funny to see like,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Because most people who do comedy, a lot of them aren't poor. A lot of them are middle class people because they have the ability to go and at least think it's an option. But it is funny when someone goes, I'm doing comedy and I'm the scion of great wealth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's an interesting thing to me, just because I've always been fascinated with rich people and these people that run the world. And it's so interesting that some of their kids are like, I'm going to do stand-up comedy now. When was the first time you met a really rich person? How old were you? I met a couple of mafia people that my dad used to play music, so they owned some bars.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But they weren't super rich. I would observe them, because my uncle was the director of operations for all these restaurant groups in New York City, this restaurant group in New York City. that had these big high-end steakhouses. And I would go, and one of them was on 63rd and Park. And I would sit in this steakhouse with my parents. I was probably eight or nine years old. And you'd look around.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I said to my dad once, I was like, maybe 10 or 11. And this is a weird thing to say to a 10 or 11-year-old. I was like, who are these people? My dad goes, these people run the world. I was just very fascinated by all these, like, People that were so different because in Long Island, where I came from, everyone was loud and, you know, fighting all the time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And, you know, my best friend, Josh, who lived two houses down from me, his mother, Eileen, would scream at his father in the front yard. And he was like a... conductor for the railroad, and she would just go, why didn't you do it?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then you would go to Manhattan, and a lot of these restaurants that my uncle had, you'd see these kind of quiet people, and they were all very well-dressed, and they were in suits. In Manhattan, they live in these stone townhouses like Epstein did. They live in these little mini stone townhouses. And I was just fascinated. I was like, it's very interesting. These people are interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And that to me is an interesting thing. It's like, why are certain people in certain positions what role do the politicians play and what role do these really quiet rich people play that are kind of waspy and could be Jewish, could be anything. They're just kind of like, you know, they're quiet. They don't really want you to know too much about them. They really value their privacy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So it's funny with the kids doing standup comedy to me, And even these rich people that go on these reality shows, it's interesting that it used to be sacrilegious, the idea that you would show people how much money you had or that you would talk about yourself. And a lot of that started to change. A lot of these rich people just want to be famous. It almost feels like it's the last thing left.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I totally get it. If you're a young kid, you go on YouTube, you go, I want to be David Dobrik. I don't want to be... Who's that? David Dobrik. He's like a big guy on YouTube. Oh, okay. He does... Mr. Beast? He's like a Mr. Beast type. He's not as big. Mr. Beast is like a planet.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But Dobrik's big, you know, or whoever. Like they look at these young and they entertain like younger people. He does fun videos about like, hey, whatever. I don't know that. It's always the same. It's like, what if I fill the pool with M&Ms? Whatever. It's like that type of thing. It's not like the Ukraine deep dive or whatever. It's a fun, goofy thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And kids look at that and go, well, that guy's making a lot of money. He has a great car. He's got a hot girlfriend. He lives in a big mansion. I want to be that guy. Of course. But I think they missed the idea that that guy works really, really hard. Right. That's the thing that I think people don't understand about these social media people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They do have a crazy constitution in terms of how much they post, how hard they're working. Now, you might say, okay, the stuff they do is ridiculous or silly or not valuable, and I might agree on a lot of those things, but they are always putting it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
How do you feel about – can you teach people to work hard? I'm sure you can. What do you think – because I've seen so many people that are super talented but they – for whatever reason, they're not – that muscle of working hard or the dedication to it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's why I thought that show Dance Moms was good, that fat woman who screamed at those kids and demanded greatness and would make them cry. I thought that was good. You never saw Dance On?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
This woman, Abby Lee Miller, she screamed at these young kids, and one of them became Jojo Siwa, so it's not like there was any damage done. And, you know, I think it's good. I like to see greatness demanded of children. This lady, look at her hair. Watch this woman. Push the envelope.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
By the way, I guarantee you she can get a seat at Roscoe's. Really? That's the one place she can get. If you saw her, you wouldn't sit her on Roscoe's? The first thing, I would kick someone out for her in Roscoe. But yeah, it is interesting that a lot of these kids now, they just look at... you know, the followers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
How do you feel about, you're a parent, when the Jonathan Haidt book comes out and he goes, we should get rid of phones for kids until they're 16. Does that make sense or not really? No, because then you alienate your kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Do you think they'll bring charges against anyone for fraud?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
People that give up their phones always talk about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It is good to detach. It is interesting. Imagine if you just didn't even engage, like didn't really look, weren't in it at all.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So you think it would be miserable to just be happy somewhere?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You have to be connected because you have to build followers to get booked now because these clubs are like, we've got to book people with followers. You're not necessarily looking at who's working hard or who's good. And I feel for a lot of younger people because they have to, you know, they have to have a social media presence early on, maybe even before they figured out what they want to say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Maybe, you know, before they figured out how to say it the right way, they have to have this social media presence. And I think people become, and it's a dopamine hit, right? To do things. I get it. Like you get followers, you get rewarded. It's a whole system. But it also could take over your life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Dude, I had a BlackBerry. I was working in my early 20s with a BlackBerry. And that's very different than an iPhone. Sure. That's emails. It's emails. So we were getting emails from our manager at work going, will you fucking losers do something? Things like that. Because we couldn't sell anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, because you could take a shitty photo and send it to someone. You could email a photo. And the photos were like terrible quality. Yeah. But just the idea of like at your job, just sending someone an email photo was like hilarious. Like being out somewhere and taking a photo and emailing it to somebody going, fuck you, I'm not at work. That was like fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There was a New York City realtor. This lady, Dolly Lenz, was like the top realtor in New York City. She famously, she did a Blackberry commercial. She famously had like eight Blackberries. because she would just get all these contracts and stuff. She would like hand them out to her assistants and stuff. And they'd respond to over, she would get over 700 emails a day at the height of her thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
She was selling all this real estate. So black, that was the first time I didn't have a smartphone in junior high or high school.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I had like a flip phone. People had Razer phones. I didn't even have that. I had like a Sprint LG or some bullshit. And then I got BlackBerrys. And I think my first iPhone was like in my 20s, like mid-20s. Yeah, that's good. I wasn't like connected like that. Yeah, these kids are connected from the time they're six years old.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They set it up, and he just sits there, and he does, I don't know what he's watching, maybe I don't know what he's doing. No one knows either. I don't know what he's found. That's the other thing. You hope, like best case, he's playing some game.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Well, that's the other thing. I feel like that's also damaged people's... No doubt.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
People whose heads are going through glass tables. No, but that's what, like, when you have these articles that are written about this, they say it's not only that they're watching porn, it's the type of porn. It's not like regular porn.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And they're also like, I'll make some money with this kid sex doll company. What a weird way to make a fortune. What an odd way to make a fortune. I made a little bit of money. What'd you do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Don't worry about it. What'd you do? Kid sex dolls. Anyway, have you been to the Four Seasons in Cancun? It's crazy. Well, we're getting to a point where the world is really scary, but also equally unbelievable and absurd. So you have the, it's funny, but it's also insane. And I think people are like, we don't know what's real anymore.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
These AI videos come out and you don't know what's real and what's not. The deep fakes are getting better. That seems to be one of the biggest problems that no one talks about. It's like reality seems to be splintering.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They think comedians seem to be somewhat in them in the safer group of people in what way Perspective seems like maybe one of the harder things for AI to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's such a crazy library you have. It's like I wonder what you do with it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's an interesting. It's a great question. Sell it to China. What if after Spotify you go to China?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It would be actually a great idea if you just sit down and go, nothing's changing about the podcast. It's still going to be free. It's just going to be in Mandarin. It's owned by the Chinese government, but it's the same podcast it's always been.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. Your first guest is Jack Ma. Tell me what happened with Alibaba. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. It's a place I'd like to go. I've never been to China. I'd like to go. Obvious cuts.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
In the middle of someone talking. Just an ad. Just cuts. Just an ad, which is cut. You go, it's the same podcast it's always been. It's now 37 minutes because China's taken out all the stuff they don't want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I'd love to go to China just to access websites and go, what can you really say? Right. That would be super fascinating to be in China going like, what are you allowed to do? What is blocked? Do they use VPNs in China successfully? I mean, probably, right? They have to. Maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. North Korea seems to block everything. Like, certain countries can do a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, they have their own internet, right? Like, you can only get on their internet. I'm unsure, but that seems to make sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, that'd be interesting. I need to know. Because so many people, I believe, are very limited with what they can access.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's one of the crazier things in modern life, is that people are getting arrested over social media.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think they're banning this stuff in the UK because I don't think they want people to persist. in this idea that they have any ability to challenge this prevailing narrative, that any critique of immigration is an inherently racist thing. And I think the people that are sponsoring this kind of an odious thing, and it's because what they're doing is they're basically immiserating these people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Which I thought was an interesting scientific. It's not this one?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They're making the quality of their life much worse. They're losing ground. And if they speak up about it, they're called – you know, horrible names. And arrested. And arrested. So it's crazy. And they don't understand why it's happening. They're not completely, they're very confused about why you know, a lot of these countries didn't take any Syrian refugees, but Europe did. And Scandinavia did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And they're confused about why when any... disruption uh happens and it's clearly the result of bringing in large numbers of people who are not familiar with the laws of the country the culture of the country um when anything happens and they bring it up they're again called a racist or you know an extremist or they're arrested And then who's doing it, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So you have the people clearly that are in the government and these incredibly wealthy business interests that want people to work for a lot less money and they want to destroy people's social bonds because I think they really do want people to eventually just accept this kind of totalitarian surveillance state.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
breaking the spirit of these countries by destroying any social bonds that people have and destroying any economic power and destroying their belief in the democratic process and if they can do that they can break people they can get them to do anything they want do you think they're doing this in preparation for ai i think they're doing it in preparation for not only technological advancements i think they're doing it in preparation for um world wars
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It is funny to do something like this and then everyone hates you. Like everyone hates them now.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think they are doing it in preparation for a lot of things. I think they'll conscript a lot of these people into the military. I believe that. I believe they'll conscript a lot of these people into the military. I think they're looking at populations. I think they're looking at people not having enough children. I think they're saying, who's gonna fight these wars?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
who's gonna do these really shitty jobs and we're gonna go build houses in bunkers and all of this stuff. We're gonna fly private and we're gonna have our kids go to completely separate schools and we're gonna have our own water aquifers and have a compound. But why do you need all these low wage people in your country that are illegal and don't have any power? Has anyone asked that question?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Seems very obvious. They're going to conscript a lot of them into the military. And a lot of them are going to do shitty, horrible jobs. And they're going to use them as cannon fodder in wars that enrich lots of people. That would be my guess.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There was a decision made because the populist Democrats during the 90s, which was like Bill Clinton, you know, critical of immigration. Barack Obama, critical of immigration, deported a lot of people. Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton. What started to happen, though, is there was a decision made that the world was going to kind of be a borderless place where...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Countries were interchangeable and that nation states mattered a lot less than the financial architecture of global capital and where it could go. And you need a world government. And you need a government that is a world government or the closest. New world order. The closest thing you can get to it, which is having an EU. Right. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then having a government between the UK and the US that's pretty on the same page about everything. And then you have Israel in the Middle East. And then you have, you know, all of these, you know, disparate areas that we kind of control through economic means or military means and stuff like that. And then you have outliers. You have China, Iran, Russia, you know, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
People that haven't gotten the memo for whatever reason. I don't want to live in any of those places. That's the argument. They'll go, well, do you want to live in? Shut up. That's what are we, idiots? I don't want to live in any of those places, but they didn't get the memo. And then in all of these countries, by the way, in Europe, in America, not so much Israel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They don't love the immigration, as we can see. They're kind of big on the borders, Israel. They like the borders. But in America and Europe and Scandinavia and all these countries, the populations were just told to accept massively high levels of immigration over a very short period of time. That's odd, right? That doesn't make any sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I guess because you're terrified that you would ever do it. Well, yeah, and I also think it's fun to see somebody who has no self-awareness. They're always the most fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And if you point that out, you're called a racist and extremist. And that's a very strange thing. What are you doing with all these people? The Biden administration brought in 10 million people over four years. What are they here for? There's not enough jobs for the people that are here. We have vast chasms of wealth and equality. We have AI coming. We have automation coming.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Why would you bring in all of these people? What are you trying to do? What do you think they're trying to do? I think that exactly what I said. I think they need... bodies. I think they need cannon fodder. I think they need to break the idea of any social bonds that exist between people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, you bring in people, more surveillance, more dependence on the government. You get people out of the idea. You know, they got people out of the idea years ago that you could barely, you can't really, it's very hard to have your own business now. They've pretty much extinguished that in people's heads, even though there are people that still do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Now I think they're going to start to extinguish the idea that you can have a home, that you can own property, that you can drive a car, that you can do all of these things. They're going to extinguish that idea, and they're going to do that because why not control everybody?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. So they're basically like, we got to pacify these people. The conflicts seem inevitable and we're going to have to fight these wars. The good news is a lot of the people who are doing this, their children are now doing stand-up comedy. So if they're unable. Are any of them any good? If they're, I think some of them. I'm sure. I'm sure. Have you seen any of them that are any good?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I haven't seen a ton. It's just, it's one of those things that you hear now more than ever. When you're talking to a young comic and they go, and I'm hanging out with this person. I go, yeah. And they go, and their dad owns this. You go, really?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Just a curious thing. Obviously anyone in the world should be able to do comedy as much as they want But it's funny to me as somebody who just looked at these configurations of power and wealth It's kind of interesting that a lot of these kids are like doing it's just fun Have you ever met anybody from a really wealthy background that was good at stand-up? No, I mean not there. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, there are some of them for sure You've met them I've not met them. They probably don't like me. They're like unicorns. Yeah, they're around. And yes, yes, very wealthy. But I'm talking about like weird kind of interesting levels of wealth and power. That's interesting. Yeah. That's super interesting to me. It is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But so the good news is if they can't get this done soon their kids won't because their kids will be at fucking Sidesplitters in Tampa or they'll be podcasting or they'll be podcasting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, they'll get together Isn't it funny how much they now they now focus really on podcasters But they ignore all the things all the people that we're talking about the content know that there's no They don't report on any of those people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Again, the people that seem to be running and owning all of our resources. You'd think someone would write about the people that own a lot of the resources on the planet we live.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
No, I think he's saying that you're able to do things... Instantaneously.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, I think people are reading into that too much. Yeah, I don't think he's... Time machines. No, but I... Do you believe that time machines had ever at any point worked?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. So it's interesting. So the people who work in that type of space
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I don't know. Who is the most credible person that you've had on the show over the years who has talked the most convincingly? Was it Bob Lazar about... Bob Lazar is one of them, but he's...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Does he have any theory on where these crafts are coming from, or is that just completely beyond the scope of what he... They do theorize.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So what always weirded me out or interested me is like – The aliens, if you believe any of these things, they're testing us all the time. And is that because they're curious? Is that because they don't know? Well, they probably just got to keep track, see what's going on with people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What are we carrying that's important? Is it DNA? Yeah. Is it the cell?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And there has been, that's the other thing, there has been female astronauts. Let's not minimize this. Let's not minimize this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Did Jacques Vallée or any of these people ever speculate about... Is there an end game? If a planet's a farm, is there an end game? Eventually, for example, if we're running experiments on anything, eventually we go, okay, we got it. We either figured it out or we end the experiment or COVID leaks. But at a certain point...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Has there been any theorizing as to like what the end game is or is it just a curiosity for them?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's funny to hear the richest guy in the world's wife go, we're all in it together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then once you have synthetic life, what then becomes the point? That's a good question.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I don't feel like we're all in it together with you. Can we get on your jet? How in it together are we?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And then we get to this point. And we're irrelevant. Yeah, and then it's interesting. I totally get it. But then once we get to the point of irrelevance and now we have AI that becomes God, then what does God do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It feels like you hand-selected a couple of friends to go do this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it should have been a lottery system like Willy Wonka where just seven random people should have been able to go in this. I would do it just to change my... That would be fun.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And this is what a lot of these people that have looked into this have theorized that this is... So it's funny because it is just a parallel reality that we're not plugged into.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I would hate if it all came down to just AI doing stand-up comedy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If they all just decide to do stand-up comedy? What if AI decided to do podcasts and it's just a bunch of hyper, you know, fucking, you know, brilliant machines talking to each other? Maybe that's the way the world just ends with, like, artificial intelligence just blabbing. I don't think the world ends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Just a cashier at HEB, someone from MS-13. Yeah, that was what I was thinking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Someone from Trendiagua and Lauren Sanchez and Gayle King and, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's such a strange thing that we know it's coming, but we can't, the pace of it is going to be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's unbelievable to think about. It's almost beyond the grasp of our mind to consider. It is. It is, fully. And it's terrifying. Think of those stupid cars that people used to drive around in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I saw that there was a restraining order. I saw that he was hanging out with two guys that were in MS-13. Yeah, they released the... Yeah, he's definitely sketchy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
A thousand percent. So it's like we create AI, AI creates quantum computing, quantum computing creates God, God creates the Jews. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And people are watching Love on the Spectrum, which is why we're number eight on Netflix's top ten. We should be higher, but they're watching Love on the Spectrum, which I get. It's a feel-good show. Fine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's very sweet. and you filmed the special and the mothership and everybody loves it and it's great I mean a lot of people love it most people love it of course there's you know enough of this fat blowhard comments but most the vast majority of people enjoy it which is important and the show and the you saved it we know you saved it The first one was very bad.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
That's a comedy show. And it's not a, I don't know what the hell they were doing with the lights.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's super funny to do a show. I've done so many, so many shows there and they're all really, really, really good. And then you get the cameras and everything. And then the first one I go, what the fuck is happening? It would be one thing if I was in like Portland, Maine at like a liberal college. Right. I'd go, okay, well, maybe these kids don't like me or something. And I think maybe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
People need shit talking. Stop with this love on the spectrum. We get it. Yeah. They're happy as they should be. But RFK is going to- What did you want to call that they wouldn't let you? My son's pussy. I don't understand why they said no to that. There was negative feedback. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They also didn't know about the Kevin Spacey promo until the day it came out. I think My Son's Pussy would have made it number one. I think My Son's Pussy would have been a great move.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It would be like, I'm clicking on this. That's right. What is he saying? That's right. Fuck you, Lonesome Canyon. The soap opera they got.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Oh, the hairdresser has a mom and dad. Oh, no, there was a guy with an autism awareness tattoo, and they thought it was like an MS-13 tattoo, but it doesn't look like an MS-13 tattoo. It's a literal... The problem is everybody's a liar. You don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
No, I mean, they've won the street. Whatever the streaming war was, they won. They won.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
They did it. They did it. YouTube as well. Well, YouTube's number one is globally is the biggest media company.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And they defend Chappelle and all these things. And, you know, they understand comedy. They like it. And Ted Sarandos is a fan of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
So I think that's good. I think that's a really good thing that you have a platform that has that much power and accessibility.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I think that there's people that really understand that you need to have funny jokes. You need to have things that people don't love and things that people like and give people the Meghan Markle show. Give them my dumb thing. Let people choose. Put me and Meghan Markle in a thing. Make us work together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
This is the direction. You two. This is the direction. Put her on Kill Tony. This is the direction. You two.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I don't know, but I think we should go to space. Have Bezos do it. Airstream. Airstream. Yeah. You and her in an airstream. Or even better, we'll go to space. Yeah. Me and her. That's only 11 minutes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And if they did ship some- Ironically, the only people I trust are MS-13. And podcasters. Because they'll tell you. And podcasters. Podcasters and MS-13. That's all I trust. I would love if you just had MS-13 on. Just three guys with tattoos. Because, by the way, there would be no outrage. That's what's hilarious.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Nobody cares anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want money in the egg.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, I remember that's the thing. When you get older, it's just money in the egg. It's just money. Just take money.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. That's true. That's a good point. But, you know, kids go, Santa's fickle. Santa likes what he likes. He likes the suburbs. Santa likes landing his sled in the burbs. He does. He feels better about it. It feels really good visiting rich people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If you had three MS-13 gang members, not one person would go, why did he have them on?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And some of them cheat. Some of them do a little Christmas, too. Some of them have a tree. Some of them do a little Christmas. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Why not? Some of them do a little Christmas. Hopefully they do this piece. It's fun. This piece in the Middle East, hopefully. They keep talking about all this, you know, these deals they're all making.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Hopefully that the Hamas and the Israel, whatever it is, they get, you know, because. Well, that's one thing that Trump said.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There is an argument to be made that that level of devastation and death is worse than you talking to someone on your podcast.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There is an argument to be made that starvation and stuff like that and people dying is worse than a podcast. But wait a minute. I wouldn't make it. Wait a minute before you say that. Have you been there? Right. That's a good point. Have you even? You haven't been? By the way, how is he in all these wars? Can I just go to wars? By the way, are you allowed to just go to wars? Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
You should at least have the courtesy of going there. Can I just go to wars or do I have to come back and say what people want me to say about the wars? Can I go to the wars and have my own opinions or do I have to have the opinions? Not if you want to go back. That's right. That's right. It's very interesting, this war tourism. How do I get on this war tourism? I'd like to go to the Ukraine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
If you have anyone else on, it'll be a horrible thing. But if it was three guys, MS-13, with head-to-toe tattoos, who admitted to killing multiple people, and you said, now tell me about what it's like to grow up in San Pedro Sula or whatever. And it would be okay, right?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I want to go. I want to go to all this war tourism. Do you have any awards that they can melt down and make bullets out of? Joe, think about this. Do I seem like a guy that has a lot of awards?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I don't know where they're sending those YouTube plaques.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
But I like this idea of war tourism. I like the idea of going to a war and then coming back having a very black and white view. Yes. I've been there. I get it. And I know. And interesting. Okay. I like that. I like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
There's a lot of people. It gets very murky. Most people I know that have been to war have a very murky, complex view of things. But it is good to go to a war and then come back and be as sure as you were before you came. You don't have to go very long. No, you go for an hour.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It's lunch on the front lines. Put on a flak jacket that says press. Tea on the front lines and then you come back and you have all the talk. Yeah. And if you're on the right side, you probably don't get shot. Yeah, that's a good idea. Well, there doesn't seem to be a ton of danger for a lot of these people going to these wars. They seem fine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah. No, I'm going to go. I'll go to any war and anything you want. So if you want to pay for me to go to a war, I will come back and I go, I saw the Houthis. They're terrifying. They are terrifying. Any war you want. And by the way, any country, if China wants me to, you know, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Are you going to Moscow? I would love to go to Moscow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I said to my friend, Anna Hashin from the Red Scare podcast, I said, should I go to Russia? She goes, you're spiritually Russian and maybe you won't leave.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I can see you eating caviar with flip flops. Smoked fish. She goes, it might. Smoking a cigarette on a yacht. She goes, it might be for you. Listing to people's moral justifications for all kinds of things. I see your point. I get it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
What happened to all those yachts that got confiscated? I don't know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I bet. It's some high-level version of a police auto auction, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Right. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what those yachts are. It's a great question. What happens to those yachts? Those very luxurious... That was the first problem I had. Obviously... It's a tragedy, the whole Ukraine war, but I thought, frankly, going around and taking these oligarchs' boats, I was against that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
A lot of them had nothing to do. They just earned money in Russia and they were like, all right, we're going to sanction everybody. We're going to confiscate everything. And it's like, okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It could be. I think that there was a decision made at some point to not try to end this. I don't think they wanted to end this quickly. There was a decision made to bleed the Russian military and isolate Russia and try to...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
economic realities that and then you're saying to these people, OK, you know, go figure it out. It's what we said to Russia. But they did. Right. They got closer to China. They got closer to Brazil. They traded with India. You know, they started an industrial economy. They started producing their own, you know, munitions and things like that. So they were able to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
kind of start to weirdly build out this middle class this was the worst i think it's the worst thing if you don't want a country to keep invading other countries you certainly wouldn't put them in the position to be stronger while they were doing it yeah it's all very weird too with like the killing of that pipeline yeah like don't aren't more people reliant now on russian energy because of that all of this seems to have had the opposite effect
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
All of it seems to have had the opposite. Opposite from intended effect.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
We should have a day where if the Russian-Ukraine war has ended, we give all the oligarchs back their boats, and they do like a regatta, like a thing where they all, with their boats... down in Florida or Palm Beach, and they all just are reunited with their boats.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yes. And they're fascinating. They're co-opting. I still haven't accepted the fact that I've left the left. I did a CNN interview for an hour because I'm promoting my special. And then did you really?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
We were performing in the UK, and we took a little break to go down to France for two days. And we're walking around Monaco, and we said to the guy, there's all these yachts in Monaco, and we said...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
um who owns these yachts and he goes well he goes if you look up online the names of these yachts you can trace them back to businesses and you trace that business back to a person and i said so that person owns yeah he goes no you'll never find out who owns these
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, it's a show. He goes, it's very hard to find out who owns the yachts. And he goes, even if you think you know, you may not know. Or it might be more complicated than you think. There it is. There's Monaco. Wow. They like a super yacht. I mean, it's just such an interesting, just a haven of international crime.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
Yeah, this is a haven of international criminality. And look how close they park to each other. No income tax, no property tax.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
This girl, Elle Reeves. Was she cool? Elle, she was cool. She does all the, you know, when you see the Vice documentaries where she talks to the Nazis and the incels?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And it's a small spot, too. Well, they like it like that. They keep it nice like that. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
I don't think they would have put us together. But all the tech people would have magically became Democrats again.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
It was that chick. And they sent her in. Oh, that's a good move for them. I was like, this is hilarious. So I'm sitting there and she sits down. She's like, are there any left-wing comedians? And I named 10 of them. that are all in arenas. And she goes, oh, because their whole thing now is that podcasters are the most powerful people in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And she goes, do you think your friends are the new establishment? I said, well, there's 22 intelligence agencies and entire legacy media. There's lots of Ivy League schools. There's this, there's that. Do I think Theo Vaughn's the new establishment? No. I don't think so. I think you ran a really unpopular candidate. I don't think Americans like child sex changes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2307 - Tim Dillon
And I don't think they want an open border. And I think if you co-opted some of those issues, you might have won. They said to me at CNN, they're like, we're editing the interview. I said, put the hour out. I sat there for an hour and we had a nice conversation. But, you know, we talked for one hour and I was like, put it out. I'm like, I understand if you can't put it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
By the way, this is sort of a weird plot hole in Star Wars, Star Trek, where they can travel in hyperspace, but then you're flying in the canyon on the Death Star.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, it's like... And then you're doing this theatrical Klingons versus Captain Kirk at 10 miles per hour or 20 miles per hour or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It tells us that I think that if you have faster than light travel, there's something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level. And there may be other solutions, but I'll give you my two. One of them is that you need complete totalitarian controls. And it is like it is the individuals, they might not be perfect, they might be demons, doesn't matter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But you have a demonic totalitarian control of your society where it's like you have like parapsychological mind meld with everybody and no one can act independently of anybody else. No one can ever launch a warp drive weapon. And everybody who has that ability isn't like a mind meld link with everybody else or something like that. You can't have libertarian individualistic free agency.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then I think the other version socially and culturally is they have to be like perfectly altruistic, non-self-interest, they have to be angels. And so the Pazulka literal thing I'd come to is the aliens, it's not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But it is a very big leap on a, you know, if we say that something like evolution says that there's no such thing as a purely altruistic being. Right. If you were purely altruistic, if you only cared about other people, you don't survive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Because then beings that are not perfectly altruistic are somewhat dangerous. And then the danger level gets correlated to the level of technology. And if you have faster than light travel, it is infinitely dangerous.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I know that you're trying to be reassuring, but I find that monologue super non-reassuring.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
There's so many steps in it, and every single step has to work, just the way you described.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
almost otherworldly in its non-selfishness and its non-humanness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, but I don't think it's fundamentally about scarcity. Scarcity is what exists in nature. It's fundamentally about cultural, positional goods within society. It's a scarcity that's created culturally. Are you familiar with this 90s spoof movie on Star Trek called Galaxy Quest?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
So this was sort of a silly PayPal digression story from 1999. The business model idea we had in 1999 was we used Palm Pilots to beam money. It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999. But we had this sort of infrared port. You could beam people money. And we had this idea in –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
around December 99 as a media promotional thing to hire James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek. And he was going to do this media promo event for us. And it was like an 80-something older Scotty character who was – horrifically overweight. And so it's like this terrible spokesperson. Um, and, uh, but our, our tagline was, you know, he used to beam people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Now he's beaming something much more important. He's beaming money. And, um, and it was this complete flop of media event, December 99 that, uh, we, we did. Um, it was, um, the reporters couldn't get there because the traffic was too bad in San Francisco. So, you know, the tech wasn't working on a much lower tech level, but, uh,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But anyway, we had a bunch of people from our company and there was one point where one of them – William Shatner played James T. Kirk, the captain of the original Star Trek. He was already doing Priceline commercials and making a lot of money off of Priceline doing commercials for them. And so one of the people asked James Doohan –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
the Scotty character, what do you think of William Shatner doing commercials for Priceline? At which point, Doohan's agent stood up and screamed at the top of his voice, that is the forbidden question, that is a forbidden question, that is a forbidden question. And you sort of realized, because the conceit of Star Trek, the 60s show, was that it was a post-scarcity world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The transporter technology, you could reconfigure matter into anything you wanted. There was no scarcity. There was no need for money. The people who wanted money were weirdly mentally screwed up people. You only need money in a world of scarcity. You know, it's a post-scarcity, it's sort of a communist world. But Galaxy Quest was more correct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's a spoof on Star Trek that gets made in the mid-90s. And the Galaxy Quest, sorry, this is a discombobulated way I'm telling the story, but Galaxy Quest is this movie where
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You have these retread Star Trek actors and Mr. Spock opens a furniture store or something like this and they're all like – but they all hate, hate, hate the person who played the captain because the captain was a method actor where he just lorded it over everyone. Because even in the communist post-scarcity world, only one person got to be captain.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so there's a great scarcity even in this futuristic sci-fi world. And that's what we witnessed in 99 because that's the way William Shatner treated the other actors. He was a method actor and they hated him. And that was – and so even in the Star Trek world, the humans, you know, obviously they were just – they were stuck in the 1960s mentally. So that's what you'll say.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I don't think it's that straightforward for us to evolve.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I think artificial life – But then I hear that as we're going to be extinct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, I let me you know, I keep. I keep thinking there are two alternate histories that are alternate stories of the future that are more plausible than one you just told. And so one of them is it sounds like yours, but it's just the Silicon Valley propaganda story where they say that's what they're going to do. And then, of course, they don't quite do it. Right. And it doesn't quite work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it goes super, super haywire. And... There's a 1% chance that works, and there's a 99% chance that ends up ... You have two choices. You have a company that does exactly what you do. and that's super ethical, super restrained, does everything right. And there is a company that says all the things you just said, but then cuts corners and doesn't quite do it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And I won't say it's one to 99, but that sounds more plausible as that it ends up being corporate propaganda. And then, you know, my prior would be even more likely. This, of course, the argument, the effective altruist, the anti-AI people make is, yeah, Joe, you're The story you're telling us, that's just going to be the fake corporate propaganda. And we need to push back on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And the way you push back is you need to regulate it and you need to govern it and you need to do it globally. And this is, you know, the Rand Corporation in Southern California has, you know, one of their verticals, and it's a sort of public-private fusion. But one of the things they're pushing for is something they call global compute governance, which is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, it's – the AI – the accelerationist AI story is too scary and too dangerous and too likely to go wrong. And so, you know, we need to have, you know, global governance, which from my point of view sounds even worse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But that's – that's I think – I think that's the story – that's the story –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, to the extent it's driven by the military and other competition with China, you know... Until it becomes sentient. That suggests it's going to be even less in the sort of, you know, utopian, altruistic direction.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I sort of generally don't think we should trust China or the CCP. But probably the best counter argument they would have is that they are interested in maintaining control. And they are crazy fanatical about that. And that's why... you know, the CCP might actually regulate it. And they're going to put breaks on this in a way that we might not in Silicon Valley.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it's a technology they understand that will undermine their power. That's an interesting perspective.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I don't fully believe them. Right. I know what you're saying. It's sort of... There's sort of a weird way – all the big tech companies, it seemed to me, were natural ways for the CCP to extend its power to control the population, Tencent, Alibaba. And then because it was – but then it's also in theory the tech can be used as an alternate channel for people to organize or – or things like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And even though it's 80% control and maybe 20% risk of loss of control, maybe that 20% was too high. And there's sort of a strange way over the last seven, eight years where Jack Ma, Alibaba, all these people sort of got shoved aside for these party functionaries that are effectively running these companies. And so there is something about the big tech story in China
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
where the people running these companies were seen as national champions a decade ago. Now they're the enemies of the people. And it's sort of the Luddite thing was this, you know, the CCP has full control. You have this new technology that would give you even more control, but there's a chance you lose it. How do you think about that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then that's what they've done with consumer internet. And then there's probably something about the AI where it's possible they're not even in the running. And certainly it feels like it's all happening in the U.S. And so maybe it is – Maybe it could still be stopped.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You can get it, but then if you build it, is there some air gap? Does it jump the air gap? Does it somehow—
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Or it would spiral out of control. Yeah. But then I think my – and again, this is a very, very speculative conversation. But my read on the – I don't know, cultural social vibe is that the scary dystopian AI narrative is way more compelling. I don't like the effect of altruist people. I don't like the Luddites. But man, I think they are, this time around, they are winning the arguments.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so my... I don't know, you know, it's mixing metaphors, but do you want to be worried about Dr. Strangelove? who wants to blow up the world to build bigger bombs? Or do you want to worry about Greta, who wants to make everyone drive a bicycle so the world doesn't get destroyed? And we're in a world where people are worried about Dr. Strangelove. They're not worried about Greta.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it's the Greta equivalent in AI that my model is going to be surprisingly powerful. It's going to be outlawed. It's going to be regulated. As we have outlawed, you know, so many other vectors of innovation. I mean, you can think about why was there progress in computers over the last 50 years and not other stuff? Because the computers were mostly inert.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It was mostly this virtual reality that was air-gapped from the real world. It was, you know, yeah, there's all this... Crazy stuff that happens on the internet, but most of the time what happens on the internet stays on the internet. It's actually pretty decoupled. And that's why we've had a relatively light regulatory touch on that stuff versus so many other things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I know, I know. But thalidomide or whatever, all these things that went really haywire, they did a good job. People are scared.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
They're not scared of video games. They're scared of, you know, dangerous pharmaceuticals. And if you think of AI as it's not just a video game, it's about not just about this world of bits, but it's going to air gap and it's going to affect you and your physical world in a real way. You know, maybe...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Maybe you cross the air gap and get the FDA or some other – Well, the problem is they're not good at regulating anything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I don't – I think it's – but I think they have been pretty good at slowing things down and stopping them and – You know, we've made a lot less progress on, I don't know, extending human life. We've made no progress on curing dementia in 40 or 50 years. There's all the stuff where, you know, it's been regulated to death, which I think is...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
is very bad from the point of view of progress, but it is pretty effective as a regulation. They've stopped stuff. They've been effectively Luddite. They've been very effective at being Luddites. Interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But, again, these stories are all, like, very speculative. Sure. Like, maybe, you know, the counterargument might be something like, that's what China thinks it will be doing, but it will somehow, you know... Go rogue. Go rogue on them. Yeah. Or they're too arrogant about how much power they think the CCP has, and it will go rogue. So there are sort of... I'm not at all sure this is right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But I think the... Man, I think the U.S., The U.S. one, I would say, is that I think the pro-AI people in Silicon Valley are doing a pretty... bad job on, let's say, convincing people that it's going to be good for them, that it's going to be good for the average person, it's going to be good for our society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And if it all ends up being some version, you know, humans are headed towards the glue factory like a horse, man, that sort of probably makes me want to become a Luddite too.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
If that's the most positive story you can tell, then I don't think that necessarily means we're going to go to the glue factory. I think it means the glue factory is getting shut down.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The part that – look, there are all these places where there are parts of the story we don't know. Right. And so it's like how did – My general thesis is there is no evolutionary path to this. Maybe there's a guided outside alien superintelligence path for us to become superhuman and fundamentally benevolent and fundamentally radically different beings.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But there's no natural evolutionary path for this to happen. And then I don't know how this would have happened for the alien civilization.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
No, but the story you're telling was we can't just leave the humans to the natural evolution because we're still like animals. We're still into status, all these crazy— But those are the things that motivate us to innovate. And if we keep innovating, at some point we will destroy ourselves with that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
No, but the story you were telling earlier was you need to have—
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
directed in evolution it's like intelligent design it's something it's like there's some godlike being that's actually has to take over from evolution and guide our cultural and political and biological development no and it might not have any use for us at all it might just ignore us and let us live like the chimps do but then and then become the superior force in the planet
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I thought it has to – but it has to stop us from developing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, I think there still are... We still have a pretty crazy geopolitical race with China, to come back to that. Sure. You know, the natural development of drone technology in the military context is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed. Sure. And so you need to put an AI on the drone.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so there sort of are... And all these things, you know, there's a logic to them, but there doesn't seem to be a good endgame.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, do you think the— And I think all these things are very overdetermined. Do you think that the collapse in birth rates, you know, it could be plastics, but isn't it just a feature of late modernity?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I'm always – let me think – I think the why, why have birth rates collapsed is it's probably... It's, again, an overdetermined story. It's the plastics. It's the screens. It's certain ways children are not compatible with having a career in late modernity. Probably our economics of it, where people can't afford houses or space.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But I'm probably always a little bit more anchored on the social and cultural dimensions of this stuff. And again, the imitation version of this is – and it's sort of conserved across – people are below the replacement rate. In all 50 states of the U.S., even Mormon, Utah, the average woman has less than two kids. Iran is below that. Italy, way below it. South Korea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's all these very different types of societies. And then Israel is still sort of a weird exception. And then if you ask, you know, my sort of... simplistic, somewhat circular explanation would be, you know, people have kids if other people have kids, and they stop having kids when other people stop having kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so there's a dimension of it that's just, you know, if you're a 27-year-old woman in Israel, you better get married and you have to keep up with your other friends that are having kids. And if you don't, you're just like a weirdo who doesn't fit into society or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then if you're in South Korea where I think the total fertility rate is like 0.7, it's like one-third of the replacement rate. Wow. Like every generation is going down by two-thirds or something like this. Right. Really heading towards extinction pretty fast. Yeah. It is something like probably none of your friends are doing it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then probably there are ways it shifts the politics in a very, very deep way where once you get an inverted demographic pyramid where you have way more old people than young people, At some point, there's always a question, do you vote for benefits for the old or for the very young? Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And once the demographic flips and you get this inverted pyramid, maybe the politics shifts in a very deep way where the people with kids get penalized more and more economically. It just costs more and more. And then the old people without kids... just vote more and more benefits for themselves effectively. And then it just sort of, you know, once it flips, it may be very hard to reverse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I looked at all these sort of heterodox demographers, but I'm blanking on the name, but there was sort of a set of Um, where, you know, it's like, what are the longterm demographic projections?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And there's this, uh, you know, if, if, if, you know, there are 8 billion people on the planet and, you know, if every woman has not two babies, but one baby, then every generation's half the previous than the next generation's 4 billion. And then, and then people think, well, it's just going to, it'll eventually, you'll have women who want more kids and it'll just, it'll
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
get a smaller population, then it will bounce back. Yeah, one of the Japanese demographers I was looking at on this a few years ago, his thesis was, no, once it flips, it doesn't flip back because you've changed all the politics to where people get disincentive. And so, and then you should just extrapolate this as the permanent birth rate. And if it's
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
If it's one on average of one baby per woman and you have a having and then it's in 33 generations, two to the 33rd is about eight billion. And if every generation is 30 years, 30 times 33 is 990 years. In 990 years, you'd predict there'd be one person left on the planet. Jesus Christ. And then we'd go extinct if there's only one person left. That doesn't work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And again, it's a very long-term extrapolation. But the claim is... that just, you know, once you flip it, it kicks in all these social and political dimensions that are then like, yeah, maybe it got flipped by the screens or the plastics or, you know, the drugs or other stuff. But once it's flipped, you change the whole society and it actually stays flipped and it's very, very hard to undo.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then we can't talk about what's gone wrong in the U.S. because everything is so much worse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, I think I should start by being modest in answering that question and saying that nobody has a clue.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, but no one calls it nuclear science. They call it nuclear engineering. Interesting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The only thing is, I'm just making a narrow linguistic point.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Oh, Von Daniken. Yes. Yeah. You thought he was too crazy. You like Hancock but you don't like Von Daniken.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, I always find that hypothetical. It's a ridiculous hypothetical. It is ridiculous. You ask ridiculous hypotheticals, you get ridiculous answers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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 Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I think the religious categories are primary and the political categories are secondary.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, I think that's a whitewashed, enlightenment, rationalist description of the origin of politics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I think it's far more vile than that. What you're giving me is a – Well, it's very vile.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And I don't know... I don't know if it got that much more rational. I don't know if it's that much more rational today. Well, in some ways, it's not, right? This is, again, back to the progressive conception. Have we really progressed? How much have we really progressed from that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But yeah, my version would be that it was much more, it was organized around acts of mass violence, like maybe you externalize it onto a mastodon or hunting some big animal or something like this, but the real problem of violence It wasn't external. It was mostly internal. It was violence with people who were near you, proximate to you. It wasn't even natural cataclysms or other tribes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It was sort of much more the internal stuff. And it's very different, I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
situation is somehow very, very different from something like, I don't know, an ape-primate hierarchy, where in an ape context, you have an alpha male, you know, he's the strongest, and there's some sort of natural dominance, and you don't need to have a fight to the death, typically, because you know who's the strongest, and you don't need to push it all the way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
In a human context, it's always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male. So it's somehow the culture is more important, you know, if they can talk to each other and you get language and then they can coordinate and they can gang up on the leader and then you have to stop them from gang up on the leader. And how do you do that? And so...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
There's some sort of radical difference between a human and a, let's say, a pre-human world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, so I find all of that quite plausible, but I think— Both of us can be correct. So there's some... The true story of hominization, of how we became humans, there's a way to tell it where it's continuous with our animal past and where it's just, you know, there's things like this with the chimpanzees or the baboons or, you know, other primates.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then there is a part of the story that I think is also more discontinuous. And, you know, my judgment is we probably... You know, in a Darwinian context, we always stress the continuity. You know, I'm always a little bit the contrarian. And so I believe in Darwin's theory. But I think we should also be skeptical of ways it's too dogmatic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And Darwin's theories make us gloss over the discontinuities. You know, the one type of, and this is going to happen overnight, but one type of fairly dramatic discontinuity is that, you know, is that humans have something like language. And even though, you know, chimpanzees probably, I don't know, they have an IQ of 80 or they're pretty smart.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But when you don't have a rich symbolic system, that leads to sort of a very, very different kind of structure. And there's something about language.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
uh language and the kind of coordination that allows and the ways that it forces you to it enables you to coordinate on violence and then it encourages you to channel violence in certain sacred religious directions um uh i think uh creates a you know something radically different about human society we're you know we differ you know we we tell humans tell each other stories
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
A lot of the stories are not true. They're myths. But I think that's some sort of a very important difference from even our closest primate relatives. But this is, again, this is sort of like another way of getting at what's so crazy about chat GPT and passing the Turing test. Because if we had sat here two years ago and you asked me, you know, what is the distinctive feature of a human being?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
What makes someone a human? And, you know, how... in a way that differs from everybody else. It's not perfect, but my go-to answer would have been language. You're a three-year-old. You're an 80-year-old. Just about all humans can speak languages. Just about all non-humans cannot speak languages. It's this binary thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then that's sort of a way of telling us, again, why passing the Turing test was way more important than superintelligence or anything else. Yeah, I could see that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, again, let me do sort of a linguistic riff. I think... Aristotelian Darwinian biology, Aristotle, you always differ things by, put them in categories. And man, I think the line Aristotle has is something, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. And I would say that we are these giant imitating machines.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And of course the Darwinian riff on this is, you know, to imitate is to ape. And so we differ from the ape, we're more ape-like than the apes. we are far better at aping each other than the apes are. And that, you know, a first cut, I would say our brains are giant imitation machines. That's how you learn language as a kid. You imitate your parents. And that's how culture gets transmitted.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But then there are a lot of dimensions of imitation that are also very dangerous because imitations, It's not... Imitation doesn't just happen on this symbolic, linguistic level. It's also you imitate things you want. You want a banana. I want a banana. You want a blue ball. I can have a red ball. I want a blue ball because you have a blue ball. And
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so there's something about imitation that, you know, creates culture, you know, that is incredibly important pedagogically learning. You know, it's how you master something, how you... you know, in all these different ways. And then a lot of it has this incredibly conflictual dimension as well. And then there's, yeah, so I think that was sort of core to the
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
things that are both great and troubled about humanity. And that was sort of, that was in some ways the problem that needed to be solved.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
There is some story like – and again, this is a one-dimensional, one explanation fits all. But the sort of – the explanation I would go with is that it was something like our brains got bigger and so we were more powerful imitation machines. And there were things about that that were –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, that made us a lot more powerful and a lot – we could learn things and we could remember things and there was cultural transmission that happened. But then it also – we could build better weapons and we became more violent and – It also had a very, very destructive element. And then somehow the imitation had to be channeled in these sort of ritualized, religious kinds of ways.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And that's why I think all these things sort of somehow came up together in parallel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, you can always – man, you can always tell these retrospective just-so stories and how this all worked out. But it would seem – the naive retrospective story would be that there are a lot of ways that humans are, I don't know, less strong than the other apes or – You know, all these ways where we're, in some sense, weaker. Physically, at least. Physically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But maybe it was just this basic tradeoff. More of your energy went into your mind and into your brain. And then, you know, your fist wasn't as strong, but you could build a better axe. And that made you stronger than an ape. And that's where a brain with less energy was spent on growing a hair to keep warm in the winter.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then you used your brain to build an axe and skin a bear and get some fur for the winter or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
gone was that there was this dimension of increased imitation. There was some kind of cultural linguistic dimension that was incredibly important. It probably was also, you know, it was probably also somehow linked to, you know, dealing with all the violence that came with it, all the conflicts that came with it. You know, I'd be more open to the stoned ape theory if people
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I had this conversation with the other guy, Murorescu, the immortality key guy. And I always feel they whitewash it too much. How so? You know, it's like if you had these crazy Dionysian rituals in which people, you know, there's probably lots of crazy sex. There's probably lots of crazy violence that was tied to it. And so maybe you'd be out of your mind to be hunting a woolly mammoth.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
No, but you – I don't know. You went to war to fight the neighboring tribe. It's probably more dangerous than hunting.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Okay. I don't question that at all. I just think they probably – part of it was also – was a way to channel violence. It was probably, you know, whenever, I don't know, was there some degree to which whenever you went to war, you were on drugs?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And, you know, maybe it makes you less... less coordinated or something, but just if you're less scared.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
If you're just a little bit less scared, that's probably super important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Mushrooms, psychedelic drug, historical usage theories, I suspect was very widespread. I just think a lot of it was in these contexts that were pretty transgressive.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I definitely think it shouldn't be outlawed, you know, pretty hardcore libertarian on all the drug legalization stuff. And then I do wonder exactly how these things work. Probably the classical world version of it was that it was something that you did in a fairly controlled setting. You didn't do it every day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it was some way, I imagine, to get a very different perspective on your nine to five job or whatever you want to call it. But you didn't necessarily want to really decamp to the other world altogether.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Where do you think that line is? Like, you know, should everyone do one ayahuasca trip? Or if you do an ayahuasca trip a year, is that...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I was very bullish on this stuff happening. And the way I thought about it four or five years ago was that it was a hack to doing a double-blind study. Because the FDA always has this concept that you need to do a double-blind study. You give one-third of the people, you give a sugar pill, and two-thirds, you give the real drug. And you have to
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And no one knows whether they have the sugar pill or the real drug. And then you see how it works. And science requires a double-blind study. And then my anti-double-blind study theory is if it really works, you don't need a double-blind study. It should just work.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And there's something sociopathic about doing double-blind studies because one-third of the people who have this bad disease are getting a sugar pill. And we shouldn't even be – like maybe it's immoral to do double-blind studies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, my claim is if it's a – if it actually works, you shouldn't need to do a double-blind study at all. But – And then my hope was that MDMA, psychedelics, all these things, they were a hack on the double-blind study because you knew whether you got the real thing or the sugar pill. And so this would be a way to hack through this ridiculous double-blind criterion and just get the study done.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then what I think Part of it is probably just an anti-drug ideology by the FDA. But the other part that happened on the sort of scientific establishment level is they think you need a double-blind study. Joe, we know you're hacking this double-blind study because people will know whether they got the sugar pill or not.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And that's why we're going to arbitrarily change the goalposts and set them at way, way harder because we know there's no way you can do a double-blind study. And if it's not a double-blind study, it's no good because that's what our ideology of science tells us. And that's sort of what I think was part of what went sort of politically haywire with this stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Just to articulate the alternate version on this, there's always a – there's a part – let me think how to get this – you know there's there's one There's a question whether the shift to interiority, is it a complement or a substitute? Like what I said about talk and action, is it a complement or a substitute to changing the outside world? So we focus on changing ourselves.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Is this the first step to changing the world? Or is it sort of a hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected to from outer space to inner space. So I don't know, the one liner I had years ago was, you know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. And three weeks later, Woodstock started. And that's when the hippies took over the country.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And, and, you know, and we stopped going to outer space because we started going to inner space. And that's, and so there's sort of a question, you know, how much, you know, it worked as a as an activator or as a deactivator in a way. And there are all these different modalities of interiority. There's psychological therapy. There's meditation. There's yoga. There was a sexual revolution.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Gradually, you have incels living in their parents' basement playing video games. So there's the navel-gazing that is identity politics. There's a range of psychedelic things. And I think all these things, I wonder whether the interiority ended up acting as a substitute. Because, you know, the alternate history in the 1960s is that, you know, the hippies were actually, they were anti-political.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it was sort of, the drugs happened at the end of the city, at the end of the 60s, and that's when people depoliticized. It was like, I don't know, the Beatles song, if you're carrying around pictures of Chairman Mao, you're not gonna make with anyone anyhow. That's after they did LSD, and it was just, The sort of insane politics no longer matters.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so you have the civil rights, the Vietnam War, and then were the drugs the thing that motivated it? Or was that the thing where it actually, those things started to de-escalate?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, or the part of it that I thought was interesting was the MKUltra.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Where, you know, there was a predecessor version where we thought of, you know, there was a, you could think of it as we had an arms race with the fascists and the communists. And they were very good at brainwashing people. The Goebbels propaganda, North Koreans brainwashing our soldiers in the Korean War, our POWs. And we needed to have an arms race to program and reprogram and deprogram people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And LSD was sort of the MKUltra shortcut. So I think there was – and then I – yeah, my – it's so hard to reconstruct it. But my suspicion is that the MKUltra thing was a lot bigger. than we realize. And that, you know, it was the LSD movement, both in the Harvard form and the Stanford form. You know, it started as an MKUltra project. Timothy Leary at Harvard, Ken Kesey at Stanford.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I knew Tom Wolfe, the American novelist. I still think his greatest novel was... The electric Kool-Aid acid test, which is sort of this history of the LSD counterculture movement, starts at Stanford, moves to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. But it starts with Ken Kesey as a grad student at Stanford circa 1958.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And you get an extra $75 a day if you go to the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital and they give you some random drug. And, yeah, he got an extra $75 as a grad student in English doing LSD. And Tom Wolfe writes this, you know, iconic fictionalized novel, very realistic, 1968 about this. And Wolfe could not have imagined. that the whole thing started as some CIA mind control project. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The Menlo Park Veterans Hospital that was deep state adjacent. Sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Where he, again, maybe you shouldn't believe him, but he claimed that he didn't even know what he was doing. It was some sort of hypnotic trance or whatever. And it was like the assassin in the Manchurian candidate.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, I probably veer in the direction that there were you know, on the sort of conspiracy theory of history, I veer in the direction that there was a lot of crazy stuff like this that was going on in the U.S. first half of the 20th century, overdrive, 1940s, you know, I mean, you had the Manhattan Project, this giant secret project, 1950s, 1960s, and then...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then somehow the last 50 years, I think the, I'm not sure disturbing, but the perspective I have is these institutions are less functional. I don't think the CIA is doing anything quite like MKUltra anymore. Why do you think that?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I think you had the church commission hearings in the late 70s and somehow things got exposed and then when things – when bureaucracy is forced to be formalized, it probably becomes a lot less functional. like the 2000s version, I think there was a lot of crazy stuff that we did in black sites, torturing people that the CIA ran in the war on terror. There was waterboarding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
There was all sorts of batshit crazy stuff that happened. But then once John Yoo in the Bush 43 administration writes the torture memos and sort of formalizes this is how many times you can water dunk someone without it being torture, et cetera, et cetera. Once you formalize it, people somehow know that it's on its way out because it doesn't quite work anymore. So by, I don't know, by 2007,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
at Guantanamo, I think the inmates were running the asylum. The inmates and the defense lawyers were running it. You were way safer as a Muslim terrorist in Guantanamo than as a, let's say, suspected cop killer in Manhattan. There was still an informal process in Manhattan. You were a suspected cop killer.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
They'd figure out some way to deal with you outside the judicial, the formal judicial process. But I think something, there was a sort of formalization that happened. There was the post J. Edgar Hoover FBI, where Hoover was, I don't know, a law unto himself. It was completely out of control, CIA even more so. And then once it all gets exposed, it probably is a lot harder to do.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The NSA probably held up longer as a deep state entity where it at least had the virtue. I think in the 1980s it was still referred to as no such agency. So it was still far more obscure. So the necessary condition is that if some part of the deep state is doing it, we can barely know what's going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then, I don't know, you know, the 2000s, 2010s, I think the Patriot Act empowered all these FISA courts. And I think there probably were ways the NSA FISA court process was weaponized in a really, really crazy way. And it culminated in 2016 with all the crazy Russia conspiracy theories against Trump. But I think even that, I'm not sure they can do anymore because it got exposed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I'm agreeing with you. The NSA FISA court process is one where you had a pretty out of control process from let's say circa 2003 to 2017, 2018. So that's relatively recent history. I don't know. There are all the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, which I'm probably too fascinated by because it felt like there was some crazy stuff going on that they were able to cover up. And still are.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But then, man, doesn't the fact that we're still talking about Jeffrey Epstein tell us how hard it is to come up with anything else?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And probably, I don't know, man, I spend too much time thinking about all the Epstein variants. It – probably the sex stuff is overdone and everything else is underdone. It's like a limited hangout. We get to talk about the crazy underage sex and not about all the other questions. It's like when Alex Acosta testified for labor secretary and he was the DA who had prosecuted –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Epstein in 08, 09, and got him sort of the very light 13-month or whatever sentence. And it was South Florida DA or whatever he was. And Acosta was asked, you know, why did he get off so easily? And under congressional testimony when he was up for labor secretary 2017, it was he belonged to intelligence. And then, yeah, the question isn't about the sex with the underage women.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
The question is really about why was he so protected? And then I went down all these rabbit holes. Was he working for the Israelis or the Mossad or all this sort of stuff? And I've come to think that that was very secondary. Obviously, it was just the U.S. If you're working for Israel, you don't get protected. We had Jonathan Pollard. He went to jail for 25 years or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But unrelated, right? Understood. But it's – But this is one particular operation. But so it's – but it was – if it was an intelligence operation, the question we should be asking is what part of the U.S. intelligence system was he working for?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I'm sure that was part of it. I suspect there are a lot of other questions that one should also ask.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
My riff on it was always that it was – It's a little bit different from the J. Edgar Hoover thing. And the question was always whether the people doing it knew they were getting compromised. And so it's – the vibe is not that you somehow got compromised. It was more – You were joining this secret club.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
No, no, no. Only if we have compromise on you do you get ahead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's like – I don't know. It's one of these – Skull and bones type things. Yeah, the closet of the Vatican. The claim is 80 percent of the cardinals in the Catholic Church are gay. Not sure if that's true, but directionally it's probably correct.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And the basic thesis is you don't get promoted to a cardinal if you're straight because we need to have – and so you need to be compromised and then you're under control. But you also get ahead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Do you have a theory on what was Bill Gates' complicity with Epstein?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
All of that might be true, but I wonder if there are more straightforward alternate conspiracy theories on Epstein that we're missing. So let me do an alternate one on Bill Gates. Sure. The things, just looking at what's hiding in plain sight. He supposedly talked to Epstein early on about how his marriage wasn't doing that well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then Epstein suggested that he should get a divorce circa 2010, 2011. And Gates told him something like, you know, that doesn't quite work. He didn't have – presumably because he didn't have a prenup. So there's one part of Epstein as a marriage counselor, which is sort of disturbing. But then the second thing that we know that Gates talked to Epstein about was sort of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, all the sort of collaborating on funding, setting up this philanthropy, all this sort of this somewhat corrupt left-wing philanthropy structures. And so there's a question, you know, does – and then my sort of straightforward alternate conspiracy theory is should we ask – should we combine those two?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And was there, you know, and I don't have all the details on this figured out, but it would be something like, you know, Bill and Melinda get married in 1994. They don't sign a prenup. And, you know, something's going wrong with the marriage. And maybe Melinda can get half the money. In a divorce, he doesn't want her to get half the money. What do you do?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then the alternate plan is something like you set up – you commit the marital assets to this nonprofit and then it sort of – locks Melinda into not complaining about the marriage for a long, long time. And so there's something about the left-wing philanthropy world that was some sort of boomer way to control their crazy wives or something like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
There are all these – and he talked to Epstein about – he got Epstein to meet with the head of the Nobel Prize Foundation. So it was – yeah, Bill Gates wanted to get a Nobel Prize. Wow. Right? So this is all – yeah, this is all straightforward. This is all known. Yeah. And I'm not saying what you're saying about – Do you know the history of the Nobel Prize?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But I think – but then if we – and so there's – yeah, so there's an underage sex version of the Epstein story and then there is a crazy status Nobel Prize history of it and there is a corrupt left-wing philanthropy one and there is a – boomers who didn't sign prenuptial agreements with their wives story and I think all those are worth exploring more. I think you're right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well... Man, it's... There's something about Maybe it's just my hermeneutic of suspicion. But there's something about, you know, there's something about the virtue signaling and what does it mean. And I always think this is sort of a Europe – America versus Europe difference where in America we're told that – Philanthropy is something a good person does.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And if you're a Rockefeller and you start giving away all your money, this is just what a good person does and it shows how good you are. And then I think sort of the European intuition on it is something like, you know, wow, that's only something a very evil person does. And if you start giving away all your money in Europe, it's like, Joe, you must have murdered somebody.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You must be covering up for something. So there are these two very different intuitions. And I think the European one is more correct than the American one. And probably there's some history where the sort of left-wing philanthropy peaked in 2007, 2010, 2012. And there's these subtle ways we've become more European in our sensibilities as a society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so it has this very different valence from what it did uh 12 or 14 years ago but yeah it's all we ask all these questions like we're asking right now about bill gates where it's like okay he was you know it was like all the testimony in the microsoft antitrust trial in the 90s like he's cutting off the air supply he wants to strangle people
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And he's like he's kind of a sociopathic guy, it seems. And then it's this giant whitewashing operation. And then somehow the whitewashing has been made too transparent and it gets deconstructed and exposed by the Internet or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I think it's something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah. Or, um, there are all these alternate versions I can give, but yeah, I think, um, I think, uh, It's always so hard to know what's really going on in our culture, though. So I think all what you say is true, but I also think it's not working as well as it used to. I agree. And there is a way people see through this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's not always as articulate as you just articulated it, but there's some vague intuition that – You know, when Mr. Gates is just wearing sweaters and looks like Mr. Rogers, that something fishy is going on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's Google, Apple- Now NVIDIA, Meta. Yeah, I think Broadcom is close to that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Because if you're – You know, if you're virtue signaling, our intuition is something really, really, really sketchy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Again, my alternate one, which is not incompatible with yours on Gates, is that Melinda finally files for divorce in early 21. I think she told Bill she wanted one late 2019. So 2020, the year where Bill Gates goes into overdrive on COVID, you know, all this stuff, you know, part of it, maybe it's self-dealing and he's trying to make money from the drug company or something like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But, you know, isn't Isn't the other really big thing he needs to box Melinda in and force her not to get that much out? Because all the money is going to the foundation anyway. Melinda has to say, you know, I want – why do you want half the money? It's all going to the Gates Foundation anyway. We're not leaving our kids anything. And then when you lean into COVID –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
How does that work in the – it's somehow – in theory, Melinda has a really strong hand. She should get half. That's what you get in a divorce with no prenuptial. But then if you make it go overdrive on COVID, Melinda, are you a – I don't know – are you like some crazy anti-science person?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so, I don't know, my reconstruction is that you should not underestimate how much of it was, you know, About just controlling his ex-wife and not about controlling the whole society.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
They can both be correct. Sure. There's many factors. But mine lines up really well with the timeline.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Really? Interesting. And she should have gotten half. It's amazing he got it down that much. Wow. Interesting. But I think she was just boxed in. Every time he went on TV talking about COVID, she was boxed in with all of her left-wing friends.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Was he having extramarital affairs through Epstein or maybe Epstein was – from Melinda's point of view, would it be worse for Epstein to facilitate an extramarital affair or would it be worse for Epstein to be advising Gates on how to ditch Melinda without giving her any money?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And I think... How'd you get introduced? It was Reid Hoffman in Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014. But it was basically... And, you know, Chuck didn't ask enough questions about it. But I think there were sort of a lot of things where it was fraudulent. I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And there were probably these complicated ways you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially in a marital context that I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about. How – when you were introduced to him? I don't think Epstein would have been able to comment on super string theory or something like that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But I think this sort of thing he might have actually been pretty expert on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
He was described as one of the smartest tax people in the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And I probably—it probably was my moral weakness that I— Well, how could you have known back then?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
No, this was 2014. It was post-arrest. Oh, so his arrest was the first arrest, right? Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Okay. And so... But, you know, you assume he didn't go to jail for that long. Right. It was probably not as serious as alleged. There certainly was the illusion that there were all these other people that I trusted. Reed, who introduced us, was, you know, he started LinkedIn. He was, you know, maybe too focused on business networking. Right. But I thought he always had good judgment in people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, I think it was – I think a lot of it was this strange commentary on – You know, there was some secret club, secret society you could be part of. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Again, that wasn't explicit, but that was the vague vibe of the whole thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Yeah, I think there were probably different things that were pitched for different people. Sure. You know, I was pitched on the taxes. I think, you know, there were probably other people that were, you know, more prone to the, you know, the social club part. And then there were probably people – yeah, and there was probably – A fairly limited group where it was, yeah, off the charts bad stuff.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And we still don't have it on the Kennedy assassination. That's crazy. JFK.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I haven't studied that one that carefully, but isn't. You know, there are all these alternate conspiracy theories on who killed JFK. It's, you know, the CIA and the mafia and the Russians and the Cubans. And, you know, there's an LBJ version since he's the one who benefited. So all these happen in Texas. And you have all these alternate theories.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And on some level, it's – yeah, it's – I always think it's just a commentary where 1963 America was – it wasn't like Leave it to Beaver. It was like a really crazy country underneath the surface. Absolutely. And even though probably most of the conspiracy theories are wrong, it was like Murder on the Orient Express and all these people – sort of had different reasons for wanting Kennedy dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And that's what the theories are right, even if they're wrong on the level of factual detail. And then the sort of more minimal one that I'm open to, and I think there's some evidence in this from the stuff that has come out, is, you know, Oswald was talking to parts of the US deep state.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And so even if Oswald was the lone assassin, and you somehow get the magic bullet theory and all that stuff to work, but let's say Oswald was the lone assassin. Did he tell someone in the FBI or CIA, you know, I'm going to go kill Kennedy tomorrow? And then, you know, maybe the CIA didn't have to kill him. They just had to do nothing, just had to sit on it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Or maybe he was too incompetent and didn't go up the bureaucracy. And so it's, you know, I think we sort of know that they talked to Oswald before. You know, a fair amount before before it happened. And and so there's at least something, you know, that was grossly incompetent.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Probably some amount of LSD that's dangerous for you. Probably an enormous amount.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
less crazy version that might still be true which is just that uh people in the secret service in the um biden administration don't like trump and it's they didn't have full intention to kill him but it's just they didn't protect him we're just we're just you know we're gonna have we're gonna understaff it we're um we're not gonna we don't have to do as good a job coordinating with the local police there's all these ways you know to make someone less safe
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
It's always a question who they is though. Right. Well, if I'm a sniper and I'm on the – People in the audience. There were people there telling it to people. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Well, I suspect some of the Secret Service people were told that and then – Who knows how that got relayed or who all is they?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Secret service that I don't know about the snipers. I don't know about – the thing I don't have a good sense on with shooting, and maybe you'd have a better feel for this, is my – My sense is it was a pretty straightforward shot for the guy and the Trump assassin would be assassin. I think the Oswald shot was a much harder one because Kennedy's moving.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Let me go back. Back to Mike. I thought it was a much easier shot. It's not an easy head shot. He's shooting at his head. But why was shooting at the head the right thing? Shouldn't you be shooting at the middle of the body?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Was there anything about the high angle from Oswald that made it harder?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And the Warren Commission's report – And obviously the Warren Commission whitewashed everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But then do you get to anything more concrete than my murder on the Orient Express where they're just – it could have been a lot of people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Oh, for sure. The Cuba version of the assassination theory was, you know, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62 about a year earlier. And then the deal happened. that we struck with the Soviets was, you know, they take the missiles out of Cuba and we promised we wouldn't try to overthrow the government in Cuba. And I guess we
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, we no longer did, you know, no longer did Bay of Pigs type covert stuff like that. But I think there were still something like four or five assassination plots on Fidel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then I think there was, I don't know, I think that, again, I'm going to get this garbled. I think a month or two before the JFK assassination, Castro said something like, you know, there might be repercussions if you keep doing this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
This is again where I think it is. I don't think we're in a world where zero stuff is happening. The place where I directionally have a different feel for it is I think so much less of this stuff is going on. And it's so much harder in this internet world for people to hide.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And there are legacy programs and there are internal records that are being kept. And, you know, I don't know this for sure, but I think even the NSA FISA court stuff, which was an out-of-control deep state thing that was going on through about 2016, 2017, I suspect even that at this point, you know, can't quite work because people know that they're being watched. They know they're being recorded.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And it's just, you know— You can't do waterboarding in Guantanamo if you have lawyers running all over the place.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then on the other hand, I think there's also a degree to which our government, our deep state across the board is shockingly less competent, less functional, And it's less capable of this. And this is where I'm not even sure whether this is an improvement. So it's sort of like maybe the 1963 U.S. where let's go with the craziest version where our deep state is capable of
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Knocking off the president. Maybe that's actually a higher functioning society than the crazy version where they're incapable of doing it. Right. And they're bogged down with DEI. They can't get the gunman even to have a scope on his rifle or whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, it's like much bigger – they can't find someone as competent as Oswald or something like that. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point. So I veer more to the explanation that it's gross –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Very effectively. You can do things as a solo actor. It's hard to organize because everything gets recorded.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You all will coordinate together. That is still a strange counterpoint to my thesis. Why has the dirt not come out? And so somehow there's some way – The container is still kind of working.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, in the – but again, just to take the other side of this, both in the Assange-Snowden stuff, yeah, it showed an out-of-control deep state that was just hoovering up all the data in the world. Right. And then – but we weren't – like, it didn't show – Like James Bond times 100. There weren't like exploding cigar assassination plots. There was none of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
We're doing so little with this is is is that or at least that's the. But, you know, it's I think it's there's so much less agency in the CIA, in the Central Intelligence Agency. It's so much less agentic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
So that's your placeholder theory or that's what you think more than space aliens? Or do you think both space aliens and that or which version of this?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But do you think the UFO sightings from the 50s and 60s were already drone programs? Were they already that advanced?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
But can't decide between those two. So I end up stuck in California.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, the – let me think what my – I hear everything you're saying. I'm strangely under-motivated by it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
I'll do – And I guess on the space aliens, which is the wilder, more interesting one in a way, you know, I don't know, Roswell was 77 years ago, 1947. And if... If the phenomenon is real and it's from another world, it's space aliens, space robots, whatever, probably one of the key features is its ephemerality or its cloaking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And they are really good at hiding it, at cloaking it, at scrambling people's brains after they see them or stuff like this.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then, you know, if you're a researcher, you have to pick fields where you can make progress. And so this is it's not a promising field. And, you know, academia is messed up. But even if academia were not messed up, this would not be a good field in which to try to make a career because there's been so little progress in 77 years. And so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
So if you think of it from the point of view of. I don't know, Jacques Vallée or some of these people who have been working on this for 50 years. And yeah, it feels like there's something there, but then it's just as soon as you feel like you have something almost that's graspable, like the TikTok videos, whatever, it's just always at the margin of recognition. The ephemerality is a key feature.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
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.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
And then maybe you have to – I think you have to have some theory of why is this about to change. And then it's always – I don't know. The abstract mathematical formulation would be something doesn't happen for time interval 0 to t. And time interval T plus one, next minute, next year, how likely is it? And maybe there's a chance something will happen. You're waiting at the airport.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Your luggage hasn't shown up. It's more and more likely it shows up in the next minute. But after an hour. At some point, the luggage is lost. And if you're still waiting at the airport a year later, that's a dumb idea. At some point, the luggage is lost. And like, you know, I don't know, 77 years, it's like maybe it's like 77 minutes at the airport.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
At 77 minutes, you should start, you know, I'd start getting very demotivated waiting for my luggage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Man, it's like, you know, it's mid-August here in Austin. Yeah. It's just brutal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Although you could say that's what chat GPT is. It could be. It's like an alien intelligence. I think that's what ultimately they are. But I think – Let me – man, there's so many parts of it that I find – puzzling or disturbing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
Let me go down one other rabbit hole along this with you, which is, you know, I always wonder, and again, this is a little bit too simplistic an argument, but I always wonder, that I'm about to give, but what the alien civilization can be like. And if you have faster than light travel, if you have warp drive, which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2190 - Peter Thiel
You know, what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you see them coming. And there is no defense against a warp speed weapon. And you could sort of take over the whole universe before anybody could see you coming.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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 Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And there was no big regulatory counter-movement in Victoria.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But then we get to something like thermonuclear weapons, and that specifically has a very different character. It has a really different character. And probably, I don't know, by the 1950s and 1960s, You know, baby boomers get, you know, you're a kid, you get brought up on Dr. Seuss and not on adventure stories. And it probably changes childhood education.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
It changes the way we form and develop human beings. And it leads to a society where, you know, science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence. There's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much science and technology
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
you know, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West, and were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a compliment? Where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation, and this is sort of a way that it's, You know, it's a fulfillment. Furtherance. A furtherance of this.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God? Radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project. Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence. And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, this is where I think someone like Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And it is, we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress. And then I've had this Bacon discussion with a number of people lately. And they all think, no, no, that can't be right. Bacon was just the somewhat heterodox Christian.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And because in late modernity, where we find ourselves, and again, it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally, but in late modernity, it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point. And so if you think about Hollywood.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity. He is like a fossil from before 1789. He's the last of the Enlightenment. He's a fossil from before 1789. And Greta is more representative, or, you know, everything about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so to the extent, the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's, yeah, it's God's fault, but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place. And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so in the 17th and 18th century, the Christian God was blamed for slowing down the scientific technological project. In the 20th and 21st century, the Christian God gets blamed for starting it speeding up, keeping it going. And so the invariant is the Christian God always gets blamed, but the fact that it's the exact opposite tells us something very interesting about how this is transformed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The only point I'll make is that we're, again, we're in a very different place with science and technology than we were in the 17th, 18th century. 17th, 18th century, I don't think people would have said, yeah, we're gonna make all this progress and then there's gonna be a lot of pushback and it'll get regulated.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I know the thought was we'll make a lot of progress and it'll be so good that it will actually then accelerate and it will, you know, it'll smash religion even more and then we can go even faster and it'll go even better. And it's going to have this sort of unraveling, accelerating effect.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then in the 20th, 21st century, we make the opposite argument as there are some things in this project that have gone somewhat haywire.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Well, again, let's start with the early... the early modern history. And I'm always a sort of hardcore Girardian, this great thinker, intellectual, sort of in some ways Christian polymath that I studied under Stanford in the late 80s, 90s, and influenced me tremendously. And
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
You know, these things are, again, very complicated intellectual history questions, but certainly one intuition that's odd about your telling would be that you would say that we had sort of a law-centered, monotheistic tradition also in Islam, also in Judaism.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And if we say there was something about Christianity where this really came, and it was not in the Islamic world that you got the scientific revolution, for example, It's just that maybe it wasn't just the metaphysics, not just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Girard was fond of always saying that when people focus too much in the Bible on what it tells us about God, there must also be something it tells us about man.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And certainly the Girardian intuition is that one of the things is always that there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating, that in some ways, some sense of Judaism and then Christianity, it's the same story. It's the same story of, you know, sacrifice, but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community. It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And there's a certain way where it sets in process this gradual, this dynamic revelation that has, that leads to the sort of gradual unraveling. And there are, And as you stop believing in scapegoats, you're forced to come up with other explanations, and that includes science. So, for example, you can ask, why did the witchcraft trials come to an end?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And the atheist scientific explanation is, we got science to prove that witchcraft is impossible. And I don't think that's even been proven in 2025 because we don't know everything. Maybe it's a lost art that's been lost. Maybe you can go to a bookstore in Berkeley.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But then the Girardian alternate story of why the witchcraft trials ended were that at some point people realized that this sort of collective scapegoating in some ways was like a version of the Death of Christ, you know, the witches were not absolutely innocent like Christ, but they were relatively innocent. It was a community that went crazy.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then you, you know, and then once you know that the witches are innocent or are relatively innocent, then you steal yourself and force yourself to find natural explanations. You know, if you don't think that it was, you know, I don't know, the Jews that poisoned the wells in the Middle Ages. Right.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Or some devils or- Eventually, or, you know, this was during the Salem witch trials, there were these, you know, you had these competing sermons on Sundays and, you know, the initial ones were sort of that, yeah, these women had made a pact with the devil, but then the way it got reconstructed, because it was right afterwards that the witchcraft trials ended and people sort of realized pretty fast they'd kind of collectively lost their minds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And the alternate one was, the devil had entered the whole community and had possessed all of Salem. And those were the sermons you gave in the aftermath of the witchcraft trials. And then in that sort of a context, maybe science was also a way a way to find, you know, you can steel yourself to find natural explanations.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
When you're in an archaic, you know, thing, scapegoating is always an explanation. It's a, you know, this person did this, that person did this, it's that person's fault. And when you say those explanations won't do, maybe you're forced to do scientific explanations. So there are all these different threads one can stress. I think you have to always ask this question
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
What was specific about the Christian message that really enabled this? I think there was a way the Jewish context was extremely learned. And people, I don't know, if you compare the Talmudic abilities already in the Middle Ages to understand the Bible, to read it. It was as good or better than anything that the Christian scholastics were doing.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But somehow it never really got a part of society to orient in this other way. But again, it's obviously a complicated history.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I think it was somewhere in Karl Marx where he says that all social criticism starts with the criticism of religion. And then the Christian addendum, I would always say, was that Jesus Christ was the first person to actually do that, really, and started that whole process, where you can think so much of it was calling into question the social institutions, the religious institutions,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
in a way, deconstructing them. And there's something about this that is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
know i i think is true i i think um i i think there is something about it that has an unraveling character um and i don't think you can go back we can't go back to these these pagan institutions once they once they have been deconstructed and you know maybe maybe the gods get recharacterized as demons or psychosocial phenomena
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But, you know, that doesn't sound like, you know, the way you really bring Zeus back, you know, into the way it would have been understood by, you know, the average person in ancient Greece or something like that. But, yeah, I think... You know, one of the other dimensions that, I mean, it was sort of this combination of literature and anthropology
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But also, there was always a psychological dimension to Girard. And the psychological intuition in Girard is that there's something about human beings being imitative that's very deep, very important, very underexplored. And it is... It is that you have something like, I believe it's in Aristotle, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then you could say this is like, you know, and of course Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes. And the apes, they ape, they imitate. And so we differ from the apes in being more ape-like than the apes. If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the Darwinian one, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way. And then the problem...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted. This is how you learn language. Without imitation, nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work. And then the thing that's dangerous is it's not just on a representational level. It's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate. It's also on the level of desires, of things they want.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And when everybody wants the same thing, this becomes this incredibly, incredibly violent thing. And then, in Gibrard's understanding, the point of, you know, a major point of a lot of the laws, divine laws in these archaic societies was to, in some sense, stop imitation, to prevent imitation, to, you know, the job you do will be the same job that your father did.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
if your father's a baker, you will be a baker. And this creates, you know, a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and it all goes, everybody's at everybody else's throats. And then somehow, you know, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
before we had anything cultural at all, before we had invented, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence. And so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
is, you know, it's what makes our society dynamic, but there are no natural barriers, and that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, and again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it has this super open-ended dimension where it can go in all these different ways, you know.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
There's probably, again, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here, there probably is you know, something about the loss of the transcendent, where, you know, if you have some transcendent reference, you're not in mimetic competition. Yeah, okay, I want to return to that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so one of the intuitions Girard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list. The first commandment, you know, only worship one God, there's one God above you, that's who you worship.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The 10th commandment is the one about, you know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being too your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things. And it's basically when you, you know, when you stop looking up, you start looking around and when you look around too much, It's not a wisdom of crowds. It's a madness of crowds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then that is... That's the envy issue. And then that is sort of where, again, we're not even talking about what to do about this, but this is just sort of a... Well, kind of. Looking up is partly what to do about it. As a description, I would say there is something about...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
late modernity a society that's not dominated by a supernatural being that's sort of you know it's it's atheist the liberal atheist society we live in is one where people look around a great deal it's it's a lot of very unhealthy status competition games that end up driving it um
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And that would be sort of a Girardian description of this world where mimesis is far more out of control than ever before. Don't think we can go back. But there are all these ways. It's frustrating, unsatisfactory. It may be apocalyptic, but that's a way to, again, understand this history. And it's in some ways downstream of Christianity. It's downstream of these things being revealed.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
In some ways, it's the opposite to it. Because one of the questions, Gerard, if you asked Gerard, you have this theory about mimesis, and there are all these bad forms of mimesis. We have the wrong role models, and then isn't it just, okay, you should be less mimetic? Yeah, no. And then, of course, Girard was, no, this is just the nature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
You can maybe choose your role model, you can choose Christ, but you can't choose not to be mimetic. By the way, that's the Ayn Rand answer, where in Atlas Shrugged, The bad people are all the people who imitate. They're the second handers. They're the people who don't know what they want and just copy everybody else. And then the really great people are the unmoved movers.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
They're like Aristotelian gods. They're not influenced by anybody. And it's all from within. But they're united by the same ethos across the entrepreneurs. But the Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be people like that don't exist. We all exist. grow up deeply in a social context. There's a developmental part to human biology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children because children are incredibly imitative, both good and bad. This is just the way we are. But so, yes, Girard's answer was never that you could get rid of mimesis or anything like this. Yeah, no, that's not going to happen. Or even that some kind of psychological approach would be, you know, that you talk about your memetic stuff with your therapist.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
That might make it worse, right? Because you'd focus on it even more, and then you'd conclude... As in so much therapy, it gets marketed as self-transformation, and it crashes out as self-acceptance, and then you probably just conclude, I'm just a really mimetic person, I can't help it.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Into self-acceptance, let's say.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I wish it would stop there, but it doesn't. And then I think Girard's answer would still be something like, you should just go to church.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The way I believe it was sort of this somewhat optimistic, you know, just positive society's progressing through imitation.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it. It's something like the Christian anthropology.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Well, let me see. There's many different threads here, but I would say, Gerard would reference people like Piaget and said that, you know, they underestimated imitation massively. They whitewash it. It's, you know, if you ignore this all-important runaway violence dimension and things like this... Yeah, well, Piaget was not a psychopathologist, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, yeah. And then I think Gerard... intuition was much more that, in some sense, the so-called normal case is the less important one. It's the extreme case. It's the madness of crowds. That's an extremely important case. Hey, fair enough. Because Piaget also wasn't an abnormal psychologist. Piaget would have been like Malcolm Gladwell, in the wisdom of crowds.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The crowds are wise because they imitate each other, and this is how a lot of stuff works.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
All these ways were still within some structure, but... But you could always say this is a basic difference between enlightenment rationalism and biblical revelation is, you know, in the Bible, the crowd is always wrong. The crowd is always crazy. It is mad. It's, you know, the Tower of Babel, it's in part, it's the unanimity. The Israelites. It's the unanimity.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And enlightenment rationality, it's always, you know, democracy is good. The more people vote for something, the more rational it is. Although, you know, at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea. And so, you know, it's a very important question. When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And I think the Girardian, and I would say Christian intuition is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than you have to, than you think. And that, you know, and this is, yeah. And so that's sort of one dimension. I don't know if I would anchor it as much on sacrifice, though, as the key feature.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And again, this is one of the places where Girard argued that it's Christianity was, in Girard's telling, is anti-sacrificial. It is a move away from sacrifice. All these theories about the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death. But even if we go
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Well, it is Christ's death is supposed to be the last one. Christ made the sacrifice, so we do not have to make it. And then, yeah, you can say it is a sacrifice of others versus the sacrifice of self. You could say that, but you could say the way Girard would put the stress would be that you refused, it's not there was some virtue in Christ sacrificing himself.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
He's not like some, I don't know, some sort of silly hero saying, you know, please let the lions come and eat me up or something like that, you know, giving some sort of dramatic announcement. It said, Christ at Gethsemane, you know, it's still praying, please let this cup be taken away from me. It is, so it is, it's not, you know, this is, you know, a wonderful, necessary thing to do at all.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
It's quite the opposite. But you could say it is the refusal to sacrifice others that characterizes Christ. Well, definitely that. And we're not willing to resort to violence. You're not willing to use power. You aren't willing to call down all the angels from heaven to stop the crucifixion. And so it's a refusal to sacrifice others.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But, and then, yeah, maybe in some contexts, you have to lay down your life, your friends. There are things like that that happen, but I think it's much more, you know, the anti-sacrificial intuition. And you have this already in, you know, a number of the Old Testament prophets. I think it's Hosea, where it's, you know, God desires mercy and not sacrifice. You know, so it's, you know, and...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then these are sort of, in a way you can think of the Old Testament law as a sacrificial set of laws as it's centered on the temple and we have this sort of elaborate set of sacrifices. And then in some sense, Christ replaces it with, love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then pay attention to the moment. And then we could say,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
We could say it's, and then he says he's not getting rid of the Old Testament law. Yeah. But if you do those two things, you don't need any of the Old Testament law anymore. Okay, so let's delve into that. You can even eat bacon and pork.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Which was a really, really bad thing to do under the Old Testament law.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then there's another side... Let me push back on just that description. Is it a sacrificial move or is it a rational move? Because... there's some way in which- I think it's both. It's both. It's rational once you can see the future, right? But it's sort of very, to the extent it's rational, it may not be that sacrificial. You know, you save money in order to buy a house.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Man, this is where I want to push back a little bit. Push away, man. I don't think you tell a two- or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice. No, you probably act it out for them. It's if you don't take turns, something bad happens. You won't have friends. And you won't have friends. Or the other kids tell the kids that. Yeah, there's some very...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
pretty fast, immediate consequences to it. And again, you don't say it's rational, but it's sort of, you learn pretty fast to do these things. And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I'm going to give lots of examples, but there's always a question about what should be done about academia. All the conservative academics are being expelled. It's so hard to do this. And there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
right-of-center people over the last 20 years, where it's, well, we just, you know, we need to just train more people with PhDs, and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system, and have to somehow break in. Yeah, right. And there's sort of a lot of reasons to think that it's hard to do or might not work, but
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice. And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made. It's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice confused things.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And then the non-sacrificial move is roughly like what you yourself did with the University of Toronto, wherever you were, where it's, at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia. I'm not sacrificing or I'm not playing by all their silly rules. And I think that was the correct thing to do.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But again, I would describe it as the anti-sacrificial move. The sacrificial move would be, you know, you have a tender position there and you might be unhappy about it, but you know, for the greater good, you have to stay there.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But I would also say that- And I think those were irrational things that you should not have sacrificed. I'm fully on board with that.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I think you made totally the right decision, but I would describe it as, the way I would describe it, and maybe this just shows how the language of sacrifice is confusing, but I would describe it as you refused to make the sacrifices that were demanded of you because they were silly, irrational, crazy. In relation to what?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
See, that's the issue, because I think that's true, but— In relation to things that, again, maybe can't be fully rationally defined, but in relation to some of the alternatives you could do, in relation to, you know, maybe even something as stupid as what you found hedonically enjoyable, right?
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Did you find it enjoyable sitting on silly faculty committees as a tenured professor, or did you find it boring? And it wasn't fun. The boredom wasn't fun. And it's not the only reason to leave. Maybe it's not a sufficient reason, but from my perspective, it's a good partial reason. And there were probably a lot of things like this that added up.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But again, I don't want to make this too aggrandizing to you, but I think what you're doing is far better, far more important now.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
So if you had sacrificed your job and you were completely unemployable, and had no economic prospects, you could describe it as sacrificing your job so you could express yourself, but if nobody's listening to you, that might be a pretty irrational thing to do, again. And so it was, I think it was a, yeah, it's rational for you to,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
focus on reaching a much larger audience for you to do all these things. And I think those were good decisions. You didn't let let's say the moralizing left-wing people in academia get to you, you didn't let their value system control you. Their value system is that, you know, there's nothing more important than academia. This is the world that really matters.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
This is where you have to fight the battles. He said, no, you didn't let that morality control you. So I would, yeah, I would describe it as, Christian or maybe Nietzschean, but anti-sacrificial, what you did, in a very good way.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But then the meta layer would be, this is where maybe just the language of sacrifice is often more confusing than helpful.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I want to push back on all of these things. Yes, I will confess to being an unreconstructed Girardian, and there were probably ways Girard modified his views more than I have. And so he probably, towards the end of his life, was more open to sacrifice. And I stick with the Girard of the 70s and 80s, who was more categorically... You know, I think, let me do an alternate cut on one story.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And there's one of these Bible stories. And I always think one needs to interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament. This is sort of, again, a Christian bias I have that it doesn't fully make sense on its own. You need to interpret it in the light of the new.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And so there's a passage in the New Testament, I don't have the verse memorized, but it's basically where Christ says one must have faith like a child. Mm-hmm. And then there's, it's again, you can think it's like an abstract thing, but maybe it's again, we should always think more concretely.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And the concrete question I would have is, is there a faith of a child that's being highlighted as especially noteworthy and worthy of attention? of emulation. And I think there is, in fact, one child whose faith gets described in the Old Testament, and we never seem to talk about it, and it's Isaac.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Because as they're going up the mountain, you know, Abraham tells Isaac this fictional story that maybe God will provide something else and that's what might happen. And then Isaac just believes that. Abraham believes he has to make sacrifice. That's the delusional faith of an adult. who's read too much Kierkegaard or something.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And Isaac's is the true Christian faith that God will figure out a way where the sacrifice doesn't need to happen. God is not a violent God. The violence doesn't come from God. He's a loving God. And there's a way to do this without sacrifice. And I'm always...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
Yeah, what I find so odd about the Abraham-Isaac story is that we've written, endless amounts has been written on the faith of Abraham, or Abraham is seen as the iconic person with faith. And it's, again, linked to a certain conception of sacrifice. And yet we have the line in the New Testament where Christ tells us to look at the faith of a child. Maybe you can come up with a better example.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
I think the concrete one is Isaac.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
We get enough of Isaac's perspective implicitly in the story. It's all the reviews. When we talk about, you know, whose faith should we emulate? Yeah, the theologians, the philosophers, they always tell us you need to emulate the faith of Abraham.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
The way I understand Christ, I understand him to be telling me to emulate the faith of Isaac, which I think is very different and maybe also very different on this question of sacrifice. There always are questions how one interprets sacrifice. the Christian account. I believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, both as an event that happened historically, but also as a promise.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
And in some sense, following Christ, there may be all sorts of bad things that happen to you, but it's a rational trade for saving your soul and for having eternal life. And so if you think of it in the context of saving your soul and eternal life, you know, we can call that a sacrifice, but it has a very different character.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
But you have to, you know, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in a literal sacrifice, you know, eternal life. That's one sort of thing. If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as a really high value. But that's why I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial. And maybe, I don't like the word rational, but just you're making a good choice, a wise choice.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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...
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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,
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel
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.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
They are no longer good places to learn how to defend liberalism. Maybe they're good places for training conservatives. If you go to Yale Law School, if you're one of five people in the class of 170 who's still conservative at the end, you'll be pretty good at understanding what's wrong with liberalism. You'll have thought about it a lot and you'll be a more thoughtful person.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Newsom Tries to Salvage Political Career, and Woke Policies Backfire, with Stu Burguiere and Ilya Shapiro | Ep. 981
And so it will actually train you well to be a conservative. And we're right to value the small number of conservatives who come out of that gauntlet as quite talented people.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Why All AI Companies Are Under-Valued | The Future of Foundation Models: Scaling Laws, Generalised vs Specialised, Commoditised? | From Unable to Afford Rent to Raising $130M From Index and Peter Thiel with George Sivulka @ Hebbia
Yeah.