Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman. Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund and leads the Thiel Foundation, which funds technological progress and long-term thinking. He is also the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Zero to One. https://foundersfund.com https://palantir.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Joe Rogan Podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day. Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. What's up, man? Good to see you. Glad to be on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. What's cracking? How you doing? Doing all right. We were just talking about how you're still trapped in L.A. I'm still trapped in L.A. I know. You're friends with a lot of people out here. Have you thought about jettisoning?
Chapter 2: Why does Peter Thiel feel trapped in L.A.?
I talk about it all the time. But, you know, it's always talk is often a substitute for action. It's always does it lead to action or does it end up substituting for action? That's a good point. But I have endless conversations about leaving. And I moved from San Francisco to L.A. back in 2018. That felt about as big a move away as possible.
And I keep – the extreme thing I keep saying – and you're going to have to keep in mind talk is a substitute for action. The extreme thing – I keep saying is I can't decide whether to leave the state or the country. Oh, boy. If you went out of the country, where would you go? Man, it's tough to find places because, you know, there are a lot of problems in the U.S.
and most places are doing so much worse.
Yeah. It's not a good move to leave here. Yeah.
As fucked up as this place is. But I keep thinking I shouldn't move twice. So I should either – I can't decide whether I should move to Florida or should move to New Zealand or Costa Rica or something like that.
Yeah. Go full John McAfee.
But can't decide between those two. So I end up stuck in California.
Well, Australia is okay, but they're even worse when it comes to rule of law and what they decide to make you do and the way they're cracking down on people now for online speech. And it's very sketchy in other countries.
But somehow the relative outperformance of the U.S. and the absolute stagnation decline of the U.S., they're actually related things. Because the way the conversation's grooved, every time I tell someone, you know, I'm thinking about leaving the country. They'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse. And then that somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of leaving California?
that's very dangerous seeming to me about the current fiscal situation is the interest rates have gone back to positive like they were in the 90s and early 2000s, mid-2000s. And it's just this incredibly large debt. And so we now have a real runaway deficit problem. But people have been talking about this for 40 years and crying wolf for 40 years. So it's very hard for people to take it seriously.
Most people don't even understand what it means. Like when you say there's a deficit, we owe money. Okay, to who?
How does that work? Well, it's to people who bought the bonds and it's – A lot of it's to Americans. Some of them are held by the Federal Reserve. A decent amount are held by foreigners at this point because in some ways it's the opposite of the trade current account deficits. The U.S.
has been running these big current account deficits, and then the foreigners end up with way more dollars than they want to spend on American goods or services. And so they have to reinvest them in the U.S. Some put it into houses or stocks, but a lot of it just goes into government debt. So in some ways it's a function of the chronic trade imbalances, chronic trade deficits.
Well, if you had supreme power, if Peter Thiel was the ruler of the world and you could fix this, what would you do?
Man, I always find that hypothetical. It's a ridiculous hypothetical. It is ridiculous. You ask ridiculous hypotheticals, you get ridiculous answers.
I want a ridiculous answer. That's what I like. But what could be done? First of all, what could be done to mitigate it and what could be done to solve it?
I think my answers are probably all in the very libertarian direction. So it would be sort of – Figure out ways to have smaller governments. Figure out ways to increase the age on Social Security. Means test Social Security so not everyone gets it. Just figure out ways to gradually dial back a lot of these government benefits. And then that's insanely unpopular.
So it's completely unrealistic on that level.
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Chapter 4: How is the current fiscal situation related to the U.S. economy?
And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector. And you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money. And sort of the government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the – the big tech money in California.
And it's not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it's pretty stable. People have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous. It's going to collapse any year now. They've been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that's the way you have to think of California.
Yeah.
Well, the other thing is you're also- There are things about it that are ridiculous, but there's something about it that, you know, it doesn't naturally self-destruct overnight.
Well, there's a lot of kick-ass people there. And there's a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there. And it's too difficult to just pack up and leave.
I think it's something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California.
That's amazing.
It's Google, Apple- Now NVIDIA, Meta. Yeah, I think Broadcom is close to that.
And there's no ideal place to live either. It's not like California sucks. So there's a place that's got it totally dialed in with also that has an enormous GDP, also has an enormous population. There's not like one big city that's really dialed in.
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Chapter 5: What historical events led to the rise of conspiracy theories?
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.
Can't do that anymore.
But a small program that is top secret, that is designed under the auspices of protecting American lives. extracting information from people.
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.
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?
No, because there's no answers for the Jeffrey Epstein thing. There's been no consequences other than Ghislaine Maxwell going to jail and Jeffrey Epstein allegedly committing suicide, which I don't think he did. Other than that, what are the consequences? They were able to pull off this thing, this some sort of operation. Who knows who was behind it? Who knows what was the motivation?
But it clearly has something to do with compromising people. which is an age-old strategy for getting people to do what you want them to do. You have things on them, you use those things as leverage, and then next thing you know, you've got people saying things that you want them to say, and it moves policy, changes things, you get things done. They did that.
And we know they did that, and yet no one is asking for the tapes, no one's asking for the client list. We're in the dark still.
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 –
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Chapter 6: How did the Jeffrey Epstein case exemplify powerful manipulation?
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 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.
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?
Was he working for – But don't you think that's an effective strategy for controlling politicians? Yeah. Getting them involved in sex scandals. I mean, that's always been one of the worst things that can happen to a politician. Look at Monica Lewinsky. A very simple one. Consensual, inappropriate sexual relationship between a president and a staffer. And it almost takes down the presidency.
It causes him to get impeached. Powerful motivators. The shame of it all. Also, the illegal activity. The fact that it's one of the most disgusting things that we think of, people having sex with underage people.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of declining birth rates on society?
I'm sure that was part of it. I suspect there are a lot of other questions that one should also ask.
Most certainly. But I would think that that is one of the best motivators that we have. is having dirt on people like that, especially something that could ruin your career, especially people that are deeply embedded in this system of people knowing things about people and using those at their advantage. I mean, that's an age-old strategy in politics.
That was J. Edgar Hoover's entire modus operandi.
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.
Right.
You got to be made – you're a made man in the mafia.
And you get to do crazy things.
No, no, no. Only if we have compromise on you do you get ahead.
Right.
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Chapter 8: How might artificial intelligence shape the future of humanity?
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.
Completely makes sense. Completely makes sense in the way to do that with especially all these politicians who are essentially like bad actors. A lot of them, they're just people that want power and people that want control. A lot of them. And, you know, those kind of guys, they want to party. You know, I mean, that has been you've got two types of leaders that are presidents.
You've got pussy hounds and warmongers. Sometimes you have both, but generally you don't. Guys like Clinton and JFK were anti-war. And then you have guys like Bush, who you don't think of at all as a pussy hound, but most certainly you think of as a warmonger.
Do you have a theory on what was Bill Gates' complicity with Epstein?
I think he likes pussy. I think he's a man. I think he likes power. He likes monopoly. I mean, he's incredibly effective with Microsoft. And for the longest time, he was thought of as a villain, right? He was this antitrust villain. He was this guy who was monopolizing this operating system and controlling just this incredible empire. And he had a real bad rap.
And then I think he wisely turned towards philanthropy.
Do you think that he needed Epstein?
I think it's very difficult for a very famous, very high-profile person to fuck around. I think it's very difficult. I think you have to worry about people telling people. You worry about it taking you down if you're having affairs.
If you're running some philanthropy organization, you're supposed to be thought of as this guy who's like this wonderful person who's trying to really fix all the problems in the world. But really, he's just flying around and banging all these different chicks. You have to figure out a way to pull that off. And this is what Eric Weinstein and I, we've had discussions about this and
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