Joe Rogan Experience #2190 — Peter Thiel Transcript

Transcript

0:00 This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. The world is a big place and it's filled with all different kinds of people. From accountant to zoologist, ZipRecruiter makes hiring faster and easier. and more ways to cash out quick. My pleasure. I know. thing I keep saying, and again, I have to keep in mind talks of substitute fraction, But I keep thinking I shouldn't move twice.

3:40 of the U.S., they're actually related things because the way the conversations right so they try to do mental gymnastics to try to support some of the And presumably, you have to do one of three things. percent of GDP in 1991. show up in servicing the debt because you just paid 0% interest on the T-bills. And the thing that's very dangerous, seeming

6:41 Okay, to who? So in some ways it's a function of the chronic trade imbalances, chronic trade deficits. Well if you had supreme power, governments, figure out ways, you know, to increase the age on social security, means So Social Security, even if you're very wealthy, I don't even know how it works. Do you still Whereas if we were more honest and said it's you know, it's just a welfare system Maybe you could you could start dialing you could you could you could probably

10:12 your income. level like that. And why should be regressive where if you make 500k or a million k a year Yeah, but it, look, it gets away with it. I know. You still increase the amount of revenues you're getting. has three times the population of California. Same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP. sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money in sort

13:47 I think that's that's the way to that's that's the way you have to think of California And there's no ideal place to live either. And so, if you're somewhat biased towards living in at least a moderately sized city, You know, it's sort of Houston is just sort of an oil town, which is good if you're in the tourists I think it's pretty segmented from the tourist strip from everything else.

17:35 Nashville, no problem. I'm probably always, I'm always, I'm always to, you know, fifth grade onward since, you know, 77, I lived in California. And so I'm I think so. 85? die. I know you can die from the heat but you probably won't especially if you all. If you get an 80 degree day in Malibu, it's unusual. I didn't want to leave California. It was very difficult for me.

20:13 May, 2020. May I started looking at houses. Cool. That's when I came to Austin first. been able to make money at all. But with the one exception was Miami. Bought it in September four years ago. And then the interest rates have also doubled. And so you get a 30-year relative to what it was four years ago. a little bit, you know, all these differences but Austin was kind of, you know, a big part

23:13 It's not that easy. and more mismanaged and people thought the network sort of protected them because, you just look at what happened at Flint, Michigan when all the auto factories pulled out. banks, but also the crypto companies, the crypto protocols, you could do those from if we say that crypto is libertarian, out of the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, I would say, let me do sort of a history.

27:37 of the last two years, but the 2010s AI discussion, maybe it was – so I'll start with the And it was sort of, it defined AI as, it was fairly low tech, it was just surveillance, And those were sort of like, say, two extreme competing visions of what AI would mean in the computer can fool you into thinking that it's a human being. And it's a somewhat fuzzy test because, you know,

30:34 it's passed the Turing test. And that was, that was the holy grail. That was the holy grail of about. There is a question. Mr. God because you'd have a – you'd have competition for being God. But surely the Turing test is more important for us humans One last thought. you know, it didn't take that long in the scheme of things. It took, you know, 15, 20

34:12 and I think you're right about the Turing test. to be better, GPT-6 is going to be insane, and then they're working on these right now. living standards for everybody? You know, the internet was a massive achievement. big happens. The internet was pretty big in 99. Bitcoin was moderately big. The internet machines, we saw VHS tapes, then we saw the internet, and then where we're at right now,

37:31 It can be a big change culturally or politically. And there has been a lot of progress in the world of bits, information, computers, internet, It would have meant supersonic airplanes. It would have meant computers. It would have also meant rockets. It would have meant supersonic airplanes. It would have meant new medicines. It would have meant the Green

39:19 There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress And then, of course, there's also a sense in versus the world of atoms. You know, I would say as human beings we're things turned out to be stuck, they were regulated, you couldn't come up with new things to do. 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.

42:18 as social science or political science. Maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures are if you said nuclear science, you wouldn't question it, right? science. After they said that, within a month or two, And so if you're a hardcore environmentalist, you know, you don't want And then you have people like Bill Gates saying that planting trees to deal with carbon is

46:24 today on earth than it has been in a hundred years. Sure. These are all facts that are hit a pollution constraint. But the, in the 1970s it was you're going to have overpopulation, Maybe fracking can add 10 percent, 10 million to that. You probably could mitigate it a lot. the less of the environment it takes up. And when we go back, when we go from oil to natural gas,

50:23 Why did we not go down that route? weapons. But we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the US gets to keep its nuclear weapons Like even China, which is the country where they're building the most nuclear power plants, relative percentage is still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive version by now? They're just not allowed.

55:13 dimensions. And then there's always a question, you know, why did this happen? And my cop-out and then with the thermonuclear weapons in the early 50s. It took a while for it to really on all these dimensions with supersonics That's a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. It really ignores think those were human beings I think those were human beings in that place, in that time, and I think they had some sort

59:22 So those things can happen in the same planet at the same time. And I think while the rest of the world was essentially operating and also massive changes in the environment the... in some ways the one which we have the best history is the fall of the Roman If you say civilization has seen great rises and falls. And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history where even the Roman Empire

1:02:52 then the sort of alternate, purely progressive view is the population has always just been been monotonically always progressing, then there's nothing we should worry about. Nothing can possibly I think technology progressed in a different direction. That's they did, they did without machines, supposedly. They did without the use of the combustion engine. They didn't have electricity.

1:06:11 than anyone anywhere else in the world? How is a big one. How did they figure out how to do it? I think the, I would say the real mystery is why were they motivated. The end of it there was this limestone which is permeable, right? But like my just coming back to our earlier conversation if it sounds it harness the energy of these things with specific gases and through some method convert that into

1:09:28 Well, they didn't do a lot of them. that this is a tomb for the pharaoh. The newer archaeologists, established archaeologists, The scapegoats were, you know, there was sort of a crisis in the archaic community. It got blamed on The stones that were thrown on a victim. It was something like in the 30th year of the reign of the Pharaoh, the Pharaoh gets transformed into a living God.

1:13:05 of Pharaoh. The name was taken from the name of the Egyptian wolf god, one of whom's name age or condition. solve the engineering puzzle. you'll figure out a way to organize the whole society, And if you can get the whole society working on it, the understanding of whatever methods they use to shape and have political power, they figure out ways to manipulate it, things like this.

1:16:07 You know, I think that's a whitewashed, enlightenment, rationalist contract theory in which people sit down, negotiate, and have, you know, a nice legal that much more rational. I don't know if it's that much more It was sort of much more the internal stuff. somehow the culture is more important, you know, if they can talk to each other and you And so because they were embedded, they had very specific rules. You have to maintain at least 20 yards from you and any of the chimps. No food.

1:19:59 things that happens also, they get invaded by other chimps and that chimps very important thing with chimpanzees they get very jealous if they think that you know, there's things like this with the chimpanzees or the baboons or, you know, other And I think, you know, the one type of – and this is going to happen overnight – but that it forces you to – it enables you to coordinate on violence and then it encourages

1:22:48 But this is, again, this is sort of like another way of getting at what's so crazy about CHAT than super intelligence or anything else. It's great. Do you think, what do you think the factor was? Aristotelian-Darwinian biology, Aristotle, you always differ things by And that, a first cut, I would say, I want a banana, you want a blue ball, I can have a red ball, I want a blue ball because

1:26:23 become human? But then it also we could build better weapons and we became more violent. like rough and durable like almost every other primate is. you could build a better axe and that made you stronger than an ape and that's Like what was the primary motivating factor? also somehow linked to, you know, dealing with all the violence that came with it, all the conflicts that came

1:30:19 And so maybe, like maybe you'd be out of your mind to be hunting a woolly mammoth. Okay. I don't question that at all. And maybe it makes you less coordinated or something, but just if you're less scared, probably more aware probably a better hunter and Violence was a part of how society was kept together. very interesting and innovative ideas. And it was sort of, it was some way,

1:34:49 I don't think everyone has to do anything and I think everyone has their own requirements very disappointing. the real drug. It's been around a long, well, unique, yes, but... Joe, we know you're hacking this double blind study because people will know whether they Well, I also think that it's Pandora's box. during the 1960s and that's one of the reasons why they threw water on everything and had it become schedule one and locked the country down in terms of the access to psychedelics.

1:39:22 Like what I said about talk and action, is it a compliment or a substitute to changing the outside world so we focus on changing ourselves? Is this a sexual revolution, there were gradually you have incels living in their parents' basement playing video games. of Sharon Mowry, you're not going to make with anyone anyhow. It's like that's what far less likely to support any war. And I think there was this sort of bizarre movement

1:42:23 you could think of it as we had an arms race with the Timothy Leary at Harvard, Ken Kesey at Stanford, you know, I knew Tom Wolfe, the American novelist. And Tom Wolfe writes this, you know, iconic fictionalized novel, very realistic, 1968, about this. And Wolf could not have Yeah, the whole thing's crazy, which leads me to what do you think they're doing today?

1:45:12 which is one of the things that I think about a lot when I think about this guy RFK dad assassination 1960s. Sir Hans Sir Han. Where he again, maybe you shouldn't believe Obviously, it's convenient. was a lot of crazy stuff like this that was going on in the U.S. first half of the 20th You know, there was like the 2000s version, there was, I think, there was a lot of crazy stuff that we did

1:48:46 You were way safer as a Muslim terrorist in Guantanamo than as a, let's say, suspected It was completely out of control, CIA even more so. on with them. And then, I don't know, you know, the 2000s, 2010s history on the, you know, I think the Patriot Act empowered all these FISA courts and I lives, extracting information from people. up. They were able to pull off this thing, this some sort of operation.

1:52:16 And then next thing you know, you've We're in the dark still. why did he get off so easily? And then, you know, I went down all these rabbit holes. Understood, but it's... Getting them involved in sex scandals? disgusting things that we think of, people having sex with underage people. compromised. And so it's the vibe The claim is 80% of the cardinals

1:56:55 Completely makes sense. Do you what? I think it's very difficult very very famous very high profile person to fuck around think it's very difficult It makes sense that if you pay people enough and you have people motivated in order to like establish these That doesn't quite work out but it would be something like, you know, Bill and Melinda get married in 1994. They

2:01:31 And it's some kind of a – and so there's something about the left-wing philanthropy And I'm not saying what you're saying about... he realized that, oh my God, this is my reputation. This is how people think about me. I have So it's ironic that Bill Gates would want to get a Nobel Prize What about these left-wing philanthropy ventures do you think is uniquely corrupt?

2:05:02 And you know, if you're a Rockefeller or become, you know, we've become more, you know, more European in our sensibilities as a society. including donating somewhere in the neighborhood causes. used to. Yeah. Yeah. it's a clever move to pay the media it's a clever move you know, I want, why do you want half the money? It's all going to the Yeats Foundation anyway.

2:10:38 You know about just controlling his ex-wife and not about controlling the whole society makes sense Wow. Interesting. Probably had a pre-note, but yeah. on how to ditch Melinda without giving her any money? I mean, when you're at that level of wealth, I'm sure you have wealth management people How'd you get introduced? 16 a few times as well. And I think...

2:14:00 I don't think Epstein would have been able to, you know, comment on super string theory post arrest. Oh so his arrest was the first arrest right? Yeah. Which was like 2007, yeah I'm sure Jesus Christ well he tricked a lot of people I know a lot of Again, it wasn't explicit, Oh my God, get it, get it. friendships. Very small amount of people that you can trust probably very difficult to form new friendships Yeah, I think we're probably different different things that were pitched for different people sure, you know

2:17:01 Exactly how this is formulated and what they were doing and how they were getting information out of people but I think people have to I haven't studied that one that carefully but isn't you, there are all these alternate conspiracy theories on who killed JFK. Absolutely. say Oswald was the lone assassin, did he tell someone in the FBI or CIA, you know, I'm going to go kill Kennedy

2:19:47 And then they these they're not connected. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was a part of it Jack Ruby. Well, Jack Ruby just that's a weird one, right Oswald shit he was yelling out? He went nuts. which is why all the comedian brings the video the the actual film rather of the They know he has a rifle. What was the motivation? What was he on any drugs? What's the toxicology report? How did he get up there?

2:23:19 We're we're not going to we don't have to do as good a job coordinating with the local how that got relayed or who all is they. with with with shooting and maybe maybe you'd have a better feel for this is So Oswald had a rifle, the Marcano rifle, one of the snipers stationed inside the building You got a fucking range finder about the suspect's action.

2:25:28 By the time the police started rushing the scene Horrific incompetence at the very least let me go back. Yeah, okay, but back to Mike was it Oh, but the scope was off. But that doesn't mean anything, because scopes can get off when you pick it up. at a hospital. They found that, they found out where it hit, the bullet had hit. So they And then they find this pristine bullet, they find it in the gurney when they're bringing Governor Connolly

2:28:03 All that's crazy. They do it so the bullet doesn't distort. The law is the Warren Commission whitewashed everything. which is a great place to shoot, by the way. you shove it up against your shoulder, They saw smoke. This is a part of David Lifton's book, Best Evidence. I think people were suspicious. information no one knows the people are that whoever organized it if anyone did

2:32:00 gets murdered right afterwards, kind of nuts. The whole thing's nuts. He wanted to get rid the government in Cuba. And I guess we no longer did Bay of Pigs type covert stuff like that. and you knew that Cuba can get you assassins or that they could help in any With whistleblowers as well. I hope you're correct. is capable of knocking off the president, maybe that's actually a higher functioning

2:35:43 That's a good point. I veer more to the explanation that it's gross incompetence, but I don't know if that Everything does get recorded. That is a fact. But it brings me back to that thing about having dirt on people that you happens. And then, but we weren't like, it didn't show like James Bond times a hundred. You know, that brings me to this whole UAP thing, because one of my primary theories

2:38:34 whether it's anti-gravity propulsion system or some, you know. Our rooms are named after the nuclear bombs because those nuclear bombs, when they drop nuclear bases and shut down their missiles. very bizarre accounts of these things all the way back to Ezekiel in the Bible. do we have a lot of stuff that we send into space if we lived another million

2:41:28 by it even if it's plausible. Me too. Believe it or not. And I guess on the space aliens, which is the wilder, more interesting one in a way, you know, I don't know, Roswell So if you think of it from the point of view of Jacques Vallee or some of these people t and time interval t plus 1, next minute, next year, how likely is it and understood the progression of technology and understood the biological evolution

2:44:51 people time machines. It's a long road for these people to develop the sophistication, the Commander David Fravor incident off Like, what is all that? zeitgeist and for it to not be some sort of a complete disruption of society It would be pretty crazy. wonder that I'm about to give, but what the alien civilization can be like, and if you in Star Wars, Star Trek, where they can travel in hyperspace,

2:48:44 It's an absurd plot. And so it tells us that I think that if you have faster than light travel, mind-meld link with everybody else or something something like that. You can't have libertarian way you compare us to a mouse. Compare us to a mouse and what we're capable of and then from us to them. Not much of a leap. faster than light travel, it is infinitely dangerous.

2:51:51 As AI becomes more and more powerful, we will integrate. The creation of technology, new technology eventually reaches an infinite point, where things that are unimaginable to us today in terms of propulsion And we're on the track to that 100%. It's a scarcity that's created culturally. Dewan who played Scotty in the original Star Trek and he was going to do this media

2:55:38 tech wasn't working on a much lower tech level. that is a forbidden question. You only need money in a world of scarcity. You know, it's it's it's a post scarcity. It's sort of a communist world, but where he just lorded it over everyone because even in the communist post-scarcity world, But I don't think it's that straightforward for us to evolve.

2:58:33 to need enormous amounts of power to do it. And that thing becomes the primary life force of the universe. We are stuck in thinking that this is the only way to live because it's the way we live. that we are on the way out and that the only way forward really to make an only have to exist in intelligent species that have biological limitations. I think

3:01:24 quite do it. cuts corners and doesn't quite do it and I won't say it's one to ninety nine but in Southern California has, you know, one of their verticals and it's a sort of public-private steam ahead in order to compete with China. That suggests it's going to be even less in the sort of, you know, utopian, altruistic Which totally makes sense that it would be it totally makes sense that if it's gonna make better versions of itself first thing

3:04:46 And that's why, you know, the CCP might actually regulate it. know, Jack Ma, Ali Baba, all these people sort of got shoved aside for these But there's a chance you lose it they're gonna figure out how to get it. to get to the point where it gets there, You know, I don't like the effect of altruist people. so the world doesn't get destroyed? crazy stuff that happens on the internet, but most of the time what happens on the internet stays on the internet.

3:09:41 Yeah, yeah, that would be a disaster. You know, maybe you cross the air gap and get the FDA or some other government agency Right. something like, that's what China thinks it will be doing, but it will somehow go rogue on them, or they're too arrogant man, that's sort of probably That's the problem. I think that's what they are. Maybe there's a guided outside alien super intelligence path for us to become superhuman

3:14:20 But those are the things that motivate us to innovate. has to take over from evolution and guide our evolution as long as that takes, but this new life form now becomes a superior life that we are all experiencing on a daily basis are radically lowering birth rates, radically thing. we still have a pretty crazy geopolitical race with China, be a good end game.

3:17:32 it just a feature of late modernity? You have miscarriage rates that are up. You have a lot of pharmaceutical drugs you could attach to that as well And these unnatural factors that are entering into the biological body of human beings and causing But you have also environmental things there's like we're getting poisoned on a daily basis. Our diets are fucking terrible.

3:19:15 I'm worried about a lot of things though. which you could see that if we've dropped like it's again an over-determined story. It's the plastics, it's the screens, it's the, you know, it's certain ways they're It's woman in Israel, you better get married, and you have to keep up with your other friends Really heading towards extinction pretty fast. Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?

3:23:36 of a set of where, you know, it's like what are the long-term demographic projections His thesis was no once it flips And then we'd go extinct if there's only one person left. That doesn't work. And again, on this was, you know, it was 50 years ago or whatever, 1968, Paul Ehrlich writes The to be quite Herculean to get back to something like stasis.

3:26:57 extremely polarized on the gender on the gender thing and you know if you get And then, I don't know, you know, I was in South Korea a year and a half ago, two years ago now, you're totally right, it's a total disaster. doing more, not really solving them. And then in practice, it often becomes the opposite. The way it works is something like Well, that is an interesting thing about talking about things, because I think you're correct

3:31:18 I acknowledge, but you have to do that. to just take steps. But they talk about it a lot. Yeah. Listen, man, I really enjoyed talking to you. Awesome.