EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,120 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- PTPeter Thiel
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)
- JRJoe Rogan
What's up, man? Good to see you.
- PTPeter Thiel
Glad to be on the show.
- JRJoe Rogan
My, my pleasure.
- PTPeter Thiel
Thanks for having me.
- JRJoe Rogan
My pleasure. What's cracking? How you doing?
- PTPeter Thiel
Doing all right. Doing all right.
- JRJoe Rogan
We were just talking about how you're still trapped in LA. (laughs)
- PTPeter Thiel
I'm still trapped in LA. I know. It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
You're friends with a lot of people out here, have you thought about, uh, jettisoning?
- PTPeter Thiel
I, uh, I talk about it all the time and, uh, it's ... But, you know, it's always, talk is often a substitute for action. It's always, does it, does it-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... lead to action or does it-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... does it end up substituting for action? And, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a good point.
- PTPeter Thiel
But I have endless conversations about leaving. I moved from San Francisco to LA back in 2018. That felt, uh, felt about as big a move away as possible. And, uh, I keep, I keep ... The, the extreme thing I keep saying, and here you're gonna 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, uh, the state or the country.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy.
- PTPeter Thiel
And, uh, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
If you went out of the country, where would you go?
- PTPeter Thiel
Man, I, I've, uh, it's, it's, it's tough to find places, because, uh, you know, there are a lot of problems in the US and most places are doing so much worse.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not a good move to leave here. (laughs)
- PTPeter Thiel
But, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
As fucked up as this place is.
- PTPeter Thiel
But, but I keep, uh, I keep, I keep thinking I shou- I shouldn't move twice. So I should either ... I can't decide whether I should move to Florida or should move to, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Costa Rica.
- PTPeter Thiel
... New Zealand or Costa Rica.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 15:00 – 30:00
I think it's, I…
- JRJoe Rogan
- PTPeter Thiel
I think it's, I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty segmented from the tourist- the tourist strip from everything else. It, it probably is ... You know, there probably is something a little bit paradoxical about any place that gets lots of tourists, where-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... um, you know, it's, it's, it's in some sense a vaca- ... Uh, there's some things that are great about it because so many tourists go, but then in some sense, it's, um, it creates a weird aesthetic because, uh, the, you know, the, the day-to-day vibe is that you don't, you don't work and you're just having fun or some- something like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, 'cause so many people are going there-
- PTPeter Thiel
And-
- JRJoe Rogan
... just to do that.
- PTPeter Thiel
And that's, that's probably a little bit off with the South Florida, the South Florida thing. But, um, but I think it's, um ... And then I think, uh, and I think Nashville is, is, is also sort of its own real place.
- JRJoe Rogan
Nashville's great. Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
So those, those would be my ... Those are the top two I-
- JRJoe Rogan
I could live in Nashville. No problem. Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
I'm probably always ... I'm always, I'm always too, uh ... You know, I ... Fifth grade onward since, you know, '70, '77, I lived in California, and, uh, and, 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 US. May- maybe Hawaii is pretty good. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Coastal California's tough to beat.
- PTPeter Thiel
And, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
And you're two hours from the mountains.
- PTPeter Thiel
Man, it's like, you know, it's mid-August here in Austin. This is just, it's just brutal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is it?
- PTPeter Thiel
I, I think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really? That was too hot for you?
- PTPeter Thiel
It was too hot for me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Today's mild.
- PTPeter Thiel
I ... Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
What is it out there, like 80?
- PTPeter Thiel
All right.
- JRJoe Rogan
85?
- NANarrator
96.
- JRJoe Rogan
96?
- PTPeter Thiel
You're proving my point.
- JRJoe Rogan
I do so much sauna that I literally don't even notice it. I'm outside for hours every day shooting arrows, and I don't even notice it.
- PTPeter Thiel
Well, that's, uh ... I, I don't know if you're a representative of the average Austin resident.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Yeah. …
- PTPeter Thiel
long time to apply it. There is a question. There's this AGI discussion. You know, will we get Artificial General Intelligence? Which is a hopelessly vague concept, which, you know, 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? Uh, so it's sort of an ambiguous thing. Um, but I, I keep thinking that, uh...... maybe the AGI question's less important than passing the Turing test. If, if we got AGI, if we got s- let's say, super intelligence, if we got... That would be interesting to Mr. God, because, um, you'd have a competi- you'd have competition for being God. But, um, but surely, the Turing test is more important for us humans, because it's either a complement or a substitute to humans, and so it's... Yeah. It, it's gonna rearrange the economic, cultural, political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways. And, and I think maybe what's already happened is much more important than anything else that's gonna be done.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
And yet, it's just... It's gonna be a long ways in applying it. One, one last thought. The, you know, the, the, um ... the analogy I'm always tempted to go to, and it's, these things are never... Historical analogies are never perfect, but it's, it's that maybe AI in 2023, '24 is like... It's like the internet in 1999, where on one level it's clear the internet's going to be big and get ver- a lot bigger, and it's gonna dominate the economy, it's gonna rearrange the society in the 21st century. And then, at the same time, it was a complete bubble and, um, people had no idea how the business models worked. Um, you know, almost everything blew up. It, it took, you know... It didn't take that long in the scheme of things. It took, you know, 15, 20 years for it to become super dominant. But, uh, it didn't happen sort of in 18 months as people fantasized in, in 1999. And, uh, and maybe, maybe, maybe what we have in AI is, is, is something like this. It's, um, figuring out how to actually apply it, you know, h- um, in sort of all these different ways is gonna take something like two decades. But, but that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal.
- JRJoe Rogan
It is a really big deal, and I think you're right about the Turing test. Uh, I... Do you think that the lack of acknowledgement or the public celebration, or at least, uh, th- this, like, mainstream discussion, like, which I think should be everywhere, that we've passed the Turing test, do you think it's connected to the fact this stuff accelerates so rapidly that even though we've essentially breached this new territory, it... We still know that GPT-5 is gonna be better, GPT-6 is gonna be insane. And then they're working on these right now, and the, and the change is happening so quickly we're almost, uh, a little reluctant to acknowledge where we're at.
- PTPeter Thiel
Yeah. Uh, you know, I, I have, I've often... I've, you know, 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, um, and even on the AI level, I think it's a massive technical achievement. It's still an open question. You know, is it actually gonna lead to much higher living standards for everybody? You know, the internet was a massive achievement. How much did it raise people's living standards? Uh, much, much trickier question. So, um, so I, I s- I... But, um, but in, in this world where not much has happened, one of the paradoxes of a, of an era of relative tech stagnation, um, is that when something does happen, we don't even know how to process it. So, you know, I think, I think Bitcoin was a... I mean, it was a big invention. We can debate whether it was good or bad. But it was a pretty big deal, and it was, um, systematically under-estimated for at least, you know, the first, uh, um, 10, 11 years. And, uh, y- y- you know, you could, you could trade it. It went up smoothly for 10, 11 years. It didn't get repriced all at once because, uh, we're in a world where nothing big ever happens. And, um, and so we, we have no way of processing it when something pretty big happens. The internet was pretty big in '99. Bitcoin was moderately big. The internet was really big. Bitcoin was moderately big. And I'd say, um, passing the Turing test is really big. It's on the same scale as the internet. And, uh, and because, uh, our, our lived experience is that so little has felt like it's been changing for the last few decades, we're, we're probably underestimating it.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's interesting that you say that s- so little, uh, we feel like so little has changed, because if you're a person... How old are you?
- PTPeter Thiel
Um, same age as you are.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- PTPeter Thiel
Born 1967.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, in our age, we've seen all the change. Right? We saw the, uh, end of the Cold War. We saw answering machines, we saw VHS tapes, then we saw the internet. And then where we're at right now, which is like this bizarre moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day. And these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous, everybody has one, there's, uh, incredible technology that's being ramped up every year. They're getting better all the time. And now there's AI. There's AI on your phone. You could access ChatGPT and a bunch of different programs on your phone.
- PTPeter Thiel
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I think that's a s- an insane change. I, I think that that's, uh, one of the most, uh... Especially with the use of social media, it's one of the most bizarre changes I think our culture's ever... The most bizarre.
- PTPeter Thiel
Well, it's, it can be a, it can be a big change culturally or, or politically. Um, but, uh, the... You know, the kinds of questions I would, I'd ask is, how do you measure it economically? Does it imp- how much does it change GDP? How much does it change productivity? Um, and, um ... and certainly, um, the, the story I would generally tell for the last 50 years, since the 1970s, early '70s, is that we've been not absolute stagnation, we've been in a relative stagnation where there has been, um, very limited progress in the world of atoms, the world of physical things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
Um, um, and, uh, there has been, um, a lot of progress in the world of bits. Information, computers, internet, mobile internet, you know, now, now AI.
- JRJoe Rogan
What are you referring to when you're saying the w- the world of physical things?
- PTPeter Thiel
Um, you know, it's any... Um, it's... Well, if, if we had to find technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, th- the year we were born, and we had a discussion about technology, what technology would have meant? Would it... It would have meant computers. It would have also meant rockets. It would have meant super sonic airplanes. It would have meant, um, new medicines. It would have meant the green revolution, agriculture, maybe underwater cities. Um, you know, it, it sort of had bec- and it... Because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing, and so there was progress on all these fronts. T- today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology. Technology has been reduced to meaning computers, and that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird. There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers, and then all the other areas have been relatively stagnant. We're not moving any faster. You know, the Concorde got de-commissioned in 2003 or whenever, um, and then with all the low-tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly, to get through all, all of them fr- from, from one city to the next. You know, the highways have gone backwards because there are more traffic jams. We haven't figured out ways around those. So there's sort of... We're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. Um, and, um, and then, yeah, a- as su- some... Uh, and that's, that's sort of the, uh, that's sort of the... Um, and then, you know, the... And then of course, um, there's also a sense in which, uh, these, uh, the screens and the devices, you know, have, have this effect distracting us from this, so you know, when you're, you know, riding a hundred-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can, you can look and wow, this is this cool new gadget, but you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed, you know, in a hundred years. And, and, and so there's, yeah, there's a question, how important is this world of bits versus, versus the world of atoms? You know, I would say, as human beings we're physically embodied in a material world, and so I, I would, 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, that doesn't make sense. I, I was an undergraduate at Stanford late '80s, and at the time, um, in retrospect, every engineering area would've 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 c- couldn't come up with new things to do. Nuclear engineering, aero astro engineering, people already knew those were really bad ones to go into. They were, you know, outlawed. You weren't gonna make any progress in n- nuclear reactor designs or, or stuff like that. Um, electrical engineering, which was the one that's sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay. And then the only field that, uh, was actually gonna progress a lot was computer science, and, um, and again, you know, it's, 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. Um, you know, I al- I always... The, the linguistic cut is always when, when people use the word "science," I'm in favor of science, I'm not in favor of "science" in quotes, and when... Th- 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, um, you know, you're just sort of making it up and you have an inferiority complex...
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- PTPeter Thiel
... to real science or something like physics or chemistry, and computer science was in the same category as social science or political science. It was, it was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and, um, um, and, and sort of dropped out of, out of the real, the real science and real, um, real engineering fields.
- JRJoe Rogan
You don't feel that climate science is a real science?
- PTPeter Thiel
It's, it is, um, it's, it's, um, well, uh, uh... I mean, it's... I, I, I... There's several different things one could say. It's, uh, 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, I'm not questioning any of those things, but, uh, but how scientific it is, um, I, I don't think, um, I don't think it's, it's a place where we have really vigorous debates. You know, may- maybe the climate is increasing because of carbon dioxide emissions, t- temperatures are going up. Maybe it's methane. Maybe it's people are eating too much steak. S- it's the c- cows flatulating or, and you have to measure, you know, how a- how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus, versus carbon dioxide. I don't think they're, I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff scientifically, and, and I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than, than s- than anything that's truly science should be.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why does that-
- PTPeter Thiel
It doesn't mean... Dogma doesn't mean that it's wrong, but it is-
- JRJoe Rogan
But why is the fact that it's called climate science mean that it's more dogmatic? Because if you said nuclear science, who wouldn't question it, right? It's-
- PTPeter Thiel
Yeah, but it's... No one calls it nuclear science, they call it nuclear engineering.
- JRJoe Rogan
Interesting.
- PTPeter Thiel
Because... So I'm, I'm just-
- JRJoe Rogan
I see what you're saying.
- PTPeter Thiel
The only, the only thing is, I was just making, I'm just making a narrow linguistic point.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there anything called science that is legitimately science?
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Hmm. Um, how much…
- PTPeter Thiel
where, um, where maybe, maybe, um ... You know, the, the original 1970s, uh, you know, I think the manifesto that's always very interesting from the other side was this, uh, book by the Club of Rome, 1972, The Limits of Growth, and it's, you can't have ... Y- we need to head towards a society in which there's 0%, there's very limited growth, because if you have unlimited growth, you're gonna run out of resources. If you don't run out of resources, you'll hit a pollution constraint. But the, um ... In the 1970s it was, um, you're gonna have overpopulation, um, you're gonna run out of oil. We had the oil shocks. Um, and then, um, and then by the '90s, it was, it sort of morphed into more of the pollution problem with, uh, with carbon dioxide, climate change, other, other environmental things. But, uh, but there is sort of, um ... You, you know, it's ... You know, there's been some, you know, some improvement in, in oil, carbon fuels with fracking, things like this in Texas. It's, um, it's not at the scale that's been enough to, uh, um, you know, give an American standard of living to the whole planet. You know, we consume 100 million barrels, um, of oil, um, you know, a day globally. Um, maybe fracking can add 10%, 10 million to that. If everybody on this planet has an American standard of living, it's something like three, 300, 400 million barrels of oil, and (Joe scoffs) I don't, I don't think that's there. So that's, that's kind of ... I, I always wondered whether that was the, that was the real environmental argument is, w- we can't have an American standard of living for the whole planet. We somehow can't justify this degree of inequality. And, um, and therefore, you know, we have to figure out ways to dial back and, you know, tax the carbon, restrict it, and, uh, and maybe, you know, maybe that's ... There's s- some sort of a Malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. Um, how much of that could, th- the, the demand for oil could be mitigated by nuclear?
- PTPeter Thiel
Uh ... It ... You pro- you probably could mitigate it a lot. Uh, there's ... There's a question why th- why the nuclear thing has gone so wrong. It's ... Um, especially if you, if you have electric vehicles, right? If you-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... you know, it's, uh ... Um, the combustion engine's probably hard to get nuclear to work, but if you, um, if you shift to electric vehicles, you can, you can charge them, you know, your Tesla cars at night. Um, and that, that would seemingly work. Um, and there's definitely, yeah, there's definitely a history of energy where it was always in the direction of, you know, more intense use. It went from wood to coal to oil, which is a more compact form of energy, and in a way takes up less of the environment. And then if we move from oil to uranium, that's even, you know, it, it, it, it, it's even smaller. And so in a sense, the smaller, the more dense the energy is, the less of the environment it takes up. And when we go back, when we go from oil to natural gas, which takes up more space, and from natural gas to solar or wind, we have to, you know, you have to pollute the whole environment by putting up windmills everywhere. Or you have to, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... you know, you have to cover the whole desert with solar panels.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that is a good way to look at it-
- PTPeter Thiel
And, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
... 'cause it is a form-
- PTPeter Thiel
And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
... of pollution.
- PTPeter Thiel
And so, um, and so there was a way, there was a way that nuclear was supposed to be the, uh, the, the energy mode of the, the 21st century. And then, yeah, there, there are all these, there are these historical questions. Why did it, why did it get stopped? Why did we not, uh, why did we not go down that route? The, um-You know, the, the standard explanation of why it stopped, um, was that, uh, it was, um, there were all these dangers. We had Three Mile Island, 1979, you know, Chernobyl in, um, in, uh, 1986, and then the Fukushima one in Japan, I think, uh, 2011. And, uh, you had these sort of- you had these various ac- accidents. Um, my alternate theory on why, uh, why nuclear energy really stopped is that it, um, it, it was, um, it was sort of dystopian or even apocalyptic because it turned out that it was all, um... it, it turned out to be very dual use. If you build nuclear power plants, um, uh, it's, it's only sort of one step away from, uh, building nuclear weapons. And, uh, and it turned out to be a lot trickier to, um, to separate those two things out than it looked. And I think the, you know, the signature moment was 1974 or '75 when India gets the nuclear bomb and I th- the US, 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PTPeter Thiel
And then the, and then sort of the geopolitical problem with, uh, with nuclear power was you either, you know, um, you need a double standard where we n- we have nuclear power in the US, but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the US gets to keep its nuclear weapons. We don't let 100 other countries have nuclear weapons, and this, that's an extreme double standard, probably a little bit hard to justify. Um, or, um, or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either. And, uh, and then sort of the compromise was just to, um, to, um, regulate it so much that, uh, you know, maybe the, the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones.
- JRJoe Rogan
Jesus.
- PTPeter Thiel
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, um, you know, they, they don't trust, they don't trust their own designs. And so they have to copy the over safety, over-protected designs from the West and the nuclear plants. Nuclear power costs too much money. It's cheaper to do coal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- PTPeter Thiel
So, um, so if I, you know, I'm not getting the numbers exactly right, but if you look at what percent of Chinese electricity was nuclear, it was- it wasn't that high. It was like maybe four or 5% in 2013, 2014 and the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because, you know, they've maybe doubled the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear, but the relative percentage is still, is still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive when you have these, you know, over-safety designed reactors. There are probably ways to build small reactors, um, that, that, that are, that are way cheaper, but then you still have this, you still have this dual use thing, you know? Do you, do you create plutonium? Do you, you know... are, are there ways you can create a pathway to building, uh, more nuclear weapons?
- JRJoe Rogan
And if there was innovation, if nuclear engineering had gotten to a point where, you know, let's say there wasn't Three Mile Island or Chernobyl didn't happen, do you think that it would've gotten to a much more efficient and much more effective version by now?
- PTPeter Thiel
Well, my, my understanding is there are... we ha- we have way, we have way more efficient designs. We have small... you can, you can do small reactor designs, which, which are... you don't need this giant containment structure, so it costs much less per kilowatt hour of, of electricity you produce. So I, I think we have those designs. They're, they're just not allowed. And then, but then I think the problem is that, um, if you were able to build them in all these countries all over the world, you still have this dual use problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
And I... 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, that's the official story. The real story was India getting the bomb.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. That makes sense. It completely makes sense. Geez, Louise.
- PTPeter Thiel
And then this is, you know, this is always, you know, this is always the question about, uh, um... there's always a big picture question people ask me, you know, uh, you know, if, if, if I'm right about this picture of, you know, this slowdown in tech, this, this sort of stagnation in many, many dimensions and then there's always a question, you know, wh- why did this happen? And, um, and my cop-out answer is always, uh, why questions are overdetermined. Uh, because, you know, um, it can be... there, there are multiple reasons, and so it could be... why it could be we became a more feminized, risk-averse society. It could be that, uh, the education system worked w- less well. It could be that we were just out of ideas. The easy ideas have been found, the hard ideas, the cupboard, nature's cupboard was bare. The low hanging fruit had been picked so that it can be overdetermined. But I think, I think one dimension that's not to be underrated for the science and tech stagnation was that, uh, an awful lot of science and technology had this dystopian or apocalyptic, uh, dimension. And, uh, and probably what happened at, you know, Los Alamos in 1945 and then, uh, with, with the thermonuclear weapons in the early '50s, um, it took a while for it to really seep in, but it had this sort of delayed effect where, you know, maybe, maybe a s- a stagnant world in which the physicists don't get to do anything and they have to putter around with DEI and, um, you're not... you know, um, but, uh, you don't build weapons that blow up the world anymore.... you know, is that a, is that a feature or a bug?
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PTPeter Thiel
And so the stagnation was sort of, was sort of like this, this response. And so, it sucks that we've lived in this world for 50 years where a lot of stuff has been inert. But, um, 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've already blown up. And so we're, we're in that, we're in the stagnant path of the multiverse because it had, it had this partially protective thing, even though in all these other ways I feel it's, it's deeply deranged our society.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. It really does. And particularly, the dual use thing with nuclear power, and especially distributing that to other countries. When you talk about the stagnation in this country, like, I don't know how much you follow this whole UAP nonsense. I know we met ... What was that guy's name, at your place? The, uh, the guy who did Chariots of the Gods?
- PTPeter Thiel
Oh, uh, von Däniken.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes. Yeah.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Wow. …
- PTPeter Thiel
Empire was, again, this, you know, pretty cataclysmic thing, where it was ... There were diseases and, you know, and then there were political things that unraveled. But, uh, somehow, you know, it was, was a massive regression for, you know, four, five, 600 years into the, into the Dark Ages. And, um, the, um, the, the sort of naive, the progressive views, things always just got monotonically better. And, uh, there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history, where even the Roman Empire didn't decline. And even ... You know, this ... One, one d- 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, um, 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. You know, city of Rome maybe had a million people at its peak, and then by, you know, I don't know, 650 AD, it's, maybe it's down to-... 10,000 people or less. It, you have this-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- PTPeter Thiel
... complete collapse in population. And then, um, and then the, 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, have always been getting better. So I am, I am definitely on your side that population had great rises and falls, civilizations had great rises and falls. Um, um, and so that part of it, I, I, I agree with you or even, you know, some variant of what Hancock or von Däniken say. Uh, the, the, the place where I would say I think things are different is I don't think, I don't think, um ... And, and, and, and, and therefore, it seems possible something could happen to our civilization. That's, that's always the upshot of it. If, if, if it, if it had been monotonically always progressing, then there's nothing we should worry about, nothing can possibly-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... go wrong. And then certainly, certainly the thing, um, the, the, the, the sort of alternate Hancock, von Däniken, um, Joe Rogan history of the world, uh, tells us is that, uh, we shouldn't take our civilization for granted. There's a l- there's things that can go really haywire. I, I agree with that. The, the, the one place where I, 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, um, you know, spaceships, um, or, or, or anything like that. And, uh, and so the failure mode is likely to be, be, be somewhat different from, from these, these past ones.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I think, uh, technology progressed in a different direction. That's what I think. I think, uh, structural technology, building technology had somehow or another achieved levels of competence that's not available today. When you look at the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, there's 2,300,000 stones in it. There, uh, the whole thing points to due north, south, east, and west. It's an incredible achievement. The m- the stones, some of them were moved from a quarry that was 500 miles away through the mountains. They have no idea how they did it. Massive stones. The ones inside the King's Chamber, where they're like, the biggest ones are like 80 tons. It's crazy. The whole thing's crazy. Like, how did they do that? Like, whatever they did, they did without machines supposedly. They did without, um, the, the use of, uh, the combustion engine. They didn't have electricity. And yet they were able to do something that stands the test of time, not just so you could look at it. You know, like you can go to the Acropolis, s- and see the Parthenon. It's gorgeous, it's, it's amazing, it's incredible. But I can understand how people could have built it. The pyramids is one of those things that you just look at it and you go, "What the fuck was going on here? What was going on here?" And none of these people are still around. You, you have this strange culture now that's entirely based around, you know, you have Cairo and, uh, uh, an enormous population of visitors, right? Which is a lot of it. People just going to stare-
- PTPeter Thiel
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
... at these ancient relics. What, what was going on that those people were so much more advanced than anyone anywhere else in the world?
- PTPeter Thiel
Yeah, I would, I would... I, I, I'm not sure I would anchor on the technological part, but I think, I think the, the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is what motivated them culturally?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, how did they do it physically?
- PTPeter Thiel
Wh- wh- why did they do it? Why-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... were you motiv- Like, I, I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure, why, but also how? How is a big one, because the, it's really difficult to solve. It, there's no traditional conventional explanations for the construction, the movement of the stones, the amount of time that it would take in. If you moved 10 stones a day, I believe it takes 664 years to make one of those pyramids. So how many people were involved? How long did it take? How'd they get them there? How'd they figure out how to do it? How come the shittier pyramids seem to be dated later? Like, what, what was going on in that particular period of time where they figured out how to do something so extraordinary that even today, 4,500 years later, we stare at it and we go, "I don't know."
- PTPeter Thiel
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"I don't know what the fuck they did."
- PTPeter Thiel
I, I haven't studied carefully enough. I'll, I'll, I'll trust you that it's very hard. I think the, the, I think the... I would say the, the real mystery is why were they motivated? And it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
... because you, you can't live in a pyramid. It's just, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PTPeter Thiel
... it's, it's, it was just the afterlife of the pharaoh.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's some debate about that.
- PTPeter Thiel
Of course there is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Christopher Dunn is an engineer who believes that it was some sort of a power plant. He's got this very bizarre theory that there was, uh, a chamber that exists. If you, you can see, well, you see the structure of the pyramid, the inside of it, there's a chamber that's subterranean. And he believes this subterranean chamber was pounding on the surface of the f- of the earth and of the walls of the thing, creating this very specific vibration. They had shafts that came down into the Queen's Chamber. These shafts, uh, they would pour chemicals into these shafts, and then there was limestone at the end of it. This is all his theory, not mine. Um...
- PTPeter Thiel
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
The end of it, there was this limestone, which is permeable, right? So the limestone, which is porous, these gases come through and creates this hydrogen that's inside of this chamber. Then there are these shafts inside the King's Chamber that are cr- c- uh, they're, they're getting, uh, energy from space, you know, gamma rays and all the shit from space. And then it's going through these chambers, which are very specifically designed to target this, these gases and put them into this chamber where they would interact with this energy, and he believes it's enough to create electricity.
- PTPeter Thiel
Man, my, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a crazy theory, but...
- PTPeter Thiel
Look, I'm, I'm always, I'm always too, uh, too fast to debunk all these things, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 1:15:00 – 1:20:13
Yeah, I don't think…
- PTPeter Thiel
That is a complete fiction.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I don't think that.
- PTPeter Thiel
And-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think that there was probably various levels of civility that were achieved when agriculture and when s- establishments were, uh, constructed that were near resources, where they didn't have to worry as much about food and water and things along those lines. Things probably got a little bit more civil. But I think that the origins of it are like the origins of all human conflict. It's filled with murder.
- PTPeter Thiel
Well, I think in the beginning was madness and murder.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, madness and murder.
- PTPeter Thiel
And, and I don't know ... I don't, I don't know if it got ... I don't know if it got that much more rational. I don't know if it's that much more rational today.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well-
- PTPeter Thiel
So, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
... in some ways it's not, right? In some ways.
- PTPeter Thiel
And this is again, this is again back to the-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PTPeter Thiel
... you know, the, the progressive conception. Are we, you know, are we really ... Have we really progressed? How much have we really progressed fr- from that? But, uh, but yeah, I ... My, my, uh, my version would be that it was, you know, it was much more, um, um ... It was organized around, you know, acts of, uh, mass violence, like maybe, maybe you externalize it onto, you know, a mastodon or hunting some big animal-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PTPeter Thiel
... or something like this. But, uh, but the real problem of violence, it ... you know, it wasn't external. It was mostly internal. It was, it was violence with people who were near you, proximate to you. Um, it wasn't even natural cla- cataclysms or other tribes. It was, it was, uh, it was sort of, um, much more, uh, the internal stuff. And, um, it's very different, I think. The, the human s- situation is somehow very, very different from something like, I don't know, an ape primate hierarchy, where ... You know, in an ape context, you have an alpha male. Um, 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, um, push it all the way. In a human context, it's always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PTPeter Thiel
So, uh, so it's, uh ... It's somehow ... The culture is more important, you know? Uh, if, if they can talk to each other and you get language and then they can coordinate and they can gang up on, on the leader, and then you have to stop them from ganging up on the leader, and how, how do you do that? And so, the ... There's some sort of radical difference between a, you know, a, a human and a, let's say, a, um, a pre-human world.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you seen Chimp Empire?
- PTPeter Thiel
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
Chimp Empire is a fascinating documentary series on Netflix where these scientists had been embedded with this tribe of chimpanzees for decades. And so because they were embedded, they had very specific rules. You ... Has to maintain at least 20 yards from you and any of the chimps. No food. You can never have food. And don't look them in the eyes. And as long as you do that, they don't feel you're a threat and they think of you as a natural part of their environment, almost like you don't exist.
- PTPeter Thiel
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
They ... And they behave completely naturally. Well, it shows in that, that sometimes it's not the largest strongest one, and that some chimps form bonds with other chimps and they form coalitions. And they do have some sort of politicking, and they do help each other. They groom each other. They do specific things for each other. And then one of the things that happens also, they get invaded by other chimps, and that chimps leave and they go on patrol and other chimps gang up on them and kill them, and they try to fight and battle over resources. So it's not nearly as cut and dry as the strongest chimp prevails, 'cause one of the chimps that was dominant was an older chimp and he was smaller than some of the other chimps, but he had formed a coalition with all these other chimps and they all respected him, and they all knew that they would be treated fairly. And being treated fairly is a very important thing with chimpanzees. They get very jealous if they think that things are not fair, which is why that guy was attacked. And, uh, you know that guy who had a, um-
- PTPeter Thiel
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... pet chimpanzee. He brought it a birthday cake. The other chimps weren't getting a piece of the cake and the ... Someone had fucked up and left a door open. They got out and they mauled this guy because he didn't give them some of the cake.
- PTPeter Thiel
Yeah. So I, I find all of that quite plausible, but I think-... both of us can be correct. So, there's some... The, the, 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 w- with the chimpanzees or the baboons, or, you know, um, other primates. And then, um, there is a part of the story that I think is also more discontinuous. Um, and, um, in my, my judgment is we probably, you know, in a, in a Darwinian context, we always stress the continuity. Um, you know, I'm, I'm always a little bit the contrarian, and so, um, I, I believe in Darwin's theory, but, uh, I think, uh, I think, uh, we should also be skeptical of ways it's too dogmatic. And, uh, and it... Darwin's theories make us gloss over the discontinuities. And I think, you know, the one, one type of in- and this doesn't have to happen overnight, but one type of fairly dramatic discontinuity is that, um, you know, is that humans have something like language.
Episode duration: 3:30:33
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