Thoughts on Joe Rogan's interview with Peter Thiel
Wide ranging conversation ranging from AI to aliens
Peter Thiel was on Joe Rogan. Thiel is an intellectual, philosophical guy and Joe Rogan is, as Rogan puts it, a cage fighting commentator. So the conversation could have gone either way, but I found it very insightful and entertaining.
If you listen to Thiel throughout the years, you’ll see him come up with some idea and craft it over months or years in several interviews. I wrote about his ideas of indefinite optimism in relation to George Hotz.
Note that I lightly edited the quotes for brevity.
California as Saudi Arabia
Thiel compares California to Saudi Arabia, drawing parallels between their economies and societal structures:
(00:12:25)
Thiel: "The rough model I have for how to think of California is that of Saudi Arabia. And you have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything. And then you have oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California and the oil pays for everything. And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector and you have all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money in government and real estate or ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the big tech money in California."
It’s not the first time Thiel went after California, yet he still lives in LA. He goes on to describe other large cities in states that don’t have income tax and why he wouldn’t necessarily want to live there:
Austin: "Austin's a government town and a college town and a wannabe hipster San Francisco town."
Dallas: "Dallas has sort of an inferiority complex to LA and New York, you know, just not the healthiest attitude."
Houston: "Houston is just sort of an oil town, which is good if you're in that business, but otherwise not."
Miami: "Miami's fun, but I wouldn't want to live there. It's a fun place to visit. It's a little too crazy a little too chaotic a little too cocaine fueled a little too party party party."
Nashville: Thiel mentions Nashville as one of his top choices for places to live.
Coastal California: "If you get an 80 degree day in Malibu, it's unusual. You know, it's wonderful. You got a beautiful breeze coming off the ocean, sun's out, everybody's pretty."
Beating Turing test more significant than AGI
Thiel argues that passing the Turing test with ChatGPT is more significant than the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). I agree that it’s rather odd that prior to Chat-GPT, the top contenders for beating the Turing test were silly gimmicks like a 13 year old Ukrainian boy. To give you an example of a pre-GPT “pass”, here is an exert:
Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
Eugene: I can’t make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from…
Scott: How many legs does a camel have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three? :-))) By the way, I still don’t know your specialty – or, possibly, I’ve missed it?
Then GPT comes out and overnight beats it and everyone just moves on.
(00:31:11)
Thiel: "Where does it go from here? There probably are ways you can refine these. It's still gonna 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 super intelligence? Is it godlike intelligence? 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 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 substitute to humans. And so it's gonna rearrange the economic, cultural, political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways."
Thiel compares the current state of AI to the internet in 1999, suggesting that while we know it's important, we don't yet fully understand its implications or how to monetize it effectively.
(00:32:53)
Thiel: “The analogy I'm always tempted to go to, and these things are never, historical analogies are never perfect, but 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 a lot bigger and it's going to dominate the economy, it's going to rearrange the society in the 21st century. And then at the same time, it was a complete bubble and people had no idea how the business models worked. You know, almost everything blew up. It took, 15, 20 years for it to become super dominant, but it didn't happen in 18 months as people fantasized in 1999. And maybe what we have in AI is something like this. It's figuring out how to actually apply it, in sort of all these different ways, it's gonna take something like two decades. But that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal."
Why is nuclear energy not being used?
Thiel discusses how scientific progress in nuclear energy and other fields has been stagnant, partly due to regulatory and societal pressures. He has a quip that I’ve heard from him before that suggests that DEI was invented and pushed in academics to keep scientists busy writing DEI grants rather than blowing up the world.
Thiel also argues that nuclear power's dual-use potential made it problematic to develop globally.
(00:51:19)
Thiel: “I think the signature moment was 1974 or 75 when India gets the nuclear bomb. And 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 and then the geopolitical problem with with nuclear power was you need a double standard where we have nuclear power in the US but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power …or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one-world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either. And then 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."
Why the pyramids were built as a more interesting question than how
The conversation goes on to discuss the pyramids with Rogan focusing on the how and Thiel being more interested in the why. Specifically, Thiel is asking how a society was able to get organized to perform such a monumental task.
(01:13:56)
Rogan: "The engineering puzzle's the biggest one. How do they do that?"
Thiel: "The one I'm focusing on is the motivational puzzle."
Rogan: "Even if you have all the motivation in the world, if you want to build a structure that's insane to build today, and you're doing it 4,500 years ago, we're dealing with a massive puzzle."
Thiel: "I think the motivational part's 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."
No one has any idea how the pyramids were built, even with today’s technology. But realistically, apart from some historians and entertainers, society’s resources are not being directed to solve this problem. If we expended as much resources to building these monuments (or whatever they are) as we do getting someone to click an ad, I’m sure we’d be able to figure something out. So I think the question of motivation is the right one.
This is also tied into Thiel’s concern about the declining birth-rate. Nearly all Western countries have birth rates below the replacement rate. So how an ancient society can organize itself to perform such monumental engineering feats while our, seemingly more advanced society, can’t even convince women to have children is baffling.
What originated first, religion or politics?
Another question brought up was what originated first: religion or politics.
(01:14:42)
Thiel: "This is always the anthropological debate between Voltaire, the enlightenment thinker of the 18th century and Durkheim, the 19th century anthropologist. And Voltaire believes that religion originates as a conspiracy of the priests to maintain power and so politics comes first the politicians invent religion and then Durkheim says the causations 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 the Durkheim story far more plausible than the Voltaire one. I think the religious categories are primary and the political categories are secondary."
Rogan: "But what about if we emanated from tribal societies? Tribal societies have always had leaders. When you have leaders, you're going to have dissent, you're going to have challenges, you're going to have politics, and you have people negotiating to try to maintain power, keep power, keep everything organized. That's the origin of politics, correct?"
Thiel: "You know, I think that's a whitewashed, enlightenment, rationalist description of the origin of politics. What do you think the origin of politics is?"
Rogan: "I think it's far more vile than that. Well, it's very vile. The control and power and maintaining power involves murder and sabotage."
Being corrupt is a prerequisite to being allowed in circles of influence
Thiel discusses the mechanisms of control in politics and institutions. Thiel brings up the idea that compromising information is used as a means of control.
(01:56:04)
Thiel: "It's only if you have kompromat on you do you get ahead. It's one of these, Stalin type things. Closets of the Vatican. The claim is 80% of the cardinals in the Catholic Church are gay. Not sure if that's true, but directionally it's probably correct. And the basic thesis is you don't get promoted to a cardinal if you're straight because you need to be compromised and then you're under control, but you also get ahead."
Rogan: “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 a party, I mean that has been, you've got two types of leaders that are presidents, you've got pussy hounds and warmongers, some of them sometimes have both but generally you don't, you know 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 hounds, but most certainly you think of as a warmonger."
European vs American view of charity
Thiel discusses philanthropy, particularly in the context of Bill Gates and other wealthy individuals. He contrasts the American and European perspectives on charitable giving.
(02:03:56)
Thiel: "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 America versus Europe difference where in America we're told that philanthropy is something a good person does. And you know, if you're a Rockefeller or 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 the European intuition on it is something like, wow, that's only something a very evil person does. And if you start giving away all your money in Europe, you must have murdered somebody or 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.
Thiel speculated that Bill Gates' motivations for his philanthropic efforts, is partly in relation to his divorce from Melinda Gates.
(02:09:53)
Thiel: "My reconstruction is that you should not underestimate how much of it was about just controlling his ex-wife and not about controlling the whole society."
Rogan: "Well, we're probably talking about a hundred million dollar or a hundred billion dollars one way or the other."
Thiel: "Well, I think she got she got less than, she got like one tenth."
Rogan: "Really interesting. And she should have gotten half as far as and I know. It's amazing. He got it down that much."
Thiel: "Wow. Interesting. But it was just 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."
…
Thiel: "You know, Bill and Melinda get married in 1994. They don't sign a prenup. And, 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? 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. ... 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."
Speaking of Bill Gates, Thiel did meet Jeffrey Epstein a few times and suggests he helped Gates structure his affairs to maintain influence, which was really what Melinda was sore about.
Rogan: "How'd you get introduced?"
Thiel: "It was Reid Hoffman at Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014. But it was basically... And I didn't check, didn't ask any 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. And there were probably these complicated ways you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially as a way in a marital context that I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about."
Rogan: "When you were introduced to him, how was he described to you?"
Thiel: "He was described as one of the smartest tax people in the world."
Outline of everything discussed
Overall it was a great conversation. Below you can find a rough breakdown of all the topics discussed and their respective timestamps
Introduction and California discussion (00:00:00 - 00:15:00)
Challenges of living in California
Comparison of different states and cities for living
Technology stagnation and progress (00:15:00 - 00:30:00)
Discussion on technological progress in different fields
Comparison of advancements in digital vs. physical realms
Climate change and energy (00:30:00 - 00:45:00)
Discussion on climate science
Nuclear power and its challenges
Ancient civilizations and technology (00:45:00 - 01:00:00)
Theories about ancient advanced civilizations
Discussion on the construction of the pyramids
Origins of human civilization and politics (01:00:00 - 01:15:00)
Theories on the development of human societies
Discussion on the nature of early political structures
JFK assassination and conspiracy theories (01:15:00 - 01:30:00)
Various theories surrounding the assassination
Discussion on the Warren Commission report
Epstein scandal and its implications (01:30:00 - 01:45:00)
Discussion on Jeffrey Epstein's connections and influence
Theories about Epstein's true role and motivations
AI development and its future (01:45:00 - 02:15:00)
Discussion on the current state and future of AI
Potential impacts of AI on society and humanity
UFOs and extraterrestrial life (02:15:00 - 02:45:00)
Theories about UFO sightings and their origins
Speculation about advanced civilizations and their technology
Human evolution and future (02:45:00 - 03:00:00)
Discussion on the future of human evolution
Potential integration of humans with technology
Declining birth rates and societal implications (03:00:00 - end)
Factors contributing to declining birth rates globally
Potential long-term consequences for human society