Ross Douthat does an impressive job of making Peter Thiel seem smart in this interview, just be being obviously much dumber than Peter Thiel. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/o...
Replies
That's kind of Douthat's schtick with any stupid right-winger.😂
jun 26, 2025, 12:39 pm • 5 0 • view
Peter Thiel is the sort of “intellectual” whose “insights” only sound brilliant if you don’t know much about the topics he’s talking about. Reading this interview, I cringed every time he oversimplified Alzheimer’s disease and cancer research—biomedical research in general, actually.
jun 26, 2025, 3:06 pm • 39 4 • view
Classic techbro who can't fathom the possibility that business success doesn't translate into expertise in every knowledge domain in which he has passing interest.
jun 26, 2025, 6:37 pm • 5 0 • view
It's not just tech bros. People who are wildly successful in one field often extrapolate their expertise to other fields. Here's a Wikipedia article on the phenomenon of Nobel laureates with the same issue: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_d...
jun 26, 2025, 8:03 pm • 10 0 • view
Look at who wrote the first two references in that Wikipedia article.😏
jun 29, 2025, 9:11 pm • 9 0 • view
Thinking of Gates’ idiot takes on climate policy 🤦🏻
jun 29, 2025, 9:29 pm • 1 0 • view
Is there a specific Gates’ take you are thinking of?
jun 30, 2025, 1:56 am • 0 0 • view
Three come immediately to mind.
jun 30, 2025, 2:03 am • 0 0 • view
Actually 4.
jun 30, 2025, 2:04 am • 0 0 • view
But I have to make coffee for everyone rn.
jun 30, 2025, 2:05 am • 0 0 • view
While the machine heats: 1) can’t contemplate solutions outside a neoliberal frame 2) obsession with ☢️ 3) “green premiums” ie notion that green tech must provide identical utility at lower cost (ignores external climate cost) & 4) always chasing 🦄 tech while ignoring commercially avail solutions.
jun 30, 2025, 2:13 am • 0 0 • view
Absolutely. I'm at Stanford, and during COVID we had no shortage of faculty here who thought they could master the fields of epidemiology and infectious diseases overnight (e.g. Scott Atlas, Michael Levitt, Jay Bhattacharya)
jun 26, 2025, 8:10 pm • 7 2 • view
Special case My cousin, by me seen as a nephew, is an alumnus. Famous for stranding a limo in a drivethru and maybe the same day at a stoplight: "Can you pass me the Grey Poupon?" Pre-Stanford. Like really, barely get onto a whirlycoaster tall-enough. Possibly my favourite Stanford alumnus.
jun 30, 2025, 7:14 am • 0 0 • view
to be clear, not a Stanford alumna
jun 30, 2025, 7:24 am • 0 0 • view
and he was 8-yo
jun 30, 2025, 7:28 am • 0 0 • view
So well said. And applicable to so many
jun 27, 2025, 3:04 am • 0 0 • view
13 minutes into the interview and so far my impression is… RD: So what do you think? PT: I don’t know… we just need to take more risks.
jun 26, 2025, 1:33 pm • 0 0 • view
🤣
jun 26, 2025, 5:38 pm • 0 0 • view
If they replace the word “and” with “is” they’re onto something
jun 26, 2025, 12:30 pm • 1 0 • view
are you kidding me? i feel actively DUMBER after having listened to the interview. ANYONE who thinks we're stagnating in science, medicine or engineering hasn't read a research article... likely ever. also, Thiel needs to lay off whatever his drug of choice is. yesterday.
jun 29, 2025, 1:26 am • 0 0 • view
Jesus Christ I didn’t realize Thiel looked like the cryptkeeper
jun 26, 2025, 12:37 pm • 9 0 • view
Resting Henry-Hill-seeing-the-helicopter face
jun 26, 2025, 12:38 pm • 13 0 • view
He has lost a lot of weight.
jun 26, 2025, 2:35 pm • 0 0 • view
Common interview naming conventions tell me Douthat is the Antichrist in this scenario
jun 26, 2025, 12:25 pm • 3 0 • view
Watched a debate between Thiel & David Graeber. David thoroughly cleaned his clock A more recent talk by Thiel amounted to him repeating the clumsy arguments from the Graeber debate years earlier Thiel not a serious thinker but rather a mostly incurious man who lucked into a fortune
jun 26, 2025, 1:14 pm • 3 0 • view
They sure have it in for Greta Thunberg, “the activist best known for anti-climate-change protests, who to you, I would say, represents a symbol of an anti-growth, effectively authoritarian, environmentalist-dominated future.”
jun 26, 2025, 12:59 pm • 2 0 • view
I heard a pundit use the word drivel.
jun 27, 2025, 4:11 am • 0 0 • view
Thiel actually doesn't care if humans go extinct as long we first create a "good" AI to replace us. It's all detailed in this article from years ago. www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/07...
jun 26, 2025, 2:59 pm • 0 0 • view
Does he believe that or is it an appeal to the specific audience he was addressing at that particular time? The more I listen to him talk the more i’m convinced he’s a complete melon with no sense of history, beliefs outside of libertarianism or knowledge on anything outside his field of expertise.
jun 26, 2025, 8:39 pm • 0 0 • view
I can't imagine anything more decadent than the belief that humans can and should live forever.
jun 26, 2025, 12:53 pm • 2 0 • view
Dolly Parton's life is an argument for humans living to be 300. Ben Shapiro's is an argument for capping us at 20.
jun 26, 2025, 1:14 pm • 4 0 • view
How can you have NZ citizenship and not fucking touch grass. I don't see intellectual rigor here, I see someone with a high iq who has surrounded themselves with sycophants. I'm sorry nature is harder than computers and things aren't going as fast as you want. Thanks for taking it out on us, pete.
jun 26, 2025, 10:19 pm • 2 0 • view
"dumber than Peter Thiel" is a pretty steep hill to climb, but Ross is more than capable of that ascent
jun 26, 2025, 1:07 pm • 2 0 • view
I am so tired if hearing "But we were promised flying cars!" Every.single.time. Whatever future they were sold, they're upset that we aren't there. Perhaps it's just disappointment they couldn't deliver the future they envisioned & now they'll punish us until we let them try & fail anyway
jun 26, 2025, 1:51 pm • 1 0 • view
Blade Runner had flying cars but I don't think the people who made that movie thought that was a good thing.
jun 28, 2025, 8:01 pm • 1 0 • view
Oh God there's not enough money in the world to get me to read this. Okay, there is, but I wouldn't enjoy it!
jun 26, 2025, 1:02 pm • 1 0 • view
Douhat gets credit for not stopping him saying stupid things. He claims to be pro-science but then dismisses climate change, the biggest science issue of our time. Saying Thunberg might be the Antichrist just underlines his juvenile perspective.
jun 28, 2025, 3:46 pm • 0 0 • view
Any interview with Thiel that doesn’t hammer him on his own explicit anti-democratic aims is complicit
jun 26, 2025, 1:47 pm • 0 0 • view
The thing about Thiel is that he is a pretty rigorous thinker, so long he never has to stray outside the boundaries of the pretend-world he has created in his head. Douthat isn't even a rigorous thinker within his own pretend-world boundaries.
jun 26, 2025, 12:27 pm • 198 13 • view
I applaud you for reading this. I found it so dull I couldn't get past the first few interchanges.
jun 26, 2025, 12:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Thiel attended a cryogenics party in 1999 and thinks, in retrospect, it is evidence of stagnation that people treated cryogenics as a weird fringe thing instead of a scientific frontier where we celebrated the bold risk-taking entrepreneurs, going out and doing all that cool risk-taking.
jun 26, 2025, 12:30 pm • 85 3 • view
I wonder, Peter, is the fact that the frozen people were later “scraped off the capsule because they had turned into a plug of fluids” had anything to do with this great scientific decline?
jun 26, 2025, 12:52 pm • 4 0 • view
*if Dangit
jun 26, 2025, 1:02 pm • 1 0 • view
Ask Ted Williams head
jun 26, 2025, 12:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Ell Oh Ell. Douthat: "Do you feel like you, as an investor, as a venture capitalisst, got anything out of the first Trump term? Thiel: "Um." Douthat: (I just love that "um." Like, "bro, you can't ask me that.")
jun 26, 2025, 12:36 pm • 109 6 • view
The frustrating thing is that I agree with Thiel's empirical claim that scientific and technological innovation has slowed down. But he's such a narrow ideologue that the only answer he can imagine is "less regulation! Less taxes! We can entrepreneur our way out of anything!"
jun 26, 2025, 12:45 pm • 99 4 • view
Unironically, he sounds bored and is pursuing progress in the only way he knows.
jun 28, 2025, 8:49 am • 0 0 • view
Someone needs to tell mark cuban this, we can entrepreneur out of this right wing coup, just make a good slide deck
jun 26, 2025, 5:37 pm • 0 0 • view
Libertarianism is a malady
jun 26, 2025, 12:59 pm • 0 0 • view
His answer to everything is, unsurprisingly "I should have more".
jun 27, 2025, 5:54 pm • 0 0 • view
I think what's going on is he assumes that the maturation of software design and engineering is the whole of science and technology and that's just nonsense. Yes, that field has matured and there are few new developments in it. But it's not the only field.
jun 27, 2025, 6:25 pm • 0 0 • view
The alternate path is "ample government funding for research priorities, scientific labs, etc." That's the route that produced an *awful lot* of our 20th century breakthroughs. (The space race wasn't privately funded, y'know.) And the slowdown happens just as the government stops funding this shit.
jun 26, 2025, 12:45 pm • 159 17 • view
The problem is that Peter Thiel doesn’t care about technological advance as it relates to humanity. He doesn’t care about what would be best for our species as a whole. It’s tool vs technopoly. It doesn’t serve his ego enough to make a website. He needs more.
jun 27, 2025, 1:46 am • 0 0 • view
Thiel's DOGEbuddies have shredded the NSF and NIH. Anyone want to take bets on whether that INCREASES or DECREASES the rate of scientific progress? Because I'll gladly take your fucking money and laugh in your face if you think the events of 2025 have been GOOD for scientific progress. Dumbshit.
jun 26, 2025, 12:45 pm • 171 20 • view
I mean, that's the thing, right? If scientific progress was due to massive cold war government subsidy then VCs aren't responsible for it and instead of being all-seeing galtian futurists they might just be bankers with impulse control problems, can't have that
jun 26, 2025, 12:47 pm • 4 0 • view
BAHAHAHAHAHA even Peter Thiel is like "okay hold on my dudes, Superintelligent AI isn't going to be *that* big of a deal."
jun 26, 2025, 12:50 pm • 147 13 • view
IMO AI has a way to be completely transformational but bc the capitalist pigs like Thiel haven’t found a way to 100% commercialize it they’ll say it’s “meh”.
jun 26, 2025, 1:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Step 1 towards making Thiel sound intelligent is removing a phone book's worth of "Umm's", "Uhh's", and aborted incomplete sentences from the transcript. Also, of course he doesn't think super intelligent AI is a big deal because he can't believe it'd be smarter than he is.
jun 26, 2025, 6:01 pm • 0 0 • view
hmm somewhere between nothing and everything very insightful
jun 26, 2025, 12:58 pm • 4 0 • view
“I’d like us to be having cures for dementia” while actively funding and empowering people destroying any medical research capacity. Shameful.
jun 26, 2025, 2:05 pm • 8 0 • view
“You can still do research. But not like that [scientifically]”
jun 26, 2025, 7:04 pm • 2 0 • view
It's also fun to just let Thiel talk about Elon for awhile. Because inevitably he ends up implying that, yes, Elon Musk is the dimmest fucking lightbulb Thiel has ever met. ("[it's not] that [Elon] doesn’t believe in the billion robots, but it suggests that maybe he hasn’t thought it through.")
jun 26, 2025, 12:54 pm • 134 12 • view
The other thing is Elon definitely does not care about budget deficits. I guess that’s just a euphemism for their vision of anarchic capitalism or something
jun 26, 2025, 1:07 pm • 2 0 • view
Elon almost killed him once that we know of, I am not surprised!
jun 26, 2025, 12:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Put this interchange on a banner. No two sentences better capture the mood of 2025: Thiel: "How much time do we have?" Douthat: "We’ve got as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist."
jun 26, 2025, 12:56 pm • 88 7 • view
I can’t imagine a more enraging minute than reading Thiel and Douthat blathering to each other. It’s a conversation between a cuckoo clock and doomsday klaxon.
jun 26, 2025, 1:58 pm • 3 0 • view
Thiel: "...I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is..." (Folks, I serve on the board of the Sierra Club. We REALLY are not powerful enough to create a one-world government...)
jun 26, 2025, 1:00 pm • 137 9 • view
A reminder from Max Chafkin’s biography that Peter Thiel thinks Musk is a fraud. bsky.app/profile/weir...
jun 26, 2025, 1:29 pm • 3 0 • view
That biography was so good.
jun 26, 2025, 1:53 pm • 2 0 • view
“It’s all we have” because these creeps have suffocated everything else by sucking up all of the money & oxygen they could into their own boondoggles.
jun 26, 2025, 2:16 pm • 4 2 • view
Ah so he expects it to be constrained by the rate at which *humans* always grow the economy in times of peace.
jun 26, 2025, 1:59 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah I honestly fear that we will lose most of the scientific talent in the US between this and the abhorrent immigration policies
jun 26, 2025, 3:22 pm • 1 0 • view
And these people are clowns to think that there are industry jobs fit for a lot of the scientists that worked for the government. There really isn't much of an industry equivalent, and some of that work is so important, but also has a very low ROI on more immediate terms.
jun 26, 2025, 3:25 pm • 0 0 • view
But I'll be damned if there goes more than half a day that I'm not pulling citations from NIH in pharma.
jun 26, 2025, 3:25 pm • 0 0 • view
I find this especially funny since if we compare past let's say NASA funding to today, it is clear that capitalistic ghouls like Thiel are responsible for largely hoarding the resources that used to be commanded by government for such ambitious public projects of the past. bsky.app/profile/phil...
jun 27, 2025, 5:53 pm • 2 1 • view
"You know a Tupperware party?" I'm dying
jun 26, 2025, 1:06 pm • 2 0 • view
lololol "I hate boomerism but cryogenics is the thing!!!"
jun 26, 2025, 1:25 pm • 1 0 • view
Counterpoint: I 100% encourage Peter Thiel and his buddies to freeze themselves in a cryogenics lab that can’t even get a dot matrix printer to function.
jun 26, 2025, 12:34 pm • 7 0 • view
And clearly has no understanding of why or how it takes a long time to generate results from medical research. If he’s as smart as he thinks he is he should be able figure out a way to recruit and retain human subjects ethically so “cures” for Alzheimer’s etc don’t take 50 years to discover.
jun 26, 2025, 12:37 pm • 2 0 • view
Or more on point, it’s clear Thiel is afraid of death and mad no one has come up with a way to prevent it from happening to him.
jun 26, 2025, 12:39 pm • 2 0 • view
I really don't understand a man who professes the Catholic faith while also being an apologist for torture. I think Ross has been a broken man for a very long time and the older he gets, the more deeply the moral-intellectual rot sets in. I don't think I could bring myself to read his output.
jun 26, 2025, 12:37 pm • 1 0 • view
They like Torquemada’s Catholicism. Think of how powerful Spain was under Los Reyes Católicos.
jun 26, 2025, 8:02 pm • 1 0 • view
That's quite a throwback, but I wonder. I'm not sure if it's my protestant upbringing, but I just can't understand these people the same way I can sorta-kinda grok conservative evangelicals. I can't figure out what he's standing on.
jun 26, 2025, 8:06 pm • 1 0 • view
These reactionary Catholics are rare, but they are terrifying. I’m only half joking when I say they want to bring back the Middle Ages—including burning heretics at the stake. There aren’t that many people like that, but they are disproportionately powerful.
jun 26, 2025, 8:11 pm • 1 0 • view
And Douthat is one? I guess he thought Shrub was a tool and he was playing Grand Vizier by writing speeches for the guy?
jun 26, 2025, 8:20 pm • 0 0 • view
Douthat has long leaned that way, but he’s gotten noticeably more so in that last year or two. He used to make at least a few feints in the direction of Catholic social teachings and now he rarely even bothers.
jun 26, 2025, 8:24 pm • 1 0 • view
At some point you get tired of making concessions and just become more of your core self. Perhaps that's a warning to religious people in general. Mind your core.
jun 26, 2025, 8:33 pm • 1 0 • view
A man may be wise if all he has to do is flip over the table when told he’s wrong
jun 26, 2025, 12:29 pm • 2 0 • view
I read Thiel's 1995 "The Diversity Myth" (as a service to the academy) and that was exactly my impression. It's a well researched, thoughtfully argued, rich book. But it's premises are so off key! It represented the best of a liberal arts education operating in an utterly pretend world
jun 26, 2025, 12:37 pm • 4 0 • view
An under appreciated talent of Ross.
jun 26, 2025, 1:43 pm • 0 0 • view
The bar is literally in hell when comparing to Douthat.
jun 26, 2025, 1:54 pm • 1 0 • view
the takeaway i got from this very boring, dumb interview was: we aren't advancing at the rate we should be (evidence: vibes) and therefore we need to be nicer to billionaires. also we need to be very scared of the new world order (terrifying combo of sharia law + green new deal) evidence: also vibes
jun 27, 2025, 1:43 pm • 1 0 • view
Thiel, one of the towering intellects of our time. Co-founder and CEO of PayPal. Talking with Douthat about the Antichrist (who may or may not be Greta Thunberg).
jun 26, 2025, 11:12 pm • 0 0 • view
my god what a depressing spectacle
jun 26, 2025, 12:32 pm • 7 0 • view
Have you seen Mountainhead yet? I think it really nails the way these dipshits think and view themselves.
jun 26, 2025, 1:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Mountainhead was basically perfect.
jun 26, 2025, 1:28 pm • 3 0 • view
Barf. It's such a disappointment that NYT ditched "Matter of Opinion" for Douthat's right-wing freak normalization hour.
jun 26, 2025, 1:01 pm • 1 0 • view
Sure looks like he’s - acquired - more than money along the way.. former - aids - say he really likes to get down and party 🎉
jun 26, 2025, 1:37 pm • 0 0 • view
It seems the commonality to all these TESCREAL types (are there that many really?) is a completely stunted adolescence. They never got past video games, sci-fi, and fantasy, and they're just stuck there. To me.
jun 27, 2025, 1:25 am • 2 0 • view
There aren’t that many, afaict. A few thousand, all congregating in the same discussion boards and listservs?
jun 27, 2025, 1:30 am • 4 0 • view
I've heard of 'the big 5' a few times but I think that refers to the CEOs. I'll have to keep my eye out as I'm writing a paper on this to present out in the Middle East, given the $ from their sovereign wealth funds they're investing (or will be) in AI. They've no idea about the cult of god in AI.
jun 27, 2025, 1:34 am • 0 0 • view