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!"
Unironically, he sounds bored and is pursuing progress in the only way he knows.
Someone needs to tell mark cuban this, we can entrepreneur out of this right wing coup, just make a good slide deck
Libertarianism is a malady
His answer to everything is, unsurprisingly "I should have more".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
BAHAHAHAHAHA even Peter Thiel is like "okay hold on my dudes, Superintelligent AI isn't going to be *that* big of a deal."
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”.
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.
hmm somewhere between nothing and everything very insightful
“I’d like us to be having cures for dementia” while actively funding and empowering people destroying any medical research capacity. Shameful.
“You can still do research. But not like that [scientifically]”
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.")
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
Elon almost killed him once that we know of, I am not surprised!
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."
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.
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...)
not with that attitude
Thiel: "In my telling of history, the hippies took over. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won." Ah yes, those powerful hippies who ruled in the 1970s. Like Richard Nixon.
These guys say they're against revisionist history?
“In my telling of history…” is very, well, telling of how Thiel views facts and knowledge. It’s all pliable to his will and “reason”. This is so dangerous.
Does make me wonder if this is the reason Tarantino decided saving Sharon Tate’s life would be as historically significant as killing Hitler, though. Gotta be a non-zero chance he and Thiel annoyed each other at a party sometime.
like he learned history from a coffee table book
Those crazy hippies in the Nixon administration doomed NASA shuttle by cutting corners to save money for their war in Vietnam 🇻🇳 Damn them all.
Saw this the other day and wouldn't you know it, Peter Thiel got the itch to wax philosophical and prove OP's point.
Same hippies who are retired and leaving the SS trust empty?
Ha
It would be cool if he didn't exist
Also, Woodstock happened before Peter Thiel (checks notes) celebrated his 2nd birthday, so what a qualified expert to discuss and analyze the sociopolitical trends of the era.
No matter how much wealth & power they amass, sociopathic Peter Thiels of the world must *always* be the endangered victims in their own internal narratives.
He has been saying that his worst fear, above everything else, is world domination by the "antichrist". In a way that what he and his gang are doing with Palantir etc. I remembered a Charles Manson inspired horror movie ("Mandy") in which the demonic villain believes he is possessed by jesus...
The actual response to "the hippies" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F...
Anyway, yeah. The TL;DR is that Peter Thiel thinks Greta Thunberg is the antichrist, and society will stagnate and fail unless we deregulate everything and let Thiel and his buddies take wild risks with everyone else's lives. Thiel is a very rigorous thinker, and a stone-cold sociopath.
> "monopolies are good actually" > "scientific progress is stagnating" someone who is is good at policy please help me. my society is dying
Peter Thiel has never read Before the Storm.
Rigorous thinker but his conclusions drive the path. So he has to avoid questions, evidence. He is a rigorous thought policeman
It's just boredom and hubris. If he could live with boredom, this wouldn't be an issue. The whole talk is reminiscent of 3 am in a freshman dorm.
“We need to take risks, man. We need to take risks…”
He is a warmed-over ubermensch who never figured out how to properly grow up with his Gen-X era scifi/fantasy obsessions. He would be a laughable figure if not for his enormous wealth and fascist ideology. I assume Ross failed to bring up the latter.
A rigorous thinker and a rigid thinker.
Thiel's philosophy is molded by rejecting the implications of Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972) which reflects the concept of planetary limits. To accept limits places at risk the entire Libertarian philosophy as it means individualism needs to be subservient to cooperation.
Private ownership needs to be subservient to public ownership in common. It cannot be understated how deeply antithetical "Limits to Growth" is to Libertarian ideologues. Thiel truly believes that to accept limits is to artificially constrain human ingenuity and progress.
For all his talk about stagnation, it’s remarkable how Pete Thiel’s views are pretty much exactly the same as they were in 1990. The guy convinced himself early on that he was right about everything, and hasn’t challenged himself since.
That is generally what “smart psychopath” gets you. Because the one thing that becomes an issue for that sort of person is suggesting that maybe they DIDN’T figure out how to fix the world in their 20s, at which point they become very violent with whatever power is available to them.
This needs little more unpacking: How many of Thiel's investment decisions are consistent with the libertarian ethos? bsky.app/profile/pkas...
Musk isn’t the only one who doesn’t think things through. Thiel laments stagnation even though it seems pretty clear that the stagnation can be tied to all the things that he advocates for, e.g. deregulation, complete capitulation on antitrust enforcement, tax policy that redistributes $ to the rich
Lol, absolutely missed the first half of this thread where you said as much
He wants the global totalitarian one state and he believes he should be in charge. Poor understanding of history.
Probably makes sense in light of the establishment of the EPA under Nixon (among other things). Ultimately, no matter how genteel or techie-coded, these dunderheads all think that "companies not being allowed to poison children at will" are the shackles holding back all human progress.
Also I can’t think of a more impotent force in American life in the last 40 years than the “Tacoma Park” style libs
Ronald Regan never happened etc etc etc
There's an Ayn Rand essay - which Thiel has surely read - where she counterpoints all the nice people who came to watch the Apollo 11 launch with the dirty commie hippies. Clearly was very influential on Thiel, at a deep emotional level...
Here t is. ari.aynrand.org/issues/scien...
I think there's a whole game going on where right wingers keep telling themselves that left wingers are monsters so that the right wingers can feel justified as they turn themselves into monsters. It's like some kind of Freudian projection game.
These dudes act like Greenpeace is fucking SPECTRE or something.
A reminder from Max Chafkin’s biography that Peter Thiel thinks Musk is a fraud. bsky.app/profile/weir...
That biography was so good.
Fantastic book. And the amount of information you can dig out of it now, in this current political moment, that helps you understand what is happening, is quite amazing.
“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.
Ah so he expects it to be constrained by the rate at which *humans* always grow the economy in times of peace.
Yeah I honestly fear that we will lose most of the scientific talent in the US between this and the abhorrent immigration policies
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.
But I'll be damned if there goes more than half a day that I'm not pulling citations from NIH in pharma.
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...
