The irony of Thiel worrying about an authoritarian world government when the company he owns (palantir) is enabling governments to become authoritarian is insane
Thiel, like all wealthy intelligent sociopaths, commits many of Gandhi's Seven Social Sins: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, religion without sacrifice, and politics without principle.
Thiel's nihilism shows a human being who shows no concern for other people & his sociopathic behavior pursues an optimization equation that is truly destructive. Moral depth is a necessary component of brilliance.
Wealth and Education just supercharge what you already are, and what you bring to the table. I describe Peter Thiel as one of the Four Horsemen, who were born, raised or moved (family) to Pre-Mandela South Africia, and seem to favor the old South Africian way of life. All the four horseman were members of the "Paypal Mafia" and all either work in, have have worked in or have connections to, the current adminstration.
"But intelligence without empathy is just sophisticated sociopathy."
This is the narcissist's most dangerous blindspot. To convince oneself that one's vision is perfect, or perfectable, and disregard what should be obvious, because it conflicts with the omniscience of the narcissist.
Rich narcissists are the most likely cause of the fall of modern civilization and the dispoiling of the world. Armageddon lurks in the TED Talk of "the smartest guy in the room".
I think your overall premise is right—he’s driving us toward the cliff at 100 mph, while thinking what he’s doing will save us. However, I did not hear any “intellectual sophistication” in this interview. If anything, it was complete cognitive incoherence.
For example, he’s zealously pouring his resources into an AI-driven world that spies on its citizens, while admitting AI and the broader questions of AI’s impact on society are not well thought through, while fearing a world with Greta Thunberg as the “Antichrist,” and lamenting a technological stagnation born of Woodstock (“the hippies have won”)!
Stop giving these guys credit for being deep thinkers. They are decidedly not.
He's horrified by environment-related regulations strangling "nuclear science" and other defense-related innovations at every turn. Just watch the previous interviews. But the way Thurnberg is used as the personification of all that is a bit funny, really.
As for the rest, what did you really expect... A public interview with Thiel is always limited.
He loves European thinkers and poets, and from what I have seen, he has always seen the US history from a point of view that takes the old Germany/Europe as its starting point. He loves the modern US, but he really does not care that much for the Founding Fathers or the Civil War or its thinkers. But he (and Karp, who is much more German than anything else - both of them refuse to use any car that is not German) can spend hours talking to you about Goethe or Wittgenstein or Schmitt, and certainly, his teacher Girard or Ayn Rand. But this is not the place.
He only has that technical stagnation thing as a meaningful political topic. Basically he wants more resources and freedom for his military companies as well as space for the medtech and edtech types of companies that he has always supported. And less and less regulations.
Because, he could not really share the whys and hows of Palantir, Greenland, Mexico, military strategy against China-Russia-Iran (and thus dealings with Israel), his satellite companies, the purposes of the UFO stories he is trying to spread, Epstein, Bilderberg, Geostrategists' conference...etc etc, could he?
And certainly he mentioned Elon Musk as if this guy was some kind of best buddy - the buddy he has never brought with him to Bilderberg (he's a member of the steering committee - he can invite) or Davos (Palantir is a partner of the WEF) . It should be Altman, Karp, Luckey, Wang, Harrington, Kratsios, but he would never share with us what he usually discusses with those people.... Or Danzeisen, who is carrying the Asia-Pacific/China "theater" (soon, it will probably become a true military theater) for him.
Many AI matters have not been well thought out, the problem is that time is limited.
Strong analysis, thanks for sharing! He’s an interesting guy who did not come across very sophisticated today, but maybe that was his intent. Even so, I would have preferred Ezra Klein give that interview instead of Ross Douthat. I think he would have asked more thoughtful questions and then shut his mouth long enough for Thiel to speak.
I'm convinced once the final war with China-Russia-Iran (2027 or 2029, per intelligence reports - certainly I don't want that war to happen, but it seems unavoidable. Thiel even seems to worry here that it might happen sooner if he pushes the AI revolution a bit harder) ends, we will hear many stories about Thiel as well as the people (mostly, his people, even in Europe) who are supercharging the military buildup in the West and allied countries, and very likely will even command the war effort in the future. Thiel's notorious for forbidding his people to speak out.
Sam Altman probably knows a lot. I think the Dem camp has purposedly let him stay with Thiel for all those years as sort of a "spy"- because they want a Dem representative in those military circles. The Dems have become bad at training this type of talent. Basically it has been Thiel who opens the way for guys of his generation (Karp, Andreessen....) and trains all the younger guys (Altman, Wang, Luckey, Kratsios...etc). Altman hated Thiel at first and yet after some years, he became part of the inner circle, and apparently now Thiel is one of the two most important people in his life (the other one is Paul Graham) . No way leftist media would just shut their mouth about this supposed Dem tech leader's relationship with Thiel. Yet they did, and still do.
Altman spent one whole week celebrating Trump's win (first term) with Thiel on that island, and then collaborated with Thiel on Oklo and Helion (both are related to the DoD), Bridgetown (Asian company, part of alliance between Thiel and Li Kashing; Thiel's spouse Danzeisen was/is the Chairman), Altman's VC fund Hydrazine, and certainly the OpenAI-Palantir partnership....
Another person would certainly be Danzeisen - whom I suspect to be a Democrat too (as the wedding congratulation tweet only mentioned "fellow GOPer Thiel", and not "fellow GOPers"). Apparently in private he protested against Thiel's support (use) of Trump.
Apparently, Altman, Danzeisen, Paul Graham, Patrick Collison (another Thiel protege), Alfred Lin (from Thiel-adjacent Sequoia) already worked on China at least 10 years ago:
It’s so difficult for me, reading this piece, Mike. I’m the daughter of a man so much like Peter Thiel that it frightens me every time I hear him speak. My father had the same kind of brilliant and utterly hollow intelligence and a guiding fascination with his own theories.
He was given millions of dollars after World War II by Eisenhower to create clinical psychology as a profession because the country didn’t have enough psychiatrists to treat all the vets coming home from World War II. From inside his authority as Chief of Clinical Psychology for the VA, he and his colleagues created the first system that removed the agency from people who had been deeply wounded in war and replaced it with an identity as “sick people” who could never get well without the highly-paid diagnoses and continuous expert "treatment" and supervision of “PhD clinicians.”
Quite literally, the first DSM was argued out over the dinner table that I grew up at in DC in the early 1950s. The experts’ application of the medical model to the human mind was the best they could do because all they had to work with was the "medical" model and they believed - as "scientists" - that it offered a sound approach to mental as well as physical health. And neither they -- nor anyone in government health agencies -- wanted to question their beliefs.
So a whole new profession was launched to exploit the vulnerabilities of soldiers and abused housewives and sexually assaulted children and people with neurodivergent brains and people with different gender, identities and… get paid a lot to do it. So it goes.
We can all see how that’s worked out, can’t we?
So, as I said, it sickens me every time I listen to Theil and his cronies promulgating their beliefs that everyone would be so much better off if the stupid little people who don't see the AI controlled future they see just came under their authoritarian rule and either did what they said ... or died.
I’m always appreciating your thoughtful writing here, Mike.
He sounds like exactly the kind of person who would already have made arrangements to upload his consciousness into some technical format and regards that as the best possible outcome - survival of the fittest taken to the ultimate extreme, ready for a theoretically purified iteration of humanity
Thanks for yet another perspective on the hollowness of proto-sapiens emotional immaturity. People who have been denied love cannot imitate something they've never felt, and have had it drained from their evolutionary heritage; namely their inborn inclination toward fulfillment and completion, as reflected in nurturing parents. As you and others point out, sapiens deem this not fully sane. It's not clear whether this stage of development can be re-created in denied individuals, to enable them to become fully human. And this is why they pose a scary threat to the rest of us.
I skimmed the transcript rather than listening to the voices (thanks for the link), but based on that I disagree with Mike's observation that Thiel "He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated"
Thiel is one confused guy. He's basing his entire "stagnation, stagnation, stagnation" world view on the last thirty years of his own life and career. If I were a psychotherapist I might see this obsession with stagnation as a symptom of boredom: personal stagnation resulting from a shallow world view that avoids any disciplined reading in serious thought such as philosophy, history or literature.
And then the wild ideas about Christianity. Somehow he blunders into a mystical doctrine from Orthodox Christianity about ultimate human perfection as a way of justifying a belief in what we might call technical transhumanism. But then he gets all knotted about transexuals changing their genitalia. Apparently there's not enough nous there for untangling what might be a personal distaste for a current cultural transition from deeper thinking about humanity, its ultimate fate, and whether God should be involved somehow.)
Gaia may indeed have a course correction coming up for an overabundant species that has destroyed its habitat. We can face up to that without plunging into nihilism.
“But intelligence without empathy is just sophisticated sociopathy.” I really appreciated this brief but sharp analysis that gave language to a sensory experience, a feeling experience, an intuitive experience I have had about certain individuals. I wish for more intelligent people to wake “down” into their soulfulness.
If they weren't billionaires, no one would be talking about Thiel or Musk or their mediocre analyses, which millions of far more intelligent people around the world think about and could articulate better.
There ya go. Without getting into the weeds of Thiel's so-called social analyses, such as his reliance on the concept of "stagnation" without proof of it, it's clear that his conclusions are threatening. And this is why no single human should accumulate the wealth and power of a Thiel or Karp or Musk. Very often, those who rise to unspeakable social power have sociopathic qualities that helped them get there.
I've looked at him for a long time. He does have that sociopathic aspect. Empathy he does have, but that aspect is not developed. It's sad though, that now Western societies have to depend on this guy to survive. Wonder why Obama, Biden, Harris or even AOC do not really say anything? AOC tried to investigate Palantir 5 years ago. And Biden chose the last day in office to warn about the AI oligarchy. But in the end, they have all helped him. Palantir did not need to wait for Trump 2.0 to attain dominance in almost all departments of the government. I believe that "If Trump does not win, I will leave the US" part a lie, or at least half a lie - a mere passing thought. NATO governments are letting him install MAVEN in every headquarter. Europe are opening the doors for him in intelligence gathering, police, customs and healthcare sectors. The only possible explanation is the upcoming war with China in 2027, or at most 2029 when Russia will also attack (per intelligence reports). Nowadays many funtions of a military commander has already transferred to the board room of the military AI CEO, which is directly connected to satellites and other intelligence gathering system. Military commanders and officials are applying for a position at Palantir or Anduril in droves. And the retired (but very powerful) ones gather at Rivada Networks (mainly for the powerful satellite technique promised by the German branch Rivada Space Networks), which is his champion for the military satellite sector (beside Blacksky and EnduroSat... So Elon Musk, beware.)
In this interview he is wondering whether China will risk it all to attack Taiwan if he develop the US"s AI sector too fast. LOL.
Empathy is important. But the society would not reach this point had the elite boomers not chosen to cling to their power and their ways of governing. And I agree with Thiel's criticism, that the society let itself distracted with cultural wars, while infrastructure, living standard and military capabilities fell into ruins or stagnation, while China had surpassed the West in many key sectors, especially in hardward production and defense-related areas (shipbuilding etc.).
I don't think Peter Thiel is very smart, I think he's a replacement-level nerd that happened to be early enough to the internet to do a very obvious thing with it and it happened to work out for him.
The irony of Thiel worrying about an authoritarian world government when the company he owns (palantir) is enabling governments to become authoritarian is insane
Thiel, like all wealthy intelligent sociopaths, commits many of Gandhi's Seven Social Sins: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, religion without sacrifice, and politics without principle.
That's a nice list, first time hearing about this, thank you.
Thank you, I appreciate this reminder!❤️
You have the same ability as Thiel but you are a soulful human being. Thanks for the excellent analysis.
Thiel's nihilism shows a human being who shows no concern for other people & his sociopathic behavior pursues an optimization equation that is truly destructive. Moral depth is a necessary component of brilliance.
Perfect title for this article. Without love, kindness, or empathy we are no longer human beings but merely tools to be exploited.
Wealth and Education just supercharge what you already are, and what you bring to the table. I describe Peter Thiel as one of the Four Horsemen, who were born, raised or moved (family) to Pre-Mandela South Africia, and seem to favor the old South Africian way of life. All the four horseman were members of the "Paypal Mafia" and all either work in, have have worked in or have connections to, the current adminstration.
"But intelligence without empathy is just sophisticated sociopathy."
This is the narcissist's most dangerous blindspot. To convince oneself that one's vision is perfect, or perfectable, and disregard what should be obvious, because it conflicts with the omniscience of the narcissist.
Rich narcissists are the most likely cause of the fall of modern civilization and the dispoiling of the world. Armageddon lurks in the TED Talk of "the smartest guy in the room".
I think your overall premise is right—he’s driving us toward the cliff at 100 mph, while thinking what he’s doing will save us. However, I did not hear any “intellectual sophistication” in this interview. If anything, it was complete cognitive incoherence.
For example, he’s zealously pouring his resources into an AI-driven world that spies on its citizens, while admitting AI and the broader questions of AI’s impact on society are not well thought through, while fearing a world with Greta Thunberg as the “Antichrist,” and lamenting a technological stagnation born of Woodstock (“the hippies have won”)!
Stop giving these guys credit for being deep thinkers. They are decidedly not.
He's horrified by environment-related regulations strangling "nuclear science" and other defense-related innovations at every turn. Just watch the previous interviews. But the way Thurnberg is used as the personification of all that is a bit funny, really.
As for the rest, what did you really expect... A public interview with Thiel is always limited.
He loves European thinkers and poets, and from what I have seen, he has always seen the US history from a point of view that takes the old Germany/Europe as its starting point. He loves the modern US, but he really does not care that much for the Founding Fathers or the Civil War or its thinkers. But he (and Karp, who is much more German than anything else - both of them refuse to use any car that is not German) can spend hours talking to you about Goethe or Wittgenstein or Schmitt, and certainly, his teacher Girard or Ayn Rand. But this is not the place.
He only has that technical stagnation thing as a meaningful political topic. Basically he wants more resources and freedom for his military companies as well as space for the medtech and edtech types of companies that he has always supported. And less and less regulations.
Because, he could not really share the whys and hows of Palantir, Greenland, Mexico, military strategy against China-Russia-Iran (and thus dealings with Israel), his satellite companies, the purposes of the UFO stories he is trying to spread, Epstein, Bilderberg, Geostrategists' conference...etc etc, could he?
And certainly he mentioned Elon Musk as if this guy was some kind of best buddy - the buddy he has never brought with him to Bilderberg (he's a member of the steering committee - he can invite) or Davos (Palantir is a partner of the WEF) . It should be Altman, Karp, Luckey, Wang, Harrington, Kratsios, but he would never share with us what he usually discusses with those people.... Or Danzeisen, who is carrying the Asia-Pacific/China "theater" (soon, it will probably become a true military theater) for him.
Many AI matters have not been well thought out, the problem is that time is limited.
Strong analysis, thanks for sharing! He’s an interesting guy who did not come across very sophisticated today, but maybe that was his intent. Even so, I would have preferred Ezra Klein give that interview instead of Ross Douthat. I think he would have asked more thoughtful questions and then shut his mouth long enough for Thiel to speak.
I'm convinced once the final war with China-Russia-Iran (2027 or 2029, per intelligence reports - certainly I don't want that war to happen, but it seems unavoidable. Thiel even seems to worry here that it might happen sooner if he pushes the AI revolution a bit harder) ends, we will hear many stories about Thiel as well as the people (mostly, his people, even in Europe) who are supercharging the military buildup in the West and allied countries, and very likely will even command the war effort in the future. Thiel's notorious for forbidding his people to speak out.
Sam Altman probably knows a lot. I think the Dem camp has purposedly let him stay with Thiel for all those years as sort of a "spy"- because they want a Dem representative in those military circles. The Dems have become bad at training this type of talent. Basically it has been Thiel who opens the way for guys of his generation (Karp, Andreessen....) and trains all the younger guys (Altman, Wang, Luckey, Kratsios...etc). Altman hated Thiel at first and yet after some years, he became part of the inner circle, and apparently now Thiel is one of the two most important people in his life (the other one is Paul Graham) . No way leftist media would just shut their mouth about this supposed Dem tech leader's relationship with Thiel. Yet they did, and still do.
Altman spent one whole week celebrating Trump's win (first term) with Thiel on that island, and then collaborated with Thiel on Oklo and Helion (both are related to the DoD), Bridgetown (Asian company, part of alliance between Thiel and Li Kashing; Thiel's spouse Danzeisen was/is the Chairman), Altman's VC fund Hydrazine, and certainly the OpenAI-Palantir partnership....
Another person would certainly be Danzeisen - whom I suspect to be a Democrat too (as the wedding congratulation tweet only mentioned "fellow GOPer Thiel", and not "fellow GOPers"). Apparently in private he protested against Thiel's support (use) of Trump.
Apparently, Altman, Danzeisen, Paul Graham, Patrick Collison (another Thiel protege), Alfred Lin (from Thiel-adjacent Sequoia) already worked on China at least 10 years ago:
https://blog.samaltman.com/china
It’s so difficult for me, reading this piece, Mike. I’m the daughter of a man so much like Peter Thiel that it frightens me every time I hear him speak. My father had the same kind of brilliant and utterly hollow intelligence and a guiding fascination with his own theories.
He was given millions of dollars after World War II by Eisenhower to create clinical psychology as a profession because the country didn’t have enough psychiatrists to treat all the vets coming home from World War II. From inside his authority as Chief of Clinical Psychology for the VA, he and his colleagues created the first system that removed the agency from people who had been deeply wounded in war and replaced it with an identity as “sick people” who could never get well without the highly-paid diagnoses and continuous expert "treatment" and supervision of “PhD clinicians.”
Quite literally, the first DSM was argued out over the dinner table that I grew up at in DC in the early 1950s. The experts’ application of the medical model to the human mind was the best they could do because all they had to work with was the "medical" model and they believed - as "scientists" - that it offered a sound approach to mental as well as physical health. And neither they -- nor anyone in government health agencies -- wanted to question their beliefs.
So a whole new profession was launched to exploit the vulnerabilities of soldiers and abused housewives and sexually assaulted children and people with neurodivergent brains and people with different gender, identities and… get paid a lot to do it. So it goes.
We can all see how that’s worked out, can’t we?
So, as I said, it sickens me every time I listen to Theil and his cronies promulgating their beliefs that everyone would be so much better off if the stupid little people who don't see the AI controlled future they see just came under their authoritarian rule and either did what they said ... or died.
I’m always appreciating your thoughtful writing here, Mike.
He sounds like exactly the kind of person who would already have made arrangements to upload his consciousness into some technical format and regards that as the best possible outcome - survival of the fittest taken to the ultimate extreme, ready for a theoretically purified iteration of humanity
Thanks for yet another perspective on the hollowness of proto-sapiens emotional immaturity. People who have been denied love cannot imitate something they've never felt, and have had it drained from their evolutionary heritage; namely their inborn inclination toward fulfillment and completion, as reflected in nurturing parents. As you and others point out, sapiens deem this not fully sane. It's not clear whether this stage of development can be re-created in denied individuals, to enable them to become fully human. And this is why they pose a scary threat to the rest of us.
I skimmed the transcript rather than listening to the voices (thanks for the link), but based on that I disagree with Mike's observation that Thiel "He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated"
Thiel is one confused guy. He's basing his entire "stagnation, stagnation, stagnation" world view on the last thirty years of his own life and career. If I were a psychotherapist I might see this obsession with stagnation as a symptom of boredom: personal stagnation resulting from a shallow world view that avoids any disciplined reading in serious thought such as philosophy, history or literature.
And then the wild ideas about Christianity. Somehow he blunders into a mystical doctrine from Orthodox Christianity about ultimate human perfection as a way of justifying a belief in what we might call technical transhumanism. But then he gets all knotted about transexuals changing their genitalia. Apparently there's not enough nous there for untangling what might be a personal distaste for a current cultural transition from deeper thinking about humanity, its ultimate fate, and whether God should be involved somehow.)
Gaia may indeed have a course correction coming up for an overabundant species that has destroyed its habitat. We can face up to that without plunging into nihilism.
“But intelligence without empathy is just sophisticated sociopathy.” I really appreciated this brief but sharp analysis that gave language to a sensory experience, a feeling experience, an intuitive experience I have had about certain individuals. I wish for more intelligent people to wake “down” into their soulfulness.
If they weren't billionaires, no one would be talking about Thiel or Musk or their mediocre analyses, which millions of far more intelligent people around the world think about and could articulate better.
There ya go. Without getting into the weeds of Thiel's so-called social analyses, such as his reliance on the concept of "stagnation" without proof of it, it's clear that his conclusions are threatening. And this is why no single human should accumulate the wealth and power of a Thiel or Karp or Musk. Very often, those who rise to unspeakable social power have sociopathic qualities that helped them get there.
I've looked at him for a long time. He does have that sociopathic aspect. Empathy he does have, but that aspect is not developed. It's sad though, that now Western societies have to depend on this guy to survive. Wonder why Obama, Biden, Harris or even AOC do not really say anything? AOC tried to investigate Palantir 5 years ago. And Biden chose the last day in office to warn about the AI oligarchy. But in the end, they have all helped him. Palantir did not need to wait for Trump 2.0 to attain dominance in almost all departments of the government. I believe that "If Trump does not win, I will leave the US" part a lie, or at least half a lie - a mere passing thought. NATO governments are letting him install MAVEN in every headquarter. Europe are opening the doors for him in intelligence gathering, police, customs and healthcare sectors. The only possible explanation is the upcoming war with China in 2027, or at most 2029 when Russia will also attack (per intelligence reports). Nowadays many funtions of a military commander has already transferred to the board room of the military AI CEO, which is directly connected to satellites and other intelligence gathering system. Military commanders and officials are applying for a position at Palantir or Anduril in droves. And the retired (but very powerful) ones gather at Rivada Networks (mainly for the powerful satellite technique promised by the German branch Rivada Space Networks), which is his champion for the military satellite sector (beside Blacksky and EnduroSat... So Elon Musk, beware.)
In this interview he is wondering whether China will risk it all to attack Taiwan if he develop the US"s AI sector too fast. LOL.
Empathy is important. But the society would not reach this point had the elite boomers not chosen to cling to their power and their ways of governing. And I agree with Thiel's criticism, that the society let itself distracted with cultural wars, while infrastructure, living standard and military capabilities fell into ruins or stagnation, while China had surpassed the West in many key sectors, especially in hardward production and defense-related areas (shipbuilding etc.).
I don't think Peter Thiel is very smart, I think he's a replacement-level nerd that happened to be early enough to the internet to do a very obvious thing with it and it happened to work out for him.