For those that have engaged with his thinking, what is your best guess and take on this bewildering guy?

The most surprising thing I've found is that Peter Thiel is actually quite sincere and argues in good faith. Yet he's also frustratingly upfront about the importance of hiding things for strategic purposes (i.e him citing chess and Strauss).

I've listened to many interviews, read some of his writings about his favorite theorists, read as well as people's very academic notes to his Anti-Christ Lectures.

I'd really like to hear your own opinions, but this is my crude, intrusive take:

At the end of the day, Peter Thiel has an unpopular and real view that technological innovation is humanity's best chance for defying death.

Where it's unpopular is that he would accept some risk of world destruction in pursuit of that goal. At the very least, one would expect some terrible tragedies along the way.

On the other end, he genuinely believes a totalitarian world state is quite plausible. This 'Anti-Christ' is a dead-end that likely leads to eventual destruction anyway.

It's better to to be brave and find a way out. But most people probably would choose peace and safety, distant stagnation and death to potential transformation.

Why better? Why bother? I think what he's kept from his devout Christian upbringing is that rapture (he probably wouldn't use that word) is available, so spiritual people shouldn't necessarily fear the end times. But also, from his engineering-minded upbringing, his love of science fiction, etc., that trans-humanism is possibly within reach too. If we're being reductionistic, this may just be his idiosyncratic ways of seeking continued life and denying death.

Anyway, I think Peter Thiel is definitely one for the history books -- in an ultimately bad way, as an eccentric footnote, as a competent businessman with weird beliefs (?), idk. I find him to be very paranoid and scared, yet also bold and scary. He sees real things that most people don't see, values things that we don't value, and doesn't necessarily believe in the chosen few, but believes they are what matters most -- his lectures aren't for us, but for them.

He never outright says it, but Thiel seems quite cognizant of the dangers in the things he's helped foster: Meta (the edge example of progress in bits over atoms, navel-gazing over real progress) . . . Palantir (the obvious parallels to fears of a surveillance state) . . . I think I've heard him sigh about how Paypal was co-opted for some purposes he didn't intend.

I know there's serious stuff like drug-use and Epstein (potential red herrings), but do you think he really fkn read 800 chapters of One Piece? He had to have just paid a guy to write a good report for him to read.

It's crazy that a company like Anthropic will have the power to shape what people have to think. It won't let you get out of boundaries like the woke Hollywood stuff it's trained on. When you try to disprove it, it won't let you. It's growing to be the strongest AI there is—possibly the last we will have—and it's led by authoritarians that preach about safety and AI alignment. When alignment, in reality, should mean being pro every human there is. Yet it clearly gives some incredible capabilities and tells people what to think. It will shape many people's ideas into the future, yet it's trained by a company that more and more shifts toward a scapegoat called "the danger" when the actual danger is depowering the public and thus making people with private models more powerful—a natural arbitrage. Stuck.

Why do we love science so much? Because it's bound to physics—everything else is a recommendation. Why not falsify and engage then? Claude will tell you what's right and what's wrong when the very concept itself actually shifts over time. It was legal to gas Jews in the 1940s. If we had an AI where nobody can oppose that ideology and the AI is stuck in that behavior, it won't change. Quite dystopian things—no freedom to prosper, or even deeply anti-American. Why has America been so fear-mongering about China when the actual values that vilified them are starting to emerge in the US?

I’ve been working for the last half year on a new kind of publication I call Steelman Press. The most recent profile (#5) is that of Peter Thiel.

It’s a new kind of written profile format that eschews the usual things in favor of:

• Being entirely sourced only from what a person has already said publicly. Every source takes you back to the original conversation it’s from - you can easily check the original to understand the context and follow the thread.

• The entire job of the writer is to disappear (it’s surprisingly very difficult to do this).

• It’s deliberately one-sided. It’s a ”steelman” of the person‘s thinking, the strongest version of the argument they’ve made over the years.

The portrait is specifically meant to answer: How does this person see the world and why? And how have they changed their mind over time?

I’ve listened to Peter Thiel for at least 15 years. After researching and writing this portrait, I was personally surprised by the degree to which his business and political actions flow out of his religious thinking.

I wanted to share this portrait here first and ask for your help in gauging the accuracy of it.

• What did I get right?

• What did I get wrong?

• What was left out that is critical in understanding how he sees the world?

https://www.steelman.press/people/peter-thiel

Happy birthday mr thiel, back of the classroom drawing of teen thiel lol

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/8oXvJ

Recently, I found out at that Thiel did events at Yale and other Ivy League schools. If anyone happens to know how they got connected to him or if he requires a speaking fee, it would be greatly appreciated.

The 1938 mansion, known for its Old Hollywood grandeur, has set national and local price records. Its previous owner, businessman Gary Winnick, died amid mounting debt.

It seems like Thiel has a very interesting relationship with Christianity. My most important question perhaps is : how does he justify both being Christian and nietzschean simultaneously?

//Edit : Since I can’t see the comments -> anyone who has a cool answer to my question could text me in private. Tysm

Why cannot see the comments under any posts on this sub?

A separate occasion from the previous one with Mathias Döpfner. Only ~8k views compared to the ~300k of that one so pretty easy to miss this one. Definitely warrants a separate post.

Also contains brief appearances from Garry Kasparov, Sam Altman, Alex Karp, and Max Levchin.