Interview Day At Thiel Capital
...
You look up from your massive mahogany desk.
“Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.”
“That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom.
“Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
“I think we’re in a simulation.”
“Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital we’re looking for something - “
“Let me finish. I think we’re in a simulation, and it’s a porno.”
“What?”
“Bostrom’s original simulation argument said that if future generations simulated the past, there would be far more of these simulations than there were actual pasts. He thought maybe people would simulate the past to learn about the branching pattern of history. That’s the kind of mistake only a philosopher could make. If we look at existing media consumption - whether it’s videos, RPGs, or incipient VR properties - by far the most common category is porn. Even if you limit your search to historical media, there are a hundred bodice-rippers for every sober investigation of Victorian lifestyles.”
“But . . . people aren’t having sex all the time!”
“Maybe not at Thiel Capital. But go outside, and you’ll find that people are, in fact, having sex all the time. Tindr. Hinge. Grindr. Young people are going out and having casual sex every weekend. There are fourteen different BDSM sex clubs in San Francisco alone. If you look at the modal society throughout history, they’re forbidding their women from leaving the house, or holding them to such high modesty standards that showing a bare ankle would be a scandal. They’re locking people up for owning porn, or killing them for being gay, or calling them rakes or sluts for having sex outside of marriage. Meanwhile, in our society women go everywhere in skimpy skin-tight clothing, you can f@&k a different partner every week, you can be polyamorous or transgender. I read conservative writers saying that no society like ours can survive over the long term. But I’ve thought about it longer than they have, and I think no society like ours could ever come to exist at all. That’s because it’s not a real society. It’s somebody’s weird fetish free-use-adjacent fantasy.”
“Who’s the protagonist? Or do future humans just watch random people in our world for months in the hopes that something sexy will happen?”
“I think we’re more of a shared worldbuilding project, like Gor or the Omegaverse. Future humans can insert themselves as “characters” at various points, or just cooperate in guiding, watching, or fleshing out the life of their favorite individual. Probably many of them are celebrities. Or maybe future transhumans have sensory modalities we can’t imagine, and can be sexually stimulated by a large class of people, or the entire world. I honestly wouldn’t want to speculate. I’m less sure about the details than the overall hypothesis.”
“I don’t know, I still think it doesn’t make sex - I mean sense! - to have a porno with so little sexual activity, as weighted by experience-moments.”
“Do you want to have sex?” asks Tom. “Right now? On this desk?”
“Thanks, but as your interviewer, I think that’s a conflict of interest.”
“Awww. I heard you guys were heterodox and based.”
“Thank you for your time, next applicant please.”
“Ah, yes. Dan. Thank you for coming to Thiel Capital today. I see you’re interviewing for Vice-President Of Undermining Democracy. Your resume looks stellar - I didn’t know anyone had served in the Trump, Putin, and Jong-un administrations. We just have one question: What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
“I think alien abductions stories come from anaesthetic failure during colonoscopies.”
“Say more?”
“So in the typical case, someone who may or may not have seen a UFO gets hypnotized and asked to ‘remember’ what happened. They usually ‘remember’ some sort of weird entities with big eyes and no mouths paralyzing them and inserting a probe into their rectum. Well, colonoscopies are usually done under ‘twilight anaesthesia’, which doesn’t really produce full unconsciousness. It just sort of scrambles your brain so you can’t figure out what’s going on and don’t form memories. Imagine that under hypnosis, an investigator is commanding you to remember. You look deep inside your brain for repressed memories that you can’t consciously access, and - there it is! - some weird half-forgotten shards of a memory you can’t quite put together. When you stare at it really hard, it resolves into an image of some people in surgical gowns, goggles, and masks, probing your rectum. Except it’s not clear enough to place the surgical dress, so you just describe them as having strangely-textured skin, big eyes, and no mouths.”
“Aren’t alien abductions older than colonoscopies?”
“There have always been a few, but the classical picture with the anal probing doesn’t start showing up en masse until the 1980s, which is about when colonoscopies became routine too. And it’s most common in Anglophone countries, which are also the ones that recommend preventative colonoscopy.”
“Are there any ways to use this theory to make investment decisions?”
“Ummmm…if the medical authorities start recommending more colonoscopies, buy stock in The History Channel.”
“Thank you, Dan.”
“Jason, thank you for coming. I see you’ve applied to join our Perpetuating Inequality team. Great choice, you won’t regret it, the people in PI are great. We do have one question that we always ask during these interviews - what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
Jason rubs his hands together. “Do you know what a skeuomorph is?”
“No.”
“It’s when something retains a design that no longer makes sense in context. The classic example is the floppy disk icon meaning ‘save’ on a computer program. Zoomers don’t even know what a floppy disk is, but they still click the weird-looking black square every time they want to save something. One day the meaning will be completely forgotten.”
“Okay, with you so far.”
“So why are emoji faces always yellow?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
“It’s a mystery. I can’t find anyone who knows. But the Simpsons are also yellow. So are SpongeBob, the Minions, and a host of other cartoon characters. There’s this whole visual language where people are yellow.”
“Maybe it’s popular because it’s a bright color?”
“Meanwhile, if you look back a century or so, there’s widespread agreement that Asian people are yellow. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Yellow Peril. But there are plenty of Asians here in California. None of them are yellow! What we have here is a skeuomorph. Humans used to be yellow! Then they changed color. Asians were the last holdouts, but now we’ve lost them too!”
“Seems implausible. We have plenty of paintings of humans, made over thousands of years.”
“Exactly. It’s a conspiracy. Have you ever heard of Tartaria? All history before the World Wars is a lie. The real story is a global civilization called Tartaria, centered in Asia, which was destroyed in some sort of flood. All the buildings we can no longer make today - the cathedrals, the Victorian houses, the Art Deco skyscrapers - are Tartarian relics. The elites disguise the true history to prevent us from realizing how far we’ve fallen. My theory is that the Tartarians were bright yellow, and our folk iconography is a skeuomorph from their culture.”
“Well I agree that’s an unpopular opinion, but…”
“This is also why newborn babies are born with jaundice so often. It’s the Tartarian genes reasserting themselves. The doctors take them away and bombard them with UV rays to hide their true nature and prevent us from realizing the con. The elites even got us to use ‘yellow-bellied’ as a synonym for ‘coward’, so that we would shun and bully whoever they didn’t catch. What do you think?”
“Honestly we were looking for something more like ‘maybe racism is actually good.’”
“Oh, I believe that one too! Let me tell you about the origin of black people!”
“I’m afraid we’re running out of time for the day, we’ll get back to you soon.”
“Mike. Welcome to Thiel Capital. Thank you so much for interviewing with us. It says here that you’re looking to be an analyst at our Nirnaeth Arnoediad Inc. subdivision, that’s great. But before we discuss compensation, can you tell me - what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on? For example, just as a prompt, something like ‘maybe racism is actually good’.”
“Hmmm…racism good…oh! I believe the Holocaust had to happen for anthropic reasons.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can condition probabilities on the fact that you have to exist to see them. So for example, if someone planned to kill you unless a d20 landed on 20, and it landed on 20 so you survive, that wasn’t lucky - it’s just that of twenty world-branches, the only one you could possibly be (alive) in was the one where it landed 20, so of course that’s what you observe.”
“Okay, I’m following you so far.”
“This is why we survived the Cold War. People wonder how we managed to get through so many crises and near-misses without starting World War III, but all the world-branches that started World War III got wiped out, so of course we’d find ourselves in one of the lucky survivors.”
“Still following.”
“All the good superweapons are invented by Jews. Einstein and Oppenheimer made the A-bomb. Teller and von Neumann made the H-bomb. Samuel Cohen made the neutron bomb, Leo Szilard made the cobalt bomb, et cetera. Even the world-destroying AIs are being invented by Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, et cetera.”
“Yeah, we at Thiel Capital are very based, we already know all this stuff.”
“So the more Jews you have, the more superweapons you have. If you want a world to survive a couple of centuries after the Industrial Revolution, you need some kind of incredibly implausible event that gets rid of Jews in particular. So everyone who’s still alive will find themselves in a world with a history of implausible events like this.”
“I’m not sure that really counts as racism.”
“Maybe not directly, but think about it. People always say that it could happen here. That early 20th century Europeans thought they were so great and civilized, but the Holocaust proves that even the seemingly-most-sophisticated countries can descend into barbarism and genocide at any time. But they can’t! Or there’s only a one in a billion chance that they do, the same as everyone thought in 1900. It’s just that everyone who’s still alive comes from world-branches where the one-in-a-billion thing happened. I even think World War I was a fluke - that was the only way the outcome pump could set up Hitler.”
“I don’t know. I still think you had to have the seed. If this was so out-of-the-blue, why would Hitler have even wanted to kill the Jews to begin with?”
“Oh, that’s obvious. It’s not just superweapons - the Jews are also over-represented in the physics of time - Einstein, for example. Hitler was trying to figure out a way to prevent the invention of time travel, in order to stop the steady stream of time travelers who were trying to kill him.”
“Look, we’ll get back to you in a couple of days, okay?”
“Luke. Nice to meet you. I see you’re interested in a position in our ‘Secretly Funding All Media That You Personally Dislike’ division. Give me just a second to view your resume…wow! The last season of Game Of Thrones! That’s quite the accomplishment! We just need to ask you one question - what’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?”
Luke spoke in a whisper. “I think Joe Biden is still President.”
“What? Of course he’s still the President.”
“No, I mean, like, literally still the President. If you watch media reports carefully, you see pictures of Biden in the White House, Biden on Air Force One, Biden with Secret Service agents. And yes, I know former Presidents get some protection, get to visit the White House often, and so on. But if you compare stories about Trump or Obama doing these things to stories about Biden, it’s almost an order of magnitude difference. He’s still President.”
“Luke, obviously Biden is still the President. That’s not even a controversy.”
“Wow, I always heard you people at Thiel Capital were based, but I guess I didn’t know the half of it! The real question is, what’s their angle? Are they trying to confuse the Republicans so they don’t know who to attack? Or is this factional conflict where they’re trying to placate the Palestine protesters by making them think ‘Genocide Joe’ is gone?”
“Luke, literally everyone knows that Joe Biden is still the President. I’m not letting you use that as your answer to the interview question.”
“Well fine. I have other unpopular beliefs.” His voice went softer again. “The Muslims did 9/11.”
“Everyone knows that one too!”
“The world order is controlled by a group of diplomats who meet at the United Nations. Einstein didn’t kill himself. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a Communist plot to undermine the United States.”
“All of those are really obvious!”
“Look, are you even trying to interview me, or just brag about how based you are?”
“It has nothing to do with based! These are just all common knowledge!”
“Well, Mr. Impressive, I’m sorry I don’t hang out with cool people who already know everything about how the world works, like you do.”
“Whatever. This interview is going nowhere. We’re not interested.”
“F@#k you!” he shouts, and heads for the door. But before leaving, he turns around for one last barb. “I guess Thiel Capital is just another tool of the billionaire elites!”
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