Ask A Genius 1553: Peter Thiel, AI Hubris, and Male Impulsivity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/23
How does Rick Rosner explain the link between high intelligence, arrogance, and male impulsivity among tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk?
In this conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss the dangers of intellectual arrogance among powerful tech figures, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Rosner describes Thiel’s apocalyptic worldview—literally believing in a battle against the Antichrist—and connects it to the “smart stupid” phenomenon: highly intelligent individuals mistaking narrow expertise for universal wisdom. He warns that such overconfidence, coupled with unchecked AI development, could threaten humanity. Rosner also contrasts tech billionaires with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, then explores biological and social reasons why men—driven by risk-taking impulses—are more prone to self-destructive stupidity.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This one is for regular stuff —last few minutes. Peter Thiel is a lunatic. There is a pattern, more common among men than women in my observation—people with high intelligence, as measured by standard tests, often turn out to be loons. Thiel has gone on a whole spiel about the Antichrist, which has now been mocked in South Park, Season 28, Episode 1.
Rick Rosner: Yeah, and he holds private talks for—I guess—other billionaire tech bros, or whoever, where he does not allow the talks to be recorded. However, he gets up there and says, “We have to fight the Antichrist.”
Jacobsen: How would you describe the character of his kind of loon?
Rosner: What is the word? There is an essay—if you Google KingDaddy (all one word)—that impressed me a lot. It is about “smart stupids,” a term for tech bros who, because they are smart or lucky in one area, think they are smart in all areas. They have this arrogant overconfidence. Elon Musk is a perfect example of that. They think they are gods among men.
This is one reason why AI is so frightening—because the money and the power behind the big AI companies are often in the hands of these arrogant billionaires, these “smart stupids,” who think their hunches and incomplete understandings of the world are better than anyone else’s. They think, “If we want to build AI and just let the chips fall where they may, that is fine—we will handle it.” No, we will not. AI without safeguards—without slowing down to align what people want and what AI might want—is dangerous.
So I would describe Thiel as a guy so confident in his worldview that he has adopted a really crazy worldview: that we are literally fighting the Antichrist. As a metaphor, it is not bad—but I think he believes it literally. He believes it so strongly that he holds these closed-door meetings—no cameras, no recording devices—with other influential people, lecturing them about this apocalyptic nonsense. That is how I would characterize these motherfuckers.
Elon Musk, in his arrogance, helped get the worst president in history re-elected. He turned Twitter—now X—into a bastion of right-wing hate and misinformation because he thinks it is somehow “good,” and it is not. These guys may end up laying waste to humanity in their arrogance.
There is a pretty fun movie called Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, about how people react when an asteroid is a few weeks away from destroying Earth. The billionaires in that movie—the tech billionaires with the power to stop it—do all the wrong things. It is funny, but it captures these people’s current behaviour perfectly.
I would characterize Bill Gates differently. He is on the autism spectrum and can be a prick, but I think his thinking and heart are in the right place. He is giving away his money to eradicate malaria and doing tangible good. I do not know what he thinks about AI—he is in the Microsoft orbit, so he is probably involved a bit—but you do not hear much from him about it.
Jacobsen: He talks about AI as an accelerant to his work on disease eradication and reducing child mortality.
Rosner: All right, so he has got a rosy view of it—maybe that makes him a “smart stupid” in that respect, too. Warren Buffett is a billionaire, but not a tech billionaire. He is an old-school investor who seems to have his heart in the right place. He is giving away his money, leaving his kids a few million each, and putting the rest toward improving the world. So, not every billionaire is a piece of shit—but every tech billionaire motherfucker is.
Jacobsen: Why do you think it is more often men than women who turn out to be loons with high intelligence?
Rosner: I have not thought about it rigorously, maybe ever, but one fact has always stuck with me: the corpus callosum—the bundle of neurons connecting the two brain hemispheres—is thicker in women than in men. Women tend to have more inter-hemispheric connectivity. They are generally less impulsive and more inclined to consider the implications of their actions.
One time when I was about twenty, walking near a campus construction site, there was a big hole in the ground—maybe ten feet by six feet. I couldn’t see what was in it, so I thought, “I’ll just jump in and see what happens.” And I did. Luckily, it wasn’t that deep, and there wasn’t rebar waiting to impale me. There were pipes down there; I ended up standing on one and climbed out. That kind of stupid impulse—jumping first, thinking later—feels very male to me. Even for someone with an IQ of 190, that kind of stupidity feels very male.
Once, in a restaurant, a guy made fun of me for wearing a mask. He said something snide, and I just started yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” at him—a guy who was at least eighty-five pounds heavier than me. I went after him, yelling, “Fuck you!” without thinking. If I had stopped to think, I’d have realized that someone who picks on a person he thinks looks weak doesn’t actually want to fight. I must have known that subconsciously, but still, there I was, a 140-pound guy yelling “Fuck you!” at a 225-pound man.
The only thing that stopped me from following him out of the restaurant was my wife, Carole, freaking out and yelling, “He’ll break you like a stick!” It annoyed me at the time, but it was also hilarious. Her panic disoriented me just long enough for the guy to leave. That moment captures male stupidity perfectly—yelling at someone who outweighs you by 60 or 70 percent.
Men are more impulsive. The autistic or “on-the-spectrum” style in men tends to be different, too—more obsessive. From a sociobiological standpoint, men are more disposable. Women have wombs, and reproduction depends on them surviving. You can only grow one or two babies at a time, so you need women to avoid getting themselves killed. Men, though, are expendable. You could lose ninety percent of your men and still repopulate, because the remaining ones can impregnate all the surviving women.
Biologically, we’re made shoddier. We die sooner. The Y chromosome is smaller and carries fewer genes. We’re the inferior product—expendable by design. It’s helpful to have lots of men around for defending the village or hunting, but evolutionarily speaking, men are meant to take risks. Villages with reckless, impulsive men probably survived better than those full of cautious, thoughtful people who paused to consider all the alternatives. That’s a bleak but persuasive take. A lot of thoughts there. Okay, we’ll call it a day.
Jacobsen: Talk to you tomorrow.
Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In-Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices. In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.
In-Sight Publishing 