No More Hustleporn: Peter Thiel thinks there are three options for the future - Islamic Sharia law, totalitarian AI, or hyper-environmentalism
We pulled out the best insights from Peter Thiel's recent interview with Bari Weiss. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu :-)
Highlights
Bari Weiss: The fact that you endorsed Trump and that you took to the stage in that way triggered a lot of people in your world. People demanded that Facebook drop you from its board, that the incubator y Combinator sever ties with you. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who you had served on the Facebook board with, called your decision to support Trump catastrophically bad judgment. Was it did you see something others didn't?
Peter Thiel: I certainly thought it was one of the least contrarian things I ever did. It's like half the country is supposed to be voting for one person. Half the country, roughly, is supposed to vote for the other person. So if you're doing something that half the country is doing, it shouldn't be that controversial. And that was something I was certainly very wrong about. On some level, the election was a debate about us not really being able to touch certain rails, sort of a narrowing of the overton window and things like that. And then I think it was triggering in the summer and fall of 2016 in certain ways. But I also underestimated how triggering it would be if Trump actually won, which I actually, you know, I sincerely thought he had a good chance of winning. I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning all the way through 2016 just because political correctness was stopping people from even telling what they thought to the pollsters or answering the polls. So I thought there were all these ways that the sentiment wasn't quite being captured. And I also thought I'd be in more trouble if Trump won. But strangely enough, I wasn't able to connect those two
Bari Weiss: Why did you think you would be in more trouble if Trump won?
Peter Thiel: Because it was just sort of like a super eccentric thing to support Trump if he lost badly, if he won, it would be seen as a much more dangerous thing. But these were all sort of half-formed thoughts in the summer, fall of 2016.
Bari Weiss: You had this great line in this interview with Mary Harrington and Unheard where you said, “We tell ourselves we're advancing because Grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface, but meanwhile she gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”
The conventional wisdom, à la Steven Pinker, right, who makes this argument in his book Better Angels, is that we're living through a time not just of tremendous change, but of betterment of progress, perhaps the most progress that any human beings have ever lived through. Make the case for me that that's wrong.
Peter Thiel: Well, I'm trying to think where to even begin.
Bari Weiss: I feel like most people think of the 21st century. We're living through amazing progress. Tell me why we're not.
Peter Thiel: Well, you know, you can define progress and there are all these different dimensions of progress we can debate: there's economic, is it per capita income? Is it moral progress? Do we have a better functioning government? And then the narrow dimension people like to focus on is technological progress. Because if there has been progress, that's the one area where it tends to have a one-way direction, where you discover new things, and technology and science, it does not get reversed.
But I would say even if we think about how much technological progress is happening, how fast it is happening, I would argue it's a narrow cone of progress where the definition of technology itself has narrowed. If we were here in 1970, technology would have meant computers, but it also would have meant new medicines, it would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, it would have meant rockets, supersonic, aviation. And it was sort of multi-multidimensional.
And we've had this in the last 50 years. We've had progress in the world of bits, not in the world of atoms. We've had progress in computers, Internet, mobile Internet, things like that. I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s. In retrospect, almost every engineering field that you could have gone into would have been a bad field to go into. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, certainly nuclear engineering, AeroAstro. These were catastrophic fields because the world of atoms got regulated and we stopped progressing.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has not approved a new nuclear reactor design in 50 years. And so that's an area where we're not progressing as a society.
Bari Weiss: You said something in an interview with Peter Robinson that I found really interesting. You said there are basically three options for the future. One Islamic Sharia law, two - totalitarian AI a la China and three - hyper environmentalism a la Greta, and the challenge you suggested is to offer a picture, a charismatic picture of the future. That's better.
Peter Thiel: That was in a European context, I think the US. I'd probably do more crazed identity politics.
Bari Weiss: Instead of environmentalism, but still call it crazed identity politics. But do you see the emergence of another option? And can life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness be that option? Or is that simply not charismatic enough?
Peter Thiel: I think it is somewhat too abstract. And we are human beings. We're physically embodied in our world somehow. And so it has something to do with the communities and cities we live in, with what our environment looks like. And so I can picture all these what I was talking about is literally a concrete picture of what the world looks like. And those three pictures, the Greta one, the Sharia law, and even the Chinese communist AI that's monitoring every you can sort of roughly picture what those societies look like and then what's sort of been I think a weakness on the center-right is we don't have as a strong picture. In some sense, it shouldn't be a top-down picture, but it is just a picture of how things would look different. And I think there are ones you can do on the level of individual companies. So Elon Musk started SpaceX, and they have a picture of sending humans to Mars, and that's not enough to compete with, let's say, Greta among the broader population. But if you had sort of a series of futuristic alternatives like that, that's one way we get back. But that's what seems to be missing. And again, I don't have all the answers. This is more just a diagnosis of where we are, that the pictures are not as concrete as I'd like them to be.
Bari Weiss: You've talked about how Christianity is the prism with which you look at the whole world. Is there something in that picture that you feel could be, if not cosmically redemptive, redemptive for America?
Peter Thiel: I think it's a very important part of it. It's a very important part of what's going on, I think of the woke religion. In some ways it's anti-Christian, in some ways it's hyperchristian. There's something about Christianity that involved this change of perspective where Christ was a victim. It's already Judaism. It's from the point of view of the Jewish people who are oppressed by pharaoh in Egypt. And or the story of Cain and Abel is told from the point of view of Abel, whereas the normal story is told from the point of view of Romulus, the founder of Rome, who kills his brother, and Cain, the founder of the first city in the world, and romulus, the founder of the greatest city of the ancient world - they're the same story.
Full Transcript
Bari Weiss: Welcome to Honestly.
Peter Thiel: Thanks for having me.
Bari Weiss: Peter, you've been called the pariah of Silicon Valley. You've been called mysterious, a provocateur. The New Yorker called you opaque, enigmatic, and oracular and secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley. And perhaps most often, you're simply described as a contrarian. There was a book by that name that came out about you a few years ago. When I hear that word, I think of someone who's sort of intentionally at odds with conventional wisdom. Do you think that's true of you and of your worldview?
Peter Thiel: Well, some of these things are flattering, but they're mostly caricatures. I try to think for myself. I don't like the contrarian label because that just means putting a minus sign in front of the conventional wisdom, which surely isn't that different as an investor. There is probably some value in being contrarian. You want to invest in things that aren't popular, but it's at least equally important to be right. And I think something like that is true of so many other things. So it's when you're contrarian and right, you're on to something important, something that's not being discussed. But there's no great virtue in being contrarian and wrong.
Bari Weiss: Have you been sort of at odds with the prevailing culture around you for a very long time? I think about your college years and starting the Stanford Review. It's pretty unusual to be a conservative on a college campus. Was that sort of an early experience for you? How do you think about that time?
Peter Thiel: Yes, although I wasn't thinking of myself as a rebel without a cause or anything like that. I was interested in big picture questions of how all these different things integrated. That's probably why I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, and that's what I've always pushed on. When we started the Stanford Review, probably the signature issue in the late 1980s was the core curriculum around the Western Civ class required freshman class at Stanford, and there was a Jesse Jackson rally at Stanford. "Hey, hey, hoho. Western cultures got to go." And it was in some sense, it was a narrow debate about this particular class, and then it was a much broader debate about sort of our whole culture had to go and the sort of simultaneously parochial and patricidal approach to our culture. And so it was in some sense, almost a topic too big for us to deal with. And then there was all sorts of debates that triggered and escalated that went. We didn't even know what we were getting ourselves into.
Bari Weiss: But some people find themselves drawn into the arena, drawn into the fray, because they naturally thrive on conflict. And some people feel compelled to do it because they feel it's the right thing, even though it's not their natural proclivity. Which one are you?
Peter Thiel: I think I have a very schizophrenic view on this. I think that politics are simultaneously very important because it just permeates the air that we breathe and they're extremely toxic. And so I end up with this schizophrenic view where I will get involved very intensely at times, and then at other times, I just try to mind my own business.
Bari Weiss: Well, let's talk about politics then. It's a perfect transition. I think the first time that many people outside the world of tech and Silicon Valley learned your name was in 2016, in July of that year, when you stepped on stage at the Republican National Convention to endorse Donald Trump and you said this.
Peter Thiel: Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Of course, every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
Bari Weiss: What brought you to that stage, into that moment?
Peter Thiel: It was a whole well, on a very narrow level, it was sort of a concatenation of random things. It was like, ten days before that, don Jr. Had asked me to speak, and we thought this would be kind of a cool thing to do. And two months before that, I had volunteered to be a Republican delegate from San Francisco, where you just needed to sign up. There were three Republican delegates, and you could just get one of the slots since nobody wanted to have them. And I thought it'd be cool to go to the convention. But the bigger context was that I had a sense that the country was in stagnation, maybe not outright decline for a long time, that we were not progressing as a society. We were not even progressing in the area that's seen as quintessentially progressive, namely technology, information technology in particular. And there was a hope that there was something about the Trump campaign, the Trump presidency, that was a scream for help, that was going to enable us to have a debate about the stagnation and how to move beyond that. I always like to say that Trump's slogan, Make America Great again, was in some sense the most triggering thing possible in Silicon Valley. It didn't trigger people at Goldman Sachs because they don't think they're making America great, but the tech, what do they think they're doing? They think they're making money, and they have a slightly bad conscience about it. But when the financial crisis hit in 2008, they knew they had done a bunch of bad things, and they lobbied to get Dodd Frank passed in a way that wouldn't be too bad for the banks. But they're arrogant.
Bari Weiss: The people that go to the Bay Area to build things, they imagine they're changing the world.
Peter Thiel: They imagine they're changing the world. They think there are utopian stories, there are extremely moralistic stories they tell themselves. And then there are all these ways that I would argue it has fallen far short of that. In some ways, they don't deserve all the blame for the stagnation, because if Silicon Valley isn't building flying cars, they're not also not being built anywhere else. So it's unfair to put all the blame on Silicon Valley. But there is something about the narrative in Silicon Valley that I think is very disconnected from the reality. And of course, there's a California version of this where in one sense, you've had this sort of gold rush boom on the Internet for the last quarter century in the context of a state where so many of the institutions, the physical infrastructure, are just disintegrating.
Bari Weiss: The fact that you endorsed Trump and that you took to the stage in that way triggered a lot of people in your world. People demanded that Facebook drop you from its board, that the incubator y Combinator sever ties with you. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who you had served on the Facebook board with, called your decision to support Trump catastrophically bad judgment. Was it did you see something others didn't?
Peter Thiel: I certainly thought it was one of the least contrarian things I ever did. It's like half the country is supposed to be voting for one person. Half the country, roughly, is supposed to vote for the other person. So if you're doing something that half the country is doing, it shouldn't be that controversial. And that was something I was certainly very wrong about. On some level, the election was a debate about us not really being able to touch certain rails, sort of a narrowing of the overton window and things like that. And then I think it was triggering in the summer and fall of 2016 in certain ways. But I also underestimated how triggering it would be if Trump actually won, which I actually, you know, I sincerely thought he had a good chance of winning. I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning all the way through 2016 just because political correctness was stopping people from even telling what they thought to the pollsters or answering the polls. So I thought there were all these ways that the sentiment wasn't quite being captured. And I also thought I'd be in more trouble if Trump won. But strangely enough, I wasn't able to connect those two
Bari Weiss: Why did you think you would be in more trouble if Trump won?
Peter Thiel: Because it was just sort of like a super eccentric thing to support Trump if he lost badly, if he won, it would be seen as a much more dangerous thing. But these were all sort of half-formed thoughts in the summer, fall of 2016.
Bari Weiss: I remember the reaction to it that night being incredibly intense. Did you lose friends because of your decision to endorse him?
Peter Thiel: I don't think I lost close friends. I'm not on Twitter. There's sort of all these contexts where people sort of get to be angry at you and say things that they later regret. So I didn't have that many interactions like that. But yeah, there were probably some part of the Silicon Valley gang that didn't want to talk to meanymore.
Bari Weiss: Looking back at the promise that Trump offered people, making America great again, did he do it?
Peter Thiel: My expectations were never that high, because I think the problems in our country are deep and they're hard to change in some ways. He did the first step of talking about them. It was sort of a scream for help, much like Brexit in the UK was a scream for help against sort of a more and more dysfunctional European Union. And then it's going to be a long, long process. And so ask me that question in ten years.
Bari Weiss: You've said that Democrats are the evil Party and Republicans are the stupid party. Why are Democrats evil? Or rather, why is the Democratic Party the evil party? I don't think you believe Democrats are evil, or maybe you do.
Peter Thiel: Well, it's the party that controls these center-left institutions, and they are, from my point of view, centralizing things too much. It's led to this direction that's not quite socialist but keeps pushing our society in a more homogenized, groupthink stagnated direction. The Republicans are often rather weak in resistance to that.
Bari Weiss: Do you think they're still weak?
Peter Thiel: I think they've probably been relatively weak for 100 years. Probably the last time one could have said that the institutions genuinely tilted Republican was maybe the 1920s. And yes, there were things that went wrong in the Great Depression. But if you look at the media, the universities, the sense-making big cities, the culture-forming institutions, the sense-making things, those have tilted center-left or further left for close to 100 years now.
Bari Weiss: One of the other things you said in that RNC speech, and I went back and read it, was this fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.
Peter Thiel: Well, things can be both important and a distraction at the same time. And in part, that comment that I made at the RNC speech in 2016 was a self-reflection on what I had done in the 1980s and 1990s, where I was involved in these campus wars where a great number of these debates were prefigured in the universities. Critical race theory was something I learned about at Stanford law school in the early 1990s. And I wrote a book with my friend David Sachs on this, published in 1995, entitled The Diversity Myth, I think still a good title. You don't have real diversity when you have a group of people who look different and think alike. Diversity is more than just hiring the extras from the space cantina scene in Star Wars.
There were arguments that we made 25-plus years ago that I think were in some sense correct. They've stood up incredibly well over time, and then at the same time, there are all these things I worry that they missed, that the focus on identity politics, on the woke religion is probably a distraction from stagnation. It's a distraction from economics. It's a distraction from the way in which the younger generation in the US is probably going to have a hard time having as good a standard of living as their parents.
And so there's a set of issues we do not want to talk about. I think DeSantis would make a terrific president. If he's the Republican nominee, I will strongly support him in 2024. But I do worry that focusing on the woke issue as ground zero is not enough. We've thought some about moving our offices from California to Florida, and it's a tough thing to do at this point because the real estate prices in Florida have doubled and the interest rates have doubled. And so if you buy a house in Miami today versus just three years ago, you're paying four times as much in a monthly mortgage payment. And that kind of an economic cost is probably not enough to offset the tax, all the wokeness in the world, or even the taxes. And so it's a really hard problem to solve. Like, what do you do about these runaway rents, these runaway housing costs? That's a super hard problem to solve. I have no idea how to solve that. I understand why DeSantis doesn't talk about that, but it surely is a bigger problem.
Bari Weiss: Let's stay on Tech for a few more questions. I think a lot of conservatives look at that list of things that I gave you - PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, the reporting that we discovered at Twitter of deranking people like Dr. J. Bhattacharya, et cetera, et cetera. And they say, you're right, Peter, it's not communist China, it's not state down, but we basically have something like a privatized social credit system. Do you think that that's hyperbole?
Peter Thiel: Well, it's slight hyperbole, but if we don't worry about it more, it'll become more and more that way, and it will keep going that way. But just to correct with it, I think it is partially top down. It is because the big companies are super entangled with these regulators. Airbnb it's a somewhat controversial business that touches a lot of local zoning regulations in cities. It's mainly in cities. The cities are very corrupt. They're not even center-left. They're far-left rackets at this point, and that's where the top-down pressure comes on. Airbnb I'd like them to resist it more, but I understand where they're coming from.
Bari Weiss: There's a paradox about your worldview that interests me. You're a self-described libertarian, and yet you also say you don't believe in competition. You've given talks titled Competition is for Losers. And in your book Zero to One, you say that there are only two types of businesses, businesses that are perfectly competitive and monopolies, and obviously monopoly is better. Explain that to me.
Peter Thiel: Well, in my Zero to One book that I wrote in 2014 on startups business generally, the core thesis was that people normally think that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and they're often actually opposites because capitalism is about the accumulation of capital. And if you have a hyper-competitive business, you're not going to ever make that much money. If you want to be, in Darwinian nature, bared red and tooth and claw competition, you should open a restaurant. And there are ways that maybe it's good for society to have hyper-competition. But a libertarian perspective, I would say, is actually more is more the perspective of the individual or the founders starting the business. And from the internal perspective, you want to pick something where you do something that's very different. It's a different product. It's not a form of runaway competition like that. And that's the business advice that I would still give to anybody starting a business. I think the large tech companies, if they are monopolies, they are for the most part what are called natural monopolies, where they just have these incredible economies of scale. And so actually, if you figured out a way to break Google up into five different search engines, it would actually cost a lot more to do that. It would be actually a much less efficient system. And the rough econ intuition is that software has a very low marginal cost, and therefore you get these incredible economies of scale. And when you have a natural monopoly, you don't want to break it up. The typical answer is you want to regulate it in some ways, which is, again, not a libertarian perspective. But that's, I think, sort of the economic reality of these businesses.
Bari Weiss: But the realm of nation-states is different. Right, but we need to compete with.
Peter Thiel: China, obviously, at a point where you start to distort the political discussion, the cultural discussion, that's something where we get into zone that's very noneconomic.
Bari Weiss: Do you think that that's what's happening at a company like Twitter, that under the previous regime? At Twitter?
Peter Thiel: There are elements of that, but it also always depends on how you define the market. And so if you define the market of Twitter as short packet information content, twitter had close to a monopoly on that. If you define it as media broadly, it obviously widened the discourse. And even when people get shadow banned, deplatformed, even when all the sort of crazy things that happened on Twitter happened, it probably was still better than, let's say, the New York Times or the mainstream media or things like this. I think the Internet in 2016 was far more free, had a far broader range of discussion than, let's say, the media landscape in the US. Circa 2000, the old media landscape circa 2000. I think there were ways that things regressed over the last six, seven years, but we're still in a better space. So, yeah, all these different questions, how you define the market and then what the alternatives are. But yes, I think there is a point where the big tech companies can be so big that you start tangling with these things in a political way. And that's a very tricky issue. I don't know even in that case, whether they should be regulated more. The nuclear weapon against the big tech companies, against a company like Google is antitrust. And I don't know if that helps our side, because who's on our side? Let's say conservatives, libertarians, the center, right? Because the fantasy is that you bring an antitrust case against Google and you'll break them up after years of litigation, and then you'll have five separate companies, which again may in a competitive market, just consolidate into one, or one might beat all of them because of the natural monopoly effect I gave. But that's probably not what happens. What probably happens is before you get to a trial or anything like this, you get a government settlement with Google. And if you have something like the Biden administration settling it with Google, it'll be we won't break you up as long as you ban even more hate speech than before. So, yes, I think on the one hand, there are some very real challenges with big tech, and then on the other hand, we need to think very hard about what kinds of regulations are likely to even be helpful versus where's the cure worse than the disease.
Bari Weiss: If you're trying to start a company. Better to choose an open lane than to choose a restaurant. But in the realm of national security and nation-states, you don't have that luxury. We need to compete with China. How do you rate how the US is doing visa vis its competition with China?
Peter Thiel: There are a lot of ways that we're not doing terribly well. It's hard to even you have to, of course, also start even by defining the competition. And the tricky thing with China, it's quite different from the competition with the Soviet Union, which was in some ways ideological and military. And China, you certainly have all these military dimensions, some of them involving all these new technologies where we don't even know how they will work. Space based weapons, cyber weapons, hypersonic missiles. And then, of course, you have this broad Internet competition, let's say TikTok, versus the US. Tech companies. You have a whole range of economic competition involving the sort of export-oriented manufacturing model in China, which creates all sorts of cheap consumer goods in the US. But also hollows out much of our economy. So it is sort of this very multidimensional set of dynamics that we tend to be quite bad at thinking about. I think there are a lot of strange problems China also has. It is very uncharismatic. It is even if it's somehow on the side of the future, it's an extremely dystopian future. They have a housing bubble. There's sort of all sorts of ways that it's far from inevitable that China is going to take over the world. I always think one should frame these things as more closely matched. If we're too optimistic, if you're too optimistic, you just say, we're going to beat China, it's going to just collapse. That's, I think, a form of denial. And if you're too pessimistic, it's China. They're willing to work for a dollar an hour in an iPhone factory, and we can never compete with people working 12 hours a day, six days a week, and we should just accept that they're going to beat us. And I think both acceptance and denial are forms where you're not in between. And the in-between mode is to say it's a roughly even competition and we need to fight.
Bari Weiss: Yeah, but you would think that there would be more of a unified response to this adversary than there is.
Peter Thiel: You'd like it to be faster. I think it is strongly trending in that direction. I think it's complicated, but I think it's one of the few things the two parties broadly agree on. Of course, there are all these ways that different parts of both parties have been co-opted and it's going to be slow to really disentangle it.
It is like the word that I've thought we should use for describing what's screwed up about the relationship with China. We shouldn't be using appeasement or detente because that focuses like on the 1930s, 1970s analogies where it was too much. The sort of narrowly military dimension. And the positive word people always use is that we are interdependent and we should replace that and say we are codependent and we have a codependent relationship with China.
It's like the North Stream pipeline between Germany and Russia. There was a codependency that was unhealthy and we have 100 pipelines between the US and China. It shouldn't dominate our economy. It doesn't actually dominate our economy as much as it does. It's surprising how much people have been willing to pander to China for how little. I mean, the Hollywood people don't make that much money from the movies in China. And I think the last year you had Hollywood movies in which the Chinese Communists were villains were 1997. Seven years in Tibet was 1997.
And so yeah, I find it disturbing that people are co-opted for so little. But I think even in Hollywood, even on Wall Street, people have gotten the memo that it's a kind of a codependent relationship. Codependent relationships eventually end and you're best off not having endless therapy. You're best off just ending it on our terms, not theirs.
Bari Weiss: So your investment firm Founders Fund used to begin its online manifesto with a quote that's become really famous. It goes like this: “We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.” In other words, we were promised big things about the technological revolution. We were promised a cure for cancer. We were promised a man on Mars. And instead, we await the latest iPhone updates that promise us the ability to delete a text message sent on Mistake.
You had this great line in this interview with Mary Harrington and Unheard where you said, “We tell ourselves we're advancing because Grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface, but meanwhile she gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”
The conventional wisdom, à la Steven Pinker, right, who makes this argument in his book Better Angels, is that we're living through a time not just of tremendous change, but of betterment of progress, perhaps the most progress that any human beings have ever lived through. Make the case for me that that's wrong.
Peter Thiel: Well, I'm trying to think where to even begin.
Bari Weiss: I feel like most people think of the 21st century. We're living through amazing progress. Tell me why we're not.
Peter Thiel: Well, you know, you can define progress and there are all these different dimensions of progress we can debate: there's economic, is it per capita income? Is it moral progress? Do we have a better functioning government? And then the narrow dimension people like to focus on is technological progress. Because if there has been progress, that's the one area where it tends to have a one-way direction, where you discover new things, and technology and science, it does not get reversed.
But I would say even if we think about how much technological progress is happening, how fast it is happening, I would argue it's a narrow cone of progress where the definition of technology itself has narrowed. If we were here in 1970, technology would have meant computers, but it also would have meant new medicines, it would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, it would have meant rockets, supersonic, aviation. And it was sort of multi-multidimensional.
And we've had this in the last 50 years. We've had progress in the world of bits, not in the world of atoms. We've had progress in computers, Internet, mobile Internet, things like that. I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s. In retrospect, almost every engineering field that you could have gone into would have been a bad field to go into. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, certainly nuclear engineering, AeroAstro. These were catastrophic fields because the world of atoms got regulated and we stopped progressing.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the US has not approved a new nuclear reactor design in 50 years. And so that's an area where we're not progressing as a society.
Bari Weiss: So the reason there's no progress in the world of Alzheimer's, cancer, nuclear is because of regulation. Meantime we have the Airbnb's and the Netflix's because there's none.
Peter Thiel: The “why” questions are always overdetermined. Yeah, the libertarian answer is there's too much regulation. There are arguments that the education systems are screwed up and the scientists aren't able to think as freely and independently as before. There are arguments that the low-hanging fruit has been picked and the easy discoveries have been made. This is sort of the Tyler Cohen argument and there probably is some truth to a lot of different ones.
There's something about neurobiology that's quite hard and then the FDA also has regulated things a great deal and it is a scandal that there's been zero progress on dementia in 40 or 50 years. So it's both probably a very hard thing to progress on and then probably also tells us something about an overly risk-averse society where we should be doing more experiments because it's a real health emergency.
But then we get into these questions how do you measure and how do you compare all these things? How do you compare the lack of progress on nuclear reactor design with the progress on the smoothness of the iPhone or things like this? And how do you sort of score it and add it all up? And that's where the qualitative things I get to are.
There's a sense in which incomes have been relatively stagnant. There's this generational sense that things are not progressing and that's broadly where I think we have quite a problem. I think it is it is a topic I've been on for 15 or 16 years, this tech stagnation one. And I think there are ways that I'm not sure this proves that I'm right, but I think that more people have come around to my side of it than were there in 2006 or 2007.
And this was - I said I think the thing I liked about the Trump MAGA slogan was not the New Age optimism, but it was the realistic pessimism that the US is not as great a country as it was in the past. Which is first off, if we're going to go back to being a society in which there's progress on many fronts, real progress, maybe we have to start by acknowledging that something's gone wrong and that things have really slowed down.
But yeah, I think Pinker - I don't know it's even the things Pinker focused on -the decline in violence, the Better Angels book, I think that was written in 2010. He picked the 100-year low in violence. It was just before the Arab Spring started. And so even if you look at the metric of how many human beings are being violently killed, even that's gone gotten worse in the last 13 years and it's not clear we're progressing towards more free societies. The Fukuyama end of history thesis is at least challenged by what's happened in China in the last decade.
So I - it's been a very strange 21st century. I think there was a lot that was fake about the 1990s, but that probably was the last decade that people genuinely believed that things were getting better.
Bari Weiss: Peter, I'm not going to ask you your net worth, because that seems uncouth, but according to Forbes, it's at least several billion dollars. You gave something like $30 million to candidates in the last election cycle. Why don't you give ten or 20 or 30 times more? In other words, you claim that things are broken, so broken that we need a radical resolution, and yet here you are with a tremendous amount of capital, a tremendous amount of power. Why aren't you doing way more?
Peter Thiel: Look, this is a very fair set of questions, and whenever I think about it, I think I'm not doing nearly enough. I keep thinking that I'm not doing enough on biotech and radical life extension, or even just trying to invest in curing just a lot of these very big chronic diseases that we have. There are all these places where we're in a society where a lot of stuff doesn't work and even money doesn't work that well. It doesn't translate in a turnkey kind of way. I think I would invest billions of dollars in biotech if I think we could get things to work and the money is a part of it. But the bigger problem is finding people with the ideas, finding a path forward.
Bari Weiss: So but if I'm you, I'm looking at what George Soros has been able to accomplish, let's just say, among the DAs in progressive cities. And I mean that's a lot. He accomplished a lot. You might not like his vision, but you can't look at that and say he didn't enact a different reality with money.
Peter Thiel: I think you have to always ask a very tough counterfactual question where what would it have been different if he didn't do it? And I think a lot of these cities were just on an arc where they were going crazy and they weren't solving problems. And yes, de Blasio was a very bad mayor for New York City. But if we were honest about it, I think Bloomberg was the most overrated ever. He didn't solve any of the real problems in New York. The public schools were worse, the cost of living was spiraling out of control. And the sort of elitist liberalism of Bloomberg, the natural sequel to it was going to be the sort of fake populist socialism of de Blasio. And yeah, there was some way in which Soros got to push the button and pretend to do it, but it was happening. The money had a role, but I think it was much more the sort of structural things that drove it.
Bari Weiss: There is a tendency among people in your cohort, super smart in the world of tech, very, very wealthy, who seem to have come to a similar consensus that America's in, inexorable decline, there's not much we can do about it, we can't really save it. And so the best thing that we can do is sort of take to the hills with good wine and sort of watch it unravel.
Peter Thiel: I don't think very many people believe that or at least believe that conclusion. Okay, look, I think there's a lot of pessimism about the US. I don't think it's particularly centered on Silicon Valley. I think Silicon Valley in some ways was delusionally optimistic about this country more than overly pessimistic, the problem of, let's say, technological and scientific stagnation is a global problem. Maybe it is an American problem because we were the frontier country, and if we're not progressing somehow, there's a way in which the problem is centered on the US. But it's not like scientific technological progress is really happening anywhere else. I don't think it's even happening in China. They're good at copying things. The jury is still very, very out on how much real innovation is going to happen from there. It's not particularly happening in Europe, which is sort of, in some ways, even more sort of small C conservative opposed to change than the US. is.
Bari Weiss: Well, I asked a few people in your world, what should I ask Peter Thiel? And to a person, they basically had the same suggestion, which is ask him if America can be saved. Which seemed to suggest to me that maybe you don't think that it can.
Peter Thiel: Look, my answer on this is always up to us to do it. There's always room for human agency, for us to make a difference. There are ways that I worry that framing the question as can America be saved? Puts 100% on the focus on politics, which I think is very important. But I also think that there are a lot of ways where surely it's going to be somewhat bottom up. It's going to be people coming up with new innovations, new businesses that change it, and it's unlikely to be saved by some kind of top-down plan coming out of Washington, DC. That I'm very skeptical of.
Bari Weiss: You said something in an interview with Peter Robinson that I found really interesting. You said there are basically three options for the future. One Islamic Sharia law, two - totalitarian AI a la China and three - hyper environmentalism a la Greta, and the challenge you suggested is to offer a picture, a charismatic picture of the future. That's better.
Peter Thiel: That was in a European context, I think the US. I'd probably do more crazed identity politics.
Bari Weiss: Instead of environmentalism, but still call it crazed identity politics. But do you see the emergence of another option? And can life, liberty in the pursuit of happiness be that option? Or is that simply not charismatic enough?
Peter Thiel: I think it is somewhat too abstract. And we are human beings. We're physically embodied in our world somehow. And so it has something to do with the communities and cities we live in, with what our environment looks like. And so I can picture all these what I was talking about is literally a concrete picture of what the world looks like. And those three pictures, the Greta one, the Sharia law, and even the Chinese communist AI that's monitoring every you can sort of roughly picture what those societies look like and then what's sort of been I think a weakness on the center-right is we don't have as a strong picture. In some sense, it shouldn't be a top-down picture, but it is just a picture of how things would look different. And I think there are ones you can do on the level of individual companies. So Elon Musk started SpaceX, and they have a picture of sending humans to Mars, and that's not enough to compete with, let's say, Greta among the broader population. But if you had sort of a series of futuristic alternatives like that, that's one way we get back. But that's what seems to be missing. And again, I don't have all the answers. This is more just a diagnosis of where we are, that the pictures are not as concrete as I'd like them to be.
Bari Weiss: There was a picture that was offered up in Kentucky for about two weeks at Asbury University, where you had this revival going on, where students were praying for more than 250 hours, sort of came to the chapel one Wednesday morning and never left. Were you aware of that story?
Peter Thiel: Yes.
Bari Weiss: You're a believer.
Peter Thiel: Yes.
Bari Weiss: You've talked about how Christianity is the prism with which you look at the whole world. Is there something in that picture that you feel could be, if not cosmically redemptive, redemptive for America?
Peter Thiel: I think it's a very important part of it. It's a very important part of what's going on, I think of the woke religion. In some ways it's anti-Christian, in some ways it's hyperchristian. There's something about Christianity that involved this change of perspective where Christ was a victim. It's already Judaism. It's from the point of view of the Jewish people who are oppressed by pharaoh in Egypt. And or the story of Cain and Abel is told from the point of view of Abel, whereas the normal story is told from the point of view of Romulus, the founder of Rome, who kills his brother, and Cain, the founder of the first city in the world, and romulus, the founder of the greatest city of the ancient world - they're the same story.
Bari Weiss: You've said that the destiny of the postmodern world would be either limitless violence or runaway mimesis, or a piece of the kingdom of God. What did you mean by that?
Peter Thiel: It is always the question of whether the stagnation itself, if you steal, manned it. I've been so critical of the stagnation throughout. But if you were to steal man, it is that people are right to be scared of runaway tech because nuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons are dangerous. Is the AI going to take our civilization to the next level? Or is the Singularity a black hole where the AI is going to kill everybody on this planet? Is there something about all these science fiction movies that give a very different picture of the future, but it's often quite dystopian? It's The Matrix, it's the killer robots, it's all these different scenarios. And so I think the sort of Christian cut I have on this apocalyptic dimension is that it has nothing to do with God. It's not some fundamentalist God who is going to come with fire and brimstone. It is just this very permanent problem of human nature, human violence, and that's no different from what it ever was and ever has been. But there's also a historical dimension where it works in a very different way, given the science and the technology. But that's just a teaser on the if you were to steal man, the pro stagnation people, this is sort of if the alternative is the world's coming to an end? Maybe Greta with her bicycle is the best option.
Bari Weiss: After the break, a lightning round with Peter Thiel.
Bari Weiss: Okay. Peter Thiel. What's your favorite Bible verse?
Peter Thiel: Oh, man. I guess just the conventional. God so loved the world that whoever believed in Him should have. I have to get the word Jesus. God's loved the world that He gave His only son that whoever believed in Him should have everlasting life.
Bari Weiss: Describe Mark Zuckerberg in one word-driven. Describe Elon Musk in one word- fearless. Do you read the New York Times?
Peter Thiel: There's a lot that one could have learned from reading Pravda and the former Soviet Union. So yes.
Bari Weiss: Do you believe in UFOs?
Peter Thiel: No.
Bari Weiss: Who is the greatest chessmaster of all time?
Peter Thiel: Bobby Fisher.
Bari Weiss: What's the most important book you've ever read?
Peter Thiel: Renee Gerard's "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World."
Bari Weiss: At the core of Gerard's worldview is the idea of the scapegoat. Do you ever wonder if you've been scapegoated?
Peter Thiel: Yeah, but it's not helpful for me to go around saying that I'm a poor and persecuted Peter person.
Bari Weiss: What's one thing most people think is true but you think is nonsense?
Peter Thiel: People think of globalization as a final synthesis. It's actually just a maintenance of absurd contradictions. It's just a thesis antithesis set of contradictions.
Bari Weiss: What's one thing most people think is nonsense, but you think is true?
Peter Thiel: I believe in a nonviolent God. And I think both the atheists and fundamentalists need to agree on the violence of God, even if they disagree on the secondary question of whether or not God exists.
Bari Weiss: What did it feel like, or did you even notice when Gawker.com shuddered a few weeks ago?
Peter Thiel: Barely noticed.
Bari Weiss: You killed Gawker. But did Gawker conquer the media world anyway?
Peter Thiel: Gawker's power consisted of it was the combination of the hate factory with a veneer of objectivity, and that no longer exists. The hate factory is still going, but it is far weaker than it was a decade ago because people can see through it.
Bari Weiss: In 1999, you had a Roth IRA worth less than $2,000. It's now worth upward of $5 billion, totally tax exempt. When this was made public, a lot of people had the reaction that our tax code is broken. What would you say to those people?
Peter Thiel: There's no crime in arranging your finances to try to minimize taxes.
Bari Weiss: Do you put limits on how many hours you use your iPhone?
Peter Thiel: Unfortunately, no. But I have virtually no apps on it, so I can't do very much with it.
Bari Weiss: Do you use signal?
Peter Thiel: Yes.
Bari Weiss: Do you use any social media?
Peter Thiel: I use Facebook.
Bari Weiss: Can humanity conquer death? And should we want to conquer death?
Peter Thiel: We haven't even tried. We should either conquer death or at least figure out why it's impossible.
Bari Weiss: Is it true that you're signed up to be cryonically preserved when you die so that you might be brought back to life in the future?
Peter Thiel: Yes, but think of it more as an ideological statement.
Bari Weiss: So it's true?
Peter Thiel: Sure. I don't necessarily expect it to work, but I think it's the sort of thing we're supposed to try to do.
Bari Weiss: Have you signed up other people you love?
Peter Thiel: I'm not convinced it works. It's more I think we need to be trying these things. It's not there yet.
Bari Weiss: What do people misunderstand about you most?
Peter Thiel: I don't always have a master plan. I'm just trying to figure things out.
Bari Weiss: What have you been most wrong about in your life?
Peter Thiel: I don't even think it's healthy to think about that too much. I don't dwell on failures. Maybe that's a mistake, but I never dwell on failures.
Bari Weiss: We've talked a lot about things that are broken and challenges that face the US. What's something that you feel happy and excited about right now? What makes you excited to get up in the morning?
Peter Thiel: Two young daughters.
Bari Weiss: How has fatherhood changed you?
Peter Thiel: It focuses you on the question of the future in a very different way, where you think about our kids should still be alive in the year 2100. And then the question is what sort of world they will live in? And how does that fit in with everything we talked about in this whole interview?
Bari Weiss: Peter Thiel, thank you so much.