《有趣时代》：与 Peter Thiel 的一场令人脑洞大开的对谈

Well, Kevin, it's July 11th. What are you doing right now?

Well, I'm time traveling because we are recording this in June. But on July 11th, if all goes according to plan, I will be on a beach chair, Modelo in hand, sunblock applied liberally all over my body, watching my child eat sand—and enjoying our one and only summer vacation. Casey, what are you doing right now?

Well, if all goes according to plan for me, I will be in Japan for the first time.

Hmm.

And so, if you're in Japan and you see somebody who looks like me, it might actually be me.

Yes.

And let's just say, you're going to stick out in Japan. You're very tall.

I'm looking forward to it. So we are away this week, but in our place we are bringing you something really interesting, specifically an episode of Interesting Times, which is a New Times opinion podcast where columnist Ross Douthat explores the ideas of today's most influential leaders and thinkers of the modern American right. A few weeks ago, he spoke with Peter Thiel, and we thought, “That's a conversation our listeners should hear.”

Yeah, Peter Thiel is, of course, the well-known venture capitalist. He was one of the co-founders of PayPal. He now runs Founders Fund and has a bunch of other important positions within tech. He's on the board of Meta, and he is also one of the most prominent conservatives in Silicon Valley. He was on the Trump train before it became trendy for tech executives, and he's just a guy who's been thinking about tech and the future for a long time.

So here's Ross's interview with Peter Thiel.

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. Is Silicon Valley recklessly ambitious, or is it not ambitious enough? What should we fear more, Armageddon or stagnation? Why is one of the world's most successful investors worrying about the Antichrist?

My guest today is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early investor in the political careers of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Peter Thiel is the original tech-right power player, well known for funding a range of conservative and simply contrarian ideas. But we're going to talk about his own ideas because, despite the slight handicap of being a billionaire, there's a good case that he's the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years. Peter Thiel, welcome to Interesting Times.

Thanks for having me.

1. The Stagnation Thesis

So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” Basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that—

Yes.

Actually, we'd entered a period of technological stagnation, that digital life was a breakthrough but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was kind of stuck, basically.

Yes.

And you weren't the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution. So I'm curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis, so the claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck. It was, in some ways, a claim that the velocity had slowed. It wasn't zero, but from 1750 to 1970, the 200-plus years were a period of accelerating change, where we were relentlessly moving faster. The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, and the planes were faster. It culminated in the Concorde and the Apollo missions.

Then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed. I always made an exception for the world of bits. We had computers, software, the internet, and mobile internet. Then, in the last 10 to 15 years, you had crypto and the AI revolution, which I think is, in some sense, pretty big. But the question is whether it's enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation.

There's an epistemological question you can start with on the stagnation thesis: How do we even know whether we're in stagnation or acceleration? Because one of the features of late modernity is that people are hyper-specialized. Can you say that we're not making progress in physics unless you've devoted half your life to studying string theory? Or what about quantum computers? What about cancer research and biotech, and all these verticals? How much does progress in cancer count versus string theory?

So you have to give weightings to all these things. In theory, it's an extremely difficult question to get a handle on. The fact that it's so hard to answer, that we have ever-narrower groups of guardians guarding themselves, is itself cause for skepticism. So, yes, I think, broadly, we're in this world that's still pretty stuck. It's not absolutely stuck.

You mentioned Back to the Future, and we just showed our kids the original Back to the Future, the first one with Michael J. Fox. Of course—

Yeah, it was like 1955 to 1985—

Right.

Thirty years back. And then Back to the Future Part II was, I think, 1985 to 2015, which is now a decade in the past. That's where you had flying cars, and the 2015 future is wildly divergent from 1985.

The 2015 future did have Biff Tannen as a Donald Trump-like figure in some kind of power. So it had some kind of prescience. But, yeah, the big noticeable thing is just how different the built environment looks. One of the strongest cases for stagnation that I've heard is that if you put someone in a time machine from various points, they would recognize themselves to be in a completely different world if they left 1860 and landed—

Or 1890 to 1970. Those are the 80 years of your lifetime. Something like that.

Right.

Something like that.

But the world today, just to my kids as children of 2025, looking at 1985, is like the cars are a little different and no one has phones, but the world seems fairly similar. So that's the kind of nonstatistical, but I think—

That's the common-sense intuition.

That's a common-sense understanding. What would convince you that we were living through a period of takeoff? Is it just economic growth? Is it productivity growth? Are there numbers for stagnation versus dynamism that you look at?

The economic number would just be: What are your living standards compared to your parents? If you're a 30-year-old millennial, how are you doing versus when your boomer parents were 30 years old? How did they do at the time?

There are intellectual questions. How many breakthroughs are we having? How do we quantify these things? What are the returns of going into research? There certainly are diminishing returns to going into science or going into academia generally. Maybe this is why so much of it feels like this sociopathic, Malthusian kind of institution, because you have to throw more and more and more at something to get the same returns. At some point, people give up and the thing collapses.

2. Growth Keeps Society Stable

So let's pick up on that. Why should we want growth and dynamism? Because, as you've pointed out in some of your arguments on the subject, there is a kind of cultural change that happens in the Western world in the 1970s, around the time you think things slow down, start to stagnate—

Mm-hmm.

where people become very anxious about the costs of growth, the environmental costs above all.

Yes.

And the idea being, you end up with a widely shared perspective that we're sort of rich enough, and if we try too hard to get that much richer, the planet won't be able to support us. We'll have degradation of various kinds, and we should be content with where we are. So what's wrong with that argument?

Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always 3 questions you can ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have the question, What should be done about it? But there's also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk-averse, and there were these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think, to some extent, people also had some very legitimate worries about the future. If we continue to have accelerating progress, are we accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don't find a way back to the future, society—I don't know—it unravels. It doesn't work. The middle class, I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves, and when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there's some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there's some way you can shift to some radically different society, but it's not the way the Western world—not the way the United States—has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

So you think that ordinary people won't accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and sort of pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

They may rebel, or our institutions don't work. All of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Right. Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Yeah. If you say Reagan and Obama, Reagan was consumer capitalism, which is oxymoronic. You don't save money as a capitalist; you borrow money. And Obama was low-tax socialism, just as oxymoronic as the consumerist capitalism of Reagan.

I like low-tax socialism way better than high-tax socialism, but I worry that it's not sustainable. At some point, the taxes go up or the socialism ends. So it's deeply, deeply unstable, and that's why people aren't optimistic. They don't think we've hit some stable point.

Right.

The Greta future maybe can work, but we're not yet there.

This is the Greta Thunberg future, since her name will probably come up again in this conversation. That's a reference to Greta Thunberg, the activist best known for anti-climate-change protests, who, to you, I would say, represents a kind of symbol of an anti-growth, effectively authoritarian, environmentalist-dominated future.

Sure, but we're not there yet. We're not there yet. It would be a very, very different society if you were really—

If you actually lived in a kind of degrowth, small Scandinavian village.

Yeah. I'm not sure it'd be North Korea, but it would be super-oppressive.

3. Decadence Demands A Crisis

One thing that's always struck me is that when you have this sense of stagnation, a sense of decadence, to use a word that I like to use for it, in a society, you then also have people who end up being kind of eager for a crisis, right? Eager for a moment to come along where they can radically redirect society from the path it's on.

Because I tend to think that in rich societies, you hit a certain level of wealth, people become very comfortable, they become risk-averse, and it's hard to get out of decadence into something new without a crisis. So the original example for me was after September 11, there was this whole mentality among foreign-policy conservatives that we had been decadent and stagnant, and now was our time to wake up and launch a new crusade and remake the world. Obviously, that ended very badly. But something similar—

But Bush 43 just told people to go shopping right away, so—

So it wasn't anti-decadent enough—

There was some neocon foreign-policy enclave in which people were LARPing as a way to get out of decadence, but the dominant thing was Bush 43 telling people just to go shopping.

So what risks should you be willing to take to escape decadence? It does seem like there's a danger here where the people who want to be anti-decadent have to take on a lot of risk. They have to say, "Look, you've got this nice, stable, comfortable society, but guess what? We'd like to have a war or a crisis or a total reorganization of government and so on." They have to lean into danger, right?

Well, I don't know if I'd give you a precise answer, but my directional answer's a lot more.

Yeah.

We should take a lot more risk. We should be doing a lot more, and I don't know—I can go through all these different verticals.

You know, if you look at biotech, something like dementia or Alzheimer's, we've made zero progress in 40 to 50 years. People are completely stuck on beta-amyloids. It's obviously not working. It's just some kind of stupid racket where people are just reinforcing themselves. So, yes, we need to take way more risk in that department.

Let's keep us in the concrete. I want to stay with that example for a minute and ask: What does that mean, saying we need to take more risks in anti-aging research? Does it mean that the FDA has to step back and say, "Anyone who has a new treatment for Alzheimer's can go ahead and sell it on the open market"? What does risk in the medical space look like?

Yeah, you would take a lot more risk. If you have some fatal disease, there probably are a lot more risks you can take. There are a lot more risks the researchers can take.

Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity, where people thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet, and others. Maybe it was anti-Christian. Maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.

But I don't know. I remember 1999 and 2000, when we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders, Luke Nosek, was into Alcor and cryonics, and the idea that people should freeze themselves. We had 1 day when we took the whole company to a freezing party. You know, at a Tupperware party, people sell Tupperware policies; at a freezing party, they sell—

They sell their—was it just your heads? What was going to be frozen?

You could get a full body or just a head.

Just a head. The just-the-head option was cheaper.

It was disturbing when the dot-matrix printer didn't quite work, and so the freezing policies couldn't be printed out. But in retrospect, this was still—

Technological stagnation once again, right?

But it's also a symptom of the decline, because in 1999, this was not a mainstream view, but there was still a fringe boomer view where they still believed they could live forever. And that was the last generation.

I'm always anti-boomer, but maybe there's something we've lost even in this fringe boomer narcissism, where there were at least a few boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who's a millennial believes that anymore.

I think there are some people who believe in a different kind of immortality, though, right now. I think part of the fascination with AI is connected to a specific vision of transcending limits. And I'm going to ask you about that after I ask you about politics.

4. Trump Became A Disruptor

Because one of the striking things I thought about your original argument on stagnation, which was mostly about technology and the economy, was that it could be applied to a pretty wide range of things. And at the time you were writing that essay, you were interested in seasteading—this idea of essentially building new polities independent of the sclerotic Western world.

But then you made a pivot in the 2010s, so you were one of the few prominent, maybe the only prominent, Silicon Valley supporters of Donald Trump in 2016. You supported a few carefully selected Republican Senate candidates. One of them is now the vice president of the United States.

And my view, as an observer of what you were doing, having read your arguments about decadence, was that you were basically being a kind of venture capitalist for politics, right? You were saying, "Here are some disruptive agents who might change the political status quo, and it's worth a certain kind of risk here."

Yeah.

Is that how you thought about that?

Sure. There were all sorts of levels. One level was the hope that we could redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading toward, or whatever the metaphor is, and really change course as a society.

Through political change.

Maybe a much narrower aspiration was that we could at least have a conversation about this. When someone like Trump said, “Make America great again,” is that a positive, optimistic, ambitious agenda, or is it merely a very pessimistic assessment of where we are—that we are no longer a great country?

I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought that at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. That was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation.

In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy. I had these 2 thoughts in 2016, and you often have ideas that are just below the level of your consciousness. The 2 thoughts I had that I wasn’t able to combine were, number 1, nobody would be mad at me for supporting Trump if he lost, and number 2, I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning. Then I had this implicit—

Why would nobody be mad at you if he lost?

It would just be such a weird thing, and it wouldn’t really matter.

Okay.

But then I thought he had a 50-50 chance because the problems were deep, the stagnation was frustrating, and the reality was that people weren’t ready for it.

Maybe we’ve progressed to the point where we can have this conversation in 2025, a decade after Trump. Of course, you’re not a zombie left-wing person, Ross, but this is—

I’ve been called many things, Peter.

I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

So, from your perspective, let’s say there are 2 layers. There’s a basic sense that society needs disruption and risk: Trump is disruption, and Trump is risk. The second level is that Trump is actually willing to say things that are true about American decline.

Do you feel like you, as an investor and as a venture capitalist, got anything out of the first Trump term?

I think it took longer and was slower than I would have liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something has gone wrong. That was not the conversation I was having in 2012, 2013 or 2014.

I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012, Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Jeff Bezos in 2014. I was on the side saying there’s a stagnation problem, and all 3 of them were versions of, “Everything’s going great.”

I think at least those 3 people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley has adjusted.

Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted. A big part of Silicon Valley—

On the stagnation question—

Right, on the stagnation.

On the stagnation question.

But then a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024, including, most famously, Elon Musk.

This is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but I don’t think—I’m hesitant to speak for all these people—but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook and Meta, in some ways, I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much.

The default was to be liberal, and it was always, “If liberalism isn’t working, what do you do?” Year after year after year, the answer was that you do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose, and you up the dose, and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and you go completely woke, and everybody hates you.

At some point, it’s like, “Okay, maybe this isn’t working.”

So they pivot.

Yeah.

Right?

It’s not a pro-Trump thing.

It’s not a pro-Trump thing.

But—

But both in public and private conversations, there is a kind of sense that Trumpism and populism in 2024—maybe not in 2016, when Peter was out there as the lone supporter, but now in 2024—they can be a vehicle for technological innovation and economic dynamism.

Yeah, you’re framing it really optimistically here.

Well, the people—

When you frame it this optimistically—

But I think—I know you’re pessimistic.

You’re just saying these people are going to be disappointed, and they’re set up for failure and things like that.

People expressed a lot of optimism. Elon Musk expressed a lot of—he expressed some apocalyptic anxieties about how budget deficits were going to—

Mm-hmm.

—kill us all, but he came into government—

Mm-hmm.

—and people around him came into government basically saying, “We have a partnership with the Trump administration, and we’re pursuing technological greatness.” I think they were optimistic.

Yes.

So you’re coming from a place of greater pessimism or realism. I’m asking for your assessment of where we are, not their assessment. Does populism in Trump 2.0 look like a vehicle for technological dynamism to you?

It’s still by far the best option we have.

Uh-huh.

I don’t think— is Harvard going to cure dementia by just puttering along, doing the same thing that hasn’t worked for 50 years? The negative—

But that’s just a case for—

The negative—

—that it can’t get worse, so let’s do disruption, right? But the—

The zombie—

The critique of populism right now would be that Silicon Valley made an alliance with the populists, but in the end, the populists don’t care about science. They don’t want to spend money on science. They want to cut funding to Harvard just because they don’t like Harvard, and in the end, you’re not going to get the kind of investment in the future that Silicon Valley wanted. Is that wrong?

Yeah, but you—

Is it? Do you—

Again, we have to go back to this question of how well the science is working in the background. This is where the New Dealers, whatever was wrong with them, pushed science hard. You funded it, you gave money to people, and you scaled it.

Whereas today, if there were an equivalent of Einstein and he wrote a letter to the White House, it would get lost in the mailroom, and the Manhattan Project is unthinkable.

If we call something a moonshot, the way Biden talked about, let’s say, cancer research, a moonshot in the ’60s still meant that you went to the moon. A moonshot now means something completely fictional that’s never going to happen. You need a moonshot for that. It’s not like we need an Apollo program. It means it’s never, ever going to happen. That’s—

But it seems like you’re still in the mode where, for you—as opposed to maybe for some other people in Silicon Valley—the value of populism is in tearing away the veils and illusions. We’re not necessarily at the stage where you’re looking to the Trump administration to do the Manhattan Project or the moonshot. It’s more like populism helps us see that it was all fake.

You need to try to do both, and they’re very entangled with each other. There’s a deregulation of nuclear power, and at some point we’ll get back to building new nuclear power plants, or better-designed ones, or maybe even fusion reactors.

So, yes, there’s a deregulatory, deconstructive part, and then at some point you actually get to construction. It’s all things like that. In some ways, you’re clearing the field, and then—

But you’ve personally stopped funding politicians.

I’m schizophrenic on this stuff. I think it’s incredibly important, and it’s incredibly toxic, so I go back and forth on what one should do.

Incredibly toxic for you personally?

For everybody who gets involved. It’s zero-sum. It’s crazy. In some ways—

Because everyone hates you and associates you—

It—

—with Trump? How is it toxic for you personally?

It’s toxic because it’s a zero-sum world.

The stakes in it feel really high.

And you end up having—

No, it’s—

—enemies you didn’t have before?

Yeah, there is—

It’s toxic for all the people who get involved in different ways.

Right.

There is a political dimension to getting back to the future. This is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024, and we had all these conversations. I had the seasteading version with Elon, where I said, “If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country.” And then Elon said, “There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go. This is the only place.”

You always think of the right arguments to make later, and it was about 2 hours after we had dinner, when I was home, that I thought, “Wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore.” 2024 is the year when Elon stopped believing in Mars—not as a silly science-tech project, but as a political project. Mars was supposed to be a political project. It was building an alternative.

In 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, the socialist U.S. government and the woke AI would follow you to Mars. It was the Demis meeting with Elon that we brokered. He was—

This is an AI company.

Yes, this was the rough conversation: Demis tells Elon, “I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman AI,” and Elon responds to Demis, “Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into an interplanetary species.”

Then Demis said, “My AI will be able to follow you to Mars.” And then Elon sort of went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some kind of battle—

Yeah, but what does—

—over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

What does Mars mean? And again, it’s—

What does Mars mean?

Is it just a scientific project, or is it—I don’t know, a Heinlein—

A vision of a new society.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Heinlein, you know—

Populated by many—

The moon, the moon as a—

Many people—

Libertarian paradise or something like this.

Descended from Elon Musk.

Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project, and then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: The AI, the woke AI, will follow you; the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

5. AI Cannot End Stagnation

Okay, so the woke AI. Artificial intelligence seems like—one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to stagnation.

Yes, yes.

It’s the place where there’s been—

Yes.

—remarkable progress—

Yes.

—surprising to many people, progress. It’s also the place we were just talking about politics. It’s the place where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving AI investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships.

So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement. And you are an investor in AI. What do you think you’re investing in?

There are a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is just how big a thing do I think AI is. My stupid answer is that it’s more than a nothingburger and less than the total transformation of our society.

My placeholder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late 1990s, which is—I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. The internet added maybe a few percentage points to GDP, maybe 1% to GDP growth every year for 10 or 15 years. It adds some to productivity.

That’s roughly my placeholder for AI. It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia.

If all we have is AI, I will take it. There are risks with it. There are obviously dangers with this technology. But there are also—

So you’re a skeptic. Then you are a skeptic of what you might call the superintelligence cascade theory, which basically says that if AI succeeds, it gets so smart that it gives us the progress in the world of atoms. It’s like, all right, we can’t cure dementia. We can’t figure out how to build the perfect factory that builds the rockets that go to Mars, but the AI can.

At a certain point, you just pass a certain threshold, and it gives us not just more digital progress, but many other forms of progress. It sounds like you don’t believe that, or you think that’s less likely.

I don’t know if that’s really been the gating factor.

What does that mean, the gating factor?

It’s probably a Silicon Valley ideology, and maybe in a weird way it’s more a liberal than a conservative thing. But people are really fixated on IQ in Silicon Valley, and on the idea that it’s all about smart people.

Right.

If you have more smart people, they will do great things. And then the economic anti-IQ argument is that people actually do worse. The smarter they are, the worse they do.

They don’t know how to apply it, or our society doesn’t know what to do with them, and they don’t fit in. So that suggests that the gating factor isn’t IQ, but something that’s deeply wrong with our society. So I don’t—

But is that a limit on intelligence, or a problem of the sort of personality types—

Well, it’s—

—that human superintelligence creates? I’m very sympathetic to the idea, and I made this case when I did an episode of this podcast with a sort of AI accelerationist, that certain problems can just be solved if you ramp up intelligence.

It’s like we ramp up intelligence and, boom, Alzheimer’s is solved. We ramp up intelligence and the AI can figure out the automation process that builds you a billion robots overnight. I’m an intelligence skeptic in the sense that I don’t think—

Yeah, it’s—

—I think you probably have limits.

It’s hard to prove one way or—

Yes.

—it’s always hard to prove these things. But I—

Until we have the superintelligence.

—I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people, and things have been stuck for other reasons. Maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view.

Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem. Or maybe it’s these cultural things, so it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society.

Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments, and if the AI is just conventionally smart—if we define wokeness again, wokeness is too ideological, but if you just define it as conformist—maybe that’s not the kind of smartness that’s going to make a difference.

So do you fear, then, a plausible future where AI, in a way, becomes itself stagnationist? That it’s highly intelligent, creative in a conformist way.

It’s like the Netflix algorithm. It makes infinite okay movies that people watch. It generates infinite okay ideas. It puts a bunch of people out of work and makes them obsolete, but it deepens stagnation in some way. Is that a fear?

It’s quite possible. That’s certainly a risk. But I guess where I end up is that I still think we should be trying AI, and that the alternative is just total stagnation. There are all sorts of interesting things that can happen with, you know, maybe drones in a military context being combined with AI. This is kind of scary or dangerous or dystopian, or it’s going to change things. But if you don’t have AI, wow, there’s just nothing going on. And I don’t know, there’s a version of this discussion on the internet about whether the internet led to more conformity and more wokeness.

Right.

There are all sorts of ways in which it didn’t lead to quite the cornucopian, diverse explosion of ideas that libertarians fantasized about in 1999. But counterfactually, I would argue that it was still better than the alternative. If we hadn’t had the internet, maybe it would have been worse. AI is better than the alternative, and the alternative is nothing at all.

Because here’s one place where the stagnationist arguments are still reinforced: The fact that we’re only talking about AI is always an implicit acknowledgment that, but for AI, we are in almost total stagnation.

But the world of AI is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative—whatever word you want to call it—view of the technology than you’re expressing here, right? You mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn’t anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism, for transcendence of our mortal flesh, and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.

Do you think that’s all kind of irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are trying to raise money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about? You would—

Yeah.

You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Yeah, well, I—

You’re hesitating.

I don’t know. I would—

This is a long hesitation.

There are so many questions implicit in this.

This is a long hesitation.

Should the human race survive?

Yes.

Okay.

But I also would like us to radically solve these problems.

Right.

And so it’s always—I don’t know—transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your natural human body gets transformed into an immortal body.

There’s a critique of, let’s say, trans people in a sexual context, or—I don’t know—a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your penis into a vagina, and we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural. It’s, man, it’s so pathetically little. We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way—the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this is that these things don’t go far enough. Transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul, and you need to transform your whole self.

Right. But the other—

This is where—

Wait. I generally agree with what I think is your belief, that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors.

But it still also seems like the promise of Christianity, in the end, is that you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God’s grace, and the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.

Well, let’s articulate this—

And you can have a heretical form of Christianity—

Yeah. I—

Right? That says something else.

I don’t know. I think the word “nature” does not occur once in the Old Testament. There is a sense in which the way I understand Judeo-Christian inspiration is that it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things.

The closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen, and that the natural thing, in a Christian sense, is that you’re messed up. That’s true, but in some ways, with God’s help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.

Right.

And if you just say you’re—

But the people—

And if you just say you’re—

Present company excepted, most of the people working to build the hypothetical machine god don’t think that they’re cooperating with Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts. They think that they’re building—

Sure, but—

Immortality on their own.

Okay, but—

Right?

We’re jumping around a lot of things.

Yes.

So again, the critique I was making is that they’re not ambitious enough.

Right.

From a Christian point of view, these people are not ambitious enough. Now we get into this question: Are they still—

But they’re not morally and spiritually ambitious enough—

And then are they still physically ambitious enough, and are they even still really transhumanists? The cryonics thing seems like a retro thing from 1999. There isn’t that much of that going on. So they’re not transhumanists in terms of the physical body.

Maybe it’s about uploading.

Right.

I’d rather have my body. I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me.

Yes.

So uploading seemed like a step down from cryonics. But even that’s part of the conversation, and this is where it gets very hard to score. I don’t want to say they’re all making it up and it’s all fake, but I don’t think—

You think some of it’s fake.

I don’t think “fake” implies that people are lying, but I want to say it’s not the center of gravity.

Yeah.

There is a cornucopian language. There’s an optimistic language. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Elon about this, and he said, “You know, we’re going to have 1 billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years.” And I said, “Well, you know, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits, because we’re going to have so much growth. The growth will take care of this.”

But he still worried about the budget deficits. This doesn’t prove that he doesn’t believe in the 1 billion robots, but it suggests that maybe he hasn’t thought it through, or that he doesn’t think it’s going to be as transformative economically, or that there are big error bars around it.

But yeah, there’s some way in which these things are not quite thought through. If I had to give a critique of Silicon Valley, it’s that it’s always bad at understanding what the meaning of tech is.

The conversations tend to go into this microscopic thing where it’s, okay, what are the IQ and Elo scores of the AI? Exactly how do you define AGI? And we get into all these endless technical debates. But there are a lot of questions at an intermediate level of meaning that seem to me to be very important: What does it mean for the budget deficit? What does it mean for the economy? What does it mean for geopolitics?

One of the conversations you and I had recently was about whether it changes the calculus for China invading Taiwan when we have an accelerating AI revolution in the military. Is China falling behind? On the optimistic side, maybe it deters China because they’ve effectively lost. On the pessimistic side, it accelerates them because they know it’s now or never. If they don’t grab Taiwan now, they will fall behind.

Either way, this is pretty important. It’s not thought through. We don’t think about what AI means for geopolitics.

We don't think about what it means for the macroeconomy. And those are the kinds of questions I'd want us to push more.

There's also a very macroscopic question that you're interested in. We'll pull on the religion thread a little bit here. You have been giving talks recently about the concept of the Antichrist, which is a Christian concept, an apocalyptic concept. What does that mean to you? What is the Antichrist?

How much time do we have?

We've got as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

I could talk about it for a long time, but—

6. The Antichrist Promises Peace

I think there's always a question: How do we articulate some of these existential risks and the challenges we have? They're all framed as runaway dystopian science-fiction scenarios. There's a risk of nuclear war. There's a risk of environmental disaster, maybe something specific like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we could come up with. There's a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different science-fiction scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with AI.

But I always think that if we're going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. What do you do about nuclear weapons? We have a United Nations with real teeth that controls them, and they're controlled by an international political order.

And then something like this is also, you know, what do we do about AI? We need global compute governance. We need a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, and make sure people don't program a dangerous AI. I've been wondering whether that's going from the frying pan into the fire.

The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late 1940s. It starts with a nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously you need a one-world government to stop it: one world or none. The Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is Antichrist or Armageddon. You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we're sleepwalking toward Armageddon. One world or none, Antichrist or Armageddon—on one level, they're the same question.

I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but one question is—and this was a plot hole in all these Antichrist books people wrote—how does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic, hypnotic speeches, and people just fall for it. And so it's this plot hole. It's this deus ex machina.

It's totally implausible.

It's a very implausible plot hole. But I think we have an answer to this plot hole. The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate.

It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th and 18th centuries, where the Antichrist is some evil tech genius, an evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is, “We need to stop science. We need to just say stop to this.”

In the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

Okay, I want to suggest a middle ground between those 2 options. It used to be that—

Strangelove?

The reasonable fear of the Antichrist was a kind of wizard of technology, and now the reasonable fear is someone who promises to control technology, make it safe, and usher in what, from your point of view, would be a kind of universal stagnation, right?

Well, that's more my description of how it would happen.

Right.

So I think people still have a fear of a 17th-century Antichrist.

Yes.

We're still scared—

Right. The—

—of Dr. Strangelove.

Right. But you're saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say—

Yes.

—you must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon.

Yes.

And I guess my view would be, looking at the world right now, that you would need a certain kind of novel technological progress to make that fear concrete, right? I can buy that the world could turn to someone who promised peace and regulation if the world became convinced that AI was about to destroy everybody. But I think to get to that point, you need one of the accelerationist apocalyptic scenarios to start to play out. To get your peace-and-safety Antichrist, you need more technological progress.

One of the key failures of totalitarianism in the 20th century was that it had a problem of knowledge. It couldn't know what was going on all over the world, right? So you need the AI, or whatever else, to be capable of helping the peace-and-safety totalitarian rule. So don't you think you need, essentially, your worst-case scenario to involve some burst of progress that is then tamed and used to impose stagnant totalitarianism? You can't just get there from where we are right now.

Well, it can—

Greta Thunberg's on a boat in the Mediterranean, protesting Israel. I just don't see the promise of safety from AI, safety from tech, or safety even from climate change right now as a powerful universal rallying cry, absent accelerating change and a real fear of total catastrophe.

Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism's pretty powerful. I don't know if it's absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but it is—

I think it is not.

It is—

In its current form.

I want to say it's the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic sharia law or the Chinese communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only 3 on offer in Europe are green, sharia, and the totalitarian communist state, and the green one is by far the strongest.

In a declining, decaying Europe—

Sure.

—that is not a dominant player in the world.

It's always in a context.

Right.

And then I would—I don't know. We had this really complicated history with the way nuclear technology worked. We didn't really get to a totalitarian one-world state, but by the 1970s, one account of the stagnation is that the runaway progress of technology had gotten very scary, and that Baconian science ended at Los Alamos. Then it was, “Okay, it ended there, and we didn't want to have any more.”

And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late 1960s and started murdering people, what he saw on LSD, what he learned, was that you could be like an antihero in Dostoevsky, and everything was permitted. Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson, but in my telling—

But everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson, and the hippies took over.

But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world, right?

We're ending in the apocalyptic.

My telling of the history of the 1970s is that the hippies did win.

You know, we landed on the moon in July 1969. Woodstock started—

Right.

Three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won. It was not literally Charles Manson—

Okay, but you’re retreating. I want to stay with the Antichrist just to end, right? And you’re retreating. You’re saying, okay, environmentalism is already pro-stagnation and so on. Okay, let’s agree with all that.

No, I’m just saying these things are powerful.

But we’re not living under the Antichrist right now. We’re just stagnant, right? And you’re positing that something worse could be on the horizon that would make stagnation permanent, that would be driven by fear, and I’m suggesting that for that to happen, there would have to be some burst of technological progress that was akin to Los Alamos that people are afraid of. And I guess this is my very specific question for you, right?

You are an investor in AI. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance, in technologies of warfare, and so on, right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story—

Mm-hmm.

—about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you—

Yeah, but—

—but that you are building, right? Wouldn’t the Antichrist be like, “Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far,” right?

Yeah, but—

Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t the irony of history be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that’s what I’m doing.

I don’t think that’s what you’re doing either. I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.

Well, again, there are these different gradations of this we can describe, but is this so preposterous, what I’ve just told you, as a broad account of the stagnation—that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace-and-safety-ism? This is 1 Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.”

The FDA regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but, de facto, in the whole world because the rest of the world defers to the FDA. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators; they’re going to defer to the U.S.

And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation, and one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. The cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer: It was just some transformation of humanity into this sort of more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnation thing. And nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century, and it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world on a worldwide basis.

So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist in that telling.

Do you think God is in control of history?

I think that there’s always room for human freedom and human choice. These things are not absolutely predetermined one way or another.

Right.

Attributing too much causation to God is always a problem. I know there are different Bible verses I can give you, but I’ll give you John 15:25, where Christ says, “They hated me without cause.” And so all these people who are persecuting Christ have no reason, no cause for why they’re persecuting Christ. And if we interpret this as an ultimate causation verse, they want to say, “I’m persecuting because God caused me to do this. God is causing everything.” And the Christian view is anti-Calvinist. God is not behind history. God is not causing everything. If you say God’s causing everything—

But wait.

You’re scapegoating God.

But God is behind Jesus Christ entering history because God was not going to leave us in a stagnationist, decadent Roman Empire, right? At some point, God is going to step in.

I am not that Calvinist.

That’s not Calvinism, though. That’s just Christianity. God will not leave us eternally staring into screens and being lectured by Greta Thunberg, right? He will not abandon us to that fate.

For better and for worse, I think there’s a great deal of scope for human action, for human freedom. If I thought these things were deterministic, you might as well maybe just accept it. The lions are coming. You should just have some yoga and prayerful meditation and wait while the lions—

Right.

—eat you up. And I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

No, I agree with that, and I think on that note, I’m just trying to be hopeful and suggesting that, in trying to resist the Antichrist using your human freedom, you should have hope that you’ll succeed, right?

We can agree on that.

Good. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.

Thank you.