A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? – Peter Thiel (Transcript)

It was never an absolute thesis. So the claim was not that we were absolutely completely stuck. It was in some ways a claim about that the velocity had slowed, it wasn’t zero, but that we were, I don’t know, from 1750 to 1970.

Two hundred plus years were periods of accelerating change where we’re relentlessly, we’re moving faster. The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions and then that in all sorts of dimensions things had slowed.

There was, you know, I always made an exception for the world of bits. So we had, you know, computers and software and Internet and mobile Internet. And then, you know, the last 10, 15 years you had crypto and the AI revolution, which I think is, is, is in some sense pretty big. But, but the question is, you know, is it enough to, to really get out of this, this generalized sense of stagnation?

And there’s an epistemological question you can start with on the, you know, the, the “Back to the Future” essays. How do we even, 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. And so, you know, you know, 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 or what about cancer research and biotech and sort of all these verticals and then how much does progress in cancer count versus string theory?

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

The Back to the Future Test

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah, 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, and of course it was like.

PETER THIEL: 1955 to 1985, 30 years back. And then the “Back to the Future Two” was I think 1985 to 2015, which is now a decade in the past. And that’s where you had flying cars. And the 2015 future is wildly divergent.

ROSS DOUTHAT: From the United States. 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.

And so one of the strongest cases for stagnation that I’ve heard is that, yeah, 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 or.

PETER THIEL: 1890 to 1970, if you lived, those are the 80 years of your lifetime, something like that.

ROSS DOUTHAT: But the world just to my kids, even, you know, as children of 2025, looking at 1985, it’s like the cars are a little different and no one has phones, but the world seems fairly similar. So that’s a kind of, that’s a kind of non-statistical. But that’s the common sense. It’s a common sense understanding.

But are there like, what, what would convince you that we were living through a period of takeoff? Is it just economic growth? Is it productivity growth? Like what are, are there numbers for stagnation versus dynamism that you look at?

PETER THIEL: Sure, it would be well, the economic number would just be how, you know, what are your living standards compared to your parents? You know, if you’re a 30-year-old millennial or you know, how are you doing versus when your parent, your boomer parents were 30 years old, how did they do at the time?

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

The Environmental Argument Against Growth

ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, right, 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, right, 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, where people become very anxious about the costs of growth, the environmental costs above all.

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?

PETER THIEL: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happens. So there are always three questions. You ask about history, what actually happened, and there’s a question, get to 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 sort of these cultural transformations we can describe.

But then I think to some extent also people had some very legitimate worries about the future. Where if we continue to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating towards environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think the 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.

And maybe there’s, 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, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

ROSS DOUTHAT: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end, it’s that they will rebel and sort of pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion.

PETER THIEL: You know, they may rebel or our institutions don’t work. You know, all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right. Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

PETER THIEL: Yeah. If you say, I don’t know, Reagan and Obama, you know, Reagan was, was sort of consumer capitalism, which is oxymoronic. It was, you know, you borrowed, 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.

And I like low tax socialism way better than high tax socialism. But I worry that it’s not sustainable. At some point, either the taxes go up or the socialism ends. So it’s, it’s, it’s deeply, deeply unstable. And that’s, that’s why people are, they’re not optimistic. They, they don’t think we’ve hit some stable, you know, the Greta future. Maybe it can work.

ROSS DOUTHAT: This is the Greta Thunberg. Just to be clear, 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 a kind of anti-growth, effectively authoritarian, environmentalist dominated future.

PETER THIEL: Sure. But we’re not there yet. We’re not there yet. You know, it would be, it’d be like a very, very different society if you, if you, if you, if you.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Actually lived in a kind of degrowth, you know, small Scandinavian villages.

PETER THIEL: I’m not sure it would be North Korea, but it would be, it would be super oppressive.

The Danger of Crisis-Seeking

ROSS DOUTHAT: One thing that’s always struck me is that when you have this sense of stagnation, a sense of decadence. Right. To use, to, to use a word that I, I like to use for it in, 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, you know, they can, 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 just hard, it’s hard to get out of decadence into something, 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 is our time to, you know, wake up and launch a new crusade and remake the world. And obviously that ended very badly. But something similar it was, it was.

PETER THIEL: Bush 43 just told people to go shopping right away.

ROSS DOUTHAT: So it wasn’t anti-decadent for them.

PETER THIEL: For the most part. So you, there was, there was, maybe there was some neocon foreign policy enclave in which people were larping as a way to get out of decadence. But the, the dominant thing was Bush 43, people telling people just to go shopping.

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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, into danger. Right.

PETER THIEL: I don’t know if I have to answer, you know, I don’t know if I’ve give you a precise answer, but my directional answer is a lot more, 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.

It’s, you know, if we, if we look at biotech, something like dementia, 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 a stupid racket where the people are just reinforcing themselves. And so, yes, we need to take way more risk in that department.

Taking Risks in Medical Research

ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, I want to ask, to keep us in the concrete, I want to stay with that example for a minute and ask, okay, 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, you know, go ahead and sell it on the open market? Like, what is, what is, what is risk in the medical space look like?

The Risk-Taking Imperative

PETER THIEL: Yeah, you would take a lot more risk. You know, 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, yeah, they thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension, immortality. That was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet. And maybe it was anti Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity was competitive. If Christ, if Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, you know, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.

But I don’t know. I remember 1999, 2000, when I was running PayPal, one of my co founders, Luke Nosek, he was into Alcor and cryonics and people should freeze themselves. And we had one day where we took the whole company to a “freezing party.” You know, Tupperware party. People sell Tupperware policies at a freezing party.

ROSS DOUTHAT: They sell their. Was it just your heads what was going to be frozen?

PETER THIEL: You could get a full body or just the head?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Just the head was cheaper.

PETER THIEL: 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.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right.

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

Political Venture Capitalism

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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.

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 ideas 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 supporter of Donald Trump. In 2016, you supported a few sort of 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 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. Is that how you thought about?

PETER THIEL: Sure. There were all sorts of levels. I mean, one level was, yeah, was these hopes that we could redirect the Titanic from the iceberg was heading to, or whatever the metaphor is, you know, really change course as a society through political piece.

Maybe a narrower, a much narrower aspiration was that we could maybe at least have a conversation about this. When someone like Trump said, “make America great again,” okay, 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?

And I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought, at least for the first time in a hundred years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. And 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 two thoughts in 2016, and you often have these ideas that are just below the level of your sort of consciousness. But the two thoughts I had that I wasn’t able to combine was, number one, you know, nobody would be mad at me for supporting Trump if he lost. And number two, I thought he had a 50-50 chance of winning.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Why would nobody be mad at you if he lost?

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

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.

PETER THIEL: And then I thought, you know, he had more. He had, I thought he had a 50-50 chance because the problems were deep and the stagnation was frustrating. And then the fantasy I had was, yeah, if he won, we could have this conversation. And the reality was people weren’t ready for it.

And then, you know, maybe we’ve progressed to the point where we can have this conversation at this point in 2025, a decade after Trump. And of course, you’re not a zombie left wing person, Ross. But it’s, this is.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I’ve been called many things, many things.

PETER THIEL: I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

The Stagnation Conversation

ROSS DOUTHAT: So from your perspective of. So let’s say there’s two layers, right? There’s sort of a basic sense of, you know, this society needs disruption. It needs risk. Trump is disruption. Trump is risk. And the second level is Trump is actually willing to say things that are true about American decline. Right.

So do you feel like you as an investor, as a venture capitalist, got anything out of the first Trump term? Like what did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti decadent or anti stagnation? If anything, maybe the answer is nothing.

PETER THIEL: Well, I think we, I think it took longer and it was slower than I would have liked. But we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012, 2013, 2014.

I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014. I was on the “There’s a stagnation problem.” And all three of them were versions of “everything’s going great.” I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted Silicon Valley’s. Adjusted.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted a big part of Silicon.

PETER THIEL: Valley on the stagnation. Right.

ROSS DOUTHAT: On the stagnation. But then a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024, including obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

PETER THIEL: Yeah, this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue in my telling. I mean, these things are always super complicated, but my telling is, you know, I don’t, and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people, but, you know, someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook Meta, and, you know, in some ways, I don’t think he was, he’s very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff necessarily through that much.

It was the default was to be liberal and it was always what, you know, if the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was, you do more. You know, if something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. And 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. And at some point it’s like, okay, maybe this isn’t working.

ROSS DOUTHAT: So they pivot.

PETER THIEL: Yes, it’s not a pro Trump thing.

ROSS DOUTHAT: It’s not a pro Trump thing, but it is, you know, just both in public and private conversations, it 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, economic dynamism and so on.

The Optimism Problem

PETER THIEL: You’re framing it really, really optimistically here. So I, well, the people.

ROSS DOUTHAT: But I think, I know you’re pessimistic.

PETER THIEL: When you frame it optimistically. You’re just saying these people are going to be disappointed and they’re just set up for failure and things like that.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I mean, people expressed a lot of optimism. That’s all I’m saying. Elon Musk expressed a lot of, I mean, he expressed some apocalyptic anxieties about how budget deficits were going to kill us all. But he came into government, 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. And so you’re coming from a place of greater pessimism or realism. So what I’m asking for is your assessment of where we are, not their assessment. But do you think, does populism in Trump 2.0 look like a vehicle for technological dynamism to you?

PETER THIEL: It’s still by far the best option we have. I don’t think. I don’t know. Is Harvard going to cure dementia by just puttering along, doing the same thing that hasn’t worked for 50 years?

ROSS DOUTHAT: That’s just a case for. It can’t get worse. Let’s do disruption. Right, but the critique of populism right now would be Silicon Valley made an alliance with the populists. But in the end, the populace don’t care about science. They don’t want to spend money on science. They want to kill funding to Harvard just because they don’t like Harvard. Right. And in the end, you’re not going to get the kind of investments in the future that Silicon Valley wanted. Is that wrong?

The Science Problem

PETER THIEL: Yeah, but it, we have to go back to this question of, you know, how well is this, is the science working in the background? This is where, you know, the New Dealers, whatever was wrong with them, you know, they pushed science hard and you funded it and you gave money to people and you scaled it.

And, you know, whereas today, if there was 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, you know, if we call something a moonshot, the way this is 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. Oh, you need a moonshot for that. It’s not like we need an Apollo program. It means it’s never, ever going to happen.

ROSS DOUTHAT: And so, but it seems like then you’re still in the mode of, 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. And we’re not necessarily in the stage where you’re looking to the Trump administration to, to build the new, to do the Manhattan Project, to do the moonshot. It’s more like populism helps us see that it was all fake.

PETER THIEL: You need to try to do both. And they are very entangled with each other. And I don’t know, there’s deregulation of nuclear power and at some point, at some point we’ll get back to building, you know, new nuclear power plants or better designed ones or maybe even fusion reactors.

And so, yes, there’s a deregulatory deconstructive part. And then at some point you actually get to construction and it’s all things like that. So, yeah, in some ways you’re clearing the field.

The Toxicity of Politics

ROSS DOUTHAT: And then, but you’ve personally stopped funding politicians.

PETER THIEL: I am schizophrenic on this stuff. You know, I think it is incredibly important and it’s incredibly toxic. And so I go back and forth on it.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Incredibly toxic for you personally?

PETER THIEL: For everybody, everybody who gets involved. It’s zero sum. It’s crazy, you know, and then it’s, and then in some ways, because everyone.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Hates you and associates you with Trump. Like, what, how is it toxic for you personally?

PETER THIEL: It’s toxic because it’s in a zero sum world. You know, the stakes in it feel really, really high and you.

ROSS DOUTHAT: End up having enemies you didn’t have before.

The Political Dimension of Mars

PETER THIEL: Yeah, it’s toxic for all the people who get involved in different ways. There is a political dimension of getting back to the future. You can’t, you know, I don’t know. This is a conversation I had with Elon back in, you know, 2024, and we had all these, you know, conversations.

I had this, I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said, you know, 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.” And then, you know, you always think of the right arguments to make later.

And it was about two hours after we had dinner and I was home that I thought of, “Wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore.” 2024. 2024 is the year where 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, was building an alternative.

And in 2024, Elon came to believe that if you went to Mars, you know, the socialist US Government, the Woke AI, it would follow you to Mars. It was the Demis meeting with Elon that we sort of brokered. He was doing DeepMind.

ROSS DOUTHAT: This is an AI company.

PETER THIEL: Yeah. This was the rough conversation was, you know, 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 this into an interplanetary species.”

And then Demis said, “Well, you know, 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 till 2024 to process it.

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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 over budget deficits for wokeness to get to Mars.

PETER THIEL: What does Mars mean? Is it a. Yeah. Is it? And again, it’s.

ROSS DOUTHAT: What does Mars mean?

PETER THIEL: Well, it was. It was. It’s. Is it. Is it just. Is it just a scientific project or is it. I don’t know, is it like a.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I don’t know, a vision of a new society?

PETER THIEL: Yeah, Heinlein, you know, populated by many, many people in paradise, descendants from Elon Musk. Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that. 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, well, 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.

AI: Progress or Stagnation?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay, so the Woke AI, artificial intelligence seems like one. If we’re still stagnant. It’s the biggest exception to stagnation. It’s the place where there’s been remarkable progress, 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?

PETER THIEL: Well, I don’t know. There’s sort of a lot of layers to this. So I do think, I know there’s one question we can frame is just how big, how big a thing do I think AI is? And I don’t know. My stupid answer is it’s somewhere. It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society.

So my placeholder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the Internet in the late 90s, which is, you know, I’m not sure it’s enough to, to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And, you know, the Internet added maybe a few points, percentage points to the GDP, maybe 1% to GDP growth every year for 10, 15 years. It adds some to productivity. And so that’s sort of roughly my placeholder for AI.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s, it’s a little bit 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, there are dangers with this technology.

The Superintelligence Question

ROSS DOUTHAT: But then you are a skeptic of the, what you might call the sort of 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, that 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.

And at a certain point, it just, you pass a certain threshold and it gives us not just more digital progress, but 64 other forms of progress. It sounds like you don’t believe that, or you think that’s less likely.

PETER THIEL: Yeah, I, I, I somehow don’t know if that’s been really the gating factor.

ROSS DOUTHAT: What does that mean, the gating factor?

PETER THIEL: It’s probably a Silicon Valley ideology and maybe, maybe in a weird way it’s more liberal than a conservative thing, but people are really fixated on IQ in Silicon Valley and that it’s all about smart people. And if you have more smart people, they’ll do great things.

And then the economics anti IQ argument is that people actually do worse. The smarter they are, the worse they do. And they, you know, it’s just, 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. And so that suggests that the gating factor isn’t IQ, but something, you know, that’s deeply wrong with our society.

ROSS DOUTHAT: So is that a limit on intelligence or a problem of the sort of personality types human superintelligence creates? I mean, I’m very sympathetic to the idea and I made this case when I did an episode of this, of this podcast with a sort of AI accelerationist that just throwing, 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, you know, figure out the automation process that builds you a billion robots overnight. I, I’m an intelligent skeptic in the sense I don’t think, yeah, I think you probably have limits.

PETER THIEL: It’s, it’s, it’s hard to prove one way or it’s always hard to prove these things.

ROSS DOUTHAT: But I, until we have the super.

PETER THIEL: Intelligence, I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe, 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. It’s. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem or maybe it’s these cultural things.

So it’s not, you know, it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe it’s, maybe you need heterodox smart people to, you know, do, do crazy experiments. And, and, and if the, you know, if the AI is just conventionally smart, if it’s sort of, 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.

The Risk of Conformist AI

ROSS DOUTHAT: So do you fear then a plausible future where AI in a way becomes itself stagnationist, that it’s like 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 doesn’t. It like deepens stagnation in some way. Is that, Is that a fear?

PETER THIEL: It.

ROSS DOUTHAT: It’s like people just outsource.

PETER THIEL: It’s quite possible that that’s. That’s certainly a risk, but. But I guess. I guess where I end up is I still think we should be trying AI and that the alternative is just total stagnation.

So, yeah, there’s sort of all sorts of interesting things can happen with, okay, maybe drones in a military context are combined with AI, and okay, 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 like a version of this discussion on the Internet. Where did the Internet lead to more conformity and more wokeness. And yeah, there are all sorts of ways where 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, that if we hadn’t had the Internet, maybe it would have been worse.

AI is better. It’s better than the alternative. And the alternative is nothing at all, because the sta. Look, here’s one place where the stagnationist arguments are still reinforced. The fact that we’re only talking about AI, I feel, is always an implicit acknowledgement that but for AI, we are in almost total stagnation.

Transhumanism and Immortality

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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, and you were 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 kind of 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.

And do you think that’s just 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. Right. Is it, is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about? You. I think you, you would prefer the human race to endure. Right? You’re hesitating. Well, I, Yes.

PETER THIEL: I don’t know. I, I would, I would.

ROSS DOUTHAT: This is a long hesitation.

PETER THIEL: There’s so many questions and pushes.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Should the human race survive?

PETER THIEL: Yes.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.

PETER THIEL: But, but I, I also would. I, I also would like us to, to radically solve these problems. And, and so, you know, it’s always. I don’t know, you know. Yeah. Transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.

And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context or, I don’t know, transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, 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. And okay, 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 these things don’t go far enough like that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so.

Christianity and Transcendence

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right, but the other way. Wait, wait. Sorry. 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, yeah, the promise of Christianity in the end is 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.

PETER THIEL: Well, it’s. Let’s, let’s articulate this and you can.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Have a heretical form of Christianity. Right. That says something else.

PETER THIEL: I don’t know. I think the word nature does not occur once in The Old Testament. And so if you, and there is a word in which, a sense in which the way I understand the Judeo Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things.

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

ROSS DOUTHAT: Present company accepted. Present company accepted. 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 immortality on their own.

PETER THIEL: Yeah, right. We’re jumping around a lot. A lot of things. So again, the critique I was saying is they’re not ambitious enough.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right.

PETER THIEL: From a Christian point of view, these people are not ambitious enough. Now then we get into this question, well, are they?

ROSS DOUTHAT: But they’re not morally and spiritually ambitious enough.

PETER THIEL: And are they? And then are they still physically ambitious enough? And are they even still really transhumanists? And this is where, okay, you know, man, the cryonics thing, that seems like a retro thing from 1999, there isn’t that much of that going on. So they’re not transhumanists on a physical body. And then. Okay, well, maybe it’s not about cryonics. Maybe it’s about uploading, which. Okay, well, that’s not quite. I’d rather have my body. I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me. So that uploading seemed like a step down from cryonics.

But then even that’s, you know, it’s part of the conversation. And this is where it gets very hard to score. And I don’t want to say they’re all making it up and it’s all fake, but I don’t.

ROSS DOUTHAT: You think some of it’s fake?

PETER THIEL: I don’t think it’s fake. Implies people are lying. But it’s. I want to say it’s not the center of gravity.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Yeah.

PETER THIEL: And so there is, yeah, there is a cornucopian language. There’s an optimistic language. A conversation I had with Elon a few weeks ago about this was, he said, “We’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the US in 10 years.” And I said, “Well, 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.” And then, well, he’s still worried about the budget deficits. And then this doesn’t prove that he doesn’t believe in the 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 always bad at what the meaning of tech is. And the conversations, they tend to go into this microscopic thing where it’s okay, it’s like, what are the IQ ELO scores of the AI? And exactly how do you define AGI? And we get into all these endless technical debates, and there are a lot of questions that are at an intermediate level of meaning that seem to me to be very important, which is like, 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 we had recently, you and I had, was does it change the calculus for China invading Taiwan, where if we have an accelerating AI revolution, the military, is China falling behind? Maybe on the optimistic side, it deters China because they’ve effectively lost. And 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. And either way, this is a pretty important thing. 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 macro economy. And those are the kinds of questions I’d want us to push more.

The Antichrist and Existential Risk

ROSS DOUTHAT: There’s also a very macroscopic question that you’re interested in that, you know, will 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?

PETER THIEL: How much time do we have?

ROSS DOUTHAT: We’ve got as long, as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

PETER THIEL: All right, well, I have a. I could talk about, but we’re near.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I mean.

PETER THIEL: But no, I think there’s always a question, you know, how do we articulate, you know, some of these existential risks, some of the challenges we have, and they’re all framed this sort of runaway dystopian science text. 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 come up with. There’s a risk of, you know, bioweapons, you have all the different sci fi 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 a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one world totalitarian state.

Because I would say the political solution, the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one world governance. You know, 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 what do we do about AI? And we need global compute governance. We need a one world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke to make sure people don’t program a dangerous AI. And I’ve been wondering whether that’s sort of going from the frying pan into the fire.

And so the atheist philosophical framing is “one world or none.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late 40s, starts with a nuclear bomb blowing up the world. And obviously you need a one world government to stop it. One world or none. And 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 towards Armageddon. One world or none. Antichrist or Armageddon on one level are the same question.

Now I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but sort of 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 daemonium explanation.

ROSS DOUTHAT: It’s totally, it’s implausible.

PETER THIEL: 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, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, 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. It is the thing that has political resonance is we need to stop science. We need to just say stop to this. And this is where, yeah, I don’t know. 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.

The Modern Antichrist: Control Through Fear

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay. I want to suggest a middle ground between those two options. It used to be that 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 sort of usher in what, from your point of view would be a kind of universal stagnation. Right.

PETER THIEL: Well, that’s more my description of how it would happen.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right.

PETER THIEL: So I think people still have a fear of a 17th century Antichrist. We’re still scared of Dr. Strangelove.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right. But you’re saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say, “You must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon.”

PETER THIEL: Yes.

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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. So 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. Right. But I think to get to that point, you need one of the accelerationist apocalyptic scenarios to start to play out. Right. To get your peace and safety Antichrist, you need more technological progress.

Like one of the key failures of totalitarianism in the 20th century was it had a problem of knowledge. It couldn’t know what was going on all over in 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 you need 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, like Greta Thunberg’s on a boat in the Mediterranean, like, you know, like protesting Israel, like the. I just don’t see the promise of safety from AI, safety from tech, safety, even safety from climate change right now as a powerful, universal rallying cry. Absent accelerating change and real fear of total catastrophe.

PETER THIEL: I mean, 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 man, it is.

ROSS DOUTHAT: I think it is not in its current form.

PETER THIEL: It is, I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. Like, you know, they believe in the green thing more than Islamic Sharia law or more than in, you know, the Chinese communist totalitarian takeover. And the future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green Sharia and you know, the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest in a declining, decaying.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Europe that is not a dominant player in the world.

PETER THIEL: It’s always in a context, right? And then I would, you know, I don’t know, you know, we had this really complicated history with the way nuclear technology worked. And you know, we, okay, we didn’t. Yeah, we didn’t really get to, you know, a totalitarian one world state. But you know, by the 1970s, one account of the stagnation is that the runaway progress of technology had gotten very scary and that, you know, Baconian science, it ended at Los Alamos and then it was okay, it ended there and we didn’t want to have any more.

And you know, when Charles Manson took LSD in the late 60s and started murdering people, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like Dostoyevsky, an anti hero in Dostoyevsky and everything was permitted. And of course, not everyone became Charles Manson but Charles Hellingson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson.

ROSS DOUTHAT: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. Right, I’m just. We’re ending in the apocalyptic.

PETER THIEL: No, but my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win and they landed, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later. And with a benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won. And yeah, it was not literally Charles, man.

The Irony of Building the Tools of Control

ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay, but you’re retreating. You’re just. I want to stay with the Antichrist just to end. Right, because. And you’re retreating, you’re saying, okay, you know, environmentalism is already pro stagnation and so on. Okay, let’s agree with all that, but we’re not living under, 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, is that you’re an investor in AI you’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology and technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. Right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would be, maybe be using the tools that you were building, right?

Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like, “Great, you know, we’re not going to have any more technological progress. But I really like what Palantir has done so far.” Right. I mean, isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

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

The Antichrist of Stagnation

ROSS DOUTHAT: I mean, to be clear, 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.

PETER THIEL: Well, but 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 Safetyism”? This is 1 Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.” And we’ve submitted to it.

The FDA regulates not just drugs in the US 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. People, 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 US.

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. And then the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom up answer, that 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.

I think something like 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.

ROSS DOUTHAT: 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?

Human Freedom vs. Divine Determinism

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

ROSS DOUTHAT: Right? But God wouldn’t leave us forever under the rule of a mild, moderate stagnationist Antichrist, right? That can’t be how the story ends, right?

PETER THIEL: Attributing too much causation to God is always a problem. You know, I don’t 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 it’s all these people that are persecuting Christ have no reason, no cause for why they’re persecuting Christ.

And if we interpret this as a 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, then God is—

ROSS DOUTHAT: But wait, but God is—

PETER THIEL: You’re scapegoating God.

ROSS DOUTHAT: But God is behind—okay, but God is behind Jesus Christ entering history because God was not going to leave us in a stagnationist, decadent Roman Empire. Right? So at some point, at some point God is going to step in.

PETER THIEL: I am not that Calvinist.

ROSS DOUTHAT: And 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.

The Scope for Human Action

PETER THIEL: There is 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 eat you up. And I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

ROSS DOUTHAT: No, I agree with that. And I think on that note, I’m just trying to be hopeful and suggesting that, you know, in trying to resist the Antichrist, using your human freedom, you should have hope that you’ll succeed. Right.

PETER THIEL: We can agree on that.

ROSS DOUTHAT: Good. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.

PETER THIEL: Thank you.

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