Peter Thiel

Preface

Peter Thiel started his life by doing exactly what he now warns against: copying the people around him, competing for things he hadn't chosen, following a track so well-worn that a teenage friend predicted where it led before he'd taken a step.

I'm always bad at doing the autobiography personal history thing. But the summary autobiography I always give of myself, and I always see myself as, in some ways, having been very guilty of these same things... As a lot of talented kids, [I] was just hypertracked.

Peter ThielTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin12/20/2024

His best friend wrote in his eighth-grade yearbook, "I know in four years, you're gonna get into Stanford." And he did. Then Stanford Law School. And then a top New York law firm.

[The law firm] was one of these very strange places where, from the outside, everybody wanted to get in. On the inside, everybody wanted to get out. And so in my mid-20s, I had kind of a quarter-life crisis. Why in the world was I so dominated by social status, prestige? The money was okay. It wasn't that great relative to selling your soul or something like that.

Peter ThielTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin12/20/2024

During an interview in 2015, he described how his time at a law firm ended:

When I left [the law firm] after seven months and three days, one of the people down the hall from me said they had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz… But of course all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But this was psychologically very hard for people to do, because their whole sense of self-worth, their identity, everything they thought about themselves was wrapped up in all these competitions they had won over many, many years.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

But where did these goals come from? Not from his parents. They were German immigrants who believed in education but weren't as immersed in the elite American system. The goals, he says, "somehow came from our society broadly". Two thirds of the undergraduates at Stanford in the 1980s were on one of four tracks. It was pre-law, pre-medicine, pre-banking, and pre-consulting.

I always think of myself as somehow I was both a total insider and a total outsider. So I was like, straight A student, on the elite university, elite law school, elite law firm track. I was a bit of a nerd. I was born in Germany, so immigrant to the US. The gay thing. So all these ways that I was sort of both an outsider and insider, and probably there's some way all this stuff summed up to make me less prone to just believing in the received wisdom.

Peter ThielThe Rubin Report9/12/2018

Desire

Years before he walked out of the law firm, Thiel studied under René Girard as an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s.

My biases were sort of libertarian, classic liberal. Only individuals exist. Individuals are radically autonomous, can think for themselves. And so [Girard] was… a powerful corrective to that intellectually. But then it also worked on an existential level where you sort of realize, wow, there are all these ways that I've been hyper-mimetic, I've been hyper-tracked. Why am I at Stanford? Why does this matter so much?

Peter ThielEric Weinstein7/19/2019

Girard was a French professor at Stanford — literary theorist, anthropologist, cultural critic — and in Thiel's words, "one of the greater Christian thinkers of the 20th century". His central claim is that human beings are, at their core, imitative.

There's something about human beings being imitative that's very deep, very important, very under-explored… 'Man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.' … Darwinism says our closest relatives are the apes. And the apes, they ape. They imitate and so we differ from the apes in being more ape-like than the apes.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

Imitation is how culture gets transmitted, how anyone learns a language. The danger, he says, lies one level down:

The thing that's dangerous is not just on a representational level, it's not just on the level of ideas that people imitate, it's also on the level of desires, of things they want. And when everybody wants the same thing, this becomes this incredibly violent thing.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

In Girard's account, the divine laws of archaic societies existed in large part to stop imitation. The baker's son became a baker, and a guild system kept everybody from being at each other's throats.

That containment had a price. At the Veritas Forum in 2015, he described the archaic religious system people were living in:

I'm not sure you'd call [archaic religious systems] demonic, but you could say they were sort of permanently hypnotized, and it was like they were sleepwalking through things… I think breaking that is very important… We live in a world in which our lives are no longer ritual… And so we have to make choices. There's room for intentionality.

Peter ThielThe Veritas Forum6/15/2015

In his account, Christ broke the spell. He was the first to call the religious and social institutions of his world into question, and the process he started “has an unraveling character.” Once the pagan order has been taken apart, there is no going back to it. Breaking the spell also broke the containers:

In late modernity… as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did before we had anything cultural at all… It's what makes our society dynamic, but there are no natural barriers… And again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or it hasn't yet.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

Can't you escape by becoming less imitative? By willing yourself into independence, like an Ayn Rand hero?

The Girardian critique of Ayn Rand would be people like [her heroes] don't exist. We all grow up deeply in a social context. Ayn Rand doesn't like to talk about children, because children are incredibly imitative.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

What about simply being aware of it and seeing it clearly? Here Thiel admits to a personal temptation:

Probably one of the things that I always find very tempting to do on a personal level with the mimetic part of the Girard theory is, well, there are all these bad forms of mimesis and if you're more aware of them, maybe you don't get caught up in them as much. As an investor you have all these mimetic bubbles and markets and you don't want to get too caught up in it… And I think it has a certain limited truth, but it's striking how Girard's intuition was actually quite different… A therapist isn't going to help you.

Peter ThielMeeting of Minds with Jerry Bowyer9/29/2022

Therapy, in his telling, is awareness taken as far as it goes:

I don't think psychology's a completely failed field, but the very odd thing about psychology is that it gets advertised as self-transformation and then after years of therapy you're sort of exhausted with paying the bills, you get bored with the therapist, and it often cashes out as self-acceptance… There's something odd about something that gets marketed as self-transformation and crashes into self-acceptance.

Peter ThielMeeting of Minds with Jerry Bowyer9/29/2022

Awareness can sharpen what you see. It can't change what you want. Real transformation, as Thiel reads Girard, was religious, "something like a conversion experience," and the advice that followed was blunt:

If you want to solve [the problem of bad mimesis] you have to actually just go to church… And that was just the advice. You just have to go to church.

Peter ThielMeeting of Minds with Jerry Bowyer9/29/2022

Think

Sarah Lacy asked him in 2012 whether he was contrarian for the sake of it.

I don't think it makes sense to be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, because that assumes that people have well-defined views. And I think one of the big things that's shifted is people have no opinions anymore.

Peter ThielSarah Lacy4/19/2012

The tech and housing bubbles had at least been manias of belief. By 2012 he thought almost none were left, "because people don't believe in anything anymore." The exception was higher education. At Harvard's Kennedy School that February, he had called it a very serious bubble: students are told human capital is the best thing they can invest in, and of course, we are immediately forbidden to ask what the returns on these investments are. It was overvalued and intensely socially believed, and it would end the way bubbles do, when people start thinking for themselves. He had put money behind the view, paying young people $100,000 over two years to "stop out" of school and pursue a passion, ideally by starting or joining a tech company. By April, talking with Lacy, he wasn't sure it still counted as contrarian: "I've found that an awful lot of people have agreed with me," which "may suggest we're sort of at the very tail end of the education bubble."

To be contrarian in a world where people don't believe in anything is to actually think about things, to have well-defined beliefs, and to anchor that. So I think the way to be contrarian is to think for yourself.

Peter ThielSarah Lacy4/19/2012

Six years later, he described the opposite failure. People believed plenty, but they all believed the same thing.

In a democracy, we always think the majority is right. So it's 51-49, 51's probably right. If it's a big majority, it's even more right. So 70-30, even more right. But if it's 100 to 0 or 99 to 1, that's when we start to suspect that we're not in a democracy but we're in North Korea, or that something's gone wrong with the voting machine… And so when we have these sort of hothouse environments at places like Stanford or Silicon Valley, where you have this complete uniformity of thought, the thing you have to suspect, it's not the wisdom of crowds. It's not that everyone's figured out the truth. It's a madness of crowds. It's some psychosocial insanity.

Peter ThielThe Rubin Report9/12/2018

In the same conversation he recalled Girard's line about the more politically correct professors at Stanford: they all thought they were in the French Resistance, but if they had lived in Vichy France they would have been collaborators. Thiel applied it to the present: "by identifying yourself as part of some mob-like resistance movement, you're suggesting the exact opposite."

What he's testing for is sincerity, and the best evidence of it is what a belief costs in the room where you publically hold it.

I think there are people who can have sincere views even if they're in the overwhelming majority, but it's impressive if you're in the minority. So if you're speaking out against President Trump in your small town in Alabama, I tend to think that's a sincere person. If you're in San Francisco or Manhattan, and you're part of the resistance, I suspect something very different is going on.

Peter ThielThe Rubin Report9/12/2018

He hedged even as he made the point. "You don't wanna always psychologize people you disagree with," and he narrowed the test to a single question: "is this really what people think or… are they just under incredible peer pressure to fit in?" Two years later, he applied the same test to Christians like himself. In Manhattan, he said, just saying you're a Christian takes enough courage; in a small town in Alabama, you might have to do more.

By 2025, talking with Jordan Peterson, he was drawing the same contrast between democratic arithmetic and the Bible that he had drawn years earlier, but he now put the tipping point much sooner:

In the Bible, the crowd is always wrong. The crowd is always crazy. It is mad. It's the Tower of Babel… It's the unanimity… And enlightenment rationality, it's always… democracy is good. The more people vote for something, the more rational it is. Although you know at some point, you get 99.99% of the people who vote for something and you're in North Korea… When do you go from wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds? And I think the Girardian, and I would say Christian intuition, is that it happens much sooner and in a much more representative way than you think.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

In his account, seeing the crowd isn't the hard part. When promoting his book Zero to One, he described his favorite interview question, "Tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on," and why people fail it:

[When answering the question, 'tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on',] we always think you have to be really brilliant to come up with an answer. But I think many of us actually do have answers to this question, but we are embarrassed, we're uncomfortable to tell the answers to the person asking the question, because a good answer is one the person asking the question will disagree on… The good answers are ones that people will not want to hear. And I think we live in a world in which courage is in far shorter supply than genius.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

In 2024, he was asked whether people can be blamed for conforming when they're paid to.

I'm not encouraging people to be foolhardy or to be martyrs or to be suicidally insane or anything like that. But at the margin, I think it would do a lot of good if people had just a little bit more courage in all of these cases… If you look at it locally, it's always not your fault… But then if you widen the aperture, I think you can blame people a little bit more for having made the decisions to put themselves in these situations, not thinking about the social context enough and having had the blinders on in some sense.

Peter ThielTriggernometry7/28/2024

Much of the courage he means is choosing the room, and with it the people you will imitate. It was the lesson he learned in the law firm, where all you had to do was go out the front door.

In 2012 he had said a contrarian needs to anchor his beliefs. Asked in 2018 what hope he could offer young people, he began, as he often does, with the eighth-grade yearbook and the law firm. The tracks aren't working, he said, so "it's more important than ever to think for yourself." Don't be overly competitive. Find some other reference point than the people around you. Then, he turned to the Ten Commandments. Seven years later he gave Jordan Peterson the compressed version:

One of the intuitions Girard always had on the Ten Commandments is that the most important were the first and last on the list. The First Commandment, you should only worship one God, there's one God above you, and that's who you worship. The Tenth Commandment is the one about not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor. And it's basically when you stop looking up, you start looking around and when you look around too much it's not a wisdom of crowds, it's a madness of crowds.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

Looking up still means imitating. The question is, who are you imitating?

There's an understanding of human nature where we're in the image of God, we're mimetic… and we need good role models. The only good role model for us is Christ. All other role models lead to interpersonal conflicts of one sort or another.

Peter ThielSocrates in the City2/26/2020

Losers

We are always taught to compete, that if you want to succeed, you need to compete. And my single overarching idea is that if you really want to succeed, you need to figure out how not to compete.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

In 2012, while organizing the material for his Stanford lectures that would become the basis for Zero to One, he laid out the economics to Sarah Lacy:

Capitalism and competition are antonyms. People always think of them as almost synonymous, but they're really antonyms. You define a capitalist as someone who accumulates capital. And the world of perfect competition is a world in which there are lots of businesses that enter and the profits are competed away. And so the restaurant business in San Francisco is a very competitive business, but it's not capitalist. The airline business is very competitive in the US, but they haven't made any money in 100 years.

Peter ThielSarah Lacy4/19/2012

In contrast, Apple had real pricing power on the iPhone. But writing apps for the iPhone meant competing with some 600,000 other developers. The fact that so many were competing, he said, "doesn't necessarily make it better… it makes it worse."

Competition, may be a good thing from the perspective of society: if you like eating in restaurants, rival restaurants give you good food at low prices. "But it's not a good thing if you're in the business of starting a restaurant." Asked whether the country would be better off with more monopolies, he put limits on that concession:

[Society] would be better off if people focused on doing unique things rather than if people tried to do things that were undifferentiated... Obviously, monopolies are bad in a static world... [It's] a much better society where people are innovating, creating new things, capturing some of the value for what they've created, rather than one where everyone's trying to do the same thing, which is probably a static society at the end of the day.

Peter ThielSarah Lacy4/19/2012

His preferred term is monopoly: a great company is "something where there's no competition at all," like Google in search. He calls the distinction the single most important business idea that people do not understand, and he gives two reasons as to why it stays hidden.

The first is that nobody involved will say it:

If you're the CEO of Google, you will not go on TV and say, 'We have a fantastic monopoly.' Because when you say that, the government will come after you very, very quickly. And so, you will instead pretend that there is enormous amounts of competition, and that you are not a search engine, but you are a technology company… And then on the other hand, if you're competing like crazy, you will also tend to want to downplay that a little bit too… You'd try to come with some fictional story how you're not competing, but the reality is it's just a restaurant, and it's competition like crazy. So I think this truth gets obscured by everybody involved, and as a result is very poorly understood.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

The second reason, he says, is that "we're all somehow addicted to competition. We find competition incredibly validating psychologically."

Henry Kissinger once [said]... 'The battles in academia are so ferocious because the stakes are so small,' which always seems like a definition of absolute insanity. Why would you fight like crazy over nothing at all?… On another level, it's just a logic of a certain situation, where the logic is that if you can't differentiate yourself from the other person, the stakes get very small… And so it's both insane and the deep logic of a certain situation.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

His chapter on monopoly took its title from Tolstoy:

The opening sentence in Anna Karenina… is 'All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way.' And I think the opposite is true of business. I think that all happy companies are different, because they found something unique to do. All unhappy companies are alike, because they somehow failed to escape the essential sameness that is competition.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

When the Wall Street Journal excerpted the chapter, its editors wanted something edgier and retitled it "Competition Is for Losers." He called the new title very counterintuitive because we picture the losers as the people who aren't good enough at competing, whose test scores fall short or who are a little bit too slow on the athletic team.

We never think of the losers as people who are addicted so badly to competition, who are so obsessed with the people around them that they lose sight of anything transcendent, anything important, valuable, meaningful in the process.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

The obvious way to avoid it is to copy whoever won. Promoting Zero to One, he ruled that out:

It is not a science. There is no science. There's no formula where if you follow these seven steps, you will make a million dollars or you will have a successful company. And everybody's always looking for a formula. And the problem is that the next Mark Zuckerberg will not start a social networking site. The next Larry Page will not start a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system company. And so if you are copying these people, you're in some sense, not learning from them at all.

Peter ThielKBS 셀럽병사의 비밀3/7/2015

What there is to learn from them is that "the critical thing is to do something new that's never been done before." Building another social network copies Zuckerberg. Building something that has never existed imitates him.

That distinction gave the book its name. In the Stanford class he kept returning to one chart, which set extensive growth, "where you do more of the same," against intensive growth, "where you do something new": one to n against zero to one. His student Blake Masters suggested the title.

As soon as I heard the title [Zero to One], it's, "Okay, the title's good enough. We have to just do the book."… It's creation from nothing… It's like God creates the universe in a zero to one move, and so somehow it is like the creative act.

Peter ThielTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin12/20/2024

Copy a rival's product and you join the crowd around it. Imitate the act of creation and you make something no one else has, and the model for that act is God's.

At the 2015 Veritas Forum, he described what makes such acts possible at all:

I think one thing that both a Christian and a scientific technological worldview have in common is that they believe… that every moment in history happens only once. There's sort of a definite progress to history where, in the form of science, you have new inventions, they happen at a particular point when something's invented, that's something new. And time is not cyclical.

Peter ThielThe Veritas Forum6/15/2015

A future that never repeats holds things nobody knows yet. He calls them secrets.

A mystery is something that is just unknowable… And then a secret is something that's not yet known, but that is humanly knowable, that we can figure out and there's somebody who will be a first person to figure it out.

Peter ThielTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin12/20/2024

The line between the two is fuzzy, he admits. To someone in the 16th century, the map of the world looked like a mystery, until explorers came along and you could be the one to figure it out. Geography then became "a thing to do." And then the whole world was explored, and it stopped being a place to look for secrets. The question now, he says, is "what are things in the 21st century that are analogous to Christopher Columbus discovering the New World in 1492?"

PayPal is his own lived experience. Its secret, as he described it in 2014, was a question it never fully answered:

At PayPal, we were very focused on the intersection of cryptography and currency. Could you create a new encrypted digital currency? We didn't quite succeed in doing this, but by really thinking about that problem, it sort of… focused us on coming up with some creative solutions in the payment space and helped us to build this company.

Peter ThielLSE9/28/2014

The pitch in June 1999 was to be the world's first mobile internet bank, but it was "a decade too early." One month after Nokia Ventures invested, they told Nokia they were pivoting back to the regular internet. When they launched that October, they had no particular idea who would use it. A partnership with Amex died when nobody in its New York office could work out who should open their boxes, and advertising was super inefficient. By this weird process of elimination, they concluded the cheapest way to get people to open accounts was just to pay them money.

The mechanism, too, was something they "eventually stumbled on": linking money to email. Some 300 million people already had email in 1999, so only the sender needed a PayPal account, and the recipient signed up to collect the cash. With $10 for joining and $10 for each referral, the network grew 7 to 10 percent a day, from the 24 people in their office to a million users by mid-April 2000. Then the users showed them the market they can go after: eBay, a network of small sellers who typically couldn't accept credit cards, in a world of 1999 and 2000 that was far less regulated. "You could not have started a company like this after 9/11... You could not have done it a year or two earlier, and two years later, it probably would've been completely illegal."

Looking back on the experience in 2019, he drew a lesson about effort:

One of the lessons you learn at PayPal was it was hard, but possible to build a great company… Most of the time people are either in companies that fail, and then the lesson you learn is that it's impossible to build a great company… Or you are in a company where everything works just phenomenally from day one, sort of like Microsoft or Google, where you then learn the lesson that it's easy to build a great company. And there's a way in which both the lesson that it's easy and the lesson that it's impossible are sort of equally wrong, because both lessons tell you that… there's no point in working hard or you don't need to work hard. Impossible, no point. Easy, no need.

Peter Thiela16z1/2/2019

Stagnation

He started talking about "the tech stagnation" around 2008, and by his count it has been running on five decades, really since the 1970s.

When I was an undergraduate student from the late 1980s, it was a mistake to major in anything having to do with atoms. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, aerospace were terrible decisions, and then the only thing that really worked were the world of bits. Computers, internet, mobile internet, software.

Peter ThielWorld of DaaS with Auren Hoffman10/3/2023

He doesn't deny the recent progress in bits. In 2023 he ranked large language models "on par with the internet itself." It's everything else that has been "much less than advertised and much further from the science fiction future of the Jetsons."

If you define technology in the late 1960s, it would've meant rockets and aerospace and the Green Revolution and agriculture and computers and new medicines and all sorts of things. Whereas today, maybe the last quarter century, the word technology is synonymous with information technology… How do you weight the smoothness of your iPhone versus the lack of a flying car?… I think the difficulty of quantifying it is one of the reasons that we have not talked about it enough… We think we've been in an enchanted forest but we've been wandering the desert for 40 or 50 years or something like that.

Peter ThielHoover Institution11/9/2022

At SXSW in 2013, he offered a map of the ways a society can face the future: a 2×2 matrix of optimistic or pessimistic, determinate or indeterminate.

I think the US in the '50s and '60s and maybe even before then was fundamentally optimistic and determinate. The future was clearly going to be better… There was a way that cars would get faster, planes would get faster, rockets would get faster… I think there's sort of a very different paradigm that the US had for a quarter century from 1982 to 2007 where the future was gonna be better. That was the official religion. It was still sort of very optimistic. But if you asked how or why, people had no good answer for it.

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

In 2013 he thought the country was still "maybe in an Indian summer of indeterminate optimism." Each quadrant, he said, has its professions:

The indeterminate optimistic world is dominated by finance and law because these are the kinds of process-oriented disciplines that you pursue if you have no idea about the future, if it's fundamentally about making sure that the piping of the system works, but you have the sense the system just sort of works automatically. In a determinate optimistic world, that's probably a world in which there's much more room for engineering, art, very specific things. It's people who have ideas about the future that are radically different from the present. It's people who have dreams about the future that nobody else shares.

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

He tied each axis to money. Optimists don't save: "If you're super optimistic, you know the future's going to be better, there's no need to save any money." Counting government borrowing, he put the actual US savings rate at negative 6 percent. So we are still incredibly optimistic about the future." Determinate thinkers invest, because they know "specific companies, buildings, ideas" to back. Indeterminate thinkers don't, because "you will not know what specific things to invest in." So indeterminate optimism expects a better future and invests in none of it.

One of the strange things about indeterminate optimism is that it's the quadrant that has both low savings and low investment… Is it possible for the future to be better when no one saves and no one invests because no one's thinking and everyone's outsourcing all the thinking to other people?

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

Indeterminate optimism says yes. It places its faith in evolution as a method for everything: take enough small steps, each a little better than the last, and you get "a path of monotonic and potentially never-ending improvement," whether or not anyone has a plan.

The paradigmatic indeterminate optimist example is Darwin and Darwin's Theory of Evolution, where you basically over billions of years develop this proliferation of different life forms, and that's the paradigmatic example that we apply to all these different fields, and we think that things like that work.

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

He doesn't share the faith:

At some point your luck runs out... Darwinistic A/B testing might work if you have billions of years, but in practice you tend to run out of money well before then.

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

And some problems have no incremental path at all. In São Paulo the drive to the airport can take four hours, and from a helicopter at dusk you see "endless lines of red-lit cars backed up bumper to bumper." There is, he says, "no actual incremental way to improve something like this." Iteration can make each block a little better without ever fixing the city. Climb whatever hill is nearest and you "end up in a slightly better part of an infinitely large slum."

What ties it all together, he says, is a refusal to look ahead. It shows up as very short time horizons among founders and, maybe even more, among the people who fund them:

Anything that takes longer than a year is considered unreal and fake because we can have no opinions about the future, and so everything has to be on a super short time horizon… And this is the official religion that we have today… I don't believe in the official religion, but… I want people just to at least be aware that this is the religion that… it's all statistical, it's all luck-driven.

Peter ThielSXSW10/14/2013

Today's accepted faith takes its model from improvement by chance over billions of years. Zero to one takes its model from the Creator: something from nothing, on purpose.

In 2015, he put it in one line:

Luck is an atheistic word for God.

Peter ThielThe Veritas Forum6/15/2015

It's the idea he says he's most opposed to: treating luck as all-powerful is really a self-defeating notion. And the argument goes both ways. If you're an atheist, you shouldn't believe in luck, and if you're a Christian, you shouldn't believe in luck.

What he doesn't do is claim that luck plays no part. Asked at Harvard in 2012 how much of his success was blind luck, he granted that he'd been quite fortunate and certainly in the right place and the right time. How much luck mattered, he said, is impossible to measure, because you can't run the experiment a thousand different times. What he could point to was his own record. Whenever he invested thinking "it might work, it might not work," that had "almost always been a formula for things not working." Where they had done their homework and thought the hardest, they had done the best.

Once you think of the world as consisting of lottery tickets, you have set yourself up to lose… Even though there may be certain things that involve irreducible elements of luck, I think that in many cases an excess of emphasis on this is not this intellectual truth about the world but is really a kind of laziness where people don't wanna think as hard about things as they should.

Peter ThielJohn F. Kennedy Jr. Forum2/21/2012

That is how he can say PayPal "eventually stumbled on" payments by email without treating it as a lottery ticket: they stumbled while working hard on a problem they had chosen.

Why progress in the world of atoms stalled after the 1970s is a harder question, and he admits it. His "cop-out answer," he told Jordan Peterson in 2025, "is always that why questions are over-determined." Society became "risk-averse or too feminized," or there was "too much regulation and bureaucracy," which is "sort of a libertarian intuition I have." In 2012 he had noticed that the stalled sectors were the regulated ones. The fastest airliner was still the Concorde of 1970, while computers grew up untouched because the government thought Bill Gates in his parents' garage was "not worthy of scrutiny or regulation." By 2020 he called it "more of a cultural problem": "We're not willing to take risks… there's too much conformity of thought." He rejected the idea that "all the low-hanging fruit has been picked," insisting "there's no reason we couldn't cure cancer."

He dates the cultural turn to a single summer:

July of 1969, where we landed on the moon, and Woodstock started three weeks later, and with benefit of hindsight, in some sense, that's when progress — scientific, technological progress stopped, and the hippies took over the country… In some ways, you can describe it as a shift from outer space, from exploring the world outside of us, to inner space.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

Part of it, he argued in 2014, is paradoxically globalization. In a world of seven billion people, you assume "someone else will have already figured it out or it's impossibly hard," and "in either case, there's no point in me doing it or even trying." The belief "becomes a very self-fulfilling way in which people give up and do not try."

He had been tracing the counterculture back to nuclear weapons since at least 2023. By 2025 he had "come to think that one of the bigger factors" was "the sense that a lot of the science and technology was quite dangerous." The Baconian science project "both culminated and terminated at Los Alamos," and within a quarter century the culture wanted out:

We don't wanna be doing this outside world where we're gonna build ever more thermonuclear bombs. We wanna be peacing out at Burning Man with psychedelic drugs… We wanna be in a world not of change, but of stasis, because a world of change has this apocalyptic dimension. Change is change for the worse… The places where it's still allowed, you can say are the most inert. So in a way, the world of bits was seen as incredibly inert, because you're not building bombs.

Peter ThielJordan B Peterson4/24/2025

He doesn't like "the stagnation and the risk aversion," but "there's a part of it that I think is understandable."

Stagnation, in his account, changes what politics is for:

If you have an ever-growing pie, then there's always some question, how do you divide up this growing pie? And if you're a very difficult, obnoxious political actor, you don't get a bigger piece of the pie for yourself, and that sort of a person doesn't do well. But then if the pie is not growing and it becomes this very brutal zero sum thing where there's a winner for every loser or something like that, I would expect the politics to have a much nastier sort of edge.

Peter ThielTriggernometry7/28/2024

He offers it with a hedge, a "man with the hammer sees a nail everywhere," but he thinks of "the polarized and nasty politics as downstream" from stagnation. The bad compromise that follows is debt: "we just keep borrowing money 'cause that way we can sort of pretend that we have growth." The political fights, he thinks, are not over real differences:

Karl Marx people fight each other because they're truly different. In Shakespeare, they fight each other because there are no differences at all. And so it's like the opening line of Romeo and Juliet, two houses alike in dignity, the Montagues and the Capulets, and they hate each other… but there's no difference at all… I don't think it's 100% Shakespeare, but we're probably in a world that's 90% Shakespeare and maybe 10% Marx.

Peter ThielWorld of DaaS with Auren Hoffman10/3/2023

In 2025 Ross Douthat called AI "the biggest exception to stagnation" and asked what Thiel thought he was investing in. Thiel placed it somewhere between "more than a nothing burger" and "less than the total transformation of our society," roughly the internet in the late '90s: "I'm not sure it's enough to really end the stagnation."

[AI is] the only thing we have, it's a little bit unhealthy that it's so unbalanced that this is the only thing we have. I'd like to have more multi-dimensional 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.

Peter ThielInteresting Times with Ross Douthat6/26/2025

He doubts intelligence was ever the bottleneck: "we've had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons." His worry is an AI that is "just conventionally smart," which he suspects is "not the kind of smartness that's gonna make a difference."

Asked by Mathias Döpfner whether he had changed his mind about stagnation, he said, "I've changed my mind to some extent." The internet "was bigger than anything else, perhaps not big enough to take our whole civilization to the next level."

Perhaps AI is bigger than the internet and at least has the potential to re-accelerate growth with all the good and bad things that come with that… Now that we have AI, nobody disagrees with me that we were in stagnation for decades before.

Peter ThielMDMEETS9/24/2026

He doesn't think the odds of an AI catastrophe are "very high," and he isn't sure such odds can even be estimated. But even five or 10 percent, he grants, "seems pretty bad." What he rejects is the conclusion people draw from that, that going slower is the safe choice:

If there is no progress on any dimension, I don't think our societies work at all… The middle class in the US, Europe, they're the people who expect their children to do better than themselves… And when that breaks down, I think the whole society starts to derange in very, very strange ways… There's a picture that people implicitly have that the alternative to AI, let's say a zero growth world where there's no progress at all, will somehow be this peaceful social democratic society, and I don't think that's true.

Peter ThielMDMEETS9/24/2026