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The Builders with Walter Isaacson · 4 min · Oct 22, 2026

Thiel sees AI as a better growth engine than globalization

Peter Thiel argues AI could raise productivity per person more smoothly than globalization did. He favors acceleration partly because a no-growth society becomes more zero-sum.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, investor.

Co-founded PayPal and Palantir, was Facebook's first outside investor, and co-founded Founders Fund.

About this segment

Peter Thiel argues AI could raise productivity per person more smoothly than globalization did. He favors acceleration partly because a no-growth society becomes more zero-sum.

From “Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think”, Oct 22, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Will AI boost economic growth?” See all 6 answers

“my intuition is always that the tech form of growth is the kind that's better for an advanced country than the globalization kind.”
Peter Thielat 18:10 · The Builders with Walter Isaacson18:10

Takeaways

  1. He says AI may help restore expectations of generational progress.
  2. Technology can raise per-capita output, unlike labor-cost arbitrage.
  3. He argues that banning AI could leave the US with little growth.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 46:58Thiel ranks incompetence below evil3:28
  2. 21:13AI leaders may ask for regulation for their own reasons2:33
  3. 31:33Thiel sees companies split between founders and bureaucracy2:49
  4. 10:10Thiel finds weak monopoly stories in AI pitches3:51

  5. 15:36Thiel sees AI as a better growth engine than globalization3:47

  6. 23:37Thiel sees global government as an existential risk too7:18Up next
  7. 5:03Effective altruists saw AI coming before it was mainstream4:02
  8. 40:27Thiel sees original builders as resisting status imitation3:53

Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

  1. 15:43

    So that's caused you to have some pause because you were not in the pause button camp.

  2. 15:48

    Well, I'm still not in the pause button camp. And I'm saying this on your show that I'm not in the pause button. We need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible. Well, wait a minute. Let me stop that.

  3. 15:58

    Why haven't the past few weeks caused you to be more amenable to a pause button? It's pretty scary, that hugging phase.

  4. 16:07

    You know, I think In some ways, you have to develop the AI technology to control the AI technology. So if you assume China will develop things like that, it's more imperative than ever that we stay ahead of them. So if you look at it geopolitically, maybe you can even interpret something like the hugging face thing as it's so imperative that we not lose the lead and that we get cyber attack to death. The sort of in-between economic question that I find more central is I think the way our society works on some level is through economic growth. You know, I think the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves.

  5. 16:45

    And in that sense, the United States has been a middle class society. And then what's gone a little bit haywire and where it's sort of been fraying at the edges is that, you know, the millennials to some extent, Gen Z have lost that, that generational expectation of progress. And rightfully so. And, um, I don't know if AI is enough to do it, bring it back. There's a risk that AI is unevenly distributed. But I would say if we had outlawed the internet and if we now outlaw AI, there will be virtually no growth. We will be looking more like Europe, more like Japan. And that's a much nastier zero-sum society where there's no growth. There's a loser for every winner. And that's a much worse world in a lot of ways.

  6. 17:33

    Yeah, but one reason for the past 40, 50 years, millennials, and the stagnation, and the fact people are being left behind, is a lot of people, like me, believed in globalization, immigration, free trade, free movement of capital, and we thought it would cause growth. And guess what? It did. We were right. What we didn't know is how badly that would leave people behind. Is that true, and could that be true of AI?

  7. 17:58

    Yeah. I think it was true of globalization that it led to a decent amount of growth, both in our country and other countries. And the growth was pretty uneven. There's a risk of that with technology. I think it's, I don't know, my intuition is always that the tech form of growth is the kind that's better for an advanced country than the globalization kind. The globalization is we're just sort of taking advantage of labor market arbitrages and things like that. And it works when people in China make 5% as much as they do in the US and we get cheap t-shirts and almost everyone's better off. And at some point, it becomes more zero sum as globalization succeeds and these arbitrages go down. Whereas technology, if it actually works, it means doing more with less. It means improving not the GDP of the whole country, but per capita GDP.

  8. 18:56

    And so at its best, it has a more progressive character. The problem in some ways was that the internet wasn't big enough. It added some growth. It wasn't big enough. I think AI is bigger than the internet. I think it could be a way for us to really improve per capita GDP in a smoother way than, let's say, globalization did.