Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think

Peter Thiel is a high profile figure in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is one of the most respected names in the world of venture capital. In addition to his co-founding of PayPal, he was also an early investor in companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Peter Thiel occupies a different role. He's a builder of builders. He makes bets on people. Elon Musk at PayPal, Alex Karp at Palantir, Sam Altman and the founders of OpenAI. And he backed politicians such as J.D. Vance.

There's two reasons that Senator Vance could be a heartbeat from presidency and basically the president.

The first is Peter, the second is Thiel. To some, he's a visionary investor. I think Peter is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. He thinks of things no one else does. To others... He's a shadowy figure. Peter Thiel is quiet and deadly. I think Thiel is pulling all. The strings here. I think he seems like a dark lord to a lot of us.

And it's like, does he think he has an endgame that is like happy? It's so strange to have this.

You build autonomous drone technology. You build domestic surveillance technology. And then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.

So I wanted to ask the builder of builders, what does he believe we are building toward? Are the fears that are sweeping the headlines grounded in reality? And what does he. Mean when he goes around the world giving lectures about the Antichrist? But perhaps most importantly, have we concentrated way too much power in the hands of people who have the demons in drive that allow them to be audacious builders, but may not have the empathy and stable moral compass to be good stewards of this technology. So here's my conversation with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining The Builders. Thanks for having me.

We've seen this enormous backlash in the past few months against AI. What is causing that?

Yeah, I agree with the what that it's happening. You know, why questions are always much harder, much more speculative in nature. I'm tempted to say it's somewhat overdetermined. It's very unclear who the winners and losers from. AI will be. So I think it's going to add a lot to growth, but it will do so in a fairly disruptive kind of a way. There are, of course, these dystopian science fiction scenarios that, you know, in some ways we believe, and maybe they're not entirely unreasonable. So there's some small tale. Dystopian mean that we'll all be white. The Terminator movie, the Matrix.

But we see that Dario and Elon and Sam are now talking about that. Yeah, to some extent they've leaned into it or partially believed it or too many of their employees believed it. And so there was, yeah, there's some prehistory where This was in the air for a long time. I think Elon believes it for a decade. Well, you know, it was in some ways when Demis has created DeepMind and it gets sold to Google, Elon and Sam create OpenAI the next year or so after that. And it's basically, in some ways, it's an anti-Google company, right? This technology is too important, too dangerous to be just in a single company. And then, of course, there are people who take it even more seriously than Altman. I think Elon exits around 2018. And then by 2020, you have thereabouts is the seven people who start Anthropic exit from OpenAI. In some sense, they want to take these issues even more seriously than before. You know, effective altruism, this idea had been in the air for a while.

Wait, explain that because people are now saying it's sort of a psyops or David Sacks says. conspiracy theory of effective altruism. And I think even people like me vaguely know what Sam Bankman Free was on about. Well, you don't get that. Tell me about that.

Well, there's a lot of history, but even if you go back to the 2000s in the East Bay of Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places, it wasn't where the big tech companies were being built, but there was sort of a creativity with ideas. It was a little bit adjacent to the new atheists, you know, how could you be more reasonable, rational? Where was the world heading? And the one big idea that these sort of futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps something like AI could happen, that perhaps it was closer than people thought. There had been an AI desert for a long time. It had been over-promised for many decades. But on the other hand, Moore's law was still progressing. The computers were relentlessly getting more powerful. And perhaps it was not a question of necessarily a much better algorithm. Perhaps it was just almost a hardware problem that once you got the chips and the computers that were powerful enough, it would be more likely that something like this would happen. And then that this would be a very, very big thing when it happened, that this would be an enormously socially transformative thing. It was potentially very dangerous. It could be maybe it could be weaponized. Maybe there were these science

fiction scenarios where the AI would almost become autonomous. So there were very many different kinds of scenarios. And then there were, of course, parts of it that were, I don't know, crazy and almost cult-like. But it had maybe the good dimension of a cult where there was one big thing they knew that the other people did not. And I think even though there are ways I'd like to be very critical of them today, there were ways they got that one big thing right. And then, you know, has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic. Even a billion-dollar company seems like bigger than a crazed cult could build. So if you have a cult that's built a company that's worth probably close to $ 2 trillion at the IPO, it would probably be the, I don't know, sixth, seventh largest company by market cap in the world, built in like six, seven years. Has a cult ever done something like that? So yes, I want to be critical of them, and they're things I'm uncomfortable and critical about.

But the first thing I would try to do is always, you always want to steel man your opponents. You want to try to understand them as well as they understand

Peter Thielthemselves or even make their arguments better. And the way I would steel man the effect of altruists is, first off, they got one enormously big thing right.

And that one enormously big thing was? AI is around the corner. But also that it could become misaligned with human values?

The way AI was classically defined, let's say. There were all these different definitions of AI, of course. It could be just sort of machine learning and sort of like maybe cameras everywhere or something like that. It's a sort of totalitarian AI that you have in China. Or it could be this sort of super-duper AI with a godlike intelligence or something, which was sort of the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy. But the in-between version of AI was not that it would be this dumb surveillance cameras, not that it would be godlike. but they would be like a human being. That had been the AI test. The Turing test from the beginning was, it's not that it is a human being, but that it can fool you into thinking it's a person. And from the outputs, you can't tell the difference. Yeah, that's going to be a very, very big deal. And it raises all sorts of, you know, raises even basic economics questions. Is it an economic compliment to people? Is it a substitute for people?

Well, let's do both. There's two big things it raises. One is what will it do to human labor? Will it create more jobs and more productivity? Or will it pretty much put us out of work and we'll have to figure out what we do? That's part of the backlash, especially my students at Tulane are like, wait a minute.

So tell me your feeling about that backlash. Okay, so let me start by answering what I think will happen with a qualifier that nobody really knows and nobody can be certain. I think in aggregate, on a macroeconomic level, AI will increase productivity a lot. It will be a fairly disinflationary force in our economy. And then unless it's incredibly narrowly captured by a few companies. You'd expect the median person to be better off or things like that. This was, you know, the Luddites in the 19th century were always worried that the machines would replace the people. and then of course you know what happened in practice was yeah there was definitely various industries sometimes even big industries where there was a lot of disruption but then it would free people up to do more productive things to do do other things and that's still my intuition with But real.

Quick, before you go on, you said, unless it's captured by a few companies, are you worried that indeed we're about to have four or five companies capture it?

It's certainly, yeah, and certainly there's a history where most of the history of tech innovation, I would say for 200, 250 years, relatively small parts of the innovation were captured by business. They mostly went to consumers, to workers, to the rest of the economy. there are ways that software and the internet were somewhat of an exception. And so we had these enormously successful businesses. Maybe they were natural monopolies of sorts. They were in some sense good for consumers, but also extremely profitable. And so there's a pattern matching to what happened with the internet that I think people quite reasonably are worried about will happen with AI, that it'll be And maybe it's an even bigger market. It's a bigger technology. And so perhaps.

So you would try to stop that. In other words, our antitrust laws. Well, the question is, is that how likely do you think that's going to happen? The intuition that I have on the other side is that one of the questions I always like asking companies is, tell me why you have a monopoly. Because monopolies, we can sort of debate whether they're good or bad for society. Obviously, we have IP. We have all kinds of good forms of monopoly. But on the inside, yeah, you don't want to have just

Peter Thielcutthroat competition where all the profits get competed away. And the kind of narratives people tell me when they pitch me on AI companies, they're narratives of growth, of terrific technology. They are incredibly weak on the monopoly story. And then

the felt sense of it is that it's like this incredibly fast, dynamic race where it's been changing a lot. DeepMind, in a sense, was in the lead in the early 2010s. You know, then OpenAI with chat GPT and the transformer models was able to replace that. And then in some ways, you know, Altman locked up a lot of the chips and built the data centers preemptively. So there were sort of all sorts of ways he correctly leaned into this incredibly CapEx intensive strategy. And then there still is a sense where, you know, maybe Anthropic is a little bit more in the pole position now than OpenAI was. And it's always hard to exactly score these things, but I would say that it also still feels that Google and Meta and Grok are not that far behind. I'm not sure China is that far behind. Or if we describe it on the level of the Shakespearean drama among these people, it's like really crazy. So they're acting like, man, it is a fight to the death. It is the furthest thing from monopoly imaginable. And if it's not a monopoly, that's where I think the benefits will be likely distributed pretty widely in society. Now, if I had to steel man the anxiety, which was your starting question, you could have a lot of growth and the median person could

be better off. But if it's with a lot of volatility, you know, you expect to get a 3% wage hike, but it's plus or minus 10% or something like that. And we're kind of in this society that doesn't really like risk, doesn't like that sort of volatility. It doesn't like disruption. So, yes, it may be good for the median person. The good may be sort of unknown. The bad things are more predictable and the disruption is clearer. So I think even on the economic level, I can understand the anxiety even though I think it is misguided.

Well, you talk about there being a lot of competition among these and that seems like generally a good thing. Although in some ways, if it was just one or two companies, you could control it better, regulate it for safety better. And secondly, the competition, either amongst these companies or with China, means you can't pause the way people are saying now, shouldn't we be pausing this?

That seems correct to me. There's sort of all these very complicated questions one can ask about China or the CCP, Chinese Communist Party. But I worry about totalitarianism. I don't like it. And I think there is a certain a certain type of high-tech totalitarianism that's being tried out in China. It's not as violent as Stalin or Mao or Hitler. You don't need to kill as many people, but it somehow knows more about you than you know about yourself. And there's something about that that we really don't want that to be the model that wins.

And your old friend, David Sacks, and of course, President Trump are now saying, because of the competition with China, stop talking about pausing AI, even if you think it could be an existential threat. Do you agree with that? Yes.

Yes. I broadly agree with that. I would say the challenge that, and I've been friends with David Sacks for many decades, the thing that makes me less comfortable making those kinds of arguments publicly is that on some level, it's hard when the big companies themselves are telling you to stop and to slow down.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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? 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

Peter Thieldon'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. 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.

Don't go anywhere. There's a lot more right after this break. Let me get back to the doomsday scenario that suddenly has, yeah, you talked about Nick Bostrom and everybody's talked about it for a while. But in the past few weeks after Hugging Face and everything else, and when I read. what some of these agents have done and how they conspire, the notion that they could become unaligned with the good of humans is something that Dario Amodei is now on about, Elon Musk is on about, so. Many others have. Do you have any worry, whether it's 5% or 10%, that there is a doomsday scenario?

And do you have any backup plans? Do you have some bunker? I don't think a bunker would help for that kind of doomsday scenario. I don't think, you know, I think people are very bad on their probabilistic intuitions. If you ask the question, yes, 5% to 10% sounds way too high for, like, everybody on this planet getting killed. Don't think that's going to happen. Maybe even a tiny bit above zero is too high. But I think the intuitions on this are very poor. The way I would push back, though, is it's always also risky not to innovate. It's dangerous not to hit the accelerator because if China leapfrogs the U.S.

in AI and we have an intensification of the geopolitical rivalry with China, they may very well be tempted to use it as a weapon against us. Let's hold on for a second.

Imagine, just thought experiment, there's no China. Then do you just put a pause on this? Cause it could be a day.

Mrs. Lincoln. Imagine besides that, how'd you like the play? You know? So that's, that's too, that's too crazy. A thought experiment. But then of course, even if we have these, these multiple companies and they are, you know, they're under a lot of pressure to develop it, to innovate it. They have to be pretty careful that it not go badly wrong. So I think they have a lot of internal controls. They know more about it than the government does. The government doesn't really know how to regulate it. Um, I don't know. This is too cynical a cut, but I always think when they're telling the government people, we want you to regulate us, perhaps they know the government doesn't know how to do it and that it will be slow. And so it sort of gets them a little bit off the hook. And then when Trump said, no, you already are subject to all sorts of criminal penalties if you mess this up. I don't need to regulate you more. The way in which Trump was actually saying we need to go slow is you need to you need to do it yourselves and it's your responsibility, not mine.

There was a version of this discussion that I had when Meta was sort of in this very tricky spin cycle for many, many years. And I was on the board there from 2005 to 2022. And circa 2018, 2019, the sort of company line that Zuckerberg adopted was, we think there needs to be regulation and we would like the government to tell us what we can and cannot do. And at some point I told Zuckerberg, who I believe still has the all-time record for a private citizen being hauled in front of Congress. And he was hauled in front of eight congressional committees. And I told him, you know,

Peter Thielthey don't want to regulate you. They want to yell at you. They want to complain about you and yell at you. And of course, you know, the other in-between

version where it's not about them wanting regulation or them secretly trying to stop regulation. The other interpretation, you know, there are different audiences these people have when they're pushing for regulation, the internal audience for their employees is, yes, we're working on a technology that's potentially really dangerous, but man, it's important. This is the most important company in the world to work at. This is going to be an incredibly successful company. The risk is we're going too fast, which nobody says. So yeah, there's some part of it where it occasionally scares people in these companies, and there are various people who've quit and said things. But on some other level, I would think it's incredibly motivational. Because when Dario says, yeah, this is a technology that's really big and really dangerous, that's a way to tell all his employees you're working at the greatest, most important company in the history of the world. And so it works on that level, too. So I think it works on many levels, you know.

Let me read you something you once said, because I'm sort of wrestling, and I mean this genuinely, with the whole Antichrist thing and what you mean by that. But it ties into this new AI moment we're in. which you said the way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop. The Antichrist wouldn't seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by convincing everyone that the apocalypse was coming. Is that what's happening now?

Well, since I said that like a year and a half ago, yeah, I'm tempted to take a victory lap of sorts that you have to... You have to at least ask certain questions, and that's what I would want people to do. Oppenheimer and the nuclear scientists who wanted a global authority to control all the nuclear weapons and who thought after 1945, it was too dangerous for the US to have them and they should be handed over to the United Nations with a stronger UN, a real world government. And if you didn't hand it over to the UN, then we'd have a nuclear war. And so there was a certain parallel with the nuclear debates. We got partial global authorities where we, you know, regulated, controlled nuclear weapons. We never got rid of them altogether. So maybe, you know, maybe Oppenheimer's still right in the long run.

Yeah, I mean, Oppenheimer's that morning led to Atchison, Lilienthal, and it actually has kind of worked.

It partially worked, although, you know, it's only been 100 years or 80 years or whatever. But on the AI thing, yes, let's— I would always concede that there are a bunch of these existential risks that are serious. I think climate change is pretty serious. There are other environmental risks that are serious. I still think the nuclear weapons thing is pretty real. I think there probably are other technologies and AI is this very fast, very big one. And so there are existential risks surely that are also tied up with AI. And then the existential risk that I also want to always throw in the hopper and the balance of the discussion is the risk of a, you know, softly totalitarian one world government. And that also seems like, you know, if the whole world becomes totalitarian, there's no outside left.

That feels like this catastrophic singularity, which might not be reversible. You know, Soviet Union was a totalitarian system. At some point it could decay and fall apart because there was still an outside left. You know, if the whole world is North Korea, that might last for a really, or, you know.

Well, wait, explain to me, though, what you mean by the Antichrist. Well, it is, I mean, it's a sort of, I don't know, medieval, biblical concept of sort of a tyrant who will somehow rule the entire world at the end of history. If you think of it in a literary way, or, you know... sort of a creative way, you can say, well, how would the Antichrist come to power in different times and different places? And in early modernity, 17th, 18th century, perhaps the Antichrist would use science and technology to build weapons and take over the world. In my telling, in late modernity, we in some ways still think of the Antichrist in 17th century categories. We still think it's like a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller type person who builds nuclear bombs to to conquer the world. But if you think of it as a political dimension, the way I think the politics work in our society is that the fear of science and technology are far more powerful and that that's the kind of thing that would really crystallize things.

I don't think Greta is the antichrist. I think Greta Thunberg, I don't think she's the antichrist, but I think environmentalism, you know, there are real fears.

People pushing back on progress is what you're saying. Pushing back on progress, but then also pushing for these very, very powerful global political structures. Because something like climate change, it sounds like the sort of thing where you need a global regulatory authority.

So your big feel is some global regulatory authority. Yeah. And again, there are probably versions of that that could be good. You know, the nuclear ones we ended up with were definitely more good than bad. But there also are versions of it that can be quite bad. And I tend to think they're bad if they're not theorized. You know, globalization can be good. It can be bad. We didn't think about it a lot. And because we didn't think about it a lot, you know, there were a lot of bad things that came with globalization that maybe could have been avoided had we been able to be more critical about it. You know, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote this book last fall, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

And he's talking about AI. He's talking about AI. And it's, again, very precise, detailed on some of the risks, some of these scenarios. We can debate what the probabilities really are. But that part is quite detailed, quite technical. The part that's completely hand-wavy is it needs to be globally regulated. He's very clear on that. But then the details of how you do that, that's incredibly fuzzy, incredibly vague. And so I worry that we're not thinking about that. And so we're worrying about Armageddon. We're not worrying about the Antichrist. And my contrarian intuition is that alone tells you you need to worry more about the Antichrist than Armageddon.

I sort of have a personal question. A lot of people think you're kind of like spooky.

Or whatever it may be. Why using the Antichrist? Why does that help clarify things when even I look at you giving lectures on the Antichrist and I go, what's that all about?

Well, it got people's attention. So it certainly worked on that level. There are probably ways you could describe all these things in philosophical or more neutral, less religious language. The way the Federation of Atomic Scientists, they put out a short film after 1945, and it was one world or none. It shows a nuclear bomb blowing up the world. And You know, the way I often describe it is, yeah, one world or none. In a way, it's a very similar question to Antichrist, the one world authority versus Armageddon. But the reason I prefer the religious formulation to the, let's say, the political formulation, one world or none, without asking any questions, we sign up straight for the one world government. That's clearly better. There's no debate, no thinking through it at all. If you can reframe that question

Peter Thielas Antichrist or Armageddon, The point of it is not to be fatalistic. The point of it is, okay, we need to avoid both. They're both equally bad. We need

to think about all these existential risks. They're serious, but also the risk of this sort of totalitarian one-world state. And Antichrist or Armageddon pushes us to find a moderate third way. One world or none pushes us towards an immoderately powerful UN.

This series has been talking to builders, many of whom you help build. In other words, you Alex Karp or Palmer Luckey or Elon Musk. There's been a real backlash against the billionaire tech bro builders. And some of it is understandable to me. I mean, it's like, whoa, these people have gotten way too much power. They're out of control. Don't you worry about that too as much as other existential risks?

You mean power in an economic sense or power in a narrowly political sense? I meant both.

Whatever happens to us in the future, the future we're trying to build, there are very few people now controlling it who seem to have less moral guardrails than previous.

I was thinking about this a little bit in advance of your interview. My venture fund is called Founders Fund. I sort of invest in the people who found these things. You're focused on the builders. And in some ways, that's a better framing than the founders because... Yeah, it's somehow very important to start one of these businesses, but then the way they really end up having impact, the way they end up being transformative, for better or worse, is this enormous growth compounding effect over time. And it's more a marathon than a sprint. Yes, I'm tempted to quibble with all of your characterizations. Let's grant all of them for the sake of argument. What is the alternative? And on a corporate level, You know, the alternative to founder-led company where it's sort of this slightly crazy, creative, Elon-like person.

The alternative is a bureaucrat with an MBA degree, with a very bureaucratic board of people who never want to do anything. And so, yes, it is. It is maybe too much power in a charismatic leader or it is

Peter Thiela super lame bureaucracy. And my claim is it's a bimodal distribution. Those are literally the only two kinds of companies we have. It's, yeah, the charismatic, maybe dangerous, but

very inspiring leader who will do new things versus the boring bureaucracy where it's just going to be.

But what about in Apple? That after the charismatic founder, did it lose its way? Did it become bureaucratic?

It's an extraordinary story. But yes, in my telling... it did nothing new after jobs. And there are all these metrics we can look at. It was like, you know, it was by far the lowest dollar spend on R & D, by far the largest on share buybacks. It was just, you know, this pure, well-run value stock. And you probably, you know, the way Tim Cook, he was the anti-jobs. He was the zero charisma, efficient operator. And then it turned out, yeah, the The mobile phone was this giant invention. There was not that much more to do. And then it was just scaling and branding and building it out over 15 years or whatever.

I don't know. If you say what's good for the shareholders, they both can be good. But I would still say somehow Elon or Steve Jobs are way better for society than Tim Cook.

People always, when they talk about the characters I'll write about, They try to explain them by saying, oh, they just want money. I don't quite think so. What would you call your scorecard?

Yeah, I think there are all these different dimensions, but it is– I probably do like winning too much. I am really into ideas. It's not quite a hobby, but the closest thing to a hobby I have is having sort of interesting dinner conversations with people. I like figuring things out for their own sake. I sometimes rationalize it as, yeah, that somehow makes me a better investor. It probably has nothing to do with it. It's probably just an excuse for being somewhat of a dilettante or something like that. But yeah, I think of myself as just really intellectually curious.

What's the purpose that we're building for now? If we can have enormous amounts of productivity, is it that we're trying to preserve democratic freedoms? Is it human flourishing? What would you want your builders to have as their lodestar other than I can find the new, new thing in the era of AI?

There are all sorts of dimensions of progress that we could have as a society. And, you know, there's always this narrative I have that, you know, in some ways, progress, it's hard to measure progress in the aggregate. In some ways, it slowed down in the 1970s where we had enormous progress in the world of bits and somewhat less in the world of atoms. And when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 80s, it wasn't completely obvious at the time, but already in retrospect, most engineering fields were bad ones to go into, mechanical engineering, aero-astroengineering, chemical engineering, because the world of atoms was too slow, too regulated.

Nothing really dramatic and new happened there. Nuclear engineering was already very passe by the late 80s. And then there's still electrical engineering still had a few good years. And then it really shifted to just this, you know, computer science as the one field. That's instead of atoms. And so, you know, the hope that I always have is that somehow we're, you know, humans, we are embodied in this world. And the world of atoms in which we live is a really important world. And there's some part where going back to that, you know, it's... I know it's been very hard. I would like there to be more progress in medicine, in medical technology. Maybe the radical life extension project strikes people as too creepy, but could we at least cure dementia? Could we at least cure Alzheimer's or something like that? And then the hope is that somehow restarting science and engineering much more broadly will be stimulated more. by AI in part.

Well, one reason I'm sort of going to this notion of what is the purpose of progress, when you were interviewed by Ross Luthat, and he asked at one point, you know, do you really care if humanity survives? And you pause a long time.

You would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitating. Yes? I don't know. I would... I would... This is a long hesitation. This is a long hesitation. There's so many questions implicit in this. Should the human race survive?

But I ask that again. Is that our main goal, the sort of Asimov goal, that humanity survives? Or is that not?

That is, well, that is an extremely important goal. I don't think it can be the only goal. In some sense, you know, humanity can survive if we do nothing, or presumably, maybe things go very haywire, as I say, without growth. But yes, I don't know. I think Silicon Valley is always quite bad at the meaning of technology. And maybe it's not fully up to Silicon Valley to articulate the meaning. Maybe there's not a single meaning. Certainly, part of it has to be done in a way where we avoid existential risks, or maybe technology is even a way to avoid existential risks. And maybe if we go back to nuclear power, that would be a carbon neutral technology. So nuclear power is a technology we need to lean into so that humanity can survive in a more carbon neutral way.

The place where I pushed back, the reason I paused when I answered that question that Douth had asked is that the question I heard behind it was, you know, the Luddite question where maybe this technology is dangerous and, you know, why isn't it good enough for things just to continue the way they are right now? And we don't need all this improvement and all this change that might be dangerous. And then, you know, my intuition is, yeah, there are all these ways that things are far from perfect with humanity. And this was the core project of, the Enlightenment, 17th, 18th century science. It was the relief of man's estate. Life was supposed to be more than nasty, brutish, and short in Hobbes. It's longer. I don't see why it's not desirable for us to make it significantly longer still than it is. or at least to cure a lot of these terrible diseases that still exist, things like that.

And so, yes, that's sort of the other intuition. So, yes, I want humanities to survive. I want humanity to flourish. And then, yeah, there are all these dimensions where maybe this will not happen without progress.

We'll be right back after this quick break. Let me take it back to some of the philosophers who hit you. One, René Girard, the notion of mimetic desire. Explain what that is and why you feel the need to resist it.

René Girard, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford. And the human nature, the count of people is that we're deeply mimetic, deeply imitative. Girard liked to quote, Aristotle, you know, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. And then this is a way you can combine Aristotle and Darwin. So Darwin's saying we're linked to the apes. And then Aristotle says we differ from the apes by being more imitative and saying we're more ape-like than the apes. Because that's how you learn language as a child. You copy your parents. And then that's how human culture gets transmitted. And we wouldn't be humans if we weren't these incredibly powerful imitation machines. And then there also are ways that imitation can go haywire when two apes reach for the same banana. There are ways, you know, it can become extremely conflictual. And so, yes, in Girard's telling, mimesis is this incredibly powerful thing in the background.

Mimesis meaning mimicking, basically. Bad, bad forms of imitation. It's very generative. And then in various points, it also becomes destructive and You end up with sort of these very sterile competitions for status or for these positional goods that don't mean nearly as much as you think you do. I think it was Napoleon who said that it was amazing what you could get generals to do if you gave them medals or something like that. The psychological way one is tempted to interpret Girard, even though this is not what he would have done, but the psychological way you're tempted to interpret it is, okay, you have to sort of, think about avoiding this bad mimesis and you want to avoid getting caught up in these silly competitions that there's sort of nothing new, nothing creative that happens in that context. So that's the psychological intuition against mimesis. Girard as a Christian would have said, you know, it's actually out of your power to not be a medic. The best you can do is just go to church on Sundays or something like that. So he would have been skeptical of this.

The sort of in-between way where I always think about it is, Yeah, there are, there are parts of it that are very powerful. There are also parts where, you know, there's a wisdom of crowds, but there's also a madness of crowds. And in some ways, you know, I see one of the, I don't think it's necessarily a character of all the builders, but certainly a lot of the

Peter Thielbuilders I would admire the most are ones who had a somewhat idiosyncratic sustained vision. Maybe it came from certain

first principles, certain fixed ideas. Like Elon going to Mars, you know, it was somewhat out there, but man, it was not a socially conventional idea. But the way in which this was extremely generative was it suggested a whole avenue for growth and for building where if you didn't do it, maybe it would never have happened. You know, that's probably where I would still, I don't know, maybe rank Elon, and in some ways Steve Jobs as the two great non-mimetic builders. And, you know, Jobs put together all these pieces, and in some ways they were out there, but he combined them in a unique way to bring forward, you know, the internet-enabled phone.

All right, but listen to your answer. You maybe get a sense of why I asked it. Because when you say imitation, the imitation game, mimetic, generative from coming to be mimetic, This is language we're now doing with AI, which is basically, as Alan Turing would say, starts off with being an imitation game. Secondly, it's generative. And you say it's dangerous. Is there something about the creation of AI that René Girard would warn us against?

You know, I think his general intuition on technology is, was that we gave it too great an autonomy of its own, and that the real questions were these questions about the human beings that used them, and we tend to, you know, we talk about the nuclear bomb as though it was this godlike thing. But Bingo, don't you think he's right? But then, you know, maybe the important, you know, or an important dimension of the AI question is, you know, it's not what the AI is going to do, or but it's what's really driving the people who are building these companies. What are their motives? You know, what, what are they, they up to? So those are, yeah, those are the kinds of, um.

Well, it answered me those questions. Oh, that's, that's hard, hard to say. We've spent endless amounts of time, endless amounts of time thinking about it, but yet there's some, some dimension like that. That's hard to figure out, but is, is, is probably quite important. I, I don't know. I, I score them as far more good than bad across the board. I think they very easily get demonized and scapegoated. Let's say Elon, Dario, Sam Altman. I'll pick on those, let's say those three, Zuckerberg. But I think even in the case of AI, this question of who the people are that are doing it is a really, really important question. When you write your biographies, it's about the importance of these individuals and who they are about. And it's not just a idiosyncratic story that has nothing to do with the companies they built or with the world they're helping to shape. It's this very, very important question. The alternate view, and again, I don't want to simplify your work too much, but most of your biographies have the sense that these people are complicated.

They're still more good than bad. And the alternate view to it is not that these people are more evil than good. The alternate view is they don't matter at all and that there are no great men, there are no charismatic leaders. It doesn't matter who they are at all.

Peter Robinson And these people do matter, these builders. Does it matter that they avoid being evil? Yes. Yeah.

Well, I think yes on all these versions of that. Of course, you know, there's always a lot of complexity to that too where, you know, maybe appearing not to be evil is just a fake PR stunt at this point. And so maybe, you know, Bill Gates is into virtue signaling. Elon Musk is into vice signaling. And in our world, maybe you're more honest if you vice signal than if you virtue signal. So maybe honesty is a good thing. So you're actually a better person if you vice signal than if you virtue signal. So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of complexity to it. You know, I always, I always, again, this is not a pro-evil argument I'm about to make, but the qualifier that I always give on it is always a question, what's the antonym of good? And is it evil as in morally evil?

Or is it bad as an incompetent, you know, let's say a Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn't get many miles to the gallon and, uh, whatever a lot of our Trabi, the Eastern block cars that don't work are worse than a golf cart. That's a bad card breaks down all the time. And so it's better to be good than evil, but maybe if you're evil, you're at least competent and at least you're not bad. And the thing that. even with all the demonization of people like Elon, you know, where they get in some context, constantly described as evil and also irrelevant because of this, you know, we say there are no individuals, but to the extent they're described as evil, they're at least not described as bad. And if we're in a world full of, you know, bland bureaucrats running these companies, you know.

Well, wait a minute. Wouldn't you rather bland bureaucrats than evil people? Well, if the bland bureaucrat stands for bad, it's incompetent. The evil person gets something done. What side would you be on for that?

Peter ThielI'm ranking these. I'm good over evil. But evil is better than bad. By the way, this is the difference

between the Faust of Goethe versus the Faust of Marlowe. In Marlow's Faust, Faust is kind of this fake scientist. He's a fraud. He's a magician, sort of a trickster, a fake alchemist. He rips people off. He is a bad scientist. And he goes straight to hell. In Goethe's Faust, Faust is kind of, he works with the devil, so it's this evil place where he gets the knowledge. Then, you know, it does stuff. It does more good than evil. And Goethe's Faust gets saved. So, yes, I take... You know, I don't want to be, I don't think of myself as the devil in Faust, and I don't think of myself as Faust even. But I prefer the sentiment of a Goethe to that of a Marlowe.

And you prefer somebody evil who can get things done to somebody who's incompetent?

I think, well, I'm just making a broad social observation. I think in our society, that's the overwhelming preference to have because people, they experience just incompetence everywhere. You know, when you go to the DMV, you know, it's, I'm not sure you describe it as evil. It's merely bad. Bad is so much worse than evil. How would you define evil? Well, it's this, it's this, it's where we, where we stress, I don't know, this is very hard to fully unpack, but it's where we stress these, these moral dimensions that it's, it's morally questionable. You know, this was the way the conservatives attacked stem cell research in the 2000s. It wasn't bad science because it would work. They didn't question that it would lead to cures, but it was evil science because you had to do embryo harvesting. And then I think that's actually why they lost the debate because it was like, wow, this is actually going to work. It can't be all evil if it does so much good.

The conservatives won the debate about art in the 90s where the liberals were saying, art is supposed to be transgressive and it's really great art if it's a little bit evil, so it offends your sensibilities. Evil art is great art. Conservatives didn't fall for that. They said, it's not even art. It's bad art. It's not even art. It shouldn't get government funding. It's so bad. And so, yes, if you say it's bad, you get the art defunded. If you say the science is evil, you get it funded. So I I'm telling you something I think most people in our society agree with me on.

If you were to back a builder, though, where would you rank having a moral compass?

I rank that pretty high. I rank that highly. I would say let's– you know, I– I don't like investing in companies where it's simply a business. There's some transcendent purpose. There's something, you know, very important that you're doing. So, you know, Elon going to Mars is, I don't know exactly where I would rank that on sort of a moral good versus evil dimension, but it is transcendent. It is, it's somehow, it's not just a business. It's, we're not just, you know, a stock brokerage where we're making a few dollars and every time people buy and sell stocks. It's not just this sort of short-term coin-operated business. It has this transcendent sense of purpose. That's what I like.

And in this era of AI that we're worried about, what do you think, if anything, there are things that humans can uniquely do?

Well, this is the sense in which the question about AI is a question about us. What does it mean to be a human being? Someone like Chomsky, the MIT linguist. Somehow language was this core human ability and then somehow that seemed pretty good until 2022. Now it's consciousness. I think there is a hard problem of consciousness and probably. Vaguely Cartesian in that I don't think AI is conscious or ever will be. And so certainly one dimension where humans are different is we experience the world in a different way. We experience it consciously. You see a beautiful sunset. There's a human way you see a beautiful sunset.

And we're self-aware about consciousness, as Descartes would say. And if there were no humans in the world, I don't think the computer would experience the sunset in the same way And that would be a very big loss. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily the single thing I want to anchor on, on why it's imperative for humanity to survive. But if humanity doesn't survive, you would at least lose that. I think the Girardian intuition, we're also very relational. And there are ways, a very important part of our lives, it's not just this mind thinking itself, a la Descartes. It's the way we relate to other people, you know, in families and companies in our larger society.

And the relational dimension of what it means to be human, I think maybe it will be changed by AI. You know, I think in theory it should improve that. There should be ways we could get better at that. We could spend more time on that, you know, less time doing robotic labor in a factory or something like that. So I think these relational dimensions maybe are very core and will become more important. And yeah, if you replaced all the humans with computers, you would at least lose those two things. Those would be very severe. Peter, thank you. Awesome. That's it for today's episode.

I'm Walter Isaacson. We'll see you next time on The Builders. The Builders is a Kaleidoscope and iHeart production. This series is hosted by Walter Isaacson. It's executive produced for Kaleidoscope by Oz Wolishin, David Weisbord, and Mungesh Hetikadur. Sheena Uzaki is the producer. Julia Nutter is supervising producer. Eva Zorich is our consulting producer. Fact-checking by Eamon Whalen. Research by Gloria Thiel. Maria Paz Mendez-Hodes is head of video. Marketing by Christy Mirabal and Elle Lube. Production support by Dara Look Potts. Music for this series was created by Spencer Stevenson, a.k.a. Botany, and it was mixed by Steve Bone. From iHeart, this series is EP'd by Allie Perry and Katrina Norvell. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Conal Byrne, Will Pearson, John Sykes, Nikki Etor, Carrie Lieberman, Binky Urban, Julia Prosser, Jeremy Blum, Allison Goldberger, WYES, and ASL Studios. For more from Walter Isaacson, be sure to check out his newest paperback, The Innovators, how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. It's available wherever fine books are sold. And for more videos and podcasts from the frontiers of discovery, be sure to check out kaleidoscope.nyc.