Billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel sits down with Jordan Peterson for a powerful conversation about why real progress has stalled. Thiel argues that the last truly groundbreaking achievement may have been landing on the moon—and since then, we've slowed down. He explains how fear, red tape, and over-specialization have made us more cautious and less ambitious. They dig into how society has shifted away from building and inventing, toward digital distractions and endless talk. They also explore what’s been lost as faith and meaning have disappeared from public life. From broken universities to status-driven culture wars, this is a deep and thought-provoking look at the challenges facing the West—and what we might do to turn things around. Peter Thiel is a German-born entrepreneur, venture capitalist, activist, and billionaire who emigrated to the U.S. as a child, eventually settling in California after years of moving between countries. A Stanford Law graduate, he began his career as a clerk and derivatives trader before founding Thiel Capital with $1 million from friends and family. Despite early setbacks, he co-founded Confinity, which became PayPal, launching a streak of ventures including Palantir, Clarium Capital, and early investment in Facebook. Thiel is an openly gay supporter of the Republican party, advocating for both equal rights and certain conservative policies, making his political stance admirably nuanced. This episode was filmed on March 31st, 2025. | Links | For Peter Thiel: X https://x.com/peterthiel?lang=en Read “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” https://a.co/d/fAfeXm8
Chapter 1: Why has progress stalled in recent decades?
So this question of, you know, is there really progress? We used to move faster. We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age. There is a dimension of science and technology. It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.
Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there.
It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it. It's something like the Christian anthropology.
Thank you.
So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today. And Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time. And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side. We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation because his thought tends in that direction.
He's a philosophically inclined person. And our discussion really walks through One of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world, and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s, and that there are deep reasons for that. Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor. Some of it is this hippie-like desire to look inside.
Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction. And so, He outlined his theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low-level mimetic envy predicated status games, which I think has been a very wise target of skepticism. We walked through his thoughts on
social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60, and also began to flesh out a metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise. And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain
well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic. So, join us for that. So, the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC, and you said a number of things there that were provocative, and one in particular that I wanted to follow up on. It surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it. You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now.
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Chapter 2: What are the consequences of hyper-specialization?
We moved faster every decade from, you know, 1500 on, it was faster sailing boats and faster railroads, faster cars, faster planes. We've stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. So, you know, that's one dimension. And so there sort of is a common sense way that we have stagnation. There is a, There's an economic way to measure it.
And then there's probably always a political intuition I have on this too, which is that perhaps if you have ideas that are taboo, that you're not allowed to discuss, my shortcut is to suspect they're simply correct. And so the example I always give is Professor Bob Laughlin, who's a Stanford physics professor, I think around 1998, he gets a Nobel Prize in physics.
And he suffers from the extreme delusion that now that he has a Nobel Prize, he finally has academic freedom and can talk about whatever he would like to talk about. There are all sorts of areas that are very taboo in the sciences. I mean, question Darwinism or question stem cell research or... question, you know, climate change. These are very dangerous areas.
But he picked one of those even more dangerous than any of those three. He believed that most of the scientists, so-called scientists, were basically stealing money from the government, engaging in borderline fraudulent science, or it was incrementalist, not worth much. You know, his area of special, his area of focus was high-temperature superconductivity.
And he told me at one point there were maybe 50,000 papers written in that area and maybe 25 out of 50,000 had actually advanced the science at all. And, you know, I don't even need to tell you how the, and then, you know, he started by, yeah, it was not just the abstract replication crisis.
He started by talking about naming people and, you know, this person has stole money and this person is a fraud. And I mean, I don't even need to tell you how that movie ended. He promptly got defunded. His students couldn't get PhDs anymore.
And then my hermeneutic of suspicion is if you have an idea like stagnation in science, which immediately gets you deplatformed, that's an idea we should take very seriously. So that's a political intuition I have on this. So I have a few of these different ideas that we've been a lot more stuck. It doesn't mean... It doesn't mean that there's been zero progress.
It doesn't mean that the progress we've had has been uniformly good. It doesn't mean that people's fears about the limited progress we have are unjustified either. Maybe all these things are actually part of the explanation for why the stagnation has happened. Now, there's a much harder question
And then there's sort of our cultural transformations that one can describe that at least coincided with us and were correlated. How causal they were is always hard to say. But if we sort of think of the Apollo space program as this... last great, you know, technological scientific project, there's some sense where July of 1969, where we landed on the moon and Woodstock started three weeks later.
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Chapter 3: How do fear and bureaucracy affect innovation?
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, you're not building weapons with it. And then, of course, even there, there's some sort of way in which the ideas on the internet, maybe they do translate into reality every now and then.
You know, what happens on Twitter or X doesn't always stay there. Most of the time it stays there, so it feels like it's this extremely angry, intense conversation, but every now and then it still translates to the real world. So the internet, you could say, was allowed because it was sort of a safe space. a place where the sort of violence could be contained.
And then even there, probably not totally, and even there, people felt it was like maybe too much. But yes, the sort of apocalyptic background of late modernity where, you know, you know, every microaggression has the potential to escalate to Armageddon is in the background.
And again, I don't like the stagnation and the risk aversion and all these responses, but there's a part of it that I think is understandable.
So it sounds to me, now that you've clarified that, it sounds to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that what you're grappling with is... more of an attempt to account for where we are now and how it's different from, let's say, the post-war period or maybe even the Enlightenment to the post-war period. Like, things have shifted radically. And it sounds to me like what you're outlining is a...
It's an attempt to characterize the nature of that shift, perhaps even more than an attempt to deny the idea that there's any progress. You said yourself when you were laying out your argument that it's very difficult to measure progress, but it's also undeniable that many, many things have shifted and we're not where we were, let's say, well, 10 years ago probably, and certainly not 30 years ago.
Well, I would say we are broadly progressing more slowly than we were 100 years ago. We are still progressing in some dimensions. There may be still too fast and too scary for people, but the big thing that has shifted vis-a-vis, let's say, the world of 1913, pre-World War I,
is that we feel like we are in an apocalyptic age, that there is a dimension of science and technology that has a dark dimension and it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself. And I don't like Greta and I don't like the full precautionary principle, but her argument that we have just one planet isn't entirely wrong.
And so you see this shift in part as a shift from the ethos of progress, the a priori assumption of progress.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the 1960s in technological progress?
you know i'm there probably a lot of dimensions where the environment can be impacted in very uh very radical ways uh we can probably build very dangerous bioweapons you know maybe that's even what was going on in the wuhan lab we can um you know there are there are dimensions of ai that are you know um potentially violent and very dangerous and you don't have to necessarily believe the the um
all these sort of weird pictures where it's this superintelligence that's somehow completely disembodied and is going to kill every last human being on the planet. But there are natural ways to combine it with weapons technology that feel... Unsettling. Unsettling. And just a simple example is that we have this drone technology. That's, again, a new form of technology that's...
come to the fore in the conflict between Russia and the Ukraine. And you have a human in the loop, but the human can get jammed. And so the natural fix is to put AI on the drones and turn these into more autonomous weapon systems. And that's... Seems inevitable. That seems like the natural, logical thing to do. And then... Even I, as a pro-tech person, have to say I find that somewhat unsettling.
Okay, so let me lay these ideas out again and summarize. So one of the threads that you were developing was, we'll do two at the same time. One was that the scientific process in terms of physical reality, maybe, in your view, peaked in the 1960s. And then you could imagine that you kind of outlined two, maybe, reasons for that. One was,
fear of the apocalyptic consequences of that technology, and an escape into various forms of abstraction. So some of those abstractions were psychological abstractions, inner journeys, but some of it also was escape into digital abstraction. And then you also made a case that the avenue for exploration in the digital realm was still open. And so maybe we could understand this.
And then in the digital realm, and then some ways, even these escape, weren't full escapes. So AI, yeah, that's a, it seems to be just about bits, not atoms, but then if you combine it with a drone, you know, the AI comes back to the physical world.
Yeah, well, we can, we'll get back to that, back to the overlap, but so you could imagine that, okay, so the scientific approach, the method produced an explosion of technological consequences. Many of them were dramatic in the physical world. There was kickbacks against that. One of the kickbacks was the apocalyptic element. The other was the turn away from spirituality, you might say.
But then there was also the counter position that always develops after any revolution is that things get tangled up in red tape in weird ways. Like the scientific... I was just in Uzbekistan, you know? they developed a pretty sophisticated industrial economy in the last five years. And part of the reason that they could do that was because there was nothing in the way, right?
Because Uzbekistan was kind of devoid of impediments to radical entrepreneurship in the aftermath of the communist default. Now, you could imagine that for a good time, the scientific method was so powerful that it was producing revolutions nonstop, and the legal and bureaucratic frameworks were lagging it.
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Chapter 5: How does Peter Thiel view the shift from outer to inner space?
It changes the way we form and develop human beings. And it leads to a society where, you know, science and technology no longer have quite of this former valence. There's always sort of an interesting big picture history question of how much science and technology
you know, how they were entangled with Christianity in the West, and were they sort of, they were somehow entangled, but was it meant as a compliment? Where, you know, you're sort of encouraged to understand God's creation, and this is sort of a way that it's, You know, it's a fulfillment. Furtherance. A furtherance of this.
Or was it meant to be a substitute where it was an alternate way to build heaven on earth without requiring God? Radical life extension was sort of an important part of the early modern project. Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet, all these people thought that you could perhaps indefinitely prolong human life.
And so I think early modernity, you know, it wasn't the only thing, a lot of complicated things going on, but a lot of it had sort of an anti-biblical valence. And you could say that 17th and 18th century scientists, you know, and again, this is where I think someone like Francis Bacon needs to be interpreted as a hardcore materialist atheist.
And it is, we need to stop religion because it's slowing down this wonderful scientific progress. And then I've had this Bacon discussion with a number of people lately. And they all think, no, no, that can't be right. Bacon was just the somewhat heterodox Christian.
And because in late modernity, where we find ourselves, and again, it's complicated to describe what's going on culturally, but in late modernity, it's the atheist liberals that are anti-science at this point. And so if you think about Hollywood.
Richard Dawkins' despair.
Yeah, you have to think of Richard Dawkins as a representative of early modernity. He is like a fossil from before 1789. He's the last of the Enlightenment. He's a fossil from before 1789. And Greta is more representative, or, you know, everything about the Hollywood atheist liberals, the movies are all about technology that doesn't work, it's scary.
And so to the extent, the way the anti-Christian argument gets made in late modernity is that it's, yeah, it's God's fault, but this time it's God's fault for putting us on this whole dangerous project in the first place. And it's like, yeah, it's like the lines in Genesis, you shall have dominion over the earth.
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Chapter 6: What role does Christianity play in scientific development?
And then you could say this is like, you know, and of course 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. If you sort of combine the Aristotelian and the Darwinian one, that's kind of a very, very strange thing in a way. And then the problem...
The good thing about imitation is this is how culture gets transmitted. This is how you learn language. Without imitation, nothing like the sort of cultural edifice that we have would work. And then the thing that's dangerous is it's 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, incredibly violent thing. And then, in Gibrard's understanding, the point of, you know, a major point of a lot of the laws, divine laws in these archaic societies was to, in some sense, stop imitation, to prevent imitation, to, you know, the job you do will be the same job that your father did.
if your father's a baker, you will be a baker. And this creates, you know, a guild system where you don't have this sort of free market competition between everybody and it all goes, everybody's at everybody else's throats. And then somehow, you know, what's happened in late modernity in Girard is that as these institutions have unraveled, there has again been this freedom to imitate like we did
before we had anything cultural at all, before we had invented, when the apes hadn't yet invented religion or these sacred structures that somehow channeled the violence. And so in late modernity, it's again, the mimesis is,
is, you know, it's what makes our society dynamic, but there are no natural barriers, and that's also, you know, what can give it an apocalyptic dimension or, you know, and again, there are ways it doesn't fully spiral into thermonuclear war all the time, or hasn't yet, but, you know, it has this super open-ended dimension where it can go in all these different ways, you know.
There's probably, again, we're throwing out a lot of different ideas here, there probably is you know, something about the loss of the transcendent, where, you know, if you have some transcendent reference, you're not in mimetic competition. Yeah, okay, I want to return to that.
And so 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 know, only worship one God, there's one God above you, that's who you worship.
The 10th commandment is the one about, you know, not coveting the things that belong to your neighbor, not being too your neighbor's ox or wife or, you know, this whole set of things. And it's basically when you, you know, 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.
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Chapter 7: How does societal fear impact scientific inquiry?
So, like I could ask you, what's worth sacrificing your short-term pleasure for? Now, the pleasure speaks for itself, right? There has to be something that you're giving that up for when you work, for example, that you regard as worthwhile. And it isn't also clear to me that that's a purely rational move. Now, there's one more sacrificial element. It's like, as you mature...
it becomes less and less about what the motivated sub-components of you want now, and more about how you find harmony in competition and cooperation in social groups. So, for example, one of the things children have to learn between two and three to be social is to take turns. And that's also a sacrifice because the default is, it's always my turn.
That's what it is like for non-social animals, for example.
Man, this is where I want to push back a little bit. Push away, man. I don't think you tell a two- or three-year-old this in the language of sacrifice. No, you probably act it out for them. It's if you don't take turns, something bad happens. You won't have friends. And you won't have friends. Or the other kids tell the kids that. Yeah, there's some very...
pretty fast, immediate consequences to it. And again, you don't say it's rational, but it's sort of, you learn pretty fast to do these things. And then the place where I'm uncomfortable with using the sort of language of sacrifice is that the evidence-based, non-rational part of it, if that's all we have left, I wonder whether those are the sacrifices that we should make.
I'm going to give lots of examples, but there's always a question about what should be done about academia. All the conservative academics are being expelled. It's so hard to do this. And there's a version of a debate I've had with a lot of
right-of-center people over the last 20 years, where it's, well, we just, you know, we need to just train more people with PhDs, and then they have to keep trying to sneak into the system, and have to somehow break in. Yeah, right. And there's sort of a lot of reasons to think that it's hard to do or might not work, but
But the way I push back on it is it strikes me as an irrational kind of sacrifice. And so from the point of view of a young person who is going to be a right-wing academic with a PhD and will be completely unemployable, that's not a rational sacrifice they made. It's a very foolish choice that perhaps this language of sacrifice confused things.
And then the non-sacrificial move is roughly like what you yourself did with the University of Toronto, wherever you were, where it's, at some point, I am not putting up with these silly sacrifices they're making me make in academia. I'm not sacrificing or I'm not playing by all their silly rules. And I think that was the correct thing to do.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from the past about progress?
Right, that's why he says his yoke is light, which is a weird thing to say when it's an invitation to the cross.
But you have to, you know, the non-sacrificial way I would say it is, yeah, if you believe in a literal sacrifice, you know, eternal life. That's one sort of thing. If you think these are just some sort of Jungian archetype story, then you end up with much more of sacrifice qua sacrifice as a really high value. But that's why I would always interpret the Orthodox Christian message as
as very anti-sacrificial, very non-sacrificial. And maybe, I don't like the word rational, but just you're making a good choice, a wise choice.
Okay, okay, got it, got it. Okay, so I'm gonna stop us here. And so this is what we're gonna do on the Daily Wire side. All you watching and listening know we do an extra half an hour. I want to continue our conversation about the faith of a child, but I also wanna ask you, why you think, if you think it's true, that you are temperamentally inclined to focus on the dark side.
And I'd like to know what the consequence of that has been. Because that's something we actually share in common. You know, unlike Piaget, I'm a psychopathologist. He was a developmental psychologist. And I've always been interested in the extreme case. And so I'd like to talk to you about that.
this faith issue that you just described, I'd like to talk to you a bit more about Christianity, and I'd like to talk to you about what it is you think that it is about you that's focused you on that, on the more apocalyptic and dark edge of things. So, all right, so everybody who's watching and listening, well, this part of the conversation has come to a halt.
And thank you for everybody here in Scottsdale for making this possible and The Daily Wire. We're going to continue for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side with the topics that I just described. Thank you very much for coming to see me today and to talk. We obviously just barely got going.
Just got started.
Thank you.
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