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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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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.
You feel, you seem to feel, I don't want to put words in your mouth, that the most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so. And so I'm curious about... We've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated. There's tremendous advancements in robotics.
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