Peter Thiel: The AI Crisis, Europe’s Decline & the Battle for America

0:03Welcome to Berlin. Thank you.

0:15We'll come back to Germany. Let's switch to English now. Peter, you have discussed a lot over the last years the problem that, in your view, the West did not deliver enough progress, enough change in technology. you even spoke about stagnation that is a topic and a term that almost nobody would use these days it's pretty much the opposite people are discussing is there too much acceleration is ai progressing too fast so what's what's your take did you change your mind or is it still not enough i've changed my mind um uh to some extent uh let me first articulate the stagnation thesis which I started articulating 20 years ago or so, is that it's always very hard to measure these things because there's so many different dimensions of progress, so many different areas of technology and science.

1:14And the basic thesis was that since the 1970s, there had been a slowdown. There had been progress in the world of bits, you know, computers, internet, mobile internet, software, but not so much in the world of atoms. And most of the engineering fields that were related to atoms were not even successful fields for people to study. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, you know, aero-astro, nuclear engineering was already a bad idea by the 1980s. And that for a variety of reasons there had been this slowdown. I believed that this not total stagnation, but this broad slowdown in progress was an important factor driving a lot of things that were going wrong in our society.

2:04A lot of the politics have become more polarized because when there's a loser for every winner, it becomes this very zero-sum game and you get a much worse society. And of course, there were some very deep reasons why I speculated this had happened. But a big picture was that for decades, we had something like stagnation. There was a way that the internet was an important growth driver in the late 90s. It was bigger than anything else, perhaps not big enough to take our whole civilization to the next level. And then I think 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.

2:55But yes, the way I would defend the stagnation thesis is that now that we have AI, nobody disagrees with me that we were in stagnation for decades before. Yeah, it has been proven in retrospect, definitely. So these days, the perception of AI is swinging pretty much between euphoria and dystopia. And there was a lot of discussion over the last weeks about the collective warning that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk presented. and that was the monster could get out of control. What's your take on that? Is it, as some people are saying, mainly a tactical move, a marketing move, or a move in order to drive the expectations down with regard to big multi-trillion IPOs?

3:51Or is it truly the fear that AI could get out of control and could overrule human intelligence and mankind? Well, there are many, many different dimensions to the AI debates and the problems. And yes, there are these scenarios that are maybe science fiction, science fiction fantasy. Maybe they're somewhat more realistic where if you have something that in some sense is way smarter than any human being? Is there some way it can escape control? And we have, of course, all kinds of dystopian science fiction movies, Matrix, Terminator, things like that. And I don't even know how you speak about probabilities of things like that happen.

4:43I don't think the probabilities are very high. On the other hand, if the probability is even 5 % or 10%, that seems pretty bad. So there's something about the conversation that ends up pushing people very hard in a sort of defensive precautionary way. If it's about probabilities, there was recently an experiment to ask the six biggest LLMs, is there an extinction risk with regard to AI? And the predicted percentage was between one and 10%. Do you think it's just because the LLMs are based on human fears, human pessimism, or is it a real point? Let us, for the sake of argument, say that it is a real point.

5:30I think it's hard to argue that probabilities are 0 % something. I do think, but you shouldn't, it doesn't necessarily follow that you should always go slower and always go in the precautionary direction. Because if you do nothing, if there is no progress on any dimension, I don't think our societies work at all. And I've often said the middle class in the US, Europe, they're the people who expect their children to do better than themselves. And the sort of intergenerational progressive compact in our society was that there was progress from one generation to the next, maybe economic progress, material progress, progress in health progress, all sorts of softer social kinds of dimensions.

6:24And when that breaks down, I think the whole society starts to derange in very, very strange ways. And so, yes, 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. So I think the alternative is also far from neutral. I also think there's some degree to which you can never just turn the clock back. But then slowing it down is just unrealistic, or how could it work? I mean, I don't get it. If America is slowing down and China is accelerating, we are just strengthening China, but it's not just solving anything.

7:19It's all, yeah. In theory, you could slow it down if you had genuine, you know, deep cooperation across the whole world. But I think that would require like a one world government with real teeth, real force. And the sort of classical liberal part of me thinks that's almost, you know, that's a frying pan into fire. It's a cure that's worse than the disease. And then, of course, you can have fake global government where you have a lot of conferences to discuss it, a lot of somewhat empty statements that get put out. And then there's also, of course, a risk that it ends up being slowed down in the West and not in China.

8:06You know, the Pope recently issued this AI encyclical, or I would characterize it as an anti-AI encyclical. And again, maybe it was too harsh, but the rhetorical point I have on it is that the Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope. There's a chance people in the US will. And so, in effect, the Pope's encyclical was working for the Communist Party. I'm not saying he was an agent of the communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP. I spoke to two founders of big AI platforms and both said that they have evidence that the Chinese are spreading anti-AI content, particularly through American social media platforms, but also elsewhere, in order to turn around the American sentiment towards more AI skepticism in order to increase their advantage.

9:07advantage. Do you see similar things? Is there any evidence for that? Do you believe that? What's your take? I haven't studied it that carefully. I'm inclined to believe it. I'm also inclined to think that that's not the main factor driving it, that this is mainly what we're doing to ourselves. There's a way I'm tempted to say that Greta is working for the Chinese communists, and maybe she is, but she's more of a problem we've created for ourselves in the West. But is Greta's influence on the American sentiment that big? I mean, I'm surprised. No, I think she's passed her primes. But yeah, I think there are so many of these things that we're doing to ourselves.

9:52So we should be... I'm a very tough critic of China's. I think we need to take the competition, the rivalry with China very seriously. And then also, it's often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China. Yeah, but then why is it so negative at the moment in the US? I mean, I really have the feeling that if we are talking to our European colleagues about AI, as long as they are unable to learn and participate in the journey, they're actually pretty positive. In America, it's very different. People are raising posters and are protesting against AI. So it is almost a very anti-cliché of being American.

10:35Usually America is perceived to be pro-technology, pro-progress. And in that case, it is a bit the other way around. The next election campaign could be to a degree, even a campaign, which political party is protecting their people better against AI. Why is there such an anti-AI sentiment in America? Do they know more about it than the Europeans? Or has the American mentality changed? What's happening? Well, let me Let me do the pro-US version. Okay. This is where the US is the place where AI is happening. And then Europe is, we can debate how far behind it is. In my telling, it's extremely far behind.

11:11Yeah. It's extremely hard to catch up. It's obviously still a very fluid situation. But to first order, there's a lot happening in the US. China is a fast follower. And then Europe is extremely far behind. So it's not felt in Europe. It's not even felt on the level of corporations. If I look at something like one of the businesses I've been involved with for many years, Palantir, the sales to U.S. corporations have accelerated tremendously in the last few years because there's an urgency to get ahead of the curve and figure out how companies need to be transformed in this new AI. and there's still much, much less of that sense of urgency in Europe where there's still this inertia.

12:04We can wait. We can, you know, don't do tomorrow what you can say for the day after. Do you think in the long run is AI going to be good for democracy or bad? It is. That's a very big, very big question. I think... And I think the place where our democracies are in trouble, I always prefer saying constitutional republics or our broadly liberal societies, broadly free societies are in trouble, is that there's a way that we don't have a broad growth story of the future. There's a sense in which people don't think things are getting better, things have become more zero-sum. I don't think AI is the panacea for everything, but I think without that, you're just going to continue to have these sort of zero-sum parties on the extreme right and left game ground.

13:12Should we perhaps stop to discuss whether AI is positive or negative? I mean, I think it is almost like a knife. With a knife, you can prepare the most wonderful food and have a great dinner. And with a knife, you can kill a person. So if you don't want killings, you criticize murderer, but you don't criticize or you don't bend the knife. So why do we always moralize new technologies? I would say technologies are just neutral. You can use them for good and for bad causes. And it depends on us what we human beings are doing with it. Yes, I'm going to get in trouble for what I'm about to say. But I think we moralize way too much.

13:56And there's always a question I like to ask. What is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad. A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn't get many miles per gallon. A Truby is a bad car. It's less good than a golf cart, the former East German car. And so, you know, if you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad. And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done. If you contrast the Faust books of Marlowe versus Goethe, in Marlowe's Faust, that was the 16th century Faust story, Faust is a fake scientist.

14:50He's sort of like a magician, you know, sort of a fake alchemist, and it's bad science, and he goes straight to hell. In Goethe's Faust, he has a pact with the devil, and he sort of gets his knowledge by morally dubious means. But it still always works out more for the best, and Goethe's Faust gets redeemed. So I think it's better to be good than evil. I want to be very clear. But I prefer Goethe's Faust to Marlow's Faust. And then the moral question in our society is we have all these good versus evil debates and we're full of badness. It's most of the time, most things are not even evil. They're not even good.

15:40They're just merely bad. And so if you're in a world where 99 % of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent, that's the problem we should actually be talking about. Very few people would say about you that you are incompetent, but there are some people in a very polarized discussion that say you are evil. And if it is about you being evil, it is about democracy. And some people are portraying you as the anti-democrat, and they are basically all referring to one quote from 2009, where you wrote, I stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible.

16:19Can you explain why you wrote it, what you mean with it, and what your thinking today is about? And it's always very dangerous to write things. I know what you're talking about. The context was it was this article I quickly typed out one night. I sent it to one of my colleagues. I asked him to write anything controversial in it that I should not have written. And no, nothing controversial in here at all. And then the meta-level post-mortem I had was the fact that I asked someone for a second opinion told me that I had probably needed to be more careful in my wording. I did issue a correction two weeks later.

16:57So you can still go to the website where I make it very clear that I don't think anyone's votes are going to be taken away. I don't think the democracy will go anywhere. And what I was arguing for was a certain depoliticization, a deintensification of politics. The original article occurred in this sort of libertarian Cato online journal, and the point of it was directed against libertarians who put too much faith in politics and wanted to change things, change the world by winning elections and doing things like that. And I thought, you know, these pure libertarian, pure classical liberal ideas, I believe in them.

17:44I don't think they're easy to win in a democracy. I didn't say anything that Montesquieu or, you know, John Stuart Mill or any of these people wouldn't have said. But it was not, you know, it's not a claim that democracy is going to go away or anything like that. But isn't it that sometimes you simply have fun in being provocative and stimulate a debate? I do like doing that. I don't think that one… I think that one is more deranging than stimulating. So my reading of your personality is that you… I always try to push people. Yeah, but you care a lot about democracy. So you'd say you're not only not an anti-democrat, you are actually a person who thinks about how to strengthen, how to save democracy.

18:30Are you worried that we are going a wrong path these days? Polarizing of societies and weaker and weaker centrist leadership all around the world. Autocratic systems are basically achieving their goals pretty successfully. An economy in China that is a kind of authoritarian state economy is prospering. So if we simply draw a line at the moment, democracy is not doing particularly well. Sure. But look, I'm not a Hegelian. So we can always say there's a way where history seems to be going. There's a certain trend. And then it's not morally good. In Hegel, whatever happens, happens for the best. And so, yeah, I think there is a trend against democracy.

19:19There's a trend where these things are in some trouble. And what went wrong in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, it was two anti-democratic parties. It was the Nazis and the communists. In the 1932 election, those two parties got over 50 % of the vote. And once over 50 % of the people, you know, vote for parties that want to get rid of the democracy, you know, it's almost too late. You're really in trouble. We have a situation in Germany these days where you also have very strong parties on the very left and on the very right. In Berlin, the socialists won the election and Sachsen-Anhalt, a smaller state, the very right-wing party, AfD, won the last election in a landslide.

20:03And more and more is shifting from the center to the extremes. Do you have any ideas what could be done in order to reverse that trend? Or is it a trend that cannot be reversed? I don't know what you would do if you ran for office. I don't think I would be a good politician. It's not what I would want to do. I don't have great advice for the political leaders, the centrist political leaders in these countries. I think they systematically underestimate the scale of the problem. You know, in Great Britain, there have been seven prime ministers in the last 10 years. Nobody's had a plan for how to turn their societies around.

20:43They all think, you know, once I become prime minister, that's all I have to do. I have to figure out this complicated internal intraparty, you know, complicated game to become prime minister. And once I do that, you know, I can figure out all these problems. And then there are these deep structural problems. You know, in my, again, the technological stagnationist perspective I had is that there's not been enough progress. The societies have been fraying. The intergenerational compact has broken down. And this is what these things are reflections of. I don't think the extreme parties will solve things, but we need to take it seriously.

21:26So the Linke in the Berlin elections had got 25 % of the vote. Among 16 to 24-year-old voters, it got 47%. And that's, you know, eventually the young people are the people, you know, who will be deciding things in your society. That's a very bad trend. And, you know, I'm making the pro-Linka argument because you will not accuse me of being a sympathizer of the Linka or a communist or anything like that. So what's the pro-argument? Tell me. Well, the pro-argument is you have to at least take the issues the young people are talking about seriously. So there's some problem in Berlin where the rents are too high and it's impossible to build houses.

22:13Or, you know, the young generation finds it very hard to get ahead. It finds it very hard to be successful. There's a way that Germany is at Europe and some of the United States. These are gerontocracies. Their society is going to run for old people. Hello, this is Brooke DeVard, host of the Naked Beauty Podcast. I want to take a minute to tell you about K18 because it completely shifted the way I think about hair care. We're so used to thinking about longevity when it comes to our skin, but I hadn't really thought about taking that same proactive approach with my hair and scalp. That's what makes K18's new Future IQ Biomimetic Hair Longevity Serum so interesting.

22:53By month three, the serum was clinically proven to deliver fewer visible gray hairs and up to 19 ,000 more hairs, along with improved scalp barrier. It's powered by K18's proprietary multivital technology, the first synergistic multi-pathway system designed to address premature hair aging. You can find Future IQ at Sephora or get 10 % off your first purchase at k18hair.com with code Brooke. Thanks again to K18 for supporting Naked Beauty.

23:52clan chiefs. So I think that's where taking things seriously ends. Well, they don't have solutions. But all they need to do to win is that they can say, and this is something I often say too, is when you ask me what to do about the text stagnation, my simplistic answer is always, well, I don't have a comprehensive solution, but the first step is you have to talk about it. And so I don't know the exact debate in Berlin, but I could imagine the link is saying, okay, we don't know if our solutions exactly work, but we're at least talking about the problems. Nobody else is talking about them. So what's your take on the other side of the political spectrum, the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, the far right-wing party?

24:35Is that an alternative for conservatism, or are you worried about that development? How do you see it? Again, I'm hesitant to speak too much to the specifics of German politics, but yes, I think it reflects these failures of the centrist parties. It reflects a failure to find an economic future for Germany that somehow is inclusive and broad and works for the society as a whole. I don't think they have great solutions. I don't think they know how to balance the budget. Either the parties of the extreme left or extreme right. With the extreme right, there is another issue. It is about foreign policy.

25:23The foreign policy concept is basically pro-Putin, pro-China, understanding anti-Israelism or being anti-Israel, being anti-Semitic in parts. so well my you know my paradoxical the paradoxical thing I told you earlier today is that I think it's important for us to have debates about all three of those and so I think there can be a reasonable debate about Ukraine a reasonable debate about China a reasonable debate about Israel and at the same time somehow I do think the AFD is wrong on all three And that's, you can't be wrong on all three. Let's switch to the United States. You were in 2016 supporting Donald Trump.

26:15Ten years later, how would you analyze his achievements? How would you analyze his failures? Where do you stand today with regards to the last two years and then the first term of the president? Man, my facile answer is you should ask me in 10 years or so, and we'll see in 10 years how it all works out. I still think that in many ways it reflected a failure of the establishment to deal with these long-term problems the U.S. had with these growth problems with some of the challenges of globalization, with the endless entanglements the U.S. had in the Middle East that had not really worked all that well.

27:08And then, of course, there are all these things that you wish they had appointed more competent people. I think the two administrations kind of made opposite mistakes. The first administration brought in all these people who couldn't agree, and it was just all this internal fighting. the second administration I think had all these they over corrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests you got sort of an administration staffed by not very smart but very loyal people so there are all sorts of ways it's it can be criticized I don't but it also again it reflected a way that things had reached a certain exhaustion, and certainly on the Republican side.

28:08And I worry in the United States that the kind of exhaustion with the Republican establishment that happened with the Bush family that happened in 2016, we're about to see with the sort of Clinton-Obama center-left establishment. And the last three elections, in 2016, Trump, the sort of anti-establishment person, won the Republican primary. Hillary, the establishment person, barely beat Bernie Sanders. And then again, the establishment won in 2020 and 24. I don't know if they'll be able to do it in 28. And the Democratic Party is the more important party. That is the establishment party in the US.

28:50The Republican Party is always a little bit the anti-establishment one. So if the Democratic socialists take over the Democratic Party, that's a much bigger deal. And that is like, I don't know, the end of America. I remember very well a lunch that we had in 2016 when I asked you, why do you support Trump? And you basically said, because the existing party and the existing leadership is so dysfunctional, it just needs disruption. And that was an interesting thing that I could understand very well. Would you say now, 10 years later, we need disruption again?

29:31I don't want disruption of the democratic socialist variety. That seems catastrophic. But again, if I do it not morally, not normatively, just on a descriptive level, I worry that the establishment Democratic Party has failed as badly as the establishment Republicans. and so we are going to get this disruption and there is a risk that the U.S. will shift very far to the left. That's the real disruption we're going to get. So you belong to those who say the democratic socialists of America are a real option. They are a real danger. You once said it's the most kind of energetic and in a way the most successful political movement these days.

30:19And so it's young. So it's like pop culture. The history on it was, I looked this up the other day, but it was the Democratic Socialists got created in 1982 as a sort of fusion of these very fringe socialist groups and sort of members paid thing. It was like 5 ,000 people. It was a very small fringe thing. And in the 2016 campaign, a legacy of the Bernie Sanders candidacy is the membership of the Democratic Socialists, of the sort of cadre of the vanguard, ballooned from 5 ,000 to 50 ,000. The median age went from 66 to 33. And so it was this old socialist people thing to a young revolutionary thing.

31:04And yes, it has a certain amount of energy. It has a certain amount of charisma. You know, again, the established Democrats, they're all lame. They can't say anything. I mean, it's the same problem with the SPD, CDU people in Germany. You were an early supporter of J.D. Vance. You worked with him. You basically saw something in him that other people didn't see then. Can you describe what it was and why you supported him?

31:40I always, I'm always hesitant to overrate, you know, overrate my, my role in these things. I, um, I probably always have a very soft spot for smart people. So I thought he was thoughtful, open-minded, um, charismatic. And, uh, you know, he was, he was working for, uh, one of the venture funds I had helped start called Mithril and then wanted to write this book on the side, and I encouraged him to do that. It became this bestseller in 2016, and I helped him out financially when he ran for Senate in 2022. But I think I'm always hesitant to answer this question because I think it just detracts from his achievement in many ways.

32:27Now, the Republicans will make a decision sooner or later, the names about the potential candidates that are heard most often are J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. Who do you think would be the better candidate in order to increase the likelihood that the Republicans would win the next election?

32:54Well, I'm still advanced partisan. I worry that it will be very hard for either candidate to win. And so, I don't know. My pessimistic thought is that that's the wrong question. So the right question would be… Who's going to be the Democratic candidate? That's the right question. And would it be a center-left centrist candidate of the Democrats who would provide them with the better chances, or would it be a DSA candidate? Well, obviously, in a close election, a center-left candidate is probably better. If it's not a close election, it probably doesn't matter. And I think there's a decent chance that it will not even be close.

33:42If the Republicans get wiped out in the midterms this fall, then the Democrats will think that they will win no matter what in 2028. And therefore, there probably will not be as strong a firewall against Democrats. You won't pull out all the stops to prevent a Democratic Socialist from winning. So I think the Democrats will do well enough in the midterms in a month and a half that they will be indifferent to a center-left versus far-left presidential candidate. And then it's a completely open field, completely open question. And I had this discussion debate with Fukuyama at the end of history, and he doesn't fully believe his theories anymore, but when I told him that there was a good chance democratic socialists would win in 2028, he responded with absolute confidence, no way, can never happen, and I don't think history is like that.

34:44So you think from today's perspective that's the most likely outcome? Not the most likely, but let's say it's a 50 % chance. It's pretty high. It's pretty high. You are a fan of Millet because he's a disruptor, I assume. Can you describe a little bit what we, what Western societies, what America, but also what Europe could and should learn from Javier Millet? Well, I think we're all fascinated by Argentina because we worry that their past is our future, where you had sort of this, I don't know, it's not zero growth or decline, but subpar growth for a century. It's a complicated history of what went wrong.

35:31It was obviously the Peronist history with this very charismatic leader who had a lot of bad ideas.

35:42And then there were ways that it took a long time. In 1900, 1920, riches in Argentine was still a common expression. That's sort of gone out of usage. And then, yeah, it's an open question whether Malay will succeed in turning Argentina around, whether he will get re-elected a year from now. I still think he will because people sort of understand that it's so existential and you just can't go back. The problem for all of us is, is there any way we can learn from the history of Argentina? So it won't take us 100 years of decline to get there. You know, I don't like the accelerationist Leninist idea, which is Vladimir Lenin.

36:31The worse things get, the better they get because the closer you get to revolution. And then at the same time, the sense I always have in the US and Europe is people are upset, pessimistic, angry. it's never enough to lead to positive change and instead we just have this drift where you worry things have to get a lot worse before they turn around. But if you had to make a bet today do you think we are close to a turning point because what we are seeing now in America, in Europe, in the West the stumbling centrist governments, the British successful autocrats that this is a healthy warning call and we will recover, we will reinvent ourselves?

37:20Or do you think that's basically the beginning of the end and the beginning of a new world order where the autocratic systems are going to prevail? You know, I think you should always try to think of these things much more concretely, less abstractly. So let me just flip it around as a question to you. You know, will people get rid of Mertz in Germany? It's like a complete total failure any way you cut it. And then, I don't know, there's a decent argument. Nothing will happen to him for another three years because everybody else thinks they won't do any better. And so, yes, there's this. So that's an indirect answer that you think is more likely that we are going to deteriorate further.

37:59I'm not sure, but it's sort of an open question. It's amazing how robust the Merck's thing seems to be relative to how bad it seems to be. So I don't know. Yeah, that's probably my intuition is that things will keep drifting for a long way because the people who replace him don't really have answers to these problems. If you frame the macroeconomic problems, again, sort of a boring macroeconomic version is we have very large welfare states, the taxes feel pretty high to me. And then we have very big deficits. And maybe the deficits would be sustainable if you had 0 % interest rates. The interest rates are no longer zero.

38:47And so there's sort of a compounding runaway deficit problem. And you have basically three choices. Do you massively cut spending? Which is the Malay answer. Do you massively hike taxes? which was basically completely shut down our societies and all growth or do you keep going with the deficits to take the can down the road? And for close to 20 years, the answer has been number three. Ever since the 2008 crisis, we've just been borrowing more and more money. And then my intuition is we're close to point where that ends And then you're going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures.

39:41And the best idea Mertz has is just borrow more. Why do you care so much about politics? Well, I don't know if I – I think about it probably too much. I mean, I'm not a politician. Would you imagine to become a politician? Never, never, never. You're 100 % excluded. Look, I'm not sure I'm perfectly self-aware or anything like this, but I'm self-aware enough to know that I'm not electable. But it permeates our society. It is sort of like, I don't know, it's both toxic, but it's the air we breathe. And so, I don't know, I have a schizophrenic view on it. I think about it a lot and then I try to compartmentalize and ignore it as much as possible.

40:34what's your take on the kind of bigger geopolitical picture where should europe be there's a discussion about european sovereignty politically but particularly also with regard to ai and the economy the two big players are america and china basically in all areas not only with regard to ai one is a very autocratic authoritarian country the other one is a democratic country the authoritarian crunch is pretty perfect the democratic country is pretty imperfect so 10 years down the road who is going to win that race not only the arms race in ai but in the broader context also the race of systems. And where should Europe be?

41:31Neutral? From China's side as a colony or a reliable ally of America?

41:39I think it would be best for Europe to be a reliable ally. I always want to push back very hard on these sort of ways that this often gets framed as a sort of moral equivalence between the US and China. I always find that very, very offensive. But let me make a slightly different point. I think from an American perspective, more important than whether Europe is a super close ally or, I don't know, a somewhat allied but very independent thinking place is it's in America's interest for Europe to get its act together and for Europe to be more functional, I guess economy going, to be a part of building the future.

42:38And then the question is how to do that. There are probably, in various sectors, if Europe can build up its own industry, or it can even become a world-leading industry in some things, that'd be very good. If it's further behind, then probably you should find ways to work with America much more closely. So let me concretize with, you know, I don't know, there was this, in the late 60s, you had the Concorde program, which was sort of a British-French, you know, Not exactly a free market plan. You know, supersonic aviation started in the U.S. with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947.

43:25But Europe was behind, but you could get your act together and you could catch up and overtake the U.S. And, you know, the supersonic aviation industry, you know, was a European leading industry. And so that's not a free market thing, but that's something that I think the U.S. should be fine with, supportive of. That was Europe doing something. And then on the other hand, you had something like the French Minitel program of the 1990s, where the internet was supposed to be French. And it ended up, you were behind and you just dug yourself into a deeper and deeper ditch. And so if you ask the question about AI in 2026, is it like the Concorde or is it like Minitel?

44:17And if we were honest, my assessment is that Europe's further behind than Minitel was. unfortunately i i agree the question is why is that and how likely is it that we can change it what is your analysis why is it and do you have any ideas what europe what germany should do in order to get back to the map and get its act together the what the why questions are always overdetermined and much harder to answer. But let me, on a very, you know, one of the things in Germany that people always talk about in this entrepreneurship context is that there's a fear of failure, that people are too risk averse and things like that.

45:11And then, and maybe that's true, but the dimension I want to always push back on is perhaps there's also a fear of success, that if you have something that works, you're not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. And at some point, you'll sell the company or you'll exit or something like that. And so what's very striking is how few you know, great new companies have been built, you know, in Germany in the last number of decades. Here's a stat that I looked up, and this is, again, it's one particular dimension to look at. But if you look at the 50 wealthiest people in the U.S., and most of this money comes from particular companies, only 12 are Gen X or younger, people born 1965 or later.

46:10So it's You know, it's also pretty much dominated by old people who've had more time to compound their wealth. Germany, it's actually more distributed. There are 20 of the 50 people are Gen X or younger of the 50 wealthiest people in Germany. But here's the difference. In the U.S., 9 out of 12 of those people made their own money. In Germany, all 20 of those 20 inherited it. Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large, new, scalable company. And then, of course, I'm just looking at this very extreme, but for each of those people, they created thousands of millionaires in their companies, tens of thousands of other jobs.

46:53They added to the economy in lots of different ways. And there used to be this ability in Germany to build great new business. There was the Mittelstand. There were also much larger companies that got built in the late 19th, early 20th, even after 1945 period. And then it's really something about that has really broken down since 1995. And yeah, that's sort of, I don't have an answer to that, but that would be the kind of question I would try to think about really hard. Tonight, you're going to receive the Axel Springer Award. and when I informed you about that, you said something very remarkable.

47:36You said, thank you. I always tried over the last decades to get Germany out of my mind. Intellectually, I did quite well, but I didn't get it out of my heart.

47:54Hello, this is Brooke DeVard, host of the Naked Beauty Podcast. I want to take a minute to tell you about K18 because it completely shifted the way I think about hair care. We're so used to thinking about longevity when it comes to our skin, but I hadn't really thought about taking that same proactive approach with my hair and scalp. That's what makes K18's new Future IQ Biomimetic Hair Longevity Serum so interesting. By month three, the serum was clinically proven to deliver fewer visible gray hairs and up to 19 ,000 more hairs along with improved scalp barrier. It's powered by K18's proprietary multivital technology, the first synergistic multi-pathway system designed to address premature hair aging.

48:38You can find Future IQ at Sephora or get 10 % off your first purchase at k18hair.com with code Brooke. Thanks again to K18 for supporting Naked Beauty.

48:52Why not? What's still so German about you being born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967, living now for almost all your life in America? Why is there still this emotional affiliation to Germany?

49:11Man, it would be strange if there weren't. I think it would be much more strange if there weren't. But you left Germany when you were one year old, so you don't have any memories. My grandparents were here. In some ways, I grew up, I went to English-speaking schools in America, but spoke German at home. So I really, I grew up between Susschenstweibauten. And so, yes, there's a part where it's sort of understandable. All these reasons things have gone somewhat wrong, but it's also very important for us to find a way to turn Germany around. It's at the heart of Europe. In some ways, Europe is still at the core of Western civilization.

50:05So there's a crisis of the West. There's a crisis in Europe and Germany. Yeah, but you're shifting back to intellectual. We were talking about feelings, about your heart. So what do you love about Germany? What is it? I mean, the past of Germany is difficult. We spoke about the present and the future. That's also quite difficult. So what do you love about Germany? It's just part. I'm always bad at answering this question. It's just part of who I am. Okay. Tonight we will have two of your co-founders, Alex Karp from Palantir and Max Levchin, with whom you founded PayPal.

50:45So, Alex Karp also has this very, very strong affiliation to Germany. With Max, it's a different history. He's from Ukraine, but in any case, there's a European element in it. Do you think that these two guys played such an important role for you in your business life, but also in your personal development as friends because there is this common European denominator or doesn't that play a role? It's probably a part of it. I don't want to overdo it. I think there are a way that a lot of the founders of these tech companies, I think, are both insiders and outsiders. And so, you know, Alex and I both were insiders who went to the elite Stanford Law School.

51:41And then, you know, I was in some ways an outsider to America. Alex is Jewish where you always have a little bit of that as part of the background and it was somehow. Sorry I didn't get it he is Jewish but it has nothing to do with your background but it's a little bit of the outsider there's an outsider part and an insider I always say that the founders have both the outsider insider dynamic and there was a way you know Max was this super achieving straight-A student, this incredibly charismatic person, but then also grew up on the, you know, left the Ukraine when he was 16 years old, and they grew up in a poor part of Chicago, and then it was, you know, so it was just, you know, it was just an incredible drive.

52:39Being an outsider can really be an advantage. I think in your case— Well, I think it's always, I wouldn't say it's both, though. It's this outsider-insider combination. People always exaggerate that. They exaggerate the outsider piece because that's always, you know, in the way you're so plain, you're a big dumb and stuff like that. And there's also some part where, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley. Very few people did that. Okay, let's assume in this perfect mix of being an insider and an outsider, you have developed an overproportional degree of contrarianism. You love to contradict. I think, for me, the word no is the foundation of freedom and democracy, so I also love to say no.

53:19But I think in your case, it's almost kind of an automatic impulse. As soon as there is a consensus or people get close to a consensus, you say the opposite. Okay, so just say no. No, that's not true. I think that I don't think the point is to be contrarian for its own sake. I think because then you just look at the consensus and put a minus sign in front of it. That's not that interesting. You know, I think the real goal is always to try to think for oneself. And that's what I try to do. I don't think of it as just you know reflexively negative thing. How have you been able to develop that intrinsic strength to listen to your own compass and not being influenced so much by zeitgeist, by consensus, by the juste milieu?

54:21Do you have any explanation why you've been able to develop that superpower?

54:31You know, I'm always, again, I'm always bad at the self-psychoanalysis, but I, you know, I'm probably like interested in a lot of different things. And so it's like big picture history and politics and economics and science fiction and the future and psychology, sort of all these different things. And it's always, I don't know, this is sort of not a, in late modernity, we're supposed to be narrow specialists. It's the pin factory in Adam Smith where you have 100 people working in a pin factory and everyone's specialized in one narrow area. And somehow very efficient for people to be super specialized, but you lose sight of the big picture.

55:20And I've always wondered, how does everything fit together? How do we make sense of all these things? and maybe it's just sort of a, I don't know, a renaissance dilettante type thing that I'm rationalizing. But I tell myself there has to be room for at least one generalist in a world where everyone's hyper-specialized. And in that renaissance spirit of having many interests and many fields of activity, where are the areas of passion and interest that have no professional, no pragmatic, no business rationale that are purely kind of private, personal, irrational?

56:12Don't tell me that you don't have it at all. I don't, I, you know, I, I, I probably still play way too much chess on the internet all the time. And this was, you know, this was, you know, I was a scholastic chess player and it's this, I don't know, it's this very beautiful, somewhat dangerously addictive, somewhat dangerously addictive game. it's probably not equivalent to all of reality which is what I at various points of delusion in my teenage years like to say that everything in the world you know if you didn't play chess you didn't understand reality it's probably too extreme a thing to say but I don't know there are all sorts of questions that don't connect directly I think a lot of these political questions you know they're important they frustratingly feel largely outside of our power and so you know I think they're important I think they do somehow relate to business in many ways it might be healthier it might be more profitable not to think about them and to just focus on on a particular business you have now four pretty young kids to which degree did they change your life or is there anything that you already learned from them by watching them it's um it's always um it's always thinking about um and it really changes your time horizons on the future you know and it is um if we're in this, you know, if we're in this accelerating technological world or in this crazy world where we don't know how the world's going to make it till 2030 or 2035, you know, if you're sort of, if you're in this, you know, world of only adults, you can sort of pretend that you're just thinking about it year to year.

58:26But I don't know, my oldest daughter will be 81 years old in 2100. And so, yeah, you start to wonder what will the 22nd century be like. Talking about time horizons, I mean, one of the areas that you're particularly interested in and also investing in is health, longevity. Why is that apart from a good investment case? I mean, I'm also having a high degree of interest because I'm hypochondriac. I don't know what your motivation is. Is it only the business rationale or is there also a kind of personal motivation of something that we all have more or less a fear of death? Yeah, fear of death, fear of getting old, all these things.

59:15You know, I always push back on, it's odd to me that this is not more widely shared and that this can't be articulated more widely. And again, this was the optimism of early modernity, 17th, 18th century, was that science would relieve man's estate. Hobbes said, in the state of nature, life was nasty, brutish, and short. And we were supposed to make it longer and maybe indefinitely longer. and, I don't know, people like Condorcet or Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, they thought you could cure death, you can cure all diseases. And it's just this shocking social decline that we've given up on that.

1:00:12You know, people don't even think we can cure Alzheimer's. Why can't we at least try to do that? for me the discussion about progress has always two sides almost every progress in technology or wherever has a flip side and a downside in the case of health i just don't see it i think it is for me the only area where progress is only positive for centuries scientific progress progress in medicine has improved not only the lifespan, but the quality of our life, enjoyment of our life, everything. So in that spirit, could you share with me the most optimistic, the most visionary case about longevity?

1:01:01What can be achieved? Eternal life? 150 years?

1:01:16it's not clear why it shouldn't be, you know, it's not clear that there are any natural limits. We still have not, you know, there are all sorts of reasons people have become more pessimistic because, you know, certain things have been very hard to cure. Nixon declared war on cancer. 71 said it would be cured in five years. It's now 55 years later. And there's been some progress, but it's very far from. The AI is accelerating it now big times. But then there's always a question. I don't know. It's badly simplifying things. But if you think of biological processes as sort of irreversible and information computational processes as fundamentally reversible, if you could understand biology as an information science, then in theory you could find a way to traverse all these processes and then that's, you know, like computers can live forever.

1:02:32But is it then more in this physical sense that we really reverse the process of aging of our body and with that achieve a longer lifespan or even eternal life? Or is it rather in the sense that we at a certain point are able to download our brain and our consciousness? Well, again, I'm… And live in a different body or in a different form. I have a very physical, maybe Christian-informed view where I wouldn't find it acceptable to be uploaded in a computer program that simulated me. I don't think it would be me. So I tend to think our identity is very wrapped up in our physical selves. But yeah, no, I think the full Christian vision of this was, of course, that you were going to have an eternal body, and your soul would be transformed.

1:03:26You know, it was one of my friends, this 80-year-old mathematician, and he once joked to me, you know, he didn't know whether there was an afterlife, but he hoped that there wouldn't be because he didn't want to run to his ex-wife. And so I do think that, you know, in some ways, yeah, eternal life is very desirable. And then Christianity always aimed for even more. But the point with transhumanism and Christianity is, you know, it's not that transhumanism is too weird and too extreme. From a real Christian point of view, it's that it didn't go far enough. But let's assume that we would achieve eternal life.

1:04:09Is it really desirable or would we be extremely bored because everything is unlimited? Why being ambitious?

1:04:19I think the answer to all those things is it's better than the alternative. Okay. Um, so I don't think I would be bored. Good. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So what is then the concrete thing, the concrete innovation, invention, or investment that you have seen over the kind of last month or, or years with regard to longevity that makes you most optimistic? Can you share the craziest thing with us? I, I, I, I keep, um, I keep investing in, in these biotech areas. It is, it is surprisingly difficult. There are all sorts of reasons. There are challenges. But if I wanted to focus on a single one, it would be really trying to do something about dementia, about finding a way to slow or reverse declines in people's brains.

1:05:15And that's the one that I'd want to find a way to tackle in the years ahead. Peter to conclude I would love to ask you a question that you are asking almost every candidate you are talking to before you hire her or him or people that you find interesting tell me a truth that you believe in that almost nobody else agrees with I'm giving you a lot today already let's see give me one second take your time

1:05:54In any case, it's nice to see that it is also a tough question for you.

1:06:02There's always a meta-level version of this where there are all sorts of things that you think are very, that nobody believes in. And then you realize, actually, a lot of people almost do. And so maybe it's contrarian. And then we can sort of debate which is the contrarian one. So when I started giving these speeches about the Antichrist three years ago, I thought this was an extremely unconventional view that was very far outside the zone. And so I would have said that that's an answer. and now I would say and then most people would say that's a really crazy thing to talk about I would now say that it's actually it's not contrarian that most people think something like the Antichrist is right around the corner that we have incipient totalitarianism throughout the world and so it was less contrarian than I thought but then the meta level truth is I think everybody thinks, everybody says that the Antichrist is a crazy idea, and the reality is they actually secretly agree with me.

1:07:19Peter, thank you very much for the conversation. Thank you.