Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy

Science isn't just in the lab, it's in homes, classrooms, and even kitchens around the world.

Join me, Alicia Wainwright, as we tell stories of health and discovery shaped by lived experience at the heart of global breakthroughs.

Listen to When Science Finds a Way from Welcome, wherever you get your podcasts.

Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did.

The Sausage McMuffin with Egg Extra Value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5.

Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

Prices and participation may vary.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I remember seeing Peter Thiel speak during the 2016 Republican convention and being interested in that, but also kind of confused.

Good evening.

I'm Peter Thiel.

I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships.

I'm not a politician, but neither is Donald Trump.

What was this man known for being obsessed with the fantastical future?

A billionaire founder of PayPal, early investor in Facebook, a guy who dreamed of living on Mars.

What was he doing in this room full of nostalgics?

We don't accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.

In that 2016 speech, he complained about fake debates and pointless culture war fights.

When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union.

Now we are told, now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.

This is a distraction from our real problems.

Who cares?

This was an interesting choice for a room full of Trump supporters.

Thiel seemed like a man testing out a new kind of political influence.

During Trump's transition, Thiel kept an office in Trump Tower, but over time, he became disenchanted with the former president.

Trump did not turn out to be the revolutionary Thiel had hoped he might be.

Still, Thiel kept giving talks in front of conservative crowds, testing out applause lines about, say, the quest for diversity and how it's evil and silly, or how the humanities have become transparently ridiculous, as he put it.

In this campaign, Thiel hasn't given any pro-Trump speeches or publicly said who he will support.

It's unsettling, like having a panther lurking under the American political system, funding who knows what.

You just don't know when or where he will strike again.

So when I heard that Atlantic staff writer Barton Gelman had several long interviews with Peter Thiel,

I was curious if all those hours of talking would reveal what Thiel's next move would be, particularly with Trump back in the race.

I asked Bart to join me in studio, and it turns out that Peter Thiel did in fact have a very strategic reason for wanting to talk to Bart.

And it was a weird one.

It came out after we had already been talking for several hours.

I finally asked him, why would you talk to mainstream media magazine like The Atlantic, which you clearly see in opposition to your worldview?

And he said that it was because he had decided to commit himself not to participate in the 2024 election, not to back any of the candidates, either in the primaries or in the general election.

And he didn't trust himself to stick by that decision unless he committed himself in public.

By talking to you, it makes it harder for me to change my mind.

My husband doesn't want me to give him any more money, and I know they're going to be pestering me like crazy.

And by talking to you, it's going to lock me out of the cycle for 2024.

And I'm just giving you the key to the safe.

And I can't get access to the money to give to these people.

And I might be too weak to do it on my own.

That's so funny.

Where did you put the key, Bart?

Yeah, I better not say.

It's like a new role, journalist, as accountability partner.

Yes, accountability partner.

But I also think he just made the decision that people often do when they know someone's going to write a profile.

And he figured he would come off better if he participated than if he didn't.

Yeah.

It's a funny moment to do a profile when someone's receding, but I imagine you had some instinct that he would continue to be politically relevant.

Right.

And also, he's not just important for his money.

He has been an influential figure for his ideas, and he likes to be provocative.

He doesn't necessarily like the label contrarian, but he often lines himself up against whatever he considers to be the latest conventional wisdom.

And he does tend to move the needle on the debate.

All right.

Let's learn a little bit more about how his mind works.

Like a lot of Silicon Valley dreamers, Thiel was really influenced by a very particular era of sci-fi.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, Thiel grew up reading the sci-fi of 50 and 60 years ago.

He read a lot of Asimov, he read Heinlein, he read Clark, but especially he read Tolkien.

And he has said that he read The Lord of the Rings

10 times as a teenager, and it clearly just captured his imagination because he comes back to it over and over again as an adult.

He's known for naming his companies after things in the Tolkien Middle-earth universe.

But it's more than that.

It's a sense of wonder that he never got over and that I think could fairly be said he...

he's sort of failed to adapt as an adult to the disappointments of the non-fictional world.

Wow, that is so interesting.

Like, how did that work in practice?

Did this love of science fiction actually concretely influence his real-world financial investments?

Yeah, he puts a lot of money into

his sort of science fictional aspirations,

extraterrestrial space, remarkable advances in health and medical care, and particularly in longevity.

And he is disappointed that all these

great ambitions to improve humanity, to change the world, didn't come to fruition.

So is that the pattern, even starting with his first great success, which is PayPal?

It begins as a grand ideological project and then it ends as something else.

So I'd start back a little further, which is in high school and college.

He was very ambitious, valedictorian of his high school class.

He got into Stanford, checked all the boxes, took a job in a big law firm and hated it, took a job in a big financial firm and hated it.

And he went back to Silicon Valley, where he'd grown up.

He is a libertarian.

And he was going to create a new currency.

He joined a brilliant computer scientist named Max Lifton, and they created the company that later became PayPal.

It turned out to be a really good way to pay for online purchases.

And he sold it for something like a billion and a half dollars and made his first fortune that way.

So even though all these things to many people would be huge successes, like starting PayPal, going to Stanford, it sounds like he doesn't find them all that fulfilling.

That's right.

And he later created a fellowship named after himself in which he chooses people each year and gives them $100,000 to invest in a new business in exchange for them dropping out of college.

Right.

Okay.

So Thiel made his first fortune with PayPal.

He goes on to invest in Facebook and founded all these companies since then.

Have any of these successes scratched the itch for him?

Well, that's the problem for Peter Thiel.

He does not consider that to be world-shaking change.

And he has tried to find breakthroughs all across the world of technology.

And he just hasn't found the companies that would bring his science fiction dreams to reality.

He thinks that we've stagnated.

For example,

you can't cross the Atlantic any faster now in an airplane than you could back then.

Right.

So his tombstone would be like, where's my jetpack?

I mean, that seems to be the driving principle.

Give me my jetpack.

Right, exactly.

He created a venture capital firm called Founders Fund with a couple of partners.

And in their sort of statement of purpose, they famously said, we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters.

Right.

I mean, one way that he's interesting is, or maybe impressive, is he doesn't just complain.

He's like, oh, I'm just going to start a whole new society and make it different.

I'm, of course, thinking of this whole seasteading idea.

Can you talk about that?

He became enamored of this idea that you would build these little islands or even artificial platforms in the sea outside of the national waters of any country, and people would come to live there.

And they would be under nobody's sovereignty but their own.

Basically,

libertarian utopia.

And he put a lot of focus on that for several years and then became disappointed that it wasn't getting anywhere.

And he stopped funding it.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, but it's interesting to hear how he talks about it.

I love that question you asked him about his possible role in this seasteading society or whatever it is.

Aaron Trevor Barrett, in the days when you had the most sort of, if you would agree with calling it, a romantic attachment to the idea of seasteading, did you ever imagine yourself as, you know, the president of the the monarch, the baron of some seasted?

Aaron Powell, yeah, in theory that sounds pretty cool.

And then in practice, are you just adjudicating all kinds of crazy disputes people have?

Or,

you know,

what is that actually

you know, what that actually would mean in practice would I think be very, very, very different.

But yes,

sure.

Again, in theory, yes.

Why would a libertarian who essentially disdains government want to be in charge of the government?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, right.

I mean, look, one of his friends had joked on Twitter that 100% of founders have envisioned creating their own countries.

I mean, he is, after all, a guy who wants to be in charge and run things.

But

he is

so disdainful of the actual everyday work of governing that when he pictures the job, he immediately sort of turns away.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, I did find that interesting, that there's this disdain of government, but it's not actually a disdain of government.

It's a disdain of the bureaucracy of government.

Aaron Ross Powell, I think that's right.

Although I think there's also, frankly,

an immature

wish for a world in which government doesn't need to exist.

I mean, go back to Middle-earth and Lord of the Rings.

There effectively is no government in that world.

Extraordinary people rise to their destinies and do great things.

And there's a struggle for power.

But people who know what to do just go and do it.

And it's heroic individuals who make those choices.

And that is, I think, an underlying theme of the way he wants to live his life.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So the government is sort of irrelevant and maybe humming in the background?

I think that's right.

Yeah.

People who are trying to figure out what he really means when he talks about government See see

Curtis Yarvin, he's a friend of Thiel's, and he watched the 2016 election at Thiel's house

and is a neo-monarchist

who believes

that an autocratic figure, populist figure, should rise up, seize the reins of government,

strangle the independent media and rule the country as a monarch.

And Thiel has described him as an interesting thinker.

Now, some of the conversations you had that I found the most interesting and somewhat intimate were about death.

I know that many of these Silicon Valley founders have this idea that death is a nuisance and can be conquered.

Peter Thiel is one of them.

He signed up as a client for something called Alcor.

Can you explain what that is and what his relationship with it is?

Yeah, their mission is

to freeze people upon their death and preserve them cryonically until the world and technology evolve enough that they can be revived.

And Teal has signed up the moment he's declared legally dead, that team of technicians will immediately hook him up to a breathing machine and to recirculate his blood to protect the brain and then inject him with cryonic preservation fluids and he will be placed into a freezer in the hope that one day he will wake up into a new world.

Wow.

It's like the spectacular opposite of a do not resuscitate order, but the billionaire addition.

You asked him about Alcor and the conversation got somewhat personal involving his husband, Matt, and Wills, and it was very interesting.

I mean, his feelings about death, his squeamishness about death maybe emerged in that conversation.

Aaron Powell, as things stand right now,

if God forbid you keeled over right here, right now,

in a very short time, your body would be transported to what, Scottsdale and put into a tank?

I don't know if that would actually happen.

Why not?

I don't even know where the contracts are, where all the records are, and so.

And then, of course,

you'd have to have the people around you know where to do it, and they'd have to be informed.

I haven't broadcast it.

You haven't had that discussion.

I don't mean to pierce into his private area, but I mean, have you not discussed this with Matt?

It's the sort of thing I don't want to talk about because I don't want to think about my death.

Yeah.

But I mean, you've got a will, I presume.

That took a long time.

Didn't want to do that.

I think I didn't have one until like

some point past 40.

Wow.

I don't even want to think about doing a will.

That's like a defeatist thing to do.

A defeatist thing to do.

Wow.

What did you read off him in this exchange?

Well, it went on for a while, and

there came a point when I basically said, don't you want your husband in the tank next to you?

And he said in a very kind of rattled voice that he would, you know, I will think about that.

And then he sort of picked his hand up and gave me kind of a stop sign, like he was done talking about that.

And what's that about?

Aaron Powell,

it's about

his complete squeamishness on the subject of death.

That,

you know, he told me at one point

he doesn't spend nearly enough time on defeating death.

He doesn't spend nearly enough money on technology that would do that.

And every time he does pause to think about it, he thinks he's not doing enough.

There was a great moment in the exchange.

At some point, you just said what most of us think about death.

You just said it.

And he did not respond in the expected way.

We're all at some very deep level terrified of death.

I think there's no naturalistic way to deal with death

is still the thing I would say.

So

I think if you're just terrified of death, that's probably very low functioning.

I think the more common thing is we figure out ways not to think about it.

I mean, terms like low functioning, spending more money,

these are business terms.

I mean, it sounds like we're looking for a, you know, neoliberal business solution for death.

Like we have this problem.

Let's just put our heads together and come up with a capitalist solution.

Is that what's going on here?

You know, he once wrote that he rejects the ideology, was his word, the ideology of the inevitability of death of every individual.

And so I asked him how science fiction and fantasy novels of his youth had influenced his thinking on mortality.

He was very influenced by the Tolkien Lord of the Rings books, where it's again sort of complicated, and there are all these ways where

trying to live unnaturally long goes haywire, but you also have these immortal beings, the elves.

They can die, but they can potentially live forever.

They're basically.

I think

the main difference is just they're humans that don't die.

It's much more complicated than that.

So why can't we be elves?

Why can't we be elves?

You asked him, why can't we be elves?

And he echoed you.

He was clearly right there with you.

What did he mean?

He had a look on his face like, yes, you've hit the nail on the head.

It was wistful, really.

It was, yes, that's exactly what I'm wondering.

Why can't we be elves?

Like you read my mind kind of look.

Yeah, like you read my mind.

And I really think that,

you know, when he reads Tolkien, he imagines himself as one.

And the elves are not only immortal, they're stronger and more agile and wiser than humans in Lord of the Rings.

And I think he aspires to that.

Yeah, I mean, I get it.

It's intoxicating to think that we could conquer death.

And there's, I guess, something beautifully aspirational in that.

But I also have to say, I listen to this stuff and it feels like the opposite of intellectually sophisticated.

Like it feels more like a never growing out of boyhood situation or a never incorporating the difficult realities of human life situation.

And I guess like I'm stuck there.

I'm just not sure which one of these it is.

I'm right there with you.

And I tend to think that there's more than a little bit of both going on here.

There is a youthful imagination that he's never sort of shaken off and said, well, that's not the real world.

And then there's a degree of hubris in imagining that you can make it come true.

Yeah.

Although he's not by temperament, he doesn't come across as an optimistic,

you know, can-do American type.

He comes across as dark.

Like his disappointment feels stronger than his optimism in a lot of the way that he talks.

But his companies are founded on the idea of big progress.

He's extremely excited right now about a company that's still in stealth mode, and he asked me not to name it, but it is researching breakthrough medical technology.

I mean, that's the kind of thing he's looking for.

He's looking for revolutionary improvements.

Right.

So there, he doesn't give up on the idea of making this magic real.

Right, exactly.

Well, what happens when you apply magical thinking to the American political system?

That's after the break.

Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs.

That's why you need Shopify.

They'll help you create a convenient, unified command center for whatever your business throws at you, whether you sell online, in store, or both.

You can sell the way you want, attract the customers you need, and keep them coming back.

Turn those what-ifs into why-nots with Shopify.

Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com slash specialoffer.

That's shopify.com slash special offer.

Attention, all small biz owners.

At the UPS store, you can count on us to handle your packages with care.

With our certified packing experts, your packages are properly packed and protected.

And with our pack and ship guarantee, when we pack it and ship it, we guarantee it.

Because your items arrive safe or you'll be reimbursed.

Visit the ups store.com/slash guarantee for full details.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, pricing, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

Bart, Peter Thiel is a billionaire who doesn't just put his money into startups.

He's invested in campaigns.

So let's get into that.

He spoke at the 2016 Republican convention.

He became a major donor to the Trump campaign.

What do you think he learned from this fast entry into mainstream presidential politics?

By 2016, he had lost confidence that he could change the world through being an entrepreneur.

So when Don Trump Jr.

noticed his name on the delegate list to the Republican National Convention and called him and said, would you like to speak?

Trump did not actually have exactly an A-list of speakers at his convention.

He decided to do that, and he decided to make a million-dollar contribution to the Trump campaign.

And he admitted that he didn't agree with Republicans on everything, but he thought that no one else was talking about the big problems.

And he said a fascinating thing.

He said that he has believed the most pessimistic candidate would win in a presidential race because he thought that a realistic candidate would be pessimistic.

And yet it all went into the usual cycle, which is that it landed in tremendous disappointment.

What was the lesson for him?

Well, the lesson was that he had placed his hopes in a figure who didn't deserve them.

He basically found that what he had projected on Trump and the hope that he could

tear down what needed to be torn down in government and build up the good parts that

he had put his faith in the wrong man.

Right.

And I asked him whether

he was bothered by Trump's effort to overthrow the election.

He said, well,

I don't believe the election was stolen by Biden.

And I said to him, I thought that that was so important that if he didn't think it was important, I wanted to know why.

He started and stopped his answer and finally said.

Yeah, there were lots of crazy things that happened in 2020.

And there were,

I don't know, some deranged protesters that stormed the Capitol.

And we had riots in all these cities.

And we had a lot of crazy things that happened that year.

But

I wouldn't rank it even in the top 10 issues in 2023.

And if that's the most important issue in the 2024 election,

wow, we're just not talking about anything that matters.

Interesting.

Maybe he thinks of this as like we're all perseverating on a business problem that we already solved.

Yeah, and I also think

the

ideal of democracy is not especially important to Thiel.

He does not fundamentally trust the people to make the right decisions or to protect freedom.

Right.

And do you think that's truly the end of his involvement in presidential politics?

I think he's going to stay out of 2024.

I doubt if it's the end.

He has these cycles of enthusiasm for politics and then disappointment, and then he comes back into it again.

What about his future as a cultural figure, a figure on the cultural right?

Thiel himself is gay in a gay marriage.

Polls are increasingly showing month by month that Republicans are moving away from supporting gay rights that had had solid support.

How does he reconcile that?

I think he has some trouble with that.

I mean, he says gay bashing is a bad idea or it's a distraction, but he pivots to how Democrats are abusing that issue to try to recruit people to the rest of their evil agenda.

Yeah.

It's funny because there are portions of your interview in which he's so nuanced and thoughtful

and really engages with the questions.

What was your experience of talking with him?

Like, did you enjoy it?

Do you think he enjoyed it?

Aaron Powell, I found him quite personable.

He did not display the kind of big ego that conveys,

I'm a billionaire and you're not, I'm a big wheel and you're just a journalist.

He was pretty relaxed.

He gave a lot of his time, which surprised me.

He was more open to hard questions than lots of big famous people are.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And did you come out at the end with a different impression of him than when you went in?

Well, as he well knows, I think his political agenda, his political philosophy is

on the wrong side of things.

And some of his views I find personally, politically repugnant, but I found him to be

a more personable, well-rounded human being than I knew before I met him.

That's always a good surprise, particularly these days.

It doesn't happen that often between people who think differently.

I wonder in the days after the interview, when you were out of the surprise of his ability to talk so freely.

What do you think he didn't see or didn't understand

about the world?

I think he has

a failure of imagination about

how difficult life is for so many people on this planet.

He's just not very interested in the problem of inequality.

We talked about philanthropy, and he doesn't feel especially bound to help people who haven't had those resources or that good fortune.

He told me that he

had been approached to join the Bill Gates and Warren Buffett billionaire's pledge to give away more than half of your fortune, and he decided not to sign up for that.

I mean, you could also say if he gives it away, he can't take it with him.

And he does, in some ways, hope to take it with him because he hopes not to die the regular kind of death, but to stave that off indefinitely or to revive after his death.

Right.

So you'll need that money.

The same way the pharaohs might have needed their gold.

Now,

you know, people who are perpetually disappointed, disappointed over and over again, often at some point, they reach the place where they give up.

Do you think that will happen to him or he'll just keep finding new arenas to try?

I tend to think he's going to keep trying.

He's a very driven man.

You don't get to be a billionaire in his field if you're not driven.

And he is constantly looking for new ideas and new possibilities.

And I don't see that changing anytime soon at all.

Bart, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank and Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Babe.

It was engineered by Rob Smirciak and fact-checked by Will Gordon.

The managing editor of Atlantic Audio is Andrea Valdez.

I'm Hannah Rosen.

We'll be back with new episodes every Thursday.