Peter Thiel

It was a tagline we had on our venture capital website. They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. It was more a commentary on technology that we were promised these massive breakthroughs that would transform the way the world works. And then we got sort of incremental communication technologies but not world transforming. And so I do think flying cars would be a good thing. I think Elon's objection was they were too noisy and then of course the question is can you design them so they're not so noisy. So there's always, what are the actual limits on the technology.

But they're sort of iconic for can we have a Jetsons future? Can we have a future where things look really different? And the striking thing is that we live in a world that doesn't look that different from the 1980s. Again, we're looking at screens, we're distracted by our iPhones all the time. But the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from the way in which our environment strangely hasn't changed. We're running, maybe riding on a hundred year old subway in New York City. Or the zoning laws mean that the cities like San Francisco look like they haven't changed in 50 years. And are not that technologically advanced.

San Francisco is getting so expensive you had to leave. I mean that's something. That's not the precise reason. But it basically, so it's sort of like can we have more technological progress than we have. And I think that one of the ways our society works, one of the ways liberal democracy or representative government works, is that you have a scientific technological progress going on in the background. You have growth. The pie is growing. If the pie grows we can find creative ways to shift the pieces so that everybody gets more. When the pie stops growing, when there's no progress, then you end up with this polarized world with these zero sum politics.

You know, for every winner there's a loser. Anyone who succeeds is suspected of being part of some kind of a racket or something. And so I think there is actually a pretty, there's a link, a pretty deep link between this, the question of scientific and technological progress and the health of our sort of representative democracy. How can you wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out your wish out Thank you.

Perhaps the antithesis of my book is the cliched version of Malcolm Gladwell, The Wisdom of Crowds. If you had to give credit to Malcolm Gladwell, the way the argument actually works in The Wisdom of Crowds is that if you have a crowd of people and they independently make a judgment, and they all independently think something through, you can average it out and you'll get to a pretty good idea. So if you had a bag of marbles and you asked every single person how many marbles there were and everyone thought about it independently of one another, the average answer would be pretty good. But the problem is that in most cases, the decisions don't end up getting made individually.

People are influenced by one another as they make them. And when you have a crowd dynamic in which people are drawing conclusions because they're looking to one another, that's where the crowd is untruth. In the time of Shakespeare, the word primate meant both ape and to imitate. And I think it was Aristotle who said that man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. It's a very deep part of human nature. Kids learn language by copying their parents. It's how culture is transmitted in our society. But it's also how very many things go wrong. And the slightly extreme formulation I have of this is that there's this strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where so many of the successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's or something like this.

I think we always need to flip this around and ask the question, why is it that the people who are not suffering from Asperger's are at a disadvantage in our society where they're in effect talked out of their interesting original ideas before they're even fully formed. And you pick up on all these subtle cues from people. Oh, that's a little bit too strange. That's too weird. I better just go ahead and open that restaurant or do something super conventional, which lots of other people are doing, and probably is at the end of the day weirdly not going to be that effective. My apologies to the audience here.

I often think of the business school demographic as the anti -Asperger's demographic. And so it would be the sort of people who are hyper -socialized. They perhaps can be criticized for being somewhat low on the conviction level. And if you put all these people in a hothouse environment for a few years and they look to one another and try to figure out what to do with their lives, it's not clear at all that that sort of process gets you to the right answer. They've done these studies at Harvard Business School where they found that the largest cohort of people all conclude after two years were going to try to catch the last wave.

And in 89, they all wanted to work for Michael Milliken one or two years before he went to jail for junk bonds. And they never really interested in tech except 99, 2000 when they timed the dot -com bubble ending perfectly. And so I think this is something to be aware of. And again, I think it's unfair to just criticize business school students because we're all subject to this. And it's disturbing how powerful something like advertising is. We always think of advertising. Who are all these stupid people who watch these TV ads and who these ads work? And the disturbing answer is that it's all of us to a much larger degree than it should be.

Yeah.

I'm super strongly in favor of technology. Probably the one technology I am at least marginally nervous about is if you could build generalized AI. I think when people talk about AI, they focus too much on the economic question. You know, will computers replace people? And, you know, will you lose your job? I think if you actually were able to build a generalized AI that was smarter than humans, I mean, this would be the equivalent of aliens landing on this planet. It would be like a really epical event. And the first question if aliens landed on this planet would not be the economic question. It would be the political question.

Are they friendly? Are they not friendly? If you could build AI that was smarter than humans in every dimension, my intuition is there would be something kind of scary about it. And so it's probably the one area I would be nervous about funding.

There's a version of this question that I often get about what are future trends in technology. And it's always a hard question I feel to answer because you either give a banal generality where it's something that's so abstract like there'll be more cell phones in the future. That's not very interesting. Or you give something super particular which is likely just to be plain wrong. What I always say about trends in technology and I will also say about areas of study is they're probably all overrated. So in terms of trends in technology, all trends are overrated. Education software, healthcare IT software, business enterprise software are really overrated.

If you hear the words big data, cloud computing, you should just think fraud and run away as fast as you possibly can. And the reason these things are overrated is because when you have something that can be reduced to a buzzword, it means that a lot of different people are doing it and they're somehow adequately differentiated within that particular field. The kinds of companies that I think are underrated and undervalued are the ones that are somehow one of a kind that don't easily fit into some sort of narrative where it's hard to actually explain what they're doing. By analogy, we're investors in Airbnb. So it's like you say, what kind of a company is that?

And it's actually just a one of a kind new hotel lodging business. And it doesn't really fit into categories, but that really misses the uniqueness of the business. So I think great companies always have this one of a kind attribute. And I suspect if you're just in a big area of study where everyone's studying the same thing, you're not adequately differentiating yourself from other people. It's probably some somewhat idiosyncratic vertical that you're really passionate, really interested in, and people aren't doing enough of that. So I think people are spending too much time studying the things everybody else is studying. They're spending too little time studying more particular things that they're really passionate about.

there is a political dimension of getting back to the future you can't you know i don't know this this is a conversation i had with elon back in you know 2024 and we had all these you know conversations i i had this i had the seasteading version with elon where i said you know um trump doesn't win i want to just leave the country and then elon said there's nowhere to go there's nowhere to go this is the only place and then you know you always think of the art the right arguments to make later and it was about two hours after we had dinner and i was home that i thought of wow elon you don't believe in going to mars anymore 2024 2024 is the year where elon stopped believing

in mars not as a you know as a silly science tech project but as a political project mars was supposed to be a political project was building an alternative and in 2024 elon came to believe that if you went to mars you know the socialist u.s government the woke ai it would follow you to mars it was you know it was the demis meeting with elon that we sort of brokered he was doing deep mind this is an ai company yeah this was the rough conversation was you know demis tells elon i'm working on the most important project in the world i'm building a superhuman ai and elon responds to demis well i'm working on the most important project in the world i am turning this into interplanetary

species and then demis said well you know my ai will be able to follow you to mars and and then elon sort of went quiet but uh but my in my telling of the history it took years for that to really hit elon it took him till 2024 to process it but that doesn't mean he doesn't believe in mars it just means that he decided he had to win some kind of battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to mars what does mars mean is it a yeah is it and again it's what does mars mean well it was it was it's is it is it just is it just a scientific project or is it i don't know is it like a

i don't know a vision of a new society yeah a hindline you know populated by many many libertarian paradise or something like this elon musk well i don't know if it was concretized that that specifically but if you concretize things then maybe you realize that um that mars is supposed to be more than a science project it's supposed to be a political project and then when you concretize it you have to start thinking through well the ai the woke ai will follow you the socialist government will follow you and then um maybe you have to do something other than just going to mars

I think it's always worth asking, you know, where you're going to go with this business. And so I think we're always focused on very short time horizons because you have to, you know, figure out a way to get through the next month, the next quarter. You know, how do you get some customers? How do you track? But it's always worth thinking ahead, you know, five to ten years. You know, why will this be a really valuable business in five to ten years? And, you know, how's the competitive landscape going to develop? How's technology going to develop? How's the world going to develop? These are hard questions to answer.

But I think the great entrepreneurs that I know always have some perspective on it. And it might be wrong, but it's just this is what's going to happen. And then it's sort of well -reasoned. And so you have a plan. And, you know, when I was playing chess, you know, in junior high school, one of the early lessons I learned was a bad plan is still always better than no plan at all. And so, you know, have a plan. You can always change it, but don't just pretend that you have no clue about what's going to happen and that everything about the future is random. If you sort of say that everything is random and out of your control, that's the way you set yourself up for failure.

Right. You talk about that as, like, even as a societal problem in America today. Like, we are a nation of optimists but without a definite idea of where we're going, unlike, say, you know, maybe 50 years ago. Well, it's, you know, it's the way the whole education system works. You know, you build a resume with, you know, a wide variety of activities. And then you go to college, you get some general degree. And then it's supposed to lead to various jobs that lead to other jobs. And it's sort of this random walk. We sort of figure out what to do. Right. What to do in your future.

And so I do think we overplay the role of luck. When we exaggerate the role of luck in our future, I've said, you know, I think luck is like an atheistic word for God where when we attribute too much to luck, we could be thinking a little bit more. So you think it's, is it the old hard work? You make your own luck that old? I like that. Okay.

The boomers learned to take shortcuts. We didn't take as many shortcuts. I like that. Millennials know to take all the shortcuts. It's a good idea to take shortcuts in a world where nobody takes shortcuts.

In a world where everybody takes shortcuts, you have to actually figure out maybe the shortcut isn't going to work. And you're actually better off figuring out the other thing. Yeah, oh, I love that. So one way to frame this would be in the boomer era, the boomers who figured out how to take shortcuts. So the shortcut in politics is I'm not going to figure out what I think about the issues. I'm just going to look at the polls. And the pollster is the one who's really running for president. We're just listening to the pollster. And that was an effective boomer technique for many years that you just look at the polls.

And if you had a better pollster, you could more quickly get to where the puck was going, where the crowd was going. And you didn't need to think. You didn't need to waste time thinking about stuff. And so in a world where very few people were doing it, that could be a very good strategy. By the time you get to something like the millennials, where everyone's been trained to do shortcuts, it somehow doesn't quite work. It vaguely maps onto the tracking because you can think of tracking in school, tracking professionally is a way to, it's like a shortcut to a successful career. And so the baby boomers who stayed on track did quite well.

So if you didn't tune in and drop out in the late 60s and just went to law school and you became a partner in a law firm, the tracks worked. By the time we get to the millennials, they know all the tracks you're supposed to do. Tracks work less well when everyone knows them. Everyone's doing the same thing. So it has, there are these similarities between the millennials and the boomers, but they're really different in practice. And it's working really differently. So the things that would have worked perfectly for you as a boomer are deadly if you're a millennial.

On a technology side, I would say that I think the AI breakthroughs are important. They're going to have an enormous impact on our society in very different ways.

But as investments, they're very, very treacherous at this point. The rough analogy is that AI in 2024 is like the Internet in 1999. It's clearly going to be important, big, transformative, have all kinds of interesting social, political effects, maybe even effects about how humans think about themselves. But on a business level, it's very, very treacherous. There were a lot of different Internet businesses that failed, and even the ones that succeeded. It was quite a roller coaster. Amazon was the leading e -commerce site in 1999. It was $113 a share. By October of 2001, it was $5.50. You had to wait until the end of 2009 to get back to the 99 level, and then it went up 25x from there.

So if you'd held it from December 99 to today, you would have made 25 times your money. But you would have first lost 95%. And then if you'd bought it in October 2001, you would have made 500 times your money or so. So in some sense, Amazon was the obvious Internet company to invest in. And even that was quite a roller coaster. And my suspicion is that that's roughly where we are in AI. It's correct as a technology, but then extremely bubbly and crazed as a company building thing or as a sector to invest. So it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say it didn't say Thank you.

I think you want to have sort of very big differences inside the team, but then from the outside you want to be seen as very different from the rest of the world. And so if you take a company like Elon Musk's SpaceX business, one of my PayPal colleagues that started a rocket company, their mission is to go to Mars. And so everybody at the company thinks we're the only place in the world where people are going to go to Mars. And that one idea separates it very sharply from the rest of the world. So you want to have this commonality that everybody intensely shares that differentiates you from the rest of the world.

And then I think within a company you want the roles to be as differentiated as possible. And one of the challenges in an early stage business and a startup is that there's a certain fluidity to it. The roles tend to fluctuate a lot. And I think this is sort of the way I think conflicts tend to arise and things tend to go wrong. You know, there's sort of a conventional Marxist theory of conflict is that conflicts happen when people want different things. And I tend to think it's more the other way around. Conflicts happen when people want the same thing. And if you were a sociopathic boss who wanted to just create conflicts among your employees for no reason at all, the formula for creating conflicts is to tell two people to do the exact same thing.

So you say, the two of you are going to work on the website. I'm not going to figure out who has which responsibility. You figure it out amongst yourselves. But you have the exact same job. It doesn't really matter what the history of those people were. That will be a recipe for conflict. And so I think one of the key management things to always try to do is to differentiate as sharply as you possibly can. You want to have roles differentiated sharply within companies. You want to have the mission of the company differentiated sharply from the rest of the world. Perfect. X - X X! X

I don't think that your goal in starting a company should be to disrupt or destroy a big company. Your goal is to create a successful company. And this is why I'm very skeptical. I really dislike disruption as a buzzword. I think it's just one of these horrible, overused buzzwords. A disruptive person is someone who looks for trouble and finds it. The disruptive person in elementary school gets sent to the principal's office. Napster was a very disruptive company. It set out to destroy the music industry. I think that you can argue they sort of succeeded at doing that. People got on the front page of Time magazine.

A year later, it got shut down by the government. You nap some music, you nap a kid. That's disruptive, but it's not constructive. And so I think one shouldn't really take one's bearings from destroying existing companies. And certainly, there are ways things can change. But PayPal did create a new payment solution. On some level, it constrained what the card companies like Visa, MasterCard, Amex could do. On some level, it extended what they could do. They didn't like us that much, but it wasn't that hostile. It was not a zero -sum disruption dynamic. And so I do think that in a lot of these areas, there's room for growth.

And your success doesn't require large existing companies to fail.

Whenever a decision gets made to sell a business, you are often making the decision to stop the innovation cycle in it. And one of the questions that I've spent a lot of time thinking about as a venture capitalist is how these companies get founded. How long does the founding period last? And I think the founding period is the period when you have innovation. And once that's over, it sort of becomes a normal business that runs in a bureaucratic, mechanistic sort of a way. And it's a very important question of how long can one enable the founding in these companies to last. The classic example where people sort of cut the founding off too early, I would argue, would be Apple, where the judgment call the board at Apple in 1985 made was that computers were like Pepsi.

It was just a marketing thing. There was going to be no more innovation in the computer industry. You could get rid of the founder and you could replace the founder with sort of someone who would run the business in a much more predictable, mechanistic sort of a way. And that turned out to be a bit of a mistake. It's unusual for the founder ever to come back once these mistakes are made.

And then we saw another 14 years of innovation, at least through 2011 in the case of Apple. And so I do think the businesses that are led by founders are the ones that are able to innovate. The ones that are not led by founders are generally not able to innovate. And if you are in favor of innovation, you have to figure out ways for founders to stay in control as long as possible and to avoid selling a business or substituting someone other than the founder and a CEO. Thank you.

The Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist, all of those kinds of things. And these things are not simply anti -Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong. There are sort of ways Christ wants to unify the world. You have the parable of the Good Samaritan, where you should take care of people even if you're not related to them. It's good to act like the Good Samaritan and to take care of people who are not just in your family or tribe or country. But then if you force everyone to be a Good Samaritan and you force a borderless world, that's somehow adjacent, somehow it's an intensification, but it's somehow also very much the opposite.

Welcome, Welcome Welcome Welcome