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

Welcome to Berlin!

Thank you!

Stagnation, then AI

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. What people are discussing is too much acceleration: AI progressing too fast. So what's your take? Did you change your mind, or is it still not enough?

I've changed my mind to some extent. Let me first articulate the stagnation thesis, which I started articulating 20 years ago or so. It's always very hard to measure these things, because there are so many different dimensions of progress, so many different areas of technology and science. The basic thesis was that since the 1970s there had been a slowdown. There had been progress in the world of bits (computers, internet, mobile internet, software) but not so much in the world of atoms. Most of the engineering fields that were related to atoms were not even successful fields for people to study. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, aero-astro: nuclear engineering was already a bad idea by the 1980s.

For a variety of reasons there had been this slowdown, and I believed that this, not total stagnation, but this broad slowdown in progress, was an important factor driving a lot of the things that were going wrong in our society. A lot of the politics had 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.

Of course, there were some very deep reasons why I speculated this had happened. But the big picture was that for decades we had something like stagnation. The internet was an important growth driver in the late '90s. It was bigger than anything else, but 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.

But 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, I think.

The monster out of control

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? Or 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. 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 of course you have all kinds of dystopian science-fiction movies, The Matrix, Terminator, things like that. And I don't even know how you speak about the probabilities of things like that happening. I don't think the probabilities are very high. On the other hand, if the probability is even 5 or 10 percent, 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 1 and 10 percent. 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. I think it's hard to argue that the probabilities are 0 percent. But 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.

I've often said the middle class in the U.S. and Europe are 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, all sorts of softer social kinds of dimensions. And when that breaks down, I think the whole society starts to derange in very, very strange ways.

So 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.

So 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 solving anything.

In theory, you could slow it down if you had genuine, deep cooperation across the whole world. But I think that would require a one-world government with real teeth, real force. And the sort of classical liberal part of me thinks that's out of the frying pan into the fire. It's a cure that's worse than the disease. And then, of course, you can have fake global government, where we have a lot of conferences discussing 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.

The Pope recently issued this AI encyclical, or it was characterized as an anti-AI encyclical. And again, maybe I was too harsh, but the rhetorical point I had on it is that the Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope. There's a chance people in the U.S. 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.

What we are doing to ourselves

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 the American sentiment towards more AI skepticism and increase their advantage. 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 it's 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 past her prime. But yeah, I think there are so many of these things that we're doing to ourselves. 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 it's also often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China.

But then why is it so negative at the moment in the U.S.? I really have the feeling that if we are talking to our European colleagues about AI, as long as they are able 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 the anti-cliché of being American. Usually America is perceived to be pro-technology, pro-progress, and in this case it is a bit the other way around. The next election campaign could be, to a degree, even a campaign about 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 do the pro-U.S. version: that the U.S. 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. It's extremely hard to catch up. It's obviously still a very fluid situation. But first order, there's a lot happening in the U.S., China is a fast follower, and then Europe is extremely far behind.

It's not felt in Europe. It's not even felt on the level of corporations. If I look at one business 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 to figure out how companies need to be transformed in this new AI age. And there's still much, much less of that sense of urgency in Europe, where there's still this inertia. We can wait. Don't do tomorrow what you can save for the day after.

Good, evil, and bad

Do you think in the long run AI is going to be good for democracy, or bad?

That's a very big question. 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 it you're just going to continue to have these zero-sum parties on the extreme right and left gaining ground.

Should we perhaps stop discussing whether AI is positive or negative? 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. If you don't want killings, you criticize the murderer, but you don't ban the knife. Why do we always moralize new technologies? I would say technologies are just neutral. We can use them for good and for bad causes, and it depends on us, what we human beings are doing with them.

I'm going to get in trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. There's always a question I like to ask: what is the antonym of good? 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 Trabi, the former East German car, is a bad car. It's less good than a Golf. And so if you're evil, you're at least competent. And if you're evil, you're not bad. 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, the 16th-century Faust story, Faust is a fake scientist. He's sort of like a magician, 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 for the best, and Goethe's Faust gets redeemed. I think it's better to be good than evil, I want to be very clear, but perhaps I prefer Goethe's Faust to Marlowe's Faust.

The moral question in our society is that we have all these good-versus-evil debates, and we're just full of badness. Most of the time, most things are not even evil. They're not even good; they're just merely bad. And so if you're in a world where 99 percent of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent, that's the problem we should actually be talking about.

Freedom and democracy

Very few people would say about you that you are incompetent, but there are some people in a very polarized discussion who say you are evil. And if it is about you being evil, it is about democracy. Some people are portraying you as the anti-democrat, and they are basically all referring to one quote from 2009, where you wrote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Can you explain why you wrote it, what you meant with it, and what you're thinking about it today? It's always very dangerous to write things.

Very dangerous. I know what you're talking about. The context was that it was this article I quickly typed out one night. I sent it to one of my colleagues. I asked him if there was anything controversial in it that I should not have written, and he said no, nothing controversial in here at all. And then the meta-level post-mortem I had was that the fact that I asked someone for a second opinion told me that I probably needed to be more careful in my wording.

I did issue a correction two weeks later, so 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 democracy will go anywhere. And what I was arguing for was a certain depoliticization, a de-intensification of politics.

The original article appeared 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 these pure libertarian, pure classical liberal ideas, I believe in them, but I don't think they're easy to win with in a democracy. I didn't say anything that Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill or any of these people wouldn't have said. But it is not a claim that democracy is going to go away, or anything like that.

But isn't it that sometimes you're simply a fan of being provocative and stimulating the debate?

I do like doing that. I think that one was more deranging than stimulating. I always try to push people.

The extremes and the center

But you care a lot about democracy. So you'd say you're not only not an anti-democrat, you're actually a person who thinks about how to strengthen or how to save democracy. Are you worried that we are going down a wrong path these days? Polarizing of societies, and a weaker and weaker centrist leadership all around the world. Autocratic systems are basically achieving their goals pretty successfully in the economy. In China, 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 I'm not a Hegelian. So we can always say there's a way 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. There's a trend where these things are in some trouble.

And what went wrong in Germany in the 1920s and '30s was two anti-democratic parties. It was the Nazis and the Communists. In the 1932 election, those two parties got over 50 percent of the vote. And once over 50 percent of the people vote for parties that want to get rid of the democracy, 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. In Saxony-Anhalt, a smaller state, the very right-wing party, the AfD, won the last election in a landslide. And 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.

In Great Britain, there have been seven prime ministers in the last ten years. Nobody's had a plan for how to turn their societies around. They all think: once I become prime minister, that's all I have to do. I have to figure out this complicated internal, intraparty game to become prime minister, and once I do that, I can figure out all these problems. And then there are these deep structural problems.

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.

Die Linke in the Berlin elections got 25 percent of the vote. Among 16-to-24-year-old voters, it got 47 percent. Eventually the young people are the people who will be deciding things in your society. That's a very bad trend. I'm making the pro-Linke argument because you will not accuse me of being a sympathizer of Die Linke or a communist or anything like that.

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. There's some problem in Berlin where the rents are too high and it's impossible to build houses, or the young generation finds it very hard to get ahead. It finds it very hard to be successful. There's a way that Germany and Europe, and some of the United States, are gerontocracies. These are societies run for old people.

To take the problem seriously is definitely the right approach, but it also depends on the solutions. And the solutions that Die Linke proposes here are to solve the rent problem by nationalizing real estate companies, and basically to mobilize society, very much driven by anti-Semitism, pro-Islamism, and now it seems, if we look at the images of the party on election night, also with the help of organized crime, clan chiefs. So I think that's where taking things seriously...

Well, they don't have solutions. But all they need to do to win is... They can say, and this is something I often say too: when you ask me what to do about the tech 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 can imagine Die Linke 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: is that an alternative for conservatism? Or are you worried by that development? How do you see it?

Again, I'm hesitant to speak too much to the specific 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 the extreme right.

With the extreme right there is another issue. It is about foreign policy. The foreign-policy concept is basically pro-Putin, pro-China-understanding, anti-Israelism, or being anti-Israel, being anti-Semitic in parts.

My paradoxical thing, as I told you earlier today, is that I think it's important for us to have debates about all three of those. 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.

You can't be wrong on all three.

Trump, ten years later

Let's switch to the United States. You were in 2016 supporting Donald Trump. Ten years later, how would you analyze his achievements? How would you analyze his failures? Where do you stand today with regard to the last two years, and then the first term of the president?

My fastball answer is you should ask me in ten years or so, and we'll see in ten 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.

And then, of course, there are all these things where 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, overcorrected 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. And so there are all sorts of ways it can be criticized.

But again, it reflected a way that things had reached a certain exhaustion, certainly on the Republican side. And I worry in the United States that the kind of exhaustion of the Republican establishment that happened with the Bush family in 2016, we're about to see with the sort of Clinton-Obama center-left establishment.

In 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, maybe. 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 U.S. The 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.

The Democratic Socialists

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 are so dysfunctional, it just needs disruption. And that was an interesting thing that I could understand very well. Would you say now, ten years later, we need disruption again?

Well, I 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: I don't think it's good, but the Democratic Socialists of America are a real option. They are a real danger. You once said it's the most energetic and, in a way, the most successful political movement these days.

And it's young. It's like pop culture. The history on it was, I looked this up the other day, the Democratic Socialists got created in 1982 as a sort of fusion of these very fringe socialist groups, and the members paying dues were something like 5,000 people. It was a very small fringe thing. And in the 2016 campaign, a legacy of the Bernie Sanders candidacy is that the membership of the Democratic Socialists, of the sort of cadre, the vanguard, ballooned from 5,000 to 50,000. The median age went from 66 to 33. And so it went from this old socialist people's thing to a young revolutionary thing. And yes, it has a certain amount of energy. It has a certain amount of charisma. Again, the establishment Democrats, they're all lying. They can't say anything. It's the same problem with the SPD and CDU people in Germany.

JD Vance and 2028

You were an early supporter of JD 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?

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

Now, the Republicans will make a decision sooner or later. The names of the potential candidates that are heard most often are JD 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?

Well, I'm still a Vance 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?

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 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. If 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. They 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 a far-left presidential candidate. And then it's a completely open field, a completely open question.

And I had this discussion, this debate, with Fukuyama, of The End of History. He doesn't fully believe his theories anymore. But when I told him that there was a good chance a Democratic socialist would win in 2028, he responded with absolute confidence: no way, it can never happen. And I don't think history is settled like that.

So you think, from today's perspective, that's the most likely outcome?

Not the most likely, but let's say it's a 50 percent chance.

It's pretty high.

It's pretty high.

Argentina's past, our future

You're a fan of Milei because he's a disruptor, I assume. Can you describe a little bit what Western societies, what America but also what Europe, could and should learn from Javier Milei?

Well, I think we're all fascinated by Argentina because we worry that their past is our future, where you had this, I don't know, not zero growth or decline, but subpar growth for a century. It's a complicated history of what went wrong. Obviously the Peronist history, with this very charismatic leader who had a lot of bad ideas, and then there were ways that it took a long time. In 1900, 1920, "rich as an Argentine" was still a common expression. That's sort of gone out of usage.

And then, yeah, it's an open question whether Milei will succeed in turning Argentina around, whether he will get reelected 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 that it won't take us 100 years of decline to get there? I don't like the accelerationist, Leninist idea, Vladimir Lenin's idea, that the 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 U.S. and Europe is that 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 pretty successful autocrats, is a healthy wake-up call and we will recover, we will reinvent ourselves? Or do you think that's basically the beginning of the end, and the beginning of a new world where the autocratic systems are going to prevail?

I think we 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. Will people get rid of Merz in Germany? It's a complete, total failure, any way you cut it. And then, I don't know, there's a decent argument that nothing will happen to him for another three years, because everybody else thinks they won't do any better.

So that's an indirect answer: you think it's more likely that we are going to deteriorate further.

I'm not sure, but it's sort of an open question. It's amazing how robust the Merz thing seems to be relative to how bad it seems to be. So I don't know. Yeah, my intuition is probably that things will keep drifting for a long way, because the people who would replace them don't really have answers to these problems.

Frame the macroeconomic problems. Again, the sort of 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 percent interest rates. The interest rates are no longer zero, so there's sort of a compounding, runaway deficit problem.

And you have basically three choices. Do you massively cut spending? That's the Milei answer. Do you massively hike taxes, which basically completely shuts down our societies and all growth? Or do you keep going with the deficits and kick 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 my intuition is we're close to the point where that ends. And then you're going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution: either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures. And the best idea Merz has is just to borrow more.

The air we breathe

Why do you care so much about politics?

Well, I don't know. I think about it probably too much. I mean, I'm not a politician.

But never, never, never? You're 100 percent 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 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.

Concorde or Minitel

What'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 country is pretty perfect. The democratic country is pretty imperfect. So ten 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? Neutral? On China's side, as a colony? Or a reliable ally of America?

I think it would be best for Europe to be a reliable ally. I always want to push back very hard on the ways this often gets framed as a moral equivalence between the U.S. 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 that it's in America's interest for Europe to get its act together, for Europe to be more functional, to get its economy going, to be a part of building the future.

And then the question is how to do that. There are probably various sectors where, if Europe can build up its own industry, or can even become a world-leading industry in some things, that would 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. In the late '60s you had the Concorde program, which was a sort of British-French, not exactly free-market plan. Supersonic aviation started in the U.S., with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947. Europe was behind, but you could get your act together, and you could catch up and overtake the U.S., and the supersonic aviation industry was a European-led 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, where the internet was supposed to be French, and it ended up that 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? If we're honest, my assessment is that Europe's further behind than Minitel was.

A fear of success

Unfortunately, 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 or Germany should do in order to get back on the map and get its act together?

The why questions are always overdetermined and much harder to answer. But 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. And maybe that's true. But the dimension I always want to push on is that 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 a 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 great new companies have been built in Germany in the last number of decades.

Here's a stat that I looked up, and again, it's one particular dimension to look at. 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. So it's also pretty much dominated by old people, who've had more time to compound their wealth. In Germany it's actually more distributed: 20 of the 50 wealthiest people in Germany are Gen X or younger. 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 of course I'm just looking at this very extreme end. Each of those people created, I don't know, thousands of millionaires in their companies, tens of thousands of other jobs; they added to the economy in lots of different ways. And there used to be this ability in Germany to build great new businesses. There was the Mittelstand, and there were also much larger companies that got built in the late 19th and early 20th century, even in the period after 1945. And then something about that has really broken down since 1995. I don't have an answer to that, but that would be the kind of question I would try to think about really hard.

Germany in the heart

Tonight you're going to receive the Axel Springer Award. And when I informed you about that, you said something very remarkable. You 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. Why not? What's still so German about you, 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?

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, you don't have any cultural...

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 grew up between. And so yes, there's a part where it's sort of understandable. For 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. There's a crisis of the West; there's a crisis in Europe and in Germany.

Yeah, but you're shifting back to intellectual analysis. We were talking about feelings, about the 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?

I'm always bad at answering this question. It's just part of who I am.

Insiders and outsiders

Okay. Tonight we will have two of your co-founders, Alex Karp from Palantir and Max Levchin, with whom you founded PayPal. Alex Karp also has this very, very strong affiliation to Germany. With Max it's a different history, from Ukraine, but in any case there's a European element in it. Do you think 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 part of it. I don't want to overdo it. I think there's a way that a lot of the founders of these tech companies are both insiders and outsiders. And so Alex and I both were insiders who went to the elite Stanford Law School, and then 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...

Sorry, I didn't get it. He is Jewish, but that has nothing to do with your background.

No, 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 and the insider dynamic. Max was this super-achieving, straight-A student, this incredibly charismatic person, but then he also left Ukraine when he was 16 years old, and they grew up in a poor part of Chicago, and it was just an incredible drive.

Being an outsider can really be an advantage. I think in your case...

I want to say it's both, though. It's this outsider-insider combination. People always exaggerate the outsider piece. There's also some part where I grew up in Silicon Valley. Very few people did that.

Thinking for oneself

Let's assume that in this perfect mix of being an insider and an outsider you have developed an over-proportional 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. But I think in your case it's almost a kind of automatic impulse. As soon as there is a consensus, or people get close to a consensus, you say the opposite. So: just say no.

I don't think the point is to be contrarian for its own sake, because then you just look at the consensus and put a minus sign in front of it. That's not that interesting. 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 it is just this reflexively negative thing.

How have you been able to develop that intrinsic strength, to listen to your own compass and not be influenced so much by zeitgeist, by consensus, by the juste milieu? Do you have any explanation why you've been able to develop that superpower?

Again, I'm always bad at the self-psychoanalysis, but I'm probably interested in a lot of different things: big-picture history and politics and economics and science fiction and the future and psychology, all these different things. In late modernity, we're supposed to be narrow specialists. The Adam Smith pin factory: 100 people working in a pin factory, and everyone's specialized in one narrow area, and somehow it's very efficient for people to be super-specialized, but you lose sight of the big picture. And 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, 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.

Chess, children, time horizons

And 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 private, personal, irrational? Don't tell me that you don't have them at all.

I probably still play way too much chess on the internet, all the time. I was a scholastic chess player, and it's this very beautiful, 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, liked to say: that if you didn't play chess, you didn't understand reality. It's probably too extreme a thing to say.

But there are all sorts of questions that don't connect directly. I think a lot of these political questions are important. They frustratingly feel largely outside of our power. And so, 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 a particular business.

You now have four pretty young kids. To what degree did they change your life? Or is there anything that you've already learned from them by watching them?

It really changes your time horizons on the future. 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 to 2030 or 2035, and you're in a world of only adults, you can sort of pretend that you're just thinking about it year to year. But, 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?

Longevity

Talking about time horizons: 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 also have a high degree of interest, because I'm a hypochondriac. I don't know what your motivation is. Is it only the business rationale, or is there also a kind of personal motivation, something that we all have more or less, the fear of death?

Yeah, fear of death, fear of getting old, all these things. It's odd to me that this is not more widely shared, and that it can't be articulated more widely. The optimism of early modernity, the 17th and 18th century, was that science would relieve man's estate. In the state of nature, life was nasty, brutish and short, and science was supposed to make it longer, and maybe indefinitely longer. People like Condorcet or Francis Bacon or Benjamin Franklin thought you could cure all diseases. And it's just this shocking social decline that we've given up on that. 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 always has two sides. Almost every progress in technology 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, the enjoyment of our life, everything. So in that spirit, could you share with me the most optimistic, the most visionary case about longevity? What can be achieved? Eternal life? 150 years?

It's not clear why it shouldn't be... It's not clear there are any natural limits. There are all sorts of reasons people have become more pessimistic, because certain things have been very hard to cure. Nixon declared war on cancer in '71 and 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...

It's accelerating now, big time.

But then there's always a question. I don't know, it's badly simplifying things, but if you think biological processes are irreversible and information, computational processes are fundamentally reversible: if you could understand biology as an information science, then in theory you could find a way to reverse all these processes. Computers can live forever.

But 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 at a certain point we are able to download our brain and our consciousness and live in a different body?

I have a very physical, maybe Christian-informed, view, where I wouldn't find it acceptable to be uploaded into 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, I think the full Christian vision of this was, of course, that you were going to have an eternal body, and your soul would also be transformed.

One of my friends, this 80-year-old mathematician, once joked to me that he didn't know whether there was an afterlife, but he hoped there wouldn't be, because he didn't want to run into his ex-wife. And so I do think that in some ways eternal life is very desirable, and Christianity always aimed for even more. The point with transhumanism and Christianity is not that transhumanism is too weird and too extreme. From a real Christian point of view, it's that it doesn't go far enough.

But let's assume that we would achieve eternal life. Is it really desirable, or would we be extremely bored? Because everything is unlimited. Why be ambitious?

I think the answer to all those things is that it's better than the alternative. I don't think I would be bored.

Good, yeah. I agree. So what then is the concrete thing, the concrete innovation, invention or investment that you have seen over the last months or years with regard to longevity that makes you most optimistic? Can you share the craziest thing with us?

I keep investing in these biotech areas. 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, finding a way to slow or reverse declines in people's brains. That's the one that I want to find a way to tackle in the years ahead.

A truth few agree with

Peter, to conclude, I would love to ask you a question that you ask almost every candidate you talk 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.

Oh, let's see. Give me one second.

Take your time. In any case, it's nice to see that it is also a tough question for you.

There's always a meta-level version of this, where there are all sorts of things that you think nobody believes in, and then you realize actually a lot of people almost do. And so maybe it's contrarian, and then we can 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 most people would say: yeah, that's a really crazy thing to talk about. I would now say that it's actually 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: everybody says that the Antichrist is a crazy idea, and the reality is they actually secretly agree with me.

Peter, thank you very much for the conversation.

Thank you.