Peter Thiel — The AI Crisis, Europe’s Decline and the Battle for America

Author / Host: Mathias Döpfner · MDMEETS — Essential Talks with Mathias Döpfner Guest: Peter Thiel URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7yl7fEHeKM Runtime: 65 minutes Occasion: recorded the day Thiel received the Axel Springer Award One-line: Thiel partially recants the stagnation thesis — AI may be the first thing since the internet big enough to restart growth — then argues that the deeper crisis is not evil but incompetence, that Europe is further behind on AI than it was on Minitel, and that the most likely American disruption of 2028 comes from the democratic socialist left.

Key claims

• The stagnation thesis was right and AI is the retroactive proof. Since the 1970s there was progress in the world of bits and very little in the world of atoms — mechanical, chemical, aero-astro and nuclear engineering stopped being good fields to study. Thiel’s point now: nobody disagrees that the decades before AI were stagnant. See Cultural Stagnation.
• He has changed his mind “to some extent.” The internet was a real growth driver in the late 1990s but not big enough to take civilization to the next level; AI may be bigger than the internet and has the potential to reaccelerate growth, with all the good and bad that follows.
• Zero growth is not a neutral fallback. People implicitly assume the alternative to AI is a peaceful social-democratic society. Thiel’s claim is that a no-progress world derails: when there is a loser for every winner, politics goes zero-sum and the intergenerational compact — the middle class expecting their children to do better — breaks down. Links to Non-Zero-Sum and Degrowth.
• Extinction risk is not zero, but precaution is not free. He grants a 5–10% doom probability “seems pretty bad,” and still argues that always choosing the slower, precautionary direction fails, because a genuinely enforced global slowdown would require a world government with real teeth — a cure worse than the disease.
• A Western-only slowdown works for Beijing. On the Pope’s AI encyclical: the Communist Party of China will not listen to the Pope, but Americans might, so in effect the encyclical served the CCP. He extends the same logic to Greta Thunberg — plausibly useful to China, but fundamentally “a problem we’ve created for ourselves in the West.”
• The real moral category is badness, not evil. His antonym test: the moral antonym of good is evil; the functional antonym is bad. A Ferrari is an “evil” car (bad mileage); a Trabant is a bad car. Evil is at least competent. Society runs good-versus-evil debates while 99% of its businesses and leaders are merely incompetent — “that’s the problem we should actually be talking about.”
• Marlowe’s Faust versus Goethe’s Faust. Marlowe’s 16th-century Faust is a fake scientist doing bad science and goes straight to hell; Goethe’s Faust gets his knowledge by morally dubious means and is redeemed. Thiel prefers Goethe’s — and reads transhumanism’s failure against Christianity as not going far enough, rather than going too far. See Transhumanism and Peter Thiel’s Religion.
• On the 2009 “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible” line. He says the article was typed out in one night, he issued a public correction two weeks later, and the argument was for depoliticization aimed at libertarians who put too much faith in winning elections — “I didn’t say anything that Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill wouldn’t have said.” He concedes that one was “more deranging than stimulating.”
• The 2028 risk he names is the left, not the right. The Democratic Socialists of America went from ~5,000 members with a median age of 66 to ~50,000 with a median age of 33 after the 2016 Sanders campaign. He puts a democratic socialist winning in 2028 at roughly 50%, against Fukuyama’s “no way, can never happen.” His framing: the Democratic Party is the establishment party in the US, so its capture is a much bigger deal than the Republicans’ was in 2016.
• Europe is further behind on AI than it was on Minitel. His test: is European AI the Concorde (behind, then caught up and led) or Minitel (behind, and dug a deeper ditch)? His honest assessment is that it is worse than Minitel. He wants Europe functional and allied — “it’s in America’s interest for Europe to get its act together” — and rejects any moral equivalence framing between the US and China.
• Germany’s problem may be fear of success, not fear of failure. The stat he looked up: of the 50 wealthiest people in the US, 12 are Gen X or younger and 9 of those 12 made their own money. In Germany, 20 of the 50 are Gen X or younger — and all 20 inherited it. Not one built a large new scalable company. Something broke after about 1995.
• The macro trap has three doors and the West keeps choosing the third. Large welfare states, high taxes, big deficits that were only sustainable at 0% interest. Massively cut spending (the Milei answer), massively hike taxes (shuts down growth), or keep rolling the deficit forward — the answer since 2008 has been door three, and he thinks that is close to ending.
• Longevity is the progress with no downside, and dementia is the target. He invokes Bacon, Condorcet and Franklin — who thought you could cure death — against a present that doesn’t even believe Alzheimer’s is curable. He rejects mind-uploading: identity is wrapped up in the physical self, and a simulation of him would not be him.

Notable quotes

Now that we have AI, nobody disagrees with me that we were in stagnation for decades before.

— Peter Thiel · on the stagnation thesis

If the probability is even 5 or 10%, that seems pretty bad.

— Peter Thiel · on AI extinction risk

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.

— Peter Thiel

The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope. There’s a chance people in the US will. And so, in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist Party. I’m not saying he was an agent of the Communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.

— Peter Thiel · on the AI encyclical

A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. A Trabant is a bad car. If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. If you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent — that’s the problem we should actually be talking about.

— Peter Thiel · on good, evil and bad

The fact that I asked someone for a second opinion told me that I had probably needed to be more careful in my wording.

— Peter Thiel · on the 2009 Cato essay

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. The real goal is always to try to think for oneself.

— Peter Thiel · on contrarianism

In the US, nine 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.

— Peter Thiel · on German wealth creation since 1995

There has to be room for at least one generalist in a world where everyone’s hyper specialized.

— Peter Thiel

My oldest daughter will be 81 years old in 2100. And so you start to wonder what will the 22nd century be like?

— Peter Thiel · on how children changed his time horizons

People don’t even think we can cure Alzheimer’s. Why can’t we at least try to do that?

— Peter Thiel

The problem with transhumanism and Christianity is — it’s not that transhumanism is too weird and too extreme from a real Christian point of view. It’s that it didn’t go far enough.

— Peter Thiel

Everybody says that the Antichrist is a crazy idea and the reality is they actually secretly agree with me.

— Peter Thiel · his answer to his own interview question

How it connects

• Peter Thiel — the fullest single statement of his 2026 position; pairs with Peter Thiel’s Religion (Perell) for the Girardian/eschatological substructure underneath the Faust and Antichrist material here.
• Cultural Stagnation / Definite Optimism — this is the partial recantation: bits-not-atoms held for fifty years, and AI is the first candidate since the internet to break it.
• Non-Zero-Sum / Degrowth — his sharpest political claim is economic: stagnation manufactures zero-sum politics, so the extremes on both flanks are a symptom of a growth failure, not a cause.
• Democracy — the 1932 Reichstag analogy (Nazis plus Communists over 50%) as his test for when a democracy is past saving, and Die Linke’s 47% among Berlin voters aged 16–24 as the number he takes seriously.
• Transhumanism — longevity as the one form of progress with no flip side, plus his rejection of uploading on explicitly embodied, Christian-inflected grounds.
• Contrarianism — his own correction to how he is usually read: not inverting consensus, but thinking independently of it.
• Palantir, PayPal, Alex Karp, Max Levchin, Elon Musk — the insider/outsider founder theory he offers about his own co-founders, and Palantir’s US corporate sales as his evidence for the American/European urgency gap.
• Zero To One — the competition-is-for-losers frame sits directly under the “99% are merely incompetent” argument.

Transcript

Mathias Döpfner: How’s [funeral?] Let’s switch to English now. Peter, you have discussed a lot over the last years the problem that in your view the West did not deliver enough progress, enough change in technology. You even spoke about stagnation. That is a topic and a term that almost nobody would use these days. It’s pretty much the opposite. People are discussing: is there too much acceleration? Is AI progressing too fast? So what’s your take? Did you change your mind or is it still not enough?

Peter Thiel: I’ve changed my mind to some extent. Let me first articulate the stagnation thesis which I started articulating 20 years ago or so, and it is that 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. And 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. And that 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. And that for a variety of reasons there had been this slowdown.

I believed that this not-total-stagnation but broad slowdown in progress was an important factor driving a lot of things that were going wrong in our society. A lot of the politics have become more polarized because when there’s a loser for every winner it becomes this very zero-sum game and you sort of get a much worse society. And 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.

There was a way that the internet was an important growth driver in the late ’90s — it was bigger than anything else, perhaps not big enough to take our whole civilization to the next level. And then I think perhaps AI is bigger than the internet and at least has the potential to reaccelerate 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.

MD: Yeah, it has been proven in retrospect, definitely. So these days the perception of AI is swinging pretty much between euphoria and dystopia. And there was a lot of discussion over the last weeks about the collective warning that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk presented — that 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?

PT: Well, there are many different dimensions to the AI debates and the problems. And yes, there are these scenarios that are maybe 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 there are all kinds of dystopian science fiction movies — Matrix, Terminator, things like that. And I don’t even know how you speak about probabilities of things like that happening. I don’t think the probabilities are very high. On the other hand, if the probability is even 5 or 10%, that seems pretty bad. So there’s something about the conversation that ends up pushing people very hard in a sort of defensive, precautionary way.

MD: 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%. Do you think it’s just because the LLMs are based on human fears, human pessimism, or is it a real point?

PT: Let us for the sake of argument say that it is a real point. I think it’s hard to argue that probabilities are 0% of something. I do think, but you shouldn’t — it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should always go slower and always go in the precautionary direction, because if you do nothing, if there is no progress on any dimension, I don’t think our societies work at all.

I’ve often said the middle class in the US, Europe — they’re the people who expect their children to do better than themselves. And the sort of intergenerational progressive compact in our society was that there was progress from one generation to the next: maybe economic progress, material progress, progress in health, 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.

And 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.

MD: So but then slowing it down is just unrealistic, or how could it work? I mean, I don’t get it. If America is slowing down and China is accelerating, we are just strengthening China, but it’s not solving anything.

PT: In theory you could slow it down if you had genuine deep cooperation across the whole world, and then 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 almost — that’s a frying pan into fire, it’s a cure that’s worse than the disease. And then of course you can have fake global governance, and we have a lot of conferences to discuss it, a lot of somewhat empty statements that get put out. And then there’s also of course a risk that it ends up being slowed down in the West and not in China.

The Pope recently issued this AI encyclical — I would characterize it as an anti-AI encyclical. And again, maybe it was too harsh, but the rhetorical point I have on it is that the Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope. There’s a chance people in the US will. And so, in effect, the Pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist Party. I’m not saying he was an agent of the Communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.

MD: I spoke to two founders of big AI platforms and both said that they have evidence that the Chinese are spreading anti-AI content, particularly through American social media platforms but also elsewhere, in order to turn around the American sentiment towards more AI skepticism, in order to increase their advantage. Do you see similar things? Is there any evidence for that? Do you believe that? What’s your take?

PT: 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.

MD: But is Greta’s influence on the American sentiment that big? I mean, I’m surprised, I have to say.

PT: I think she’s past her prime, but yes, I think there are so many of these things that we’re doing to ourselves. So we should be — I’m a very tough critic of China. I think we need to take the competition, the rivalry with China very seriously. And then also it’s often somewhat too easy to simply blame it on China.

MD: Yeah. But then why is it so negative at the moment in the US? I really have the feeling that if we are talking to our European colleagues about AI, as long as they are enabled 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 an anti-cliché of being American. Usually America is perceived to be pro technology, progress, and in that case it is a bit the other way around. The next election campaign could be to a degree even a campaign 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?

PT: Well, let me do the pro-US version, okay? That this is where the US is the place where AI is happening, and then Europe — 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 US. China is a fast follower. And then Europe is extremely far behind. So it is not felt in Europe. It’s not even felt on the level of corporations.

If I look at something like one of the businesses I’ve been involved with for many years, Palantir — the sales to US 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.

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

PT: 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 that, you’re just going to continue to have these sort of zero-sum parties on the extreme right and left gain ground.

MD: Should we perhaps stop discussing whether AI is positive or negative? I mean, I think it is almost like a knife. With a knife you can prepare the most wonderful food and have a great dinner, and with a knife you can kill a person. So if you don’t want killings you criticize the murderer, but you don’t criticize or ban the knife. So why do we always moralize new technologies? I would say technologies are just neutral. You can use them for good and for bad causes and it depends on us, what we human beings are doing with it.

PT: Yes. So I’m going to get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And 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 Trabant is a bad car. It works, it’s less good than a Golf — you know, the former East German car. And so if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore actually 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, it was 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 always still works out more for the best, and Goethe’s Faust gets redeemed. So I think it’s better to be good than evil, I want to be very clear, but perhaps — I prefer Goethe’s Faust to Marlowe’s Faust.

And then the moral question in our society is, we have all these good versus evil debates and we’re just full of badness. Most of the time those 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% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent — that’s the problem we should actually be talking about.

MD: Very few people would say about you that you are incompetent. But there are some people in a very polarized discussion that say you are evil. And if it is about you being evil, it is about democracy. And some people are portraying you as the anti-democrat. And they are basically all referring to one quote from 2009 where you wrote: “I stopped believing that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Can you explain why you wrote it, what you mean with it, and what your thinking today is about it?

PT: It’s always very dangerous to write things.

MD: Very dangerous, I know what you’re talking about.

PT: The context was, it was this article I quickly typed out one night. I sent it to one of my colleagues, I asked him, did I write anything controversial in it that I should not have written? And — no, nothing controversial in here at all. And then the meta-level postmortem I had was: the fact that I asked someone for a second opinion told me that I had probably needed to be more careful in my wording.

I did issue a correction two weeks later. So you can still go to the website where I make it very clear that I don’t think anyone’s voters are going to be taken away. I don’t think the democracy will go anywhere. And what I was arguing for was a certain depoliticization, a de-intensification of politics. The original article occurred in this sort of libertarian Cato online journal, and the point of it was directed against libertarians who put too much faith in politics and wanted to change the world by winning elections and doing things like that. And I thought these pure libertarian, pure classical liberal ideas — I believe in them, I don’t think they’re easy to win 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.

MD: But isn’t it that sometimes you simply have fun in being provocative and stimulating a debate?

PT: I do like doing that. I don’t think that one — I think that one was more deranging than stimulating.

MD: So it really is your personality. You’ve always tried to push people.

PT: Yeah.

MD: But you care a lot about democracy. So you 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 a wrong path these days? Polarizing of societies and weaker and weaker centrist leadership all around the world. Autocratic systems are basically achieving their goals pretty successfully. An economy in China that is a kind of authoritarian state economy is prospering. So if we simply draw a line, at the moment democracy is not doing particularly well.

PT: Sure, but look, I’m not a Hegelian. So we can always say there’s a way where history seems to be going. There’s a certain trend, and then it’s not morally good. In Hegel, whatever happens happens for the best. And so yeah, I think there is a trend against democracy. There’s a trend where these things are in some trouble.

Now, what went wrong in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s? It was two anti-democratic parties. It was the Nazis and the Communists. In the 1932 election, those two parties got over 50% of the vote. And once over 50% of the people vote for parties that want to get rid of the democracy, it’s almost too late. You’re really in trouble.

MD: 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, the smaller state, the very right-wing party 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?

PT: 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. And so I don’t have great advice for 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 10 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 intra-party 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.

In my technological stagnationist perspective, 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. And maybe — I don’t think the extreme parties will solve things, but we need to take it seriously.

So Die Linke in the Berlin elections got 25% of the vote; among 16 to 24 year old voters it got 47%. And eventually the young people are the people who will be deciding things in your society. That’s a very bad trend. And I’m making the pro-Linke argument because you will not accuse me of being a sympathizer of Die Linke or a communist.

MD: So what’s the pro argument? Tell me.

PT: Well, the pro argument is you have to at least take the issues the young people are talking about seriously. So there’s some problem in Berlin where the rents are too high and it’s impossible to build houses, 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, Europe and some of the United States — these are gerontocracies. Their societies are run for old people.

MD: To take the problem seriously is definitely the right approach, but it also depends on the solutions. And the solution that Die Linke proposes here is to solve the rent problem by nationalizing real estate companies, and to basically motivate society very much driven by antisemitism, 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 —

PT: Well, they don’t have solutions. But all they need to do to win is — they can say, and this is always 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 could imagine Die Linke is saying, okay, we don’t know if our solutions exactly work, but we’re at least talking about the problems. Nobody else is talking about them.

MD: 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?

PT: Again, I’m hesitant to speak too much to the specifics of German politics, but yes, I think it reflects these failures of the centrist parties. It reflects a failure to find an economic future for Germany that somehow is inclusive and broad and works for the society as a whole. I don’t think they have great solutions. I don’t think they know how to balance the budget — either the parties of the extreme left or extreme right.

MD: 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-Israel, being antisemitic in parts.

PT: Well, the paradoxical thing I told you earlier today is that I think it’s important for us to have debates about all three of those. And so I think there can be a reasonable debate about Ukraine, a reasonable debate about China, a reasonable debate about Israel. And at the same time, somehow I do think the AfD is wrong on all three. And that — you can’t be wrong on all three.

MD: Let’s switch to the United States. You were in 2016 supporting Donald Trump. 10 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?

PT: Man, my fast answer is you should ask me in 10 years or so and we’ll see in 10 years how it all works out. I still think that in many ways it reflected a failure of the establishment to deal with these long-term problems the US had — with these growth problems, with some of the challenges of globalization, with the endless entanglements the US had in the Middle East that had not really worked all that well.

And then of course there are all these things that — you wish they’d appointed more competent people. And 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 it also again 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 with the Republican establishment that happened with the Bush family, that happened in 2016 — we’re about to see with the sort of Clinton-Obama center-left establishment. And the last three elections: 2016, Trump, the sort of anti-establishment person won the Republican primary; Hillary, the establishment person, barely beat Bernie Sanders. And then again the establishment won in 2020 and ‘24. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do it in ‘28. And the Democratic Party is the more important party. That is the establishment party in the US. 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, I don’t know, the end of America.

MD: I remember very well a lunch that we had in 2016 when I asked you why do you support Trump, and you basically said because the existing party and the existing leadership is so dysfunctional, it just needs disruption. And that was an interesting thing that I could understand very well. Would you say now, 10 years later, we need disruption again?

PT: Well, I don’t want disruption of the Democratic Socialist variety. That seems catastrophic. But I worry — and 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’s a risk that the US will shift very far to the left. That’s the real disruption we’re going to get.

MD: So you belong to those who say —

PT: I don’t think it’s good that the Democratic Socialists of America are a real option. They are a real danger.

MD: You once said it’s the most kind of energetic and in a way the most successful political movement these days.

PT: And so it’s young. It’s like pop culture. The history on it — 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 sort of membership thing was like 5,000 people. It was a very small fringe thing. And in the 2016 campaign, a legacy of the Bernie Sanders candidacy is the membership of the Democratic Socialists, the sort of cadre of the vanguard, ballooned from 5,000 to 50,000. The median age went from 66 to 33. And so it was this old socialist people thing to 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 lame. They can’t say anything. I mean, it’s the same problem with the SPD, CDU people in Germany.

MD: 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?

PT: 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 had helped start called Mithril, and then wanted to write this book on the side and I encouraged him to do that. It became this bestseller in 2016. And I helped him out financially when he ran for Senate in 2022. But I’m always hesitant to answer this question because I think it just detracts from his achievement in many ways.

MD: Now the Republicans will make a decision sooner or later. The names of the potential candidates that I 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?

PT: Well, I am 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.

MD: So the right question would be, who’s going to be the Democratic candidate?

PT: That’s the right question.

MD: 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?

PT: 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 against — you won’t pull out all the stops to prevent a Democratic Socialist from winning. So I think the Democrats will do well enough in the midterms in a month and a half that they will be indifferent to a center-left versus far-left presidential candidate. And then it’s a completely open field, completely open question.

And I had this discussion, debate with Fukuyama — the end of history. And 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, can never happen. And I don’t think history stops like that.

MD: So you think from today’s perspective that’s the most likely outcome?

PT: Not the most likely, but let’s say it’s a 50% chance.

MD: That’s pretty high. That’s pretty high. You are a fan of Milei because he’s a disruptor, I assume. Can you describe a little bit what we, what Western societies, what America but also what Europe could and should learn from Javier Milei?

PT: Well, I think we’re all fascinated by Argentina because we worry that their past is our future — where you had sort of this, I don’t know, it’s not zero growth or decline but subpar growth for a century. It’s a complicated history of what went wrong. It was obviously the Peronist history with this very charismatic leader who had a lot of bad ideas. And then 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.

So 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 this is so existential and you just can’t go back. The problem for all of us is, is there any way we can learn from the history of Argentina so it won’t take us 100 years of decline to get there?

I don’t like the accelerationist Leninist idea, which is Vladimir Lenin: 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 US and Europe is people are upset, pessimistic, angry — it’s never enough to lead to positive change. And instead we just have this drift where you worry things have to get a lot worse before they turn around.

MD: 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 successful autocrats — that this is a healthy warning 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 order where the autocratic systems are going to break through?

PT: 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 like a complete total failure any way you cut it. And then I don’t know, there’s a decent argument nothing will happen to him for another three years because everybody else thinks they won’t do any better.

MD: So that’s an indirect answer, that you think it’s more likely that we’re going to deteriorate further.

PT: 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. My intuition is that things will keep drifting for a long way, because the people who replace him don’t really have answers to these problems.

You frame the macroeconomic problem — this is again sort of a boring macroeconomic version — we have very large welfare states. The taxes feel pretty high to me. And then we have very big deficits, and maybe the deficits would be sustainable if you had 0% interest rates. The interest rates are no longer zero. And 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 is basically completely shut 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’s been number three. Ever since the 2008 crisis, we’ve just been borrowing more and more money. And then my intuition is we’re close to a point where that ends, and then you’re going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures. And the best idea Merz has is just borrow more.

MD: Why do you care so much about politics?

PT: Well, I don’t know if I — I think about it probably too much. I mean, I’m not a politician.

MD: Never, never? Not 100%?

PT: Exclusive. Look, I’m not sure I’m perfectly self-aware or anything like this, but I am self-aware enough to know that I’m not electable. But it permeates our society. It is sort of like, I don’t know, it’s both toxic, but it’s the air we breathe. And so I don’t know, I have a schizophrenic view on it. I think about it a lot, and then I try to compartmentalize and ignore it as much as possible.

MD: What’s your take on the 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 10 years down the road, who is going to win that race — not only the arms race in AI but in the broader context also the race of systems? And where should Europe be? Neutral, on China’s side, as a colony, or a reliable ally of America?

PT: I think it would be best for Europe to be a reliable ally. I always want to push back very hard on these sort of ways that this often gets framed as a sort of moral equivalence between the US and China. I always find that very offensive. But let me make a slightly different point.

I think from an American perspective, more important than whether Europe is a super close ally or, I don’t know, a somewhat allied but very independent thinking place, is it’s in America’s interest for Europe to get its act together and for Europe to be more functional, 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 in various sectors — if Europe can build up its own industry, or it can even become 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 sort of a British-French, not exactly free market plan. Supersonic aviation started in the US with Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier in 1947, but Europe was behind, but you could get your act together and you could catch up and overtake the US, and the supersonic aviation industry was a European leading industry. And so that’s not a free market thing, but that’s something that I think the US should be fine with, supportive of. And then on the other hand you had something like the French Minitel program of the 1990s, where the internet was supposed to be French and it ended up you were behind and you just dug yourself into a deeper and deeper ditch.

And so if you ask the question about AI in 2026: is it like the Concorde or is it like Minitel? And if we were honest, my assessment is that it’s further — Europe’s further behind than Minitel was.

MD: 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, what Germany should do in order to get back on the map and get its act together?

PT: The why questions are always overdetermined and much harder to answer. But let me — 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 risk averse and things like that. And maybe that’s true, but the dimension I want to always push back on is perhaps there’s also a fear of success. That if you have something that works, you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, and at some point you’ll sell the company or you’ll exit or something like that.

And so what’s very striking is how few great new companies have been built in Germany in the last number of decades. Here’s a stat that I looked up, and this is one particular dimension to look at, but if you look at the 50 wealthiest people in the US — and most 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 have had more time to compound their wealth. Germany, it’s actually more distributed: 20 of the 50 people are Gen X or younger, of the 50 wealthiest people in Germany. But here’s the difference. In the US, nine out of 12 of those people made their own money. In Germany, all 20 of those 20 inherited it. Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large new scalable company.

And then of course, what I’m just looking at is this very extreme, but for each of those people they created thousands of, I don’t know, 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 were also much larger companies that got built in the late 19th, early 20th, even after 1945 period. And then it’s really something about that has really broken down since 1995. And I don’t have an answer to that, but that would be the kind of question I would try to think about really hard.

MD: 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, being born in Frankfurt am Main in 1967, living now for almost all your life in America? Why is there still this emotional affiliation to Germany?

PT: Man, it would be strange if there weren’t. I think I would be much more strange if there weren’t.

MD: But you left Germany when you were one year old, so you don’t have any memories.

PT: My grandparents were here. There was sort of — 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, 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. So there’s a crisis of —

MD: So sorry, but that is of the West. There’s a crisis in Europe and Germany.

PT: Yeah.

MD: But you’re shifting back to intellectual analysis. We were talking about feelings. So what do you love about Germany? 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?

PT: It’s just part — I’m always bad at answering this question. It’s just part of who I am.

MD: 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 — he’s from Ukraine, but in any case there’s a European element in it. Do you think that these two guys played such an important role for you in your business life, but also in your personal development as friends, because there is this common European denominator, or doesn’t that play a role?

PT: It’s probably a 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 I think of as 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 was Jewish, where you always have a little bit of that as part of the background.

MD: Sorry, I didn’t get it — he is Jewish, but it has nothing to do with your background?

PT: But it’s a little bit of the outsider. There’s an outsider part.

MD: Okay, I see.

PT: And an insider. I always say that these founders have both the outsider-insider dynamic. And there was a way — Max was this super achieving straight-A student, this incredibly charismatic person, but then also grew up — he left Ukraine when he was 16 years old and grew up in a poor part of Chicago. And so it was just an incredible drive.

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

PT: Well, I think it’s always — I wouldn’t say it’s both though. It’s this outsider-insider combination. People always exaggerate the outsider piece, because that’s always in a way you’re sort of playing the victim and stuff like that. And there’s also some part where I grew up in Silicon Valley. Very few people did that.

MD: Okay, let’s assume in this perfect mix of being an insider and an outsider you have developed an overproportional degree of contrarianism. You love to contradict. I think for me the word “no” is the foundation of freedom and democracy. So I also love to say no. But I think in your case it’s almost kind of an automatic impulse. As soon as there is a consensus or people get close to a consensus, you say the opposite.

PT: All right. So just say no. No. I think that 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 of it as just this reflexively negative thing.

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

PT: Again, I’m always bad at the self psychoanalysis, but I’m probably interested in a lot of different things. And so it’s like big picture history and politics and economics and science fiction and the future and psychology — sort of all these different things. And it’s always — I don’t know, this is sort of not — in late modernity we’re supposed to be narrow specialists. It’s the pin factory in Adam Smith, where you have 100 people working in a pin factory and everyone’s specialized in one narrow area, and somehow 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, I don’t know, a Renaissance dilettante type thing that I’m rationalizing, but I tell myself there has to be room for at least one generalist in a world where everyone’s hyper specialized.

MD: And in that Renaissance spirit of having many interests and many fields of activity, where are the areas of passion and interest that have no professional, no pragmatic, no business rationale — that are purely kind of private, personal, irrational? Don’t tell me that you don’t have it at all.

PT: I probably still play way too much chess on the internet all the time. And this was — 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 everything in the world, if you didn’t play chess, you didn’t understand reality. It’s probably too extreme a thing to say.

But I don’t know, there are all sorts of questions that don’t connect directly. I think a lot of these political questions, they’re 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.

MD: You have now four pretty young kids. To which degree did they change your life, or is there anything that you already learned from them by watching them?

PT: It’s always thinking about — man, it really changes your time horizons on the future. And if we’re in this accelerating technological world, or in this crazy world where we don’t know how the world’s going to make it till 2030 or 2035, if you’re in this world of only adults, you can sort of pretend that you’re just thinking about it year to year. But my oldest daughter will be 81 years old in 2100. And so you start to wonder what will the 22nd century be like?

MD: 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’m also having 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 of something that we all have more or less, a fear of death?

PT: Yeah, fear of death, fear of getting old, all these things. But I always push back on — it’s odd to me that this is not more widely shared and that this can’t be articulated more widely. This was the optimism of early modernity, 17th, 18th century: that science would relieve man’s estate. Hobbes said in the state of nature life was nasty, brutish and short, and we were supposed to make it longer, and maybe indefinitely longer. And people like Condorcet or Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin — they thought you could cure death. You can cure all diseases. And it’s just this shocking social decline that we’ve given up on that. People don’t even think we can cure Alzheimer’s. Why can’t we at least try to do that?

MD: For me, the discussion about progress has always two sides. Almost every progress in technology or wherever has a flip side and a downside. In the case of health, I just don’t see it. I think it is for me the only area where progress is only positive. For centuries, scientific progress, progress in medicine has improved not only the lifespan but the quality of our life, enjoyment of our life, everything. So in that spirit, could you share with me the most optimistic, the most visionary case about longevity? What can be achieved? Eternal life? 150 years?

PT: It’s not clear why it shouldn’t be. It’s not clear there are any natural limits. We still have not — 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, 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 —

MD: Is it accelerating now, big time?

PT: And then there’s always a question — I don’t know, it’s badly simplifying things, but if you think of biological processes as sort of irreversible and information computational processes as fundamentally reversible — if you could understand biology as an information science, then in theory you could find a way to traverse all these processes. And that’s, you know, like computers can live forever.

MD: 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 we at a certain point are able to download our brain and our consciousness?

PT: Well, again, I have a very physical, maybe Christian-informed view where I wouldn’t find it acceptable to be uploaded in a computer program that simulated me. I don’t think it would be me. So I tend to think our identity is very wrapped up in our physical selves. And then the full Christian vision of this was of course that you were going to have an eternal body, and it would also be your soul, be transformed.

One of my friends is this 80-year-old mathematician, and he once joked to me that he didn’t know whether there was an afterlife but he hoped that 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 then Christianity always aimed for even more. But the problem with transhumanism and Christianity is, it’s not that transhumanism is too weird and too extreme from a real Christian point of view. It’s that it didn’t go far enough.

MD: 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?

PT: I think the answer to all those things is: better than the alternative. So I don’t think I would be bored.

MD: Good. Yeah, I agree. So what is then 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?

PT: 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. And that’s the one that I’d want to find a way to tackle in the years ahead.

MD: Peter, to conclude, I would love to ask you a question that you are asking almost every candidate you’re talking to before you hire her or him, or people that you find interesting. Tell me a truth that you believe in that almost nobody else agrees with.

PT: I’m giving you a lot today already. Let’s see. Just give me one second.

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

PT: 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 we can sort of debate which is the contrarian one.

So when I started giving these speeches about the Antichrist three years ago, I thought this was an extremely unconventional view that was very far outside the zone. And so I would have said that that’s an answer. And now I would say — but then yeah, 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, I think everybody says that the Antichrist is a crazy idea and the reality is they actually secretly agree with me.

MD: Peter, thank you very much for the conversation.

PT: Thank you.