A conversation with the original tech right power player.
A conversation with the original tech right power player.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Is Silicon Valley recklessly ambitious? What should we fear more: Armageddon or stagnation? Why is one of the world’s most successful investors worrying about the Antichrist?
My guest today is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early investor in the political careers of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Peter Thiel is the original tech right power player, well known for funding a range of conservative and simply contrarian ideas. But we’re going to talk about his own ideas because, despite the slight handicap of being a billionaire, there’s a good case that he’s the most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years.
Peter Thiel, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Peter Thiel: Thanks for having me.
Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.
So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?
Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.
