Ross Douthat at the NY Time just sat down with Peter Thiel for an interview. The whole thing is about an hour long and covers a lot of ground so I'm not going to try to summarize all of that, but I did want to pull on one thread that I found really interesting.
Douthat argues in his opening that Thiel may be the most influential conservative thinker of the past 20 years and whether you agree with that or not there's no doubt he was one of the first high-profile people in Silicon Valley to jump on the Trump bandwagon. That's a path that many more people, notably Elon Musk, would follow when Trump ran for reelection in 2024. What's interesting is why Thiel did it and why he thinks Musk joined in.
It all started with Thiel's belief, expressed in a 2011 piece at National Review, that somewhere over the last 50 years, the west had stopped believing in the future.
Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force. Liberals often assert that science and technology remain essentially healthy; conservatives sometimes counter that these are false utopias; but the two sides of the culture wars silently agree that the accelerating development and application of the natural sciences continues apace...
In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline...
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.
Thiel made an exception for computers which continued to follow Moore's law and which gave us home computers, cell phones, the internet. But he argues that despite all of this, the sense of progress seems dim. The computers are faster but that only seems to have kept our economic prospects at a standstill or a slow measure of growth.
The whole thing is worth reading but the gist is that society has been slowing down, getting old, lowering its expectations. And with that view in mind, Thiel saw a real danger that society itself falls apart.
Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?
People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?
But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.
The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society.
And into all of this, Thiel saw Trump as a disrupter. He says he wasn't optimistic he could make a lot of positive change but at least he could maybe shake the stagnation up a bit. He was a disrupter who might change the conversation, and he did.
Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.
Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.
I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted...
These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.
And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.
Thiel repeatedly tries to say that the shift isn't about people necessarily believe Donald Trump is the person who is going to become the proponent of a new technological advance but he could be a necessary step in the right direction.
There’s a deregulation of nuclear power, and at some point we’ll get back to building new nuclear power plants or better-designed ones, or maybe even fusion reactors. So, yes, there’s a deregulatory, deconstructive part. And then at some point you actually get to construction, and it’s all things like that. In some ways you’re clearing the field, and then maybe...
At this point, in the conversation I was hearing echoes of the Abundance discussion that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been pushing on the left. Thiel isn't directly citing them but he is making a kind of macro case that dovetails with the micro cases Klein and Thompson point to in cities like San Francisco or states like California. Their argument is that we can't build great things anymore and that needs to change. Thiel's argument is that no one has been building great things for quite a while and anything that rattles that stasis is probably good.
But how do you do that beyond writing a book? And that's where he tells a story about Elon Musk who has famously has been pushing to make civilization multi-planetary by starting a human colony on Mars.
Thiel: ...this is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024, and we had all these conversations. I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said: If Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country. And then Elon said: There’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go.
And then you always think of the right arguments to make later. It was about two hours after we had dinner and I was home that I thought of: Wow, Elon, you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore...
It was a meeting with Elon and the C.E.O. of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, that we brokered.
Douthat: This is an A.I. company.
Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.
And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.
Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.
Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?
Douthat: What does Mars mean?
Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?
Douthat: A vision of a new society.
What I think Thiel is trying to say is that Mars isn't just a technical challenge to Musk, it's a new frontier. It's a chance to recreate the creation of America and thereby create a society which can still be dynamic. And Thiel is suggesting that at some point Elon may have realized the new frontier could be ruined by the AI and the stagnant social democratic politics which following people to Mars in the same way that California ex-pats head to Texas and immediately start trying to make it more like California.
Did Musk actually mean it that way or was he just suggesting there was no where else on earth to go? I'd love to ask him that question. In any case, the point was a sense that the window was closing and if something didn't happen to shake things up here in the US maybe stagnation become inescapable.
In any case, the idea of Mars not just a moonshot project for America but as a new frontier for a free people who believe great things are possible in the future is one that makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe that's because I've read most of Robert Heinlein's books.
