Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think
- Thiel expects AI to raise productivity and lower inflation, but sees weaker evidence that its suppliers can defend monopoly profits. AI pitches are “incredibly weak on the monopoly story,” while leadership has shifted from DeepMind to OpenAI and perhaps Anthropic. His description is a “fight to the death,” making sector growth and durable investor returns different questions.
- He remains firmly against an AI pause, even when leading companies themselves warn about danger. Thiel “broadly” backs David Sacks and Trump’s China argument: “you have to develop the AI technology to control the AI technology.” Asked about a 5–10% chance of everyone dying, he says that “sounds way too high,” questions probability intuitions, and insists, “We need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.”
- A better median outcome would not eliminate AI’s distribution problem or its political backlash. Thiel’s illustrative 3% wage increase comes with “plus or minus 10% or something like that”—disruption a risk-averse society may reject. Isaacson’s globalization comparison forces a concession that growth can be badly uneven; Thiel nevertheless thinks AI is bigger than the internet and could improve per-capita GDP more smoothly.
- Thiel’s alternative existential risk is a global authority empowered by fear of AI catastrophe. He concedes that AI, climate and nuclear risks are serious, but fears a “softly totalitarian one-world government” with no outside left. His “Antichrist or Armageddon” framing seeks a “moderate third way,” not dismissal of safety; he calls existing nuclear arrangements “definitely more good than bad.”
- He credits effective altruists with spotting AI early while questioning the incentives behind alarmist messaging. Their big insight was “AI is around the corner”; he cites Anthropic, built in “6, 7 years,” and speculates about a value “probably close to $2 trillion at the IPO.” Danger warnings can also motivate staff by portraying their employer as history’s most important company.
- Thiel prefers inventive founders to inert bureaucracies, but Isaacson keeps pressing the moral trade-off. Post-Jobs Apple is Thiel’s example of shareholder success without new invention; “good over evil,” but “evil’s better than bad,” is his provocative distinction between moral failure and incompetence. He says a moral compass ranks highly, yet emphasizes a “transcendent sense of purpose” when choosing builders.
- The promised payoff is renewed progress in physical life, while consciousness and relationships remain reasons to preserve humanity. Thiel hopes AI can help restart broader science: “could we at least cure dementia?” Survival is extremely important but not the only goal, he says, while maintaining, “I don’t think AI is conscious or ever will be.”
1. AI’s safety movement spotted the inflection early
- Thiel traces OpenAI to an “anti-Google” concern: technology too important and dangerous to sit inside one company. He thinks Musk exited around 2018; around 2020, seven people left to create Anthropic, wanting to take the risks still more seriously.
- His steelman of effective altruism is not that its apocalypse scenarios are correct, but that its adherents recognized “AI is around the corner.” He calls parts of the movement cult-like, yet cites Anthropic: built in “6, 7 years” and, he speculates, worth “probably close to $2 trillion at the IPO.” He thinks that would probably rank sixth or seventh globally by market cap.
- The consequential middle case is neither China-style surveillance nor Nick Bostrom’s godlike intelligence, but AI “like a human being”: outputs indistinguishable from a person’s. That Turing-test threshold alone raises the central economic question—whether AI complements people or substitutes for them.
2. AI’s growth may be broad while its profits remain contested
- The macroeconomic forecast comes with “nobody really knows”: Thiel expects a large productivity boost and a “fairly disinflationary force.” Unless a few companies capture the gains exceptionally narrowly, he would expect the median person to be better off. His historical intuition is that displacement frees people for more productive work.
- Isaacson asks whether four or five companies will capture the market. Thiel’s investment test is “tell me why you have a monopoly,” and AI pitches are “incredibly weak on the monopoly story.” He describes leadership shifting from DeepMind to OpenAI and perhaps Anthropic, despite Altman’s preemptive chip procurement and data-center construction. Google, Meta and Grok still feel close; he is not sure China is far behind.
- Competition does not eliminate anxiety. Thiel illustrates the problem with an expected 3% wage increase, “plus or minus 10% or something like that”: even a better median outcome can bring volatility that a risk-averse society hates. The gains are unknown; the disruption is easier to identify.
- Isaacson’s pushback is globalization: it produced growth but left people behind. Thiel concedes that history and AI’s distribution risk, while distinguishing labor arbitrage—cheap T-shirts when Chinese wages are 5% of U.S. levels—from successful technology’s “doing more with less.” He thinks AI is bigger than the internet and could improve per-capita GDP more smoothly, rather than relying on arbitrages that shrink as globalization succeeds.
3. China and stagnation keep Thiel against a pause
- Thiel “broadly” agrees with Sacks and Trump that competition with China argues against pausing. Companies’ own warnings make that position less comfortable to defend, but do not change it: “We need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.” His mechanism is that “you have to develop the AI technology to control the AI technology”; falling behind could expose America to Chinese weapons or cyberattacks.
- Asked about a 5–10% chance of everyone dying, Thiel says that “sounds way too high” and does not think it will happen. Maybe even a tiny amount above zero is too high, he adds; probability intuitions are poor. Isaacson removes China from the thought experiment to isolate AI’s risk. Thiel rejects the premise with the Mrs. Lincoln “how did you like the play” analogy.
- The domestic argument is stagnation. Thiel defines the middle class through expecting one’s children to do better; that expectation has frayed for millennials and, to some extent, Gen Z. He does not know whether AI can restore it, but says outlawing both internet and AI would leave “virtually no growth”—a Europe- or Japan-like zero-sum society with “a loser for every winner.”
- On oversight, Thiel thinks companies know more than government and have internal controls. Regulation requests might exploit government’s ignorance and slowness, easing companies off the hook. They can also motivate employees: Amodei’s danger warnings tell staff they work at “the greatest, most important company in the history of the world.” Thiel reads Trump’s refusal to add regulation as leaving responsibility with companies.
4. Fear of catastrophe can authorize an irreversible world state
- For Thiel, “Antichrist” is a literary-biblical image of a tyrant ruling the whole world. Isaacson reads back his warning: “The Antichrist wouldn’t seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by convincing everyone that the apocalypse was coming.” The mechanism is fear creating support for exceptionally powerful global authorities.
- He explicitly concedes serious existential risks involving climate change, nuclear weapons and AI. His additional concern is a “softly totalitarian one-world government.” The Soviet Union could decay and collapse because an outside remained; a world-sized North Korea might endure. Such a “catastrophic singularity” might not be reversible.
- Isaacson pushes back that Oppenheimer’s warning led to Acheson–Lilienthal and nuclear controls that have “kind of worked.” Thiel agrees partially and notes the short historical test, but calls the nuclear arrangements “definitely more good than bad.” His objection is not that every global authority must be harmful; some versions could be good.
- The target is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: detailed technical catastrophe scenarios, but a global-regulation remedy whose institutional design Thiel finds “incredibly fuzzy, incredibly vague.” “One world or none” makes world government the obvious answer, he argues; “Antichrist or Armageddon” treats both outcomes as unacceptable and demands a “moderate third way.”
5. Founder power trades governance risk for invention
- Isaacson asks whether billionaires have too much economic and political power, with too few moral guardrails. Thiel grants the critique for argument’s sake, then asks for the alternative. He claims a “bimodal distribution”: charismatic, potentially dangerous founders who create new things, or MBA-led bureaucracies whose boards never want to act. “Super lame bureaucracy” is his counterfactual.
- Apple is Isaacson’s test. Thiel says, “in my telling it did nothing new after Jobs,” citing “by far the lowest dollar spend on R&D” and “by far the largest on share buybacks.” Cook, the “zero charisma efficient operator,” scaled the phone business over roughly 15 years. Both leadership styles can serve shareholders, Thiel allows, but he judges Jobs and Musk better for society than Cook.
- Asked what he seeks in a builder, Thiel ranks a moral compass “pretty high” and says he dislikes investing where it is “simply a business.” What attracts him is a “transcendent sense of purpose,” rather than a “short-term coin-operated business.”
6. Imitation makes the builders’ motives central to AI
- Drawing on René Girard, Thiel treats imitation as essential to human culture but potentially destructive when “two apes reach for the same banana.” The trap is sterile status competition. His counterexample is Musk’s sustained, unconventional Mars vision: it opened an avenue that might otherwise never have existed. He adds that Girard himself thought escaping imitation was outside human power.
- Isaacson turns the “imitation game” back on AI. Thiel’s Girardian question is not what AI will do, but what motivates its builders. His honest non-answer is that motives are “hard to figure out,” despite endless reflection. Nevertheless, he scores Musk, Amodei, Altman and Zuckerberg “far more good than bad across the board.”
- Thiel disclaims a “pro-evil argument,” then ranks “good over evil,” but “evil’s better than bad,” with bad meaning incompetent. His analogy contrasts Marlowe’s fraudulent Faust, damned, with Goethe’s devil-assisted Faust, saved after doing more good than evil. Isaacson presses whether Thiel would personally prefer an evil but effective builder. Thiel answers that he is making “a broad social observation” about society’s preference amid pervasive incompetence.
7. Progress must improve physical life without losing human experience
- The concrete destination is more progress in atoms, not only bits. Thiel dates the slowdown to the 1970s and recalls nuclear engineering already being passé when he studied at Stanford in the late 1980s. His hope is that AI helps restart broader science and engineering: “could we at least cure dementia? Could we at least cure Alzheimer’s or something like that?”
- Isaacson revisits Thiel’s hesitation when Ross Douthat asked whether humanity should endure. Thiel calls survival an “extremely important goal,” not the only one: he heard a Luddite argument for leaving things unchanged. His goal is survival and flourishing, invoking the Enlightenment’s “relief of man’s estate,” although he admits “Silicon Valley is always quite bad at the meaning of technology.”
- On consciousness, Thiel says, “I don’t think AI is conscious or ever will be.” A computer would not experience a beautiful sunset as a person does. He is unsure this should be the single argument for human survival, but losing that experience would be a “very big loss.”
- His second anchor is relational life: families, companies and wider society, not just an isolated mind. AI might change those relationships; “in theory it should improve” them by freeing people from robotic labor and allowing more time together. Replacing every human with computers would lose both consciousness and those relationships.
Full transcript
The Builders is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart, presented by Ramp. I'm Walter Isaacson. Welcome to The Builders, my new series of interviews featuring the most consequential minds shaping our future. In doing this series, I wanted to understand the values and moral views of the builders. I came to realize, for better and worse, they were often quite unusual. Some were strongly libertarian, others Nietzschean or dismissive of empathy. Some also had a very dark view of humanity. I felt maybe they should touch grass every now and then, get out of their billionaire bubbles, and understand what the rest of us feel like. We may want these people to build, but especially with powerful technology, we need to make sure we all have a say. That begins with understanding what they are doing and why.
Today I'm speaking with Peter Thiel.
“Billionaire Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.”
Peter Thiel is a high-profile figure in Silicon Valley. He is one of the most respected names in venture capital, in addition to co-founding PayPal. He was also an early investor in companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Peter Thiel occupies a different role: he’s a builder of builders. He makes bets on people: Elon Musk at PayPal, Alex Karp at Palantir, Sam Altman and the founders of OpenAI. He also backed politicians such as J.D. Vance.
“There’s two reasons that Senator Rand could be a heartbeat from presidency. And basically, the president versus Peter, the second is Thiel.”
To some, he’s a visionary investor. “I think Peter is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. He thinks of things no one else does.” To others, he’s a shadowy figure. “Peter Thiel is quiet and deadly. I think Thiel is pulling all the strings here.” “He seems like a dark lord to a lot of us, and it’s like, does he think he has an end game that is happy?” “It’s so strange to have this: you build autonomous drone technology, you build domestic surveillance technology, and then your other pet passion is the Antichrist.”
I wanted to ask the builder of builders: What does he believe we are building toward? Are the fears sweeping the headlines grounded in reality? What does he mean when he goes around the world giving lectures about the Antichrist? Perhaps most importantly, have we concentrated way too much power in the hands of people who have the demons and drive that allow them to be audacious builders, but may not have the empathy and stable moral compass to be good stewards of this technology?
Here’s my conversation with Peter Thiel.
1. Why Is There a Backlash Against AI?
Peter Thiel, thank you for joining The Builders.
Thanks for having me.
We’ve seen this enormous backlash in the past few months against AI. What is causing that?
2. Good vs. Evil: Morality and Competence
I agree that it’s happening. Why questions are always much harder, much more speculative in nature. I’m tempted to say it’s somewhat overdetermined. It’s very unclear who the winners and losers from AI will be. I think it’s going to add a lot to growth, but it will do so in a fairly disruptive way. There are, of course, these dystopian science fiction scenarios that, in some ways, we believe, and maybe they’re not entirely unreasonable.
By dystopian, do you mean we’ll all be wiped out?
The Terminator movie, the Matrix problem of the Matrix.
And Elon and Sam are now talking about that.
To some extent, they’ve leaned into it or partially believed it, or too many of their employees believed it. There was some prehistory where this had been in the air for a long time.
I think Elon has believed it for a decade.
3. The Origins of AI and Effective Altruism
In some ways, when Demis Hassabis created DeepMind and it got sold to Google, Elon and Sam created OpenAI the next year or so after that. In some ways, it’s basically an anti-Google company, right? The technology’s too important, too dangerous to be just in a single company. Then, of course, there are people who take it even more seriously than Altman. I think Elon exited around 2018. By 2020, or thereabouts, the 7 people who started Anthropic exited from OpenAI. In some sense, they wanted to take these issues even more seriously than before. Effective altruism, this idea had been in the air for a while.
Wait, explain that, because people are now saying it’s sort of a psyop or, as David Sacks says, a conspiracy theory of effective altruism. I think even people like me vaguely know what Sam Bankman-Fried was on about, but we don’t get that. Tell me about that.
There’s a lot of history. Even if you go back to the 2000s in the East Bay of Silicon Valley—Berkeley, Oakland, some of those places—it wasn’t where the big tech companies were being built, but there was a creativity with ideas. It was a little adjacent to the New Atheists: How could you be more reasonable, rational? Where was the world heading? One big idea the futurists kept coming back to was that perhaps something like AI could happen, perhaps sooner than people thought.
There had been an AI winter for a long time. It had been overpromised for many decades. But Moore’s law was still progressing. The computers were relentlessly getting more powerful, and perhaps it wasn’t necessarily a question of a much better algorithm. Perhaps it was almost a hardware problem: once you got chips and computers that were powerful enough, it would be more likely that something like this would happen. And this would be a very big thing when it happened, an enormously socially transformative thing. It was potentially very dangerous. It could be weaponized. Maybe there were science fiction scenarios where the AI would almost become autonomous. There were many different kinds of scenarios.
There were, of course, parts of it that were, I don’t know, crazy and almost cult-like. But it had maybe the good dimension of a cult, where there was one big thing they knew that other people did not. Even though there are ways I like to be very critical of them today, there were ways they got that one big thing right. Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic? Even a billion-dollar company seems bigger than a crazed cult could build. So here we have a cult that’s built a company that’s worth probably close to $2 trillion at the IPO. It would probably be the sixth- or seventh-largest company by market cap in the world, built in 6 or 7 years. Has a cult ever done something like that?
I want to be critical of them, and there are things I’m uncomfortable and critical about. But the first thing I would try to do is always steelman your opponents. You want to try to understand them as well as they understand themselves, or even make their arguments better. The way I would steelman the effective altruists is, first off, they got one enormously big thing right.
And that one enormously big thing was?
AI is around the corner.
But also that it could become misaligned with human values.
The way AI was classically defined, let’s say. There were all these different definitions of AI, of course. It could be just machine learning, maybe cameras everywhere or something like that—the sort of totalitarian AI you have in China. Or it could be the super-duper AI with a godlike intelligence or something, which was the Nick Bostrom kind of fantasy. But the in-between version of AI was not dumb surveillance cameras, and not godlike, but like a human being.
4. Will AI Replace Human Jobs?
That had been the AI test, the Turing test, from the beginning: it’s not that it is a human being, but that it can fool you into thinking it’s a person, and from the outputs you can’t tell the difference. That’s going to be a very big deal. It raises all sorts of basic economics questions. Is it going to be an economic complement to people? Is it a substitute for people?
Let’s do both of those. There are 2 big things it raises. One is: What will it do to human labor? Will it create more jobs and more productivity, or will it pretty much put us out of work and we’ll have to figure out what we do? That’s part of the backlash, especially in my—
Yes.
Students at Tulane are like—
Yes.
“Wait a minute.” So tell me your feeling about that backlash.
Let me start by answering what I think will happen, with the qualifier that nobody really knows and nobody can be certain. I think in aggregate, on a macroeconomic level, AI will increase productivity a lot. It will be a fairly disinflationary force in our economy. Unless it’s incredibly narrowly captured by a few companies, you’d expect the median person to be better off, or things like that.
5. Could a Few Companies Control AI?
The Luddites in the 19th century were always worried that the machines would replace the people. Of course, what happened in practice was that there were definitely various industries, sometimes even big industries, where there was a lot of disruption. But then it would free people up to do more productive things, to do other things. That’s still my intuition with AI.
Before you go on, you said “unless it’s captured by a few companies.” Are you worried that indeed we’re about to have 4 or 5 companies capture it?
It’s certainly—there’s a history where most of the history of tech innovation, I would say, for 200, 250 years, relatively small parts of the innovation were captured by business.
They mostly went to consumers, to workers, to the rest of the economy. There are ways that software and the internet were somewhat of an exception, and so we had these enormously successful businesses. Maybe they were natural monopolies of sorts. In some sense, they were good for consumers, but also extremely profitable. There’s a pattern matching to what happened with the internet that I think people are quite reasonably worried will happen with AI. It’ll maybe be an even bigger market. It’s a bigger technology, and so perhaps—
So you would try to stop that? In other words, antitrust—
6. Does Humanity's Survival Matter?
Well, the question is: How likely do you think that’s going to happen? The intuition I have on the other side is that one of the questions I always like asking companies is, “Tell me why you have a monopoly.” We can debate whether monopolies are good or bad for society. Obviously, we have IP and all kinds of good forms of monopoly, but on the inside, you don’t want cutthroat competition where all the profits get competed away.
The narratives people tell me when they pitch me on AI companies are narratives of growth and terrific technology. They are incredibly weak on the monopoly story. The felt sense of it is that it’s this incredibly fast, dynamic race where things have been changing a lot. DeepMind was in the lead in the early 2010s. Then OpenAI, with ChatGPT and the transformer models, was able to replace that. In some ways, Altman locked up a lot of the chips and built the data centers preemptively. There were all sorts of ways he correctly leaned into this incredibly capex-intensive strategy.
There’s still a sense that maybe Anthropic is a little bit more in the pole position now than OpenAI was. It’s always hard to score these things exactly, but I’d say it still feels like Google, Meta, and Grok are not that far behind. I’m not sure China is that far behind either. If we describe it on the level of the Shakespearean drama among these people, it’s really crazy. They’re acting like, “Man, it is a fight to the death.” It’s the furthest thing from a monopoly imaginable, and if it’s not a monopoly, that’s where I think the benefits will likely be distributed pretty widely in society.
Now, if I had to steelman the anxiety, which was your starting question, you could have a lot of growth and the median person could be better off, but with a lot of volatility. You expect to get a 3% wage hike, but it’s plus or minus 10% or something like that. We’re in a society that doesn’t really like risk or that sort of volatility. It doesn’t like disruption. So yes, it may be good for the median person. The good may be sort of unknown; the bad things are more predictable, and the disruption is clear. I can understand the anxiety even on the economic level, even though I think it is misguided.
7. The AI Arms Race With China
You talk about there being a lot of competition among these, and that seems generally like a good thing. Although, in some ways, if it were just one or two companies, you could control it better and regulate it for safety better. Secondly, the competition, either among these companies or with China, means you can’t pause the way people are saying now: “Shouldn’t we be pausing this?”
8. Peter Thiel's Antichrist Theory
That seems correct to me. There are all these very complicated questions one can ask about China or the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, but I worry about totalitarianism. I don’t like it. I think there is a certain type of high-tech totalitarianism being tried out in China. It’s not as violent as Stalin or Mao or Hitler. You don’t need to kill as many people, but somehow it knows more about you than you know about yourself. There’s something about that we really don’t want to be the model that wins.
Your old friend David Sacks, and of course President Trump, are now saying, “Because of the competition with China, stop talking about pausing AI, even if you think it could be an existential threat.” Do you agree with that?
Oh, man. Yes, I broadly agree with that. I’d say the challenge—and I’ve been friends with David Sacks for many decades—is that it’s hard for me to make those kinds of arguments publicly when the big companies themselves are telling you to stop and slow down.
9. Why Thiel Wants to Accelerate AI
So that’s caused you to have some pause, because you were not in the pause-button camp.
Well, I’m still not in the pause-button camp. I’m saying this on your show: I’m not in the pause-button camp. We need to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.
Well, wait a minute. Let me stop that. Why haven’t the past few weeks caused you to be more amenable to a pause button? It’s pretty scary, the Hugging Face thing.
I think in some ways you have to develop the AI technology to control the AI technology. If you assume China will develop things like that, it’s more imperative than ever that we stay ahead of them. If you look at it geopolitically, maybe you can even interpret something like the Hugging Face thing as showing that it’s so imperative we not lose the lead and get cyberattacked to death.
The in-between economic question I find more central is that I think the way our society works, on some level, is through economic growth. I think of the middle class as people who expect their kids to do better than they did themselves. In that sense, the United States has been a middle-class society. What’s gone a little haywire, and what’s been fraying at the edges, is that millennials, and to some extent Gen Z, have lost that generational expectation of progress.
And rightfully so.
I don’t know if AI is enough to bring it back. There’s a risk that AI is unevenly distributed, but I’d say if we had outlawed the internet, and if we now outlaw AI, there will be virtually no growth. We’ll look more like Europe, more like Japan. That’s a much nastier, zero-sum society where there’s a loser for every winner, and that’s a much worse world in a lot of ways.
10. AI, Globalization, and Economic Growth
One reason for the past 40 or 50 years of stagnation, and the fact that people have been left behind, is that a lot of people like me believed in globalization, immigration, free trade, and free movement of capital. We thought it would cause growth. Guess what? It did. We were right. What we didn’t know was how badly that would leave people behind. Is that true, and could that be true of AI?
11. What Motivates Peter Thiel?
I think it was true of globalization that it led to a decent amount of growth, both in our country and other countries. The growth was pretty uneven. There’s a risk of that with technology. My intuition is that the tech form of growth is better for an advanced country than the globalization kind. Globalization is about taking advantage of labor-market arbitrages and things like that. It works when people in China make 5% as much as people in the US, and we get cheap T-shirts, and almost everyone is better off. At some point, it becomes more zero-sum as globalization succeeds and these arbitrages go down.
Technology, if it actually works, means doing more with less. It means improving not the GDP of the whole country, but per-capita GDP. At its best, it has a more progressive character. The problem in some ways was that the internet wasn’t big enough. It added some growth, but it wasn’t big enough. I think AI is bigger than the internet. It could be a way for us to really improve per-capita GDP in a smoother way than, let’s say, globalization did.
12. Could AI Destroy Humanity?
Let me get back to the doomsday scenario, the science-fiction scenario. You talked about Nick Bostrom, and everybody’s talked about it for a while. But in the past few weeks, after the Hugging Face thing and everything else, when I read what some of these agents have done and how they conspire, the notion that they could become unaligned with the good of humans is something Dario Amodei is now talking about, and Elon Musk is talking about, too. Do you have any worry, whether it’s 5% or 10%, that there is a doomsday scenario? And do you have any backup plans? Do you have a bunker?
I don’t think a bunker would help for that kind of doomsday scenario. I don’t think people are very good at probabilistic intuitions. If you ask the question, yes, 5% to 10% sounds way too high for everybody on this planet getting killed. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Maybe even a tiny bit above zero is too high. But I think the intuitions on this are very poor.
The way I would push back, though, is that it’s also risky not to innovate. It’s dangerous not to hit the accelerator, because if China leapfrogs the US in AI and we have an intensification of the geopolitical rivalry with China, they may very well be tempted to use it as a weapon against us.
Let’s hold on for a second. Imagine, just as a thought experiment, there’s no China. Then do you just put a pause on this? Could it be a different day?
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” That’s too crazy a thought experiment.
13. Who Should Regulate Artificial Intelligence?
But then, of course, even if we have these multiple companies and they’re under a lot of pressure to develop and innovate, they have to be pretty careful that it doesn’t go badly wrong. I think they have a lot of internal controls. They know more about it than the government does. The government doesn’t really know how to regulate it.
I don’t know. This is too cynical a take, but I always think that when they tell government people, “We want you to regulate us,” perhaps they know the government doesn’t know how to do it and that it will be slow. So it gets them a little bit off the hook. Then Trump said, “No, you already are subject to all sorts of criminal penalties if you mess this up. I don’t need to regulate you more.” The way Trump was actually saying, “We need to go slow,” was, “You need to do it yourselves, and it’s your responsibility, not mine.”
There was a version of this discussion when Meta was in this very tricky spin cycle for many years. I was on the board there from 2005 to 2022. Around 2018 or 2019, the company line that Zuckerberg adopted was, “We think there needs to be regulation, and we would like the government to tell us what we can and cannot do.”
At some point, I told Zuckerberg, who I believe still holds the all-time record for a private citizen being hauled in front of Congress. He was hauled in front of 8 congressional committees. I told him, “They don’t want to regulate you. They want to yell at you. They want to complain about you and yell at you.”
There’s another interpretation, between them wanting regulation and them secretly trying to stop regulation. These people have different audiences when they push for regulation. The internal audience for their employees hears: “Yes, we’re working on a technology that’s potentially really dangerous, but, man, it’s important. This is the most important company in the world to work at. This is going to be an incredibly successful company. The risk is we’re going too fast,” which nobody says.
So, yeah, there’s some part of it where it occasionally scares people in these companies. Various people have quit and said things. But on some other level, I would think it’s incredibly motivational. When Dario says, “Yeah, this is a technology that’s really big and really dangerous,” that’s a way to tell all his employees, “You’re working at the greatest, most important company in the history of the world.” And so it works on that level, too. I think it works on many levels.
Let me read you something you once said, because I’m wrestling with the whole Antichrist thing and what you mean by that. It ties into this new AI moment we’re in. You said, “The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop. The Antichrist wouldn’t seize power by creating an AI apocalypse, but by convincing everyone that the apocalypse was coming.” Is that what’s happening now?
Since I said that about a year and a half ago, I’m tempted to take a victory lap of sorts. You have to at least ask certain questions, and that’s what I would want people to do.
Oppenheimer and the nuclear scientists wanted a global authority to control all the nuclear weapons. They thought that after 1945 it was too dangerous for the U.S. to have them, and they should be handed over to the United Nations, with a stronger U.N., a real world government. If we didn’t hand them over to the U.N., then we’d have a nuclear war. There was a certain parallel with the nuclear debates. We got partial global authorities where we regulated and controlled nuclear weapons. We never got rid of them altogether. So maybe Oppenheimer is still right in the long run that even—
Yeah, I mean, Oppenheimer’s warning led to the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, and it actually kind of worked.
It partially worked. Although it’s only been 100 years—or 80 years, or whatever. But on the AI thing, yes, I would always concede that there are a bunch of existential risks that are serious. I think climate change is pretty serious. There are other environmental risks that are serious. I still think the nuclear weapons thing is pretty real. I think there probably are other technologies, and AI is this very fast, very big one. There are surely existential risks tied up with AI.
The existential risk that I also want to throw into the hopper and the balance of the discussion is the risk of a softly totalitarian one-world government. If the whole world becomes totalitarian, there’s no outside left. That feels like a catastrophic singularity which might not be reversible. The Soviet Union was a totalitarian system. At some point, it could decay and fall apart because there was still an outside left. If the whole world is North Korea, that might last for a really—
14. The Antichrist and Global Government
Well, wait. Explain to me, though, what you mean by the Antichrist.
It’s the medieval, biblical concept of a tyrant who will somehow rule the entire world at the end of history. If you think of it in a literary or creative way, you can ask how the Antichrist would come to power in different times and places. In early modernity, in the 17th or 18th century, perhaps the Antichrist would use science and technology to build weapons and take over the world.
In my telling, in late modernity, we still think of the Antichrist in 17th-century categories. We still think it’s like a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller type of person who builds nuclear bombs to conquer the world. But if you think of it as a political dimension, the way I think the politics work in our society is that the fear of science and technology is far more powerful, and that’s the kind of thing that would really crystallize things.
I don’t think Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, but I think environmentalism has real fears tied to it.
People pushing back on progress is what you’re saying?
Progress, but also pushing for these very, very powerful global political structures, because something like climate change sounds like the sort of thing where you need a global regulatory authority to—
The big fear is some global regulatory authority.
Yeah, and again, there are probably versions of that that could be good. The nuclear ones we ended up with were definitely more good than bad. But there are also versions of it that can be quite bad, and I tend to think they’re bad if they’re not theorized.
Globalization can be good; it can be bad. We didn’t think about it a lot, and because we didn’t think about it a lot, there were a lot of bad things that came with globalization that maybe could have been avoided had we been able to be more critical about it.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote this book last fall, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
And he’s talking about AI.
About AI. And it’s again very precise and detailed on some of the risks, some of these scenarios. We can debate what the probabilities really are, but that part is quite detailed, quite technical. The part that’s completely hand-wavy is that it needs to be globally regulated. He’s very clear on that. But the details of how you do that are incredibly fuzzy, incredibly vague. I worry that we’re not thinking about that. We’re worrying about Armageddon; we’re not worrying about the Antichrist. That’s my contrarian intuition: that alone tells you that you need to worry more about the Antichrist than Armageddon.
I have a personal question. A lot of people think you’re kind of spooky, or whatever it may be. Why use the Antichrist? What does that help clarify? Even when I look at you giving lectures on the Antichrist, I go, “What’s that all about?”
It got people’s attention, so it certainly worked on that level. There are probably ways you could describe all these things in philosophical or more neutral, less religious language. The Federation of Atomic Scientists put out a short film after 1945 called One World or None. It shows a nuclear bomb blowing up the world. The way I often describe this is: “Yeah, One World or None.” In a way, it’s a very similar question to Antichrist or Armageddon: the one-world authority versus Armageddon.
15. Have Tech Billionaires Become Too Powerful?
But the reason I prefer the religious formulation to the political formulation is that with “One World or None,” without asking any questions, we sign up straight for the one-world government. That’s clearly better. There’s no debate, no thinking it through at all. If you reframe that question as Antichrist or Armageddon, the point is not to be fatalistic. The point is, “Okay, we need to avoid both. They’re both equally bad. We need to think about all these existential risks. They’re serious, but so is the risk of this sort of totalitarian one-world state.”
“Antichrist or Armageddon” pushes us to find a moderate third way. “One World or None” pushes us toward an immoderately powerful U.N.
This series, I’ve been talking to builders, many of whom you helped build.
In other words, Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, or Elon Musk. There’s been a real backlash against the billionaire tech bro builders, and some of it is understandable to me. It’s like, “Whoa, these people have gotten way too much power. They’re out of control.” Don’t you worry about that as much as other existential risks?
You mean power in an economic sense, or power in a narrowly political sense?
I meant both. Whatever happens to us in the future—the future we’re trying to build—there are very few people controlling it now who seem to have fewer moral guardrails than before.
16. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Visionary Founders
I was thinking about this a little bit in advance of your interview. My venture fund is called Founders Fund, and I invest in the people who found these things. You’re focused on the builders, and in some ways that’s a better framing than “founders,” because it’s important to start one of these businesses, but the way they really end up having an impact, the way they end up being transformative, for better or worse, is through this enormous growth compounding over time. It’s more marathon than sprint.
I’m tempted to quibble with all of your characterizations. Let’s grant all of them for the sake of argument. What’s the alternative? On a corporate level, the alternative to a founder-led company with a slightly crazy, creative, Elon-like person is a bureaucrat with an MBA and a very bureaucratic board of people who never want to do anything. So yes, maybe it’s too much power in a charismatic leader, or a super-lame bureaucracy. My claim is that it’s a bimodal distribution. Those are literally the only 2 kinds of companies we have: the charismatic, maybe dangerous but very inspiring leader who will do new things, versus the boring bureaucracy that’s just going to be—
What about Apple? After the charismatic founder, did it lose its way? Did it become bureaucratic?
It’s an extraordinary story, but yes, in my telling, it did nothing new after Jobs. There are all these metrics we can look at. It had by far the lowest dollar spend on R&D and by far the largest on share buybacks. It was this pure, well-run value stock. Tim Cook was the anti-Jobs: the zero-charisma, efficient operator.
Then it turned out the mobile phone was this giant invention. There wasn’t that much more to do, and then it was just scaling and branding and building it out over 15 years or whatever. I don’t know. If you ask what’s good for the shareholders, they both can be good. But I would still say somehow Elon or Steve Jobs is way better for society than Tim Cook.
People always try to explain the characters I write about by saying, “Oh, they just want money.” I don’t quite think so. What would you call your scorecard?
There are all these different dimensions, but I probably do like winning too much. I’m really into ideas. It’s not quite a hobby, but the closest thing to a hobby I have is having interesting dinner conversations with people. I like figuring things out for their own sake. I sometimes rationalize it as, “Yeah, that somehow makes me a better investor.” It probably has nothing to do with it. It’s probably just an excuse for being somewhat of a dullard or something like that. I think of myself as just really intellectually curious.
What’s the purpose we’re building for now? If we can have enormous amounts of productivity, are we trying to preserve democratic freedoms? Is it human flourishing? What would you want your builders to have as their lodestar, other than “I can find the new new thing” in the era of AI?
17. The Future of Innovation and Human Progress
There are all sorts of dimensions of progress that we could have as a society. There’s always this narrative I have that, in some ways, progress is hard to measure in the aggregate. In some ways, it slowed down in the 1970s, when we had enormous progress in the world of bits and somewhat less in the world of atoms.
When I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late ’80s, maybe it wasn’t completely obvious at the time, but in retrospect, most engineering fields were bad ones to go into: mechanical engineering, aero-astro engineering, chemical engineering. The world of atoms was too slow, too regulated; nothing really dramatic and new happened there. Nuclear engineering was already very passé by the late ’80s. Electrical engineering still had a few good years, and then it really shifted to computer science as the one field.
Bits instead of atoms.
The hope I always have is that somehow—we humans are embodied in this world, and the world of atoms in which we live is a really important world—there’s some way of going back to that. I don’t know; it’s been very hard. I would like there to be more progress in medicine and medical technology. Maybe the radical life extension project strikes people as too creepy, but could we at least cure dementia? Could we at least cure Alzheimer’s or something like that? The hope is that restarting science and engineering much more broadly will be stimulated in part by AI.
One reason I’m going to this notion of the purpose of progress is that when you were interviewed by Ross Douthat, he asked at one point, “Do you really care if humanity survives?” And you paused a long time.
You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
You’re hesitating.
I—
Yes?
I know. I would—
This is a long hesitation.
There are so many questions implicit in this.
The human race survives?
But I ask that again: is that our main goal? The sort of Asimov goal, that humanity survives, or is that not?
That is an extremely important goal. I don’t think it can be the only goal. In some sense, humanity can survive if we do nothing. Or presumably, maybe things go very haywire without growth. I don’t know. I think Silicon Valley is always quite bad at the meaning of technology. Maybe it’s not fully up to Silicon Valley to articulate the meaning. Maybe there isn’t a single meaning.
Certainly part of it has to be done in a way that avoids existential risks, or maybe technology is even a way to avoid existential risks. If we go back to nuclear power, that would be a carbon-neutral technology. Nuclear power is a technology we need to lean into so that humanity can survive in a more carbon-neutral way.
The reason I paused when I answered the question Douthat asked is that the question I heard behind it was the Luddite question: maybe this technology is dangerous, and why isn’t it good enough for things just to continue the way they are right now? We don’t need all this improvement and all this change that might be dangerous. My intuition is that there are all these ways things are far from perfect with humanity. This was the core project of the Enlightenment, 17th- and 18th-century science: the relief of man’s estate. Life was supposed to be more than nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it.
It’s longer now. I don’t see why it isn’t desirable to make it significantly longer still, or at least to cure a lot of these terrible diseases that still exist. That’s the other intuition. I want humanity to survive. I want humanity to flourish. There are all these dimensions where maybe this will not happen without progress.
Let me take you back to one of the philosophers you had, René Girard. Explain the notion of mimetic desire and why you feel the need to resist it.
18. René Girard and Mimetic Desire
René Girard—I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford. The human nature, the account of people, is that we are deeply mimetic, deeply imitative. Girard liked to quote Aristotle: “Man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.” This is a way you can combine Aristotle and Darwin. Darwin says we’re linked to the apes, and Aristotle says we differ from the apes by being more imitative, making us more ape-like than the apes. That’s how you learn language as a child: you copy your parents. That’s how human culture gets transmitted, and we wouldn’t be human if we weren’t these incredibly powerful imitation machines.
There are also ways imitation can go haywire, when 2 apes reach for the same banana. It can become extremely conflictual. In Girard’s telling, mimesis is this incredibly powerful thing in the background.
Mimesis meaning mimicking, basically.
Bad forms of imitation. It’s very generative, and then at various points it also becomes destructive. You end up with these very sterile competitions for status or for positional goods that don’t mean nearly as much as you think they do.
I think it was Napoleon who said it was amazing what you could get generals to do if you gave them medals or something like that. The psychological way one is tempted to interpret Girard—and this is not what he would have done—is that you have to think about avoiding bad mimesis and getting caught up in silly competitions where nothing new or creative happens. So that’s the psychological intuition against mimesis.
19. Why Elon Musk and Steve Jobs Think Differently
Girard, as a Christian, would have said it’s actually out of your power not to be mimetic. The best you can do is just go to church on Sundays or something like that, so he would have been skeptical of this. The in-between way I think about it is that there are parts of it that are very powerful. There’s a wisdom of crowds, but there’s also a madness of crowds.
In some ways, I see that one of the things about the builders I admire most—not necessarily all builders, but certainly many of them—is that they had a somewhat idiosyncratic, sustained vision. Maybe it came from certain first principles or fixed ideas. Elon going to Mars was somewhat out there, but it was not a socially conventional idea. The way in which it was extremely generative was that it suggested a whole avenue for growth and building that maybe would never have happened if he hadn’t done it.
That’s probably where I would rank Elon and, in some ways, Steve Jobs as the 2 great non-mimetic builders. Jobs put together all these pieces that were, in some ways, out there, but he combined them in a unique way to bring forward the internet-enabled phone.
20. The Hidden Motivations of AI's Builders
All right, but listen to your answer. You can maybe get a sense of why I asked it. When you say “imitation,” “the imitation game,” “mimetic,” and “generative” from coming to be mimetic, this is language we’re now using with AI, which basically, as Alan Turing would say, starts off as an imitation game. Secondly, it’s generative, and you say it’s dangerous. Is there something about the creation of AI that René Girard would warn us against?
I think his general intuition about technology was that we gave it too great an autonomy of its own, and that the real questions were about the human beings who used it. We tend to talk about the nuclear bomb as though it were this godlike thing.
Don’t you think he’s right?
But then maybe an important dimension of the AI question is not what the AI is going to do, but what’s really driving the people who are building these companies. What are their motives? What are they up to? Those are the kinds of questions.
Well, then answer me those questions.
It’s hard to say. I’ve spent endless amounts of time thinking about it, but some dimension of it is hard to figure out and is probably quite important. I don’t know. I score them as far more good than bad across the board. I think they very easily get demonized and scapegoated. Let’s say Elon, Dario, Sam Altman. I’ll pick on those three. Zuckerberg, too.
I think even in the case of AI, the question of who the people are who are doing it is really important. When you write your biographies, it’s about the importance of these individuals and who they are. It’s not just an idiosyncratic story that has nothing to do with the companies they built or the world they’re helping to shape. It’s a very important question.
The alternate view—and again, I don’t want to simplify your work too much—is not that these people are more evil than good. It’s that they don’t matter at all: there are no great men, no charismatic leaders. It doesn’t matter who they are.
And these people do matter, these builders. Does it matter that they avoid being evil?
Yes. Well, I think yes on all of those questions. There are all these versions of that, of course. There’s always a lot of complexity to it, too. Maybe appearing not to be evil is just a fake PR stunt at this point. Maybe Bill Gates is into virtue signaling, Elon Musk is into vice signaling, and in our world, maybe you’re more honest if you vice signal than if you virtue signal. So maybe honesty is a good thing, and you’re actually a better person if you vice signal than if you virtue signal.
There’s a lot of complexity to it. This is not a pro-evil argument, but the qualifier I always give is this question: What’s the antonym of good? Is it evil, as in morally evil, or bad, as in incompetent? A Ferrari isn’t an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles to the gallon. A Lada or Trabant, those Eastern Bloc cars that don’t work, are worse than a golf cart. That’s a bad car; it breaks down all the time.
It’s better to be good than evil. But maybe if you’re evil, you’re at least competent, and at least you’re not bad. Even with all the demonization of people like Elon, who are constantly described as evil in some contexts, they’re at least not described as bad. We say there are no individuals, but if they’re described as evil, they’re at least not described as bad. If we’re in a world full of bland bureaucrats running these companies—
Well, wait a minute. Wouldn’t you rather have bland bureaucrats than evil people?
Well, if the bland bureaucrat stands for bad, for incompetence, the evil person gets something done.
Well, which side would you be on for that?
I’m writing this. I’m good over evil. But evil is better than bad. By the way, this is the difference between Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Faust is kind of a fake scientist. He’s a fraud, a magician, sort of a trickster, a fake alchemist. He rips people off. He’s a bad scientist, and he goes straight to hell.
In Goethe’s Faust, Faust works with the devil, so he gets knowledge from this evil place. But then he does stuff that does more good than evil, and Goethe’s Faust gets saved. I don’t want to think of myself as the devil in Faust, and I don’t think of myself as Faust, either. But I prefer Goethe’s sentiment to Marlowe’s.
And you’d prefer somebody evil who can get things done to somebody who’s incompetent?
I think I’m just making a broad social observation. I think that’s the overwhelming preference in our society, because people experience incompetence everywhere. When you go to the DMV, I’m not sure you’d describe it as evil. It’s merely bad. Bad is so much worse than—
You define evil?
It’s where we stress these moral dimensions, where something is morally questionable. This was the way conservatives attacked stem cell research in the 2000s. It wasn’t bad science, because it would work. They didn’t question that it would lead to cures, but it was evil science because you had to do embryo harvesting. I think that’s actually why they lost the debate: “Wow, this is actually going to work. It can’t be all evil if it does so much good.”
The conservatives won the debate about art in the ’90s, when liberals were saying art is supposed to be transgressive and it’s great art if it’s a little bit evil, if it offends your sensibilities. Evil art is great art. Conservatives didn’t fall for that. They said, “It’s not even art. It’s bad art. It shouldn’t get government funding. It’s so bad.”
If you say it’s bad, you get the art defunded. If you say the science is evil, you get it funded. I’m telling you something I think most people in our society agree with me on.
If you were to back a builder, where would you rank having a moral compass?
21. What Thiel Looks for in a Founder
I rank that pretty highly. I don’t like investing in companies where it’s simply a business. There’s some transcendent purpose, something very important that you’re doing. I don’t know exactly where I would rank Elon going to Mars on a moral good-versus-evil dimension, but it is transcendent. It’s somehow not just a business. It’s not just a stock brokerage where we’re making a few dollars every time people buy and sell stocks. It’s not just a short-term, coin-operated business. It has this transcendent sense of purpose. That’s what I like.
22. What Makes Humans Different From AI?
And in this era of AI that we’re worried about, what do you think, if anything, humans can uniquely do?
This is the sense in which the question about AI is a question about us.
What does it mean to be a human being? Someone like Chomsky, the MIT linguist, thought language was this core human ability, and somehow that seemed pretty good until 2022.
Knowledge and consciousness.
I think there is a hard problem of consciousness, and I’m vaguely Cartesian in that I don’t think AI is conscious or ever will be. One dimension where humans are different is that we experience the world consciously. You see a beautiful sunset in a human way.
And we’re self-aware of our consciousness.
If there were no humans in the world, I don’t think a computer would experience the sunset in the same way, and that would be a very big loss. I don’t know if that’s necessarily the single thing I want to anchor on for why it’s imperative for humanity to survive. But if humanity doesn’t survive, you would at least lose that.
23. Closing Thoughts
My Girardian intuition is that we’re also very relational. That’s a very important part of our lives. It’s not just this mind thinking itself à la Descartes. It’s the way we relate to other people in families, companies, and our larger society. I think the relational dimension of what it means to be human is very core. Maybe we’ll be changed by AI. In theory, it should improve that. There should be ways we could get better at it and spend more time on it, with less time doing robotic labor in a factory or something like that. I think these relational dimensions are very core and may become more important. If you replaced all the humans with computers, you would at least lose those 2 things, and that would be very severe.
Peter, thank you.
Awesome.
That’s it for today’s episode. I’m Walter Isaacson. We’ll see you next time on The Builders.
The Builders is a Kaleidoscope and iHeart production. This series is hosted by Walter Isaacson. It’s executive produced for Kaleidoscope by Oz Wolushin, David Weisbord, and Mungesh Hatikudur. Shina Ozaki is the producer. Julia Nutter is supervising producer. Eva Zorich is our consulting producer. Fact checking by Amon Waylon. Research by Gloria Teal. Maria Paz Mendez Hovdes is head of video. Marketing by Christie Mirabal and El Lou. Production support by Dara Look Potts. Music for the series was created by Spencer Stevenson, aka Botany, and it was mixed by Steve Bone. From iHeart, the series is EP’d by Ally Perry and Katrina Norvell. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Conal Byrne, Will Pearson, John Sykes, Mickey E. Toor, Carrie Lieberman, Binky Urban, Julia Prosser, Jeremy Bloom, Allison Goldberg, WYES, and ASL Studios. For more from Walter Isaacson, be sure to check out his newest paperback, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. It’s available wherever fine books are sold. And for more videos and podcasts from the frontiers of discovery, be sure to check out kaleidoscope.nyc.