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Peter Thiel

Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir

Search every verified Peter Thiel interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a September 2026 interview with Mathias Döpfner, Peter Thiel discussed his evolving views on technological progress, saying he had changed his mind "to some extent" about his long-held stagnation thesis. He stated that while progress had slowed in the physical world of atoms since the 1970s, he now sees a debate about whether AI is advancing too quickly. Thiel also commented on political dynamics, expressing continued support for JD Vance as a Republican candidate while suggesting the more important question is who the Democratic nominee will be. He discussed challenges facing democracies, arguing that without a broad growth story, societies become more zero-sum and prone to extreme political parties. He also reflected on his earlier speeches about the Antichrist, saying he now believes many people secretly agree with his views on incipient totalitarianism. In a 2014 Stanford talk that has resurfaced, Thiel argued that scientific and technological progress had stagnated for 50 years, claiming that the "crown jewels of STEM are not actually delivering the goods" and that the only real progress had been in information technology. He criticized what he called "STEM propaganda" and suggested that engineering fields outside computer science had failed, noting that exaggerating technological progress had been used to balance budgets under the Clinton administration.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“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 at the same time, the sense I always have in the US and Europe is people are upset, pessimistic, angry. It's nev”

“I think the big place where our democracies are in trouble, I always say constitutional republics or our broadly liberal societies, broadly free societies, 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 j”

“I suspect we're close to a recession. It's being stopped by really big government spending. So in May of 2023 the projection for the deficit in fiscal year 24 which is October of 23 to September 24 was something like 1.5 1.6 trillion. The deficit's going to come in about 400 billion higher.”

“I think there's so many ways our policies are messed up but probably that you know the one thing that's roughly correct on the Taiwan policy is that we don't tell China what we're going to do and what we tell them is we don't know what we'll do and we'll figure it out when you do it which is probably has the virtue of being correct.”

“The history of science has generally been one where Y is 0% across the board. The scientists never make any money. They're always deluded into thinking that they live in a just universe that will reward them for their work and for their inventions.”

“You have a valuable company if two things are true. Number one that it creates x dollars of value for the world and number two that you capture y% of x. And the critical thing that people always miss in this sort of analysis is that x and y are completely independent variables.”

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