Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir Technologies
Peter Thiel: Mafia-like Corruption is Killing American Innovation
Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale discuss the stagnation of innovation in the world of atoms and how to overcome the regulatory ...
About Peter Thiel
In a June 2026 podcast, Peter Thiel discussed the ideological shift in Silicon Valley, attributing it in part to pressure from a left-wing regulatory state. He described a period where tech executives felt unable to speak publicly about certain topics, and he characterized the subsequent change as a "preference cascade" in which people realized others shared their private views. Thiel also commented on the difficulty of building infrastructure in the United States, citing the cost of subway construction in Manhattan and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's record on approving new reactor designs.
Transcript (18 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Do you think that we could bring, maybe using AI, some more advanced manufacturing here that wasn't in China? Is that a real thing in the next decade, to do a bunch more of it here thanks to our more efficiencies and productivity?
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Peter Thiel0:10
There's probably always a decent amount of things like that. You have to always be extremely granular on how expensive the robots are, how expensive the equipment is, because in some sense manufacturing has been getting steadily more automated for 250 years. And you've had the machines that make the machines, the machines that make the machines are getting sort of smarter and more complicated. And there are ways in which AI is a quantum leap. There's a way in which it's just a natural continuation of this two-century-long process. I think there are some parts that can be moved to the US with AI. Maybe also if you change some of the environmental rules and some of the other anti-industrial policies we have in the US. And then if parts of this are moved to other emerging market countries, you know, Vietnam is a communist country, it has bad mercantilist policies, but it's not planning to take over the world. And so at the margins, if we can move things from China to Vietnam, that's a big win.
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Interviewer1:28
I want to ask you about a theory I have that's based on how you see things. So, one of the things you've been talking a lot about lately is how our culture—I don't want to put words in your mouth—but things are broken to such an extent that we're not advancing as quickly as we were in the Industrial Revolution, right? And there's something wrong with our culture, something's wrong with science. It's not advancing.
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Peter Thiel1:45
Yeah, I would say it's generally been stagnant in the world of atoms, not the world of bits, for something like 50 years. And yeah, why it's happened is overdetermined, but there are cultural factors, maybe we just ran out of ideas, which is a very pessimistic version. Maybe there's something wrong in our culture. Maybe we're too risk-averse. Maybe we're scared about how apocalyptic some of the science and tech are. But for a range of different reasons, it's slowed down since the 1970s.
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Interviewer2:16
Mhm. And I tend to think of things, and I'm not sure this is how you see it, but I take some of maybe your interest in Girard and in memetic theory, and I say people tend to often think of things the same way even when it's incorrect because it's natural to be memetic and to think of things the wrong way together. That's kind of why culture's moving the wrong way. And so I tend to see that there's a lot of opportunities right now thanks to the fact that you do have this kind of broken cultural situation where people are thinking of it wrong. So for example, I'm particularly bullish—I know it's random—but on Elon's Boring Company. I'm excited, I was working on it with some of the guys yesterday on tunnels, because I think it's just obvious we could create trillions of dollars of value by building tunnels and getting rid of traffic around our cities. And the reason that opportunity exists is because of this thing that's really broken, because it's an obvious thing but it's so broken that no one's doing it. Is there other things like that where there's opportunities tied to the fact that things are broken? Do you see it that way?
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Peter Thiel3:01
Well, anything that fits that pattern is a great opportunity. So if it's broken not because of the science or tech, it doesn't require a miraculous—you don't have to have a dozen miracles in terms of tech breakthroughs. You have to just do something in this non-mafia-controlled drilling way or whatever. I think so many of the tunneling is super corrupt contracting. It's mafia-adjacent, super corrupt labor union-adjacent. And so I don't know what it costs. What does it cost to build a subway in Manhattan? It's like a billion dollars a mile.
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Interviewer3:49
Yeah.
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Peter Thiel3:50
I think it's 10 times as much as Paris or something like that, which we don't think of as exactly capitalist efficiency.
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Interviewer3:56
It's the same.
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Peter Thiel3:57
So, and Elon's a tenth the cost of Paris, which is like a 100x multiple. It's crazy. But you know, the place where I always think it's non-trivial is there's some non-tech reason we're not even at the Paris level.
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Interviewer4:12
Yep. Yeah, but so you can—but if you could push through, then you could do something big.
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Peter Thiel4:16
You can do something big even if you could get to the Paris level. And so you have to think really hard about what that political blocker is and how to overcome that.
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Interviewer4:27
And so there's all these things that are dysfunctional and broken and not working. And like, things right now—I think you're more optimistic than you have been. You said should we be trying to use our voice and fix things more? I know a lot of friends have just decided to exit, right? And a lot of friends are in Singapore and Switzerland. They gave up. They think it's going to be too hard to fix it. I feel like you're in between this where you've done a lot of things to fight for our society and to fix a lot of things, but then you're skeptical you should be pushing too hard in a bunch of areas. How do you think about that trade-off with voice and exit on these things?
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Peter Thiel4:58
I think it's very important to try. It's very important to pick the right battles, is what I would always say. And so, I don't know, the in-between answer is, you know, I don't think you can just be shooting at bad guys when they're two miles away and firing your guns at random. And it's like, yeah, you get credit for some kind of Marxist labor theory of value. You're trying hard. But we're not Marxists.
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Interviewer5:29
Yes. And we're...
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Peter Thiel5:30
It's about actually winning.
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Interviewer5:31
It's not—we're not measuring input. We're measuring where you can actually get output.
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Peter Thiel5:38
I keep trying in a lot of these areas. We've made a number of investments over the years in nuclear technology. And it always—when you look at the science, there are all these much better ways that in theory you could do it. You could build small modular fission reactors. Maybe the fusion technology is not that far away. There are different verticals within the industry where things are extremely broken and in theory should find a way to build a successful company that overcomes some of these problems. And then there's the sobering reality that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission basically hasn't approved a new reactor design in 50 plus years. And so it's always these things that you're trading off.