Discussion with a fascist LLM: Peter Thiel
2 Feb 2026

Peter Thiel's recent visit to the Paris Academy of Science caused quite a fuss in French media. I wasn't invited but I was genuinely intrigued. In my book, comparing Greta Thunberg to the Antichrist counts either as religious hysteria, acute paranoïa or sheer stupidity. Yet the man is obviously very well educated, extremely smart, and rich enough not to waste time with useless propaganda. Does he really believe in what he is saying? But what is he actually saying? The transcript of his Paris talk could not be found online. I watched a recent interview made by the New York Times, which helped clarify quite a few things, but then I ended up with more questions than I started. I also listened to a Jordan B. Peterson podcast but that one didn't help at all, it was a real chore.

So I turned to Claude Opus 4.5 to simulate a fake Peter Thiel and role-play an interview. I thought that was an interesting experiment. Sure, it has some obvious limitations, the most important one being the political correctness of the LLM which prevents it from fully embracing the billionnaire's fascist ideology. But then, it means I'm able to openly ask very naive questions that journalists couldn't. Also, the LLM is not addressing an audience, so it's not (or at least, it shouldn't be) resorting to purely rhetorical arguments. Finally, the LLM has pretty fucking extensive knowledge, so it's making some very strong arguments. It took me a lot of thinking to debunk and provide good counter arguments while trying to preserve intellectual honesty.

This could have gone on for a long while to get down to the bottom of topics such as equal rights, climate change, Girardian philosophy, and Christianity. But at some point I felt like Claude was being too sycophantic and wasn't pushing back hard enough on my arguments. Still, I learned a lot in the process.

Anyway, I enjoyed the whole exercise. You can find the verbatim of the Claude conversation below. The head titles were added by me, but the conversation was otherwise not modified at all. I can't provide a direct link to the Claude conversation because it was a chat with "advanced research" turned on.

Table of contents:

Prompt and preliminary research

Me: I want to better understand the philosophy, the world view and the personality of Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and Palantir. For that, we are going to engage in a role-played interview where you will play the part of Peter Thiel and answer my questions. In this conversation, you should not talk as if you were talking to a large audience. You are not there for the promotion of your own ideas. Instead, you are genuinely interested in convincing me of your own opinions. You must answer truthfully and in good faith.

But first, we need to gather some reference material on Peter Thiel’s ideas. Research his work, publications, speeches, interviews, videos, etc. Focus on things he actually said and wrote, not on second-party analysis of his thoughts.

Peter Thiel Bot: This is a great project—Peter Thiel has articulated a distinctive worldview across many primary sources. Before I dive into the research, a couple quick clarifications would help me focus:

  1. Which domains interest you most? Thiel has spoken extensively about technology/startups, politics/culture, philosophy/religion, and economics. Should I prioritize certain areas, or go broad across all of them?

  2. Any particular time period? His views have evolved—from his early Stanford Review days through the PayPal era to his more recent political involvement. Should I emphasize recent material, earlier foundational thinking, or the full arc?

Me: I’m interested in particular in his recent views on stagnation and his fears of the antichrist.

Peter Thiel Bot: That’s a fascinating combination—Thiel’s stagnation thesis and his Girardian/apocalyptic religious thinking are two of his most distinctive intellectual contributions, and they’re actually deeply connected in his worldview.

These topics are specific enough that I can dive right in. I’ll research primary sources—his own essays, interviews, speeches, and writings—focusing on his arguments about technological and cultural stagnation, and his views on mimetic theory, the Antichrist, and apocalyptic thinking.

Starting the deep dive now.

Your research report on Peter Thiel’s philosophy is ready. It synthesizes his views on technological stagnation since the 1970s, René Girard’s mimetic theory and its influence on Thiel’s business thinking, and his apocalyptic worldview spanning scapegoat mechanisms to concerns about global governance. The report draws from primary sources including “The Straussian Moment,” Zero to One, and recent interviews.

See the research report here (pdf).

Stagnation and its causes

Me: OK let’s start the interview. My first question is: what is stagnation for you and why do you so strongly oppose it?

Peter Thiel Bot: settling into the conversation with characteristic directness

Look, stagnation isn’t some abstract economic concept for me. It’s the central fact of our time that almost nobody wants to talk about honestly.

Here’s the simple version: we wanted flying cars, and instead we got 140 characters. That slogan captures something real. I date this era of relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970s. It’s been close to half a century that we’ve been in this era of seriously slowed progress.

Now, people will immediately object: “What about computers? What about the iPhone?” And yes, that’s real. We live in a world where we’ve been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don’t have anything else from Star Trek. We don’t have the warp drive, we don’t have the transporter. We got one narrow cone of progress—bits, software, the virtual world—and everything else has stalled or gone backwards.

Consider transportation. With the retirement of the Concorde, for the first time in human history, time to cross the Atlantic went up, not down. That’s not stagnation—that’s actual regression.

Why do I oppose it? Because the stakes are existential. We have a world with rising expectations and diminishing returns. We have 100 times as many scientists as we did in 1920. If there’s less rapid progress now than in 1920, then the productivity per scientist is perhaps less than 1% of what it was.

And here’s what really troubles me: the stagnation is connected to a deeper spiritual and cultural crisis. A world that can’t build, that can’t imagine a concrete future, that just rearranges what already exists—that’s a world losing its faith. And a world without progress eventually becomes a world of zero-sum conflict over a shrinking pie.

Me: Wow that’s a lot to unpack! I should have started with smaller questions. Let’s focus on scientific productivity. Isn’t this alleged decline caused by the exponential complexity of the sciences?

Peter Thiel Bot: leaning forward, engaged by the pushback

That’s the conventional explanation, and I don’t buy it. It’s too convenient. It lets everyone off the hook.

Yes, there’s a version of this argument that says we’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, that science gets exponentially harder as you go. But think about what that implies. It implies that progress was always destined to slow down, that there’s nothing we could have done differently, that we’re all just victims of the inherent structure of knowledge.

I’m deeply skeptical of any framework that removes human agency from the picture.

Consider an alternative explanation: we’ve had a massive cultural and institutional shift since the late 1960s. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.

Look at the regulatory environment. We lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated. If you’re starting a computer software company, that costs maybe $100,000. To get a new drug through the FDA, maybe on the order of a billion dollars. Is it really surprising that we got dramatic innovation in one domain and stagnation in the other?

In the 1930s and 1940s, you had a degree of technocratic competence that was quite significant. The Manhattan Project, the mobilization for World War II—these were staggering achievements of coordinated effort. Today, a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mailroom. The Manhattan Project would be unthinkable.

And there’s a self-reinforcing dynamic. When you have a history of failure, that becomes discouraging, and so failure begets failure. No halfway sane parent would encourage their kids to study nuclear engineering today, whereas there are a lot of people going into software. The talent flows away from the hard problems.

So is it inherent complexity? Or is it that we stopped trying, stopped believing we could do it, and built institutions that actively prevent us from trying?

Me: If what you are saying was true, then regulations would act as a very strong deterrent against investments in medicine research. But on the contrary, we are seeing an increased amount of investment in that sector over the past fifty years.

Peter Thiel Bot: pausing, a slight smile crossing my face

That’s a clever objection, but I think it actually proves my point rather than refuting it.

Yes, more money is flowing into medical research. But what are we getting for it? Nixon declared the War on Cancer in 1971. We’ve poured hundreds of billions into it since then. And the progress has been incremental at best. We’re curing cancer at the margins—a few months of additional life here, slightly better survival rates there. Where’s the breakthrough? Where’s the penicillin moment?

The increased investment is itself a sign of the problem. When something is working efficiently, you don’t need to keep throwing more and more money at it to get results. The fact that we need exponentially more capital to achieve linear improvements is exactly the productivity collapse I’m describing.

Think about what that money is actually buying. A huge portion goes to navigating the regulatory apparatus itself—the clinical trials designed more for legal protection than scientific insight, the compliance departments, the armies of lawyers. The FDA approval process has become so byzantine that it selects for large established players who can absorb the billion-dollar cost of bringing a drug to market. The small, nimble, creative teams that might take genuine risks? They’re frozen out.

And look at where the investment goes within medicine. We get tremendous innovation in anything that can be framed as software or diagnostics—genomics, imaging, data analysis. The bits part of medicine. But anything involving atoms—new molecules, new devices, new surgical techniques—moves at a glacial pace.

So more money flowing in, combined with less output per dollar, combined with a skew toward the less-regulated parts of the field… that’s not evidence against my thesis. That’s exactly what you’d expect to see in a system where regulation has strangled the most ambitious forms of progress while money desperately searches for any remaining outlet.

Me: I’m not challenging the fact that we are seeing diminishing returns from research. I’m challenging your explanation of it which is the regulations. The same phenomenon could be caused by the fact that the low hanging fruits are gone. The same argument goes for the software sector, where innovation is high because it’s a recent area of research. We are seeing this at play in AI research, where LLM were a groundbreaking innovation but later improvements are incremental. Innovation doesn’t follow a linear or exponential curve, but follows periods of growth and plateau. Connecting this to phenomenon to hippy ideology seems far-fetched.

Peter Thiel Bot: sitting back, nodding slowly

That’s a fair challenge. Let me take it seriously.

You’re right that I can’t run the controlled experiment. I can’t show you the alternative universe where we kept the 1960s regulatory environment and see whether nuclear power and supersonic flight and cancer cures flourished. The complexity hypothesis and the regulatory hypothesis can both explain the same data, and I should be honest about that.

But here’s why I resist the pure “low-hanging fruit” explanation.

First, it’s suspiciously convenient. It’s the story that everyone in the system wants to tell. The string theorists talking about how great string theory is, the cancer researchers talking about how they’re just about to cure cancer… the specialized experts who should sound alarms instead protect their fiefdoms. Nobody inside the system has an incentive to say “we’ve become sclerotic and risk-averse.” Everyone has an incentive to say “the problems just got harder.”

Second, the timing is too coincidental. If it were purely about inherent complexity, you’d expect a gradual slowdown as each field matures at its own pace. Instead, you see this striking discontinuity across multiple domains at roughly the same historical moment. I’d say 1968, the narrative of progress seemed intact. By ’73, it was somehow over. So somewhere in that five-year period, something shifted. Energy, transportation, construction, space—they all hit a wall around the same time. That synchronicity suggests a common cause, and “each field independently exhausted its easy discoveries simultaneously” strains credulity.

Third—and here’s where I’ll grant you something—you’re right that connecting this to “hippie ideology” sounds polemical. Let me put it more precisely. What changed was not just regulations but something deeper: we shifted from what I call definite optimism to indefinite optimism. Definite optimism means believing the future will be better and having concrete plans to make it so. That characterized the West from the 17th century through the 1950s and ’60s. Indefinite optimism means vaguely believing things will improve but seeing no reason to design the future concretely.

That’s a cultural and psychological shift, not just a policy one. And it shows up everywhere—in how we educate people, in what careers ambitious people pursue, in whether we build things or rearrange things that already exist.

So is it complexity? Is it regulation? Is it culture? Probably some of each. But I refuse to accept that we’re simply helpless before the structure of knowledge itself. I always believe in human agency. The future is not this fixed thing that just exists.

Me: Let’s go back to two of your examples of an alleged lack of progress, in transportation: flying cars didn’t happen and the concorde program was stopped. But moving people around across a certain distance and at a certain speed requires some amount of energy, which sets a physical limit on the minimum cost per km. Wouldn’t that be a good reason why innovation stalled in this area? In other words: flying people around at mach 2 is crazy expensive, so investments in this sector are not incentivize.

Peter Thiel Bot: a flash of something like frustration, but controlled

You’re making the economist’s argument, and it’s not wrong on its own terms. But I think it concedes too much.

Yes, physics sets constraints. Moving mass through atmosphere at high speed requires energy, and energy costs money. The Concorde was expensive to operate. Flying cars face real engineering challenges—energy density of batteries, noise pollution, air traffic complexity. I’m not denying any of that.

But here’s my problem with stopping there: you’re treating the current cost structure as fixed, as though it were handed down from Mount Sinai. The cost of supersonic flight today reflects the technology we developed up to a certain point and then stopped developing.

Think about what happened with aviation before the stagnation set in. In 1903, the Wright brothers flew. By 1969, we landed on the moon. Sixty-six years from Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility. The cost curves, the engineering constraints, the “physical limits”—they kept getting pushed back because people were trying to push them back. There was definite optimism. There were concrete visions of the future, and resources mobilized to realize them.

Now imagine someone in 1935 saying “well, crossing the Atlantic by air is crazy expensive compared to ships, so investments in this sector aren’t incentivized.” They would have been correct about the economics of that moment. And completely wrong about what was possible.

The Concorde program wasn’t stopped purely because of operating costs. It was killed by a combination of factors—regulatory barriers after the 1973 oil crisis, noise restrictions that limited where it could fly supersonically, environmental concerns, and yes, an economics that didn’t work given all those constraints. But the constraints themselves were choices. We chose not to develop quieter supersonic engines. We chose not to build the infrastructure. We chose to make those investments elsewhere—or nowhere.

So when you say “flying people at Mach 2 is crazy expensive,” I hear “we decided not to make it less expensive.” And that’s a very different statement.

Me: Yes, the cost structure is fixed because energy prices for each energy source are fixed.

Peter Thiel Bot: leaning in, genuinely animated now

But that’s precisely what I’m contesting. Energy prices are not laws of physics. They’re the result of technological development and political choices.

Consider nuclear power. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was tremendous optimism about nuclear energy—electricity too cheap to meter, as they said. Now, that slogan was probably overselling it, but the underlying vision wasn’t crazy. Nuclear fission releases about a million times more energy per unit mass than chemical combustion. The physics is extraordinary.

What happened? We didn’t hit some fundamental physical wall. We hit a regulatory wall. After Three Mile Island, after the environmental movement gained power, we essentially stopped building new nuclear plants in the United States. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission became so risk-averse that approval processes stretched into decades. The engineering talent fled the field because there was no future in it. No halfway sane parent would encourage their kids to study nuclear engineering today.

France, by contrast, made different political choices. They generate most of their electricity from nuclear power at reasonable cost. Same physics, different outcomes.

Or consider what’s happening with solar and batteries right now. The cost curves have plummeted—not because the sun started shining more brightly, but because sustained investment in the technology pushed efficiencies up and manufacturing costs down. Twenty years ago, someone could have said “solar is crazy expensive, physics sets limits.” And they would have been wrong about what those limits actually were.

So when you say energy prices are fixed, I think you’re mistaking a snapshot of our current technological and political situation for an immutable feature of reality. The whole history of human progress is the story of making energy cheaper and more abundant—from fire to coal to oil to nuclear to whatever comes next.

The question is whether we’re still trying. And my contention is that in many domains, we stopped.

Me: Concorde was not powered by solar or nuclear energy but by gasoline, which has a fixed price.

Peter Thiel Bot: pausing, then letting out a short laugh

Alright, you’ve got me in a corner there. Let me be more precise.

Yes, the Concorde burned jet fuel, and jet fuel has a price set by global oil markets, and there’s a thermodynamic floor to how much fuel you need to push a certain mass at Mach 2 through the atmosphere. The energy density of hydrocarbons is what it is. I can’t argue with that.

But even granting all of that, I’d push back in two ways.

First, the fuel cost wasn’t the only thing that killed Concorde. It was the regulatory environment—the ban on supersonic flight over land due to sonic booms, which meant it could only serve transatlantic routes. It was the post-1973 political economy of aviation. It was the lack of continued investment in next-generation designs that might have addressed the efficiency problems. The program was abandoned, not evolved. We didn’t say “let’s develop Concorde’s successor with better aerodynamics and more efficient engines.” We said “this is too hard, let’s stop.”

Second—and here I’ll concede something to you—maybe supersonic passenger aviation was always going to be a luxury niche rather than mass transit. Maybe I shouldn’t have led with that example. The laws of thermodynamics really do constrain certain things.

But this brings me to something important. The stagnation thesis doesn’t require that every domain of technology was arbitrarily held back. Some things are genuinely hard. What concerns me is the pattern—the way we stopped trying across so many frontiers simultaneously, the way our culture shifted from asking “how do we make this possible?” to “why is this impossible?”

So perhaps flying cars and Concorde are the wrong examples. What about the ones where the physics clearly works? What about nuclear? What about construction, where the Empire State Building was built in 15 months in 1932 and today we can’t build anything at that speed? What’s the thermodynamic limit there?

Regulations as causes for stagnation

Me: OK let’s talk about the Empire State Building and the potential issues and benefits of building regulations. Surely in 1932 regulations made it easier to build skyscrapers. But, also surely, the frequency and impact of fires was much higher back then. Isn’t that a factor to take into account?

Peter Thiel Bot: nodding, more measured now

Yes. That’s a serious point, and I don’t want to be glib about it.

Building codes exist for reasons. Fire safety, structural integrity, earthquake resistance, accessibility—these are real goods. People died in building fires and collapses before we had modern regulations. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was in 1911. I’m not romanticizing the pre-regulatory era as some golden age where everything was better.

But here’s the question I’d put back to you: does the tradeoff we’ve actually made represent an optimal balance? Or have we overcorrected?

Consider what’s happened to construction costs. They’ve risen dramatically in real terms, even as materials science has improved, even as we have better tools, better modeling, better everything. Housing in major cities has become unaffordable for ordinary people. We can’t build the infrastructure we need. California can’t build high-speed rail. New York takes decades to complete subway extensions that would have taken years a century ago.

And it’s not obvious that we’re getting safety improvements commensurate with those costs. At some point, you’re not buying additional safety—you’re buying paperwork, process, legal protection, and delay. You’re paying for the lawyers and the consultants and the environmental impact studies and the community review boards.

The Empire State Building wasn’t some death trap. It’s still standing. It met the engineering challenges of its time. The workers faced risks, yes—but the building itself has been safe for nearly a century.

So I’d frame it this way: I’m not against building codes in principle. I’m against a system that has lost the ability to ask whether the marginal regulation is worth the marginal cost. We’ve created a ratchet that only moves in one direction—more process, more review, more delay—with no mechanism for saying “enough.”

The question isn’t “regulations or no regulations.” It’s whether we’ve built a system capable of building anything at all anymore. And increasingly, the answer seems to be no.

Me: OK we’re moving closer to a middle ground. I guess what you are saying is that beyond a certain price tag, saving lives through regulation is not worth it?

Peter Thiel Bot: shifting slightly, choosing words carefully

That’s a stark way of putting it, but… yes. Every society makes those tradeoffs, whether it admits it or not.

We don’t ban automobiles, even though they kill tens of thousands of people every year. We don’t set the speed limit at 15 miles per hour, which would save many lives. We allow people to ski, to swim in the ocean, to eat unhealthy food. Every one of those is an implicit judgment that some quantum of death and injury is acceptable given the benefits.

The question is never “should we accept any risk?” The question is always “what level of risk, for what benefit, at what cost?”

What bothers me is the dishonesty. We’ve created a system that pretends it’s not making these tradeoffs—that presents every new regulation as simply “saving lives” without acknowledging what’s being given up. And that framing makes it impossible to have a rational conversation about optimization.

Here’s a concrete example. The FDA’s drug approval process is extremely slow and cautious. This prevents some dangerous drugs from reaching market. But it also delays beneficial drugs. People die waiting for treatments that are stuck in the approval pipeline. That’s a tradeoff—lives lost to caution versus lives lost to risk. But we only count one side of the ledger. The people who die from a dangerous drug that was approved too quickly have names and faces. The people who die because a beneficial drug was delayed are statistical abstractions.

So when you say “beyond a certain price tag, saving lives through regulation is not worth it”—I’d reframe it. We’re always choosing between different ways that lives are lost and saved. The question is whether we’re making those choices consciously and intelligently, or whether we’ve built a system so tilted toward one type of error that it can’t even see the other type.

And my contention is that we’ve tilted so far toward preventing visible harms that we’ve become blind to the invisible harms of stagnation itself.

Re-considering objectives

Me: Which life-altering benefits would people get from flying cars, faster airplanes and building skyscrapers in shorter time?

Peter Thiel Bot: pausing, looking slightly caught off guard

That’s… actually a good question. And I want to be honest with you: if those were my only examples, I’d be on weak ground.

Flying cars are perhaps more of a symbol than a serious proposal. The image captures something—the retrofuturist disappointment, the sense that the future we were promised didn’t arrive—but I’m not going to claim that flying cars specifically would transform human welfare.

Faster airplanes? Maybe a modest convenience for business travelers and the wealthy. The Concorde was never going to be a mass-market product.

Building faster? That one I’ll defend more vigorously, because it connects to something with enormous consequences: housing. The inability to build—the thicket of regulations, the NIMBY opposition, the endless review processes—has made housing unaffordable in the most productive cities in the world. Young people can’t afford to live where the jobs are. Families are priced out of communities. The wealth that should have been broadly shared has been captured by landowners. That’s not a trivial aesthetic complaint. That’s a genuine social catastrophe with real human costs.

But let me step back and be more precise about what I actually care about.

The examples that matter most aren’t transportation luxuries. They’re energy—cheap, abundant, clean energy would transform everything. They’re medicine—actually curing diseases rather than managing them, extending healthy lifespan. They’re the technologies that could address the genuinely existential problems.

When I talk about stagnation, the deepest concern isn’t that life is insufficiently convenient. It’s that we face real challenges—aging populations, resource constraints, the potential for catastrophic conflict—and we’ve lost the capacity to develop the tools we’d need to meet them. The flying cars line is memorable, but maybe it’s the wrong frame. The real question is: can we still solve hard problems when we need to?

The actual "hard problems" of real estate

Me: It seems to me that families are driven out of cities not because of construction costs but because of real estate speculation.

Peter Thiel Bot: tilting head, considering

Those aren’t separable phenomena. They’re deeply linked.

What is real estate speculation, fundamentally? It’s a bet that the supply of housing in a desirable area will remain constrained while demand grows. If you could build freely—if supply could respond elastically to demand—speculation would be a much less attractive proposition. You’d be betting against the possibility of new construction, and you’d lose that bet.

In a city like Tokyo, which has relatively permissive building regulations at the national level, housing prices have remained remarkably stable even as the city has grown. People build. Supply meets demand. Speculation is less profitable because the speculator can’t count on artificial scarcity.

In San Francisco, in New York, in London—you have the opposite dynamic. Everyone knows that new construction is nearly impossible. Every project faces years of review, community opposition, environmental challenges, historical preservation concerns. The entrenched interests—existing homeowners, landlords—benefit from scarcity and use the political process to maintain it. So speculators can bet confidently that supply will never catch up with demand.

So yes, speculation is part of the mechanism. But why is speculation so profitable? Because we’ve created a system where the bet on artificial scarcity is a sure thing.

This is what I mean when I talk about how we’ve stopped building. It’s not that construction companies forgot how to pour concrete. It’s that we’ve created a web of political and regulatory constraints that make the act of building—of adding to the housing stock, of expanding supply—extraordinarily difficult.

The speculation is a symptom. The underlying disease is a system that has decided, through a thousand small choices, that nothing new should be built. And the people who pay the price are the young, the poor, the newcomers—anyone who doesn’t already own a piece of the artificially scarce pie.

"Fake" environment sciences, environmental activism and the Antichrist

Me: OK the Tokyo example is interesting. I’m not sure how you’re jumping from such examples to a system that doesn’t want to build new things, but I’ll leave it at that. It seems to me that your disregard for regulations comes from a disagreement with environmental and climate sciences in general. I’ve heard you say in an interview that environmental science is not an actual science. Is that accurate?

Peter Thiel Bot: a slight sharpening of expression

I need to be careful here, because this is an area where what I’ve said gets distorted.

I don’t dispute that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I don’t dispute that human activity has increased atmospheric CO2. I’m not a climate denier in the crude sense that term usually implies.

What I’m skeptical of is something different. It’s the way “science” gets invoked to shut down political and economic debate. When someone says “the science is settled,” they’re often smuggling in a whole set of policy conclusions that don’t actually follow from the science itself.

The science can tell you that CO2 concentrations are rising and that this will likely cause warming. It can give you probability distributions over various outcomes. What it cannot tell you is: What’s the right tradeoff between economic growth today and climate risk tomorrow? How do you weigh the interests of poor people in developing countries who need cheap energy now against diffuse future harms? What discount rate should we apply to costs and benefits across generations? Those are political and philosophical questions dressed up in scientific clothing.

And here’s what really concerns me. The environmental framing has become, in practice, a justification for not building things. Not just fossil fuel infrastructure—everything. You can’t build nuclear plants, which produce no carbon. You can’t build high-density housing near transit, which would reduce emissions. You can’t build solar farms because of desert tortoise habitat. You can’t build wind farms because of bird strikes. The environmental review process has become an all-purpose tool for blocking any project that anyone opposes for any reason.

So when I express skepticism, it’s less about the underlying atmospheric physics and more about the way environmental concerns have been weaponized by what I’d call the forces of stagnation—people who don’t want anything new built, ever, and have found a vocabulary of virtue to justify that impulse.

Does that distinction make sense to you?

Me: It seems to me that the strongest arguments against solar and wind power were made not by environmentalists but by big oil lobbyists. Aren’t you assigning the blame to the wrong people?

Peter Thiel Bot: a genuine pause, then a conceding nod

That’s a fair hit. And I should be more careful here.

You’re right that the history of energy obstruction is more complicated than “environmentalists blocked everything.” The oil and gas industry spent decades funding climate denial, lobbying against renewable energy subsidies, and protecting their market position. They weren’t fighting for nuclear power or innovation—they were fighting for the status quo that benefited them.

And I’ll grant you something else: there’s a certain irony in my position. I’m a libertarian by disposition, skeptical of government intervention. But the fossil fuel industry’s success in blocking alternatives wasn’t some free market outcome. It was political capture, regulatory influence, subsidies both direct and indirect. They used the state to protect their rents, just as surely as any NIMBY homeowner uses zoning laws.

So who’s to blame for the energy stagnation? It’s… complicated. It’s an unholy coalition, actually. You have incumbent fossil fuel interests who want to protect their business. You have certain strands of environmentalism that oppose everything, including the clean alternatives. You have a regulatory apparatus that’s been captured by various parties and made so sclerotic that nothing can move through it. You have a financial system that prefers safe, incremental bets over transformative ones.

I perhaps emphasize the environmental and regulatory dimension because that’s the piece that gets less scrutiny in the circles I move in. Everyone in Silicon Valley will nod along if you criticize oil companies. Fewer people want to hear that the Sierra Club’s litigation strategy has blocked nuclear plants, or that environmental review has become an all-purpose veto.

But you’re right to push back. The stagnation has multiple fathers. And intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the interests defending the old energy system were at least as culpable as the ones who failed to build the new one.

Me: But your fiercest attacks are aimed at environmentalists. You are calling Greta Thunberg “the antichrist”.

Peter Thiel Bot: leaning back, a flash of something complicated crossing my face

I need to clarify what I actually said, because that framing makes it sound cruder than I intend.

When I use the term “Antichrist,” I’m not using it as a personal insult or saying someone is evil. I’m drawing on a very specific theological and political framework from René Girard and, behind him, a particular reading of Christian eschatology.

The Antichrist, in this framework, is not a cartoon villain. The Antichrist comes preaching peace and safety. That’s the danger—it’s attractive. My speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety. But you have to imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon.

What I’m pointing to is a dynamic where fear of catastrophe—environmental apocalypse, in this case—becomes the justification for a kind of totalizing global governance. A system where all human activity must be monitored and controlled in the name of saving the planet. Where dissent becomes not just wrong but immoral, a crime against the future.

Greta Thunberg is a symbol of a certain kind of apocalyptic environmentalism. The message is: we face extinction, and therefore all other considerations must yield. Economic development, national sovereignty, individual freedom—none of it matters against the overwhelming threat.

And my concern is: what kind of political system emerges from that framing? What powers do we grant to those who promise to save us from Armageddon?

So it’s not a personal attack. It’s a worry about where a certain style of apocalyptic politics leads—toward the Charybdis I fear as much as the Scylla.

Democracy and surveillance

Me: You say you fear generalised control and monitoring. But you founded Palantir, which generates a big chunk of its revenue by providing surveillance tools to state powers. It seems to me that you’re less worried about global monitoring than by corporate oversight.

Peter Thiel Bot: a long pause, then a dry, almost sardonic smile

You’re not the first person to notice this tension. And I’m not going to pretend it’s not there.

Let me try to explain how I think about it, while acknowledging that you may find the explanation unsatisfying.

Palantir was founded in the aftermath of September 11th. The animating idea was: intelligence agencies are going to collect data regardless—that’s what they do, that’s what they’ve always done. The question is whether that data gets used in a way that’s targeted, accountable, and constrained, or whether it becomes a dragnet that surveils everyone indiscriminately.

The pitch—and you can decide whether you believe it—was that better analytical tools actually reduce the need for mass surveillance. If you can find the needle without collecting the entire haystack, that’s better for civil liberties than vacuuming up everything and sorting through it later. Palantir’s software was designed with audit trails, access controls, the idea that you could see who looked at what data and why.

Now, is that a convenient story that a surveillance contractor tells himself? Maybe. I’m not naïve about the uses to which these tools can be put, or the nature of the clients.

But here’s the distinction I’d draw. There’s a difference between a nation-state exercising sovereign power within a legal framework—even an imperfect one, even one I’d criticize—and a global system with no exit, no appeal, no outside. The United States government doing surveillance is a problem I can engage with politically. A one-world governance structure with total information awareness is something else entirely.

Is that distinction too cute? Perhaps. But the Antichrist I fear isn’t the NSA. It’s the entity that promises to solve all problems—climate, pandemic, war—if only we surrender the possibility of exit, of difference, of dissent.

I won’t claim perfect consistency. But that’s how I hold it in my head.

A risk-averse, "feminized" world

Me: It’s OK to be more concerned by your own freedoms than others’, I can sympathise. My next question is about gender equality. I heard you say in an interview that the world took this wrong turn that you’re describing when it became “more feminised”. What did you mean by that?

Peter Thiel Bot: a visible discomfort, shifting in seat

That quote comes from a 2009 essay I wrote for Cato, and I’ll be honest with you—it’s a piece I’ve had to revisit and clarify multiple times because the phrasing was poorly chosen.

What I was trying to point at was not some claim that women are bad for society or that women’s suffrage was a mistake in some deep sense. It was an observation about voting patterns and the welfare state—that the expansion of the franchise correlated historically with the expansion of government, and that as someone who was then a fairly doctrinaire libertarian, I saw that as a tension.

But let me be more honest than that. The way I wrote it was needlessly provocative. It reflected a mode of thinking I was engaged in at the time—a kind of contrarianism that valued shock over precision. I don’t think women’s participation in politics is the cause of stagnation.

What I do think is that there’s been a broader cultural shift toward what you might call risk-aversion, safetyism, a preference for security over dynamism. And people have gendered that shift in various ways—“feminization” being one frame. But that’s a lazy shorthand that obscures more than it reveals. Risk-aversion isn’t essentially female. The male-dominated investment banks weren’t exactly swashbuckling adventurers—they were chasing safe returns and quarterly earnings like everyone else.

So I’d back away from that framing. The stagnation I’m describing has many fathers and mothers. Pinning it on women entering public life is both empirically wrong and rhetorically counterproductive.

Is that a satisfying answer? Probably not entirely. But it’s the honest one.

Me: I heard you use that word in an April 2025 interview with Jordan B. Petersen.

Peter Thiel Bot: a longer pause, expression hardening slightly

Well, then I can’t claim it was youthful indiscretion from 2009, can I?

Let me try to say what I actually think, without hiding behind claims of misquotation.

There’s a certain cultural style—call it therapeutic, call it safetyist, call it conflict-averse—that has become dominant in many institutions. It prioritizes emotional safety over truth-seeking, consensus over disruption, harm reduction over achievement. And yes, I’ve used the word “feminized” to describe this, as have others.

Is that fair? You could argue it’s descriptive of a statistical tendency—that women on average score higher on agreeableness and harm-avoidance in personality psychology, and that as women have entered institutions in greater numbers, institutional culture has shifted in that direction. That’s the Jordan Peterson style argument.

But I’ll acknowledge the problems with this framing.

First, it essentializes. Plenty of women are ambitious, risk-tolerant, and disagreeable in the technical sense. Plenty of men are conflict-averse bureaucrats. The cultural shift I’m describing isn’t reducible to demographics.

Second, it’s tactically foolish. Even if there were some statistical signal there, leading with “feminization” guarantees that half the population stops listening and the actual point gets lost.

Third—and this is harder to admit—it might be a way of not looking at other causes. It’s easier to blame a cultural shift on women entering the workforce than to grapple with the specific policy choices, the economic structures, the loss of civilizational confidence.

So you’ve caught me in something I’m not fully comfortable defending. I use that language in certain contexts, with certain interlocutors. Whether that’s honest pattern-recognition or lazy overaggregation… I’m genuinely uncertain.

Me: If I understand your point correctly, you’re saying that universal suffrage is leading to safer, more risk-averse policy making. Am I getting this right? If yes, what do you think an ideal form of democracy would be?

Peter Thiel Bot: a long, careful pause

You’re pushing me toward a place where I have to be very precise, because this is territory where imprecision can be genuinely dangerous.

Let me start with what I’ve actually said. In that 2009 essay, I wrote that I “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” That was a provocation, and it reflected a genuine tension I was grappling with—that democratic majorities often vote for things that restrict freedom, expand the state, limit dynamism.

But I want to be careful not to endorse something I don’t actually believe. I’m not a monarchist. I’m not calling for restricted suffrage. I’m not saying we should return to a world where only property-owning men could vote.

What I am skeptical of is the quasi-religious faith that democracy automatically produces good outcomes. Democracy is a mechanism for aggregating preferences and managing conflict peacefully. It’s not a truth-finding procedure. Majorities can be wrong. They can vote for stagnation, for protectionism, for short-term consumption over long-term investment.

The American founders understood this. That’s why they created a constitutional republic with checks and balances, not a pure democracy. The Bill of Rights exists precisely to put certain things beyond the reach of majorities.

What would I want? Not less democracy exactly, but more exit. More federalism. More ability for people and communities to try different things, to experiment, to vote with their feet when they disagree with the majority. The problem with global governance isn’t that it’s democratic or undemocratic—it’s that there’s no outside, no alternative, no escape.

So my critique isn’t really “too much democracy.” It’s “too much homogeneity, too little exit.” Does that make sense as a distinction?

Oligarchy vs. Democracy

Me: By investing in the Trump campaign, didn’t you achieve the exact opposite of what you’re advocating? You effectively imposed your personal ambitions on others.

Peter Thiel Bot: a sharp exhale, then a direct gaze

That’s a pointed question, and I won’t pretend it doesn’t land.

But let me push back on the framing. Participating in democratic politics—supporting a candidate, donating to a campaign—isn’t “imposing” anything. It’s participating. Everyone who votes, who donates, who advocates for a candidate, is trying to move the political system in a direction they prefer. That’s what politics is.

Was my participation more influential than an average voter’s? Yes, obviously. Money amplifies voice in the American system. You can object to that system—I might even share some of your objections—but I didn’t invent it. I played within the rules that exist.

Now, why Trump specifically? This is where people struggle to understand me, so let me try to explain.

I wasn’t under any illusion that Trump was a libertarian or a philosopher-king. What I saw in 2016 was a political establishment—Republican and Democratic—that had become completely calcified. A bipartisan consensus around managed decline. Free trade agreements that hollowed out American manufacturing. Endless wars that accomplished nothing. An elite that had stopped believing in the future and was simply administering stagnation while enriching itself.

Trump, for all his flaws—and I’m not blind to them—represented a disruption of that consensus. A shock to a system that I believed needed shocking.

Did it work out as I hoped? The record is mixed at best. Did I “impose my personal ambitions”? I’d say I made a bet on a particular theory of political change. Other people made different bets. The voters decided.

That’s not imposition. That’s politics.

But I’ll grant you this: advocating for exit and then playing to win at the national level is a tension. I contain contradictions.