The billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whom I interview for this week’s episode of “Interesting Times,” has a career that looks like a sprawling constellation. His role in famous Silicon Valley companies like PayPal, Facebook, Palantir and OpenAI is the bright center, and then all around pulse the lights from his weirder ventures — starting new countries on the open seas, paying young people to skip college, funding the right-wing counterculture, fitting transhumanism and Christianity into a single worldview, throwing money behind Donald Trump in 2016 when nobody else in Silicon Valley would touch him. What unites these projects is Thiel’s fixation on stagnation — meaning the loss of ambition, the decline of invention, the collapse of faith in the future — as the central problem of our time. Or at least that’s my working theory, after watching him, reading him and occasionally conversing with him over the last decade. I don’t think he’s executing a master plan for global domination. I think he’s behaving like a venture capitalist in the world of ideas — playing around with different forms of intellectual radicalism and political disruption, looking for the lever that will move the world. Which makes him an interesting person to talk to right now, with politicians he’s supported and technologies he’s invested in making everything feel more dynamic and also more unstable. Is this the world he wanted, or are we still in stagnation’s grip? What did he really hope to get from his investment in populism, and is Trump 2.0 delivering? Where does he think artificial intelligence is really likely to take us? And finally, because it wouldn’t be a Thiel conversation without an apocalyptic element — why is he worried about the Antichrist? Read, watch or listen:
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