Peter Thiel used a long interview on Mathias Döpfner’s MDMeets program to revisit a theme he has argued for over many years: the West, in his view, has spent decades in technological stagnation, even as software and the internet created the appearance of relentless progress.
Speaking with Döpfner, the Axel Springer chief executive, Thiel tied together AI, political polarization, Europe’s economic drift, generational stress, and what he sees as a broader civilizational slowdown. His central claim was that recent decades brought rapid gains in the world of bits, but very little comparable progress in the world of atoms.
Thiel says the stagnation thesis still stands
Asked whether the current AI boom had changed his mind, Thiel said he had shifted his thinking to some extent, but still stood by the “stagnation” thesis he first laid out about 20 years ago.
He said measuring technological development in a comprehensive way is difficult because science and engineering move across many dimensions. Even so, he argued that the broad pattern has been clear since the 1970s: overall technological progress slowed.
Computers, the internet, mobile connectivity and software all showed dramatic gains, he said, but those gains were concentrated in bits. In atoms, meaning the physical world, breakthroughs were limited. He pointed to the decline in prestige and ambition around fields such as mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and aerospace, and said nuclear engineering had already become widely seen as a poor career choice by the 1980s.
For Thiel, that slowdown is not a side issue. He described it as one of the roots of modern systemic crises. When economies stop generating enough new growth, every winner implies a loser, and politics turns into a zero-sum contest. He said the internet boom of the late 1990s was enormous, larger than anything before it, but still did not push civilization into a new phase change.
AI may be different, he said. It may be larger than the internet, or at least large enough to restore growth. Whether that turns out to be “honey or poison,” as he put it, remains open. But he added that AI’s arrival has made it much harder for critics to deny his broader point that the previous decades were marked by stagnation rather than acceleration.
Extinction risk is not zero, but freezing progress is not an answer
Döpfner asked about recent warnings from Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who have all spoken publicly about the possibility that AI could slip beyond human control. Thiel said the debate is sprawling and includes scenarios that sound like science fiction but cannot be dismissed outright.
He referenced the kind of catastrophic futures popularized by The Matrix and The Terminator, then said he does not personally think those outcomes are highly probable. Still, he added that even if the chance of destruction were only 5% or 10%, that would be enough to unsettle anyone.
His larger concern was different. He said the most dangerous effect of this public debate is that it can push society into an excessively defensive, fully precautionary mindset. When asked about an experiment in which six leading large language models were asked whether AI poses a risk of human extinction and returned answers in a 1% to 10% range, Thiel said one can assume for the sake of argument that the threat is real, because nobody can guarantee the probability is exactly zero.
But he rejected the idea that this should lead to a permanent brake on technological development. If society does nothing in pursuit of absolute safety, he argued, civilization will stop evolving across multiple dimensions and the social order will begin to fracture. He tied that risk to what he called the intergenerational contract: the expectation that each generation will live better than the one before it, through gains in wealth, health and upward mobility.
If that contract breaks, he said, the result will be social disorder in distorted forms. Zero growth is not neutral in his telling, and time does not run backward.
Why a real global AI slowdown would imply a world government
On whether AI can realistically be slowed, Thiel said a genuine brake would require deep and seamless coordination at the global level. In practice, he argued, that would mean a single world government with real authority and coercive enforcement power.
That prospect alarms him more than it reassures him. He said his classical liberal instincts see such a solution as jumping from one fire into another, perhaps into something worse than the disease itself. A more likely outcome, in his view, would be a form of pseudo-global governance built around endless international meetings and empty declarations.
He also warned about a second risk: the West slows itself while “the other side of the ocean” keeps moving at full speed. Thiel cited a recent papal encyclical on AI, which he described as an “anti-AI encyclical.” According to him, leaders on the other side would not listen to the pope, but many in the West would, leaving the pope to function as a “useful idiot” for a rival camp.
Döpfner then raised claims from two founders of major AI platforms who said they had evidence that competitors were using U.S. social platforms to spread anti-AI fear and shape public opinion. Thiel said he had not studied the evidence chain in depth, but was inclined to believe it. Even so, he said the deeper problem lies inside the West itself.
He used Greta Thunberg as an example. He said he would like to reduce her to an agent sent by an opposing camp, but does not think that is true. In his view, she is a product generated by Western society itself. Her peak may have passed, he said, but the West has repeatedly imposed this kind of self-defeating pressure on itself.
Why anti-AI anxiety looks different in the U.S. and Europe
Thiel said the stronger anti-AI mood in the United States reflects the fact that the real technological break is happening there, not in Europe. American companies, he said, feel direct pressure to rebuild their businesses around AI or risk falling behind.
He pointed to Palantir’s business and said sales growth among U.S. enterprise customers is accelerating sharply because companies feel they must move faster or be left out. Europe, by contrast, remains trapped in inertia. In his description, the prevailing attitude is that if something can be postponed from today to the day after tomorrow, there is no reason to do it tomorrow.
Not evil, but bad and incompetent
Thiel argued that people no longer believe tomorrow will be better, and that this loss of confidence turns political and economic bargaining into a harsher zero-sum struggle. AI is not a cure-all, he said, but without renewed growth the political extremes on both left and right will keep expanding.
He also pushed back against the habit of moralizing every new technology. In moral terms, he said, the opposite of good is evil. In functional terms, the opposite of good is simply bad, meaning ineffective or incompetent.
He illustrated the distinction with cars. A Ferrari can be called “evil,” he said, because it burns an extraordinary amount of fuel per gallon. A Trabant, the old East German car, is “bad” because it barely works on the road. An evil person, in his framing, at least has the capacity to carry out a will and achieve an end.
He then moved to Faust. In Christopher Marlowe’s version, the protagonist is a fraud peddling inferior pseudo-science and ends in damnation. In Goethe’s version, Faust still makes a pact with the devil, but the story ends in real creation and redemption. Thiel used that contrast to argue that the deeper collapse in society today is not wickedness so much as mediocrity and incapacity.
He put it bluntly: 99% of politicians, business magnates and corporate executives are not evil, he said. They are simply incompetent.
Depoliticization, moderation and structural stress
At one point Thiel referred to an old essay he wrote late at night for a libertarian online publication linked to the Cato Institute. He said he issued a formal clarification two weeks after it appeared. What he had actually wanted, he said, was some degree of depoliticization and a reduction in the intensity of public life. His criticism was aimed at libertarians who believed winning elections was the main route to remaking the world.
Asked whether he worries about deepening polarization and the collapse of moderate leadership, Thiel said today’s moderate political elites underestimate the structural crisis created by technological stagnation and the breakdown of the intergenerational contract. He pointed to the United Kingdom, which has cycled through seven prime ministers in 10 years without producing a convincing plan to reverse social decline.
Germany, youth radicalization and the rise of extremes
Döpfner cited Berlin election figures showing Die Linke at 25% overall and 47% among voters aged 16 to 24. Thiel said the first step is to take young people’s material conditions seriously. In Berlin, he said, rents are extremely high, new housing construction is blocked, and younger people see little path to upward mobility.
He described Germany, and much of Europe, as a gerontocracy: a political order dominated by older people and organized around their interests. Extreme parties gain ground, he said, because they at least speak openly about problems that moderates prefer not to confront, even if the remedies they offer do not work.
On Alternative for Germany, or AfD, Thiel said its growth reflects the incompetence of establishment parties, which have failed to produce an inclusive economic vision for Germany and, in his telling, cannot even balance a budget. At the same time, he said AfD is wrong on all three of the major foreign policy fronts he named: Ukraine, China and Israel.
Trump, Vance and the shape of U.S. politics
Looking back at his public support for Donald Trump in 2016, Thiel said Trump’s rise was the product of a long failure by establishment elites. He tied that failure to stagnant growth, the aftereffects of globalization and the geopolitical quagmire in the Middle East.
He said Trump’s first administration was consumed by endless bureaucratic factional fighting. In the second administration, he said, the correction went too far in the other direction, with loyalty tests elevated above all else and a resulting crop of executors who lacked professional competence.
On J.D. Vance, whom Thiel backed early, he said he has always been drawn to genuinely intelligent minds. He described Vance as thoughtful, open-minded and personally charismatic. Vance worked at Thiel’s Mithril fund, wrote Hillbilly Elegy, and received Thiel’s support in his 2022 Ohio Senate run. When asked who would be the central contenders in 2028, the source text did not include a substantive answer from Thiel.
Milei, deficits and Europe’s place between the U.S. and China
Turning to Argentina’s Javier Milei, Thiel said Argentina serves as a mirror showing where a society can end up after a century of below-average, mediocre growth. He noted that in 1900, “rich as an Argentine” was once a common expression.
He said Western countries trapped in uncontrolled deficits face three broad options: cut spending aggressively in the style of Milei, accept a socialist-style tax stagnation, or keep borrowing and push debt into the future. In his view, politicians such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz have chosen the third path.
Asked why he spends so much time thinking about politics if he sees himself as unelectable, Thiel said he knows he is not someone who could run for office. But politics, he said, has seeped into every pore of society. “It is toxic, but it is the air we have to breathe,” he said in substance. His effort has been to think through politics while trying to isolate that toxicity.
On Europe’s role in the U.S.-China rivalry, he said Europe should be a reliable ally of the United States. Restarting Europe’s economic engine and preserving healthy commercial circulation would, in his view, serve American strategic interests.
Why Europe has not produced new global tech giants
Thiel contrasted Europe’s current position with an earlier era. In the late 1960s, he said, Europe managed to leap ahead in high-end aviation by building the Concorde. In the current AI race, by contrast, Europe’s lag is even more severe than France’s attachment to Minitel in the 1990s.
Asked why Germany, despite its engineering and manufacturing reputation, has not produced globally dominant technology companies over recent decades, Thiel said the problem goes beyond a conservative fear of failure. The deeper issue, he argued, is a fear of success.
European founders and investors, he said, do not push companies to their outer limits and do not build the kind of disruptive large-scale machines associated with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. He backed that up with a comparison: among the 50 richest people in the United States, 12 belong to Generation X or younger, and nine of those 12 are self-made founders. Among Germany’s 50 richest people, 20 are Generation X or younger, but all 20 inherited family wealth. In his telling, Germany has not produced even one newly built, scaled-up trillion-dollar technology giant over the past several decades.
Germany, founders, contrarian thinking and chess
Thiel also spoke about his personal tie to Germany. He said he grew up speaking German at home with his parents and grandparents. Germany, in his view, sits at the central junction of continental Europe and Western civilization, and any effort to rescue the West has to take Germany seriously.
Discussing his co-founders Alex Karp and Max Levchin, Thiel said elite founders often combine a rare insider-outsider tension. They have access to institutions and power, but also retain the outsider’s instinct to break things open. Karp, he said, graduated with him from Stanford Law School and fits the insider mold, yet still carries the energy of a rebel. Levchin arrived alone in Chicago from Ukraine at age 16 and brought with him an almost ferocious drive to break through.
As for his attachment to contrarian thinking, Thiel said the point is not to be contrary for its own sake. The point is to defend independent thought. In a technical society shaped by narrow specialization, he said, there still has to be room for generalists who can connect history, science, economics and human psychology.
When asked about a hobby with no business rationale, he answered with chess, calling it a game of extreme intellectual beauty and dangerous addictiveness.
Children, longevity, embodiment and the Antichrist
Thiel said having four young children changed his sense of time. He gave one example: by the year 2100, his eldest daughter will be 81. Once that becomes real, he said, the mind is forced to think about what civilization in the 22nd century might actually look like.
On health and longevity, he traced his interest back to the optimism of early modern thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin and Condorcet. Science, he said, was originally meant to relieve the human condition and ultimately conquer terminal disease and death itself. The collective abandonment of that ambition, in his view, marks a serious civilizational retreat.
He added that if biology is understood again as a foundational information science, then aging itself becomes something computational and, in principle, reversible. His top priority in this area, he said, is defeating brain atrophy, cognitive disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.
At the same time, Thiel rejected the idea of uploading consciousness into the cloud. His sense of identity, he said, is rooted in the physical body and shaped by Christian tradition. What he wants is a real extension of embodied life, not a digital copy of the mind in software, because cold code would not be the real self.
In the final exchange, Thiel returned to a theme he has spoken about publicly for the past three years: the Antichrist. He said he once thought this was an unusually provocative and heretical position. Now he is less sure it is so unusual. Publicly, he said, people dismiss talk of the Antichrist as madness. Privately, many of them seem to agree that the world is moving toward an emerging system of global authoritarianism.
No comforting ending
The source article closed by arguing that Silicon Valley has long made fortunes by selling the future: some sell superintelligence as a path to godlike transcendence, others sell safety as a ticket out of apocalypse. Thiel, it said, is buying neither.
Its reading of the interview was that Thiel’s coldest move was to strip away familiar assumptions: to treat 50 years of digital abundance as a collective hallucination in which bits obscured atoms; to frame moral panic over technology as a cover for mediocrity and incompetence; and to cast calls for safety-first global governance as a route toward a single authoritarian order.
The article ended on a more personal note. It pointed to the pauses in Thiel’s own life: a venture capitalist associated with the technological singularity who refuses mind uploading; a hard-headed operator whose late-night obsession is online chess with no commercial ROI; and a thinker of zero-sum deadlocks who recalibrated his time horizon after realizing his eldest daughter would be 81 in 2100.
Thiel did not offer a final answer, the article said, and did not leave behind a blessing. The clock is still running, the pieces have crossed the board, and the real player does not leave early.