Peter Thiel: The AI Crisis, Europe’s Decline & the Battle for America

How's funeral?

Let's switch to English now. Peter, you have discussed a lot over the last years the problem that in your view the west did not deliver enough progress uh enough change in technology. Um you even spoke about stagnation. Uh that is a topic uh and a term that almost nobody would use these days. It's pretty

much the opposite. People are discussing is there too much acceleration? Is AI progressing too fast? So what's what's your take? Did you change your mind or is it still not enough? I've changed my mind um uh to some extent. Uh let me first articulate the stagnation thesis which I started articulating 20 years

ago or so. uh and is is that uh it's always very hard to measure these things because there's so so many different dimensions of progress, so many different areas of technology and science and uh the basic thesis uh was was that since the 1970s there had been a slowdown. There had been progress in

the world of bits, you know, computers, internet, mobile internet, software, but not so much in the world of atoms. And that most the you know most the engineering fields that were um related to atoms were not even successful fields for people to study. Mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, you know, aereroastro nuclear engineering was already a bad idea by the 1980s. Uh

and that uh for a variety of reasons there had been this this slowdown. Uh I thought um I I believed that this um this not total stagnation but this this broad slowdown in progress uh was an important factor driving you know um a lot of things were going wrong in our society. uh you know a lot of the po