>> he has been called the king of techtopia. peter thiel made his name founding paypal and funding facebook, and now is backing rocket ships and starting islands off the coast. he paid kids to skip college and started companies instead. i know there will be flying cars along the way, joining me is the bold and controversial venture capitalist and now the author of

a new book, "zero to one," peter thiel. >> thank you. >> "zero to one," what does that mean? >> if we are going to take our society to a new level, it will require new things. >> yet you argue for the last few decades, we have been in a tech slowdown. have facebook and apple not been innovative enough? >> as a society, i would argue we have not done as much as we could have your it there are not as many innovations in energy and biotechnology, and not as many as we would like, transportation, it is not moving any faster. >> one thing you tell entrepreneurs is don't copy mark

zuckerberg and bill gates, why not? >> the next mark zuckerberg will not want to start a social networking site, bill gates will not want to start an operating system, and so in some sense you cannot copy them because they did not copy somebody else. >> you also suggest that they, with one very important truth that very few people agree with you on. >> i think great companies, they have a sense of mission. they have a sense of where a good investor has a patent and has good technology, and that is the best kind of investor to have. >> you say google is a monopoly? >> it is. they tend to focus on all these other areas. ebay has a monopoly in the auction space.

>> is facebook a monopoly? >> i would argue it is not as robust a monopoly as google, because there are other places that pop up in the social networking space every year, you think of twitter and snapchat. >> do you think companies could ever become too powerful that they would stifle innovation? >> there has always been enough innovation to keep things flowing. >> does that mean that you think someday that google and amazon will not be as common it as they are? >> i think they will be dominant a while, but i don't think they will be dominant forever. >> do you see one or the other becoming dominant? >> it is always difficult to judge this, but if i had to pick

one, i do tend to think of google as the one that is on an incredible arc at this point. >> why? >> they are trying to extend into other areas. >> their monopoly is exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. what kind of project are you most excited about? >> i think self-driving cars is going to change transportation. >> you compare compelling startups, should they be like cults? >> they should not be like cults, that is something that is wrong, but there is always an intense understanding of something is true that very few other people do. my friend, elon musk, believes

that he has a unique set of ideas to motivate people there to motivate his workers. >> another thing you say that a messed up startup cannot be fixed. why is that? >> if you get the foundation wrong, it is hard to fix. >> can hp be fixed? >> i would argue that hp and yahoo! are not technology companies at all. they were technology companies in the 80's and 90's, and even though they were technology companies in the 80's and 90's, they are not now.

>> even though they are not technology companies, can they compete? >> there are all kinds of things to do to streamline them, but it would not be good to reinvent. >> you mentioned marissa mayer. >> i think she should not be evaluated on whether she invents something new, she is trying to improve those incrementally and that is fantastic. >> other than what you have written in this, what are some things that you believe that very few people agree with you on? >> certainly an issue that i have been outspoken is college education, it has become something of a bubble. a trillion dollars of student

debt, not getting what we are paying for, and it has to be rethought of in a very fundamental way. >> if you could start education over again, what would you do? would there be no school? >> they are stuck in the 19th century, i think you need to figure out more ways to make them innovative, let students learn at their own pace. >> you do have a scholarship where you give aspiring entrepreneurs an amount of money to not go to school, and i know some of those entrepreneurs have gone back to school. >> most of them have not. it was designed as a two-year program in which people could take a break from college. i think across the board, they have found it to be an incredible learning experience. i went to stanford, i went to law school, i might do that again. >> i was going to ask. >> if i did it again, i would be

wanting to do it my own way. having gone to stanford and having met a lot of the people there was a valuable. having been to other universities may have discouraged me from going into tech. i would be tempted to be a teacher. >> the guy that wants to get rid of education was to be a teacher? >> i am not against learning, i am against education. >> of the six people who built paypal, four of them build bombs in high school. >> i was not one of them. [laughter] ♪ >> something that you talk

about is the danger of founders becoming captive to their own myths. what is the myth of peter thiel and what is the reality? >> the myth is that they are

somehow singular and that they are somehow divine, omnipotent beings. these things that i am doing are not solo efforts. i have friends that i talk to a lot and people i talk to closely. >> i am curious about your background, and what shped you along the way. i know that you were born in germany and moved around a lot, you went to south africa and namibia. >> i went to seven different elementary schools as a kid, and so i felt a little bit like an outsider instead of an insider. so there is kind of a combination of outsider-insider perspective that shaped me a lot. >> what were your parents like? >> my dad was an engineer. >> you were raised an evangelical christian and did not believe in anything like evolution? >> i still consider myself christian and i think it is

important to have a very different perspective on things, because it pushes you to either defend your ideas really well or to have a much deeper understanding. >> on paper you worked in a new york law firm and you worked on wall street. it sounds pretty standard. where is the renegade in you? >> there was a sense that i could not see myself that happy -- >> was there any event in life that triggered you to start down a different path? >> it was a bit of an evolution. there were late nights at the law firm where i was asking what i was doing there. >> who do you call? >> there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, this is an intense experience and i think those bonds will never quite be matched in their intensity. >> in your book, the first line

in chapter 14 is, "of the six people who founded paypal, four of them built bombs in high school." >> i was not one of those four. [laughter] >> who built the bombs? it wasn't you? >> i can't say. >> as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia has been, you have also had failure. why? >> we did not achieve the vision of a completely new currency system in the world. >> what about bitcoins? >> if we could not succeed at paypal, i would be tempted to come up with reasons why no one could succeed at it.

>> do you think the chances of it succeeding are unlikely? >> my sense is that it is slightly too cumbersome to work at the end of the day as a new payment system. >> you once invested in facebook. did mark convince you to invest or did you convince mark to let you invest? >> i knew it was growing very fast, they needed more money for computers, and i convinced them that i would be very hands-off. >> do you worry that facebook could get distracted? >> it is always a challenge. you have to do new things, because you are not in a static world, and you don't want to do too many. you want to do the right number of things. >> you created palantir. customers include the cia and the air force, yet there is so much mystery around it. as i understand, palantir is using data on a massive scale to solve problems from disease to

terrorism. >> it is always an interactive problem. in palantir, data can be processed by computers, and the parts of that data can be analyzed by humans. palantir was critical in connecting all the dots in fighting bin laden. >> do you think you could stop the next 9/11, or has it already? >> i don't think we are going to do it by projecting military force throughout the world, i think we will do it by sort of very cleverly uncovering these conspiracies before they come together. >> some have expressed concern that palantir could actually be used to do evil things? do you worry about that? >> there are always two parts to these technologies, and technologies are never intrinsically good, there is always a question as to how they could be used or abused.

i think there are a lot of checks in place. >> someone described it as plugging into the matrix. >> palantir received a bunch of data, and we discovered a terrorist plot that the government had not suspected that existed, and they had to reclassify all sorts of data as classified. >> would you say it has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? >> i suspect that is true. >> what is the craziest sector that you might enter that we would not expect? >> one that we started to look at is wildly out of fashion is the nuclear power industry. is it possible to build safer, cheaper, better reactors with all of these new technologies? and when you look at the technologies, it looks like the answer is definitely yes. i am very worried about the regulatory issues with it. but i think it is worth tackling that some more.

>> i want to talk more about your issue with man versus machine. you are not concerned that machines are going to take our jobs? >> not so much, i think technology has freed people up to do other things. >> at some point though, you said in the 22nd century, computers could be smarter than us. >> there is always an interesting sort of debate and how will that change things? i don't think that will happen for a long time, but i think our political and cultural problems, i think it is like having extraterrestrials landing on the planet. with aliens landing on the planet, we ask if they are friendly or not friendly. >> have you pondered about how humans could potentially survive in the future?

>> we should give nuclear power very serious consideration, it does not create greenhouse gases. >> is mars going to be first? >> yes. >> you ponder several other different futures, including human extinction. what are the possibilities about that? >> what are the technologies we need to develop? we need to stay focused on that and i think our prospects are very good. >> you have a startup island off the coast. what is your vision there? >> this is a very small-sized project. is it possible to create some new community that we could start a new society that would have very different rules and be able to govern itself? this is very far in the future, but it has a lot of people interested.

>> so you're talking about another country? >> it would be another country, and it would cost tens of billions to build, more capital than i have. >> you think that you may live to be 120. >> i certainly hope to, yes. ♪ >> you have been portrayed on

the hbo show "silicon valley" and the island has been portrayed on the show. >> it would not necessarily me. >> he is called peter gregory! he invested in an island! >> the character is determined

to make things happen, but people are driven in slightly different crazy ways. i think as a whole it is a very positive show. >> can you grow meat in a lab? >> yes, i think the problem is if somebody will actually eat it. >> what you think about failure? >> when a company fails, it is always a tragedy. it is devastating for people to go through it. >> what do you consider your biggest failures? >> there are some things that work better than others, there are concepts that have worked better than others. >> i know you have thought a lot about the extension of human life. you think you may live to 120. >> i certainly hope to, yes.

>> do you think about taking an immortality pill, a super exercise regimen? >> i think on the nutrition side, there are some very basic things that can be done. you should not eat sugar. that is the one nutritional rule. >> do you still eat sugar? >> i still do, but not so much. i do the paleo diet. >> can life be extended through new technology, like what? >> we need to find cures for cancer, cures for alzheimer's, a way to restore organs so they don't fall apart, and find other ways to stop people's bodies from breaking down. the thing i am doing is on hgh -- human growth hormone -- study.

it helps maintain muscle mass, so you are much is likely to get bone injuries or arthritis, stuff like that as you get older. but there is also an increase of cancer risk. >> you're not worried about that? >> i am hopeful we will get cancer cures in the next decade. the other thing that is happening is all of the stuff on the biome level, where you have as many bacteria inside of you as stars in the universe. -- cells. hopefully we can reset your bacterial ecosystem. >> peter thiel, thank you so much for joining us today on "studio 1.0," it was great having you today. ♪ >> the opinions and views

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