>> he has been called the king of techtopia. it is one of the most contrary and investors. -- he is one of the most contrarian investors. peter thiel made his name founding paypal and funding facebook, and now is backing rocket ships and starting islands off the coast. he has paid students to skip

college and start 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? >> it means doing something new, something that's never been done. 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 would learn from entrepreneurs is don't copy mark zuckerberg and bill gates, why not?

>> mark zuckerberg wanted to start a social networking site, bill gates wanted 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.

amazon has a monopoly of scale in e-commerce at this point. >> is facebook a monopoly? >> i would argue it is not as robust a monopoly as google, because there are other places -- emerging competitors that pop up in the social networking space every year, you think of twitter and snapchat. >> do you think they 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 in search, but they are exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. next absolutely -- >> absolutely. as a business matter, these are all attempt to extend the monopoly. >> i think self-driving cars is going to change transportation. maybe as the development of the car itself. >> you compare compelling startups to cults, should they be like cults? >> they should not be like cults in the sense of believing something that is wrong, but there is always an intense understanding that something is true that very few other people do.

my paypal friend's, elon musk, spacex company believes that he will get people to mars in the next 50 years ago. it is unusual. it is a unique set of ideas to motivate people there to distinguish them from the rest of the world. something else you say a messed up startup cannot , be fixed. why not? m of the foundations are incredibly important. if you get some of the first things wrong, it's extremely hard to recover. >> can yahoo!, 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 -- 70's and 80's with hp, even yahoo!. or 90's with

they are not now. >> even though they are not technology companies, can they be fixed? >> there are all kinds of things to do to streamline them, but it is probably not a good idea to reinvent them. >> you mentioned marissa mayer. >> i think she is by far the best ceo david has had in a decade -- ceo yahoo! has had in a decade. she should not be evaluated on what she cannot do, she is trying to improve those incrementally and that is fantastic. >> other than what you have written in this book, what are some things that you believe that very few people agree with you on? >> certainly an issue that i have been outspoken on 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? >> get word test rid of the word education to start with. education of the word to start with. >> 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 the thiel fellowship. 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. why do you think that is? >> 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 incredibly valuable learning experience. i went to stanford, i went to law school, i might do that again. >> i was going to ask. would you do it over? >> if i did it again, i would be

asking a lot more tough questions why i was doing it. >> would you be where you are if you didn't go to stanford and where he met the paypal -- where you met the paypal mafia? >> having gone to stanford and having met a lot of the people there was a valuable. i believe that, having been to other universities may have discouraged me into going into tech. >> if you were in tech, what would you do? >> 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 midst of all these th of all-- the my these founders 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 who i talk to a lot and people i talked to -- work with closely. >> i am curious about your background, and what should 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 i think of myself as always having been an outsider and a little bit of an insider. so there is kind of a combination of outsider-insider perspective that shaped me a lot. >> what did your parents do? what were your parents like? >> my dad was an engineer. my mom ended up being a homemaker after i was born. they were very focused on education. >> you were raised an evangelical christian and did and did things like --

question things like evolution. >> i still consider myself a 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 was the contrarian in you? >> you can see ahead what people were going to be doing a decade from now and two decades from now. there was a sense that i couldn't see myself as being that happy doing this. >> was there any event in life that triggered you to start down a different path? >> it was a bit of an evolution. i can certainly point to late nights at the law firm, where you are sort of thinking what are you doing here? >> from the paypal mafia to the people you have met sense? who do you call for what? >> there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, this was an intense experience. and i think those bonds will never quite be matched in their intensity.

>> the first line of chapter 14, of the six people who built paypal, four had built farms in high school. -- build bombs in high school. >> i was not one of those four. [laughter] there is always something quite extreme that goes into the personalities building a company. >> building a bomb is a good thing? >> it is not a good thing. having an extreme personality is a good ring. >> who built the bombs? it wasn't you? >> i can't say. >> as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia has -- have been, you have said you think i fell -- think paypal was a failure. why? >> we did not achieve the vision -- the original vision of it, a completely new currency system in the world. >> what about bitcoins? does that get closer to what you imagine? >> i am psychologically biased against it. 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 were the first outside investor in facebook. did mark convince you to invest or did you convince mark to let you invest? >> i supposed some combination of old. it felt like a no-brainer. the company was growing very fast. they needed more money for computers, and i convinced them that i would be relatively hands-off as an investor. >> do you worry that facebook could get distracted? internet.org, virtual reality? >> 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 fbi, the army, the marines, 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. part of the data can be processed by computers and part of it can best be analyzed by humans. one reporter who looked into it concluded its software had been used in the bin laden raid and was critical in connecting all the dots to finding him. stop you think it could the next 9/11, or has it already? >> something like it is key to stopping military -- terrorist attacks. i don't think we are going to do it by projecting military forces 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 your clients could actually use palantir 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 it is kind of like plugging into the matrix. >> one government agency that gave us a bunch of data, during the demo, we discovered a terrorist plot that they had not even suspected existed, and it led them to reclassify all sorts of data as classified. >> would you say it has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? >> i suspect that is true. >> with founders fund, for example, what is the craziest sector that you might enter that we would not expect? >> one that we started to look at at the margins, that 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 vision of the future and man versus machine. you are not so worried that computers are going to take our jobs? >> not anytime soon. 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. >> this is always an interesting sort of debate. what will happen? will artificial intelligence actually get smarter than humans? how would that change things? i don't think that will happen for a long time, but i think our when itnk if and happens, the primary questions are not economic, but political and cultural. it would be like extraterrestrials landing on the planet. if we had aliens land on the planet, we would not ask what does this mean for my job. we would ask, are they friendly or not friendly? >> what's the most audacious idea you have wandered about how

humans could potentially survive in the future? >> we should give nuclear power very serious consideration, it does not emit greenhouse gases. >> is it about colonizing other planets or solar systems? >> it is going to happen. >> is mars going to be first? >> there are a lot of things that make mars the natural other planet in the system. yes. >> you ponder several other different futures, including human extinction. what are the possibilities about that? >> what are the right things for us to be doing. -- doing? 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 -- small side project. the question is 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 -- and different ways of governing it? this is very far in the future, but it has a lot of people

-- it has pulled in a lot of people. >> so, you are imagining it being another country? >> it would be another country, and it would cost tens of millions to build, more capital than i have. there is nothing that makes it impossible. >> 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. have you watched it? >> i've seen a few of the episodes. they would dispute they are really portraying me on the show. >> >> he is called peter gregory! he invested in an island!

>> the character gives a compelling portrayal of someone who is passionate about the future, determined to make his happen, people are driven, slightly crazy in different ways, but i think, on the whole, it is a very positive show. >> do you believe you can grow meat in a lab? >> yes, you can. it's not yet clear if people will eat it. >> failure is ok? >> it is one of the more destructive ideas. failure is always a problem. when a company fails, it is always a tragedy. it is often quite damaging for the people who go through it. >> what do you consider your biggest failures? >> there are some things that work better than others, there investments -- there are investments that have failed. but on the whole, i've always been resilient and always have come back. >> 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.

>> what are you doing differently? are you taking immortality pills, some super exercise regimen? >> investing in a lot of biotechnology companies. 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. >> what do you need more of? paleo-type helio -- diet. you need new technology, new innovation for us to really have both longer and healthier lives. >> new technology like what? >> we need to find cures for cancer, cures for alzheimer's, a way to restore organs when they are falling apart, just all different ways bodies break down and find ways to reverse all of them. the amazing, drastic thing i'm doing is i am on hgh, human growth hormone, on a daily

basis. >> what is the benefit of that to be? >> it helps maintain muscle mass. you're much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis, stuff like that as you get older. there is always a worry of it will increase your cancer risk areas >> you are -- cancer risk. family you are not concerned about that? you are not concerned 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 bio level, where you have as many bacteria inside of you as cells. i think one of the things that is going to happen in the next few years is people are going to figure out ways to reset your bacterial ecosystem. you look at people who are super healthy. regret what ecosystem they have and replace -- figure out what ecosystem may have an replace yours with bears -- and replace yours with theirs. >> peter thiel, thank you so

much for joining us today on "studio 1.0," it was great having you today. ♪

>> he made his name as a top tech analyst on wall street, leading coverage of the amazon ipo. then, bill gurley made his way to the promised land of silicon valley, launching a venture -- launching his career as a venture capitalist, joining benchmark capital in 1999. almost right away, the bubble burst. gurley rode the market up and down and then down and then up again, along the way making his early bets on some of the best names -- twitter, uber, snapchat, instagram. joining me today on "studio 1.0," seasoned venture