>> this is a bloomberg news update. i am pimm fox. the s&p 500 moving higher, about eight points, trading at 2090. dow jones industrial average higher by more than 50 points. nasdaq composite also gaining down. let's take a look at crude oil if we can as well. $55.57 for a barrel. arrests since two officers abandoned and -- assassinated last saturday. another person was arrested

after a witness said the suspect talked about killing cops while on the phone. eyes president joe biden is excited to attend the funeral of the officers tomorrow. amazon has something to celebrate this holiday shopping season. the online retailer says total holiday sales from its app -- the united states this year for stop nearly 60% of the customers used their cell phones to make purchases, and the good news is they also extends to brick-and-mortar stores. strong december sales may result of the best holiday growth in three years. and it was a christmas united as americans filled independent theaters across the country to watch the movie "the interview," despite threats of attacks on theaters. no incidents reported for stop hackers targeted sony again with an attack on its playstation network yesterday. microsoft's xbox live was also hit. both are still a serious thing some technical issues. we have got more updates coming at the bottom of the hour. later today starting at a

special time, 2:00 p.m. eastern, "street smart" with trish regan, cory johnson, and myself. ♪ >> he has been called the king of techtopia. peter thiel is one of silicon valley's most audacious and contrarian investors. he made his name founding paypal then funding facebook. he is now is backing rocket ships, dna manipulation, meat grown in labs, and a start-up island off the coast.

he has paid kids to skip college and start companies instead, in hopes of reaching a better future, faster. and building 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. going to the first typewriter, the first word processor, the first car, the first airplane. doing something that has never been done before. if we are going to take our civilization to the next level, it will require us to do new things. to invent new things. >> what companies have taken us from zero to one? >> facebook with social networking. google in search. >> yet, you argue for the last few decades, we have been in a tech slowdown. have facebook and apple and google not been innovative enough? >> as a society, i would argue we have not done as much as we could have. you have had less innovations in energy and biotechnology, and not as many as we would like, transportation, it is not moving any faster.

>> one thing you would tell aspiring entrepreneurs is don't copy mark zuckerberg and bill gates, why not? >> the next mark zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking site, the next bill gates won't be starting an operating system, and so in some sense you cannot copy them because they did not copy somebody else. >> you also suggest they come up with one very important truth that very few people agree with you on. why is finding something that nobody agrees with you on the best way to get everyone to believe in you? >> 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 business to have. >> you say google is a monopoly?

>> it is. they do not talk about the 98% of revenue that comes from search, which is where they have a monopoly. they focus on all these other areas. ebay has a monopoly in the auction space. amazon has a monopoly of scale. in e-commerce. >> is facebook a monopoly? >> i would argue it is not as robust a monopoly as google, because there are still emerging competitors that pop up in the social networking space every year, you see a twitter or snapchat. all these come but these are emerging on an annual basis. >> do you have any concerns that companies like google, facebook, amazon, could ever become too powerful that they stifle innovation? >> i tend to think this has not happened a lot in the technology area, because there has always been enough innovation to keep things flowing. >> do you think someday google, facebook, amazon, will not be as dominant as they are? >> i think they will be dominant for a while, but i don't think they will be dominant forever. >> do you see one or the other

becoming more dominant than the rest? >> 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? >> the core search monopoly is powerful. they are trying to extend it into all these other areas. >> their monopoly is in search, but they are exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. you applaud that? >> absolutely. >> what kind of project are you most excited about? >> i think self-driving cars is going to change transportation. maybe as much as much 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 it is always a good sign if there

is an intense understanding that something is true that very few other people do. my paypal friend, elon musk's spacex company, is motivated by the idea that they will get human beings to mars in the next fifteen years or so. it is not a cult in that that's a wrong belief, but it is unusual -- it is a unique set of ideas that motivate people there and distinguish them from the rest of the world. >> something else you say is that a messed up startup can't be fixed. why not? >> the foundations are important. if you get some of the first things wrong, it is extremely hard to recover. >> i am guessing you do not think messed up tech companies that are larger than startups can be fixed either. can yahoo!, hp can they be fixed? >> i would argue that hp and yahoo! are not really technology companies at all. they were technology companies, in the 1970's and 1980's with hp. in the 1990's with yahoo!

even though these were technology companies in the 1980's or 1990's, today they are fundamentally bets against technology and innovation. >> even though they are not technology companies, can yahoo! and hp be fixed? >> there are things we can do to streamline them. it is probably a mistake for them to radically try to reinvent themselves and become technology companies once again. >> you mention marissa mayer, what do you think her chances are of turning things around? >> i think she is by far the best ceo yahoo! has had in a decade. she should not be evaluated on whether she invents something new. that is setting her up for failure. the existing businesses are big, if you can improve those incrementally and make those work, that is fantastic. >> other than what you have written in this book, what are some things you believe that very few people agree with you on? >> an issue i have been out spoken about is this idea that

college education has become something of a bubble. with a trillion dollars of student debt, not getting what we are paying for. it needs to be rethought in a fundamental way. >> if you could start education over again, what would you do? >> get rid of the word "education." >> would there be no schools? >> you would still have schools, but they would look very different. they are stuck in the 19th century. you figure out ways to make them individuated, where different students learn at their own pace. >> you have the thiel fellowship. basically, you give aspiring entrepreneurs money to not go to school and start companies instead. some of those entrepreneurs have gone back to school. why'd 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 they have found it to be an incredible learning experience.

i went to stanford, law school. i might do that again. >> would you do it over? >> i would ask a lot more tough questions. about why i was doing it. >> would you be where you are if you did not go to stanford. to law school, where you met the paypal mafia? >> you can never run the same experience twice. having met a lot of people there was valuable. had i gone to any other university, that may have discouraged me from going into tech. >> if you were not in tech, what else would you may want to do? >> be a teacher. i am not against learning, i am against education. >> of the six people who built paypal, four of them built bombs in high school. >> i was not one of them. [laughter] >> who built the bombs if it wasn't you? ♪

>> something that you talk about is the danger of founders becoming captive to their own myth. what is the myth of peter thiel and what is the reality?

>> the myth of all these founders is that it is 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 talked to a lot and people i talk to 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. tell me about your upbringing. >> 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. my mom was a homemaker. after i was born. they were focused on education. >> you were raised an evangelical christian and did not believe in anything like evolution? >> i still consider myself a christian and i think it is valuable 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 of why they are wrong. >> 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? >> there was a sense that i could not see myself as being happy doing this. >> was there any event in life or something that triggered you to start down a different path? >> it was a bit of an evolution. i can point to late nights at the law firm where i was asking myself, what am i doing here? >> from the paypal mafia, to the people you have met since, who do you call for what? >> there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, there was an intense experience and i think those bonds will never quite be matched in their intensity. >> the first line in chapter 14 is, "of the six people who

built paypal, four of them built bombs in high school." >> i was not one of those four. [laughter] i think there is something that is quite extreme about personalities that go into starting up a company. >> so building a bomb is a good thing? >> it is not a good thing. having extreme personalities is a somewhat good thing. >> who built the bombs if it wasn't you? >> you'll have to choose four of the remaining five. >> as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia have been, you have said you think paypal is a failure. why? >> it was a failure in that we did not achieve our original vision of a completely new currency system for the world. >> what about bitcoin, does that get closer to what you imagine? >> i am psychologically biased against it, since if we couldn't

succeed at paypal i would be tempted to come up with reasons why nobody would succeed at it. >> but you think chances of it succeeding are unlikely? >> my sense is 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 you convince mark or did he convince you? >> some combination of both. at the time, it felt like a no brainer, the company was growing fast. they only needed more money for computers. i convinced them i would be relatively hands-off. as an investor. >> do you worry facebook could get distracted with internet.org, drone companies, virtual reality? >> it is always a challenge. you have to do some 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 new things. >> palantir. this is a company -- 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 major problems from disease to terrorism.

>> it is always an interactive problem. part of the data can be processed by computers. part of it can best be analyzed by humans. a reporter who looked into it concluded palantir software was used in the bin laden raid and was critical in collecting all the dots. >> do you think you could stop the next 9/11, or has it already? >> something like palantir could. 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 your clients could use palantir to do evil things? do you worry about that? >> there is always a two edged part to these technologies. technologies are never in transit with a good, there is always a question of how they can be used or abused.

i think there are a lot of checks in place. >> someone described it as plugging into the matrix. >> one government agency that gave us a bunch of data, and during the demo, we uncovered a terrorist plot they had not suspected. this led them to conclude they had to reclassify data as classified. >> would you say palantir 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 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 concerned 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 say, in the 22nd century, computers could be smarter than us. >> this is always an interesting sort of debate, will technology get smarter than humans, 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 extraterrestrial landing on the planet. if we had aliens landing on this planet, we would not ask, as a first question, what does this mean for my job. we would ask, are they friendly or not friendly? >> what is the most audacious idea you have pondered about how

humans could potentially survive in the future? >> we should give nuclear power very serious consideration, it does not create greenhouse gases. >> what about colonizing other planets? >> a little further in the future. >> but it will happen. >> yes. >> is mars going to be first? >> there are a lot of things that make mars natural, 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? what are the technologies we need to develop? if we stay focused on that, 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 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 govern itself? this is still far in the future, but it has a lot of people interested. >> you imagine this like another country?

>> it would be another country, and it would cost tens of billions to build, more capital than i have. but 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 have seen a few episodes. they would dispute they were portraying me. >> he is called peter gregory. >> they would dispute -- >> he invested in an island. >> they would still dispute that. i think the character gives a

compelling portrayal of someone who is passionate about the future, determined to make things happen. people are driven, slightly crazy in different ways. i think it is a positive show. >> can you really grow meat and leather in labs? >> yes, i think the problem is if somebody will actually eat it. >> failure in silicon valley is ok, right? >> this idea that failure is ok is one of the more destructive means in silicon valley. i think that failure is always a problem. when a company fails, it is a tragedy. it is often damaging for the people who go through it. >> what is your biggest failure? >> there are some things that work better than others. investments that have failed. but, on the whole, i have always been resilient. and come back. >> i know you have thought a lot about the extension of human life. you think that you may live until 120. >> i certainly hope to, yes. >> what are you doing differently, are you taking

immortality pills, some super exercise regimen? >> i am investing in a lot of bio-technology 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 not eat sugar? >> i eat some, but not so much. >> what do you eat more of? >> i am on a paleo-type diet. i don't think paleo gets you to 120. the caveman diet does not get you to 120. i think you will need new technology and innovation for us to have longer and healthier lives. >> like what? >> cures for cancer, alzheimer's, find ways to restore organs when they are falling apart. you can go through all the different ways people's bodies break down and solve them. the main, drastic thing i am doing, is i am on hgh, human growth hormone, on a daily basis.

>> what is the benefit of that? >> it helps maintain muscle mass, so you are much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis, stuff like that. there is always a worry it increases your cancer risk. >> but you're not concerned about that? >> i am hopeful we will get cancer cured in the next decade. the other big nutrition thing that is happening is all of the stuff on the biome, where you have as many bacteria inside of you as you have cells. i think one of the things in the next few years is that people will figure out ways to reset your bacterial ecosystem. you can look at people who are super healthy, you can figure out what ecosystem they have 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. ♪ ♪

make the best entertainment part of your holidays. catch all the hottest handpicked titles on the winter watchlist, only with xfinity from comcast. >> this is a bloomberg news update. i am pimm fox. the s&p 500 moving higher, a gun of more than eight points, up 2090 right now. let's take a look at the nasdaq composite, posting a gain of more than 26 points. for aoil, down to $55.59 barrel of crude oil. let's talk gasoline prices. they have fallen to the lowest level since may 2009, an average of $2.32 a gallon. aaa says prices have fallen 92 straight days. that has never happened before. missouri is the first