>> this is a bloomberg news update. i am pimm fox. let's take a look at how equity marks -- markets are doing. the dow jones industrial average adding as well, about 10 points higher. the nasdaq composite showing a gain of about three points. crude oil, the price of crude rises about 1/2 of 1%. i want to give you an update on a story we have been following or you. a virgin atlantic flight that departed london on its way to las vegas has landed a fleet after a technical issue with part of its landing gear -- has

landed safely after a technical issue with part of its landing gear. the family and friends of the 162 people on board the missing error asia playing continue to gather -- missing airasia plane continue to gather, awaiting new of what happeneds. investigators suspect it crashed and is at the bottom of the sea. the company's main focus is finding the airliner. >> we don't want to speculate until we find the aircraft. then we will look into it and see what we need to improve, if we need to improve. it is speculation at the moment, so it is premature to talk at the moment. >> the flight was headed to indonesia from singapore, a trip that normally takes about two hours. the company shares fell the most since 2011. races bracing for snap -- greece is bracing for snap elections next month.

the prime minister wants parliament to vote for new leadership on the 25th. stocks and bonds in greece are plunging today. another update the bottom of the hour. stay with bloomberg. ♪ >> 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, and 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 so much for joining us. >> thanks for having me. >> "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 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. where facebook and apple and google, have they not been innovative enough? society,d argue, as a we have not done as much as we could have. if 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 learn from 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 larry page will not be starting a search engine. 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 that they come up with one very important truth that very few people agree with you on. why is finding something nobody agrees with you on the best way to get somebody to believe any of? >> i think great companies 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 investment 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 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 that pop up in the social networking space every year, you see a twitter or snapchat. all these companies emerge on an -- on a continual basis. >> do you have any concern that companies like google, facebook, amazon could ever become too powerful that they would stifle innovation? >> i tend to think this has not happened a lot in the technology area, because there has been enough innovation to keep things flowing. >> does not mean 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 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? >> i think the core search monopoly is powerful. they are trying to extend it into all these other areas. >> their monopoly is exploring -- is in search, but they are exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. >> as a business matter, these are all attempts to extend the search monopoly. >> which product 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 but ts 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, elon musk's, spacex company is built on the idea that he is going to get people to mars in the next 15 years or so. it is not a cult in that it is a wrong belief, but it is unique and it motivates the people there and distinguishes them from the rest of the world. >> something else you say is that a messed up startup cannot be fixed. why not? >> 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 a yahoo!, can an hp be fixed? >> i would argue that hp and yahoo! aren't really technology companies at all. they were technology companies in the 1970's and 1980's with

hp, and in the 1990's with yahoo! even though these companies were technology companies, today, they are fundamentally bets against technology, bets against innovation. >> even though they are not technology companies, can yahoo! and hp be fixed? >> there are things we can do to -- one could do to streamline them. it is probably a mistake for them to try 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 at least a decade. i think she should not be evaluated on whether she comes and invents that is setting her something new. that is setting her up for failure. the existing businesses are big, -- comes and invents something new. that is setting her up for failure. the existing businesses are big, if you can improve those 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 which i have been quite outspoken is this idea that college education has become something of a bubble. a trillion dollars of student debt. we are not getting what we are paying for. it needs to be rethought in a really fundamental way. >> if you could start education over again, what would you do? >> get rid of the word education. >> would there be no schools? >> i think you would still have schools, but they might look very different. they are stuck in the 19th century. i think you would try to figure out ways to make them more 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 to start companies instead. 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 they have, across the board, found it to be an incredible learning experience. i went to stanford and law school. i might do that again. >> would you do it over? >> if i did it again i would ask , a lot more tough questions why i was doing it. >> would you be where you are if did not -- if you did not go to stanford, where he met the paypal mafia? -- where you met the paypal mafia? >> you can never run these experiments 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 weren't in text, what is something else -- in tech, what is something else you might do? >> be a teacher. i am not against learning, i am against education. >> of the six people who built paypal, four of them buil bombs -- four have built 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 myth. what is the myth of peter thiel and what is the reality? >> the myth of all these founders is that they are

somehow singular and that they are somehow divine, omnipotent beings. any of these things that i am doing are not solo efforts. i have friends that i talk to a lot. they are people i work with closely. >> i am curious about your background, and what should you -- and what shaped 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. -- a little bit of 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 they like? >> my dad was an engineer. my mom was a homemaker. they were focused on education. >> you are also raised an evangelical christian, and you question things, like evolution? >> i still consider myself a

christian. i question things. 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 of why they are wrong. >> on paper, you worked at a new york law firm, you worked on wall street. it sounds pretty standard. where was the contrarian in you? >> you could see what people would be doing a decade from now, two decades from now, and there was a sense that i couldn't see myself 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 start thinking what are you doing here? >> from the paypal mafia to the people you have met sense, -- since, who do you call for what? >> there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, it was just 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 bombs in high school." >> i was not one of those four. [laughter] you know i think there is , something that is quite extreme about personalities of going to 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 things. >> who built the bombs if it wasn't you? >> i'm not going to -- you would have to choose four of the remaining five. >> as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia has -- have been, you have also had -- you have said you think paypal was a failure. why? >> it was a failure and that we -- failure in that we did not achieve our original vision of a completely new currency system. >> what about bitcoin, does that get closer to what you imagine? >> i am probably psychologically biased against it. i would be tempted to come up with reasons why nobody would succeed at it.

>> you think chances of it succeeding are unlikely? >> my sense is that it is still slightly too cumbersome to work, at the end of the day, as a new payment system. >> you were the first outside investor in in facebook. did mark convince you to invest, or did you convince mark to let you invest? >> >> some combination of both. it felt like a no-brainer the . company was growing fast. they only needed more money for computers. i convince them i would be -- i convinced them i would be relatively hands-off. >> do you worry facebook to get could get distracted? -- do you worry 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. >> palantir. customers include the cia and the air force, yet there is so much mystery around it. as i understand it, it 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. one reporter concluded that the software had been used in the and was critical in connecting all the dots to finding him. >> >> do you think palantir could stop the next 9/11, or has it already? >> something like palantir is the key to stopping terrorist attacks. 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 intrinsically good. there is always a question of how they can be used or abused. i think there are a lot of checks in place in palantir. >> someone described it as plugging into the matrix. >> one government agency that gave us a bunch of data, we uncovered a terrorist plot they had not suspected. this led them to conclude they had to reclassify data as classified. >> would you say that palantir h as helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? >> i suspect that is true. >> 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 become smarter than us? >> this is always an interesting sort of debate. what will happen? will artificial intelligence get smarter than humans? how would that change things? i don't think it will happen for a long time, but i think, if and when it happens, the primary questions are not economic, they are political and cultural. it would be like extraterrestrials landing on the planet. if we had aliens landing on this planet, we wouldn't ask at the first question, what does this mean for my job. we would ask, are they friendly or not friendly. >> what's 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 -- since it does not emit greenhouse gases. >> is it about colonization of other planets? >> it's going to happen? >> it is going to happen. >> 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 -- of that? >> just think about it. 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. projects you have invested in is 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 communities? if we could start a new society with very different rules and very different ways of governing -- this is still far in the future,

but it has pulled in a lot of people are >> would it be like another country? >> it would be another country, and it would cost tens of billions 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 this 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. >> they would still dispute

that. i think the character gives a compelling portrayal of someone who is passionate about the future, determined to make his -- make things happen, and people are driven, slightly crazy in different ways, but i think, on the whole, it is a very positive show. grow meat really and leather in labs. >> yes, you can. it's not yet clear if people will eat it. >> failure is ok? >> it is one of the more destructive memes out there. 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 failure? >> there definitely are some things that worked better than others. 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 not eat sugar? i still eat some, but not as much as i used to. >> what do you need more of? >> i do the paleo-type diet. the caveman diet doesn't get you to 120. i think you will 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 main, drastic thing i'm doing is i am on hgh, human growth hormone, on a daily basis. >> what is the benefit of that

supposed 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 cancer risk. >> you are not concerned about that? >> i am hopeful we will get cancer cures in the next decade. the other thing that is -- other big nutrition thing that is happening is all of the stuff on the biome, where you basically have -- you have about as many bacteria inside of you as you have cells. so 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. 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. ♪

>> this is a bloomberg news update. i am pimm fox. the s&p 500, dow jones industrial average, the nasdaq -- again of about four points. the dow at 11. let's take a look at the treasury markets. treasury market is open. the yield down about seven/10 of a percent. 2.2% for the 10-year. crude prices gaining about .25%. let me tell you about shake shack. the restaurant company filing for an ipo. c