>> 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 and 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 building 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 for joining us. >> 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 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 learn -- one thing you tell aspiring entrepreneurs is don't copy mark zuckerberg and bill gates, why not?

>> mark zuckerberg won't be starting a social networking -- the next mark zuckerberg won't be starting a social network 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 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 -- get somebody 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 investor to have. -- 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 other places that pop up in the social networking space every year, you see a twitter or snapchat. you see all these companies emerge on a continual basis. >> do you think they 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. >> do you think someday google, facebook, amazon, will not be as dominant as they are? >> i think they will be dominant for a while because i think the are all great businesses, but i don't think they will be dominant forever. >> do you see one or the other becoming dominant? -- 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 exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. do 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 colts -- cults. should they be compared to this? >> they should not be like cults, that is something that is wrong, but there is always an intense understanding that 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. they believe they will build rockets that will get people -- that will take people in the next couple of years or so. it distinguishes them from the rest of the world. >> something else you say is that a messed up startups 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 yahoo!, hp can they be fixed? >> hp and yahoo! are not really technology companies at all. they were technology companies in the 1970's and 1980's. in the 1990's with yahoo! these companies were technology companies in the 1980's and 1990's, but now they are fundamentally now against technology. >> even though they are not

technology companies, can yahoo! and hp be fixed? there are things we can do to streamline them. >> it is 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? >> she is by far the best ceo it 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 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 spoken about 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 fundamental way. >> if you could start education over again, what would you do? >> get rid of the word education to start with. >> would there be no school? >> there would be schools, but they would be 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. you give aspiring entrepreneurs money to not go to school. 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 -- an incredibly valuable 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.

>> would you be where you are if you do not go to stanford. undergrad, law school where you met the paypal people? >> you can never run these experiments twice. having met a lot of people there was valuable. have i got to any other university, that may have discouraged me from going into tech question. >> 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 build bombs in high school. >> i was not one of them. >> who built them if it was not 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 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 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. 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 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 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 concerned a point to late nights at the law firm where i was asking myself, what am i doing here? >> who do you call for what? >> there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, there 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] >> i think there is something that is quite extreme about personalities of going to starting up a company. having extreme personalities is a somewhat good things. >> who built the bombs? it wasn't you? >> i can't say. you will have to choose four of the remaining five. >> as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia has been, you have also had failure. why do you think paypal is a failure? >> it was a failure and 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. i would be tempted to come up with reasons why nobody would succeed at it. >> chances of it succeeding are

unlikely? >> i think it is slightly too cumbersome to work 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. the company was growing very fast. they needed more money for computers. i convinced them i would be a relatively hands off investor. >> do you worry facebook to get this tractive? -- facebook could get distracted tackle too many things. >> it is always a challenge. you have to do is 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.

>> right. it is always an interactive problem. part of the data can be processed by computers. 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? >> something like it is the key to stopping major 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 palantir could actually be used to do evil things? do you worry about that? >> there is always a two edged part to these technologies. technologies are never in -- 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. >> 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 it has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? >> i suspect that is true. >> of 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 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 machines 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. >> there is always an interesting sort of debate and how will that change things? will artificial intelligence get smarter than humans and how would 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 the first question, what does this mean for my job. we would ask, are they friendly or are they 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 it about, like -- colonizing other planets and parts of the solar system? >> it will happen eventually. >> 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 technologies we need to develop? if we stay focused on that, i think our prospects are very good. >> one thing 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 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. >> 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. 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. they would dispute -- >> he invested in an island. and he is called peter gregory. >> they would still dispute that. i think the character gives a compelling portrayal of someone

who is passionate about the future, determine to make things happen. people are driven, slightly crazy in different ways. i think it is a positive show. >> do you believe you can grow meat in a lab? >> yes, i think the problem is if somebody will actually eat it. >> what you think about failure? >> this idea that failure is ok is a destructive means. 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. there have been investments that have failed. but, on the whole, i have always been resilient. i have always 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. >> are you drinking -- taking

immortality pills. a super exercise regimen? >> i'm investing in a lot of nutritional 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? >> i do the paleo diet. that does not get you to 120. the caveman diet does not get to 220 -- 120. you need new technology and innovation for us to have a longer and healthier lives. >> like what? >> cures for cancer, cures for alzheimer's, and five -- find ways to restore organs when they are falling apart. the main, drastic thing i am doing, is i am on hgh, human growth hormone, on a daily basis. >> really? 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 a worry that it can increase your cancer risk. >> you are not concerned about that? >> i am hopeful we will get cancer cured in the next decade. the other 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. hopefully we can reset your bacterial ecosystem. you can look at people who are super healthy, you can figure out what ecosystem they have an replace yours with theirs. >> peter thiel, thank you so much for joining us today on "studio 1.0," it was great having you today. ♪

>> from pier three in san francisco, welcome to a special edition of the best of "bloomberg west." we will bring you the top interviews from 2014 with some of the biggest names in technology and media. i'm emily chang. we begin with alibaba. the record-smashing ipo of the year and now the largest ipo in global history. shares of the company surged 38% on its september 19 debut and would go on to make founder jack ma the richest man in all of