emily: 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 today on "studio 1."" is the bold and controversial venture capitalist and now the author of a new book, "zero to one," peter thiel. thanks for joining us.

peter thiel: thanks for having me. emily: "zero to one," what does that mean? peter: 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. emily: what companies have taken us from zero to one? peter: facebook with social networking. google in search. emily: yet, you argue for the last few decades, we have actually been in a tech slowdown. have facebook and apple and google not been innovative enough? peter: i think as a society, i would argue we have not done as much as we could have. you have had less innovations in areas like energy and biotechnology. there has been some but not as many as we would like. transportation. we're not moving any faster. emily: one thing you would learn from entrepreneurs is don't copy mark zuckerberg. don't copy larry and sergey. don't copy steve jobs. why not? peter: the next mark zuckerberg will not be starting a social

networking site. the next larry page will not be starting a search engine. bill gates won't be starting an operating system, and so in some sense you can't copy them because they did not copy somebody else. emily: you also suggest 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 someone to believe in you? peter: i think great companies have a sense of mission. there is a sense of if we weren't doing this, nobody else would be doing this and you will be a monopoly. not in the bad sense of a rent-collector, but in the good sense as an inventor who has gotten a patent and has intellectual property and done something new. and that is the best kind of business to have. emily: you say that google is a monopoly? peter: it obviously 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. emily: is facebook a monopoly? peter: i would argue it is not as robust a monopoly as google, because there are emerging competitors in the social networking space that come up every year. you see a twitter. you see a snapchat. you see all these companies emerge on a continual basis. emily: do you have a concern that companies like google, facebook, apple, amazon could ever become too powerful that they would stifle innovation? peter: 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. emily: do you think someday google, facebook, apple, amazon will not be as dominant as they are? peter: i think they will be dominant for a while as they are all great businesses, but i don't think they will be dominant forever. emily: do you see one or the other becoming more dominant than the rest? peter: 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. emily: why? peter: i think the core search monopoly is powerful. they are trying to extend it into all these other areas. emily: their monopoly is in search but they are exploring so many different things, robotics, google glass, self-driving cars. do you applaud that? peter: absolutely. although in a business sense, they are all attempts to extend the monopoly. emily: which of the google project are you most excited about? peter: i think self-driving cars would change transportation maybe as much as much as the development of the car itself. emily: you compare compelling startups to cults. should start-ups be more like cults? peter: they should not be like cults in the sense of believing something that's wrong. but it is always a good sign if there is an intense understanding of that something that's true that very few other people do. my paypal friend elon musk's space-x company is motivated by the idea that they will build rockets that will get human

beings to mars in the next 15 years or so. it's not a cult in that it's a wrong belief. it is unusual. it is this unique set of ideas to motivate the people there and distinguish them from the rest of the world. emily: something else you say is that a messed-up startup cannot be fixed. why not? peter: the foundations are incredibly important. if you get some of the first things wrong, it is extremely hard to recover. emily: i am guessing you do not think mess-up tech companies that are larger than start-ups can be fixed either. can yahoo!? can hp? can they be fixed? peter: 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, and in the 1990's with yahoo! these though they were technology companies in the 1980's or 1990's, today they are fundamentally against technology. against innovation. emily: even though they are not technology companies, can yahoo!

and hp be fixed? peter: there are all sorts of things we can do to streamline them. it's probably a mistake for them to radically try to reinvent themselves and become technology companies once again. emily: you do mention marissa mayer. what do you think her chances are of turning things around? peter: 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 invents something new. that is setting her up for failure. the existing businesses are really big, and if you can improve those and make those work, that is fantastic. emily: other than what you have written in this book, what are some things you believe that very few people agree with you on? peter: an issue i have spoken about is this idea that college education has become something of a bubble. a trillion dollars of student debt is not getting what we are paying for. it needs to be rethought in a

fundamental way. emily: if you could start education over again, what would you do? peter: get rid of the word "education." emily: would there be no schools? peter: i think you still might have schools but they would be very different. they are stuck in the 19th century. i think you try to figure out ways to make them more individuated, where different students learn at their own pace. emily: you have the thiel fellowship. basically, you give aspiring entrepreneurs some money to not go to school and start companies instead. i know some of those entrepreneurs have gone back to school. why do you think that is? peter: 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 across the board have found it to be an incredibly valuable learning experience. i went to stanford and law school. i might even do that again. emily: would you do it over? peter: if i did it again i would ask a lot more tough questions about why i was doing it. emily: would you be where you are if you did not go to

stanford undergrad and law school, and where you met the paypal mafia? peter: you can never run these experiments twice. i do think having gone to standford, having met a lot of people there was quite valuable. i worry that had i gone to any other university, that may have discouraged me from going into tech. emily: what else would you may want to do? peter: i would be tempted to be a teacher. emily: the guy that wants to get rid of education? peter: i am not against learning, i am against education. emily: of the six people who built paypal, four of them built bombs in high school. peter: i was not one of those four. [laughter] emily: who built the bombs if it wasn't you? ♪

emily: 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? peter: 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 talked to a lot and people i work with closely. emily: i am curious about your background, and what shaped your views along the way. i know that you were born in germany. you moved around a lot -- south africa, namibia. tell me about your upbringing. peter: i lived in a lot of different places. i went to seven different elementary schools as a kid. i think of myself of always having been in some ways a little bit like an outsider and a little bit of an insider. so there is some sort of a combination of outsider-insider perspective that shaped things a lot. emily: what were your parents like? peter: my dad was an engineer. my mom ended up being a homemaker. they were focused on education. emily: you were raised an evangelical christian. peter: yes. emily: and you question things like evolution? peter: i still consider myself a christian and i think there is something quite valuable about having 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. emily: on paper, you worked in a new york law firm, you worked on wall street. where was the contrarian in you? peter: you could see ahead at what people would be doing a decade from now. two decades from now. there was a sense that i could not see myself as being happy doing this. emily: was there any event in life that triggered you to start down a different path? peter: it was a bit of an evolution. i can certainly point to late nights at the law firm where i was asking myself, what am i doing here? emily: from the paypal mafia to the people you have met since, who do you call for what? peter: there is something about a set of my friends from paypal, there is an intense experience and i think those bonds can never quite be matched in their intensity. emily: the first line in chapter 14 is, "of the six people who built paypal, four of them had

built bombs in high school." peter: i was not one of those four. [laughter] peter: but i think there is something that is always quite extreme about the personalities of going to starting up a company. emily: so building a bomb is a good thing? peter: it is not a good thing. having extreme personalities is a somewhat good thing. emily: who built the bombs if it wasn't you? peter: i'm not going to -- you would have to choose four of the remaining five. emily: as successful as paypal was, as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia have been, you have said you thought paypal was a failure. why? peter: it was a failure in that we did not achieve our original vision of a completely new currency system for the world. emily: what about bitcoin? does that get closer to what you had imagined? peter: i am probably psychologically biased against it, since if we couldn't succeed at it at paypal i would be tempted to come up with reasons why nobody would succeed at it. emily: you think the chances of it succeeding are unlikely?

peter: my sense it that it is still slightly too cumbersome to work at the end of the day as a new payment system. emily: you were the first outside investor in facebook. did mark convince you to invest or did you convince mark to let you invest? peter: i suppose some combination of both. at the time it really felt like a no-brainer to do it. the company was growing fast. they only needed money for more computers. i convinced them i would be relatively hands-off. emily: do you worry facebook could get distracted? internet.org, drones companies, virtual reality? peter: 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 just the right number of new things. emily: palantir. this is a company -- customers include the cia, the fbi, the army, the marines, 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. peter: right. 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 who looked into it concluded that its software had been used in the bin laden raid and was critical in connecting all the dots at the end of the day. emily: do you think palantir could stop the next 9/11, or has it already? peter: something like palantir 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. emily: some have expressed concern that your clients could actually use palantir to do evil things? do you worry about that? peter: 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. emily: someone described it as it's like plugging into the matrix. peter: one government agency that gave us a bunch of data, and during the demo we uncovered a terrorist plot they had not suspected even exited and it led them to conclude they had to reclassify all sorts of data as classified. emily: would you say palantir has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? peter: i suspect that is true. emily: founder's fund, for example. what is the craziest sector that you might enter that we would not expect? peter: one that we've 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 actually 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. emily: 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? peter: not anytime soon. i think technology has generally freed people up to do other things. emily: at some point though, you said in the 22nd century, computers could become smarter than us. peter: there is always an interesting sort of debate. will artificial intelligence actually get smarter than humans and how will that change things? i don't think that will happen for a long time, but i think the primary questions are not economic, but 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 not friendly. emily: what is the most audacious idea you've pondered about how humans could potentially survive in the future? peter: we should give nuclear power very serious consideration

since it does not emit greenhouse gases. emily: is it about colonizing other planets? other solar systems? peter: i'd put the date for that in the second half of the 21st century. that's a little bit further in the future. emily: but its going to happen? peter: it's going to happen. emily: is mars going to be first? peter: there are a lot of things about it that makes mars the natural other planet in the system. emily: you ponder several other different futures, including human extinction. what are the possibilities about that? peter: 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 and i think our prospects are very good. emily: one of the things you have invested in is a startup island off the coast. what is the vision there? peter: this is a very small side project. is it possible to create some new community? if we could start a new society, it would have very different rules and different way of governing it? this is still far in the future, but it has pulled in a lot of people interested. emily: you imagine as being like another country. peter: it would be another country. it would cost tens of

billions to build which more capital than i have. but there is nothing that makes it impossible. emily: you think that you may live to 120. peter: i certainly hope to, yes. ♪

emily: you have been portrayed on the hbo show "silicon valley" -- this island has been portrayed on the show. have you watched it? peter: i've seen a few of the episodes. they would dispute they were really portraying me. emily: he is called peter gregory. peter: they would still dispute whether -- emily: he invested in an island. peter: they still dispute that. but i think the character gives a compelling portrayal of someone who is passionate about the future, determined to make

things happen. people are driven. they're slightly crazy in different ways. but i think, on the whole, it is a very positive show. emily: can you really grow meat and leather in labs? peter: yes, you can. it's not yet clear whether people will eat it. emily: failure in silicon valley is okay, right? peter: i think this idea that failure is okay is one of the more destructive memes that is out there in silicon valley. i think that 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. emily: what do you consider your biggest failure? peter: there definitely are some things that work better than others. there are some investments that have failed. but, on the whole, i have always been resilient. i've always come back. emily: i know you have thought a lot about the extension of human life. you think that you may live until 120. peter: i certainly hope to, yes. emily: what are you doing differently? are you taking immortality pills? some super exercise

regiment? peter: i'm investing a lot in 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 probably the one nutritional rule. emily: do you not eat sugar? peter: i still eat some, but not as much as i used to. emily: what do you eat more of? peter: i on a paleo-type diet. i don't think paleo gets you to 120. a caveman diet doesn't get you to 120. but i think you will need new technology, new innovation for us to have both longer and healthier lives. emily: new technology like what? peter: we need to find cures for cancer, cures for alzheimer's. we need to figure out ways to restore organs when they are falling apart. you can go through all the different ways people's bodies break down and figure out ways to reverse all of them. the main, drastic thing i am doing is i am on hgh, the human growth hormone, on a daily basis. emily: what is the benefit of that supposed to be?

peter: it helps maintain muscle mass, so you are much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis, stuff like that as you get older. there is always a worry that it increases your cancer risk. emily: but you're not concerned about that? peter: 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 biom, where you have about as many bacteria inside of you as cells. i think one of the things that will happen in the next few years is people will figure out ways to reset your bacterial ecosystem. you look at people who are super-healthy and you can figure out what ecosystem they have and you can replace yours with theirs. emily: peter thiel, thank you so much for joining us today on "studio 1.0." it was great to have you. ♪

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