♪ 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 and 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 a betterreaching 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. peter: thank you. 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 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 been in a tech slowdown. have facebook and apple and google not been innovative enough? peter: 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, and not as many as we would like, transportation, it is not moving any faster. emily: one thing he would tell

entrepreneurs is don't copy mark zuckerberg and bill gates, why not? peter: 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. emily: 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 everyone to believe in you? peter: i think great companies have a sense of mission. they have a sense of where is no one is doing this we would be doing it. 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. emily: you say 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. emily: is facebook a monopoly? peter: i would argue it is not as robust a monopoly as google, because there still are emergence in competitors that pop up in the social networking space every year, you see a twitter or snapchat. all these companies emerge on a continual basis. emily: do you have any concern that companies like google, facebook, and 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 been enough innovation to keep things flowing. emily: do you think someday google, facebook, amazon, will not be as dominant as they are? peter: i think they will be dominant for a while, but i don't think they will be dominant forever. emily: do you see one or the other becoming dominant? 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: the core search monopoly is very powerful and 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. what kind of 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 colts. cults. should they be like cults? peter: they should not be like cults but there is always an intense understanding that something is true that very few other people do. musk'sal friends, elon

company believes that he has a unique set of ideas to motivate people there. it is not a cult and that it is a wrong belief, but it is unusual and a unique set of ideas that motivate. emily: something else you say is that a messed up startup cannot be fixed. why not? peter: foundations are incredibly important. if you get some of the first things wrong, it is extremely hard to recover. emily: i would guess that you do not think messed up tech companies that are large now can be fixed. i am guessing you do not think yahoo!, hp can 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! even though these were technology companies in the 1980's or 1990's, now they are

against technology. emily: even though they are not technology companies, can yahoo! and hp be fixed? peter: 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. emily: you mention marissa mayer, what do you think her chances are of turning things around? peter: she is by far the best ceo yahoo! has had an at least 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, and if you can improve those and incrementally 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: certainly an issue in which i have been quite outspoken is this idea that college education has become something of a bubble. with a trillion dollars in

student debt, we are 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 to start with. emily: would there be no schools? peter: i think you would have schools, but i think 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. emily: you have the thiel fellowship. basically, you give aspiring entrepreneurs money to not go to school and start companies instead. i know that 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 have a across the board found it to be an incredible learning experience. i went to stanford and law school. i might even do that again. emily: i was going to ask -- would you do it over? peter: i would ask a lot more

tough questions of why i was doing it could emily: would you be where you are if you did not school,anford and law where you met the paypal mafia? peter: 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. tech, if you were not in what else would you might want ? peter: i would be tempted to be a teacher. 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: 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 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 talk to and work with closely. emily: i am curious about your background, 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. peter: i went to seven different elementary schools as a kid, and so i felt a little bit like an outsider and a little bit of an insider. so there is kind of a combination of outsider-insider perspective that shape things a lot. emily: what were your parents like? peter: my dad was an engineer. my mom ended up being a homemaker after i was born. they were focused on education. emily: you were raised an evangelical christian and did not question things like

evolution? peter: 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. emily: on paper you worked in a new york law firm and you worked on wall street. it sounds pretty standard. where was the contrary in -- contrarian in you? peter: there was a sense that i couldn't see two decades from now and 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 point to late nights at the law firm where i am thinking what am i doing here? , emily: 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 will can probably never quite be matched in their intensity.

emily: in your book, the first line in chapter 14 is, "of the six people who founded paypal, four built bombs in high school." peter: i was not one of those four. [laughter] peter: i think there is something that is quite extreme about personalities of going to starting up a company. emily: so building a bomb is a good thing? peter: having extreme personalities is a somewhat good thing. emily: who built the bombs? it wasn't you? peter: i can't say. emily: as successful as so many members of the paypal mafia have been, you have also had failure. -- you think that 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. emily: what about bitcoin? does that get closer to what you peter: i am? psychologically biased against it.

i would be tempted to come up with reasons why nobody would succeed at it. emily: chances of it succeeding are unlikely? peter: i think it is slightly too cumbersome to work as a new payment system. emily: you were the first onset investor in facebook. dittmar convinced you to invest markd he convince -- did convinced you to invest or did he convince you to invest? peter: some combination of both. the company was growing fast. i convinced them i would be relatively hands-off. emily: do you worry that facebook could get distracted? internet.org, virtual reality i g? peter: 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. emily: you created palantir. customers include the cia and army and the marines 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. peter: 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 and said it had been used in the bin laden raid and was critical connecting all the thoughts to finding him at the end of the day. emily: do you think you could stop the next 9/11, or has it already? peter: something like palantir is the key to stopping terrorist attack. 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 do think there are a lot of checks and place at palantir. emily: someone described it as plugging into the matrix. peter: one government agency that gave us a bunch of data, we during a demo, we uncovered a terrorist plot they had not suspected. this led them to conclude they had to reclassify data as classified. emily: would you say palantir has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots? peter: i suspect that is true. emily: what is the craziest sector that you might enter that we would not expect? peter: 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.

emily: i want to talk to you 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 freed people up to do other things. emily: at some point though, you actually say that in the 22nd century, computers could be smarter than us. peter: there is always an interesting sort of debate and 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 our primary questions are not economic but political and cultural. i think it would be like extraterrestrials landing on this 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 that you have pondered about how humans could potentially survive in the future? peter: we should give nuclear power very serious consideration because it does not create greenhouse gases. emily: is it about colonizing other planets or soul in the systems -- solar systems? that's possible. emily: is mars going to be first? peter: there are a lot of things that make mars natural, yes. emily: you ponder several other different futures, including human extinction. what are the possibilities about that? peter: what are the technologies we need to develop? if we stay focused on that, i think our prospects are very good. emily: one of the things that you have started is a a startup island off the coast. what is your vision there? peter: this is a very small-sized project. is it possible to create some new community that we could start a new society that would very different rules and different ways of governing it. this is still far in the future,

but it has a lot of people interested. emily: do you imagine this as being like another country ?choin peter: it would be another country, and it would cost tens of billions to build, more capital than i have. emily: you think that you may live to be 120. peter: i certainly hope to, yes. ♪

♪ emily: you have been portrayed on the hbo show "silicon valley" and this island has been portrayed on the hbo show "silicon valley. " have you watched it? peter: they would dispute they were portraying me. emily: he is called peter gregory and he invested in an island. peter: 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 different ways. i think on the whole it is a positive show. emily: can you really grow meat and leather in labs? peter: yes, you can. i think it is not yet clear if people actually eat it. emily: what do you think about failure? peter: this idea that failure is ok is one of the more destructive means that is out there and silken 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. emily: what you consider your biggest failure? peter: there are some things that work better than others. there are 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 regimen? peter: i'm 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. 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'm on a paleo type diet. the caveman diet does not get you to 120. you need new technology and innovation for us to have longer and healthier lives. emily: new technology like what? peter: cures for cancer, alzheimer's. we need to find ways to restore organs when they are falling apart. we need to figure out ways to reverse the ways bodies are falling apart. the main, drastic thing i am doing is i am on hgh, human growth hormone, on a daily basis.

emily: what is the benefit of ?hat supposed to be gek peter: it helps maintain muscle mass, so you are much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis, stuff like that. there is always a worry that it increases your cancer risk. but that is the -- emily: 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 bio level, 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 we will find a way 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. emily: peter thiel, thank you so much for joining us today on "studio 1.0." it has been great to have you. ♪

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oh! i can't believe it! [cheering] hi, grandma! ♪ ♪ emily: if he is right, one day, drones will be everywhere. chris anderson started playing around with robots in the backyard with his kids on a whim. robotics,ompany, 3-d manufactures self flying planes. helicopters, blimps, around the world. but his flight to ceo has been anything but direct. he has been a punk rocker. a particle physicist. a journalist. editor-in-chief of "wired" magazine for 12 years. and a three-time author. joining me today on "studio 1.0" is inventor, father, and founder, chris anderson.