Big Think Interview With Peter Thiel
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A conversation with the venture capitalist.
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PETER THIEL:

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist. He is Clarium’s President and the Chairman of the firm’s investment committee, which oversees the firm’s research, investment, and trading strategies. Before starting Clarium, Peter served as Chairman and CEO of PayPal, an Internet company he co-founded in December 1998 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.

Prior to founding PayPal, Peter ran Thiel Capital Management , the predecessor to Clarium, which started with $1 million under management in 1996. Peter began his financial career as a derivatives trader at CS Financial Products, after practicing securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell.

In addition to managing Clarium, Peter is active in a variety of philanthropic and educational pursuits; he sits on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Research Institute, the Board of Visitors of Stanford Law School, and is an adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Peter received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School. He is self-described libertarian and a minority investor in Big Think.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Bill Gates believes that the free market fails to encourage innovation in areas where there’s a long timeframe. Do you agree?

Peter Thiel: Well, I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort. I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures. So if you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

At the same time, I think one of the places where I would disagree with Gates is that it is not at all clear that we have a government that is doing this much better. And so even though I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that’s a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that, you know, a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.

Question: Is there a better way to encourage long-term innovation?

Peter Thiel: There is a lot that could be done with the market. I think, we want people to have long-term time horizons and so I think to some extent it is... there’s a cultural question, there’s people should be thinking of their life, you know... life is long. It doesn’t end in six months or three years or whatever the next line on your resume is, it’s something that for most of us we can expect to go on for quite a number of decades ahead. And so I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it’s true for governments and it’s true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.

Question: Will technology reshape capitalism in the future?

Peter Thiel: Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I would frame the link a little differently. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society. In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where – where people – where there’s growth, where there’s a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don’t, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there’s no progress and basically everybody’s gain is somebody else’s loss. And that, I think, tends to encourage a much less capitalist system, and that’s where you sort of get a you know, what are often called a bull market in politics, but politics becomes more important, people become more interested in using the government to get things for...

Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/big-think...