✨ 5 takeaways from Peter Thiel's NYT chat with Ross Douthat

It's an interview worth a deep dive

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Yes, I’m going to devote this essay to my main takeaways from Peter Thiel’s interview with Ross Douthat. The conversation between the billionaire PayPal and Palantir co-founder — and early backer of both Donald Trump and JD Vance — and the conservative NYT columnist offers much to chew over.

Regular Faster, Please! readers will recognize the themes that made Thiel a public intellectual on the right, the first from Tech World. His famous lament — "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters"— neatly captured a worldview that technological stagnation poses an existential threat to Western civilization. His theory of definite optimism, the belief that bold visions require concrete plans rather than vague hopes, a) reflects Silicon Valley's approach to everything from space exploration to artificial intelligence and b) continues to shape the thinking of the pro-progress/growth/accelerationist movement. (You could toss “Up Wing” and “abundance” in there, too.)

Here we go:

⏩ Relative economic stagnation. Douthat asked Thiel whether America is still in a half-century economic and technological stagnation, a thesis he publicly put forward back in 2011.

Thiel answered, “Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis,” an understandable response give that all the recent tech advances — AI, CRISPR, reusable rockets — have yet to significantly change our world. Then he continued, “It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed.”

Me: This is such an important point. Whether you call the post-1970 period “The Great Stagnation” or “The Great Downshift” (the phrase used in my book), it isn’t the case that we’re no better off today than five decades ago. American living standards are incontrovertibly higher. There are also way fewer global diseases and less poverty. Still, it’s not the nuclear fusion-powered, spacefaring America — where flying cars are real, universal vaccines prevent pandemics, orbital factories hum with activity, and incomes are three times higher — we were promised.

⏩ The need for economic growth. Douthat asked why, if we've achieved substantial wealth and comfort — and if further growth perhaps threatens environmental stability — it isn’t rational and responsible to simply stop pushing for more.

Thiel conceded that environmental worries about growth were "legitimate" but insisted stagnation is no solution. Western society, he argued, depends on progress: without it, institutions "unravel" and the middle class, defined as those expecting their children to prosper, collapses. A degrowth society would be a dreary and oppressive one, more like North Korea than some solarpunk fantasy.

Me: My answer would be to stress how degrowthing now would be utterly and self-harmful irrational not just for America, but for the world. Billions still live in poverty and telling them “enough is enough” denies them the prosperity already enjoyed in rich nations. At the same time, further growth is how we unlock clean energy, end terrible diseases, and build a future where more people have more opportunity to lead the lives they choose — both down here and up there! Growth isn’t a luxury; it’s remains a moral imperative.