Peter Thiel has been described variously as ‘America’s leading public intellectual’, the ‘architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos’ or as an ‘incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic’ malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

WILLIAM ATKINSON: Following Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, an email that you sent five years ago has gone viral. You argued that with accumulating student debt and housing costs, it was no surprise that young people were turning to socialism. How do you explain that there are Gen Zs, like us, who aren’t on the left? 

‘The Trump administration is trying to pull off an extremely difficult thing. America is no longer a great country’

PETER THIEL: My sense is that in the US, Britain, Germany and France, the Gen Z voters are less centrist. I wouldn’t say they’re more drawn to the extremes, but they do not believe there are solutions within the Overton window straitjacket, the narrow space that’s been defined between New Labour and the Tories [in the UK] for the past three decades. And then there’s Reform, a party that repudiates that spectrum. For the first time in 200 years, there’s a real party to the right of the Tories. It’s not just a Gen Z phenomenon, but there’s a Gen Z part that is very important.

WE: You first argued in the late 2000s that the backlash from globalisation would upend politics. Do you often feel that the world is catching up with Peter Thiel?

PT: These things were coming for a long time. Student debt was $300 billion in 2000, around $2 trillion today. The GFC [global financial crisis] in 2008 was a big watershed. Entry-level jobs became less well paid. For students graduating after 2008, it became much, much harder to get out of the debt. Student debt slows you down from buying a house, getting started with forming a family, becoming an actual adult. You end up with a completely different society. It takes a long time to figure this out. But I started talking about this a lot in 2010… Why did house prices go up so much faster than incomes? Not enough was built. A big part was built as a retirement vehicle for older people. They were happy with the prices going up. The Tory party in the UK is probably completely past the point of no return. The suggestion that I have had was that you must start by throwing everybody out of the party who comes from real estate. You must be willing to purge all the people that are part of this dysfunctional system.

JOHN POWER: What would your advice be to someone in their twenties about how they can have an impact in politics? Should they join Reform?

PT: I think about politics a fair bit, but if I spent all my life on it, I would go out of my mind. I would like people to be more involved in right-wing politics, but I’m not sure that’s the best thing for most. You certainly should work for Reform rather than Labour or the Tories. You can criticise Nigel Farage as too much of a Boomer but he’s less structurally hateful to the young people. But maybe this is not the right way to frame the questions. We’re gonna have a revolution from Gen Z – all these crazy things that they are going to be doing. Is this good or bad? I’ve often said, in the early 20th century you think of both communism and fascism as youth movements that went very, very haywire. In the early 21st century, the reality is we have inverted demographic pyramids. There are not enough young people. We’re not going to get youthful communism or youthful fascism. We have this unbelievably oppressive, powerful gerontocracy. Maybe you can get communism or fascism of old people, but it’s very low-energy. It will avoid some of the defects of the early 20th century.But it’ll have many other kinds of problems. The general challenge for Gen Z is that there are big constraints.

My hope is that there always are some technological fixes, defining technology as doing more with less. If the debate is more with more spending or less with less spending, you end up with runaway deficits or extremely cruel rationing. I have critiques of the three biggest European countries – Germany, France and Britain. France is way too socialist. That doesn’t work. Germany is just insane. People have got caught up in crazed ideological fixations. There’s almost nothing like the Green party anywhere outside of Germany. Britain is neither too insane nor too socialist, but it’s extremely unpragmatic. It is extraordinary how lacking in common sense it is. The optimistic case for the UK is that there are extraordinary efficiencies one could wring out of the state. It has the greatest room for improvement of any European country. But why haven’t these things been done in the past 60 or 70 years?… Maybe the entire population is just too docile.

LARA BROWN: You’ve talked before about Europe’s choice between ‘Greta on a bicycle’ environmentalism, Chinese surveillance and radical Islam. Would you say Europe has chosen one path?

PT: The bad doors for Europe, the three doors of the future. For the future to have power as a cultural or political idea, you want it to be different. You can’t stay in this Groundhog Day, this Tory/Labour thing where we’re never doing anything new. The problem is the three actual pictures of the future.........

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