From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

Is Silicon Valley recklessly ambitious, or is it not ambitious enough? What should we

fear more? Armageddon or stagnation? Why is one of the world's most successful investors worrying about the Antichrist?

My guest today is a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in the political careers of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Peter Thiel is the original tech-right power player, well known for funding a range of conservative

and simply contrarian ideas. But we're going to talk about his own ideas, because despite the

slight handicap of being a billionaire, there's a good case that he's the most influential

right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years.

Peter Thiel, welcome to interesting times.

Thanks for having me.

So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years.

You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called

The End of the Future.

And basically the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing,

modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought.

And that actually we entered a period of

technological stagnation, that sort of digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a

breakthrough as people had hoped, and that sort of the world was kind of stuck, basically. And you

weren't the only person to make arguments like this,

but it had a special potency coming from you

because you were a Silicon Valley insider

who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

...