Bari Weiss and entrepreneur Peter Thiel talked this week in Washington, D.C.
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”
Internet meme culture has now landed in the White House. Dogecoin is a memecoin—and if you don’t understand that sentence, fear not—I am sure Nellie will cover it in TGIF tomorrow.
But what the announcement solidifies—if Trump’s win hadn’t already—is the triumph of the counter-elite.
A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. They are about to reshape not just the government, but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.
How they did that—and why—is a question that I’ve been thinking about nonstop since Tuesday.
And there was one person, more than any other, who I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel.
If you listened to my last conversation with the billionaire venture capitalist a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first person in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave a memorable speech at the Republican National Convention that many in his orbit thought was simply a step too far.
He lost business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous things” he had ever seen.
A lot has changed since then.
For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate to Trump’s campaign. There was no big RNC speech this time around.
But the bigger change is a cultural one: He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump. There’s Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Shaun Maguire, and Elon Musk, among many other tech titans who have joined the Trump train.
On the surface, Thiel seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He invests in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but still seems to venerate the Ivy League.
But perhaps that’s the secret to his success. He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own.
And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook—Thiel’s investments in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX have paid off, to say the least.
His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected senator and then on the Trump ticket—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.
On Honestly, Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; why the Trump 2.0 team, with antiestablishment figures willing to rethink the system, will be better than last time. We talk about the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III.
Bari Weiss: I want to start with a broad question, which is, how are you feeling about this political moment that we’re in?
Peter Thiel: I wouldn’t say I’m ecstatic, but I am relieved. I think I would be incredibly depressed if the election had gone the other way. It’s probably a little bit asymmetric—I’m less happy than I would be unhappy had it gone the other way.
BW: Were you surprised by what happened on Tuesday night? Because some have credited you for predicting it. You said it was going to be a blowout in one direction or the other.
PT: I didn’t think it was going to be that close, and I didn’t think that Harris was going to win by a big margin. If you combine those two things, it’s a way of saying I thought it was going to be a solid win for Trump. There were a lot of early tea leaves that suggested things were definitely trending the right way. But—on some level—I think it was just a collapse of liberalism.
BW: Say more.
PT: I think it’s too narrow to blame it on a senile [Joe] Biden and a goofy Kamala Harris. It was this much broader collapse. It feels like a much more decisive election than 2016, when Trump beat the Republicans—the Bush Republicans—and he sort of snuck by Hillary. She didn’t take him seriously at all.
You can’t say that about 2024. Everyone knew it was going to be the Midwest states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. The Democrats gave it their all. I won’t say that the Democratic Party tried to kill Trump. Certainly the institutions did try to prosecute him. They tried to take him off the ballot. They tried to stop him in every way possible. And so, unlike 2016, it was Trump against the Democrats. The Democrats gave it their all and just collapsed.
It exploded the lie of identity politics, that your identity matters more than the argument. Trump made an argument. J.D. Vance made an argument. They made a strong case, and I think there was no argument on the Democratic side—it was free of substance, free of ideas.
On the failure of celebrities to deliver votes for Harris:
PT: It tells us that celebrity isn’t what it used to be. Celebrities used to have a certain mystique. We think of Hollywood celebrities as these left-wing dittoheads. They may be smart people, but they’re not allowed to articulate smart things. I don’t think there is room for individual thought on the left—certainly not in Hollywood. Hollywood in the 1990s was liberal, but behind closed doors, you could say very transgressive things and realize it was this show you were putting on.
Now, I don’t think people are able to have conversations—even in small groups at dinners, behind closed doors, in a liberal context. People are not allowed to think for themselves. Same thing for university professors. When I was at Stanford in the ’80s and early ’90s, it was overwhelmingly liberal, but you had a lot of thoughtful liberals. There was still such a thing as an eccentric university professor, and that’s a species that’s basically gone extinct.
On Elon Musk’s political evolution:
PT: I’ve known Elon since 2000—almost 25 years. He was never doctrinaire, but for the first 20 years, he was left of center. Tesla was a clean-energy electric vehicle company, and the Republicans were these people who didn’t believe in climate change.
It was much more comfortable in deep-blue, Democratic California. And then at some point, Elon shifted. Part of it is this sort of intellectual straitjacket where you’re not allowed to have ideas, even if you agree with them 80 percent. It’s never enough. You have to be 100 percent.
Likening today’s political environment to ‘Star Wars’:
PT: One of the metaphors I’ve used is that the Democratic Party—it’s like the Empire. They’re all Imperial Stormtroopers, and we’re the Rebel Alliance. It’s an uncomfortably diverse, heterogeneous group, and we have Chewbacca, Princess Leia, and autistic C-3PO policy wonks. It’s a ragtag Rebel Alliance against the Empire.
On the rise of populism:
BW: Populism is en vogue right now. It’s something that always makes me wary, because populism leads to scapegoating, and scapegoating leads to blaming minority groups, and often Jews. I see this sentiment: Vox populi, vox dei—I can’t think of a wronger thing that has been said. I don’t think the voice of the people is the voice of God. How do you contain populist energies and harness them in a productive way without them running roughshod over minority groups?
PT: This is plagiarizing an idea that Eric Weinstein has popularized—this thing called a Russell conjugation—two words that are synonyms, but are emotional antonyms: a fink and a whistleblower. Maybe it’s the same thing, but a whistleblower is a good person and a fink is a bad person.
I would submit that you can see a Russell conjugation with populism and democracy. Democracy is good; populism is bad. It’s democracy when people vote the right way, and it’s populism when they vote the wrong way.
What that tells us is there’s a lot in these concepts that needs to be unpacked. I share your concerns about populism. I also have concerns about democracy for the exact same reason. If everyone gets to vote on everything, that’s rampant majoritarianism.
Republicanism is supposed to be a check on democracy where the people don’t vote on things directly. They vote on them indirectly and you elect representatives. The Constitution is supposed to be a check on republicanism, where even the legislature can’t just do whatever it wants—it still has to be compatible with the Constitution.
I don’t think we are too populist or too democratic because, maybe there’s a mob of voters, but they don’t really get to do all that much on a day-to-day basis, and the problem is we’re less of a constitutional republic than we used to be.
It hasn’t shifted from the constitutional republic to this mob of voters, but it has shifted from the constitutional republic to this unelected technocratic bureaucracy—the deep state. Maybe that’s what you need to have in a technologically advanced society: You need experts; you need a Central Intelligence Agency; you need to have secrets about nuclear weapons, secrets about other things. And so there are all kinds of ways that an advanced technological society—by its very nature—is far less populist or democratic than the U.S. was even in its eighteenth-century conception.
On the fight between the elites:
BW: One of the things I’ve been thinking about since Tuesday, but really over the past few years, is this intramural fight between the elites, what you’ve called “the Borg”—the groupthink that control so many of our institutions and the Democratic Party—and what you’ve described as the Rebel Alliance, who are skeptical of institutions.
One specific example: the RFK Jr. MAHA movement (Make America Healthy Again). On one hand, it’s right for people to be skeptical of “Big Pharma.” But it can tip so fast into, “vaccines cause autism” territory. How do you think about the fine line between skepticism of an elite, whose gatekeeping has been too strident and falling into a rabbit hole, where there’s no gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all?
PT: One institution where you can ask this question is science. I always think of the history of science—that it started as a two-front war against both excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a scientist was a heterodox thinker who didn’t believe in, say, the decayed Aristotelian scholasticism of the Catholic Church.
Maybe you were empirical, and there were dogmas you were questioning. But you also couldn’t be extremely skeptical—you couldn’t trust your senses. Extreme dogmatism was incompatible with science. Extreme skepticism was incompatible with science. The problem is, it’s easy to be against one. If you’re always against dogmatism, maybe you’re too skeptical of everything. If you’re always against skepticism, maybe you’re too dogmatic. There’s this complicated balance where we need to be both anti-dogmatic and anti-skeptical.
If we fast-forward to 2024 and you asked scientists: Where are people too skeptical? Where are people too dogmatic? I think there is a whole long list of things. There are climate-change skeptics; there are vaccine skeptics; there are Darwin skeptics. There are all these people who are too skeptical, and the skepticism is undercutting science.
Then if you asked the scientists: Where are the scientists too dogmatic? I don’t think they could tell you. Doesn’t that tell you that we have completely lost the sense of balance? What has become “science” is something more dogmatic than the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century.
You can’t go all out skepticism. Obviously, there’s a slippery slope to nihilism, but directionally, that’s where we have to course correct. You have to go through these specific issues and think about them.
I don’t think vaccines lead to autism, but if they did, I don’t think our science would be capable of figuring it out. The results would get suppressed, because they would undercut the vaccine lobby. I’m pretty sure that question isn’t being investigated. There has been a dramatic increase in autism in recent decades, and we don’t have particularly good explanations for it. Surely, it’s something we should be thinking about more.
So again: I don’t think vaccines lead to autism. I do think it would be healthy if we were allowed to ask that question a little bit more than we currently are.
On why 2020 was the anomaly, not 2016:
BW: In 2020, many people—even those who supported Trump—could tell themselves a story: His presidency was some kind of anomaly. Now, with this overwhelming victory, historians are going to be telling themselves a very different story.
PT: We have to tell a story of what happened the last eight years. If Harris had won, the story would have been 2016 was a fluke, we can ignore it, and liberalism’s basically fine. We can go back to the somewhat braindead, but comfortable Obama consensus. The straightforward story is that 2020 was the fluke for this ancient regime with an ancient President Biden to dodder over the finish line one last time. It was not a sign of health at all.
We can still pretend that it was just the fault of Biden or Harris, but I think it was much broader than that. You go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly, and at some point it’s past the sell-by date. It’s over.
Somehow, the twentieth century went on in this zombie way for another 20 years in the 2000s and 2010s. And now that the twentieth century is over—this New Deal liberalism, this politically correct leftism, the progressive cult that is the university—these things have finally unraveled. I don’t see how it recovers. They will figure something out, but it’s not obvious how they will.
On whether he feels vindicated for his early support of Trump:
BW: Something I’ve been thinking about a lot since Tuesday night is, does Peter Thiel feel vindicated in this moment? In 2016, you were the boogeyman. You made history; you were the first gay man to ever speak at the RNC. And it didn’t lead to a cascade of other people standing with you.
PT: I think my fantasy in 2016 was that Trump was a way for us to force a conversation about the stagnation. Make America Great Again was the most pessimistic slogan that any presidential candidate—certainly any Republican candidate—had in a hundred years. Maybe you’re going to make it great again, but you’re going to start by saying we are no longer a great country.
And that’s what the slogan meant. It was this powerful political way of articulating this problem of stagnation. What do you do about it? Hard to say. The first step is to talk about it, then maybe we can become great again if we admit where we are. That was my fantasy. I don’t think the country was remotely ready for this and certainly not the Democratic part of the country.
There is now some sort of admission that there was a lot of stuff Trump was right about. We feel like we’re on the wrong track.
Why prominent tech leaders warmed to Trump:
BW: Let’s talk a little bit about the shift that happened in Silicon Valley. I think what happened was a preference cascade—when several people, around the same time, realize they’re not the only one.
PT: There was some degree to which it was safer for people to speak out when other people were speaking out.
BW: Was Elon the critical ingredient? Did he give people cover?
PT: I think Elon was incredibly important to it. There were a lot of pieces that had built up in Silicon Valley—for many years, people had been doubling down on the wokeness inside these companies.
It’s always an ambiguous thing. Let’s say wokeness isn’t really working. It’s not making your employees happier and more productive and more constructive. But the ambiguity is, does that mean you need to have more wokeness, or do you need to cut it out altogether?
For a number of years the intuition was, we just have to do a little bit more. There’s some point where it just got exhausted, and a lot of the top tech founders and CEOs felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors.
In Silicon Valley, I think it was largely experienced as corporate governance—how ridiculous it’s gotten to manage these ideologically deranged millennial employees.
On his relationship with J.D. Vance:
BW: I want to talk a little bit about J.D. Vance. You gave $15 million to help him get elected in the 2022 midterms. It might be the best $15 million you’ve ever spent. You introduced Trump to J.D. Vance in 2021 at Mar-a-Lago. J.D. Vance had been singing a very different tune; he had called Trump reprehensible. He had talked about him being America’s Hitler. Obviously, we’ve come a long way in those three years. What did you see in him?
PT: I first met him in 2011 at Yale Law School and did a small lunch with the Federalist Society group there. He worked for one of my venture funds, and we became friends. He was a very thoughtful person—he made a great first impression, and I got to know him better over time.
I do think there are different ways of articulating his shift since 2016.
In 2016, he believed there was a way to convince liberals to figure out a way to solve some of these deep problems: immigration, economics, the crisis of the Midwest. Then at some point, he thought they weren’t really interested in solving them at all, and maybe Trump’s somewhat more adversarial approach was actually more correct than he first thought.
On Trump’s leadership style and whether he’s too difficult to work for:
BW: One of the fears of those that oppose Trump was the fact that he had a lot of people around him who some on the right would view as swamp creatures, but who other people—me included—would view as public servants trying to keep this thing on the rails. The idea is, he’s burned through the A-list, the B-list, the C-list. Who’s left? Do you share that fear?
PT: Not at all. I think they’ll have a much stronger bench this time. I think a lot of the establishmentarian swamp creature people they ended up with were not that good.
BW: Who are the people that are most influential in Trump’s ear right now?
PT: I think Trump is calling the shots. He’s probably thought about it a lot more than he did in 2016. I’m not sure he’ll get everything right, but I think he is going to be much more focused on bringing in people that are roughly in sync with the program, and I’m hopeful it’ll be off to a much better start. At the end of the day, the buck stops with Trump. It’s very different from Biden or whatever the last four years were.
On the chaos of Trump’s first term:
BW: You said in one interview in 2023 that the Trump administration was crazier and more dangerous than you expected. What do you mean by that?
PT: All these quotes are slightly out of context.
BW: I don’t think that’s an outlandish thing to say.
PT: It felt very unstable. It felt dangerous for the people who got involved. There were all sorts of people who were prosecuted, people who went to jail. They probably did things that were wrong. They were also subject to crazy double standards. It felt like there was a lot of uncompensated volatility for the people that got involved. I’m certain it will be improved this time, but I still worry it will not be improved by enough.
I expect him to fall short in some ways. The problems are extremely difficult. They are harder than they were eight years ago. The border issue is out of control. So, maybe you need to actually deport people instead of just building a wall. And that’s a far more violent, far more drastic thing to do.
And the foreign policy situation—there’s a crisis in Russia and Ukraine; the Iran problem is far worse than it was eight years ago; the China-Taiwan thing—there’s all these ways it feels like the world is sleepwalking to Armageddon.
I think Trump is better than Harris. Is he good enough to stop us from Armageddon? I hope so, but I’m not 100 percent sure he’s good enough.
On the lessons of the twentieth century’s world wars and their relevance today:
PT: The way I would tell the history of the twentieth century is that we had two world wars. And the thing that’s extremely confusing about the two world wars is that they teach diametrically opposite lessons.
The lesson of World War II is you do not appease dictators. But World War I teaches the opposite lesson, which is you don’t want to have a network of secret alliances with hair-trigger escalation schedules—where the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand triggers this four-year conflagration that destroys Europe.
I think you have to learn the lessons of both wars. You can’t have excessive appeasement, and you also can’t go sleepwalking into Armageddon. In a way, they’re opposite lessons.
I won’t say that you should be 100 percent World War I and zero percent World War II, but my contrarian intuition is I’d be maybe 60 or 70 percent focused on World War I and 30 or 40 percent on World War II.
I think we have a recency bias. We’re always fighting the last war, and the last world war was World War II. So that’s the one we’re obsessed with drawing the lessons from. My contrarian intuition is, if we have a world war, it’ll be more like World War I. It’ll look like what’s been happening the last few years, where it’s this gradually escalating conflagration, but it’ll happen overnight. It will not be World War II, which people could see coming for a long time.