What Peter Thiel Gets Wrong About Stagnation, Innovation, and Progress

Thiel says we've stopped dreaming. I think we've started thinking. This is what happens when complexity catches up with ambition.

The Argument

Peter Thiel gave an interview titled "A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough?" and argued that we are living in an age of stagnation. That we've lost our appetite for risk, for transformation, for the kind of dreaming that built the modern world. That regulation, caution, and institutional complexity have become a soft authoritarianism that suffocates greatness.

He claims:

"We've had a slowdown in science and technology over the last 50 years… we no longer believe a dramatically better future is possible."

Thiel sees the forces of regulation, caution, and institutional complexity as a kind of modern Antichrist. It's a soft authoritarianism that dulls ambition and suffocates greatness.

But as I listened to the interview, something didn't sit right. Not just because I disagree with his conclusions, but because his argument skips the hardest questions, leans on oversimplified history, and ultimately confuses slowness with failure.

The Place, The Things

Thiel is one of the sharpest thinkers the Valley has produced. Zero to One is a genuine contribution to how people think about building things. It's one of my favorite books.

But brilliant people have a specific blind spot. The confidence that gets them to the top becomes the thing that distorts their view from it. Thiel's stagnation argument has a very specific geography. It is measured from Palo Alto. From the window of a car on a road that looks roughly like it did in 1985. From the lived experience of someone who was already connected in 1985.

In 1985, I was living in the city of Beijing, a mega city with more than 9.8 million people already. It's one of the most advanced cities in the most populous country on earth, one fifth of humanity's most developed urban center. And Beijing in 1985 was far closer to Beijing in 1885 than to Beijing today. One story Courtyard Houses everywhere, connected by narrow roads. No highway, and horse wagons were a common sight. In the 1990s, our high school batch was sent to the villages for two weeks to help with the harvest. It was a village wealthy enough to host three hundred students. Yet everything was done by hand, using a sickle.

Now, that 1985 and 2025 are very different even from a car window. Especially considering the fact that no family had cars then, and 60% of families now have at least one. Beijing today has roughly 21.8 million people, 20+ highways adding up to more than 1,200km. Forty years ago, a 4 hour train ride would take you from Beijing to neighboring Tianjin, roughly 150km away. Now, 4 hours can cover 1,300km, that's from Beijing to Shanghai.

So you'd understand that from my window, I see something dramatically different from Thiel's. And I suspect more people would see my version: 1985 to now has seen the most significant changes of any period in human history.

The Frontier

And even within the rich world he's measuring from, the frontier is moving faster than he described. 1985 physics is not 2025 physics. The standard model has been stress-tested to extraordinary precision. Quantum computing moved from theory to working hardware. CRISPR rewrote what biology means. mRNA vaccines were developed in days because decades of invisible foundational work had already been done.

The James Webb Space Telescope unfolds itself in space. Eighteen gold mirrors, each polished to nanometer precision, folding out over two weeks in the cold vacuum a million miles from earth. It has sent back images of galaxies that formed 300 million years after the Big Bang. LIGO detected gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime itself, using mirrors that can measure a distance one ten-thousandth the width of a proton. Einstein predicted it in 1916. It took us a century to build something sensitive enough to feel it.

That is not stagnation. This is acceleration, my friends.

We don't feel this progress because it lives beyond where most people stopped following. Somewhere around high school, or graduate school if you went that far. The frontier didn't stall. It got harder to witness from a car rolling around town. That's not physics stopping, for sure.

Back to the Future

His core test is the Back to the Future argument. A person transported from 1860 to 1940 would find themselves in a completely different world. A person transported from 1985 to 2025 would find cars a little different and nobody has phones. Therefore: stagnation.

I'd start smaller. A person from 2019 can't imagine today. In six years we went through COVID, rejected vaccines on social media, started chatting with non-humans, and learned to remove clothing from photos in public. I'd call that something quite surprising.

Nobody in 1985 could have imagined the Cybertruck. When I first came to California, the freeways had no exit numbers. Now they do. Progress isn't always a flying car. Sometimes it's just knowing where to get off.

And though our dining tables might look exactly the same as what Henry VIII used, Henry VIII would approve we are in a different era. Our tables are cleaner. Our food is tastier. He died at 55 from conditions we cure with a weekend of antibiotics. He'd approve time has changed.

The Questions He Didn't Ask

Thiel is very good at asking what we should be doing. He's less interested in why, how, or who pays.

Why do we need this? Why is Mars the solution? Why is immortality desirable? Are we solving human problems, or running from human limits? The boldness of a goal doesn't answer the question of whether it's the right one.

At what cost? AI consumes power at a scale that competes with cities. Medical trials carry ethical trade-offs. Space colonization pulls capital from problems that exist right now, on this planet, for people who are alive today. Progress isn't free. Pretending it is isn't vision. It's accounting fraud.

At whose cost? Who gets access to life extension? Who gets displaced by the automation that funds the moonshots? Who is left behind when innovation serves the few and bills the many? This isn't anti-progress. It's the foundation of progress worth building.

Thiel asks if we're dreaming big enough. I'd ask if we're thinking deep enough. Bold questions are easy. The hard ones are the ones nobody wants to sit with.

The Complexity

When a complex system resists you, it's not because the people inside it lack ambition. It's because the problem is real. The gap between an elegant idea and a thing that actually works, at scale, reliably, for real people, that gap is where most of the work lives. It is slow. It is technical. It is unglamorous. And it is not stagnation.

AI requires energy at a scale we're still learning to provide. Chip design is hitting physical limits that don't care about our ambition. Aging isn't a single condition, it's thousands of overlapping processes that have been evolving for billions of years. Space colonization isn't just rocket fuel, it's governance, life support, ethics, and the question of who gets to go and who gets left behind.

These aren't blocked by cowardice. They're blocked by reality. Thiel sees slowness and diagnoses fear. I see slowness and recognize it. I've been inside it. I know what it feels like when a problem genuinely resists.

That's not weakness. That's what real science looks like.

Maybe what Thiel reads as stagnation is something else entirely. We've picked the low-hanging fruit. Now we're in the hard stuff: consciousness, ecology, biological systems, distributed ethics, the question of what kind of future is actually worth building and for whom.

This phase is less glamorous. It won't produce the kind of headlines that make a good interview. But it might be more important than the rocket age ever was.

Speed doesn't equal soul. Acceleration doesn't mean we're on the right track. We've built brilliant tools and used them for war, surveillance, inequality, and extraction. Progress arrived. Wisdom lagged. It always has.

Thiel asks: are we dreaming big enough?

I'd ask: are we building carefully enough? Are we asking the right questions, not just the bold ones? Are we thinking about who inherits what we build?

I am a nobody who has built things. And who has lived through the greatest transformation any civilization has ever produced, on both sides of it, with my own hands.

What building things taught me is this: the hardest problems don't yield to ambition alone. They yield to patience, precision, and the willingness to sit with complexity long enough to actually understand it.

That's not stagnation. That's growing up.

And growing up, for a civilization, might be the most important thing we've ever done.

p.s. Here is where I'd like to introduce a book to all of you who made it this far.

It's a book Bill Gates also recommended: Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling spent decades surveying people about basic facts, child mortality, literacy, life expectancy, extreme poverty. In every survey, almost everyone was wrong. Not slightly. Dramatically. Systematically in the direction of pessimism. The world was getting better faster than anyone believed. We just weren't counting the right things. Good news doesn't announce itself. It just happens, quietly, every day, one child vaccinated, one family fed, one girl who gets to go to school.

Let's put it this way: you will feel much better once you finish the book. Though I'd say reading it in 2019 probably would make you feel even better.