The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (61 page)

Schmidt was smiling to suppress his irritation. The moderator pointed at the Google
chairman. “You’re not accusing him of being a computer, are you?”

“You know, they like computers more than people in many cases,” Thiel said. “That’s
why they missed the social networking revolution. But if you look at it from the perspective
of forty years in the future, Moore’s Law is good if you’re a computer. But the question
is, how good is it for human beings, and how does this translate into economic progress
for humans?”

Thiel loved to scandalize respectable opinion. A passage from one of his essays, “The
Education of a Libertarian,” rocketed around the Web in 2009 and brought down the
wrath of the bien-pensants: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during
which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase
in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies
notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’
into an oxymoron.” Thiel tried to explain that he didn’t want to take away women’s
right to vote—instead, he wanted to find a way around democracy, which was incompatible
with freedom. He had a long record of donating to political causes. In 2009 he funded
James O’Keefe, whose undercover videos subsequently took down ACORN. In 2011 and 2012
he gave $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s Super PAC and another $1 million to the pro-free-market
Club for Growth, while hosting a fundraiser for a gay conservative group, GOProud,
in his Union Square loft, with Ann Coulter as the featured speaker. But more and more
he wanted to get away from politics, a highly inefficient way to bring about change.
He remained committed to the faith of his teenage years, but Americans would not vote
for libertarians.

Technology, on the other hand, could change the world without other people’s permission.
In the same essay, he wrote:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in
all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking
demos that guides so-called “social democracy” … We are in a deadly race between politics
and technology … The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person
who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

Thiel set out to become that person.

*   *   *

On a rainy spring morning in Silicon Valley, Thiel, in windbreaker and jeans, was
at the wheel of his dark blue Mercedes SL500, trying to find an address in an industrial
park between Highway 101 and the bay. The address was for a company called Halcyon
Molecular, which wanted to cure aging. Thiel, who was the company’s biggest investor
and sat on its board, was driving with his seatbelt off. He oscillated on the seatbelt
question—the pro-seatbelt argument was that it was safer, and the anti-seatbelt argument
was that if you knew that you were not as safe, you would be a more careful driver.
Empirically, it would be safest if you wore a seatbelt and were careful at the same
time. He made a left turn and fastened his seatbelt.

In spite of oscillating on the seatbelt question, Thiel had never lost the three-year-old’s
primordial dismay at the news of death. He refused to submit to what he called “the
ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” He saw it as a problem
to be solved, and the sooner the better. With the current state of medical research,
he expected to live to be 120—a sorry compromise, given the grand possibilities of
life extension. But 150 was becoming thinkable, and immortality wasn’t out of the
question. In his last years, Steve Jobs had given speeches about how motivated he
was by the prospect of death, but Thiel didn’t agree. Death was very demotivating.
It ended up having a depressing effect, it gave a desperate tone to things and imposed
constraints on what people tried to achieve. It would be healthier to live every day
as though life were going to go on forever. Immortality would make people treat one
another better, if they thought they were going to see one another over and over forever.
There was a line from the old song “American Pie”: “with no time left to start again.”
The idea of your own decline was like the idea of America’s—you wanted to be in a
place where it was never too late to start again.

In 2010, Luke Nosek, Thiel’s friend and partner at Founders Fund, told him about a
biotech start-up that was developing a way to read the entire DNA sequence of the
human genome through an electron microscope, potentially allowing doctors to learn
everything about their patients’ genetic makeup quickly, for around a thousand dollars.
Halcyon Molecular’s work held the promise of radical improvements in detecting and
reversing genetic disorders, and Thiel decided to make Founders Fund the first outside
investor. He knew little about electron microscopy DNA sequencing, but then the young
scientists at Halcyon hadn’t yet mastered it, either—no one had, which was why it
excited Thiel. He took note of their talent and passion, and when they asked for fifty
thousand dollars he gave them a first round of five hundred thousand.

Thiel finally found Halcyon’s offices, parked, and hurried inside. In the hallway,
a row of posters asked
WHAT IF WE HAD MORE TIME?
A photo of a futuristic library, a giant cage of metal bookshelves, was captioned
“129,864,880 known books. How many have you read?” In the conference room, an all-hands
meeting was going on: forty or so people, almost all in their twenties and thirties.
They took turns giving slide presentations on their team’s progress while Halcyon’s
founder, William Andregg, asked the occasional question. Andregg, a lanky twenty-eight-year-old,
was wearing cargo pants and a rumpled, untucked pink button-down shirt. One day, as
an undergrad studying biochemistry at the University of Arizona, he had made a list
of all the things he wanted to do in life, which included traveling to other solar
systems. Suddenly he knew that he would never live long enough to do even a fraction
of them. He plunged into gloom for a few weeks, before deciding to put “cure aging”
at the top of the list. At first he was guarded about using the phrase, but Thiel
urged him to make it the company’s message: some people might think it was crazy,
but others would be attracted.

At the meeting, Thiel listened with his lips pursed in a frown of concentration and
took notes on a yellow legal pad. “I realize this is a dangerous question to ask,
but what’s your over/under for prototype A?”

“Fifty percent by the beginning of summer,” said the scientist at the screen, laser
pointer in hand. His hair and beard appeared to have been cut by a macaque. “Eighty
percent by the end of summer.”

“Very cool.”

As part of the weekly meeting, several staff members gave presentations about themselves.
Michael Andregg, William’s brother and Halcyon’s chief technology officer, showed
a slide that listed his hobbies and interests:

cryonics, in case all else fails

dodgeball

self-improvement

personal digital archivization

super intelligence through AI or Uploading

On his way out, Thiel dispensed some business advice: by the following Monday, everyone
in the company should come up with the names of the three smartest people they knew.
“We should try to build things through existing networks as much as possible,” he
told the assembly. It was what he had done at PayPal. “We have to be building this
company as if it’s going to be an incredibly successful company. Once you hit that
inflection point, you’re under incredible pressure to hire people yesterday.”

Biology joined with computation to extend life: that was the kind of radical future
where Thiel was placing his effort and money. In the deadly race between politics
and technology, he was investing in robotics (robot-driven cars would put an end to
congestion, and not one more road would have to be built in America). After the sale
of PayPal, Thiel’s old colleague Elon Musk had gone on to found a company called SpaceX,
to make commercial space exploration affordable, and Founders Fund became the first
outside investor, with $20 million. Through his foundation, Thiel funded research
in nanotechnology. He gave $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal was
to reverse human aging, and he supported a nonprofit called Humanity Plus, dedicated
to transhumanism—the transformation of the human condition through technology. When
a friend told Thiel about a reality TV show in which ugly women’s lives were changed
by extreme makeovers such as plastic surgery, liposuction, and tooth whitening, he
became excited and wondered what other technologies were available to transform the
human body.

He was the largest patron and a board member of the Seasteading Institute, a libertarian
nonprofit group founded by Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer and Milton Friedman’s
grandson. “Seasteading” referred to the founding of new city-states on floating platforms
in international waters—communities beyond the reach of laws and regulations. The
goal was to create more minimalist forms of government that would force existing regimes
to innovate under competitive pressure. (Thiel had come to believe that the U.S. Constitution
was unworkable and had to be scrapped.)

If there was one breakthrough technology, it was likely to be artificial intelligence.
As computers became capable of improving themselves, they would eventually outsmart
human beings, with unpredictable results—a scenario known as the singularity. Whether
it would be for better or worse, it would be extremely important. Founders Fund invested
in a British AI company called DeepMind Technologies, and the Thiel Foundation gave
a quarter million dollars a year to the Singularity Institute, a think tank in Silicon
Valley. AI could solve problems that human beings couldn’t even imagine solving. The
singularity was so weird and hard to visualize that it was under the radar, completely
unregulated, and that was where Thiel liked to focus.

On the other hand, he shied away from investing in the area that would provide the
most immediate help to struggling Americans—food and energy. Those were too regulated,
too political. If there was something inegalitarian about his investments, every technological
advance had an unequal component—you were doing the new thing, and the new thing could
seldom be instantaneously transmitted to everybody. The starkest example was life
extension: the most extreme form of inequality was between people who were alive and
people who were dead. It was hard to get more unequal than that. The first people
to live to be 150 would probably be rich—but Thiel believed that every technological
breakthrough eventually improved the lives of most people, and anyway, none of it
would happen if it were left to a popular vote.

*   *   *

The scientists at Halcyon Molecular were refugees from research universities, disenchanted
with academic science, convinced that the best way to change the world was to start
a company—ideal finds for Thiel, who believed that the latest bubble in the U.S. economy
was education. He compared university administrators to subprime mortgage brokers
and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world,
unable to get free even through bankruptcy. Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment,
with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite
degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue.
A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy,
like owning a gun. “The future is so-so, but you can sort of navigate through it if
you have a house with a gun and an electric fence and a college degree. And if you
don’t, you’re just screwed. What’s gone wrong? Why is that? If all the debates are
about how do we get everybody to have a gun, that might be ignoring the crime problem.”
In the midst of economic stagnation, education had become a status game, “purely positional
and extremely decoupled” from the question of its benefit to the individual and society.

In Silicon Valley you didn’t have to look far for evidence. The public schools that
had once been the pride of California belonged to a statewide system ranked forty-eighth
in the country, chronically underfunded and in crisis. Private schools had become
the option for more and more families, but so had something novel in American history:
a privatized public education. Schools in the prosperous towns of Silicon Valley had
come to depend on massive fundraising to stay at the top. The elementary school in
Woodside, with four hundred seventy kids, was supported by a foundation—begun five
years after Proposition 13, in 1983, to save the job of a special ed teacher from
budget cuts—that pulled in two million dollars a year. At least half a million came
in its annual evening grand auction at the school. The theme in 2011 was “Rockstar.”
Parents dressed in leopard print shirts, skintight minidresses, and Spinal Tap or
Tina Turner wigs, ate “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” hanger steaks, danced to an eighties band
called Notorious, and were goaded by the auctioneer to bid skyward on Pimp My Hog!
and Rockin’ Goddess Retreat. A tour of the famous Japanese garden of Larry Ellison—CEO
of Oracle, the third-wealthiest American, and the highest-paid executive of the decade—went
for twenty thousand dollars; a
Mad Men
–themed dinner for sixteen at a private home (“Amid the libations and smokes, inhibitions
are shed and your behavior is worthy only of regret”) was pumped up to forty-three
thousand dollars by a real estate investor and his wife.

A few miles away, in East Palo Alto, elementary schools had no foundations and chronically
lacked textbooks and classroom supplies. In California’s public schools there was
a long way to fall.

The same held true for universities. The University of California’s world-class system
saw its budget cut by nearly a billion dollars, more than 25 percent, in four years,
and by 2012, facing billions more in cuts, was on the verge of collapse. That year,
Stanford announced that it had raised $6.2 billion in a five-year capital campaign,
during a financial crisis and recession—the largest amount in the history of higher
education. While Silicon Valley was booming, Stanford built a new medical school,
business school, engineering center, institute of design, interdisciplinary law building,
environment and energy building, center for nanoscale research and technology, cognitive
and neurobiological imaging building, bioengineering center, automotive innovation
facility, and concert hall. The university gave birth to more than five thousand companies
and licensed eight thousand inventions that brought in $1.3 billion in royalties.
Areas of the campus that in the seventies had been empty fields now looked like a
gleaming vision of Oz.