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 h
is 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.
In Thiel’s eyes, this frantic education chase in a stratified society was another sign of things not working. He thought highly of Stanford, had studied there for seven years, now taught the occasional course. But the university seemed strangely separate from Silicon Valley—the new companies were started by students, not professors, who were more and more specialized in esoteric fields. He disliked the whole idea of using college to find an intellectual focus. Majoring in the humanities struck him as particularly unwise, since it so often led to the default choice of law school. The academic sciences were nearly as dubious—timid and narrow, driven by turf battles rather than the quest for breakthroughs. Above all, a college education taught nothing about entrepreneurship.
Thiel thought about starting his own university, but he concluded that it would be too difficult to wean parents off the prestige of Stanford and the Ivies. Then, on a flight from New York back to San Francisco, he and Luke Nosek came up with the idea of giving fellowships to brilliant young people so that they would leave college and start their own technology businesses. Thiel liked to move fast and make a splash (he did it on a regular basis). The next day, at Tech Crunch, an annual conference in San Francisco, he announced the Thiel Fellowships—twenty two-year grants of a hundred thousand dollars each to young people under the age of twenty who had an entrepreneurial idea that would make the world a better place. Critics accused him of corrupting youth into chasing riches while short-circuiting their educations. He pointed out that the winners could return to school at the end of the fellowship, but no small part of his goal was to poke a stick in the eye of top universities and steal away some of their best.
* * *
After Thiel’s visit to the biotech start-up, he drove up the peninsula to Clarium’s offices in San Francisco. He had a round of interviews scheduled with a few fellowship applicants from the group of fifty that had made the final cut out of an original six hundred. The first candidate to sit down at the dark-stained conference table was a Chinese American grad student from outside Seattle named Andrew Hsu. A nineteen-year-old prodigy, he still had braces on his teeth. At five he had been solving simple algebra problems; at eleven he and his brother cofounded a nonprofit group, the World Children’s Organization, that provided schoolbooks and vaccinations for kids in Asian countries; at twelve he entered the University of Washington; at nineteen, as a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in neurosciences at Stanford, he decided to leave his education behind to start a company that made educational video games based on the latest neuroscientific research. “My core goal is to disrupt both the education and the game sectors,” he said, sounding like Peter Thiel.
Thiel expressed concern that the company would attract people with a nonprofit attitude, who felt that “it’s not about making money, we’re doing something good, so we don’t have to work as hard. And I think this has been an endemic problem, parenthetically, in the clean-tech space, which has attracted a lot of very talented people who believe they’re making the world a better place.”
“They don’t work as hard?” Hsu asked.
“Have you thought about how to mitigate that problem?”
“So you’re saying that might be a problem just because the company has an educational slant?”
“Yes,” Thiel said. “Our main bias against investing in these sorts of companies is that you end up attracting people who just don’t want to work that hard. And that, sort of, is my deep theory on why they haven’t worked.”
Hsu caught Thiel’s drift. “Yeah, well, this is a game company. I wouldn’t call it an educational start-up. I would say it’s a game start-up. The types of people that I want to bring in are hard-core game engineers. So I don’t think these are the types of people that would slack off.”
Hsu would get a Thiel Fellowship. So would the Stanford sophomore from Minnesota who had been obsessed with energy and water scarcity since age nine, when he tried to build the first-ever perpetual motion machine. “After two years of being unsuccessful, I realized that even if we solved perpetual motion we wouldn’t use it if it was too expensive,” he told Thiel. “The sun is a source of perpetual energy, yet we’re not harnessing that. So I became obsessed with cost reductions.”
At seventeen he had learned about photovoltaic heliostats, or solar trackers—“dual-access tracking mirrors that direct sunlight to one point.” If he could invent a cheap enough way to produce heat using heliostats, solar energy could become financially competitive with coal. At Stanford he started a company to work on the problem, but the university refused to count his hours on the project as academic units. So he went on leave and applied for a Thiel Fellowship.
“I think I’m getting the best possible things out of Stanford,” he said. “I’m staying in this entrepreneurial house called Black Box. It’s about twelve minutes off campus. And so that’ll be really fun, because it’s really close to our office, and they have a hot tub and pool, and then just go to Stanford to see my friends on the weekends. You get all the best of the social but get to fundamentally work on what you love.”
A pair of Stanford freshmen—an entrepreneur named Stanley Tang and a programmer named Thomas Schmidt—came in next, with an idea for a mobile phone application called QuadMob, which would allow you to locate your closest friends on a map in real time. “It’s about taking your phone out and knowing where your friends are right now, whether they’re at the library or at the gym,” Tang, who came from Hong Kong, said. He had already published a book called eMillions: Behind-the-Scenes Stories of 14 Successful Internet Millionaires. “On Friday night, every single week, I go to a party, and somehow you just lose your friends—people roll out to different parties. And I always have to text people, ‘Where are you, what are you doing, which party are you at?’ and I have to do that for like ten friends, and that’s just like a huge pain point and it’s just really annoying, and I think this is the reason why we’re solving a pain point that we personally have experienced and probably most college students.”
Schmidt, another Minnesotan, explained the name of the app. “Back in the eighties, in the seventies, before Facebook, before the Internet, the Quad Center was the place to hang out—like, people would just chill there, talk to their friends, and now the Quad is totally deserted except for tourists and people biking through it, and so we feel like it’s kind of silly, it’s wrecking social interaction. There are so many cool people here and you really don’t get to meet that many people.”
Tang was asked how QuadMob would change the world. “We’re redefining college life, we’re connecting people,” he said. “And once this expands outside of college life, we’re really defining social life. We’d like to think of ourselves as bridging the gap between the digital and the physical world.”
Thiel was skeptical. It sounded like too many other venture start-ups looking to find a nar
row opening between Facebook and Foursquare. It certainly wasn’t going to propel America out of the tech slowdown. The QuadMob candidates would not get a Thiel Fellowship.
* * *
That night, Thiel hosted a small dinner party at his mansion in the Marina. A chessboard and a bookcase full of sci-fi and philosophy titles were the only indicators of who lived there. The elegant blond assistants in black refilled wineglasses and called the guests to dinner. A menu at each place around the table announced a three-course meal, with a choice of poached wild salmon with grilled asparagus, spring onions, forbidden rice, and a Meyer-lemon-scented ravigote sauce, or pan-roasted sweet pepper polenta with sautéed winter mushrooms, braised dino kale, caramelized cippolini, and niçoise olive puree.
Thiel’s guests seemed as out of place in this candlelit formality as their host. There was David Sacks, Thiel’s friend from Stanford and PayPal, coauthor of The Diversity Myth, and the founder of Yammer, a social network within organizations. There was Luke Nosek, another PayPal mafioso and the biotech specialist at Founders Fund—he was a member of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to cryonics, and had signed up to have his body filled with liquid nitrogen upon his official death so that it could be restored to full health upon the invention of new technology. There was Eliezer Yudkowsky, an artificial-intelligence researcher who had cofounded the Singularity Institute—an autodidact who never went past eighth grade, he was the author of a thousand-page online fanfic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which recast the original story in an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method. And there was Patri Friedman, the founder of the Seasteading Institute. An elfin man with cropped black hair and a thin line of beard, he was dressed in the eccentrically antic manner of Raskolnikov. He lived in Mountain View in an “intentional community” as a free-love libertarian, about which he regularly blogged and tweeted: “Polyamory/competitive govt parallel: more choice/competition yields more challenge, change, growth. Whatever lasts is tougher.”
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