Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…Why do you have an appetite to live longer, and what’s your life’s mission? Have you fulfilled your life’s mission yet? I think it’s somewhat independent of a life mission. I actually think life is something that’s worthwhile in and of itself. Death is kind of a bad thing, in [and] of itself, so even if I was adrift and had no sense of what I was doing at all, I would still all else being equal, hopefully prefer to live a lot longer. I always think it’s very odd how weirdly strange the anti-aging, life extension idea is. I always think, “Why would people think that you would need a life mission or some extraordinary reason to want to live longer?” Part of it goes to these very strange psychological ways we deal with mortality, through a combination of acceptance and denial. We accept that we’re all going to die, and so we don’t do anything, and we think we’re not going to die anytime soon, so we don’t really need to worry about it. We have this sort of schizophrenic combination of acceptance and denial, like extreme pessimism and extreme optimism. It converges to doing nothing, and I’d like us to just fight it a little bit more for its own sake. If you accept for the moment the premise that in general, the sort of free-market system we have has done a pretty fair job on the production side, but that there may be a secular threat to its success on the distributional side — in other words, increased concentration of wealth, perhaps due to technology changes — is there a way to substitute something on the distribution side without harming the effective progress performance on the production side?…

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