Peter Thiel predicts 30 years of chaos and turmoil followed by a period of unimaginable flourishing and prosperity.

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Peter Thiel: I don’t know.  I think it’s really going to be dependent on the kinds of choices people make.  I'd be more optimistic if I felt other people were less irrationally optimistic.  I think people are not fully aware of some of the risks and some of the challenges we face; and so because of that are overly complacent.  That seems to me is a recipe for dramatically increasing the probability of something very bad happening. 

It’s very hard to know.  And it’s very hard to know which choices are going to be the critical ones, and how these things are precisely going to work out.  Because the world is a big place.  A lot of complicated things are going on. 

If you held a gun to my head and forced me to make a prediction, I think we’re headed towards 20, 30 years of incredible chaos and turmoil.  And then at the tail end we’ll emerge with a world better than any we can now imagine.

Recorded on: Sep 05, 2007