Peter Thiel may be a crackpot, but he’s one of the crackpots who rule the world. Founder of PayPal and Palantir, philosopher, doctor of law, disciple of the French philosopher René Girard, and a key supporter of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, he is one of the most powerful figures in the United States and the world. He’s not entirely sure he wants the human species to survive through transhumanism. He envisions a human-machine alliance, a technical extension of the human mind through artificial intelligence, an augmented, technically and virtually immortal human being — a new species, in short.










