Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel is an interesting guy, though I don’t agree with most of what he says. I’d love, for instance, to see him apply some of his know-how to coming up with solutions for poverty. Like a lot of people in Silicon Valley, he seems to exist on an island where such messy problems don’t register.

From a new Financial Times profile of Thiel by Richard Waters, in which the subject rails against government regulation, some of which might have come in handy on Wall Street during the aughts:

“He sounds equally uncomfortable discussing himself. The ‘ums’ multiply as he tries to explain why he threw in law and banking and came to Silicon Valley to pursue something far more world-changing. ‘There was this decision to move back to California and try something new and different,’ he says as though it were something that happened to someone else.

He is similarly vague when talking about the origins of his personal philosophy. ‘I’ve always been very interested in ideas and trying to figure things out.’ His undergraduate degree, from Stanford University, was in philosophy but his stance against the dominant political philosophy on many issues seems more visceral than intellectual. ‘I think that one of the most contrarian things one can do in our society is try to think for oneself,’ he says.

He only really regains his stride when talking about how technological ambition has gone from the world, leaving what he calls an ‘age of diminished expectations that has slowly seeped into the culture.’ Predictably, given his libertarian bent, much of this is traced back to regulation.

This is his explanation for why the computer industry (which inhabits ‘the world of bits’) has thrived while so many others (‘the world of atoms’) have not. ‘The world of bits has not been regulated and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of progress in the past 40 years, and the world of atoms has been regulated, and that’s why it’s been hard to get progress in areas like biotechnology and aviation and all sorts of material science areas.'”