New Zealand is a beautiful place, but it's also rather boring and small, remote and inaccessible unless you own a car for local transit and can afford plenty of plane tickets for your larger travels.

I would disagree and say that the future of the worlds environment probably looks like the opposite of New Zealand, but I'll hand it to him, the New Zealand economy does look a lot like the future of the USA in my opinion if Trump continues down his path hurting innovating industries by favouring traditional factory work: irrelevant.

As a VC Thiel is used to people saying what it takes to get what they want. I am pretty sure he's just going through the motions, much like most people who come to him asking for money in exchange for an idea that will "change the world" are doing.