How Peter Thiel Thinks: Anti-Mimetic & Contradictory

In the course of my many interviews with Thiel for my book Conspiracy I would observe his extraordinarily sharp mind in action. There are a few things that are worth pointing out.

First, one of the most profound intellectual influences on Peter Thiel is a French thinker named René Girard, whom he met while at Stanford and whose funeral he would eventually speak at. If you haven’t heard of his work, he is famous for his theory of mimetic desire, which holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so are drawn to what other people want. A more crude way to say it is that you don’t have any real preferences and desires of your own, and you are always looking at others. It’s this, Girard says, that is the source of almost all the conflict in the world—people wanting the same things. In one way, this would forge Thiel’s modus operandi: shun social convention and think from first principles. People say that Thiel is “contrarian” but it’s more accurate to say he is anti-mimetic.

I mean, take a look at the unique path he has shaped for himself, and I will focus on his earlier days here. In some ways it is very traditional and highly competitive with other people— from Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to a high-powered law firm—but it is also marked by bouts of rebellion and doing the opposite of “what he is supposed to do.” At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. All these are examples of his decisiveness to make his choices based on first principles—not how you’re supposed to do things but what is true.

Second, another interesting method in his intellectual toolkit, is that he uses the Steel Man technique when arguing or explaining a complicated issue. This surprised me given that he had taken to calling Gawker, the website that outed him as gay, terrorists and such. But really, he was always very open-minded when it came to discussing things. For instance, if you ask Thiel a question—about Gawker or Trump or whatever—he doesn’t just pull up some half-formed opinion. Instead, he begins with, “One view of these things is that . . . ,” and then proceeds to explain the exact opposite of what he happens to personally believe. Only after he has finished, with complete sincerity and deference, describing how most people think about the issue, will he then give you his opinion, which almost always happens to be something radically unorthodox—all of it punctuated with liberal pauses to consider what he is saying as he is saying it.

Thiel seems to eschew social media and most popular culture as well. A friend would say that Thiel is averse to “casual bar talk” and I think part of the reason for that is that he is not well versed in the topics that typically make up those conversations. In one of our meetings I made an observation about how the HBO show Girls gets much more media attention than the the CBS show The Big Bang Theory even though the latter has a much, much larger audience than the former. This observation fell flat because Thiel was not familiar with either show. However, when I mentioned an obscure chapter in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Thiel could cite it from memory and discuss at length. The same went for the Battle of Valmy, an early episode in the French Revolution. This is because Thiel is extremely well-read and again, tends to focus on talking about and thinking about deep, obscure topics rather than superficial, trivial matters.

It could also be said that Thiel’s default state is to embody contradiction. Even when he does describe his opinion, he prefaces it with “I tend to think . . .” or “It’s always this question of . . . ,” as if what he is about to tell you is simply capturing where his opinion falls the majority of the time when running a thought exercise on the topic, as if he is always in the process of deciding what he thinks. Doing so is what makes him such a brilliant investor, considering each trade and investment anew from a dozen perspectives, seeing what others aren’t able to see and to do it on a regenerative basis. A friend would say that “Peter is of two minds on everything. If you were able to open his skull, you would see a number of Mexican standoffs between powerful antagonistic ideas you wouldn’t think could be safely housed in the same brain.”

All these traits combine to make someone who is not only traditionally intelligent, but also unique and singular in his views on the world. He once told Wired that, “The things that I think I’m right about other people are in some sense not even wrong about, because they’re not thinking about them.” That’s a good encapsulation of Thiel’s approach. He’s smart because he thinks about the things you and I aren’t thinking about, and thinks about them in a way we likely wouldn’t.

My new book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, which the New York Times raved about, is out now. Not only is the book an epic page turner, it’s designed to be a deep meditation on strategy and power inspired by the decade-long conspiracy engineered by the billionaire Peter Thiel to take down Gawker. Order your copy now.

Inventors Seldom Capture the Value of their Invention

anscript

00:02
hi everybody I’m Josh constant here at
00:05
TechCrunch Disrupt SF I’m here with
00:07
Peter Thiel of founders fund and Metro
00:09
capital now you’ve talked a lot about
00:11
how you need to choose companies that
00:13
might seem crazy at first to the average
00:15
person otherwise it would be an idea
00:16
that somebody already taken how do you
00:18
tell the difference between crazy and
00:20
crazy like a fox you’re something that
00:21
will actually pan out well you try to
00:24
you try to just always evaluate the
00:27
substance afresh so does the technology
00:30
work you can ask questions about what
00:33
what’s the prehistory of the founders
00:35
have they been working together for a
00:36
while are they are they going to give up
00:39
at the first sign of trouble so I think
00:41
you you want to always focus on the
00:43
substance there are no shortcuts so you
00:46
try to avoid you know coming in with
00:48
biases about what can and can’t work
00:49
ahead of time yet there’s always a
00:51
temptation to come with all sorts of
00:53
sort of one-sentence rules and we’re as
00:56
guilty of that as anybody but but I
00:59
think what’s what’s gone best is you
01:00
find something interesting about it and
01:02
then you try not to get to a yes or no
01:04
decision right away you try to really
01:06
understand the substance keep an open
01:08
mind and understand that so substance
01:11
over-over process every time so it’s
01:14
surely a hard question to answer because
01:16
it’s very generic and everyone every
01:18
startup is different but when you hear
01:19
an idea that you’re wondering if it can
01:21
really work what is it your go-to
01:23
follow-up question to ask an
01:25
entrepreneur pitching you about and what
01:27
is their their philosophy or their
01:29
long-term vision and how likely they are
01:31
to succeed at it well well there’s sort
01:34
of you always want to get the team the
01:36
technology and the business strategy so
01:38
you have to get all three of those to
01:40
work and so if people are if you want to
01:42
talk about the technology we’ll talk
01:44
about the people in the business
01:45
strategy so you go to you go to the the
01:47
other two topics if they don’t want to
01:48
talk about them that much so I wanted to
01:51
ask you a little bit about your
01:52
philosophy and the philosophy of the new
01:54
rich that’s come out of the technology
01:56
scene you know you’re known for having
01:57
very strong perspectives I personally
01:59
went to the seasteading festival of
02:01
ephemeral really fascinated by that way
02:04
of looking at things where we can solve
02:05
the problems ourselves we don’t
02:06
necessarily have to wait for somebody
02:07
else what do you think do you think that
02:09
there’s a different value system amongst
02:12
people who are becoming wealthy out of
02:14
the technology scene opposed to you know
02:16
industries of old it’s always hard to
02:19
generalize but it I I do think there’s
02:21
play something different whether you
02:22
made your money in computers or in say
02:25
resources in the Congo or something like
02:27
that so I do think I do think that
02:29
there’s something generally good about
02:31
technology and generally very positive
02:34
about this as an industry I’m obviously
02:35
a bit biased but I do really I do really
02:38
believe that I think I think
02:40
philanthropy is an area that deserves to
02:43
also be rethought and I always like
02:45
asking these contrarian questions and so
02:46
if the contrary in question businesses
02:48
what great companies nobody’s starting
02:50
in on implants would be the contrarian
02:53
question I think is always something
02:54
like what great cause does nobody want
02:57
to support and and so I always uh I one
03:01
of the questions I always like to ask is
03:02
why is it cause unpopular I don’t want
03:04
to give money to popular cause I feel
03:05
those are well enough funded I think the
03:07
unpopular causes that deserve to get
03:09
more its me it seems like when people
03:11
come up so quickly in the technology
03:13
world because of the way that you know
03:14
equity structures work and how quickly
03:16
you can get to market and make something
03:18
really big with the modern distribution
03:20
channels that you know if somebody
03:22
becomes rich in five years it feels like
03:24
maybe that money doesn’t really belong
03:25
all in my bank account like it’s kind of
03:27
belongs to the world it was kind of
03:28
random that it ended up with me opposed
03:30
to somebody who maybe came up through a
03:31
more hierarchical world worked every day
03:33
for twenty years and when they get to
03:34
the end of it they say this money really
03:36
is mine do you see any of that
03:37
perspective that people feel like they
03:39
don’t really have a right to the money
03:40
that they’ve earned in technology and
03:42
that it’s better for them to give it
03:43
away or like what is the philosophy of
03:45
people who are taking the giving pledge
03:46
or making those really big donations
03:48
well I think I think in general it is um
03:52
it is that that they they want to give
03:55
something back to society I’m not sure
03:57
they I think that mostly do think that
03:59
they actually deserve all of it but I
04:01
think these are some of what they got I
think the reality is that what’s unusual
about the tech industry in Silicon
Valley
is that the inventors are capturing
anything at all the history of
innovation has been one where most the
people who invent things get nothing at
all and so the Wright brothers came up
with the first airplane but didn’t get
rich or you know even the original
Edison versus Tesla you say Tesla is the
greater in
and that was the better way to go but
somehow Edison edged out Tesla and so
most of innovation has actually not not
gone to the people who came up with
things you have to to make money you
have to do two things number one you
have to create something of value for
the world and number two you have to
capture some fraction of the value you
create and and often people have
completely failed of doing the second so
I think Silicon Valley is very unusual
04:51
in that there’s this large class of
04:54
innovative people that are actually able
04:56
to capture some fraction of the value
04:58
they’re creating that’s great so now
05:00
that we have founders who are making a
05:01
fortune by making something everyone in
05:03
the world wants hopefully they can make
05:05
some difference for the better in the
05:06
world as well yes yes and I always I
05:09
always would say that you want to make a
05:11
difference for the better in a way
05:12
that’s not just looking for status not
05:14
just in a respectable way but people
05:17
should try to be courageous in their
05:19
philanthropy

Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment”

says well we’ve had all these years of
warfare over religion we’ll stop asking
important questions and all these
decades these centuries after the
Enlightenment here’s the world we’ve
reached this is the way I read you you
can correct my reading but let me finish
quoting you instead of violent wars
there could be violent video games
instead of heroic feats
there could be thrilling amusement park
rides instead of serious thought there
could be intrigues of all sorts
in a soap opera it is a world where
people spend their lives amusing
themselves to death close quote
now that is a devastating indictment of
much of contemporary America correct
well it is I mean I think this has been
06:59
the trend of modernity now it’s it’s
07:02
it’s not as though politics has
07:04
disappeared though it’s it’s often just
07:05
gets displaced in various ways but but
07:08
yes I think there is this this
07:10
incredible degree to which we’ve we’ve
07:14
we’ve substituted the realities of
07:18
politics for these sort of increasingly
07:20
fictionalized worlds and and it’s
07:23
probably uh that’s probably a very very
07:25
unhealthy thing there’s sort of a
07:27
slightly different frame that I’ve often
07:29
given on this is is that in in the last
07:33
40 or 50 years there’s been a shift from
07:36
exteriority which I which you know doing
07:41
things in the real world to the sort of
07:43
interior world which is sort of in a way
07:46
can be thought of this also the shift
07:47
from politics to entertainment or
07:50
something like that and and the the from
07:54
a dr. Phil a the powerful frame I give
07:57
is you know almost exactly 50 years ago
08:00
today and you know July of 1969 men
08:03
reached the moon and three weeks later
08:05
Woodstock began and with the benefit of
08:07
hindsight we can say that that’s when
08:10
you know progress ended and when the
08:12
hippies took over the country or
08:14
something like that and then we’ve had
08:16
we’ve had this incredible shift to
08:18
interior tea in the decades since then I
08:20
would include things like the drug
08:22
counterculture I would include
08:24
videogames you know maybe a lot of
08:27
entertainment more generally you know
08:30
there’s sort of parts of the internet
08:31
that can be scored both ways but but
08:34
certainly there all these things where
08:36
we’ve shifted towards the you know your
08:39
world of yoga meditation there’s a world
08:41
of interior culture that sort of and it
11:04
Rene Girard is in some ways the
addresses an aspect of human nature well
it’s it’s good it’s the very thing that
the Enlightenment says no no don’t even
think about such things right
yeah well the Enlightenment always
whitewashes violence it’s one of the
there are many things we can’t think
about an under Enlightenment reason but
one one is certainly violence itself and
and if you go to the anthropological
myth of the Enlightenment it’s the myth
of the social contract so what happens
when everybody is that everybody’s
else’s throat what the Enlightenment
says is everybody in the middle of the
crisis sits down and has a nice legal
chat and draws up a social contract and
that’s maybe maybe that’s the founding
myth the central lie of the
Enlightenment if you will and what
Gerrard says something very different
must have happened and when everybody’s
at everybody’s throat the violence
doesn’t just resolve itself and maybe it
gets channeled against a a specific
scapegoat where the war of all against
all becomes a war can of all against one
and then somehow gets resolved but in a
in a very violent way and so I think you
know what what Gerrard and Schmidt or
Machiavelli or you know the
12:18
judeo-christian inspiration all have in
12:20
common is this idea that human nature is
12:22
problematic its violent it’s um you know
12:25
it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s not
12:27
straightforward at all what what you do