Peter Thiel’s Religion

In job interviews, Thiel famously asks: “What very important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

 To Peter Thiel, short-term thinking is the essence of sin.

Thiel offers an alternative to perfect competition: monopoly. Without competition, they can produce at the quantity and price combination that maximizes their profits. Successful strategies attract imitators, so the best businesses are difficult to copy.

Ritual protects communities from the great violence of Mimetic disorder thanks to the real and symbolic violence of sacrifice. Girard said “sacrificial systems contain violence.” 

He doesn’t see the world as a mere distribution of luck-based outcomes. Instead, he praises conviction, bets on transcendent founders, and invests in the kind of companies he’d want to work for.

Thiel asks: “Is this a business that I have enough confidence in that I would consider joining it myself?” If yes, he’ll consider an investment. If the answer is no, he won’t.

If there was ever a silver bullet, Thiel believes living with a long time horizon is it.

“There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people get all tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers… It’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students.”

We increasingly believe that progress is inevitable. Progress, though, is not guaranteed. We must work for it. Otherwise, our living standards will not improve, and may get worse.