Peter Thiel’s Religion

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.

Strauss did not believe in transparency. He believed that even in the most open-minded societies, many truths were too problematic to be shouted. His contemporary disciples, like Thiel, conceal their words. They hide controversial ideas in esoteric language.

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

Firms in a competitive industry who sell a commodity product cannot turn a profit. But companies who have a monopoly can set their own prices since they offer an in-demand product that cannot be replicated. Monopoly firms are big fish in a small pond.

Long time horizons aren’t just psychological. They’re cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as, sociologist Elise Boulding once said: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”

As a libertarian who holds the New Testament as a seminal text, Thiel seeks to increase individual freedoms while preventing runaway Mimetic violence.

Thiel defines the four quadrants as such:1) Definite Optimism: The future will be better and we know how. 2) Indefinite Optimism: The future will be better and we don’t know how. 3) Definite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we know how. 4) Indefinite Pessimism: The future will be worse and we don’t know how. 

The top colleges have become vocational schools for investment banking and management consulting.

When you compete to be the best, you imitate. When you compete to be unique, you innovate.

“To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.” -- Jose Raul Capablance (Thiel's favorite chess player)