Peter Thiel’s Religion

“The big secret is that there are many secrets left to uncover. There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.”

Optionality is a means to an end, not the end itself. Our obsession with optionality can backfire.

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

After all, if people fight on social media, they won’t fight on the streets. Like a boiling kettle, we have to let out steam somewhere. Better to cool the pot on social media than in the streets. In the words of Thiel, “social media proved to be more important than it looked.”

 When I left after seven months and three days, one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, ‘You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz.’ Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of. Because their... See more

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.

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 concludes that time is linear, not cyclical. The future won’t look like the present. It will either be much worse or much better. Or more explicitly, “stagnation leads straight to apocalypse.”

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