Our Mimetic nature is simultaneously our biggest strength and biggest weakness. When it goes right, imitation is a shortcut to learning. But when it spirals out of control, Mimetic imitation leads to envy, violence, and bitter, ever-escalating violence.

Once you have many people doing something, you have lots of competition and little differentiation. You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend… So I think trends are often things to avoid. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.

We all form our identity by looking towards others. Since everybody copies, we can improve society by encouraging people to copy the right people.

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. 

“Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.”In an email to Ryan Holiday, Peter responded as such: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they get it really right.”

Thiel can identify heterodox thinkers who aren’t blinded by Mimetic dogmas or intellectual fashions. He insists that there are still secrets left to uncover. Some are small and incremental. But the most valuable secrets are big enough to shake the world.

Nomads are hackers. They love finding loopholes and exploiting them. The internet allows us to route around political roadblocks in interesting ways. Nomads are primarily knowledge workers, and that generally makes us desirable visitors for most countries. So, the real bounty here isn't to convince border officials to let nomads in by providing an ... See more

Thiel opposes the idea that luck is all-powerful. He encourages human agency and believes in the power of a single individual to bend the future to their will. Thiel believes we attribute too much to luck, which stops us from actually doing things.

“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)