Emily Nabnian

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.”

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.

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.

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

So far, chatter around blockchain in fashion has largely centered around legacy brands using ledgers of provenance to nip high-street cooptation and Canal Street counterfeits in the bud. Karl and Angelo are more interested in establishing provenance for the sake of profit redistribution, especially for creators who have accrued cultural capital wit... See more

“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.”

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.