Peter Thiel on science and institutions

2015–2025

“One sort of question is always like, what great business is nobody building? There's a more intellectual version of it, which I always like to ask as an interview question. It's: tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on. And this turns out to be a shockingly hard question for people to answer, and it's hard because, for one thing, it's hard because we've just been taught that truth is conventional. The truth is whatever everybody agrees on, and so coming up with something new that people don't already agree on puts us in a very uncomfortable sort of a place. It sounds like it's really hard to do this, and so you have to be really, really brilliant, so we think. But the other reason it's a very tough question to answer is because you sort of think about the literal dynamic of an interview, where I'm asking the question to somebody, and then give me an answer, and it's like, oh yeah, I already thought that, or I agree with that — that's the wrong answer. And so that the right answer is one that, in some sense, people might not agree with, and so it, I think, often requires quite a bit of courage to come up with an answer that people haven't thought of.”

2019–2026 · changed view

“And then in some ways I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years Maybe 1970 or so is a is an inflection point one could one could cite it doesn't mean it's stopped altogether you know one way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits you know computers software internet mobile internet you know maybe crypto now AI but there's been much less progress in the world of atoms.”

2015–2024

“I think that, um, all — if you're a founder or entrepreneur, what you want to aim for is monopoly. You want to aim to build a company that is one of a kind, uh, and that it's so far, um, differentiated from the competition that it's not even competing. Um, and, um, and I think this is the — conventional wisdom is always that capitalism and competition are somehow synonyms. I believe they're antonyms. A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect compet— competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. If you want to compete like crazy, um, then you should just open a restaurant in Chicago. Um, and, um, and, uh, and I think the, the great companies, like, uh, Google, sort of the paradigm example I use, has had no serious competition in search since 2002, when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft, and as a result it's been generating enormous cash flows for the last 12 years.”

2019–2026

“And certainly the Girardian intuition is that one of the you know one of the things is always that you know there's this really big problem of violence and scapegoating that in some ways some sense Judaism and then Christianity it's the same story It's the same story of you know sacrifice but it's told not from the point of view of the violent community It's told from the point of view of the innocent victim And there's a certain way where it sets in process this gradual this dynamic revelation that has that leads to the sort of gradual unraveling And there are and as you stop believing in scapegoats you're forced to come up with other explanations and that includes science.”