Peter Thiel: observation

Transcript context

…I have a question about your personal life, if I may, and if possible, if you could give your answer as a story, that’d be lovely. Obviously, you feel a great sense of personal responsibility, indeed responsibility to history. How did that sentiment begin? How has it evolved? What have you found to be the more fruitful and less fruitful avenues for expressing it? Oh, I’m always so bad at doing a self-psychoanalysis or something like that. There were all these ways I was incredibly competitive and tracked as a kid. In my eighth-grade junior high school yearbook, one of my friends said, “I know you’re going to get into Stanford in four years.” I got into Stanford, and I went to Stanford. Then I went to law school. I ended up at a top law firm in Manhattan. From the outside, it was a place where everybody wanted to get in. On the inside was a place everybody wanted to get out. I had some kind of a quarter-life crisis in my mid-20s. Unclear what to do, but somehow, you have to try to avoid the worst mimetic entanglements, the worst forms of mimetic competition possible. I don’t think psychology really works. I don’t think awareness of these things is quite the way to do it, but there was some part of that that was very important for me. Thank you. To that point, to get people off of the mimetic track, I think the Thiel Fellowship was really amazing and has had tremendous success. Have you thought about trying to scale that in a way that might be profitable or can make a larger impact than, say, 20 folks a year and maybe 20,000 eventually?…

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