My Litany of Thiel Answers
Important truths that very few people agree with me on
Peter Thiel is renowned and vilified in equal parts: he’s one of the most rebellious members of the public intellectual clique, and he wears his non-conformity on his sleeve. In 2023 he gave a fantastic speech to the Oxford Union and he starts it off by asking a rather contrarian question: what is the single antonym for diversity.
The answer is most excellent. The antonym for diversity is university.
Thiel also has a famously contrarian interview question: "Name an important truth very few people agree with you on”. I love this question. It forces you not just to think but think about what’s unique or different about what you think. And then you need to decide just how much of your differences you’re willing to share.
One of the interesting bits about this question is that it can be audience-dependent. Some ideas will be disagreeable to almost everyone, but there are other truths, and these might be harder to say, where you disagree with those closest to you. Or with your in-group. I want to know the answers all of my friends would give.
I’ve thought a lot about this question and I decided to write a bunch of my answers down. Chances are you won’t agree with most of them.
Here we go:
Fossil Fuels Are Not Only From Fossils.
Freedom From Opinions Is The Foundation of Success.
Climate Change Might Be Good.
Diversity Is Overrated.
Power Is Defined By Secrets.
Healthcare Should Be More Capitalist.
Offline Is The New Luxury Signal.
Activism Is A Power Game Not A Change Agent.
Falsifiability Is What Science Is.
Policy Prescriptions Are About Which Outliers We Focus On.
We Build Ourselves Out of Corners, We Don't Politick Out of Them.
The Catholic Creed.
We Live In The Best Time Ever.
Contrarianism Is Essential In Theory, But Wrong In Practice.
Truth: Fossil Fuels Are Not Only From Fossils.
Explanation: Almost everyone thinks of oil, coal, natural gas, etc. as Fossil Fuels. The idea is that the hydrocarbons from dead plant and animal material has condensed and formed the substances we use today. There's a largely disregarded theory called Abiogenic Petroleum Theory that challenges the conventional thinking. Hydrocarbons like methane are present on every large rocky body in our solar systems. Multiple experiments have been done demonstrating that fossil fuels can be produced in temperature/pressure conditions similar to the mantle. And there are more in-depth analyses that explain particulars like it’s relationship with hydrogen and it’s location in non-sedimentary rock.
There’s a ton of science behind the conventional theories of oil too, but this still points to a very important idea. Most people don’t realize that our known oil reserves have continued to increase despite our ever-increasing extraction and use of them. We have a longer timeline in front of us for fossil fuel usage than ever before and yet we still think in terms of ideas like “peak oil”. The Ghawar oil field alone is a colossus defying our expectations with reserves. It could pump 12mm barrels per day for 50 more years at least.
Tommy Gold has a fantastic book on this called The Deep Hot Biosphere. It’s a great read.
Fossil fuels - the bastions of non-renewable energy - will never run out.
Truth: Freedom From Opinions Is The Foundation of Success.
Explanation: I realized this while writing and thinking about Mimetic Theory. Once you see mimesis it’s everywhere and can’t be unseen. The thing about mimesis is that we’re all susceptible. We want to want what others want. We model our desire.
So what do we want to want?
God, that’s a hard question to answer. It takes a lifetime. Getting the opportunity to find the answer means working hard to stop caring about the influence we get from everyone else. And we care so so much.
Successful people find ways to turn this off. They blaze trails without worrying about who is watching or what judgement they’re passing. They care very little what other people are doing and pass very little judgement on others because they are too focused on their own action.
If you want to be successful — in anything — stop caring what other people think and do your thing.
Truth: Climate Change Might Be Good.
Explanation: Climate change has been presented to us as a sort of slow-motion catastrophe over the next 10 to 100 years (depending on the journalist or politician). When they get extra unctuous and need to make it more about TODAYRIGHTNOW they’ll cite increasing storm intensity or heat waves or blizzards, skipping the science-y parts where the IPCC discusses these things as either lacking evidence or “low confidence”.
Let’s look at a couple of potential positives:
The world is greening significantly. CO2 is plant food - photosynthesis actually stops below about 150 ppm (which, ahhh, would be bad) - and as there has been more of it, plants have made a pretty remarkable increase.
Climate change based on CO2 is more pronounced in colder and dryer places than in warm and wet places. So the effect is larger in winter, at night, at higher altitudes, and near the poles. There are about 10 times as many cold deaths as there are heat deaths, so the offset towards warm will actually decrease total deaths from heat and cold together.
Climate deaths have decreased dramatically over time. This has more to do with our adaptation than it does anything else, but I still find that too few have seen the graph:
Things are better.. Estimates suggest the potential for a dramatic increase in arable land on the timespan of decades.
A lot of you might be saying BUT SO WHAT IF WE’RE ALL UNDERWATER AHHHHHH. It’s certainly true that sea level has been remarkably consistent for a few thousand years. And it’s also true that there are some triggers that are very scary — the one I think about the most is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — but even these would occur over decades and centuries, not weeks and years.
What a lot of the climate debate really comes down to is a philosophical difference between two camps, what Freeman Dyson calls “the naturalists” and “the humanists”. Naturalists believe that an untouched earth, free from any taint of humanity, will thrive and provide the best environment for life (this camp has varying opinions about humans). But humanists believe that humans have a key role to play in ecology and that the highest value is coexistence between nature and humans. The irony is that both groups should point to similar solutions to a better world: like very high urban density which is more efficient and more sustainable than country living.
I’m definitely in the humanist camp. I think most people are wildly deluded by what a natural world actually looks like. They focus too much on charismatic megafauna and too little on understanding the natural catastrophes and changes that happened before the 19th century. I believe strongly that humans will continue to flourish in the 21st and 22nd century, that we will continue to get better at adapting to our environment, that our technology will let us get better at impacting the rest of nature less, and that a warmer world could be good for both us and nature.
Truth: Diversity Is Overrated.
Explanation: “Misunderstood” is a better word than “overrated”, but hey this is my contrarian litany and I reserve the right to overhype my dramatic titles.
The general wisdom of the day is that “diversity is our strength”. Thiel said the antonym of diversity is university. That sounds about right.
Diversity is a strength, but people incorrectly interpret this as a sort of perfectly homogenous admixture across society. That’s not how people work and it’s not how they want to work.
There’s a principle called Subsidiarity which simply suggests that social and political problems are best handled at the smallest or most local level possible. It will be better if you can solve a problem in your family first, then your neighborhood, then your town before you take it up to to your entire state or your country.
People clump. People want to clump. We like to be together surrounded by those that think, believe, and yes, look like ourselves. This goes for any sort of group identity. Examples? There’s a huge list of exemplar communities that have made big clumps. The Irish and Italians did it over a hundred years ago. The Hasidic Jewish community did it in Brooklyn. The Somali community did it in Minnesota. It’s true on the left and the right and on any continent and in any culture. Our towns and communities and societies will function better if 1) we are willing to settle in groups and feel the support of those that are like us and 2) when these groups interact, they do it recognizing and respecting their differences.
Ironically, a better form of diversity is thinking about groups of groups. Today’s identity politics is such a problem because media and political forces incentivize thinking only about groups at a country-level scale rather than allowing and focusing on the local, natural way humanity wants to work. In country-wide media, identity groups make it easy for viewers to see the Mob. The faceless “Other” becomes an out-group scapegoat; a common enemy. And then the identity politicians can push their viewpoint as the federally-approved and country-wide “Way” and force everyone to agree. Identity politics leads to the dissolution of community so that only the Individual and the State exist.
We need more institutions with smaller, local memberships and they need to exist across a wide swath of political ideology, culture, and tradition.
Truth: Power Is Defined By Secrets.
Explanation: One book I've kept coming back to many times is Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. Appropriate for this litany, it’s about Peter Thiel's takedown of Gawker.
But the story isn't why it stays in my mind (though the story is great too). It's the question Holiday asks at the very beginning: Would a world with more conspiracies be worse, or better?
I've asked myself this question a lot. Because the act of conspiring involves a secret, and I believe secrets hold most of the power in this world.
Secrets don't mean "conspiracy theories" or any of that subculture. Secrets are simply closely held knowledge and beliefs by select groups of people. Conspiracies are plans to act on them.
Every successful company is defined by their secrets. It might be a straightforward trade secret like the Coca Cola recipe or it could be something far more nuanced, like the market theories directing a hedge fund's bets. Every startup has a secret way they want the future to look, and the point of the startup is to change the world to match their vision.
Every good marriage is a secret too. My relationship with my wife is a secret nobody else is in on, with its own language and dynamics and inside jokes. My immediate family is a secret in the same way.
Organizations and institutions are secrets too. They may have a public mission statement and it may even say what they mean. But often it's only the members that fully understand the power and direction. They understand it beyond the words, with that tacit vibration that allows you to live it. I know members of both the Opus Dei and Communion and Liberation movements in the Catholic Church and I feel this emanating out from them in a positive way. I imagine the priesthood in much the same way.
It is far more natural for information to be public in 2025 than it was before the internet. The world was filled with secrets back then. Some of them were only kept by geography or proximity or language, and sometimes just by default. Google was the first major accelerant towards more public knowledge. Everything suddenly became Googleable. AI is another. As more and more information goes into the LLM machine it becomes both known and homogenized, and secrets are lost or broken down.
That makes the secrets we keep now more important than ever. And more powerful.
Truth: Healthcare Should Be MORE Capitalist
Explanation:I remember first listening to this episode of Econtalk with Keith Smith. Keith talks about his experience opening the Surgery Center of Oklahoma and trying to provide upfront pricing on procedures. He basically had to guess on all material costs because nobody actually knew prices on anything from gloves to sutures. He also talks about how hospitals receive tax-exempt status as nonprofits and what incentive structures this produces. The main idea here is that any hospital that accepts Medicare (most of them) must provide emergency and medical care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. This is a great thing and it was defined under EMTALA. But it also helped create incentives for insurance companies and hospitals to maximize the “community benefit” they are providing. This is why you get $100,000 bills that are reduced down to $6,000 and $50 deductibles through insurance magic.
A hospital administrator replied to this explanation and said that Smith is on point but that Smith’s secret is that:
He doesn’t have any ‘losing’ service lines that must be subsidized with his surgery program. As one example, half of the babies delivered in my hospital each year are paid for by Medicaid, which doesn’t cover our full costs. Same with mental health/ substance abuse services. At the same time , we’re supporting school nurse programs and opioid interdiction efforts. Every hospital in the US uses the proceeds from their surgery program to subsidize a wide range of services that the community needs. Smith doesn’t have any of those issues, and so can price surgeries at a reasonable margin over costs. Could I run my hospital like Dr. Smith does? Sure, if 70% of my services weren’t rendered to Medicare or Medicaid patients; but that’s not the environment in which I operate.
Our healthcare system is a weird mix of subsidy and regulation that makes it appear capitalist if you squint one way but socialist if you peek at it another. The insane fake prices that circulate ($100k for a hip replacement?) are what make people think it needs to be turned into a single-payer system. But single-payer would be awful: the government does very little efficiently and medicine would be no different. People like to praise the Canadian system or the British NHS until they learn about some of the crazy wait times for routine surgeries. Three year wait for a cancer screening? News flash: rich people in England have supplemental insurance and pay for access.
On the other hand, look at some of the healthcare procedures that are outside the American subsidized system, like LASIK surgery. It’s not covered by insurance and it has a capitalist incentive to drop costs significantly while increasing probability of outcome. Vein treatments, IVF, and some cosmetic surgery have followed a similar trend.
We need EMTALA and we need a wide medical and social safety net for anyone without insurance. But we’d have a better system if we separated those costs from the rest of the system and learned what the heck most medical care actually costs. Because nobody really knows today.
Truth: Offline Is The New Luxury Signal.
Explanation: This is a prediction but we’re going to see a big change over the next decade. We’ve reached market saturation for smartphones: everyone from 8-80+ that wants one, has one. And a tablet. And teenagers still think it’s cool. But class signals are starting to slowly change. Someone pointed out that the best way to tell if you’re wealthy today is whether you have a phone case. Only wealthy people don’t use one.
The same is true for phones and screens in general. All of these tools are still really cool now but once people realize that market saturation is complete the gloss will wear off. All of our kids want to be content creators. The height of cool is to produce, not to consume.
That trend will continue. Twenty years from now, the ultra wealthy will live in the real world, drive “classic” analog cars from the 1990s, write in their paper notebooks, and ask their assistants (whether AI or human) to manage their email and online presence. We’re seeing some of it already.
Truth: Activism Is A Power Game Not A Change Agent.
Explanation: My favorite person in the whole world is Greta Thunberg. Do you believe me?
Let’s talk about what activism is. It’s promoting change in society and it usually happens when there’s a need for collective action that requires a mass of humanity behind it. It has had some fantastic success examples like Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement.
It doesn’t work today the same way it used to. Information and attention flows far more quickly now and society has somehow grafted on a belief that young people, through the power of sheer emotion alone, can use activism to drive change. If you’re looking for a good cringe example the hubris of this group of children in Diane Feinstein’s office is a good one. I won’t even deign to link to an Extinction Rebellion example.
I don’t like Greta, and I don’t like activism today either. I’d much rather young people follow the model of Boyan Slat. He saw an environmental problem, came up with a novel solution, started The Ocean Cleanup, and is working hard to remove plastic from the water. That seems far better than the theatre of posing with police as a photo-op.
It’s hard to underestimate the amount of change that information speed has caused in this ecosystem. Audience capture is a real thing and it backs anyone with some celebrity into a corner. They can’t change from the message their audience wants. All they can do is double down.
I’ve thought a lot about Cincinnatus as a model of behavior for changing the world: clear objectives and the ability to declare success instead of moving the goalposts.
Activism today exploits emotion. It declares moral superiority to the loudest, reinforces the idea of an elite class, and promotes a lack of self-determination except for shouting. It has become a force for accumulating power while feeling justified.
This is a Stafford Beer argument: The purpose of a system is what it does.
Truth: Falsifiability Is What Science Is.
Explanation:. Everyone looooooooves science. But not many people really know what science is.
To some extent, that’s fair. Science is a loose term: a method, a body of knowledge, and — if you’re into the zeitgeist of the last few years — a consensus that we should “follow”. You know, follow the science!
In my mind, falsifiability is the foundational idea around “science”. If something is falsifiable, we can apply the scientific method and evaluate the results. Counterfactuals aren’t falsifiable. Consensus isn’t falsifiable. Prediction can be falsifiable by experiment or time, but we need to understand the results and timeframes. For example, some of the hypotheses that climate models provide are falsifiable, but we won’t know their accuracy for decades. Alex Epstein has written eloquently on the accuracy of some of the climate model output we can verify so far (backed up with analysis here from Bryan Caplan).
Karl Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability and it should be better understood by more people as the single most important idea of science. A close runner-up are the Four Mertonian Norms.
Truth: Policy Prescriptions Are About Which Outliers We Focus On.
Explanation: One of the most powerful models I’ve come to rely on is the idea of false negatives and false negatives. It’s a great model for thinking about outcomes, probabilities and expectations.
I’ve started to apply it much more to policy positions. Because here’s the thing: both sides like to portray the other guys as evil (see Diversity or Activism above) but that’s not how human nature works. Nobody actually wants poverty or homelessness or bad schools or any number of other things. But we do tend to focus on different outliers.
Some examples:
Would you rather reduce inequality by bringing the floor of income up and reduce poverty but allow a bunch of outlier billionaires? Or is it better to reduce inequality by driving the superwealthy down towards a lower average.
Do you focus educational efforts on bringing the bottom students up towards the average and letting the smartest be bored? Or do you let the very top students run loose and drive forward as fast as possible at the cost of leaving some behind?
Is science about tiny iterative papers on small details (that don’t need replication) or is it about the occasional breakthrough masterpiece that blows our current paradigm away?
Policy decisions are often about which outliers we focus on. This makes it easy to be critical of the other side. It’s kind of amazing how broad this lens can be. This is the tension between capitalism and socialism. The difference between baseball and golf. The reason why some people love or hate Elon.
Truth: We Build Ourselves Out of Corners, We Don't Politick Out of Them.
Explanation: Externalities are solved by technology not coordination and political games.
In a lot of ways, this is the opposite side of the activism truth since most of the activism happening these days is about major externalities and the activism-ing's goal is high level coordination at the level of major governments.
When I went back and looked through many of the Doomer predictions throughout history, some were simply outright wrong. But many of the rest were solved through technology. The Green Revolution eliminated global famine concerns. The Haber-Bosch process allowed us to nitrogenate the soil. Gen III nuclear reactors have evolved to allow passive cooling so that meltdown isn't even possible. And despite believing fossil fuels won't ever run out, I think we will one day get most of our energy from renewables and nuclear. They'll win when the technology is good enough to make them cheap; they won’t win based on subsidy or “being green”.
The next time you see a tragedy of the commons, think about how the incentives could be modified to allow technology to fix it. We solve the problems of our world not by yelling about it and getting everyone to do something they don't want to, but by building.
Truth: The Catholic Creed
Explanation: This one certainly depends on audience. I converted to Catholicism at 24. I’ve had my own doubts, problems, and sallow depressions with the religion. But I still believe it.
It’s important to concretely enumerate exactly what this entails. There are many cultural Catholics that hold onto family traditions without including the whole “belief” part. So, this means that I actually believe:
The traditional Creed that we recite weekly. The Apostle’s Creed is a remarkably succinct summary of the Soteriology of man: our fallen nature, our need for redemption, the barest highlights of the incredible story of Christ as the Son of God, and the different institutions and traditions that we need to continue.
The Institution of the Church itself is, fundamentally, the direct and forward movement of the Apostolic tradition all the way back to the time of Christ. For all it’s problems, warts, and human failings (and there have been some remarkably profound problems over a tumultuous 2,000 year history), the Roman Church is still the cradle of Christian thought and teachings.
The meta-idea that trying to follow (and continually failing, let it be said) these teachings brings inherent good to my life and the life of my family and my community.
The overall zeitgeist of humanity seems bent on moving away from believing in the primacy of the values of the Judeo-Christian ideal, let alone some of the more poignant Catholic principles like the transcendence of the Eucharist or the power of Confession. We are surrounded by decadence and hedonic liberation. In this world, discipline, constraint, and eternity are revolutionary.
What I find most remarkable is that even as I learn more about the nature of our universe — the construction of heavy elements from supernova, the fundamental nature of information and entropy as a description of creation, the nature of evolving biological systems, the algorithms that we’re able to describe to build “intelligences” far beyond our own — I don’t find any of this incompatible. The more ancient and moral critiques of Christianity (e.g. the nature of evil) still carry weight. I’m reminded of GK Chesterton’s quip:
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Truth: We Live In The Best Time Ever.
Explanation: The world is awesome. Amazing. Incredible. And it’s getting better.
I don’t think I can be more optimistic than that. The problem is that so many people today are depressed and pessimistic to an almost psychotic level. We live in the best world for humans in all history BY FAR and yet we’re all sad.
A lot of this has to do with what information we’re being fed through our dumb devices. Jonathan Haidt has been documenting the effects exhaustively. We’re doing it to ourselves. It’s not that things are objectively worse today than they were, it’s that we have access to so much more data than before. Today there are less catastrophes, less murders, less everything-bad than ever before. But we have statistics now on all of it, and video on all of it, and we disseminate and feast on all this negativity. And then we emote.
I ran across this description from Matt Ridley on how much better today’s world is compared to just a couple hundred years ago:
This should not need saying, but it does. There are people today who think life was better in the past. They argue that there was not only a simplicity, tranquility, sociability and spirituality about life in the distant past that has been lost, but a virtue too. This rose-tinted nostalgia, please note, is generally confined to the wealthy. It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet. Imagine that it is 1800, somewhere in Western Europe or eastern North America. The family is gathering around the hearth in the simple timber-framed house. Father reads aloud from the Bible while mother prepares to dish out a stew of beef and onions. The baby boy is being comforted by one of his sisters and the eldest lad is pouring water from a pitcher into the earthenware mugs on the table. His elder sister is feeding the horse in the stable. Outside there is no noise of traffic, there are no drug dealers and neither dioxins nor radioactive fall-out have been found in the cow’s milk. All is tranquil; a bird sings outside the window.
Oh Please! Though this is one of the better-off families in the village, father’s Scripture reading is interrupted by a bronchitic cough that presages the pneumonia that will kill him at 53 – not helped by the wood smoke of the fire. (He is lucky: life expectancy even in England was less than 40 in 1800.) The baby will die of smallpox that is now causing him to cry; his sister will soon be chattel of a drunken husband. The water the son is pouring tastes of the cows that drink from the brook. Toothache tortures the mother. The neighbour’s lodger is getting the other girl pregnant in the hayshed even now and her child will be sent to an orphanage. The stew is grey and gristly yet the meat is a rare change from gruel; there is no fruit or salad at this season. It is eaten with a wooden spoon from a wooden bowl. Candles cost too much, so firelight is all there is to see by. Nobody in the family has ever seen a play, painted a picture or heard a piano. School is a few years of dull Latin taught by a bigoted martinet at the vicarage. Father visited the city once, but travel cost him a week’s wages and the others have never travelled more than fifteen miles from home. Each daughter owns two wool dresses, two linen shirts and one pair of shoes. Fathers’ jacket cost him a month’s wages but it is now infested with lice. The children sleep two to a bed on straw mattresses on the floor. As for the bird outside the window, tomorrow it will be trapped and eaten by the boy.
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.
Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break down the world into bits, it is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955.
We still have lots of problems. We need to do better for ourselves and the world we live in. But on the whole, we should be wildly optimistic about where we are and where we’re going. If that’s not how you feel: get off your phone.
“This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse.” -Julian Simon
Last Truth: Contrarianism Is Essential In Theory, But Wrong In Practice.
Explanation: I enjoy practicing contrarianism. It’s a way to force yourself to think independently.
But being a contrarian in practice is often dumb. As much as I rage against the idea of science being practiced by consensus, it’s also true that the obvious or majority answer is usually the right one. Occam’s Razor is right. Most edgy theories are false.
The ability to hold an idea in your head that is different — one that the majority rejects — is critical to individualism and democracy. It’s one of the levers that prevents the Overton windows from shrinking into monocausal, evidence-less groupthink. In our mimetic and content-driven world, independent thought is a competitive advantage and a lodestar.