TYLER COWEN: In your view, perhaps the contemporary
world is becoming, I don’t know what the word would be, stranger, or weirder, or more
shaped by individuals who are different, precisely because conformity is being piled on other
places. So if the movers and shakers would be people
who are in some way neuro diverse, then overall, the world is becoming more surprising in a
way, right? That’s what we expect at different margins,
at different corners. This will accumulate. It may not ever feel like we’re getting
out of the great stagnation, but each bit of change we get is in a way a more different
change than we would get, say, in 1957, where everything was done with guys with white shirts
and starched white collars, hoping they would be able to buy a little pocket calculator
someday. PETER THIEL: I think the innovation that we
are getting is driven in strange ways. I worry that the conformity problem is actually
more acute than it was in the ’50s or ’60s, so that the category of the eccentric scientist,
or even the eccentric professor, is a species that is steadily going extinct because there
is less space for that in our research universities than there used to be.I worry that perhaps,
if anything, it’s a little bit the other way. It’s very hard to measure these things or
calibrate them, but I think that in politics, the conventional approach is to simply look
at pollsters. What are your positions going to be? You just look at the polls, you figure this
out, and it works fairly well. At the end of the day, that’s probably not
how the system really changes. It probably will be changed by some idiosyncratic
people who have really strong convictions, and are over time, able to convince more people
of them. But whether this means that we have more or
less change is hard to evaluate. It always comes from these somewhat nonconventional
channels. TYLER COWEN: Let’s say you’re trying to
select people for your Thiel fellowships, or maybe to work for one of your companies,
or to start a new company with. Just you, Peter Thiel, as a judge of talent,
what trait do you look for in that person that is being undervalued by others? The rest of the world out there is way too
conformist, so there must then be unexploited profit opportunities in finding people. If you’re less conformist, which I’m very
willing to believe, indeed would insist on that being the case, what is it you look for? PETER THIEL: It’s very difficult to reduce
it to any single traits, because a lot of what you’re looking for, are these almost
Zen-like opposites. You want people who are both really stubborn
and really open-minded. That’s a little bit contradictory. You want people who are idiosyncratic and
really different, but then who can work well together in teams. And so, this is again, maybe not 180 degrees
opposite, but like 175 degrees. TYLER COWEN: This is why you like Hegel? PETER THIEL: I don’t like Hegel that much. [laughter]
PETER THIEL: I think if you focus too much on one or the other end of it, you would tend
to get it completely wrong. I like to get things where you get these combinations
of unusual traits, so if you have people with some really interesting, very different ideas,
that suggests we’re in the idiosyncratic category. Then the important question becomes, OK, would
they actually be able to function socially and execute? Then maybe the teamwork question you’d ask
would be, what’s the prehistory of this company? How did you meet, how long have you been working
together, and if there’s a long prehistory, that would be good on the other side. I think it’s always getting these combinations
right.
