Even for a self-made billionaire, Peter Thiel has strong opinions.  Having founded a conservative/libertarian newspaper while a Stanford undergraduate, he earned a law degree from that school, and then quit his career to co-found PayPal, a payments company that set out to undermine government-issued currency. When that didn’t pan out, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.  He also co-founded Palantir, a data analysis company that struggled for years and is now valued at more than $9 billion. He was one of the earliest outside investors in Facebook, and now manages a global hedge fund and a venture capital fund.  Mr. Thiel spends much of his time agitating to change how we educate people and create economic and technological growth. In his book “Zero to One,” written with Blake Masters, Mr. Thiel argues that society has become too rule-oriented, and people need to devise ways to think differently, and find like-minded individuals to realize goals. That, he says, is how you move things to novel discoveries and markets. This recent conversation has been condensed and edited.  What is one idea you’d like people to get from your book?  We’ve built a country in which people are tracked, from kindergarten to graduate school, and everyone who is “successful” acts the same way. That is overrated. It distorts things and hurts growth.  There is a strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley: Many founders seem to have some kind of Asperger’s, are bad at understanding social cues. What does it say about our society when they are the innovators, and normal people basically learn to conform?  If you are a banker or a lawyer, someone in one of the elite, high-paying professions, creativity and growth are typically something that happens someplace else. That was supposed to be enough. It completely blew up in 2008.  There is no real track. The next Bill Gates won’t start another computer operating system; another Larry Page wouldn’t build another search engine. My book purposely does not have a recipe. Most business books like to give the reader a method, some formula for how to do things. I’m anti-pseudo-science.  What society is good at remaking itself?  There is nothing intrinsic to the government not being able to do things. It’s just hard if you don’t believe deeply in something, and you follow a conventional process. The process of “success” — in government, education, even business — has become a process against thinking deeply about things.  America handles change relatively well, since we have free speech. But I wonder if there is something about modern media, our mass information system, which makes it even more conservative, in the sense of being unwilling to encounter difference.  Stanford, Stanford Law, big New York law firm: Aren’t you the perfect product of the process society?  Between the ages of 18 and 28 I came to believe less and less in the tracked things I’d been doing all my life. The cathartic moment was when I got to the law firm. From the outside, everyone was trying to get in. From the inside, everyone was trying to get out. Emotionally I wanted to work with friends and compete externally. At the law firm you competed with the guy next to you to get ahead.  In the start-up there was a sense of being unique, doing something no one had ever done. If you didn’t do it, it never would be done. It should be generally understood – every moment is unique, you are a unique person.  Do you really think everyone in the Valley is a big risk taker? More people get rich with predictable paths at hot, high-growth companies.  The rank and file of people who have done well at a Google mostly invests in homes and college funds, maybe a little money gets invested in tech. I understand the conservatism, particularly in a time of great change, but it’s ultimately a catastrophe.  Your program of Thiel Fellows get paid to leave great schools and work on projects out here with guidance from you and others. Isn’t that swapping one “can’t lose” elite pursuit for another?  I don’t have any regrets about the program. There was a limitation where it wasn’t possible to do it with a broader set of people, from all sorts of schools and backgrounds. You wouldn’t want to mess up their lives if they didn’t succeed in the fellowship.  Reid Hoffman, whom you knew at Stanford and worked with at PayPal, named an interesting downside to being a billionaire. He said, “Now everyone thinks all of my ideas are smart.” Do you have that problem?  There is a lot of truth to it. People don’t push back on you, because you were successful. It’s not just other people: If you are successful you tend to stick to the same cues. It makes it easy to get caught up in a status game. I really value my friends from my start-up days, they knew me before all this.  In your book you urge a person to find something they believe passionately that is away from the common wisdom. What’s yours?  I’m most passionate about longevity. I feel like I haven’t done enough. We’re either in denial or acceptance about the “reality” of our mortality, so we don’t do enough. Extreme optimism or extreme pessimism takes you to the same point.
The PayPal co-founder turned venture capitalist has a new book coming it. And with it, one of Silicon Valley’s most outspoken leaders explains why so often tries to get people to see the world through a different lense.