Thiel sees original builders as resisting status imitation

Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

1. 40:33

   Let me take it back to some of the philosophers who hit you. One, René Girard, the notion of mimetic desire. Explain what that is and why you feel the need to resist it.

2. 40:46

   René Girard, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford. And the human nature, the count of people is that we're deeply mimetic, deeply imitative. Girard liked to quote, Aristotle, you know, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation. And then this is a way you can combine Aristotle and Darwin. So Darwin's saying we're linked to the apes. And then Aristotle says we differ from the apes by being more imitative and saying we're more ape-like than the apes. Because that's how you learn language as a child. You copy your parents. And then that's how human culture gets transmitted. And we wouldn't be humans if we weren't these incredibly powerful imitation machines. And then there also are ways that imitation can go haywire when two apes reach for the same banana. There are ways,

3. 41:41

   you know, it can become extremely conflictual. And so, yes, in Girard's telling, mimesis is this incredibly powerful thing in the background. Mimesis meaning mimicking, basically. Bad, bad forms of imitation. It's very generative. And then in various points, it also becomes destructive and You end up with sort of these very sterile competitions for status or for these positional goods that don't mean nearly as much as you think you do. I think it was Napoleon who said that it was amazing what you could get generals to do if you gave them medals or something like that. The psychological way one is tempted to interpret Girard, even though this is not what he would have done, but the psychological way you're tempted to interpret it is, okay, you have to sort of, think about avoiding this bad mimesis and you want to avoid getting

4. 42:34

   caught up in these silly competitions that there's sort of nothing new, nothing creative that happens in that context. So that's the psychological intuition against mimesis. Girard as a Christian would have said, you know, it's actually out of your power to not be a medic. The best you can do is just go to church on Sundays or something like that. So he would have been skeptical of this. The sort of in-between way where I always think about it is, Yeah, there are, there are parts of it that are very powerful. There are also parts where, you know, there's a wisdom of crowds, but there's also a madness of crowds. And in some ways, you know, I see one of the, I don't think it's necessarily a character of all the builders, but certainly a lot of the builders I would admire the most are ones who had

5. 43:23

   a somewhat idiosyncratic sustained vision. Maybe it came from certain first principles, certain fixed ideas. Like Elon going to Mars, you know, it was somewhat out there, but man, it was not a socially conventional idea. But the way in which this was extremely generative was it suggested a whole avenue for growth and for building where if you didn't do it, maybe it would never have happened. You know, that's probably where I would still, I don't know, maybe rank Elon, and in some ways Steve Jobs as the two great non-mimetic builders. And, you know, Jobs put together all these pieces, and in some ways they were out there, but he combined them in a unique way to bring forward, you know, the internet-enabled phone.