In this conversation, Peter Thiel describes how he first encountered René Girard’s work and how, over time, Girard’s account of imitation became a durable interpretive framework for Thiel’s thinking about human behavior, institutional dynamics, and business leadership. Thiel situates the encounter in the late 1980s, when he was an undergraduate philosophy student at Stanford. He recalls that Girard’s reputation circulated informally among students as that of an unusually original professor whose perspective did not align with dominant academic fashions. In Thiel’s telling, this mismatch with prevailing intellectual “conformity” made Girard’s work attractive to students who wanted an alternative vocabulary for describing modern social life, including religion, culture, and conflict.
Thiel emphasizes that his first reaction to Girard’s central claim—namely that imitation plays a decisive role in desire, rivalry, and collective behavior—was disbelief. He describes the idea as initially seeming implausible in its scope: that imitation could plausibly “drive” such a wide range of phenomena. The shift, as he presents it, occurred gradually. Over a period of years, he reports that the explanatory reach of the thesis began to accumulate across different domains: it appeared to fit aspects of his own experience and it also offered a coherent way to interpret patterns in the wider social world. He treats the time lag as important: the theory did not persuade through a single argument or encounter, but through repeated application and the slow consolidation of a new perspective.
Within this frame, Thiel acknowledges Girard’s controversial status while also forecasting a significant reassessment. He suggests that if intellectual history is written with a long horizon—he offers the speculative benchmark of “around 2100”—Girard may be recognized as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century, even if full assimilation of the work remains incomplete for some time. Thiel attributes part of Girard’s power to a combination of unusual perceptiveness about human motives and an expansive range of interest. He portrays Girard as a rare “generalist,” attentive across disciplines rather than confined to a narrow specialty, and he recalls seminar and informal discussion settings in which Girard would, as Thiel describes it, identify what was “really happening” in a particular social context with striking specificity. The effect, for Thiel, is a recurrent sense of intellectual renewal: Girard’s approach produces moments in which familiar situations appear newly legible, yielding a feeling of conceptual “freshness” rather than mere accumulation of information.
Thiel then offers a brief professional self-description to contextualize how these ideas traveled with him beyond the university. He describes studying philosophy at Stanford, attending law school, and beginning a conventional professional trajectory in law and finance in New York before returning to California during the late 1990s technology boom. He identifies himself as a co-founder and CEO of PayPal and, from 2002 onward, as an investor working with a range of technology companies, including Facebook, where he says he was the original investor. Alongside these roles, he depicts himself as continuing to pursue intellectual and philanthropic interests oriented toward understanding long-term trajectories—“trying to make sense of the future,” as he puts it—and toward leaving the world “better” than he found it.
When Thiel turns explicitly to the influence of mimetic theory on business, he does so through concrete managerial and strategic claims rather than through abstract endorsement. First, he argues that an awareness of imitation pushes entrepreneurs and investors toward systematic attention to novelty and differentiation. His claim is that many markets and professional environments exhibit strong herding tendencies, with participants converging on the same goals, the same narratives, and the same perceived opportunities. Mimetic theory, as he presents it, makes this convergence more visible by treating it as a structural pattern rather than as a series of independent choices. In practical terms, Thiel associates this visibility with a contrarian posture: the attempt to look where others are not looking, to pursue opportunities that are overlooked precisely because collective attention has narrowed. He frames this as a recurring principle of both company-building and investment selection: the largest opportunities tend to appear where consensus is weakest, because consensus itself often concentrates competition and reduces the space for genuinely differentiated value creation.
Second, Thiel applies the same conceptual lens to internal organizational conflict. He contrasts a “standard” account of conflict—one that explains disputes as clashes of difference—with the Girardian claim that conflict often escalates because people desire the same scarce object: the same status, role, promotion, authority, or recognition. Thiel reports that, in his experience across roughly a decade or more of company leadership and involvement, major conflicts typically arose from convergence on the same objective rather than from divergent objectives. This claim functions as a management diagnosis with operational implications. If rivalry is driven by overlapping desire for the same position or domain, then one preventative strategy is to reduce ambiguity about roles and responsibilities, thereby limiting the conditions under which employees come to experience each other as direct competitors for an indistinct prize.
He underscores that this is especially difficult in early-stage companies, where job descriptions are inherently fluid and the organization must adapt quickly. In such environments, he argues, the very flexibility that enables innovation also amplifies the risk of mimetic conflict: as boundaries blur, people can more easily interpret one another’s work as encroachment, and prestige can become a shared target without clear allocation rules. For Thiel, this makes “role differentiation” a central leadership task, linked less to administrative neatness than to conflict prevention and organizational coherence. He goes further by asserting that the fate of many companies is determined more by internal dynamics than by external competition. In his account, the decisive variable is frequently whether the team can work together well enough to build a product or technology. External market structure matters, yet it often becomes secondary to the organization’s capacity to avoid destructive internal spirals that consume attention and trust.
Asked about ethics in business in light of these ideas, Thiel avoids presenting a simple formula. Instead, he returns to a practical emphasis on conflict avoidance and on the cultivation of relationships that reduce rivalry. He suggests that conflicts can take “very bad directions,” and he treats this as a general risk across business, personal life, and politics. The ethical stake, in his view, lies in reducing the likelihood that competitive imitation escalates into cycles of recrimination that undermine collaboration and judgment. He also highlights mentorship as a model of healthy relational structure: an interaction that aims at the other’s development without converting success into a zero-sum rivalry. The goal, as he frames it, is to preserve the constructive side of imitation—learning, inspiration, emulation—while limiting the forms that become envious fixation and antagonism.
Thiel also acknowledges a familiar limitation: theoretical insight does not reliably translate into practical conduct. He illustrates the point with an everyday analogy—people can understand that a behavior is harmful while continuing to do it—indicating that knowledge of a mechanism does not automatically dissolve the mechanism. Even so, he maintains that understanding can change probabilities over time. In particular, he links Girard’s account to scapegoating dynamics: scapegoating, he suggests, operates most effectively when participants do not recognize the mechanism at work and do not clearly identify what they are doing. As mechanisms become understood, he proposes, they may become harder to sustain in their classic form. He concedes that social pathologies can reappear in new forms—awareness does not guarantee elimination—yet he expresses a conditional hope that clearer understanding will reduce the frequency or intensity of what he calls “crazy rivalry,” thereby shifting social life toward more stable cooperation.
The discussion ends with a guarded future orientation. Thiel rejects unqualified optimism, yet he presents a criterion for a workable twenty-first century: a future in which “good mimesis” exceeds “bad mimesis.” By this, he indicates a world where imitation tends to support constructive learning, collaboration, and credible forms of aspiration, rather than intensifying rivalry, counterfeit forms of meaning, or destabilizing cycles of collective hostility. He frames the stakes in stark systemic terms—whether the world “blows itself up” in the coming century—and he links that outcome to whether societies learn practices of coexistence that reduce escalating mimetic antagonism. In this formulation, Girard’s influence on Thiel is less a matter of adopting a doctrine than of acquiring a diagnostic language for recurring patterns of desire and conflict, together with a management and civic aspiration: to design roles, relationships, and institutions that make cooperation more robust than rivalry.
Simon Gros 
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