Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

by Ryan Holiday

Most people, when they find something they don’t like, do that. They call it names. They complain. They make it bigger than it is, make it representative of some larger trend. They think someone should do something, but never them. Not me. It’s a classic collective action problem: we know things are bad, but they only affect each of us a little bit. So who is going to take care of it for us?

The economist Tyler Cowen once observed that at some point in the 1970s, Americans went from being the country that took literal moonshots to being the people who waited patiently in long lines for gasoline. It’s not completely accurate, of course, but it is a criticism that resonates with Thiel as he sits in his office at the Presidio one day looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and wonders if people will ever build something like that again. Do people even have the arrogance anymore? To test the limits? To try big things?

people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what other people have. They covet. It’s this, Girard says, that is the source of almost all the conflict in the world.

A start-up is, in Peter’s definition, “a small group of people that you’ve convinced of a truth that nobody else believes in.”

To begin you must study the end. You don’t want to be the first to act, you want to be the last man standing.

choose your enemies wisely, he had been told, because you become just like them—but

Thiel and Trump agreed in theory on at least one thing: that America had lost some form of its greatness and could be made great again.

Peter endorsed Trump because of the trial.

Thiel had big ideas for changing the world and believed that an outsider like Trump had a better shot at implementing them than anyone else.

Lyndon Johnson would famously conspire to steal a Senate election from Coke Stevenson in 1948, which put him on the path to the presidency. But given how it went, and the fact that Coke died an old man, surrounded by people who loved and admired him, who is to say that LBJ really won?

We live in a world where only people like Peter Thiel can pull something so intentional and long-term off—and it’s not because, as Gawker has tried to make it seem, he’s rich. It’s because he’s one of the few who believes it can be done. To borrow a line from Zero to One, to believe in conspiracies is an effective truth. To dismiss anything as impossible is as well.

the lesson he had learned was that free speech was not necessarily noble by itself, that it needed to be paired with compassion and understanding.