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by
Ryan Holiday
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July 16 - September 2, 2018
things that I think I’m right about,” Thiel said, “other people are in some sense not even wrong about, because they’re not thinking about them.” In this sense, it’s an
Peter had learned from his early experiences with Gawker and the media that those with unconventional beliefs should probably keep most of what they think to themselves.
“Psychologically, there is this weird thing where you want to brag about these things that you’re not supposed to,”
“Gawker was basically getting free labor. And I had talked to an employment lawyer about this in New York and they said it’s one hundred percent against the law.”
No one can be certain of the effects of what Thiel describes as “long-term strategic pressure,” but very few people, organizations, or teams can withstand it.
Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est—cut anything into tiny pieces and it all becomes a mass of confusion.
Being feared, Machiavelli says, is an important protection against a conspiracy.
The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if
They might not be rich, but if they can bring the rich and powerful to their knees with their writing, it might feel like the same thing.
The effect of this over time was that Gawker was staffed by the kind of impolite, impolitic people who could not work at your average company.
But the incentives were built into the core of the company.
“We were not all perfectly aligned by any means,” Thiel explains about the setup between him and Hogan, between Mr. A and the lawyers, between the lawyers and everyone else, “but it was the evil nature of our enemy that was somehow super galvanizing. Even as it got to be this bigger, more complicated thing, we were able to achieve a certain unity of purpose over time.”
It always takes longer than expected, per Hofstadter’s Law, even when—and this is the critical part—one takes Hofstadter’s
Two armies are hurled at each other and both are thrown into confusion and disarray by the force of the collision. Victory is simple. It goes to whoever reassembles and redoubles first.
There is a story about a young John D. Rockefeller who found himself stuck with bullying, corrupt business partners. He wants to break with them, but he can’t, because they control the votes. They are squeezing his business to death. They abuse him, talk about forcing him out. What is he to do? Quietly, Rockefeller lines up financing from another oilman and waits. Finally there is a confrontation; one of them tries to threaten him: “You really want to break it up?” Yes. He calls their bluff. They go along, knowing that the firm’s assets will have to go to auction. They’re sure they’ll
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The story of this conspiracy, too, is the story of one person working while the other talked big and loud.
“It’s a game of spouses, too,”
“Not only were they trying to make me quit, talk me into quitting before trial, they were trying to reward me for quitting,”
“It’s going to be a marathon,” he would say to his team, “we just can’t conk out. There are all these psychological things Gawker is going to try to do to get us to not fight as hard and we can’t let them influence us. I’m not going to try to reach a compromise. I’m not going to try to talk to them.”
If you have a propaganda line that you keep telling people, there’s some point at which you have to start believing it.”
“Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.”
They were so convinced they were the underdog that it didn’t occur to them that they might appear to be the bully.
“It became very clear that the kind of jurors we wanted were overweight women. Most people can’t empathize with a sex tape, but overweight women are sensitive about their bodies and feel like they have been bullied on the internet. Men don’t have that problem. Attractive women don’t have that problem. They haven’t been body shamed,”
Gawker thinks this is all kayfabe, but it’s about to become a shoot.
The great sin for a leader, Frederick the Great once observed, was not in being defeated but in being surprised.
“We would have hit A.J. harder, but we just didn’t think you could get blood out of a rock.”
He had proven that “nothing you can do about it” is just what people who don’t want to do anything about it like to say to make themselves feel better about their inaction.
“It is much better to be the last mover,” not the first mover.
‘you must study the endgame before everything else.’”
an army should not only leave a road for their enemy to retreat by, they should pave it.
“The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”
He learned another important lesson in that Florida courtroom, this one also about America—that average and ordinary people cared little for the assumptions of the so-called elites. I think he also learned something about his own willingness to put up a middle finger at those elites, and how vulnerable they might be.
Jeff Bezos had also felt the need to opine about Peter’s politics: “Peter Thiel is a contrarian, first and foremost. You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.” It certainly looked that way, until November 10, and then I would get an email from Peter: “Contrarians may be mostly wrong, but when they get it right, they really get it right.”
“but Peter endorsed Trump because of the trial. It gave him an appreciation for the dynamic of the country and for Middle America. I don’t think there is an alternate reality where he wins and doesn’t support Trump. I don’t think Peter Thiel would have been involved with Trump at all without this case.”
would ask Mr. A what he thought of Trump, what he made of it all. He would smile and tell me, “I don’t care about politics, I only care that my friends are in power.”
Thiel himself would take to quietly predicting to friends that there was a 50 percent chance the Trump presidency would end in catastrophic disaster.
It is said that the weapons invented at the end of one war become the dominant killers in the next one.
Forces, once unleashed, cannot be contained. Genies do not go back into bottles. A smart man observed that inertia is difficult to overcome in politics, but once it has been, momentum is even harder to stop.
Peter Thiel’s claim that destroying Gawker was “one of the most philanthropic” things he has ever done
What would the world look like if more people tried to change things, conspired to change things they found unjust, unfair, immoral?
