Mark Gagnon

But, yeah, Alexander Hamilton.

Which then becomes... Yeah, the New York Post.

So...

This guy, Rene Girard, develops this thing called memetic theory, and TL has described this as a foundational intellectual influence in a bunch of different interviews and different essays.

And we can talk more about memetic theory in a second, but...

After he's at Stanford, he leaves and he goes to work as a judicial clerk and then as a securities lawyer, then as a speechwriter, then like a derivatives trader for like a Swiss bank.

And he's just kind of like bouncing around to all these jobs that don't have a ton of like, you know, potential future elevation.

And now he's coming into the six, like the mid 90s.

And he's like, all right, stuff's happening in Silicon Valley.

This tech thing is like really heating up and he wants to get involved.

So he founds Thiel Capital Management.

And then in 98, he co-found PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek.

And then in 2002, they sell PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Damn.

He's the CEO at the time of the sale.

And then this is where we get, obviously, the PayPal mafia that we mentioned before.

And then after that, he's now just a regular billionaire living his life, founded an insanely successful company and continues to just push on.

That's the thing that I always find so fascinating.

Like if you sold a company for 1.5 billion, what are you doing?

Probably chilling.