Peter Thiel’s legendary interview question is, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” The motivation behind this question is that Thiel believes that the most successful companies are based on secrets. They solve a problem that others didn’t even know they had until it was solved. This frame of thinking about secrets was inspired by one of Thiel’s late Stanford professors, René Girard, who claimed that the world is filled with important but undiscovered truths. I love this question because it forces you to look for the ground truth. But what is truth? I think that in many cases, uncovering a secret involves first unraveling a contradiction. It’s hard to learn secrets because they are not immediately apparent to us. But when we dive deep - when we keep asking why - we might uncover inconsistencies that were previously hidden. Paradoxes that prompt us to challenge our initial assumptions. I see a lot of these contradictions. I’m not sure what secrets they reveal, other than the idea that contradictions are a part of life. An area ripe with contradictions is reckoning immediate desires with long-term goals. We rightly pay heart surgeons a lot of money to do the craft they spent decades perfecting - saving lives. But if we really wanted to live healthy lives until our hearts naturally expired, we wouldn’t exactly need heart surgeons. We would be much more interested in eating right and exercising regularly. But we aren’t interested in doing either of those things because they are in opposition to the dopamine that comes from ordering junk food and having it delivered to our doorsteps. So therein lies the problem. Being in touch with our immediate desires is also important. Otherwise, we would be no different from robots. So how do we get closer to the long-term goal of living healthily? Well, it would certainly make things easier if our immediate desires weren’t so readily fulfilled. So we stop eating sugar. No, but that’s not possible. Economies have been built and people's livelihoods depend on the fact that we are willing to pay a premium for dopamine. So… let’s try to get others to help us do the things we’re supposed to do to combat our immediate desires. Let’s invest in the grade school P.E. curriculums. Let’s pay dietitians more and let’s have more of them. But we don’t do these things. Why? Who knows. Another area filled with contradictions is our values. Courage is one of our oldest virtues, yet our many of us are here today by way of our ancestors choosing not to die in battle. We come from a line of cowards that claim to value courage. This is an oversimplification, but it illustrates my point. An even more egregious contradiction in values is the problem medieval culture ran into when trying to square chivalry with Christianity. Chivalry was a code of conduct that knights were expected to follow, emphasizing virtues like loyalty and protection of the weak. It often involved the idea of defending the vulnerable and upholding honor, which could mean going into battle, protecting women, and showing generosity. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches values such as humility, compassion, and turning the other cheek, which might conflict with the more aggressive and honor-driven aspects of chivalry. Participating in combat, even for honorable reasons, could involve violence that contradicted the message of peace and forgiveness promoted by Christianity. The last example I’ll mention might be a touchy subject - the clash of equality and liberty. Our species has gone through a lot of political and social reformation in the last few centuries, and we have come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. But these two values are in gross conflict with each other. Equality often requires restricting the freedoms of those who possess greater advantages. But ensuring the freedom of every individual to act according to their desires inherently compromises the goal of equality. The history of the last few hundred years can be interpreted as a succession of efforts to resolve this inherent contradiction. I’m not sure what secrets I’m close to uncovering, much less what money there is to be made based on these secrets. But hey, I could probably have a good conversation with Peter Thiel.