Valley of the Gods Read online

  Someone must have considered this idea already, Burnham thought to himself. Maybe at SpaceX? He wanted to meet whoever these people were and be part of this discovery, or perhaps it would be a race, if there were a lot of people working on it. “The first one there becomes the next Standard Oil,” he thought. “In any case, this is the easiest way that I can see to fulfill one of the dreams of the last fifty years of space exploration: to make space profitable.”

  But to John, the most exciting part of space was the idea of a new frontier, or “the next frontier,” he said. “Space is big. I bet that it’s big enough so that if a group of people want to create a society that completely contravenes every legal and moral principle of the United States, they’ll be free to find a place to do it.” This place would be a new Plymouth, Massachusetts; or a new Jamestown, Virginia; or Salt Lake City or San Francisco. “Space allows for people to fulfill that primal urge to pioneer,” he wrote.

  • • •

  When Burnham told his parents about his desire to apply to the Thiel Fellowship, they were supportive. They had long wondered what to do with their unconventional genius. They couldn’t reconcile the subjects and ideas that interested him—far more advanced than anyone else’s his age—with a known academic track.

  Burnham’s parents thought it might be possible for him to learn something in college but that he’d likely learn more outside the system. His father, Stephen Burnham, told the New York Times, “I would say in four years there’s a big opportunity cost there if you could be out starting your career doing something that could change the world.”

  John’s parents couldn’t get him excited about any age-­appropriate institution, and he didn’t want to leave his education to his online heroes, such as Friedman or Moldbug. Here was a fellowship run by a man with a real track record. Somehow it seemed to fit with their child’s uncanny musings and excite him. He could be the harbinger of a new kind of prodigy: the self-directed learner whose superior skill set demanded a new kind of plan not yet available on the ivy-covered East Coast track. The track of private school to boarding school to college wasn’t working, despite their son’s apparent brilliance. Here was a respectable option, at least.

  A few months later, among Burnham’s rejection letters from college came an acceptance to the Thiel Fellowship’s final round. To him, it was the closest he’d come to getting to space. To the Burnhams, it was some kind of direction—the opposite of what they feared he’d find at the University of Massachusetts, where he would be even more bored than he was in high school.

  Burnham had already been screened twice on the phone; first by his blogging hero Patri Friedman, who was helping Thiel organize the fellowship and choose the finalists. “We talked a fair bit about asteroid mining,” Burnham remembered excitedly. He then spoke with Danielle Strachman, the Thiel Foundation staffer in charge of providing a structure for what the fellows would do once they got to California.

  By that point, both Burnham and his parents found the possibility of winning the fellowship even more selective than getting into an Ivy League institution. When they met the other finalists, most had been accepted to prestigious universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. They chose the fellowship instead. The list of finalists leaked out, making them suddenly objects of intense interest from media outlets around the country. As John said to the Times, “[The fellowship] is giving them that opportunity even though their personalities and characters don’t quite fit the academic mold.”

  The final rounds took place in spring 2011 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco. To get to the subterranean conference room in the lower lobby of the behemoth building, parents and finalists walked aimlessly through the cavernous space, asking staffers to point them to the Thiel Foundation’s event. When they finally found the small room, they encountered Burnham and nearly forty other finalists who were nervously walking back and forth up and down a narrow hall outside the room where they would be giving brief presentations. They whispered in huddles outside, wondering who everyone was.

  After a tense few minutes, they filed into the room to see Thiel himself standing up at a podium, and an audience of casually dressed San Francisco techies who would be their mentors, if they were selected. That March day marked the last round of the selection process. Following the candidates’ presentations, everyone attended a reception at Thiel’s house. Later, audience members would fill out forms ranking the fellows. A few weeks later, the top twenty would be picked.

  • • •

  Thiel has an angular, expressive face, and a direct demeanor. That day, like most days, he wore tailored jeans, a polo shirt, and sneakers. He was used to public speaking, and did so in crisp, clear sentences, with no added emphasis on his many controversial points. He presented forgoing a college education as entirely logical.

  He, like many of the people in the room, from the tech execs to the aspiring fellows, weren’t the kind of people you would find schmoozing at Manhattan cocktail parties. They weren’t socially at ease and didn’t like small talk. Some were awkward. If they even went to a party, they much preferred talking to one good friend, or someone they thought was uniquely or esoterically intelligent. Social barometers really meant nothing.

  After speeches, Thiel was sometimes asked if he thought there was a high percentage of people with Asperger’s syndrome in Silicon Valley. He dismissed the disorder and its traits as the only ways that smooth-talking socially adept types could describe people they couldn’t understand. He doesn’t even believe in the spectrum, or the range of disorders that could be variations on the social impairments symptomatic of autism or Asperger’s. In fact, under the DSM-5, Asperger’s syndrome and autism spectrum disorder are shown as far more than social impairments—they can produce learning disabilities, mental retardation, anxiety disorder, and Tourette syndrome, among other ailments.

  But in Silicon Valley, that behavior was Asperger’s Chic. When faced with choosing two engineers with the same skill set, employers would often take the one with the stutter over the smooth talker, any day. Some employers unofficially sought out socially awkward recruits. They tended to be more productive, recruiters felt.

  Thiel was never a fan of cocktail party culture. He didn’t like talking about mundane topics such as the weather, or vacations, just to make conversation. His reticence on those subjects led people to think he was awkward. Thiel was certainly capable of talking about the weather; he just didn’t understand why he needed to waste time doing so. Talking about a subject that interested him, Thiel was as charismatic as they came, much like John Burnham. In the first few minutes, the teenager would be outgoing and energetic, but after ten more minutes it became clear that he didn’t particularly want to change topics or talk about someone else’s day, for that matter.

  It was a personality that might not get a future programmer or engineer into one of Harvard’s exclusive social clubs, like the Fly Club or the Spee Club, elite members organizations that were the school’s version of fraternities, but to the programmers, what would those people ever become? What was the use of social graces if it couldn’t help solve an engineering problem or write the code for a new company? They had an idealism that some sense of social awareness might have censored. In a way, it was scoffing at what those others have to say: those weather-asking chatterers who couldn’t understand the complexity of thinking out of bounds.

  That afternoon, Thiel was explaining enthusiastically that young people would do better to educate themselves as opposed to pay to enroll in a four-year institution. “All great entrepreneurs have a passion about education and self-education,” he projected to the group of fifty or so professors, entrepreneurs, investors, and friends in the Hyatt conference room. “It’s never too early to begin.” Higher education, he said, was a distraction from thinking about what to actually do in life. “You lose sight of a plan and intention about the future,” he added.

  The investo
rs in the room were already convinced. Most had succeeded by thinking unconventionally and veering off one track or another, whether it was dropping out of a PhD program or turning down a job at a bank or consulting company. None showed signs of ever having worked at a giant corporation such as Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. As for the applicants, they were just happy to be in Thiel’s audience. At this point, they hadn’t really thought about what this new kind of plan would entail, where they would live, how they would get there, or even what specifically they would do.

  Thiel then told an anecdote from the early days at Facebook. He said that when Mark Zuckerberg was offered $1 billion to sell the company in 2006, the founder and CEO refused because he still had plans for the company in the future. Facebook is now valued at over $100 billion. If he’d sold out too soon, he’d be just an another engineer, albeit with a second home or two.

  “You don’t have to be dogmatic, but you have to have a plan,” Thiel stressed, adding that today students saw going to college as a path to having career options—but after the recession, those options were increasingly less available. And it was a vicious cycle. Just going to college was supposed to give students more opportunities, until he or she went into a tracked career, such as banking or consulting. Those jobs weren’t the final goal, however. They were just the next steps to having even more options, whatever those options were. Maybe they could someday enroll in some kind of graduate school, the function of which was to offer still more options. The recession, however, had pruned the option tree and had left students without plans but hopes of optimizing on ever-expanding choices that often led back to living in their parents’ houses. “Any plan is better than no plan,” Thiel said.

  The audience looked like it had already internalized his advice. From Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a British Cambridge University graduate with a nearly two-foot-long beard, to Patri Friedman, with his Fives sneakers and goatee, no one looked as though he or she still subscribed to any institution resembling the East Coast elite. Professor de Grey, who was bent on “curing” aging, was on hand to help choose the final twenty, while a handful of the other mentors had already helped screen applications. Their influence soon became clear: at least half the students onstage put forth ideas in the science or biotech space, among them Laura Deming, a New Zealand–born prodigy who’d joined MIT’s research lab to study longevity at age twelve, and British-born James Proud, who ended his biotech pitch with the line “Even those who want to get to heaven don’t want to die to get there.” Others had trendier ideas—for instance, involving social media or e-commerce—such as Paul Gu, who later transitioned to a personal lending start-up.

  When the finalists had applied back in December 2010, the foundation made it clear that it didn’t want another social networking site. “Maybe another Tumblr blog will change the world. But it sure isn’t going to put someone on Mars,” said Jonathan Cain, the slim, bespectacled president of the Thiel Foundation. Cain was a Yale graduate who used to be a speechwriter for George W. Bush’s secretary of health and human services, but had since seen the Silicon Valley light. He started working on political donations—mostly to libertarian and Republican causes—for Thiel until he moved over to his philanthropic side to fund unusual projects in the charity world. He didn’t intend to support big city zoos or museums or hosted galas to save polar bears or Venice. Instead, he was supposed to look for what was already good or promising and fund it to make it better, such as brilliant scientists working on faster ways to sequence DNA.

  “We’re not looking for the next Facebook—we’re looking for people who are thinking two to ten years beyond what the rest of the world thinks is possible today,” said Cain. It was a tall order, one so high that even the teenagers filling out the application, most of whom were still in high school, would have to stretch to come up with an idea at all. But then, that was how many Silicon Valley start-ups had begun. The foundation had selected these forty finalists out of four hundred applicants based on how originally and compellingly they had answered the questions, such as what the world’s biggest problems are and why their idea “simply cannot wait.” The forty had proposed ideas that the foundation considered counterintuitive. Those who weren’t selected applied with hackneyed social media company ideas, or copies of what already existed. Basically, the forty they picked were oddballs. Or in other words, they’d fit in out here.

  Soon after Thiel’s speech, the finalists began their presentations and came up to the podium one after the other. Some were barely tall enough to clear it. John Burnham was among the first. While some of the first few finalists sputtered and stuttered, giving jargon-heavy presentations with esoteric technical names, there was no mistaking what Burnham was talking about. From the moment he strode to the podium, looked up at the audience, and began speaking, it was as if he were channeling a friendlier Howard Roark—the uncompromising young protagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead. John seemed so unaware of how outrageous his idea was that he said it almost conversationally: “I am going to mine asteroids.” His determined diction, much like Thiel’s, made it clear that he was not joking. Nobody laughed. Burnham then explained that his goal was to develop space industry technologies to mine asteroids and other planetary bodies such as comets for gold and platinum. He listed in exacting detail the compounds and elements he hoped to find there. “There are hundreds of billions of dollars out there in the universe,” he said, “and I plan to find it.” Burnham practically got a standing ovation.

  Laura Deming, a striking seventeen-year-old half-Asian wunderkind, looked like a schoolgirl gone bad, but with her rapid speech and frantic gesticulations, she sounded more mad scientist. Waves of unkempt, long, black hair framed her porcelain face, and her tall, lithe body was covered in an untucked Oxford shirt, black miniskirt, and stockings, along with a pair of hulking black combat boots that swallowed her shapely calves. Her tiny figure and doll-like mouth made her serious, deadpan voice surprising. Far from dainty and meek, Deming slashed her frail arms left and right like a conductor angry with her orchestra.

  Having spent the last four years, since age twelve, working in gerontology labs, she said she was frustrated by the lack of sufficient funds for immortality research. With a Thiel Fellowship, she would create her own private equity firm to fund antiaging breakthroughs. “I want to disrupt the current research paradigm by changing the incentives embedded in today’s traditional funding structures,” she said. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing she’d done, either. Homeschooled in New Zealand, Deming finished high school at fourteen and enrolled at MIT as the school’s youngest sophomore.

  James Proud, a small, stocky eighteen-year-old high school graduate from South London, also stood out among the crowd. He looked about ten years old, but when he spoke, his deep voice and British accent made him sound as though he were fifty. His presentation came later. He had already moved to Palo Alto even though he hadn’t been accepted to the program yet. James, who’d been coding in his bedroom through most of high school, had told his parents he didn’t want to go to college well before the Thiel Fellowship was even an option. He did want to go to music concerts, however, but couldn’t find a single website that listed all the shows he wanted to see. So his idea was to create GigLocator, which would aggregate shows big and small on a single app.

  After the presentations, the fellows and their parents went to Thiel’s big bayfront house in the Marina District of San Francisco for a reception. Investors hoping to be mentors to Burnham surrounded the young finalist. He soaked in the attention and pitched one venture capitalist after the other with the poise of a seasoned actor on the red carpet. With many in attendance already invested in the private rocket company SpaceX, the brainchild of Elon Musk, they wanted to know if Burnham’s theory could really work. Barney Pell, the founder of Powerset and later the commercial space company Moon Express, peppered the teen with questions. Although John was engaging, he, like many of the already successful entrep
reneurs at the reception, didn’t ask many questions of others. It was his show, and he was happy to be on display.

  “You have an asteroid you send into orbit, right?” he explained to the attentive group. “You have to be careful when you send it into orbit.”

  “How are you going to send it into orbit?” asked Laura Deming’s father, John.

  “Well, I have to send it into the orbit I want,” he said.

  “But you’re still not answering the question,” said Mr. Deming. “When can this actually happen?”

  “When the world’s not ready for your idea, there’s an easy solution,” said Burnham. “Wait.” It was an answer he had given before, one meant to be funny and tidy at the same time. He gave them a little smirk, as they had no response, or a better idea.

  A white-haired mentor standing nearby asked John what he thought of SpaceX. “I hear Elon Musk is against asteroid mining,” said the man. “I hear he’s ignoring the asteroid question and focusing on lunar landings to start with.”

  “I don’t know why Elon Musk would be against asteroids,” Burnham replied. “Because their mission is to get to Mars, and to get to Mars, you need asteroids.” No one argued with him. He knew so many esoteric astronomical phrases that there was little common knowledge that could refute him.