But the idea of the fellowship, the idea of just dropping out, the idea of being encouraged to try that, I do think is worthwhile. If you ask the Thiel Foundation, the whole point was to get people to stop and pause and think: “Do I have to do this thing that everybody else is doing? Maybe there is this thing that I’m really good at.”

I think that idea is valuable, too. As everybody rushes to frantically apply to college, and then frantically to try to get a job in an acceptable firm, magazine, auction house, instead of following like lemmings, stopping and saying, “Maybe I can scrape by and do something I really want to for a little while, and that’s okay?” Or, “Maybe I can think of something new?”

Did writing this book actually make you question your own decision to go to college? Yes. But not because I had a brilliant idea. Because I don’t think I learned very much there. I sort of felt adrift in college. I had a great time, but I didn’t really feel like the scholar I thought I should be. I don’t know if not going to college would have helped that. Maybe I would have started at the Observer at 18 or something. I wouldn’t have loved to start a company, but I maybe would have done something else.

If I were to go back and do it all over again at that time, I would still go to college, I’m sure. But at this time, maybe I wouldn’t. I think now, maybe this is overly biased, just because I’ve been focusing on it for so long, but I think the Thiel fellowship really did change the mentality around that. You can now not go to college with less of a stigma. Whereas if I hadn’t gone to college in 1998, when I graduated from high school, that would have been unacceptable.

As people who live in New York, on the East Coast, we’re used to the idea that we export our culture west, that we’re at the center of where things are happening. But increasingly, it feels the opposite: The west is sending culture east. Are we about to inherit all of Silicon Valley’s weirdest ideas one by one? I totally agree with you, I was laughing so hard, a friend of mine was saying there was some Wall Street banker trying to underwrite some big tech IPO, and he showed up in a hoodie. It was somebody who wore a suit all the time, at like age 75, in a hoodie trying to get them to feel one with him, which is beyond preposterous. There was a company out there that had Tie Tuesdays. They had a day of the week where they would make fun of, or ironically gesture toward, this old-fashioned thing called a tie. The whole culture seems to be coming east, I guess in large part because banking isn’t that cool anymore. The recession probably did a number on that one.