Peter Thiel
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A lot of people hate Peter Thiel because of politics. Without commenting on that, I think the man has very unique way of thinking and listening to him always makes me think a lot. His book Zero to One is good.
I’ve been listening to some Peter Thiel interview by Joe Rogan. I had heard that Rogan is pretty crazy about conspiracy theory like stuff, but now for the first time I heard him talk about a bunch of unhinged stuff. What I found more interesting was how Thiel seems to be able to entertain very interesting thoughts on the very low end of the conspiracy theory spectrums. He is smart enough to discredit the dumb stuff people like Rogan think about, but also able to make the same crazy questions and come up with more plausible answers.
For example Rogan was talking about how no one has a plausible explanation how egyptians built the pyramids, so he reiterates some fringe theories about how that civilization used to be very smart but somehow got wiped away. That the pyramids could have been some “power plants” using some tech similar to nuclear power but unknown to current human civilization. Thiel politely hears his thoughts and then explains another “fringe” but somewhat plausible theory about the motivations of normal people to go to the impossible lengths needed to build such monuments. I don’t remember the details but it was something like this: There may have existed some kind of “ritual” that required the egyptian pharaos to give up their life in exchange for the right to rule over the people, and that the physical form of this ritual was that of “stoning” the ruler to death. They would pile rocks on him until he died. Then over time, this became ritual became more symbolic in the form of building small rock piles for tombs of the rulers, small pyramids that is. And since the rulers naturally had a lot of power, they altered these rituals to be longer in time so they could live longer. So basically the biggest of pyramids are a side effect of extremely powerful pharaos prolonging their ritual death as long as they could. I’m not sure I find this theory very plausible, but it’s at least intriguing, unlike the “aliens gave us the blueprints for pyramids” kind of theories.
I like listening to Thiel because he has and knows about this kind of “fringe” ideas about absolutely everything. He doesn’t tout them as truth, but as interesting ideas people should perhaps consider instead of going with the “default narrative”. For example in the same talk his theory for why nuclear power isn’t used much these days is “because India got the nuclear bomb”. His reasoning is that it turns out nuclear power tech and nuclear bomb tech are so close that having the former gives the latter. So what happened was that US gave India nuclear power tech and got spooked when India quickly developed nuclear weapons. Then they upped the regulation all over the world so that no one could easily build nuclear reactors anymore. Thiel also says other “world of atoms” technologies have been regulated into non-existence due to fears of their dystopic implications. The intuition of the world’s leaders is that it’s better to have the technological progress stagnate than risk total annihilation.
As a result, all technological advance for the past several decades has taken place in the “world of bits”, that is computer science, because it just doesn’t have such dystopic threats that would have required regulating it. Until perhaps now with the advance of artificial intelligence.
[JqxzLUE6pP8] “How To Build The Next Billion Dollar Startup | Forbes”
The problem you are working is so unique that, if you weren’t tackling the problem, then nobody would — that’s what is meaningul. If you are in a competition, then you are by definition at least number two.
“Competition is for losers” (a headline of article reviewing Peter’s writing) “You will always be wanting to build a monopoly.”
“The future is never valued.” — about Yahoo underestimating future value of Facebook in their pitifiul $1B acquistion offer.
[yODORwGmHqo] “Peter Thiel: Successful Businesses are Based on Secrets | WIRED”
“We live in a world where courage is in even more shortage than genius.”
Too much stuff to quote. I must soon read that book Zero to One, I think.
[VtZbWnIALeE] “Copy of In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen”
In that video, Thiel mentions that 11 of the top 50(?) richest people have carved their position by being innovative. These are names like Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates, and Bezos that everybody knows. But on that list, are 22 names that have made all their money from leveraging the government/public enforced energy regulations, basically these are people who make money out of oil and gas. Nobody knows any of the names on that list. You could say they are exploiting the system of energy policies, but really you should be blaming the system and its upholders instead.
Funny how the discussion mediator is feeling anxious about how the two panelists keep going over the time limits on their speeches. I would think they should have a flexible format that takes the best out of the panelists, how ever they want to play it out in the moment. And I think the reason the panelists keep talking over the mediator is that they know the audience doesn’t care about the questions the mediator has, they just want to hear the two smart guys talk on whatever. Also I think Thiel seemed very nervous in the beginning but once he realized he was the important person on stage, he dropped all the stress and assumed control.
Mr. Thiel was identified as gay nine years ago by a blog owned by Gawker Media. He said writers at Gawker should be identified “as terrorists, not as writers or reporters,” and he eventually funded the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s successful lawsuit against the site. Gawker’s flagship website was closed by its new owner, Univision, in August.
From a NY times article on Peter Thiel:
When I ask if he is concerned about conflicts of interest, either for himself or the Trump children, who sat in on the tech meeting, he flips that one, too: “I don’t want to dismiss ethical concerns here, but I worry that ‘conflict of interest’ gets overly weaponized in our politics. I think in many cases, when there’s a conflict of interest, it’s an indication that someone understands something way better than if there’s no conflict of interest. If there’s no conflict of interest, it’s often because you’re just not interested.”
But the 49-year-old social-media visionary rarely updates his Facebook page and doesn’t tweet, “because you always want to get things exactly right” and “if you start doing it, you have to do it a lot.”
[Thiel] recalls a story from his and Mr. Musk’s PayPal days, when Mr. Musk joined the engineering team’s poker game and bet everything on every hand, admitting only afterward that it was his first time playing poker. Then there was the time they were driving in Mr. Musk’s McLaren F1 car, “the fastest car in the world.” It hit an embankment, achieved liftoff, made a 360-degree horizontal turn, crashed and was destroyed. “It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” Mr. Thiel says. “I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon’s first comment was, ‘Wow, Peter, that was really intense.’ And then it was: ‘You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn’t get any insurance.’ And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting.”
[z6K8PZxyQfU] (Broken link)
Another Peter Thiel video. Lots of the stuff I already heard from him but it’s good enough to hear again.
Durability of business is more important than growth rate. “75% of the revenue of big Silicon valley companies comes after year 2024, very far in the future.” Growth here and now is easy to measure, but it is much more important whether the business will still be around in ten years. “People often talk about great companies having been ‘first in the market’, but you want to instead think about ‘being last in the market’. For example Microsoft was the last operating system (for decades)”.
He talks about vertical integration as key to few of the extremely successful companies in engineering. SpaceX does much less subcontracting and so doesn’t get charged monopoly prices. Tesla does distribution by itself to keep the margins. The idea is to bring together a number of complex parts rather than get 10X in a single dimension.
Scientists may produce great value, but they unvariably capture 0% of it for themselves. “Twitter must be much more valuable than creations of Einstein because it makes so much money and Einstein didn’t become even a millionare?”
“We always think of ‘losers’ as people who can’t compete. Sports teams, Standardized tests.”
“The competition was ferocious because the stakes were so small.” — about Hardvard graduate schools or academia in general. “You think on one level this is description of insanity.”
Answering questions: “I’m sort of skeptical about the Lean startup movement. I think all the big companies did quantum improvements. They rarely did massive customer surveys. So I do think many are too focused on iterative thinking rather than figuring the needs of customer out yourself by use of a virtual ESP link.”
Yet another Peter Thiel video [iZM_JmZdqCw] “You are not a lottery ticket”. I like listening to him, but I wish he wrote more books (or articles) instead because his presentation skill lack a bit (and I would like to hear more deeply about his ideas). I’m very pleased that people seem to listen to him (on youtube) despite that.
I have a little simulation of Peter Thiel. He lives on my shoulder right here. I argue with him all day long.
Picked these on 2021-01 from unknown source:
If you were a sociopathic boss who wanted to create trouble for your employees, the formula you would follow would be to tell two people to do the exact same thing. That’s a guaranteed formula for creating conflict. If you’re not a sociopath, you want to be very careful to avoid this.
We have this ideological understanding of conflict, where we say it happens when people want different things. But I think it actually happens when people want the same thing — the same promotion, recognition for doing the same job well, the same toy as a kid.
People always say you should live every day as though it’s your last. I sort of have taken the opposite tack, where I think you should live every day as though it’s going to go on forever. You should treat people like you’re going to see them again in the future. You should start working on projects that may take a long time.
[iRleB034EC8] “Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment””
Since there now exists a culture to villanize people who cross certain arbitrary limits, I feel like it’s worth pointing out Thiel is the only(?) billionare out there who does philosophy openly. Elon Musk’s ambitions are also such that his talks necessarily touch on philosophical aspects (eg the need to colonize space). But people like Zuckerberg or Bezos, despite working on some really big things, don’t give me the vibe they do it for philosophical reasons — maybe for utilitarian, but not really philosophical reasons.
This interview is way harder than I expected
I think interviews are a pretty bad format for philosophy (sorry Socrates), even though most of them are planned to some extent. Essay, book or any other type of monologue is the way to go, mainly to reach the audience who already understands your “language”. Even the simplest forms of dialogue such as answering another person’s question tends to fail because it forces the speaker to try adopt the language of the other, and the listener to leave his. Not only is the message necessarily garbled in the translation, there may not even exist a way to express the ideas in the language.