Peter Thiel of PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Founder's Fund

• Wikipedia - Peter Thiel
• YouTube - Every Peter Thiel Video (Channel)

Questions for Thiel

• He should make the "Vision of the Future" movie.

Books to check out

• The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
  • IIRC this is rec'd in the Milken Institute debate

Quora

How did Peter Thiel build such a great team at PayPal?
http://www.quora.com/How-did-Peter-Thie ... -at-PayPal

What strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter / Max / David have at PayPal?
http://www.quora.com/What-strong-belief ... is?share=1

http://www.atrader.com/manager-profile/ ... al-markets

Undated

Dated

1995 - Amazon - The Diversity Myth

1995, 1996, 1998 - Independent Institute - Articles by Peter Thiel

• 1996 - C-SPAN - Peter Thiel panel with Ellen Moran of Emily's List
  • It's basically Thiel Moran being asked their opinions of various issues that were in that day's newspapers. It isn't very interesting. The most-interesting thing is probably 1) the confidence with which he expresses his opinions, and 2) how polished his appearance is.
  • 5:50 - Peter Thiel
  • 7:30 - Thiel's point seems to be that, because of the seriousness of claims of sexism / racism / etc., we need to have some degree of skepticism.
  • 10:20 - He says that the central thesis of The Diversity Myth is that you don't have real diversity when you have a group of people who look different from each other but think alike.
  • 12:00 - "I think we should get rid of all racial categories."

1999.10.20 - The Independent Institute - Virtual Money, Privacy, and the Internet

Thiel's talk begins at 35:54.

36:52 - His articles have appeared in the WSJ, Washington Times, San Francisco Chronicle, 
37:02 - Also rated a national master in the US Chess Federation
39:30 - He brings up the example of hyperinflation in Argentina
- This talk was less than a year after he had started Confinity (Dec '98), only ~8 months after merging with Elon Musk's X.com.

 - The talk seems to explain how he came to start Confinity. It seems he probably got the idea from working as a trader.
- It's interesting to see Thiel talking before he had achieved his first success.

- He has few instances of saying 'umm' or 'uhh' or 'you know' or 'like'.
- His hair is kept neat, he's got a collared shirt and jacket.
- He uses a lot of ten-dollar words like 'impute', 'conglomeration', 'extent', 'government actors', 'lest', 'apparatus', 'arise', 'consolidation', 'under the auspices of', 'countervailing forces', 'exacerbated'
- He throws out a lot of examples, which is one of the heuristics I use to judge if someone has done their homework on an issue.
49:09 - He talks about just about everybody having internet-enabled cellphones within 5 years.
49:50 - He talks about how governments will have to decide if they're going to regulate the communications network (which we now see happening).


2004 - News story on the book 'The PayPal Wars'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YEXBEq9vJU
- There's a short clip of 


2004.01.21 - Talk at Stanford Technology Ventures Program
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMater ... l?mid=1021
Speaker(s): Max Levchin , Peter Thiel

- the original concept of paypal was to allow for secure transmission of money between palm pilots via an IR link

- when trying to convince someone to move out to Palo Alto, have them come when it's really cold in their home state (e.g. January)
- they only hired friends at first
- they used a stunt to market their product: they transferred $3 million from the venture capitalists to their own account in front of news cameras

- how do you get customers?
1) advertising (billboards) - this wasn't cost effective b/c it had started to cost $100,000 for 1 month and each sign was only seen for 6-10 seconds
2) work with a big partner who will tell the world about your product; they met with mid-level execs at HSBC through a friend(?) and realized they wouldn't be able to help b/c the bank knew nothing about how to reach people (they were just getting into television advertising)
3) selling dollar bills for $0.85 - anyone who joined got $10; if you recruited someone you got an additional $10. they realized it was smarter b/c the cost per customer was $20, whereas the cost of online click ads was $60-100 per new customer.

paypal really started to take off b/c people selling stuff on ebay (another new company at that time) needed a way of paying each other.

they were burning $10 million a month in payments to new customers; rather than reduce the bonus they decided to raise more money
they merged with a competitor before looking for more money

their second round raised $100 million

section: "Coping with Fraud"
the guy on the right said that while paypal's business seems fairly simple on the surface, their real success is the ability to reduce fraud. there's a lot going on under the hood.
peter thiel described how paypal was in an arm's race with russian mobsters; as both paypal and the mobsters got more sophisticated, the mobsters got better at wiping out paypal's competitors, which made it impossible for paypal's customers to go anywhere else

section: "Viral Marketing"
Thiel - "if there's an easy formula, that's not a business you want to go into"

section: "Beating Competition"
Thiel - there are three important factors in UI: privacy, security, and convenience; if you get to 100% on any two of them the other one will be at 0%
- There was a whole academic circle of people who were writing papers about how digital cash would never work. lesson: just because a lot of people are saying something can't work doesn't mean they're right.

section: "Negotiating with Ebay"
Thiel - They were going to function as the cash registers to Ebay's Wal-Mart, but they were worried that Ebay would get some people on the inside to figure out how to handle the cash register portion themselves. Ebay had problems, though, dealing with the fraud-protection and everything else. They tried to create something, and it was secure, but it wasn't convenient, which is why it didn't work.
Thiel - They had a 1.5 year negotiating period, with 5 different rounds. The 4th round lasted 6 weeks straight, with many meetings having people throwing up numbers to back their proposed valuations

• 2004.04.21 - Thiel talk @ Independent Institute - Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Global Marketplace
  • 9:30 - In the spring of 2000 they had issues.
    • Customers were calling in non-stop.
    • Russian mobsters were stealing. One of the core innovations was coming up with a way to stop this.
  • 12:00 - The biggest challenge was government regulation.
    • The government didn't help with the fraud issues.
    • Arcane, unworkable banking systems.
    • They were spending $500k a month in legal fees to deal with regulatory issues.
  • 15:00 - They effectively became the cash register for eBay: 2/3 of their volume was on eBay, and 2/3 of eBay's volume was via PayPal.
  • 15:30 - In the middle of the IPO
    • The SEC evaluator assigned to their IPO was looking for a reason to reject their IPO.
    • Thiel had to track down the bank commissioner in LA in the middle of Mardi Gras.
  • 19:30 - The way politics works is to identify a common enemy. It's only possible to achieve political benefits against enemies. It isn't possible for goods.
    • 20:30 - There isn't any way to identify a common enemy at a global scale.
  • 23:40 - End of Thiel's opening remarks.
  • 53:13 - Beginning of the Q&A period
  • 58:19 - Q: What's your take on outsourcing?
    • A: He quotes Adam Smith. There are a lot of internal challenges, but if we are to remain competitive we need to outsource.
  • 1:03 - Q: How do you ___ something spiritual practice (??)
    • 1:05:10 - A: Something about the Enlightenment.
  • 1:06:04 - Q: Would you describe the US as neo-mercantilist?
    • 1:08:30 - A: Mercantilism doesn't make sense.
  • 1:09:10 - Q: What are the stranger ideas you come across?
    • A: The strangest were outside the US.
      • A startup in France was called "Z-Bank" and had monkeys on the webpage and had an even shorter workweek.
      • Who do you want to copy? Who do you want to emulate? (this quote is worth writing up)
      • At the tail end of the boom people were copying crazy things from other people.

• 2007.11.01 - WSJ - Interview with Peter Thiel
  • he thinks old-media companies should just try to k
  • "I tend to invest in companies because I think the people are intelligent" ("he's creative, he works hard, and he's smart")
  • 05:29 - Q: What do you think is overhyped? What worries you?
  • 06:40 - There are two big questions Facebook has: 1) will the growth continue, and 2) can they figure out a revenue model that is more-targeted, and that's the holy grail.
  • 08:25 - I think people talk too much about there being a bubble. You can't have a bubble if there are no IPOs. The venture capital industry is still living in 1999.
  • 09:50 - We had a boom and a bust. And people remember the bust more than the boom, so people are dominated by fear.

• 2009 - Capital IQ Investor Leadership Series: Peter Thiel

 [in 4 parts]
- Observation: "if [the tech sector in Silicon Valley] is not enough to actually drive things in California, is it really enough to drive things in the US and the world as a whole?"
- Observation: People talk about exponential growth in technology and yet median wages have remained stagnant. [My response: but you can have the same wage and yet be able to purchase more with it; e.g. buying stuff at Wal-Mart, having a computer exponentially faster than 20 years ago, having tons of free stuff on the internet, having an iPod instead of a tape deck, having an iPad instead of a notepad]
- His Q: Why has there been such an incredible disconnect between our technological innovation and the changes in our standards of living [time spent working, etc.]?
- His Q: Do you really know that things will continue to grow the way it has over the past 100 years?
- Him: If there was no growth people would need to work until they were 80 and save 40% of their income.
- His Observation: We have 30-50 times as many scientists and yet he doesn't think we're progressing much faster than at that time.
- He thinks investing in Google is basically a bet against new search technology
- He thinks China's big strength over the US is that they think 30-40 years ahead
- In Part 4 he seems to agree with John T Reed that things are seriously messed up in the world economy and there is going to have to be a correction in how the markets view the value of the dollar; he calls it the "disconnect between the real economy and the financial economy". He says this in response to a question on why his fund performed poorly in a particular year; if you look it up on wikipedia it was because he bet that the dollar would drop in value, and it didn't. John T Reed is making the same prediction [he thinks people are going to stop lending the US money, at which point the US will have to inflate its currency or say "we can't pay you guys who we owe money to, so we're not going to even try", aka defaulting on its debt].

terms referred to in the speech:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_ ... _recession
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIX

• 2008.12.05 - Hoover Institution - The U.S. Economy with Peter Thiel
  • "there's less volatility as a result of the shift to a service economy, but there's probably also less growth [because unlike a factory owner who can create a larger factory, it's harder to scale up your services] [I noticed the very same thing when thinking about the difference between working as a tutor and creating a factory]
• 2009.04.13 - Cato Unbound - The Education of a Libertarian
  • "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
  • "Those who have argued for free markets have been screaming into a hurricane."
  • "The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
  • "I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms (...) Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom."
  • "Between cyberspace and outer space lies the possibility of settling the oceans."
    • What I don't get about seasteading is that countries already exert tremendous pressure outside their borders through the use of sanctions and threat of military force (drones, etc.). What leads Peter to think that that wouldn't also hold true for seasteading? I guess it depends on what exactly he wants to do offshore. [Later: It may also be the case that while countries like the US could impose their will on a seasteading nation, that a seasteading nation could kind of 'fly under the radar' and not draw the full attention of the US public / media to such an extent that it would force US politicians to act against the seasteading nation. So, for example, Asian countries can get away with labor practices that have been outlawed in the US because the US public hasn't been riled up to demand action against those Asian countries for doing those things.]

------

• 2011 - BigThink - How to End the Google Monopoly
• 2011 (sometime between Fall of 2010 and Spring of 2011) - Into the night with Garry Kasparov and Peter Thiel
  • VERY VERY interesting, you get a real sense of what these guys are like to hang out with.
  • You get to see Peter play chess (he gives his rating as around 2300)
  • At the end Thiel talks about Buffett
  • I need to go back through this whole thing and write up a synopsis and write down the main quotes.
  • Summary:
    • Intro of Gary
    • Intro of Peter
    • Initial meeting
      • 3:50 - Gary tells the camera that they're working on a book that argues that the rate of technological improvement has slowed.
        • "We're working on a book with the tentative title, 'The Wall of Fake Values', and we're arguing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the human race goes through the slowest development in technologies. Because in the last 30 years, we have not seen a breakthrough technology at the pace we saw it before."
      • 5:15
        <Shot from Kasparov's talk at Google>
        Kasparov: "I believe that chess is a unique playing field to look for the combination of the machine's power and a human's abilities. So it's like, you know, to solve the Moravec's paradox, because it's exactly what happens, we're good at something that machines are bad at, and vice versa."
        </Google talk>
        
        Thiel: "Well, you know, it was the case at PayPal that we found that you needed this human-computer combination to solve the fraud problems. And so I think that it's been very under-explored as an approach."
        
        K: "Oh yeah, absolutely, and the example I brought to Googlers is, it was very natural, so why not, to maximize the effect of the search, by adding a tiny element of human...not intuition...but visualization. (He takes a deep breath.) Great reservations."
        
        T: "The Google ideology is that computers will replace humans in the next 20 years, 30 years."
        
        K: "It's a bit odd, because certain things you could very quickly, if you accept that man plus machine is a solution."
    • At the Colombia robotics lab
    • At the chess club
    • At the Empire State Building / Human Rights Foundation
    • Eating dinner
• 2011.10 - IntelligenceSquared Debates - Too Many Kids Go To College
  • Overview of the debate.
    • The pro-college argument:
      • 0:35 - College grads earn ~$20,000/yr more than high school graduates, ~$500,000 over their lifetime.
      • 0:45 - 9.7% of HS grads are unemployed, only 4.2% of college grads. "So going to high school and not college doubles your chance of being unemployed." ← Hmm....
      • 0:59 - With globalization, many of the manufacturing jobs that HS grads used to be able to get are gone forever, "and employers are looking for the kinds of cognitive skills we associate with college graduates."
      • 1:22 - A liberal arts education is likely to produce a superior electorate, better able to adapt to change.
    • 1:50 - The con-college argument:
      • 1:55 - Only a small percentage of people have the aptitude to do well at colleges of reasonable quality.
      • 2:15 - For the students who are not qualified, college becomes an extended adolescence, and at best a remediation for bad high schools.
      • 2:20 - They're not becoming employable with the skills of expository writing, quantitative reasoning, the scientific method, or primary research.
      • 2:30 - Such students would do better at vocational schools, like those in Germany in Switzerland. In those countries only 20% of students complete four-year degree programs.
      • 2:55 - For the most-elite students, college may prove an impediment to creative thinking or a distraction from their entrepreneurial drive.
  • 3:50 - Intro of the speakers and explanation of the debate format.
  • 7:50 - Peter gives his opening remarks.
    • 7:50 - When he was starting PayPal he heavily favored people from good schools.
      • "Throughout the '90s I had a belief that education was absolutely paramount, we should only hire people who went to the best schools, and we discriminated on this basis very aggressively in hiring at PayPal, and I thought this was the most important thing in our society."
      • 8:25 - "I saw so many very-talented people who had not gone through college tracks and who had still done extraordinarily well; in some ways they were often more creative. They were not laden down with these enormous college debts that were somehow forcing people to take better-paying jobs that were more remunerative but were more boring and track them into things that were not as interesting or important. That were discouraging people from doing things in nonprofit work, or on the more-entrepreneurial side."
      • 9:00 - The cost of college has gone up tremendously. After inflation, it costs ~4x as much (inflation-adjusted) as it did 30 years ago to go to college.
      • 9:45 - We are experiencing something of a bubble in education. (...) It is characterized by two things: 1) runaway costs, (...) 2) an incredible psycho-social dynamic where you cannot question it. (...) This is the one thing people still really believe in our society.
      • 11:10 - "an enormous misallocation of resources"
      • 11:15 - Student debts at this point total over $1 trillion. And when you look at how well people are doing who come out of college, they're still doing pretty well, they're still doing better than they used to, but the outperformance has been going down. It's been going down since about 2000.
      • 11:50 - The median wage for lawyers is $62,000, which isn't that great when you've taken on $250,000 in law school debt.
      • 11:57 - There are only about 9% of the people who study pre-med have slots available to them in medical school; the other 91% are wasting their time. And somebody should have told them that their freshman or sophomore year, and not waited until their senior year or several years post-college to figure that sort of stuff out.
      • 12:20 - There are millions of people who have college degrees who are doing unskilled work. (...) There are 6100 people in the US who have PhDs and are doing janitorial work.
      • 12:45 - We need to figure out, how do we create more jobs, how do we create more good-paying jobs, we don't have enough of either in our society. While education is linked to them, it's not this absolute thing. What we want to question is that education is an absolute good, or an absolute necessity.
      • 13:27 - We're not saying that nobody should go to college. We're not saying that college is categorically a bad thing, we're not saying that everyone should drop. We're just saying that too many people are going to college. (...) We need to make this a much more deliberate and careful choice. (...) Think more about your future. Do not think about education as something that's an automatic ticket to the future.
      • 14:09 - If I had to do something over again, having gone to Stanford, I probably would still go to college, even with the higher costs, I didn't have any great ideas of what to do instead, I would probably have done the exact same thing as I did in the late '80s, even with all the problems, but one thing I would try to do very differently, is not accept the answer that this was the automatic thing. That this was the thing you should do without thinking. I would have tried to think about what I want to do with my life as a senior in high school and a senior in college and not simply have more education be the automatic default answer for everything.
• 2011.11.28 - New Yorker - No Death, No Taxes

Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the Apollo space program.” [NW: Hmm...that seems debatable.]

Thiel, an entrepreneur who runs both a hedge fund and a venture-capital firm, was waiting for a table at Café Venetia, which is on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, California. The street is the launchpad of Silicon Valley. All the café’s tables were occupied by healthy, downwardly dressed people using Apple devices while discussing idea creation and angel investments. Ten years ago, Thiel met his friend Elon Musk for coffee at the same spot, and decided that PayPal, the online-payments company they had helped found, should go public. Soon after the initial public offering, in 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for one and a half billion dollars, and Thiel’s take was fifty-five million.

Most of Thiel’s fortune was made within shouting distance of Café Venetia. PayPal’s first office was five blocks down the street, above a bike shop. Just across the street was 156 University Avenue, the original headquarters of Facebook. In the summer of 2004, Thiel gave a Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg a half-million-dollar loan, the first outside investment in Facebook, which Thiel later converted into a seven-per-cent ownership stake and a seat on the board; his share today is worth at least one and a half billion dollars. Facebook’s successor at 156 University Avenue is Palantir Technologies, whose software helps government agencies track down terrorists, fraudsters, and other criminals, by detecting subtle patterns in torrents of information. Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2004 and invested thirty million dollars in it. Palantir is now valued at two and a half billion dollars, and Thiel is the chairman of the board.

The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn’t created enough jobs, and it hasn’t produced revolutionary improvements in manufacturing and productivity. The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world. “The Internet—I think it’s a net plus, but not a big one,” he said. “Apple is an innovative company, but I think it’s mostly a design innovator.” Twitter has a lot of users, but it doesn’t employ that many Americans: “Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.” 
(...)
Thiel’s own story of progress began near the end of the golden age, in 1967, in Frankfurt, Germany. When Peter was one, his father, Klaus, moved the family to Cleveland. Klaus’s employment in various large engineering firms kept uprooting the family—South Africa and Namibia were other locations—and Peter attended seven elementary schools. The final one was near Foster City, a planned community, along the southern edge of San Francisco Bay, where the Thiels settled when he was in fifth grade. His parents banned TV until Peter was in junior high school. He grew up with the untrammelled self-confidence and competitiveness of a brilliant loner. He became a math prodigy and a nationally ranked chess player; his chess kit was decorated with a sticker carrying the motto “Born to Win.” (On the rare occasions when he lost in college, he swept the pieces off the board; he would say, “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”) As a teen-ager, his favorite book was “The Lord of the Rings,” which he read again and again. Later came Solzhenitsyn and Rand. He acquired the libertarian faith in high school and took it close to the limit. (He now allows for government spending on science.)
(...)
 In an amiably impersonal way, he is both transparent and opaque. He opens himself to all questions and answers them at length, but his line of reasoning is so uninflected that it becomes a barrier against intimacy.
(...)
Thiel’s closest friends date back to the early days of PayPal, in the late nineties, or even further, to his years at Stanford, in the late eighties. They are, for the most part, like him and one another: male, conservative, and super-smart in the fields of math and logical reasoning. These friendships were forged through abstract argument. David Sacks, who left PayPal in 2002 and now runs Yammer, a social-network site for businesses, met Thiel at Stanford, where they were members of the same eating club. The topics of conversation included evolutionary theory, libertarian philosophy, and the anthropic principle, which holds that observations about the universe depend on the existence of a consciousness that can observe. “He would demolish your arguments in five minutes,” Sacks said. “It was like playing chess. He was libertarian, but he would ask questions like ‘Should there even be a market for nuclear weapons?’ He would drill down and find the weakness in your argument. He does like to win.”

In the summer of 1998, Max Levchin, a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian-born computer programmer, had just arrived in the Bay Area when he heard Thiel give a talk at Stanford on currency trading. The next day, they met for smoothies in Palo Alto and came up with the idea that became PayPal: a system of electronic payment designed to make e-commerce easy, consistent, and secure. “I’m addicted to hanging out with smart people,” Levchin said. “And I found myself craving more time with Peter.” While developing the first prototype for PayPal, Levchin and Thiel tried to stump each other with increasingly difficult math puzzles. (How many digits does the number 125100 have? Two hundred and ten.) “It was a bit like a weird courting process, nerds trying to impress each other,” Levchin said.

• 2012 - Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Stanford, Spring 2012
• 2012.02.21 - Harvard Business School - John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum - A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Niall Ferguson
• 2012.02.21 - Panel w/ Peter Thiel and Aubrey de Grey
  
  • It's a bit of a meh discussion.
  • ~11mins -
  • 1) He says that he was very serious about chess in high school, and it was when he saw the computers getting better than the humans that he realized that maybe he wasn't spending his time in the most valuable way.
  • 2) He thinks that there are too many smart people in physics (ie some of them should be in other fields)
  • 12:45 - If you try to chase status or money for their own sake, you probably won't succeed. It's the guys who love the process who make it.
• 2012.03.30-31 - World Affairs Council - Peter Thiel and Charles Bolden on The World in 2050: What is the Next Big Idea?
• 2012.07 - Fortune - Dinner and Debate with Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel
  • There's an AMAZING segment where Thiel rips into Schmidt for not spending more of their $50 billion in cash to innovate. Schmidt responds very candidly: "What you find out when you get to our level is that there are barriers that aren't cash barriers." (hiring, regulation)
• 2013.03.19 - Credit Suisse - Developing the Developed World
• 2013 - SXSW Interactive - Peter Thiel: You Are Not a Lottery Ticket
  • 24:40 - He shows his graph of how nobody knows what to do with money:
    • 1) sell company shares, make money
    • 2) give money to large bank
    • 3) large bank gives money to portfolio of institutional investors
    • 4) institutional investor gives money to portfolio of stocks
    • 5) each company seeks to generate free cash flows
    • 6) repeat
  • 26:30 - We prefer investing in companies that are able to reinvest all their profits. If a company is just accumulating money it suggests they don't know what to do next.
• 2013.04.29 - Milken Institute - In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen
  • General:
    • The issue to be debated: "Is innovation accelerating or decelerating?"
    • IMO Andreessen does a much better job of presenting his opinions. The nature of his evidence feels more convincing, and I like how he pre-emptively acknowledged weaknesses in his evidence.
    • In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Marc admits that he spent weeks preparing for the debate. You can see in the debate that he has a lot of notes, while Peter doesn't have any notes.
  • 1:19 - The moderator explaining Thiel's side: "Nobody recently has come up with an invention that's had as much impact as the lavatory, with its clean lines and its sort-of intuitive user interface. And although there have been advances in communication and computing, elsewhere there's been little to match the car, the telephone, the radio, and antibiotics, as well as the humble loo, and they all sprang from late 19th century and 20th century minds."
    • One thing to note about the inventions the moderator mentions is that people may be unconsciously discounting the amount of time it took those inventions to reach their current state from the year they were "invented".
    • Also, I suspect that people tend not to be aware of the way life was before the inventions came out, and how people had been able to serve the same need that the invention serves. So, for example, I think I've heard people ask, "Wow, what did people do before there was television?", and not know that before television existed, the radio was basically the television; the family would gather around the radio and listen to shows in the evening, the same way they watch television. So when people are considering the impact of an invention, they try to imagine what their lives would be like without the invention nowadays, which isn't an accurate picture of how the invention changed the lives of the people who were alive when the invention first came out.
    • The fact that mobile phones can be afforded by some of the poorest people in the world seems like a pretty significant advance.
  • 4:30 - Thiel makes the point that "almost all" movies portray technology as a bad thing.
    • My response: Movies try to make people feel emotional, and one of the emotions they like to tickle is fear. People also like novel experiences, and science fiction is a good way to tickle that desire. So when you put those together, you can end up with a situation where some new technology is used as a source of fear. It seems likely to me that this isn't a result of malice or fear felt by the movie's creators.
  • 5:10 - Thiel hypothesizes that one reason the public feels antipathy towards technology is that it hasn't been "delivering the goods".
    • Ex: Phones are used for games (Angry Birds), sending pictures of cats to other people, Foursquare. And he contrasts that with "riding a subway from the 19th century".

• 2013.07.01 - Effective Altruism Summit
• 2014.01.16 - Churchill Club - World Chess Champ Magnus Carlsen, in conversation w/ Peter Thiel
  
  • You can find my full summary of the talk here: Magnus Carlsen
  • I'll just list Thiel's comments / questions here:
  • - This is all about asking Carlsen questions. Thiel asks great, great questions. Carlsen gives some great answers to Thiel's questions, some OK answers to audience questions.
  • The first few minutes are all 
  • 7:30 - Thiel: I was 7th in the US in the under-13 age category, but someone like Carlsen would be expected to beat me 100 times for every time I beat him (if we were both the same age).
  • 8:50 - Q from Thiel: When did you start playing chess? What year did you start to really improve?
  • 10:45 - Q from Thiel: At what point did you decide to focus on playing chess for a living?
  • 11:30 - Q from Thiel: Is there something you can tell us about the process by which someone becomes a great chess player?
  • 13:10 - Q from Thiel: Were there any chess players you particularly looked up to?
  • 14:30 - Q from Thiel: Has does one go about improving when you're at the level you're at today?
  • 15:30 - Q from Thiel: Do you think you have to learn chess as a kid, or can you learn it at any time in your life?
  • 16:10 - Q from Thiel: Is chess a sport, an art, or a science?
  • 17:00 - Q from Thiel: Is there any psychological aspect to chess?
  • 18:20 - Q from Thiel: Is there a physical fitness component? Do you find you play better if you're healthy?
  • 19:13 - Q from Thiel: How have computers changed chess in the last 30 years?
  • 21:50 - Q from Thiel: Have computers made chess more tactical?
  • 23:50 - Q from Thiel: You generally don't play against computers?
  • 24:38 - Q from Thiel: Do you learn the most from games you lose, or games you win?
  • 42:10 - Q from Thiel: How much do you think chess carries over to life?
    
    • 44:00 - Q from audience: 
    • 48:50 - Q from Thiel: Do you find you learn more from studying than from playing? Or is it a combination of both?
  • 50:30 - Q from Thiel: Where do you think chess is going to go in 20-30 years? Do you think it'll be fully solved?
  • 1:00:00 - Q from Thiel: Is playing too much blitz bad for your full game?

• 2014.02.04 - 5.16 - Thiel Macro v. David Ryan Brumberg
  • If you look at Exhibit 1 of the complaint, it has the employment / compensation agreement, and the agreement seems to mention (some of?) the money in the fund: "Your 'Trading Bonus Amount' means an amount equal to 10% of (x) your team trading account's balance as of December 31, 2013, minus (y) $49,820,482 which was your team trading account's balance as of January 1, 2013..."
  • I'm not sure what a "team trading account balance" is. If these guys were hired to start some new 'quant' subteam within the larger 'Thiel Macro' fund, then the $50 mill may just be a fraction of the total amount in the fund.
• 2014.05 - The Veritas Forum - The Merits of Indefinite Life Extension
• 2014.08? - Glenn Beck Interviews Peter Thiel
  • Beck doesn't give a great interview IMO, he doesn't seem to know enough about Thiel to ask very interesting questions.

• 2014.09.09 - Tim Ferriss - Interview with Peter Thiel
  
  • The interview actually begins at 4:30
  • 4:30 - Q: What do you believe that very few others do?
    1. Technology is far more important than globalization (copying things that work). Technology is the main driver of progress.
    2. I think capitalism and competition are antonyms.
  • 5:53 - Q: What do you wish you knew about business 20 years ago?
    • I wish I knew that there was no need to wait. If you have a ten year plan, you should ask yourself why you can't do it in six months.
  • 6:30 - Q: How important is failure in business?
    • Failure is overrated. Most businesses fail for multiple reasons, so people tend not to learn very much from failure. And it tends to be damaging and demoralising. Failure is always simply
  • 7:30 - Q: When you hear the word 'successful', who comes to mind?
    • Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.
    • "What I think people like Zuckerberg, or Musk or Jeff Bezos at Amazon have in common is that they're relentless, they don't stop, every day they start over, do more, and get better at it."
  • 8:20 - Q: Where do you see Bitcoin going?
    • Bitcoin is dealing with a lot of the issues we dealt with at PayPal.
    • Bitcoin is in some ways the opposite configuration as PayPal.
  • 9:14 - Q: What are the biggest tech trends that you see defining the future?
    • I don't like talking about tech trends because I think that you end up in a very competitive space.
    • Trends are often things to avoid.
    • What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission; you're working on a problem that people are not solving elsewhere.
      
      • Ex: SpaceX was solving a problem that was not going to get solved by anyone else.
  • 10:38 - Q: Why do so many investors 'spray and pray'? Do you have any rules you follow or tips you'd recommend?
    • People say they 'spray and pray' because of a diversification theory, but I think the real reason is that people lack conviction, and perhaps because they're too lazy to really spend the time to figure out which companies are ultimately going to work.
    • I don't think it's good to treat companies like lottery tickets. It leads people to avoid
  • 12:15 - Q: What problem do you face every day that no one has solved yet?
    • Aging and death.
    • "What I always find extraordinary is how little we are doing about this problem. It seems people are either in a mode of denial or acceptance, which are in one sense opposite extremes, but they both have the effect of stopping you from doing anything."
  • 13:23 - Q: What would you say to the unemployed people in the US?
    • Micro answer: I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach. (He goes into more detail)
    • Macro answer: We need to figure out how to have more growth in the US economy.
  • 15:06 - Q: What would you say to someone who say you're being hypocritical on the college issue, since you went to college and law school?
    • I'm not saying that nobody should go to college. I'm saying that not everybody should do the same thing.
    • 16:21 - If I had to it over again, I would have thought much more about it.
  • 16:45 - Q: What does philosophy have to do with business, and how has studying that subject helped you?
    • It's about, 'What do people agree by convention, and what is the truth?'
    • We don't want convention to be a shortcut for the truth.
    • SV is laden with conventional thinking. Everyone is listening to everybody else.
  • 18:22 - Q: What do you think the future of education looks like?
    • I don't like the term 'education'.
    • I'm in favor of learning, I'm less in favor of credentialling.
    • Engineering is the opposite of education because it's a specific skill.
    • I think we'll have less of a one-size-fits-all approach.
    • One of my friends has compared the current state of education to the state of the Catholic Church right before the reformation.
  • 20:40 - Q: What are your daily habits and routines?
    • It tends to be very unstructured.
    • One thing I try to do daily is have a conversation with the smartest person I know. And it's often people I've known for years.
  • 21:31 - Q: What one thing would you like to change about yourself or improve on?
    • When I was younger I was insanely tracked and insanely competitive.
  • 22:35 - Q: What were you trying to achieve by writing Zero to One?
    • I think this question of technology is critical.
• 2014.09.10 - TechCrunch Disrupt (SF) - Interview
  • Great back-and-forth
  • She asks him what he thinks about the SV tv show
• 2014.09.10 - TechCrunch Disrupt (SF) - Backstage

• 2014.09.11 - Reddit - Peter Thiel - Ask Me Anything (AMA)

2014.09.10 - Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
http://danwang.co/why-is-peter-thiel-pe ... nnovation/
- good selection of quotes from talks Thiel has given
- also, good links to other talks by Thiel. I should merge that into this list.


2014.09.14 - BusinessInsider - Peter Thiel: Luck Is Just An Excuse For Not Working Hard Enough
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-th ... z3RyPRl21m
http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-th ... ard-2014-9

2014.09.25 - WiredUK - Speech on the ideas in his book / Q&A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yODORwGmHqo

2014.10.07 - Stanford - Lecture 5 - How to Start a Startup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0dVHMpJlo
- This seems to be the same set of ideas found in Zero to One.

- Yay! Andrew Rohn (a YouTube user) summarized the talk:

2014.10.11 - The Australian - Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel is on a mission to change the world

“Peter is very different from most ­people in Silicon Valley,” says Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders of PayPal. “With a lot of people the conversation is about how are we going to make more money; with Peter the conversation is, ‘How are we going to figure this out?’ He has a tremendous curiosity about how the world works, and all the philosophical and moral questions around that.” Another colleague evaluates his ability for “casual bar talk” as “very low. The ability to recall a data point — what was gold trading at on day five of World War II and what was the impact of that — he has it like a record book.”
(...)
Thiel’s investments have tended to be in things that more cautious thinkers may regard as far-fetched, unfeasible or, more simply, bad bets. “Ideally,” he says, “I want us to be working on things where if we’re not working on them, they won’t happen; companies where if we don’t fund them they will not receive funding.”
(...)
He has no great interest in music and seldom reads novels. In recent years he has “dialled back” on his chess-playing — “It’s a very dangerous addiction.” He lives alone but has a boyfriend. He has thought about having children, he says, “although I think you have to spend enough time to really raise them well. And I’m not sure I could do that.”

• 2014.10.24 - Uncommon Knowledge - Peter Thiel on markets, technology, and education
  • 00:00 - 1:30 - Intro of who Thiel is
  • 1:40 - Thiel: My main idea is that there are going to be two main drivers of progress in the 21st century: globalization (copying things that work) and technological development. The west isn't creating new technology as rapidly as they should be.
  • 4:00 - Standing still isn't an option for the west.
  • 5:00 - Once we stop having growth, our democratic system starts to get very polarized. Democracy works better when everyone can agree 
  • 5:30 - Robinson: Zero-to-One is a how-to guide, but you also throw in lots of ideas that go against the consensus in Silicon Valley.
  • 7:17 - Quote from the book to prompt discussion: "Competitive markets destroy profits."
  • 8:00 - Paraphrasing of an idea: "There are only two kinds of businesses: monopolies, and those that never make any money." Thiel: "I think this is the fundamental difference in business."
    • 9:10 - Robinson brings up a counterexample: Ford had periods of profitability and unprofitability over its lifetime. So did they periodically have monopolies?
      • Thiel responds by saying that Ford did have a monopoly over their process at the beginning, but lately they've been reduced to a brand-monopoly, which is a weak form of monopoly.
    • 11:40 - R: How do you think through the question of brand when you're investing?
  • 12:20 - Conventional SV wisdom is to focus on the product; in the book, you say sales are as important as the product.
    • Thiel: There's just a general bias for people to overvalue what they're good at and undervalue what they're not good at. And SV is full of engineers.
  • 14:20 - Another piece of conventional wisdom is that planning isn't necessary; you say, "A bad plan is better than no plan."
    • Thiel: If your starting point is, "We have no idea what we're doing, we're going to figure it out as we go along", that's a very bad idea.
    • 15:27 - A good business plan is quite a bit more rare than talented people, so it's quite valuable when it comes along.
    • 15:30 - R: Do you apply this advice to your personal life? Did you have a 5-year plan when you were coming out of law school?
      • Thiel: Actually, no, I didn't, and that would be one of the piece of advice I would give to my younger self: plan a lot more. My bias was to not think about them; I treated education as a substitute for thinking about my future.
  • 17:10 - Another quote: In the late 60s people anticipated a four-day workweek, cheap (free) energy, and vacations on the moon. None of that has happened. Only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury. (...) And one of the reasons for that is that the world of atoms is a lot more heavily regulated.
  • 20:30 - R: Gives a quote by Larry Summers about how we may see slow growth going forward. Thiel agrees but says the solution isn't to print money (as Summers would suggest) but instead to fix the regulations that are making it hard for people to create new things.
  • 22:20 -  ~~ Education ~~
  • 22:20 - R: You've said we're in an education bubble. But people from all over the world are trying to get into these schools. Explain that.
    • Thiel: It's a parasitic system; it's like a very expensive IQ test.
  • 25:30 - R: So if it's a bubble, how will it pop?
    • Thiel: I think we'll see more choices. "There's not any formula; people will have to figure out how to save themselves."
  • 27:00 - R: Would you tell your 18-year-old self not to go to Stanford?
    • Thiel: It would be, "Why are you going? Value substance more than status. Are you doing it for the prestige? For the status? Or are you doing it because there are a lot of important things that you want to learn?"
    • My response: One thing I've learned is that, at least at the most-elite levels, money can
  • 27:50 - R: What form will the alternatives take? MOOCs?
    • Thiel: I think it'll be many different things.
  • 28:20 - R: To what extent is the policy of the federal government supporting the education bubble?
    • It's making it easy for people to get these loans and impossible to get out of them.
  • 28:50 - R: (Quote from the book about how the government isn't as competent as it used to be) - Why isn't the government as competent as it used to be?
    • Thiel: Redistributionist / utilitarian thinking dominates. The government is preferring to give everyone in the country a little more money for Medicare rather than invest that money into a big research project. Discretionary spending is going down and nondiscretionary spending is going up. They can't imagine what to do with the money.
  • 30:50 - R: Does imagining a different future require huge government sums?
    • I think the progress is going to come from start-ups. The media (eg movies) portrays technology as something to fear. So in that world, you're not going to get broad political support for doing something very different.
  • 32:40 - R: George Gilder said we could fix these problems very quickly if we fixed the taxes and the regulation. Do you agree?
    • Thiel: Thought experiments are always dangerous because you get into very speculative territory. I do think there are political things that would be better or worse, but I don't think we should wait for this.
  • 34:15 - R: So you don't think that people should just turn their back on the US system.
  • 35:35 - R: NY vs. SV?
    • Thiel: Long SV, short NY.
  • 37:35 - R: (He gives a quote about how AI may come to surpass humans.) In your book you don't seem worried about this.
    • Thiel: I think strong AI is still very far away.
    • R: So Kurzweil is wrong?
      • Thiel: I think it's a mistake to think that the future is inevitable, where it doesn't matter what you do.
  • 40:40 - R: Why bother trying to go from zero to one? You're not suggesting that we just try to acquire more gadgets / material objects, smarter devices for the sake of smarter devices, right?
    • T: I don't believe technology is an absolute good, but I think it's necessary to get to a better world.
  • 42:30 - R: You seem to be saying two different things: 1) you should try to go from zero to one because it's part of a good life, and 2) we need to go from zero to one to get out of the problems we're facing.
    • T: I don't see a contradiction.
  • 43:40 - R: How does 'happiness' factor into the zero-to-one plan of action?
    • T: I prefer talking about 'meaning' to 'happiness'. You don't want to just be a cog in a machine: 'but for me, this important thing would not get done'. That tends to be extremely meaningful.
• 2015.01.27 - The Independent Institute - Peter Thiel | Developing the Developed World: Entrepreneurship, Liberty, and the Future
  • 4:40 - 7:50 - Bio of Peter Thiel
  • 8:00 - "One of the challenges in writing a book about entrepreneurship or teaching a class on this is that there is sort of no formula. I think science always starts with the number '2'. It starts with experiments you can repeat, things you can do over and over again. But there's sort of a sense that every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be starting a social networking company; the next Larry Page will not start a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be starting an operating system. And so if you're trying to copy these people, you're in some sense not learning from them. And so I think one of the really big challenges in teaching or writing about entrepreneurship is, what can you say about being an entrepreneur at all when the key thing is always to do something new, different, that's not precisely been done before?"
  • 9:00 - He gives a good quote about his famous interview question.
  • 12:00 - He says he was once talked into trying to create a restaurant in San Francisco.
  • 12:45 - The monopoly issue isn't well understood because no company wants to talk about it. If you have a monopoly you don't want to talk about it (eg Google). 
    • 14:10 - The people who are in really competitive environments say that they will have a monopoly?
  • 14:50 - All happy companies are different because they found something unique to do, whereas all unhappy companies are alike because they're all doing the same thing.
  • 16:20 - He talks about how incredibly tracked his life was before he went into entrepreneurship.
  • 17:30 - People's identities were so wrapped up in their situation that they 
  • 18:10 - What does it mean for society that people who don't have Asperger's get talked out of their ideas?
  • 18:50 - He gives some anecdote about how Harvard MBAs tend to all end up gravitating to the same industry.
  • 19:55 - We find competition validating but it's counterproductive.
  • 20:50 - One of the questions he gets asked is, "What are the trends you're aware of?"
    • The general answer is, "All trends are overrated." (he seems to be referring to fads)
    • And the reason these "trends" or "fads" tend to be bad is that the very fact they're referred to as a trend is a sign of lots of companies going after the same opportunity, which indicates lots of competition.
  • 23:00 - He seems to say Google and Facebook were misclassified.
    • 24:26 - The big breakthrough was having your real identity on the Internet, and Facebook was the first company to break through that barrier.
  • 25:00 - You want to start with small markets and take that market first.
    • 25:33 - They got to 35% market share in the first 3 months.
    • 25:50 - Facebook got 60% market share in the first 10 days.
  • 26:00 - He talks about the clean tech companies.
    • 26:30 - One of the mistakes they made was to go after the entire market at once (?)
  • 27:30 - He thinks we need to have technology improve alongside globalization
    • He thinks the problem is the amount of regulation.
    • He thinks another problem is a general attitude of fear of new technology.
    • 30:50 - He uses the example of there not being a movie created in the past 25 years with a positive view of the future.
  • 33:20 - Switch to Q&A
  • 33:35 - Q: Let's hear about your failures.
    • A: It's not that clear how much people can learn from failure. (This is worth transcribing.)
    • 35:20 - He talks about how lots of people at PayPal learned that it's hard, but possible, to succeed. Whereas if you end up at a company that fails, you end up giving up. If you learn the lesson that it's easy, that's also not good. (This is worth transcribing.)
  • 36:40: Q: What companies do you think are worth betting on? What advice would you give an entrepreneur to help them unlock secrets?
    • Investing in most companies in the stock market, you're betting against technology, because these companies are not innovating.
    • (He doesn't address the second question.)
  • 38:50 - Q: What's something that you think is right that most people don't agree with you on?
    • He already gave a bunch of examples.
    • There is an imitation aspect to human nature that makes it difficult to be original.
    • "I don't think there's a formula." (This is worth transcribing.)
    • "Having some sense of mission is very valuable." 
    • He makes a very interesting point about how social entrepreneurship allows
  • 42:20 - Q: What's your opinion on Bitcoin?
    • (This is worth transcribing.)
    • Bitcoin created a new currency but they need to work on the payment system.
  • 43:30 - Q: What will happen when the education system blows up?
    • (This is worth transcribing.)
    • Bubbles always involve an abstraction. For example, education is not seen solely as an investment.
    • Education is a combination of an insurance policy with a zero-sum tournament.
    • [NW: I see it as a loan of credibility. It serves to account for the fact that we don't yet have a good global reputation system. In a village everyone would know how competent you are.]
    • The university is some kind of atheist church.
    • I don't think it will be replaced with a single alternate system.
  • 48:20 - Q: Is California a monopoly?
    • A: Yes.
    • The scary thing is that the regulators can go very, very far, and 
  • 51:00 - Q: What about your upbringing made you think differently?
    • A: Having different political opinions gives you practice being apart from the rest of society.

2015.03.31 - George Mason Uni - The Future of Innovation (Talk)

2015.06.25 - Aspen Ideas Festival - Interview with Thiel

13:10 - "I'm always a little nervous about people who say, 'I want to be an entrepreneur'."
13:20 - "Ideally you start a business because there's a very important problem..." I disagree. The biographies of lots of successful businessmen show that you can be motivated by money and still do a phenomenal job.

15:50 - He says you don't want to have your presentation present you as a tiny minnow in a vast market.

16:30 - He talks about the trouble with solar tech, where each year you'll see a different company come along with something ~10-15% better. It makes it hard to grab the market.

17 - Can you do something where you can get enough of a breakthrough and are able to maintain that lead?

17:30 - Education software is overrated

18:00 - buzzwords are a tell that you're BSing

18:40 - Interviewer starts to talk about aging

19:20 - "That's the wrong way to think about the future. The future is not this thing that's out there and set in stone.

2015.07 - Inc - How Peter Thiel Is Trying to Save the World

• They had resigned themselves to returning to Pittsburgh, where they had wrangled some angel funding and lab space. But before leaving town, they played their last card. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin was the former boss of Frezza's older brother, who died in 2001 of complications from type 1 diabetes. Levchin spoke at the funeral and over the years had become an informal mentor to Frezza. After Frezza called him with his and Kleinbaum's plans, Levchin offered them seed money, and something even more valuable--an invitation to connect with his PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, one of the few VCs, according to Levchin, prepared to "make extreme bets on stuff that sounds right out of a science-fiction novel."

• Halcyon Molecular set out to cure all diseases for under $100 a pop by decoding the entire human genome. However, Founders Fund soon learned there was such a thing as an overly ambitious biotech bet, a $10 million lesson that would shape the firm's investment strategy. In 2012, a U.K.-based competitor claimed to have solved the problem Halcyon was still working to crack, so the founders abruptly shut down their company (though they later found out the claim was premature). In retrospect, Thiel realized that setting out to solve every medical problem was a red flag for biotech startups. "You want to avoid things that feel too much like a Rube Goldberg, where you have to get a vast number of things to work," says Thiel.

2015.07.07 - Inc - Peter Thiel Wants You to Get Angry About Death

he believes companies like Emerald Therapeutics and Immusoft will be huge businesses

• 2016.09.06 - WashPo - Peter Thiel: Trump has taught us this year’s most important political lesson
  • For the Republican Party to be a credible alternative to the Democrats’ enabling, it must stand for effective government, not for giving up on government. I believe that effective government will require less bureaucracy and less rulemaking; we may need to have fewer public servants, and we might need to pay some of them more. At a minimum, we should recognize that success cannot be reduced to the overall size of the budget: Spending money and solving problems are not the same thing. When Americans lived in an engineering age rather than a financial one, they mastered far bigger tasks for far less money. We can’t go back in time, but we can recover the common sense that guided our grandparents who accomplished so much. One elementary principle is accountability: We can’t expect the government to get the job done until voters can say both to incompetent transit workers and to the incompetent elites who feel entitled to govern: “You’re fired.”
• 2016.10.10 - Roosevelt University - American Dream Reconsidered 2016: A Conversation with Peter Thiel
  • 00:00 - First guy starts giving an intro.
    • 2:00 - The American dream is a marathon, passed from generation to generation.
    • 2:40 - The American dream is when everyone can reach their maximum potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
  • 3:00 - The interviewer introduces Thiel.
    • The interviewer met him twice at two conferences / lecture-things.
  • 3:50 - We're going to talk about globalization, technology, and progress.
  • 4:00 - Let's start with globalization. It originally meant one thing and then switched to a different meaning.
  • 4:45 - What do you mean when you talk about 'globalization'?
  • Thiel gives the idea from his book about zero-to-one vs. 1-to-N. "Globalization is copying things that work." [NW: That is such a weird definition of globalization...]
  • 7:00 - Progress involves advancing these things, but I'm not utopian about these things. There are forms of technology and globalization that can be bad.
  • 9:00 - People are now starting to ask if globalization is as good as it seemed a few decades ago.
  • 10:00 - Q: Can you talk about the things you saw in Japan, where people had adopted western culture(?)
  • 12:20 - Thiel: I've noticed a trend AWAY from Western habits; no one plays golf anymore. They aren't interested in copying us anymore. And so the critical question is: Does this mean that we aren't worthy of being emulated anymore? Do we have problems in our society / culture that are holding us back?
  • 13:50 - The interviewer relates his own memory of that, where in the past Japanese would come and buy books on western culture in bulk, and they don't do that anymore.
  • 15:10 - Q: People used to talk about Japan overtaking the US, and that didn't happen. People are now talking about China and India; do you think it'll happen?
  • A: Well, China and India are much bigger than Japan.
  • 17:50 - You don't always have technological progress and globalization at the same time. [He then goes through different time periods.]
  • ~19:00 - He talks about how there are only a narrow range of fields that are seeing progress nowadays, whereas in the past there was progress happening along a number of different dimensions.
  • 22:10 - He brings up his idea that the term "the developed world" seems to suggest that no more progress is to be made.
  • (I stopped here.)

• 2016.10.31 - National Press Club - Peter Thiel speaks at The National Press Club

  • Takeaway: I agree with some of the ideas he expressed, and I very much like that he's pushing the government to be more effective. On the other hand, I wasn't impressed with some of his arguments / presentation; I didn't feel like he had explored the argument-space (?) as much as he could have, and so there were times when he would dodge or not answer basic questions, which I thought looked bad (although many people may not notice). IMO the most impressive arguments are when someone takes an unusual position that you disagree with and turns out to have explored the area so well that they will already anticipate all of your objections, will explain your arguments in a way that you agree with, and then point out various assumptions that you hadn't paid attention to or facts you were unaware of that make your position not as strong as you initially thought. I feel like I've heard much-more-persuasive arguments when I was in the debate club. It reminded me of Elon Musk's product-unveils, where his focus seems to be on getting stuff done and out in the public view rather than forever-refining it. I've definitely had it happen to me where I'll put something out which I think sucks, just because I'm procrastinating about working on it and I just want it done with.

  • 
    

     Click here to expand...

    0:00 - 2:30 - Generic intro from the interviewer
    3:30 - Baby boomers have less than a year's worth of savings.
    4:00 - Health bills are 10x other countries
    4:40 - Education costs are skyrocketing
    5:25 -
    5:40 - Government is wasting taxpayer money, incl. to fight wars.
    6:40 - Both major candidates are imperfect. Donald's comments were unacceptable.
    7:15 - People are voting for Trump because they see that the status quo government has failed.
    7:50 - Loud voices have said Trump's
    8:04 - "The Advocate" has said Thiel is not a gay man.
    8:40 - Trump gets some big things right.
    - Free trade has not worked well for all of America.
    9:30 - The trade deficit shows things are going wrong. The US is importing more than $500 billion every year.
    10:15 - Americans are voting for Trump because they're tired of war.
    - He describes Iraq as being in a state of "chaos". A bit of an exaggeration...
    10:40 - The Dems are more hawkish today than any period since Vietnam.
    11:00 - Calling for a no-fly zone over Syria is more reckless than invading Iraq. Since most of the planes over Syria are Russian, it would risk a nuclear conflict. [This seems very far-fetched.]
    12:00 - He talks about how denying painful realities are how bubbles are formed, and that baby boomers have been subject to bubbles over and over. Very...antagonistic.
    12:30-13:10 - He talks about how the establishment wanted it to be an election between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. He uses the '90s stock bubble and the '00s real estate bubble to draw attention to how long the Bush/Clintons have been in power.
    13:45 - Trump has questioned the core concept of American exceptionalism.
    16:00 - Wrap-up and switch to Qs.
    16:25 - Q:
    A: I have a strong bias for outsider candidates. I don't like the more-polished candidates because it does seem like they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
    17:45 - Q: Isn't there something ot be said for voting for someone who actually knows how to get things done?
    A: We've been trying that for a while and it hasn't been working. They were asleep during the stock and housing bubbles. They've been making micro policy adjustments and letting massive bubbles inflate [NW: Doesn't seem totally fair to me, almost nobody saw those coming, including people in the private sector.]. Trump's argument that Hillary is experienced, but that it's the wrong experience, resonates with me a lot.
    18:50 - Q: Has your support of Trump affected your professional relationships?
    A: Friend
    19:10 - Q: Are there people in SV in the closet about supporting Trump?
    A: Yes, not a lot, but a small number.
    19:40 - Q: What have you learned about SV's appetite for political difference?
    A: It's more polarized than I realized. I didn't think it would be such a visceral reaction. It's suprising to me that it's beyond-the-pale to support Trump.
    20:55 - Q: Have your companies suffered any blowback?
    A: I don't think so. That would be even crazier. [NW: IDK, in war, anything goes.]
    21:45 - Q: Do you think SV understands America? Why the disconnect?
    A: SV has been extremely successful. And the people in SV want to tell the story that their personal success is linked to improvement for everyone in the country. But that's just often not true.
    23:20 - Q: How do you think the disconnect between SV and the rest of the country affects the products that get created in SV?
    A: [NW: He doesn't really answer the question; not from trying to dodge it, but just from going off-topic.] SV is very-much based in the world of bits. The rest of the country is based more in the world of atoms.
    25:25 - Q: Was the timing of your donation related to the Access Hollywood tape?
    A: No, I think the tape was in extremely poor taste. I didn't think as much about the donation as I should have. I didn't think money made much of a difference in this election. [NW: I'm getting a vibe from his answer that he did it to be provocative, didn't realize how controversial it would be, and doesn't want to admit it.]
    26:50 - Q: Are you concerned about what Trump's behavior says to younger Americans? IE setting a bad precedent.
    A: I think the sexual comments are being policed adequately [he seems to briefly allude to the Trump argument that 'that was years ago', which I never found convincing]. He says he's more concerned about behavior likely to lead to war, like behavior towards Russia. "I don't think Hillary has accused Trump of being overly-hostile to Putin." [NW: Hmm...he doesn't seem to see Russia as a threat. That seems odd to me, given that there's a lot of info on Wikipedia about all the shenanigans the Russian government has partaked in wrt their own constituents, their neighbors, etc.]
    28:10 - Q: Are you concerned about Trump's temperament wrt the nuclear codes?
    A: Hillary's policy is much more confrontational than Trump's.
    28:40 - Q: What about Trump's behavior towards other countries, like North Korea?
    A: I think NK is more of China's problem. I think China will keep them in line. [NW: IMO he doesn't address the central issue, which is that Trump HAS used provocative rhetoric towards other countries.]
    29:15 - Q: How would you rank Trump's economic plan against Hillary's?
    A: It rejects the bubble way of thinking. [NW: He seems to dodge the specifics of the question, ie he doesn't know the details of either plan.] Temperamentally, Trump's anti-regulation should help small businesses.
    31:25 - Q: Do Trump's bankruptcies worry you?
    A: I think he's been a successful businessman, I thin he's been a very successful real estate developer. [NW: ???] I think Trump's record is par for the course in the industry he was in. [NW: I'm not so sure about that.]
    - I think people are subject to too much of the wrong type of scrutiny when running for office, and it's one of the reasons we don't have more talented people running for office.
    33:13 - Q: You do believe the vetting process should be thorough, right?
    A: We have a less-talented group of people running today than we did 40 years ago. It's not clear that someone like JFK would be electable today.
    33:45 - Q: Has Trump given you private assurances about not rolling back LGBTQ rights?
    A: I haven't talked to him about that topic, but I think Trump's campaigning has indicated that he'd be much more progressive than previous Republican candidates.
    34:28 - Q: Do you support Trump's 'ban Muslims' proposal?
    A: I think the media is taking Trump literally, whereas Trump's supporters are not necessarily relying on that. [NW: I'm not sure about that.] I would like an immigration policy like Canada and Australia.
    36:15 - Q: Do you think you've set a dangerous precedent with the Gawker lawsuit?
    A: I don't think so. Let's look at the facts of the case. [He goes into details.] I think calling their behavior journalism is an insult to journalists.
    38:30 - Q: Do you think what happened to Gawker could happen to more-reasonable journalists?
    A: I think rich people shouldn't do that, and if they try I think they won't succeed. We were very careful to pick a case where the issue was over privacy and not libel.
    40:10 - Q: How'd you get connected with Hogan's lawyer, and why you did it secretly.
    A: I got involved over a number of years.
    - He brings up the point again about how Gawker was going after people they knew couldn't fight back.
    - I did it secretly because I wanted the focus to be on the facts of the case and not have Gawker hijack the narrative.
    - I don't like that we have these flash-mobs on the Internet that get targeted at very-specific individuals.
    - Some of the people who encouraged me were other people in the media, because they knew that Gawker was going after journalists.
    42:40 - Q: When did you set this in motion?
    A: It was around when the lawyer got involved with Hogan, so ~4-5 years ago. Around 2011 a friend convinced me that if no one stood up to Gawker, they'd continue to get away with their behavior.
    44:40 - Q: Trump has talked about changing the libel laws so he can sue journalists he doesn't like. What do you think about that?
    A: I don't think the libel laws need to be changed.
    45:50 - Q: The Hogan lawyer is now taking on other cases; he's becoming the go-to lawyer. What's your opinion on that?
    A: I think what actually matters in litigation is the end-game. Personally I wouldn't bring many of these cases because I don't think they'll win.
    47:30 - Q: What do you think are the problems with the news media? What would you do to fix them?
    A: A lot of the business models that the media has are not working as well as they used to. I'm not sure how to fix that. The newspapers were incredibly powerful monopolies a few decades ago, and the Internet eroded that.
    49:30 - Q: Do you think it's the responsibility of rich people to fund good journalism?
    A: I wouldn't want to compete with Jeff Bezos, ever. I think he's the toughest person in the world to compete with right now. I think it's possible that journalism will become more nonprofit-oriented, but I'm not sure that's the best thing for the industry.
    50:50 - Q: What do you think are the greatest threats to freedom today, and what do you think can increase people's individual freedoms?
    A: The ideological answer is always "the government". I'd like our focus to be on bringing our country in-line with other developed countries on things like the prison system, healthcare, etc.
    52:20 - Q: How does America fix the broken-government problems you brought up in your RNC speech?
    A: My ideal answer would be a smaller government that does more with less.
    - Libertarian thinking was super-super fringe in the '50s because back then people thought
    55:39 - Q: What's your future in politics?
    A: I think my future is going to be in the tech industry; that's what I enjoy, that's what I'm good at. I occasionally get involved in politics, but I don't want to make it a full-time thing.

• 2017.01.11 - NYT - Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself

  • Talking about how the Billy Bush tape was not so shocking if you’ve worked on the Wall Street trading floor, Mr. Thiel says: “On the one hand, the tape was clearly offensive and inappropriate. At the same time, I worry there’s a part of Silicon Valley that is hyper-politically correct about sex. One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex. They’re not having that much fun.”

  • When I ask him if he can explain to Mr. Trump that climate change is not a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, he offers a Chinese box of an answer: “Does he really think that? If he really thinks that, how would you influence that? If he really thinks that and you could influence him, what would be the best way to do it?”

  • He recalls that he went through a lot of “meta” debates about Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley. “One of my good friends said, ‘Peter, do you realize how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?’ I was like: ‘Well, why am I wrong? What’s substantively wrong with this?’ And it all got referred back to ‘Everybody thinks Trump’s really crazy.’ So it’s like there’s a shortcut, which is: ‘I don’t need to explain it. It’s good enough that everybody thinks something. If everybody thinks this is crazy, I don’t even have to explain to you why it’s crazy. You should just change your mind.’”

    • NW: My impression is that the real answer is that this election was something of a civil war between different interest groups in the US, and by supporting Trump Thiel was making himself an enemy to the other side.

  • Over a four-hour dinner of duck and chocolate dessert — a surprisingly sybaritic meal for a man who admits he is prone to weird diets — Mr. Thiel shows, again and again, how he likes to “flip around” issues to see if conventional wisdom is wrong, a technique he calls Pyrrhonian skepticism.
    “Maybe I do always have this background program running where I’m trying to think of, ‘O.K., what’s the opposite of what you’re saying?’ and then I’ll try that,” he says. “It works surprisingly often.” He has even wondered if his most famous investment, Facebook, contributes to herd mentality.

  • He says that at the tech meeting, Mr. Trump showed “a phenomenal understanding of people. He’s very charismatic, but it’s because he sort of knows exactly what to say to different people to put them at ease.”

  • I ask him if Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are similar.
    “I’m going to get in trouble, but they are, actually. They’re both grandmaster-level salespeople and these very much larger-than-life figures.”
    He 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.”

• 2017.01.11 - NYT - Confirm or Deny: Peter Thiel

  • Maureen Dowd: California should secede.
    Peter Thiel: Confirm. I’d be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.

  • We should create a GPS-style algorithm to tell employees what to do at any given moment, like Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, is doing, according to The Wall Street Journal.
    Deny. That’s always the place where everyone’s overpaid and superunhappy. That algorithm doesn’t seem like a formula for happiness.

  • As Jeff Bezos said of you in October, contrarians are usually wrong.
    Deny.

  • Zuckerberg did not have a great pitch.
    Confirm. He was 19 years old. He was totally introverted, didn’t say much. You desperately need a good pitch when you have a bad company. When you have a great company, you don’t need a great pitch.

  • There’s no job you would take in the Trump administration.
    Confirm. I want to stay involved in Silicon Valley and help Mr. Trump as I can without a full-time position.

  • You do weird diets.
    Confirm — on Paleo diet.

  • You think the stock market is a giant bubble right now.
    Confirm.

  • You’re addicted to online chess.
    Confirm. I delete it and download it a few times a year. I have it right now.

• 2017.11 - Masters of Scale - Interview with Peter Thiel
  • TODO: Summarize the advice in this.
  • Mostly-accurate transcript
    • There's actually a section in the transcript that isn't in the audio:
      • HOFFMAN:​ ​Now​ ​as​ ​an​ ​investor,​ ​if​ ​a​ ​founder​ ​told​ ​me​ ​they​ ​acquired​ ​users​ ​at​ ​$20​ ​a​ ​person,​ ​I’d ask​ ​some​ ​tough​ ​questions.​ ​A​ ​critical​ ​objective​ ​of​ ​a​ ​rapidly​ ​scaling​ ​business​ ​is​ ​to​ ​shrink​ ​the​ ​cost per​ ​user.​ ​You​ ​don’t​ ​want​ ​costs​ ​and​ ​revenue​ ​to​ ​rise​ ​together,​ ​and​ ​certainly​ ​not​ ​exponentially. That​ ​pushes​ ​your​ ​payday​ ​—​ ​that​ ​first​ ​prize​ ​Cadillac​ ​dealership​ ​—​ ​far,​ ​far​ ​into​ ​the​ ​future.​ ​Just how​ ​far​ ​off​ ​was​ ​PayPal’s​ ​payday?​ ​Once​ ​again,​ ​Peter​ ​crunched​ ​the​ ​numbers.
        
        THIEL: You know one of the other calculations I did at Pay-Pal in March of 2001, we'd been business for 27 months of that time, was you do a discounted cash flow analysis. And it turns out you know all sorts of crazy different valuations you get to for the company. But the basic thing was the key variable was the terminal value. 80 percent of the value came from cash flows a decade or more in the future in 2011 and beyond. That's like, how in the world do you think about that?
• 2017.10 - Peter Thiel interviewed by Maria Bartiromo in Saudi Arabia
  

  • 1:13 - Q: Where are you finding growth in the world today?

    • A: Within the technology space, it's been very centered on Silicon Valley. The question is where the growth is going to be in the next 10 years. I think it will be more diversified. These companies can be built anywhere. It was always very odd that all the companies were being built in the same place. The reason was network effects, knowledge, and role models, but I think at this point I would bet on places outside of Silicon Valley. One big place has been China, and I think the question is where else one might look.

  • 2:56 - Q: What industries are you finding opportunities in?

    • A: I think there are all sorts of trends. As investments they're often very dangerous. When you hear buzzwords you should run away, because it often means that the specifics have not been thought through carefully enough. What I think is to never invest in trends, and instead always invest in specific companies. What I try to do is find unique companies that are doing something that can't be done anywhere else. Whereas if you're investing in a trend, the companies will tend to be somewhat undifferentiated, and you'll be facing a lot of competitors.

  • 4:45 - Q: Can you give us some examples?

    • A: Airbnb, SpaceX, Facebook were investments I made. You could describe them as part of a trend, but that's a misleading way to describe them. It's much better to think of them as solving a very specific problem. Airbnb is a hotel-room substitute. Facebook figured out how to get people to put their real identity on the Internet. My friend Reid Hoffman started a social network seven years before Facebook, and they had people use avatars, and it turned out that people were not interested in that, they were interested in real identity. I prefer a bottom-up approach, where you meet with the entrepreneur, you think hard about the technology, the business opportunity, and it's the ones that are different, that don't fit into any categories, that are the great ones. And when we've invested in trends, it's been much more treacherous, because we're more likely to gloss over too many of the important details.

  • 7:05 - Q: What are the problems in the world that you see today that you think we can come up with solutions for?

    • A: If I already knew the answer to that I would have started the company. There are a lot of problems that I find myself very passionate about. One area we've done in a fair bit in is biotech investing. Could we really do things to cure cancer, alzheimer's, and other diseases? It's a challenging area to invest in. The lack of progress that we've seen hasn't been because of some law of nature, it's been because we haven't been trying the right way, we haven't been funding the right scientists.

  • 8:20 - Q: What is technology doing to enable longevity and to move the needle on biotech?

    • A: It's always a very specific story. We had one company where they developed a way to target a particular type of cancer, and they got bought for $6-10 billion. What motivates the great entrepreneurs is to be working on an important problem that won't otherwise get solved.

  • 10:05 - Q: His Highness (the king of Saudi Arabia) is working on new cities. When you have the opportunity to "start from scratch" like that, what technologies do you think will be most needed?

    • A: There's a tremendous amount that you can do when you start from scratch. One feature of many of the great old cities like New York, London, etc. is that it's very difficult to change things. In NYC it costs $1 billion to build a mile of subway. In SF you can't build new highways or things like that. What ends up happening if you have a bad transportation system, like what we see today, is that people end up needing to either deal with super-long commutes or live in tiny apartments. "And that's a challenge that I think you could rethink in a very exciting way."

  • 12:35 - Q: What's your take on what transportation will look like in the future?

    • A: I think we're going to have a bunch of different things. I'm not sure self-driving cars are a good investment because there are a bunch of companies working on the issue. The tech I wonder about is, is there a way to do an end-run around the transportation problem. The IT solution is to work from home. There have been problems that have prevented it from taking on, but I think we're starting to see it become a trend. So I think this is a trend that's not getting as much attention as it should be.

  • 15:00 - Q: Regarding AI, are robots going to be taking our jobs?

    • A: "AI" is a very vague term that can refer to many different levels of technology. If we're talking about general AI, I think the economic consequences are not as urgent as the political ones: it would be like if an alien landed on our planet. The history of technology has not been one of pure substitution, but rather more complementary: technology has freed people up to do other things. It only becomes a game of substitution at the end, when you arrive at general AI.

  • 17:10 - Q: What skillsets do people need to thrive in this new world?

    • A: It's good to start with things where you're not competing directly with computers. I think one thing that we should definitely *not* do is tell people that if they have a college degree, everything will be fine.

  • 18:05 - Q: But I feel like I'm competing with a computer on everything! Are you talking about emotional skillsets?

  • 18:35 - Q: You've done a lot of work on cybersecurity. What can we do to protect ourselves?

    • A: There's a lot we can do in combining computers with humans. A lot of the existing solutions are either all-computer or all-human, and I think there's a lot to be done with intermediate solutions. And a lot of what we did at PayPal and Palantir was to get the division of labor right between computers and humans.

  • 20:30 - Q: Are the bad actors an obvious group? Where are they?

    • A: I don't think it's an obvious group. One of the challenges with cybersecurity is that it's very asymmetric. In cybersecurity it's very hard to defend, and very easy to attack.

  • 22:00 - Q: What excites you right now?

    • A: I'm always nervous about being excited about things, because it feels too "irrationally exhuberant" and too emotional. I do think there are pockets in biotech, and I do suspect people may be underestimating bitcoin a little. If Bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold, that's a great potential.

  • 23:40 - Q: People question Bitcoin because it seems to not be based on.

    • A: It's based on the math, so that it can never be diluted by the government.

  • 24:50 - Maria: And it's anonymous.

    • A: It's half-anonymous, there's some question about how true that is.

• 2018.09.12 - The Rubin Report - Peter Thiel on Trump, Gawker, and Leaving Silicon Valley (Full Interview)
  • Peter directly contradicts himself within the span of a few minutes:
    • 1:32:45 - Thiel says Gawker was trying to silence people with heterodox views, and he suspects that was part of the motivation for why they went after him.
    • 1:36:56 - Thiel says it wasn't a factor