Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’ (opens in new tab)

> but his love for secrets make him dangerous

I understood the part about "secrets" differently. I read Thiel's book about entrepreneurial mindset, Zero to One, a few years ago and found it valuable. As a long-time serial entrepreneur myself (initially unsuccessful and eventually quite successful), Thiel clearly understands the complex dynamics deeply and offers actionable insights. One of the things Thiel touches on is how entrepreneurs are often contrarians trying to identify the occasional exceptions where mainstream thinking got something important wrong.

Paul Graham also talks about this, observing that entrepreneurs aren't just looking for "good ideas", they are looking for "good ideas most people are wrong about". This is necessary because if most people hadn't missed something then the "good idea" would already be a hotly contested mature market with deep-pocketed big players slugging it out for dominance. Pretty much by definition, a high-growth start-up must believe they've identified some aspect of the opportunity other smart people missed. The start-up might be wrong but when they are correct it can be both disruptive and transformative.

This is the context in which I read the discussion of "secrets"

> people like him do more harm than good to the world because they're very bad at the whole "don't tear a fence down until you know why it was put up" thing.

Quite wrong. The article mentions that Thiel is anti-consensus - to him, 100% agreement with no real space for debate (on an issue with any amount of inherent complexity) is inherently fishy. This means that trying to figure out why the fence might be there is an especially worthwhile "search for secrets". And once you've done that work, you might end up tearing that fence down after all - or perhaps not.

Maybe this is petty, but any time the word "learnings" appears, my brain goes "this will be Business Blather, nothing of value will be said here, feel free to turn me off"

Completely off Topic:

The video player is very nice. Instead of mbps bit rate we use in video encoding which most users dont have a clue. They are showing MB / Min. So the user know how much data the could be using when switching quality. I wish more player do they same. ( But leave an advance mode to show mbps for us nerds )

I remember the Long Now Foundation did something like this, where people staked money on long term predictions (with the proceeds from said wagers going to charities): https://longbets.org/

I’d say profiting off those ideas would probably be a better test (which seems to be what Thiel focuses on i.e profitable secrets). Also, he has many failed investments too so it’s not like his status comes from predicting more wins

> Around that time, an anthropologist who had recently returned from Chinese refugee camps saw how people would sacrifice half their disposable income just to own an iPhone.

Wait, what Chinese refugee camp? Where? From what war? China hasn't had a mass displacement event since well before the iPhone came out.

The reason I'm harping on this is because the author is committing the exact same sin they're accusing the McKinsey consultants of, a lack of cultural competence and curiosity that would rather have them substitute their stereotyped and prejudiced image of people rather than actual lived experience.

>It doesn't discuss anything else and offers nothing except banalities about the Bible, Jesus (speaking in Parables) and Rene (sic) Girard, a French author who was ridiculed in France for his obsessions and circular thinking, but enjoyed some kind of cult following in the US, apparently.

Girard was never ridiculed in France (at least, not any more than any other who became a target at this or that point). He remains a very respected figure, and his theories are very deep. That said, they're not suitable for consumption by analytical philosophy types.

Thiel, however, has only ever said trivialities regarding Girard and his theories, that reveal a very shallow understanding (if that), something analogous to "As Einstein said, everything is relative".

Many years ago I was traveling with an Ericsson executive who knew exactly the opposite: Mobile networks and phones were how the developing world would connect to the internet's resources. I'm certain Nokia's leadership knew exactly the same thing. I am familiar enough with Nokia's early smartphones to know they held nothing back, even though, at the time, Series 40 was the mass-market device, Series 60, was high-end. Series 60 ran Symbian, a true smartphone OS with an app runtime, 3rd party SDK, and an app store. Even higher-end Nokia smartphones ran Maemo, a Linux-based smartphone OS that roughly resembled Android.

Nokia failed at smartphones because they were forced to abandon Maemo and Symbian in favor of Microsoft's under-baked smartphone OS and the generally disastrous "leadership" of Stephen Elop, and subsequently being bought by Microsoft to continue to try to make Windows Phone happen at the expense of everything that succeeded at Nokia.

>The second sentence of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading.

I was confused by what you meant until I realized you were referring to the third sentence, not the second sentence. [Insert sentence here warding off replies about irony.]

> McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive

Just goes to show what all those fancy consultancies are worth. Same applies to Gartner and their "predictions".

When are people finally going to stop for the scam of the big five brands?

Girard was a Stanford professor. His Uncommon Knowledge episode from the Hoover Institution is quite interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk

I do agree though, the article is pretty lame.

Girard was also elected to the Académie Française…

The irony of writing problems from an article that concludes by offering writing advice!

A neat follow up article would be "I was so excited about my dinner with Pete, it overwhelmed my ability to write about it and here's what I learned about myself and my needs"

I’m furiously speculating that in person pre-college public American education was mostly bad and this badness just carried over to remote education, but for whatever reason the badness is more apparent when conducted remotely.

> Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?

Yes? Thiel is one of the major pusher / backer of “dark enlightenment” type theories and efforts. Neo-feudalism is his goal, or at least one if his goals.

What are examples of wanting different rules? I didn't see it in the article

If I had a couple billion dollars Id probably think I was better than the vast majority of people. Lets be honest though the vast majority of people are morons, I cite the last two years as evidence. Its not hard to be better than that.