Peter Thiel
The companies, the lawsuit- what is your view?
Thiel-on science, dogma, scepticism and the need for balance and why the NSA is so corrupt
https://x.com/alexandrosM/status/1857225816964522221
“it’s so much fresher”
who was CEO at Paypal- on education:
From here 1.09 on universities
1.41 It’s a different question at a certain tuition level.
$1.3 tr of student debt
2000 $300 bn
2.15 Is the education worth it?
3.00 What kind of a good is education?
Investment, consumption good, tournament, insurance product- scared of falling through the cracks
Invest or consume?
Underlying question- why have the cracks got so big?
A tournament- elite driven by exclusion
Pres- get lynched, students, professors, alumni, triple enrolllment
Value comes from exclusion
Studio 5 nightclub
Superpose those 2
Also- what about networking? see University of Illinois and Youtube
or:
from ACX
26: Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend, historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.
paying students to not go to university
from the famous Stanford lectures which became “Zero to One”.
Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:50 - Outline 00:00:57 - Capturing value 00:01:57 - Big piece of a small pie 00:03:37 - Perfect competition 00:04:31 - Monopoly 00:05:33 - Lies people tell 00:05:36 - Differences underestimated 00:06:59 - Narratives 00:07:54 - British food in Palo Alto 00:08:40 - Do the intersections make money? 00:08:45 - Blockbuster movie 00:09:29 - Is the intersection valuable? 00:09:35 - Startup version 00:10:11 - The search market 00:11:00 - The advertising market 00:11:29 - The technology market 00:12:36 - Evidence of narrow markets 00:13:28 - How to build a monopoly 00:13:39 - The right size 00:14:36 - Start small and expand 00:17:05 - Start big and shrink 00:18:40 - Last mover advantage 00:18:45 - Characteristics of monopoly 00:27:10 - Value of the future 00:27:55 - History of innovation 00:28:28 - Technological innovation 00:30:16 - Capturing value 00:31:59 - Success cases 00:37:03 - Psychology of competition 00:38:14 - Mimetic preferences 00:38:33 - Competition as validation 00:42:22 - Q&A 00:42:26 - Q1 00:43:01 - Q2 00:43:38 - Q3 00:44:34 - Q4 00:46:40 - Q5 00:47:55 - Q6
(more here)
Thiel on everything
on tech
Thiel on google
Thiel interview question
Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question to job candidates: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
https://qz.com/work/1485668/this-is-peter-thiels-favorite-interview-question/
he worked as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
He founded Clarium Capital, a global macrohedge fund based in San Francisco, Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Earlier, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017.
He funds nonprofit research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker.
“I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated.”
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible... 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.”
2000
Thiel libertarian
https://medium.com/equal-citizens/peter-thiels-speech-ff3c4566121#.87fhl5l6e
Whenever Peter Thiel interviews someone he likes to ask the following question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
NFT what kind of a good is an NFT?
At what point of dollars does a consumption good become an investment good?
“He had been seated next to Curtis Yarvin, founder of the Thiel-funded computing platform Urbit. As anyone who takes an unhealthy interest in the weirder recesses of the online far-right is aware, Yarvin is more widely known as the blogger Mencius Moldbug, the intellectual progenitor of Neoreaction, an antidemocratic movement that advocates for a kind of white-nationalist oligarchic neofeudalism – rule by and for a self-proclaimed cognitive elite – and which has found a small but influential constituency in Silicon Valley.”
In 2005, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, befriended Mr. Yudkowsky and gave money to MIRI. In 2010, at Mr. Thiel’s San Francisco townhouse, Mr. Yudkowsky introduced him to a pair of young researchers named Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis. That fall, with an investment from Mr. Thiel’s firm, the two created an A.I. lab called DeepMind.
In 2014, Google bought DeepMind for $650 million.
‘Peter Thiel Shows Us There’s a Difference between Gay Sex and Gay.’ The sub-banner on the 1,300-word piece by Jim Downs (an associate professor of history at Connecticut College) asked ‘When you abandon numerous aspects of queer identity, are you still LGBT?’
Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man. Because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’
Stripe
In 2007, when the brothers were coding their APIs, online payments were supposed to have been solved. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal in 1998, which was bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. The fintech ‘revolution’ that followed, however, wasn’t much of an uprising but more of a spot of portfolio diversifying by some banks that laid down the payment rails any eager startup had to ride on. The banks still verified identity and owned the account for cards.
In 2011, they approached Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
“It’s a little impetuous to go to PayPal founders and say payments on the internet are totally broken,” says John with a wry smile.
Thiel gawker https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/
The most expensive comment in internet history
Derek Thompson: On December 19, 2007, Gawker’s tech blog Valleywag published a post under the headline “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people,” ending with the sentence, “I think it's important to say this: Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. More power to him.” Based on your conversations with Thiel, why do you think he’s so mad about this blog post, if most of his friends (and their friends) knew he was gay?
Ryan Holiday: My initial instinct was that it must have been pure anger. What was strange, though, is that in speaking to Peter Thiel, I never saw the anger. Of course, sources can present a mask. But I feel like I would have seen a flicker of it.
I think what happened was this: The article comes out, and it is a rude awakening for a private person. The article was legal, but it was also tasteless and deliberately insensitive. But what Peter reacts to the most is the comment on the bottom, which was written by Denton. [The comment is one sentence long: “The only thing that’s strange about Thiel’s sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long?”] He thought Denton was implying that Peter had psychological problems.
in April 2011, he is in Berlin and he takes a dinner meeting with a then-26-year-old Thiel devotee, who you call Mr. A. This young man essentially tells Thiel, I know you’re obsessed with Gawker, and I have an idea to destroy them. He says Thiel should create a shell company to fund investigators and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker and ultimately sue it into oblivion. He estimates that the plan will take up to five years and up to $10 million in funding, which is prophetic. What struck you most about Mr. A’s story?
Holiday: I was shocked by the very existence of Mr. A, this mysterious operative who put the plan in motion. Not only does nobody but me or the conspirators know his real name, but also nobody even realized that he exists. They don’t realize there was another senior-level person involved in the plot against Gawker. That’s fascinating for a story that has been reported so extensively for so many years.
Hogan’s marriage is falling apart. A distraught Hogan is invited to go to the home of his best friend, a shock jock by the name of Bubba the Love Sponge. Bubba tells Hogan that he can have sex with his wife to cheer him up. Hogan asks if the sex will be taped. Bubba, lying, says no. Then Bubba leaves and secretly records Hogan having sex with his own wife.
In 2012, these tapes are leaked to Gawker, which publishes the video under the headline: “Even for a Minute, Watching Hulk Hogan Have Sex in a Canopy Bed is Not Safe For Work but Watch it Anyway.” Hogan is mortified and tells reporters that he’s going to sue for violation of privacy. News of this threat reaches Thiel’s legal team. They notify Hogan’s lawyers that they’re willing to bankroll a lawsuit against Gawker.
tedtalk from 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOB7nezuQ7g
freedom of thought, not “contrarian”
https://youtu.be/fDB1CsfUjys?t=671
Blake Masters notes on Thiel’s Stanford course
http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/blake-masters-start-up-notes.pdf
Thiel today https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets