Tyler/Peter Thiel

  • When evaluating people you’re looking for Zen like opposites stubborn and open minded idiosyncratic and works well together in teams

  • Looking for combinations of interesting traits

  • Japanese are finding less that they want to imitate in the US or western European culture

  • The five your boom and finance 82 to 07

  • Hindsight we will review 2007 as a peek year of globalization similar to 1913!!!

  • You want to be in places/industries that aren’t levered to globalization (TX and CA, no NY and VA/DC)

  • “You can’t benefit from the Chinese boom unless you’re a card-carrying member of the CCP, so I haven’t focused much on China”

  • Brazil is VERY insular; took a long time for FB to break in there

  • California and Germany are extremely opposite. California = extremely optimistic but desperate; Germany = pessimistic but comfortable (!!!)

  • Might be beneficial to adopt an attitude opposite of the culture you’re in (ex: mild optimism living in Germany)

  • 20,000 ppl move to LA every year trying to be actors

  • Extreme optimism and pessimism aren’t that helpful....better to adopt a milder form of either

  • The future doesn’t exist on its own...we have to create it collectively!!!!!!

  • It’s always a mistake to be too focused on prestige/status. Be long substance/short status

  • Don’t just aim for respectability. It will come at price of softening your edges

  • Substance over status, always

  • Horizontal progress easier than vertical progress

  • Science starts w number 2

  • It’s good to be passionate about something that you’re good at that other people are doing if you can line up those three things you’ve got a real shot to make something special!!!! (That’s a really good start)

  • Contrarian non-profit question = what great causes are deeply unpopular

  • Always have counter factual sense of mission

  • 1970s = decade where institutions stopped working well (ex: Nixon’s war on cancer)

  • Govt w 2/3 lawyers; 30ish people total with technical degrees

  • Must focus on substance over process

  • Prefers to focus on atoms over bits

  • Money should ideally linked back to the real in some ways (ex: equity market link rather than just fiat money)

  • National security conversations often involve this fall straight ass they are framed as do more with more or less with less

  • False dichotomy of NSA versus ACLU; real innovation would be to do more with less

  • We have a strange mix of acceptance and denial when it comes to mortality

  • Question: the free market system has done a pretty good job on the production side but not a great job on the distribution side can you make a substitution on the distribution side to improve it without impacting negatively the production side

  • Are you questions on the inequality debate is it going up why is it going up and what to do about it

  • You raise the marginal tax rate there were also be more loopholes so it might hurt the middle class more than a wealthy you have to go very very far left to get effective redistribution Venezuela is not far enough left to have affective tree distribution you have to go all the way left to Cuba

  • Stagnation issue more than inequality. Housing costs make people feel stagnation

  • Break Holy Alliance between urban slumlords and Patrick-environmentalism to solve rent issues

  • Hey I store his likely happening. Slower than we think there’s an extreme consensus around the inevitability of a guy but it will likely take longer than we think

  • Petitions and scientist are diametrically opposite side to seek the truth trouble relationship with the truth

  • Stream specialization of science has made this very esoteric scientific communities and their processes is extremely opaque and politicized; self reinforcing expert communities

  • Skeptical of people who invoke science as an incantation if sorts

  • Saying the words science is often a tell that you’re bluffing like in poker political science social science but we don’t say physical science or chemical signs they’re just physics and chemistry

  • (How happy are the super-rich) I’m not sure subjective happiness should be most important metric to evaluate things; there’s other things we can use [he often challenges the premise of questions]