by jrm4 on 2/12/22, 3:41 PM
Perfect example of a brilliant thinker who needs to be contained. It's great to begin with ways of thinking like he does; but his love for secrets make him dangerous; 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.
by magicjosh on 2/12/22, 3:49 PM
Huh I usually like Perell's stuff but this one seems a bit empty, like a cream puff without filling. The examples seem weak, for example the McKinsey story about smartphones is vague. Sure, people get things wrong, and groups certainly do. I wonder what the purpose of this piece is. Maybe there's 100 more pieces coming influenced by this dinner, this was just getting the crumbly cork out of the wine bottle.
Or maybe the secret is dinner with Pete was boring af.
by d12bb on 2/12/22, 3:59 PM
by coldtea on 2/12/22, 5:05 PM
>
Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending ‘Secrets’Because like many ultra-rich has translated his "smarts+upbringing+luck+connections+right-place-right-time" success into just his capability alone, or just to his following some "success formula", and thinks such formulas can be canned and re-applied at will...
Meanwhile the "reality-bending secrets" didn't prevent e.g. average to bad performace from his fund.
by analog31 on 2/12/22, 4:23 PM
Discovering and acting against an erroneous consensus is easy to claim in hindsight, to boost your image as some kind of special "thinker." Maybe we need a version of pre-registration for thinkers, like what we now have for some branches of science: You have to document your ideas somewhere, before you test them, in order to get credit for the idea afterwards. And report both the right ideas and the wrong ideas.
by bambax on 2/12/22, 3:43 PM
>
Sometimes, our sense-making machinery has a glitch too. Many years ago, a McKinsey study concluded that nobody in the developing world would buy smartphones because they were too expensive. Based on that study, they held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. 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. Though Nokia had an internet-enabled phone with a color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera in 2004, the executives held off on launching a smartphone for another three years. Between the peak of their mobile dominance and their sale of the mobile division in 2013, Nokia’s value fell by almost $250 billion.The first half of that paragraph is misplaced; "they" int the 3rd sentence doesn't refer to anything, as Nokia is only mentioned later in the paragraph. This would benefit from a bit of proofreading. (Edited; the first version referred incorrectly to the "2nd" sentence instead of the 3rd.
Also:
> I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel (...) the contents of our conversation will remain private
The whole purpose of the article seems to be to brag about having dinner with Mr Thiel.
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.
by dc-programmer on 2/12/22, 4:21 PM
by mrandish on 2/12/22, 4:19 PM
Sadly, a mostly content-free article. Surprising when the topic is such an interesting and successful person with some notable contrarian views.
by darod on 2/12/22, 5:11 PM
Is this quality of “searching for a secret” any different than any entrepreneur? Is the point of being an entrepreneur to find a secret that will give you a competitive advantage to make you a lot of money. Now him being a VC he would be doing the same from an investor standpoint? Maybe I’m missing the “secret” message in this article.
by atarian on 2/12/22, 3:48 PM
I thought the Nokia story was a pretty bad example because it’s not like they got everything else down perfectly.
by counternotions on 2/12/22, 4:02 PM
While I am intrigued by the tease of what kind of secrets could possibly have been discussed, this piece comes off as kind of try-hard, an excuse to flex that David took part in a private dinner with his #1 hero.
by georgewsinger on 2/12/22, 4:33 PM
Does anyone here have any "secrets" they'd like to share?
by vmception on 2/12/22, 3:56 PM
So he is contrarian solely for the probability of asymmetric alpha, even if he hasn't identified what that could be yet
That puts a lot of color into his decisions, validates his decisions to me
by jdrc on 2/12/22, 4:24 PM
Remote education is going to be huge, especially if sufficient numbers of people move after the pandemic. It's just that teachers are not the right people for it.
by windex on 2/12/22, 5:02 PM
I thought I was reading then introductory passage. And then the article/post was over! This is so pointless.
by JaimeThompson on 2/12/22, 3:52 PM
It is interesting to me that Peter Thiel doesn't want to live / follow the same rules / laws he would have everyone else live under. Is it that he thinks himself better than the vast majority of us?
by ykevinator2 on 2/12/22, 6:18 PM
This guy is so overrated. He's like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.