Says the guy who won the lottery. I'm frankly more interested in the guy who blew up during the dot com boom and who is currently some random employee at some random company, with a past filled with mistakes - frankly you'd learn more from his actual failures, than from Thiel's failure masking success.
Just watched this talk.. absolutely great material. I wish he was a slightly better/more confident speaker, but I got over it.<p>For someone who is the farthest thing from libertarian, is there any more literature on the idea of big planning, deterministic optimism, etc in a libertarian framework? His examples of the US as optimistic and deterministic were all "centrally planned", and done through government, not individuals or groups of individuals (corps, ngos, etc). Or at least that's how I perceived it.
I'm usually not a fan of Peter Thiel's ideas—always seemed quite a bit on the extreme side of the spectrum to me—but this talk is fantastic. I have a new respect for his viewpoints, and a renewed zeal to work harder.<p>I still think he discounts the effect that random chance has in your ability to succeed, on many counts, but he at least seems to understand it extremely well and speaks about it in a way which seems to indicate he respects the complexities involved. Quite good and thought-provoking to watch regardless of how you think of success.
This organizes a lot of thoughts I've had regarding the economic history of the 20th century. It seemed that something really changed in patterns of invention and investment somewhere in the late 70s, whereby - as Peter notes - big ideas and making plans became considerably less fashionable.<p>I hadn't made the connection to the surge of effort in law and finance, but it's a convincing argument.<p>The real question, then, is: Can we return the western economies to an optimistic-deterministic point of view? It would require really reframing a lot of public debate - or perhaps taking discourse elsewhere from regulated airwaves where the established players seem to worship an utterly indeterminate world view, as evidenced by continuous coverage of uncontrollable events.
Lecture notes from his CS183 Startup class was about similar subjects. If you found the talk interesting you'll like the notes as well.<p><a href="http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup" rel="nofollow">http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup</a>
One reason the western world is appearing more indeterminate and becoming less optimistic is because of the diminishing returns of progress. That's the main problem in Europe. A hundred years ago, most people had difficult lives and technical progress offered a clear path to better lives. Now most people there have a pretty good life and understandably don't want it to change.
The OP's link didn't work for me. Here's one with sound only, no video, no slides, no transcript.
<a href="http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP15892" rel="nofollow">http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP15892</a>
According to the Googles, you can grab the .mp3 of the talk here: <a href="http://mp3yeah.com/download.php?id=83442458&t=Peter%20Thiel:%20You%20Are%20Not%20A%20Lottery%20Ticket%20-%20SXSW%20Interactive%202013" rel="nofollow">http://mp3yeah.com/download.php?id=83442458&t=Peter%20Th...</a>