Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…Think of a place like Brazil. I tend to think of Brazil as fairly inward-looking. If you’re on a bus in Brazil, you hear Brazilian music typically, not American pop music. You think Brazil is underrated, or overrated, economically? Do you agree with my characterization of it is as relatively inward-looking, and if it’s an exception, what would account for that? It’s relatively inward-looking. Actually, one other metric for inward- versus outward-looking is which countries were first taken over by Facebook, how Facebook spread all over the world. It started with the US, other English-speaking countries. Then it went to all the small European countries where people spoke English: Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavian countries. The ones that were the hardest to break into were the ones with the very separate language groups. Brazil was much harder than the rest of Latin America, it sort of had this Spain to Latin America aspect, whereas Brazil is a self-contained country where most of the people in the world who speak Portuguese live, and Portugal barely counts. I do think it qualifies on the inward-looking piece. If you look at the history over the last 150 years, I think there have been four points where people were hyper-bullish on Brazil. I’m not going to get them exactly right, but there was one in the pre–World War I. There was one in the ’60s, in the ’50s, in the ’70s . . . That’s right.…

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