Peter Thiel: evaluation

Transcript context

…There’s an interview with you when someone asks, “What’s the Straussian reading of your book, Zero to One?” You say something like, “The Straussian reading is don’t be an entrepreneur.” Yet at the same time, society has this problem, which many of us would recognize, that too many people go down tracks of conservative career choices. You work for a consulting firm, or you go to finance if you come out of a top school. It’s now become a new kind of conservative choice, maybe, to go to Silicon Valley in certain ways. Given the difficulties of becoming an entrepreneur, and the pull of conformity, how is it actually, socially? What kind of intellectual or ideological reconstruction do we need to get people out of so many of these conservative career choices? It’s hard to say. I think “entrepreneur” is one of these very odd terms people will say — where you’ll ask somebody, “What do you want to be doing in five, ten years?” “Oh, it’s very clear, I want to be an entrepreneur.” It’s just this vague, empty term. It’s like “I want to be rich” or “I want to be famous. ” I am actually quite skeptical of that as a term, so yes, I think I did say the Straussian reading of Zero to One, was that perhaps — I had the adverb in — but perhaps you should not be an entrepreneur. It was because on one level, the book is advice about how you would go about building a business, but then on some level, you could also read every single chapter as discouraging people from going into business potentially as well. If you give the core advice that you should start a business that’s going to be a monopoly, and then you say, well that’s really discouraging a lot of people who don’t have an idea for a monopoly, so maybe they shouldn’t be starting businesses. My view is we should be starting more good businesses and fewer bad ones. Not more businesses in the abstract, not more start-ups in the abstract. Yes, there is always this psychosocial bubble question. I don’t think we’re in a tech bubble today, like we were in ’99, 2000. I actually do not think the public, as a whole, is involved in quite the same way, and so I’m not worried about it like I would have been in ’99, 2000. I had some[one] email me a question; let me read it off and tell us what you think. This is a quotation. “What do you think a well-educated but zero marginal product worker in his mid-30s should do to remake himself for the next 30 years?”…

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