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Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel Quotes

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Famous Peter Thiel Quotes

“There are all these things that you never know whether they're features or bugs- in a company or organization, or even in a personal trait. I'm interested in lots of different things. I'm interested in business but also economics and philosophy and literature. I always like to rationalize that as helping me think about things better, or that these things are interdisciplinary. But maybe it's just being a dilettante or procrastinating and not ever really getting focused.”

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Author:Peter Thiel
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“Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There’s plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won’t be easy, but it’s not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets.”

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“Because globalization and technology are different modes of progress, it’s possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time. For example, 1815 to 1914 was a period of both rapid technological development and rapid globalization. Between the First World War and Kissinger’s trip to reopen relations with China in 1971, there was rapid technological development but not much globalization. Since 1971, we have seen rapid globalization along with limited technological development, mostly confined to IT. This age of globalization has made it easy to imagine that the decades ahead will bring more convergence and more sameness. But I don’t think that’s true. [...] Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do—using only today’s tools—the result would be environmentally catastrophic. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”

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Book:Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
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“When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.”

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Book:Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
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“I think markets are often not thinking on a long-time horizon, I think that our government structurally is doing even less so. When we have a government where we have people who are up for election at most once every six years for a U.S. senator, that's a time horizon that is much shorter than in a market that a company is looking at 10, 15, 20 years which is a time horizon over which a stock price is typically valued.”

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“One of the reasons I think people are increasingly nervous about U.S. debt is because they think that we are not actually digging ourselves out of the hole, but instead are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole and will not be able to pay it back because we're not actually creating the new technologies that will enable us to pay back and the money somehow is not really being invested in the future or in progress.”

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