No Death, No Taxes - Profile on Peter Thiel
Catching up on The New Yorker and stumbled on this profile by George Packer.
Combines both of my two favorite topics, politics & technology, throws them on the ground, stomps on them and then rebuilds them via Peter Thiel of PayPal & Founders Fund fame.
Libertarian Entrepreneurship.
I was surprised by how closely my line of thinking falls in step with his. Perhaps, I really am a closet libertarian ..aka..Republican.
Mind. Blown.
Here are some great excerpts:
On politics and technology -
In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its form - from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guide so-called ‘social democracy’ …We are in a deadly race between politics and technology ..
On higher-education -
Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to sub-prime mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world. .Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become very expensive insurance policy…In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game “purely positional and extremely decoupled from the question of its benefit to the individual and society”
On Internet companies -
Internet companies over the past decade, the people who run them are sort of autistic. These mild cases of Asperger’s seem to be quite rampant. There’s no need for sales - “the companies themselves are weirdly nonsocial in nature.” But, he added, “In a society where things are not great and a lot of stuff is fairly dysfunctional, that may actually be the thing where you can add the most value”.
On Thiel himself -
An appetite on disruption and risk - two of Thiel’s favorite words - reflects in part, a sense of immunity to the normal heartbreak and defeats a deadening job, money trouble, and unhappy children deal out to the “unthinking herd”. Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people precisely because they’ve never refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow.
If you want the full piece, let me know. Great read.
