American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.
Peter ThielValue investors look at cash flows. If a company can maintain present cash flows for 5 or 6 years, itโs a good investment. Investors then just hope that those cash flows - and thus the companyโs value - donโt decrease faster than they anticipate.
Peter ThielIf you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
Peter ThielThe most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present.
Peter ThielBut the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.
Peter Thiel