If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
Peter ThielYou have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? Itโs being used to throw angry birds at pigs; itโs being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; itโs being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while youโre riding a subway from the nineteenth century.
Peter ThielWhen you already have $150 billion a year in revenues from the iPhone, it's very hard to come up with any new vertical that will sort of move the dial. And there's this sort of weird effect where the larger a company gets, the harder it is to come up with any new product that really moves the dial.
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