Emily Nabnian

“The big secret is that there are many secrets left to uncover. There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.”

 Whether the future is better or worse will depend on our actions. Like Girard, Thiel, believes that Western political philosophy cannot cope with global violence.

Thiel offers an alternative to perfect competition: monopoly. Without competition, they can produce at the quantity and price combination that maximizes their profits. Successful strategies attract imitators, so the best businesses are difficult to copy.

Thiel says a bad plan is better than no plan at all. Having no plan is chaotic. He supports people who trade the shiny mirage of short-termism for the calm, controlled grace of a long time horizon. Like Capablanca, they are the kinds of people who study the end-game and work backwards from there.

Long time horizons aren’t just psychological. They’re cultural. Modern society suffers from temporal exhaustion. Or as, sociologist Elise Boulding once said: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future.”

Thiel opposes the idea that luck is all-powerful. He encourages human agency and believes in the power of a single individual to bend the future to their will. Thiel believes we attribute too much to luck, which stops us from actually doing things.

Social media made us experts in forming opinions about things we can see but not touch.

At first, we should think about an internet country in the same way, as a means for nomads to interface with nation-state systems.

Let the flame of Definite Optimism burn away the Mimetic virus. Use the Internet to curate your environment, so you can be hyper-mimetic towards the rare few who are anti-mimetic. Copy the people who don’t copy people. Take risks. Build a differentiated skillset. Pursue timeless wisdom, not intellectual fashions. Be skeptical of convention, and don... See more