The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One' - Part 3

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

50 MinutesPG-13Pete continues reading and commenting on Peter Thiel's best-seller, Zero to One. In this third episode, Pete covers chapters 6: You are Not a Lottery TicketGet Autonomy Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Lidl, more to value. All right, I want to welcome everyone back to part three of this reading of zero to one by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. So far we've read the preface, zero to one. Chapter one, The Challenge of the Future. Chapter two, Party Like It's 1999. Chapter 3, all happy companies are different. Chapter 4, the ideology of competition. Chapter 5, last mover advantage.

And I am going to jump right into Chapter 6. You are not a lottery ticket. Here we go. The most contentious question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill. What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about successful people, declares an outliers that success results from a patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages. Warren Buffett famously considers himself a member of the Lucky Sperm Club and a winner of the Ovarian

Lottery. Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon's success to an incredible planetary alignment and jokes that it was half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains. Bill Gates even goes so far as to claim that he was lucky to be born with certain scumption. skills, though it's not clear whether that's actually possible. Let me stop right here. Some people have commented saying, I know how Bill Gates got windows. I know what Jeff Bezos did. Do you understand that if he puts that in here, he's up for slander and libel?

Okay? Stop trying to be the smartest guy in the room because most of the people who make those comments aren't. All right? Just try to learn something. Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multi-million dollar businesses. A few like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk have created several multi-billion dollar companies.

If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn't exist. In January 2013, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, tweeted to his 2 million followers, Success is Never Accidental. Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in the Atlantic, reporter Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply, Success is Never Accidental, said all multimillionaire white men. It's true that already successful people have an easier time doing new things, whether due to their networks, wealth, or experience.

But perhaps we become too quick to dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan. Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we'd have to rewind to 2004, create a thousand copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn't work when the sample size is one.

From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled. Everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldn't. Rolfo Aldo Emerson captured the ethos when he wrote, shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances. Strong men believe in cause and effect. In 1912, after he became the first explore to reach the South Pole, Rod Amundsen wrote,

Victory awaits him who has everything in order. Luck, people call it. No one pretended that misfortune didn't exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard. if somebody says immediately says about a successful person that they were just lucky, I dismissed them as quickly as I dismiss someone who goes, oh, well, you know, they got their seed money from Incut's hell. So therefore, yada, yada. Okay, maybe they did.

Okay. That doesn't mean that the project was going to work. doesn't mean that the project was good. And it doesn't mean that it can't be rested from the hands of the people who had control of it many years later. If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is worthless if you're just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot machines for dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit's foot to rub and how to tell machines are hot, but it can't tell you how to win.

I had a really hot machine I played last week. And yeah, that was fun, actually. Did Bill Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Cheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon, or did she lean in? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far more important are questions about the future. Is it a matter of chance or design? Can you control your future?

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you'll give up on trying to master it. Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what's most dysfunctional in our world today. You understand this is very simple stuff. If you want to accomplish something, you have to pull. plan it out. And it's not as simple as the old thing about, oh, just write your goals down on an index card and look at them every day. That may be helpful, but that's not what this is.

Process trump substance. When people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes, see, this is also, this reminds me now, and I don't know if he's going to get into it, I don't remember, of, um, it's basically like competition. If you have all these various options, it's like going into business where you're going to have competition. If you have a concrete plan, it's like going into business, expecting to monopolize, expecting to accomplish what you're doing. Let me go back. Process Trump's substance, when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we're encouraged to start

hoarding extracurricular activities. In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetence. By the time a student goes to college, he spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready for nothing in particular. This reminds me of somebody saying that the best way to get into a good college was to write when you write your essay to get in that college, it's about something about climbing a mountain or some kind of thing that you did that you exceeded, you against the odds kind of thing, and that most of the people who wrote those just completely made them up. A definite view by contrast favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it well-roundedness, a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive, to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball. Take a break here for a sec.

So there's a chart here on the top. There's four. It looks almost like a political compass force. On top it says definite. On the on the left says definite top. Top right says indefinite. On the top right on the top left, on the side left it says optimistic. On the bottom left, this is pessimistic. Definite optimistic US 1950s, 1960s. Indefinite optimistic US in 1982 to present. Pessimist. definite China present indefinite pessimistic Europe present you can also expect the future to be either worse than the present optimists welcome the future pessimists fear it combining these possibilities yields four views optimists welcome the future and pessimists fear it

when when we started talking about the whole PayPal Mafia thing one of the first things we said was we don't really endorse these guys. It just looks like if they took over it may be better than what it is now. The best we can tell these people are kind of indifferent to us and I'd rather have someone be indifferent to me than hate me, especially when they have the power of government behind them. But the pessimism just came, comes roaring in, roaring in. And that pessimism I see is pessimism because people are holding on to an ideology. And if what they see happening doesn't match up to their ideology, they hate it, nothing good is going to happen, nothing ever happens, quote unquote,

nothing good is going to happen. And I saw that in libertarianism. I see it in every kind of the white nationalists I talk to, the national socialists I talk to, the leftist. I mean, everyone. Everyone is like, well, this isn't going to be the perfect thing that I want. So I'm just going to shit all over it.

I mean, is that pessim. There's no optimism in that whatsoever. Maybe that's one of the reasons why a lot of people contact me and they're like, I really have nothing going on in my life. How can you not have anything going on in your life? how can how how how at this time it just doesn't make any sense there are people who are completely incompetent doing jobs right now that if you just showed up on time and left on time and just did basic minimum work you could outperform them if you go above and beyond a little bit you're you can

pretty much write your own ticket. But the world doesn't set up the way I want. And, you know, everyone, everyone's out to get me. And there's going to be 40 million Pagit's coming into the country. Make all the excuses you want. Go ahead. Make them all. Combining these possibilities yields four views.

Indefinite pessimism. Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age. And almost all people throughout history have been pessimists. Even today, pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. It's most of the people that, it's most of the people commenting on YouTube, Rumble. I mean, not most, but the ones who really stand out, the ones who really want to dominate the conversation in like a chat on YouTube. Ready for huge savings?

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See it, buy it, get it tomorrow. Or you know, fight Brenda. Because they're just so, everything's so bleak and they're, I don't know, hiding in their house that they just want the attention. I don't know what it is. I don't want a straw man them, but it's really sad to see it. It really is. This describes Europe since the early 1970s when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift.

Today, the whole Eurozone is in slow motion crisis and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn't stand for anything but improvisation. The United States Treasury prints in God we trust in the dollar, the ECB might as well, print kick the can down the road on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don't get worse. The indefinite pessimist can't know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime.

And complain. That was my comment. Hence Europe's famous vacation mania. Definite pessimist. Definite pessimism. Sorry. A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, and this could surprise, this could, this describes me as part of my plan.

It's like I hope for the best, work towards making out the best, but I also prepare for the worst at the same time. So some of this is slapping me dead in the face, too. And it has. All of this has slapped me dead in the face. I'm not perfect. I'm still working on changing to make myself better, to make myself better for you so that I can present this better, so that I can have a better message going forward to try and help people.

The letters I've been getting, they really changed my mind about a lot of things. And a lot of that has to do with not blaming every, not blaming certain groups, but looking at the masses and figuring out, exactly what they're doing. Because blaming certain groups, it sounds great, but what is it? It's just basically your pessimism.

You have no plan to defeat certain groups. Do you? What's your plan? Keep posting on Twitter? I do it. I'm not expecting to take anything down and really waking people up. Anyone who believes in elite theory knows that's bullshit. A definite pessimist.

believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast, 10% per year per year since 2000, we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that's because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China's viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to, take over the world. China is the only country afraid that it won't. China can grow so fast,

China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West, and that's exactly what it's doing, executing definite plans by burning evermore coal to build evermore factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there's no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries. And the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming.

Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poor Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously. Definite optimism. To a definite optimist, the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better. From the 17th century through the 1950s and 60s, definite optimists led the Western world. Scientists, engineers, doctors, and businessmen made the world richer, healthier, and more long-lived than previously imaginable. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw, clearly the 19th century business class created more massive and more colossal productive forces

than all preceding generations. This is quoting Marx and Engels. I'll start from the quote. He says the 19th century business class, quote, created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,

canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor. Each generation's inventors and visionaries surpassed their predecessors. In 1843, the London public was invited to make its first crossing underneath the river Thames by a newly dug tunnel. In 1869, the Suez Canal saved Eurasian shipping traffic surrounding the Cape of Good Hope. In 1914, the Panama Canal cut short the route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Even the Great Depression failed to impede relentless progress in the United States, which has always been home of the world's most far-seeing definite optimists. The Empire State Building was started in 1929 and finished in 1931. The Golden Gate Bridge was started in 1933 and completed in 1937. The Manhattan Project was started in 1941 and had already produced the world's first nuclear bomb by 1945. Americans continue to make the face of the world in peacetime. The interstate highway system began construction in 1956, and the first 20,000 miles of road were open for driving by 1965. Definite planning even went beyond the surface of this planet. NASA's Apollo program began in 1961 and put 12 men on the moon before it finished in 1972.

Bold plans were not reserved just for political leaders or government scientists. In the late 1940s, a California named John Riber set out to reinvent the physical geography of the whole San Francisco Bay area. Reber was a school teacher, an amateur theater producer, and a self-taught engineer. Undaunted by his lack of credentials, he publicly proposed to build two huge dams in the bay, construct massive freshwater lakes for drinking water, and irrigation, and reclaim 20,000 acres of land for development. Even though he had no personal authority, people took the Weber plan seriously. It was endorsed by newspaper editorial boards across California, the U.S. Congress held hearings on its feasibility.

The Army Corps of Engineers even constructed a 1.5-acre scale model of the bay in a cavernous Sosolito warehouse to simulate it. These tests revealed technical shortcomings, so the plan wasn't executed. But would anybody today take such a vision seriously in the first place? In the 1950s, people welcome big plans and asked whether they would work. Today, a grand plan coming from a school teacher would be, dismissed as crankery and a long-range vision coming from someone more powerful would be derided as hubris. You can still visit the Bay model in that Sausalito warehouse, but today it's just a tourist

attraction. Big plans for the future have become archaic curiosities. It's pessimism. It's if you, someone came up with a plan today as such, you would just look at him and you would laugh at him because you're trained to. We are trained to. We are trained to. I'm not leaving myself out of this. This is what we are trained to do. There's the proposed barriers in San Francisco Bay. There's a map of it. All right.

The fourth part, indefinite optimism. After a brief pessimistic phase in the 1970s, indefinite optimism has dominated American thinking ever since 1982, when a long bull market began and finance eclipsed engineering as the way to approach the future. Let's say that again. When a long bull market began and finance, eclipsed engineering

as the way to approach the future. Now it was going to be all about banking. And what did Murray Rothbard say? Murray Rothbard said, the history of the United States as the history of its banking. 100% agree with that. And I know that pisses off

people whose family have been here who settled this land. But ever since this country formed and formalized itself, it's been about banking. Just look at the first war after the Revolution, 1812. Anyone who knows anything about that knows it's about banking. And then you can just come forward and look at all of the wars after the Federal Reserve. To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn't know how exactly, so he won't make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future, but sees no reason to design it concretely. Instead of working for years to build a new project, indefinite optimist rearrange already invented ones.

Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. and private equity investors and management consultants don't start new businesses. They squeeze extra efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations. It's no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high achieving Ivy League optionality chasers, which could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of resume building than a seemingly elite process-oriented career, that promises to keep options open.

And let me just remind people of something, okay? Because you're going to blame this banking stuff on people. Ready for huge savings? Well, mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs.

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Or, you know, fight Branda. You chose to participate. You don't have to participate in this. An offer was made and you chose it. Okay? Not all of you. I know someone's screaming, not me, not me. I haven't had electricity since 1980.

I live out in the middle of nowhere. Okay. Most people choose like there's no other options. All right. Recent graduates' parents often cheer them on the established path. The strange history of the baby boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year. year for the first 18 years of your life and it had nothing to do with you boomers i know i get i get

crap for crapping on boomers because i got some really based cool boomers that listen to me but you know can i speak in generalities is that okay with you technological technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically so the boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind,

but the wealthy boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naive optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can't imagine that they want to work for their kids too. Malcolm Gladwell says you can't understand Bill Gates' success without understanding his fortunate personal context. He grew up in a good family, went to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a childhood friend. But perhaps you can't understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding his historical context as a boomer, born in 1963, when baby boomers grew up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual's context as determined by chance.

But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations. A whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation. All right. Next section. This is still under, you are not a lottery ticket. It's called our indefinitely optimistic world.

Subheading, indefinite finance. While a definitely optimistic future, we need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, and indefinitely optimistic future calls from more bankers and lawyers. Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it's the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. If they don't go to law school, bright college students head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers. And once they arrive at Goldman, they find that even inside finance, everything is indefinite. It's still optimistic. You wouldn't play in the market

to be expected to lose, but the fundamental tenet is that the market is random. You can't know anything specific or substantive. Diversification becomes supremely important. The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company.

What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this. Four bullet points. The founders don't know what to do with it. they give it to a large bank. The founders don't know what to do with it, so they diversify by spreading it across a portfolio of institutional investors. Institutional investors don't know what to do with their managed capital, so they diversify by amassing a portfolio of stocks. Companies try to increase their share price by generating free cash flows. If they do, they issue dividends or

buyback shares and the cycle repeats. At no point does anyone in the chain, know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality. Money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself. New section. Indefinite politics. Politicians have always been officially accountable to the public at election time, but today they are tuned to what the public thinks at end.

every moment. Modern polling enables politicians to tailor their message to match pre-existing public opinion exactly. So for the most part, they do. Nate Silver's election predictions are remarkably accurate, but even more remarkable is how big a story they become every four years. We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks' time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 to 20 years from now. It's amazing, isn't it? It's just such short-term thinking. You know, when I used to work for a company that was a very old company, it was a European company. They had been around for over a century. And the only way that they were able to be around for over a

century was because they planned ahead. They didn't look at, you know, what's the next quarter going to look like they were looking 10 to 20 years down the line and i never understood why in my in the north american headquarters where i was stationed um that how they allowed an american to run it because the american ran it as what does the next quarter look like because i want to know what my bonus looks like i had always said why don't we get why don't we get somebody from the home country over here to run it. Somebody who knows what it's going to look like 10, 20 years down the line, and then we won't have to be holding meetings every month

to talk about what's going on with the company and how we need to do better. And it's not just the electoral process. The very character of government has become indefinite, too. The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite, creep the government mainly just provides insurance our solutions to big problems are medicare social

security and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs i think it was andrew yang that just i don't have enough bad things to say about andrew yang especially some of the comments he made about social issues but he he made one good point when he brings up ubi what the government is right now best at is sending out checks. That's exactly what it says here. Our solution to big problems are medicine, social security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment programs. It's no surprise that entitlement spending has eclips discretionary spending every year since 1975. That's an incredible sentence. To increase discretionary spending, we need definite plans to solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending, we can make these things

better just by sending out more checks. I was talking about this to increase discretionary spending. We need definite plans to solve specific problems. I've been saying this a lot lately. I have no idea besides like two issues what Bekele believes in is El Salvador. I know that he made crime his number one thing. And he, he, basically turned it from the murder capital of the world to the safest country in the western hemisphere and i know he's into bitcoin he looked at two problems and he said i'm going to focus on those originally he ran for president in a far left party and they kicked him out and he went to like a center i don't know if he's a left-wing or right-winger honestly but i know that i look at what he does and

I'm like, damn. So that's what concentrating on ideology, which is what government, you know, especially like when you look at the left, even though it may be the most absurd ideology in the history of mankind, this is what you get. You don't get definite plans. You're all over the place because they're thinking and their belief system is all over the place. Indefinite philosophy. You can see the shift to an indefinite attitude.

not just in politics, but in the political philosophers whose idea underpin both left and right. So it's amazing how I don't really look ahead, but I always seem to be like right over the target for what comes next. The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic. Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential. The only question was how best to cope with our tragic fate. Modern philosophers have been mostly optimistic, from Herbert Spencer, on the right and Hegel in the center to Marx on the left, Hegel's on the right, but too many

people on the left also claim Hegel. From Herbert Spencer on the right, and Hegel in the middle to Marx on the left, the 19th century shared a belief in progress. Remember Marx and Engels and conium to the technological triumphs of capitalism from the previous page. These thinkers expected material advances to fundamentally change human life for the better. They were definite optimists. In the late 20th century,

indefinite philosophies came to the four. The two dominant political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozik, are usually seen as stark opposites. On the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of fairness and distribution. On the libertarian right,

Nozik focused on maximizing individual freedom. They both believe that people could get along with each other peacefully, So unlike the ancients, they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer or Marx, Rawls and Nozik were indefinite optimists. They didn't have any specific vision of the future. It's a nice chart here if you want to check out the video at this point. This is 3523.

I'm not going to try and describe it. It's just a where Hegel and Marx, Rosicke and Nozich and Rawls and Epicurus Lucretius. or some Plato and Aristotle would be on the optimistic, pessimistic, indefinite. Their indefiniteness took different forms. Rawls begins a theory of justice with the famous veil of ignorance. Fair political reasoning is supposed to be impossible for anyone with knowledge of the world as it concretely exists. Instead of trying to change our actual world of unique people and real technologies,

Rawls fantasized about an inherently stable society with lots of fairness, but little dynamism. There's that word again. Nozik opposed Rawls' pattern concept of justice. To Nozik, any voluntary exchange must be allowed, and no social pattern could be noble enough to justify maintenance by coercion. He didn't have any more concrete ideas about the good society than Rawls. Both of them focused on process. Ideologues. Today we exaggerate the differences between the left liberal egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their common indefinite attitude. In philosophy, politics,

and business too, arguing over process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future. Indefinite life. Our ancestors sought to understand. and extend the human lifespan. In the 16th century, Conquistador asserts the jungles of Florida for a fountain of youth. Francis Bacon wrote that the prolongation of life should be considered its own branch of medicine and the noblest. In the 1660s, Robert Boyle placed life extension, along with the recovery of youth, atop his famous wish list for the future of science.

Whether through geographic exploration or laboratory research, the best minds of the Renaissance thought of death as something to defeat this is in parentheses. Some resistors were killed in action. Bacon caught pneumonia and died in 1626 while experimenting to see if he could extend the chicken's life by freezing it in the snow. We haven't yet uncovered the secrets of life, but insurers and statisticians in the 19th century successfully revealed a secret about death that still governs our thinking today. They discovered how to reduce it by a mathematical probability. Life tables tell us our chances of dying.

in any given year something previous generations didn't know. However, in exchange for better insurance contracts, we seem to have given up the search for secrets about longevity. Systematic knowledge of the current range of human lifespans has made that range seem natural. Today, our society is permeated by the twin ideas that death is both inevitable and random. Meanwhile, probabilistic attitudes have come to shape the agenda of biology itself. In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a peat tree dish he'd forgotten to cover in his laboratory. He discovered penicillin by accident.

Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming's serendipitous circumstances a millionfold. Pharmaceutical companies search that through combination, of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit. But it's not working as well as it used to. Despite dramatic advances over the past two centuries in recent decades, biotechnology hasn't met the expectations of investors or patients. Aroom's law, that's Moore's law backwards, observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.

Since information technology accelerated faster than ever during those same years, the big question for biotech today is whether it will ever see similar progress. Compare biotech startups to their counterparts in computer software. There's a chart here of biotech startups, software startups, subject is subject environment approach regulation cost team so if you're watching the video you can see this biotech startups are an extreme example of indefinite thinking researchers experiment with things that just might work instead of refining definite theories about how the body's system operates biologists say they need to work this way because the underlying biology is hard according to them

IT startups work because we created computers ourselves and designed them to reliably obey our commands. Biotech is difficult because we didn't design our bodies, and the more we learn about them, the more complex they turn out to be. But today it's possible to wonder whether the genuine difficulty of biology has become an excuse for biotech startup's indefinite approach to business in general. Most of the people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few people involved expect some things to work eventually, but few want to commit to a specific company with the level of intensity necessary for success. It starts with the professors who often become part-time

consultants instead of full-time employees, even for the biotech startups that begin from their own research. Then everyone else imitates the professor's indefinite attitude. It's easy for libertarians to complain that heavy regulation holds biotech back, and it does. But indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech. Is indefinite optimism even possible? What kind of future will our indefinitely optimistic decisions bring about? If American households were saving, at least they could expect to have money to spend later. And if American companies were investing, they could expect to reap the rewards of new

wealth in the future. But U.S. households are saving almost nothing. And U.S. companies are letting cash pile up on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don't have any concrete plans for the future. The other three views of the future can work. Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision. Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new. Indefinite pessimism works because it's self-fulfilling. If you're a slacker with low expectations, they'll probably be.

met. But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable. How can the future get better if no one plans for it? Actually, most everybody in the modern world has already heard an answer to this question. Progress without planning is what we call evolution. Darwin himself wrote that life tends to progress without anybody intending it to. Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism and the best iterations win. Darwin's theory explains the origin of trilobites and dinosaurs, but can it be extended to domains that are far removed? Just as Newtonian physics can't explain black holes or the Big Bang.

It's not clear that Darwinian biology should explain how to build a better society or how to create a new business out of nothing. Yet in recent years, Darwinian or pseudo-Darwinian metaphors have become common business. Journalists, journalists analog, sorry, journalists analogous literal survival in competitive ecosystems to corporate survival in competitive markets. Hence, all the headlines like digital Darwinism, dot-com Darwinism, and survival of the clickiest. Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a lean startup that can adapt and evolve to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance.

We're supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a minimum viable product, and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology. Not at all. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won't help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone,

but iteration without a bold plan won't take you from zero to one. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist. Why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinianism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best. The Return of Design What would it mean to prioritize design over chance? Today, good design is an aesthetic imperative, and everybody from slackers to yuppies

carefully curates their outward appearance. It's true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer. Anyone who is held in i-device or a smoothly machined MacBook has felt the result of Steve Jobs' obsession with visual and experimental perfection. But the most important lesson to learn from jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics.

The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively. Forget minimum viable products. Ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying other successes. Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite. short-term world. When the first iPod was released in October 2001, industry analysts couldn't see much more than a nice feature for Macintosh users that doesn't make any difference to the rest of the

world. Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people. One look at the company's stock chart shows the harvest of this multi-year plan. When you look at the chart, it goes 2014. way down below 2007 peaks up. It's right around the time of the iPhone, comes down in between 2008 and 2009, and then just skyrocketed into 2012. The power of planning explains the difficulty of valuing private companies. When a big company makes an offer to acquire a successful startup, it almost always offers too much or too little. Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company, in which case the acquirer probably overpaid.

Definite founders with robust plans don't sell, which means the offer wasn't high enough. When Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced, okay, guys, this is just a formality. It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We're obviously not going to sell here. Mark saw where he could take the company and Yahoo didn't. A business with a good, definite plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random. You are not a lottery ticket. We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western world needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.

Where to start? John Rawls will need to be displaced in philosophy departments. Malcolm Gladwell must be persuaded to change his theories, and pollsters have to be driven from politics. But the philosophy professors and the gladwells of the world are set in their ways to say nothing of our politicians. It's extremely hard to make changes in those crowded fields, even with brains and good intentions. A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency, not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust charity of chance.

You are not a lottery ticket. and the next chapter is followed the money, but since that chapter was so long, we are going to end it right there. All right. I hope everybody's getting a lot out of this. I know this is the third time I read this, and I'm still seeing things I haven't seen before.

So this is great for me. I will mention again that if you want to get these episodes without commercials, without ads, you go to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support. And there's a link to my website. There's a link to Patreon.

There's a link to Subscribe Star. I'd prefer people do it through my website. I get to control of that. And yeah, monthly or yearly there. And then I send out these episodes early as soon as you're edited and without ads. All right. that's it this was the third third part of this and i will be back for part four which is follow the money and maybe we can even get that's chapter seven maybe we can even get chapter eight

in if chapter seven isn't too long i do not remember at the time but thank you very much and uh come on back for this