The Pete Quiñones Show - Pete Reads Peter Thiel's 'Zero to One' - Part 7 - The Finale

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

39 MinutesPG-13Pete concludes reading and commenting on Peter Thiel's best-seller, Zero to One. In this seventh and final episode, Pete covers chapters 14, The Founder's Paradox, and the Conclusion: Stagnation or Singularity?FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% offVIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport 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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All right, I want to welcome everyone to the finale of Peter Reteel's 0 to 1. we're going to do the very last chapter, the founder's paradox, and then we're going to do a conclusion, which is titled Stagnation or Singularity. So I'm going to run through this. We'll get done with this, and then start up on a new book in a couple days. All right. Let's get this done. The Founder's Paradox.

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. Five were just 23 years old, or younger. Four of us had been born outside the United States. Three had escaped here from communist countries. Japan from China, Luke Nosek from Poland, and Max Levchen from Soviet Ukraine. Building bombs was not what kids normally did in those countries at that time. The six of us could have been seen as eccentric. My first ever conversation with Luke was about how he just signed up for

cryonics to be frozen upon death in hope of medical resurrection. Max claimed to be without a country and proud of it. His family was put into diplomatic limbo when the USSR collapsed while they were escaping from the U.S. Russ Simmons had escaped from a trailer park at the top to the top math and science magnet school in Illinois. Only Ken Howrie fit the stereotype of a privileged American childhood. He was PayPal's sole Eagle Scout. But Kenny's peers thought he was crazy. to join the rest of us and make just one-third of the salary he had been offered by a big bank.

So even he wasn't entirely normal. A drawing of the PayPal team, 1999. Are all founders unusual people? Or do we just tend to remember and exaggerate whatever is most unusual about them? More important, which personal traits actually matter in a founder? This chapter is about why it's more powerful, but at the same time more dangerous for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager. The Difference Engine

Some people are strong, some are weak, some are geniuses, some are dullards, but most people are in the middle. Plot where everyone falls and you'll see a bell curve. Typical bell curve, one end, weak nerd, idiot, savant, disagreeable, outsider, poor, villain, infamous. In the middle, average, normal, in the middle you have the average person. person at the top of the bell. At the other end, you have strong, athletic, polymath, charismatic, insider-rich, hero-famous. Since so many founders seem to have extreme traits, you might guess that a

plot showing only founder's traits would have fatter tails with more people at either end. And it shows a fat-tail distribution of the same thing. But that doesn't capture the strangest thing about founders. Normally, we expect opposite traits to be mutually exclusive. A normal person can't be both rich and poor at the same time, for instance. But it happens all the time to founders. Startup CEOs can be cash poor, but millionaires on paper. They may oscillate between sullen jerkiness and appealing charisma. Almost all successful entrepreneurs are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. And when they do succeed, they attract both fame and infamy. When you plot them out, founders' traits appear to follow an inverse normal distribution.

So this is the same kind of bell curve thing, except the bell's inverted, starts high up on the weak nerd side, average all the way down at the bottom, and then strong athletic polymath charismatic on the top on the other end. Where does this strange and extreme combination of traits come from? They could be present from birth, nature, or acquired from an individual's environment, nurture. But perhaps founders aren't really. as extreme as they appear. Might they strategically exaggerate certain qualities, or is it possible that everyone else exaggerates them? All of these effects can be present at the same time,

and whenever present, they powerfully reinforce each other. It's interesting because I've known a lot of people in my life. I mean, I've worked at big companies. I've worked at small companies. When I was growing up, I had a huge, huge, huge circle of, if not friends, acquaintances. School, I went to different schools. I knew a lot of different people.

And most people I find are just boring. I'm sure people find me boring, and that's fine. But most people I find, not boring, they're just, they're not interested in things that I'm interested in. They're not interested in, like, Russian history. like 15th century Russian history. They're not interested in when you ask somebody the question, do you know anything about the Spanish Civil War?

If they know anything about the Spanish Civil War, they're going to say it started 1936, and I'm going to say it started in 7-E11 AD. You know, I'm just a weirdo. And I find most people are normal. And if you ask most weirdos like me, at some point, and pretty often we say we just wish we could be like other people

because then when we get into crowds, we wouldn't have people looking at us like we have a second head. Because as soon as we open our mouths, it's like, well, people realize you're different. But it's interesting about this crew here. The four of them had built bombs in high school. It also goes towards the belief

that most insanely successful people actually have societies. apathic tendencies, and it's probably not untrue. The cycle usually starts with unusual people and ends with them acting and seeming even more unusual. There's a circle here at the beginning. At the top, actually different. Drops down to the right, develop extreme traits. The bottom, they exaggerate. Top, others exaggerate it, and then it goes right around the circle again. as an example, take Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group.

He could be described as a natural entrepreneur. Branson started his first business at age 16, and at just 22, he founded Virgin Records. But other aspects of his renown, the trademark lion's main hairstyle, for example, are less natural. One suspects he wasn't born with that exact look. As Branson has cultivated his other extreme traits, is kiteboarding with naked supermodels of PR stunt, Just a guy having fun? Both? The media has eagerly enthroned him.

Branson is the Virgin King, the Undisputed King of PR, the King of Branding, and the King of the Desert and Space. When Virgin Atlantic Airways began serving passengers' drinks with ice cubes shaped like Branson's face, he became the Ice King. Is Branson just a normal businessman who happens to be lionized by the media with the help of a good PR team? or is he himself a born branding genius rightly singled out by the journalist he is so good at manipulating? It's hard to tell. Maybe he's both. Hand-drawing of Branson holding what looks like could be a supermodel. Another example is Sean Parker, who started out with the ultimate outsider status, criminal.

Sean was a careful hacker in high school, but his father decided that Sean was spending way too much time on the computer for a 16-year-old, So one day he took away Sean's keyboard mid-hack. Sean couldn't log out. The FBI noticed. Soon, federal agents were placing him under arrest. Sean got off easy since he was a minor. If anything, the episode emboldened him. Three years later, he co-founded Napster.

The peer-to-peer file sharing service amassed 10 million users in its first year, making it one of the fastest growing businesses of all time. But the record company sued, and a federal judge ordered it shut down about 20,000. shut down 20 months after opening. Thank you, Lars Elwork. After a whirlwind period at the center, Sean was back to being an outsider again. That was all wild, but I mean,

it basically set up the whole premise for iTunes. As soon as iTunes came out, I knew, as soon as I heard about iTunes, I'm like, I know where that idea came from. It also destroyed the music industry, which I was in at one point, and I was in the publishing, the publishing side of it for a time. And I just knew that once that started publishing was dead, basically.

I mean, most artists never made a lot of money off of publishing anyway because they usually signed away their rights to the record company. Van Halen famously said that when they went on tour, they had three tractor trailers. One held their equipment and two held their merchandise because they 100% owned their merchandise. That's how they made their money. That's how I think about any rapper who has their own clothing brand. Where do you think their money came from? Then came Facebook. Sean met Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 helped negotiate Facebook's first funding and became the company's founding president. He had to step down in 2005 amid allegations of drug use, but this only enhanced his notoriety. Ever since Justin

Timberlake portrayed him in the social network, Sean has been is one of the coolest people in America. J.T. is still more famous, but when he visits Silicon Valley, people ask if he's Sean Parker. Creepy picture. All right. The most famous people in the world are founders, too. Instead of a company, every celebrity founds and cultivates a personal brand. Lady Gaga, for example, became one of the most influential living people. But is she even a real person? Her real name isn't a secret, but almost no one knows or cares what it is. She wears costumes so bizarre as to put any other wearer at risk of an involuntarily psychiatric hold.

Gaga would have you believe that she was born this way, the title of both her second album and its lead track. But no one is born looking like a zombie with horns coming out of her head. Gaga must therefore be a self-manufactured myth. Then again, what kind of person would do this to herself? Certainly nobody normal. So perhaps Gaga really was born that way. Where kings come from. Extreme founder figures are not new in human affairs.

Classical mythology is full of them. Oedipus is the paradigmatic insider outsider. He was abandoned as an infant and ended up in a foreign land, but he was a brilliant king and smart enough to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Romulus and Remus were born of royal blood and abandoned as orphans. When they discovered their pedigree, they decided to found a city. But they couldn't agree on where to put it. it. When Remus crossed the boundary that Romulus had decided was the edge of Rome, Romulus killed him, declaring, so perish everyone that shall hear after leap over my wall. Lawmaker and lawbreaker,

criminal outlaw and king who defined Rome, Romulus was a self-contradictory insider, outsider. Normal people aren't like Oedipus or Romulus. Whatever those individuals were actually like in life, the mythologized versions of them remember only the extremes. But why was it so important for archaic cultures to remember extraordinary people. The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment. They're praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune. Scapegoats. It's funny because of Teal's connection to René Girard.

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Primitive societies face one fundamental problem above all. They would be torn apart by conflict if they... Sorry, let me start that again. Primative societies face one fundamental problem. above all. They would be torn apart by conflict if they didn't have a way to stop it. So whenever plagues, disasters, or violent rivalries threaten the peace, it was beneficial for the society to place the entire blame on a single person, someone everyone could agree on, a scapegoat. Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures.

On the one hand, a scapegoat is necessarily weak. He is powerless to stop his own victimization. On the other hand, as the one who can diffuse conflict by taking the blame, he is the most powerful member of the community. Let's just put a bunch of thoughts through my head. I'm reading this for the third time, and maybe some of you were thinking the same thing as I'm thinking. Before execution, scapegoats were often worshipped like... Before execution, scapegoats were often worship like deities. The Aztec considered their victims to be earthly forms of gods to they were sacrificed. You would be dressed in fine clothes and feast royally until your brief rain ended and they cut your heart out. These are the roots of monarchy. Every king was a living

God and every God was a murdered king. Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution. American royalty. Celebrities are supposedly American royalty. We even grant titles to our favorite performers. Elvis Presley was the king of rock, Michael Jackson was the king of pop, Britney Spears was the pop princess. Until they weren't. Elvis self-destructed in the 70s and died alone, overweight, sitting on his toilet. Today, his impersonators are fat and sketchy, not lean and cool. Michael Jackson went from beloved child star to an erratic, physically repulsive, drug-addicted shell of his former self. The world reveled in the details of his trials.

Brittany's story is the most dramatic of all. We created her from nothing, elevated her from nothing, elevated her to superstardom as a teenager, but then everything fell off the tracks, witnessed the shaved head, the over and under-eating scandals, and the highly publicized court case to take away her children. Was she always a little bit crazy? Did the publicity just get to her? Or did she do it all to get more? For some fallen stars, death brings resurrection. So many popular musicians have died at age 27, Janice Chapplin, Jimmy Hendricks, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, for example. That this set has, has been immortalized as the 27 club.

Before she joined the club in 2011, Amy Winehouse sang, they tried to make me go to rehab, but I said, no, no, no. Maybe rehab seems so unattractive because it blocked the path to immortality. Perhaps the only way to be a rock god forever is to die in early age. We alternately worship and despise technology founders just as we do celebrities. Howard Hughes's arc from fame to pity is the most dramatic of any 20th century tech founder. He was born wealthy, but he was always more interested in engineering than luxury. He built Houston's first radio transmitter at the age of 11. The year after that, he built the city's

first motorcycle. By age 30, he'd made nine commercially successful movies at a time when Hollywood was on the technological frontier. But Hughes was even more famous for his parallel career in aviation. He designed planes, produced them, and piloted them himself. Hughes set world records for top speed, fastest transcontinental flight, and fastest flight around the world. Hughes was obsessed with flying higher than everyone else. He liked to remind people that he was a mere mortal, not a Greek god. Sometimes that mortal, something that mortals say only when they want to invite comparisons to gods. Hughes was a man to whom you cannot apply the same standards as you can to you and me. His lawyer once argued in federal court. Hughes paid the lawyer to say that, but according to

New York Times, there was no dispute on this point from judge or jury. When Hughes was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 for his achievements in aviation, he didn't even show up to claim it. Years later, President Truman found it in the White House and mailed it to him. The beginning of Hughes's end came in 1946, when he suffered his third and worst plane crash. Had he died then, he would have been remembered forever as one of the most dashing and successful Americans of all time. But he survived. Barely. He became obsessive, compulsive, addicted to painkillers, and withdrew from the public to spend the last 30 years of his life in self-imposed solitary confinement. Hughes had always acted a little crazy on the theory that fewer people would want to bother a crazy person. But when

his crazy act turned into crazy life, he became an object of pity as much as awe. More recently, Bill Gates has shown how highly visible success can attract highly focused attacks. Gates embodied the founder archetype. He was simultaneously an awkward and nerdy college dropout outsider and the world's wealthiest insider. Did he choose his geeky eyeglasses strategically, to build up a distinctive persona? Or in his incurable nerdiness, did his geek glasses choose him? It's hard to know, but his dominance was undeniable.

Microsoft Windows claimed that 90% share of the market for operating systems in 2000. That year, Peter Jennings plausibly ask, Who is more important in the world today? Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? I don't know. It's a good question. The U.S. Department of Justice didn't limit itself to rhetorical questions. They opened an investigation and sued Microsoft for anti-competitive conduct.

In June 2000, a court ordered that Microsoft be broken apart. Gates had stepped down as CEO of Microsoft six months earlier, having been forced to spend most of his time responding to legal threats instead of building new technology. A court of appeals later over the court of, returned the breakup, and Microsoft reached a settlement with the government in 2001. But by then, Gates' enemies had already deprived his company of the full engagement of its founder, and Microsoft entered an era of relative stagnation. Today, Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist.

I think he'd become more of a villain than anything else, considering his links to viruses. Steve is passionate about good coffee. He founded Fox and Sons coffee in order to provide customers with the very best small batch, family farm-grown, organically roasted beans that he could find. He also chose the coffee business as a way to honor special times with his father, shared over breakfast and coffee, and to teach his sons about entrepreneurship. Fox and Sons Coffee features five amazing blends from Peru. The dark roast was the first blend Steve introduced, and it's still my mind. favorite. You can also order a variety of single-source beans from all over the world. Currently, you can order beans from Brazil, Tanzania, Guatemala, Mexico, and Ethiopia.

And Steve is introducing four new roasts this month, so be on the look out for some special new options. Order online at fox and sons.com. That's f-o-x-n-s-s-o-n-s-s-com and use discount code Peter. You'll get 18% off orders of $30 or more, and you'll get free shipping, with all orders over 3799. Thank you. The Return of the King. Just as a legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates' dominance, Steve Jobs returned to Apple,

demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else. Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insiders, outsiders, and both pushed to companies. They started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.

A college dropout who walked around barefoot and refused to shower, Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult. He could act charismatic or crazy, perhaps according to his mood or perhaps according to his calculations. It's hard to believe that such weird practices as Apple-only diets weren't part of a larger strategy, a strategy, but all this eccentricity backfired on him in 1985. Apple's board effectively kicked jobs out of his own company when he clashed with the professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision. Jobs returned to Apple 12 years later shows how the

most important task in business, the creation of new value, cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals. When he was hired as interim CEO of Apple in 1997, the impeccably credentialed executives who preceded him had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy. That year, Michael Dell famously said of Apple, what would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. Instead, Jobs introduced the iPod, 2001, the iPhone 2007, the iPad 2010, before he had to resign in 2011 because of poor health. By the following year, Apple was the most single valuable company in the world. That's amazing.

I rejected Apple products for so long. I still don't have an iPhone. I never had an iPod and I've never had an iPad, but all of my home computer equipment is Mac. It's just once I got a MacMany and a couple MacBooks, it was over. I don't know. I became a fan, but you don't hear me screaming about it and everything.

I don't have one of those Apple stickers in the back of my car or like a bunch of people. But yeah, I think the products are great. I just like Android phones. Apple's value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange way in which companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more modern. A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades. paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracy staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons.

The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism. Think about that. does what can be turned back easier incrementalism or a total shift and at once change where it's now we're doing things this way incrementalism can be rolled back as you're making incremental progress you can do the typical one step forward two steps back the lesson for founders is that individual prominence and adulation can never be enjoyed except on the condition that it may be exchanged for individual notoriety and demonization at any moment. So be careful. Above all, don't overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value,

but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. that we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ein Randian prime movers who claim to be independent of everyone around them in this respect Rand was a merely half great writer

her villains were real but her heroes were fake there is no Galtz Gulch there is no secession from society to believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual but of a person who has mistaken in the crowds worship or jeering for the truth.

The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom. Take a sip and we'll conclude this. Conclusion. Stagnation or singularity. If even the most far-sighted founders cannot plan beyond the next 20 to 30 years, is there

anything to say about the very distant future. We don't know anything specific, but we can make out the broad contours. Philosopher Nick Bostrom described four possible patterns for the future of humanity. The ancient saw all of history as a never-ending alternation between prosperity and ruin. Only recently have people dared to hope that we might permanently escape misfortune, and it's still possible to wonder whether the stability we take for granted will last. However, we usually suppress our doubts. Conventional wisdom seems to assume instead that the whole world will converge today a plateau of development similar to the life of the richest countries today. In this scenario, the future will look a lot like the presence.

Given the interconnected geography of the contemporary world and the unprecedented destructive power of modern weaponry, it's hard not to ask whether a large-scale social disaster could be contained or it to occur. This is what fuels our fears of the third possible scenario, a collapse so devastating that we won't survive it. The last of the four possibilities is the hardest one to imagine. Accelerating takeoff toward a much better future, the end result of such a breakthrough could take a number of forms, but any one of them would be so different from the present as to defy description. Which of the four will it be? Recurrent collapse seems unlikely. the knowledge underlying civilization is so widespread today that complete annihilation would be more probable than a long period of darkness followed by recovery.

However, in case of extinction, there is no future of any kind to consider. When I look at everything that's available to us today, and I look at the, just how this society is right now, and how it seems like, all the progress we want to make, there's roadblocks put up, whether it be financial roadblocks, inflation of the money, whether it be cultural roadblocks, attacks on children, trying to trans children, whether it be anything, the decline of people going to church, things like that, there's a decline in faith. it's the way I see it is we're just stuck in a system that's obsolete this system is completely obsolete and the only way you know I I don't remember who said it

or in McIntyre Miv I don't remember who said it but probably I probably heard it from orrin is the only way out is through and what that means is we can't turn back what we build in the future may have echoes of what's in the past, may have the morality of what's in the past. But what it's going to look like is going to be something completely different. It's going to be something that you're going to need the generations who are alive when it happens to die off in order for it to just be considered the way it is again. And I mean, I think there are some people alive who, I think a lot of people adapt, but I think a lot of people will fight against it.

And, you know, I posted the thing, I guess, comes from, from code or culture, or comes from computer culture. The only, I can't remember what the, I have to look it up. Sorry, sorry for this, but I think it's, it's the purpose of the system is what it does. I think that's a great quote. And when you're looking at the system right now, it's set up to do one thing. And that one thing is not to benefit us. It's not to benefit people. It's not to benefit the future.

It's not to benefit progress, technological process, things that can make our lives easier. And it's definitely not set up to benefit those who would like to avoid all of that and live some play and just be left alone. That's going to take work. If we define the future at a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren't expecting any future at all. Instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness. In this scenario, poorer countries will catch up to richer countries and the world as a whole will reach an economic plateau. But even in a truly globalized plateau, even if a truly globalized plateau were possible, could it last? In the best case, economic competition would be more intense than ever before every single person and firm on the planet.

However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it's hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction. That leaves the fourth scenario, in which we create new technology. to make a much better future. The most dramatic version of this outcome is called the singularity, an attempt to name the imagined results of new technologies as powerful as to transcend the current limits of our understanding.

Ray Kurzweil, the best-known singularitarian, starts from Moore's Law and traces exponential growth trends in dozens of fields confidently projecting a future of superhuman artificial intelligence. According to Kurzweil, the same. singularity is near. It's inevitable, and all we have to do is prepare ourselves to accept it. But no matter how many trends can be traced, the future won't happen on its own. What the singularity would look like matters less than the stark choice we face today between the two most likely scenarios. Nothing or something. I can't stress this enough. You're not going, if you're sitting there

as a purist thinking about your libertarian utopia, your Amcap utopia, your National Socialist, you're white nationalist utopia. If you're thinking about that, and that's all you're thinking about, and you won't accept anything different, you're never going to be happy. You're going to die miserable. You're going to die miserable.

Change is either going to be no change, or there's going to be some change. The some change, you may not like, and it may be worse than we have right now, but at least if it's worse than we have right now, there's a possibility that we can come out on the other end of that and maybe it'll just accelerate. But you're not going to get your utopia ever. Accept that.

Your kids aren't going to get it. No one in your line is going to get it. It's never going to happen. So stop. Wake up. Do what makes you happy as an individual. And then look at the world around you and see how things are playing out and see how you can use it. See how it can benefit you. And if it doesn't benefit you, retreat. Retreat. No one's coming for you.

No one wants to put a chip in your head. Stop it. You're not that special. I'm sorry to tell you. You're not that special. I don't think they're coming to put a chip in my head. Maybe someone would come to get me because of some of the things I say or whatever. Maybe that'll happen one day. whatever. I chose to do this. You who are just going about your life and live your life, stop it. Stop making excuses. Just go do it. It's up to us. We cannot take for granted that the future will be better and that means we need to work to create it today. Whether we achieve the singularity on a cosmic scale is perhaps less important than whether we seize the unique opportunities we have to do new things in our own working lives.

Everything important to us, the universe, the planet, the country, your company, your life, and this very moment is singular. Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better, to go from zero to one. The essential first step is to think for yourself, only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first. Can we both recreate it and preserve it for the future? I'm just going to leave that up there and highlight that.

I appreciate everyone tuning in for this. As I've said in previous episodes, I have inserted ads. A couple people have complained about the ads. Well, I mean, sorry. I need to pay bills. I mean, I'm sorry. I can't turn the volume down on the ads. I can't, I can tell them I don't want vaccine ads, I don't want political ads,

I don't want ads like this. If you complain that there's ads for gambling and you're like, well, that doesn't seem like it would be, if I'm in a town there's a casino, I might go in there and play a couple hands of blackjack. I may go in there and play a couple hands of poker. I may even hit a slot machine. if it's if you're if it's something that you're morally opposed to i'm sorry i'm not all right um i tried to make sure that there's nothing there that goes against my morality there may be something that'll slip through and everything if you let me know then i have i have ways i can deal with it but um

the ads are there i apologize it's the way you pay the bills and if you want to avoid the ads for as little as $2 a month. You can support me on Patreon, my website, or subscribe star. go to freemanbionthewall.com forward slash support, and you can get them without ads. Okay. Maybe one day, I won't have to run ads. That'd be great. Okay.

I don't want, personally, I don't like them being there. All right. But I hope you really got a lot out of this because this book changed the way I think, especially coming out of Austrian economics, where competition is so brought up, brought up in almost everything, this just changes the way you think that if we're going to have progress, if we're going to have that next thing

that makes our lives so much better and so much easier, that we have to get past this idea that everything, oh, everything's a competition, and competition is good. shit. I hope this helps you understand that. And if you don't and if you think he's full of shit, thank you for listening. At least you went into it with an open mind and you listened to it. I mean, most people don't, yeah, I mean, I can read stuff that I don't agree with. I've done, I've done full series on subjects I don't agree with. But I want to know what they are and I want

other people to know what they are if they're interested. So thank you for this. New book coming up in a couple days. Almost positive. I already know what. what it's going to be and we're going to switch gears. Oh, by the way, if I start a book series, if I start reading a book, okay, and it's on a subject like this, or if say my next subject is political theory, recommending to me another book that's just like zero to one,

why would, what from my podcast do you know that would have me just concentrate on one subject? I'm gonna move on. come back to something like this again but i'm moving on it's what my interest is and my interest is not only one thing i like broad subject so i'm not yelling at you i'm not screaming at you but you know if i start like the next one may be some just basic political theory please don't contact me saying this is the next one you should read and it's political theory and it's pretty close to what what what i'm reading at the time i'm not going to do it i'm going to move on to

something completely different all right so So I appreciate all of you. I do appreciate the contact when people do contact me because when you make the recommendation, even though I'm like, I'm not going to do this. You always say something really nice. And I appreciate that. It's very, it motivates me. So thank you for tuning in for this book.

See on the next one.