| An Underestimated Intellectual Contributor: Part 1  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
Who is this guy anyway? His name is David Perell of the North Star Podcast. One way or another, without meeting the man, he has telepathically captured the essence of the genius of Peter Thiel in a way no other writer has done. In some 15,000 word essay, the young branding consultant from San Francisco shows that Thiel's career embodies a unique and powerful system of the world. Thiel — make no mistake — is one of the supreme contrarian minds of our era. He is the only billionaire whose intellectual contribution is drastically underestimated. But shrouding his depths are contradictions and enigmas. Peter Thiel is best known as the creator of transformative companies such as PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX. But he is also the source of such radical concepts as the Thiel Fellows program luring students to drop out of college, and the 1517 fund, backing their companies. In Zero to One — in my opinion, it's the most interesting and original business book ever written — Thiel pioneers unique and revolutionary insights on the nature of capitalism. I feature his insights in many of my Daily Prophecies… Thiel's Impressive Legacy In many books, I have criticized the banality and futility of the theory of perfect competition. I have depicted all enterprises as the pursuit of transitory positions of monopoly. Celebrating monopoly as the indispensable fruit of true innovation, Thiel takes the argument to the personal level: "How do I become less competitive in order that I may become more successful?" But Thiel's first testament is his portfolio. Thiel's companies, more than any other venture, express a system of the world, a philosophy, and even theology. Long before Bitcoin and its derivatives and long before the financial crisis of 2008, PayPal began with the goal of overthrowing the current world financial system of sovereign monies. By conceiving a new global payments medium, PayPal attempted to transcend the global scandal of central banks hacking each other's currencies in the $5.1 trillion a day debauch of floating currencies. Facebook expressed a recognition that the crippling flaw of the internet was the absence of "faces" or real identities. Thiel saw that privacy and anonymity are radically different things. Anonymous speech is not free speech. Not only does anonymity make security essentially impossible, its products are graffiti on the net. Anonymity befouls virtually every web page that relies on it. By making all sources undifferentiated, it makes them all the same, all creatures from the same dark lagoon. Unsigned ideas are by definition deracinated. Without human reference, they comprise almost meaningless noise. Palantir addresses the breakdown of internet security by grasping the futility of pure machine solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning in robotic deployments. Rejecting this strategy prevailing through most of the feckless Internet security firms of Silicon Valley, Palantir uses artificial intelligence to enhance the effectiveness of human agency, not to replace it. Thiel understands that the only singularity we directly know in the Universe is the human mind. In SpaceX, Thiel joins Elon Musk in the heroic venture of continuing the early inspiration and success of the Apollo program projecting human ambition and creativity beyond the confines of a limited planet. Implicitly throwing down the gantlet to the bureaucratic sterility of NASA, Thiel declares: "Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic, it is rare." | 
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