Zero To One

"Zero to one? What does that mean?" Zac asked.

"You know... like Peter Thiel's book. Have you read Zero to One?"

"No," he replied.

"Oh, well, it's just a book about business strategy and economics. Basically, Peter Thiel — the founder of Paypal and Palantir — explains how the biggest leaps in progress are vertical, not horizontal. Vertical progress goes from zero to one, creating something completely new. Horizontal progress goes from one to n, taking something that already exists and doing more of it. Like this..."

"A great example is Steve Jobs. Jobs was constantly going from zero to one, and that's why society regards him as a great visionary. He could see things that didn't exist yet, and bring them into the world. That is art. That is creativity.

Think about the iPhone. Apple created the first real smartphone, going from zero to one. From there, an entire market opened up for apps, wearable devices, social media applications like Instagram, and mobile commerce. Think about the level of impact that one innovation has had on the world. The iPhone was a paradigm shift. It was a huge vertical leap; a revolution. It went from zero to one.

Then all these other companies swooped in and took the technology from one to n. There are tons of smartphone companies out there now, and all of them are building upon that huge vertical leap in progress. All of them are making smartphones cheaper, distributing them globally, and incrementally improving them. An iPhone ten years ago and an iPhone today are not that different. Today's iPhone is incrementally better, but adding a higher quality camera and more processing power is not a big vertical leap.

Anyway, Thiel argues that every vertical leap — going from zero to one — has a secret at its heart. Here, listen to this." I flipped through the notes on my phone and found an extract from Thiel's book.

Every one of today’s most famous and familiar ideas was once unknown and unsuspected. The mathematical relationship between a triangle’s sides, for example, was secret for millennia. Pythagoras had to think hard to discover it. If you wanted in on Pythagoras’s new discovery, joining his strange vegetarian cult was the best way to learn about it. Today, his geometry has become a convention — a simple truth we teach to grade schoolers. A conventional truth can be important — it’s essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example — but it won’t give you an edge. It’s not a secret.

Remember our contrarian question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? If we already understand as much of the natural world as we ever will — if all of today’s conventional ideas are already enlightened, and if everything has already been done — then there are no good answers. Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.

Zero To One Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

I paused for a moment. "I like that question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? For me, it's this: we live in a mathematical dream world that is being procedurally generated and controlled by our individual and collective consciousness. That's my favorite secret.

But think about secrets in the context of science, rather than business. Take Darwin's theory of evolution as an example. For millennia, we called the complexity of biological life a mystery and attributed it to gods. It was a deeply hidden secret — hence why I'm calling it a mystery. Then Darwin came along with his theory of evolution, and exposed the secret. He went from zero to one, creating a huge paradigm shift in the process. Complex biological life was no longer a mystery. Fast forward a few hundred years, and evolution is just conventional knowledge. It's not a secret anymore."

"Unless you're a young-earth creationist," Zac added.

"Well, yes. But they aren't playing by the rules of rationality and logic. To a scientist today, evolution by natural selection just seems obvious and elegant and beautiful. What was once a mystery is now convention. There are plenty of scientists who are building upon Darwin's theory by furthering research into evolution. These people are the equivalent of all the iPhone copycats who came out with smartphones only after Steve Jobs went from zero to one. The world needs the copycats to globalize the innovation, but they aren't creating something new.

So to be clear, Darwin is an artist. He went from zero to one. He exposed a deeply hidden secret about the world. Everyone who built upon his work and took it further is a scientist. They are going from one to n. Going from zero to one requires creativity, and going from one to n requires methodical execution. Zero to one is big-picture, one to n is detail. Zero to one is abstract thinking, one to n is linear thinking. They are completely different.

If you want to make progress in any field, you need both artists and scientists. If you just have artists, you might get a breakthrough innovation, but it probably won't spread throughout the world without meticulous detail-oriented execution. If you just have scientists, you will only ever get incremental improvements on what already exists, but those improvements will be executed well.

Now, being an entrepreneur yourself, you understand the value of diversity on a team. You're the crazy inventor who comes up with some hare-brained scheme, and then you hire good executors to take that creative idea and execute on the details, right?"

"Yeah," Zac agreed.

"Good. This is obvious in the realm of business, but not so obvious in the realm of science. The problem with scientists is that the majority of them are... well... scientists. They're all self-selected scientists. By definition, they're the kinds of people who will take something from one to n, not zero to one. The artists generally self-select into more creative fields. Artists also despise arbitrary rules, and academia is full of restrictive, non-sensical, political bullshit. Plus, you need a mathematical mind to operate at the highest levels of physics, and people who love maths tend to be better linear thinkers, not divergent thinkers.

Now don't get me wrong — we absolutely need scientists. They are essential and brilliant and valuable. This is not me ripping on scientists, as one skill set is not necessarily superior to the other. God knows I couldn't — and wouldn't want to — do the work of a scientist.

I'm just pointing out that the vast majority of the scientific establishment are self-selected scientists. Occasionally you get an artist like Einstein, who was completely rejected from academia because he displayed artist-like tendencies: disrespect for authority, a disdain for rules, and he challenged preconceived notions. Einstein wasn't a scientist — he was an artist who used mathematics as his medium to paint a portrait of the universe.

Scientists are excellent linear thinkers. They are great at looking at what is right in front of them and taking it further. They are generally shit at seeing counter-intuitive things, though. Absolutely terrible. I've worked with scientist types before, and it baffles me how little vision they have of their own accord. They are brilliant executors because they trust what is right in front of them. They are also terrible innovators because they trust what is right in front of them. By definition, what is right in front of them, and obvious, is also not a secret. Hence, scientists are not innovators.

This is all very simple logic. If there were no more secrets left in the universe, we would have a perfect understanding of reality. If there were no more secrets left, physicists would have figured out their 'theory of everything' ages ago. Big secrets are paradigm shifts, like the iPhone was a paradigm shift for society. If the physics community is stalled out, which they most definitely are, there has to be a big secret hiding somewhere. There has to be. Simple logic says there must be.

So why aren't the physicists flipping all of their assumptions on their head and questioning everything they think they know? There is a cancer hiding in their logic, and if they don't extract it soon, the cancer will kill the field of physics. All of the brightest minds will self-select into different careers with better pay and more growth and excitement. That's just economics. When this happens, the secrets will remain hidden forever.

It's actually a very large systemic problem that is threatening the progress of humanity. If you trace our current quality of life back to its root cause, almost every big advance came from the field of physics. If we don't continue to deepen our understanding of the natural world, we have very little hope for the kind of technological progress we'll need to support our rapidly changing society: clean and affordable energy, climate change solutions, efficient agriculture, alleviation of poverty. If we want to save the world, we have to save physics."

I began reading another extract from Thiel's book.

Why has so much of our society come to believe that there are no hard secrets left? It might start with geography. There are no blank spaces left on the map anymore. If you grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go. After hearing tales of foreign adventure, you could become an explorer yourself. This was probably true up through the 19th and early 20th centuries; after that point photography from National Geographic showed every Westerner what even the most exotic, underexplored places on earth look like. Today, explorers are found mostly in history books and children’s tales. Parents don’t expect their kids to become explorers any more than they expect them to become pirates or sultans. Perhaps there are a few dozen uncontacted tribes somewhere deep in the Amazon, and we know there remains one last earthly frontier in the depths of the oceans. But the unknown seems less accessible than ever.

Along with the natural fact that physical frontiers have receded, four social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets. First is incrementalism. From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. If you overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, you won’t receive credit for it. But in exchange for doing exactly what’s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you’ll get an A. This process extends all the way up through the tenure track, which is why academics usually chase large numbers of trivial publications instead of new frontiers.

Second is risk aversion. People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right — dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in — is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

Third is complacency. Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe it.

Fourth is “flatness.” As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is “flat.” Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn’t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique.

Zero To One Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

"Okay, I get it," Zac said. "Artists find new secrets. Scientists extrapolate on things that are no longer secrets. And our entire society is optimized to produce scientists, not artists. "

"Yes," I confirmed.

"And you're an artist, not a scientist."

"Yes," I said again.

"So, this thesis of yours is art, not science?"

"Exactly," I replied. "For some reason, I have a fascination with building beautiful, logical structures in my mind. This is the most beautiful one I've ever created, and it took me five years to build. I like to think of it as mind-art."

"What makes it so beautiful?"

"Minimalism," I replied. "I've removed everything that isn't necessary, and the structure still stands."

"How minimal are we talking here? How many postulates does the answer to this riddle rest on?"

"You mean the algorithm that I mentioned at the beginning? The answer to what reality is?" I asked.

"Yeah. That thing. How many postulates does it rely on?"

"Other than 'I think, therefore I am,' just one."

"One?!" Zac shouted. "You can get an answer to life, the universe, and everything from one postulate?!"

"Yeah," I replied. "As I said, the whole thing is ludicrously simple, and the simplicity gives it structural integrity. If you want to attack my logical structure, there is only one postulate you can knock down, which means there is only one point of failure. But don't be deceived by its simplicity — it's also a counter-intuitive mindfuck, which is why it's going to take me all night to explain."