What follows are some concepts and ideas Peter Thiel shared during his conversation with Bambi Francisco at Lincoln Network.

How do you define freedom? Freedom has many different dimensions. Freedom of thought and the freedom to think for yourself is important. And that feels under assault in the Western world. The problem of political correctness. People are not allowed to think differently.

You should look up and not look so much around. Mob consensus is not good. Where is the break point between wisdom and madness of crowds? We have probably leaned too much into the madness of crowds.

The nature of technological progress. How do we measure it and what can we say of the progress as a whole. Utopia or Dystopia? There isn’t as much progress happening as advertised. Unfashionable view: in some ways younger generations are not doing better than previous ones.

The larger social and political question is to what extent is technology changing our society. Is this actually transformative and taking our society to the next level?

The internet is not quite as big as advertised. The propaganda talks about how great Silicon Valley is. The most honest statement is to acknowledge that we are not as great as we used to be. It is a sort of existential question. We should not accept this.

Democracy is a loaded word. We are supposed to be a constitutional republic with checks on the elites. The people in charge should be able to be replaced if they are not serving the country. Too much dogmatism. More skepticism to beat misinformation.

Not enough fighting against dogmatism. We need a check against government. Technology that really challenges the state but Silicon Valley does not look like that.

Universities are corrupt and the educational system is not incentivized to change because of perverse incentives underpinning it (e.g. high tuition fees). At least it is being more transparently acknowledged that the education system is broken.

In July of 1969 we landed on the moon and then three weeks later we had Woodstock. Technology stopped and the hippies took over the country. The shift from exteriority to interiority. There have been all these ways that we have moved into ourselves.

A line he likes to quote by John Milton from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” It does not matter. It is a state of mind. The thing we should ask ourselves: to what extent is that true?

Psychology was developed in the early 20th century. If you don’t have external things that encourage people to be good, how do you create internal mechanisms for people to be good for people to control themselves or to be controlled.

Psychology gets advertised as personal transformation. But how well does it work? You could spend years in therapy and then go from self-transformation to self-acceptance. You realize you do not need to change at all.

Bambi mentioned that we are paying more attention to mental health. Last year was a boom with billions of dollars invested. Are we doing it the right way though? Just rising above positive psychology won’t do it. We need to acknowledge our inherit brokenness to move forward.

We need to keep a good balance between exteriority and interiority. Some interventions through psychedelics in controlled settings can help people get a new perspective and that can be helpful. But it can also go the other way and be harmful.

For transformation to really work you actually have to believe it is possible. If it is just internal drama, it is not going to happen. You are trying to simulate a religious conversion. Sometimes it can be powerful, sometimes it can go haywire.

He quotes Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Opposite is true for startups. All great startups are special in a good way and all failed companies are generic.

Often the greatest companies do not have a narrative. With a narrative you are one of many. Ask the hard question: what is essential and unique?

Satoshi was probably at that event among 200 other people that discussed e-gold. He was the one that recognized bitcoin as a solution to e-gold. We are at a crisis moment for the federal reserve. My only hesitation is that it is a secret that is already known by everybody.

The bubble of the megacities is hopefully over. I did not move to Los Angeles. I moved away from San Francisco. Seasteading felt unrealistic and now more closer to happening because of remote work and life being reality.

Identity is a strange word. It means two things. It means that which makes you unique and that which makes you identical and same as other people. Think about anti-identity and in that context we can try to figure out things about the world and truth.