It's inaccurate to say that websites are his ideal, just the first example in his book "Zero to One" of minimal regulation producing maximal innovation.

If we didn't have as many regulations, his "ideal" would be innovation in something "better."

This is well known. The thesis of Peter Thiel's Zero to One was precisely about how a tech company's ultimate goal should be about creating a monopoly. An op-ed by Thiel in the WSJ talk about exactly this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

> I'm living in Europe and...

>... enjoy more free time now by reducing work hours than to bet on an uncertain future.

Unknowingly or not, you've just echoed a chapter in Peter Thiel's book Zero to One with such perfect clarity, Mr Thiel may start to look like a savant.

Thiel isn't at all the cartoon villain he's made out to be. That's just lazy partisan propaganda. Read his book "Zero to One" or watch a few of his interviews for a nuanced perspective.

The answer depends on why you want to grow a business sense. What are you trying to achieve with your business skills?

If you want to understand the business world, the management aspect of it, I suggest reading Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

If you want to get better at networking, I would suggest reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

If you want to understand marketing, I would suggest, Marketing: An Introduction by Philip Kotler

Peter Thiels' book Zero to One might be a good starting point to understand the start-up world.

But for a general instinct about business, you have to stay curious and learn how people think and behave. Being curious about anthropology, psychology, economics, news, trends, sociology are key.

This is a good case study in why one should never fight against something. When you fight against, you end up copying your enemy.

Thiel here argues that America, to counter China, needs to become a lot more like China.

The idea that "competition" is bad because it makes you copy your enemy is the most valuable insight in the book Zero to One by Thiel and Masters, yet here he doesn't seem to be using that insight at all.

A list I put together a while back: https://www.encona.com/posts/product-manager-resources

Overview books:

* Inspired

* The Product Manager’s Desk Reference

* The Lean Startup

* Agile Product Management with Scrum

Interview preparation (good for breadth, even if you’re not applying for jobs):

* Decode & Conquer

* Cracking the PM interview

Other good books for PMs:

* Hooked

* The Design of Everyday Things

* Zero to One

* Traction

Also, Peter Thiel's Zero to One

A couple of months ago a techie friend linked me a podcast episode featuring Peter Thiel being interviewed by Eric Weinstein. He raved about how it was incredible and groundbreaking. The episode itself may have been from 2018 or 2019.

I watched the entire thing (I think close to 3 hours), and about halfway through I came to the realization that both Peter and Eric were using a lot of words... to say basically nothing.

The entire thing was full of truisms and platitudes and overall grievances about the state of science and technology and the slowing down of innovation, with some politics and economics thrown in. Neither of them knew the underlying subjects well, if at all, but had read or heard other people's various takes on them, packaged it up using lots of jargon, and were now spouting it as "wisdom."

It left a very sour taste in my mouth, because I also read Zero to One, and Peter (probably thanks to a very good editor) came across as much more cogent there.

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgDkrDeuV6I

I like how Thiel's counter-culture criticisms that seems to go against the crowd gets shut down by big tech and media. It is one of his techniques in his book Zero to One:
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-y...

He might just be misunderstood: he is not making conclusions, but asking questions, posting hypotheses or conjectures for further investigation (the scientist method). He is checking against his own biases (investor in Facebook and Bitcoin)

Ex: His support for Trump happened to be a bad bet against the crowd, but he did not endorse him for a 2nd term (after seeing the data). Most Palantir attacks by the tech community are also baseless and political (covered by liberal media).

His suspicions are valid given past observations.
Who would blame him for distrusting marketing giants = brainwashing machines like Google, Apple, Facebook and by extension China? Do you see his logic? His law background might actually make him the best advocate for ethics, which big tech hides violations really well with marketing and PR.

Bitcoin may have been countercultural at the beginning, until is was not- right now it is being speculated more like a money making scheme than a promising technology. Thiel's comment might be right onto something, let's not discredit him this early. Remember, he was part of the Paypal mafia...

"The flagship industry of the definite optimism of the 1950s was engineering. The flagship industry of the indefinite optimism of the 2010s is finance. Finance is about “making money when you have no idea how to create wealth”. While the engineers plan out specific dams and rockets and so on, the more abstract levels of finance invest in “the market”, a vague aggregate of all economic activity which is expected to go up because Progress."

From Scott Alexander's review of Thiel's Zero to One:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/31/book-review-zero-to-on...