The funny part of this exchange was how Thiel and Zuckerberg are at such a remove from the daily functioning of Facebook that they can write long, polished, bloviating emails with vague ideas in them. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, who works for them, writes business-style emails with short sentences and bullet points, and seems to just want to know what specific actions they are telling him to take so he can keep his job.
> Perhaps we should consider Millennials as a diversity criterion for our Board of Directors. [...] Should we aim to have two or three Millennials on our board? If we did, how would it change the nature of the discussion at the Board level?
What could a person who is in a position to be on the board of directors of one of these companies... and who happens to be a Millennial... be able to tell the board anything substantial they don't already know?
If a major company board wants to be informed by the thinking that they don't already have, of Millennials or Zoomers, maybe start with with a question more like:
Who has a representative experience of Millennials or Zoomers (and who we normally wouldn't even consider for a board position, if we ever became aware of them at all)?
(A bit cynically, I'm imagining a scenario of, somehow, a board makes a bold decision to bring in a true outsider, who they think will be disruptive in an overall good way, despite the board being a bit scared of the move... but the anointed person actually plays it like their entree to higher circles of power, and acclimates almost immediately to the same-ol' thinking and behavior. :)
Beyond showing just how much influence Mr. Thiel has on Mr. Zuckerberg (referring to efforts behind the commencement speech as 'we'), I didn't glean anything from these e-mails. They seemed rather devoid of meaningful content.
Perhaps this is a poor assessment due to my recent reading of Ben Franklin's private correspondence, and comparing one to the other might not make sense. It did, however, remind me of so much corporate and PR correspondence which is all but designed to be as inspid as possible.
The saving grace, I suppose, is that these individuals probably did not intend to publicize these e-mails. Then again, neither did Mr. Franklin.
I find them shallow because the conversations are purely based on how they want to be perceived and lack any ideas into how things ought to be. Which I imagine the founding fathers correspondence was rich with.
This book [0] contains several such letters. Beware it makes for fairly dry reading sometimes, since they're usually addressed to one person about a topic that may or may not be of general interest, and often missing greater context.
The beauty of email is the asynchronous nature where participants have ample time to compose and structure their thoughts instead of needing to be real-time during a video chat or gc.
Agreed. Any complex ideas (not that these ideas are that) are done a service by fleshing out completely in long form writing. Video also works well, but has significant overhead.
Conversations are good for exploration of ideas and aligning perspectives between two people quickly.
The Economist just launched a new podcast, "Boom!", on why boomers, as a generation, have been holding an "iron grip" on major US institutions.
The first episode is free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QEy9RO7bEJ8 -- I listened to it today, I thought it was pretty good. It digs into the history of a very important political year of boomers' lives: 1968. And it started to answer why the demographics of US political institutions skew so much toward people in their 70s and 80s (and, occasionally, 90s).
This is the Thiel quote I'm reacting to here: "What I would add to Mark's summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past."
As a cynical and slacker-esque GenXer, my take is that capable people, people with drive and resources, choose instead to follow all the broadening paths to wealth (and by extension power) rather than pursue politics.
Before the dot.com, the ways to relatively rapid wealth were mostly, finance, law, and maybe medicine (and that was less rapid) — starting a company and acquiring capital was much more limited. Going into politics was actually a decent option if you were smart but a little less connected to get into finance and didn’t want debt of law/med school.
Additionally, with the rise of the internet, being political which requires a lot more public speaking than most other careers, offers way more chance for missteps and life altering embarrassments.
To summarize: GenX basically said “talk to the hand” to politics.
I don't know, I'm skeptical that a politics career is less dependent on connections than finance. Not that finance isn't, but a huge portion of successful politicians come from well connected families.
The money needed to run even a lower level campaign is far more than most average folks have a way to access. Things might have even gone the other way and gotten slightly more accessible over the past couple decades. The internet has given a platform to many people to build a brand on, and made it easier to collect small dollar donations.
I am not sure how changing how we refer to cohorts of people would do that.
Aside from that, I have no idea what you mean by "all people who were born, depending on who you ask, between 1946 and 1964, steal from people who were born after them"
That cannot be true. I am not sure anyone agrees with that broad of a statement, yet, it is repeated often.
Instead you could say, "People in the US who gathered assets before 1970 and are still alive today had a greater economic advantage than those who were born in 1985 and gathered assets before 2008".
At least then it would be easy for someone to know what you are actually talking about, and to not be dismissive of absurd claims.
Birth years of last 5 presidents: 1946, 1946, 1961, 1946, 1942. And, assuming no one drops out and they both survive to election day, 1942 or 1946 will be the next one.
Obama, being born in 1961, is on the edge of Boomers and Gen X, since generational boundaries are always a little poorly defined. He was 47 years old when elected to his first term in 2008, so we definitely think of him as a "young president." Plus, he was only a US senator for 3 years before winning the presidency. Bill Clinton, a definite boomer, was 46 when he was elected in 1992.
Trump is technically Silent Generation (edit: Nope, im wrong, he's a boomer), but I feel like he's very much a "Gen-X" president in how he sort of encapsulates that generations id. He rose to prominence in public consciousness during Gen-X's formative years. His TV career likewise took off as Gen-X grew as a share of the adult TV viewing audience, with his shows doing well in that demographic. And finally, during the 2016 and 2020 election his support was extremely strong with them in 2016 and 2020[1], tracking closer 65+ voters than Millennials or Zoomers. Romney did not enjoy the same support from Xers in 2012[2]. Long story short, Trump has tapped into Gen-X in a way even Gen-X politicians have been unable to.
1946 is absolutely the beginning of the Boomers. The Boomers are the babies born after soldiers came home from WWII in 1945. If anything, Biden (1942) is technically the Silent Generation.
Gen X are the children of the Boomers. So starting ~1965 or so. Trump may have a connection with Gen Xers, just like Reagan had a connection with Boomers, but he's not a Gen X president. Not in any way.
Zuckerberg: “Finally, I think there's also some distinction between me and the company here. While our company has a special role in the lives of this generation, this is likely particularly important for how I show up because I am the most well-known person of my generation.”
Does he really think he’s better known than, say, Lebron James or Lionel Messi?
Yes, I think he is. And I don’t think his claim is unreasonable. I have heard of Lebron and Messi, but haven’t seen either of them play. Ever. Lebron is Basketball, and I’m pretty sure Messi is soccer, but I only know that because the latter came up in conversations about Apple buying sports rights. I would say there are more people engaging with Instagram and Facebook than there are with basketball.
I get what you’re saying, but I think it’s a limited viewpoint, just as mine is.
Out of those three, Messi is one of the most famous players in the most popular sport in the world (that Americans don't really follow, for some reason). Lebron does something that's popular in the US, but I didn't really recognize him. Zuckerberg is well known among those who follow business news, but he has little visibility in everyday life.
If you restrict the audience to Americans, we can use this YouGov survey: https://today.yougov.com/ratings/international/fame/all-time... The most famous millennial is currently either Beyonce (#6, a borderline millennial) or Taylor Swift (#14). Zuckerberg is well behind them at #99.
I'm pretty confident more people know Messi globally than Zuckerberg and Thiel combined. He is the greatest sportsperson of this generation. You might be living in a bubble.
>He is the greatest sportsperson of this generation.
Had Messi not joined the US league and Apple bought the right I would not be surprised if half of the Americans dont know him. There also plenty of people around the world who simply dont watch Football, at least actively.
Close to 1.5B, according to FIFA, I could not find any independent estimations. But what's 500m among friends.
I just asked two people not in tech >60 who Zuckerberg is and they both knew him. But, I mean, they still read the newspaper, so I guess they're out of touch, as well.
Yeah ok, anecdotally and I just asked my dad who never watched a football match in his life but uses facebook daily if he knew them and he only new Messi.
Depends on where you live, in Europe Messi is very well known for example, Lebron I've never heard of, Zuckerberg is known by people in tech and maybe some others.
I'd bet on some singer or actor / actress being the most well known globally.
There's always a possibility that it's some Chinese / Indian person that is completely unknown outside their own country, but because of that country's size still ends up "the most well-known"
The number of users of Meta products is one thing, Zuckerberg’s personal fame is another.
Conflating the two would imply that, for example, Phil Knight is one of the best known people in the world because of the ubiquity of his company, Nike. That’s obviously not the case.
Based on this email, Zuckerberg seems to have an exaggerated sense of just how well-known he personally is.
An entire Sorkin movie was about Zuck and I've seen him on the front page of the BBC, NHK, as well as in major Chinese and Indian media many, many times. I've seen Messi a few times and I'm not sure if I've ever seen Lebron on them.
Zuck's name recognition isn't yet at the Bill Gates or Taylor Swift level, but he's already beyond what even top athletes of the current generation can hope for.
This is one of those comments where I really have to remember what site I'm on. "Engaging with Meta apps" has nothing to do with knowing who Mark Zuckerberg is, the average WhatsApp user globally is far more familiar with Messi than Zuck.
> I would say there are more people engaging with Instagram and Facebook than there are with basketball.
Sure, but I don't see how that equates to more people knowing about Zuck. Lots of Meta users neither know nor care who he is. Outside of business and tech I almost never see his name or face pop up.
Lebron on the other hand is all over the place. I have zero interest in the NBA but could easily pick him out of a lineup.
In Europe, LeBron is definitely not a household name. Maybe if you are into sports. Ronaldo and Messi on the other hand, are someone most people will know.
It's really regional. Where I live, baseball is the primary sport and basketball (primarily NBA) is a distant second. Many but considerably less than half of young people know who Messi is but only because he just won a world cup and even that memory is fading fast since most people didn't watch it. You'd struggle to find anyone under 60 who hadn't heard of Zuck.
That’s the US perspective. But globally the final of the World Cup (which Messi played) was seen by more than 1.5B people (compared to <200M in the Super Bowl). It is a big name.
No, it's not. Did you really think baseball was the most popular sport in America? I was talking about where I live (Taiwan).
Also, it's a safe bet that more than 1.5 billion people just between India and China have heard of Zuck given how often he's been front page media in both countries.
> I remember playing JRPGs late into the night growing up and reading GamePro magazine.
From another of your comments, it sounds like you're middle class. Or, at least, a working class American which is quite privileged from a global standpoint.
Either way, you're hardly a representative sample of one (1).
>Does he really think he’s better known than, say, Lebron James or Lionel Messi?
Depends. There are lots of people who aren't into Basketball or Football. But there are ~3B user who uses Facebook and Instagram. Technology has such a wide reach these days I would not be surprised if he is better known.
I think Bill Gate and Steve Jobs are pretty well known, even in my circle of people who dont even know what a CPU is. Nearly everyone who uses an iPhone know or have at least heard of Steve Jobs.
Although arguably Mark Zuckerberg dont get as much press as them.
A charitable reading of this would be that he means this within the scope of Facebook itself. In the preceding paragraph he talking about Facebook being built by millennials and it's utility, product evolution and comms reflecting their life changes, so it's possible he is talking about how to separate himself out from it's evolution in that direction so people just don't think "facebook is doing this thing because zuck is getting older" and instead see it as a reflection of the journey of the people that build the company.
But I dunno, he may just actually believe he's the most famous millennial ever. He's up there but I don't know how one could ever quantify that.
The hubris of thinking you're representative of the world.
I think there's a better chance of Messi being known because there's more people in Europe and Latin America that are fans of football than corporations. Even Africa, soccer is quite a popular sport.
Now, for Asia, I'm not sure. That's where the game would be played.
In a lot of ways when these people say "the world" they mean the subset of people they actually care about. Mostly, US Americans and perhaps Canadians.
I think it’s odd to assume that people in Europe, Latin America, and Africa wouldn’t know who the creator of Facebook is, like he’s some obscure figure only known to G7 countries and tech enthusiasts.
I think the biggest revelation is that he says he's the most famous of his generation, not "one of the most famous". That says a lot about his personality. Has anyone ever asked him if he's a narcissist?
I could believe that a lot of people under 20 would not know who Zuckerberg is at all, but definitely know who Messi is, if we are talking outside of the USA. Cristiano Ronaldo would be another.
As expected, Biden and Trump as presidential candidates and former POTUS are better known. Messi has way better recognition than Lebron worldwide owing to soccer's broader appeal and popularity.
Search interest obviously isn't a direct correlation to name recognition - you can have recognition and no one is interested in you - but I'd say it's far more likely that people know who Lionel Messi is considering he won the World Cup in a spectacular fashion and 1.5B people watched the world cup live & I'm sure more than that many people heard about it.
I know who Lionel Messi is, and I read the article that he walks better than other people run (he walks to the right place, while they run to the wrong place). But, what do you mean he won the World Cup in a spectacular fashion? Link to a video of that?
He literally has the whole world at his doorstep and can just ask them.
It would be awesome if Zuckerberg pulled an "Apple U2" moment and posted on Facebook, in some special way that it appears on all 800 million active accounts: "What are your thoughts if I were to run for U.S. President someday?"
I can't really read this. Peter Thiel seems so stupid and out of touch here, it's drivel.
I know the HN audience has lots of people who would like to be sycophantic to Thiel and call my above commentary rude, but man.. it is such an overwhelming stench.
The paradox of capitalism is that its biggest cheerleaders talk about the virtues of investment and bottom-up organization, while also acting like the top-down bureaucrats they (rightfully) accuse authoritarian communists of being.
Company CEO's may be top-down bureaucrats, but they don't have power to coerce you. No one is legally required to have a Facebook account, on pain of civil or criminal penalties. And if Facebook becomes less popular with its users, Zuckerberg feels the hit immediately as the value of his stake in the venture drops. Government bureaucrats can have vast powers of coercion at their disposal, and there's no obvious way to replace them if this power is abused. Elections are better than nothing, but they're also slow and imperfect.
There's a difference between hard power, which Facebook doesn't have, and soft power, which Facebook has tons of.
No one is legally required to have a Facebook account, but if you want to find out what times businesses are (actually) open and closed, get the latest information about what's happening in your neighborhood or even remain somewhat connected with people, you absolutely need to have an Instagram account and better be fine with using X (hence Musk willing to break the bank to acquire it).
In many countries, you must have a WhatsApp account to receive official communications from their governments. In other words, not having a WhatsApp account could be a safety issue.
The American consumer lacks the discipline needed to boycott products and services that merely harm the consumer, which is amusing considering how effective the American consumer is at boycotting products and services offered by companies with views which offend the consumer.
It's not an accident. Both big-C capitalism and socialism are the rule of the strong over the weak. They are tyrannical, where "tyranny" means rule for private self-interest instead of the common good. In a society that makes self-interest the highest and only principle of the land, the result will always be that the strong will, out of self-interest, come to dominate and use the weak for private gain. Hierarchy, rather than becoming a structure by which the common good is secured and by which each person can play their part, becomes a structure of domination and exploitation. Socialism is the terminus of individualistic capitalistic error, consummated in the grotesque error of egalitarianism. Your society is effectively made the supreme corporation.
"Architects of society" seems to be a running theme the last 100-200 years. And there is indeed a great deal of hubris in that idea.
Thiel is a libertarian (i.e., effectively a classical liberal and then some), and libertarians are individualists who view society as some kind of thing we enter into almost grudgingly and purely for the sake of private self-interest. The notion of the common good is either offensive to them, or understood as something ceded to "society" by individuals with little enthusiasm, but for the sake of some kind of utility or unfortunate necessity. For a libertarian to "architect society" can only mean ordering it in a manner that conforms to libertarian notions, and in practice, this means rule of the powerful for their own self-interest. This is the definition of tyranny.
The Soviets, too, wanted to "architect" societies, to remake Man and society in their own image, gladly throwing millions under the crushing wheels of the socialist machine.
The similarities between the two are not an accident, because they're not true opposites.
I realized quite early in life, through teenage exposure to libertarianism, that there seemed to be a very high correlation between self professed libertarians and emotional imbalance. This observation has held up pretty well.
There is no such thing as independence. It's a delusion. People get wrapped up in the idea that they have merit at the expense of others, and their good fortune should keep them isolated. It doesn't make sense unless you have some weird psychological issues.
Intergenerational conflict is particularly salient for wealthy Americans. The death of the boomers enables the millennials’ inheritance. Millennials blame boomers for not gracefully ceding power in their own lifetimes. But boomers see millennials as waiting for their parents to die, as complacent and heartless.
This conflict does not exist to nearly the same degree in families without wealth to inherit, and in cultures that respect the wisdom of one’s elders; rejection of one’s elders/youth worship is one value that millennial Americans inherited from Baby Boomers.
As to the emails, Clegg was right when he said this:
> For Millennials, authenticity, agency, autonomy, idealism, altruism etc all seem to be top of their list of desirable virtues – for better or worse, they are difficult to reconcile with Silicon Valley these days.
Well, it’s worse, not better.
Anyway, this kind of self-conscious persona-construction is opposite to what millennials vibe with. No matter how much Zuck styles himself like a rapper or athlete, he only appeals to boomer or at best Gen X sensibilities. This is great for META stock price, but doesn’t make Zuck appealing to millennials.
Interesting and intelligent but limited scope by the bubble in which all of the participants live. The major dichotomy is NOT boomer’s vs millennials or other generations. At best this is a heuristic associated with crude generalizations.
And of course the entire not-so-tacit motivation for this conversation in 2019 was on how to keep millennials glued to FB.
Completely left undisturbed is the ugly and true dichotomy caused by ever more extreme wealth imbalance across most of the world. Zuckerberg at one point seems to bemoan that even his very well paid employees cannot afford housing in San Francisco, as if this were the crux of a major problem.
Smart, ridiculously rich people living in a cloud.
> Completely left undisturbed is the ugly and true dichotomy caused by ever more extreme wealth imbalance across most of the world. Zuckerberg at one point seems to bemoan that even his very well paid employees cannot afford housing in San Francisco, as if this were the crux of a major problem.
Except a hugely important point is that Zuck and Thiel are arguing that Boomers are responsible for policies that exacerbate the huge wealth inequality by transferring wealth from younger generations to Boomers.
The SF/CA housing crisis is a perfect example. Boomers were able to buy property when it was affordable and new developments were still being constructed. Then they made it nearly impossible to add new housing stock, so you have people who could afford a small, nice house on a blue collar salary in the Bay Area that now goes for 2-3 million, transferring all this wealth from younger (poorer) people just starting out to landowners.
The solution to the SF/CA crisis - and indeed, to 'gentrification' more generally - is for people to vote with their feet and move out of SF/CA. There's plenty of "second-rate", cheap cities which are seen as "second-rate" only because people have yet to move there.
2. A lot of "second rate" cities experienced an explosion of housing prices during the pandemic as people from bigger/wealthier cities moved into them.
3. But more to the point, moving around is not really the solution. Tons of even large cities have tried to recreate Silicon Valley elsewhere, and they've mostly just succeeded at cheesy names (e.g. "Silicon Alley", "Silicon Prairie", "Silicon Hills"). It's incredibly difficult to reproduce the unique combination of culture, money, educational institutions, legal frameworks, etc. that allowed Silicon Valley to develop.
The real solution is simply to build more housing. It nearly always works in places that do it (see Austin over the past ~2 years). But the Boomers, as a matter of preserving their own wealth, have enacted tons of policies to restrict housing and keep prices going ever upward. That's why you've seen a backlash and "YIMBY" movements all over CA.
What distinguishes apparently “enlightened boomers in Austin from the greedy not-in-my-neighborhood boomers in San Francisco? Does it really make sense to set this up as boomers vs millennials? Mark Z is merely 42 and has a decent house or two in the Bay Area. Is he building condos for his millennial employees on his back-lot?
This has been a problem for at least 50 years. Junior faculty at Stanford or even Santa Crus could not afford houses in 1975. Was that the era of boomers versus the greatest generation? Did the greatest generation suck capital from their poor boomer hippy children?
These simplistic dichotomies lead to nothing as much as unwarranted and misplaced social friction. The fundamental problem is a damaging imbalance in wealth.
You've both got the wrong dichotomy here, it's not about age groups at all, it's about politics - this is a voluntarily-created "problem".
California is handicapped in housing construction due to state-level policies implemented by well-meaning progressives, largely focused around reducing negative externalities.
Texas isn't handicapped in housing construction, largely due to state-level policies implemented by greedy capitalists.
The greedy capitalists are better at serving customers (prospective homebuyers) than they are at managing negative externalities. This is a policy choice reflective of the values of the people who live there.
The well-meaning progressives are better at managing negative externalities than they are at serving customers (prospective homebuyers). This is a policy choice reflective of the values of the people who live there.
The reality is, there is no housing "problem" in California, there are only the consequences of the values and preferences of the people living there. Texas's values and preferences carry consequences of their own that Texans have to live with (ask me how I know), but housing unaffordability is, compared to California, not one of them.
Thiel - "I would be tempted to draw a very sharp contrast between CZI and the Gates Foundation by asking questions about what kinds of philanthropy resonate with the younger generation (vs. what kinds of philanthropy Boomers think younger people should be doing!)"
HOUSING. Millennials and younger age cohorts need affordable and preferably private, housing.
Zuckerberg - "we work a lot on housing, but perhaps there are specific things we could do to make housing more affordable with an emphasis on younger people who don't have large families yet."
This is smart, though the conspiracist in me wonders if he's talking about "pods"?
Thiel - "What I would add to Mark's summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions."
Refreshing. Talking to you NIMBYS.
I assume a lot of the negative comments in this thread are from those who the system has worked for, those with housing and wealth. Talk about an impending revolution from organized labor sounds like wealthy liberals larping as radicals. We need real solutions from those capable of providing it, fast. It can't get much worse, if Zuck, Thiel or whoever want to have a go at reforming this mess I say cheers.
> As a result of this history and success, there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation
I’ve had a few interactions with Thiel. Like other megalomaniacs I know, they all have this tendency of speaking in these very strong macro generalities about humanity or society with absolutely no justification with any type of hypothesis testing, statistics, or any type of actual measurable research
Like this is quite a claim frankly, to say that an entire generation worldwide is looking towards the richest capitalist as a moral guide for society
Then going on to make all these ridiculous “..and therefore” arguments that just accept the premise
It’s frankly absurd and indicative of how this class of owners views the rest of the world. And to be clear for the most part, they are not hiding these perspectives and it’s not new historically with political dominionists (of which Thiel is one and a strong supporter of fascists like Trump)
They’re very aggressively, pushing this idea that there are genuinely different classes of people have power differentials respectively because of their positioning and access.
To the extent where they view their role as managing global perceptions of their own power distribution and how they’re managing to pull power from cross society and consolidated into the hands of their elite friends via classic propaganda and nudge based manipulation for power:
“Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
It’s ironic to see these clowns talking about the impending overthrow of the elites, not recognizing that they are precisely the people that are about to have their metaphorical “King Charles I” moment coming soon - brought to you by the rapidly organizing labor force.
At least to me, there's nothing subtle about it. As soon as I read that paragraph I wondered how obvious it was to Zuck that Thiel was blowing smoke up his ass.
The problem with King Charles was he kept on doing stupid things and not recognizing what could happen to him. Thiel seems smarter to understand that and might wanna go the route of James II when the time comes (off course these are all just broad analogies)
> They’re very aggressively, pushing this idea that there are genuinely different classes of people have power differentials respectively because of their positioning and access.
Is this not absolutely true, and has it not been the case for all of human history?
I 100% agree that it is. Which is why democratic institutions must be protected at all costs. Imagine if these kinds of people had unilateral control over something even remotely more powerful than they already do.
> As a result of this history and success, there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation
LOL I'm just a bit older than "Millenials" but I don't know anyone in that age range who thinks Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, has the lived experience, and the same shared hopes, dreams, struggles, and fears of that generation at large, to the point where he can speak for that generation. I haven't even gotten through 1/4 of the article and Thiel seems so lost and out of touch.
EDIT: This is why you should read the whole article before posting. Right after that part, Thiel admits that Zucc is actually not that representative of his generation. Pulled the trigger too soon on this one!
It's still pretty deranged. "When Mark shares on Facebook, a part of the narrative is a generational narrative..." Like millennials are sitting around reading whatever Mark Zuckerberg posts on facebook and discussing it with each other.
I also found it humorous. Zuck is known as "is he that Facebook guy?" and a human robot among millennials, not a glorified spokesperson for his generation.
Then you should definitely read as it is contains stuff mostly very unconnected with their public speeches. In particular you can say Thiel kinda defending socialism which is funny.
what do a pair of out of touch billionaires have to say that’s worth listening to. especially one that’s actively funding the erosion of American democracy
I for one think, it’s almost refreshing to see Billionaires acknowledge the problems truthfully, even if it is to protect their own interests.
> But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why
> Beyond how we talk, there's also a question of which issues we focus on and try to provide solutions for. For example, we work a lot on housing, but perhaps there are specific things we could do to make housing more affordable with an emphasis on younger people who don't have large families yet. Or given that so many people graduate college today burdened with crazy amounts of debt, perhaps we should have a larger program for hiring people who didn't go to college to help show that that's a reasonable path as well.
That is far more than any politician, media organization or even a significant portion of boomers, even the ones in your family, are willing to do.
> "In a recent YouGov survey, 70% of US Millennials said they'd vote for socialism."
This isn't related to generational prognostication but it's really dumb that Nick Clegg, a former British politician, doesn't stop and give this claim a basic reality check. Is Zuckerberg getting his money's worth from Clegg?
It's sort of an open secret in the polling community that panel polls have serious balance problems when it comes to political questions like this. Even the best polling firms are affected by extreme levels of what is called "volunteering bias" which they have no way to remove. The underlying panels are made up of people who aren't representative of the actual population in some key respects and so pollsters compete on the skill of their models in weighting the responses. For their bread and butter surveys (brand recognition etc) it's assumed that the bias doesn't matter, but if it does the problem is fixed with models that are calibrated for a relatively small set of tasks, like predicting elections. When polling firms ask socio-political questions for which they don't have sufficient remodelling ability they frequently yield extreme results, and this is one of them.
People are just way too willing to repeat claims by polling firms even when they are mad as a box of frogs. I wrote an essay about this problem a few years ago, using data from Pew Research and some social science studies to show how this problem can lead to extremely implausible claims about what people think (it was about a YouGov poll) [1]. Pew is one of the better/more self-reflective pollsters and have done some great research into the volunteering bias problem.
A few years later the problem was demonstrated again when the BBC blithely reported that a quarter of the British population thought COVID was a hoax, that millions of people had participated in marches against 15 Minute Cities and obscure conspiracy theory magazine "The Light" was by far Britain's top selling news magazine with over 3.4 million people helping to distribute it (i.e. a distribution network six times larger than the Labour Party) [2]. The source was a poll by Savanta laundered through King's College London [3]. Despite three different orgs being involved nobody sanity checked these numbers, and only KCL apologised (and even then only in a half-hearted way). The BBC doubled down even (Marianna Spring needless to say).
tl;dr take polling results on social questions with a big dose of salt.
I'm perplexed by Thiel's inability to grasp how his disdain for "Boomers" and disdain for Pete Buttigieg are contradictory. Thiel advocates against left wing government-funded social benefits (free college education), the very same that Buttigieg isn't as supportive of, causing his lack of popularity with younger voters amongst Democrats like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren!
The whole reason we have these major political divisions is instead of working inward (where the majority of peoples' opinions lie) on compromise, we have power brokers, like Thiel, hating one side so much that they try to push the middle toward the other extreme side. Then, instead of a normal distribution of voting patterns matching political opinion, we have the middle pulled out to each side voting for the edges.
I'm curious to what others think about some of the underlying themes of these emails. To be blunt, I think a lot of the comments along the lines of "lol! Mark think he speaks for Millennials!" or "Does Mark really think he's that famous" are lazy don't really add anything insightful or interesting. Yeah yeah, I love dunking on Mark (or Peter Thiel for that matter) as much as anyone, and we all know it's popular and gets lots of upvotes.
All that said, I think there were some really interesting underlying themes and tidbits in these emails:
1. The general theme of "Boomers have been hanging on to the economy with an iron grip and instituting policies that deliberately transfer wealth from younger generations to the Boomers" is not exactly news but was interesting to me to see how these people discussed it.
2. I know it's easy to hate Zuckerberg or Thiel, but I certainly thought Thiel in particular put a lot of issues in clear, insightful terms, e.g. "I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it."
3. I felt the overall theme of these emails was one that I hadn't quite thought much about before and was very interesting: namely, in generations past, the transfer of economic and political power has happened gradually. But in this case, he Boomers have held onto power so effectively that when the transition happens in the later 20s that it will be much more abrupt. Made me think about what effects this abrupt transition will have on me personally.
4. This is somewhat more random, but as someone (a Gen-X) who is generally a big fan of Pete Buttigieg, this tidbit was pretty thought-provoking for me, "You can think of Pete Buttigieg as a (political) example of what Mark absolutely should not be: Buttigieg is very popular with older Baby Boomer voters and shockingly unpopular with Millennial voters of his age and younger. Buttigieg's basic message is that the system is working reasonably well and this is precisely why younger voters do not like him — he is the sort of super annoying Millennial who tells the Boomers what they want to hear and thereby glosses over the many ways in which the generational compact in our society has been badly broken."
Anyway, all-in-all thought there was interesting stuff here once you get beyond the "Zuckerberg/Meta/Thiel sucks" knee-jerk response.
It's interesting to see Thiel and Zuckerberg be so oblivious to the problems of millennials. Boomers are a problem because they control capital and have lobbying power. The same kind of capital and political power now rests with the tech billionaires. People like Thiel are the new boomers who are destroying the younger generation.
