People believe in Secrets
Chapter 8 of Zero to One opens with a striking line:
Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find.
If you’ve read the book, you know how central “secrets” are to Peter Thiel’s worldview. His famous question: “what valuable company is nobody building?”, rests on the assumption that hidden truths still exist. Every major breakthrough once began as a secret: the Pythagorean theorem, the abolition of slavery, and countless others.
But the book was written in 2013-14, and the world has changed dramatically since then. I think it’s time to revisit the chapter. My intuition is that more people today do believe in secrets again.
Thiel and Masters lay out five reasons why society stopped believing that hard secrets remain. Let’s walk through them one by one.
1. Geography
The first argument is that the age of exploration is over. The world has been mapped; the frontier is closed; “the unknown seems less accessible than ever”.
My counterargument today is straightforward and stupidly simple: space.
Space travel has become cheaper, more frequent, and more culturally relevant since 2014. Reusable rockets land themselves. Mainstream news outlets livestream SpaceX launches. Companies are building data centers in orbit. We’re exploring again.
2. Incrementalism
Incrementalism is the idea that progress happens step-by-step: grade by grade, rung by rung. In many ways, that still describes how schools, universities, and careers work.
The rise of AI is the clearest counterpoint. One day, essentially overnight, society gained access to a chat interface that wasn’t an incremental improvement on existing tools; it was a fundamentally new kind of technology. This sort of leap breaks the incrementalist worldview entirely.
3. Risk aversion
Most people are risk-averse, and that’s probably fine for the human species as a whole.
But the landscape of risk has changed dramatically in my opinion. Since 2014, we’ve lived through multiple shocks: COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and a general geopolitical realignment. These events revealed just how fragile many of our institutions are. Systems we assumed were stable turned out to be brittle.
Risk and disturbances often reopen the search for secrets.
4. Complacency
This one is probably still mostly accurate. Many people continue to assume that the path to a good life is fixed: get into a respected university, follow a predictable career, secure stability.
But I’d like to hope that things like AI have shaken the ground a little bit. It’s harder now to believe that the world is fully known or that your future is guaranteed by simply getting into an elite institution.
5. Flatness
The argument of flatness is that as the world globalizes and becomes a talent pool of similar people, why bother trying to find something new? There’s most likely someone brighter than you already figuring it out.
Again, this ties to the global situation. I think we’ve somewhat reverted from the path of globalization we expected to have in 2014. There are again Cold War-style dynamics of “us vs them.” Which nation wins the AI race? Who can produce the best hardware?
You should believe in secrets
Maybe these are reasonable arguments. Or maybe I’m simply optimistic. I hope to see people believing in secrets. And I think you should. Remember the excitement around the alleged room-temperature superconductor LK-99? And self-driving cars: it seems so close, but still far from solved.
There’s tons of gold to mine for the one who wants to search.
A pool of infinite opportunities.
A world filled with secrets to uncover.