Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel on Facebook, Millenials, and Predictions for 2030

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. :)

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.

This could have easily been a video chat or a series of group messages.

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).

Recent data visualization on that: https://github.com/amontalenti/home/assets/40263/c21a34e4-2c...

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."

Does he really think he’s better known than, say, Lebron James or Lionel Messi?

Some have been active before, but anecdotally I've noticed more clever outreaches in the last few months.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

[1] https://dailysceptic.org/do-online-opinion-polls-overestimat...

[2] https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/bbc-verify-falls-i...

[3] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/conspiracy-bel...

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.

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.