This is the 2nd post of 5 containing the transcript of a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein interviewing Peter Thiel.

Interview

Nature and Culture

Eric Weinstein: Actually I'm scanning my memory and I don't know that we've had this conversation, so I'm curious to hear your answer. One of the things that I found surprising is that I think I can tell a reasonably decent story about how this is a result of a scientific problem rather than the mismanagement of our future. Do you believe that if we assume that there was this early 1970s structural change in the economy, that it was largely a sort of manmade problem? Which is what we seemingly implicitly always assume. Or, might it be a scientific one?

Eric Weinstein: And let me give you the one iconic example that really kind of drives it home for me. I think quarks were discovered in 1968. And to find out that the proton and neutron are comprised of up and down quarks is an incredible change in our picture of the world. Yet it has no seeming implications for industry. And I started thinking about this question: Are we somehow fenced out of whatever technologies are to come - that we sort of exhausted one orchard of low hanging fruit and haven't gotten to the next?

Peter Thiel: I think one way to parse this question of scientific, technological stagnation is sort of nature versus culture. Did the ideas in nature run out? Or, at least the useful ideas. Maybe we make some more discoveries, but they're not useful.

Eric Weinstein: Or the easily useful.

Peter Thiel: Easily useful. So it's a problem with nature. And then the cultural problem is that there was actually a lot to be discovered or a lot that could be made useful, but somehow the culture had gotten deranged. And I sort of go back and forth on those two explanations. I think it's very complicated. Yeah, I think in physics you'd say ... I mean, probably even the fundamental discoveries stopped after the mid 1970s, but certainly the translation didn't happen. Quarks don't matter for chemistry, and chemistry's what matters on a human level.

Peter Thiel: I would say there was a lot that happened in biochemistry. You know, not chemistry down, but sort of chemistry up; the interface between chemistry and biology. And that's where I would be inclined to say there's a lot more that could happen and has not quite happened, because maybe the problems are hard. But maybe also th...