Peter Thiel: prediction

Transcript context

…Just a minute on the premise of this series. It’s been my view for years now that Peter Thiel is one of the greatest and most important public intellectuals of our entire time. Throughout the course of history, he will be recognized as such. I thought Peter would be absolutely the perfect person to inaugurate this series. Peter himself doesn’t need an introduction; he has a best-selling book. His role in PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, many other companies, is well known. Peter is a dynamo. There is no one like Peter. But the purpose today is to focus on Peter’s views as a public intellectual. The way we run these dialogues are a bit different than usual. It’s not going to be chatty and drawn out. We’ll try to replicate a kind of conversation Peter and I would have with each other. Get right to the point, a lot of quick back and forth, and we’ll see how well we can do that in public. But I’ve watched a lot of interviews with Peter online and we’re going to try to make this different from all those. Let’s start with some questions about stagnation, Peter. At any point, if you care to add other topics of your own, please do so. You’re well known for arguing, well, “they promised us flying cars and all we got is 140 characters”; “technological progress has slowed down.” How is it you think that we’re most likely to get out of the great stagnation, when that happens? Yes, I think there are, those three separate things. There’s the question of stagnation, which I think has been a story of stagnation in the world of atoms, not bits. I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc. It’s sort of been this two-track area of innovation. There are a lot of questions of what has caused it and I think maybe that’s a good part to start in terms of what gets you out of it. On a first cut, I would say that we lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated. If you are starting a computer software company, that costs maybe $100,000, to get a new drug through the FDA, maybe on the order of a billion dollars or so. If the FDA were regulating video game technologies, and you had to do a double-blind study to make sure that the video games weren’t addictive, damaging to your brain, etc. These things are very overdetermined. It’s driven by many different factors. My narrow attempt to get out of it is not necessarily to come to DC and beg the regulators to be more reasonable. It is just to try to find ways for people to succeed at the margins. Because I think the other thing that has driven the stagnation is the hysteresis. When you have a history of failure, that becomes discouraging and so failure begets failure. No halfway sane parent would encourage their kids to study nuclear engineering today, whereas there are a lot of people going into software. The history of success in software is encouraging more people to go into it and drive more innovation. Then the history of failure in these other areas has been very discouraging. What I think would start, if you got some signal successes in other areas, that can then set a precedent and you can somehow get what’s been a vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle. Then if you have to make a prediction, which breakthrough in particular will get us out of the stagnation? What’s your pick?…

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