Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== What is the dominant narrative? ===

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So with your indulgence, let's talk a little bit about what you and I see, and any differences that we might have, about this period of time that we find ourselves in, in 2019. What would you say is the dominant narrative before we get to what might be our shared counter narrative?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, you know, the dominant narrative is probably fraying and has been fraying for some time, but it is something like we're in a world of generally fast scientific and technological progress. Things are getting better all the time. There's some imbalances that maybe need to be smoothed out. There's some corner case problems. Maybe there's some dystopian risks, because the technology is so fast and so scary that it might be destructive. But it's a generally accelerationist story. And then there's some sort of micro-adjustments within that, that one would have to make.

'''Peter Thiel:''' There are all sorts of ways that I think it's fraying. I think 2008 was a big watershed moment, but that still what's largely been holding together. And then there's sort of different institutions. You can look at the universities where there's a tracked thing. It's costing more every year, but it's still worth it. It's still an investment in the future. And this was probably already questionable in the 1980s, 1990s. College debt in the United States in 2000 was $300 billion. Now it's around in $1.6 trillion, $1.7 trillion. And so there's a way in which the story was shaky 20 years ago and today is much shakier. It's still sort of holding together somehow.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So in this story, in essence, the great dream is that your children will become educated, they will receive a college education, they will find careers. And in this bright and dynamic society, they can look forward to a future that is brighter than the future that previous generations look forward to.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yeah, so I think ... Now again, I think people are hesitant to actually articulate it quite that way, because that already sounds not quite true to-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Well, to your point, they've been adding epicycles for some time.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And so it's a ... Maybe it's a bright future, but it's really different from the parents, because we can't quite know. And they have all these new devices. They have an iPhone and they can text really fast on the iPhone. We can't even understand what the younger generation is doing. So maybe it's better on ... But "better" has sort of an objective scale. Maybe it's just different and unmeasurable, but better in sort of an unmeasurable way.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So there sort of are ways it's gotten modified but, that would still be a very powerfully intact narrative. And then that there are sort of straight forward things we can be doing. The system's basically working, and it's basically going to continue to work. And they're sort of a global version of this. There's a US version. There's an upper middle class US version. There's a lot of different variations on this.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' So it always strikes me that one of the things that you do very well is that you're willing - and you know, you're famously a chess player - you're willing to make certain sacrifices in order to advance a point. And in this case, I think you and I would both agree that there's certain areas that have continued to follow the growth story more than the general economy, and that you have to kind of give those stories their due before you get to see this new picture. Where do you think the future has been relatively more bright in recent years?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Well, again I sort of date this era of relative stagnation and slowed progress all the way back to the 1970s, so I think it's been close to half a century that we've been in this era of seriously slowed progress. Obviously, a very big exception to this has been the world of bits: Computers, internet, mobile internet, software. And so Silicon Valley has somehow been this dramatic exception. Whereas the world of atoms has been much slower for something like 50 years.

'''Peter Thiel:''' And you know, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, almost all engineering disciplines, in retrospect, were really bad fields to go into. People already knew, at the time, you shouldn't go into nuclear engineering. AeroAstro was a bad idea. but you know, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, all these things were bad fields. Computer science would've been a very good field to go into. And that's been sort of an area where there's been tremendous growth.

'''Peter Thiel:''' So that's sort of the signature one that I would cite. There are questions about how healthy it is, at this point, even within that field. So, you know, the iPhone is now looking the same as it did seven, eight years ago. So that's the iconic invention. Not quite so sure. And so there's been sort of a definitely a change in the tone even within Silicon Valley in the last five, six years on this. But that had been one that was very, very decoupled.

'''Peter Thiel:''' The decoupling itself had some odd effects, where if you have sort of a narrow cone of progress around this world of bits, then the people who are in those parts of the economy that have more to do with atoms will feel like they're being left behind. And so there was something, there was something about the tech narrative that had this very ... Didn't necessarily feel inclusive, didn't feel like everybody was getting ahead. And one of the ways I've described it is that we live in a world where we've been working on the Star Trek computer in Silicon Valley, but we don't have anything else from Star Trek. We don't have the warp drive, we don't have the transporter, we can't re-engineer matter in sort of this cornucopian world where there is no scarcity. And how good is a society where you have a well-functioning Star Trek computer, but nothing else from Star Trek?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Yeah, that's incredibly juicy. I mean, one of the ways that I attempted to encode something, which, in part I got from you, was to say, "Of course your iPhone is amazing. It's all that's left of your once limitless future," because it's the collision of the communications and the semiconductor revolutions that did seem to continue. And I date the sort of break in the economy to something like 1972, '73, '74. It's really quite sharp in my mind. Is it that way in yours?

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. I'd say 1968, people still ... The narrative progress seemed intact. By '73, it was somehow over. So somewhere in that five-year period. The 1969 version was we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and you know, Woodstock starts three weeks later. And maybe that's one way you could describe the cultural shift. You can describe it in terms of the oil shocks in 1973 at the back end. With the benefit of hindsight, there were things that were already fraying by the late 1960s, so the environment was getting dramatically worse.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Right.

'''Peter Thiel:''' You have the graduate movies, you should go into plastics. I think that was 1968 or '69. So there were sort of things where the story was fraying, but I think it was still broadly intact in 1968, and somehow seemed very off by '73.