Editing 1: Peter Thiel (section)

=== Motivating Stories and Science ===

'''Peter Thiel:''' I often think if you listen to a political speech, the applause lines are always the ones, "We are going to go after the other side. We're going to go after the bad people. We're going to stop them." If you try to construct a political speech in which it was, "We're going to unite people. We're going to get everybody onto this goal and there were no bad people." It's almost impossible to have a speech that has any energy at all.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Let me take issue with that slightly.

'''Peter Thiel:''' As a political speech.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I understood exactly what you said. I don't think I'm going to mischaracterize it. I think that the problem is the reason I pour energy into trying to stop the political correctness and the rules about what can be said, mostly has to do with the fact that I'm incredibly excited, except I'm excited about something non-political. If what I'm excited about is pursuing technological progress, scientific progress, more people being able to form families, et cetera, that's where the excitement is. It's not coming from the politics. It's coming from what the politics facilitates. So I think that the problem with these speeches is: if you don't believe that there is something that we're keeping this space clean for, we might as well riot or something because at least that's exciting and that's got some energy behind it. Then it's my team versus your team.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean look, at some level anybody who's focused on technology as you are is a progressive in the sense of caring about what is actually progress. I think that the danger comes from when politics becomes your entertainment. You read very correctly, and I learned this from you, that when you look at a bunch of candidates debating on a crowded stage, look at where the energy is. The energy is something that is not, in my opinion, a good indicator - it's not a good approximate for the ultimate that I care about.

'''Peter Thiel:''' Yes. Look, I'd like it to be just the way you describe. I just-

'''Eric Weinstein:''' No, no, no. I understood what you-

'''Peter Thiel:''' ...want to report it often is not. Scientific, technological progress, in a way, the hope is it can lead towards a more cornucopian world in which there's less Malthusian struggle, less violence, and then at the very same time, an honest account of the history of these things is that a lot of it was used to develop more advanced weapons. It was in the pursuit of violence. One account of the tech stagnation, the scientific tech stagnation, is that the breakthrough thing was the atom bomb and then you built the rockets to deliver the bombs more quickly. By 1970 we had enough bombs and rockets to destroy the world 10 or 20 times over or whatever, and the whole thing made no more sense.

'''Peter Thiel:''' If one of the big drivers of scientific and technological progress was actually just the military dimension, when that became absurd did the whole thing slow down to the space age? Not in 1972 when Apollo left the moon, but was the key moment 1975 when you had the Apollo Soyuz docking? If we're just going to be friends with the Russians, does it really make sense for people to be working 80 hours, 100 hours a week around the clock? And again, I don't think it's all that, but I think one of the challenges, that we should not understate how big it is in resetting science and technology in the 21st century is, how do we tell a story that motivates sacrifice, incredibly hard work, deferred gratification for the future, that's not intrinsically violent? It was combined with that in all these powerful ways.