541. Why We Stopped Progressing | Peter Thiel

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So this question of, you know, is there really progress? You used to move fast. We stopped moving faster physically the last 50 years. We feel like we are in an apocalyptic age. There is a dimension of science and technology. It has a dark dimension and it's, you know, it's a trap that humanity may be setting for itself.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
Much of the early science was done in the monasteries that turned into universities. You can think about that as concrete evidence of the underpinning of much of the scientific revolution in terms of, at least the offshoots of Christianity. But I think there's something deeper there.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it. It's something like the Christian anthropology.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
Okay. So let's delve into this a little bit.
So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today, and Mr. Thiel is probably most famous for the role that he played in establishing PayPal, but he's been a canny investor for a very long period of time. And we didn't actually talk much about practicalities on the business side. We mostly talked about the nature of cultural transformation because his thought tends in that direction. He's a philosophically inclined person. And our discussion really walks through one of Peter's fundamental propositions is that progress in the material world, and not the digital world, let's say, has slowed substantively since maybe the 1960s, and that there are deep reasons for that. Some of it is apocalyptic fear of the scientific endeavor. Some of it is this hippie like desire to look inside. Some of it is escape into a world of abstraction. And so he outlined his theory of social transformation, which is also deeply influenced by a skepticism about what low level mimetic envy predicated status games, which I think is a very wise target of skepticism. We walked through his thoughts on social and technological transformation over a couple of hundred years, concentrating more on the last 60, and also began to flesh out a metaphysics that might ameliorate some of that nihilistic pathology and malaise. And that enabled us to at least begin a discussion about what metaphysical presuppositions are necessary for a society and a psyche to remain, well, not only healthy, but non-totalitarian and catastrophic. So join us for that. So the last time we spoke was by distance at ARC. And you said a number of things there that were provocative. And one in particular that I wanted to follow up on, it surprised me, although I think I understand why you said it. You're dubious about the rate of progress, so to speak, that we're making now. You feel, you seem to feel, though I don't want to put words in your mouth, that the most innovative times are perhaps behind us, or at least temporarily so. And so I'm curious about, we've seen these revolutionary steps forward in principle on the large language model front in the last year, and our gadgetry is becoming much more sophisticated. There's tremendous advancements in robotics. And so how do you conceptualize quantifying progress, scientific and technological? And why are you skeptical about the benefits or the rate?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:44)
Well, yeah, the variations of this that I've talked about for close to two decades at this point.
And, you know, the big, and it's of course, there are all sorts of very complicated measurement problems. So how do we compare progress in AI with, let's say, lack of progress in dementia research, curing Alzheimer's. And so, you know, so all these different complicated ways of how you weight all these different things. But there was a sense that the West, the Western world was in this fast era of scientific technological progress, where it was advancing on many, many different fronts. And, you know, in some ways, it started picking up in the Renaissance, early enlightenment, 17th, 18th centuries, and then probably in important ways accelerated in the 19th, first half of the 20th. And then in some ways, I believe it's slowed down over the last 50 or so years, maybe 1970 or so is a, is an inflection point one could, one could cite. It doesn't mean it's stopped altogether. You know, one way I've often summarized it is that we've continued to have progress in the world of bits. You know, computers, software, Internet, mobile Internet, you know, maybe crypto, now AI. But there's been much less progress in the world of atoms. And if you think about the university setting, most of the engineering and scientific subjects had to do more with this physical material world in which we're embedded. And I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the late 1980s, class of 89 And, you know, it wasn't quite obvious at the time, but in retrospect, almost anything that was in the world of atoms would have been a bad feel to go into physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering, certainly aero-asteroengineering, nuclear engineering, people already knew was kind of outlawed and over by the 1980s. You could still maybe do electrical engineering, which was sort of the atoms that were used for semiconductors. But basically the only stem field that was a really going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science, which was kind of this marginal, almost fake field. Because I always have this riff where, you know, when you have, when people use, I'm in favor of science, but I'm skeptical when people use the word science. So social science, political science, climate science are called science by people who have an inferiority complex and say deep down, no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields. And something like this was true of computer science in the original day. It was people who were too dumb at math to be in mathematics or physics or electrical engineering. And they sort of flunked out into computer science. And weirdly, this was a field that worked and it had a decent amount of impact. I don't think it was, and then it worked on the scale of people building some fantastic companies.