Peter Thiel and Andy Kessler on the state of technology and innovation

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This week on Uncommon Knowledge, host Peter Robinson mediates a discussion between PayPal founder and Stanford Professor Peter Thiel and Velocity Capital Management founder and journalist Andy Kessler on the state of technology and innovation in the United States over the past four decades. Thiel argues that, outside of computers, there has been very little innovation in the past forty years, and the rate of technological change has significantly decreased when compared to the first half of the 20th century. In contrast, Kessler asserts that innovation comes in waves, and we are on the verge of another burst of technological breakthroughs. Industries covered include education, medicine and biotechnology, as well as robots and high tech.

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28 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 49

@BuzzClass 10 лет назад

This video should have 2 billion total views

@aaronw2582 5 лет назад

Now we are five years later and Thiel continues to get the better of the debate.

@Puckle74 7 лет назад

Its almost four years to the date and peter is correct.

@squamish4244 6 лет назад

No. I'd say he's quite wrong. AI breakthroughs, for instance, have come along so rapidly that the scientific establishment and society has been caught off guard. Notice they basically gloss over AI in this interview - it probably blindsided Thiel too.

@louizteinluk 6 лет назад

What benefits did AI give you? Self-driving cars? Not yet. Ask the weather with Siri? Enjoying your ads on Facebook? Nothing really changed.

@dsanalysis5013 6 лет назад

valar He was 100% right. 3D printing has died down. AI is in the same hype phase as 3D was

@DheerajBhaskar 5 лет назад

IT'S BEEN 5 YEARS! let's reconvene 😀

@lchpdmq 5 лет назад

Five years later and iPhones are slightly more waterproof, yay! Mercedes’s self driving car is nowhere in sight, not seeing much in gene therapy, at least nothing mainstream, 3d printing is still a curiosity, no robots (for which maybe we should be thankful), nothing of significance that was promised has gotten that far

@spec24 10 лет назад

Gee, imagine, those industries that government has their hands in the most are the ones that are the most stagnant. Who woulda thunk it?!

@jazerazo 10 лет назад

Totally agree. I've seen too many youtube interviews ruined by interviewers who think we are here to listen to them, instead of the interviewee.

@MrFreeLibertarian 10 лет назад

Society's expectations of innovation have always been too high. In the 1950s, the expectation was that we'd be living like the Jetsons at this point. I just don't think that's ever going to happen. In western culture, young people are now content with their relative lifestyles of leisure and government handouts. As they become content to rely on government for their needs, our economy will decline. What little work ethic remains will be snuffed out by excessive taxation and regulation.

@stephenjones796 5 лет назад

on the money Peter

@ellieroar 9 лет назад

We really enjoy your channel. Keep the vids coming :)

@MarcDeMesel123 10 лет назад

Peter Thiel is right: high inflation (and the expanding state) is the cause of the stagnation of our society. People their true income is not going up, and they are unable to save their money. It's time for Bitcoin!

@patrickschweers7858 10 лет назад

37:09 - Word!

@lizardspiral 2 года назад

Peter is correct. It's June 2022.

@Loomr 10 лет назад

nice trance music at the beginning

@mrberry7950 10 лет назад

So is this show only going to be monthly now? That would suck

@peterwright5311 10 лет назад

2 things spring to mind in just the first couple of minutes. Firstly travel speeds are a dreadful measure of advancement. For almost the whole of history the fastest way to travel was on a good horse and a good road. That only changed with the very late sail age (tea clippers for example) and then jumped again when rail and then road travel appeared. Secondly IT has barely improved productivity - a well known economic paradox.

@bernlin2000 6 лет назад

I would venture to say that Thiel is more of a pessimist, just by nature. Their views are fairly similar, it's just that Kessler have a more open, optimistic perspective on the world. It's subjectivity in its purist form.

@dsanalysis5013 6 лет назад

Chris Ducat that's nonsense. He's a realist. And he hates fake hype. And that's the bulk of what tech is today. 3D printing hype died soon after this video

@josephmelton4721 6 лет назад

You guys are missing the point of what thiel is say8ng. He's saying innovation has happened but hasn't changed the lives of the common man. Things haven't improved like so many assumed. Because of government over reach

@1Heirborn 6 лет назад

joseph melton in the other video Thiel said that small companies pretend to be monopolies and monopolies pretend to be small. Innovation is either crushed by monopolies or shot dead by over-regulation.

@dominictarantino6339 9 лет назад

Kessler's intellect can't keep pace with Thiel's. He's not even staying on topic. You can tell he's having a hard time. Look at his white knuckles.

@Srekwah 10 лет назад

You already do.

@kidwidacake 6 лет назад

@20:45 i laughed out loud

@jowb63 10 лет назад

What do you think about the transformation of New Orleans's school system after Hurricane Katrina?

@davidlong2168 8 лет назад

So Kessler turned $100M in to $1B in the 1990's.....is a 10x increase a bragging right in an era of huge tech growth ?

@AnnaMishel 5 лет назад

We might have hit a wall with safe travel speeds, butwe’ve Solved that problem with computers (I.e., Skype etc). now you don’t have to travel . . You can work from home and video conference.

@rocketmist82 10 лет назад

underwater basket weaving lol

@markrandon9122 5 лет назад

I have been in college for four years and I have not so much as heard about 3D printing since I was in high school. Theil's perspective appears to be correct. The interviewer is adversarial and delusional.

@squamish4244 9 лет назад

I have to take Kessler's side on this one - it really does look like we are at the beginning of an explosion in various forms of innovation, but in particular the health sciences. Even the notoriously intractable world of mental health is starting to open up. This wave of innovation is being driven by the massive bulge of aging baby boomers, who are in their 50s and 60s now and saw what the combination of very long lifespans + slow degeneration did to many of their parents, and do not want that to be their fate.

@thatgermanview5721 7 лет назад

yeah Kessler was right. Everybody I know uses 3D printing for everything nowadays....

@squamish4244 6 лет назад

Thiel is taking a very narrow and extremely rigid approach to technological advancement here, demanding innovation on a scale that is much harder than what we accomplished when we picked all the low-hanging fruit during the Industrial Revolution. I was recently the beneficiary of a mental health procedure that does not involve drugs and produced lasting changes in my well-being. It was only possible because we have finally attained the ability to map and model the human brain quite well via computing power. But developing the necessary computing power - and there were NO social or political impediments to this development - took decades. I'll take my much-improved outlook on life over a fucking 3-D printer any day.

@rh001YT 10 лет назад

Peter Thiel is either mad or blind or perhaps in some way dishonest. The improvements in autos in the last 20 years is definitely more than in the previous 70 years. Generally, the hole in Thiel's argument is that he does not acknowledge that between 1920 and 1980 innovation in tech was just like picking the low hanging fruit. Now that the low hanging fruit has been picked, one would be mad to expect the current pickings to be as easy. Aside from his work with Paypal, which I suppose was just computer programming (clerical work) and organizing the banks to open electronic channels to the Paypal supercomputer, I don't think he's actually an engineer and therefore can't really appreciate how far engineering has gone in the last 20 years - way further than in the previous 70. No mention is made of the fact that in the 1970s OPEC caused the price of oil to spike and they set the price to keep it at a point that is quite burdensome as compared to pre OPEC, but still allows for economies to move forwards. But don't think OPEC is acting like a shepard to it's flock - they are totally cynical and the only reason they don't set the price higher is that a) there is some competition and b) they set the price such that if they set it higher they would actually sell less and make less money. So let's put blame where blame should be and not ignore this factor to make a claim that technology is not moving forwards. A lot of universities are scary expensive because all of that has become a rigged game, the professoriat and university execs being to blame. And let's not forget that globalization plays a big role in holding down the earnings of common Americans, Cannuks, Euros, etc. Did someone actually expect the impoverished 3rd world to stay poor forever? So actually, globally, incomes have risen markedly. Using Google, search on the keywords "real estate" and "India" and you will see that India builds a staggering amount of new homes, typically condos, all of which are pretty nice. All that wealth is made from markets that used to be the exlusive backyard of the major economies. All one has to do with any of Thiel's complaints is to drill down to the exact causes of such, and the one sees that things are not bad at all with new tech and innovation, but rather there is this or that other factor which is acting like a vector pushing in an opposite direction. In fact, if it were not for the rapid pace of new tech the situation would be very bad. We can't go back to the idyllic 1950s, which was a fluke of history, when the USA emerged from WW2 with it's factories intact and humming, while those of Europe and Japan were smashed. I know a man who became a millionaire after WW2 exporting American made pots and pans, dishes and flatware to Europe. Now I suppose there are many men in China who have become millionaires exporting the same to Europe, USA, and the rest of the world.

@squamish4244 9 лет назад

Those are all good points and I was thinking of some of them myself during the interview. We have picked all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to healthcare, energy, transportation, etc. Thiel is not an engineer or a biologist (or a historian) and maybe doesn't understand the technical difficulties involved in further developments. Take computing vs. medicine for example. We built computers from the ground up, we know their ins and outs, we know everything about them. We did not build biological systems. The human body and especially the human brain have revealed themselves to be much more complex than we thought. The brain is a mass of 86 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections. The intractability of many mental health problems is a reflection of our difficulty in penetrating this complexity. Pharmaceutical industries are leaving mental health because their drugs are failing, not because the FDA is blocking them. It also meant that developing AI was going to turn out to be harder than we thought as well. IMO we have spent the last forty years building the foundation for understanding biology, and that has not translated into practical results yet - at least of the kind Thiel wants to see. I don't believe overzealous regulation was the reason we did not see the progress promised in Star Trek. Yet we are starting to see innovation that is a direct result of cracking the code of biological systems. The big news this week in medicine illustrates my point. It was about the first victim of paralysis to have regained function due to regenerated nerve tissue in his spine, transplanted from olfactory cells, the only part of the CNS that regenerates. It's the realization of a decades-long dream and was only possible because we spent those decades building a massive framework of computing power, 20 years of fMRIs to assemble a complex picture of the brain, and developing delicate microsurgical techniques. It was also a multinational collaboration between Poland and Britain. These same imaging techniques are enabling groundbreaking work on mental disorders involving such devices as 'brain caps', which are exactly what they sound like. The collaboration with Poland contributes to my point that Thiel is not a historian. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in at least a decade of lost innovation in the former Eastern Bloc as their universities were thrown into chaos and budgets vanished. Basic infrastructure even broke down in some places. All that brainpower went to waste or fled. Government regulation certainly didn't get in the way there! But we didn't have the nuclear war that everyone predicted would come if the USSR went down, which would have stifled innovation somewhat... Now that at least the former satellite states have recovered, we see their universities innovating again. Regarding universities, yes, I agree they are a mess. But one reason that reform is lagging is historical. For 800 years, until about 1980, a degree of ANY kind was an automatic ticket to a job. You got a degree, you were set for life, and for the first 700 years you were probably going to be wealthy for life too. In historical terms, the liberal arts have become a bad investment in the blink of an eye. Your other points like globalization and the power of OPEC are also well put. Global incomes have risen massively, even while local incomes in the First World have not. Doesn't that matter? OPEC *is* artificially controlling the price of oil. This is not a secret.

@rh001YT 9 лет назад

Nice to see there are others who are well read and understand the history of the actual events that have led to technological advances. Yes, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and much of the next level as well, which Theil seems not to notice, such as the blue led (which is also the white led). That was a major breakthrough. And while the 'puter is not, technically, new, the current crop of 'puters and marriage of 'puter and cell are dazzling. And what about the surge in online shopping...this is now huge in India via Flipkart. In fact I would say the computing-tech revolution in India is something new. there's really so much new happening I find this video totally out of step and the interviewer is out of step also - didn't know what questions to ask, what new tech to point out.

@321Collapse 9 лет назад

rh001YT Try fixing one.

@squamish4244 9 лет назад

321Collapse Fixing what?

@bobbeckle9453 10 лет назад

Necessity is the mother of invention (and innovation). If, instead of constantly importing slave labor to perform tasks citizens do not want to do, we waited for innovation, it would come.

@liyah623 9 лет назад

I have to generally disagree with these gentlemen on the education style they are proposing. Whilst I generally agree with their advocating for more use of internet I disagree with their approach of making school more and more online based. Why? Because it takes away from human interaction and socialisation. Schools are not just for absorbing information they are also about human socialisation. I mean look at the evidence of stunted socialisation skills in children due to increasing computer use. Also many people prefer classroom setup where they can interact with the teacher. I do think tertiary education has become ridiculously expensive. They are inefficiencies within these institutions and there is a need for revisiting the curriculms but I dont think making it all online makes "us" better educated. Infact I think it robs us of full learning experience which is all encompassing.

@NEMO-NEMO 6 лет назад

liyah623 why is it that these men cannot simply say clearly that this country is being run by power hungry regulatory folks that feel satisfied with the power and money (wealth) that they simply made through laws that were crookitized in their favor so that they could simply hang on to it until it was time to pass it down to their off spring. Who in turn will seek more ways of crookitizing the system so God forbid, they would not need to work or think of the USA's we'll being. Or even use the ill gotten wealth to, at least invest in the progress of this country.

@AssRapingLlama 10 лет назад

Fascism has been installed already.

@qncsc 10 лет назад

19:10 *how can someone get it so so so wrong!* robotics will destroy employment -- and soon.

@squamish4244 6 лет назад

No one in this interview saw the very recent advances in AI coming, which I would say basically destroys Thiel's thesis. But he's probably already shifted the goalposts and is wondering why we all aren't immortal superhans on the Mars colony yet.

@josephmelton4721 6 лет назад

valar we would have alot more without government over reach