DLD13 - Developing the Developed World (Peter Thiel) - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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I'm doing a very short
introduction for Peter Thiel whom
you already saw on stage already
but a little bit on the background
meaning I think most of the facts
are about Peter are very
well known I thought myself if I
if I would have one
sentence to
introduce Peter just
one sentence then I would
say I proudly welcome
the guy who
revolutionised my personal
dating life by financing
Facebook itís an amazing tool for
dating if you haven't realised
that but as I have a little
bit more time some more maybe
more important facts about
Peter are I think I can
say heís a legendary investor
entrepreneur and as you
also heard he is a very good
philanthropist he founded
Pay Pal in
one998 and
sold it already 4 years
later in 2002
to eBay for some
billion US dollars so
pretty successful he then
founded Palantir
you will hear the name Iím
pretty sure much more often in the
next years 2004
which is a ground breaking
platform technology
to analyse
big data and
he was as I already said
the first yeah the first investor in
Facebook besides that you think okay he
might be occupied a lot and
have not a lot of time no he founded
or started 2 other
funds Mithrill more for
growth investments and the
Founders Fund for internet
investments and he also
started a very successful hedge fund
Clarium Capital so very busy
business life aside of
that as you heard
heís very active in
philanthropy and also
politically very active
why I really think heís a
great great guest of DLD
is because maybe bottom line
he's a great thinker heís one of
the smartest guys Iíve ever met
heís original yeah heís not
just telling you what you have heard
in one0 other speeches maybe
before heís out of the box heís maybe
controversial politically
whatever so it's not
mainstream what heís saying
but I think this is the main
reason why I will enjoy his speech
enjoy thank you very much Christian
I wanted to just see where the
presentation here is I wanted to
talk a little bit today about
about sort of technology
globalisation and the question
of how how we
actually sort of make the
2onest century a much
better sense we sort of want to make it sort of share
a few broad thoughts on this question
and then leave as much time as possible for
some questions and answers and
make it as interactive as possible now
letís see I think when one when one
looks at the at the 2onest
century there are there are
probably 2 major
themes that one has going on
the globalisation
and the technology and what I
want to underscore is that I think these
are 2 very different
kinds of things in a sense
of globalisation
you can think of is
horizontal or
extensive growth and it
involves copying things
that work and I think of
technology as
vertical or intensive
growth and it involves
doing new things and in
some sense we need to do some of both
in the in the 2onest century
there's a thereís a sense in
which we're in a world that's
very focused on
globalisation but I think much less
focused on a on
technology and in some ways this is already
reflected in in the
division of the world between
developing and developed
worlds the developing countries
are those countries that will somehow
converge with the developed world
through globalisation and so a
place like China has a very
straightforward plan for the
next 20 years and it is basically
to copy things that have worked in
the developed world there are things China
can copy and improve it may skip some steps so maybe you
don't need to build out a full land based phone
system you go straight to
mobile phones thereís some
things you can do better but for the most
part itís very very
straightforward but for the
developed countries the
question of how we actually
have progress I think is a very
different one and I think we
the question of how the
developed world gets better is one that is
not very often asked in these in
these forums and itís one that I want to at
least try to pose today and
I think that the developed
developing world dichotomy
while it's on the one
hand very pro
globalisation believes in a
convergence theory of
globalisation it is also
implicitly somewhat
sceptical of technology
does not believe that
technology will so radically
transform the world and in some
ways it has a somewhat
defeatist pessimistic attitude
where the developed world is
the part of the world where nothing new is going
to happen and that is why sort of I picked this
somewhat strange sounding title of
developing the developed world
because it's something I think we don't
ask enough about how to make that
happen you know very thematically
if we think about the
developed world and how
progress and technology can
happen I want to suggest that there are
sort of 4 basic
scenarios and I think these are the 4
basic things that can happen
with technological progress
in the 21st century the
first one is that it
continues but at a
decelerating rate
thereís some sort of we we make some
progress incrementally but it
gradually slows down we
eventually run out of new
ideas the rest of the world
catches up which is
globalisation but you have sort of this
decelerating decelerating arc
sort of the even more
pessimistic one is that it is
just cyclical you know
civilisations go in cycles they
rise they fall and sometimes the
knowledge gets lost this is what happened in the
classical world and maybe this
happens again at some point in the
modern world you have an even more
pessimistic one is that somehow
technology or
science are a giant trap that
humanity has created for
itself and that you will have
some sort of runaway
catastrophe and so
it looks like there's tremendous
progress but maybe it hits a
wall and the whole system
collapses at one point and then
finally there is the most
optimistic one which is that
things continue to
accelerate in the decades
and the century ahead I believe these
are actually the only 4
possibilities that exist
it's deceleration
cyclicality collapse
or acceleration and I believe
that I would defy anyone to
draw a graph thatís different
from one of those 4 and since
you know we don't want collapse
we don't want cyclicality
even
deceleration doesnít
sound that great this
is the one we have to actually
work for and if you don't have
acceleration by negative
implication you have one of
the other 3 so one of the questions
is how do we you know
how well are we doing
on technological
acceleration which I think is the
key for the developed
world to progress in the decades
ahead and I think it is sort of a very
very mixed story
so you know have we been
continuing to accelerate
in in the
recent decades and the thing I
want to basically suggest as my my
core thesis is that there
has been continued
acceleration in computer and
all the computer-related
technologies but there has been
you know somewhat less progress in many
other areas and so if you
want to sort of have a you
know have a sort of an
example of a place where
things are not quite have not
quite lived up to the
expectations of
1967 you can look
at Star Trek The Final
Frontier to explore new planets
new star systems new
civilisations to boldly
go where no one has
gone before and that has sort
of devolved into a somewhat
flabbier
person with a bad toupee
selling selling cheap
trips to the Caribbean and
so and so while
while we don't want to and you know of
course if we had to go down the
list there are sort of many other areas where
progress has fallen short of what
people had expected 40
or 50 years ago the Nixon
administration declared war on cancer
in 1970 said
cancer would be fully defeated by
1976 the US
Bicentennial today it's
2013 we're
43 years closer to the
goal than we were 43
years ago that is sort of true
logically by definition
however almost nobody thinks we will
be have a cure within
6 years or if one looks at
energy you know thereís been
a lot of efforts to innovate
but the actual cost of fuel has
gone up dramatically in recent
decades and there has still not
been enough progress on
developing alternatives
to fossil fuels
or even if you look at something like
transportation where youíd have a
classic measure of how fast
are we moving and weíre no longer moving
faster the Concorde was
decommissioned and airplane
travel is has actually probably
gotten slower than it was 15
years ago with all the very low
technology airport
security systems we have so
that's some of our many different areas
where where I think progress
has been less fast
and we can at least worry some whether this
questions this accelerating
trajectory is still fully
intact so
so one sort of
macroeconomic way to
describe it is if you
look at if you look at sort of
incomes in the world in the
in the developed world
the upper right chart looks at them
from from basically
over the last
2000 years and if
you look at that you'd basically
say you know around 1750
with the start of the
Industrial Revolution where you know
incomes were effectively 1000
dollars per person per year
they have accelerated
tremendously and and
that looks over a span of
200 or 2000 years
it looks like we're very much in the
accelerating
technological civilisation
but if you look at say the
last 50 or 60
years thereís actually been a
deceleration and so the
the number I always give
on this if you take 40 year intervals United
States 1933 to
1973
1973 to
2013
1973 to
sorry 1933 to
73 that 40 year
period average incomes in the
US went up
350% after
inflation so you know
people saw progress every year
every decade in living
standards one year after another
things relentlessly got better
1973 to
2013 it's gone
up by 20% it still has
gotten somewhat better but for many
people it felt actually
quite quite stagnant we have
not yet had a collapse or a
decline but certainly
it it you can make a
case that we are no longer
in the accelerating
economic zone and thereís sort of a
question why that is and what
one what one needs to do about it and I think the
I think the macroeconomic
fact of a broad
stagnation in incomes
is sort of always the big data
point that something is not quite
working with the story of
technological progress or itís perhaps
not working as well as
people would have expected it to work
in the times of the original
Star Trek episode of the late
1960s now you
know it goes without saying
that the one incredibly
important counterpoint to all of
this is the digital
computer age which has
continued to
accelerate relentlessly Moore's Law
is still very much intact
you know hardware has progressed
transformed in all kinds of
ways and and on the software
side internet side weíve had
sort of one revolution
after another and and what I
what I sort of you know if
I if you had to sort of
synthesise these things
substantively and this is what I you know as a venture
capitalist as an entrepreneur I believe the
correct place to look at is still
the computer age and still
to ask what will be the next
the next area that computer
technology will
transform and will improve
because if you look at the last 40
years that's the only place something's been
happening and so it's a safe
bet to keep working on this
and and you know we and I think thatís
thatís what we very much have to
continue to to work on but at the
same time as
citizens of our countries and
you know if we want to make our society work better we
have to also ask how can we
broaden this out to to start
impacting more and more
areas and I think sort of the
the hopeful scenario I would give
is that in the next decade or
2 you will start to see the
computer revolution
exist not just in this
alternate virtual world but
they will more and more impact
everyday life and you know thereís the Google
initiative to have self-driving
cars which again is sort of a
computerisation of
transportation which would
probably represent the
biggest improvement in
transportation since the
development of cars in the first
place over a 100 years ago you
have the area of
bio-informatics which is
again sort of a very early stage
itís sort of the computerisation
of biology to turn
biology into a into
an information problem
and and if that can be done
perhaps we can break through
the stalled drug development in
so many different different
kinds of areas there are
probably there are probably
ways that these technologies
can be brought to bear on all
kinds of things but the businesses that
I find the most exciting
are ones that somehow
involve the synthesis
of the virtual digital world
and the real world because
most of us exist in the real world
that's where value does
reside and I think even the
great internet successes of
of the last 15 years have
never been purely virtual they
never involved
purely a fictitious
alternate imaginary
digital world but theyíve
always had this synthesis
between the physical real
world in which we're embedded and the the
and this digital world thatís
created to complement and help it and I think
just that thereís a Pay Pal
version of this thereís a Facebook version of this
when we started Pay Pal in the
late 1990s there were
all these different attempts to
create new virtual currencies and
to create new forms of money there was a company called
CyberCash there was one
called Digicash there was
one called eGold and they
all had this idea of creating a new
form of fiat money in some
sort of imaginary alternate
online universe
and and the thing we concluded
was you simply needed to
enable people to use
dollars and at the time
Deutsch Marks or now euros
or pounds or all these other
currencies better and so that
the key thing was not to
invent a fictional alternate
currency but actually to
extend the way in which people were
using the real currencies
into this online sort of a
context and I think in a very
similar way people sort of
forget how much of a break Facebook
represented from the consensus
thinking in 2004 because you know
at this point Facebook has sort of become the
default for social media but
before 2004
the vision
for online
identity was that it would
involve a fictional
alter-ego and
so you would
basically maybe you would
pretend to be a cat on the
internet and someone else would pretend to be a
dog and weíd have to figure out
rules how you would interact with one
another and and this was sort of
this was the 1990s
model the early 2000s model and
I think I think the
key insight that Facebook had
was that it was actually about real
identity it was about real
people and real identity
and and you know if I had to sort of
tell the Facebook versus
MySpace history from
from the mid-2000s it
was MySpace was started in you know it was
about it was started in Los Angeles it was about
people who were actors they were all
pretending to be someone different from
who they were and the model was that
the internet was going to be about fictional fundamentally
fictional people Facebook
started at Harvard it was about people
just trying to be themselves
on the internet and and
ultimately that turned out to
be the model that succeeded which I think
is sort of a very good statement about
the world weíre not trying to escape from
our world weíre not trying to let the
world fall to pieces and
create a fictional alternate
world and thatís the model
we need is somehow replicate in all
these different areas is to to
reintegrate the
digital information
age with with the real
economy and and thereby to
transform it let me let me
end by by
sort of suggesting
some some more some
other ways that I like to
think about this this problem
so to recap () we have
2 different axis for
21st century thereís
technology there's
globalisation theyíre not
incompatible with each other
but they are very different and and if you
work on one youíre probably not
working directly on the other
one way Iíve often described
the difference between the 2 is
that because globalisation is about
copying things itís taking one
and turning it into n itís a
scalability problem
and itís how do you take a new
invention and scale it and whereas
technology is about going from
0 to one it is about being the
first person to discover a new
way of doing something and would I
want the big sort of idea Iíd like to
leave you with today is that
there is something very different about
going from one to n
versus going from 0 to
one and it requires different
approaches and different ways different
ways of thinking about things
you know as my colleague from
Pay Pal started SpaceX and we'll
try to do more than the about
40 years space history Elon and SpaceX as
an engineer is the
closest thing to a magician that
exists in the real world thereís something
about science and
technology that if itís not miraculous
it is at least singular because it
involves doing things that have
never been done that have never
happened before in the history of the
world so I want to I want to sort of
suggest with some of the challenges
0 to 1 thinking all right there's
certainly always this
challenge of whoever the first
person is thereís always something about
it thatís unusual and and
people will think that it's crazy you
canít say itís going work because lots
of other people have done it you you
know one of the ways one of my
colleagues at Pay Pal David Sacks liked
to put it was that he thought that
great entrepreneurs were
missing the imitation
gene it was that people you know have
this gene which makes them
imitate other people and
great entrepreneurs somehow were not that good
at imitating people and and thatís
why creative people are often
like wearing clothes that
don't seem to be quite right because
theyíre not able to pick up social
queues they don't know
what's on precisely
fashionable or precisely the
correct thing to do the people who are
very fashionable fit in well to
society but they don't
actually theyíre not the stubborn people who
keep working really hard at
ideas that they try to get to work
and so thereís a question how
do we create a society in
which exceptionalism
is not looked down upon
not denigrated but in
which itís considered you know at least
borderline acceptable I donít think it will
ever be fully acceptable but just
that itís at least marginally tolerated
you know I think the educational
challenge we already talked about
a little bit but it represents something very
similar where the
existing education system
is fundamentally about
teaching people things that
everybody believes to be true
and education is therefore well geared
towards globalisation if it is
about learning things that everybody knows
to be true education does
that well how do you actually
teach people to think new
things to have answers on tests that
nobody thinks are right
that's not something the
schools are geared for
if you come up with an answer on the
test that nobody agrees with youíre
not likely to get a good grade
in the class and then I think there is also sort of
this narrative how do you you know
how do you explain what youíre doing how
does this actually how does this
actually fit into to everything when we sort of give
one other cut at this
challenge of
technology I've often
thought that when we think about the
future the sort of
simplistic MacKenzie style
diagram you can be
optimistic or pessimistic
about the future and you can have a view
of the future that's definite or
indefinite and so
optimistic is the future will be better
pessimistic the future will be worse
definite is you know exactly
what you're supposed to do
indefinite you have no idea
what to do and so if
you have a definite if you have an indefinite
view of the future the correct
answer is you always diversify and this is what
most you know investment advisors
tell you to do with investing money in
the stock market you diversify
and do well because you really don't know what's
going to happen if you have a
definite view you focus you have
conviction you work on
on one particular thing
you know optimistic you have
hope for the future pessimistic youíre
afraid of the future if we had to
sort of combine this diagram to describe
where we are as a society you could
say the US in the 50s and
60s had a definite and
optimistic view people
had very specific
ideas about the kinds of
things that would get built in
succeeding years youíd have
faster planes faster cars weíd
build you know out various types of
things the US somehow lost
its way I would argue in the
last quarter century
1982 to
2007 people were still
optimistic but they
no longer knew why it was
just a machine worked on its
own it was automatic the
future took care of itself things
would just automatically get better
and then I think the
upper right quadrant the
indefinite optimistic one is
ultimately an unstable
quadrant and it tends to normally
give way to the bottom
right one because if you have no ideas about
the future if the future is
indefinite you end up
ultimately being pessimistic
Japan this probably happened in Japan
first in 1990s and itís
probably the dominant zeitgeist in Europe
today is is this
indefinite pessimistic one
China I think you could arguably put in
either the optimistic or
pessimistic side I put it
in the pessimistic side because I think China
thinks that it will be
like the developed world but poor
the optimistic version of China
will be that it will be like the developed
world but wealthier and I think it is an open
question which of the 2 it
is I would put China on the more
pessimistic side at present
because when you have a savings rate of 40%
which is how much money people in
China save that is normally because
youíre still very pessimistic about
the future but it is definite they know
exactly what theyíre supposed to do in the next 20
years if you have to sort of
describe the categories
Iíll just use the upper left and bottom right so
indefinite pessimistic the main
thing you do is you buy insurance youíre going to
lose money on the insurance but youíre
just scared you spend lots you do
everything you diversify you get
insurance to protect yourself
because the future is going to be
worse the definite
optimistic one thatís a world where you
create new things thatís
engineering art all the
various creative things
upper right is sort of finance law thatís what
we have the last quarter century there's
room for that but it was pushed too
far and you canít have a
society where itís nothing but
finance and law you have to have
more than that and I think the the
basic choice that we have
in the developed world today is do
we move towards the pessimistic
indefinite world where everyone
buys insurance or do we somehow
go back to the future to
something where the world is
centred on on the creation of new
things art engineering
all the various creative
disciplines where to start let me just end
with one thematic
thought here on
this so I often think
you can ask 3 different questions
what is valuable what
can you do and what are others
not doing and and I
think and I think you should try to
find something thatís at the
intersection of those 3 so
it's not good enough to answer one of
those 3 questions you need to try to
answer all 3 the Venn diagram
intersection's not
necessarily very big but
that's where all the value
in technology intensive
growth and progress is to
be found so anyway it's not a necessarily
big intersection but that's where you should look
and if you want to frame it as
2 questions Iíll give an intellectual version
of the question and a business
version the intellectual version
is what important truth
do very few people agree with
you on and I've tried to ask
this as an interview question
Iím not itís always sort of interesting
people can never answer it they
they even though they can
read on the internet that I ask people this
question as an interview question they still
cannot answer it and I think
this this tells you something about
the conformity that exists in
our society at present and then I
think the business version is an
application of this which is
what valuable company is nobody
buildings and I will I will leave those 2
questions as homework for you
today thank you very much
you are taking questions I will
take a few questions thank you
for this grand lecture please come on stage
thank you hello hello
Iíll speak Peter thank you for that ooh thank you
Lucien from BraveNewTalent
last year I talked here about
the world going from capitalism to
talentism where the number one
currency is moving from
financial capital to
human capital and you talk a lot
about the future of education
and I think one of the really interesting
missing points is actually
how you can connect
demand of talent to
supply of talent and that's the
question of the education system
what what new businesses
that havenít been started yet in the
education model in the education
attack space
using most excites you I do think I do think
probably the whole long talk on
educational education related businesses
I think the I sort of think
one of the critical things is
matching learning to what people what
people can do with it and to
somehow turn
education from an
indefinite good where people
often learn and they donít have any idea why they are learning things
into something something more applied
Iím not against general
education or having sort of a broad
baseline but I do worry that
when people say that they learn how to learn
or theyíre learning things that are very
abstract or and that itís sort of bad to
ask how it may be applied that this is
often has become an excuse
and we need to push back on
that excuse excuse very hard
you know Iím often even hesitant to use the
word education because I think in some ways it
all has these connotations of this current
system which is so screwed up
the you know the deep problem with the
educational system I think
is that in many ways it is a zero
sum game for for
status at getting into the right
schools getting the right grades
and things like that and
so I think if you start a new a new
education business
you can try to either
work within that system and
so it's basically how you
basically are paying a zero sum
game and youíre people
compete so maybe that would be a
business that would help people score higher
on tests or something like that
and thereís probably some value in that
even though itís fundamentally zero
sum and then I think the
none zero sum version is
somehow matching you know
unappreciated talent with
unmet needs itís it's creating
completely new value where none
exists and I certainly think
the non-zero sum version is
the one thatís the really
exciting one we should work on
you know what important truth do you feel
very few people agree with
you on and then you talk
about company like you want to focus on
a company and an area where
people arenít really focussing so it generates value
do you feel your 20 under 20 programme kind of
demonstrates that like I feel from
talking to some of them that theyíre doing what they feel
other people expect of them and of course there are
a lot of people doing what other people expect of them so I guess
Iím just asking do you feel your programme
demonstrates the same values
what everything you know look everyone operates in a
social context and
so and so
itís itís probably not
entirely realistic to
not have any social cues
or not to listen to other people you know
already in the time of Shakespeare
the word ape meant both
primate and to imitate
and so I donít think that I don't
think that it is correct to say that
you are not going to imitate or youíre going to operate
outside of society or youíre going to ignore things
altogether that's probably too extreme
but I do think that in
anything people do you
have to always be aware of of these
of these kinds of social
pressures and and how
powerfully they operate I think that
you know I think the 20 under 20 programme you know
a very minimum people had to break with the track
thing they were doing and thatís probably
a very fundamental way in which they
were doing something quite different from what was
what was socially expected and I think the
thus far it seems to be working quite
well weíve weíve I donít want to go into all the details but we
are very optimistic with how itís how itís
tracked so far the
calibre of people the originality of the
kinds of projects theyíre working
on but it is a general problem
that that you know if I had a one people
once asked me you know how would I answer the question
tell me a truth that very few
people agree with you on and the
the slightly meta-level
answer I like to give is that you know
the answer always to this question is always
most people believe X but
I believe not X so
most people believe this is an
easy question but I think it is a hard question
most people think that most people
think originality is not that hard
I think itís extremely hard itís extremely rare
and when you
find it itís extremely valuable
hello hi I was just wondering if you
could speak for a moment about sea
studying and how you
think that could help bring about the
technological acceleration
you called for this is a fairly minor project
I get involved in itís
certainly was a one of my
friends Patrick Freeman who's an engineer at Google and
decided he wanted to explore
the idea of creating new communities on the ocean
we basically and I think this is still a sort of
very futuristic kind of
project that's why it is done on a non
profit basis at this
point I do think when we look at
all the frontiers from the
1960s that were abandoned
space has been largely abandoned
but people also talk about
the oceans oceans cover
72% of the worldís
surface area and people you know in
the 60s imaged underwater
cities there would be all sorts of new
ways of living on the oceans the
deserts people had visions
of transforming the deserts
into forests or arable
farmland all these sorts of
things and thatís all been dialled back so I
think as we look for new
frontiers we should look at
you know not just the sort of urban centres where we
find ourselves but we should look at you know
the deserts the oceans ultimately
outer space I think somehow the
challenge of technology the
challenge of reopening the
frontier and part of that frontier I think should
involve literally the you know
the geographic frontier hello
hi Peter my name is Henri and I
started a company in synthetic biology
and it took me almost 12
years of studying and research in
universities to
understand what needs to be built and if
you want to solve big
problems that require deep
technical knowledge how do you
correlated that with you know getting
out of college early well itís
well you know first of all my claim has never been that
nobody should go to college you know we we you know
we and I went to
college and you know I think there certainly
are many contexts in which it is important
you know you have to get a PhD if
you want to become a professor
if you want to you know and thereís certain professional tracks where
you have to go to college to get the requisite degrees
I do think that you know there
are certainly areas where the limits
of knowledge are very far and you have
to spend many years maybe decades
studying things to get to the frontier
I don't think all areas are
like this computer science certainly has not
been one where youíve classically had
to spend your whole life
there are a lot of people who have been able to start very
successful software
businesses where the critical thing
was not pursuing
some specific trajectory
that is still going to take you know many years
to get to the frontier but to
go in a different direction where the frontier
was much closer so I think if you had to
generalise the question it's a question
about how far is the frontier
of knowledge and there is an
academic version where itís really
far because you sort of see people
in graduate school and post
doctoral schools and it
seems like there is a never-ending
series of things theyíre learning
but I often wonder whether there
are other directions one can
go and where frontiers are
actually actually much much
closer you know I think I think the
bio-informatics area is
very promising certainly to
my mind itís too heavily
dominated by
priorities set by by
various academically tracked
areas and the and the
question people have not asked enough
is whether theyíre working on
things that will actually have
application and will actually
have use and thatís a very different
question from whether you can write papers
that get published in science or nature
magazine and help you get tenure and so
weíre in a world where academic
research is esoteric
and non-applied
and technology is sort of
very very applied and there
needs to be much more
much more room for the in-between things not
just things that have immediate
application and not things
that are pure theory but
somehow a synthesis of the 2 and
I think that's a thatís an open challenge that we need to work on
hi my name is Ralph Krunz of
Catagonia Capital from Berlin
I have one question to your
slide with
technology innovation on the
one axis and basical
globalisation on the other now if we look at
you know innovation
capabilities obviously
with the internet theoretically
could easily be spread out now
all over the world on the other
hand if you look at the value
creation in tech you know
where have whereís the value being
created itís still very strongly
centred around the Valley
so how do these in your opinion these
to axes basically interact on
the one hand sort of innovation
capability thatís actually
globalising on the other hand
still value creation still
pretty much focused at one spot
that is a good question I donít necessarily have answers to all these
questions but you know I think I think
it certainly is a strange
paradox of the information
age that while theoretically
everyone in the world has
access to information and
everybody could be working on
on new problems in
practise things
are extraordinarily
centred on Silicon Valley
you know I think probably the conventional
explanation for this would be that there
are very powerful network effects
involved involved in it
and these network effects are
very critical because you know when you are going
from 0 to one itís
critical to be the first person and
so if you are in Silicon
Valley youíre competing with all these other
people you have sort of a sense of whatís you know
what really the frontier of knowledge is and whether
youíre working on something important
if you're if youíre
working out of some small village you
might be the best
technology business in that
village but it's not clear itís
globally competitive and for
technology to work it
generally has to be the best
in the world you know thereís some
exceptions thereís the Chinese internet
there are certain parts that are sort of semi
closed off but the fundamental
on a fundamental level
technology competition
is global and the great
technology businesses have to be the best in the
world this is not true of all businesses
you know if you ran a hotel or a
restaurant you might do
quite well if it was the best hotel or the
best restaurant in a given city youíre not
competing with restaurants
halfway around the world or hotels halfway around
the world so most types of
businesses actually have a very heavy
local component
technology I think tends to be
necessarily globally competitive and
what makes it so hard is that
you actually have to be the best in
the world and and there's a way in
which if youíre in a place
where all the other people
many other people who're doing
it are located you have a better
sense of that frontier you have a sense of whether youíre working
on things that are actually potentially the
best or whether theyíre just reinventing things
people have done many times before so
that's that's my best explanation
not sure itís right I think in
practise thereís going to be
innovation both in Silicon Valley
and outside of it in the decade ahead
and I think there will continue to be a lot in Silicon Valley
and I think there will be a you know quite a lot
in the rest of the world put together
my name is Tim from Chrono24.com
how could governments
support to
develop developed countries
imagine youíd be in the room
with the G8 leaders what would be
the single most relevant
advice you would give to the
G8 leaders
well I think the I think certainly the starting
point would be for this to be a priority and
so this is again very abstract but I think
the I think the question of
technology or science
and innovation around these
areas is not
actually seen as a top
priority and so if you look at
the G8 the main
priorities today are
macroeconomics theyíre how much
money do we print or not print you know
itís various things like that theyíre not really
focused on science or or
technology and so you know if you
had to if you had to look at the
US specifically Iíll just talk
about the US because Iím most familiar with that
we have you know 100 senators
435 congress
congress people by a
generous count maybe
35
out of 535 have a
background in science
technology
engineering the rest of them are
basically in the Middle Ages they do not
know that windmills donít work
when the wind is not blowing or that
solar panels do not work at
night and so and so you know
I would say that the first
step towards having a
more of a role for government would
be to have government leaders who actually
understand science and
technology I personally end up coming
out somewhat on the sort of classical
liberal or libertarian side and Iím
sceptical of it but but if I was
more on the pro government side I would
start by changing the people who make up the government
Peter hi that actually sort of trumps
the question I was going to ask you which was I
think you would agree that the US
political system and the system of
government is somewhat
broken in the United States and
separate and apart from that obvious
and great comment that you just
made what would you do to
change this system
how people get elected how
things get done how we fix the
priorities and focus and attack
real problems in society after
all it still is the same system and
this is also true in you know Western European
countries it thereís a sense in which the
politics seems angrier
and more dysfunctional
in many different countries but the
system itself has not actually
changed and so the premise in your question is that
something is wrong with the system
Iím not actually sure
that's that's entirely correct
Iíll give you a sort of an alternate explanation of of
what's going on which is that in
a world where there is not enough
technological scientific
and economic progress and where people's
living standards do not
improve the world becomes
very zero sum and everyone who
for every winner there is a loser and
you only make money by taking it
from other people the pie does not grow
it simply gets reshuffled
in various ways and I think
I think the various western political
systems do not work very
well when the pie is not
growing because they work by
compromise and
consensus and you get to a
compromise if you say you have
people around the table and you figure out a
solution where thereís a little bit more
for everybody at the table and that sort
of compromise only works
when you have a growing pie and so
I actually think that we somehow
have to get the
technology progress
accelerating more and if we
do the political system will work
if you don't I think people will
just be extremely angry because they will
understand that they can only get
more by taking it from other people and
that makes that makes I focus more on
substance less on process
Axel Ruger of the Van Gogh Museum
on a completely different question because
we are talking a lot about science and technology
and so forth but it wonít my heart
of course set also in the top left
quadrant you'll also place the arts and Iím just wondering
whether you could talk a bit more about that
and the room for experiment and
what the role of the arts in
this you know in the future in the
acceleration of growth really
might be because at the moment
we also see also in arts
funding a real retrenchment
towards the tried tested and true and what we know and
blue chip names and
so forth so how do
you see that in that sort of you know
entire continuum
you know I am I am sort of I think theyíre very
similar to the question
of technology the
you know the challenge in
some ways that is maybe even
more pronounced in the arts than in
the area of technology
is this
question of originality
and what you know you know what counts
as as original and so you know you
and it it always gets sort of it gets
very complicated because you know
you sort of have this thing where you know all the
fashionable people wear black clothes
but they also end up looking alike and so this
question of how you get something thatís
authentically different rather than just everyone being
different in exactly the same
way is I think sort of a you know a very very
deep challenge and probably you know it again
comes down to
people pursuing their
passions having some
capacity in our society to
support that you know and not not the
sort of herd-like consensus
approach but I think you know I think
if everything was fine
and we could just be static
and the machine just sort of worked you would
have no need for either art or
engineering you know just be a
static world it might
decelerate but you could sum
this would be the optimistic indefinite
world that I think we had for the
last quarter century and I think
that world has hit a watershed with
the financial crisis of 07
08 and at this point
we do we really need to
do new things and that necessarily
means that there is more room for
creativity and for the whole
range and spectrum of the arts and itís itís itís
much more important than it was in
a world where everything was
fine and you just had to turn
the crank on the machine and they would work
hello thank you for your talk Iím Elizabeth Taylor
yes Iím Elizabeth Taylor and I just have a
question about your the acceleration model
you showed us I guess we all love
acceleration we love
growth but Iím just wondering
an important truth I believe is that maybe perhaps
we should de-accelerate since growth
acceleration is kind of having rather harmful
effects on human beings I mean for
example in Africa we have the dumping
of all the different computers and
those chemicals harming the residents living there
and yet we talk about design being
human centric so I guess the
I just see
the acceleration model and
having user centric design
at being odds with each other
so I was just wondering your thoughts
well there are well probably the
caveat I should have put on this was
not it was sort of good acceleration
or itís not technological
innovation per se but it's good
technological innovation
where you know good would include
not just you know not just
improved economic
well-being but also improved
quality of life some sort of
sustainability about the
environment you know obviously if you
simply have the economy do
better but you destroy the environment thatís
thatís the collapse model so you know
I actually so the
world youíre describing is one thatís headed
not towards its acceleration
leading to collapse which is not
acceleration at all now the the
to repeat the challenge though I
would say I believe there are
only 4 charts you can draw
you can draw acceleration
deceleration cycles
or collapse there are a lot of problems
with acceleration and
the big risks with it
are that it's bad acceleration so
you know maybe the development of nuclear
weapons was a form of
technological progress that was a
bad form of technological
progress or you have
unsustainable
acceleration which may be whatís
happening in a number of environmental
issues but I think on
but I I do believe that
technological acceleration
is absolutely critical at
this point because
the other 3 models are
are worse and and you know just
to give a you know very basic
example is we have about a billion
people who live in the developed
world there are about 6 billion
in the developing or emerging
market countries and if
you simply did not have any
technological progress and
you try to get those 6
billion people to the
living standard of the developed
world you would have a complete
environmental resource
driven collapse and
so and so and then I don't think
you can say well they should not
develop they should not progress they should just
stay living in their villages
without refrigerators or
any sort of technology so
because I think that's not a real
option I think the only
way forward is through more
technological progress with
all the risks that it entails because
I think you know I think the alternative
is to condemn you know billions of people
to to to
poverty which I think will not be
acceptable I donít think that is acceptable to China I donít think it
is acceptable to any other any
other country and because I
agree with you that the current
model is not entirely
sustainable my inference
is that we have to actually
move forward even faster
hi hi Peter Robin Norton from Sedition
yesterday John Maeda talked about his life
in 4 quarters sort of 0 to 25 25 50 50 75
75 100 and you hear a lot
about education in
the first quarter right the 0 to 25s your programme
itself thereís also this urge with
singularity technology to
maybe think of life having
additional segments and going on for longer periods
than we currently imagine regardless
of whether that's the case
how do you think the developed
world should look at the last
2 quarters the 50 to
75 and 75 to 100
and how do you think the developed world
is doing in terms of valuing those
assets and those people
well I wouldnít I would hope we don't necessarily
end at 100 but even though you know I
I think that you know I think people people
always say that people often say you know you
should live every day as though it's your
last which always strikes me as a
very pessimistic view on life
and I think you should actually live every
day as though itís going to go on forever and
so every day should be so awesome and so
great that youíd be happy if it would
be like this not just for the
next 50 or 100 years but but
indefinitely and and I think the and so I
think you know I think the
the question we have to
ask when we when people think
about these things is you know
what sense of the future do people
have are there things they think they
can you know meaningfully improve and
work on and and I think
that you know if weíre not going to have a
super pessimistic
society in which everyone is just dejected
you have to have this view that wherever you
are in your life thereís some meaningful things you can
do there're ways you can make the future better
and and sort of optimism
about the future is not
something that should be
limited to people in their
20s we have to find a way for that
to be true at all these
levels and and certainly when we
have this radical duality between
education and life
where you learn and then you leave school and you stop
learning there is there is a
profound pessimism thatís part
of it which is that there is nothing you can
learn thatís worth the effort and of
course that becomes self-fulfilling at
some point so you
have to actually believe that there are
meaningful things you can do and and
and improve yourself and it's it's
hard we all have all these priorities
but but itís something I I
certainly try to like you know block off long
weekends you know read a book
discuss it with various people just
do various structured types of
things to advance my thinking and I think we should
all try to do that hi Iím Leah Weiss from sorry
last question so you get the
last question oh dear no pressure
so as you
try to be a contrarian investor
and as a VC I think
it comes with often
underrated
responsibility in shaping the
future not because the
companies
that are backed will be
the building blocks of future
society but at least they stand a greater
chance and I was wondering
what advice do you have
on investors trying to
find real game
changers and sort of breaking
off of the common mold that
often is feeding this monster
of people doing jobs
they donít enjoy to you know by
stuff they donít need to impress
people they don't like well these are
all things one should try to resist
and and we should not
exaggerate or make it sound
easy to resist and I think you
know you know I think in both an
entrepreneurial and a venture
capital context we
always like to style
ourselves as very
original and as able
to think for ourselves but we are under
tremendous social pressures
and and when there are these long time
horizons where you know might take
5 7 10 years
before you know whether something is really
working you often want to get faster
feedback and and
often a lot of the feedback ends up being of a
social in nature I donít want to dismiss all that but
but you end up you end up in this in
this zone and I think that you know I think itís
an endemic problem in
Silicon Valley that the venture capital
thinking is very herd like thereíre
clearly these fashions
and trends and and theyíre not
necessarily you know supported
by by any of the data
my my own my own approach is generally
to try to be anti-thematic
I think that once you have a theme and say this is
something that's going to happen
itís either too late or thereíre too many
people doing it and I think
all great businesses have a
unique narrative and thereís a unique
story and it is a story
about what they're doing that nobody
else is doing you know one other version of the sort of question
I gave the intellectual and business
version of the question one
question I often like ask
people at the very beginning when theyíre
starting companies this is itís
very cute in Silicon Valley
but I think thereís a European version
that probably is also quite
powerful and it is you know
if you the
2 or 3 people starting a company thatís
cool you get to be the founder the
CEO you know whatever title you give
yourself but why will
the 20th
talented person join your
company when they can go to work at
Google or Facebook have a
very safe
very well-paying job that looks very good
on their rÈsumÈ and what
story are you going to tell
the 20th person to join your company
and itís the you know
it normally does not work
that everything will be working
so great in the business that it will
obviously be
spectacularly successful itís not
not an economic story the
economic story never works
and I find that
probably well under 10%
of the people I talk to have a
half way decent answer to
to that question alone so it's
always a unique you know a unique
thematic story you have to
obviously you know itís and I think being
contrarian is not the only
thing itís a 3-part Venn diagram it also has to be
true it has to be something you have some
confidence in so if
it is simply contrarian there are a
lot of ideas that nobody agrees with that are
just wrong most ideas that most people do
not agree with are wrong I think this is
worth you know underscoring but it is
really finding the intersection and the
version of it I like to ask is
whatís the you know whatís the you know why is the
20th person going to join this company
thank you very much