So this question of, you know, is there really progress used to move faster.

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.

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.

It wasn't just the theological metaphysics that drove it, but something like the Christian anthropology. Okay, so let's delve into this a little bit.

So I had the opportunity to sit down with Peter Thiel today,

and Mr. Teal 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 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

...