Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel on the Future of Innovation

 Innovation  

Peter Thiel talks with Tyler Cowen about stagnation, company names, chess, favorite TV shows, and especially innovation.

Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen, both bestselling authors, are among today’s top global thought leaders and influential innovators. Watch as these two engage in a serious dialogue on the ideas and policies that will shape the future of innovation and progress in the coming years and decades.

In the conversation, Thiel discusses how he thinks we will leave the “great stagnation,” whether the AI hype is justified, how he would boil his thought down to the smallest number of dimensions, whether NYC is over- or underrated, why globalization is likely to decline and what that means for different regions, the parts of the Bible which have influenced him most, “the Straussian Jesus,” to what age he thinks he will live, why Japan is special, how his German background matters, his favorite opening chess move, how and why company names matter, and even his favorite TV show, Game of Thrones.

"There’s no straightforward formula for innovation."

"I think we’ve had a lot of innovation in computers, information technology, Internet, mobile Internet in the world of bits. Not so much in the world of atoms, supersonic travel, space travel, new forms of energy, new forms of medicine, new medical devices, etc. It’s sort of been this two-track area of innovation," Thiel states.

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When asked, where the breakthroughs that will get the economy out of stagnation are, Thiel replies:

AI feels slightly overhyped. Biotech, a lot could happen. It feels heavily regulated. But if you’ve got self-driving cars, that would be a significant innovation which would change a decent amount at the margins. There’s some regulatory challenges with it, but it’s sort of right at the intersection of the kinds of things that could happen.

I think the most natural hope is that information technology starts to broaden out and starts to impact this world of atoms. Then we’re going to have this question about whether the technology outpaces the politics or vice versa.

According to Thiel, "There’s no straightforward formula for innovation. It’s much easier to do horizontal progress, which I describe as globalization, copying things that work going from one to n, versus vertical progress, technology, doing new things, going from zero to one."

Peter Thiel is among the most impressive innovators of the past two decades. As co-founder of Paypal and seed-funder for Facebook, Thiel has been instrumental in the conception and growth of some of today’s most entrepreneurial and innovative companies. In his latest best-selling book, Zero to One, Thiel explains how to build a better future by capitalizing on innovation. A staunch optimist, he maintains that progress can be achieved anywhere the human mind is able to think creatively. Thiel describes how entrepreneurial thinking leads to innovation, which builds something new and moves the mark from zero to one.

Tyler Cowen is a world-renowned professor of economics, co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, co-founder of the award-winning online educational platform Marginal Revolution University, and chairman of the Board at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bloomberg Businessweek profiled Cowen as “America’s Hottest Economist,” Foreign Policy named Cowen as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and an Economist survey counted Cowen as one of the most influential economists of the last decade.


SOURCE  Mercatus Center

By 33rd Square

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