Business figure and thinker, author, and agent provacateur, Peter Teal, from Fiezzoli, Italy,

Uncommon Knowledge, now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. Peter Teal graduated from Stanford

and then from Stanford Law School. A few months after joining one of the most prestigious law firms

in New York he decided not to practice law, returned to California and soon co-founded a tech startup.

After selling that startup, PayPal, he became an investor making the first

outside investment in Facebook, since then he has invested in companies such as LinkedIn,

Palantir, and SpaceX. Peter Teal has also become a public intellectual. Peter, welcome.

Peter, thanks for having me. Things slow down. In the last quarter century,

an economic growth in the United States has slowed. Real wages have remained for the most part

stagnant. Moore's Law, that computing power per dollar would effectively double 18,

every 18 months, hasn't applied for years. Instead, we've got a kind of parody of Moore's Law,

e-rooms law, which is more spelled backwards, that the price of a new biotech drug doubles

every seven years. And in field after field, even theoretical progress seems to have slowed.

Physics in the last 50 years, nothing like the enormous creativity of the first half of the 20th

century. From Einstein's general relativity in 1916 to putting a man on the moon in 1969,

just over half a century, the last time we put a man on the moon, half a century ago.

Peter Teal, we were promised flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters. What has happened?

Well, I think you just gave a very good summary of what happened. We had this multi-faceted,

multi-dimensional progress in the first half of the 20th century, where if you define technology

in the late 1960s, it would have meant rockets and aerospace, and the green revolution and

agriculture, and computers, and new medicines, and all sorts of things. Whereas today,

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