Basically saying the science and technology should be held accountable for failing to keep up with the advances in Wall Street's level of greed. Even his audience looks painfully incredulous.

It's not Science and Technology that are failing us. It's people and human nature that are screwing us over. We, the middle and lower economic classes, have been the targets of 40 years of class warfare...and we're only now beginning to see significant numbers of people wake up to this fact. Science and technology have, in fact, produced huge gains in productivity, virtually all of which has been gobbled up by the ultra-wealthy.

>> ^Enzoblue:

Basically saying the science and technology should be held accountable for failing to keep up with the advances in Wall Street's level of greed. Even his audience looks painfully incredulous.


Yeah, that is the 1st of the 4 theories Thiel covers in the larger video (this clip is set to start near the end), and he's definitely smart enough to admit multiple theories likely all play an important part in complex events.

His point here is that Wall Street and the government overestimated the rate of progress... if we had really made as much progress in the last 40 years as we thought we were going to, we wouldn't have seen the housing market collapse.


The people in his audience are happy to be there... Thiel is among the smartest people alive by many of the measures they most care about (see e.g. his early investment in Facebook and the performance of his hedge fund*) and among the most powerful people in the world. I think you might be reading in to their expressions.

*"From 2002 to 2008, [Thiel's] fund had an average annual return of 57.9%, which was significantly better than the average of -0.75% for hedge funds overall... [and experienced] losses of only 4.5% for 2008 compared to the average of 20% for other hedge funds." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital

Moving this video to chilaxe's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.