I tried to summarise the ideas discussed in the podcast (Full summary at <a href="https://medium.com/@rishdotblog/peter-theil-and-eric-weinstein-on-the-portal-episode-1-a-summary-298ccd0251a9" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@rishdotblog/peter-theil-and-eric-weinste...</a>):<p>1. Innovation has continued and accelerated in the world of bits, but has plateaued in the world of stuff<p>2. If you go to a room and get rid of all the screens, how do you know you’re not in 1979?<p>3. Since the Great Depression, we’ve been managing economic metrics. But the technological and economic tailwinds haven’t been there at all.<p>4. In a healthy system, you can have wild dissent and it’s not threatening. Because everyone knows that the system is heathy. In an unhealthy system, the dissent becomes much more dangerous. There are very few people who openly criticise the unhealthy systems that they are part of<p>5. In late modernity (which we are living in), there’s simply too much knowledge for an individual to understand all of it. In 1800s, Goethe could understand all of everything. In 1900s, Hilbert could understand all of mathematics. But now, the kind of specialisation we have is much harder to get a handle on.<p>6. If you believe that productivity and growth is over, and you don’t want to emphasise merit. Instead, you focus on simply making sure that each group has its share of slots on the table. It’s not about wealth creation, it’s about receiving the wealth that’s already there.