Why The Future Isn't Cool Anymore - With Guest Peter Thiel

I'm going to show you some magazines from the 1960's that talk about the future in a completely different way than the way we talk about the future today. Why was the Concorde cancelled? Why is everyone going into computer science and not engineering? Why aren't people excited about the future anymore?

[@UncleDiddles]

We used to do things just to do them, cost and risk be damned. We jumped out of balloons from over 100,000 feet, we piloted aircraft to above Mach 6, we went to the bottom of the Marianas trench, we created a nuclear powered bomber, all of which occurred in the 50's and 60's. Man's lust for exploration, and the motivation of "why climb that mountain?... because its there" is gone. If you look at what constituted luxury throughout time, and compare it to what luxury is now, you will see the difference. And that difference is laziness. We have all become lazy. We have things that do everything for us. We as a species used to create the most intricate and beautiful things ever seen by man, with our hands, and it lasted for thousands of years. And now everything is made from machines, and lasts 3 months. We spent thousands of years beating back the world, conquering it, bending it to our will. And somewhere along the way, when we realized we could create things that do the work for us, we threw up our hands and said meh I'm comfortable now, no need to keep going. I think its mainly about necessity, and comfort. All of our necessities are met now, with very little effort, therefore we are comfortable. Why make ourselves uncomfortable, just to do it? I am a watch enthusiast. I liken myself an amateur horologist, and spend much of my time reading about just that, the study of time. You would be astounded with what we as a species achieved, so early in our intellectual awakening. The beauty, and craftsmanship, and science and engineering that went into the earliest timepieces. And now, most watches use a quartz movement and cost $18. If you want an actual handmade watch, you are physically paying the salary of a craftsman, to spend years of his life making it for you. And it is a dying art, so there aren't many left, so expect to pay mid to high six figures. You may be interested in the movie Longitude, about the quest to create the most accurate clock in the world in the 1700s, and as a result, enable accurate sea travel and world exploration. All of this to say, we outsourced our labor as a civilization, to machinery and computers. So there is no longer the spark left in us to just physically create something astounding. We sold our soul for air conditioning and Netflix....