I apologize for not being clear enough. Thiel means that the IT world is unregulated, so that's where most of the progress has been. Various government agencies have saddled traditional tech (energy, medicine, electrical engineering, etc.) with intense regulation that has made it toxic for investment at all but the highest levels which is itself risk averse in the way that scientific breakthrough often needs, squeezes out scrappy tiny companies, and discourages people with revolutionary ideas from wanting to enter them, because safety and compliance concerns have run amok. And this is all borne of a cultural shift toward a fear that traditional scientific progress will kill us sooner that help us, maybe due to the Bomb and Cold War, but I forgot whether he precisely named an event.