—

Wonderful, sparky conversation between technology investor and entrepreneur, Peter Thiel and Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt as part of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event taking place in Aspen. Ranging across topics, from the true impact of technology innovation to the influence of government on innovation and growth, the pair take on some thorny topics of our time. I did like the acknowledgement, forced by Thiel, that while social media played a role in the Arab Spring uprisings, the catalysts were really more fundamental and less prosaic. Thiel: “The fundamental driver for that was the food prices went up 50 percent and people were going to starve and I think it’s smug and complacent to pretend that it was anything other than that.” Well said.

[Live tweeting of this event came c/o Bill Gross]