I think it's fair to say that academia and industry tend to attract different personality types. I'm in academia myself, and if you're deadwood it's far easier to survive there than in industry. OTOH, I've known plenty of academic scientists who you could call any night of the week after midnight without worrying about waking them up - because they'd be working on their research.
I'd even go so far as to say that a lot of academic scientific research is useless if you want to get a product out the door. (I'd even say that a lot of it is useless, period.) However, what's useless now may not be useless later. Among his other sins, the mathematician G. E. Hardy said that three areas which would never have practical application would be number theory (his field), general relativity, and quantum mechanics. Were he alive today, he might say it via an encrypted e-mail message sent from an electronic computer via satellite dish.
Re your co-worker: You said he was a Physics PhD. Physics and Math seem to have the same leftist infestation as the humanities, possibly because there are more people than jobs, and the ones who get in tend to come from the same schools and culture, and form a self-sustaining clique.
I didn't mean to completely "diss" academics, they serve their purposes. And a lot "research" is worthless. Academia today is like the CIA. It has become institutionally corrupt, no longer serves the mission for which it was created and is unresponsive to its customers. (It is also become unbelievably bloated and incredibly inefficient.)