Speaker 1: Also media, Ah, what's Dick my Cheney's This is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, a podcast where every week we talk about
Speaker 1: the great decisions being made by the Democratic Party, which
Speaker 1: this week includes really really burnishing their Dick Cheney credentials.
Speaker 1: We'll see how that works out in about three weeks
Speaker 1: with me to talk about, you know something related to
Speaker 1: this election is our lovely Yeah, is our lovely guest
Speaker 1: today A contributing writer at Rolling Stone and contributing editor
Speaker 1: at Wired, Noah Shackedman. Noah, welcome to the podcast program show.
Speaker 2: You gave this very confused look in between. My first
Speaker 2: and last name was over time.
Speaker 1: I wrote your the stuff you wanted me to, because
Speaker 1: we have a different intro for you this time. I
Speaker 1: wrote it up at the top of the piece, And
Speaker 1: so the top of the piece is just the words
Speaker 1: Peter Teel because that's the sub of our episodes. So
Speaker 1: at the top of my article it says contributing writer
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, Peter Teal And wait
Speaker 1: a second while, so I had to like catch my
Speaker 1: brain and fix it in between.
Speaker 2: Look, I welcome my new colleague.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Peter Teel would be a great guest on the program.
Speaker 1: But I wouldn't do Peter Teal for the you know what,
Speaker 1: I might do Dick Cheney for the Peter Teal episode
Speaker 1: about who does me? Yeah, Peter Teal? Noah oh Man,
Speaker 1: So yeah, Noah. How do you feel about being friendly
Speaker 1: with Dick Cheney. It's a good decision. Is this going
Speaker 1: to work out for the Harris campaign?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: I am not incredibly bullish on the old befriending war
Speaker 2: criminal campaign strategy.
Speaker 1: It's the it's an impart a decision you make if
Speaker 1: like you don't understand Republicans because like I grew up loving,
Speaker 1: like with a family that loved George W. Bush right,
Speaker 1: Like he was a hero in my household as a kid,
Speaker 1: and no one liked Dick Cheney, Like they didn't hate him,
Speaker 1: but like he was not a figure of admiration to
Speaker 1: anyone in my family, like because he was. That was
Speaker 1: kind of the point of Dick Cheney is he was
Speaker 1: like the guy behind the scenes that you don't need
Speaker 1: to like very much. It's just confusing to me that
Speaker 1: they think there's a bunch of Republicans out there who
Speaker 1: will change their vote based on this.
Speaker 3: It was wild at the DNZ how credible it was
Speaker 3: that this rumor that George W. Bush was going to
Speaker 3: come out and speak at the DNC.
Speaker 1: I would have lost my mind.
Speaker 4: Everyone was like, Oh, he's coming, He's coming.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: It was like more credible than Beyonce.
Speaker 1: It's happening here. Yeah, there's there's still time. There's still time,
Speaker 1: and you know who. I don't know if he's he's
Speaker 1: got a chance to be worse than George W. Bush.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say he's there yet. Peter Teal, Peter Tele Uh,
Speaker 1: And that's what we're going to talk about when we
Speaker 1: come back from the cold open to warm things up
Speaker 1: a little bit. Noah, so we're back, Peter Teal, how
Speaker 1: would you describe in brief if someone is like, hey,
Speaker 1: I hear there's this Peter tele guy who's influencing elections
Speaker 1: or whatever. Who is he? How would you describe Peter Teal?
Speaker 1: What would be your like elevator, Like, Oh, that's who
Speaker 1: this guy is.
Speaker 2: He's like the power behind like the weirdest curtain.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess this is how I would describe it, like
Speaker 2: deeply strange, deeply influential. I think it would be my
Speaker 2: elevator pitch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, he's I would say, like, he's the guy
Speaker 1: whose money is responsible for getting Oh shit, what's his name?
Speaker 1: The hillbilly jd Vance started. He's the guy who you know,
Speaker 1: like backed Trump pretty early on in twenty sixteen. He
Speaker 1: was the you know, the billionaire who came up and
Speaker 1: endorsed him at the RNC that year and talked about
Speaker 1: how like he was supporting the Republicans as a gay man.
Speaker 1: These are all glad about Peter Teeter.
Speaker 3: I'm really glad you're able to forget jd Vance's name
Speaker 3: like that. That feels That feels healthy to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It took a lot of work and a lot
Speaker 1: of gas station substances, but I managed to do it,
Speaker 1: and managed to do it. It was mixing the kraton
Speaker 1: Clemato and then one of those yellow jackets truckers take together.
Speaker 1: I reached a state of what I think the Buddhists
Speaker 1: called nirvana, and yeah, all knowledge of jd Vance fled
Speaker 1: from my mind.
Speaker 2: Dude, I'm gonna fucking throw up on a keyboard. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, it seems like it's like in the weirdo
Speaker 2: crypto fascist right, if you follow the roots down far enough, it.
Speaker 1: All comes back to Peter. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of ways of looking at Tel.
Speaker 1: One of them is he is a capitalist Lenin, And
Speaker 1: what I mean by that, I'm not comparing the two
Speaker 1: like ideologically, but Lenin is a guy who grew up
Speaker 1: kind of in the upper middle class strata of his
Speaker 1: society and from an extremely early age hated the system
Speaker 1: that he lived under because his brother was killed by
Speaker 1: the czar, and dedicated himself to its destruction, and he
Speaker 1: went about destroying that system very methodically and very effectively. Right,
Speaker 1: Peter is a guy who grew up in the upper
Speaker 1: middle class strata of his culture always seems to have
Speaker 1: hated the systems that ran the country he lived in,
Speaker 1: and dedicated himself from an early age at getting resources
Speaker 1: and then kind of methodically destroying the system, which is
Speaker 1: representative democracy, that he lived under. That's one way of
Speaker 1: looking at Peter. The other is that Peter is a
Speaker 1: guy who is fairly intelligent, has okay instincts, but not
Speaker 1: as good as he thinks they are, and he's just
Speaker 1: kind of been careening from point to point, making gambles
Speaker 1: that have led him to this position where he is
Speaker 1: now backing the Republicans to the hilt in order to
Speaker 1: hopefully crumble the system of democracy enough that like he
Speaker 1: gets to rule his own little bitty city somewhere on
Speaker 1: the West coast, right, Like one of them is Peter
Speaker 1: Teel is the master Plotter, and the other is that
Speaker 1: he's this kind of like reactive figure. And I don't
Speaker 1: actually know which is the better way to look at
Speaker 1: this guy is some of it's got to come down
Speaker 1: to like personal preference. But he's an interesting character, and
Speaker 1: I think he's probably, of all of the figures on
Speaker 1: the right now, one of the ones that it's more
Speaker 1: it's easiest to kind of respect at an intellectual level
Speaker 1: because he's very smart and he's succeeded in a lot
Speaker 1: of his Like the reason why the master Plottery thing
Speaker 1: kind of has a lot of traction is he's been
Speaker 1: very successful in a lot of his goals over time,
Speaker 1: Like he's been willing to, he's been able to. He
Speaker 1: has a degree of like focus and discipline that's fairly
Speaker 1: rare on the right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty weird, wells, isn't he also like drinking
Speaker 2: the blood of younger people or something like that.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about that later on in the series.
Speaker 1: It's unclear to me if he's ever drank any young
Speaker 1: people's blood, but he's definitely been accused of it and
Speaker 1: has like expressed an interest in it. I think the
Speaker 1: guy who definitely is drinking young people's blood is Brian Johnson.
Speaker 1: That like like rich founder dude who's obsessed with reducing
Speaker 1: his biological age back to seventeen. He takes his son's
Speaker 1: blood as a supplement. Really yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean he brags about it. Yeah, Like he's very open
Speaker 1: about that. Peter has always Peter is on the record
Speaker 1: to say I don't do that. He was just kind
Speaker 1: of He's invested in a lot of companies that did
Speaker 1: anti aging stuff, some of which like we're looking into
Speaker 1: plasma replacement, right, But it's unclear if he ever did it,
Speaker 1: and if he didn't do it, it would be because
Speaker 1: like he just didn't think it worked. He is a
Speaker 1: big advocate of taking human growth hormone as an anti
Speaker 1: aging supplement. So I think it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where if he doesn't, if he hasn't done the young
Speaker 1: people's blood thing, it's just because he decided the science wasn't.
Speaker 2: There, or he's just so fucking roided out that he's.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, the ruids have given him enough blood. There's
Speaker 1: no more room for blood in Peter's body. So no,
Speaker 1: Like many of the worst things on this earth, Peter
Speaker 1: Teel began in Germany, Frankfort to be specific, where he
Speaker 1: was born on October eleventh, nineteen sixty seven. His father, Klaus,
Speaker 1: was a chemical engineer who the very next year, sixty eight,
Speaker 1: got high by a consulting firm that specialized in heavy industry,
Speaker 1: including oil and gas refining. The founder of the company,
Speaker 1: Arthur G. McKee, had owned a series of steel foundries
Speaker 1: in the Cleveland area, where the Teals moved in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight. So now, at this point, and I think
Speaker 1: this is probably clue to most of our listeners, in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight, Cleveland is just a series of river
Speaker 1: fires with some subjects attached, right Like, It's not the
Speaker 1: city we know and tolerate today. It's nothing but the
Speaker 1: kyah Hogan burning and a couple of soot drenched houses.
Speaker 1: And the reason the Kyahogue is always on fire is
Speaker 1: guys like Arthur McKee, who runs steel boundaries.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So that is that Peter grows up with his dad
Speaker 1: kind of working in the destroying the planet industry, Like
Speaker 1: he's an oil and gas man working for an industrial
Speaker 1: magnate in fucking Cleveland. So Klaus works for a firm
Speaker 1: in Cleveland for a couple of years while he gets
Speaker 1: his graduate degree, and in nineteen seventy one, when Peter
Speaker 1: was four, his parents have a second child, Patrick now
Speaker 1: tealsby biographer Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, which is
Speaker 1: a book that will be a sizable source for this.
Speaker 1: Although I do have some disagree. I think Chaefkin's a
Speaker 1: very good writer, good biographer. There's a couple of areas
Speaker 1: where I disagree with them that we'll talk about here.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he has described Klaus and Peter's mom Suzanne,
Speaker 1: as fanatical Republicans who were absolutely gaga for Nixon. That
Speaker 1: may be true, you know, chaef Cains certainly knows more
Speaker 1: about this than me. However, Peter disagrees with that characterization
Speaker 1: of his parents. He doesn't seem to have considered them
Speaker 1: to have been fanatical Republicans or religious extremists, and chaf
Speaker 1: Can also kind of paints them as Christian like hardcore
Speaker 1: Christian conservatives. Peter is an outspoken Christian. It's unclear to
Speaker 1: me again, if this is just Peter disliking the description
Speaker 1: of himself and his parents as extremists, or if this
Speaker 1: is that Chase can you know, maybe doesn't have all
Speaker 1: of the context. We don't get a lot of detail
Speaker 1: about Teale's parents, so it's not perfectly clear, right. Chaefkin
Speaker 1: describes his father as cold, bordering on cruel at times. Again,
Speaker 1: this is a characterization Peter would disagree with, at least
Speaker 1: publicly in terms of like stories that paint that picture
Speaker 1: of his dad is cruel. I don't see a lot
Speaker 1: of really good detailed evidence about it. The story that
Speaker 1: Chafkin cites is kind of evidence of how cold and
Speaker 1: cruel Peter's dad was. Is a story that Peter tells
Speaker 1: a lot. Two biographers I've seen this or two interviewers
Speaker 1: I've seen this story recounted in a couple of different
Speaker 1: articles that interviewed Peter before Chaefgin's biography came out. And
Speaker 1: the story is that one day, when Peter is a
Speaker 1: little kid, like maybe four or five, he was looking
Speaker 1: at a rug in the family home that was made
Speaker 1: from a cow hide, and he asked his dad where
Speaker 1: did this rug come from? And Klaus, matter of fact,
Speaker 1: they explained that it was made from a dead cow.
Speaker 1: Peter asked, like, what what does it mean that something's dead?
Speaker 1: And his dad told him, quote, death happens to all animals,
Speaker 1: all people. It will happen to me one day, it
Speaker 1: will happen to you one day. And Chafkin describes this
Speaker 1: as a moment of like brutal honesty, and he kind
Speaker 1: of insinuates that it may have done some damage to Peter,
Speaker 1: writing that he quote would return to the cow and
Speaker 1: the brutal finality of the thing again and again, even
Speaker 1: in middle age. Now, it does seem to be accurate
Speaker 1: that Peter is stuck in his mind. I just don't
Speaker 1: know that I consider that a brutal description of death.
Speaker 1: That seems like, you know, kind of just factual, right,
Speaker 1: Like I had a conversation with my dad about death
Speaker 1: that wasn't all that different from this, right, Like, it
Speaker 1: happens to everything, it'll happen to me, it'll happen to you.
Speaker 1: Like how else do you explain death to a kid? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, I mean I don't know. That feels like
Speaker 2: pretty like a pretty weak antecedent for everything that's about
Speaker 2: to transpire.
Speaker 1: I think what's going on here is that Peter is
Speaker 1: obsessed with death and dying.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He's put a huge amount of money into like reversing
Speaker 1: aging and anti senizence and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: So like, he clearly is a guy who's obsessed with
Speaker 1: his own mortality, and like you're looking for evidence of
Speaker 1: that in his childhood, and he does tell this story.
Speaker 1: He told The New Yorker in twenty eleven that this
Speaker 1: was a quote very very disturbing day. So obviously this
Speaker 1: does stick in his mind. But I don't know that
Speaker 1: that makes the case that his dad is like cold
Speaker 1: because this I just don't see it from that anecdote.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously that's one anecdote. We're talking about a whole childhood,
Speaker 1: So that doesn't mean that he was not cold. I
Speaker 1: just don't I feel like what we may get from
Speaker 1: the fact that this story fucks Peter up so much
Speaker 1: says less about his dad and more about like who
Speaker 1: Peter is as a person, because I think most of
Speaker 1: us have this experience and like don't grow up dedicated
Speaker 1: to conquering mortality, whereas kind of like, oh yeah, everything dies,
Speaker 1: all right, well, I better figure out something I'm going
Speaker 1: to do with my life, right yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: like gas station drugs. That was my That was my decision,
Speaker 1: which I think if Peter had gotten into that just
Speaker 1: by some of these trucker pills, Peter, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: they'll keep you, they'll keep you alive forever, as well
Speaker 1: as HGH will. So anyway, Peter has never made peace
Speaker 1: with death, or what he calls the ideology of the
Speaker 1: inevitability of the death of every individual. I also love
Speaker 1: that the ideal. It's not an ideology, man, it's just
Speaker 1: a fact. That's like, that's like seeing some people who
Speaker 1: are like staying back from a cliff's edge on a
Speaker 1: windy day and be like, oh, you've fallen for the
Speaker 1: ideology of dying in a fall.
Speaker 3: Come on the ideal, man, the inevitability of the death
Speaker 3: of every individual.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I've had conversations with anti seatbelt guys
Speaker 1: about like the ideology of safety of like a nanny
Speaker 1: state culture, and it's like, no, man, I just don't
Speaker 1: want to diet at car crash.
Speaker 2: This huge old libertarian right.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, as all hell. Well, you see nowadays, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you'd call it that, but he definitely
Speaker 1: comes out of libertarianism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so, and when I think of libertarians, I
Speaker 2: think of like people who never evolved past like second
Speaker 2: semester freshman dorm room, uh ideology, And that feels very
Speaker 2: much like the like the the the ideology of the
Speaker 2: inevitability of death feels very like third bong hit freshman
Speaker 2: year dorm room.
Speaker 1: Yeah, dude, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. You know
Speaker 1: what I will say for libertarians, I always have to
Speaker 1: give a little bit of pushback just because of where
Speaker 1: I come out there. You've got your two kinds, You've
Speaker 1: got your like dorm room. I'm gonna read fucking Murray
Speaker 1: Rothbard and basically become a fascist whenever anyone suggests I
Speaker 1: pay my fair share in taxes Libertarians, which Peter is no, no, no,
Speaker 1: My kind the kind that I respect are I'm not.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say I'm there now, but I have I
Speaker 1: do have a degree of respect and love for Like
Speaker 1: after the big hurricane in North Carolina, you had like
Speaker 1: several dozen guys who owned their own helicopters and often
Speaker 1: built their own helicopters, who like flew in just because
Speaker 1: they're like they're like helicopter libertarians. I like my helicopter
Speaker 1: libertarians where it's like I just don't trust the States,
Speaker 1: so I bought my own helicopter a disaster rescue. Those
Speaker 1: guys are fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, although are those the same guys that also
Speaker 2: were the militia that tried to interfere with.
Speaker 1: Those guys were in trucks. Those guys were in trucks.
Speaker 1: That might be yet another different kind of libertarian Helicopterah,
Speaker 1: we're very very pro helicopter libertarian in this ass. Those
Speaker 1: guys are fine. So yeah, that's a Peter's like kind
Speaker 1: of inciting incident.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If you're making the Peter Teal movie, you started with
Speaker 1: his dad explaining death to him while looking at this
Speaker 1: cowhide rug. Now, shortly after that conversation, his dad decides
Speaker 1: to move the family away from Cleveland, usually a good
Speaker 1: decision and live every engineer's dream, which is, of course
Speaker 1: helping South Africa build a uranium mind. You know what
Speaker 1: engineer doesn't want to live that? So the Teal family
Speaker 1: moves to South Africa kind of yeah, I mean they're
Speaker 1: technically in South Africa. Peter's parents send him to an expensive,
Speaker 1: whites only private school called Pridwin. According to the school's website,
Speaker 1: it was founded in nineteen twenty three as a non
Speaker 1: denominational school rooted in Christian ethics and values. Today, the
Speaker 1: Pridwood website prominently features numerous stock photos of non white kids.
Speaker 1: So it does seem like maybe things have been forced
Speaker 1: to move forward there. But when Peter went there, it
Speaker 1: would have taught racial separation as an obvious good and
Speaker 1: a necessity. Right this is we're talking South Africa in
Speaker 1: the seventies, right after Pridwen. Peter went to a German
Speaker 1: language public school. He was a good student. He always
Speaker 1: does well in school, but these are not happy years
Speaker 1: for him, at least his chafkin paints it quote. A
Speaker 1: picture from that era shows a sullen boy in shorts,
Speaker 1: knickers and a tie carrying an adult sized briefcase. A
Speaker 1: grade school classmate in Namibia, George erb recalled Teal as
Speaker 1: smart but withdrawt. He had that distinct, striking smart look
Speaker 1: about him, almost like he seemed bored. Rb said, we
Speaker 1: didn't really mingle a lot with Peter in school, though
Speaker 1: we always knew the miners' kids would not stay long
Speaker 1: in town. Now, as he noted here, I said that
Speaker 1: they moved to South Africa. They are, though actually not
Speaker 1: in what in South Africa. They were in Namibia, which
Speaker 1: a big chunk of Namibia is governed and run by
Speaker 1: South Africa. At this point, right at the time, a
Speaker 1: lot of what we call Namibia today was known to
Speaker 1: South Africans as South West Africa, and it was governed
Speaker 1: under a military occupation, as if it were essentially the
Speaker 1: little brother of the apartheid state. The whole reason that
Speaker 1: South Africa has a uranium mine comes down to environmental
Speaker 1: regulations in western nations. Around this period, some of the
Speaker 1: very earliest waves of uranium had been mined in places
Speaker 1: like the US and Australia. But pretty quickly, once it
Speaker 1: becomes clear that we're going to need a lot of uranium,
Speaker 1: it also becomes clear that like uranium mining is really
Speaker 1: bad for the environment, so we'd better do that a
Speaker 1: lot in Africa, right, like a big bit. Actually, King
Speaker 1: Leopold's old colony in the Cargo becomes a major source
Speaker 1: of uranium mining, and Namibia in this period becomes the
Speaker 1: fourth largest global producer of uranium. During the Cold War,
Speaker 1: when we are using up quite a lot of the stuff,
Speaker 1: so That's why South Africa is a big. Part of
Speaker 1: why South Africa is so hesitant to give up their
Speaker 1: occupation of Namibia is like, Namibia has a shitload of
Speaker 1: uranium and South Africa wants that for several reasons, none
Speaker 1: of them good. Now, the managing and engineering staff at
Speaker 1: the mine where Klaus worked was white. The workforce were
Speaker 1: largely migrants on one year contracts for white families. This
Speaker 1: was a good job. You had good access to medical care,
Speaker 1: you had nice houses. You're basically living in a company
Speaker 1: town that is built for the white employees of this mine.
Speaker 1: There's a country club there, there's quality schools. Things are
Speaker 1: a lot uglier for the contract workers who are being
Speaker 1: brought in to do a lot of the heavy lifting
Speaker 1: at the mine. Now, much of this ugliness came from
Speaker 1: the fact that South Africa was not allowed to be
Speaker 1: in Southwest Namibia. Right, They are not supposed to be
Speaker 1: occupying this chunk of Namibia. The UN had ordered them
Speaker 1: to leave in nineteen sixty six, but by the time
Speaker 1: the Teals moved into the country, South Africa had yet
Speaker 1: to move their troops out. This is like nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: to one or two, right, So they've overstayed their visa
Speaker 1: by quite a while. But you don't really need a
Speaker 1: visa if you have enough guns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this whole thing is fucking grim man. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: parteid uranium. Mind, just fucking grim.
Speaker 1: Peter's childhood is in an apartheid uranium mine.
Speaker 2: Like I thought Elon Musk had liken uh kind of
Speaker 2: like super villain origin story with the emerald mine. But
Speaker 2: the uranium not really trumps.
Speaker 1: Honestly, bro, I'll take an emerald mine over this any
Speaker 1: day in a fucking week. So in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: the ICC, the International Criminal Court, upheld that you in
Speaker 1: ruling and said again South Africa, you've got to leave Namibia.
Speaker 1: This is not your country. What are you doing there,
Speaker 1: to which South Africa says, we are getting a lot
Speaker 1: of uranium and we're not going to leave. This leads
Speaker 1: to sanctions against the sale of minerals from mine and
Speaker 1: occupied Namibia, sanctions that are ignored by much of the West.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to just quote read about that via
Speaker 1: a quote I found on the website Mining Sea. The
Speaker 1: decree warned that anyone found extracting and selling minerals from
Speaker 1: Namibia would be held liable beneficiaries to Namibia's minerals, including
Speaker 1: Britain and the United States, except Sweden did not honor
Speaker 1: the decree when uranium production from Rossing would satisfy Britain's
Speaker 1: ten percent demand. So because uranium was so needed for
Speaker 1: this build up, basically a lot of the West was like, no, fuck,
Speaker 1: what the UN says, We're going to keep paying South
Speaker 1: Africa for their uranium because we really need it right
Speaker 1: tale as old as time now. The company that ran
Speaker 1: the mine where Klaus worked as a contractor was called
Speaker 1: Rio Tinto, and they had You're not going to be
Speaker 1: surprised to hear that this illegal uranium mine company has
Speaker 1: an evil history, but they have like a comically evil history.
Speaker 2: I feel like I've heard a name before.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh yeah. So in the late nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Rio Tino had called on Francisco Franco to use his
Speaker 1: soldiers to crush left wing miners protesting against bad working
Speaker 1: conditions in Spain. The head of the company at the
Speaker 1: time Sir auckland Getty's, which is such an evil mine
Speaker 1: owner's name, What an amazing evil Sir auckland Getty's. Jesus
Speaker 1: Getty's brag that quote miners found guilty of trouble making
Speaker 1: our quote martialed and shot big fan of Franco the
Speaker 1: leaders of Rio Tento. As another interesting side note, Noah,
Speaker 1: Rio Tinto was also a major source of raw materials
Speaker 1: for the Nazi rearmament campaign. These are the guys that
Speaker 1: build the Wehrmacht back up into fighting shape. Thank God.
Speaker 1: You know where would we be without Rio Tinto.
Speaker 2: God?
Speaker 1: Yes, Now, by the early seventies there were no more
Speaker 1: Nazis to arms, so Rio said about finding their next
Speaker 1: best equivalent, which is of course s apartheid South Africa.
Speaker 1: Right now, since they're running an illegal uranium mine and
Speaker 1: occupied Namibia, they're like, why not go full fascist? And
Speaker 1: they decide to operate their facilities in Namibia like a
Speaker 1: concentration camp. And I'm going to quote from an article
Speaker 1: by the London Mining Network. Here, black workers constructing the
Speaker 1: Rossing uranium mine lived in appalling conditions in temporary camps,
Speaker 1: which researchers found akin to slavery. By akin to slavery,
Speaker 1: it means that actually leaving work for any meaning, but
Speaker 1: being for any reason, but being dismissed by your manager
Speaker 1: was a crime, workers who misplaced or forgot their ID
Speaker 1: badge could be jailed. Now, the fact that someone might
Speaker 1: get hired to consult at such a mind doesn't imply
Speaker 1: that they were involved with setting up or executing any
Speaker 1: of these policies, but it does suggest that one was
Speaker 1: broadly fine with them. As Max Chafkin writes, a contract
Speaker 1: laborer on the Construs Auction project, the project Klaus's company
Speaker 1: was helping to oversee, who said workers had not been
Speaker 1: told they were building a uranium mine and were thus
Speaker 1: unaware of the risks of radiation. The only clue had
Speaker 1: been that white employees would hand out wages from behind glass,
Speaker 1: seemingly trying to avoid contamination themselves. The report mentioned workers
Speaker 1: dying like flies in nineteen seventy six while the mine
Speaker 1: was under construction.
Speaker 2: So this is so bad.
Speaker 1: This is pretty evil.
Speaker 2: To illegal apartheid uranium mining concentration camp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's Peter's dad's job and some of his
Speaker 1: earliest memories as a kid.
Speaker 2: And he's disturbed by like Bessie the coin.
Speaker 1: What, Peter, If you want to end death, the first
Speaker 1: step might be ending illegal uranium mines. If you just
Speaker 1: care about death as a concept.
Speaker 2: I cannot believe how cartoonish is.
Speaker 1: It's so funny. It's like the funniest bad story he
Speaker 1: could have just being the guy he is coming from.
Speaker 1: This is a background like a lot of these guys,
Speaker 1: like Elon Musk, there's this period of time in musks
Speaker 1: backstories like, oh, well, he is this kid who's moved
Speaker 1: around about. His family sucks, his dad's this abusive monster.
Speaker 1: He's bullied as a kid. It's a really sad like
Speaker 1: I can see how he you know, there's a I
Speaker 1: can see how a couple of different kinds of kid
Speaker 1: could have come out of this, some of them who
Speaker 1: would have been a lot better than Musk was right,
Speaker 1: Maybe he wasn't always destined to be the kind of
Speaker 1: guy he is. With Teal, you're like, oh, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: this is this childhood. Was Taylor made to produce Peter Teal?
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: You know what else was Taylor made to produce Peter
Speaker 1: Tel Noah, Yeah. The sponsors of our show are attempting
Speaker 1: to breed clones of Peter Teel in a tank. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like that the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection,
Speaker 1: down to the fact that they are mixing Peter Teal's
Speaker 1: jeans with Sigourney we So let's see what happens everybody,
Speaker 1: you know, We'll see what happens. We're back and in
Speaker 1: the time that we were off air, the Peter Teel
Speaker 1: Sigourney Weaver clones escaped containment in our in our our
Speaker 1: our sponsors orbital base. Things do not seem to be
Speaker 1: going well. Sorry, air, that was probably predictable. Anyway, We'll
Speaker 1: keep you updated on the situation. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: uranium mining in South Africa, which is getting South Africa
Speaker 1: in trouble. And it's one of those things where if
Speaker 1: it was if it had just been about the money
Speaker 1: South Africa could make exporting uranium, it probably wouldn't have
Speaker 1: been worthwhile to piss off the whole international community to
Speaker 1: keep this mine open. But that's not the only reason
Speaker 1: why South Africa wants the uranium mine. A big part
Speaker 1: of why they insisted on keeping this thing operational was
Speaker 1: that they are an unpopular apartheid government that is in
Speaker 1: the process of becoming a global pariah. They are dealing
Speaker 1: with something of an extential of an existential pr crisis
Speaker 1: because of all of like the racism and violence that
Speaker 1: the world is watching them do, and the white rulers
Speaker 1: of the country decided the best way for them to
Speaker 1: gain long term security for the regime was to get
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, even if they had to break international law
Speaker 1: to do so. Right, And South Africa does eventually construct
Speaker 1: a handful of very illegal nukes, right. They are not
Speaker 1: supposed to have these internationally, No one's supposed to be
Speaker 1: allowed to be arming themselves with new nukes. South Africa
Speaker 1: makes their nukes and it does not, as you may
Speaker 1: be aware, keep the apartheid regime in power. You know,
Speaker 1: the government does in fact fall and in a kind
Speaker 1: of unique historical case, before the government hands over power
Speaker 1: to the ANC which is, you know, the party that
Speaker 1: over as apartheid goes out, they disassemble all of their
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons. To this day, this makes South Africa the
Speaker 1: only nation to have ever made nuclear weapons and given
Speaker 1: them up voluntarily. Obviously Ukraine receive had nuclear weapons when
Speaker 1: the USSR crumbled and gave those up. But South Africa
Speaker 1: actually like makes their own nuclear weapons independently and then
Speaker 1: disassembles them and stops being a nuclear power. And that's
Speaker 1: a unique thing in history. Although they do it, I
Speaker 1: think mainly for reasons of racism.
Speaker 2: It's still pretty wild. I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting story. So while Peter's dad
Speaker 1: was I don't know how you again, how you want
Speaker 1: to parse out his complicity here, but he is adjacent
Speaker 1: to some very bad things.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: While his dad's doing this, Peter himself gets very little
Speaker 1: that seems to be good from his two and a
Speaker 1: half three years in Africa. He mostly claims to have
Speaker 1: played alone a lot near the family house. He started
Speaker 1: to develop a habit for comp heative chess, and he
Speaker 1: became a voracious leader less than three years. After less
Speaker 1: than three years away, the family decides they just haven't
Speaker 1: had enough Cleveland and they move back. Yeah. Then as
Speaker 1: soon as they're back in Cleveland, they're like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: Cleveland is still not a great place to live. The
Speaker 1: Rivers have not stopped being on fire. So they move
Speaker 1: one last time to the Bay Area. Their specific final
Speaker 1: residence is Foster City, which is just northwest of San
Speaker 1: Jose and south of San Francisco. Proper, it's a fairly
Speaker 1: affluent town and in the late nineteen seventies, Teals family
Speaker 1: seems like they probably would have qualified as upper middle class, right,
Speaker 1: and this is what you tend to see with the
Speaker 1: first and second generation of tech industry giants. Guys like
Speaker 1: Gates and Jobs all come from or move to similar
Speaker 1: parts of California, and they're all kind of at a
Speaker 1: similar level of family affluence.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Their parents are not like rich, they're not going to
Speaker 1: inherit generational wealth, but their parents have enough money to
Speaker 1: shower their kids with attention and educational opportunities that really
Speaker 1: weren't available before. And in part because of some of
Speaker 1: the decisions guys like this make aren't going to be
Speaker 1: available after, you know, lease not do as many kids now.
Speaker 1: In terms of the parenting situation, because Gates Bill Gates's
Speaker 1: parents doting absolutely like obsessed with his development and health.
Speaker 1: Steve's parents again doting like really really like caring parents
Speaker 1: who were very much focused on their child doing well.
Speaker 1: It is unclear to me how much attention Peter gets.
Speaker 1: This is kind of an open questions. It's left as
Speaker 1: an open question. In Chafkin's book, Peter does not seem
Speaker 1: to embrace like the claims that his parents were very
Speaker 1: strict or you know, fanatical conservatives, but we also get
Speaker 1: very little of them in his stories, right, which is
Speaker 1: very different from like, Steve Jobs told a lot of
Speaker 1: stories about his parents, right, and so did Gates. So
Speaker 1: I don't really know if this is a case of,
Speaker 1: you know, he didn't want to say much about his parents,
Speaker 1: that this is an area of insecurity form, or if
Speaker 1: it's just he's not a guy who's super talkative about
Speaker 1: his background, which he definitely isn't you know. That may
Speaker 1: just explain it, But it does seem that his parents
Speaker 1: are not kind of central to his feelings or ambitions
Speaker 1: in the same way that they really seem to have
Speaker 1: been for a lot of other like tech industry icons
Speaker 1: that came up in a similar place in period. We
Speaker 1: do know as a child, Peter Teel is a massive nerd.
Speaker 1: He is one of the first wave of like really
Speaker 1: big nerds, and he's particularly a fantasy nerd for his
Speaker 1: kind of fantasy and sci fi. He reads The Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings as a little kid, he falls in
Speaker 1: love with Tolkien. He would later claim that he memorized
Speaker 1: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I suspect is
Speaker 1: probably overstating things. That's a lot to memorize, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: three thousand pages. Yeah, that's that might be a little much.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much I believe that, but I just.
Speaker 2: Remember the English or the Yet.
Speaker 1: Did he have the Elvish down? Does he know the
Speaker 1: Black speech by heart?
Speaker 2: Speaks at all? Maybe folks so much? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the very few journalists know the Black speech. As
Speaker 1: you might imagine from a kid who at least probably
Speaker 1: meant memorized passages from the Lord of the Rings, Peter
Speaker 1: gets bullied a lot, right, not super surprising from this kid.
Speaker 1: He's also very small and skinny, and according to one peer,
Speaker 1: he gets pushed around a lot as a little kid.
Speaker 1: This may have had something to do with what seems
Speaker 1: to have been a flair for escapism. In addition to
Speaker 1: loving Tolkien, Peter is one of the very first Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons players, right, He and his because D and
Speaker 1: D has just come out while he is a kid,
Speaker 1: and he is he and his friends are playing it
Speaker 1: while it is very new. They they played every single weekend,
Speaker 1: and this is This may have caused a degree of
Speaker 1: life a conflict with his parents, because there are at
Speaker 1: least some stories that his parents they couldn't play, He
Speaker 1: couldn't play at his house because his parents, being very
Speaker 1: strict Christians, thought that D and D was evil. Again,
Speaker 1: this is one of those things. Is that totally accurate?
Speaker 1: I don't know. He definitely played a lot of D
Speaker 1: and D. It may have been a kind of thing
Speaker 1: that he had to skirt around his family because it is.
Speaker 1: And there's this thing that you get from Peter that
Speaker 1: everyone will say about him, which is that like he's
Speaker 1: a habitual contrarian. Whatever people are doing, he has to
Speaker 1: be doing the opposite. There's this big moral panic against
Speaker 1: dungeons and dragons at the time. It very much fits
Speaker 1: in with that that he would want to be playing
Speaker 1: this game that a lot of people in his life
Speaker 1: and like maybe even his parents consider to be evil.
Speaker 1: That is very like fitting with the guy Peter Teel
Speaker 1: is like whatever the people around him are saying is bad,
Speaker 1: That's what Peter's going to want to do, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Outside of that, his main hobby seems to have been
Speaker 1: Chess's extremely good at this. He was generally ranked number
Speaker 1: one by his school chess club. He plays a lot
Speaker 1: of speed chess. He probably could have been a professional
Speaker 1: chess guy, but he has some There's some quotes he
Speaker 1: makes later where he's like, I had to choose between
Speaker 1: chess and everything else in life, Right, I just get
Speaker 1: too obsessed with it. George Packer, writing for The New Yorker,
Speaker 1: summarizes his chest kit was decorated with a sticker carrying
Speaker 1: the motto born to Win. On the rare occasions when
Speaker 1: he lost in college, he swept the pieces off the board.
Speaker 1: He would say, show me a good loser, and I'll
Speaker 1: show you a loser. So maybe not I guy you
Speaker 1: want to play with, right, Jesus Christ. Yeah, A little
Speaker 1: bit of a dick. This is the kind of guy
Speaker 1: who I don't know. Again, I'm a big believer in
Speaker 1: the fact that everyone who's proud of their chess performance
Speaker 1: should get into the real game of skill. Warhammer forty
Speaker 1: thousand fish shows your real skill, Peter paint some fucking orcs?
Speaker 2: Do you have? Born to Win?
Speaker 1: I haven't actually tattooed. You can't see it. The camera
Speaker 1: blots out my tattoos. But I've got like one of
Speaker 1: those throat tattoos. I got a sticking poke when I
Speaker 1: was in prison that just says born to Win. And
Speaker 1: it's got a picture of an orc on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: h correct, Yeah, yeah, it's good. It really makes me
Speaker 1: popular at the gaming store with the fourteen year olds.
Speaker 1: So Chaefkin has my favorite story of Peter and his
Speaker 1: chess phase because it is the one that makes me
Speaker 1: actually kind of hopeful that we can beat this guy eventually. Quote.
Speaker 1: Once at a tournament, he was playing a scrimmage match
Speaker 1: for fun in between games and seemed to be only
Speaker 1: half paying attention. His opponent was inexperienced and not aware
Speaker 1: of what was happening, put Peter in check. Then he realized,
Speaker 1: to both of their surprise that it was checkmate. Peter
Speaker 1: became visibly distraught and was unable to regain his composure
Speaker 1: for the rest of the tournament and lost the rest
Speaker 1: of the matches he played. A defeat, even a meaningless
Speaker 1: one was too much to handle. Yeah, okay, that's been
Speaker 1: a little hopeful. There a little bit of motivation for
Speaker 1: you kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, maybe wasn't so born to win.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So among the nerds, Peter was king. He was
Speaker 1: the most academically gifted of his friends, and I suspect
Speaker 1: was the best at doing things like cooking up overpowered
Speaker 1: characters in Dungeons and Dragons. He had a fantastic memory,
Speaker 1: and he expounded upon different short stories and novels by
Speaker 1: guys like Asimov and Clark with a faculty that would
Speaker 1: have embarrassed most adults. He's the kind of guy who
Speaker 1: can like quote passages of stories he likes from memory.
Speaker 1: One of Peter's nerdy peers said that he and others
Speaker 1: were quote in awe of Teal, but added, I don't
Speaker 1: know that he had any close friends. So he's got
Speaker 1: like some peers, but maybe not a lot of people
Speaker 1: that he like actually entrusts any pieces of himself too
Speaker 1: in any meaningful way. Right, Again, a lonely person in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. Peter is genuinely described by the
Speaker 1: kids he spent time around the way wizards were in
Speaker 1: Peter's favorite fantasy novels as this like mysterious figure. He
Speaker 1: can do great and terrifying things, but who's also fundamentally
Speaker 1: separate from all of the people around him.
Speaker 2: Right, that's your characterization. You're calling him a wizard, or
Speaker 2: he called himself a wizard.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that's just kind of my description based on
Speaker 1: what other kids said about Peter, right that he's like,
Speaker 1: we're in awe of him. He could do all these
Speaker 1: amazing things, but we didn't really understand him. He seemed
Speaker 1: to be like someone who was fundamentally separate. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like the way Gandolf is written in The Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings, Right, Wizards are these like mysterious and
Speaker 1: kind of frightening figures that you can't ever really get that,
Speaker 1: Like they're kind of a knowable in certain senses. Right,
Speaker 1: That's just kind of the way other kids talked about.
Speaker 2: Peter seems more Seramone than Gandolph.
Speaker 1: He's definitely I mean, he's going to build a company
Speaker 1: named Palette here, so yeah, that's probably a fair fair note.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: As he became a teenager, the bullying changed from physical
Speaker 1: violence to sillier shit that was also calculated to make
Speaker 1: him feel unwelcome and othered. One example would be that
Speaker 1: a group of kids frequently stole for sale signs from
Speaker 1: around the neighborhood and set them up on Peter's lawn,
Speaker 1: and then they would harass them about it the next
Speaker 1: day school, being like, hey, when are you moving right,
Speaker 1: and like that actually legitimately does suck, Peter, if you're listening,
Speaker 1: that's like a really shitty thing this kids did to you.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's a bummer, you know, you can like
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of like probably more devastating than the
Speaker 1: physical violence like people stealing lawn signs to like make
Speaker 1: it clear we want you and your family to leave. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see, I can see how that feeds into
Speaker 1: a guy becoming like Peter is. By the time the
Speaker 1: high school years come around, You've got this kind of
Speaker 1: misanthropic genius who spends his free time escaping reality and competing,
Speaker 1: you know, in order to show everyone how smart he is,
Speaker 1: right when he's The only times he wants to engage
Speaker 1: with a people is when he can beat them in
Speaker 1: a contest of wits. Otherwise he likes to kind of
Speaker 1: focus on his fantasy worlds. One friend described his general
Speaker 1: attitude as fuck you world. Now. I think we all
Speaker 1: knew or were to some degree, kids like that. Right,
Speaker 1: this is going to sound very familiar, like as a
Speaker 1: kid who grew up like bullied and nerdy. Aspects of
Speaker 1: this are familiar to me.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: Peter also, it's interesting maintains this attitude while managing to
Speaker 1: be the best student in his school. Right, he is
Speaker 1: going to be the valedictorian. He's an exceptional student academically,
Speaker 1: so he has both this kind of anger at normal
Speaker 1: kids and the world around him, and also this attitude
Speaker 1: that's reinforced by the social structures of his world, that
Speaker 1: like he's better than everyone else in an important way. Now,
Speaker 1: his classmates, interviewed by Chaefgins, seem to suggest that Peter
Speaker 1: and kind of everyone at their school are obsessed with
Speaker 1: getting like this. This is a school where the kids,
Speaker 1: you know, their parents are high achievers. Everyone is obsessed
Speaker 1: with getting into good colleges. This was seen as the
Speaker 1: past of success at the time, and Peter's parents, if
Speaker 1: they were strict, were probably pushing him hard to get
Speaker 1: the best grades possible so that he could get into
Speaker 1: the best school. Right. This is and this is going
Speaker 1: to be important later he grows up being told by
Speaker 1: all the authority figures in his life what matters most
Speaker 1: is getting into a good college. Right That is like
Speaker 1: the number one priority you have to have as a kid.
Speaker 1: I don't know when I went to school that was
Speaker 1: the priority that was really rammed home to me by
Speaker 1: my parents. So I don't have trouble believing that this
Speaker 1: is the case for Peter, and it's He's going to
Speaker 1: get very angry at this later in his life. This
Speaker 1: is going to be a major motivating factor in his
Speaker 1: life the idea that like he was forced to value
Speaker 1: higher education, which he fundamentally thinks is not a valuable
Speaker 1: thing in the same way that his parents did, and
Speaker 1: he's really angry about it. He's kind of never forgiven
Speaker 1: the concept of academia for this. He graduates in eighty
Speaker 1: five as the valedictorian of San Mateo High. During the
Speaker 1: later years in public school, he had moved on from
Speaker 1: Tolkien and Asimov to Einrand, And you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of helps nurse the strain of vigorous anti communist sentiment
Speaker 1: that would have you know, this would have been a
Speaker 1: part of his upbringing. Anyway, We're talking like Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: in the seventies. You know, it's a lot of defense
Speaker 1: industry stuff is out there. It is not a radical
Speaker 1: left hotbed. So he probably didn't need the Iron Rand
Speaker 1: to make him into an anti communist, but this definitely
Speaker 1: makes him into like a libertarian anti communist. During one
Speaker 1: article in twenty eleven, he described his ideology as so
Speaker 1: strictly libertarian that for a time he was against all
Speaker 1: government spending, which he's not now he's very supportive of
Speaker 1: like the government spending money to research how rich people
Speaker 1: can live longer. So that's that's good. It's nice to
Speaker 1: see that people can grow.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know who else has evolved since since the
Speaker 1: last time we talked about them is the sponsors of
Speaker 1: this podcast. You know, they're moving past their their their
Speaker 1: mistakes of like twenty minutes or so ago, losing control
Speaker 1: of that orbital habitat to the Peter Teal clones, and
Speaker 1: they're moving on, you know, to to greater pastures, blowing
Speaker 1: up that orbital habitat primarily. So we'll check back in
Speaker 1: with them later and we're back. Noah, have you seen
Speaker 1: Alien Resurrection? To these alien resurrection jokes? Hitting I don't
Speaker 1: know if anyone seen that.
Speaker 2: Remember, I'd like, I cannot recall this alien movie, and
Speaker 2: I thought, like, I feel like I saw some spin
Speaker 2: off with like a Roman name, like, oh God, Prometheus.
Speaker 1: Is that Prometheus? Yes? No, that's that's one of the
Speaker 1: ones that was made by Ridley Scott. Again though, see
Speaker 1: this was the the fourth Alien was the alien movie
Speaker 1: that was written by Joss Whedon as kind of a
Speaker 1: backdoor pilot for Firefly. It's a very strange movie, but
Speaker 1: it's got Ron Pearlman in it.
Speaker 2: I don't know what to say in response to any
Speaker 2: of these words.
Speaker 1: No one knows what to say in response to Alien Resurrection,
Speaker 1: other than it's the fourth movie in the Alien series, so.
Speaker 2: What will take You?
Speaker 1: Probably shouldn't have hung so many jokes on the fourth
Speaker 1: Alien movie you watching.
Speaker 2: I feel like if you're hanging Alien jokes, it's going
Speaker 2: to end with, you know, game over man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that I am the Hudson in this series.
Speaker 1: Like I'm realizing that I've led us, I've gotten us
Speaker 1: into a or we're in this horrible disaster that I'm
Speaker 1: not going to get out of, and now I'm just
Speaker 1: firing my gun blindly at the ceiling, trying to escape.
Speaker 3: No, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: But someone in this he just brought up Hudson. Someone
Speaker 1: in the.
Speaker 3: Subred it will be really excited that you're just keeping
Speaker 3: going on this. Oh my god, someone.
Speaker 1: It really is game over man, Game over, game over unbelievable.
Speaker 1: So one particularly baffling segment from the Chafkin book involves
Speaker 1: Peter's senior yearbook quote, which he credited to the hobbit,
Speaker 1: the greatest adventure is what lies ahead today and tomorrow
Speaker 1: are yet to be said. Now, you know, that seems
Speaker 1: like something a nerdy kid would do, And that's a
Speaker 1: perfectly fined yearbook quote. I would go so far as
Speaker 1: to say maybe even a little like stereotypical. But when
Speaker 1: it comes up in Chafkin's book, chaef gin Actually, this
Speaker 1: is one of the areas where I think his analysis
Speaker 1: of Peter is a little unfair. Here's what Chafkin writes
Speaker 1: about Peter putting that quote in his yearbook. Years later,
Speaker 1: he'd say that he memorized the entire passage, which continues
Speaker 1: the chances, the changes are all yours to make. The
Speaker 1: mold of your life is in your hands to break.
Speaker 1: It would become, in a way, the motto of his life,
Speaker 1: though it was still at this point a confused life.
Speaker 1: The passage is not in fact from Tolkien, who wrote
Speaker 1: The Hobbit as well as the load of the Rings
Speaker 1: trilogy books Teal obsessed over. It's from a theme song
Speaker 1: written by Jules Bass, creative genius behind the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: cartoon ThunderCats for the animated version of The Hobbit, which
Speaker 1: came out in nineteen seventy seven. Now, I think maybe
Speaker 1: because it's not clear to me that Peter was being
Speaker 1: dishonest or making a mistake, Like if he quote, if
Speaker 1: he attributed that quote to the Hobbit, that quote is
Speaker 1: from the Hobbit. It's from the Hobbit movie. But like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'd necessarily care to be that
Speaker 1: specific about this in like your fucking yearbook. Right, this
Speaker 1: isn't an essay you're writing. I think like Chafkin kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to point this out as maybe like Teal
Speaker 1: not really being a token fan or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's kind of unclear to me. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: particularly weird that like an eighteen year old kid would
Speaker 1: credit the Hobbit animated movie for a quote as the
Speaker 1: Hobbit instead of like specifying that like it was it was,
Speaker 1: you know, not the book. I think that that may
Speaker 1: be a little bit like reaching. But anyway, I guess
Speaker 1: you could see this as evidence that Peter wasn't a
Speaker 1: big Tolkien fan and just like the animated movies. But
Speaker 1: to be honest, if you are quoting from the fucking
Speaker 1: Hobbit animated movie of nineteen seventy seven, you're a pretty
Speaker 1: big Tolkien nerd.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It was not a wildly popular movie, although better than
Speaker 1: the Hobbit movies we would later get arguably.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, this whole thing seems like nerd like I
Speaker 2: think it's a little bit of a little bit of
Speaker 2: nerd fighting. Yeah, you're not actually memorizing the.
Speaker 1: Book that was from animated movie.
Speaker 2: How dare you? It's not even can And.
Speaker 1: He brings up that the song was written by the
Speaker 1: ThunderCats guy to kind of like make it more gents, like, man,
Speaker 1: the ThunderCats was fine, Like, we don't need to be
Speaker 1: shipping on the ThunderCats here because of what Peter Thial
Speaker 1: does in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 1: Come on, man, come on, Chafkin. Look I like Chafkin.
Speaker 1: I just disagree with him.
Speaker 2: Here there's a Hobbit movie. I thought there was only
Speaker 2: a Lord of the Rings movie.
Speaker 1: No, there's definitely a Hobbit movie. We are we are
Speaker 1: not talking about the Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, Sophie. We're
Speaker 1: talking about the animated Hobbit movie, which is wonderful.
Speaker 3: No, I did watch that one. I did watch that one.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend like
Speaker 1: half a hit acid and just sink down into your
Speaker 1: couch and let it happen to you.
Speaker 2: What I know of you, you would recommend a half
Speaker 2: a hit acid literally anything, you know.
Speaker 1: It keeps my hand steady when I'm driving, especially if
Speaker 1: I've got a trailer. You know, I don't trust anyone
Speaker 1: who tows on less than half a hit acid. That's
Speaker 1: my advice. Kids out there, Yeah, going shooting? Oh man,
Speaker 1: you don't even need tracers. So anyway, whatever I don't need,
Speaker 1: we don't need to continue down this. Peter teal.
Speaker 2: Like reading into somebody's your book quote, yeah, is like
Speaker 2: a little much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe Peter didn't, specially by the animated version. And
Speaker 1: then a yearbook editor was like, now like, we'll just
Speaker 1: say the hobbit. It's fine.
Speaker 2: But anyway, so that much thought into your yearbook quote,
Speaker 2: come on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a yearbook, come on. So A much better
Speaker 1: story of Peter actually being a weirdo, which Chaefkin does
Speaker 1: also share, comes from one of his few female friends,
Speaker 1: who apparently shared with Peter at some point that she'd
Speaker 1: been the result of an unplanned pregnancy, right that her
Speaker 1: parents had had her without meaning to. Peter wrote in
Speaker 1: her yearbook quote, I could never even hypothetically have aborted
Speaker 1: you love Peter Teal. That is an odd thing to
Speaker 1: write about your friend based on them sharing this with you.
Speaker 1: That is that is an odd line. Now, I will say,
Speaker 1: that's not a cold statement. It's just weird, right, Like
Speaker 1: that is in a way kind of a warm statement. Right.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, it doesn't it doesn't entirely comport with,
Speaker 1: like Peter can't connect with people, but it definitely comports
Speaker 1: with like nobody Peter doesn't quite talk like anyone else, right,
Speaker 1: Like nobody else would say this just to a friend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, unless he wrote in everybody else's your book like.
Speaker 1: That, I would have aborted you. That's everyone else's Peter
Speaker 1: deeeal signatures. Yeah. Now, Peter was accepted by Stanford and
Speaker 1: started his freshman year at this at the beginning of
Speaker 1: Reagan's second term. Now, Stanford at this period was a
Speaker 1: major source of thinkers and doers among the conservative movement.
Speaker 1: The Hoover Institution, which is a right wing think tank
Speaker 1: on campus, gave the world Martin Anderson, who start who
Speaker 1: helped create Reaganomics. Right, he's like the author of Reaganomics
Speaker 1: as a concept. Many Institute fellows were members of the
Speaker 1: Reagan administration. Peter definitely seems to have like seen this
Speaker 1: as kind of maybe the path he wanted for himself.
Speaker 1: And even though what's interesting to me is he, because
Speaker 1: he has this sort of emotional need to be seen
Speaker 1: as a contrarian, is the guy going against the grain,
Speaker 1: he will always frame higher education as time as Stanford
Speaker 1: is like this din of liberals and like leftist rivolity,
Speaker 1: right where it's like, this is the school that gave
Speaker 1: us the Reagan administration. Right, Like fucking Stanford is not
Speaker 1: a hotbed of leftists. You know, there's like liberals and
Speaker 1: leftists on campus and leftist clubs, but like one of
Speaker 1: the most influential conservative think tanks in the countries is
Speaker 1: based out of Stanford. Right. I think the main reason
Speaker 1: why Peter has to kind of characterize college this way
Speaker 1: is that he just doesn't like college, right, He doesn't
Speaker 1: like Stanford, and he primarily seems to dislike Stanford not
Speaker 1: because of a political thing, but because all of the
Speaker 1: kids there acted like kids. Right. They're all teenagers, They're
Speaker 1: not quite grown up, which is what college students are,
Speaker 1: and this is annoying to Peter. One of his chief
Speaker 1: bugbears was that there was a campus heide and seek game,
Speaker 1: which made him very angry, right, the fact that other
Speaker 1: people are like, well, he's trying to learn playing hide
Speaker 1: and seek. Peter isn't like this. He avoids most parties.
Speaker 1: He does not date. Now. He's gay, right, and that's
Speaker 1: certainly not nearly as acceptable a thing, even in a
Speaker 1: place like Stanford in this period of time. So it's
Speaker 1: not exactly weird, and that may play into kind of
Speaker 1: part of why he's so frustrated seeing all of his
Speaker 1: peers kind of date and socialize when that is not
Speaker 1: a thing that's safe for him. I think maybe that
Speaker 1: does play into it to some degree. Whenever he could,
Speaker 1: rather than hang out with anyone he met on campus,
Speaker 1: he would go back home to hang out with his
Speaker 1: old friends from high school. Right now, one of his
Speaker 1: Stanford peers suggests that he viewed other kids at the
Speaker 1: school as deeply unserious. I think there's also an element
Speaker 1: of discomfort insecurity and meeting and trying to connect with
Speaker 1: new people. Whatever the case, Peter is the weird kid
Speaker 1: on campus. Every morning he would leave his dorm room
Speaker 1: and walk to the water fountain to take a huge
Speaker 1: number of vitamins. One at a time. He seems to
Speaker 1: do this in a way that's like deliberately exhibitionist. Classmate
Speaker 1: Megan Maxwell alleges base that he kind of does this
Speaker 1: to confront other kids, right to set himself apart. Everyone
Speaker 1: else is partying and drinking and doing drugs, and every
Speaker 1: morning Peter gets out there and slowly takes all of
Speaker 1: his supplements so everyone can see him right. Quote, it
Speaker 1: was like a ritual. She told Chafkin he was a strange,
Speaker 1: strange boy. I don't think she's lying there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He studied philosophy at Stanford and This as an undergrad
Speaker 1: and was particularly drawn to the work of Renee Girard,
Speaker 1: a professor and theorist of social sciences. Girard was particularly
Speaker 1: focused on the psychology of desire, or why people want
Speaker 1: things and how they decide they want things. From a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one article in The New Yorker by Anna Weener,
Speaker 1: Teel was particularly taken with Gerard's concept of mimetic desire.
Speaker 1: Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,
Speaker 1: and he turns to others in order to make up
Speaker 1: his mind. Durro wrote, we desire what others desire because
Speaker 1: we imitate their desires. Memetic desire involves a surrender of agency.
Speaker 1: It means allowing others to dictate ones once, and the
Speaker 1: theory goes can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment. It also,
Speaker 1: Duri wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve
Speaker 1: to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a
Speaker 1: group or individual. He thinks this is how people work, right, that, Like,
Speaker 1: people's desires are largely based on this kind of like
Speaker 1: herd mentality. Right, we're imitating other people's desires that we see,
Speaker 1: We like surrender our agency to like let other people
Speaker 1: dictate once for us. And this is kind of why
Speaker 1: scapegoating is natural and actually is kind of a necessary
Speaker 1: thing in order to avoid further mass violence. Right, If
Speaker 1: you can scapegoat individuals for problems, you can avoid more
Speaker 1: widespread violence. I think one could kind of extrapolate this
Speaker 1: into Peter as a member of like the wealthy ruling class,
Speaker 1: seeing the scapegoating that conservatives do with migrants or trans
Speaker 1: people as a way to like avoid potential you know,
Speaker 1: mass violence against his class, right, like the wealthy. But
Speaker 1: maybe I'm reading a little bit too much into it there.
Speaker 3: This is he's the he's the scapegoat author guy. You
Speaker 3: see also the violence and the sacred guy Gerard. That's
Speaker 3: that that that actually makes so much sense.
Speaker 1: It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the fact that
Speaker 1: this gets brought I mean, Teal brings up Gerard a lot.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of writing Teal has done where he
Speaker 1: quotes Gerard talking about memetic desire. So it is not
Speaker 1: Chaefgen and others, you know, because I'm quoting directly from
Speaker 1: Anna's article here, like they're not going on on a
Speaker 1: limb connecting a lot of what he does to Chafgin,
Speaker 1: this is like a foundational part of his thinking.
Speaker 3: He's the guy who who wrote a book about like
Speaker 3: like sacrifice rituals and he's yeah, he's this makes sense.
Speaker 1: I'm on board with that. I think we should do
Speaker 1: more human sacrifice, and I think we should. We need
Speaker 1: to be building more pyramids. We don't build enough. We
Speaker 1: built that one in a where is it Nashville? Right?
Speaker 1: We did have a pyramid in every city, and we
Speaker 1: should sacrifice people on them. That's all I'm saying. Noziggarot
Speaker 1: guy even gotten by big ziggurat. The brickmakers, have you
Speaker 1: in their thrall. There's more material in a zigguratte that's all.
Speaker 1: That's why they want it there to walk up to
Speaker 1: the walk up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you can throw your human sacrifice off
Speaker 2: the top, Yeah don't you. Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I do like a ziggarot, a solid
Speaker 1: ziggarat a good old fashioned step pyramid. Hell yeah.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The concept of mimetic desire and the potential use of
Speaker 1: violent scapegoating would remain focuses of Peter's thinking on human nature, business,
Speaker 1: and politics up to the present day. Two years into
Speaker 1: his time on campus, he started a monthly magazine, The
Speaker 1: Stanford Review, with one of his high school friends who
Speaker 1: went to college with him. The Stanford Review was a
Speaker 1: right wing rag. It featured articles accusing professors of being
Speaker 1: closet Marxists, columns complaining about non white authors and a
Speaker 1: Western culture class, and some very weird takes on the
Speaker 1: AIDS epidemic. Here's an excerpt from a column in New
Speaker 1: York Magazine by Chafkin. The first issue featured a satirical column,
Speaker 1: Confessions of a Sexual Deviant, about a young straight man
Speaker 1: who'd chosen to be celibate. According to the Review, it
Speaker 1: was almost impossible to visit a men's restroom without witnessing
Speaker 1: a gay sex act, or to cross the quad without
Speaker 1: having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, presenting homosexuality as an addiction, a columnist
Speaker 1: wrote that unnatural gay men had yielded to temptations so
Speaker 1: many times that the fires of lust burn within them,
Speaker 1: making it indeed difficult for them to control themselves. During
Speaker 1: Teale's last year on campus, his close friend and Review
Speaker 1: collaborator Keith Raboy stood outside the home of a Stanford
Speaker 1: residential fellow and shouted at the top of his lungs,
Speaker 1: f ward, you are going to die of aids. You
Speaker 1: are going to get what's coming to you. Two days later,
Speaker 1: the Review published the rape issue, with an impassioned defense
Speaker 1: of a student who'd pleaded no contest to statutory rape.
Speaker 1: So he's this is he's the guy that he's going
Speaker 1: to be the rest of his life. By eighty seven,
Speaker 1: we can say that there's a lot and because Peter
Speaker 1: doesn't like to talk about and I, you know, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the Gawker stuff later. I actually think he's
Speaker 1: less in the wrong on that that he tends to
Speaker 1: be painted as which is not to say that he's
Speaker 1: in the right there, but like he doesn't like talking
Speaker 1: about his sexuality. I get the there's like a decent
Speaker 1: little chunk of even even up to this day. And
Speaker 1: this is not exactly Peter's kind of thing. But I've
Speaker 1: interviewed a couple of like gay conservatives who are celibate.
Speaker 1: They're like catholic. They believe, they accept that they're homosexual.
Speaker 1: They're open about that, but they think it's immoral to
Speaker 1: do a thing about it because they're also extremely catholic.
Speaker 1: And I see shades of that at least in Peter's
Speaker 1: thinking here. Like the fact that he is putting out
Speaker 1: these articles about celibacy and about like the the unnatural
Speaker 1: and like evil lusts of the gay community and like
Speaker 1: AIDS very much feels in line with that to me here.
Speaker 1: But you know, we just don't get a ton of
Speaker 1: Peter himself talking about but you can see like he
Speaker 1: wouldn't be putting out these articles about like how AIDS
Speaker 1: is the fault, like by this guy yelling about how
Speaker 1: like AIDS is your fault, right if you're gay, If
Speaker 1: he didn't, if there wasn't an element of that in
Speaker 1: his thinking, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this young man is extremely broken.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this is this is the Yeah, the
Speaker 1: the fact that you're defending a guy who pled no
Speaker 1: contest to statutory rape, the anger about condoms over a
Speaker 1: guy who pled no contest to statutory rape. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, you don't want to judge someone too much
Speaker 2: by their you know, corny campus newspapers.
Speaker 1: If they move on from it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I say this as someone who started
Speaker 2: a corny campus newspaper.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like, but I mean that's really it's really beyond the pale,
Speaker 2: and it does seem to connect to who this dude
Speaker 2: is later, which is like this weird like there's so
Speaker 2: much like like hate, both internal and external happening.
Speaker 1: You really get why he becomes the guy he becomes
Speaker 1: because so much of Peter's modern politics is like the
Speaker 1: right wing hating the normies, like fuck the normies kind
Speaker 1: of politics, and like a big part of like just
Speaker 1: like how much anger there is at you know, Marxists
Speaker 1: on campus, they're handing out columns on the quad. It's
Speaker 1: just like whatever he sees the people around him are
Speaker 1: fine with makes him angry. You know that there is
Speaker 1: a degree of that in being this kind of dude
Speaker 1: in Stanford. Of this period of time now, the late
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties are a period in which public rage over
Speaker 1: the justices of apartheid had started to reach a fever
Speaker 1: pitch two. Right, this is one of the most kind
Speaker 1: of salient public issues at the time. Is like the
Speaker 1: entire Western international community is kind of lining up against
Speaker 1: the apartheid regime. There were regular protests on campus and
Speaker 1: calls to divest the school from South African financial interests.
Speaker 1: According to one source, Peter was not supportive of this.
Speaker 1: He was very angry that all of the kids on
Speaker 1: campus are anti South Africa. And I want to read now,
Speaker 1: this is a very interesting chapter of his life. From
Speaker 1: a medium post by one of his classmates at Stanford,
Speaker 1: Julia Lithcott Hayms. She wrote this about an encounter in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six, and this is going to be very relevant.
Speaker 1: Julie is a black woman. We ran in different circles.
Speaker 1: His fiercely libertarian views were often a topic of conversation
Speaker 1: among those of us living in Branner Hall. Day I
Speaker 1: heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid, which was then
Speaker 1: still the law of the land in South Africa, which
Speaker 1: I found morally repugnant to know that a fellow student,
Speaker 1: a dorm mate for that matter, might defend such a
Speaker 1: brutally oppressive race based caste system. Gave me the willies,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt,
Speaker 1: so I mustered the courage to go to his room
Speaker 1: and ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect,
Speaker 1: that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and
Speaker 1: moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even
Speaker 1: acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise
Speaker 1: for me, a black woman. So, and it's very in
Speaker 1: line with the kind of like, well it works economically,
Speaker 1: the system is economically successful and that's all that matters.
Speaker 1: The moral issues are irrelevant, right, just completely that kind
Speaker 1: of guy.
Speaker 2: I mean, how much of this is just like that's
Speaker 2: my dad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean how much of it is that's
Speaker 1: my dad, And just like this reflexive contrarian thing. All
Speaker 1: of these kids hate South Africa. I've been there. I
Speaker 1: know it's actually a good system because it works economy,
Speaker 1: you know, which to my dad, Yeah, yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 1: When Julie posted this in twenty sixteen. It went sort
Speaker 1: of viral, and Peter issued a response through a spokesperson.
Speaker 1: Peter has no recollection of a stranger demanding his views
Speaker 1: on apartheid. He has never supported it, but he can
Speaker 1: easily see how a conversation might be misremembered thirty years later.
Speaker 1: And that's interesting, Like, I don't recall talking to this stranger,
Speaker 1: but you can easily see how someone could misremember the
Speaker 1: conversation that.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure happened, if I did it.
Speaker 1: If I did it, Yeah, Apartheid Edition. Now, obviously I
Speaker 1: don't know that Julie's recollection of events from thirty years
Speaker 1: ago is perfectly accurate. No one's are ever right. But
Speaker 1: there is some outside corroboration for aspects of Julie's story.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from an article an NPR here.
Speaker 1: Lifke At Haymes's account of Teel's opinion about apartheid was
Speaker 1: backed up by Megan Maxwell, a freelance at who also
Speaker 1: attended Stanford with Teal. Maxwell, who was also an African American,
Speaker 1: told NPR that in a separate incident, Teal also told
Speaker 1: her that morality and governments shouldn't be connected, and that
Speaker 1: you shouldn't judge a government based on whether it fits
Speaker 1: your view of morality. I don't know, man, shouldn't shouldn't
Speaker 1: you like, isn't that part of how you should judge
Speaker 1: a government, whether or not you think it's moral.
Speaker 2: Should he's doing anti morality or a morality?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that it should just matter if it's economically efficient, right.
Speaker 2: And then but but then gays are bad on the
Speaker 2: other hand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at least he's publishing other people who are writing
Speaker 1: about the immorality of homosexual life, right, Yeah, I think interesting, interesting, Peter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: part of what's going on here is like Peter is
Speaker 1: an outspoken Christian and he is up to the present day,
Speaker 1: and that means some very odd the things for a
Speaker 1: guy who is also like gay and a libertarian. You
Speaker 1: know that's going to like, Well, he's.
Speaker 2: Spoking Christian who doesn't believe that we should judge things
Speaker 2: by their morality.
Speaker 1: That's what he says here, because he definitely seems to
Speaker 1: in other instances believe that we should judge things based
Speaker 1: on whether or not they're his definition of moral you know.
Speaker 1: Part of and this is not just Peter, this is everyone.
Speaker 1: He's not consistent nobody is right like this. We found
Speaker 1: a point of inconsistency here. Sure now Peter's present political situation,
Speaker 1: I will say, when we're talking about his classmates talking
Speaker 1: about thirty years ago, you should always read any quote
Speaker 1: about someone like this with the perspective of like the
Speaker 1: fact that his modern day political stances might be deep,
Speaker 1: like post facto coloring people's recollections of him right as
Speaker 1: a kid, because nobody's memories are perfect. So I did
Speaker 1: go looking for other accounts of the man at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and I found a few from former classmates of his
Speaker 1: on Quora. In one post, Chris Gray recalled he was
Speaker 1: very interested in constitutional law and wanted to clerk at
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court. He was serious about religion. He went
Speaker 1: to the gym frequently to work out. Peter was always
Speaker 1: what I would describe as thoughtful and civil in his
Speaker 1: dealings with people, which is unusual in my experience. He
Speaker 1: had a stubborn side and did not typically change his
Speaker 1: mind about things. And you know, maybe he was more
Speaker 1: friendly to this guy because this guy was more sympatico
Speaker 1: to his beliefs. But a lot of that seems like
Speaker 1: pretty consistent with other stories you get about Peter. Chris
Speaker 1: also recalled that Peter was very interested in another thinker,
Speaker 1: Leo Strauss. I recall the most interesting thing Peter said
Speaker 1: was derived from his understanding of Strauss, which was that
Speaker 1: there are not really any facts, just values. Another classmate,
Speaker 1: Lance Lance Ishimoto, recalls Peter as an outspoken conservative who
Speaker 1: was a part of the Federalist Society and hung out
Speaker 1: with Greg Kennedy Justice Kennedy. He went on to note
Speaker 1: his entrepreneurial nature was also apparent from the way he
Speaker 1: and a friend decided to make their own version of
Speaker 1: Stanford Laws sweatshirts and sell them at a price forty
Speaker 1: dollars that was cheaper than the official ones at the
Speaker 1: bookstore seventy five dollars. Yeah, so there you go. Peter
Speaker 1: got his BA in nineteen eighty nine and then got
Speaker 1: his law degree from Stanford Law. Now that's quite a
Speaker 1: lot of schooling for a guy that, as an adult
Speaker 1: would declare his own personal war on the higher education system.
Speaker 1: From Chaefkin and others. It certainly sounds as if some
Speaker 1: of this was related to his annoyance with liberal classmates,
Speaker 1: but I wonder if a larger reason wasn't the disillusionment
Speaker 1: he felt later because of his law career, which is
Speaker 1: a spoiler, doesn't work out the way he'd hoped. As
Speaker 1: Chris recalled, Peter was obsessed in this period as he's
Speaker 1: getting out of college, as he's finishing his law degree.
Speaker 1: The thing that he wants for his life is not
Speaker 1: to be an entrepreneur or a founder. It is to
Speaker 1: clerk for the Supreme Court. And one kind of assumes
Speaker 1: he's maybe hoping to eventually get on the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: George Packer, writing for The New Yorkers states quote, after
Speaker 1: graduating from law school and clerking for a federal judge,
Speaker 1: he was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship by
Speaker 1: Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. And if we're looking
Speaker 1: for like the inciting institute incident, of like Peter's turn
Speaker 1: towards evil, for like his desire to destroy higher education,
Speaker 1: what makes him choose the path of becoming like a
Speaker 1: corporate founder a venture capitalist? This is why, right his
Speaker 1: first choice is he wants to be in working in
Speaker 1: and around and with the Supreme Court, and he gets
Speaker 1: shot down. He's not this guy who has always been
Speaker 1: the best at everything, isn't good enough for Scalia or Kennedy, right,
Speaker 1: and that that's kind of what sets him on the
Speaker 1: path that he's going to go down later, at least
Speaker 1: according to a lot of people who knew him at
Speaker 1: this point in time.
Speaker 2: Wow, like the font of Skalia of so much not good,
Speaker 2: does one good thing and it backfires utterly and completely
Speaker 2: and fucks us all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I wonder if it's just that they can
Speaker 1: see the because like, even if you're Scalia, right, you
Speaker 1: don't really want to work every day with a reflexive
Speaker 1: contrarian right, Like they're not. That's not a guy who's
Speaker 1: always whose whole thing is always I have to be
Speaker 1: doing a different thing than everyone else, Like I have
Speaker 1: to be smarter than everyone else, everyone else who has
Speaker 1: to be wrong and I have to be right. You
Speaker 1: don't want to work with that guy, like that guy sucks.
Speaker 2: Or maybe because his work wasn't good enough, yeah, or.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe maybe his lost shit wasn't good enough, right,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't
Speaker 1: have the ability to judge Peter Thiel's like writing on law.
Speaker 1: But whatever the case, he because he's the valictorian of
Speaker 1: his high school, he does very well at Stanford, He's
Speaker 1: friends with Kennedy's kid, he's he's he's doing everything he
Speaker 1: should be doing to make this work. Just doesn't work
Speaker 1: for him, right, and that does seem to be like
Speaker 1: the thing that fucks him up anyway, Noah, how are
Speaker 1: you feeling about Peter so far?
Speaker 2: I feel like right now, were it kind of like
Speaker 2: only somewhat harmful toxic nerd stage, and if the story
Speaker 2: ended there would be like, Okay, fine, you know, go ahead, buddy,
Speaker 2: Now you get to grow up and live life.
Speaker 1: I feel like you'd be a person. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I feel like there's still like, you know,
Speaker 2: the fate is not set at this point.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I would say the fate is not set.
Speaker 1: There's there's a lot of ways that this guy could
Speaker 1: go after this. But I also feel like you can
Speaker 1: tell that a guy who runs that kind of newspaper
Speaker 1: and whose goal is to work for Scalia or Kennedy
Speaker 1: probably isn't gonna wind up being like a guy you'd
Speaker 1: want to have dinner with, you know, Like, no, this.
Speaker 2: Isn't behind the Yeah, guys, you don't want to have
Speaker 2: dinner with.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, we're not guaranteed he's going to become
Speaker 1: a bastard yet, So we'll be hitting that increasingly by
Speaker 1: part two. And I'm excited for you to see where
Speaker 1: Peter goes after this. Noah, where are you going to
Speaker 1: go after this?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm going to have like several shots
Speaker 2: of whiskey. Yeah, after this, I feel like I need it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one pm, so that's the right time. Or
Speaker 1: a nice, nice stiff drink.
Speaker 2: Four o'clock over here, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's four o'clock somewhere. That's why I can
Speaker 1: start drinking. All right, Well, I'm going to go listen
Speaker 1: to some Jimmy Buffett. You call also go listen to
Speaker 1: some Jimmy Buffett and then come back on Thursday.
Speaker 2: We need six drinks Jimmy Buffett.
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