October 29, 2024 • 72 mins
Robert sits down with Noah Shachtman to discuss the life and times of Peter Thiel, the demon investor of Silicon Valley and would-be assassin of democracy.
(4 Part Series)
Sources:
https://www.newser.com/story/235229/peter-thiel-wanted-innovation-he-got-networking-instead.html
https://www.edsurge.com/nhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2017/01/03/what-happened-to-the-original-class-of-peter-thiels-college-skipping-fellows-nowelcome1/
ews/2023-12-12-how-a-billionaire-s-fellowship-spread-skepticism-about-college-s-value
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/peter-thiel-israel-palantir/
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s542/client/snv?isnewsnv=true¬eGuid=46c636b6-b40
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Ah, what's Dick my Cheney's This is Behind
the Bastards, a podcast where every week we talk about
the great decisions being made by the Democratic Party, which
this week includes really really burnishing their Dick Cheney credentials.
We'll see how that works out in about three weeks
(00:24):
with me to talk about, you know something related to
this election is our lovely Yeah, is our lovely guest
today A contributing writer at Rolling Stone and contributing editor
at Wired, Noah Shackedman. Noah, welcome to the podcast program show.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You gave this very confused look in between. My first
and last name was over time.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I wrote your the stuff you wanted me to, because
we have a different intro for you this time. I
wrote it up at the top of the piece, And
so the top of the piece is just the words
Peter Teel because that's the sub of our episodes. So
at the top of my article it says contributing writer
Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, Peter Teal And wait
a second while, so I had to like catch my
(01:09):
brain and fix it in between.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Look, I welcome my new colleague.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, Peter Teel would be a great guest on the program.
But I wouldn't do Peter Teal for the you know what,
I might do Dick Cheney for the Peter Teal episode
about who does me? Yeah, Peter Teal? Noah oh Man,
So yeah, Noah. How do you feel about being friendly
(01:37):
with Dick Cheney. It's a good decision. Is this going
to work out for the Harris campaign?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
You know?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I am not incredibly bullish on the old befriending war
criminal campaign strategy.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's the it's an impart a decision you make if
like you don't understand Republicans because like I grew up loving,
like with a family that loved George W. Bush right,
Like he was a hero in my household as a kid,
and no one liked Dick Cheney, Like they didn't hate him,
but like he was not a figure of admiration to
(02:16):
anyone in my family, like because he was. That was
kind of the point of Dick Cheney is he was
like the guy behind the scenes that you don't need
to like very much. It's just confusing to me that
they think there's a bunch of Republicans out there who
will change their vote based on this.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
It was wild at the DNZ how credible it was
that this rumor that George W. Bush was going to
come out and speak at the DNC.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
I would have lost my mind.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Everyone was like, Oh, he's coming, He's coming.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
It was like more credible than Beyonce.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
It's happening here. Yeah, there's there's still time. There's still time,
and you know who. I don't know if he's he's
got a chance to be worse than George W. Bush.
I wouldn't say he's there yet. Peter Teal, Peter Tele Uh,
And that's what we're going to talk about when we
come back from the cold open to warm things up
(03:06):
a little bit. Noah, so we're back, Peter Teal, how
would you describe in brief if someone is like, hey,
I hear there's this Peter tele guy who's influencing elections
or whatever. Who is he? How would you describe Peter Teal?
What would be your like elevator, Like, Oh, that's who
(03:27):
this guy is.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
He's like the power behind like the weirdest curtain.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I guess this is how I would describe it, like
deeply strange, deeply influential. I think it would be my
elevator pitch.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, Yeah, he's I would say, like, he's the guy
whose money is responsible for getting Oh shit, what's his name?
The hillbilly jd Vance started. He's the guy who you know,
like backed Trump pretty early on in twenty sixteen. He
was the you know, the billionaire who came up and
(04:06):
endorsed him at the RNC that year and talked about
how like he was supporting the Republicans as a gay man.
These are all glad about Peter Teeter.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
I'm really glad you're able to forget jd Vance's name
like that. That feels That feels healthy to me.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah. It took a lot of work and a lot
of gas station substances, but I managed to do it,
and managed to do it. It was mixing the kraton
Clemato and then one of those yellow jackets truckers take together.
I reached a state of what I think the Buddhists
called nirvana, and yeah, all knowledge of jd Vance fled
(04:40):
from my mind.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Dude, I'm gonna fucking throw up on a keyboard. Yeah,
I mean, it seems like it's like in the weirdo
crypto fascist right, if you follow the roots down far enough, it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
All comes back to Peter. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And there's a couple of ways of looking at Tel.
One of them is he is a capitalist Lenin, And
what I mean by that, I'm not comparing the two
like ideologically, but Lenin is a guy who grew up
kind of in the upper middle class strata of his
society and from an extremely early age hated the system
(05:23):
that he lived under because his brother was killed by
the czar, and dedicated himself to its destruction, and he
went about destroying that system very methodically and very effectively. Right,
Peter is a guy who grew up in the upper
middle class strata of his culture always seems to have
hated the systems that ran the country he lived in,
(05:46):
and dedicated himself from an early age at getting resources
and then kind of methodically destroying the system, which is
representative democracy, that he lived under. That's one way of
looking at Peter. The other is that Peter is a
guy who is fairly intelligent, has okay instincts, but not
as good as he thinks they are, and he's just
(06:08):
kind of been careening from point to point, making gambles
that have led him to this position where he is
now backing the Republicans to the hilt in order to
hopefully crumble the system of democracy enough that like he
gets to rule his own little bitty city somewhere on
the West coast, right, Like one of them is Peter
(06:31):
Teel is the master Plotter, and the other is that
he's this kind of like reactive figure. And I don't
actually know which is the better way to look at
this guy is some of it's got to come down
to like personal preference. But he's an interesting character, and
I think he's probably, of all of the figures on
the right now, one of the ones that it's more
(06:54):
it's easiest to kind of respect at an intellectual level
because he's very smart and he's succeeded in a lot
of his Like the reason why the master Plottery thing
kind of has a lot of traction is he's been
very successful in a lot of his goals over time,
Like he's been willing to, he's been able to. He
has a degree of like focus and discipline that's fairly
(07:15):
rare on the right.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, it's pretty weird, wells, isn't he also like drinking
the blood of younger people or something like that.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
We're going to talk about that later on in the series.
It's unclear to me if he's ever drank any young
people's blood, but he's definitely been accused of it and
has like expressed an interest in it. I think the
guy who definitely is drinking young people's blood is Brian Johnson.
That like like rich founder dude who's obsessed with reducing
(07:44):
his biological age back to seventeen. He takes his son's
blood as a supplement. Really yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I
mean he brags about it. Yeah, Like he's very open
about that. Peter has always Peter is on the record
to say I don't do that. He was just kind
of He's invested in a lot of companies that did
anti aging stuff, some of which like we're looking into
(08:07):
plasma replacement, right, But it's unclear if he ever did it,
and if he didn't do it, it would be because
like he just didn't think it worked. He is a
big advocate of taking human growth hormone as an anti
aging supplement. So I think it's one of those things
where if he doesn't, if he hasn't done the young
people's blood thing, it's just because he decided the science wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
There, or he's just so fucking roided out that he's.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Just yeah, the ruids have given him enough blood. There's
no more room for blood in Peter's body. So no,
Like many of the worst things on this earth, Peter
Teel began in Germany, Frankfort to be specific, where he
was born on October eleventh, nineteen sixty seven. His father, Klaus,
(08:56):
was a chemical engineer who the very next year, sixty eight,
got high by a consulting firm that specialized in heavy industry,
including oil and gas refining. The founder of the company,
Arthur G. McKee, had owned a series of steel foundries
in the Cleveland area, where the Teals moved in nineteen
sixty eight. So now, at this point, and I think
(09:17):
this is probably clue to most of our listeners, in
nineteen sixty eight, Cleveland is just a series of river
fires with some subjects attached, right Like, It's not the
city we know and tolerate today. It's nothing but the
kyah Hogan burning and a couple of soot drenched houses.
And the reason the Kyahogue is always on fire is
guys like Arthur McKee, who runs steel boundaries.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So that is that Peter grows up with his dad
kind of working in the destroying the planet industry, Like
he's an oil and gas man working for an industrial
magnate in fucking Cleveland. So Klaus works for a firm
in Cleveland for a couple of years while he gets
his graduate degree, and in nineteen seventy one, when Peter
was four, his parents have a second child, Patrick now
(10:03):
tealsby biographer Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, which is
a book that will be a sizable source for this.
Although I do have some disagree. I think Chaefkin's a
very good writer, good biographer. There's a couple of areas
where I disagree with them that we'll talk about here.
But yeah, he has described Klaus and Peter's mom Suzanne,
(10:23):
as fanatical Republicans who were absolutely gaga for Nixon. That
may be true, you know, chaef Cains certainly knows more
about this than me. However, Peter disagrees with that characterization
of his parents. He doesn't seem to have considered them
to have been fanatical Republicans or religious extremists, and chaf
Can also kind of paints them as Christian like hardcore
(10:45):
Christian conservatives. Peter is an outspoken Christian. It's unclear to
me again, if this is just Peter disliking the description
of himself and his parents as extremists, or if this
is that Chase can you know, maybe doesn't have all
of the context. We don't get a lot of detail
about Teale's parents, so it's not perfectly clear, right. Chaefkin
(11:10):
describes his father as cold, bordering on cruel at times. Again,
this is a characterization Peter would disagree with, at least
publicly in terms of like stories that paint that picture
of his dad is cruel. I don't see a lot
of really good detailed evidence about it. The story that
(11:31):
Chafkin cites is kind of evidence of how cold and
cruel Peter's dad was. Is a story that Peter tells
a lot. Two biographers I've seen this or two interviewers
I've seen this story recounted in a couple of different
articles that interviewed Peter before Chaefgin's biography came out. And
the story is that one day, when Peter is a
little kid, like maybe four or five, he was looking
at a rug in the family home that was made
(11:53):
from a cow hide, and he asked his dad where
did this rug come from? And Klaus, matter of fact,
they explained that it was made from a dead cow.
Peter asked, like, what what does it mean that something's dead?
And his dad told him, quote, death happens to all animals,
all people. It will happen to me one day, it
will happen to you one day. And Chafkin describes this
as a moment of like brutal honesty, and he kind
(12:15):
of insinuates that it may have done some damage to Peter,
writing that he quote would return to the cow and
the brutal finality of the thing again and again, even
in middle age. Now, it does seem to be accurate
that Peter is stuck in his mind. I just don't
know that I consider that a brutal description of death.
That seems like, you know, kind of just factual, right,
(12:38):
Like I had a conversation with my dad about death
that wasn't all that different from this, right, Like, it
happens to everything, it'll happen to me, it'll happen to you.
Like how else do you explain death to a kid? Right?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean I don't know. That feels like
pretty like a pretty weak antecedent for everything that's about
to transpire.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
I think what's going on here is that Peter is
obsessed with death and dying.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
He's put a huge amount of money into like reversing
aging and anti senizence and all this kind of stuff.
So like, he clearly is a guy who's obsessed with
his own mortality, and like you're looking for evidence of
that in his childhood, and he does tell this story.
He told The New Yorker in twenty eleven that this
was a quote very very disturbing day. So obviously this
(13:23):
does stick in his mind. But I don't know that
that makes the case that his dad is like cold
because this I just don't see it from that anecdote.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Obviously that's one anecdote. We're talking about a whole childhood,
So that doesn't mean that he was not cold. I
just don't I feel like what we may get from
the fact that this story fucks Peter up so much
says less about his dad and more about like who
Peter is as a person, because I think most of
us have this experience and like don't grow up dedicated
(13:54):
to conquering mortality, whereas kind of like, oh yeah, everything dies,
all right, well, I better figure out something I'm going
to do with my life, right yeah, yeah, you know,
like gas station drugs. That was my That was my decision,
which I think if Peter had gotten into that just
by some of these trucker pills, Peter, you know, yeah,
(14:14):
they'll keep you, they'll keep you alive forever, as well
as HGH will. So anyway, Peter has never made peace
with death, or what he calls the ideology of the
inevitability of the death of every individual. I also love
that the ideal. It's not an ideology, man, it's just
(14:34):
a fact. That's like, that's like seeing some people who
are like staying back from a cliff's edge on a
windy day and be like, oh, you've fallen for the
ideology of dying in a fall.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Come on the ideal, man, the inevitability of the death
of every individual.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, I think I've had conversations with anti seatbelt guys
about like the ideology of safety of like a nanny
state culture, and it's like, no, man, I just don't
want to diet at car crash.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
This huge old libertarian right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Oh yeah, as all hell. Well, you see nowadays, I
don't know if you'd call it that, but he definitely
comes out of libertarianism.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, and so, and when I think of libertarians, I
think of like people who never evolved past like second
semester freshman dorm room, uh ideology, And that feels very
much like the like the the the ideology of the
inevitability of death feels very like third bong hit freshman
(15:37):
year dorm room.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Yeah, dude, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. You know
what I will say for libertarians, I always have to
give a little bit of pushback just because of where
I come out there. You've got your two kinds, You've
got your like dorm room. I'm gonna read fucking Murray
Rothbard and basically become a fascist whenever anyone suggests I
(16:01):
pay my fair share in taxes Libertarians, which Peter is no, no, no,
My kind the kind that I respect are I'm not.
I wouldn't say I'm there now, but I have I
do have a degree of respect and love for Like
after the big hurricane in North Carolina, you had like
several dozen guys who owned their own helicopters and often
built their own helicopters, who like flew in just because
(16:24):
they're like they're like helicopter libertarians. I like my helicopter
libertarians where it's like I just don't trust the States,
so I bought my own helicopter a disaster rescue. Those
guys are fine.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, yeah, although are those the same guys that also
were the militia that tried to interfere with.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Those guys were in trucks. Those guys were in trucks.
That might be yet another different kind of libertarian Helicopterah,
we're very very pro helicopter libertarian in this ass. Those
guys are fine. So yeah, that's a Peter's like kind
(17:05):
of inciting incident.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
If you're making the Peter Teal movie, you started with
his dad explaining death to him while looking at this
cowhide rug. Now, shortly after that conversation, his dad decides
to move the family away from Cleveland, usually a good
decision and live every engineer's dream, which is, of course
helping South Africa build a uranium mind. You know what
(17:31):
engineer doesn't want to live that? So the Teal family
moves to South Africa kind of yeah, I mean they're
technically in South Africa. Peter's parents send him to an expensive,
whites only private school called Pridwin. According to the school's website,
it was founded in nineteen twenty three as a non
denominational school rooted in Christian ethics and values. Today, the
(17:56):
Pridwood website prominently features numerous stock photos of non white kids.
So it does seem like maybe things have been forced
to move forward there. But when Peter went there, it
would have taught racial separation as an obvious good and
a necessity. Right this is we're talking South Africa in
the seventies, right after Pridwen. Peter went to a German
(18:18):
language public school. He was a good student. He always
does well in school, but these are not happy years
for him, at least his chafkin paints it quote. A
picture from that era shows a sullen boy in shorts,
knickers and a tie carrying an adult sized briefcase. A
grade school classmate in Namibia, George erb recalled Teal as
smart but withdrawt. He had that distinct, striking smart look
(18:41):
about him, almost like he seemed bored. Rb said, we
didn't really mingle a lot with Peter in school, though
we always knew the miners' kids would not stay long
in town. Now, as he noted here, I said that
they moved to South Africa. They are, though actually not
in what in South Africa. They were in Namibia, which
a big chunk of Namibia is governed and run by
(19:01):
South Africa. At this point, right at the time, a
lot of what we call Namibia today was known to
South Africans as South West Africa, and it was governed
under a military occupation, as if it were essentially the
little brother of the apartheid state. The whole reason that
South Africa has a uranium mine comes down to environmental
(19:23):
regulations in western nations. Around this period, some of the
very earliest waves of uranium had been mined in places
like the US and Australia. But pretty quickly, once it
becomes clear that we're going to need a lot of uranium,
it also becomes clear that like uranium mining is really
bad for the environment, so we'd better do that a
lot in Africa, right, like a big bit. Actually, King
(19:43):
Leopold's old colony in the Cargo becomes a major source
of uranium mining, and Namibia in this period becomes the
fourth largest global producer of uranium. During the Cold War,
when we are using up quite a lot of the stuff,
so That's why South Africa is a big. Part of
why South Africa is so hesitant to give up their
(20:03):
occupation of Namibia is like, Namibia has a shitload of
uranium and South Africa wants that for several reasons, none
of them good. Now, the managing and engineering staff at
the mine where Klaus worked was white. The workforce were
largely migrants on one year contracts for white families. This
was a good job. You had good access to medical care,
(20:24):
you had nice houses. You're basically living in a company
town that is built for the white employees of this mine.
There's a country club there, there's quality schools. Things are
a lot uglier for the contract workers who are being
brought in to do a lot of the heavy lifting
at the mine. Now, much of this ugliness came from
the fact that South Africa was not allowed to be
(20:45):
in Southwest Namibia. Right, They are not supposed to be
occupying this chunk of Namibia. The UN had ordered them
to leave in nineteen sixty six, but by the time
the Teals moved into the country, South Africa had yet
to move their troops out. This is like nineteen seventy
to one or two, right, So they've overstayed their visa
(21:06):
by quite a while. But you don't really need a
visa if you have enough guns.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, this whole thing is fucking grim man. Yeah, it's
parteid uranium. Mind, just fucking grim.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Peter's childhood is in an apartheid uranium mine.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Like I thought Elon Musk had liken uh kind of
like super villain origin story with the emerald mine. But
the uranium not really trumps.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Honestly, bro, I'll take an emerald mine over this any
day in a fucking week. So in nineteen seventy three,
the ICC, the International Criminal Court, upheld that you in
ruling and said again South Africa, you've got to leave Namibia.
This is not your country. What are you doing there,
to which South Africa says, we are getting a lot
of uranium and we're not going to leave. This leads
(21:57):
to sanctions against the sale of minerals from mine and
occupied Namibia, sanctions that are ignored by much of the West.
And I'm going to just quote read about that via
a quote I found on the website Mining Sea. The
decree warned that anyone found extracting and selling minerals from
Namibia would be held liable beneficiaries to Namibia's minerals, including
(22:19):
Britain and the United States, except Sweden did not honor
the decree when uranium production from Rossing would satisfy Britain's
ten percent demand. So because uranium was so needed for
this build up, basically a lot of the West was like, no, fuck,
what the UN says, We're going to keep paying South
Africa for their uranium because we really need it right
(22:41):
tale as old as time now. The company that ran
the mine where Klaus worked as a contractor was called
Rio Tinto, and they had You're not going to be
surprised to hear that this illegal uranium mine company has
an evil history, but they have like a comically evil history.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I feel like I've heard a name before.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So in the late nineteen thirties,
Rio Tino had called on Francisco Franco to use his
soldiers to crush left wing miners protesting against bad working
conditions in Spain. The head of the company at the
time Sir auckland Getty's, which is such an evil mine
owner's name, What an amazing evil Sir auckland Getty's. Jesus
(23:25):
Getty's brag that quote miners found guilty of trouble making
our quote martialed and shot big fan of Franco the
leaders of Rio Tento. As another interesting side note, Noah,
Rio Tinto was also a major source of raw materials
for the Nazi rearmament campaign. These are the guys that
build the Wehrmacht back up into fighting shape. Thank God.
(23:47):
You know where would we be without Rio Tinto.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
God?
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yes, Now, by the early seventies there were no more
Nazis to arms, so Rio said about finding their next
best equivalent, which is of course s apartheid South Africa.
Right now, since they're running an illegal uranium mine and
occupied Namibia, they're like, why not go full fascist? And
they decide to operate their facilities in Namibia like a
(24:17):
concentration camp. And I'm going to quote from an article
by the London Mining Network. Here, black workers constructing the
Rossing uranium mine lived in appalling conditions in temporary camps,
which researchers found akin to slavery. By akin to slavery,
it means that actually leaving work for any meaning, but
being for any reason, but being dismissed by your manager
(24:38):
was a crime, workers who misplaced or forgot their ID
badge could be jailed. Now, the fact that someone might
get hired to consult at such a mind doesn't imply
that they were involved with setting up or executing any
of these policies, but it does suggest that one was
broadly fine with them. As Max Chafkin writes, a contract
(24:59):
laborer on the Construs Auction project, the project Klaus's company
was helping to oversee, who said workers had not been
told they were building a uranium mine and were thus
unaware of the risks of radiation. The only clue had
been that white employees would hand out wages from behind glass,
seemingly trying to avoid contamination themselves. The report mentioned workers
dying like flies in nineteen seventy six while the mine
(25:20):
was under construction.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
So this is so bad.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
This is pretty evil.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
To illegal apartheid uranium mining concentration camp.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, yeah, that's Peter's dad's job and some of his
earliest memories as a kid.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
And he's disturbed by like Bessie the coin.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
What, Peter, If you want to end death, the first
step might be ending illegal uranium mines. If you just
care about death as a concept.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I cannot believe how cartoonish is.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
It's so funny. It's like the funniest bad story he
could have just being the guy he is coming from.
This is a background like a lot of these guys,
like Elon Musk, there's this period of time in musks
backstories like, oh, well, he is this kid who's moved
around about. His family sucks, his dad's this abusive monster.
(26:15):
He's bullied as a kid. It's a really sad like
I can see how he you know, there's a I
can see how a couple of different kinds of kid
could have come out of this, some of them who
would have been a lot better than Musk was right,
Maybe he wasn't always destined to be the kind of
guy he is. With Teal, you're like, oh, yeah, no,
this is this childhood. Was Taylor made to produce Peter Teal?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
You know what else was Taylor made to produce Peter
Tel Noah, Yeah. The sponsors of our show are attempting
to breed clones of Peter Teel in a tank. It's
kind of like that the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection,
down to the fact that they are mixing Peter Teal's
jeans with Sigourney we So let's see what happens everybody,
(27:02):
you know, We'll see what happens. We're back and in
the time that we were off air, the Peter Teel
Sigourney Weaver clones escaped containment in our in our our
our sponsors orbital base. Things do not seem to be
(27:23):
going well. Sorry, air, that was probably predictable. Anyway, We'll
keep you updated on the situation. So we're talking about
uranium mining in South Africa, which is getting South Africa
in trouble. And it's one of those things where if
it was if it had just been about the money
(27:43):
South Africa could make exporting uranium, it probably wouldn't have
been worthwhile to piss off the whole international community to
keep this mine open. But that's not the only reason
why South Africa wants the uranium mine. A big part
of why they insisted on keeping this thing operational was
that they are an unpopular apartheid government that is in
(28:04):
the process of becoming a global pariah. They are dealing
with something of an extential of an existential pr crisis
because of all of like the racism and violence that
the world is watching them do, and the white rulers
of the country decided the best way for them to
gain long term security for the regime was to get
nuclear weapons, even if they had to break international law
(28:26):
to do so. Right, And South Africa does eventually construct
a handful of very illegal nukes, right. They are not
supposed to have these internationally, No one's supposed to be
allowed to be arming themselves with new nukes. South Africa
makes their nukes and it does not, as you may
be aware, keep the apartheid regime in power. You know,
(28:48):
the government does in fact fall and in a kind
of unique historical case, before the government hands over power
to the ANC which is, you know, the party that
over as apartheid goes out, they disassemble all of their
nuclear weapons. To this day, this makes South Africa the
(29:08):
only nation to have ever made nuclear weapons and given
them up voluntarily. Obviously Ukraine receive had nuclear weapons when
the USSR crumbled and gave those up. But South Africa
actually like makes their own nuclear weapons independently and then
disassembles them and stops being a nuclear power. And that's
a unique thing in history. Although they do it, I
(29:30):
think mainly for reasons of racism.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
It's still pretty wild. I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting story. So while Peter's dad
was I don't know how you again, how you want
to parse out his complicity here, but he is adjacent
to some very bad things.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
While his dad's doing this, Peter himself gets very little
that seems to be good from his two and a
half three years in Africa. He mostly claims to have
played alone a lot near the family house. He started
to develop a habit for comp heative chess, and he
became a voracious leader less than three years. After less
than three years away, the family decides they just haven't
(30:07):
had enough Cleveland and they move back. Yeah. Then as
soon as they're back in Cleveland, they're like, oh shit,
Cleveland is still not a great place to live. The
Rivers have not stopped being on fire. So they move
one last time to the Bay Area. Their specific final
residence is Foster City, which is just northwest of San
(30:28):
Jose and south of San Francisco. Proper, it's a fairly
affluent town and in the late nineteen seventies, Teals family
seems like they probably would have qualified as upper middle class, right,
and this is what you tend to see with the
first and second generation of tech industry giants. Guys like
Gates and Jobs all come from or move to similar
(30:48):
parts of California, and they're all kind of at a
similar level of family affluence.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Their parents are not like rich, they're not going to
inherit generational wealth, but their parents have enough money to
shower their kids with attention and educational opportunities that really
weren't available before. And in part because of some of
the decisions guys like this make aren't going to be
available after, you know, lease not do as many kids now.
(31:15):
In terms of the parenting situation, because Gates Bill Gates's
parents doting absolutely like obsessed with his development and health.
Steve's parents again doting like really really like caring parents
who were very much focused on their child doing well.
It is unclear to me how much attention Peter gets.
This is kind of an open questions. It's left as
(31:36):
an open question. In Chafkin's book, Peter does not seem
to embrace like the claims that his parents were very
strict or you know, fanatical conservatives, but we also get
very little of them in his stories, right, which is
very different from like, Steve Jobs told a lot of
stories about his parents, right, and so did Gates. So
I don't really know if this is a case of,
(31:57):
you know, he didn't want to say much about his parents,
that this is an area of insecurity form, or if
it's just he's not a guy who's super talkative about
his background, which he definitely isn't you know. That may
just explain it, But it does seem that his parents
are not kind of central to his feelings or ambitions
in the same way that they really seem to have
(32:18):
been for a lot of other like tech industry icons
that came up in a similar place in period. We
do know as a child, Peter Teel is a massive nerd.
He is one of the first wave of like really
big nerds, and he's particularly a fantasy nerd for his
kind of fantasy and sci fi. He reads The Lord
of the Rings as a little kid, he falls in
(32:39):
love with Tolkien. He would later claim that he memorized
the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I suspect is
probably overstating things. That's a lot to memorize, Yeah, yeah,
three thousand pages. Yeah, that's that might be a little much.
I don't know how much I believe that, but I just.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Remember the English or the Yet.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Did he have the Elvish down? Does he know the
Black speech by heart?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Speaks at all? Maybe folks so much? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, the very few journalists know the Black speech. As
you might imagine from a kid who at least probably
meant memorized passages from the Lord of the Rings, Peter
gets bullied a lot, right, not super surprising from this kid.
He's also very small and skinny, and according to one peer,
he gets pushed around a lot as a little kid.
(33:37):
This may have had something to do with what seems
to have been a flair for escapism. In addition to
loving Tolkien, Peter is one of the very first Dungeons
and Dragons players, right, He and his because D and
D has just come out while he is a kid,
and he is he and his friends are playing it
while it is very new. They they played every single weekend,
and this is This may have caused a degree of
(33:59):
life a conflict with his parents, because there are at
least some stories that his parents they couldn't play, He
couldn't play at his house because his parents, being very
strict Christians, thought that D and D was evil. Again,
this is one of those things. Is that totally accurate?
I don't know. He definitely played a lot of D
and D. It may have been a kind of thing
(34:19):
that he had to skirt around his family because it is.
And there's this thing that you get from Peter that
everyone will say about him, which is that like he's
a habitual contrarian. Whatever people are doing, he has to
be doing the opposite. There's this big moral panic against
dungeons and dragons at the time. It very much fits
in with that that he would want to be playing
(34:40):
this game that a lot of people in his life
and like maybe even his parents consider to be evil.
That is very like fitting with the guy Peter Teel
is like whatever the people around him are saying is bad,
That's what Peter's going to want to do, right. Yeah.
Outside of that, his main hobby seems to have been
Chess's extremely good at this. He was generally ranked number
(35:03):
one by his school chess club. He plays a lot
of speed chess. He probably could have been a professional
chess guy, but he has some There's some quotes he
makes later where he's like, I had to choose between
chess and everything else in life, Right, I just get
too obsessed with it. George Packer, writing for The New Yorker,
summarizes his chest kit was decorated with a sticker carrying
(35:24):
the motto born to Win. On the rare occasions when
he lost in college, he swept the pieces off the board.
He would say, show me a good loser, and I'll
show you a loser. So maybe not I guy you
want to play with, right, Jesus Christ. Yeah, A little
bit of a dick. This is the kind of guy
who I don't know. Again, I'm a big believer in
(35:46):
the fact that everyone who's proud of their chess performance
should get into the real game of skill. Warhammer forty
thousand fish shows your real skill, Peter paint some fucking orcs?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Do you have? Born to Win?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I haven't actually tattooed. You can't see it. The camera
blots out my tattoos. But I've got like one of
those throat tattoos. I got a sticking poke when I
was in prison that just says born to Win. And
it's got a picture of an orc on it. Yeah,
h correct, Yeah, yeah, it's good. It really makes me
popular at the gaming store with the fourteen year olds.
(36:27):
So Chaefkin has my favorite story of Peter and his
chess phase because it is the one that makes me
actually kind of hopeful that we can beat this guy eventually. Quote.
Once at a tournament, he was playing a scrimmage match
for fun in between games and seemed to be only
half paying attention. His opponent was inexperienced and not aware
of what was happening, put Peter in check. Then he realized,
(36:48):
to both of their surprise that it was checkmate. Peter
became visibly distraught and was unable to regain his composure
for the rest of the tournament and lost the rest
of the matches he played. A defeat, even a meaningless
one was too much to handle. Yeah, okay, that's been
a little hopeful. There a little bit of motivation for
you kids.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah yeah, maybe wasn't so born to win.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yeah. So among the nerds, Peter was king. He was
the most academically gifted of his friends, and I suspect
was the best at doing things like cooking up overpowered
characters in Dungeons and Dragons. He had a fantastic memory,
and he expounded upon different short stories and novels by
guys like Asimov and Clark with a faculty that would
have embarrassed most adults. He's the kind of guy who
(37:31):
can like quote passages of stories he likes from memory.
One of Peter's nerdy peers said that he and others
were quote in awe of Teal, but added, I don't
know that he had any close friends. So he's got
like some peers, but maybe not a lot of people
that he like actually entrusts any pieces of himself too
(37:52):
in any meaningful way. Right, Again, a lonely person in
a lot of ways. Peter is genuinely described by the
kids he spent time around the way wizards were in
Peter's favorite fantasy novels as this like mysterious figure. He
can do great and terrifying things, but who's also fundamentally
separate from all of the people around him.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Right, that's your characterization. You're calling him a wizard, or
he called himself a wizard.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
No, no, no, that's just kind of my description based on
what other kids said about Peter, right that he's like,
we're in awe of him. He could do all these
amazing things, but we didn't really understand him. He seemed
to be like someone who was fundamentally separate. It's kind
of like the way Gandolf is written in The Lord
of the Rings, Right, Wizards are these like mysterious and
kind of frightening figures that you can't ever really get that,
(38:39):
Like they're kind of a knowable in certain senses. Right,
That's just kind of the way other kids talked about.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Peter seems more Seramone than Gandolph.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
He's definitely I mean, he's going to build a company
named Palette here, so yeah, that's probably a fair fair note.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
No.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
As he became a teenager, the bullying changed from physical
violence to sillier shit that was also calculated to make
him feel unwelcome and othered. One example would be that
a group of kids frequently stole for sale signs from
around the neighborhood and set them up on Peter's lawn,
and then they would harass them about it the next
day school, being like, hey, when are you moving right,
(39:17):
and like that actually legitimately does suck, Peter, if you're listening,
that's like a really shitty thing this kids did to you.
I'm sorry, that's a bummer, you know, you can like
that's that's kind of like probably more devastating than the
physical violence like people stealing lawn signs to like make
it clear we want you and your family to leave. Like, yeah,
(39:39):
I can see, I can see how that feeds into
a guy becoming like Peter is. By the time the
high school years come around, You've got this kind of
misanthropic genius who spends his free time escaping reality and competing,
you know, in order to show everyone how smart he is,
right when he's The only times he wants to engage
(39:59):
with a people is when he can beat them in
a contest of wits. Otherwise he likes to kind of
focus on his fantasy worlds. One friend described his general
attitude as fuck you world. Now. I think we all
knew or were to some degree, kids like that. Right,
this is going to sound very familiar, like as a
(40:19):
kid who grew up like bullied and nerdy. Aspects of
this are familiar to me.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Peter also, it's interesting maintains this attitude while managing to
be the best student in his school. Right, he is
going to be the valedictorian. He's an exceptional student academically,
so he has both this kind of anger at normal
kids and the world around him, and also this attitude
that's reinforced by the social structures of his world, that
(40:46):
like he's better than everyone else in an important way. Now,
his classmates, interviewed by Chaefgins, seem to suggest that Peter
and kind of everyone at their school are obsessed with
getting like this. This is a school where the kids,
you know, their parents are high achievers. Everyone is obsessed
with getting into good colleges. This was seen as the
(41:06):
past of success at the time, and Peter's parents, if
they were strict, were probably pushing him hard to get
the best grades possible so that he could get into
the best school. Right. This is and this is going
to be important later he grows up being told by
all the authority figures in his life what matters most
is getting into a good college. Right That is like
the number one priority you have to have as a kid.
(41:29):
I don't know when I went to school that was
the priority that was really rammed home to me by
my parents. So I don't have trouble believing that this
is the case for Peter, and it's He's going to
get very angry at this later in his life. This
is going to be a major motivating factor in his
life the idea that like he was forced to value
higher education, which he fundamentally thinks is not a valuable
(41:51):
thing in the same way that his parents did, and
he's really angry about it. He's kind of never forgiven
the concept of academia for this. He graduates in eighty
five as the valedictorian of San Mateo High. During the
later years in public school, he had moved on from
Tolkien and Asimov to Einrand, And you know, this kind
(42:12):
of helps nurse the strain of vigorous anti communist sentiment
that would have you know, this would have been a
part of his upbringing. Anyway, We're talking like Silicon Valley
in the seventies. You know, it's a lot of defense
industry stuff is out there. It is not a radical
left hotbed. So he probably didn't need the Iron Rand
(42:33):
to make him into an anti communist, but this definitely
makes him into like a libertarian anti communist. During one
article in twenty eleven, he described his ideology as so
strictly libertarian that for a time he was against all
government spending, which he's not now he's very supportive of
like the government spending money to research how rich people
(42:54):
can live longer. So that's that's good. It's nice to
see that people can grow.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah. You know who else has evolved since since the
last time we talked about them is the sponsors of
this podcast. You know, they're moving past their their their
mistakes of like twenty minutes or so ago, losing control
of that orbital habitat to the Peter Teal clones, and
they're moving on, you know, to to greater pastures, blowing
(43:22):
up that orbital habitat primarily. So we'll check back in
with them later and we're back. Noah, have you seen
Alien Resurrection? To these alien resurrection jokes? Hitting I don't
know if anyone seen that.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Remember, I'd like, I cannot recall this alien movie, and
I thought, like, I feel like I saw some spin
off with like a Roman name, like, oh God, Prometheus.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Is that Prometheus? Yes? No, that's that's one of the
ones that was made by Ridley Scott. Again though, see
this was the the fourth Alien was the alien movie
that was written by Joss Whedon as kind of a
backdoor pilot for Firefly. It's a very strange movie, but
it's got Ron Pearlman in it.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I don't know what to say in response to any
of these words.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
No one knows what to say in response to Alien Resurrection,
other than it's the fourth movie in the Alien series, so.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
What will take You?
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Probably shouldn't have hung so many jokes on the fourth
Alien movie you watching.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
I feel like if you're hanging Alien jokes, it's going
to end with, you know, game over man.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, it's that I am the Hudson in this series.
Like I'm realizing that I've led us, I've gotten us
into a or we're in this horrible disaster that I'm
not going to get out of, and now I'm just
firing my gun blindly at the ceiling, trying to escape.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
No, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
But someone in this he just brought up Hudson. Someone
in the.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Subred it will be really excited that you're just keeping
going on this. Oh my god, someone.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
It really is game over man, Game over, game over unbelievable.
So one particularly baffling segment from the Chafkin book involves
Peter's senior yearbook quote, which he credited to the hobbit,
the greatest adventure is what lies ahead today and tomorrow
are yet to be said. Now, you know, that seems
like something a nerdy kid would do, And that's a
(45:26):
perfectly fined yearbook quote. I would go so far as
to say maybe even a little like stereotypical. But when
it comes up in Chafkin's book, chaef gin Actually, this
is one of the areas where I think his analysis
of Peter is a little unfair. Here's what Chafkin writes
about Peter putting that quote in his yearbook. Years later,
he'd say that he memorized the entire passage, which continues
the chances, the changes are all yours to make. The
(45:48):
mold of your life is in your hands to break.
It would become, in a way, the motto of his life,
though it was still at this point a confused life.
The passage is not in fact from Tolkien, who wrote
The Hobbit as well as the load of the Rings
trilogy books Teal obsessed over. It's from a theme song
written by Jules Bass, creative genius behind the nineteen eighties
cartoon ThunderCats for the animated version of The Hobbit, which
(46:10):
came out in nineteen seventy seven. Now, I think maybe
because it's not clear to me that Peter was being
dishonest or making a mistake, Like if he quote, if
he attributed that quote to the Hobbit, that quote is
from the Hobbit. It's from the Hobbit movie. But like,
I don't know if you'd necessarily care to be that
specific about this in like your fucking yearbook. Right, this
(46:32):
isn't an essay you're writing. I think like Chafkin kind
of wanted to point this out as maybe like Teal
not really being a token fan or something like that.
It's kind of unclear to me. I don't think it's
particularly weird that like an eighteen year old kid would
credit the Hobbit animated movie for a quote as the
Hobbit instead of like specifying that like it was it was,
(46:53):
you know, not the book. I think that that may
be a little bit like reaching. But anyway, I guess
you could see this as evidence that Peter wasn't a
big Tolkien fan and just like the animated movies. But
to be honest, if you are quoting from the fucking
Hobbit animated movie of nineteen seventy seven, you're a pretty
big Tolkien nerd.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
It was not a wildly popular movie, although better than
the Hobbit movies we would later get arguably.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
So, yeah, this whole thing seems like nerd like I
think it's a little bit of a little bit of
nerd fighting. Yeah, you're not actually memorizing the.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Book that was from animated movie.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
How dare you? It's not even can And.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
He brings up that the song was written by the
ThunderCats guy to kind of like make it more gents, like, man,
the ThunderCats was fine, Like, we don't need to be
shipping on the ThunderCats here because of what Peter Thial
does in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Come on, man, come on, Chafkin. Look I like Chafkin.
I just disagree with him.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Here there's a Hobbit movie. I thought there was only
a Lord of the Rings movie.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
No, there's definitely a Hobbit movie. We are we are
not talking about the Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, Sophie. We're
talking about the animated Hobbit movie, which is wonderful.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
No, I did watch that one. I did watch that one.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Oh yeah, no, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend like
half a hit acid and just sink down into your
couch and let it happen to you.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
What I know of you, you would recommend a half
a hit acid literally anything, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
It keeps my hand steady when I'm driving, especially if
I've got a trailer. You know, I don't trust anyone
who tows on less than half a hit acid. That's
my advice. Kids out there, Yeah, going shooting? Oh man,
you don't even need tracers. So anyway, whatever I don't need,
(48:49):
we don't need to continue down this. Peter teal.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Like reading into somebody's your book quote, yeah, is like
a little much.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah, maybe Peter didn't, specially by the animated version. And
then a yearbook editor was like, now like, we'll just
say the hobbit. It's fine.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
But anyway, so that much thought into your yearbook quote,
come on.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, it's a yearbook, come on. So A much better
story of Peter actually being a weirdo, which Chaefkin does
also share, comes from one of his few female friends,
who apparently shared with Peter at some point that she'd
been the result of an unplanned pregnancy, right that her
parents had had her without meaning to. Peter wrote in
her yearbook quote, I could never even hypothetically have aborted
(49:30):
you love Peter Teal. That is an odd thing to
write about your friend based on them sharing this with you.
That is that is an odd line. Now, I will say,
that's not a cold statement. It's just weird, right, Like
that is in a way kind of a warm statement. Right.
(49:52):
So I don't know, it doesn't it doesn't entirely comport with,
like Peter can't connect with people, but it definitely comports
with like nobody Peter doesn't quite talk like anyone else, right,
Like nobody else would say this just to a friend.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, unless he wrote in everybody else's your book like.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
That, I would have aborted you. That's everyone else's Peter
deeeal signatures. Yeah. Now, Peter was accepted by Stanford and
started his freshman year at this at the beginning of
Reagan's second term. Now, Stanford at this period was a
major source of thinkers and doers among the conservative movement.
(50:32):
The Hoover Institution, which is a right wing think tank
on campus, gave the world Martin Anderson, who start who
helped create Reaganomics. Right, he's like the author of Reaganomics
as a concept. Many Institute fellows were members of the
Reagan administration. Peter definitely seems to have like seen this
as kind of maybe the path he wanted for himself.
(50:53):
And even though what's interesting to me is he, because
he has this sort of emotional need to be seen
as a contrarian, is the guy going against the grain,
he will always frame higher education as time as Stanford
is like this din of liberals and like leftist rivolity,
right where it's like, this is the school that gave
us the Reagan administration. Right, Like fucking Stanford is not
(51:16):
a hotbed of leftists. You know, there's like liberals and
leftists on campus and leftist clubs, but like one of
the most influential conservative think tanks in the countries is
based out of Stanford. Right. I think the main reason
why Peter has to kind of characterize college this way
is that he just doesn't like college, right, He doesn't
like Stanford, and he primarily seems to dislike Stanford not
(51:39):
because of a political thing, but because all of the
kids there acted like kids. Right. They're all teenagers, They're
not quite grown up, which is what college students are,
and this is annoying to Peter. One of his chief
bugbears was that there was a campus heide and seek game,
which made him very angry, right, the fact that other
(52:00):
people are like, well, he's trying to learn playing hide
and seek. Peter isn't like this. He avoids most parties.
He does not date. Now. He's gay, right, and that's
certainly not nearly as acceptable a thing, even in a
place like Stanford in this period of time. So it's
not exactly weird, and that may play into kind of
part of why he's so frustrated seeing all of his
(52:20):
peers kind of date and socialize when that is not
a thing that's safe for him. I think maybe that
does play into it to some degree. Whenever he could,
rather than hang out with anyone he met on campus,
he would go back home to hang out with his
old friends from high school. Right now, one of his
Stanford peers suggests that he viewed other kids at the
(52:41):
school as deeply unserious. I think there's also an element
of discomfort insecurity and meeting and trying to connect with
new people. Whatever the case, Peter is the weird kid
on campus. Every morning he would leave his dorm room
and walk to the water fountain to take a huge
number of vitamins. One at a time. He seems to
do this in a way that's like deliberately exhibitionist. Classmate
(53:04):
Megan Maxwell alleges base that he kind of does this
to confront other kids, right to set himself apart. Everyone
else is partying and drinking and doing drugs, and every
morning Peter gets out there and slowly takes all of
his supplements so everyone can see him right. Quote, it
was like a ritual. She told Chafkin he was a strange,
strange boy. I don't think she's lying there.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
He studied philosophy at Stanford and This as an undergrad
and was particularly drawn to the work of Renee Girard,
a professor and theorist of social sciences. Girard was particularly
focused on the psychology of desire, or why people want
things and how they decide they want things. From a
twenty twenty one article in The New Yorker by Anna Weener,
(53:51):
Teel was particularly taken with Gerard's concept of mimetic desire.
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,
and he turns to others in order to make up
his mind. Durro wrote, we desire what others desire because
we imitate their desires. Memetic desire involves a surrender of agency.
It means allowing others to dictate ones once, and the
(54:11):
theory goes can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment. It also,
Duri wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve
to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a
group or individual. He thinks this is how people work, right, that, Like,
people's desires are largely based on this kind of like
(54:33):
herd mentality. Right, we're imitating other people's desires that we see,
We like surrender our agency to like let other people
dictate once for us. And this is kind of why
scapegoating is natural and actually is kind of a necessary
thing in order to avoid further mass violence. Right, If
you can scapegoat individuals for problems, you can avoid more
(54:54):
widespread violence. I think one could kind of extrapolate this
into Peter as a member of like the wealthy ruling class,
seeing the scapegoating that conservatives do with migrants or trans
people as a way to like avoid potential you know,
mass violence against his class, right, like the wealthy. But
(55:14):
maybe I'm reading a little bit too much into it there.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
This is he's the he's the scapegoat author guy. You
see also the violence and the sacred guy Gerard. That's
that that that actually makes so much sense.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the fact that
this gets brought I mean, Teal brings up Gerard a lot.
There's a lot of writing Teal has done where he
quotes Gerard talking about memetic desire. So it is not
Chaefgen and others, you know, because I'm quoting directly from
Anna's article here, like they're not going on on a
limb connecting a lot of what he does to Chafgin,
this is like a foundational part of his thinking.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
He's the guy who who wrote a book about like
like sacrifice rituals and he's yeah, he's this makes sense.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
I'm on board with that. I think we should do
more human sacrifice, and I think we should. We need
to be building more pyramids. We don't build enough. We
built that one in a where is it Nashville? Right?
We did have a pyramid in every city, and we
should sacrifice people on them. That's all I'm saying. Noziggarot
(56:16):
guy even gotten by big ziggurat. The brickmakers, have you
in their thrall. There's more material in a zigguratte that's all.
That's why they want it there to walk up to
the walk up.
Speaker 2 (56:29):
Yeah, and then you can throw your human sacrifice off
the top, Yeah don't you. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (56:34):
Yeah, I mean I do like a ziggarot, a solid
ziggarat a good old fashioned step pyramid. Hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
The concept of mimetic desire and the potential use of
violent scapegoating would remain focuses of Peter's thinking on human nature, business,
and politics up to the present day. Two years into
his time on campus, he started a monthly magazine, The
Stanford Review, with one of his high school friends who
went to college with him. The Stanford Review was a
right wing rag. It featured articles accusing professors of being
(57:06):
closet Marxists, columns complaining about non white authors and a
Western culture class, and some very weird takes on the
AIDS epidemic. Here's an excerpt from a column in New
York Magazine by Chafkin. The first issue featured a satirical column,
Confessions of a Sexual Deviant, about a young straight man
who'd chosen to be celibate. According to the Review, it
(57:27):
was almost impossible to visit a men's restroom without witnessing
a gay sex act, or to cross the quad without
having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand. In
nineteen eighty seven, presenting homosexuality as an addiction, a columnist
wrote that unnatural gay men had yielded to temptations so
many times that the fires of lust burn within them,
making it indeed difficult for them to control themselves. During
(57:50):
Teale's last year on campus, his close friend and Review
collaborator Keith Raboy stood outside the home of a Stanford
residential fellow and shouted at the top of his lungs,
f ward, you are going to die of aids. You
are going to get what's coming to you. Two days later,
the Review published the rape issue, with an impassioned defense
of a student who'd pleaded no contest to statutory rape.
(58:13):
So he's this is he's the guy that he's going
to be the rest of his life. By eighty seven,
we can say that there's a lot and because Peter
doesn't like to talk about and I, you know, we'll
talk about the Gawker stuff later. I actually think he's
less in the wrong on that that he tends to
be painted as which is not to say that he's
in the right there, but like he doesn't like talking
(58:35):
about his sexuality. I get the there's like a decent
little chunk of even even up to this day. And
this is not exactly Peter's kind of thing. But I've
interviewed a couple of like gay conservatives who are celibate.
They're like catholic. They believe, they accept that they're homosexual.
(58:56):
They're open about that, but they think it's immoral to
do a thing about it because they're also extremely catholic.
And I see shades of that at least in Peter's
thinking here. Like the fact that he is putting out
these articles about celibacy and about like the the unnatural
and like evil lusts of the gay community and like
AIDS very much feels in line with that to me here.
(59:21):
But you know, we just don't get a ton of
Peter himself talking about but you can see like he
wouldn't be putting out these articles about like how AIDS
is the fault, like by this guy yelling about how
like AIDS is your fault, right if you're gay, If
he didn't, if there wasn't an element of that in
his thinking, right.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Yeah, this young man is extremely broken.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yeah, I mean this is this is the Yeah, the
the fact that you're defending a guy who pled no
contest to statutory rape, the anger about condoms over a
guy who pled no contest to statutory rape. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
I mean, you don't want to judge someone too much
by their you know, corny campus newspapers.
Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
If they move on from it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah, I mean I say this as someone who started
a corny campus newspaper.
Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Like, but I mean that's really it's really beyond the pale,
and it does seem to connect to who this dude
is later, which is like this weird like there's so
much like like hate, both internal and external happening.
Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
You really get why he becomes the guy he becomes
because so much of Peter's modern politics is like the
right wing hating the normies, like fuck the normies kind
of politics, and like a big part of like just
like how much anger there is at you know, Marxists
on campus, they're handing out columns on the quad. It's
just like whatever he sees the people around him are
(01:00:53):
fine with makes him angry. You know that there is
a degree of that in being this kind of dude
in Stanford. Of this period of time now, the late
nineteen eighties are a period in which public rage over
the justices of apartheid had started to reach a fever
pitch two. Right, this is one of the most kind
of salient public issues at the time. Is like the
(01:01:15):
entire Western international community is kind of lining up against
the apartheid regime. There were regular protests on campus and
calls to divest the school from South African financial interests.
According to one source, Peter was not supportive of this.
He was very angry that all of the kids on
campus are anti South Africa. And I want to read now,
(01:01:37):
this is a very interesting chapter of his life. From
a medium post by one of his classmates at Stanford,
Julia Lithcott Hayms. She wrote this about an encounter in
nineteen eighty six, and this is going to be very relevant.
Julie is a black woman. We ran in different circles.
His fiercely libertarian views were often a topic of conversation
(01:01:57):
among those of us living in Branner Hall. Day I
heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid, which was then
still the law of the land in South Africa, which
I found morally repugnant to know that a fellow student,
a dorm mate for that matter, might defend such a
brutally oppressive race based caste system. Gave me the willies,
but I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt,
so I mustered the courage to go to his room
(01:02:18):
and ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect,
that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and
moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even
acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise
for me, a black woman. So, and it's very in
line with the kind of like, well it works economically,
(01:02:40):
the system is economically successful and that's all that matters.
The moral issues are irrelevant, right, just completely that kind
of guy.
Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
I mean, how much of this is just like that's
my dad.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Yeah, well, I mean how much of it is that's
my dad, And just like this reflexive contrarian thing. All
of these kids hate South Africa. I've been there. I
know it's actually a good system because it works economy,
you know, which to my dad, Yeah, yeah, great stuff.
When Julie posted this in twenty sixteen. It went sort
of viral, and Peter issued a response through a spokesperson.
(01:03:16):
Peter has no recollection of a stranger demanding his views
on apartheid. He has never supported it, but he can
easily see how a conversation might be misremembered thirty years later.
And that's interesting, Like, I don't recall talking to this stranger,
but you can easily see how someone could misremember the
conversation that.
Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
I'm not sure happened, if I did it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
If I did it, Yeah, Apartheid Edition. Now, obviously I
don't know that Julie's recollection of events from thirty years
ago is perfectly accurate. No one's are ever right. But
there is some outside corroboration for aspects of Julie's story.
And I'm going to quote from an article an NPR here.
Lifke At Haymes's account of Teel's opinion about apartheid was
(01:03:57):
backed up by Megan Maxwell, a freelance at who also
attended Stanford with Teal. Maxwell, who was also an African American,
told NPR that in a separate incident, Teal also told
her that morality and governments shouldn't be connected, and that
you shouldn't judge a government based on whether it fits
your view of morality. I don't know, man, shouldn't shouldn't
(01:04:17):
you like, isn't that part of how you should judge
a government, whether or not you think it's moral.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Should he's doing anti morality or a morality?
Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Yeah, that it should just matter if it's economically efficient, right.
Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
And then but but then gays are bad on the
other hand.
Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
Yeah, at least he's publishing other people who are writing
about the immorality of homosexual life, right, Yeah, I think interesting, interesting, Peter. Yeah,
part of what's going on here is like Peter is
an outspoken Christian and he is up to the present day,
and that means some very odd the things for a
(01:05:01):
guy who is also like gay and a libertarian. You
know that's going to like, Well, he's.
Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Spoking Christian who doesn't believe that we should judge things
by their morality.
Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
That's what he says here, because he definitely seems to
in other instances believe that we should judge things based
on whether or not they're his definition of moral you know.
Part of and this is not just Peter, this is everyone.
He's not consistent nobody is right like this. We found
a point of inconsistency here. Sure now Peter's present political situation,
(01:05:36):
I will say, when we're talking about his classmates talking
about thirty years ago, you should always read any quote
about someone like this with the perspective of like the
fact that his modern day political stances might be deep,
like post facto coloring people's recollections of him right as
a kid, because nobody's memories are perfect. So I did
(01:05:57):
go looking for other accounts of the man at Stanford,
and I found a few from former classmates of his
on Quora. In one post, Chris Gray recalled he was
very interested in constitutional law and wanted to clerk at
the Supreme Court. He was serious about religion. He went
to the gym frequently to work out. Peter was always
what I would describe as thoughtful and civil in his
(01:06:17):
dealings with people, which is unusual in my experience. He
had a stubborn side and did not typically change his
mind about things. And you know, maybe he was more
friendly to this guy because this guy was more sympatico
to his beliefs. But a lot of that seems like
pretty consistent with other stories you get about Peter. Chris
also recalled that Peter was very interested in another thinker,
(01:06:39):
Leo Strauss. I recall the most interesting thing Peter said
was derived from his understanding of Strauss, which was that
there are not really any facts, just values. Another classmate,
Lance Lance Ishimoto, recalls Peter as an outspoken conservative who
was a part of the Federalist Society and hung out
with Greg Kennedy Justice Kennedy. He went on to note
(01:07:01):
his entrepreneurial nature was also apparent from the way he
and a friend decided to make their own version of
Stanford Laws sweatshirts and sell them at a price forty
dollars that was cheaper than the official ones at the
bookstore seventy five dollars. Yeah, so there you go. Peter
got his BA in nineteen eighty nine and then got
his law degree from Stanford Law. Now that's quite a
(01:07:21):
lot of schooling for a guy that, as an adult
would declare his own personal war on the higher education system.
From Chaefkin and others. It certainly sounds as if some
of this was related to his annoyance with liberal classmates,
but I wonder if a larger reason wasn't the disillusionment
he felt later because of his law career, which is
a spoiler, doesn't work out the way he'd hoped. As
(01:07:43):
Chris recalled, Peter was obsessed in this period as he's
getting out of college, as he's finishing his law degree.
The thing that he wants for his life is not
to be an entrepreneur or a founder. It is to
clerk for the Supreme Court. And one kind of assumes
he's maybe hoping to eventually get on the Supreme Court.
George Packer, writing for The New Yorkers states quote, after
(01:08:03):
graduating from law school and clerking for a federal judge,
he was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship by
Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. And if we're looking
for like the inciting institute incident, of like Peter's turn
towards evil, for like his desire to destroy higher education,
(01:08:23):
what makes him choose the path of becoming like a
corporate founder a venture capitalist? This is why, right his
first choice is he wants to be in working in
and around and with the Supreme Court, and he gets
shot down. He's not this guy who has always been
the best at everything, isn't good enough for Scalia or Kennedy, right,
(01:08:44):
and that that's kind of what sets him on the
path that he's going to go down later, at least
according to a lot of people who knew him at
this point in time.
Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Wow, like the font of Skalia of so much not good,
does one good thing and it backfires utterly and completely
and fucks us all.
Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Yeah, And I wonder if it's just that they can
see the because like, even if you're Scalia, right, you
don't really want to work every day with a reflexive
contrarian right, Like they're not. That's not a guy who's
always whose whole thing is always I have to be
doing a different thing than everyone else, Like I have
to be smarter than everyone else, everyone else who has
(01:09:28):
to be wrong and I have to be right. You
don't want to work with that guy, like that guy sucks.
Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Or maybe because his work wasn't good enough, yeah, or.
Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Maybe maybe maybe his lost shit wasn't good enough, right,
Like I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't
have the ability to judge Peter Thiel's like writing on law.
But whatever the case, he because he's the valictorian of
his high school, he does very well at Stanford, He's
friends with Kennedy's kid, he's he's he's doing everything he
(01:09:56):
should be doing to make this work. Just doesn't work
for him, right, and that does seem to be like
the thing that fucks him up anyway, Noah, how are
you feeling about Peter so far?
Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
I feel like right now, were it kind of like
only somewhat harmful toxic nerd stage, and if the story
ended there would be like, Okay, fine, you know, go ahead, buddy,
Now you get to grow up and live life.
Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
I feel like you'd be a person. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Yeah, Like I feel like there's still like, you know,
the fate is not set at this point.
Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Right, Yeah, I would say the fate is not set.
There's there's a lot of ways that this guy could
go after this. But I also feel like you can
tell that a guy who runs that kind of newspaper
and whose goal is to work for Scalia or Kennedy
probably isn't gonna wind up being like a guy you'd
want to have dinner with, you know, Like, no, this.
Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
Isn't behind the Yeah, guys, you don't want to have
dinner with.
Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
No, no, no, we're not guaranteed he's going to become
a bastard yet, So we'll be hitting that increasingly by
part two. And I'm excited for you to see where
Peter goes after this. Noah, where are you going to
go after this?
Speaker 4 (01:11:18):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
I feel like I'm going to have like several shots
of whiskey. Yeah, after this, I feel like I need it.
Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
Yeah, it's one pm, so that's the right time. Or
a nice, nice stiff drink.
Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
Four o'clock over here, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's four o'clock somewhere. That's why I can
start drinking. All right, Well, I'm going to go listen
to some Jimmy Buffett. You call also go listen to
some Jimmy Buffett and then come back on Thursday.
Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
We need six drinks Jimmy Buffett.
Speaker 4 (01:11:53):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zone Media, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards
Also media, Ah, what's Dick my Cheney's This is Behind
the Bastards, a podcast where every week we talk about
the great decisions being made by the Democratic Party, which
this week includes really really burnishing their Dick Cheney credentials.
We'll see how that works out in about three weeks
(00:24):
with me to talk about, you know something related to
this election is our lovely Yeah, is our lovely guest
today A contributing writer at Rolling Stone and contributing editor
at Wired, Noah Shackedman. Noah, welcome to the podcast program show.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
You gave this very confused look in between. My first
and last name was over time.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I wrote your the stuff you wanted me to, because
we have a different intro for you this time. I
wrote it up at the top of the piece, And
so the top of the piece is just the words
Peter Teel because that's the sub of our episodes. So
at the top of my article it says contributing writer
Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, Peter Teal And wait
a second while, so I had to like catch my
(01:09):
brain and fix it in between.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Look, I welcome my new colleague.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, Peter Teel would be a great guest on the program.
But I wouldn't do Peter Teal for the you know what,
I might do Dick Cheney for the Peter Teal episode
about who does me? Yeah, Peter Teal? Noah oh Man,
So yeah, Noah. How do you feel about being friendly
(01:37):
with Dick Cheney. It's a good decision. Is this going
to work out for the Harris campaign?
Speaker 2 (01:42):
You know?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:44):
I am not incredibly bullish on the old befriending war
criminal campaign strategy.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's the it's an impart a decision you make if
like you don't understand Republicans because like I grew up loving,
like with a family that loved George W. Bush right,
Like he was a hero in my household as a kid,
and no one liked Dick Cheney, Like they didn't hate him,
but like he was not a figure of admiration to
(02:16):
anyone in my family, like because he was. That was
kind of the point of Dick Cheney is he was
like the guy behind the scenes that you don't need
to like very much. It's just confusing to me that
they think there's a bunch of Republicans out there who
will change their vote based on this.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
It was wild at the DNZ how credible it was
that this rumor that George W. Bush was going to
come out and speak at the DNC.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
I would have lost my mind.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Everyone was like, Oh, he's coming, He's coming.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It was.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
It was like more credible than Beyonce.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
It's happening here. Yeah, there's there's still time. There's still time,
and you know who. I don't know if he's he's
got a chance to be worse than George W. Bush.
I wouldn't say he's there yet. Peter Teal, Peter Tele Uh,
And that's what we're going to talk about when we
come back from the cold open to warm things up
(03:06):
a little bit. Noah, so we're back, Peter Teal, how
would you describe in brief if someone is like, hey,
I hear there's this Peter tele guy who's influencing elections
or whatever. Who is he? How would you describe Peter Teal?
What would be your like elevator, Like, Oh, that's who
(03:27):
this guy is.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
He's like the power behind like the weirdest curtain.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
I guess this is how I would describe it, like
deeply strange, deeply influential. I think it would be my
elevator pitch.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Yeah, Yeah, he's I would say, like, he's the guy
whose money is responsible for getting Oh shit, what's his name?
The hillbilly jd Vance started. He's the guy who you know,
like backed Trump pretty early on in twenty sixteen. He
was the you know, the billionaire who came up and
(04:06):
endorsed him at the RNC that year and talked about
how like he was supporting the Republicans as a gay man.
These are all glad about Peter Teeter.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
I'm really glad you're able to forget jd Vance's name
like that. That feels That feels healthy to me.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah. It took a lot of work and a lot
of gas station substances, but I managed to do it,
and managed to do it. It was mixing the kraton
Clemato and then one of those yellow jackets truckers take together.
I reached a state of what I think the Buddhists
called nirvana, and yeah, all knowledge of jd Vance fled
(04:40):
from my mind.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Dude, I'm gonna fucking throw up on a keyboard. Yeah,
I mean, it seems like it's like in the weirdo
crypto fascist right, if you follow the roots down far enough, it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
All comes back to Peter. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
And there's a couple of ways of looking at Tel.
One of them is he is a capitalist Lenin, And
what I mean by that, I'm not comparing the two
like ideologically, but Lenin is a guy who grew up
kind of in the upper middle class strata of his
society and from an extremely early age hated the system
(05:23):
that he lived under because his brother was killed by
the czar, and dedicated himself to its destruction, and he
went about destroying that system very methodically and very effectively. Right,
Peter is a guy who grew up in the upper
middle class strata of his culture always seems to have
hated the systems that ran the country he lived in,
(05:46):
and dedicated himself from an early age at getting resources
and then kind of methodically destroying the system, which is
representative democracy, that he lived under. That's one way of
looking at Peter. The other is that Peter is a
guy who is fairly intelligent, has okay instincts, but not
as good as he thinks they are, and he's just
(06:08):
kind of been careening from point to point, making gambles
that have led him to this position where he is
now backing the Republicans to the hilt in order to
hopefully crumble the system of democracy enough that like he
gets to rule his own little bitty city somewhere on
the West coast, right, Like one of them is Peter
(06:31):
Teel is the master Plotter, and the other is that
he's this kind of like reactive figure. And I don't
actually know which is the better way to look at
this guy is some of it's got to come down
to like personal preference. But he's an interesting character, and
I think he's probably, of all of the figures on
the right now, one of the ones that it's more
(06:54):
it's easiest to kind of respect at an intellectual level
because he's very smart and he's succeeded in a lot
of his Like the reason why the master Plottery thing
kind of has a lot of traction is he's been
very successful in a lot of his goals over time,
Like he's been willing to, he's been able to. He
has a degree of like focus and discipline that's fairly
(07:15):
rare on the right.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, it's pretty weird, wells, isn't he also like drinking
the blood of younger people or something like that.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
We're going to talk about that later on in the series.
It's unclear to me if he's ever drank any young
people's blood, but he's definitely been accused of it and
has like expressed an interest in it. I think the
guy who definitely is drinking young people's blood is Brian Johnson.
That like like rich founder dude who's obsessed with reducing
(07:44):
his biological age back to seventeen. He takes his son's
blood as a supplement. Really yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I
mean he brags about it. Yeah, Like he's very open
about that. Peter has always Peter is on the record
to say I don't do that. He was just kind
of He's invested in a lot of companies that did
anti aging stuff, some of which like we're looking into
(08:07):
plasma replacement, right, But it's unclear if he ever did it,
and if he didn't do it, it would be because
like he just didn't think it worked. He is a
big advocate of taking human growth hormone as an anti
aging supplement. So I think it's one of those things
where if he doesn't, if he hasn't done the young
people's blood thing, it's just because he decided the science wasn't.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
There, or he's just so fucking roided out that he's.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Just yeah, the ruids have given him enough blood. There's
no more room for blood in Peter's body. So no,
Like many of the worst things on this earth, Peter
Teel began in Germany, Frankfort to be specific, where he
was born on October eleventh, nineteen sixty seven. His father, Klaus,
(08:56):
was a chemical engineer who the very next year, sixty eight,
got high by a consulting firm that specialized in heavy industry,
including oil and gas refining. The founder of the company,
Arthur G. McKee, had owned a series of steel foundries
in the Cleveland area, where the Teals moved in nineteen
sixty eight. So now, at this point, and I think
(09:17):
this is probably clue to most of our listeners, in
nineteen sixty eight, Cleveland is just a series of river
fires with some subjects attached, right Like, It's not the
city we know and tolerate today. It's nothing but the
kyah Hogan burning and a couple of soot drenched houses.
And the reason the Kyahogue is always on fire is
guys like Arthur McKee, who runs steel boundaries.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So that is that Peter grows up with his dad
kind of working in the destroying the planet industry, Like
he's an oil and gas man working for an industrial
magnate in fucking Cleveland. So Klaus works for a firm
in Cleveland for a couple of years while he gets
his graduate degree, and in nineteen seventy one, when Peter
was four, his parents have a second child, Patrick now
(10:03):
tealsby biographer Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, which is
a book that will be a sizable source for this.
Although I do have some disagree. I think Chaefkin's a
very good writer, good biographer. There's a couple of areas
where I disagree with them that we'll talk about here.
But yeah, he has described Klaus and Peter's mom Suzanne,
(10:23):
as fanatical Republicans who were absolutely gaga for Nixon. That
may be true, you know, chaef Cains certainly knows more
about this than me. However, Peter disagrees with that characterization
of his parents. He doesn't seem to have considered them
to have been fanatical Republicans or religious extremists, and chaf
Can also kind of paints them as Christian like hardcore
(10:45):
Christian conservatives. Peter is an outspoken Christian. It's unclear to
me again, if this is just Peter disliking the description
of himself and his parents as extremists, or if this
is that Chase can you know, maybe doesn't have all
of the context. We don't get a lot of detail
about Teale's parents, so it's not perfectly clear, right. Chaefkin
(11:10):
describes his father as cold, bordering on cruel at times. Again,
this is a characterization Peter would disagree with, at least
publicly in terms of like stories that paint that picture
of his dad is cruel. I don't see a lot
of really good detailed evidence about it. The story that
(11:31):
Chafkin cites is kind of evidence of how cold and
cruel Peter's dad was. Is a story that Peter tells
a lot. Two biographers I've seen this or two interviewers
I've seen this story recounted in a couple of different
articles that interviewed Peter before Chaefgin's biography came out. And
the story is that one day, when Peter is a
little kid, like maybe four or five, he was looking
at a rug in the family home that was made
(11:53):
from a cow hide, and he asked his dad where
did this rug come from? And Klaus, matter of fact,
they explained that it was made from a dead cow.
Peter asked, like, what what does it mean that something's dead?
And his dad told him, quote, death happens to all animals,
all people. It will happen to me one day, it
will happen to you one day. And Chafkin describes this
as a moment of like brutal honesty, and he kind
(12:15):
of insinuates that it may have done some damage to Peter,
writing that he quote would return to the cow and
the brutal finality of the thing again and again, even
in middle age. Now, it does seem to be accurate
that Peter is stuck in his mind. I just don't
know that I consider that a brutal description of death.
That seems like, you know, kind of just factual, right,
(12:38):
Like I had a conversation with my dad about death
that wasn't all that different from this, right, Like, it
happens to everything, it'll happen to me, it'll happen to you.
Like how else do you explain death to a kid? Right?
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Yeah, Yeah, I mean I don't know. That feels like
pretty like a pretty weak antecedent for everything that's about
to transpire.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
I think what's going on here is that Peter is
obsessed with death and dying.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
He's put a huge amount of money into like reversing
aging and anti senizence and all this kind of stuff.
So like, he clearly is a guy who's obsessed with
his own mortality, and like you're looking for evidence of
that in his childhood, and he does tell this story.
He told The New Yorker in twenty eleven that this
was a quote very very disturbing day. So obviously this
(13:23):
does stick in his mind. But I don't know that
that makes the case that his dad is like cold
because this I just don't see it from that anecdote.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Obviously that's one anecdote. We're talking about a whole childhood,
So that doesn't mean that he was not cold. I
just don't I feel like what we may get from
the fact that this story fucks Peter up so much
says less about his dad and more about like who
Peter is as a person, because I think most of
us have this experience and like don't grow up dedicated
(13:54):
to conquering mortality, whereas kind of like, oh yeah, everything dies,
all right, well, I better figure out something I'm going
to do with my life, right yeah, yeah, you know,
like gas station drugs. That was my That was my decision,
which I think if Peter had gotten into that just
by some of these trucker pills, Peter, you know, yeah,
(14:14):
they'll keep you, they'll keep you alive forever, as well
as HGH will. So anyway, Peter has never made peace
with death, or what he calls the ideology of the
inevitability of the death of every individual. I also love
that the ideal. It's not an ideology, man, it's just
(14:34):
a fact. That's like, that's like seeing some people who
are like staying back from a cliff's edge on a
windy day and be like, oh, you've fallen for the
ideology of dying in a fall.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
Come on the ideal, man, the inevitability of the death
of every individual.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, I think I've had conversations with anti seatbelt guys
about like the ideology of safety of like a nanny
state culture, and it's like, no, man, I just don't
want to diet at car crash.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
This huge old libertarian right.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Oh yeah, as all hell. Well, you see nowadays, I
don't know if you'd call it that, but he definitely
comes out of libertarianism.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, and so, and when I think of libertarians, I
think of like people who never evolved past like second
semester freshman dorm room, uh ideology, And that feels very
much like the like the the the ideology of the
inevitability of death feels very like third bong hit freshman
(15:37):
year dorm room.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Yeah, dude, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. You know
what I will say for libertarians, I always have to
give a little bit of pushback just because of where
I come out there. You've got your two kinds, You've
got your like dorm room. I'm gonna read fucking Murray
Rothbard and basically become a fascist whenever anyone suggests I
(16:01):
pay my fair share in taxes Libertarians, which Peter is no, no, no,
My kind the kind that I respect are I'm not.
I wouldn't say I'm there now, but I have I
do have a degree of respect and love for Like
after the big hurricane in North Carolina, you had like
several dozen guys who owned their own helicopters and often
built their own helicopters, who like flew in just because
(16:24):
they're like they're like helicopter libertarians. I like my helicopter
libertarians where it's like I just don't trust the States,
so I bought my own helicopter a disaster rescue. Those
guys are fine.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, yeah, although are those the same guys that also
were the militia that tried to interfere with.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Those guys were in trucks. Those guys were in trucks.
That might be yet another different kind of libertarian Helicopterah,
we're very very pro helicopter libertarian in this ass. Those
guys are fine. So yeah, that's a Peter's like kind
(17:05):
of inciting incident.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Right.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
If you're making the Peter Teal movie, you started with
his dad explaining death to him while looking at this
cowhide rug. Now, shortly after that conversation, his dad decides
to move the family away from Cleveland, usually a good
decision and live every engineer's dream, which is, of course
helping South Africa build a uranium mind. You know what
(17:31):
engineer doesn't want to live that? So the Teal family
moves to South Africa kind of yeah, I mean they're
technically in South Africa. Peter's parents send him to an expensive,
whites only private school called Pridwin. According to the school's website,
it was founded in nineteen twenty three as a non
denominational school rooted in Christian ethics and values. Today, the
(17:56):
Pridwood website prominently features numerous stock photos of non white kids.
So it does seem like maybe things have been forced
to move forward there. But when Peter went there, it
would have taught racial separation as an obvious good and
a necessity. Right this is we're talking South Africa in
the seventies, right after Pridwen. Peter went to a German
(18:18):
language public school. He was a good student. He always
does well in school, but these are not happy years
for him, at least his chafkin paints it quote. A
picture from that era shows a sullen boy in shorts,
knickers and a tie carrying an adult sized briefcase. A
grade school classmate in Namibia, George erb recalled Teal as
smart but withdrawt. He had that distinct, striking smart look
(18:41):
about him, almost like he seemed bored. Rb said, we
didn't really mingle a lot with Peter in school, though
we always knew the miners' kids would not stay long
in town. Now, as he noted here, I said that
they moved to South Africa. They are, though actually not
in what in South Africa. They were in Namibia, which
a big chunk of Namibia is governed and run by
(19:01):
South Africa. At this point, right at the time, a
lot of what we call Namibia today was known to
South Africans as South West Africa, and it was governed
under a military occupation, as if it were essentially the
little brother of the apartheid state. The whole reason that
South Africa has a uranium mine comes down to environmental
(19:23):
regulations in western nations. Around this period, some of the
very earliest waves of uranium had been mined in places
like the US and Australia. But pretty quickly, once it
becomes clear that we're going to need a lot of uranium,
it also becomes clear that like uranium mining is really
bad for the environment, so we'd better do that a
lot in Africa, right, like a big bit. Actually, King
(19:43):
Leopold's old colony in the Cargo becomes a major source
of uranium mining, and Namibia in this period becomes the
fourth largest global producer of uranium. During the Cold War,
when we are using up quite a lot of the stuff,
so That's why South Africa is a big. Part of
why South Africa is so hesitant to give up their
(20:03):
occupation of Namibia is like, Namibia has a shitload of
uranium and South Africa wants that for several reasons, none
of them good. Now, the managing and engineering staff at
the mine where Klaus worked was white. The workforce were
largely migrants on one year contracts for white families. This
was a good job. You had good access to medical care,
(20:24):
you had nice houses. You're basically living in a company
town that is built for the white employees of this mine.
There's a country club there, there's quality schools. Things are
a lot uglier for the contract workers who are being
brought in to do a lot of the heavy lifting
at the mine. Now, much of this ugliness came from
the fact that South Africa was not allowed to be
(20:45):
in Southwest Namibia. Right, They are not supposed to be
occupying this chunk of Namibia. The UN had ordered them
to leave in nineteen sixty six, but by the time
the Teals moved into the country, South Africa had yet
to move their troops out. This is like nineteen seventy
to one or two, right, So they've overstayed their visa
(21:06):
by quite a while. But you don't really need a
visa if you have enough guns.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, this whole thing is fucking grim man. Yeah, it's
parteid uranium. Mind, just fucking grim.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Peter's childhood is in an apartheid uranium mine.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Like I thought Elon Musk had liken uh kind of
like super villain origin story with the emerald mine. But
the uranium not really trumps.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Honestly, bro, I'll take an emerald mine over this any
day in a fucking week. So in nineteen seventy three,
the ICC, the International Criminal Court, upheld that you in
ruling and said again South Africa, you've got to leave Namibia.
This is not your country. What are you doing there,
to which South Africa says, we are getting a lot
of uranium and we're not going to leave. This leads
(21:57):
to sanctions against the sale of minerals from mine and
occupied Namibia, sanctions that are ignored by much of the West.
And I'm going to just quote read about that via
a quote I found on the website Mining Sea. The
decree warned that anyone found extracting and selling minerals from
Namibia would be held liable beneficiaries to Namibia's minerals, including
(22:19):
Britain and the United States, except Sweden did not honor
the decree when uranium production from Rossing would satisfy Britain's
ten percent demand. So because uranium was so needed for
this build up, basically a lot of the West was like, no, fuck,
what the UN says, We're going to keep paying South
Africa for their uranium because we really need it right
(22:41):
tale as old as time now. The company that ran
the mine where Klaus worked as a contractor was called
Rio Tinto, and they had You're not going to be
surprised to hear that this illegal uranium mine company has
an evil history, but they have like a comically evil history.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I feel like I've heard a name before.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. So in the late nineteen thirties,
Rio Tino had called on Francisco Franco to use his
soldiers to crush left wing miners protesting against bad working
conditions in Spain. The head of the company at the
time Sir auckland Getty's, which is such an evil mine
owner's name, What an amazing evil Sir auckland Getty's. Jesus
(23:25):
Getty's brag that quote miners found guilty of trouble making
our quote martialed and shot big fan of Franco the
leaders of Rio Tento. As another interesting side note, Noah,
Rio Tinto was also a major source of raw materials
for the Nazi rearmament campaign. These are the guys that
build the Wehrmacht back up into fighting shape. Thank God.
(23:47):
You know where would we be without Rio Tinto.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
God?
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Yes, Now, by the early seventies there were no more
Nazis to arms, so Rio said about finding their next
best equivalent, which is of course s apartheid South Africa.
Right now, since they're running an illegal uranium mine and
occupied Namibia, they're like, why not go full fascist? And
they decide to operate their facilities in Namibia like a
(24:17):
concentration camp. And I'm going to quote from an article
by the London Mining Network. Here, black workers constructing the
Rossing uranium mine lived in appalling conditions in temporary camps,
which researchers found akin to slavery. By akin to slavery,
it means that actually leaving work for any meaning, but
being for any reason, but being dismissed by your manager
(24:38):
was a crime, workers who misplaced or forgot their ID
badge could be jailed. Now, the fact that someone might
get hired to consult at such a mind doesn't imply
that they were involved with setting up or executing any
of these policies, but it does suggest that one was
broadly fine with them. As Max Chafkin writes, a contract
(24:59):
laborer on the Construs Auction project, the project Klaus's company
was helping to oversee, who said workers had not been
told they were building a uranium mine and were thus
unaware of the risks of radiation. The only clue had
been that white employees would hand out wages from behind glass,
seemingly trying to avoid contamination themselves. The report mentioned workers
dying like flies in nineteen seventy six while the mine
(25:20):
was under construction.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
So this is so bad.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
This is pretty evil.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
To illegal apartheid uranium mining concentration camp.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Yeah, yeah, that's Peter's dad's job and some of his
earliest memories as a kid.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
And he's disturbed by like Bessie the coin.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
What, Peter, If you want to end death, the first
step might be ending illegal uranium mines. If you just
care about death as a concept.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
I cannot believe how cartoonish is.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
It's so funny. It's like the funniest bad story he
could have just being the guy he is coming from.
This is a background like a lot of these guys,
like Elon Musk, there's this period of time in musks
backstories like, oh, well, he is this kid who's moved
around about. His family sucks, his dad's this abusive monster.
(26:15):
He's bullied as a kid. It's a really sad like
I can see how he you know, there's a I
can see how a couple of different kinds of kid
could have come out of this, some of them who
would have been a lot better than Musk was right,
Maybe he wasn't always destined to be the kind of
guy he is. With Teal, you're like, oh, yeah, no,
this is this childhood. Was Taylor made to produce Peter Teal?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
You know what else was Taylor made to produce Peter
Tel Noah, Yeah. The sponsors of our show are attempting
to breed clones of Peter Teel in a tank. It's
kind of like that the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection,
down to the fact that they are mixing Peter Teal's
jeans with Sigourney we So let's see what happens everybody,
(27:02):
you know, We'll see what happens. We're back and in
the time that we were off air, the Peter Teel
Sigourney Weaver clones escaped containment in our in our our
our sponsors orbital base. Things do not seem to be
(27:23):
going well. Sorry, air, that was probably predictable. Anyway, We'll
keep you updated on the situation. So we're talking about
uranium mining in South Africa, which is getting South Africa
in trouble. And it's one of those things where if
it was if it had just been about the money
(27:43):
South Africa could make exporting uranium, it probably wouldn't have
been worthwhile to piss off the whole international community to
keep this mine open. But that's not the only reason
why South Africa wants the uranium mine. A big part
of why they insisted on keeping this thing operational was
that they are an unpopular apartheid government that is in
(28:04):
the process of becoming a global pariah. They are dealing
with something of an extential of an existential pr crisis
because of all of like the racism and violence that
the world is watching them do, and the white rulers
of the country decided the best way for them to
gain long term security for the regime was to get
nuclear weapons, even if they had to break international law
(28:26):
to do so. Right, And South Africa does eventually construct
a handful of very illegal nukes, right. They are not
supposed to have these internationally, No one's supposed to be
allowed to be arming themselves with new nukes. South Africa
makes their nukes and it does not, as you may
be aware, keep the apartheid regime in power. You know,
(28:48):
the government does in fact fall and in a kind
of unique historical case, before the government hands over power
to the ANC which is, you know, the party that
over as apartheid goes out, they disassemble all of their
nuclear weapons. To this day, this makes South Africa the
(29:08):
only nation to have ever made nuclear weapons and given
them up voluntarily. Obviously Ukraine receive had nuclear weapons when
the USSR crumbled and gave those up. But South Africa
actually like makes their own nuclear weapons independently and then
disassembles them and stops being a nuclear power. And that's
a unique thing in history. Although they do it, I
(29:30):
think mainly for reasons of racism.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
It's still pretty wild. I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting story. So while Peter's dad
was I don't know how you again, how you want
to parse out his complicity here, but he is adjacent
to some very bad things.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
While his dad's doing this, Peter himself gets very little
that seems to be good from his two and a
half three years in Africa. He mostly claims to have
played alone a lot near the family house. He started
to develop a habit for comp heative chess, and he
became a voracious leader less than three years. After less
than three years away, the family decides they just haven't
(30:07):
had enough Cleveland and they move back. Yeah. Then as
soon as they're back in Cleveland, they're like, oh shit,
Cleveland is still not a great place to live. The
Rivers have not stopped being on fire. So they move
one last time to the Bay Area. Their specific final
residence is Foster City, which is just northwest of San
(30:28):
Jose and south of San Francisco. Proper, it's a fairly
affluent town and in the late nineteen seventies, Teals family
seems like they probably would have qualified as upper middle class, right,
and this is what you tend to see with the
first and second generation of tech industry giants. Guys like
Gates and Jobs all come from or move to similar
(30:48):
parts of California, and they're all kind of at a
similar level of family affluence.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Right.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Their parents are not like rich, they're not going to
inherit generational wealth, but their parents have enough money to
shower their kids with attention and educational opportunities that really
weren't available before. And in part because of some of
the decisions guys like this make aren't going to be
available after, you know, lease not do as many kids now.
(31:15):
In terms of the parenting situation, because Gates Bill Gates's
parents doting absolutely like obsessed with his development and health.
Steve's parents again doting like really really like caring parents
who were very much focused on their child doing well.
It is unclear to me how much attention Peter gets.
This is kind of an open questions. It's left as
(31:36):
an open question. In Chafkin's book, Peter does not seem
to embrace like the claims that his parents were very
strict or you know, fanatical conservatives, but we also get
very little of them in his stories, right, which is
very different from like, Steve Jobs told a lot of
stories about his parents, right, and so did Gates. So
I don't really know if this is a case of,
(31:57):
you know, he didn't want to say much about his parents,
that this is an area of insecurity form, or if
it's just he's not a guy who's super talkative about
his background, which he definitely isn't you know. That may
just explain it, But it does seem that his parents
are not kind of central to his feelings or ambitions
in the same way that they really seem to have
(32:18):
been for a lot of other like tech industry icons
that came up in a similar place in period. We
do know as a child, Peter Teel is a massive nerd.
He is one of the first wave of like really
big nerds, and he's particularly a fantasy nerd for his
kind of fantasy and sci fi. He reads The Lord
of the Rings as a little kid, he falls in
(32:39):
love with Tolkien. He would later claim that he memorized
the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I suspect is
probably overstating things. That's a lot to memorize, Yeah, yeah,
three thousand pages. Yeah, that's that might be a little much.
I don't know how much I believe that, but I just.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Remember the English or the Yet.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Did he have the Elvish down? Does he know the
Black speech by heart?
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Speaks at all? Maybe folks so much? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, the very few journalists know the Black speech. As
you might imagine from a kid who at least probably
meant memorized passages from the Lord of the Rings, Peter
gets bullied a lot, right, not super surprising from this kid.
He's also very small and skinny, and according to one peer,
he gets pushed around a lot as a little kid.
(33:37):
This may have had something to do with what seems
to have been a flair for escapism. In addition to
loving Tolkien, Peter is one of the very first Dungeons
and Dragons players, right, He and his because D and
D has just come out while he is a kid,
and he is he and his friends are playing it
while it is very new. They they played every single weekend,
and this is This may have caused a degree of
(33:59):
life a conflict with his parents, because there are at
least some stories that his parents they couldn't play, He
couldn't play at his house because his parents, being very
strict Christians, thought that D and D was evil. Again,
this is one of those things. Is that totally accurate?
I don't know. He definitely played a lot of D
and D. It may have been a kind of thing
(34:19):
that he had to skirt around his family because it is.
And there's this thing that you get from Peter that
everyone will say about him, which is that like he's
a habitual contrarian. Whatever people are doing, he has to
be doing the opposite. There's this big moral panic against
dungeons and dragons at the time. It very much fits
in with that that he would want to be playing
(34:40):
this game that a lot of people in his life
and like maybe even his parents consider to be evil.
That is very like fitting with the guy Peter Teel
is like whatever the people around him are saying is bad,
That's what Peter's going to want to do, right. Yeah.
Outside of that, his main hobby seems to have been
Chess's extremely good at this. He was generally ranked number
(35:03):
one by his school chess club. He plays a lot
of speed chess. He probably could have been a professional
chess guy, but he has some There's some quotes he
makes later where he's like, I had to choose between
chess and everything else in life, Right, I just get
too obsessed with it. George Packer, writing for The New Yorker,
summarizes his chest kit was decorated with a sticker carrying
(35:24):
the motto born to Win. On the rare occasions when
he lost in college, he swept the pieces off the board.
He would say, show me a good loser, and I'll
show you a loser. So maybe not I guy you
want to play with, right, Jesus Christ. Yeah, A little
bit of a dick. This is the kind of guy
who I don't know. Again, I'm a big believer in
(35:46):
the fact that everyone who's proud of their chess performance
should get into the real game of skill. Warhammer forty
thousand fish shows your real skill, Peter paint some fucking orcs?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Do you have? Born to Win?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I haven't actually tattooed. You can't see it. The camera
blots out my tattoos. But I've got like one of
those throat tattoos. I got a sticking poke when I
was in prison that just says born to Win. And
it's got a picture of an orc on it. Yeah,
h correct, Yeah, yeah, it's good. It really makes me
popular at the gaming store with the fourteen year olds.
(36:27):
So Chaefkin has my favorite story of Peter and his
chess phase because it is the one that makes me
actually kind of hopeful that we can beat this guy eventually. Quote.
Once at a tournament, he was playing a scrimmage match
for fun in between games and seemed to be only
half paying attention. His opponent was inexperienced and not aware
of what was happening, put Peter in check. Then he realized,
(36:48):
to both of their surprise that it was checkmate. Peter
became visibly distraught and was unable to regain his composure
for the rest of the tournament and lost the rest
of the matches he played. A defeat, even a meaningless
one was too much to handle. Yeah, okay, that's been
a little hopeful. There a little bit of motivation for
you kids.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah yeah, maybe wasn't so born to win.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Yeah. So among the nerds, Peter was king. He was
the most academically gifted of his friends, and I suspect
was the best at doing things like cooking up overpowered
characters in Dungeons and Dragons. He had a fantastic memory,
and he expounded upon different short stories and novels by
guys like Asimov and Clark with a faculty that would
have embarrassed most adults. He's the kind of guy who
(37:31):
can like quote passages of stories he likes from memory.
One of Peter's nerdy peers said that he and others
were quote in awe of Teal, but added, I don't
know that he had any close friends. So he's got
like some peers, but maybe not a lot of people
that he like actually entrusts any pieces of himself too
(37:52):
in any meaningful way. Right, Again, a lonely person in
a lot of ways. Peter is genuinely described by the
kids he spent time around the way wizards were in
Peter's favorite fantasy novels as this like mysterious figure. He
can do great and terrifying things, but who's also fundamentally
separate from all of the people around him.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Right, that's your characterization. You're calling him a wizard, or
he called himself a wizard.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
No, no, no, that's just kind of my description based on
what other kids said about Peter, right that he's like,
we're in awe of him. He could do all these
amazing things, but we didn't really understand him. He seemed
to be like someone who was fundamentally separate. It's kind
of like the way Gandolf is written in The Lord
of the Rings, Right, Wizards are these like mysterious and
kind of frightening figures that you can't ever really get that,
(38:39):
Like they're kind of a knowable in certain senses. Right,
That's just kind of the way other kids talked about.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Peter seems more Seramone than Gandolph.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
He's definitely I mean, he's going to build a company
named Palette here, so yeah, that's probably a fair fair note.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
No.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
As he became a teenager, the bullying changed from physical
violence to sillier shit that was also calculated to make
him feel unwelcome and othered. One example would be that
a group of kids frequently stole for sale signs from
around the neighborhood and set them up on Peter's lawn,
and then they would harass them about it the next
day school, being like, hey, when are you moving right,
(39:17):
and like that actually legitimately does suck, Peter, if you're listening,
that's like a really shitty thing this kids did to you.
I'm sorry, that's a bummer, you know, you can like
that's that's kind of like probably more devastating than the
physical violence like people stealing lawn signs to like make
it clear we want you and your family to leave. Like, yeah,
(39:39):
I can see, I can see how that feeds into
a guy becoming like Peter is. By the time the
high school years come around, You've got this kind of
misanthropic genius who spends his free time escaping reality and competing,
you know, in order to show everyone how smart he is,
right when he's The only times he wants to engage
(39:59):
with a people is when he can beat them in
a contest of wits. Otherwise he likes to kind of
focus on his fantasy worlds. One friend described his general
attitude as fuck you world. Now. I think we all
knew or were to some degree, kids like that. Right,
this is going to sound very familiar, like as a
(40:19):
kid who grew up like bullied and nerdy. Aspects of
this are familiar to me.
Speaker 2 (40:25):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Peter also, it's interesting maintains this attitude while managing to
be the best student in his school. Right, he is
going to be the valedictorian. He's an exceptional student academically,
so he has both this kind of anger at normal
kids and the world around him, and also this attitude
that's reinforced by the social structures of his world, that
(40:46):
like he's better than everyone else in an important way. Now,
his classmates, interviewed by Chaefgins, seem to suggest that Peter
and kind of everyone at their school are obsessed with
getting like this. This is a school where the kids,
you know, their parents are high achievers. Everyone is obsessed
with getting into good colleges. This was seen as the
(41:06):
past of success at the time, and Peter's parents, if
they were strict, were probably pushing him hard to get
the best grades possible so that he could get into
the best school. Right. This is and this is going
to be important later he grows up being told by
all the authority figures in his life what matters most
is getting into a good college. Right That is like
the number one priority you have to have as a kid.
(41:29):
I don't know when I went to school that was
the priority that was really rammed home to me by
my parents. So I don't have trouble believing that this
is the case for Peter, and it's He's going to
get very angry at this later in his life. This
is going to be a major motivating factor in his
life the idea that like he was forced to value
higher education, which he fundamentally thinks is not a valuable
(41:51):
thing in the same way that his parents did, and
he's really angry about it. He's kind of never forgiven
the concept of academia for this. He graduates in eighty
five as the valedictorian of San Mateo High. During the
later years in public school, he had moved on from
Tolkien and Asimov to Einrand, And you know, this kind
(42:12):
of helps nurse the strain of vigorous anti communist sentiment
that would have you know, this would have been a
part of his upbringing. Anyway, We're talking like Silicon Valley
in the seventies. You know, it's a lot of defense
industry stuff is out there. It is not a radical
left hotbed. So he probably didn't need the Iron Rand
(42:33):
to make him into an anti communist, but this definitely
makes him into like a libertarian anti communist. During one
article in twenty eleven, he described his ideology as so
strictly libertarian that for a time he was against all
government spending, which he's not now he's very supportive of
like the government spending money to research how rich people
(42:54):
can live longer. So that's that's good. It's nice to
see that people can grow.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah. You know who else has evolved since since the
last time we talked about them is the sponsors of
this podcast. You know, they're moving past their their their
mistakes of like twenty minutes or so ago, losing control
of that orbital habitat to the Peter Teal clones, and
they're moving on, you know, to to greater pastures, blowing
(43:22):
up that orbital habitat primarily. So we'll check back in
with them later and we're back. Noah, have you seen
Alien Resurrection? To these alien resurrection jokes? Hitting I don't
know if anyone seen that.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Remember, I'd like, I cannot recall this alien movie, and
I thought, like, I feel like I saw some spin
off with like a Roman name, like, oh God, Prometheus.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Is that Prometheus? Yes? No, that's that's one of the
ones that was made by Ridley Scott. Again though, see
this was the the fourth Alien was the alien movie
that was written by Joss Whedon as kind of a
backdoor pilot for Firefly. It's a very strange movie, but
it's got Ron Pearlman in it.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I don't know what to say in response to any
of these words.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
No one knows what to say in response to Alien Resurrection,
other than it's the fourth movie in the Alien series, so.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
What will take You?
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Probably shouldn't have hung so many jokes on the fourth
Alien movie you watching.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
I feel like if you're hanging Alien jokes, it's going
to end with, you know, game over man.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yeah, it's that I am the Hudson in this series.
Like I'm realizing that I've led us, I've gotten us
into a or we're in this horrible disaster that I'm
not going to get out of, and now I'm just
firing my gun blindly at the ceiling, trying to escape.
Speaker 3 (44:54):
No, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
But someone in this he just brought up Hudson. Someone
in the.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Subred it will be really excited that you're just keeping
going on this. Oh my god, someone.
Speaker 1 (45:04):
It really is game over man, Game over, game over unbelievable.
So one particularly baffling segment from the Chafkin book involves
Peter's senior yearbook quote, which he credited to the hobbit,
the greatest adventure is what lies ahead today and tomorrow
are yet to be said. Now, you know, that seems
like something a nerdy kid would do, And that's a
(45:26):
perfectly fined yearbook quote. I would go so far as
to say maybe even a little like stereotypical. But when
it comes up in Chafkin's book, chaef gin Actually, this
is one of the areas where I think his analysis
of Peter is a little unfair. Here's what Chafkin writes
about Peter putting that quote in his yearbook. Years later,
he'd say that he memorized the entire passage, which continues
the chances, the changes are all yours to make. The
(45:48):
mold of your life is in your hands to break.
It would become, in a way, the motto of his life,
though it was still at this point a confused life.
The passage is not in fact from Tolkien, who wrote
The Hobbit as well as the load of the Rings
trilogy books Teal obsessed over. It's from a theme song
written by Jules Bass, creative genius behind the nineteen eighties
cartoon ThunderCats for the animated version of The Hobbit, which
(46:10):
came out in nineteen seventy seven. Now, I think maybe
because it's not clear to me that Peter was being
dishonest or making a mistake, Like if he quote, if
he attributed that quote to the Hobbit, that quote is
from the Hobbit. It's from the Hobbit movie. But like,
I don't know if you'd necessarily care to be that
specific about this in like your fucking yearbook. Right, this
(46:32):
isn't an essay you're writing. I think like Chafkin kind
of wanted to point this out as maybe like Teal
not really being a token fan or something like that.
It's kind of unclear to me. I don't think it's
particularly weird that like an eighteen year old kid would
credit the Hobbit animated movie for a quote as the
Hobbit instead of like specifying that like it was it was,
(46:53):
you know, not the book. I think that that may
be a little bit like reaching. But anyway, I guess
you could see this as evidence that Peter wasn't a
big Tolkien fan and just like the animated movies. But
to be honest, if you are quoting from the fucking
Hobbit animated movie of nineteen seventy seven, you're a pretty
big Tolkien nerd.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
It was not a wildly popular movie, although better than
the Hobbit movies we would later get arguably.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
So, yeah, this whole thing seems like nerd like I
think it's a little bit of a little bit of
nerd fighting. Yeah, you're not actually memorizing the.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Book that was from animated movie.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
How dare you? It's not even can And.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
He brings up that the song was written by the
ThunderCats guy to kind of like make it more gents, like, man,
the ThunderCats was fine, Like, we don't need to be
shipping on the ThunderCats here because of what Peter Thial
does in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Come on, man, come on, Chafkin. Look I like Chafkin.
I just disagree with him.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
Here there's a Hobbit movie. I thought there was only
a Lord of the Rings movie.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
No, there's definitely a Hobbit movie. We are we are
not talking about the Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, Sophie. We're
talking about the animated Hobbit movie, which is wonderful.
Speaker 3 (48:10):
No, I did watch that one. I did watch that one.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Oh yeah, no, uh, I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend like
half a hit acid and just sink down into your
couch and let it happen to you.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
What I know of you, you would recommend a half
a hit acid literally anything, you know.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
It keeps my hand steady when I'm driving, especially if
I've got a trailer. You know, I don't trust anyone
who tows on less than half a hit acid. That's
my advice. Kids out there, Yeah, going shooting? Oh man,
you don't even need tracers. So anyway, whatever I don't need,
(48:49):
we don't need to continue down this. Peter teal.
Speaker 2 (48:53):
Like reading into somebody's your book quote, yeah, is like
a little much.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
Yeah, maybe Peter didn't, specially by the animated version. And
then a yearbook editor was like, now like, we'll just
say the hobbit. It's fine.
Speaker 2 (49:05):
But anyway, so that much thought into your yearbook quote,
come on.
Speaker 1 (49:08):
Yeah, it's a yearbook, come on. So A much better
story of Peter actually being a weirdo, which Chaefkin does
also share, comes from one of his few female friends,
who apparently shared with Peter at some point that she'd
been the result of an unplanned pregnancy, right that her
parents had had her without meaning to. Peter wrote in
her yearbook quote, I could never even hypothetically have aborted
(49:30):
you love Peter Teal. That is an odd thing to
write about your friend based on them sharing this with you.
That is that is an odd line. Now, I will say,
that's not a cold statement. It's just weird, right, Like
that is in a way kind of a warm statement. Right.
(49:52):
So I don't know, it doesn't it doesn't entirely comport with,
like Peter can't connect with people, but it definitely comports
with like nobody Peter doesn't quite talk like anyone else, right,
Like nobody else would say this just to a friend.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, unless he wrote in everybody else's your book like.
Speaker 1 (50:10):
That, I would have aborted you. That's everyone else's Peter
deeeal signatures. Yeah. Now, Peter was accepted by Stanford and
started his freshman year at this at the beginning of
Reagan's second term. Now, Stanford at this period was a
major source of thinkers and doers among the conservative movement.
(50:32):
The Hoover Institution, which is a right wing think tank
on campus, gave the world Martin Anderson, who start who
helped create Reaganomics. Right, he's like the author of Reaganomics
as a concept. Many Institute fellows were members of the
Reagan administration. Peter definitely seems to have like seen this
as kind of maybe the path he wanted for himself.
(50:53):
And even though what's interesting to me is he, because
he has this sort of emotional need to be seen
as a contrarian, is the guy going against the grain,
he will always frame higher education as time as Stanford
is like this din of liberals and like leftist rivolity,
right where it's like, this is the school that gave
us the Reagan administration. Right, Like fucking Stanford is not
(51:16):
a hotbed of leftists. You know, there's like liberals and
leftists on campus and leftist clubs, but like one of
the most influential conservative think tanks in the countries is
based out of Stanford. Right. I think the main reason
why Peter has to kind of characterize college this way
is that he just doesn't like college, right, He doesn't
like Stanford, and he primarily seems to dislike Stanford not
(51:39):
because of a political thing, but because all of the
kids there acted like kids. Right. They're all teenagers, They're
not quite grown up, which is what college students are,
and this is annoying to Peter. One of his chief
bugbears was that there was a campus heide and seek game,
which made him very angry, right, the fact that other
(52:00):
people are like, well, he's trying to learn playing hide
and seek. Peter isn't like this. He avoids most parties.
He does not date. Now. He's gay, right, and that's
certainly not nearly as acceptable a thing, even in a
place like Stanford in this period of time. So it's
not exactly weird, and that may play into kind of
part of why he's so frustrated seeing all of his
(52:20):
peers kind of date and socialize when that is not
a thing that's safe for him. I think maybe that
does play into it to some degree. Whenever he could,
rather than hang out with anyone he met on campus,
he would go back home to hang out with his
old friends from high school. Right now, one of his
Stanford peers suggests that he viewed other kids at the
(52:41):
school as deeply unserious. I think there's also an element
of discomfort insecurity and meeting and trying to connect with
new people. Whatever the case, Peter is the weird kid
on campus. Every morning he would leave his dorm room
and walk to the water fountain to take a huge
number of vitamins. One at a time. He seems to
do this in a way that's like deliberately exhibitionist. Classmate
(53:04):
Megan Maxwell alleges base that he kind of does this
to confront other kids, right to set himself apart. Everyone
else is partying and drinking and doing drugs, and every
morning Peter gets out there and slowly takes all of
his supplements so everyone can see him right. Quote, it
was like a ritual. She told Chafkin he was a strange,
strange boy. I don't think she's lying there.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
He studied philosophy at Stanford and This as an undergrad
and was particularly drawn to the work of Renee Girard,
a professor and theorist of social sciences. Girard was particularly
focused on the psychology of desire, or why people want
things and how they decide they want things. From a
twenty twenty one article in The New Yorker by Anna Weener,
(53:51):
Teel was particularly taken with Gerard's concept of mimetic desire.
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,
and he turns to others in order to make up
his mind. Durro wrote, we desire what others desire because
we imitate their desires. Memetic desire involves a surrender of agency.
It means allowing others to dictate ones once, and the
(54:11):
theory goes can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment. It also,
Duri wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve
to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a
group or individual. He thinks this is how people work, right, that, Like,
people's desires are largely based on this kind of like
(54:33):
herd mentality. Right, we're imitating other people's desires that we see,
We like surrender our agency to like let other people
dictate once for us. And this is kind of why
scapegoating is natural and actually is kind of a necessary
thing in order to avoid further mass violence. Right, If
you can scapegoat individuals for problems, you can avoid more
(54:54):
widespread violence. I think one could kind of extrapolate this
into Peter as a member of like the wealthy ruling class,
seeing the scapegoating that conservatives do with migrants or trans
people as a way to like avoid potential you know,
mass violence against his class, right, like the wealthy. But
(55:14):
maybe I'm reading a little bit too much into it there.
Speaker 3 (55:17):
This is he's the he's the scapegoat author guy. You
see also the violence and the sacred guy Gerard. That's
that that that actually makes so much sense.
Speaker 1 (55:27):
It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the fact that
this gets brought I mean, Teal brings up Gerard a lot.
There's a lot of writing Teal has done where he
quotes Gerard talking about memetic desire. So it is not
Chaefgen and others, you know, because I'm quoting directly from
Anna's article here, like they're not going on on a
limb connecting a lot of what he does to Chafgin,
this is like a foundational part of his thinking.
Speaker 3 (55:47):
He's the guy who who wrote a book about like
like sacrifice rituals and he's yeah, he's this makes sense.
Speaker 1 (55:55):
I'm on board with that. I think we should do
more human sacrifice, and I think we should. We need
to be building more pyramids. We don't build enough. We
built that one in a where is it Nashville? Right?
We did have a pyramid in every city, and we
should sacrifice people on them. That's all I'm saying. Noziggarot
(56:16):
guy even gotten by big ziggurat. The brickmakers, have you
in their thrall. There's more material in a zigguratte that's all.
That's why they want it there to walk up to
the walk up.
Speaker 2 (56:29):
Yeah, and then you can throw your human sacrifice off
the top, Yeah don't you. Yeah?
Speaker 1 (56:34):
Yeah, I mean I do like a ziggarot, a solid
ziggarat a good old fashioned step pyramid. Hell yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:42):
Now.
Speaker 1 (56:42):
The concept of mimetic desire and the potential use of
violent scapegoating would remain focuses of Peter's thinking on human nature, business,
and politics up to the present day. Two years into
his time on campus, he started a monthly magazine, The
Stanford Review, with one of his high school friends who
went to college with him. The Stanford Review was a
right wing rag. It featured articles accusing professors of being
(57:06):
closet Marxists, columns complaining about non white authors and a
Western culture class, and some very weird takes on the
AIDS epidemic. Here's an excerpt from a column in New
York Magazine by Chafkin. The first issue featured a satirical column,
Confessions of a Sexual Deviant, about a young straight man
who'd chosen to be celibate. According to the Review, it
(57:27):
was almost impossible to visit a men's restroom without witnessing
a gay sex act, or to cross the quad without
having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand. In
nineteen eighty seven, presenting homosexuality as an addiction, a columnist
wrote that unnatural gay men had yielded to temptations so
many times that the fires of lust burn within them,
making it indeed difficult for them to control themselves. During
(57:50):
Teale's last year on campus, his close friend and Review
collaborator Keith Raboy stood outside the home of a Stanford
residential fellow and shouted at the top of his lungs,
f ward, you are going to die of aids. You
are going to get what's coming to you. Two days later,
the Review published the rape issue, with an impassioned defense
of a student who'd pleaded no contest to statutory rape.
(58:13):
So he's this is he's the guy that he's going
to be the rest of his life. By eighty seven,
we can say that there's a lot and because Peter
doesn't like to talk about and I, you know, we'll
talk about the Gawker stuff later. I actually think he's
less in the wrong on that that he tends to
be painted as which is not to say that he's
in the right there, but like he doesn't like talking
(58:35):
about his sexuality. I get the there's like a decent
little chunk of even even up to this day. And
this is not exactly Peter's kind of thing. But I've
interviewed a couple of like gay conservatives who are celibate.
They're like catholic. They believe, they accept that they're homosexual.
(58:56):
They're open about that, but they think it's immoral to
do a thing about it because they're also extremely catholic.
And I see shades of that at least in Peter's
thinking here. Like the fact that he is putting out
these articles about celibacy and about like the the unnatural
and like evil lusts of the gay community and like
AIDS very much feels in line with that to me here.
(59:21):
But you know, we just don't get a ton of
Peter himself talking about but you can see like he
wouldn't be putting out these articles about like how AIDS
is the fault, like by this guy yelling about how
like AIDS is your fault, right if you're gay, If
he didn't, if there wasn't an element of that in
his thinking, right.
Speaker 2 (59:39):
Yeah, this young man is extremely broken.
Speaker 1 (59:44):
Yeah, I mean this is this is the Yeah, the
the fact that you're defending a guy who pled no
contest to statutory rape, the anger about condoms over a
guy who pled no contest to statutory rape. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
I mean, you don't want to judge someone too much
by their you know, corny campus newspapers.
Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
If they move on from it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah, I mean I say this as someone who started
a corny campus newspaper.
Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Like, but I mean that's really it's really beyond the pale,
and it does seem to connect to who this dude
is later, which is like this weird like there's so
much like like hate, both internal and external happening.
Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
You really get why he becomes the guy he becomes
because so much of Peter's modern politics is like the
right wing hating the normies, like fuck the normies kind
of politics, and like a big part of like just
like how much anger there is at you know, Marxists
on campus, they're handing out columns on the quad. It's
just like whatever he sees the people around him are
(01:00:53):
fine with makes him angry. You know that there is
a degree of that in being this kind of dude
in Stanford. Of this period of time now, the late
nineteen eighties are a period in which public rage over
the justices of apartheid had started to reach a fever
pitch two. Right, this is one of the most kind
of salient public issues at the time. Is like the
(01:01:15):
entire Western international community is kind of lining up against
the apartheid regime. There were regular protests on campus and
calls to divest the school from South African financial interests.
According to one source, Peter was not supportive of this.
He was very angry that all of the kids on
campus are anti South Africa. And I want to read now,
(01:01:37):
this is a very interesting chapter of his life. From
a medium post by one of his classmates at Stanford,
Julia Lithcott Hayms. She wrote this about an encounter in
nineteen eighty six, and this is going to be very relevant.
Julie is a black woman. We ran in different circles.
His fiercely libertarian views were often a topic of conversation
(01:01:57):
among those of us living in Branner Hall. Day I
heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid, which was then
still the law of the land in South Africa, which
I found morally repugnant to know that a fellow student,
a dorm mate for that matter, might defend such a
brutally oppressive race based caste system. Gave me the willies,
but I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt,
so I mustered the courage to go to his room
(01:02:18):
and ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect,
that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and
moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even
acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise
for me, a black woman. So, and it's very in
line with the kind of like, well it works economically,
(01:02:40):
the system is economically successful and that's all that matters.
The moral issues are irrelevant, right, just completely that kind
of guy.
Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
I mean, how much of this is just like that's
my dad.
Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Yeah, well, I mean how much of it is that's
my dad, And just like this reflexive contrarian thing. All
of these kids hate South Africa. I've been there. I
know it's actually a good system because it works economy,
you know, which to my dad, Yeah, yeah, great stuff.
When Julie posted this in twenty sixteen. It went sort
of viral, and Peter issued a response through a spokesperson.
(01:03:16):
Peter has no recollection of a stranger demanding his views
on apartheid. He has never supported it, but he can
easily see how a conversation might be misremembered thirty years later.
And that's interesting, Like, I don't recall talking to this stranger,
but you can easily see how someone could misremember the
conversation that.
Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
I'm not sure happened, if I did it.
Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
If I did it, Yeah, Apartheid Edition. Now, obviously I
don't know that Julie's recollection of events from thirty years
ago is perfectly accurate. No one's are ever right. But
there is some outside corroboration for aspects of Julie's story.
And I'm going to quote from an article an NPR here.
Lifke At Haymes's account of Teel's opinion about apartheid was
(01:03:57):
backed up by Megan Maxwell, a freelance at who also
attended Stanford with Teal. Maxwell, who was also an African American,
told NPR that in a separate incident, Teal also told
her that morality and governments shouldn't be connected, and that
you shouldn't judge a government based on whether it fits
your view of morality. I don't know, man, shouldn't shouldn't
(01:04:17):
you like, isn't that part of how you should judge
a government, whether or not you think it's moral.
Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Should he's doing anti morality or a morality?
Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Yeah, that it should just matter if it's economically efficient, right.
Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
And then but but then gays are bad on the
other hand.
Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
Yeah, at least he's publishing other people who are writing
about the immorality of homosexual life, right, Yeah, I think interesting, interesting, Peter. Yeah,
part of what's going on here is like Peter is
an outspoken Christian and he is up to the present day,
and that means some very odd the things for a
(01:05:01):
guy who is also like gay and a libertarian. You
know that's going to like, Well, he's.
Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Spoking Christian who doesn't believe that we should judge things
by their morality.
Speaker 1 (01:05:14):
That's what he says here, because he definitely seems to
in other instances believe that we should judge things based
on whether or not they're his definition of moral you know.
Part of and this is not just Peter, this is everyone.
He's not consistent nobody is right like this. We found
a point of inconsistency here. Sure now Peter's present political situation,
(01:05:36):
I will say, when we're talking about his classmates talking
about thirty years ago, you should always read any quote
about someone like this with the perspective of like the
fact that his modern day political stances might be deep,
like post facto coloring people's recollections of him right as
a kid, because nobody's memories are perfect. So I did
(01:05:57):
go looking for other accounts of the man at Stanford,
and I found a few from former classmates of his
on Quora. In one post, Chris Gray recalled he was
very interested in constitutional law and wanted to clerk at
the Supreme Court. He was serious about religion. He went
to the gym frequently to work out. Peter was always
what I would describe as thoughtful and civil in his
(01:06:17):
dealings with people, which is unusual in my experience. He
had a stubborn side and did not typically change his
mind about things. And you know, maybe he was more
friendly to this guy because this guy was more sympatico
to his beliefs. But a lot of that seems like
pretty consistent with other stories you get about Peter. Chris
also recalled that Peter was very interested in another thinker,
(01:06:39):
Leo Strauss. I recall the most interesting thing Peter said
was derived from his understanding of Strauss, which was that
there are not really any facts, just values. Another classmate,
Lance Lance Ishimoto, recalls Peter as an outspoken conservative who
was a part of the Federalist Society and hung out
with Greg Kennedy Justice Kennedy. He went on to note
(01:07:01):
his entrepreneurial nature was also apparent from the way he
and a friend decided to make their own version of
Stanford Laws sweatshirts and sell them at a price forty
dollars that was cheaper than the official ones at the
bookstore seventy five dollars. Yeah, so there you go. Peter
got his BA in nineteen eighty nine and then got
his law degree from Stanford Law. Now that's quite a
(01:07:21):
lot of schooling for a guy that, as an adult
would declare his own personal war on the higher education system.
From Chaefkin and others. It certainly sounds as if some
of this was related to his annoyance with liberal classmates,
but I wonder if a larger reason wasn't the disillusionment
he felt later because of his law career, which is
a spoiler, doesn't work out the way he'd hoped. As
(01:07:43):
Chris recalled, Peter was obsessed in this period as he's
getting out of college, as he's finishing his law degree.
The thing that he wants for his life is not
to be an entrepreneur or a founder. It is to
clerk for the Supreme Court. And one kind of assumes
he's maybe hoping to eventually get on the Supreme Court.
George Packer, writing for The New Yorkers states quote, after
(01:08:03):
graduating from law school and clerking for a federal judge,
he was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship by
Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. And if we're looking
for like the inciting institute incident, of like Peter's turn
towards evil, for like his desire to destroy higher education,
(01:08:23):
what makes him choose the path of becoming like a
corporate founder a venture capitalist? This is why, right his
first choice is he wants to be in working in
and around and with the Supreme Court, and he gets
shot down. He's not this guy who has always been
the best at everything, isn't good enough for Scalia or Kennedy, right,
(01:08:44):
and that that's kind of what sets him on the
path that he's going to go down later, at least
according to a lot of people who knew him at
this point in time.
Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Wow, like the font of Skalia of so much not good,
does one good thing and it backfires utterly and completely
and fucks us all.
Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Yeah, And I wonder if it's just that they can
see the because like, even if you're Scalia, right, you
don't really want to work every day with a reflexive
contrarian right, Like they're not. That's not a guy who's
always whose whole thing is always I have to be
doing a different thing than everyone else, Like I have
to be smarter than everyone else, everyone else who has
(01:09:28):
to be wrong and I have to be right. You
don't want to work with that guy, like that guy sucks.
Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
Or maybe because his work wasn't good enough, yeah, or.
Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
Maybe maybe maybe his lost shit wasn't good enough, right,
Like I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't
have the ability to judge Peter Thiel's like writing on law.
But whatever the case, he because he's the valictorian of
his high school, he does very well at Stanford, He's
friends with Kennedy's kid, he's he's he's doing everything he
(01:09:56):
should be doing to make this work. Just doesn't work
for him, right, and that does seem to be like
the thing that fucks him up anyway, Noah, how are
you feeling about Peter so far?
Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
I feel like right now, were it kind of like
only somewhat harmful toxic nerd stage, and if the story
ended there would be like, Okay, fine, you know, go ahead, buddy,
Now you get to grow up and live life.
Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
I feel like you'd be a person. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
Yeah, Like I feel like there's still like, you know,
the fate is not set at this point.
Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Right, Yeah, I would say the fate is not set.
There's there's a lot of ways that this guy could
go after this. But I also feel like you can
tell that a guy who runs that kind of newspaper
and whose goal is to work for Scalia or Kennedy
probably isn't gonna wind up being like a guy you'd
want to have dinner with, you know, Like, no, this.
Speaker 2 (01:10:58):
Isn't behind the Yeah, guys, you don't want to have
dinner with.
Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
No, no, no, we're not guaranteed he's going to become
a bastard yet, So we'll be hitting that increasingly by
part two. And I'm excited for you to see where
Peter goes after this. Noah, where are you going to
go after this?
Speaker 4 (01:11:18):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
I feel like I'm going to have like several shots
of whiskey. Yeah, after this, I feel like I need it.
Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
Yeah, it's one pm, so that's the right time. Or
a nice, nice stiff drink.
Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
Four o'clock over here, man, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11:35):
Yeah, yeah, it's four o'clock somewhere. That's why I can
start drinking. All right, Well, I'm going to go listen
to some Jimmy Buffett. You call also go listen to
some Jimmy Buffett and then come back on Thursday.
Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
We need six drinks Jimmy Buffett.
Speaker 4 (01:11:53):
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zone Media, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
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