#0015 Peter Thiel

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2190 with guest Peter Teal.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

It's a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Cecil Cicero.

I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's August 2024 interview with Peter Thiel.

Hey, Marsh, how did Joe introduce Peter Thial in the show notes?

So, according to Joe, Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor.

He co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded Palantir Technologies, where he serves as chairman.

Thiel is a partner at the Founders Fund and leads the Thiel Foundation, which funds technological progress and long-term thinking.

He's also the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Zero to One.

Okay, is there anything else we should know about Peter?

Yeah, so Peter Thiel has a net worth of $16.2 billion, which makes him the 129th richest person in the world.

And yeah, he was the chief exec of PayPal until 2002, when it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.

And then he has been a big investor in other companies, just like Facebook, but notably, he is the chairman of Palantir, which is a huge data company that's been criticized for a massive laundry list of privacy intrusions and collusions with governments.

And it's even been accused by human rights charity Amnesty International of contributing to human rights violations of asylum seekers and migrants.

Teal also funded Hulk Hogan in the Boleya versus Gawker lawsuit because Gorka had outed Teal as gay.

And that was the lawsuit that eventually bankrupted Gorka.

I want to jump in here real quick and point people to a citation needed episode.

We covered that.

You did indeed.

Absolutely.

So check that out if you want to learn more about the Bolea versus Gawker.

Yeah, and in an interesting note, in 2011, Teal became a citizen of New Zealand, despite stating he had no intention of ever living in New Zealand, which is literally one of the citizenship requests,

you know, the requirements for citizenship.

And also, despite him falling some way short of the requirement of having resided in the country for 1,350 days, in that teal had stayed there for a total of 12 days.

Missed it by that much.

Just close.

But the government, who just happened to have long-standing links to Palantir and long-standing contracts with his companies, waived those requirements for him.

The first thing he did once he got that passport was to buy off some land that you could only buy if you were a New Zealand citizen because it was protected land.

So it's pretty clear why he was doing this.

Also in 2011,

Teal met and began to mentor a lawyer named J.D.

Vance, whose move into politics Teal apparently funded and guided, which puts Thial one slightly more accurate gunshot away from influencing the presidency.

I wonder if they communicated his intent through signal or not.

I'm not sure they did that.

Well, what else they talk about, Marsh?

So they talked about leaving California.

They talked about tax rates, the deficit, social security, AI, the Turing test, climate change, a lot about climate change.

We will come back to climate change.

Ancient civilizations, Eric Van Danagan, Graeme Hancock, pyramids, chimps, drugs, hippies, Bill Gates, all of Joe and Peter's many friends who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein,

JFK, assassins getting bogged down by DEI.

Yeah, that's right.

Using warp speed to make weapons, faster than like fascists, and how Greta Thunberg might actually be scarier than nuclear annihilation.

Okay, well, before we get to our main event, we want to say thanks to our Area 51 all-access past patrons, Stone Banana, Laura Williams, no, not that one, the other one, definitely not an AI overlord.

11 Gruthius, Chonky Cat in Chicago eats the rich, another feast worthy chunky cat.

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Fred R.

Gruthius and Martin Fidel, they subscribed at patreon.com/slash no rogan, and you can too.

All patrons get an early access to episodes and a special patron-only bonus segment each week.

And this week we'll talk about pyramids, Bill Gates, more Epstein conspiracy, and how a second billionaire thinks social security is a Ponzi scheme.

And we'll also ask if that's a social security problem or if it's a billionaire problem.

We'll probably come to a conclusion on that.

You can check that out at patreon.com slash no Rogan.

For now, our main event.

Huge thank you to this week's Veteran Voice of the Podcast.

That was Starlight Masquerade on Bandcamp.

Model Y is out now, and that's an electronica album with break beats and stuff.

And they put that in as a shameless plug so you can do a search for them and find their work.

Thank you to them for announcing our main event.

Remember that you too can be on the show by sending a recording of you giving us your best rendition of It's Time.

Send that to no RoganPod at gmail.com.

That's K-N-O-Wroganpod at gmail.com, as well as how you would like to be credited.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think I'm very happy with Shameless Plugs on that.

If you send us in its time, you've got a few seconds in there for a, we can put a shameless plug in.

Not a problem.

Absolutely.

Shameless plugs are perfectly fine.

I will say to this person, Starlight Masquerade, I did have to shorten yours.

You sent it a little long.

I want to say the clip itself is 11 seconds, but 11 seconds is too long, okay?

So 11 seconds, it's got to be like the sweet spot is like nine.

I know, Marsha, this is a third rule, but the sweet spot's probably like nine-ish seconds.

So just be, be aware that if you send me, you know, an entire, I don't know, music album, I cannot put it in there.

I'm sorry.

I apologize.

All right.

Let's get on to our main event segment, Marsh.

We're going to talk a little bit about regulation and climate change in this.

This is something that Peter Thiel clearly had in his crawl when he came on to chat about something on Joe Rogan's show.

He figured he would do this instead, you know, chit-chat about regulation.

And a great way to do that is to talk about climate change with Joe, who has, you know, I think over the last several years, we just did a patron-only episode where he seemed to think that climate change was real, but that was four years ago.

And I think his views on that have changed pretty starkly.

So he came on to chit-chat about that.

And that's what we're going to cover today.

So, all right, so this first clip is about how the world is changing.

Our lived experience is that so little has felt like it's been changing for the last few decades, we're probably underestimating it.

It's interesting that you say that so little, we feel like so little has changed.

Because if you're a person, how old are you?

Same age you were, born in 1967.

So in our age, we've seen all the change, right?

We saw the end of the Cold War.

We saw answering machines.

we saw VHS tapes, then we saw the internet, and then where we're at right now, which is like this bizarre moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day.

And these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous.

Everybody has one.

There's incredible technology that's being ramped up every year.

They're getting better all the time.

And now there's AI.

There's AI on your phone.

You could access ChatGPT and a bunch of different programs on your phone.

And I think that's an insane change.

I think that that's one of the most, especially with the use of social media, it's one of the most bizarre changes I think our culture has ever, the most bizarre.

It can be a big change culturally or politically.

But

the kinds of questions I'd ask is, how do you measure it economically?

How much does it change GDP?

How much does it change productivity?

So his framing here is that we live in this world where nothing big ever happens.

And I would question,

is that how many of us would describe even the last decade?

I would say quite a lot has happened in the last decade.

And that's setting aside the global pandemic that we all went through, which was pretty big, pretty significant.

We've had massive political changes and all sorts of stuff.

So I think even right in this first clip, we're getting a sense of how connected Teal is to the regular life that you and I and Joe's listeners and our listeners actually lead.

That's a great point.

And, you know, he's talking about the last few decades, but he says he's 57.

So he's only talking, you know, 20 to 30 years.

He can't be talking about, I don't think he's talking about since he was in his teens.

Let's say it's like 20 to 30 years.

He's talking about the changes that have happened from at the earliest, 1995, to now.

I think the world is a completely different place.

And, you know, we get

we're here to criticize Joe Rorgan, but we should also be fair to him when he's when he's saying something that is quite quite useful.

Hats off to Joe here.

He's totally right when he pushes back on this.

He picks out all the changes that we've gone through and how substantial they are for society.

He adds some odd details, like VHS tips and answering machines feature oddly high in his listings, just like in the past the Telegraph Machine did.

But fair play to him.

Yeah, he at least picking up some big stuff.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Just, I mean, just personal cell phones, changing that from like an actual thing you talk on to a pocket computer, the size and cost of data storage, social media, GPS advances, web tool advances.

You know, I could go on with less user-based ones, but the last, just the last 20 years have been amazing in personal tech advances.

Genuinely,

night and day.

If you were going to try to do something back in 2000 versus today, it'd be a totally different workflow.

Yeah, yeah, completely.

And Teal is at best showing that he doesn't consider something to be actually important unless it fits like his very narrow definition of impact, which is changing GDP and changing productivity.

But those are not the only definitions of impactful.

There are other definitions available.

Well, and how much does it change productivity to have cloud documents and not a typewriter?

This show probably wouldn't even be able to exist in a good way if there wasn't cloud documents because we both share a document.

I mean, it would be really difficult for us to collaborate on this if like Gmail and Google Docs didn't exist.

Yeah, especially bearing in mind, we are currently having

a live video conversation in real time whilst being able to record it individually in ways that either one of us could edit at any given point with not an expertise level of audio engineering.

Let's go back 20 years and editing was a much, much more complicated job.

Everything has gotten so much more complicated and

so much more productive.

Talking to somebody, messaging somebody, getting in touch with somebody, going back to

the late 90s, early 2000s, it was a phone call or it was nothing, basically.

It was a phone call or

email was starting to take off in the back end of the 90s.

So yeah, that was kind of there.

It wasn't anywhere near as ubiquitous.

But even then, it was email that you had to go to a computer and have your computer yell noises down the phone line at another computer for a while so so nobody could use the phone at the same time like the the night and day changes to productivity are phenomenal and he's just glossing all of over all of that and that's one of the that's one of the things he mentions is yeah well how did it change productivity like literally night and day man i mean if you started working in the 90s you had an email account like late 90s you would have an email account right but anytime before that you had a typewriter and a bunch of carbon paper and you sent stuff via snail mail or inner office mail i also want to mention in gdp that's about 9% of the United States GDP is tech.

So what he's talking about is, you know, well, how much is it?

Well, it's 9%.

That's a whole lot in both productivity and in GDP.

So maybe what we're actually seeing isn't that life hasn't changed substantially in the last 20 to 30 years, but maybe it's that.

Teal's life hasn't changed substantially since, you know, he's saying a couple of decades, well, he became a billionaire 20 years ago, or at least he sold his company for a billion and a half.

So maybe he wasn't directly a billionaire, but he became incredibly wealthy, ludicrously wealthy 20 years ago.

And maybe since then, his life has been kind of samey because it's the that money inoculates you and

insulates you from the ravages of general life, from the pressures we're all under.

Which is just a further illustration of the fact that we've kind of said a few times on this show just through the guests that Jaws had, is that the lives of billionaires are so removed from what you and I would experience and suffer and struggle with, and George's listeners would experience and struggle with, that billionaires are practically aliens to us at this point.

So maybe they're not the people who ought to be in control because they don't know what your life is.

They can't even imagine.

Yeah, you're going to hear that a lot in this and in the gloves off portion because there's a lot of moments where Peter Thiel doesn't even realize how insulated he is because of his own money.

Okay,

we're going to stay on technology here with the next clip.

Well, if we had defined technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, the year we were born, and we had a discussion about technology, what technology would have meant?

It would have meant computers, it would have also meant rockets, it would have meant supersonic airplanes, it would have meant new medicines, it would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, maybe underwater cities.

You know, it sort of had,

because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing.

And so there's progress on all these fronts.

Today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology.

Technology has been reduced to meaning computers.

And that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird.

There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers.

And then all the other areas have been relatively stagnant.

We're not moving any faster.

You know, the Concorde got decommissioned in 2003 or whenever.

And then with all the low-tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly to get through all of them from one city to the next.

The highways have gone backwards because there are more traffic jams.

We haven't figured out ways around those.

So

we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago.

This, I think, is, again, an incredible summary of his worldview.

The 1960s sci-fi vision of living underwater never happened, therefore, technology hasn't advanced.

If we aren't the Jetsons, we aren't anything.

If we're not the Jetsons, we're the Flintstones, is essentially what he's kind of suggesting.

But this worldview doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

So highways are moving slower, so technology has an advances.

Meanwhile, as you've just said, I'm watching a conversation here from two men that I've never met that's freely available on demand anytime I wanted, while having a real-time instant video call with a friend who lives on the other side of the world, and we're able to easily edit and distribute this to tens of thousands of people.

And every bit of that process would have been mind-blowing to people in the 60s.

Every single bit of it.

The Star Trek communicator was considered to be far-flung, futuristic technology, and it pales into insignificance compared to what we can do with an iPhone now.

So,

the world has clearly moved on.

And, you know, right now, parents can know that their kids are safe if they're outside by watching a dot on a map.

And swathes of text can be translated to any language in an instant.

You can turn on the heating in your house without being in your house.

And you can even make it that the house just recognizes when you're home and turns it on for you.

These are wild technological advances, but Teal can write all of this off as just computers.

Because if everything has a computer in it, everything is just computers.

All the things that otherwise would have been seen as technology and now just bits because computers are so inherent to how we've been able to develop all these things.

But individually, they are still massive technological advances.

But also that vision he had of the lost 1960s with its underwater cities, that would have been no less computer-based.

Right.

Like underwater cities would probably have needed some computers.

Rockets kind of need some computers.

Even going back to the rockets that made the moon, they had the best computers kind of available at the time.

It's just that our computers are so much better now.

And then he looks at where we've kind of, it seems like we've either stagnated or gone backwards.

So Concorde, supersonic, hypersonic planes.

Well, replacing Concorde wasn't a commercial priority because it wasn't commercially scalable to fly at that speed.

Concorde was a very expensive thing to do.

And we could still do that if we wanted to, but it just didn't have the commercial viability.

If it did, we'd still be doing it.

Airline security, it's slower to get through an airport.

Is that because technology's gone backwards?

There's plenty of technology in an airline.

The reason, in an airline, in an airport, rather, in the security lines of things, you have like full-body scanners that are able to do all sorts of things.

You've got scanners that can look inside your bag and now look inside your liquids and see if those liquids are safe.

They have those scanners.

That's a new scanner that's been out in the last kind of year or whatever.

The reason that we're slower in airports isn't because technology's gone backwards.

It's because 9-11 happened and we now want to make sure that nobody uses

an airplane as a weapon.

Traffic jams aren't an evidence of stagnation.

They're an evidence of population density, underinvestment in public transport and a general lack, an unwillingness to invest in infrastructure.

These aren't signs of a lack of technological advance.

They're signs of political will and other forms of stagnation.

Yeah.

And I'll mention this later on too, but like there's a difference between private enterprise and what we decide to invest in and what we decide to what we decide to research in the public sphere.

And, you know, there's no appetite.

You know, for instance, there's no appetite for high-speed rail in the United States.

There's no appetite for it.

There's very little, right?

But occasionally, someone will get an idea.

And a lot of people, I think, really like it, but a lot of politicians sort of put it down, probably because lobbyists tell them to put it down, I presume.

And we even saw that in a recent episode when we were talking about Elon Musk's Hyperloop and building, and I think it was on the Patreon episode that we did.

He built a Hyperloop in order to put a tunnel under to make it under between LA and Vegas, I think it was, in order to, but really it was because there was a proposal for high-speed rail and it was designed to

stall that proposal because

a functional high-speed rail network is a threat to the

automobile industry.

There's a lot of other mechanical stuff that isn't like computer-based.

I mean, just think about how batteries have advanced since then.

Like how batteries have changed from, you know,

something that was, you know, very small charge, didn't last a very long time from when he was a child to now lithium-ion batteries that I can plug into my wall, I can charge them, you know, they can run all the way down, charge them back up and keep doing that.

And they keep their charge for a very long time and they're very small.

Now, that's not technology, babe.

That's not computers.

That's literally like battery tech.

So, you know, there's other stuff too that we're missing.

But he's just, like you suggest, I think his, his worldview is so narrow.

And I think like this point is really important for him to make that there's that there's that things don't change.

And I think we're going to see that as we start working our way into climate change.

I think there's a reason why he's planting this seed very early.

Yeah.

Okay.

This again, another piece, all engineering has stopped is what he mentions.

I was an undergraduate at Stanford, late 80s.

And at the time,

in retrospect, every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into.

You know, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these engineering fields where you were tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck.

They were regulated, couldn't come up with new things to do.

Nuclear engineering, aeroastroengineering, people already knew those were really bad ones to go into.

They were outlawed.

You weren't going to make any progress in new nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that.

Electrical engineering, which was the one that's sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay.

And then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot was computer science.

And again,

it's been very powerful, but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s.

This is really calculated.

He makes those two previous points very specifically so he can make this one.

And this is a very clear anti-regulation section.

He's listing all the things and mentioning the regulation, how it basically handcuffed innovation.

And no one wanted to get into those fields because regulation was so stifling, is essentially what he's saying.

And he's throwing these out as if to say there's been no major advancements in these other fields because of regulation.

And that's pretty obviously false.

Just mechanical engineering, like I just mentioned, the battery, EVs, hybrids, wind and solar, all that stuff, all that is taking place because of regulations.

We put regulations in place.

Specifically, think about how California is approaching this.

They're saying we want to be carbon neutral by a certain point.

We want to make sure that all cars are EVs by a certain point.

They put regulations in place and then the technology followed.

There was innovation in those areas because they knew

they had to compete in a market where they would not be able to use gas combustion engines anymore.

So they were forced, they forced the hand of industry to push them to do this other thing.

That's regulation based.

So there's two ways that regulations can work.

And we're seeing in the EV field and in the green energy field, it's working in a way that's beneficial to all of us.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in California, they've got the choice between become carbon neutral or become charcoal.

And they're choosing the carbon neutral version of it.

Exactly.

One of the most powerful drivers of innovation is having a limitation or a problem, like a problem to overcome.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

That's

a well-known idiom for a very good reason.

But what Thiel's actually doing in this conversation is illustrating why it's actually so vital that regulation ensures that billionaires like him can't just use their wealth to do anything they want, regardless of its effects on the rest of us.

Because to Peter Thiel, very little of any significance has happened since at least 2005.

But he's the man arguing that people like him shouldn't be reined in on what effect they can have on the world in which we live.

Yeah.

All right, so now we're going to talk a little bit about science.

This is also leading up to climate change too, to talk about what sciences are actual science.

In the 1980s, computer science was this ridiculous, inferior subject.

You know, I always, the linguistic cut is always when people use the word science.

I'm in favor of science.

I'm not in favor of science in quotes.

and it's always a tell that it's not real science.

And so when we call it climate science or political science or social science,

you know, you're just sort of making it up and you have an inferiority complex to real science or something like physics or chemistry.

And computer science was in the same category as social science or political science.

It was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and

sort of dropped out of the real science and real engineering fields.

Yeah, so climate science isn't real because it's got the word science in it.

Well, nuclear science, biomedical science, rocket science, rocket scientists, you're doing rocket science.

We can stick science at the end of all sorts of different sciences if we want to kind of denigrate them by saying that you can't put science at the end of something that's real.

Yeah, it feels like he's really just saying we made up all the sciences that I don't like.

Yeah, I don't like these certain sciences or I don't think they're respectful and so I'm respectable.

So I won't, I'm not going to acknowledge that they're actual sciences when they're actually sciences, Peter.

I'm sorry.

It's just a very silly argument.

And bear in mind, like we don't have a clip for this, but later in this interview, he actually does say that double-blind studies are sociopathic and immoral.

Yeah.

Because if something, this is a direct quote.

If something really works, you don't need a double-blind study.

That's his quote.

Now, obviously, you need the study to see if it works because otherwise it can look like it works when it doesn't.

But so maybe, though, he isn't the one we should be listening about, listening to when it comes to like what kills science or not, because that's his views.

Like in that bit of the conversation, it's too long for us to play just for these two little points, but he literally claims that double-blind studies are part of the FDA's anti-drug ideology.

The FDA, that famous anti-drug, drug-averse organization.

So his understanding of science is so, it's as poor as his understanding of the value of regulation.

And the two of those things in combination become actively dangerous given this man's resources.

Now we're going to move directly into talking about climate science.

You don't feel that climate science is a a real science?

It is.

Well,

there's several different things one could say.

It's possible climate change is happening.

It's possible we don't have great accounts of why that's going on.

So I'm not questioning any of those things.

But how scientific it is,

I don't think it's a place where we have really vigorous debates.

Maybe the climate is increasing because carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures are going up.

Maybe it's methane.

Maybe it's people eating too much steak.

It's the cows flatulating.

And you have to measure how much is methane a greenhouse gas versus carbon dioxide.

I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff scientifically.

And I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than anything that's truly science should be.

Dogma doesn't mean that it's wrong.

But why is the fact that it's called climate science mean that it's more dogmatic?

Because if you said nuclear science, you wouldn't question it, right?

Yeah, but no one calls it nuclear science.

They call it nuclear engineering.

He says it's possible that climate change is happening.

Well, that is deliberately leaving space for the, but we don't know for sure.

That's what the unstated part of that.

But we do.

The evidence is really strong.

He says we don't have great accounts of why that's going on.

That's also incorrect.

We've got very good ideas.

We know about the impacts of greenhouse gases and how they trap heat in the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to warm up.

And I'll put links in the show notes to all of this.

We know about the melting of the ice caps, which we can measure clearly over decades.

And we have, and we've seen that the amount of ice ice at the same point every year has been shrinking.

And you know that the loss of that big white reflective expanse causes more heat to be absorbed rather than reflected.

And that heat gets absorbed into the oceans, which speeds up the heating of the atmosphere, which then accelerates the shrinking of the ice caps.

And everything starts to expand.

We know that as the ice reserves melt, carbon that was stored in the ground underneath those ice shelves gets re-released.

And that speeds things up.

So there are very well understood mechanisms at play here.

It's a very complex picture.

It's a very complex model, but it is very, very well understood.

But he's, and he says, I'm not questioning any of that, but by questioning how scientific this is, he is questioning all of that.

He's questioning that basis is not scientific.

But, you know, Peter, if it makes you feel better at all, climatology.

We don't have to call it climate science.

The official name is climatology.

Climate science is what we colloquially call it when we're just talking about it, but climatology is the name of the field.

You see, we're not saying the science words, so presumably it's better.

It's science again.

Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about ideology.

Well, there's certainly ideology that's connected to climate science.

And then there's certainly corporations that are invested in this prospect of green energy and the concept of green energy.

And they're profiting off of it and pushing these different things, whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is.

Like California, I think

2035, they have a mandate that all new vehicles have to be electric, which is hilarious when you're connected to a grid that can't support the electric cars it currently has.

After they said said that, within a month or two, Gavin Newsom asked people to not charge their Teslas because it was summer and the grid was fucked.

Yeah, look,

it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways.

And

there's an environmental project, which is, you know, and maybe it shouldn't be scientific.

You know, there's the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet and we don't have time to do science.

If you have to do rigorous science and you can prove that we're overheating, it'll be too late.

And so if you're a hardcore hardcore environmentalist, you don't want to have as high standard science.

Yeah, my intuition is certainly when you go away from that, you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological.

Yeah,

I love how they hand wave away.

They say, oh, there's so much money to be made from these corporations in green energy.

It's like, oh, there's no profit on other energies.

Is that what we're saying?

That there's also been no governmental authorities that have been trying to keep those other energies relevant through lobbying forever?

I mean, come on.

how stupid do you think we are?

We know that big oil has been doing all this stuff for years.

Ultimately, the profits on green energy, and there will be some profits on green energy.

There are manufacturers of wind turbines, there's manufacturers of solar cells, things like that.

But those profits are absolutely dwarfed by the profits from fossil fuels.

With wind and solar, you build it once, and then your costs are maintenance and replacement of parts.

With fossil fuels, it's the constant ongoing supply and sale of the fossil fuel.

And Joe puts forward this profit motive on electric car mandates.

You know, the mandate is all profit-driven.

But the mandate that he's talking about is that a decade from now, new cars have to be electric.

Not existing cars.

If your car right now lasted until 10 years from now, the mandate isn't changing that.

And it's not tomorrow.

It's a decade from now.

If this was really about profiteering and

being profit-driven, wouldn't the mandate be like complete replacement?

Or maybe it will be sooner than a decade from now.

And I think it should be sooner because of climate change.

But the reason that it isn't sooner is due to lobbying from big oil to keep their product relevant for longer.

Like, okay, you've got to have, and, you know, Joe was saying, and it's ridiculous.

It's so hilarious.

It's ridiculous that you have to have this electric car in a in 10 years from now.

You've got to have an electric car, even though the grid right now can't support it.

But the mandate isn't for right now.

It's for 10 years from now.

Arguably, it's saying

to the electricity grid, you've got 10 years to get this grid up to speed to be able to handle all these electric cars.

But it's not hilarious that it can't do that tomorrow.

It can't, that you can't, and I didn't bother looking into whether it was true that Newson told you not to charge your cars.

But even if that was true, it's not hilarious that you can't charge every one of these cars tomorrow, but we expect it to be done in 10 years.

Cause that's like saying, I don't believe there's going to be a building here in 10 years' time because right now it's a derelict lot.

Like the 10 years is the building time.

The 10 years is the time to get to a point at the end point.

I did look it up to see whether or not, and I couldn't find whether he said that or not, but I did find that the previous year that they were talking to, there were problems with the grid.

There was brownouts, et cetera, throughout.

But then in the year that they were discussing this, there was a heat wave in California, and they had improved their grid, and it had withstood the heat wave.

So again, like, I think like things are.

incrementally improving.

You got a big, a lot of population out there.

You got, you know, sometimes very

weird changes in weather.

And, you know, sometimes you're going to have to deal with that stuff.

I mean, what's so funny is they're shitting on the grid in California and they're in Texas.

They're just having this conversation.

That's a very good conversation.

Like, that's so funny is, oh, yeah, well, you know, the grid in California is terrible.

By the way, our senator left because it was too cold for a while.

So yeah, it just, it's, it's such a hypocrisy.

It's such a, it's such a silly hypocrisy.

The grid is not an electric car problem.

The problem is with grid is never an electric car problem.

It's a lack of infrastructure investment problem.

Like invest in the infrastructure and things will work better, but you can't invest in the infrastructure if there are people saying we can't have taxes this high because billionaires need tax cuts.

Yeah, I want to point out the hardcore environmentalist argument he makes is actually kind of a good one.

I like it.

I don't think that you should skip doing the science, but you definitely, you know, you like, think about, stop thinking about it like the earth.

Think about it like your own body.

Would you want to wait and do a wait and see approach on certain things that you know could kill you?

Like, of course you wouldn't, especially if you were the only test subject, you would definitely be more cautious in how you handled certain things.

So it's kind of ridiculous to say, you know, like, well, this hardcore argument, it's like, yeah, man, the hardcore argument happens to be real because we do only have one planet right now until Elon takes us to Mars.

Yeah, that's a great point.

And I think it's something that Teal does keep doing throughout.

There's a couple of other clips I think that illustrate that he thinks he sees the cost of overcaution to be equal to or worse than the cost of excessive risk.

And that is true when you have a safety net, when you have a fallback position, but it isn't true when it's all or nothing.

And even here, even in that analogy, he's still

belittling the quality of the climate science, of climatology, because he says about that hardcore environmentalist thing of like, maybe you don't want to have to have as high a standard of science and claiming that it's all dogmatic and ideological.

But the science on climate change is very, very strong at this point.

It is a very good standard of science.

And saying it's otherwise is just an attempt to belittle it.

All right.

So now we are going to circle back to methane versus carbon dioxide.

Maybe it doesn't even work even if the planet's getting warmer.

You know, maybe climate science is not, like my question is, is carbon, like maybe methane is a worse,

is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

We're not even capable of measuring that.

Let's for one second agree that we can't see if something is definitely worse or not.

I don't need to know if I can tell that they're both bad, right?

Like I don't need to, let's just presume that he's right.

He's not right.

We know which one is worse.

Even if he's right, that we can't figure that out, they're both bad, then we both, we need to limit both, then we need to pay attention to both.

The idea that we just say, oh, well, we can't tell.

So why bother with either is a stupid answer.

So I agree, although I would say it is definitely worth us knowing the relevant levels of

because for prioritizing, you don't want to spend an equal amount of time on two different, on these two things if they are nowhere near equal in terms of impact.

And of course, in this situation, Thiel is trying to argue that it isn't worth taking this kind of action either way.

So, him saying we don't know whether carbon dioxide or methane is worse is a complete red herring because his argument is, therefore, we shouldn't do anything.

But if they're both bad, but the relative badness of the two, or even if just one of them was bad and the other one wasn't, it would still necessitate action, which is the thing that Peter Thiel is trying to argue against.

Yeah, and the answer is that methane is way more dangerous, but we produce less of it.

So, it has less of an impact on the environment.

Carbon is still still the major contributor to our problems in the environment.

But if we continue to thaw the planet and more methane releases from certain places on the planet, it could overwhelm

how bad carbon is.

But as it stands right now, carbon is the main contributor.

Yeah, exactly.

So we do know that.

And it took me no time to find that.

Yeah.

And so that's why the certainty with which Teal says we're not capable of measuring carbon dioxide versus methane, that should give everybody a pause, especially if you are prone to listening to him.

If you were listening to him on this interview and on the interview with Rorgan and thinking he sounded like he really knows what he's talking about, because he isn't making that statement from a position of knowledge.

A very quick Google will tell you he's completely wrong about that.

His view is literally, by the definition of the word, ignorant.

And if we're to ask why he's ignorant, maybe we would come back to terms like dogma and ideology as to why he hasn't bothered checking this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So now we're going to shift a little bit and start talking about trees and planting trees.

Well, we're also ignoring certain things like regenerative farms that sequester carbon.

And then you have people like Bill Gates saying that planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous.

That's a ridiculous way to do it.

Like, how is that ridiculous?

They literally turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.

It is their food, their food.

That's what the food of plants is.

That's what powers the whole plant life and the way we have the symbiotic relationship with them.

And the more carbon dioxide is, the greener it is, which is is why it's greener today on Earth than it has been in 100 years.

Sure.

These are all facts that are inconvenient to people that have a very specific, narrow window of how to approach this.

Yeah, well, I think this is really interesting because his point here seems like common sense.

It seems completely common sense that you're planting trees.

Trees must be a good thing.

Trees soak up oxygen.

How can this be wrong?

And this is quite a persuasive argument that does the rounds quite often.

But this is why I think this is such an interesting area, because there is subtlety and nuance and complexity that we have to try and understand, because otherwise, the solutions we'll propose could end up doing either nothing or do more harm than good.

So, like, trees are obviously good.

Nobody is saying that trees aren't good.

Bill Gates isn't saying trees are bad, but there are criticisms of tree planting schemes because, for one thing, they're not going to do anywhere near enough.

Here's a quote from Fortune.

I think this is actually from Bill Gates, as what he was saying here.

A study by MIT found that planting one trillion trees would eliminate about 6% of the carbon dioxide the world needs to stop emitting by 2050 to reach the goals set out in the 2015 Paris Accords.

So a trillion trees is about 6% of what we need to do.

So we need a lot of trillions of trees before we even start to do that.

And planting that number of trees would be a very huge undertaking.

Maybe there are better ways for us to get a bang for our book or return on our time.

There's another article in the BBC, actually by Michael Marshall, but not me.

There is a different Michael Marshall who's a science.

You should reach out to him for comment.

You should have.

You should have been like, hey, Samsies, come on.

Well, I do get a lot of his emails and he gets some of mine.

At one point, this is a tangent.

At one point, we both wrote for The Guardian and The Guardian's accounting department would send me like

invoices or receipts that were due for him.

Also, even more annoyingly,

there's a sci-fi writer called Michael Marshall Smith, who who also wrote a piece for The Guardian.

And at one point, I was getting his mail as well.

And because he writes thrillers, somebody sent me a copy of their thriller book to review.

And I was like, I'm not him.

And then they sort of went, yeah, but can you review it anyway?

And I thought, is that because they think that's the kind of response a thriller writer would give them?

Like, oh, you would say that.

You would keep me in suspense.

Amazing.

So listeners, if you want to know why I typically go by Marsh and not Michael Marshall, it's because there's too many Michael Marshalls mocking around.

But anyway, this article in the BBC by the other Michael Marshall explained that, quote, much of the land described as available for tree planting already has plants growing in it, all of them storing carbon, many of which would have to be removed.

And this is me saying, now, and if you remove them, obviously the process of removal would release some of that carbon.

So the tree that you plant isn't replacing the carbon that you're, that you're, so that you're emitting in the atmosphere from what you're replacing.

And then we plan, we, we published a really great piece to the magazine that I edit called The Skeptic some time ago.

This was from a writer called Sarah Hearn, who I thought had a great understanding, a really great explanation of exactly this issue in an article called Tree Planting Schemes Look Fantastic on Paper, but they won't save us from climate change.

It'll be linked in the show notes, but I'll just give you this one segment from it.

To get to big trees, you must first start with small trees.

So the tree planting schemes make sense as long as every tree that you plant grows up, but not all of them do.

Gloucester City Council in the UK planted 12,500 whips, whips, which are small trees aged two to three years old and less than a meter tall, at the beginning of 2022.

And by the summer of 2022, only 700 were still alive.

So those whips all had to be cultivated, dug up, transported in vehicles emitting carbon and planted.

And every step of this generated carbon.

Digging the soil releases carbon.

In fact, when you add it all up, it can take years for a tree to become a carbon sink rather than a carbon source, the one that you've planted to be

net positive to the world.

And the more whips that die, the longer it will take for schemes like this to

pay themselves off carbon-wise.

Yeah.

Also, the big takeaway also here is that these are often performative by companies so that they can pollute and create, they can create a ton of carbon.

And then they pay for some trees to get planted as a way to distract from all the carbon that they're emitting.

They're saying, well, we pledged to plant 50,000 trees or 200 million trees or whatever it is.

It still isn't offsetting all the stuff that they're doing to create more climate change.

Yeah, exactly.

And then you have other issues.

So Joe says about how the world is more green than it was.

And I checked out this.

This is an article in Vox called The Earth is Getting Greener.

And here's a quote from it.

To sensors on a satellite, a rainforest in Indonesia and a nearby monoculture of coffee or rubber trees looks the same.

They both appear green, yet these two landscapes are dramatically different.

The rainforest is home to orangutans and rare plants and helps regulate the local climate, whereas the plantation is relatively devoid of life.

Measurements of color alone fail to capture these important differences.

More than that, they can mask ecosystem destruction.

Companies commonly tear up native forests to plant commercial crops.

Satellite data alone struggles to capture these changes in land use.

We're going to stay on climate change.

In the 1970s, it was you're going to have overpopulation.

You're going to run out of oil.

We had the oil shocks.

And then by the 90s, it sort of morphed into more of the pollution problem with carbon dioxide, climate change, other environmental things.

So I think what he's doing in this very quick clip, he's trying to tie modern concerns about the climate to historic incorrect concerns about overpopulation and oil shocks.

In this kind of sense, overpopulation was a worry that, oh, there's going to be way too many people by a certain point until we fully understood what drives population growth and population shrinkage.

And the oil shocks was the idea that we're going to hit peak oil and we'll have no more oil anymore and it'll be a real problem.

Those things both turned out to be untrue for various reasons.

And so, he's trying to tie this, this climate change crisis we're in, to this idea of, well, they were wrong back then, and they're wrong now.

This is just the latest thing that they're wrong about.

And then also, he calls climate change, he says, you know, now it's more about a pollution problem.

And I think it's a bit more than a pollution problem.

I think that's an attempt to belittle it, because this is, I would say, an existential threat.

It's not that the environment will be in, will be, and pollution is very bad, don't get me wrong.

But this is more of a sense that if we don't solve this they won't there won't be a a flourishing environment for us to live in next we're going to talk about uh energy and energy infrastructure

um how much of that could the the the demand for oil could be mitigated by nuclear

uh it you probably you probably could mitigate it a lot there's there's a question why the why the nuclear thing has gone so wrong.

Especially if you have electric vehicles, right?

Combustion engine is probably hard to get nuclear to work, but if you shift to electric vehicles, you can charge them your Tesla cars at night.

And that would seemingly work.

And

there's definitely a history of energy where it was always in the direction of

more intense use.

It went from wood to coal to oil, which is a more compact form of energy.

And in a way, it takes up less of the environment.

And then if we move from oil to uranium, that's even you know, it it it's even smaller.

And so in a sense, the smaller, the more dense the energy is, the less of the environment it takes up.

And when we go back, when we go from oil to natural gas, which takes up more space, and from natural gas to solar or wind,

you have to pollute the whole environment by putting up windmills everywhere.

Or

you have to cover the whole desert with solar panels.

That is a good way to look at it because it is a form of pollution.

I think this is really disingenuous to say that things are getting, first of all, the sources of energy are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and now we're starting to expand again.

I don't think it's true to say that we went to coal and oil, and now they're they're expanding to go out to solar and wind.

Because with coal and oil, you are shipping those things around the world as products that need to be burned.

Whereas it's more like saying there's a coal plant and there is a wind turbine and those are building structures, but there's nothing you need to put into the wind turbine or get out of the wind turbine or get to anywhere.

So it's not comparing things fairly between those two.

He's just trying to demonize it.

I mean, unless you're saying the source of energy in solar is the sun and that is bigger than coal.

Like the sun is pretty big.

I don't think that's what he's saying.

So I think he's doing a little bit of a rhetorica sleight of hands the more that I listen to that back again there.

But also when people talk about pollution, they're not thinking about visual pollution.

I think the conversation here is about climate change and we're shifting the definition of that terming.

The pollution we're talking about is the CO2 that is causing our

world to heat up, which is causing like devastating climate catastrophes like what we've seen in California and floods and all these other kind of things.

So, so he's switching those terms around in order to make it seem like there is an equivalence here, and there isn't.

And then he talks about you've got to pollute the entire environment, the whole environment, by putting up wind turbines.

But what he means then is just visually, I assume, because you're not, that's the only form of pollution you could be talking about.

And Joe says, well, that's a good way to look at it.

It's a form of pollution.

Visual pollution is a form of pollution.

But apart from the places that are not in the line of sight of a wind turbine, those aren't visually polluted.

If you're nowhere near a wind turbine, or if you're, if there's a house or building building in the way between you and the wind turbine, there's no visual pollution going on there.

Even offshore wind, so there's a lot of onshore wind.

There's a lot of offshore wind.

In the UK, we're kind of surrounded by offshore wind.

There's a wind farm a few miles away from where I am in Liverpool, just off the coast of in the Irish Sea, just off the coast of Liverpool.

And on a clear day, when you come over a hill in the city center, you can see them.

I actually think they look really cool.

I actually really like the look of windmills.

But if you didn't like the look of them, you wouldn't see them unless it was a clear day and you were on that hill.

Otherwise, they're just quietly in the background, giving free electricity in exchange for zero greenhouse gases no pollution there and you talk about solar farms you've got to cover the desert in solar farms well solar farms in the desert is actually a pretty efficient way of generating masses of solar energy if there's nothing else going on in the desert there you're not going to disturb land farmland for crops you're not going to disturb the land that people are living on because people typically live less densely in those areas as long as you can deal with two big issues which is sand buildup on the actual panels themselves from like sandstorms and stuff, and how to transport that energy elsewhere, then solar panels in the desert is a pretty good idea.

It's a very efficient way of using those panels.

But all of that, all of that is granting their argument that seeing a wind turbine or seeing a solar farm is a pollution of your environment.

And I don't get that.

I don't buy that argument at all.

There are solar panels on top of my house.

I don't consider my roof polluted.

I actually think they look kind of cool.

But even if you believe that, what about electricity pylons, which are across the landscape everywhere?

What about LNG tankers?

Would you rather see an offshore wind turbine or an LNG tanker floating around there?

They see no issue with pylons and LNG tankers and things like that, because those are just part of the existing environment they've always seen.

Yes, exactly.

So they've become kind of change blind to them.

And then finally, they're talking about, well, as I say, finally, there's lots more we could be saying, but they're talking about like polluting the whole environment.

Well, let's circle back around to greenhouse gases, which are literally polluting the whole environment.

Those greenhouse gases are getting into the air and filling our environment.

And not just the fossil fuels that your car is burning or

the gas that you're burning to eat your home.

What about the amount of carbon dioxide released during the

mining and refining processes?

And then also the transportation, like the oil tankers and

liquid natural gas tankers that are burning diesel to sail around,

to head around the oceans taking vast amounts of oil to countries that aren't producing oil all of those things are adding carbon to the atmosphere and solar farms and wind farms are doing none of those extra things yeah whenever they bring this point up and this is i think the second time we've heard this point on joe's show is that these are visually gross to look at that that solar and wind is visually gross to look at and then i i just just drive by a refinery i grew up by a refinery and it would occasionally blow up like you know just like on occasion it'd just explode just like wind photo yeah yeah yeah like every five or six years yeah on that land man they definitely talk about how when those things blow up and kill people and all that stuff no but but like it would occasionally just explode but it looked like a rusty nail like everything is rusted everything's corroded it's constantly belching garbage into the sky it looks nasty and it's huge it's like enormous it was an enormous refinery with huge tanks and like fire shooting out of it.

And there's like all kinds of pipes that go in all kinds of different directions.

It looked horrifying when you drive by it.

It looks like a future.

It looks like, it looks like the set of RoboCop.

You know what I mean?

It looks awful.

But these guys,

they conveniently forget that our entire landscape is littered with those.

And coal plants are gross and they constantly burn coal and shoot coal dust into the air.

And there's big giant piles of coal you have to drive by.

So it's all bad.

Plus all the stuff just to get that energy.

And then like you suggest move it places.

All that's included in that.

And they seem to just gloss right over it.

Yeah, yeah, completely.

I mean, I grew up in coal mining country.

My village was a coal mining town.

My grandfather was a coal miner.

I think he'd have far rather been servicing a wind farm than going several, several

hundred feet underground in order to chip away at rock for eight hours a day.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about nuclear power and why it stopped.

And then, yeah, there are all these

historical questions.

Why did it get stopped?

Why did we not go down that route?

The standard explanation of why it stopped was that

there were all these dangers.

We had Three Mile On in 1979, Chernobyl

in 1986, and then the Fukushima one in Japan, I think, 2011.

And

you had these various accidents.

My alternate theory on on

why nuclear energy really stopped is that

it was sort of dystopian or even apocalyptic because

it turned out to be very dual use.

If you build nuclear power plants,

it's only sort of one step away from building nuclear weapons.

And it turned out to be a lot trickier to separate those two things out than it looked.

And I think the signature moment was 1974 or 75 when India gets the nuclear bomb.

And the U.S., I believe, had transferred the nuclear reactor technology to India.

We thought they couldn't weaponize it.

And then it turned out it was pretty easy to weaponize.

So I think there's a lot going on here.

First of all, it's worth us just remembering that Fukushima wasn't first and foremost a nuclear disaster.

So an earthquake happened in that area.

That earthquake caused a tsunami, and that tsunami hit the power plant.

And that is what caused there to be a worry about the nuclear leaks and things like this.

This wasn't a failure of the power plant.

This was a catastrophic situation

that was triggered by other things going on.

But even then, the nuclear leak showed minimal health effects on the population.

So, radiation exposure of those living in proximity to the accident site was estimated at between 12 and 25 millisieverts in the year following the accident.

And residents of Fukushima City were estimated to have received four millisieverts

over the same time period.

Now, in comparison, the dosage of background radiation that will receive over a lifetime is 170 millisieverts.

There are very few or no detectable cancers that are expected as a result of the accumulated radiation exposures.

Residents who were evacuated were exposed to so little radiation that radiation-induced health effects were likely to be below detectable levels.

There's been no increase in miscarriages, or stillbirths, or physical and mental disorders in babies born after the accident.

So, this, while we talk about this as a really serious nuclear disaster, and obviously it was a huge nuclear risk,

the human cost was not from the nuclear disaster far far far more people were killed by the earthquake and the tsunami yes what we should learn there's lots of lessons we should learn from fukushima one of them is that building nuclear power plants in areas that are um earthquake prone might be a risk whereas building them in places that don't have earthquakes and tsunamis will not have those issues.

So if this, if that power plant existed in the UK where we don't have earthquakes or tsunamis, this would never have been a problem at all.

And also, it was an old style nuclear reactor.

And so it was one of the reactors that you need a constant stream of electricity in order to keep it safe, essentially.

Now, the newer forms of nuclear reactor have the opposite mechanism, that if there's a cut to power, it shuts down.

Like you need, the power needs to keep something going, bit, keep it on, and it keeps the fail safe from kicking in.

So it's this will, if we lose power, this will stop, is how the new ones work.

And in that situation, when the earthquake hit and the tsunami hit, power would have been been lost and it would have shut down and not been a risk.

So the modern forms of nuclear power plants would not have had this kind of potential risk for an escalating meltdown, which was the fear in Fukushima.

Also, the modern forms of nuclear power plants can't be repurposed into nuclear weapons.

There is no, I looked this up, there's no case where any nuclear, any modern nuclear power plant using the latest technology has produced material that could be used, that could be weaponized.

So for a man here, Peter Thiel, in this interview, who is complaining that technology hasn't changed in decades, if not the last 100 years, our lifestyle hasn't changed in 100 years.

Technology hasn't advanced in at least two or three decades.

For this guy, he's currently referencing technology that is literally 50 years out of date.

He's talking about 1975.

That's a different form of a completely different technology that he's referencing.

Modern nuclear technology looks nothing like what...

India had in 1975.

You're absolutely right.

I do think, you know, to his credit, I do think he's somewhat right about our perceptions, at least the United States perceptions of it.

We stopped much of our planning of nuclear reactors here in the United States after Three Mile Island.

We kept building the ones we had approved before, so we had a bunch approved, and they did continue to grow like from the through the 80s and 90s, but now they've stagnant, they're stagnant and they don't, they're starting to drop off.

Actually, we're starting to decommission some of them.

So, there was several that were approved before Three Mile Island and very few that got approved after Three Mile Island because it just is not one of those things.

America didn't want it, they just saw it and they didn't want it.

I want to mention too, this is an aside, but I think we could, if we could get into Joe's studio, Marsh, I think we could get a conspiracy going.

Here's the conspiracy.

Hear me.

Okay.

Okay.

12 days before the shutdown of Three Mile Island, the China Syndrome was released.

It came out.

Now, this movie plot was similar to the events at Three Mile Island.

So we say.

that the movie was put out by Big Cole and the government was in on it and they were paid by Big Cole to mess with the reactor and then suddenly Joe is pro-nuclear power plants.

What do you think?

We could do this.

I think we could easily do this.

I think that could work.

So, I mean,

I'm going to take one step back from there, but still be in a similar space.

It wouldn't surprise me.

I didn't know the history of nuclear power plants in America and how

the will for it waned.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the government will for nuclear power plants waning was a result of lobbying from America's massive oil industry because there's so much oil and coal in America and nuclear is a massive, would be a massive threat to that.

It was always been a massive threat to it.

It wouldn't surprise me.

I also know that after Fukushima, Germany, I think, either shut down, I think it shut down several of its nuclear power plants or shells plans to have them.

Yeah.

Because they were worried about the same thing.

Germany doesn't have earthquakes and doesn't have tsunamis, but this was just a fear response that wasn't rational.

And I believe at the same time, France upped their capacity because they recognized that someone's going to give Germany all that electricity.

So it might as well be France selling that electricity to Germany.

All right.

So next up, we're going to talk about how expensive nuclear power is.

And then, sort of the compromise was just to

regulate it so much that, you know, maybe the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones.

Jeez.

Like, even China, which is the country where they're building the most nuclear power plants, they built way less than people expected a decade ago because

they don't trust their own designs.

And so they have to copy the oversafety, over-protected designs from the West and the nuclear plants.

Nuclear power costs too much money.

It's cheaper to do coal.

Wow.

So

I'm not getting the numbers exactly right, but if you look at what percent of Chinese electricity was nuclear, it wasn't that high.

It was like maybe 4% or 5% in 2013, 2014.

And the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because they've maybe doubled the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear, but the relative percentage is still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive when you have these over safety designed reactors.

So, yeah, maybe they doubled their nuclear, but the percentage is still small.

That's of China.

Well, I looked this up.

In 2014, China had 130 terawatt-hour capacity.

And in 2022, that was up to 418 terawatt hours.

So it's more than triple.

They didn't just double it, they more than tripled it.

But okay, the percentage is still small.

Well, let's look at that as well.

In 2000, 1% of China's energy use was nuclear.

In 2013, which is when Teal is talking about, it was up to 2%.

And by 2023, it was at 4.86 percent so their capacity has doubled every decade because china has gone in pretty hard on solar and nuclear as part of their decarbonization schemes so what teal is actually trying to do here is paint nuclear as the expensive solution and that you know it's more expensive than coal and it's more expensive of oil and it is if you're just looking at the cost of generation and running but there's other costs to consider here like the cost of climate change the cost of climate change is incredibly uh high for all of us There's an article, I think, from The Guardian, which is pointing out that in 2024, it was the most costly, the most costly climate disasters in 2024 killed 2,000 people and caused $229 billion of damage around the world, just for

those most costly disasters.

And I know we're flush with these things now, right?

Flush with coal, flush with oil in different places.

But as time goes on, those resources dwindle and they're going to get more and more expensive to get out of the ground and get to the places where they need to go.

So those costs are also going to continue to increase as time goes on.

They're just going to keep going up.

And again, this feels like a calculated attack on regulation.

These plants are overprotected.

There's just too much overprotected by whose standards?

What are we talking about here?

And I think like he's trying to say, regulation is bad.

We need to make it cheaper.

We need to make these plants a little more loosey-goosey, you know?

And I, and I, and I think, again, I think that this is a real simple way to just undermine how people regulate, how our governments regulate things to keep things safe for us.

Far on into the conversation, they have talked about a bunch of different things.

They had moved on to AI, but there is one more jab at climate change here.

I don't know.

You know, it's mixing metaphors, but do you want to be worried about Dr.

Strangelove, who wants to blow up the world to build bigger bombs?

Or do you want to worry about Greta, who wants to, you know, make everyone drive a bicycle so the world doesn't get destroyed?

And we're in a world where people are worried about Dr.

Strangelove.

They're not worried about Greta.

And it's the Greta equivalent in AI that

my model is going to be surprisingly powerful.

This is Greta Thunberg they're talking about, right?

Yeah, he is, yeah.

And let's say he's talking about the regulation of AI here and what form of regulation

we should follow.

But this really sums up Thiel's viewpoint on so many issues on climate change, on regulation, AI, risk, all sorts of things.

Like, first of all, the fact that he is using Greta Thunberg as an avatar of the big threat that concerns him most really shows where he stands on climate change as well as on regulation.

Like, I don't think many people would see Greta Thunberg and say she is the biggest threat to human society and progress.

But he thinks it's a genuine question.

And when it comes to technological advancement, should we be more worried about destruction or should we, we, should we be more worried about the over caution that might avoid destruction?

Now, I don't think that's a difficult question.

Now, obviously, anytime you have the possibility of destruction, you have to increase the level of caution that you're taking because the cost of failure is so much higher.

If this is like the cost, if the risk is just either, you know, AI will stop working and we can try something else, then okay, maybe you can afford to be more risky and not as cautious.

But if it's a AI will cause these catastrophic effects to society that will cause society to crumble, or if it's climate change will prevent the world from being habitable for humans, you have to take more precaution because if you're wrong, or if it if it goes wrong, the cost is so high.

So, even if we did accept his framing that a Greta Thunberg version of the world where we're riding bicycles is a vision of hell, he is still presenting us with a false dichotomy here because there are other choices available between these two extremes.

It's not let it rip or be way too cold.

It's not Strange Love or Greta Thunberg.

There is a middle ground that we could walk on AI regulation.

That's a great segue to get us to our toolbox section this week.

Wow.

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For our toolbox, Marsh, we're doing false dichotomy.

So tell us what that is.

So yeah, a false dichotomy, it's also known as a false dilemma or an either-or fallacy.

It's a rhetorical technique where you present only two possible options or solutions, often where either one or even both are extreme.

And then you try to force people into rejecting the more negative or undesirable option of the two, try to force them down this choice and try to bias their choice in one direction by saying there is only two choices here.

Whereas in reality, there's more than two choices available.

They're just presenting these two choices in order to force your hand.

But actually, there's a lot of other options.

For example, we might say, look, you can either listen to our podcast or you can listen to Joe Rogan.

Which is it going to be?

So like, you know, while we'd love everybody to choose to listen to our show instead of Joe Rogan, in reality, there's lots of other podcasts available.

Yeah.

Like a lot of other podcasts available.

But, you know, still tell your friends about us.

Okay.

Well, let's, we're going to, we're going to circle back a little bit to what they were talking about when we first started the show, about how your lived environment hasn't changed.

That's our first segment in the toolbox.

And then, of course, there's also a sense in which these screens and the devices.

you know, have this effect of distracting us from this.

So, you know, when you're riding a hundred-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can look at, wow, this is this cool new gadget, but you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed, you know, in a hundred years.

A hundred years.

Now, a hundred years ago was 1925.

He's saying the lived environment hasn't changed since 1925.

In 1925, my granddaughter was underground in a coal mine all day and then working in a bar job in the evening to feed his 10 children.

Wow.

And also, he was white, like the lived environment for people who weren't white has changed pretty substantially in that time as well.

And it kind of makes me ask, what does Peter Thial think life was like in the 1920s that it was so similar to right now?

Yeah.

This feels like he's trying to make a point about tech being the most important thing in our lives.

And I'm not sure I disagree 100%, but I think his metaphors are super weird.

The reason why we've never advanced any of this stuff is because we never put any money into it.

And the false dichotomy here is that only computer tech has advanced and is futuristic.

and he's comparing it to things that are not in the same sector or funding.

They're just not in the same, they're totally different.

It's apples and oranges.

So here we go.

So

next piece is oil is the key to standard of living.

There's been some

improvement in oil, carbon fuels with fracking, things like this in Texas.

It's not at the scale that's been enough to

give an American standard of living to the whole planet.

We consume 100 million barrels of oil

a day globally.

Maybe fracking can add 10%, 10 million to that.

If everybody on this planet has an American standard of living, it's something like 300, 400 million barrels of oil.

And I don't think that's there.

So that's kind of, I always wondered whether that was the real environmental argument.

We can't have an American standard of living for the whole planet.

We somehow can't justify this degree of inequality.

And therefore, we have to figure out ways to dial back and and tax the carbon, restrict it.

And

maybe that's

some sort of a Malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution.

Yeah, so this is a false dichotomy because you don't have to be relying on oil to change things.

Oil doesn't have to be the standard, the way to give an American standard of living.

So it can't just be, we need oil to do this or nobody could have it.

There are other ways to do it.

Those standards of living

can be achieved through energy of different sorts.

You can get energy through means other than oil.

And you can claim that fracking is the key to an American standard of living, but tell that to the towns that are downwater and fracking sites and see how high their standard of living is.

And so he's saying that either we have the flourishing oil industry that we want, or we have to limit resources and have this Malthusian calculus.

And

Malthusianism is the idea that population has to be controlled for optimal resource allocation.

Therefore, we should limit population growth and even try to get rid of some undesirables in order to make sure that we stay below a certain number, that we can all have plenty of resources.

This is a

false dichotomy.

This is a false dilemma.

There are other ways to achieve a high standard of living without having to rely on fracking and oil.

And he's just closing those doors off for us.

It sounds like he's saying that Americans tax and restrict carbon because they feel bad that the world isn't living up to our standard.

What an odd motivation to do that.

Not that, and again, I think this takes away agency for people who are really passionate about climate change.

We saw this a couple of weeks ago when they were trying to belittle the Black Lives Matter protests.

And they try to take away agencies from those people to say, oh, well, it was agent provocateurs that did all this stuff.

And they were the ones who were out there doing this.

It wasn't the rage of the people who were being exploited or the people who were being attacked by our government.

It was all these other people who were sort of agent provocateurs that were able to do this sort of thing to make it look like those those protests were what those protests were.

Those people didn't have that kind of motivation.

Same thing here where you're saying, oh, well, we do it because we feel bad.

No, a lot of times people are really motivated to change climate change because they're very worried about it.

So they're talking here in this next clip about the Turing test and deciding how an AI can be human.

If we had sat here two years ago and you asked me, you know, what is the distinctive feature of a human being?

What makes someone a human?

And, you know, how in a way that differs from everybody else.

It's not perfect, but my go-to answer would have been language.

You're a three-year-old, you're an 80-year-old,

just about all humans can speak languages, just about all non-humans cannot speak languages.

It's this binary thing.

Yeah, that's not how binary works.

That one side is just about this

and just about the other side is this.

He's taken sort of fuzzy kind of things here.

Now, I think it's a false dichotomy.

It's sort of saying, like, he's saying, I've got a bunch of things that are just about ones and a bunch of other things that are practically zeros, and therefore it's literally binary.

It's not binary.

The false dichotomy here is that not all humans can speak.

And there are other, there are animals that have forms of communication that don't rise to the level of strict language, but would be considered some forms of communication that are in that kind of area.

They're able to convey some ideas.

So

it's not a straightforward thing as to say that every human has language and everything that isn't human has nothing even close to language.

There are gradations between the two as to what constitutes language.

And even in his example, he points out, you know, three-year-olds and above age, there are people who are like too young and too old to currently still be able to speak.

There are non-verbal adults.

We covered a recent episode all about non-verbal autistic people who can't speak.

They are still human.

This is the, so that language isn't the only tell of humanity.

Normally I trim these clips and I decide, on Marsha's suggestion, I did not trim this one.

Normally what I'll do is I'll speed it up just a touch because normally they talk pretty slow, so I'll speed it up just a touch and I will trim out the silences.

I did not do it on this clip.

This clip is about philanthropy, and we capped those very specific uh pauses in here so you could hear sort of give you a sample of what some of this episode is like.

Now, this is an extreme example because this is the longest pause, I think, in the episode itself, but but

but it is it is an example of what what the most of this episode is.

What about these left-wing philanthropy ventures do you think is uniquely corrupt?

Sorry, which one do I think is most corrupt?

Or which one?

What about them?

When you said corrupt.

Yeah.

Well, um

man it's it's there's something about

it's maybe it's just my hermeneutic of suspicion but there's something about

you know

there's something about the virtue signaling and what does it mean and I always think this is sort of a Europe America versus Europe difference where in America, we're told that

philanthropy is something a good person does.

And

if you're a Rockefeller or you start giving away all your money,

this is just what a good person does, and it shows how good you are.

And then I think sort of the European intuition on it is something like,

you know, wow,

that's only something a very evil person does.

And if you if you start giving away all your money in Europe, it's like, Joe, you must have murdered somebody.

You must be covering up for something.

And so there are these two very different intuitions.

Oh,

I have to check that several times when I watch this for the first time.

I timed this.

So Joe asks him, he's talking about how corrupt and evil left-wing

philanthropy is seen by left-wing people and how evil left-wing philanthropy generally is.

And Joe's, his question is basically, so why do you believe what you just said?

And

Peter Thiel is so flummoxed that he pauses, counted, for 37 seconds.

There is 37 seconds.

In the middle of that 30 seven seconds, he says, you've asked me what's the most corrupt.

And Joe's like, not the question.

Please go back to the question to ask.

But it's 37 seconds of pause.

And eventually his answer is, well, you know, suspicious, innit?

That's what he's got.

That's what he's got.

It's just gossip.

And this just shows this was a man who was not remotely prepared for there to be follow-up questions in this conversation.

He's very used to making pronouncements and hiding it behind language, like his hermeneutic of suspicion, and just expecting people to just believe him.

Yeah.

False dichotomy here is that there's only two ways to look at philanthropy and that it's monolithic in both cultures.

And that's just not true.

Also, you know.

Let's ask why there's not more European billionaires in fact, because there's not more European billionaires.

Perhaps they've figured out taxing better than the United States has.

Maybe that's why there's fewer European billionaires because there is.

Like if you look it up, like the United States has the most billionaires, and then the like fourth one down is Germany, and it's a very small amount in comparison.

China's second, United States is first, but it's maybe it's because we tax people a lot better.

And, you know, you got to ask yourself, why does a billionaire think giving away money is bad?

You know, ask yourself why that is.

Why is it bad to have that instinct?

Why is it you're automatically covering up for for something if that's the case?

Why would your mind go there?

Just think about that when you listen to him talk.

Yeah.

All right.

So last bit, we're talking about aging and your politics as you age.

There are ways it shifts the politics in a very, very deep way where, you know, once you get an inverted demographic pyramid where you have way more old people than young people,

at some point, you know, there's always a question, do you vote?

You know, do you vote for benefits for the old or for the very young?

Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?

And

once the demographic flips and you get this inverted pyramid, maybe the politics shifts in a very deep way where the people with kids get penalized more and more economically.

It just costs more and more.

And then the old people without kids just vote more and more benefits for themselves, effectively.

And then it just sort of,

you know, once it flips, it may be very hard to reverse.

Marsh, what's a spare leg?

It's a three-legged nun.

It's just your three-legged granny.

It's that.

What is he?

I don't know.

Maybe his grandma has got three legs.

Maybe, maybe.

I'm not judging.

I just was curious.

I just thought maybe you knew.

I didn't know.

So there's more than two choices here.

You could do the middle one, which is vote so everybody gets benefits.

That's also a choice.

He's presenting it as if there's only two choices and you're only self-motivated.

Why is both of his choices selfish?

Why isn't there one choice in the middle that says, hey, I would really like older people to have benefits and I would really like those people who are having children to have benefits.

And that would be okay because that's how I would vote.

Like

he automatically just presumes that those that

there's that you're automatically self-interested and that should tell you a lot about who Peter Thiel is.

Yeah, exactly.

There is the option that you give the benefits to people who require it, who need it, who would benefit from it, who are suffering, who need the help, rather than just through self-interest, as you say, through one particular group that you happen to be in.

Yeah, good point.

And I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh.

This was three and an hours and a half, I think it was.

Was there any piece of this that was good?

I think there's a couple of things.

I think the last hour was relatively innocuous, so that kind of saved some of my analysis time.

That was pretty good.

And also, there was a point where he talks fairly early on, actually, about kind of moving out of LA.

And he talks about how the house prices in Florida and Austin, he bought a house in Florida and now the house is worth so much more.

But now to try and buy anything else, everything has gone up so much, especially in those areas.

And it's more expensive to live there and things.

And to be honest, hearing a billionaire realize in real time the effect of gentrification was a mildly enjoyable thing to hear, that he suddenly kind of stumbled across gentrification like like it was new.

You know, I will say, great part.

You're right.

That's also a great part.

I will say that I didn't dislike the conversation about possible

alien life, the warp drive ethics, the things you were talking about, the space fascist stuff you were talking about.

Like I didn't, I don't, it's fine, Chatter.

It's a good back and forth, and it's fine to have that conversation.

I definitely think there's better people to have that conversation with than Peter Thiel.

I think you're wasting your opportunity to talk to Peter Thiel when you mention space fascists and you start talking about how humans got a larger brain because of evolution, et cetera, and how, what's that link and why do we have a larger brain?

Why would you ask Peter Thiel those questions and not the Weinstein you had in or you have in pretty much on the regular?

That seems like a guy who I would ask that question to instead of Peter Thiel.

I would talk to Peter Thiel about wealth accumulation.

I talked to him about data brokering.

I talk to him about a lot of other things that aren't just these weird sort of things that I'm into.

I would talk to him about stuff that, you know, he would know a lot about.

And I think, Joe, you know,

they spend a lot of time, like we suggest, talking about climate change.

The AI stuff is fine because I think.

Peter's in that sort of realm.

So that's, that's fine to talk to him about.

But I think like any of this other stuff that they talked about, I thought it was a wasted guest.

I think like find somebody who knows about climate science to talk to the climate science guy.

Don't make Peter Thiel talk about all these other things that he's not an expert in.

I I think that's fair.

Although I will say, if he was talking about all the things he was an expert in, I think you and I would come away with less of a strong understanding of who Peter Thiel is

and what he's talking about.

So it's not, it's not good for Joe, it's not good for his guests, but it's kind of useful from an analytic point of view to understand it.

Well, that's it for the show this week.

Remember, you can access more than half an hour of bonus content every single week from as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com forward slash no rogan, K-N-O-W-Rogan.

And meanwhile, you can hear more from Cecil at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed.

And you can hear more from me at Skeptic to the K and the Skeptic podcast.

So we'll be back next time for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

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