Peter Thiel
speaker
1,088 appearances
12 recordings
11 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 15 Jun
Peter Thiel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Sure. Although there probably are ways to steel man the other side too where maybe – Maybe the original 1970s, I think the manifesto that's always Very interesting from the other side was this book by the Club of Rome, 1972, The Limits of Growth. And it's, you can't have, we need to head towards a society in which there's zero percent, there's very limited growth.
Because if you have unlimited growth, you're going to run out of resources. If you don't run out of resources, you'll hit a pollution constraint. But 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. But there is sort of... You know, there's been some, you know, some improvement in oil, carbon fuels with fracking, things like this in Texas. It's not at the scale that's been enough to, you know, give an American standard of living to the whole planet.
And we consume 100 million barrels a year. 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 wonder 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 tax the carbon, restrict it. And maybe that's... There's some sort of a Malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution.
You probably could mitigate it a lot. There's a question why the nuclear thing. has gone so wrong, especially if you have electric vehicles, right? The combustion engine is probably hard to get nuclear to work, but if you shift to electric vehicles, you can charge 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, 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.
And so there was a way that nuclear was supposed to be the energy mode of the 21st century. 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 Island 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 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. And then the...
And then sort of the geopolitical problem with nuclear power was you either, you know, you need a double standard where we have nuclear power in the U.S., but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the U.S. gets to keep its nuclear weapons. We don't let a hundred other countries have nuclear weapons.
And that's an extreme double standard, probably a little bit hard to justify, right? Or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one-world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either.
And then sort of the compromise was just to regulate it so much that maybe the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones. 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, you know, they don't trust their own designs.
And so they have to copy the over-safety, over-protected designs from the West and the nuclear plants. Nuclear power costs too much money. It's cheaper to do coal. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, I'm not going to get 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 percent in 2013, 2014.
And the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because, you know, they've maybe doubled the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear. But the relative percentage is still high. It's still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive when you have these over-safety designed reactors.
There are probably ways to build small reactors that are way cheaper, but then you still have this dual-use thing. Do you create plutonium? Are there ways you can create a pathway to building more nuclear weapons?
Well, my understanding is we have way more efficient designs. You can do small reactor designs, which are – you don't need this giant containment structure, so it costs much less per kilowatt hour of electricity you produce. So I think we have those designs. They're just not allowed. But then I think the problem is that –
If you were able to build them in all these countries all over the world, you still have this dual-use problem. And again, my alternate history of what really went wrong with nuclear power, it wasn't Three Mile Island. It wasn't Chernobyl. That's the official story. The real story was India getting the bomb.
It completely makes sense. Jeez Louise. And then this is always the question about – There's always a big picture question. People ask me, you know, if I'm right about this picture of, you know, this slowdown in tech, this sort of stagnation in many, many dimensions. And then there's always a question, you know, why did this happen?
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