Oct 8, 2026 · 13 min · 7 segments
In this episode, Mike and Peter revisit Peter Thiel's recent public statements on good, evil and bad - this time through the lens of linguistics and word choice. Michael Fragomeni earned his…
Since we just released this episode on Peter Thiel and the things that he said about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
I think I said at the beginning of that episode that we were doing more of a philosophical deconstruction or analysis.
We can look at it linguistically because there's enough meat on the bone there for us to sort of look at it again linguistically.
And one of the things that I wanted to focus on was his choice of the word bad.
And he explains how evil is the antonym to good when it comes to morality, whereas bad is the antonym to good when it comes to functionality.
Because if we're talking of quality, I mean, you can say that's of bad quality.
But a native speaker of English would be more likely to say that's of poor quality.
I definitely think a native speaker of English of roughly any age probably would recognize quality.
When someone said that's a poor quality and they would they would understand what was meant.
So that's a bad quality, whatever that was badly done or that or that was or that was done bad.
And certainly I think younger people are using the word poor in that context less and less.
Since we just released this episode on Peter Thiel and the things that he said about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
I think I said at the beginning of that episode that we were doing more of a philosophical deconstruction or analysis.
We can look at it linguistically because there's enough meat on the bone there for us to sort of look at it again linguistically.
And one of the things that I wanted to focus on was his choice of the word bad.
And he explains how evil is the antonym to good when it comes to morality, whereas bad is the antonym to good when it comes to functionality.
Because if we're talking of quality, I mean, you can say that's of bad quality.
But a native speaker of English would be more likely to say that's of poor quality.
I definitely think a native speaker of English of roughly any age probably would recognize quality.
When someone said that's a poor quality and they would they would understand what was meant.
So that's a bad quality, whatever that was badly done or that or that was or that was done bad.
And certainly I think younger people are using the word poor in that context less and less.
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