Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

Robert tells Noah how Peter Thiel went to war against Gawker and also completely whiffed on profiting from the 2008 financial crash. Bonus: how Palantir enabled a bunch of creepy corporate security types to stalk their girlfriends, each other.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cool Zone Media. What's dying in darkness? My democracy. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. We're coming on recording this the day that the Washington Post is getting attacked online for not endorsing anybody in the election, which I'm grateful for because it means that no one has noticed that Cool Zone has also not put in our endorsement for the 2024 election, which is is really good because every year, you know, we advise people to vote for the same man, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now to talk about our greatest president and I think our greatest future president, Noah Shaq, Noah, how are you feeling?

You think Nixon's got it this year? You think he's going to pull out, pull out a win? I thought you were saying I was your greatest future president. Hmm. You could be you could be, but you need to be a little more Nixonian, you know. Have you considered trying to destroy the world while drunk and only Henry Kissinger being the one that can stop you? No, I haven't. So I guess I'm not qualified.

Yeah. Bummer. That is a bummer. No, you are a contributing writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired. And you're here to talk about P Tizzy, which Peter Thiel does not go by and will probably if he was not committed to destroying us after the first two episodes, that nickname is probably going to get us attacked.

Yeah, you're definitely getting sued. Yeah, we're done. We're done here, everybody. Yeah, yeah. How do you feel about the news today? Is it good? Are you happy? Happy about the news?

The Washington Post thing? I don't know, Whatever news is happening today. I assume something else went down, right? Somebody died. I'm excited. The Yankees are playing in the World Series. That's good. That's good. Bill Clinton called Kerry Lake attractive.

It's been an exciting week for everybody. I mean, you know. Tiger can't change his stripes, right? Yeah. Yeah. If we want to call him a tiger. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, let's I guess let's get back into the old Peter Thiel game. I'm I'm I'm ready to talk about him. You're ready to talk about him. But my son, Robert, tell us. Yeah.

I will. Bums away. Yeah. I will... Bums away. Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new True Crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.

Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy.

Join me on Tell Me Something Messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. From the Scopes Monkey Trial to O.J. Simpson, trials have always made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward and my podcast, History on Trial, will explore fascinating trials from American history. Join me in revealing the true story behind the headlines and discover how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial, now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

It's been 30 years since the horror began. 9-1-1, what's your emergency? He said he was gonna kill me! In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.

Listen to the Murder Years, Season Two, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. April 10th, 2001, Scottsdale, Arizona. One on one, right at sea. A suburban home explodes. A fireball rises into the sky. In the rubble below, police find three bodies,

Mary Fisher and her two kids. But where's the dad? Where's Robert Fisher? Nine days later, a camper spots Mary's SUV in a remote forest. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. Then nothing. Did Robert die in the wild?

Did he escape? Is he alive today? I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. You can now binge all 16 episodes. So join me as I travel the nation, tracking down clues. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed.

Crawling into caves. He could be buried under rockfall and you've got a skeleton leaning up against the wall. Searching for Robert Fischer. Listen to Missing in Arizona on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a journalist, which two thirds of us are in this call December 7th 2007 ought to be a date that lives in infamy as my my Pearl Harbor joke But it's also a joke referencing the Gawker lawsuit

Because that is the day that Gawker via its tech website Valley wag Published an article with the title Peter Thiel is totally gay people published an article with the title, Peter Thiel is Totally Gay People. Now, Valley Wag, which was, you know, again, like the tech imprint of Gawker, had been writing about Peter Thiel for a while, and they had published articles kind of insinuating that Peter was gay for quite a while.

The company founder, Nick Denton, was, to his credit, someone who recognized early on that Peter was not just another rich investor guy, but somebody who was amassing significant power and had a weird ideology and should be covered. Unfortunately, the downside of it was that Nick's instincts were, you know, this was a messy time for digital media, shall we say, and Valleywag was not at this point

entirely conducting itself in the best traditions of a journalistic enterprise, right? And while I think an argument can be made, a strong one, that Peter being gay, given his funding of the Republican Party, is to a degree relevant to the public interest, the way in which Valley Wag reported on this initially was not a public interest story, right? Like that title, Peter Thiel is, that's not a, we're getting out necessary information title, right?

That's kind of, that's being extremely catty, right? By the way, our guest today is Noah Schaffman, crediting writer at Rolling Stones, contributing editor at Wired. I introduced him. Not introduced him. Why are you slipping me in on the catty outing here? I introduced him. I did introduce him. Why are you slipping me in on the catty outing yourself? I introduced him.

This much. I haven't cataly outed anybody in weeks. Yeah. Robert definitely did forget to introduce you last time. No, not this time. But we redid it, we did it and it was fine. I got it this time. I'm just making sure Noah gets his credits because they're and thank you Shopee. Thank you

Shaking up for me your credits Robert I would credit you too if I could Know when when Gawker outed Peter because I didn't catch it really at the time, but I was a little baby at this I didn't need I didn't either But I did the time, but I was a little baby at this point. I didn't either, but I did know the Nick Denton crew and Nick a little bit back then. And honestly, so many of the people involved were so fucking whacked out on powders and pills, they probably forgot they even did it.

All of the money that was going around in digital media back then, I think it would have been hard not to be whacked out on powders and pills, but you could, this is not like the Post wouldn't have done this reporting in this way, right? Or the New York Times, you can think of that what you will,

but this was a little messy. I think probably, I mean, Peter never sues over this, but this is the inciting incident of why he gets angry at them. So I don't think this would have been something that could have been adjudicated in court. But it is something that if you're kind of going on, where does Peter Thiel have a right to privacy?

Like if you're arguing that because of his advocacy, this is relevant, which I think is an argument that can be made strongly. You probably wanna be a little bit clearer in making that argument than Peter Thiel is totally gay folks. that can be made strongly. You probably want to be a little bit clearer in making that argument than Peter Thiel is totally gay folks. Yeah, yeah.

Now again, that's that I don't think like the fundamental like issue here is that they outed him. I think it's just more that like, yeah, it's kind of a grody way to do it. You say grody? Grody, I did, I did. I am a high school girl in 2004.

Wow. Well, that would've been more the late 90s, right? We're jumping all over the place. I thought it was more of an 80s thing, but hey. Yeah, it's probably more of an 80s thing, yeah. So, this had been, Valleywag had been kind of poking at Peter for a while, right? They had been making, before that article,

some kind of veiled claims about him being gay. And Valiwag is kind of certainly writing more on like the, what do you call it? Tabloid end of things, right? At this period of time. Gawker is going to professionalize in the period before they get sued into oblivion by Peter. But in 2007, they are still very much like new kids on the block. We don't really give a shit. Now, the question that comes to mind,

if you've read about Peter Thiel is like, why did he get so offended at the fact that he was outed? Because by all accounts, he was pretty open in his personal life. Like, it doesn't seem like this shocked even his Republican colleagues, people who had gone to Teal parties, who knew him personally, who had gone to his nightclub. He didn't go to extreme lengths to hide this fact about himself.

Instead, what seems to have enraged him was not the specifics of the fact that he was outed, but this line from the Valley Wag article. The only thing that's strange about Teal's sexuality, why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long? Now, I wouldn't really, that line doesn't stick out to me, but here's from an article in the Atlantic,

which interviewed Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book about the Gawker case. Here's what Ryan said about why that line in particular like tweaked Teal. He thought Denton was implying that Peter had psychological problems. When you read the comment, it doesn't feel that way, but Teal thought, here's the publisher of a media outlet,

not just a blogger going after me. The blog post felt like the first article after years of negative Gawker coverage against Teal. I mean, look, I do think it feels weird when you're on the other side of it. And I think for those of us that like writing broadcast, you sometimes wanna take a spin on the other side of the camera, so to speak,

and see how that stuff feels. On the other hand, he, what's the, he doesn't seem to have made it a secret, doesn't seem to have been a big deal. On the other other hand, you know, I think outing people is fucked up. And yeah, and so, and I feel like, you know, people's sexuality is like their own, is their own choice. On the other other other hand, like, you know, if you're going to embrace some weirdo, uh, like, you know, retro 17th century, um, ideology about religion and power, then, you know, then you might have to grapple with it with its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. So I don't know. It's a tough one. Yeah, it is. It is kind of like,, like this is I think a useful thing for people

who are interested in the ethics of journalism to comment on. I didn't think it's interesting like the specifics of why Peter gets angry, this idea that he was mostly pissed that Gawker had maybe insinuated that he was not emotionally balanced. Now, the other argument you'll hear here

is that the primary real reason Peter was pissed about this is that it was fine for him to be gay and kind of open about it in his private life with the people who hung out around him, but not publicly open about it because who he really wanted to keep this from or to maintain plausible deniability with is the Saudis, right? He has a lot of business involvement in the Middle East and the Emirates as well as in Saudi Arabia. And he didn't want to be an out gay man traveling to

and dealing with these countries, right? Like he felt that that would be damaging to his business interests. So that's the other argument that you'll hear. And I'm sure it's probably a number of things. And in any case, it doesn't, this is like,'s probably a number of things. In any case, it doesn't, this is like, I think when I first was aware of this case, most of the casual reporting was like, you know, Peter Thiel got involved in wanting to sue Gawker into

oblivion because they outed him, right? Like that was the deet deet deet A to B. I think it's a little less direct than that. And I think this is the picture Chafkin paints, the picture Holliday paints, and Holliday is the guy who really seems to have gone into this the most, is that this is what kind of gets Gawker on Peter's radar, it annoys him, but he's not committed to taking them down yet, right? Like that's not going to happen for years and years.

So this is just kind of like the beginning of the conflict that they have in each other. So we're gonna move on here and later we will come back to the story, but like, yeah, this is how he's kind of starting to get angry at Gawker. And I do think it's useful to, Holliday suggests that there's another reason

why Peter's pissed as a result of this. And it has more to do philosophically with the kind of reporting that Gawker is doing and what they represent about the media in the digital age that Peter is kind of personally repelled by, maybe even frightened of. And I'm gonna quote from an interview that he did again here.

From 2007 up until 2012, Denton was on a devil may care riot of breaking rules as a media publisher. And that was so diametrically opposed to Peter's vision of quiet individuality. This belief that weirdos needed to be left alone if they were going to change the world. Peter saw that Gawker would punish people for that weirdness. What? Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure how much I mean, it's perfectly fine for it's perfectly reasonable on holiday's part to be like

Yeah, Peter's doing this because that's just how he feels. I do think that's a very silly Give me a break. Yeah, what was Teal's? Stanford paper again, what were they doing? Yeah. Yeah the Stanford We're they were like outing professors and stuff based on their political ideology and like his best friend who wrote those anti-AIDS columns like screaming about how he hopes that this fucking gay professor dies of AIDS or whatever. Like, yeah. Right, and so now he's worried about what exactly?

Yeah, that Gawker's making it unsafe to be weird. I, you know, and Holl holidays, more sympathetic to Peter in this and that I then I certainly come out of like if that is how Peter justified this to himself, it's stupid. Or maybe it's just Ryan kind of needing to find a more reasonable reason. I think there's. Yeah, we put it a different way, man.

Like, OK, I've been as you can see from the gray hair, I've been involved in journalism for a long time and I've been involved in tech journalism for a long time. And back then was like the time of maximum subservience to, of tech journalism. It was not a critical industry. Yeah. Not at all. I mean, like if you think the political press of 2025 towards future president Trump is bad, this is like, you know, that would be a pale imitation of the Silicon Valley press of that era.

And so I think Valley Wagon, its own fucked up weirdo way was like the only people that were like bothering to penetrate or interrogate that or one of the one of the few people they weren't reflexively. Yeah, just completely subservient. Yeah. Now they're reflexively gross in some other ways. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. A friend of mine worked on that. But like, you know, I feel like some of it was just like, how dare you actually, you know, not follow the, the rules of, of obeisance here and how dare you not kiss my ass. Um, that feels like more part

of it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's probably like, I think that's probably a fair, cause this is actually what I came up in tech journalism and yeah, it was a completely like Valley wag was one of the rare places where you would get people who were trying to be confrontational to these guys who were kind of worshiped at the time. You would have to go far to find really critical reporting on Zuckerberg, on fucking Steve Jobs,

on a guy like Teal in this period of time. Like 2007 is when that Forbes article on the PayPal mafia that we quoted from comes out, where they're like taking a picture of Peter and all of his friends and framing it like it's a film like a poster and stuff. So yeah, I do think, and I do think that's important context for like, we don't want to, I'm not like trying to deny

how gross a lot of the, especially today, a lot of like the way Valley like framed things was but it is Important to note also the value of what they were doing that like well at least they were confronting these guys You know, it was it was 2007. It was a different era digital media was new We can talk about like what the ideal way to confront them would have been but like at least they were So, I don't know. It's it don't know, it's a messy time. Nobody handled it perfectly. Now in terms of how Chafkin interprets this, because Chafkin gives a lot less slack to

Peter, and his argument is like after this Gawker article comes out, Peter is angry, but at the same sense of the, but in the same time he's kind of like liberated by the fact that he's been outed now. And that this is a big part of why he becomes such an open, not just in funding of the far right, but funding of a lot of his weird libertarian pet causes is now that he has been outed like,

well, you know, maybe it's gonna fuck with some of my business in the Middle East, but at least I can be who I am openly now, right? And I think there's a good case to be made for that, because it's after this article comes out that Peter starts, for example, sinking huge amounts of money into sea-steading, which is an art idea championed by weird libertarians

who wanted to build their own cities independent of the government in the ocean. Peter backs the Seasteading Institute. He starts funding these guys who are doing like little Burning Man style events, which actually do sound kind of cool where they're like living in the sea or rivers and stuff for days at a time.

And he's funding this libertarian, you know, kind of fail son dude, who's a major C-set steadying advocate. And he's giving like speeches and stuff. He's actually more into this. This is not just, because when you've got teal money, you can just be a dilettante about something that you're casually interested in. Peter is like giving speeches and writing essays

about how C-steadying he thinks might hold some of- About C... It's an S-E-A. S-E-A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like heisteading, but on the C. Seesteading, yeah. Look... Tell me again, how did we get from... Peter once... Peter Thiel is totally gay to Peter Thiel is totally seesteading? Well, Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel, who has now been revealed as gay, can reveal himself also as a weirdo libertarian and be like, look, you know, I've been outed on this thing that I actually wanted to keep quiet.

So I might as well be open about the fact that I think that we can replace governments by living on the ocean and building floating cities. Why not? Again, like I feel like at every step, it's like, dude, this guy is like stuck in like second semester freshman year. Yeah, it's like he like took some bong hit that like he never quite recovered from.

We all took a bong hit we didn't quite recover from. No, let's not judge him for that. Guilty as fuck, you charged. I'm just saying that like his particular like techno libertarian utopian dude, what if we homesteaded on the sea? Yeah, and then no government could touch us. We could be pirates.

Arr. This is- Are you kidding me? This is the toughest part of the Peter Thiel story for me here because I have to report on this and I don't like Peter, obviously. I wrote like 17, 18,000 words on why he's a bad guy. I also-

Are you a secret steenstutter? I think this kind of rules. I do think it kind of rules. I don't like it as a political thing. It's like, we're gonna replace all the governments. But I love the idea of, I liked, look, I watched too much Seaquest as a kid to not be attracted to the idea

of taking to the ocean to build your, it's cool. I'm sorry, it's a cool idea. I like fucking, forgive me. Wow. I like it, I think it's neat. What, I'm sorry, what is Seaquest? What is Seaquest? Oh my god. This is Alien 4 all over again.

Unbelievable. Noah, so back in like the mid to late 90s, after Star Trek to the Next Generation really blew up when it was kind of like season three or so starting to hit its stride, a TV show that was basically Star Trek The Next Generation, but set in a future where humans had taken to the ocean to like expand their living territory. And it was the the the lead actor, like their Picard was Roy Scheider, the sheriff from Jaws.

And he like ran this giant like submarine city that traveled around and like kept the peace in the underwater frontier. It was a good show. It was a good show. Yeah. Wait, is draws on it, too? No, no, but there was a dolphin character. There was a talking dolphin. There was a talking dolphin, which there was supposed to be in the original Star Trek, the next generation, I think there was.

That was something. Yeah, because Gene Roddenberry was a pesadist. He was a believer that once we have a nuclear war, dolphins and humans will like ascend together. Hell yeah. Yeah. I think he might've been friends with that guy who raped that dolphin.

I'm not saying he was in favor of raping dolphins, but there was a John C. Lilly raped a dolphin. Yeah. What? You guys know about John C. Lilly. Peter Thiel raped a dolphin? Yes, that is the allegation we're making on Behind the Bastards. you, Noah for stating it Now you you and the I heart radio corporation are both on are both on the hook for making that statement

To be honest, I think the guys you think dolphins are equal to human beings I don't think Peter teiel cares about dolphins very much. Else he would have different politics. Dolphins are cool. Although I also don't think he's molested a dolphin. So, you know, some of those pro dolphin guys did. Where do you stand on molesting dolphins? Email us.

Sophie, do we have an email? Technically. Okay, well, I'm not gonna read it here. Just contact us through the contact page on our website. So we've hit about the point of 2008 or so. Peter is getting into funding seasteading. He's getting more open. He's starting to put out more money to like libertarian causes.

Are dolphins allowed on the seastead? You know, I think that's gonna vary from, if I'm seasteading, yes, dolphins are independent citizens with independent rights, but also they have to abide by our laws, which is gonna be hard for some dolphins because some dolphins are scum. But that's a separate question.

So this is right around the time, 2008 or so, that Peter Thiel starts reading the work of a fairly new blogger on like the right wing scene, this kind of underground hit, who's particularly popular in the Bay Area tech industry scene, a guy named Curtis Yarvin, who at this point is writing under the name Minchus Moldbug. Now, we did our episodes pretty recently on Minchus, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on him, but he advocates a return to monarchy based around like small city states ruled by CEO kings.

Like that's his ideas, like it wouldn't be better if tech CEOs ran the world and like it was a series of small city states that you could travel in between. Which if you've ever like had to use the, yeah, like all of us have, if you ever used any of the products these companies make, the idea of them running an entire government is a nightmare. But Peter thinks, is starting to think in this period

that maybe that's the right way to do things. And the open question I'll always hear is like, does he actually believe this is better for mankind? Because the thing you'll get in Schafkin's writing and in Peter's own writings, if you're trying to figure out why does he think this is? He has this belief that the tech industry has ground to a halt, that human innovation is frozen, right?

That all of the stuff the tech industry is putting out are these like bullshit little products and like gadgets and stuff that don't actually take us forward in the way that we had dreamed of going when Peter was a young kid, which is to a degree true, although Peter's one of the guys funding and investing in these bullshit projects that absolutely

don't take the species forward, make a lot of money. So does he believe that we need to do this in order to actually increase innovation again, because capitalist democracy can't do it? Or is he just a guy who wants to be more powerful? And he's like, well, if I'm a CEO, can't I be more powerful, right? Yeah, and that's the Occam's razor answer.

I mean, the guy that in the future will fund the right-wing YouTube is upset that tech isn't being innovative enough. Yeah. Like, that's the real motivation here. I find that hard to believe. That's what I always come back to is like, but he funded all of the bullshit projects.

Like, he's backing Facebook. He's like the first Facebook investor. That was, there was never any chance that that was going to take us into Star Trek future, right? Right, right. Yeah. Like, I want to establish a multi-planetary species and the way I'm gonna do it is by putting some money

behind MySpace 2.0. Yeah. This guy built a website to rate chicks on how hot they are. That's gonna really got to, that's gonna bring us to the hover boards. Oh my God. Yeah.

Or put us right on the Sequest. Did I say that right? Yeah, or put us on the Sequest DSP. That's right. Or put us right on the sea quest. Did I say that right? Yeah, or put us on the sea quest DSP. That's right. That's, thank you. Thank you. And also everyone, RIP Roy Scheider, you know, if there's ever been a better drunk sheriff

in film history, I haven't seen him, you know, go watch, go watch Jaws tonight, people. It's a nice Halloween movie. So Peter starts shotgunning money to Jarvan during this period of time as well. He invests like a million dollars, something like that, in the stupid tech company project Jarvan has. And I think there's probably an additional chunk of dark money that he...

This is where... We can laugh about how inconsistent or unethical his motivations are, but the way he does this is smart because he recognizes, I really like this guy's writing. This guy is putting out some stuff that's legitimately subversive on the, like the role of democracy and how it's like doomed that I think is useful towards where I want to see things go.

And he's writing in such a way that is inherently attractive and magnetic to other tech bros. So I want to fund this guy as a way of like slipping this drug into the supply of the Silicon Valley power elite that's going to warp the way they think about the world. And this is a very successful project. I don't know the degree to which all of that

is a plan from the beginning, but he really like, like Yarvin goes to parties at Peter's house and stuff. Like they are tight. And I think this is very much like a kind of part of his cohesive increasing plan that like, this is a guy who's a reflexive contrarian. He kind of hates ordinary people. He wants to be able to rule them.

He certainly wants to be locked forever as someone who is above them. And he, I think, finds very attractive, this idea of if we build, go back to a system that's this kind of neo-monarchist system, I can be enshrined like the house of Windsor as a permanent, especially if I never have to die, right? As a permanent power. And I never have to die, right? As a permanent power.

And speaking of never dying, Nova, you know who can't die, who cannot be killed? Absolutely cannot be killed. I've tried to kill them. They won't die. Is the sponsors of our podcast. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.

Who did this and why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where. Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico Desert, the swampy Louisiana Bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.

And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloane Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor,

and I'm messy, but not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. OK, let's play this messy round of smash or pass. OK, here it is.

Smash or pass. Spit play. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about bodily fluids being on me, unless it's... Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Because we're doing the pull-out message. We're living on the edge. Oh my god! Ah! Ah! Ah! I was not expecting that. Baby, like I always say, if you know

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["The New York Times"] In July 1881, a man walked into a train station, pulled out a gun, and shot the President of the United States. James Garfield's assassination horrified the American people, and they wanted his killer, Charles Gatteau, punished. But Gatteau, many experts believed, was insane. What had seemed like a black and white case was now much grayer. Could the justice system truly deliver justice

in a situation like this? Guiteau's trial was extraordinary, but not unique. Important trials have always raised questions and made us reflect on the world we live in. I'm Mira Hayward, and I'm exploring the stories of these trials in my new podcast, History on Trial.

Every episode will cover a different trial from American history and reveal how the legal battles of the past have shaped our present. Listen and subscribe to History on Trial, now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found.

We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to the Murder Years Season Two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. April 10th, 2001, Scottsdale, Arizona. A suburban home explodes. A fireball rises into the sky. In the rubble below, police find three bodies, Mary Fisher and her two kids.

But where's the dad? Where's Robert Fisher? Nine days later, a camper spots Mary's SUV in a remote forest. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. Then, nothing. Did Robert die in the wild? Did he escape? Is he alive today? I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast,

Missing in Arizona. You can now binge all 16 episodes, so join me as I travel the nation, tracking down clues. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Crawling into caves. He could be buried under rockfall and you've got a skeleton leaning up against the wall.

Searching for Robert Fisher. Listen to Missing in Arizona on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Noah I hope you tried me Nova before the Shit that might be my new nickname. Mm-hmm. There's it crap because um Because I too have a shiny helmet and a third-rate rate Marvel superhero. Oh no, you're second rated easily. You're like above Morbius tier. Wow, thank you dude.

Yeah, you're better than the Morbs. Yeah, you're Madam Web. You're a Madam Web style character. You know what, I'd go so far as Ant-Man. And you know why that's a big compliment is everybody likes Paul Rudd. Everybody, it's true. I assume everyone doesn't like Paul Rudd, likes Paul Rudd. Everybody. It's true. I assume everyone doesn't like Paul Rudd, but a lot of people do.

It's very popular. He's a dad in Brooklyn. I like him. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And speaking of Paul Rudd, not at all. Because Paul Rudd has not aged in 30 years. And Peter, Peter puts a lot of money into life extension projects. We connected it. We made it work. Yes. Yes. There you go.

Specifically trying to steal the blood of Paul Rudd to figure out what's going on there. What's going on there? How can he still play as a 39 year old man? It's incredible. He takes the blood of teenagers and Paul Rudd. Yeah. Hold on.

I want to give the Curtis Yarvin thing that we were talking about before the break. Absolutely. Isn't a little bit of it like You know Peter Thiel himself got sort of seed funding money as a weirdo Reactionary writer back when he was a kid and so he's just kind of like playing it forward To this next weirdo reactionary. Yeah paying it forward, I think credits Peter maybe with a degree of generosity, which is a weird term to use for like right wing bullshit.

But I think maybe it's, I think maybe if I'm trying to psychoanalyze Peter, and I'm not being fair here, but fuck it, it's my podcast. Peter was willing to take that money and preferred it to not having the money and not having like a platform. But I also think he probably found it kind of like emasculating maybe to need someone else's money

that like his first plans had failed. And that's why he had to take that right wing influencer grifter money in the first place. And I think maybe there's a satisfaction to him in having the shoe be on the other foot on now being the guy who is funding those influencers. Obviously he sees the value in that kind of funding. So I think he's always been kind of supportive of that.

And maybe if you're giving him more credit as like being less of a dick, although again, this is still an evil thing to do, maybe it's that he genuinely is like, well, this money was there for me when I was a fledgling right-wing shithead, I gotta pay it forward, you know, and invest in the career of another asshole.

But the difference here is, Yorvin is specifically, right? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Yorvin is like specifically promoting guys like Peter Thiel as- Yes, god- The new- Yes.

Right. God kings of the city states that are going to replace the United States as the doom of democracy comes down. Right. Yeah. Yeah, they're all neo-feudalists, right? At the end of the day, all they want

is a fucking coat of arms and a goddamn, uh, fucking March to listen to. You go to the comments, you like look up old czarist Russian band music and shit. You look at the comments about all these guys being like, Oh, if only we could go back to the beautiful days of the Romanovs. All of those guys are, are no less intellectually courageous than fucking Peter deal, right?

They just dress it up a little less by masturbating over the fucking czar. All of these guys just want a czar or they wanna be the czar, right? They wanna be, you know, the czars. I think Peter wants to be a grand duke or some shit, right? The czar is probably a little bit too much exposure. This would all be much funnier

if you think of them all with those giant curly-pue mustaches. Absolutely. Knee britches. Yeah, yeah. Or like, you know, powdered wigs. Yeah. Or if you think about them all, we could just talk about what happened to the czars in a

basement, but you know, that's probably, hey. So Peter starts throwing money into living forever. He invests a lot in a guy named Aubrey DeGray, who's running something called the Methuselah Institute. And- Wait, what? Yeah, DeGray is like the most prominent, we could live forever if we just figure out the right things advocate up to the present day.

He's still sort of like one of the big names in this industry. Depending on how you kind of read into things, I think he's a guy who got a lot more credit because I used to be interested in some of what he had to say. I think maybe I've come around to he's more of a con man in the modern era. That's not an allegation, but like that's kind of my gut feeling about the dude.

But he certainly, he is not a right wing figure in this period. DeGray, if anything, would be more on the progressive side of things in the early 2000s, like progressive left. So the fact that Peter is funding him, again, libertarians are kind of more aligned with the left in this period of time because of their opposition to the Bush party as a general rule.

So the fact that Thiel, who is kind of a neocon in some ways, is funding a guy like DeGray, would not have been seen as like, oh, it's this weird right-wing billionaire foisting money off on this, right? Like that's just not how it would have looked. He also puts money into cryogenics. And there's some interesting interviews with him

where he's like asked what he thinks would be a good human lifespan. And he was like, I don't see why people shouldn't live forever, right? But specifically, what's kind of important to note here is that Peter doesn't really have an interest in making sure people live forever. That's not what he's about.

He wants to live forever. And he even makes some specific statements about how I don't agree with the ideology that death for every person is necessary. Right, right, right. We talked about that at the top, yeah. Yeah, and I think what's happening here is that like, again, Peter is this kind of to his bones contrarian.

He rejects other people. And one of the things that bonds all people together, no matter how smart you are, how rich you are, who you are, is that everybody dies. And that, I think think is what's most offensive about Death to Peter, is that it kind of forever locks him in as one of the herd, right?

Like you're not fundamentally above the rest of mankind if you die like everyone else. And I think that's the primary reason why he's so obsessed with this, you know? Like he wants to be a pharaoh. He sees himself as like a pharaoh type, right? That he is owed this kind of eternity of power and influence because he is so special.

And the idea that like, no, man, when it all comes down into it, you wind up in the dirt like everybody else. Like that is the most offensive part of this to him, even more than like any fears about, you know, the final cessation of consciousness. It's being inextricably bound to everyone else who exists. That is like, And you think it's more than that than just like scared little man child with too much money,

who is just like, oh no, this, you know, this might happen to me. And therefore I'm going to like support this like guy who looks like a wizard who's gonna tell me yeah he doesn't look like a wizard did you have you looked up a picture of Aubrey de Grey or did you just guess that he looks like a wizard? This guy has got a beard. Oh man. He looks like such a wizard. It's crazy.

So we pull up that wizard ass motherfucker. It's crazy. So we pull up that wizard ass motherfucker. It's wild. It's like, honestly, it looks like one of those things like there's like a midget or a kid hiding inside the beard. It's so big and un- Gandalf the gray ass son of a bitch. Yeah.

We'll just have Malcolm throw a picture up while we're talking about it. Yeah, yeah. Find one that really makes him look like a fucking wizard. There's really none that don't that doesn't. They are all wizard picks. Yeah. You know, I did. Did you fund this guy directly or did he fund him through the founders?

I think it's through the founders fund that he starts at Clarion. I think that's where most of his money comes in. Yeah. Yeah. So I like some, like I ran across the edges of this when I was reporting back in the day. Yeah. I definitely like, there's a couple of other Founders Fund partners who are also equally into, you know, wizardry and life extension and stuff like that. And I was doing a story on them. Specifically, they hired an in-house meditation teacher and guru who claimed that he could personally enlighten them and bring them like universal consciousness and oneness with the Buddha. Yeah, I mean, as far as I can tell,

it totally worked, right? I mean, what else would you do with your time? Then support the end of American democracy if you're enlightened. Yeah. So anyway, and yeah, they're all into life extension and all kinds of all kinds of stuff like that. I didn't see Teal at that time, but definitely like there was a lot of his people that were in there. Well, I think it's natural. You kind of get super rich in your early 20s. And then, you know, your first concern after that, when you have more money than you could ever spend is like,

well, I want to live long enough to spend all this, right? Right, I've got more money than God. I want to be God. Yeah. I don? Right, I've got more money than God, I wanna be God. Yeah, I don't know, some of it's probably that like, I think as a general rule, by the time you get really rich, you're usually maybe probably closer to your 30s than your early 20s for most of these guys, and that is when feelings of mortality, you know,

you start to, and you start to also, at the early stages of aging, there is a lot that if you have shitloads of money for the right kind of drugs and the early stages of aging, there is a lot that if you have shitloads of money for the right kind of drugs and the right kind of like personal training and shit, you can kind of push off the early steps of aging significantly. And you can also do stuff like you see this with both teal and with Elon Musk. Once they get rich, physically, they change a lot. Initially, you get the hair, tramblans like Jeff Bezos, you get on HGH, you get a lot initially. You get the hair, Tramplants like Jeff Bezos,

she's get on HGH, you get a personal trainer. And you start to convince yourself, wow, so much of what I, you know, when I was like a young kid just working, I couldn't have a body like this because I didn't have the resources to pay experts to maintain it for me. And I'm able to, what else is possible, right?

And I think that's probably part of what's going on there. Also just getting a lot of money all at once breaks your brain. Bad for you. That was a good part of like BoJack Horseman, right? Where there's that line where it's like the age at which you suddenly, at which you become a millionaire is the age that you're like frozen at forever. You don't really progress mentally past that point.

Yeah. May we all get to that point. May we all get to that point. May we all get to that point. But hopefully when you're like 40, right? As opposed to taking the Zuckerberg route. So at this point, all of these gifts that Peter has been giving, it's interesting. The primary thing that he's done at this stage, right?

For all of the money and the high ambitions is he has started, cashed out on, and abandoned PayPal, and then he has launched an investment firm called Clarion. And by kind of the second Bush term, Clarion is becoming a really big deal. By 2004, they had $260 million under management. And within like a couple of years, the fund was worth more than $2 billion,

which is double and triple digit growth for most of its early years. It changes, people will say it completely changed how venture capital works in the Valley, right? Because it was such a successful company that kind of bets that Peter and his, because all of the people staffed there are his friends from PayPal

and his like right-wing buddies at Stanford, right? Who were also in large part, a lot of his buddies from PayPal, you know? And he's kind of picking, he's finding guys who are starting companies. Some people will allege they're all guys he finds attractive. You know, I don't know.

I think that sometimes it's just people being like, oh, this guy's handsome, Peter's gay, that must be part of it. I don't know, I think that sometimes it's just people being like, oh, this guy's handsome, Peter's gay, that must be part of it. I don't know that it actually is, but he's finding these other founders and he's bringing them in. It is noted, there's a couple of things that make Peter's fund really different from other funds.

For one, he's not interested in people constantly making moves. He's fine if you only make one investment a year, right? And again, he doesn't really fire people. He's bad at that, he's fine if you only make one investment a year, right? And again, he doesn't really fire people. He's bad at that. He's bad at confrontation. You can kind of wind up shuffled off to a part of the company where you don't have much connection to Peter if you fuck up enough, but like he doesn't like conflict for as many

sort of evil fucking confrontational things and people as this guy invests in. He personally doesn't seem to have much stomach for conflict, especially not with people he likes. So when it comes to like what made Clarion super wealthy, one of the things that was hugely influential in their growth was backing one of the most toxic corporations on the planet, Opti Canada. Now Opti is an Israeli Canadian company

that is involved in like taking bitumen and Extracting oil from it and this is of all of the ways to get oil out of the ground Bitumen extraction is like the most fucking poisonous, right? It is this is the absolute worst way to get oil for the environment it is a hideously toxic thing to do and Peter and his company put a shitload of money behind this and it secures returns of like 60% for them. And this is the period Peter is very much anti kind of climate change.

He, I don't know how much he actually. Sounds like he's pro climate change. He's very pro climate change. Yeah. I think he's anti like, I think he would say anti the ideology of climate change. Right. And one of the things that's happened here is right around like 2006, seven, he he Elon Musk and David Sacks fund a movie called Thank You for Smoking, which I actually

just watched the day that Biden dropped out of the election. It still holds up. Yeah. It's a good movie. It's a it's a fucking what's his name? The guy who played two face and the new in the Chris Nolan Batman movies. That guy, too. Yeah, him. Yeah, he was a disturbingly handsome guy. Incredibly right. Right at his Aaron Eckert, right at his like the peak of him being a handsome, charming son of a bitch.

It's a good movie. Like it's easily the best thing that those three guys were ever involved with. It's based off a book by William F. Buckley's son, which is Rhodesia lover, William F. Buckley. But it's a good book. It is extremely libertarian, and it is extremely early aughts libertarian.

It's one of those things, I think if you take the ideology that the book's characters have completely seriously, then it's a lot less enjoyable. But it's impossible to really do that when you're watching it because there's just so many talented people involved. And it's a good script. Again, Aaron Eckert is just soaking up the screen and you've got fucking J.K. Simmons is kind of the antagonist.

There's a lot of great people in that movie. Anyway, go watch, thank you for smoking. It holds up, like believe me people. But you also, as you watch it, think like, this is pretty true to Peter's actual unironic beliefs about politics in the early 2000s, right? As opposed to just like, well, this is a fun movie about like these absolutely amoral merchants

of disinformation, right? Right. Yeah. Come on, stop being so serious. Why is it not, have fun. Right, right, right. We're never going to wind up behind power. Yeah. Yeah. Come on.

So. Lame. Peter's putting money into thank you for smoking and bitumen extraction. And he's also kind of, this is the period where he's really starting to relish being the famous founder guy here. And he gets more open about everything in his life. And I'm gonna quote from Chaifkin's book,

The Contrarian here. He began telling close friends and then coworkers that he was gay. Socializing at bars or on the roof of his new house, often with the handsome young men he was hiring, many of whom were out. Teal's self-actualization would pay off. In August 2007, four months before the recession began and close to a year before most Americans

realized the economy was collapsing, he sent a letter to investors declaring that the economic expansion was officially over. We've begun a long post-boom phase that can be called the long goodbye, the letter said. And this is one of Peter's great successful predictions, right? Which is that he calls, he starts writing in 2007 about the global financial crash that's going to really hit in 2008. He is very much ahead of the curve on this. A few months after that 2007 letter, right at the start of 2008,

just weeks after he'd been outed by Gawker, Peter sends out a 10,000 word essay to investors. And this is another thing that kind of he's famous for as like a hedge fund guy is he will periodically write these massive political and philosophical, sometimes even religious essays and send them out to all of his funders, right? To kind of explain their philosophy at the moment.

And a lot of this is like, you gotta have a lot of confidence in your fucking dorm room ass musings if you're sending this kind of shit out to people you're trusting to invest money in. I'm guessing a lot of these wound up just kind of like thrown into trash. So he predicts correctly that there's this crash coming, but he also, I think because

just of who he is, he over-catastrophizes, right? The 2008 crash was really bad. He sees that coming. He also thinks it's definitely going to cause a depression, right? That no one is going to bail out anything and that the cycle of collapse will continue absolutely unabated, will go on like a runaway sort of freight train kind of deal, right? And so instead of doing what would have been the smart thing

as an evil investor, which is shorting the housing market, right, tell your, you have your people in their risky positions with like companies that owe a lot of money and fucking short the housing market, right, in order to make money off of what you can in the immediate term and kind of avoid the consequences of this cruel winter coming. Peter, he kind of continues in this like apocalypse preacher

persona and quote, and states that he is quote, recommending prayer and repentance in lieu of investment analysis, which is an insane thing to write to investors. Yeah, he's like, you should all repent to Christ. We're doomed. No. That's unbelievable.

It's so weird. Was it on a sandwich board? Is he what, sir? Was it on a sandwich board? Yeah, he's basically doing like a fucking, yeah, sandwich board kind of thing, right? Like the indisnigh. Is there any chance, come on,

was there any chance that he was just, that was just a bit, or he was just making a joke there? I think he's being, I think maybe there's an element of that, but he doesn't, what he does financially is also what you would do if you legitimately expected total collapse, right?

Like he does initially short the dollar, and there are initial like high yields, right? Like he bets against some companies that are taken up by large loans and their yields in the first half of 2008 go up to like five times their prior rate, right? Kind of the height of this, they've got between 6.4 and like $8 billion under management, right? And this is a fund that back in like 2002 or three

was 260 million, right? So you can see why people are like, wow, this is the future of investing. What a genius Peter is. And he looks like a genius and kind of the early stages of that financial collapse. But again, we're just talking about the first half of 2008 here. Now he described his school of thought on these matters as being a global macro investor, which in his terms meant looking out at world events and basing your economic predictions on kind of the vibe you felt about the times and large as opposed

to the specific situation each of those companies was in. He urged investors at Clarion to make one trade per week, which Chaffkin credits to his combination of indecisiveness and high tolerance for risk. Quote, Teal argued that the world was heading to end times. Investment analysts often employ religious metaphors, speaking of the second coming of bond yields or an equities apocalypse, but Teale was not speaking metaphorically.

The entire human order, he wrote, could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence, famine, disease, war, and death. Against this future, it is far better to save one's immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven in the eternal city of God than it is to amass a fleeting fortune

in the transient and passing city of man." And when you read it like that, it is kinda hard to see that as not, like, I don't know, man, you're going, if that's just totally tongue in cheek, you're really going far with it? Yeah, no, that is deep into the bit. I mean, you are really committing to it.

You're far too committed to this bit and it's not a great bit. Yeah, that is deep into the bit. I mean, you are committing. You're far too committed to this bit, and it's not a great bit. Yeah, that is a whole life of Brian. Yeah. Right. Right. He shit that's so weird. Yeah. This is this is a deeply weird guy. Yeah, it's such a fucking strange fella. It's pretty weird when like the young blood transfer and like bankrolling the the roided out wrestlers

lawsuit over the nudes are sort of the bottom tier weird things you do. The really weird stuff is the stuff he says out in open to his own investors. Yeah. What the hell? So strange. Oh, man. Oh, my God. I'm not going to be as rich as I'm personally not. What the hell? So strange. Oh man.

Oh my God. I'm not gonna be as rich as, I'm personally may not be as rich as I might've been before. My Wall Street buddies aren't gonna be able to rapaciously divide up loans the way they were before. True society is doomed. We're all fucked. If you hate people and you fundamentally think

that they're like messy little scum who need to be ruled, you can't imagine things would go bad. If you're scared about a financial collapse, you have to imagine they are on the edge of eating each other, right? Because they're not any better than animals, right? And I'm not trying to shit talk animals. I'm just saying, I think that's how people

think about things, right? I think animals are trying to shit talk animals. I'm just saying, I think that's how Peter thinks about things. Right? I think animals are much better than people usually. But that's, I think I'm accurately describing, that's how I think Peter feels. I'm basing that off of vibes. Like Peter was basing, is thinking about the collapse of the world, right? But I have as good a record with vibes

as Peter does at least. So yeah. Yeah. Here's some ads. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this and why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where. Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloane Glass,

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Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Anyway, that's all very weird that Peter is so kind of married to the fucking Bible as a hedge fund guy, but the weirdness does mask, there's a real insight here. And that Peter, again, he's going to fuck up on taking advantage of this, he extends it too far. I also think his fundamental analysis is correct,

which is he argues in that paper that investors are going to be unable to, as the housing market comes unwound and as these increasing contradictions in the way our economy is set up become impossible to ignore. I think, although Peter won't admit this, climate change is a big part of that. Investors are going to be unable and unwilling to accept that things can't continue growing at the rates that they'd always been growing, that that's not possible.

Rather than accept the inevitability of contraction or even collapse, they will start a process of massively overvaluing every asset systematically causing an endless cascade of bubbles in every sector. And that is what happened, right? That's today, that's the last 20 years, right? Like he's not fundamentally wrong, but he also overextends how bad it's going to be

and how quickly it's going to be that bad, right? And the other bad move here is that if you are a hedge fund guy, even though I think this is fundamentally not incorrect analysis, it's a bad thing to put out to the people investing money in you that I think the end times are coming, right?

That does not make people wanna keep money with you. It doesn't make them want to invest more money with you. It kind of makes them want to build bunkers and maybe feel like they need some of that money liquid to build bunkers, right? Right. Yeah. So Peter starts to panic increasingly later in 2008

as the signs get worse. He holds meetings to warn employees that he thinks every brokerage in the country is going to go under and there's going to be no currency. And like, he literally, he has this company making sure they have at least a couple grand or a thousand or something on hand for every employee so that he can keep his employees fed if all of the currency collapses.

They're talking about like buying gold bricks. Like this is like apocalypse hoarder nonsense. Like Peter is worried that his employee best friends who are his entire social group are going to starve to death and he has to make sure he has cash to pay for their food. Which is actually kind of sweet. Like it does show Peter is to some extent capable of caring about other people, if that's accurate.

Not in a way that makes him a good guy, Noah. But like that is, there's a degree of care there. I mean, I think it's like who else will live to serve him. Right, right. I need to have the, I need to have cash so I can buy food so I can maintain a degree of control over these other people so they have to continue being my friends, maybe that's it.

Probably likely. Did they do anything else? Did they learn Kung Fu? Did they start shooting? Did they stockpile food? You have to assume there's some stock. I can't imagine that you could believe this about the future and not be buying guns and stuff, right?

Now, Peter's strong belief that the tech bubble is going to burst and cause a depression causes him to change. So like Clarion standard operating procedure is that we're going to bet against the future stability of the U S economy. And it seems like that should have been the first half of 2008 that makes them a fuck load of money, right? And in the second half,

it's going to cost them everything, right? So because Peter's word is law, very little is expected of his workers on a day-to-day basis. So life at the company is like pretty chill during these early apocalypse stages. According to Chafkin, people played a lot of chess and spent their free time debating

over how they'd run a theoretical country if they had the freedom to build it from the ground up. Quote, everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, although it was important that those politics always be of the right-wing variety. An employee told me that it was common to talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to VDare,

a far right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. Oh, we'll be talking about that. It gets a lot worse in terms of VDare shit, my man. This has been a good enough strategy for years, but Peter's inherent distrust of tech businesses is going to cause him to miss a lot of opportunities here, as well as his belief that like collapse is inevitable. He turns down a chance to invest in Tesla, which might be understandable given his history

with Elon, right? If I can, if I can be like, well, I get why you would miss this because like, you know what a messy is, right? But that is undoubtedly, it's a bad financial decision to not get involved with Tesla in 2008 is a poor financial move, right? He also turned down the money, the chance to put money into YouTube

when it was still a startup. And that is a catastrophic, as a tech founder, missing YouTube is a big one That's also particularly funny because then later on he'll fund Rumble the right wing YouTube Yeah, right. Yeah YouTube I got something even better I got I got right wing YouTube with Russell Brown and this is like this is right the right around the same time He neglects to invest in YouTube is when he neglects

to take part in like the second funding round for Facebook. So he misses a lot in a row here and then 2008 comes about and right, and after these initial successes, he bets on the idea. So he's made money the first half of the financial of 2008 of the collapse year by betting on against the dollar. But then he has this belief that as the collapse starts to run away, he believes not only are some banks going to collapse,

every bank is going to be nationalized, right? And because he thinks that the government is gonna have to take over all of the banks, I think this is just because he's also a libertarian. So his nightmare is like this, the government taking over everything. He decides, unlike all of the guys who make money off of, you know, the collapse,

unlike all the big short guys, he decides not to short any banks because he thinks that since the government's gonna nationalize them all, once they get nationalized, their stock value is going to soar. And so after predicting the collapse, he puts nearly a billion dollars into stocks and all of these banks and like another one

and a half billion or so into Google and fucking of all of the places to put like $800 million. Fucking Yahoo. He puts $800 million into Yahoo 2008. Oh my God, that's awesome. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. It's such a whiff, it's such a fuck up. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Oh my God. It's so funny, man. It's so fucking funny. That's incredible. And I had, again, as a general rule, I actually compared to most of our guys, I respect Peter, you know, not in a positive way, but just in a like, it's dangerous not to,

but I also had thought he had been much more successful than this. And it's so interesting to me that he fucks up on these big investments while getting the bigger picture kind of fundamentally right, which is so humanizing, right? Because that's such a human thing to do. I've been there myself where like,

you predict a big thing correctly and your micro response to that, you fuck up because of who you are, right? Right. That's so human, yeah. But still, I mean, I think all banks are gonna fail, therefore I'm gonna put a billion dollars into them, is wild.

That is wild. Governments obviously get to nationalize every bank, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's really sniffing too much of your own clue. It is, and it's like this, it's this belief that like, I believe that the fucking Democrats who are going to come into office are legitimately communists.

They would never do the capitalist thing of propping up the banks and just giving these people free money to put a halt, like to paper over their fuck-ups, right? Obviously they're going to make this bid for ultimate power and nationalize everything. Right? And he's like, nope, that's not what they did.

Turns out they are just owned by bankers. Like, yeah, sorry. Sorry, Peter, you guys weren't too much and now you've lost your money. Yeah, yeah. Just because you call every Democrat a socialist does not mean in fact that every Democrat is a socialist. Not what they are.

Yeah. Good job. So at the end of the year, and by the time Obama takes office, Peter has lost billions, putting him in a similar bucket to people who had failed completely to see that the crash was coming.

After being up by like five times in early to kind of mid 2008, by the end of the year, he's down 5%, right? And then to make matters worse, once kind of the collapse hits, he dumps a shitload of his holdings while stock prices are low because he assumes that oppression is coming and nothing is going to rebound and he needs cash. And then all of this shit does rebound.

And so he misses out twice in a row here. Investors begin to abandon Clarion, which had been worth 8 billion almost, I think, at its height and by the end of the year was down to $2 billion. Like by 2009, it's like a quarter of what it had been at its height, right? Which is a major fuck up, you know?

Yeah. So, yeah, fascinating stuff. Now, this is where we also get back to Gawker, right? Kind of 2008 or so here. I stated earlier that Ryan Holiday argues Peter responded to Gawker's confrontational tabloid expose style, right? Which he saw as a danger to weird geniuses like him

who moved the species forward. Chafkin makes a somewhat different argument. Quote, Teal came to believe that the real reason for the mass redemptions, which is like all of the people taking their money out of Clarion, was Gawker media. Some of Clarion's big investors, according to former employees, were Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime. Teal has never explicitly acknowledged this, but he has hinted at why he may have wanted

to keep his sexual orientation out of view. So he, a bunch of people pull their money out of his fund in this period where he is making repeated fuck-ups and he blames it on Gawker outing him, right? Right. I invest $800 million in Yahoo of all places. In Yahoo in 2008, homie? Yeah.

What? And like somehow that's Nick Denton's fault. Yeah, Nick Denton made you put a billion dollars into Yahoo, brother. Yeah. I let my own weird like the commies are coming to steal your underwear. Yeah, it's so funny. Ideology, work my brain, and somehow that's Valleywags fault. A billion dollars almost into Yahoo, like a billion dollars into Google almost. That is so funny. Ideology, work my brain, and somehow that's Valleywags for me.

A billion dollars almost into Yahoo, like a billion dollars into Google almost, that's probably a smart, definitely a smart long-term investment. Like Yahoo, Yahoo. In 2008, I was 20, and I knew that Yahoo was a bad investment. Yeah, no, Yahoo was crazy.

Oh man, that's so funny. And Yahoo is crazy. That's so fucking funny. Oh man, that's so funny. And now he's crazy. That's so fucking funny. Oh man. Oh my God. So I think the other reason he's angry at Gawker here is that Gawker is reporting on a lot of his fuck-ups too. And I think in such a way that he kind of blames them for why investors start pulling out, right?

Gawker revealed our screw-ups publicly in a way that hurt us, right? And so, and that by the way, again, this kind of view that like, oh, they outed him and so he destroyed them. That's, you know, that makes the case of like the dangers of a petty billionaire seem clearer with that statement,

but this is much more standard evil rich guy. They damaged my business interests by reporting on me screwing up. And so I wanted them out, right? That's perfectly normal rich guy evil bullshit, right? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. So this period though,

while he is apparently burning with rage at Gawker, the end of the Bush years, the start of the Obama era, it's not a holy bad time for him either. Because while he's, again, he's super rich. So he's insulated personally from any real consequences. And while his Clarion investments fail and he stops being like the lauded, you know, hedge fund genius of the new generation, Peter sees success in another venture, which had been lodged based on the Igor software that he's... Depending on... I've heard a couple of different versions of the story. One is that Lev Chen, his founder at PayPal buddy codes it. Some of them, the

intercepts reporting says it was another guy at PayPal who coded it. I don't know which one of them coded it. But Igor is this software that they had started at PayPal to stop Russian scammers, right? That there are allegations and lawsuits that it was kind of stolen in part from another company, but that's a story for another day. Peter is as obsessed with security and fighting terrorism as any neocot. And he starts to focus on the idea that like, Igor might be useful for something besides fighting fraud.

Perhaps this could also allow the government to hunt and kill terrorists that had caused Peter to fear for his own life. I'm gonna have to go back in time here. And I hate to jump around like this, but Peter's involved in too many things to not do this from time to time. So let's, let's go back to July of 2004, right?

When he and a conservative chaplain from Stanford organize a six day seminar with Renee Girard, the scapegoat philosopher guy. Teel had attacked the Bush administration then for not being cruel enough to Muslims and had gone after the ACLU for their unhinged support of civil liberties at the expense of security. He had encouraged the creation of a new system, which he built as a replacement for the UN. He was like, instead of the UN,

we should have an international consortium of public and private intelligence companies all working together to quote, forge the decisive path to a truly global Pax Americana. Right, this American peace that intelligence agencies can bring us. If we give them enough money and power to murder people with drones.

What the fuck? It's so, why, yeah. And Igor at this point, it's just a fancy way of, what I call making a crazy board, right? That thing you see in like movies and TV, True Detective where you've got like all the pictures connected by bits crazy board, right? That thing you see in like movies and TV, true detective where you've got like all the pictures connected by bits of string, right? Igor is a way of doing that on the computer, right?

Where you're plugging in and it also is pulling from, you can have it pull from, oh, I know that we're looking for a guy who drives a, who lives in this state and drives a blue car and has a DUI. I want you to pull up from like all of these records you have access to everyone who fits that, right? And we can add them to the crazy board, you know? And it was like, look, like starting at 9-11 especially,

there was like the fantasy, the Uber fantasy of all these spook and spook adjacent types and all, and tech types that wanted to make money off of them was that, you know, you could have sort of like, you know, the equivalent of maybe what we call an AI today that like could basically predict a terrorist were going to strike before they were going to strike. You know, they were going to call, you know, they were going to stop the next 9-11 before the guys even, you know, had really hatched the plan. And so there had been a bunch of

programs that started and failed, you know, before then. And, you know And there were some that were in existence in law enforcement, but they were clunky. They were government software. So they look shitty and they didn't work so well. And they didn't have real Silicon Valley talent like these guys did. Yeah. So I think it could be a little hard for harder to visualize what Igor did, what this software does, the software that becomes Palantir does. So I'm going to quote from an article in Bloomberg by Peter Waldman, Lisette Chapman, and Jordan

Robertson here. The software combs through disparate data sources, financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social media postings, and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy to interpret graphics that look like spider webs. So based on this technology, Peter founds Palantir that same year, 2004, and Palantir is the name of the infamous Seeing Stones in The Lord of the Rings, which are, you know, the most famously the one is owned by the evil wizard the Rings, which are, you know, the most famously, the one is owned by the evil wizard, Saruman, right?

So if you're naming your company that exists to provide this like seeing stone to the highest bidder Palantir, that's explicitly evil, right? This isn't like a case where like the good guys have their own seeing stones. It's just the bad guys. It's a bad thing to have.

It connects you inevitably to Sauron. Like, anyway, very fun. I love fiction. Now, Peter, one of the things that's interesting about fucking Palantir is that, like with most of his companies, Peter has an interest in this, but he also has one of his close friends

actually running shit, being the day-to-day guy organizing everything. And Peter's friend who helps him run Palantir is famously always described as his most liberal friend, a guy named Alex Karp, who Bloomberg identifies as a self-described neo-Marxist. Now, I don't know about Alex, you know, like what the fuck do you mean? And by, as the guy starting the capitalist spy firm, how can you consider yourself a neo Marxist, but also some Marxist or bootlickers? So maybe that's the kind of guy that Alex Karp is.

I mean, look, there's plenty of people that, you know, or, you know, whatever the- Plenty of communist and spy agencies, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no, what I was gonna say is, whatever the far left equivalent of a limousine liberal is, those people are definitely out there. Yeah, the fucking CIA socialist

or something like that, I guess, yeah. Okay, there you go, keep going. Yeah, there you go. So getting off the ground is slow going at first for Palantir. I mean, this is a hard, it's a really hard industry to break into, right? Because intel agencies are first and foremost government agencies.

And if you know anything about the government, getting a government agency to adopt a new software tool is a brutal thing to do, right? It is very hard to convince them to make moves like that. It doesn't matter what kind of agency it is. This is always an uphill struggle. So in order to aid Palantir in kind of getting this buy-in they needed to really start to take off, Peter brought in some of the most ghoulish neocons

he could find to apply pressure in DC. And this included friend of the pod, John Poindexter, who, oh, JP had worked for Ronald Reagan until he was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra. He then got kind of quote unquote exonerated and gets hired by Dick Cheney to craft the total information awareness program. This was a Bush era intelligence mission with a seemingly kind of reasonable goal, right?

We're going to collect all of the data we can on everything happening, food prices, yada, yada, yada, and these different areas that we have military interests in and we're going to have algorithms comb that data to spot patterns that might be indicative of terrorist groups operating beneath the surface, right? One of those things that sounds reasonable on its face, if you look at how the war on terror went, none of this ever works out

quite as well as they think it does, right? But the smart guys in the room are all like, obviously this is how we win the war on terror back then. You know? Yeah, I mean, that was the whole shit. That was the whole thing for these guys. Yep. Was, you know, it was gonna be, you know,

what's the Tom Cruise movie? Minority Report. Right. Yeah, we're gonna know about it before they do. Yeah. Yeah. And they were going to, you know, put money to the, or where they were going to, you know, feed the information to your goals and they were going to feed you a red ball. That was the whole thing there. And yeah, Palantir got every single last one of the, you know, members of this church, uh, of this, like, you know, weird, uh,

spine church to advocate for them. The other thing was like you couldn't walk into a train in DC without there being a palantir ad. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, and like every guy that, you know, fucking hated Muslims and loved Star Wars was promoting it. What a brand they have. fucking hated Muslims and love Star Wars was promoting. It was crazy. What a brand they have.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they bring out John Poindexter. Now it's important here to note that Igor, which is what Palantir is selling at this point, didn't gather or create new information of its own, right? This is not a big brother system. This is an algorithm that works off of the extant big brother own, right? This is not a big brother system. This is an algorithm that works off

of the extant big brother system, right? Organizing all of the info that the existing surveillance operations can put at your disposal, right? It's data mining, you know? Now one early concern is that analysts using Igor would use the vast array of catalog data at their disposal to stalk and harass their ex-girlfriends,

which if you know how cops work is a thing that happens constantly. Anytime you've got a database that like a certain chunk of employees have access to, some of them are going to use it to stalk their girlfriends, right? This is a known issue. Palantir, one of the ways in which they sell themselves to a lot of these intel agencies is Alex Karp promises we're gonna make it impossible for cops to stalk their ex-girlfriends because we're going to log every search request

made into the system in a way that will allow you to audit them, right? So a big part of their selling point is like, we're going to actually provide accountability in the spook process, right? Chaffee describes this as a key part of the company's pitch, but he also writes, one of Palantir's former engineers recalled meetings

during which government clients would suggest trying to use the database to look up an ex-girlfriend immediately after hearing the whole privacy spiel. Palantir employees would never object to these requests. This person said, instead they would remind clients that searches were logged and then allow them to look up whoever they wanted, no matter how flimsy the pretext.

Yep. Yeah, that's how that always works, huh? Yeah. Every time. Every time. You don't need a predictive algorithm to predict that one, do you? Yeah, no, you sure don't. You sure don't. Yeah, you get you give people a computer spying device and they're going to stalk their girlfriends. Yeah, that's the way it works.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, thanks to their famous friends and infinite cash reserves, Palantir managed to get contracts with the CIA and the NYPD. But actual adoption on a wide scale wouldn't happen without corporate purchases, because no one in intelligence trusted a product that only the government used. Peter tried to force the government's hand here by selling other hedge funds, like selling Igor to other finance companies, right?

And he marketed it as Palantir Finance. So this, we've got this software that the government's interested in using. It's the spy software, but you can use it to like predict which kind of investments are going to work out best, right? By gathering all of this data and using it to predict the future of finance. Now this is a massive failure as an actual finance product

because it doesn't work very well. People don't really make a lot of money off of Palantir Finance advising their trades, but it works out as a business decision because they're able to get a couple of different finance companies to buy into it, and then they can go back to the government and say, hey, look, this company and that company are already using it to make trades. Obviously, DC should be using this to fight terrorism, right? And the government's like, oh, well, some bank bought it.

So I guess we should as well. Like he's- Yeah, and there's, I mean, look, in government, there's always like, you know, they're constantly being like, oh, we're falling behind. You know, the private sector really knows, even though they work in government- They wouldn't make a big fuck up.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If only we could run government more effectively, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If only we could run government more effectively like a business. Yeah. And I mean, that, I mean, it's totally how it worked. It's totally how it worked.

Our adversaries can use these tools freely. Why shouldn't we? Why shouldn't we? And obviously, as soon as the public sector, as soon as actually like the CIA and the FBI and the NYPD start putting money into Palantir, then even though Palantir finance had kind of not done great, a lot of banks and finance agencies start to be like,

oh, I guess we have to get involved. The government's buying this stuff. So we've got to buy, we've got to get. And so in 2009, JP Morgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, future subject of the pod, purchases, like makes a contract with Palantir. Now, almost the instant they, and they're doing this as like a security measure.

We want to, we have like a division in our company that's looking for evidence based on like the communications our employees have internally, that we might have an employee who's breaking the law, right? That's part of compliance, right? We want to be, there's a degree to which we're legally obligated to spy on our employees, making investment decisions to make sure nobody's doing anything criminal, right? Sure. So that's why they get this software. The instant they get it, their head of security,

who's like using the Palantir software, uses it to spy on the entire C-suite for no real reason, Right? Like he loses his mind with power and starts stalking all of the people running the company. This guy's name was Peter Kavichia and he was a former secret service man who ran again a group in the company that was tasked with using algorithms to monitor employees.

And I'm gonna quote again from Bloomberg here. Aided by as many as 120 forward deployed engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies, Caviccia's group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. Palantir's software aggregated, searched, sorted, and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior that Caviccia's team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate secrets. Palantir's algorithm, for example, alerted the insider threat team when an employee started

badging into work later than usual, a sign of potential disgruntlement. That would trigger further scrutiny and possible physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel." So that's nuts, but that's also what he's supposed to be doing, but right after, right as soon as they get access to this, Kavichia goes rogue. And I'm gonna continue with that quote. Former JP Morgan colleagues described the environment

as Wall Street meets apocalypse now, with Kavichia as Colonel Kurtz, ensconced upriver in his office suite, eight floors above the breast of the bank security team. People in the department were shocked that no one from the bank or Palantir set any real limits. They darkly joked that Caviccia was listening to their calls, reading their emails,

watching them come and go. Some planted fake information in their communications to see if Caviccia would mention it at meetings, which he did. It all ended when the bank's senior executives learned that they too were being watched and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.

Nice. Very funny. Extremely funny. Oh my God. So good. No one deserved it more. No, no, no. And just like the most predictable thing that could have happened, right?

This is what happens every time you give these guys this toy. Yeah. Kavitia gets fired, but the promise of Palantir remain undimmed, even though there is tremendous debate up to the present day as to whether or not much of what they do works. This is less the case now that they're doing like,

we'll talk about this some in the last episode, like when it comes to providing targeting solutions based on data, I mean, there's, the jury is still out on how well that's working in Ukraine. But certainly in this period, there's a big debate as to if any of this shit really work. Palantir's going to take credit for the Bin Laden assassination. Very unlikely they had anything to do with it, but they take oblique credit for it.

The software is swiftly adopted by police stations in cities like New York, Chicago, and LA. Pelletier software was often used, allegedly, to single out innocent individuals because the connections in their lives looked suspicious to the algorithm. And here's Bloomberg again. The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brain calls the secondary surveillance network, the web of who is related to who, friends with or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn't suspected of committing any crime was identified as having multiple boyfriends within

the same network of associates, says Brain, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big data policing at Princeton University and who's now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties, she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she says, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure, and toll road information. Camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John's International and Pizza Hut LLC.

This is nuts. it's fucked up. Pizza terror connection. Yeah, no, I do think that the government should have access to our Papa John's records, but mainly to make sure like, hey man, you've ordered 14 extra large pizzas this month. Everything okay? You doing all right? Do you need like a hug?

Can we send a guy by your house to give you a hug? The proper order of Papa John's orders is zero. Zero, right, right. The proper order of Domino's orders is zero. Yeah, Pizza Hut, man, come on. No, Pizza Hut, a proper number of orders is zero. No, I like a good stuff crust. I like a good stuff crust.

Oh yeah. You don't. Once a year, I love a big Pizza Hut pizza. You know what's good though? Is those the Shaq Papa John's commercials? They get me every day. Oh yeah, okay. No, no.

You can't get me into a Papa John's. But you know what they don't get me to do? Still eat Papa John's. No, no. I would eat Shaq before writing a Papa John's. Wow. Honey. This just in. Just in Papa John's. Wow. Honey. This just in.

Just in. It's gotta be pretty well, he's gotta have marbling, you know? Yeah, I've always endorsed cannibalism. I'm very pro-cannibalism. You're like one of those freaks that said they wanted to eat moodang. I don't know who that is, Sophie.

Well. But speaking of eating people, let's talk about the tragic case of Manuel Rios. He doesn't get eaten. I hope not. Manuel is a guy who grew up in East LA and had a lot of friends who joined a local gang, Eastside 18.

In 2016, he was seated in a parked car with a friend who'd been jumped into the gang when police rolled up. His friend ran, but Rios, who had not been breaking any laws, didn't run. He was like, why the fuck would I run? Like my buddy's in a gang. Like, of course he's gonna flee. I'm not doing anything wrong. been breaking any laws, didn't run. He was like, why the fuck would I run? Like my buddy's in a gang.

Of course he's going to flee. I'm not doing anything wrong. But because cops be how they are, he gets added to the LAPD's gang database. Palantir's software, because of how many other gang dudes that he just kind of socially knows because of where he lives, he gets identified as a high priority target and he starts getting stopped constantly by the cops. Quote, the police on autopilot with Palantir are driving Rios towards his gang friends, not away from them, worries Maria Saba, a neighbor and community organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities like East LA are algorithmically scraped for pre-crime suspects, data is destiny, says Saba. These are systemic processes, and when people

are constantly harassed in a gang context, it pushes them to join. They internalize being told they're bad." And that's kind of the, you know, one of the, we will talk a lot more about Palantir even in part four, but that's like one of the really dark things about this is that it's masquerading as like this genius predictive, but all it's really doing is like, oh, you live in a poor neighborhood. A lot of your friends grew up to be in gangs. Cops should probably fuck with you constantly. Fuck with this guy constantly, right?

That's all it is. It's stop and frisk that you threw an algorithm over. Yeah, or it almost reminds me of like, you know how like in the shitty day, shitty early days of like MapQuest and Google Maps where it like, you'd get some drivers that would just follow the directions, no matter how unhinged or like that. Office scene, right? They drive into a river.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, guys, use your eyes, homie. What's up? What's up? You know this. Yeah.

And instead it'd be like they just follow they blame the algorithm what yeah now if it's just going to cost you an extra 10 bucks on an uber that's one thing but when it costs you know some poor kid getting harassed over and over again that's something totally different and that right really happened yeah yeah it sure did um so in 2011 peter did an interview with Bloomberg. By this point, civil libertarians, which had been previously kind of Peter's constituency, had started blowing the horn over Palantir. Peter felt a need to make the case to his fellow libertarians on the need to embrace

being spied on. He argued that data mining was less harmful than the quote, crazy abuses and draconian policies the Bush administration had pushed after 9-11. And I would desperately love to hear which of those policies didn't you agree with Peter? Right. Because it seems like you think they didn't go far enough. Right, but he's like,

look, if we want to avoid a police state, obviously you have to let me, Peter Thiel build a surveillance state. That's all that can stop us from having an evil police state, right? Yeah, of course. I'm a libertarian. That's why I'm selling this shit to the CIA to spy on us. She said, keep liberty assured.

A libertarian police state. Yeah. You know, I hadn't thought of this before, but I remember around this time, libertarians in my life or self professed libertarians in my life, moved from like really caring about this stuff to throwing up their hands and saying, well, privacy is dead.

Yeah. Nothing you can do. It's the 9-11 effect. It's so much, because a big part of this is like, you have this kind of same thing that happens where you've got all these guys who in the early 2000s, kind of the early part of the Bush era, the late 90s had been like atheist activists

who were like super anti the religious right. And then after 9-11, they all get really racist against Muslims and it pushes them towards conservatives. And it's like, okay, so you guys didn't have any principles ever. Okay, I get it. I get it.

Yeah. And so, and on the data side, it's like, oh yeah, we were really for civil liberties, but now that privacy is dead, you might as well have our fellow libert a lost cause. Our fellow libertarian. Oh yeah. Yeah, what's the difference? Just let it happen or if someone's going to spy on you, let it be Peter Thiel.

Yeah. He's one of us at least. Yep. Speaking of Peter Thiel, Noah, you got anything to plug? Yes, I have my new, I don't know, I have some some I tried to come up with a lame joke of their own front No, I have nothing a plug but you can find me at Noah Shackman. That's no a H sh a Cht man. Oh, yeah at most social platforms

Well check out Noah and you know Figure out Well, check out Noah and you know, figure out. No, I'm not going to tell people to do anything illegal. Use your own crazy board. Find out who I'm connected to. Yeah, make it great. Go make a crazy board. Go make a crazy board. Become convinced.

Put me at the center. May I also suggest instead, touch grass and pet a dog in a concentra. Touch grass, pet a dog, make a crazy board on your wall, stop hanging out with your friends, cut off all contact with your family. Don't do any of this. Live alone in a dark room. Just try to be more like Matthew McConaughey

in True Detective, right? No. Just as much like Matt. Thank your daughter for dying and sparing you the sin of being a father. Do all that good Matthew McConaughey and True Detective stuff. Have fun with it. Don't eat. Also don't eat.

Do not eat anything but amphetamines. Nothing but amphetamines. All right. And cigarettes. All right. Just chew them up. Make a cigarette shake every morning. Okay.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel youtube.com slash at behind the bastards. Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new True Crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeart Radio

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below police find three bodies, Mary Fisher and her two kids. But where's the dad? Where's Robert Fisher? Nine days later, a camper spots Mary's SUV in a remote forest. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. Then, nothing. Did Robert die in the wild? Did he escape? Is he alive today?

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast, Missing in Arizona. You can now binge all 16 episodes. So join me as I travel the nation, tracking down clues. If you keep asking me this, I'm gonna call the police and have you removed. Crawling into caves. He could be buried under rockfall and you've got a skeleton leaning up against the wall. Searching for Robert Fisher.

Listen to Missing in Arizona on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.