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

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

We discuss Peter Thiel's rise to PayPal CEO, his betrayal of Elon Musk, and the birth of the technology that became Palantir.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Callzone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that is entirely funded and supported by the film Alien Resurrection, which no one on this call but me has seen. I have picked a bit that no one can play off of because they simply don't remember the classic Ron Perlman film Alien Resurrection. What a tragedy. Speaking of works of art. Tragedies?

No, I was gonna say works of art. Noah. Noah. Noah Schachtman, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Wired. How are you doing today? Happy? I'm doing- Sad?

Better than a astronaut with a alien implanted into my gut? Question mark? Yeah, that's good. Does that take place in that movie? I guess they, if you consider anyone who's in space an astronaut, yes. Yes.

I do. Okay, then yes, yes. That's essentially what's going on in that movie. There's a lot of cloning involved, though, which, you know, fingers crossed. Would you clone yourself if you could? You know, absolutely. You would. OK. Absolutely. Because then I could have somebody else do my job twice,

even though I know that's not how that works. Wow. Yeah, we could. If you've read any Spider-Man comics, it never goes well. No. And I do think that Spider-Man comics really, really are the that that's where I go to for my all of my cloning related information, specifically Spider-Man. I used to work for a guy that had cloned dogs.

Really? Yeah. Oh, that's so weird to me. I would never clone my dog. I love my dog, but it wouldn't be her. I know it wouldn't be her. I'd be like, who's this imposter? Not Anderson. Yeah, I don't know, folks.

You would clone yourself, but not your dog. Yeah. For efficiency purposes, I would just want somebody that could sit in the meetings I don't want to go to or sit in and do like all the work things that don't appeal to me. And then I could just do the things I want to do. So the clone would have to grow up to be exactly your age and then slow down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You would have to like accelerate its growth,

really rob it of a childhood. Or you're or you're doing a clone like in that. Well, yeah. So are you do you do not think clones are people, Sophie? Because that's a very problematic attitude to have here. I'm like, it's not real. It has no feelings. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the Spider-Man books would would tell you this is this way lies madness.

Well, it's absolute madness. There's no- If we get cloning at the same period of time, we get like Peter Thiel's ideal breakdown of federal power so that there's all these isolated city states run at the whims of rich people. There's no way we will not get someone acting as a wellness influencer who starts an island where you

can go hunt and murder a clone of yourself in order to gain like unspecified mental health benefits. That's absolutely going like Joe Rogan is going to kill his clone in order to gain its power by eating its heart. Oh, yeah. That's a version of the future. That could be us in 10 years, people. I feel like that's just called Austin, Texas. Yeah, it could be in Austin, Texas. I would say that's not a bad place to set it. I feel like that's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I killed a guy in Austin, Texas once who looked a lot like me, but that was less out of a desire to gain better mental health. And anyway, Noah, you ever killed anybody? Not that I can talk about on this podcast. Well, that's the answer Peter Thiel would give, I'm sure. And we are getting back to Peter's story.

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.

It's been 30 years since the horror began. 9-1-1, what's your emergency? He said he was going to 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. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski. And we are super excited to tell you about our new show,

Dudes on Dudes. We're spilling all the behind-the-scenes stories, crazy details, and honestly, just having a blast talking football. Every week, we're discussing our favorite players of all times, from legends to our buddies to current stars. We're finally answering the tale of an isolated isolated super disciplined kid who didn't connect with his classmates, or at least that's one version of it, right? I will say, I don't know if that's right because this vision of this kid who just doesn't understand

or get along with other people and is separate from them is at odds of a kid who hangs out with Judge Kennedy's son because he wants to clerk for Justice Kennedy, who socializes with the Federalist Society people and who starts and operates a student newspaper with several friends. That version of Peele reads less like lonely victim of bullying and more maybe kind of a rich kid asshole who doesn't like to be associated with regular people. It's not so much that he's lonely and separate, it's that he has separated himself because he wants to be better than them.

I don't know which of these, you can really make a case for either. If we're going for that latter interpretation of Teal, it makes sense then to draw a line from his failed ambitions as a lawyer and his anger at the higher education system that had evidently prepared him poorly to succeed in his first ambition.

Stanford had not made Peter into the kind of person who could clerk for the Supreme Court. And since that could not be representative of a fault of Peter's, maybe he just literally wasn't good enough, it has to have been the fault of higher education as a system. And Peter has made his anger at this everyone else's problem for the last 40 years. Now the other open question here is how did being gay influence Peter's development and

the nation state sized chip on his shoulder? In 2011, a writer for the New Yorker asked Peter more or less that same question. How did his homosexuality and status as an outsider influence the way he thinks about politics and business today? Here's his response. I can come up with stories about how they're factors, but I'm not sure that they're interesting. The gay thing is that you're sort of an outsider. There are things about it that are problematic.

There are things about it that can be positive, but it also feels contrived. Maybe I'm more of an outsider because I was a gifted and introverted child. Maybe it's some complicated combination of all these things. And maybe I'm not even an outsider. And I think that's interesting where he's like, maybe I'm just kind of full of shit with you people. And like I've always, I've never been an outsider. I just think I'm better than you, right? And a lot of this is a crafted image of like, this is a more sympathetic vision of me, right? Like, he definitely has it, takes some joy in playing the mastermind

and manipulating the media. And he's not bad at it. Yeah, no, I mean, clearly not. And, or maybe it's like, maybe it's a bit to appeal to actual outsiders. Right. Yeah, maybe it's a bit to appeal to, yeah, the real ones. One thing you can say about Peter is that very shortly after starting his career in

law, he decided, I don't want to be a lawyer. In total, his career consisted of he clerks for a judge in Atlanta for a little while, and then he becomes a first year associate at a corporate law firm and he never makes it to year two. So he just kind of hates the thing that he had studied to do in school. It seems like he hates it largely because he's not going to get a shortcut to being at the top of that. If he's going to get anywhere, he's going to have to work himself up from maybe not the bottom, but like the middle. And Peter just doesn't have any interest in doing that. That's a regular

life. That's an ordinary people kind of thing to do is like starting at kind of the bottom rung of your career and working your way up. He doesn't want to have to do that. So he leaves this profession to start trading derivatives, right? What's the thing you do if like, you know, you want to feel like you're better than everyone else, try to get into finance and get mega rich, right? That's his next move is like, well, law isn't going to be the thing I wanted,

so I'm gonna try to get wealthy. And the finance, this is not going to work out immediately well to him, right? And the fact that finance is, you know, the thing that he's doing, but it's not his first career choice seems to rub him the wrong way. And this is where we first get outside evidence that he's built a grudge against higher education. In the late 1990s, he gets together with a friend from his Harvard review days, David

Sacks, and coauthors a book called The Diversity Myth, which was published in 1995 by the Independent Institute, a right-wing think tank that made Peter a fellow. During this awkward period in his career, he was hard up for cash. His investment business isn't going well, he's not making money as a lawyer. The think tank gives him income. It helps him and David Sacks secure a series of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, mocking things like Indigenous People's Day and a broadside against multiculturalism that was anti-Western. Their book, which was endorsed by Dinesh D'Souza, had been funded in part by a $40,000

grant by the John M. Olin Foundation, a conservative nonprofit geared towards creating a counterintelligentsia that had also bankrolled some of D'Souza's early career. Peter got to do a book tour and a series of speaking engagements. He found that he enjoyed aspects of life as a right-wing intellectual. This is really interesting to me because Peter doesn't start as a founder and get successful in business and then pivot to right wing politics. He is scouted by right wing moneyed interests, by these guys working at think tanks and nonprofits funded by oil and gas billionaires and the like. He is scouted as this is a smart kid who is frustrated because the first thing he wanted

to do didn't work out for him. We could get him into right-wing politics, right? He is a conservative pundit before he starts funding conservative causes. It's wild. It's the opposite of what I thought the origin story was. Well, it's so interesting because this is how, for decades, if we want to ask the question, how did right-wing politics get so deranged? How did the Republican Party get so deranged? Well, it's because of this decades long, very dedicated methodical effort

to every time we can find an angry young man with a degree of like skill and talent who has failed out of their first ambition, let's put a pile of cash in the front of their face and say like, hey, do you want to get into conservative media, right? That's where all the daily wire guys come from, they're failed Hollywood screenwriters

and stand up comedians, right? That's where Teal gets into this from. He is a failed lawyer. Yeah, and they're like, hey, come be our Dinesh D'Souza. Right? Like come be another Dinesh D'Souza. That's his like, yeah, yeah. And in fact, Peter, while he's kind of like

having this flirtation with being a right-wing intellectual, he tries to start a Bay Area public access talk show with a liberal friend of his, which biographer Chafkin describes as crossfire, but way, way more pretentious. And I can't imagine that. Like, can you, what is a more pretentious crossfire? How does that even exist?

With like mid 90s production values too? Oh God, yeah, yeah. Like a fucking UHF crossfire, incredible shit. I desperately wish they'd gotten out like eight episodes and those were on YouTube for me to just watch. I wanna see Peter Thiel's take on Crossfire. No, you think you wanna see that? You definitely do not.

No, I for sure don't. Yeah, you would definitely gouge out at least one if not both eyes. Yeah, but I can't deal with an eye patch. That's true, but not two. Not two, no one does. So, Teal and Sachs' book becomes a foundational work in the complaining liberals on campus

are intolerant genre, right? These are, that's a big part of conservative media today, intolerant liberals ruining college by being mean to conservatives. Teal and Sachs are doing this in the 90s, right? It is also an early work of DEI panic, right? This is really where Chafkin gets a lot of credit from me because most of the articles that I read,

which talked about this period in Peter's life, mentioned that he'd co-written the diversity myth, but they just described it as a book Peter and David Sachs wrote because they were so frustrated, right? This genuinely came out of a place of, we were so angry about what we saw at Stanford that we just had to write this book about like, this is real problem we saw coming up from higher education,

all these fucked up things on campus that we just couldn't ignore anymore. And that's not true. The reality is that the diversity myth and the ideological careers of David and Peter were crafted, molded, and funded by powerful moneyed interests looking for fighters to help them tear down the liberal status quo. And chief among the bugbears of these moneyed interests was people who thought that other cultures should get to exist in American intellectual life, right?

cultures should get to exist in American intellectual life, right? That's what made these rich guys angry and they hired people like Peter and Teal to yell about it. Now the books am yeah. Yeah. Fascinating shit. The books Amazon description informs us the authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not about learning more. It's actually about learning less.

Now, if you read, there's a fun article because this has become like the modern, this is also like most of conservative politics today. Teal got to write an article about this book he wrote as a young man for a website called The New Criterion in 2023, which is coming out just as this panic that he and David had really tried to start much earlier over multiculturalism on campus became integral

to conservative politics. So Peter goes in and basically does like a victory lap. I was right all along. And he lists his examples of progressive mania that he saw in Stanford as the replacement of Shakespeare's, The Tempest in one class with a play that had been written by a modern author based on The Tempest. The inclusion of other works beyond the Western classic literature canon was in Teal's eyes a tendentious left-wing anti-Western crusade.

As opposed to just like, I don't know man, maybe it's good at a certain point to add in works that are influenced by and based on some of these like Classics instead of just having everyone read these classics, you know ad nauseam There's an intellectual value when discussing the works that they inspired that's kind of Accepting that art and creativity is a living sort of thing as opposed to just being like no Everyone just needs to memorize the Iliad well Maybe we could talk about some of the works that were influenced by it and, you know, that have descended as a result of it because that's just kind of how education

ought to work. At one point, listing examples of how progressive madness had warped education at Stanford, Teel complained that the campus refused to seal off glory holes during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Now I don't know if this is true. I have not found any outside evidence that this is a thing that happened. In that 2023 article,

Teal does make a couple of valid points. He complains about the insane increase in tuition costs and how that's a part of the housing crisis. And he's not wrong there, right? Like the fact that so many people are in educational debt is part of why it's hard for them to afford housing and to like buy houses of their own. But what he's doing here that's fucked up

is he's wrapping decisions made by people who aren't teachers, right? Teachers are not choosing to make college this expensive and they are not the primary financial benefactors of college being that expensive, right? It is the administrators of the school. It's not like your history professor isn't deciding what like the campus is going to charge people

for credit hours, you know? It's crazy. Yeah. The glory hole thing is also just like- I feel like it's just bullshit. I feel like it's just bullshit, yeah. I feel like there were probably a couple of glory holes on campus maybe, but like I don't feel like it's just bullshit. Yeah. I feel like there were probably a couple of glory holes on campus, maybe, but like, I don't feel

like the student, the school was like, no, we love our glory holes. We're keeping those in. It's it's bananas. And then also, I mean, it is a little bit bananas that this guy was like confronted for being kind of like pro-apartheid

South Africa by black classmates. Yeah. And then his solution is what? That it was bad to have any diversity on college? It's bad to have any diversity in like the course material. But if you're doing a Western class, you should only be reading old dead white men as opposed to like, well, number one, Western civilization includes a lot of people

who are not white and exists up to the present day. So it's actually very valid to say like, okay, Shakespeare is obviously part of the Western canon. Should we not also be looking at like some non-white authors who are in the Western canon, who are writing and pivoting off of works started by Shakespeare and influenced by him, right? Is that not a valid part of art education?

Which I would say, well, yeah, that just seems like what you do, you know? I just do not believe that this guy is actually this angry about it. No, well, and that's part of why I really appreciate what Chafkin does here, because once you read, oh, and all of this was funded

by some shady right-wing think tank that gave them 40 grand to write a book to, because the funders hate colleges and liberal professors. Oh, okay, so this is made up, right? Like you were paid to be angry about this. That plays a role in why Peter is doing all of this, for sure. Alas, the late 1990s demanded more of Peter than a full-time devotion to the culture war trenches. After quitting his law career, he'd been forced to live with mom and dad for a

while, which I think was a miserable experience for him. And then he'd finally managed to get himself set up in a shitty little apartment thanks to all of those think tank paychecks. Peter was not happy with this life. He was not about to live as a poor man or even just a moderately comfortable conservative intellectual. He wanted to be one of the rich founders plucking a young angry man like he'd been from obscurity

and funding them in their quest to write bullshit. And in order to become that kind of guy, the only way to make the money he needed was finance. So he decides he's going to launch a hedge fund with a friend from his magazine days at Stanford using money that he had begged from friends, family, and friends of family. Now, he'd been trying to trade derivatives up to this point,

and that had not made him a bunch of money. The fact that he's able to get enough money from friends and family to start a hedge fund is evidence again, this is not a poor kid. This is not even a middle-class kid, right? No matter what a lot of profiles really came from a middle-class family, I'm sorry. If your family has enough money for you

to start a mutual fund with their donations or hedge funds, sorry, like that's not middle-class, you're not necessarily like millionaires, but your family and friends are of a different, certainly like if I had wanted to start a hedge fund at this age, my family and friends would not have been able to pay into it, right? Like they were struggling to pay rent.

Peter was not initially good at running a hedge fund. In his first year operating, the NASDAQ went up by 40% and Peter's fund lost money betting instead on currency. Part of this is because, this is something Chafkin points out, Peter is kind of obsessed with George Soros. And George, I think kind of around the time Peter's getting into hedge funds,

makes a fortune shorting the British pound and kind of fucks up the currency of an entire nation with his betting. Peter both hates Soros because they're very different ideologically and also wants to be like him because he sees, he wants that kind of like Soros is this right wing bugbear, this like monster in their, in their nightmares. And Peter wants to be that for the left, right? So he's, he's betting on currency, but he's just not any fucking good at it. Right?

So it gradually dawns on Peter that he probably isn't going to earn a reputation as one of the great hedge fund founders. And while he struggles with this, he watches the news, which is endlessly celebrating. This is the end of the nineties now, this parade of stories about guys like Marc Andreessen, who made early.com fortunes. Peter's obsessing over this and he's supplementing his income with lectures at Stanford. So he's writing about how evil the higher education system is and also reliant upon it for some of his money, when in 1998 at Stanford, he has a run-in with someone

who would be a crucial part of the next and most profitable phase of his life. This someone's name was Max Levchin, and Max was a 23-year-old student at Peter's alma mater who showed up one day for a lecture on currency. The two hit it off and wound up talking about Peter's hedge fund. Max mentioned that he was considering an investment in a company that made software for Palm Pilots. Now, you know what a Palm Pilot was.

I think I have to step back and explain this for our Zoomer audience, because they're not gonna have any fucking idea what I'm talking about. Imagine a smartphone that can't call people or text people or like map your way to, you know, it doesn't have a GPS. You also, you can't message in it. You can't like use the internet at all really on it

in most functional ways. And there's not any games on it. It also doesn't have a camera. Basically it's a small computer that keeps track of your calendar. And if you can find out how to download a book in 1998, it can kind of be a shitty e-reader, right? Those are the things that Palm Pilots are doing

at this point in time. Wasn't it also one of those things like you had to use one of the like computer phones? It's got a stylus, yeah, oh, they're fucking, they're awful. It really is like Steve Jobs hated the Palm Pilot because he very rightly was like, this is never going to take off as a product because it sucks.

It's a piece of shit. The only people who like these are like, people with disposable income who like want to impress folks by having an electronic gadget that most people don't have, right? They're just, not that there's not uses for a Palm Pilot, but it's not an indispensable device in the same way that a smartphone't have, right? They're just, not that there's not uses for a Palm Pilot, but it's not an indispensable device in the same way that a smartphone will become, right?

Like you really can't exist in a lot of the modern economy if you don't have a fucking smartphone. Palm Pilots are never that. But- Indispensable, however, in masturbation jokes. Yes, yes. Also that, right? That was, oh God, yeah.

What a time that was. They really laid that one up for us perfectly. Yep. So Palm Pilots are a dead end tech wise, but they also are, they're not a failed product entirely. They do make money for a while. And there's a lot in Palm Pilot development that is going to feed in later to smartphones

and the smartphone app ecosystem, right? And that's going to be relevant because like Max and Peter, they start talking about like, we wanna create like an app for Palm pilot users. And specifically initially what PayPal is, is Max and Peter being like, what if Palm pilot users could send each other IOUs, right? Like, what if there was a way to do that?

And Peter's, his interest kind of evolves into, what if we use, cause they're looking at the internet and PalmPilots have some ability to connect. It's a nightmarish pain in the ass compared to just like the way your smartphone works. They do have a way of connecting. Peter is starting to look at this digital infrastructure that's being built up in this period.

And he gets this fascination with the idea of, what if we create a digital bank that can separate money from the state, right? So he sees PayPal not as just a business, but as an act of revolutionary praxis. If we're looking at like Peter as like a capitalist linen, this is his equivalent of like the banks that linen had Stalin Rob in order to fund the revolution.

PayPal will allow us to take money from the state and build up our own war chest in order to destroy this liberal nanny state and create our libertarian paradise. It's a weapon, right? Peter sees PayPal as a weapon. And he believes that at the time? Yeah, yeah, that is what he claims at, I can't tell you what he believed at the time,

all the reporting on him. And this is what people who knew him said is that like, yeah, he saw this as like, this is a way to separate money from the state. So I think it is probably credible that he sees this as an act of kind of revolutionary praxis. Wild. Yeah.

In a 2007 article for Fortune magazine, Jeffrey O'Brien wrote, Teal figured a web-based currency would undermine government tax structures. Getting there, however, would mean taking on established industries, commercial banking, for instance, which would require financial acumen and engineering expertise. That's one of the earlier, like, this is a revolutionary thing for him, right?

I want to undermine the government by building this web-based currency. And obviously that's not what PayPal becomes. PayPal is just a way to like send your friends money, you know? Like it's not, it is not separated. But also Peter is not involved in PayPal after he sells it, as we'll talk about.

Right. So one benefit of founding a company like PayPal was that Peter and his partner could bring in to work for them anyone they wanted and exclude anyone who annoyed them. And as soon as the company gets off the ground, it becomes clear that like, this is non-negotiable for Peter, right?

Like a big reason why he likes the idea of being a founder is he can kind of make his own clubhouse and say, no girls allowed, right? And that's more literal than you might think. I'm gonna read something that Levchin told Forbes in that 2007 interview. This guy came in and I asked what he liked to do for fun. He said, I really enjoy playing hoops.

I said, we can't hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot. Wow. No basketball guys. Yeah, that's true. So he would not have done well at PayPal. Nope.

I know that hurts, Sophie. I know that you really had a lot writing on a PayPal career in 2007. So I'm sorry. Would have been 2007. You know what else has a lot writing on a PayPal career, and I don't think it's gonna work out for them, is our sources.

Our sponsors? Sponsors, Jesus Christ. My head's not on straight today, Sophie. You can tell that. I mean, it's not much different than any other day, but yep. Well, hey, no, I'm normally breaking to 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, 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. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski. Guess what, folks?

We're teammates again. And we're going to welcome you guys all to Dudes on Dudes. I'm a dude, you're a dude, and Dudes on Dudes is our brand new show. We're gonna highlight players, peers, guys that we played against, legends from the past, and we're just gonna sit here and talk about them. And we'll get into the types of dudes. What kind of types of dudes are there, girls?

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Is Randy Moss a stud or a freak? Is Tom Brady a dog or a dude's dude? We're gonna find out, Jules. New episodes drop every Thursday during the NFL season. Listen to Dudes on Dudes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back! Okay, let's get back into the Peter Thiel story. So the early PayPal company culture is obsessed with work, but it also carries a little of

Peter's growing antipathy towards college educations. One early employee claimed that the big difference between Google and PayPal was quote, Google wanted to hire PhDs. PayPal wanted to hire people who got into PhD programs and dropped out. That is so interesting. Uh-huh.

That is so interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. And again, Peter's not a dropout, right? Like, not like, for example, jobs, right? He's this, and again, Peter's not a dropout, right? Like, not like, like for example, jobs, right? He's not somebody who decides college isn't for me and bounces to do his own thing. He gets a degree and fails.

So it's interesting that he's like, I am only going to hire people who were like, I guess slightly more on the ball than me about realizing college wasn't where they wanted to be. I guess PhD programs, you have spent a lot of time in college at that point. I don't know, you can interpret that how you want. Levchin describes early PayPal employees as geeky guys

who quote, didn't get laid very often. The least surprising thing I've ever heard about PayPal. If you're wondering what companies employees were fucking like crazy, PayPal is not gonna be your first bet. Obviously it's Yahoo. I was gonna say Lycos, but nobody's gonna remember Lycos either.

So here's another quote from that Forbes article in the early days. When it came time to hire a high ranking female engineer, she turned out to be bad at ping pong. Levchin took that as a lack of competitive flair, but grudgingly hired her anyway. She quit within six months. Peter never fails to rub that in, he grumbles.

Oh man. Peter like, she can't play ping pong, there's no way she'll fit in here. I think you guys are just committed to making sure she wouldn't play ping pong. There's no way she'll fit in here. I think you guys are just committed to making sure she wouldn't fit in there. Now, one thing I find interesting is that for all of Peter's obsession with hierarchy, particularly as the rest of the world is concerned,

he doesn't appear to have actually been that kind of manager. In other words, he is not a like super dick, I have to be in charge, only my way or the highway kind of guy. He actually, a like super dick, I have to be in charge, only my way or the highway kind of guy. He actually, a lot of people say he was kind of a very good manager in this period of time. I'm gonna read another quote from Forbes here.

His hallmark management MO at PayPal was the all hands open book session. Customer logs, revenue flow, fraud losses, burn rate, he'd display it all for every employee to see. This access to information, coupled with the lack of offices created a flat structure where any idea could win the day. That's not a bad way. That's a very effective way of running things.

That's probably part of why PayPal works out. And it's interesting to me that like as obsessed ideologically as he is with hierarchy, Peter tends to run things as more of like an open book flat flat organizational structure, where we're all just kind of sitting together and bullshitting and like arguing, and whoever can make the best point,

that's the idea that takes off. That's interesting to me. As long as you're good at ping pong. As long as you fit into his idea of the elites that he wants, right? And maybe that is that I respect other people who I see as being at my level. And so I can work with them on a kind of approaching

an even basis, just I can't respect anyone else. Yeah, I think that's- As long as you speak Orkish, play ping pong. Yeah, yes, as long as you can read the runes on the gates of Moria and hate basketball, you can be in Peter's Clubhouse. So you will know that around the same time this is all happening, a guy who's in the news occasionally,

some of you may have heard of him, he's an obscure figure, but he comes up now and again, named Elon Musk, started another company named x.com. Now, not the social networking site that we all refer to by that name at all times, of course. No, this was actually a different company, an earlier X.com. And the gist of the story,

I'm actually not gonna talk a lot about Musk and Teal at PayPal because in terms of like popular culture knowledge of these guys, half of it is the big fight that they had at PayPal, right? Musk and Teal had both started payment companies that were doing very similar things and the market was not big enough to support them both as independent companies.

So they had to merge in order to be valid as a business, right? And the two don't get along and wind up like fighting, but like that's the thing that gets reported all the time. I just don't think it's that interesting. It's also, as behind the bastards goes, the fact that Peter Thiel is a dick to Elon Musk, not really evil to dislike Elon Musk.

Yeah, he's behind the heroes here. Yeah, I feel like we can understand why Peter might not have gotten along with Elon Musk. But basically what's happening here understand why Peter might not have gotten along with Elon Musk. But basically what's happening here is that both of these companies, X and PayPal, are funded by a lot of VC money and they're kind of lighting it on fire at this point. Neither company is in the black.

And the belief is that the only way they'll get there is if they merge. And this does work. This is an effective, they get kind of pressured into it, but this is an effective like way to build a business. Now, Elon becomes the CEO for a period of time, but he and Peter do not get along and Peter orchestrates a coup against Musk

while Elon is on vacation. I'd relate that in more detail, but again, who can blame him? Now, the specific conflict seems to have arisen because Elon has this obsession with moving the company off of Unix and towards a Microsoft platform. Whereas Teal and his OGs are all very much

like in the Unix tank, right? And so like, that's kind of the root of a lot of the conflicts between them. But the larger issue is that there's just a personality clash. They don't like each other. And one of the things that's really funny here is that as much as both of these guys suck and they're both current

like right wing, influential right wing, like monsters, they both had each other's number 20 years ago. Like their criticisms of each other are perfectly valid. Chafkin quotes a colleague who talked to each man about the other during this period. And this colleague said Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart. Hey, you're both right. You did it. Incredible. Yeah, that's not bad.

All right. I can't wait for the next Trump administration when they're. Yeah, that's going to be fun control to dismantle the state. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of an either no matter who wins, we lose or or maybe the Mr. Burns, so many diseases that it kind we lose, or maybe the Mr. Burns so many diseases that it kind of keeps the structure propped up. I guess we'll see.

It's Alien versus Predator. Yeah, that's your call. Yeah, okay, okay. I again, I think it's Alien 4, but nobody's going to understand my references to Alien 4. So what I do think that you can probably understand all politics via one of the alien movies As long as it's not the David Fincher one, you know, let's just keep alien 3

Shovel that aside, you know alien resurrection alien aliens all good politics So yeah, I think it's funny that these guys very clearly get who each other is in such a strong way. And they kind of, they seem to have had a little bit of rapprochement in part because Peter is later going to save SpaceX with an investment, kind of. But once Peter ousts Musk, the two are at Arms, Lincoln. They hate each other for years, right?

They are very clearly enemies for a while after this. Peter takes over from Musk as CEO, and in this role, he has a couple of strengths. He's noted by his employees as being a very supportive manager. He's the kind of guy who will give you a ton of freedom in the world to explore and try stuff out. Now, the downside of this is,

Peter actually doesn't like confrontation. He's terrible at firing people. If he brings someone in, in part because I think he mostly hires people he likes, if they're bad or they fuck up, he'll shuffle them around, but he doesn't tend to just let people go. He's really bad at that actually, which is interesting to me. Now one of the big successes PayPal has in this period as a result of Peter's management style is that they develop innovative technology

aimed at fighting online fraud. From a fairly early point in the business, around the year 2000, PayPal had started dealing with Russian scammers, creating shell accounts with stolen credit card numbers using bots. It actually goes back quite a while. This is again happening before 9-11.

Teal didn't wanna to crack down on this in a way that would make the service harder to use because it being easy to use was part of the appeal, right? So instead what they needed to do was actually figure out where these networks were and shut down the network surgically. So he has Levchin design a program that forced users to copy letters displayed

over a background that made them impossible for machines to read. This becomes the CAPTCHA system, right? We all know that that comes out of PayPal. Levchin is the guy who codes it, but Teal is a big part of like why we get CAPTCHA. Now that's obviously very influential. We've all had to do God knows,

an infinite number of these fucking things, but that innovation alone only puts a dent in the online online fraud problem. So near the end of 2000, a PayPal employee named John Cothenac, who's a former military intelligence man, started building what we today call the crazy board, right? Where he's trying to do the little string,

like tiny bits of string to pictures of different fraud networks, try to map out these accounts of fraudsters who are attacking PayPal. And he does this all kind of in a very like, in a very like labor intensive way. Like building this like map is a real pain in the ass, but he does eventually isolate the main culprit

of the botnet defrauding them. A guy nicknamed Igor who had taken $20 million or so out of PayPal. Now, when this worked out, this is a very effective method of getting this guy, they decide like, we need a way to automate this process. It's too slow to build a crazy board the way Cotheneck had. So let's have Levchin code,

a system by which you can map out links between different groups of bad actors. So you can build an actual physical understanding of these networks in real time, right? This app to build this kind of a crazy board system is what becomes Palantir, right? Yeah. Yeah, Levchin calls the program Igor

because of this guy that Kothinek had caught and he builds this program and it's for PayPal to stop fraud. This is what becomes Palantir. This is the core of Palantir, right? It comes from Igor. Yeah, yeah, very interesting stuff. No idea.

Yes, and we will be talking a lot about Palantir in part three, Teal's management style. So again, if you're looking at this, this is both like, you should be hearing that dun dun dun dun dun music, like we can see the evil coming up here. But also this is evidence that like Peter's management style isn't bad.

These are effective outcomes that make a lot of money, right? He is capable of motivating and managing people and giving them the freedom they need to innovate. You know, that you have to acknowledge that about the guy. Totally. Yeah. But that said, he also has a lot of blind spots and these are well described in this quote

from that Forbes article in 2007. PayPal's losses were multiplying. It battled Russian fraudsters who were filching millions by curbing credit card numbers. Customer service complaints flooded the phone lines and inboxes were often dealt with by simply not answering the phone or doing a mass deletion. Louisiana temporarily banned PayPal

from doing business in the state. MasterCard threatened to pull the plug because of the high number of chargebacks. Peter Thiel didn't know what a chargeback was, said Jawed Karim, an early engineer who went on to found YouTube with fellow alumni, Chad Hurley and Steve Chin, and then sell it to Google.

That's one of the fundamental things of any credit card payment system. Chargebacks almost killed the company. So there's also in this very libertarian way, he doesn't understand very basic aspects of reality that are central to the thing he's trying to do, and it nearly kills them, right? Like you don't know what a chargeback is

and you are running a payment processing company. Like that's a big, big blind them, right? Like you don't know what a chargeback is and you are running a payment processing company. Like that's a big, big blind spot, right? I know what a chargeback is. And I'm just a guy who was bad at having a credit card. Right, but he's not very far removed from just being like a pundit. Right, right. And when you understand that as his background, right?

That he doesn't really have a life outside of not making it as a lawyer and then being a right wing pundit, I get why you've got some blind spots, Peter. Yeah, yeah. So that's really interesting about the Palantir report. Like that, you know, I mean, they grew a giant company, you know, almost by accident out of this other one.

Yeah, yeah. And that is like one of the more interesting stories with Teal, right? Because it doesn't come out of this, the fact that he's after 9-11 able to see like, oh, you know, this thing we've used to stop networks of scammers, you can probably sell to the government

to try to stop terrorists, right? After this big attack, you know, that's some genuine insight. So PayPal, you know, it struggles with profitability, but they eventually break even after about 180 million had been poured into the idea. Now under Elon and Peter Thiel, PayPal is never profitable, right?

They hit break even, and as soon as they hit break even, they carry out an profitable, right? They hit break even and as soon as they hit break even, they carry out an IPO, right? Immediately after their IPO, the company is sold to eBay for one and a half billion dollars and Peter leaves instantly, right? The financially successful portion of PayPal's history, he is not around for. In fact, the first thing he does after living

is he basically, he sets up, he's going to set up like a venture capital fund and he's going to short PayPal, right? He sells this thing off and he's like, I'm immediately going to bet against it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

He has no, he has absolutely not at all, no loyalty or anything like that, right? Like he gets his money and he gets out. I am done. I have no more interest in this idea, right? And I think in part, because it's become clear at this point by 2002, PayPal is not going to destroy capital, like destroy or pay,

PayPal is not going to destroy like liberal democratic governments. It's not gonna create its own currency system. It's just going to be a way people use, spend money on the internet. And that's not interesting to him, right? Now, part of why I think he gets into this like, shorting, betting against this thing he'd help to build

is that 2002 is also right after 9-11. And Peter is one of many Americans who kind of loses his mind over 9-11, right? This is a deranging moment for him. And it also like, it fucks up the fact that he has this need to be seen as a contrarian as separate as above the herd, right? And it's interesting to me that for all of that, he is very much in line with like regular people like my parents. When it comes to just like losing his mind over this terrorist attack, it terrifies him.

He's going to participate in a program by the Bush White House to bring Silicon Valley movers and shakers in closer contact with the Republican Party. This is the first, a lot of his friends from PayPal, people that like had kind of seen him as like, he's a libertarian, he's a Silicon Valley libertarian, but like libertarians were very anti-Bush in this period. And the fact that Peter is willing to get in bed with the Republican Party, a lot of people is like, oh, I don't really know this guy like I thought I did.

This does not make sense for the person I thought Peter was. And some of what's going on here is that the tech bubble has burst in this post 9-11 period. The period immediately after the attacks when the US is invading Afghanistan and spinning up towards invading Iraq is a bad time for big tech.

The dot com bubble had burst and the economy in general had shit the bed as a partly as a result of the attacks. Peter, who has always had a good gut instinct for the momentum of the moment and culture opted to spend a lot of the next two years kind of fucking around, right? He gets from 2002 to 2004 that like, there's not, this is not really a great time to be investing in most things. And he's also, he's just sold his first company. He's mega rich now.

So some of what he's doing is just, you know, he's kind of idly shorting his old business, the US economy, but he's also just kind of like doing the very understandable thing, which is partying for a while. You know? So this is also where Peter, you could kind of see this as he's getting some space and he starts to find himself during this period. Chafkin writes that as CEO of PayPal, Peter had dressed down in a t-shirt and old jeans, but as soon as he sold off his interest in the company, quote, now Teal had a wardrobe

full of suits and a silver Ferrari Spider 360. Red, he told the New York Times Magazine, would have been over the top. He purchased a 10,000 square foot mansion in San Francisco and filled it with art, but also conference rooms, a day to night lounge, and a kitchen meant for buffets. It was a place to work and host work. But, Chafkin writes, there were no keepsakes,

no magazines, and no family photos. Teafkin writes, there were no keepsakes, no magazines, and no family photos. Teal's homes, as one visitor remarked, referring to the Presidio mansion and a grand apartment that Peter acquired in New York City, look like stage sets, and it's hard to tell someone actually lives in them. I feel like that's just being mega rich.

You've got enough people to keep everything clean all the time, and you want a lot of nice artwork. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Teal invested money in a nightclub called Frisson being mega rich. You've got enough people to keep everything clean all the time and you want a lot of nice artwork. Yeah. Teal invested money in a nightclub called Frisson after one of his friends bragged about a different nightclub in New York City that had coed bathrooms. And so Frisson is largely based around its coed bathrooms,

which are designed to provide couples with an easy way to fuck in a public bathroom because some people want that. That's at least, you know, the allegation from Chaffkin's book that like he builds this night because a friend is like, yeah, there's this fucking club in New York and you can have sex with your girlfriend in the bathrooms and Peter's like, I need to own one

of those in the West Coast. So Silicon Valley, it's like, yeah, yeah. Yes, you've invented bathroom. Yeah, you've invented fucking in a club bathroom. Congratulations. Peter like comes in one day dressed as Steve Jobs. Like I've had an incredibly great idea doing cocaine in a bathroom.

Oh, this is going to revolutionize partying as a rich guy. Also now for Sean is like the name of like a USA networks, like romcoms version of a club. Yeah. It's like that's where the guys from Suits went to. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now it also hosted fine dining

and I gotta say it works for a while. Although in a way that's creepy and retrospect. Chieftain makes hay out of the celebrities that became regulars, quote, Lars Ulrich, Robert Redford, Kevin Spacey. What a party. I mean, Robert Redford, cool. Fine, yeah, Robert Redford. Cool. Fine. Yeah, Robert Redford. He's really the sandwich.

Yeah, super cool. Yeah. Lars Ulrich and Kevin Spacey. Ah, Lars Ulrich in the period. Oh, God. Because it's also like that's like page 47. Yeah. Yeah. Lars Ulrich in Spacey. God, because, yeah, that. Lars Ulrich and Kevin Spacey. God, cause yeah, that's like peak angry

at fucking Nabster Lars Ulrich. And I don't, and I'm not gonna make allegations about Kevin Spacey, given how litigious he is, but like read something about Kevin Spacey. Just read something about Kevin Spacey and then make a guess as to what's going on in the bathrooms of Frisson. Casting for great movies, obviously.

So he tries his hand at publishing in this period too, and you are not going to guess what magazine he launches. What sport would Peter Thiel launch a magazine based around in 2002? Or for something like that school. Squash, I don't know. What are we squash? OK, you got to guess, Noah. I mean, I thought you were giving us like the foreshadowing with ping pong. No, that would have been very I would have respected the hell out of that

if he had tried to get a ping pong magazineong Magazine off the ground. What's that? Complain about all time pickleball. No not pick. I don't know that exists besides pickleball is just like Ping-pong on a slightly larger court anyway. Yeah Frisbee. Yeah, it's ping-pong for dads Frisbee Frisbee no Frisbee. Frisbee, no.

Handball. I'm satisfied that none of you guessed. The magazine he launches is named American Thunder and it's about NASCAR. That sounds like a dirty magazine. It may have been, it was a little bit pornographic. This is a Psyop. Oh yeah. was a little bit pornographic. This is a Psyop.

Oh yeah. He is, he does this, the goal of this is he starts a NASCAR magazine and he hires only his right-wing think tank friends to write in it. And their goal is to use NASCAR's cultural cache with like regular conservatives to push more of their extremist, like libertarian ideas to, to, to Republicans, right? That's the goal of American thunder. And it's wild to me. He puts $10 million into this magazine, uh, despite the fact that he is not interested in NASCAR.

Um, he brings his old Stanford review buddies in, uh, and the first issue rather than like talking about NASCAR in a meaningful way has like an essay about how the Magazine is not going to embody any sense of political correctness Which at this maybe today that would work at this point in time the kind of people who buy a NASCAR magazine Really just want to read about Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, you know In your rants This what if hold on, hold on. Wait, OK. What if he had done that?

But with ping pong, that would be incredibly funny. If you just tried to red pill, everybody who ping pong, his ping pong magazine is entirely about the gold standard. There's just a 45 page rant in here about euthanizing the poor. I was trying to buy a new racket. I still don't know what kind of table to get. So yes, it seems to have been a badly disguised attempt

to propagandize to normal working Joe's. And this is embodied well by the magazine's real guys column. And here's how Chavkin describes that. It was written not by an auto journalist, but by the online editor for the weekly standard, who devoted his first column to the idea that ESPN had been emasculated

by namby pamby political correctness. The grub page where a normal magazine would have stuck the barbecue recipes included in its inaugural call. That's incredible. Yeah. A possibly tongue in cheek anthropological discussion of why household cooking should be considered women's work.

Everyday cooking is a chore, a few men ever get around to, or even care to get around to. We are grateful that this is how things have worked out. So grateful, we'll even help with the dishes from time to time. Fuck off. Just tell people how to fucking make a barbecue sauce, man.

Come on. Nobody needs this in their NASCAR magazine. Shut the fuck up, Jesus Christ. So it says a lot about the economics of magazines. Cause like if somebody hands me $10 million to start a media company, I think I could do a lot with $10 million. Peter's magazine is bankrupt by the end of 2005.

It lasts about a year. So that's a pretty, I think even with magazine money, that's a pretty, you'd know more about this than me know, but that seems like a pretty fast burn rate. I mean, good on him. I mean, good on him. You know, good on him. I'm sure there's some lavish photo shoots. Definitely. You know, featuring Camille Paglia.

Every NASCAR fan's favorite intellectual. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm on top of a stock car. Yeah. I'm sure there's some real like, you know, a lot of like 90s technology devoted to like, you know, Mussolini being photoshopped into, you know, Dale Earnhardt's machine. I wonder if we got, because Dale Earnhardt famously like helped lead a crusade against like the use of Confederate flags at NASCAR events. I wonder if there was an angry column about that in this. I don't remember the exact year that that happened though. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like bring back the General Lee. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if that was a cause for these people. Dude, you know the Dukes of Hazzard guys were in there somehow. Yeah, yeah. Jesus Christ. Peter Thiel's NASCAR magazine.

The issues of that have to be a collector's sign at this point. Oh my God. Read by exactly nobody. Yeah. American Thunder is bankrupt by the end of the year. Fresson lasts a little bit longer. It makes it till 2008.

Now the fact that he's pouring money into these and all of them are loss leaders, you could say, it doesn't hurt him. He's got plenty of money. And neither of them have been about making a profit. Both were a way, there were schemes to gain influence. Right? The nightclub was a way of like setting him up

in like the popular, like cool hip celebrity set. And this magazine was an attempt to gain influence with the working class, right? So the fact that neither of these make money doesn't disturb Peter. But he also knows that he's not gonna be able to coast forever off of his PayPal money. And you know what?

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Thank you. Thank you. I thought that was one of my better one of my better plugs. Yeah. So by this point, Peter Thiel, you know, kind of the period he's trying all this stuff out, he's also started a new company, an investment firm called Clarion Capital, which had been founded in 2002. Now, Peter, not long after Clarion gets founded,

is going to get it on the ground floor of investing in Facebook. He gets a 10% stake in the company, but that deal is also structured in some ways as a loan. This is one of those things that's covered a lot in the social network, right? Basically he puts the stake in the company to which allows Facebook to survive in its early days, but he does so in such a way that in order to. Like make the company viable.

Zuckerberg has to ice out one of his other founders who has like a 27% stake in the company, which he does. This is Zuck's big first betrayal. And you can see Peter is kind of like the puppet master in it. Now, again, these are all the kids who started Facebook. So the fact that they are backstabbing each other at Peter Thiel's incitement,

I'm not really all that interested in. It's like a mark of human evil. That just seems like the kind of thing that was always going to happen at Facebook. But you could see that like Peter's the guy who corrupts Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know that I think that's really accurate. I think Mark was always willing to be corrupted,

but that's one version of the story. Now, the play-by-play here has been covered and often movies and our own episodes on Marky Mark. What I did learn reading Chafkin's recitation of events is that Peter is kind of, he kind of fucks up his Facebook investment. He gets in early on the ground floor and he does make money,

but he loses his, he gets in on this first round and makes a profit. But when it comes time for the second, another round of investments, he thinks the business is overvalued at like something like 170 investments. He thinks the business is overvalued at like something like 170 million. Like he thinks Facebook is overvalued. And so he fails to roll his investment forward.

And as a result, despite being famous as this early Facebook investor, he doesn't make much money off of Facebook. What? Yeah, he really does not make- That's his whole shit. Compared to what you would expect, right? For normal people, he makes a lot of money off of Facebook. What? Yeah, he really does not make- But this whole shit. Compared to what you would expect, right? For normal people, he makes a lot of money

off of Facebook, right? But for what you would expect, and based on how much he does not make a lot, because he kind of bows out of subsequent rounds of investment, because he doesn't believe in the company. Right? So his whole thing, okay, so like investment number one, PayPal,

which he then sells right around in shorts, kind of shorts. Yeah. And then Facebook, which he does put money in, picks the founders against one another, maybe if they do it anyway, and then doesn't really believe in it. So it doesn't really maximize. And this is, it's not, it would never be fair to say Peter has bad instincts because he is right about a lot. He's right that there's something in PayPal, but he's wrong about how much there is in PayPal. And this is actually going to be a real pattern

in his investments where he'll understand something important, but not to the extent that allows him to actually make much money off of it, right? Or he'll get a guess, right? But he won't commit to it to the extent that allows him to really profit from it. And I think that's a really interesting aspect of him, right? That he, he has these good instincts in some ways, but that he also consistently fails to follow up on them enough.

I find that very interesting and actually actually, honestly, kind of relatable. Like as a guy who's made some of his bones predicting things, and also I am aware of the things that I had been wrong about, I really find that kind of like, like I get it, Peter, it's hard actually, you know? Yeah, totally. So as he's exploring life as a venture capitalist and kind of the early aughts,

Peter continues his involvement with Stanford, organizing a symposium on politics and the apocalypse. And this is prior to 2008. So the housing crisis is coming up. This is another one of those good predictions. Peter sees the housing crisis coming up. He sees that economic like crumbling, but he, as opposed to just being like,

oh, there's a housing collapse, it's going to be a real problem and there will be some financial opportunities as a result of that problem, which like the big short guys also, right? Peter sees the collapse coming, but he assumes the whole system is going to crumble, right? Like he literally thinks the housing collapse

is going to destroy the entire US government basically, right? What? Yeah, yeah. So again, he's like, you're right, but not in the way that allows you to like, but you also like are wrong in a way that means that you can't really profit off

of the initial rightness there, right? You see the problem and then you massively overextend it because of your ideology and so you fuck up at profiting from this moment in American history. So he like Y2Ks the housing crisis? Yeah. What year was the Mayan civilization was supposed to be this for? Like 2012? 2012. So that was going to be this for like 2012, 2012, 2012. So that was that was going around at this point in time. Yeah.

He was just a little early for the Mayan apocalypse. Yeah. Maybe maybe maybe Kevin Spacey told him about the Mayan apocalypse during a dinner at Saan. So he thought that he's like, OK, there's all these like derivatives are problematic housing rate, you were giving mortgage loans to too many people, therefore collapse of all Western civilization. Yes. And I think it's because he sees that banks and stuff are going to go under, but he doesn't

see that the government is going to respond in any way to bail them out and prop up the system. Right. Right. that the government is going to respond in any way to bail them out and prop up the system, right? Right. Which is such an interesting shortcoming to not see that like the people running the system have a sense of self-preservation, right? Like whatever you say about it, like Obama and, or even if it had been Bush,

it's like none of them had a desire in the entire financial system collapsing, you know? No, definitely not. Yeah. Writing in 2021 for the New Yorker about this politics and the apocalypse symposium, Anna Weiner summarizes, Teal's contribution later published in an essay titled The Straussian Moment was built on the premise that September 11th had upended the entire political and military framework of the 19th and 20th centuries,

demanding a re-examination of the foundations of modern politics. The essay drew from a grab bag of thinkers, it mediated on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and then combined ideas from the conservative political theorists, Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, who wrote about the inadequacies of liberal democracy

with the work of Girard to offer a diagnosis of modernity. A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars, Thiel wrote. Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the enlightenment.

And there's so much there. There's so much there. First of all, this guy is fucking messy. Yeah, he's so messy. This guy is out of fucking control. It's like the whole point of terrorism is to overreact. And this guy wants to overreact. We have to overreact and this guy wants to overreact. We have to overreact, yeah.

Yeah, it's so hard that he wants to overturn the enlightenment. Yeah. It's like, what the fuck, man? I think it's because he's writing about like, America doesn't care for religious wars, but we've been forced, and it's like, but Peter, you're a Christian culture warrior, right?

Like you have these very weird ideas about Christianity and morality that you are kind of trying to force on people through your politics, that's a religious war, right? Like to say that America doesn't care for religious wars and then to look out at 2020s US politics is a wild thing, right? And it's, yeah, just a fascinating statement

for him to make, right? This idea that like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, all the problems that we had after 9-11, or a lot of them, were because fragile men like him overreacted, freaked the fuck out, treated it like a religious war rather than as some kind of act of terrorism, treated it as some kind of like apocalyptic conflict. Yeah, we have to engage in this clash.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, it is. That's part of what's interesting to me is that again, for all his desire to be seen as this like contrarian standing apart from the herd, he's just a neocon. Like in this period at least,

like how else do you look at this, right? Cause like a big part of him after this point and in this post PayPal period is he's still scared and frightened of 9-11. And he is obsessed with the idea that 9-11 has proved we need to give up freedom for security. This is where he really jettisons a lot of those libertarian ideas, right?

He describes the ACLU's attempt to protect civil liberties in the post-9-11 period as an unviable anachronism. He acknowledges that the 20th century included a great deal of programs that claimed to exist economically to develop the third world, but really just extracted or put more cash in the hands of dictators. But he also argues that this doesn't explain why people from the global South

would want to attack the West. His reasoning, and his way of looking at Osama bin Laden is that this is a rich kid, right? And so all of these arguments about how like, we can stop terrorism and we can stop these kinds of conflicts between the West and other parts of the world by increasing economic development in those areas are bullshit because Osama bin Laden was rich.

And like, what? What? Like the fact that Osama, like Osama did not start the conflict that he was a part of here, right? And like the fact that he was a rich kid, it makes sense in the way that like you, Peter, were a rich kid who decided that you want to destroy democracy, right?

Like that is the class of people who tend to become revolutionaries often come from a degree of financial privilege because those are the people who tend to become revolutionaries often come from a degree of financial privilege because those are the people who have the time and the space to think about stuff like overthrowing the system in the most, and to have the resources to go about doing it. This is not an uncommon story in history. The fact that Bin Laden becomes this kind of guy

is no weirder than the fact that Peter becomes this kind of guy, right? Game recognizes game. Game recognizes game. And like the fact that Osama bin Laden was not an aggrieved poor person doesn't mean that the economic betrayal of the global south isn't an important factor in geopolitical instability. It's a lot of what Peter says is that like, you can't stop instability and conflict by helping to improve living standards in poor countries

because Osama Bin Laden did 9-11. Fucking nuts. It's like two sentences that have nothing to do with one another. Yeah. Okay, Peter. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's such bushy and logic. Again, for this guy who really wants to stand apart from the herd, It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's such bushy and logic. Again, for this guy who really wants to stand apart

from the herd, this is just the kind of shit my parents were saying in 2005. It's also like completely wild. Then this guy goes on to basically be like one of Glenn Greenwald's big backers, right? Oh yeah. Yeah, it's like some weird like twisted horseshoe. Also it's like this guy, so this guy is basically

just like more Christian Dick Cheney. More techie Dick Cheney. Yeah, more techie and probably more Christian. Yeah, you're probably, that's probably accurate to say. Dick Cheney with more frisson? Yeah, with more frisson, yeah that's probably accurate to say. Dictating with more Frissan? Yeah, with more Frissan, yeah. With more Kevin Spacey too, probably. Yeah.

No, no, no, that's not an allegation we're making. Yeah. So, Thiel's analysis, I think, is inch deep here because he's, in this period, and I'll say somewhat understandably because everyone was entirely focused still on 9-11. Now, the problem for Peter is that, and this is kind of what Ben Laden, like Peter falls

into Ben Laden's trap perfectly here, he sees 9-11 as this singular incident and it clearly terrifies him. And he writes that this proved to him and proved to the world that quote, a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death. And this is why everything about liberal democracy, about civil rights has to change, right? Is that now we know it's possible for a small number of people to kill a large number of people, right?

And that completely changes the game. Now, I don't think Peter's being entirely honest here because that's not what scared him about 9-11. The 21st century has been a century of air and drone strikes, of small numbers of people murdering large numbers of people in countries all over the world. Peter doesn't care about these dead people because he's never gonna get stuck in a war zone, right?

That's part of why he got a New Zealand citizenship for himself, right? It's because he's not gonna be anywhere close to a war. 9-11 shatters Peter Thiel, not because it proves that small numbers of people can kill large numbers of people, but because it proved that a small number of people could kill a lot of rich people, right?

And I'm not doing the old justifying 9-11 thing, but like 9-11 is a strike on the financial center of the country. A lot of CEOs, businessmen, people who were executives at big companies die in that attack. An attack on the World Trade Center, Peter can see himself as being a victim of that.

He very well might've been in the World Trade Center, right? Like that is the kind of thing that could have affected him. And that's why this scares him, right? It's not that a lot of people, or a small number of people can kill a lot of people, it's that I am not safe as a wealthy businessman, right? Like someone could kill me.

That's why this fucks him up. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that like the degree to which the people that really freaked out over 9-11, like none of them actually lived in the places where 9-11 happened. No.

Like I say, this is a New Yorker. Like New Yorkers did not freak out over 9-11. Like, but people, you know, from fucking uranium mine, South Africa, who relocate to Palo Alto, they're the ones who lose their minds. Yeah, cause, oh my God, I might've been in a place that was, my entire life is about

separating myself from the masses and gaining a sense of safety and like value as a result of that. And like, I could've just died like everyone else. I also think that's why he's so scared of death. It's not just the cessation of his own being, but death inevitably, the fact that you will die, this is true of all of us, links you to everyone who ever has and ever will live, right? It is one thing we all have in common, everyone will die. And Peter hates the idea that he has anything to do

with everyone else, that he has something in common with the rabble, that there is a thing that inevitably, inextricably binds him to a poor man in fucking Delhi, right? They're both gonna die. And in fact, that guy living on the street of Delhi might live longer than Peter, just because, you know, shit happens, right? Peter could be the victim of an attack someday,

and then maybe he'll be outlived by a poor person, right? Peter cannot handle this reality. It drives him mad. My brain is fried right now. Yeah. Like I'm just, I'm trying to make the logical inferences this dude makes and I'm having trouble doing it. Like I don't understand. Like there are people, tons of people I disagree with and I see how they get from A to B. This is like from A to the symbol for, you know, for Boron or something. I don't understand where it is even coming from.

It's- Yeah. Yeah. Cause it is confusing. I think what, if I had to describe it, it's oppositional defiant disorder with main, like merging with main character syndrome, right? Like that's kind of how I would look at Peter here. Now, later in that same essay, he thinks back,

he goes back to the philosophical writings of Gerard on mimetics, arguing that the need to keep up with your neighbors leads to an ever escalating rivalry. He declares that the disturbing truth of mimesis has been suppressed and in the same breath notes that envy is a mortal sin in Catholicism. And the conspiracism is weird here,

but it's no weirder than what Theodor Thiel goes on to claim about ape anthropology. This is again, an essay about 9-11. At the core of the mimetic account, there exists a mystery. What exactly happened in the distant past when all the apes were reaching for the same object, when the rivalry between mimetic doubles

threatened to escalate into unlimited violence? I don't know that moment occurred, Peter. What are you fucking talking about, man? Such a fucking weirdo. Stop this shit. Stop reading Gerard. What the fuck are youo. Stop this shit. Stop reading Gerard. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, literally stop reading Gerard.

What he's saying here is that there's this, because we want things because we see other people having things or wanting things, and that forms through this mimetic process, like our system of desire, and that this truth has been suppressed by the secret masters of the world to some extent. And there's this mystery of like, well, how did, you know,

how did we avoid this like kind of escalating sense of like jealousy and rivalry for things escalate into this unlimited violence that would have destroyed the species? And the answer is we figured out how to scapegoat individuals in order to like stop from mass killing, right? And Peter has to think in this way because he has this very narrow view of anthropology

that's informed by Girard's writing. And it's like concept Girard has of like war of all against all, right? And that the only way to avoid this is to gradually drive the combatants to gang up against a scapegoat, right? Now, among other things, if we're just talking about ape, if we're talking about anthropology, this is all ignoring the degree to which primates

work together and collaborate, which is also like as much a war and conflict is certainly a part of primate evolution. You can find like apes, different kinds species of simians go to war with each other in like a very recognizable way. You can see that with like chimpanzees and the like, but they also collaborate and work together, right? Like just picking the one side of things,

like how they fight for resources and ignoring how they team up in order to get resources and make a better life for themselves is kind of cutting out half of existence. This is, yeah, it's like, what do you only watch like the first 10 minutes of 2001 on infinite loop? Yes, yes, yes, that's the whole basis of his like understanding of like mimetic reality.

It's like, yeah, monkeys fight. It's so weird. It's really fucking strange. Noah and I have had the same face of just like, ugh, the last 10 minutes. Again, studying philosophy is sometimes a problem. This guy needs to take one walk in the woods. Yeah.

This guy needs to, I don't know, like read one other book. It's a fucking having that experience of life. He'd been in like a car wreck as a younger man and it had like a bystander come and pull him out of the wreck could have changed his whole impression of humanity. But instead he's like, we're all apes and we need a scapegoat.

Everyone's going to break down and be fighting and killing each other unless we like, and you kind of instead, he's like, we're all apes and we need a scapegoat. Everyone's going to break down and be fighting and killing each other unless we like, and you kind of get the idea that like, oh, so this war against Islam you see as like a scapegoat and maybe now these kind of attacks you're kind of working on against like the trans community against all these different enemies of conservatism. You see this as like, I have to give people a scapegoat in order to stop them from taking the things I have because they're going to want the things I have

because like they've been influenced memetically to desire the same things that I have received. I think that's like a really kind of a core aspect of his understanding of how the world works. Such a strange person. At the ending of this article, this very weird article, Peter comes around to the subject of monarchy, arguing myth transfigured the murdered scapegoats into gods.

So human beings created scapegoats so we could avoid murdering each other. And then we turned those scapegoats into our early pagan deities, which is like Again, weird. I don't I don't get that at all I I guess there's there's like some Greek gods who that kind of makes sense for right like Prometheus maybe but That I don't know. How how is Zeus a murdered scapegoat? What's the murdered scapegoat? That's the basis of that? Or like, I don't know, man. I think you're maybe like, where's,

how does Ahura Mazda fit into this kind of shit? Like that just seems like a weird statement by a guy who hasn't read a lot about world religion. I feel like this whole fucking thing is like, dude was on ketamine and just like writing down whatever came to mind, like whether it linked together or not. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

Yeah, because it just doesn't, it feels very college level philosophy to me. And it also feels like a guy who's trying to justify being an asshole to other people and manipulating them as like, this is the only way that human beings work. Is he the scapegoat like his poor little? He's afraid he could be I Think he's afraid he could be right. I think that's kind of what's going on here. Is that like fundamentally he is

Try it part of why he's into right-wing politics is he wants to make sure he never is that there's got to be a scapegoat And it might be him if he's not careful, so he's going to make sure he never is that. There's got to be a scapegoat and it might be him if he's not careful. So he's going to make sure it's someone else. Right. So it's cruelty is the point. But like, in a good way. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I think that might be it. Anyway. Yeah.

This is the stunned silence that means Right now just because I mean, this is fucking dark and weird even for the show. I'm sorry Yeah, it's it's it's getting into peter teal's head is not a comfortable place to be. I don't like it here No, he's no, he's not just a weirdo. He's a sicko. He's a sicko He's not just a weirdo, he's a sicko. He's a sicko. He's a sicko. Or all of this is part of some cunning lie that he told a bunch of interviewers over years,

in which case he's even more of a sicko. I was gonna say sicko times two. Then he's like Stephen King. Yeah, then he's creating like that weird hotel in Colorado or whatever. Yeah. He's not Stephen King. Nobody's Stephen King. Stephen King isn't even Stephen King.

No, not since he quit the blow. Well, oh, that's why we're not going to get a Cujo sequel anytime soon. Unless there's already been a Cujo sequel. Yeah. Oh, I do want to see Peter Teal write a Cujo sequel. Yeah, oh, I do wanna see Peter Thiel write a Cujo sequel. There you go, that's a good suggestion. Oh man, that could have been his, that might have been what made him happy. And what, we're only halfway through this saga, Robert?

You still have multiple, oh cool. We haven't even gotten really to Palantir. We've just laid the groundwork. Wait, maybe Trump is Cujo too. Yeah, Trump's his Cujo, that's right, that's right. And that Peter Thiel doesn't remember writing him. Yeah. That's my favorite Stephen King fact.

Wait, is that true? Yeah, yeah, I think the quote from him was something like, Cujo's a great book, I wish I could remember writing it. It was when he was really on the stuff, you know? Good for him. Yeah, hell yeah, man. That's how you know you're one of the greats.

If you write Kujo while fucking Snowblight. That's incredible. Yeah, that's fucking awesome. Everyone go read the Stephen King book. Noah, you got anything you want to push? No, you can find me at Noah Shackman. That's N-O-A-H-S-H-I-A-C-H-T-M-A-N on your social platforms. I write for a bunch of different places, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York Mag,

and even got some for the Times coming up. Hell yeah, hell yeah. Excited to meet you. That was enough for you, Peter Thiel, thank God. No, no. And listen, folks, if you're at home, don't do Excited for me to- That's nothing to Peter Thiel, thank God. No, no. And listen folks, if you're at home, don't do cocaine.

Just go to your nearest gas station and ask them for whatever pill has the most amphetamines in it. Or don't. Then buy that. Or don't. Take it, there's one called Addies, like Adderall, but it's just a shitload of caffeine and B12. What?

Oh yeah. The kind of shit that's legal to sell as energy pills is amazing. On that note. What's your favorite Kratom? Kratom? Oh, Kratom's the best. Robert loves the Kratom.

So imagine if someone took Oxycontin and then just made it so it couldn't easily kill you. And also it was sold unregulated in every gas station in the United States. That's Kratom. Wow. It's good stuff. Yeah, it's what I take it all the time. He loves the Kratom. It's wonderful.

Wait, really? Yeah. He loves the Kratom. It's a little bit caffeine, a little bit painkillery, but it won't shut down your lungs. Like it's not a central nervous system depressant. Is that like the tagline? Credo midwool, just in your lungs. It won't kill you in the same way that opiates do.

It's great. I love it. Be careful with it though, folks. It is a drug. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911, what's your emergency? He said he was going to kill us. broadcasts. 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. I'm Julian Edelman. I'm Rob Gronkowski. And we are super excited to tell you about our new show, Dudes on Dudes. We're spilling all the behind-the-scenes stories,

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