Big Technology Podcast - Unraveling The Mystery Of Peter Thiel — With Max Chafkin

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Max Chafkin is the author of The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, which debuts this week. The book is a fascinating, inside look into the life and rise of Silicon Valley���s most powerful and controversial venture capitalist. In this interview, we discuss whether Thiel is representative of Silicon Valley or an anomaly, and dig into who he really is and what motivates him. You can find the book here: https://amzn.to/3AwAKHB

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Max Chaffkin. He is a features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of the brand new book just hit shelves yesterday. it's called the contrarian, Peter Thiel, and Silicon Valley's pursuit of power. It's interesting that you also say one Silicon Valley. So we have to get into that. Is there one? Is there many Silicon Valley a location? Is it an idea? Is it uniform? Does it contain multitudes? Does the LA Times just spoke about your book anyway, Max? Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Alex. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you. You see, already got me excited. I've learned so much from this book.

and I'm just like, I'm thrilled to be talking to you, and I think this is going to be a fun discussion. So why don't we start here? Peter Thiel is one guy. We see him in headlines every now and again. He's done, you know, a handful of things. Has he built the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley? I don't think so. Certainly your presence there. So why is he so important that you became, you know, obsessed in the way that got you to write a book and and you know we're about to spend about an hour talking about him why do people if people are going to listen to one of the episode of this podcast why why this be why would this be the one yeah so i've got two two answers um and one the the the kind of quick answer is he's fascinating he's he's somebody's full of contradictions uh you know i think the thing that caught

a lot of people's attention with teal as a figure of fascination um you know in 2016 when he endorsed Donald Trump, right? There's this feeling of like this futurist, this prominent futurist who's a gay immigrant from California is backing a reactionary anti-immigrant New York real estate developer who's running on a nativist platform. That's weird and interesting. And to me, like that is, I think, you know, as obvious as that sounds, I think that's part of the kernel of why people care about him. But I mean, the real answer to your question, question is, and this is something that, you know, I thought about as I was writing the book and tried to develop it. But Teal, I think, as you say, he's not the richest tech mogul.

He hasn't started the best companies. There are certainly stories you could tell about the tech industry over the last 20 years where other people would be kind of in the main character and would be like the main character. But I would argue that Teal has had a bigger cultural impact on the tech industry than any single person. And so, like, by that, I mean how the tech industry sees itself, how companies see what they do, and how they do business. So, in other words, this idea that founders, that the class of the founder is this kind of special person who has a privileged access to kind of like what the company is supposed

to do and who's right, who just knows what's best, that came from Peter Thiel. I mean, that comes from Founders Fund. And that ethos, I think, you know, goes a long way to explaining like a lot of the weird stuff that has happened in the tech industry over the last 20 years as the tech industry kind of spills into, you know, whatever the real world as Facebook. Right, right. But, Max, isn't it more than that, though, it's more than just trusting the founder, right? Of course. It is, it is, having read your book, it is in particular, this libertarian impulse that he has. Absolutely.

Anti-institutionism. Right. That essentially says, you know, screw the government, screw the rules. Disruption is almost de facto good. Absolutely. And that is something, I mean, he starts with the company PayPal, which you outlined pretty impressively, was yes, about sending money on internet but also in some ways breaking the global financial system so yeah yeah of course he did this thing called founders fund where he wants to empower the founder and he talked about you know how how bad

education is and paid people to drop out of school but you know having read your book my takeaway was that his core cultural impact on Silicon Valley was convincing people that you know they should and could break down the system in any way possible and this is you know obviously do it for money but to me, it seemed, you know, from his very early years, he had this libertarian anti-institutionalist streak. And that extended, you know, to so many people he came into contact in Silicon Valley. And, you know, I wrote down a few that have worked with him when you talk about Elon Musk, David, David Carp, Joe Lonsdale, David Sacks. Yeah, sorry, David Sacks, Alex Carp, Joe Lonsdale. I mean, it's unbelievable how many people have sort of come into his.

orbit and seem to have walked away as theelists, you know, from their, uh, from the philosophical standpoint. I 100% agree with everything you just said. And I think you, you just put your finger on exactly, I'd say like the most important thing about teal's, you know, kind of ideology and identity is, is this idea, yeah, that breaking the rules, it's not just that it has, um, neutral value. It's not just that it's, that the rules can be ignores. It's that there's something good about breaking the rules. And that, I think, you can sort of see why that would be useful if you're building a startup. But it's also, you know, obviously can have, you know, detrimental effects. And now we've created, and this is why I think it's really important to

pay attention to somebody like Peter Thiel and to pay attention to Teal in particular, because that ethos, tealism, if you want to call it that, is basically the main ethos of Facebook, of, you know, of most of the bigger companies in Silicon Valley. This idea that the rules, yeah, just aren't that important. And maybe it's best to cast them aside from time to time. And he hated, it seems like he hated people who were pro-government, pro-institution. Yep. In part because he was bullied as a kid and was sort of an outcast. And, you know, he grew up in Silicon Valley, if I remember correctly. And people didn't treat him well. And he was like, you are out there saying you're going to go, you know,

heal the world and you know what's right. And your precious institutions. And, uh, and this is the way you treat someone, I'm going to wreck it. And that seemed to have to find a lot of what he did through life. Is that, is that a fair thing to say? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, the teal family. It's amazing how much comes back to bullying. it is yeah seriously uh they were they were outsiders um you know his parents were were german immigrants um very conservative uh very religious um and uh and and and he moved around a lot as a kid uh you know they bounced from cleveland um to south africa and then finally to foster city which is this suburb um you know you know in the bay area but it's pretty far removed from Silicon Valley

it's on marshlands yeah it's not the nicest yeah i mean it's i think the houses there are pretty expensive just like everywhere else but it's it's it's kind of a world away um yeah you can look at it as you're as you're flying into s afo right out the window that's what you look at um and so yeah he he definitely he was um you know very smart and withdrawn um and and angry and i think you know some of that anger like you said it came from from bullying um and and it kind of spilled into his sort of output as a human first in as an undergraduate Stanford starting this kind of, you know, very hard right-wing newspaper, the Stanford review, and then and then continuing on, you know, throughout, throughout his career. So here's what I'm puzzled by. So someone

who grows up as an outcast and has this, you know, the world be damned attitude. He wants to wreck things. How does he end up having the influence in Silicon Valley that influence all the people that we just spoke about? By the way, let's add Mark Zuckerberg to the list. He funded Facebook and he's a Facebook board member. Absolutely. If you're encountering a group of generally optimistic builders, how does this very dark attitude towards the world and its institutions take such a hold inside that community? So one, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I talked to a lot of, you know, former PayPal employees. And I think it's weird. People know a lot about PayPal and tech. It's been kind of scrutinized a lot, I think, rightly. But there's still

things like that I are probably underappreciated. And I think one is the extent to which there was this kind of band of brothers at PayPal who were all from this conservative publication. Like, there were like it wasn't just oh teal starts a conservative newspaper and then you know goes law school and then gets into tech but like he really brought along this whole crew of people and and their whole thing had been kind of us against the world and that then became transposed you know into paypal where PayPal you know there was a political aspect to PayPal which is something people overlook you kind of hinted at it but you know in the early days they were talking about it as you said like as this thing that would break the not just the global banking system but like

national sovereignty that it would make it impossible for countries to regulate their their monetary systems to make it possible for people in repressive states to you know obviously to move money in or out easily and and so it was this you know overtly political thing and then there were you know then then then it sort of transposes into you know it's us against the corporatist it's us against eBay, which, you know, for a long time, eBay bought PayPal, but for a long time eBay was there, was also their kind of main antagonist. And I think, he didn't, Tiel and Meg Whitman just weren't on speaking terms by the time that acquisition. No, I think there's like, that is a, yeah, they are like, I don't know, opposite ends of the spectrum. I mean,

Teal seems to have fought with everyone. You mean, he also fought with Elon and did a coup to sort to take yeah exactly over him so i just yeah i'm sorry go keep going anyway i was just going to say these um when you talk to these guys about kind of like what you know why was pay pal successful one of the things they say is like we had this kind of we had the sense that it was like us against the world there's this kind of a cohesiveness to to the paypal team and i think that that kind of you know basically spun forward into the paypal mafia this this kind of feeling that it's us against the world um you know i don't think people have noticed the that political thing much but like i think a lot of the kind of um some of this kind of cult of disruption stuff that we see in

in in silicon valley probably best epitomized by like uber or something i think kind of has its roots in right wing activist politics the right wing activist politics of of the 1980s which is like where teal did like his first um you know it wasn't a business really although i guess it kind of was a business, his first entrepreneurial venture. And, you know, in right-wing activist politics, you know, there's this like big tradition of, you know, kind of like screwing with the administration. There are all these stories of sort of news, college newspaper editors, like going in and stealing, you know, lists of names from the registrar or like, you know, sort of doing these, like, acts of protest or whatever, and sort of finding ways around the institutions. And I think

that kind of spirit, you know, you can. you know, go draw a line straight to some of the things that PayPal did. Because PayPal totally just ignored every banking regulation. You know, it wasn't just that they were ideologically opposed to, you know, like the normal model of regulating currencies. They were just actively just, you know, saying screw it. And eventually, and they, and they, you know, got away with it. I mean, I don't have got away with it is the right word, but, you know, they were able to navigate the company to a successful exit and settle with the regulators and kind of integrate themselves into the global financial system. And I think, you know, the rest of the tech industry, you know,

kind of learned a valuable lesson from that experience, which is that you can, you know, you can succeed by pursuing this sort of regulatory arbitrage, by attacking a regulated industry and by making one of your points of differentiation that you do not follow the rules. So it's largely accepted as fact. that Silicon Valley portrays itself as a save the world type of companies versus we're just doing this to make money. How do those two things look when you juxtapose them? We're trying to take down the system and this, you know, we're here to heal the world or some of the Zuckerberg language. So I think there are kind of two threads of kind of ideology that, and I argue this in the book,

it's definitely up for debate. But here's how, but the way I think about it, right? And this is was first suggested to me by Roger McNamee, who's a venture capitalist who has turned critic of Facebook. But basically you have kind of like the Steve Jobs way of thinking about companies. And I think obviously there's some hypocrisy here, but the basic idea is that business is a form of creative expression and it's a form, it's a way to help people get the most out of themselves, like, you know, kind of new age human business as like new age human potential movement stuff. So Apple, of course, fits into that. But so does Google, right? You know, it's like we're making the world's information accessible. We're making you smarter or whatever it is.

And then there's this like other thread, which is the tealist thread, which is business as disruption, business as power. And that is, you know, grow as big as big. you can and and like you know get a monopoly i mean in that you know teal wrote a whole book zero to one where the basic takeaway is you know businesses if they want to succeed they should they should strive for you know monopoly profits which is another way of saying you know dominance and and so i don't think those two things can be reconciled i think they're they're they're like on two sides of the spectrum and i think that you know obviously that the teal view is very very very cynical. But of course, you know, a lot of these companies that say they're saving the world are

actually, you know, they're just sort of saying, I don't know. I think both those frameworks are potentially useful to like understand Silicon Valley and understand why it's grown so quickly and stuff. Yeah. I think my, my theory on this is that Steve Jobs warped a lot of people's view of what tech is. Yeah. And because he was so hard, so influential and so hard on the Save the World mentality, that everyone had this picture in their head, that that's what tech is. In fact, I think you mentioned the tech press's influence a bunch in the book, which I thought was great. And I think the tech press, in large part, wanted every founder to be Steve Jobs.

I mean, you see what's happening with Elizabeth Holmes. It was her responding to those incentives and how many covers did she get wearing the turtle while she was defrauding everybody. So I think that that was something that folks needed to, felt they needed to portray to the outside world but if you looked on the inside it was teal mentality all the way yeah yeah um yeah yeah for sure and it's kind of funny i went back and read a bunch of the um you know whatever the output about the tech industry you know there were books written um you know in the in the early 2000s um and a lot of their essays and stuff all about how the the role the counterculture in forming silicon valley

which i think is okay like it's totally valid and yes like yes Steve Jobs was a bit of a hippie, but it's kind of a weird way of looking at an industry that literally started as an extension of the U.S. military. And like, you know, there's nothing, there is, there are countercultural things about Silicon Valley. But to see the tech industry as just this kind of outgrowth of 60s counterculture is like to miss, you know, the whole beginning of industry and like, you know, a thread that probably is just as important as like, as you say, you know, something that kind of a little

bit came down to branding or something like that, which is like these guys talking about saving the world. But I don't know. I mean, the real route is a bunch of defense contractors. Yeah. Well, there's something to root for in the word disrupt. I do think that the tech industries claims that the way things have been done for a long time have been corrupt and hurt people. I think there's any doubt about that. And they especially resonated in the time of the financial crisis. you even talk about how you approached teal and you you asked him to participate in the how i built this uh yeah article and you you were talking about how it was a little schlocky and but but we were looking for ways to be like you know there's got to be some optimism because the old way just brought down

the whole economy yep but but there there is you know you can see some some virtue in what these companies are doing but um it's that's where the story starts but so many so many times actually gets actualized in this tealist way which is like teal had i mean from your from your book it's clear yet hate hate hate for institutions and eventually yeah came through in his recommendations once he got asked to help staff the trump administration which we'll get to after after the break um but it is interesting to see how like you know it could start from a virtuous virtuous place but very often and in a bad place and it seems like you know i don't know it seems like teal had had a large hand in that. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I also think, you know, there's something just, like, appealing about the

honesty of the, of the teal worldview, especially if you're feeling a little bit, you know, if you're feeling betrayed, like the kind of post-financial crisis mode, if you're feeling betrayed by institutions, or if you're just kind of fed up with the hypocrisy of, you know, whatever, of, that's kind of inherent to capitalism, the sort of cynical worldview of just sort of like, yeah, get as big as you can and make as much money as you can, you know, forget being good. Like that has, I mean, I don't know. I mean, maybe it's because I'm a bad person or something, but I see the appeal. I was going to ask if some of this stuff resonated with you. I mean, some of these institutions, I mean, look, I don't know, I feel like I tend to believe in

institutions sometimes more than I should, but some of them are bad. Yeah. If you look at the state of the country. And obviously, I don't think the Teal mentality has helped this very much. But people have been let down by their institutions and they don't believe them anymore. And so the idea of burning them down is appealing in some way, even though it might not be the right solution. I really think that reforming them is the right solution. But I can see why burning them down has a real appeal among a lot of people. I mean, Teal would not be, would not have so many followers. He would not be dangerous if he wasn't right a lot i mean that that's the thing about so like yeah i think i mean he was obviously the you know for instance his his critique of universities right it's it has a lot

there's a lot of of truth to it um you know universities have been you know overcharging people and have been you know uh failing to prepare uh students and i but is the answer to convince like a bunch of 17-year-olds to, like, not go to college, especially, like, not to go to the best, like, you know, I'm not sure that the answers are correct, but often, like, his diagnosis of the problem is, is really, is effective and is true. I mean, he's gotten, you know, Jeff Bezos, like, famously ripped Teal once by saying, you know, think about contrarians is they, you know, they get most things wrong. But Teal's been right a lot, at least right on the kind of big, on the big things, Often, I think the execution is where he's sort of screwed up, either financially, like, not made as much money as he could have or just done something kind of objectionable or dangerous or something like that.

Yeah, I want to get back to the biography details and then keep going on this thread. So why don't we do that right after the break? We'll be back here on Big Technology podcast. We got Max Chaffkin. He is... Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news.

Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. This is the author of The Contrarian, Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. It's a great book. We'll be back right after this. And we're back here on the big technology podcast with Max Chaffkin. He's talking to us about his Peter Thiel book, The Contrarian. So, you know, we talked a little bit about how Peter Thiel went to PayPal and had this burn down the system type of mentality. But how does he then spread his influence?

Because, look, at the end of the day, there's a lot of founders and there's a lot of technologists with kooky views or extreme views or passionate views. about different subjects, they don't always build a following. So was it when Teal then, you know, moved on from PayPal and started a very successful hedge fund and then eventually a venture capital firm and some of the ideas that he had about society started to take hold? Absolutely. And I think he did it on purpose. Like it wasn't, it wasn't something that just happened by accident.

You know, I think Teal, obviously he's respected as a very smart investor, as a futurist. I think he has his moments of rhetorical, brilliance, but he's also like a really good marketer. And I think Teal as kind of an influencer or as a, you know, self-created figure, it's actually probably a helpful way to think about him. Actually, I think I would argue it's helpful for thinking a lot of these sort of tech industry figures. But in any case... As an influencer?

Yeah. They're the original influencers. But, you know, we could have a whole discussion about Elon Musk. I think Elon Musk is totally underrated as a marketer and like just and I'm not to say. Are you sure? I think people really understand Elon's. Well, okay, maybe it's maybe people are coming around to him now that he can like move the stock price by a, but anyway, let me get back on track. I think Teal coming out of PayPal and he made a little bit of money and I think he very self-consciously set out to turn himself into this a figure, a figure of interest and of influence.

And at first, and you can kind of see this because his early efforts of it were really bad. He opened a restaurant. It was like a kind of a restaurant nightclub called Frizzan. It sounded kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah, I mean. How much morning did he spent to build a thing? I don't know.

It was really, I think there's some detail in the book about like the cost of the sound system. And it just sounds pretty tacky. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't, it wasn't immediately successful as a restaurant. It went out of business. He also started a NASCAR magazine, you know, despite, I don't think being, you know, a big sports guy or whatever. And he felt like opinions about like basically how, what was men were happy that women were cooking for them in a NASCAR anyways. It was just like a weird combination of like a sort of college political magazine, right wing college political magazine with a sports magazine.

They hired like these weekly standard columnists to write car columns. and they, you know, inevitably, you know, wrote kind of like weekly standard columns. And, of course, you know, people who are race car fans, they might be conservative, but, like, they're not picking up a race car to get the, like, Peter Thiel view of gender relations or something. That magazine, by the way,

it just seemed to me like something that someone would imagine in a laboratory about, like, what NASCAR fans would want without ever having gone to a NASCAR race and never spoken to a NASCAR fan. Or what a rich guy who was trying to establish himself as a big-time investor hedge fund guy might do. Right. I mean, all the above.

Yeah, yeah. Media, of course, media is a great way to create influence. And same thing, like to get invited to cool parties and having a restaurant's a way to get invited to cool parties or have cool parties. And I think he was very explicitly trying to create this aura around him as an investor. And it was originally as like a hedge fund guy. And this is kind of one of the funny things to me.

because, like, if you grab, like, a random person on the street, like a random Wall Street Journal reader in 2005, 2006, and said, who is Peter Thiel? And they would say, oh, Peter Thiel, he's one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the world. They would never have said, oh, he's a technologist, anything like that. He was, he was like the next George Soros. And he was totally styling himself as that, not as, not as this technologist. And it's only asked to define what that is. He was betting large amounts of money on. things failing. Yeah, on, on, I mean, you know, broadly, yeah, it's, it's betting on, you know, macroeconomic swings, but in, and in the specific case for Teal, he was, he was betting against the U.S. economy. And this was a guy who even left, he left PayPal and bet against PayPal. Yeah, well, yeah, he wanted to. I actually don't know for sure if he did, you know, how, whether he followed through with the, uh, the investments, but he is, message going out the door. So, yeah, yes, exactly. And, and he's, you know, I talk to, um, you know, folks who worked, you know, at his investment firm in those years, and they talked about this

very explicit notion that Teal has two portfolios, an optimistic portfolio and a pessimistic portfolio. The optimistic portfolio is the startup investing. It's Facebook, it's, you know, Palantir, whatever. And the pessimistic portfolio is this macroeconomic investing, which was, you know, betting against the U.S. economy, betting that the financial crisis was going to be big and was going to be worse than anyone expected and kind of betting betting on an apocalypse um and um anyway he was he was right about that notion i mean there's this scene in the book that i think at the time the people who worked um at clarium thought was insane that was his hedge fund where yeah which was his hedge fund where you know he and other senior people were talking about you know buying a bunch of gold and

burying it and and you know just like really just flipping out in a way that felt uncomfortable to some to some of the people who worked there because you know because they didn't think you know banks were going to fail but of course you know some banks you know did fail and and so it wasn't that like their their crazy paranoia wasn't that far off but then unfortunately as I said like the execution did not kind of match the the insight they weren't Teal was not able to come up with like an investment strategy to capitalize on this. And in fact, he kind of went the other way. As someone described it to me, it was like they were trying to find a contrary intake

to their original contrarian take where like you're sort of like you think that this thing that you've called has now gone to mainstream. So you have to come up with something even weirder. And it was in that effort that they failed. They ended up trying to time the bottom of the stock. market. And as a result, missed, they both bought when they should have sold, and then they missed the rebound. And as a result, his hedge fund completely failed. And, you know, he had to basically, it was reformed as a, you know, family office, like the outside capital went away. And he lost

billions of dollars. And after that, he then kind of restiled himself again and not as a, you know, cool hedge fund manager with a cool restaurant and cool NASCAR magazine, but as the quirky tech guy. And that's when he starts backing C-steading. That's when he kind of goes back to his political roots. He starts writing more kind of out there, you know, libertarian political stuff. He's funding life extension research. And that's when the kind of like the Peter Thiel that most tech people would recognize starts to kind of come into focus. Right. And for listeners, C-Sense, setting is this libertarian idea where you basically build a barge or some sort of island off the coast and you do what you want without the rules of the oppressive rest of society.

It's fascinating stuff. So maybe we should move big technology podcast to some C-stead so we don't have to pay taxes. I'm just kidding. But anyway, so but he also has this founder's fund where he does do this startup investing and starts the fellowship. You talked to, so you met him. he was telling you that there's been like three bubbles right the financial bubble some other one and then the um education bubble which is going to burst and he basically said like if you uh end up

spending too much money on a house at least you have a house if you spend too much money on education you got nothing and he started this thing that that encouraged young people to take a hundred grand a year from him and the only condition is they they drop out of college right so was that like the second half of his uh what he was doing Absolutely. Business, influence campaign. And I think it totally was related to something else that was going on in the world at time, which was the release of the social network.

And so, you know, the social network, you know, Teal doesn't get very much screen time, but he is sort of an important figure in that story because it was Teal who sort of set in motion, this stock structure that creates the conflict between Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, which is the, you know, whatever, the basis of the social network. And as I, you know, as I understand it, an early investor, one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Yeah. As I understand it, he was part, one of the reasons that the Teal Fellowship came in to be was because he was trying to sort of take advantage of the moment and also shape the narrative, You know, where at the time, you know, Holly, the movie, right, the social network does not present a very flattering picture of Mark Zuckerberg.

But Zuckerberg, I think very savally and Teal did the same thing, chose to like, to sort of flip it and say, actually, this just shows how cool we are. And their interviews with Teal at the time saying, you know, these producers, these out of touch Hollywood producers, they didn't mean to. but really they're just making a great ad for um for entrepreneurship and and it's it's right around this time that he you know you know almost just as a media spectacle announces you know that he's going to give 20 young people under 20 $100,000 each 20 under 20 it's it's totally like a contrived um you know kind of media thing partly as a in an effort to like you know catch the sort of wave that's happening of interest from the social network, maybe to distract from the fact that this kind of teal is portrayed in the movie as kind of a schlubby, you know, not that interesting

suit. And then it takes on this life of its own. And, you know, of course, it's not just a media event. Real people come and real companies are started and it becomes this whole whole thing. But I don't think it was thought all that well through, you know, beyond the just the top line. Here's the media. Here's how we're going to describe it to the press. Yeah, and I think you put it well in the book that when he started to convince these young people to drop out of college, all of a sudden, I think that was a huge profile razor for him. I mean, he goes from being a guy who, and of course he had done this writing, and he goes from being a guy who had managed a hedge fund and had a VC firm to someone who was like trying

these radical new ideas to reshape society. And then people started, and they called it the Thiel Fellows. I mean, it was good marketing for him. And totally, and it was totally designed to like, to, to, you know, for lack of a better world, like troll the libs, right? Like they, Slate did a, slate, you know, did like a hit piece on, on the, I'm using the, sort of the builder language here. Which they end up, yeah, using in the promotion. They used it in their marketing. They loved it, you know, it's like exactly what Peter Thiel wanted was to be, you know, was to be called out by, you know, some lefty journalist. And so I think it was totally designed.

to to catch people's attention and and it did and and i think i mean that that this is like one of the um one of the big surprises in reporting the book you know is just that you know not that it doesn't it doesn't end up going well for all the teal fellows like you know obviously some of them have gone on to great success but others you know definitely um i think left the fellowship feeling a little bit used by by it and feeling like yeah this this worked out great for peter teal um I'm not sure what I got out of it, exactly. Well, maybe they just weren't tough enough. I'm kidding.

So I want to take a moment here, pause, and talk about the man that we just brought up, Mark Zuckerberg, because Teal and Zuckerberg have an interesting relationship. In fact, when I was reporting always day one, I was told that, you know, Mark has a feedback culture and he likes to listen to contrarian voices. Peter Teal is a contrarian. That's why he's on the board for this long. I wonder how much Peter Thiel's libertarian, burned down institutions mentality has influenced Facebook's direction. I'm thinking about it in particular because the Wall Street Journal this week, who these five stories that showed essentially Facebook, you know, blowing up institutions and failing to, you know, and kind of enforce its own rules.

I mean, there are stories about how it's, well, making girls feel bad on Instagram. but I think more along the lines of where this came up, letting anti-vaccine sentiment run wild, where the government really would like that not to be the case, allowing cartels and human traffickers to use the system and recruit and publicize what they're doing and essentially giving a wide range 5.8 million people of VIP users, right? I mean, how could you have 6 million VIP users? I don't get that. But basically exempting them from content moderation and letting them say whatever they want to say. And I'm reading this, and I'm thinking about your book.

And I'm like, damn, these are pretty along the lines of what Peter Thiel might want in a society. Essentially, just like in a libertarian world and just let it roam wild. And you stay out of the way and society sorts itself out. So I am curious what you think about that. How much influence has he had on Zuckerberg? And, you know, we point a lot to the problems that Facebook has today. But, you know, are they actually kind of like the idea? Yeah.

Yeah, there's a line in, there's a line in the Cecilia Caring, Cheryl Frankel book of, I think it's a quote from Kara Swisher about, it basically is like something to the effect that like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is like a blank slate that teal has, it's like a very extreme statement that I think probably overstates, you know, the case. Like Zuckerberg is a very smart person. He's obviously independently minded, but I do think, and I do think there's some truth to that sentiment and the sentiment that you're bringing up, which is I think that Teal has had, yeah, just an enormous impact on Mark Zuckerberg, both in terms of like how the company is structured, like the literal way that Zuckerberg, you know, got control of Facebook and maintained control of Facebook. and then but also um yeah this ideological thing this this notion that um as you say institutions are really not that important and that that it seems like Zuckerberg sort of thinks that facebook is like the only institution that really matters or something like that um but um but you know for me in those in those journal stories like one detail that really stuck out is um you know they're getting these reports about um you know body image women young

girls like going on Instagram and are are are feeling really bad about themselves and and really concerning research and Zuckerberg's getting those and then getting asked by Congress you know hey is this making people feel bad and he's he's just you know totally yeah I mean it's like like having just a complete lack of respect for the institution it's it's it's really outrageous because it's both a lack of respect for the for the issue and for Facebook's responsibility to society, but also just, you know, maybe people can agree to disagree and maybe Facebook, maybe they're people going to argue Facebook doesn't have a responsibility to stop that, but just the unwilling, the treatment of, you know, whatever, our nation's highest, you know,

legislative body as just kind of a big joke is just kind of crazy. And I think it's completely in line with Teal's ethos. And I think I think Facebook is in, in so many ways, is, you know, another one of these attempts to kind of go beyond the traditional institutions. I mean, there have been lots of stories, lots of stories written about, you know, Facebook kind of seeing itself as its own country. They've got their own Supreme Court now, and they're trying to have their own. Oh, man, Max, when I visited it the first time, the conference rooms were all named after countries that Facebook was bigger than.

Yeah, you walk in, you're like walking past the Brazil conference room. I'm like, oh, why Brazil? They're like, we're bigger. It's just, yeah. I mean, it's really, it is really, um, kind of like as you say it's it's it's in your face and yeah and and i do wonder like when we have facebook promises we'll do better we'll do better but maybe i mean i don't know i i do i know that they're separate from peter teal um but i also know the influence i'm also just like maybe they're

kind of close to where they want to be and they right to tell everybody there you know everybody else can cry in a river and i also think you know there's there's kind of this a lot of people have spent time trying to figure out like what is mark zuckerberg actually like what are his does he have politics is he a liberal is he a conservative you know he gave some money yeah he's i think i agree i think he's a libertarian and i think which i think you know 100 percent influenced by teal there but i also think to some extent he has no left right politics his politics are whatever is going to be required to allow facebook to grow as big as possible you know damn the authorities damn the rules and and i think that you know

even more so than teal's kind of like right wing political views i think that is more that is the that's the kind of core of the influence and and so which and in a lot of ways like that's a scarier influence because it's it's harder to talk about or even think about right it must be wild in those board meetings to have teal zuckerberg mark andresen all together well i i do think it's telling too you know the too longest serving board so facebook you know as you know i mean you know They just kind of purged all their board members a couple years ago. And the board members who have survived, of course, are the two libertarians, Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. And I think that's, you know, that's no accident.

It's, there's certainly some ideological alignment there. Yeah. Let's end this segment talking a little bit about Elon Musk. So I'd love for you to describe the interesting kind of yo-yo relationship between Teal and Musk, friends, enemies, friends, enemies. And, you know, I'm just curious, you got Elon to speak to you for the book. That's not easy to do, especially when it comes to Teal. How did you sell that? I just asked him.

Teal was, I mean, Elon was not, not hesitant to share his views. E and I have a long history of, you know, whatever. We've talked many times. But I think, I think Frenemy is the way. that I kind of, you know, put it in my mind. I think there's- Yeah, because he'll did put a pretty big investment in SpaceX. 100%.

And it's, I think that, I think that Elon and Peter are basically just almost complete opposites like temperamentally. You know, Musk is this kind of very emotional, all it, you know, he, if he's going to, if he's going all in, he, you know, wears his heart on his sleeve, he's very, you know, he's very prone to, like, you know, getting pissed. and then forgiving and then getting pissed again. And, of course, he's a gift to the journalistic gods because of that, right? But Antille, of course, is introverted.

He's cautious. He's constantly hedging his bets. He doesn't ever want to, you know, want to go all in on anything. And, you know, he keeps it all, you know, kind of close to the vest. And so I think there's some temperamental thing. But as you said, you know, Elon was running PayPal. Peter led a coup that replaced him, and then they were able to patch it up. And I think basically, you know, while Elon was on his honeymoon, he got replaced.

Exactly. Yes, it's pretty cold. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's also a testament to like, I mean, it's easy to see, oh, this coup happened. But at the time, you know, Elon was a much more better respected, more famous entrepreneur than Peter Thiel. had already sold a company at he had mike moritz who is the you know most respected venture capitalists in silicon valley behind him so like just laughing because there's the story of

musk and teal where he he bought so he sold the company and bought this like what one million dollar mclaren yeah and then claren f1 and yeah crashes it and was like i didn't buy insurance because i didn't think i was the type of guy that would crash the car that's an amazing story which he was in the car at the time yeah and of course Of course, you know, Teal would have, Teal probably had insurance already on Elon's car. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, and I think that Musk, you know, basically forgave him. Musk kind of said this in not so many words, but he basically concluded like, look, it's

not in my interest to make an enemy of this guy. And he was right. I mean, PayPal, PayPal succeeded, and they were able to kind of, you know, work closely enough together that when when Elon really needed money, when SpaceX in 2008, SpaceX was failing, it had, it had had three launch failures. I can't remember it was three or two. I think it was three launch failures. And, you know, Elon is basically, you know, maxed out his bank account trying to fund Tesla. He has no more money. Teal comes in basically as a white knight and, and saves the company. And I think does it kind of against his better judgment, you know, I think does it

with some anguish because it was, you know, obviously like if Elon had failed, that it would look very bad for Founders Fund. And as I understand it, you know, there was a lot of back and forth within Founders Fund over that investment where Luke Nosek was pushing really hard to do that investment. Teal wasn't so sure because Teal doesn't, you know, it's not his, you know, like taking that kind of risk is really not in his makeup, although he did it and the rest of his history. And as a result, he's got a nice size chunk of this very, very valuable, you know, rocket company. So it all worked out, but they definitely have, they're definitely like not, not best friends. They're more like allies or something like that.

Yeah. And he did make that investment, like, or the investment was announced a couple of days after Elon blew up a rocket. So, but yeah, it's working out well for him. What's your relationship like with Peter Thiel? I mean, one of my favorite scenes in the book was you talked about how you had this off the record, with him and he just kind of finished a sentence and left and you didn't know whether someone was going to take you out or of the room or something and turns out that was just the end of the interview and he never yeah yeah I think you said oh he was just kind of done talking

so yeah elaborate on on this yeah I mean I can't happen in that room I can't share any of the details of what was discussed um I was I mean you know as I as I as I approached this book as you know basically wanted to write a journalistic, you know, portrait of the man. And in other words, to not, not to approach him as some kind of supervillain, which has, you know, has been the treatment sometimes, but also not to approach him with, you know, with de facto deference to just treat him. There's a lot of the, a lot of the coverage of teal, you know, this is kind of a crass way of putting it, but it's like, we're talking about a fellow Davos guy, you know, he's all right. There's this kind of like coziness of some of the articles that have been written about him that I think he's kind of encouraged where they're not really calling any of the failures out or really paying attention to anything in a kind of critical way.

So I wanted to do, but I wanted to be in the middle. And so I was talking to, you know, former employees, basically everyone I talked to, but also, of course, trying to speak with him and to get his perspective because that, you know, I thought that was really important. And, yeah, we had this meeting, and, you know, it's kind of like the, you know, what you, what you would expect from somebody who's, who's worth billions of dollars and is socially awkward. I mean, he, he, yeah, he just, he just excused himself, but without actually excusing himself. And, but he was also, you know, very polite. I mean, you know, there was no, you know, a lot of people have asked, did, did they threaten you or something like that, you know, because of the gawker? Oh, he did bring down a publication. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, but go ahead. And, and I think that's, I think that's totally worth talking about, you know, in, in terms of, to the extent that there was intimidation, the only, the intimidation just came from the fact that he had done this thing. But, but in terms of the actual in-person interaction and interactions with his, like, PR people and stuff, they were not, yeah, there was, there wasn't a hint of menace. Right. He didn't send Charles Harder at you after you send him the questions for the fact check? they did not send Charles Harder after me Charles Harder is not a big part of the book though so yeah well he's the guy wasn't he the guy who the lawyer who he funded yeah he could take on yeah harder is harder was the the lawyer prosecuted the Garger case and I think um you know

one thing with teal's money yeah with with teal's money and in secret and you know and and you know basically architected the destruction of this um of this media platform um that was really big and really influential and also did you know of course wrote a lot of like really tawdry stuff um including you know the post that that that that got teal mad which you know said that he was gay um but uh but gawker also did a lot of important journalism as well and and so you know i it definitely i think i think that case definitely created an environment where it was harder for people harder for journalists to to really um think critically or write or talk to sources about Peter Thiel.

It hangs over every conversation you have, every conversation with an editor, every conversation you have with a source. Yeah, as intended. What's your relationship? Oh, you asked that. This was the question I wanted to ask you. Do you like him? I'm trying not to, I don't really want to, I don't know.

It's kind of like it feels important to me to not like past judgment or anything like that. Yeah, but you must, you must have some, I mean, I know. Well, anyway, you try not to pass judgment, but you must have some personal feeling about it. Here's this, a 330-page book about the guy. Yeah, you're right. You're right to press me. Okay. I feel like he's worthy of respect, and I think there are aspects of his achievements and the things that he's done that are worthy of admiration.

And I find, you know, I find him to be like a really interesting. um and charismatic figure but i also think that he's he's pretty dangerous and i think that the ideology that he has espoused and that he has pushed in all sorts of ways um is bad and and it's and it needs to be scrutinized and and um understood and and to the extent that it's it's filtering into these companies that are incredibly incredibly powerful um that have you know unbelievable control of our lives, access to our data. I think we need to, I think we need to talk about that. And I also think, you know, especially as he gets, as he gets into funding these, you know, funding these political campaigns, putting $10 million into this guy, Blake Masters, running for Senate in

Arizona, $10 million into J.D. Vance, both of them, either former or current, you know, teal employees, that, you know, I think those ideological questions become, you know, even more important. I mean, for me, the thing that is most troubling and that I think is worth a lot of conversation is just the relationship to democracy, this idea that democracy, you talked about indifference to institutions, which I think is definitely worth of it. Yeah, if you're about to get, I think that you're about to get into some of the Trump stuff. Okay, okay. I really want to do that.

And it's a great place to pause here, go to break, and then pick up the Trump story. So why don't we do that? We'll be back here on the big technology podcast. right after this with Max Chaffkin. He's the author of The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's pursuit of power. While they go to commercial, you can go to your favorite bookstore and pick it up. And we're back here on the big technology podcast with Max Chaffkin, features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, and also the author of The Contrarian,

which the book we've been talking about, it's all about Peter Thiel. A little biography of sorts, but, you know, getting a little bit more into the philosophical stuff. And I definitely want to talk about sort of the big Peter Thiel story where he gets to take his ideology to the world, the one that you said was bad ahead of the break. I think this is where you were going with it, where it extends to his support of Donald Trump. And then I would say more importantly, the way that he actually influenced the staffing of his administration. So is that where you were going earlier, Max? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, so as you said, Teal, you know, famously or infamously, depending on your politics, you know, made a big donation to the Trump campaign just before the 2016 election and also gave this speech at the Republican National Convention endorsing Trump. And that gets him on the transition committee. And as a result, you know, gives him access to the Trump administration. And he is given an opportunity by Steve Bannon, who was his, you know, his ally.

you know, his main ally in the administration, at least until Bannon was, you know, ousted. Given the job of appointing basically people who can, you know, disrupt, as Bannon put it to me, kind of disrupt the administrative state, who can help, you know, do the, the, the, execute the Trump revolution on government. And, and so he has a chance to appoint all of these. To pause. Yeah, he talked about. You talk about it in the book, how the view was Republicans can win elections, Democrats can win elections. As long as Democrats who believe in bigger government can staff these government agencies, the Democrats are essentially never out of power.

And what they wanted to do is strip the agencies or, you know, I guess they call it the swamp or, I don't know, of their power and of their people so that they wouldn't have this Democrat influence. It's kind of questionable as to whether it's actually true about their thesis. But it is interesting because when Trump came into power, it was kind of weird to see him put people in charge of every agency to do kind of exactly the opposite of what the agency was tasked to do. And it was one of the most weirdest puzzling thing where like the EPA guy wanted to demolish, you know, all environmental protection. And financial people wanted to demolish the financial protections. And, you know, the list goes on. And now, actually, after reading this, turns out that this is sort of the influence of Teal on the transition community. getting these people in line even if he was like moderately successful definitely the philosophy is

well and the thing that the really the mind-blowing thing for me is that you know teal actually want to go a lot further i mean banon was basically like told me basically you know teal teal's further out than trump i mean teal was too far out if you if you thought we were doing crazy things like you should have seen this stuff that peter actually wanted to do and you know that's you know teal um attempted to get belagie serena boston made fdaa commission or Bellaji, Serena Vosin, you know, a very opinionated, very outspoken, very hostile to the press. Yeah, he wanted to make the medical approval process for medicines, a big crowdsource spreadsheet where people rate their experiences with the drug and it's like, well, you could sort of learn from there.

Yeah, that was the idea. I replaced the FDA with Yelp, which, of course, which actually I think is something that Thiel actually wants, or some version of that. They're in favor of, you know, drastic deregulation of drugs and make no secret about that. But it's just kind of the idea of having somebody with, like, no government experience, who wants to get rid of the FDA, run the FDA, and who's also just been totally intemperate on Twitter, is just kind of crazy. And it wasn't going to work. Teal also had the opportunity to suggest all these chief candidates for chief scientists, the top scientific advisor to the to the president and and his two main choices were climate change deniers

who who you know one of whom um william happer uh you know he's actually he's a very respected physicist at princeton um but who has kind of has a sideline in arguing that CO2 gets a bad rap and it's actually good because it's tree food and i mean it's very like pretty fringe pretty fringe stuff um and um and teal wanted him to you know have a major scientific position the other his other candidate was this guy david galertner who um is a yale computer scientist um but who also kind of as a sideline is is a is a big time provocateur has written another you know kind of you know far right you know a book about about you know how universities are two left he's basically you know a uh yeah like a provocateur and so another guy who really had little chance to succeed and and

And so Teal didn't do that well in terms of actually getting people into government, although I think I would argue that he did have a, he did have some influence on the Trump administration. And he kind of made the most of his time there, even if he wasn't able to get any of these kind of far out picks into government. Because he was able to get, you know, access. You know, he set up this meeting, this big meeting with all the tech CEOs, gets Alex Carr, CEO of Palantir in a room with Donald Trump, which I think was very important for, for Palantir and has helped, is one of the reasons Palantir has been so successful over the past four years. Yeah, one of the interesting things to me was you wrote about how they, in the transition team, anticipated that Teal was just kind of there for the photo op, but he never asked to meet Trump and was all about filling the government with people who had his ideological beliefs. There is this kind of like talking to D.C. people about teal, you know, they kind of, to often talk about him as this kind of cipher, because he doesn't behave in the normal ways. And I think some of this may have to do with kind of inexperienced.

Like, and I think part of, if he had been a more experienced political operator, he probably could have, maybe he could have gotten Bellagie, you know, made FDA chairman or something. But I think also some of it is that his, that he's not playing the same game that many of the others are playing. And I don't think, I don't think his game was the like, let me, you know, have as much influence over the Trump administration as possible. It was, let me set things up so that my companies have as good a chance as possible. And that long term, he has political influence, which is exactly what happened. And, you know, post Trump, post, you know, January 6th insurrection you know teal i think has you know you know in a strange way maybe more influence than

he had um you know even during the trump administration was that kind of well because he's kind of he's been able to put himself in the middle of this um you know the post trump movement i mean these these candidates that he's funding i mentioned masters and vance um you know they are like kind of among the sort of standard bearers for you know what i think you probably should be described as like Trumpism or, you know, nationalist populism or whatever. It's the, it's Trumpism with or without Trump. And I think that Josh Hawley is another, is another one of these figures, also a figure, former Stanford Review guy who has taken money from Teal, who has endorsed J.D. Vance.

There's kind of a little crew. If Trumpism without Trump is actually going to work, it's, it's, I don't know, I think there's a chance that it was unique to the individual. little like Josh Halley is just too polished. I think that you talked about like how it was like, you know, Trump was the inheritor of the Paul brothers. I put Ron Paul and his son Rand and like what they realized or, you know, someone in their in their elk realized was it wasn't necessarily the ideology.

It was just they wanted the craziest person in the room. Yeah, 100%. And I think that's really tough to be the inheritor of that philosophy, even though if you say the same things on policy, it's the fact that the dude could go and trash rosy, Donald at a debate that was part of his appeal. Sorry, go ahead. But no, no, but I do think that is Peter Thiel is attempting to be the inheritor of that movement and to be, to be the patron of that movement, to be the person who is behind the scenes for the 20 to 30 percent of the country that wants the guy who's the craziest shit in the room. Right.

And which, by the way, that formulation is from this Reason magazine writer Brian Butler who wrote a really great book about, about Ron Paul. Hall. And there was this feeling among the libertarians. I think some libertarians feel, you know, a little bit betrayed by the, by, by, by, by teal was, you know, Teal kind of presented himself as a libertarian, but then, but has kind of gone all in for Trumpism, which, which is obviously very different from libertarianism. But anyway, just to get back to the thing about, you know, what exactly is bad. I mean, I think the thing that's bad is, as they've been attempting as Teal and his acolytes have been attempting to kind of harness this energy, they're positioning themselves as sort of being okay with the January 6th insurrection. You know, Josh Hawley famously,

you know, raised his fist in solidarity as he walked into the Capitol, you know, on January 6th. And we're seeing, you know, J.D. Vance and Masters to some extent, you know, kind of trying to thread the needle and kind of be okay or create a space where the people who see. storm the capital are just um just protesters and the the police that tried to stop them are you know somehow um you know strong arming you know civil disobedience or something like that and and that to me is is very dangerous um and it's it's uh at least if if you believe in democracy it's dangerous because it's it's totally hostile to to kind of this core part of american government right and all throughout teal's life he's talked about how uh you know quote that you see often in the book is voting

is overrated. I don't really believe in voted. Yeah. And he's said in all sorts of ways there was this famous essay that was published by the Cato Institute where he talked about, basically he decided that democracy was incompatible with libertarian beliefs, his beliefs. And he's been a patron to this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who is better known as moldbug, but this blogger who is, you know, this blogger who is uh whose big idea basically is is a dictatorship i mean he's uh he's advocating you know some some version of of fascism and and and you're seeing this kind of spill into you know borderline mainstream republican discourse people talking about an american caesar and i think that is i think you can draw a line from that idea to teal and and i think that is i mean that is a very very radical

position yeah um one question i have for you So till we've spoken about is gay, I, you know, obviously like he's, you know, the political beliefs across the spectrum if you're gay. But I, one of the things I'm struggling to see is how he was able to align himself with people who were so militantly anti-gay. I'm curious what you think. I mean, here's one example that you write about in the book. Let's see, about Ron Paul.

Paul supporter referred the old Romper. Paul, the Ron Paul who talked like the one of one of Teal's old Stanford review columnist who published a newsletter, talking about Paul that said 95% of black men in Washington, D.C. were criminals and said, I missed the closet about gay rights. Like Teal, they wanted to stick it to the cathedral. He was ready to help them. Yeah. And if you go back to Teal's, you know, to the newspaper or Stanford Review or the or the book he wrote, Diversity Myth, you will find some views on, you know, sexuality that are are really you know pretty backwards um uh and they're you know it's it's uh and there there's there's obviously there's a temptation to psychologize this and and and and you know a couple

some people have suggested to me um that you know it's it's self hatred or something like that you know teal's a Christian and you know maybe maybe there's some some of this is like a symptom of his own you know discomfort with himself i tend to think he is a provocateur and I think that there's it's always been profitable um especially in right wing circles to be in an out group and to kind of crap on the other members of your out group like that's that's kind of there's like a tried and true path um in in conservative activist activist politics of doing exactly that and I think so I don't like I don't think it's that complicated I think it's just it's as simple as that and I also think probably he just doesn't feel there you know he's he's he's

he's talked about this a little bit like i think the speech that he gave at the um republican national convention um which of course was he was criticized a lot by um you know gay rights because the the republican party had all had positions on trans rights and gay rights that were really you know i mean they you know they were they were against those things and um and and i think teal as he kind of said in that speech like he doesn't want to be defined by his his sexuality and and he doesn't want he he he feels so strongly about that to such an extent that you know he's willing to you know ally himself with somebody who is um you know part of a party that's anti gay i also think it's probably like i think teal has talked about this but trump probably was like less hostile

on gay rights than yeah i don't see trump as as hostile yeah yeah so i think there is some way to see it as trump is like i mean trump sorry i'm probably getting in trouble saying this but You know, Trump obviously said what he said in Charlottesville, and I'm not absolving with that. But also, like, I grew up as a New Yorker. Ted Cruz accused him of having New York values. Yeah. His daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism.

So, you know, do I think he's backwards on race in a lot of ways? Yeah. I don't know. I don't, I guess, like, his positions are a little more complicated. Yeah. And I think there was like, from Trump, like, to the extent that Trump was like anti-gay, it always seemed a little bit half-hearted or something. And I do think there's a way to see, you know, Teal's speech as an important moment, you know.

First time, right? Someone who was openly gay spoke at the Republican National Convention. First time they acknowledged it on stage because there actually had been one other, there had been another instance, but that person was booed during the, you know, during the speech. And Teal not only wasn't booed, but he got a standing ovation. And, like, it was when you watch it, you know, I do think it does feel like a moment. It feels like, wow, the beating heart of the Republican Party, they're not just accepting this. They are cheering for it. They're excited about it.

So I do think that is, that's something that probably, like on a historical basis, that will be an important historical thing that Teal was a part of. So wrapping up this chapter about politics and government, he did get some. So why did he back Trump, right? a question that a lot of people ask. I think that, like, there's an idea that Trump and Bannon did embody a lot of the values that he wanted, but there was also the business rationale, which was that he had three and a half billion dollars sitting in an IRA that he didn't want taxed, Roth IRA. And he, he wanted his businesses, Pallantier in particular, to be able to get government contracts and thought that getting close to power would be a good idea. And he

essentially made this $1 billion bet right after the Axis Hollywood tape came out. That was like, right, maybe Trump will be able to help me solve these problems. Let's see what happens. So how did that work out for him? Yeah, well, I think it's important with Thiel to see that the business and politics are always connected, that he doesn't, that he has these, he has a sort of political project and a business pot project and they work together in tandem. And you can't, his ideology is in service of his business. His business is in service of his ideology. They're hard to separate. Kind of like, I think the Koch brothers, there's some of that with the Cokes, too, where they're really good at combining, at finding an ideology that, like, sort of works with their business

imperatives and, and then finding business imperatives that work with their ideology. But I think with Teal, it's, it's two things. It's one, he was buying low. He had an opportunity to have a huge stake in, in this new administration that had very few kind of institute, there was very little institutional support for Trump. There were no, it's not only that there was little institutional support. There were no, like, respectable business people who were backing Trump. It was all kind of, I mean, there were a few, but it was like largely, you know, if you go to the, who else was speaking at the Republican National Convention, it's like real estate kind of shady seeming real estate guys. Hello sales people. Yeah, some reality TV stars. Like the guy who runs the cage fighting

company was there, you know, Chachi from Happy Days. The whole colon spoke there also, right? I don't know if he actually, did he appear on stage? I can't remember. But he showed up, right? Yeah, he was, I mean, he's, you know, one of the biggest celebrities in Tampa. So, um, so that would make sense. But, but, uh, but I also think that and, and there was so much effort among, um, tech people. And I'm sure in private, especially to kind of like explain away Teal's support of Trump as just, as just being about, it's just being kind of a Machiavellian bet. He doesn't, he couldn't possibly really want Trumpism. And I think the truth is he does like Trump. I think there's a lot of, there's a lot about Trump's ideology that is very closely aligned with Teals, despite the differences that I brought up

earlier. The core of Trump. Yeah. Well, the core of Trump's appeal is being able to say, being able to get away with saying the racist thing or the sexist thing. Well, I think you even note that like one of the things he enjoyed the most in the watch party for the election was how angry people in Silicon Valley would be about Trump's election.

Okay, but what about the money, though? the, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, um, the, the, the, did he make out okay from, from, from those. Yeah. I mean, he did great. And I think some of it, it's, of course, it's always hard to, how it's always, it's always, it's always, it's always, it's always, like, why did Palantir get those contracts? Did Palantir, palentier got a, uh, an 800 million dollar army contract, another 400 million contract. It took over this Project Maven from Google. That's another 40 million bucks a year. It goes on and on. And of course, it's very hard to untangle, you know, why does a company get these deals? Because, of course, they are, you know, their explanations, well, we're getting the

deals because we have the best product and we've spent a long time selling it. But of course, when you're talking about defense contracts, I think inevitably like politics plays a role. And I think it's it's no accident that that Pallantier took off during the Trump administration that that really had these a series of breakthroughs you know you know under an administration where teal had influence um i also um i also think you know you brought up his his his tax status and and this um we could probably have a really long conversation about this but um teal has been pursuing his whole career this very very very aggressive strategy to pay it's legal but but just exceedingly aggressive strategy to pay almost nothing in taxes on his, on most of his income.

It's his investment income because it's all in a Roth IRA retirement account. And there's been this feeling in Teal's world that at any moment, somebody could come along and take that away from him, either because there is a reinterpretation of the rules or someone changes the rules, which is something that was threatened during the Obama administration, but didn't actually happen um or there's you know or or somebody finds you know he if he if he accidentally got something wrong in his taxes then then it could all go away and i think a lot of teal's um sort of operations over the past um decade or so can be explained by that i mean the the the acquisition of of citizenship in new zealand which we haven't touched on but he he he secretly acquired citizenship

in you know max you are right this is such a fascinating story because there's i mean each one of these can be their own show. But sorry, go ahead. Anyway, I think that it was widely interpreted. And I think this even led to some jokes in Silicon Valley that this is just him being, you know, apocalyptic. He wants a doomsday bunker. But I think the truth is he actually wanted a doomsday tax shelter, you know, just in case Obama goes to, because he saw Obama as a communist, you know, case Obama, you know, goes full commie or something and tries to come for his money, Teal is going to have a backup plan. And that and that backup plan is at the time. time, a conservative government that was running New Zealand at the time and would be a way to create some leverage in a negotiation with the IRS or, you know, worst case scenario, right? There have been these billionaires or or sent to millionaires or whatever who have renounced their U.S. citizenship in order to get out of a tax bill. So that would be another option. And I think similarly, you know, Teal's engagement in politics and his support of Trump, some of it has to do with

you know, wanting to make sure that the tax, the tax policy favors him. And, you know, this sounds, from a certain point of view, this sounds outrageous. But of course, a lot of this is happening out in the open. I mean, we're seeing, you know, Keith Rubei and a bunch of these guys who have, you know, relocated to Miami, you know, they're doing it, you know, as they say, because they don't want to pay state capital gains tax in California. And you're also, you also hear kind of another threat of tealism, but this idea of exit, this idea that you should be allowed to, you know, withdraw from the government, either by going to a C-stead, as he said, or by, you know, to camping for your New Zealand bunker.

So I think a lot of the political motivation, some of the political motivation for Trump came from that sense of vulnerability and a desire to, like, make sure that the tax policy stayed friendly to the interests of tech billionaires. Right. So Teal's out of office. I mean, it's not a deal. Trump is out of office, Freddie and Slip. You know, Teal's got his money. What's his next act? I mean, I think his next act, as I said, is continued influence in this right-wing movement,

which it's true. You might be right that, like, maybe we will close the book on this and we'll get, like, kind of a more conventional Republican nominee. And then I think that'll really sideline Peter Thiel. I personally think that it'll be the return of Trump or one of his kids. It would be astonishing to me if none of them ran next cycle. So I think his play is to have influence in that world and to continue to be a political kingmaker, to be, you know, to play that kind of Coke Brothers type role. But in the, you know, the Koch brothers played that role in the kind of conventional mainstream Republican Party, but to play that role in the, you know, Trumpist party, whatever it's called, the Freedom Party or the Patriot Party.

yeah whatever um and i think that's part of it and i think also and i think you know continuing to um to to to make investments to to to do the investor thing and you know there's he's been you know he's been doing a bunch of stuff in crypto it's sort of hard to figure out what he actually um believes with crypto um because you know he's he's sort of like making investments but then he's like crapping on bitcoin and um but so i i think there's going to be uh you know continued engagement in technology and also and also a real push politically. I also think, you know, he has two kids now. And I do think it's possible that, you know, he's slowing down or something like that. Like, we'll see. And I think, as you say, some of it may come down to, you know, what happens

politically, whether it's an advantageous situation for him or not. But I know this is a guy who really seems to get a kick out of being provocative. So it's hard for me seeing him not trying to find some new way to provoke. And when you have $10 billion or however much money he has, you know, you can, that could be pretty dramatic depending on what he does. Do you think he'll talk to you again after the book? I don't know. I'm open to it. I hope so. The book was great, man. I didn't think I was going to get through it this week.

And I couldn't stop reading it. So I think that... Oh, well, thank you, Alex. I really appreciate it. Difficult subject matter, like we spoke about. And it's well-rounded. It's good. It's engaging, well-written, packed with facts, and definitely enlighten me to a lot of stuff

that I hadn't known previously about Silicon Valley and power and tech. and I suggest everybody go read it. Thank you, Max, for joining the show. I appreciate it. Thanks, Alex. It's really fun. Super fun. The book is the contrarian, Peter, Teal, and Silicon Valley's pursuit of power.

It's available in all bookstores. You can grab it today. Sometime later this week, you know, I help Max become a bestseller. All right. Well, that will do it for us here on the Big Technology podcast. Thanks to Nick Guatney for editing this and mastering the audio. Thanks to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. and thanks most importantly to you all for listeners.

Show be nothing without you. Appreciate you coming back week after week, and we will see you again next Wednesday.