Grubstakers - Episode 10: Peter Thiel

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

The full Grubstakers team are back together to talk about out and proud Republican Peter Thiel, his love for young blood, his hatred for mean news outlets that point out how bad his hedge funds are, his need for all data and CIA startup capital, his love of the mythical and how he considers diversity a myth, and his impeccable stage charisma. We also talk about the market game on BestBrokers and how we're all in the red because the stock market is on fire (the bad kind of fire). Anyway, give it a listen or Hulk Hogan said the N-word in his sex tape for nothing.

This week on Grubstakers, we're talking about billionaire, tech investor, and Republican Party investor Peter Thiel. Hear the inspiring story of how he turned the $1 million that he got from friends and family into over $2.5 billion and how he used that to help ICE deport immigrants and help Gawker not exist anymore. All that and more coming up on Grubstakers. That works? and more coming up on Grub and marketing. They taught me what it was like growing up and feeling targeted for your race. And that's just not true. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires.

All right, hey, welcome to Grubstakers, everybody. Sean McCarthy here, joined as always, back together, the full team. We got... Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. Yogi Poliwog. And, you know, this week we're going to be talking about Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is...

Already fucked up, Sean. I know. Already ruined the podcast. This guy is great. He's fascinating to me. He's, like, definitely one of the more cartoonishly evil billionaires. Yeah, definitely. Poorly animated cartoonish.

They haven't got the mouth animations correct yet. We're going to spend a week just tweeting out gifs from his Republican National Convention speech because he is missing some muscles in his face. He had surgery to move them to his heart in some weird parabiosis thing.

Right, right, right. But Peter Thiel, as of April 2018, Forbes has him at a $2.5 billion net worth, which is actually less than I thought it would be just for the influence he's had and taking down Gawker and all that. But yeah, about 2.5 billion net worth. And, but before we get into it, I did just want to mention a fun little thing we did this last week, we set up. So there were a lot of news reports about Jeff Bezos, because Donald Trump has been tweeting some things about the post office getting ripped off by Amazon. And then in turn, because of that and just the general decline in the stock market, there have been some articles about how Jeff Bezos has lost $16 billion in the last week.

And it's been kind of funny because you've seen a lot of liberal people on Twitter being like, well, anything Trump is against is good, so everyone in the resistance needs to buy things from Amazon. Because if there's anything the Democratic Party should support, it's, you know, union busting and making people walk 12 miles a day for $11 an hour, you know. But anyways, so we thought or I thought the idea would be funny to set up a GoFundMe to support Jeff Bezos and help him refund the $16 billion that he lost this week. Helping the victim, you know? Exactly. And so we pitched it on Twitter. The only real victim of the Trump administration.

That's right, that's right. I did make the point that no person financially has suffered more under the Trump presidency than Jeff Bezos in sheer monetary terms. And I said, you know, think about the most money you've ever lost. And just imagine how scared Jeff Bezos is right now, how vulnerable he feels to have lost $16 billion. So I set up a GoFundMe for like $70 million, with the thing

being that as soon as we reach our goal, we'll keep going until we get to the full $16 billion. And we'll put that all directly in Bezos' checking account. I think that's probably the amount he lost in percentage terms of wealth is probably like 10 times less than someone loses when they pay rent. Yeah, oh God. And so we posted it on Twitter and got a vociferous reaction, much of which took it seriously. But most remarkably to me was the fact that, A, the GoFundMe has not been shut down.

It's still up. So if you want to donate money, you can. And, B, somebody actually did donate $20. And now we're kind of ethically mired in what we do with that $20. Because I think we should refund it to him. But he did want us to give the money to Jeff Bezos. I mean, we could buy stuff off Amazon. I don't see why we wouldn't put it back in Bezos' pocket.

We should just mail Jeff Bezos a check for $20. Be like, hey, we have this fundraiser and the internet decided that you're resisting the Trump agenda and you need $20. My favorite thing was the people who thought it was real and were very angrily agreeing with the sentiment that we put out there. Hilarious. It was crazy to see the myriad of Twitter people that were kind of understand what we're doing and agree with it. Understand what we're doing but disagree with it.

Don't get what's going on and are mad about it. And then there was a third, fourth category. Don't get what's going on but are happy. And then there's like the guy who gave $20. Which, man, I would love to spend a day inside his head. Because it actually, on the description, it says in all caps, we are doing this as a labor of love. All funds will go directly to Jeff Bezos.

It's like you're giving $20 to literally the richest man on earth. But yes, no, I also did enjoy the Twitter replies that were like, actually, Jeff Bezos is doing fine. But instead, what we can do is buy things off Amazon and buy Amazon stock. It's like, if we want to help him resist trump oh god but you know uh just like on a serious note i think uh trump is obviously attacking amazon for the most petty personal reasons but i think the federal government uh cracking down on amazon would be almost universally a good thing. So I just don't really have much of a problem with it. It is hilarious that a president starting a petty Twitter flame war will cost the world's richest man $16 billion.

But yeah, I guess you want to guys get into Thiel? Well, first I got a big announcement on the Grubstakers. So coming up in May, Pots of America is going on tour. Oh, really? Yeah, they're going to be going to Radio City Music Hall in New York on Wednesday, May 23rd. The tickets are $122. They're going to be in Boston. Hashtag resistance.

$100. And they're going to be... You get $20 off tickets if you can show your Amazon stock certificate. And they're going to be also at Harvard, also for $100. So I have an announcement to make, which is that the Grubstakers will be doing a live show

the day before all of these concert dates with tickets $10 less. So we're going to be performing at Radio City Music Hall for $112 a ticket. Yes. $90 a ticket in Boston, both at the Botch Center Wang Theater and the Harvard Athletic Complex. Of course. And we encourage you to save $10 and come see us instead.

Yeah, we're going to go to one of their live shows and actually just copy everything they're doing so this is like it's an experiment in intellectual property law where we're just going to do the pod save america live show for ten dollars less yeah on that episode it'll be a special uh pay the amazon stock price engine fee it's my favorite thing listening to liberal podcasts is like it always starts with like uh you know we're just like trying to like save the world and everything. And, you know, by the way, if you use a promo code pod on Seamless, you can get $10 off your order. Do you hate doing laundry?

Well, this new app startup that pays freelancers $2.30 an hour, that's $2.30 an hour, and they pass the savings on to you because we're helping bust unions through the app economy. I just want everyone to know this podcast is anti-capitalism. We just don't want anyone in the capitalist system to succeed, and we want to make sure everyone knows how to benefit from being outside the system.

Also, 50% off on squarespace.com. Square Pace. And please donate to our Patreon. All right, so let's get into Teal. I got it right this time. So, Peter Teal is definitely, I think, one of the most fascinating characters

I've researched for the podcast. But to give you the basic overlines of his bio, he was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1967. His father was a chemical engineer. Klaus. Klaus. No bad history whatsoever. A chemical engineer in

Frankfurt, Germany? There's a... You know, they have made some of the greatest breakthroughs. German chemical engineers. At the home of IG Farben and Frankfurt. Yeah.

I don't see what's wrong with that, guys. I don't know what you're talking about. Did you know that PayPal's startup capital was entirely in gold teeth? I don't get it. I don't see what that problem is. I mean, that's a form of currency.

I don't see what's wrong. I don't think... I mean, yeah. what the problem is. I mean, that's a form of currency. I don't see what's wrong. I don't think... I mean, yeah, Germans pay in teeth sometimes. The original name of PayPal was Zyklon C. Oh, God. It was such a moral leftist podcast over here. But yeah, so born in Germany. He moves around a lot in his childhood.

Similar to Musk. Yeah, yeah. His father, they moved to Cleveland when he was one. Then he goes to Nambia. Interestingly enough, his father spent some time in South Africa, you know, during apartheid. So that's where some of the money came from, people. But they go to Nambia, South Africa, Cleveland. And then eventually he said i'm learning is that apartheid was great for uh innovation in the american economy

you got uh elon musk you got peter thiel you got all of this uh positive stuff coming out of apartheid nelson mandela uh trevor no. I forget him. That's true. Came out of apartheid. Some of the best products come out of apartheid. He innovated the Daily Show. But so he finally... How can we make this show 50% more black? He finally settles in San Mateo in 1977.

I believe he's 10 years old or something like that. He's a young guy. Settles in San Mateo, California. He goes to high school. In high school, he's a math prodigy. He's a chess prodigy as well. At one point, he was a nationally ranked chess player. Extremely good at chess uh interestingly um when he lost at chess he would apparently like brush all the pieces off

the board and uh he said i think it's just cleaning up yes but he would like you know be a an asshole about it and apparently in this new yorker profile i read he explained it as like uh someone who's a gracious loser is just a loser or something i'm fucking up the quote but the quote is basically if you're good at losing then you're probably a loser which you know again this is like the mindset we see in a lot of these entrepreneur type people um but so anyways what a bitch move to be like i lost that chest the pieces are gone now like yeah it's the end of the game it literally doesn't matter how you organize the pieces anymore for you to be this childish only means you're that much of a loser he also did like a ceremonial first move for like some magnus carlson uh world chess matchup or something.

I just thought Andy might find this interesting. I'm trying to get Andy to like Peter Thiel. Well, first I've got to like Magnus Carlsen. I'm sorry, but I'm a Fabio Ono Caruana boy. All right. And a Hikaru Nakamura boy. Let's not divide our listenership with chess politics. Yeah, Andy, come on.

As someone who drinks energy drinks... He slammed two monsters before we started recording people. No, I slammed one, and I'm working on the other right now. You're kidding. Anyway, Hikaru Nakamura drank so many Red Bulls at his chess tournaments that he got a sponsorship. Really? Yeah.

It was from the american heart association that motherfucker plays chess but uh uh but yes so um uh peter teal uh he's he's a prodigy in high school he goes on to stanford university, where he gets a B.A. in philosophy. And interestingly, in Stanford, he's kind of on a different career path. So what happens in the late 80s, early 90s, is we have the first of our little, the first of, I guess, two big political correctness backlashes that we've seen in recent times. So in 1987, there's something called the Rainbow Agenda at Stanford University, which is based on Jesse Jackson's The Rainbow Coalition. Stanford students who are essentially pushing for a more multicultural, diverse curriculum, more professors with tenure of color, Asian Americans, African Americans, etc., etc. is one of the co-founders of the Stanford Review, which is like a knockoff of the National Review

or the much more incendiary Dartmouth Review, which is, of course, where Dinesh D'Souza and Laura Ingram outed gay students at Dartmouth. Dartmouth? Dartmouth. Okay. Dartmouth? I don't know. Dartmouth.

Dartmouth. But yes, the The Dartmouth Review Was more incendiary The Stanford Review Is just your kind of like Oh political correctness Is destroying America And so

Peter Thiel Founds this kind of Conservative student paper And then he graduates From Stanford Law School In 1992 And he later writes a book In 1995

With One of the people he met at the Stanford Review who later went on to work at PayPal with him, David Sachs. And they wrote this book in 95 called The Diversity Myth. And he's had to apologize for multiple quotes in there.

But I just wanted to kind of go over some of the fun things he wrote in the uh hey hey ho ho western culture's gotta go it's from a c-span talk he gave on uh the diversity myth yeah 96 yeah um but so just a fun thing is like uh i didn't read the book and so i cannot tell you but i believe the title of the first chapter i believe this is the first chapter but there is a title in there called christopher columbus the first multiculturalist which i love the idea of essentially just taking the definition of multiculturalism and diversity and making it so expansive that you go, hey, that genocidal maniac, he's a multiculturalist.

And that's what they want to do to Stanford. They want to, like, rape all the white professors and make them work in gold mines. But yeah, so there's a title called Christopher Columbus, the first multiculturalist. He's had to apologize in 2016 for some of the statements they made about rape in the book. Just some of them? Yes, some of the statements.

So basically, this is from an article in The Guardian, but they talk about the case. In 1991, a Stanford freshman alleged she had been raped in a dorm room while intoxicated. 17-year-old Stanford freshman. And then they say, although the alleged perpetrator was clearly guilty of serving alcohol to an underage woman and taking advantage of her resulting lack of judgment, there was no sexual assault. Understandably, however, the woman regretted the whole incident afterwards and then from the guardian theale took issue with stanford's policy on sexual assault which said that sexual assault by force or coercion including deliberate coercion through the use of drugs or alcohol is absolutely unacceptable at stanford university in response

they wrote it is ludicrous to believe that anyone who had been forcibly violated would not know it and bear physical marks. Which is, you know, a pretty narrow definition of rape. He wrote this in college? No, after he graduated from law school in 95, he writes all this. But it's all in response to this particular case of a 17-year-old girl getting raped at stanford university and then being like yeah wow what a piece of shit but it's like it's so weird

because like their thesis is like multiculturalism is bad and diversity as a goal is actually fake because it's not like the diversity of western culture's gotta go. But it's, so it's like, they just tie everything into multiculturalism, so they call it multicultural rape charge, where they say, like, the multicultural movement is, like, expanding the definition of rape. So I'll just quote a little bit more here. This is from your own personal journals, right?

This is like, this is like, but so,'s a little a little bit more of a quote uh that that peter the teal apologized for in 2016 uh i just like to think that he's like i had i know that it wasn't all right because i have surveilled every dorm room at stanford as part of my data mining process and developing Palantir. This is how I first got the idea. We have the documents, people.

We know it was not a rape. There was transactions between all parties consensual. I don't see that problem. Alright, so I am a proud gay man and a proud rape denier. Excuse me. Okay, so basically the other quote that he apologized for in 2016,

because of course they didn't actually make him, this came out after he endorsed Donald Trump, after the grab him by the pussy tape came out. So Thiel, of course, had to walk back some of these statements. So here's what he says in this book in 1995. Number one, the purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising, quote, awareness. And number two, but since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than

belated regret, a woman might, quote, realize she had been raped in the next day or even many days later and he issued a single statement to apologize saying more than two decades ago i co-wrote a book with several insensitive crudely argued statements as i've said before i wish i'd never written those things i'm sorry for it rape in all forms is a crime i regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise well he regrets it and i mean you know that's that's really what counts right guys yeah and and you know it's good that he's like taken strides to realize the error of his ways in uh criticizing multiculturalism and it's not like in 2017 he had a $1.7 million settlement with the Department of Labor for discriminating against Asian job applicants at Palantir.

Wow, what a piece of shit. The thing I hate about his argument the most is it's like, multiculturalism and diversity aren't real, it's bullshit. It's kind of like, just because you have turmeric in your meal doesn't make you Indianian it's like okay i get what you're insinuating but also turmeric's delicious uh how about you mix shit up and enjoy it and stop being a weak bitch about everything i don't know i'm just very mad at how his entire thing is like you guys notice how everything's wrong and i'm right me too like it's It's such a strange way. In his defense, I mean, the Palantirs really went downhill

as a surveillance tool in Middle-earth once the elves got control. Stevens, of course, wraps for us in seeing. He's named six of his companies after Lord of the Rings terms, including Palantir. I haven't read Lord of the Rings, so I'm not as familiar,

but he's a huge Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons fan. Well, somebody who's read half haven't read Lord of the Rings, so I'm not as familiar, but he's a huge Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons fan. Well, somebody who's read half of two of Lord of the Rings books. Listen, Andy's not our resident senior token-talking... Let's move on. I just like the idea of like...

Again, you see that with some books where it's like they start with this thesis and this thesis is multiculturalism is bad and then they just have to expand the definition of multiculturalism to here's why uh rape is good you know here's why multiculturalism expands the definition of rape or whatever and we're talking about the fellowship of the ring here it's like since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret like what the fuck does that even mean this guy graduated from stanford law school um that's a statement about uh he's like i'm sorry just schools he's like i'm sorry i'm sorry

that some people took it that to mean right right right so it's not actually that's what they teach you to do in law school in stanford law school it's like it's not how to like you know come up or understand like the legal definition of rape it's how to talk your way out of making a bullshit statement about rape a couple more fun things about the diversity myth uh condoleezza rice was at that time stanford's provost and uh she condemned the book calling it quote a cartoon not a description of our freshman curriculum and she called their commentary quote demagoguery pure and simple and again this is their book that was arguing that essentially multiculturalism and diversity is destroying Western civilization and it calls for you, an end to affirmative action, an end to political correctness, all these kind of things you're familiar with if you've been online ever. But a couple more just interesting quotes from the book. Again, this is from The Guardian. They essentially say that racism only exists because we keep talking about it, which is like, that might

sound like an unfair characterization, so I'll just read their quote here. As paradoxical as it may seem, the extreme focus on racism has become the source of acrimony as multiculturalism charged whites with more evanescent and intangible forms of racism, such as, quote, institutional racism, or, quote, unconscious racism. As a result... Institutional racism or, quote, unconscious racism. Or, quote, shooting a black man holding a shower head and claiming that it looked enough like a gun. That they didn't have to even issue warnings. That sounds like a very intangible form of racism. Using your own cell phone in your own backyard.

Also, not racist. People with third-degree burns are thinking about fire too much. I don't understand what the issue is. Us people without third-degree burns never think about fire. That's the reason. Fucking tool. The passage continues. As a result, the awareness of racism, once the main hope for ending racial division,

today has become a major cause of debate and friction. So again, the awareness of racism is actually the cause of racism. Oh. And then there's another weird story from this book. So basically, there was, in 1991, there was a member of the Stanford Law School who, as an action intended to provoke discussion of

free speech stood outside the home of a Stanford University staff member and shouted faggot, faggot hope you die of AIDS and he was eventually forced to leave Stanford because of this and of course in their book

because the AIDS part? Yes. In their book, The Diversity Myth, published in 1995, they defend his action and compare the reaction to his comments as they compare it to the Salem witch trials, George Orwell's 1984, and the Spanish Inquisition. And then, this is, again, a direct quote from the book. They say,

His demonstration directly challenged one of the most fundamental taboos. To suggest a correlation between homosexual acts and AIDS implies that one of the multiculturalist's favorite lifestyles is more prone to contracting the disease and that not all lifestyles are equally desirable. And again, this is written by a closeted gay man, interestingly enough. Yeah, no, Peter Thiel would know being gay is nothing but a choice. Man, lifestyles of the rich and famous, am I right, guys? I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But it's like, it's interesting because essentially this was the career path Peter Thiel was on originally. And his co-author in this book, David Sachs, has said that Peter Thiel kind of wanted to be, you know, a George Will or a William F. Buckley, like a conservative commentator when he went to law school.

But he also wanted to be a billionaire. So that kind of took over. So Peter Thielal he goes to stanford he gets this ba in philosophy he goes to stanford law school he graduates in 1992 and then he goes on to clerk for an appeals court judge he's interestingly enough he tries to get a clerkship for both supreme court justices anthony and scalia and anthony kennedy he's turned down for both of them. Then he goes on. He works for a security lawyer for Cromwell and Sullivan in New York for seven months.

Then he leaves. And then he becomes a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. Is that right? I have no idea. That's great. Oh, wow. Sweet. In 1993, he wasn't satisfied with the work.

You know, so he's working. It's too derivative. It looks like Swiss. He's working as a derivatives trader. In 93, he writes the book in 95, and then he returns to California in 96. And this is when the Internet is kind of taking off, and he gets inspired to eventually co-found PayPal because, you know, again, he just kind of found a lot of these jobs boring and he really wanted to revolutionize the world or whatever other entrepreneurial things. But like, interestingly enough, with PayPal, kind of part of the idea is that they had the idea that kind of later became Bitcoin, where they wanted to protect people in other countries from inflation. Yeah.

Like the idea that you could create this digital currency to prevent governments from printing money and creating inflation because you have this PayPal software that it's like you put money into. It's like fusing. He wants to give the people more democratic control, he thought, over the value of the currency somehow in some nebulous way. It's actually kind of back now. He invested big time in Bitcoin in the beginning of this year, I think. I think last year, yeah. Last year? I thought again this year.

Yeah, he probably did as well. They made a bunch of money on Bitcoin, interestingly enough. Did they? Well, if they sold. I don't know if they sold, but if they sold, they made a bunch of money. If you invested when it was like $20,000. But, okay, so, interestingly enough, so in 96, he returns to the Bay Area. And he kind of notices the development of the internet, the personal computer.

He's fascinated by all these things. And he meets another programmer after giving a talk at, I think, Stanford, but some talk somewhere. And the two of them, you know, they get, I think, smoothies, and then they come up with the idea.

This is from the New Yorker profile I read. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. It might have been juice. I don't know. Business idea over smoothies is the most. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican.

Andy, not all lifestyles are equally desirable. And that is the heart of the critique of multiculturalism. But so they come up with this idea for PayPal, and PayPal launches in 1999. And again, I wasn't able to find much information on it, but Wikipedia does provide the helpful note that with financial supports from friends and family, he was able to raise $1 million

towards the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embark on his venture capital career, which he was later able to launch PayPal with this $1 million that he raised with the help of friends and family. And it's just kind of funny that, again, he wrote this book in 2014 called Zero to One, which is about what you need to be an entrepreneur.

But I'm sure he doesn't say a million dollars anywhere in there. He wrote this book in 2014 called Zero to One, which is about what you need to be an entrepreneur. But I'm sure he doesn't say a million dollars anywhere in there. He collects small donations from his friends and family here and there. When your father works in German chemical engineering for the apartheid government, you're able to collect a million dollars from friends and family. In doing research, he's got a brother as well, Patrick, I believe, is his name, and I usually try to find dirt on family members

and stuff, and once again, like with most billionaires, you can't find much information on his parents or his brother, and it's horseshit, because you can find me with a mohawk in high school on the internet, but you can't find any information about this billionaire's family. I mean, everything from his father being a...

You don't have a billion dollars to sweep the internet. Yeah, for some reason... Not yet. You need a planter to find this guy. Yeah, for some reason... I mean, this is... Like, with Peter Thiel saying, like, you know, he can't... It's not fair that he...

It's hard to find out stuff about him. He killed a website. He did? Right. Yeah, I was gonna say like, for some reason, it's hard to find information about this billionaire who funded a lawsuit to destroy a website that published information about him. You know,

when Peter Thiel comes with his now husband, he rips his shirt open and yells, Hulkamania. It's in the contract of the lawsuit. He won, but he lost. And then he says the N-word a bunch. I hope you die of AIDS. No, it's about free speech.

But so anyway, so they found PayPal in 99. They spent a lot of money advertising it. So they found PayPal in 1999. They merged with ElonMusk's X.com in the year 2000, which we talked a bit about on the Musk episode. That's right. It was kind of like a similar platform.

So Musk comes on board. And that's just not true. So they launched in 1999. Peter Thiel is the CEO until 2002. In 2002, they go public. In February 2002, in October 2002, they sell to eBay for a few billion dollars. Thiel's cut of that is $55 million, personally. So essentially, he's a millionaire, a multimillionaire as of 2002.

And just kind of interesting thing. There was a Forbes article in 2007 called the PayPal Mafia. And, you know, it's just like one of those corny business press things where they have like a bunch of former PayPal founders and employees, you know, wearing like mob outfits and sitting around a card table. It's kind of a stupid picture, but we'll put it as the episode picture. But anyway, so just a random fact is that six of the former... The episode picture is definitely going to be one of Peter Thiel's faces during the audience. Yeah, please.

That guy's mouth is a scientific curiosity. His face is broken, but not in a way that's ever been broken before. It's medically fascinating. Yeah. You know those Japanese pots that they break and then put together back with gold? Imagine if you put together a face,

but you didn't use gold, but you just used racist hate. And like platelets from 14-year-olds. Yes, yes. and like platelets from 14 years yes yes but basically of uh the six of the uh former paypal employees and founders uh six of them have gone on to become billionaires that's uh peter teal elon musk reid hoffman the linkedin founder luke uh nozek ken howery and keith uh rabios and Howie and Keith Rabios. Future episodes to come. Yes, so stay tuned for more PayPal discussion. But so Peter Thiel, he cashes out with $55 million in 2002 after eBay buys PayPal,

and then he goes on to found a hedge fund, partly using that money. It's called Clarium Capital, and just like a couple interesting things I've learned about Clarium Capital. First off, the Wikipedia is clearly written by either Thiel himself or a sycophant. Because it's just talking about how in like 2002 to 2008, they were getting like 50% a year returns because of his like visionary investment strategy. And it's like, wow, I'm so impressed

that in the middle of an inflating housing bubble, you guys were able to make money. And I'm so impressed that you kind of cut that off at 2008 for some reason. But it's an interesting story because he almost became like a hedge fund billionaire, but then he just like made a bunch of moronic bets as the entire market collapsed. And so Clarion Capital peaked with $8 billion in assets under management in 2008. And then as of 2011,

it only had 300 to 400 million assets under management. So it was basically just a massive collapse because they started making idiotic bets and then everybody pulled their money out. According to a website that is no longer active that we might have mentioned earlier, Clarion lost 90% of its assets since its peak. Wow. There are these great Gawker headlines where it's like

Facebook billionaire's big dumb failure. Facebook backer Peter Thiel still losing everyone's money. And then Facebook backer wishes women couldn't vote. We'll get into that one later. A bunch of meanies. They're bullies and they deserve

to be taken. Interesting thing. If you go to Clarium's web page which i did earlier uh it just gives you a login screen for clarium employees but the landing page has three peter teal quotes and it rotates between them what i know and so if i can just uh uh read a couple yes because couple because they're fascinatingly opaque. So here's one of the three quotes is, The macro investor more closely resembles a detective who must piece together indirect clues that point to nocturnal events in faraway places. Peter Thiel. I am proud to be gay.

I am proud to be a Republican. That one's not on there. on there Then there's the other one During the last quarter century The world has seen more asset booms Or bubbles than all previous times Put together Which is nonsense And then the last one

The last one I will confess In the era of global capitalism, there has been more global capitalism than any other era before the era of global capitalism. So the last of the three quotes, I will confess to not even understanding without having to look up the references to Greek mythology. The last of the three quotes is,

Clarion's mission is to find another way the straight and narrow path between the scalia scalia scilla uh it's it's move on john yeah of outdated wisdom and the charbidus of nihilistic cleverness and apparently these are both references to greek mythology it's a it's a real call to action. Yeah. But I love like, it's just like these kind of like self-indulgence. Okay. So a Charbitis is a sea monster. And a Scalia is a monster that lives on one side of a narrow channel of water from Greek mythology.

I am incredibly disappointed that someone who plays as much Magic the Gathering as Sean has to look this up when clearly on his computer the pictures of the monsters that are coming up on Google while he looks this up look like they're straight off of a magic card. See, he was more of a Dungeons & Dragons kid

and there's a notorious disconnect between Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering. It's like East Coast versus West Coast. Jay-Z versus Nas. So for the students of Greek mythology that cringed, apparently these two monsters are like two sea monsters on opposite sides

of a channel in Greek mythology. So this quote essentially means that his hedge fund's mission is to find a straight and narrow path between these two sea monsters of outdated wisdom and nihilistic cleverness. Diversity and multiculturalism.

But it's just funny. And if you want more of that, you can buy his book Zero to One. And if you make it across that channel, you will lose $90 billion. It's just another, like apparently like a lot of people were pulling money out of the funds because they said all the employees at this hedge fund were members of the

cult of Peter Thiel. And I just cannot imagine why a company with a landing page that features three self-indulgent Peter Thiel quotes would become cult members. You know what's better than one self-indulgent Peter Thiel quote? Three self-indulgent Peter Thiel quotes. But, yes, so the hedge fund's still around, but they just destroyed themselves in the 2008 financial crisis. But he did make a good bet. In 2004, he invests half a million dollars in Facebook,

which, again, we talked about a bit on the Mark Zuckerberg episode. Yeah, and social network. Clearly the guy, I mentioned this before, but the guy who played Peter Thiel did not study Peter Thiel because what he was going for was clearly like Glenn Greenwald doing a business deal and not malfunctioning robot with sparks coming out of its neck.

Interestingly, from the New Yorker profile, Peter Thiel remarks that the actor who played him looked too old. Interesting critique for the guy who's into parabiosis. Oh, by the way, if Yogi doesn't talk much on this episode, it's because he's the youngest one of us, and we're actually

all draining his blood in order to give us more energy. I've got four IVs in my arms, and they're directly going to all of their penises. Yeah, I had to increase my blood flow when I didn't know those two characters from Greek mythology. Clearly, I'm not ready.

When we said Andy was chugging Monster, we really meant my blood. That's really what he's been drinking today. Let's go into the parabiosis thing for a second. Yeah, so parabiosis is basically this kind of, from everything I've read about, it sounds like snake oil, but it's this idea that you... What, injecting young people's blood to live forever?

Is kind of a scam? It's this idea that, yes, as Andy said, that you inject blood from younger people to older uh older people and then that will make you healthier and live longer and stuff and uh peter teal has invested um i think a billion i don't know the exact number into this company much money let's just say that a lot of money no dollars right into into a company called ambrosia which studies this parabiosis. And parabiosis, interestingly enough, the term goes back, it refers to experiments first conducted in 1864 by a physiologist named Paul Burt.

Mall cop. The original mall cop. But basically, he cut the skin off of two mice and then sewed them together. And then when they healed, their blood vessels combined enough so that they essentially share the same surgery. You know, we used to build things in this country. sewed them together, and then when they healed, their blood vessels combined enough so that they essentially share the same surgical system. We used to build things in this country.

We used to tie mice together. We used to make things. But yes, this is, sorry, I quoted that from sciencebasedmagazine.org, which has an article called Parabiosis, the Next Snake Oil. If America pursued its goals of the future, we could be sewing five mice together today,

maybe even six mice. But yeah, if you do research on Peter Thiel, you find out he's obsessed with not dying. And also the movie The Human Centipede. We're not sure why. But yes, he injects young people blood. He's signed up to be cryogenically frozen. He disappointingly believes he will only live to be 120 years old.

You know, he's obsessed with beating death. And like a lot of his uh uh venture capital or um foundational things are based on uh trying to uh stop the human aging process because the guy wants to live forever um but yeah so he's interested in parabiosis and um uh he invests in facebook as we mentioned in 2004 he puts about a half million in he sells almost all of that, he makes close to a billion dollars on this investment. So his capital fund bombs. And that also, I wanted to talk a bit about Palantir. Palantir.

Palantir. So Palantir is another startup. I think he found this in 2004. Yeah, he founded it with another member of PayPal. Fainor. Alex Karp, I believe. Legolos. Yeah.

I think, yeah. It was an older startup. Yeah. In the second age. In his eyes, like, he's Legolas, and anyone working with him is the dwarf that he's gotten. So, yeah. I never thought I'd die fighting side-by-side with a radical libertarian.

What about fighting side-by-side with a friend? No. So, yeah, Palantir was started in 2004. 2004 and originally was basically the idea was to take algorithms uh that they were using at paypal that they'd use to detect fraud by looking for um using kind of massive data mining and looking for irregular irregularities and then using that to detect fraud and they had a pretty early on they had not i guess too early on uh but one of their one of their big successes um in detecting fraud was they actually their software helped to catch bernie madoff um you know that uh impossible to catch fraud that went unprotected for 22 decades before finally being exposed in the financial crisis the uh and so basically what palantir does um is for one thing it's not necessarily well

known they go to great lengths to hide everything they do but they're they radical transparency yeah yeah they they use big data and then they will essentially connect big data with just human analysts so it's a little bit of just kind of what most companies do, but apparently they seem to do it so well, or at least they're able to market themselves so well that their clients include the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point for some reason, the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board,

and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Also under DHS, they work for ICE, and I'll get to that in a minute. Just a quick thing. Andy mentioned the CIA. Interestingly enough, I believe one of their primary early backers was the CIA's Venture Capital Fund, which I didn't know existed before yesterday.

In Quito. Yeah. Look it up. But you know the CIA Venture Capital Fund is one of the best venture capital funds because they get that pure CIA cocaine. They get the real uncut stuff. But yeah, you were talking to...

Sean, this isn't the 80s. They get pure Afghan heroin. But you can't trade for 48 hours straight on heroin. Their business address is the 80s Brooklyn. So Palantir has like, they basically use all of this, all of these things for like really weird applications. Like in Afghanistan. They make it so that the Marines can upload DNA samples from remote locations and then run that against DNA databases and find matches, which is kind of creepy.

It's they've had some success in predicting where IEDs are using their data mining. And another thing that they've done... So they're like 23andMe but for terrorists, or terrorism, basically. It's like, hey, if you find this strand of DNA in this area, there's probably a bomb somewhere hidden? You know, I'm not going to say it's that direct, but I'm also not going to say it's not that direct. Cool, got it.

Yeah, yeah. So one thing they did also is they started a philanthropic uh program with new orleans where they decided to use their technology by the way palantir has two uh different subsets they have palantir gotham and palantir Metropolis. Palantir Gotham is their government branch and Palantir Metropolis is their business branch. And in case you wanted to know how much of an unsufferable nerd Peter Thiel is, and the name Palantir wasn't a dead giveaway. So basically, they started in 2012, partnering with New Orleans to give the police kind of access to Palantir technology and work on what's known as predictive policing. What could go wrong?

You know, the New Orleans police who murdered several people kind of looked into is that what it does is it takes reports from police and uses that to predict where crimes are going to be committed. And Palantir also incorporates social media information. Where crimes are going to be committed. Whenever anyone's holding a cell phone or a shower bed, they look for locations with those things. Yeah. phone or a shower yeah yeah look for locations with those things yeah uh they incorporate social media histories which you know peter teal's a major backer of facebook probably has access to uh some of that stuff more than uh the average person i'm sure mark zuckerberg would never unethically share user data with someone who sits on the board of Facebook. And so basically with predictive policing, it's not really been proven, even though they claim to have reduced the murders in New Orleans.

You obviously can't just make that claim, but they do anyway. But predictive policing, there have been academic studies that have shown that it doesn't predict where crime is going to be, just where cops have already reported crime. So if cops are basically doing racial profiling, the crime statistics are going to say that there's a lot of crime in this place where police are racial profiling, and then they're just going to keep racial profiling, even though, for instance, one of the studies tested it out with drug crimes, and what they found is that predictive policing will say that there's a lot of drug crime in this one area because that's where the police do all the drug arrests. And then public health data that's separate says, no, there's drug abuse all over this city.

It's just that the police are racist. Yeah, that's where the police go. Yeah. So it's like a technological kind of confirmation bias is what we're really building here. Yeah, exactly. Hey, we've noticed that you think that people here are doing drugs, and because you think that, we think so too.

Yeah, exactly. Wow. And here's the kicker, is that the city council was not made aware of this. What? Yeah, because the Palantir pitched it as a philanthropic thing. Basically, they were doing it pro bono. Oh, right, right. And then using it to advertise to other police departments their, quote, success in New Orleans.

See, we're helping out these black cops, so why don't you check us out? So The Verge reported on it, and they called a bunch of city council members, and the council members were like, wait, what's happening? And apparently the deal was facilitated by a paid spokesman of Palantir who happens to be James Carville,

the political guy for Bill Clinton. He's a paid advisor of palantir palantir also works with the worked with the nypd and that only became public when the nypd decided to stop using palantir but one of the data transferred to a different format and palantir refused to so the nypd sued them and that's how the public found out about it can I just go back to something though I just cannot believe that a man who in 2009 wrote I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible would freeze out an elected city council I just love that he has done so many of these bullshit backdoor deals, but on top of that, it was like, no, no, it's philanthropic. It's like for the people.

I'm only exposing your privacy because I think it's good for you. Like, what are you, what? Yeah. It's fucking insane. Well, interesting thing about Palantir is it was, as I mentioned, originally kind of kept afloat by the CIA Venture Capital Fund. But today it's actually extremely profitable. It's valued at about $20 billion. And he owns a 10% stake in it. So that's actually primarily one of the biggest sources of his $2.5 billion net worth is his 10% stake in Palantir.

And a lot of that money, they've tried to venture into business as well using like, you know, predicting fraud. Like they worked for Home Depot after Home Depot had a big database breach. And then Home Depot was like, yeah, this is this is fucking useless and cut their contract. Like so they're kind of failing in the business in terms of like business customers. But they've got all these government contracts, including they're a tool for ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, you know, who may or may not be in the news for destroying families and busting workplaces. It's almost like an awareness of racism causes racism.

Got him! Stephen's exploding the diversity myth. Other central premise is that real diversity is diversity of ideas. You know, white people who think different things. They got a $41 million contract to build and maintain something called ICN, investigative case management. Oh, good. This is from an Inter intercept article from march 2017 um they got documents detailing it and they also found that this palantir thing is quote mission

critical to ice uh meaning that ice wouldn't be able to function without this palantir program so they're essential to this like you know modern gestapo deportation machine yeah and they uh basically what they do is they provide ice with uh information such as a subject schooling family relationships employment information phone records immigration history uh foreign exchange program status personal connections biometric traits which if if that's not creepy um as hell, like then there's criminal records and home and work addresses. And so, you know,

it's really important. You just need a proper degree of data management to find the people who have been living here 30 years without committing any crimes. Yeah. Yeah. He's, he's basically building the technological infrastructure for systematic ethnic cleansing. Cool.

And that's where he's getting a good amount of his money. Yeah, you were also talking about, Andy, before we started, you mentioned kind of the irony of this libertarian capitalist who's really making most of his money off this fat government contract to help the police state and the military state yeah he had this quote um from his his rnc speech uh which is uh where the gay republican quote uh has come from which is this our nuclear bases still use floppy disks our newest fighter jets can't even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government's software works poorly because much of the time it doesn't even work at all.

That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don't accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government. Now that's coming from a guy, and it's interesting that he mentions the Manhattan Project. And his examples of failures, like the F-15 that doesn't work in the rain,

is made by a private corporation, Lockheed Martin, where it's basically just this money hole where the government keeps throwing billions and billions into this fucked up jet fighter that doesn't work and what he's kill people who don't even who don't want our system yes and he at the same time he's saying saying the solution is more privatization. And his example of a successive government was the Manhattan Project, which was a government project. Right. And so he's... I mean, yeah.

He's since evolved his libertarian views to say the government should fund science research. I love omelets. He's a Republican now. He's not in the Libertarian Party research. I mean, he's a... He is a Republican now. He's not in the Libertarian Party. Oh, interesting. The other part of that quote though is he says, you know, government software doesn't work at all. It's like, hmm, who's providing that government software? Yeah, yeah.

I just want someone in the silo to accidentally load up the Oregon Trail instead of... That'd be great. Then they get so distracted, they don't, like, they're not able to do a retaliatory strike. They're not able to wipe out half the planet.

Ah, shit, dysentery again. So, also, ICE is focusing on immigrants, but apparently ICM funding documents made it clear that the tool can also be aimed at U.S. citizens. Cool. And the document states U.S. citizens. Cool. And the document states U.S. citizens are still subject to criminal prosecution and are thus part of ICM. ICM also helps the police. It helps provide the police with information to help police engage in criminal and civil asset forfeiture. And there was also a program called,

there was a law enforcement database called Black Asphalt that was linked with this Palantir thing that was used by Iowa and Kansas. And they had to cancel it because of concerns that it quote, might not be a legal law enforcement tool. According to the Washington Post. It's really not at all terrifying that a major Trump backer has a massive database on all of us and has written I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. Oh boy. And then I also want to moving on from Palantir I also

want to circle back to the RNC speech and point out how during the speech, Peter Thiel uses an age old trick of someone giving a performance at a local venue, such as it's great to be here in Cleveland and then repeatedly fails to get the applause that is almost guaranteed. Right. He does this four times in the speech. Right here in guaranteed. Right. He does this four times in the speech. Right here in Cleveland. Wait.

Right here in Cleveland. That's a light applause. That's a light applause. My dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University just down the road from where we are now. And it was Neil Armstrong from right here in Ohio. For me, that is Cleveland and the bright future it promised.

That's pretty wonderful. Yeah. I guess we can also mention so we've talked about his anything else on Palantir or we can also talk about the Seasteading Institutes let's talk about Gawker let's get to the meat of it today let's do Gawker before we do Seasteading

alright so the Gawker lawsuit well so I only know the general overview I know some more details so Gawker lawsuit, well, so I only know the general overview. I know some more details. Go for it. Go for it. So Gawker is a rag. I think it was a rag is a good way to put it. And they were publishing articles about Peter Thiel.

Now, one of the big ones that people point to is the reason why Peter Thiel hated Gawker is the article titled Peter Thiel is totally gay people, which, by the way, grabbing headline, very grabbing. Now, Owen Thomas, the guy that wrote this, admits he didn't really out Peter Thiel. At the time, it wasn't that he wasn't known as a gay person, but in small circles, it was known. And so this article is just, Owen Thomas is being like, hey, this guy that's kind of a shitty business person is also a homosexual. However, at the end of this article, he does say,

I think it explains a lot. All right, so he's talking about how many venture VCs are not the traditional straight white dude, basically, and how Silicon Valley is narrow-minded in this thought, right? And the last paragraph of this article is what I think really pissed Peter Thiel, a guy that was born in Germany, off. He goes, I think it explains a lot about Thiel. His disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules, like the immigrant Jews

who created Hollywood, and that's a hyperlink to this book. An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Which is on the Amazon link, also links to Mein Kampf, The Rise of the Inquisition, and Secret Jews of Hollywood. I do love that that's like, I mean, I haven't read it, but I imagine

it's kind of a positive book. But there's also just like all these white nationalists who are like, well, we have to get the deep dive on Hollywood. I mean, I think that book is just like about the history of Hollywood and how Jewish people came to the U.S. and created this amazing industry. But it is linked to so much white supremacist stuff that I think that the German Peter Thiel was so enraged by this.

He was like, fuck these people. Now, Gawker also wrote a whole bunch of other stuff, one of them being about... My grandfather didn't take the Zyklon B contract for this. Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's gotta go. So Gawker published... That was one of the big early ones. It was that, and then also all of their reporting on Clarion.

Yes. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook billionaire's big dumb failure. Yeah, right. Facebook backer Peter Thiel still losing everyone's money. And Facebook backer wishes women couldn't vote. And basically, Gawker called out all of his bullshit. You know, the thing Sean mentioned,

seasteading, the movement to establish sovereign communities on permanent ocean vessels for the purpose of developing legal systems unencumbered by taxes or any other kind of traditional government policies. Basic supervillain stuff. I like the oppressive totalitarianism. purpose of developing legal systems, unencumbered by taxes, or any other kind of traditional government policies. Basic supervillain stuff. Ooh, me likey, the oppressive totalitarianism. Yeah, so... It's like, oh, are you tired of an oppressive government? Well, what about a corporate state?

You know, going to work? What if they controlled everything about your life? Right, right. Yeah, well, so interesting if we want to talk about seasteading for a second. And I'll condense this. But the Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit that has been set up, originally co-founded by Milton Friedman's grandson, who is a Google engineer and has made money playing poker as well.

But the Seasteading Institute wants to set up, as we mentioned, these kind of sea colonies in international waters so that they can experiment with radical city-state... Yes. Basically a market in children, among other things, in international waters. And Peter Thiel has given at least $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute. But just one random, a couple of interesting things

about Patrick Friedman, Milton Friedman's grandson. Basically, he's been described as a free-love libertarian by the New Yorker profile on Peter Thiel. And I just love this quote um he wrote in a blog post about polyamory uh sorry let me oh yes so uh milton friedman's grandson writes in this blog post about polyamory and he compares it to the competitive government model so he goes quote polyamory slash competitive government parallel. More choice slash competition yields more challenge, change, growth.

Whatever lasts is tougher. And this is the idea that by having multiple sexual partners, it's kind of like having multiple governments where the best one prevails. One government just keeps bugging other governments and saying, like... Listen, I... I know I'm in a relationship, but it's... The benefit for you is no strings. Intergovernmental.

But you know what? Checks and balances. Yeah. This man does not represent the poly community. I think if we have learned one thing It's that Well anyways I don't want to shit on the polys

So The Gawker case Yeah they'll fuck you And your girlfriend Hulk Hogan Hulkamania Terry Beaulieu Is in a lawsuit with Gawker

Because they published two minutes Of this 30-minute sex tape. And boy, the fact that there's 28 other minutes that we don't get to see of Hulkamania just going to town on his friend's wife. Bubba the Lunch Love Sponge. That's right.

And so he originally is not suing for the amount of money that it ends up being. Originally it's like for a copyright infringement because they use... Basically, at first, Hulk Hogan was just trying to get his... And then once the... And it had nothing to do with them sharing a video where Hulk Hogan says the N-word a whole bunch.

The case boils down to Terry Bollea saying that them releasing this hurt me, and so he received $60 million in emotional damage and another $60 million for the lawyer fees, basically. So $120 million is awarded to Hulkamania. Money he did not need, and money that is genuinely wasted on him. Yogi, isn't the man Hulk Hogan and Hulkamania the phenomenon? I think so. You're right.

It's a real Frankenstein's monster situation. What are you going to do? Just look at him and say... But later on it's revealed that Peter Thiel put in 10 million of his own money in this court case to kill Gawker, basically. Good return on investment. This is what made him such a successful hedge fund manager.

I mean, it is cheaper than the guy who bought out uh what was it uh there's another billionaire who bought out gothamist and shut it down whereas peter teal didn't have to pay full price for we'll do another episode of that guy wouldn't ask so now it's been reported that peter teal wants to buy like the skeleton of gawker because to this date the like links to some of the articles we're talking about are still up, but since Gawker is basically bankrupt, he now wants to buy to completely erase it.

This goes back to what I was saying about the families not being anywhere on the internet. It's like, oh, we have a megalomaniac billionaire with values and morals that are questionable deciding what gets to be published about himself. This will only end in turmoil, and it leads me to the Thiel Fellowship, which is his incubator of graduates.

Encouraging kids to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs. Right, and give them $100,000 to pursue ideas. Because, you know, countries that have more entrepreneurs are typically associated with third world conditions where it's more competitive and the strong rise to the top. That's right. The U.S. is actually right down there with other shithole countries like Norway and Sweden in terms of how few entrepreneurs it has. But, yes, I do want to – I know we're at an hour now I do want to get to this very fun article

He wrote in 2009 Where Most of the criticism that comes from this Article is the passage where he says that Women voting is a bad thing But just like so Essentially he writes this article in 2009 And again like you know

He apologizes for his diversity Myth book by saying this was two decades ago. And then he writes this shit in 2009. And it's for I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. All right. Well, so he writes this article in 2009 for the Cato Institute or for Cato Unbound dot org. And basically it's called The Education of a Libertarian. And he says, I basically believe the same things I believed in high school when he got into Ayn Rand and stuff.

But he says, I must confess, over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. More importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. He goes on, the higher one's IQ, the more pessimistic one becomes about free market politics. Capitalism is simply not that popular with the crowd. And then he has the infamous passage about the 1920s, which I find so funny. He goes, the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.

The 1920s, of course, were the inflation of a massive credit bubble driven on pure speculation under which people were lending money to invest in a stock market they would assume would never go down and was probably the greatest market failure in Western capitalism's history.

But that's the last decade. Let's put a pin on that for the end of the episode, capitalism's history. But that's the last... Let's put a pin on that for the end of the episode, by the way. But that's the last time we could be optimistic. And he goes, since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women, two constituencies that are notoriously tough

for libertarians, have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. And, of course, they have to put an editor's note at the end of this because, for some reason, this article got a lot of pushback. And he clarifies his thoughts by saying it would be absurd. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican.

He clarifies his thoughts by saying it would be absurd to suggest that women's votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don't think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better. And his entire thesis in this article is that we need to do, you know, seasteading and space exploration and web technologies his idea is essentially like the great einrand uh hero individual will figure out how to uh beat democracy by inventing something that makes socialism irrelevant uh which explains maybe why he was a big investor in bitcoin by fucking your married friend and saying that that's important to for true libertarianism and then dying

sad and alone but yeah i think uh another interesting thing he gave a series of lectures and then those became a book called zero to one that he published in 2014 which is just kind of like the usual half-baked investor wisdom. But interesting confession from that book is he says four of the founders of PayPal had built bombs as children, which he later specified he meant that four of the PayPal founders were making bombs in high school. He refused to identify which four they were. But, you know, it turns out the PayPal mafiaia has a little bit in common with the Trenchcoat Mafia. And he also has, like...

Actually, the Trenchcoat Mafia was... Dylan Cleveland and Eric Harris were not members. But they liked to be associated with them. They just wore trenchcoats on the day of Columbine to hide their weapons, like in The Matrix. And it also has just a bunch of like the usual half-baked kind of like business school we think it's deep bullshit where he says uh we never invest in entrepreneurs who turn up for the interview in a suit you know right that's like

jesus christ yeah he's what should they be wearing i don Peter Stain t-shirt. When he gets a call that they're on their way, he goes, what are you wearing? Just like cum stains. But that's not because he's a Republican. That's because he's a homosexual. He wants to make sure he's the most... I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. Oh, man.

All right. Well, anything else on Peter Thiel before we get into garbage time? Oh, I did want to say... I'd to say you didn't call it garbage time but other than that i think i think we're doing all right uh i do like the idea of peter thiel immortality though because it's like again he's obsessed with immortality and his idea of immortality is essentially like capitalists live forever and workers never retire right you know um but? But I also think that, you know, he's really a guy who would give Alex Jones an aneurysm because not only does he sit on the steering committee

of the Bilderberg Group, but he's obsessed with creating liquid computers. You can tell what I pre-wrote, and I just want to get into a microphone. Liquid computers? What is that? So it's this idea that molecular systems that will stop aging and will

identify diseases in cells. Basically bioengineered DNA almost. Right, yes. Yeah, it's better than saying liquid computers. I just like the idea of liquid computers. A smoothie computer that you can have with your friend

before a business meeting. Oh, man. Anything else to get to? I do have a funny story from Harvard. Go for it. Okay. So last weekend I went to Harvard with my girlfriend, and she saw Malia Obama leaving the campus of Harvard.

And my girlfriend asked Malia for a picture. Malia said, sorry, I can't, you't, because she's gotten in some trouble about this. I did think it was rude that Malia wouldn't even smoke the joint I offered her. People, I pre-write some stuff for the podcast, okay? You saw Malia Obama in the flesh? Yeah, I saw her. Is she hot?

Yeah, she's tall. She's walking with a white dude. I don't want to spread any rumors here. Might have been her boyfriend, might just be a friend. Sean, can I just say, like, we should have a rule, a minimum of three open mics before you take a bit on the podcast. I just write these things, and I have no other place to put them. You could workshop them, Sean.

You want to hear some warren buffett stuff how many mics have you taken it to yeah has it been workshopped have you ran at least once uh no i haven't this is this is fresh all right moving on uh the uh best brokers app uh so uh we've uh We're in the middle of a market crash. Yeah, we started Best Brokers. If you've been holding cash, you've been beating all of us. Yeah. We all got on Best Brokers.

Our names are Grubstakers Andy, Grubstakers Yogi, Grubstakers Sean, and Grubstakers Steve. And so we all started investing that day that we dropped the podcast and announced it. And so far, our all-time leaderboard first is Grubstaker's Steve, followed by Grubstaker's Andy, then Yogi, and then Sean. Yeah, for some reason, financial investment stocks take a bit of a hit when Trump declares a trade war.

Yeah. For some reason, these corporations founded on the basis of globalization do not do well when globalization gets rolled back. And we're all in the red. Steve is ahead of us because he waited one week to actually start investing. And so we invested right before a market crash. I'm a very cautious investor. Also, shout out to Andy andy miller who's also playing with us under the name rich pussy um though he's he's at he's at the top for today

but he's at the bottom for all time um also if you're if you're playing this game and you friended us uh we can't see friends so just like shoot one of us a message call Call me a dipshit and I'll friend you. Is it a German app? When you look up stocks, there's a whole bunch of ones from the German equivalent of the stock market. Oh, interesting. Those are totally German names.

All the prices are in euros. And everything is in euros. Yeah. What if Warren Buffett hired a woke PR firm to try and defend his actions? So they'll be like, no, he didn't disown his granddaughter because she was in a movie criticizing income inequality. He disowned her because she's a white lady wearing dreadlocks and he doesn't believe in cultural appropriation. Or yes, he forecloses on mobile homes at three times the national rate but he was just so angry that they voted for trump

i am proud to be gay i am proud to be a republican oh jesus all right i'll stop writing my dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now. Wait. That last part is what happens after your jokes. Also, a special shout-out to LaCroix Philosophy on Twitter. Sent us a nice message letting us know. Yeah, lots of good feedback.

Thanks to all our listeners. All our comrades. Our top three SoundCloud listeners, Tom Jamin, Michael Paradise, and Noah Oshiroff. Thank you for listening to our podcast. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. Natalia Laughlin for promoting us. Yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you.

Everybody, Andy's DMs are always open. Give him all your feedback. He's here for it. Add us on all of the social media nonsense. We got more fun stuff coming. Listen, if you want to shit on Sean, my DMs are open. I won't tell Sean, by which I mean I will tell Sean if I think it will hurt him. So send your best stuff.

Yeah. Make sure to say you like all the written jokes I've been doing. That Warren Puffett woke PR. That was just so good and so naturally integrated into the episode. How are they going to know about those jokes if they get cut out from the episode? All right. That's everything? Yeah.

Anything else? No. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next week. Good night. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. listening everybody we'll be back next week good night bye fight for what's right fight for your life When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside You gotta take a stand and don't have to hide If you hurt my friends, then you hurt my pride I gotta be a man

I can't let it slide I am a real American Fight for the rights of every man I am a real American Fight for what's right Fight for what's right, fight for your life I feel strong about right and wrong And I don't take trouble for very long. I got something deep inside of me. Courage is the thing that keeps us free.

I am a real American. Fight for the rights of every man. I am a real American. Fight for what's right. Fight for your life. I am a real American. Fight for your rights of every man. I am a real American.

Fight for what's right. Fight for your life. Bye. You hurt my friends and then you hurt my pride. I gotta be a man. I can't let it slide. I am a real American. Fight for the rights of every man. I am a real American. Fight for what's right. Fight for your life.

I am a real American. Fight for the rights of every man. Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins, be true to yourself, true to your country, be a real American.