Offline with Jon Favreau - How Peter Thiel Became the Right’s Tech-Authoritarian Kingmaker

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

Peter Thiel isn’t as rich as Elon Musk or as notorious as Steve Bannon. But over the last 10 years he has grown from Silicon Valley’s oddball conservative to an ideological anchor of the Trump era. And, unfortunately for us, he thinks the country would be better off without voting. Bloomberg Businessweek reporter, Max Chafkin, has written a book about Thiel and his mind boggling worldview: The Contrarian. He joins Max to discuss what Thiel wants from the Republican Party, his mentorship of J.D. Vance, and how he's emboldening a huge swath of tech leaders to be openly MAGA. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

He was like pushing all these things that like even the even the most ideological people in the Trump administration thought were too extreme. Steve Bannon was like, it was just too crazy, you know, and it's like if Steve Bannon is saying something is too crazy, it tells you something. Hey, everyone, Max here filling in for John again. Here's a somewhat contrarian thought for you. If there is one figure on the American right, aside from Donald Trump, who is most important for understanding the trajectory of Republican politics today, it might just might be the tech investor Peter Thiel. famous or as rich as Elon Musk. He's not as notorious as Steve Bannon or Richard Spencer. But over the last 10 years, he has grown from Silicon Valley's oddball conservative to Republican Party kingmaker and an ideological anchor of the party's Trump and maybe its post-Trump eras. Joining me to walk us through Peter Thiel's growing influence and his, to me, quite scary agenda is Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chavkin.

Max is the author of The Contrarian, Peter Thiel, and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. It is a great book that gets more and more timely by the day. Max, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me. So in a moment, we'll kind of rewind and tell the Peter Thiel story from the beginning, but just to level set for people, can you give us a bird's eye overview of Thiel's role in the Republican Party today? Thiel is, as you said, a really important venture capitalist, very important Silicon Valley investor. He's probably, you know, one of the top two or three most influential investors in the tech investors in the world. And he's also been a sort of pioneer in a lot of these kind of hard right ideas that were popularized by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and others.

And it's sort of been sort of was a was a seed investor, if you will, in in Trumpism. Right. And kind of the maybe the high point or at least the high visibility mark for his influence is, and we'll get into this later, like arguably picking the vice presidential candidate for Trump's 2024 ticket, which is a wild thing for a single donor to do regardless of that donor's background. Yeah. Teal in 2022 made two enormous donations, political donations to midterm Senate candidates, hard right, kind of younger, more sort of like Trump, but maybe a little bit more disciplined, a little bit more ideological. And one of those two was J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance also worked for Peter Thiel. He is, in many ways, not a business protege of Thiel, but a political protege. Right. Okay. So let's rewind and kind of start the story at the beginning-ish.

You often hear people talk about Thiel's undergrad years at Stanford in the late 80s, described as kind of his like ideological origin story. How true is that, do you think? Well, I think Thiel coming up in the 80s was interested in right-wing politics. And at the time, it was sort of like in the water back then. It's actually become much more popular now to sort of complain about the, you know, leftward drift of academic institutions. There are a lot of people doing this very sort of loudly back at the time, you know, Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, and Thiel was one of these figures. He started a right, sort of a right-wing newspaper at Stanford, Stanford Review. And the work that was produced, and you can go back and read it. I read a lot of this for my book. I'm so sorry. You know,

it's extreme. It's trolling. Thank you. It's not especially noteworthy. Thiel has written some super interesting speeches and some great essays or some sort of really, in my opinion, well-constructed, provocative essays. There's not much remarkable about the writing. It's just sort of standard issue trolling, as far as I could tell. It's a lot of jokes about race, gender, and so on.

What's most interesting is that network then became the core of this technology network. A lot of these guys who he knew from Stanford, these conservatives, became co-founders or very early employees of PayPal, became sort of central to a tech network that then became very, very influential. And when people think of Silicon Valley, now a lot of this is kind of a myth, but there's this myth of Silicon Valley as this kind of left-leaning place. But of course, the roots of at least one of the most important tech networks is definitely on the right in that kind of trolling, campus activism arm of conservatism. So Teal is kind of at the center of this Venn diagram, it sounds like, of on the one hand, you have this very specific late 80s movement of kind of

right-wing young college kids at big otherwise left-wing campuses, elite universities who are kind of representing this like the colleges are too woke backlash, like before we would refer to it as anti-woke and like running these student conservative newspapers and people like Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza. And then the other circle that Peter Thiel falls in is the late 80s kind of Stanford-centric early tech, like the people who would come into the dot-com boom. And his like being at the middle of these two worlds, at the intersection of these two worlds, it feels like it kind of becomes his superpower later in life. 100%.

He is – he sort of – he was at Stanford in the late 80s, early 90s. He actually briefly became a corporate lawyer. He was a very ambitious guy, but he returned to Silicon Valley in the late 90s just as the internet was taking off. He was friends with a lot of people and essentially was able to plug in to some really successful ideas. And he is both ideologically and as a tech guy, an investor, somebody who is very adept at looking for promising young people. Almost everybody in his network is a man. Almost everybody is a white man. And they're all ideologically conservative.

He's good at seeing these kind of conservative rebels, these bomb thrower types. And I think that shows up both in the sort of political folks like Vance that he's picked out, but also in the tech folks. Like, you know, Thiel was, his big win as an investor was Facebook, was seeing Mark Zuckerberg and thinking, this guy has something. And I think, first of all, that's very impressive because, you know, Zuckerberg had essentially been sort of tossed out of Harvard. He'd done this kind of sketchy,

arguably pretty gross thing involving the, you know, ranking the faces of his classmates. Like, and I think, and you can sort of see why somebody like Thiel would like that, right? He's somebody who loves to, you loves to piss off a university administrator. And so – and I think that was what appealed to him about Zuckerberg, and you just see it like over and over again. It's turned out to be like a pretty effective investing philosophy. I think you could question whether it's the kind of philosophy you'd want in sort of choosing the future leaders of the country. about this thing that starts as an investing strategy, but then later becomes a political philosophy, which is that in 1995, when he's either 27 or 28, I'm not sure, he publishes his

first book or co-authors it, The Diversity Myth, that was not particularly impactful at the time, but is kind of looked back on as important for understanding him. Can you talk about what that book says? The Diversity Myth is a, ostensibly a sort of like memoir confessional written by two Stanford students, Peter Thiel and this guy, David Sachs, who also became a, an investor was involved in PayPal. I just spoke at the RNC. And who spoke at the RNC. Yes. Um, uh, he's sort of become like the poor man's Peter Thiel if you're trying to find that. Um, but, but anyway, he, um, so the book really is like another one of these, like, it's very similar to the, D'Souza wrote a very similar book. The, the, the title is now, uh, you know, escaping me, but, um, I probably have it right

behind me, but anyway, it's, uh, but the, the, the point is it's all about how Stanford is this kind of left-wing place. The minorities and black people and women have too much power. It's full of lines that are pretty cringey in retrospect. You know, there's a description of date rape as being seductions later regretted. They sort of questioned the whole concept. And what's interesting anyway is when – and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. But when Teal donated to Trump in 2016, he and David Sachs issued these kind of sort of semi-mea culpa. This was after the Excess Hollywood tape.

I think they, maybe the Trump people or maybe Thiel and Sachs intuited it, that there was something kind of gross about Trump, this guy who had been accused of, you know, bragging about sexual assault, taking money from a couple of guys who'd written these super insensitive things about date rape.

And so, and they sort of issued these kind of half-hearted mea culpa they apologized for certain things um didn't didn't fully apologize it but you almost get the sense since then that they would want to like take those you know like like like a lot of the stuff that they were apologizing for i'm not sure would have been apologized for in you know 2024 uh and and and so anyway it's just uh but but the book but book put Teal, he got on TV a little bit. He wrote a couple of like Wall Street Journal, like editorial type things, and then kind of went away. And that's when he found his way into tech investing. Well, it's something that I think

is interesting to highlight about this book is that on the one hand, if you don't know Silicon Valley well, you go back and you read excerpts from it. And it's like, this is really nuts. This is like, I can't believe that someone is just saying out loud that diversity is bad and you should only hire people who look like you, which he says explicitly in the book. But at the same time, like, this is kind of a mainstream or at least was at the time a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. Like John Doerr, who was one of the most respected venture capitalists, he gives like this first big investment in Google. He like kind of shepherds YouTube, all of these tech companies that we know well, he's like the godfather of. He was quoted as kind of notoriously saying that, I think he called it pattern recognition, that the best founders were

young white men who dropped out from college. It's a crazy thing to say out loud, but it's just to say that something that I think is really important to keep in mind is that Peter Thiel both represents this far right fringe of Silicon Valley, but also Silicon Valley. Yes, absolutely. I think partly because in the 2000s, Google was very successful and Obama got elected in 2008 and embraced the technology industry. And this kind of narrative settled in of Silicon Valley as being essentially like a progressive industry. And it's true. Like there are some, there are people in tech who are, are progressives or would identify that way. But the industry like has this entirely different thread, a very conservative thread. You know, it's, it comes, it's an industry that was born

in the military industrial complex who many of, you know, there have been prominent tech Republicans forever. And I think Thiel, now Thiel represents a kind of a twist on that because he's not, there was sort of like a general kind of like libertarian thrust to Silicon Valley politics. And he is not exactly in a libertarian. He's more like a hard right, a nationalist, populist, whatever you want to call it. He's Trumpy. And that's new. But yes, as you said, a lot of these values are really embedded in the culture of the technology industry. And Thiel wrote this book, The Diversity Myth, in the mid-'90s.

And he came back and wrote a business book that was very successful. Zero to one. Zero to one. Yeah, and it argues essentially – it attempts to sort of – there's a lot of interesting and provocative stuff. It was very popular among founders, but it does suggest that you want companies where everyone kind of thinks the same. You want ultra-powerful chief executives. And it's got a lot of ideas that I think, number one, are, I don't know, questionable as business advice. But that also, if you, could be taken into weird places if you so choose to. And certainly people have.

Yeah, Zero to One is one of those books that at the time was greeted as this like brilliant business book. And I like, I went to work at one point at a media startup and we were all told that this was one of like two or three books that we had to read to understand startup culture. But if you go back and read it now,

understanding, or at least I understanding Peter Thiel and who he is better, there's some scary stuff in there. And it's also just like an incredibly important book for understanding what tech and Silicon Valley was going to become, because of course, what the title refers to, zero to one, is that you see the thing that he's saying you should do as a tech startup founder, is that you should go to some market that doesn't exist and that you should go from, you know, it's zero because there is no service that lets you order taxis on your phone. And then you invent, you're the first person who invents that and you control 100% of the market. It's a pro, overtly a pro-monopoly book, which certainly puts him at

odds with, you know, our girl, Lena Kahn. Well, it's also, I mean, to me, like the central point of zero to one and kind of like the, probably like the most important part of Peter Thiel's ideology and a lot of the ideology of Silicon Valley over the last couple of decades is that people who succeed do so

because they break the rules, because they do not follow the consensus viewpoint. And whether that consensus viewpoint is unspoken, just a cultural norm that you're breaking, or whether it is an explicit law, like you cannot operate a car service, an unlicensed car service in our city. And his idea is, it's not just that it's acceptable if a startup maybe doesn't follow all the rules. I think most people kind of believe that. That small companies, you're talking about a three-person business, they're not going to be as good at compliance as a gigantic corporate law firm.

That's, I think, somewhere close to conventional wisdom. Thiel's arguing, though, that it's a moral imperative. That you should break the rules, that if we just listened to what we as a society have agreed on, then that is a bad thing. We will get stagnation. And he thinks stagnation is the worst possible thing. And you can understand why that is an interesting, provocative idea. But it also is incredibly anti-democratic. Like a lot of these rules, like, like some rules are good and some rules are bad, but like a lot of rules are rules because the majority of people agreed on them. And because after much consideration or whatever,

we've decided that like, you know, we want people who are driving around in, in cars in our cities to, to have some oversight or whatever it is. And just sort of unilaterally saying like, all of this is bad has a lot of implication. I think it helps explain like a lot of the ways in which Silicon Valley sort of, you know, at least from a critic's point of view, got out of control during the, you know, 2010s. Something that I also read into his tech worldview and like what he was writing into Zero to One is both like you said that in order to succeed, you have to break the rules. But also that if you are successful, if your business does better, that means that you are inherently better and that your ideas are inherently superior. And it's this kind of social Darwinian might makes right that it's one thing if you're talking about, like, you know,

your food delivery platform outcompetes the other ones, but it's another thing if you're talking about, like, okay, well, if you can suppress the will of demographics that you don't like at the polling place, then that means that you are better and that it's right that you ruled unilaterally. Yeah, I mean, my, like, my take on it, reading it, is that he's saying that these, like, technologists are, like, are superior in every way.

Right, yes. And that, like, essentially, like, these people who are building the future are superior, are morally superior. Like, we need to just, like, the world would be a better place if we got out of their way. And the rest of the people who aren't that. And, like, you know, and then we would, you know, then we would cure cancer and live forever or whatever, you know, have super fast planes or something. But, but, but, you know, like that's a convenient worldview for a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Yes. It's sort of like, if you're not Peter Thiel, it's not so great for you, but if you are Peter Thiel, it's a, it's a, it's a wonderful worldview. And I do think,

you know, what Thiel understood and understood like very early was that there is this kind of – it's not – Silicon Valley is a business thing, but it's also sort of – there are social movement aspects to it. There are these young – large numbers of like young men in particular, but some women as well, who read that book, Zero to One, as a manual, as like a self-help book. And it's basically telling you that you, disaffected young person, can become rich and famous by following none of the rules. Like, you can become Peter Thiel. Like, you can have total autonomy, total freedom. And I think it sort of like helps explain like at least some corners of kind of like

the online MAGA world, right? Like these, he understood that this was a powerful thing and attempted to tap into it. And since then other figures have also tried. There are questions about just how big it is though, and just how politically valuable it will be. Let me ask you about when he first started to rise as an ideological figure just within Silicon Valley before he gets involved

in national politics. So like you mentioned, he moves to Silicon Valley in the late 90s. He gets involved in a series of startups, some of them PayPal, Facebook, of course, become enormously successful. He also founds the analytics firm Palantir, which continues to outsource to the military and intelligence agencies. And obviously he became very rich, but of course, a lot of tech investors in this period became very rich. So what was it about Peter Thiel that he was starting to become more than just like one of the other rich founders, but someone who was also kind of a like ideological lodestone in the Valley? Well, you said something like this earlier in the conversation, but I do think what his, the sort of genius, if you want to call it that, of the way Thiel has approached his career is combining money and ideology. Like understanding that money, that ideology can be a

valuable way to make money. And that money can also advance an ideology. And a lot of folks in Silicon Valley, especially back then, it was very fashionable to be like, oh, I don't care about, I'm apolitical or something like that. And I think a lot of time that's just a front or whatever, and it has to do with the, I don't know, like the culture of the place. But Thiel, you know, PayPal, which was online payments, that had an ideological component. You know, the idea, PayPal was framed explicitly as a libertarian technology. I mean, if you go back and read how Peter Thiel was talking about PayPal in the late 90s, early 2000s, talking about it the way that kind of like extreme Bitcoin people talk about. Like this will be a way for people to avoid the controls of governments. Um, and later, you know, Palantir, uh, Palantir was, was a business.

It was a software company, you know, for the, for, for military applications, but it had a political, he was, he was, he, it was formed after 9-11 at a time when, um, when there was a lot of excitement about data mining and so on in a sense that, that, you know, uh, we'd gone wrong by like failing to, to do better surveillance of, of, of terrorists that were in the United States. And so like it, it, it had a political component. And so like he's, that I think is, is one area where he has been very successful. The other thing is like this, the, the Peter Thiel style of contrarianism, which is kind of like, you know, at times it can, it can feel like dorm room type thinking where you just like

some, once one person says one thing, you just say the other, you know, um, that has, that can work in it, in an industry like tech, especially in venture capital because venture capitalists, they make a lot of very small bets, and the idea is a few of them pay off. So you don't really necessarily care if one of your crazy ideas turns out to be a crazy idea as long as a small percentage of them actually pay off. And, and then, you know, and then the other thing is like, he's, he was very good at sort of like use it, taking these assets, the, his success, um, at PayPal, his network, this, this like incredibly, um, influential group of people that then went out into the world. And then his kind of like, his, like his somewhat modest profile as a political thinker, or as he likes to call it, a public intellectual, and sort of leverage that and build that into a brand

and turn that into a thing with a following and with a best-selling book and this venture capital firm that he started, a founder's fund that sort of attempted to push these out further, and then also to benefit from it financially. So there is one idea of his in particular that you often hear said is his scariest or at least his most important, which is the idea that he opposes democracy. He once wrote very famously, or infamously I should say,

quote, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. He said that society should not be trusted to the unthinking demos, which is a Greek term for citizens or voters. So is this a case where you think he's just being a provocateur and he's saying things to get a rise out of people? Or do you think he genuinely feels that we would be better off without democracy? I think he genuinely has, I think he genuinely, I think it's real. Like, I mean, like, again, I don't know that he wants, he lives in the United States. You know, he, he has citizenship in other countries. He certainly could leave. So like my assumption is, and he said this recently on a podcast, like he's, you know, conflicted about staying in the United States or whatever. Like, I'm not, I'm not saying he's like, uh, he's like, uh, totally

opposed to, you know, to, to existing as a citizen in our, in our democracy. But I do think that, uh, that he, that, that the quote you just read is compatible with many of the choices that he's made with the, with the core things that he's advocated for. Like if you're, if you want as Peter Thiel does, you know, the future to happen as quickly as possible, like you want to have like radical expansion of drug discovery or like, um, you know, some people are going to get hurt and, and like democracy gets in the way of that. And, and so I, and, and, and so I think, yeah, I mean, he, he thinks genuinely that, that, that democracy as practiced is a constraint. And again, you know, he's a provocateur. And so you,

you always have to be a little careful about these things, but I do think, you know, you, you see that in some of his actions and in, some of his actions and not just in his own actions, but in the actions of many of the people with whom he's been closely associated. Silicon Valley since at least the early 90s that says that, you know, like you were saying, we in Silicon Valley, we are the leaders of the future. We are inventing all these great companies. The economy is doing poorly and we're doing great. That means that we are inherently smarter and better. And, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg, when he founds Facebook, he talks about it and he's just a kid. So who knows how much he's actually thinking this through, but he talks about it as replacing all of the old institutions for how medians and society and government were supposed to work. And there's this idea that, like, we are out here inventing the future and we're going to be in charge of it because we're smarter.

And maybe in some ways, Peter Thiel is the only one who's brave enough to say, and that means it will be in place of all those idiots out there outside of Silicon Valley having their vote. Yeah, I mean, I think, like I said, I think that a lot of these ideas are more, like the sort of Peter Thiel worldview is much more mainstream in tech than you'd realize, and including is sort of mainstream among people, even some people who are active in Democratic party politics. You know, Thiel has this like longtime association with this guy, Reid Hoffman, who's been a founder of LinkedIn, is a prominent Dem donor. And I think when you kind of look close, Hoffman believes a lot of the same things that Peter Thiel believes, but has chosen to, you know, I don't know, I'm not saying that Hoffman

also is opposed to American democracy. But when you look at what he's saying about tech companies and how they should be regulated and so on, like, a lot of it's kind of the same. But he is advocating – he's attempting to take – you know, pick a different channel for influence. And Thiel, particularly, you know, once he started backing Trump, has, you know, made his choice. Like, he's going to try to influence the Republican party or influence our society from this direction. Right. Yeah. No, no, of course. I think we agree that, that Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg are not going to be leading another January 6th. But I do think about moments like, you know, when Myanmar first opened up and Eric Schmidt from Google went there. And I think that

he really believed that bringing like Google's products and services in place of the old dictatorship, that that was going to be the thing that would like liberate the society. And he wasn't saying, don't worry, Myanmar, you're not going to have voting. You're going to have Google and YouTube. I think he saw them as compatible, but there is a belief that our products and services, everybody should use them. And that will bring us to the enlightenment. And by the way, it will also make all of us rich. This is something that Peter Thiel also talks about, that those two things should not be intentioned, and that if your tech company is making you rich, that means that you are improving humanity.

Yeah. And I also think, you know, when I was writing this book about Thiel, I thought a lot about, I was thinking a lot about the Koch brothers and the success that the Koch brothers had in sort of convincing the world, convincing people on both sides that libertarian values were the way to go. And that – because their influence project was more effective on the right, but I think a lot of people on the left kind of internalized a lot of their ideas that they and their closest to pushing. And I think it's similar with this sort of like idea that rule following and democracy is a problem. Like a lot of Democrats like believe, frankly, that startups should ignore regulation. And like, and everyone for, there's been a real backlash to this over the last few years you know you mentioned lena khan um you know a lot that's happened i think over the last four

years has has pushed back on that but um i think the the just general notion that like tech knows better and that and that we should get out of the way of tech was broadly accepted by by everybody not just by the right not just by the right, not just by libertarians, but by most people. Sure. No, I think that's absolutely true. There was another line from this Peter Thiel 2009 blog post that he wrote where he talks about opposing democracy that I wanted to ask you about because I don't want to say

I don't know what it means because it's very clear what it means, but it really felt to me like, whoa, this came out of nowhere. He says that since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron. Whoa. Teal, after this came out, he wrote this, I'm sure knowing there would be a backlash. This was published by the Cato Institute, and he wrote a follow-up attempting to clarify the comment. And his point, he said, was that he wasn't specifically interested in the, in denying the franchise to women. He was just against voting in general, like that, that, and which is a pretty thin, it's like a pretty thin explanation. I, you know, it, that, that it's not that he wasn't coming at

it from a, a place of sexism. He was coming at it from a place of being against voting which again like i i think it and it's kind of strange at the time that happened people took that explanation i wrote about this people took that explanation basically at face value as if it were just like a totally normal way to to to uh to explain it but you know and especially like in light of the as these beliefs have become more common and had been weaponized to some extent by, you know, by people like Donald Trump, you know, on January 6th or what have you. You know, I think that it bears sort of reevaluating and maybe and asking like it's it's you know, that's, that's a pretty extreme point of view. Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about when, or to my mind, one of the big moments when Peter Thiel started to really push into these more extreme views and at least to my eyes, stake out a set of positions that were pretty far outside of even the kind of the weirdest Silicon Valley beliefs, which is also around the 2000s. He started to become friendly with a guy named Curtis Yarvin,

who is a far-right blogger and programmer, also known by his pseudonym, Minchus Molebug. Can you tell us about Yarvin's beliefs and his connection with Teal? Yes. Yarvin, like you said, he's a blogger and a tech guy. And he, after making a little bit of money during the dot-com boom, started writing this blog. I brought up the dorm room thing. Like, Yarvin is like a very literary, like hyper-literary, hyper-verbal.

Everything is like a thousand different references. And there are all these names, some of which are weird. Anyway, but it's like this – it's like – formalism or neo-reaction. It's essentially arguing that life would be better, our society would be better if we replaced our current democracy with a sort of corporate dictatorship, a dictatorship run by a CEO. And I think Yarvin – and there's lots of stuff that's like pretty odious that he has written over the years, racism and anti-Semitism and, you know, just a lot of extreme, I think, provocation. You know, he's a provocateur, and it's always hard with somebody like that to know, like, are they actually arguing that we want to, you know, replace the United States of America with a, you know, with Eric Schmidt or something? Or is it just, is this just a thought exercise or whatever? But it became, these ideas became very influential in, within Thiel's circle. then teal circle and uh i think teal you can sort of see yarvin's idea show up in this business book this pretty anodyne you know business book that like a lot of people read and like i i have the

harvard business review probably reviewed i i can't remember but like you know that just like totally became like a mainstream way of looking at business but you know teal talks about how um you know there's a section in the book called like Founders as Gods. That's in Thiel's book. And it talks about how the best companies are like dictatorships. And you do see some parallels. Thiel also invested in a company that Yarvin was a co-founder in, has sort of kept him close to many, many folks in Yarvin's network. And now, I mean, you can really see a lot of the ideas that Yarvin has talked about, like coming out of the mouths

of some famous venture capitalists. Mark Andreessen, who's the co-founder of Netscape, major investor, and, you know, and Sachs. And, you know, like he is a, I think in the book, I called him like Thiel's like in-house philosopher or something like that. He's somebody who is like the, you know, an intellectual who Thiel became a patron of, a right-wing intellectual. And he became influential within the kind of far right parts of the conservative movement or the MAGA movement or whatever. And they're also directly connected, right? I mean, it's like as Curtis Yarvin is arguing, we need to quote unquote,

reboot American democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. He's going to Peter Thiel's election watch parties. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They watched the election together. I wrote in the book. And like I said, Thiel invested in Yarvin's company. There may be other financial connections, although I don't know for sure. There's lots of, you know, Yarvin has been prolific over the past decade or so as like a sort of right-wing financier, sort of some sort of strange stuff,

like there was an anti-woke film festival like in New York. Anyway, Teal has co-invested in some of that stuff and I think has introduced Yarvin to people in his circle. And is a connection point between, say, Yarvin and J.D. Vance or Yarvin and some of these other folks. Yarvin, they hang out together. Right. Wow, Yarvin and J.D. Vance or, you know, Yarvin and some of these other folks. Yarvin, they hang out together. Right. Wow, that sounds so fun. So how does Peter Thiel then get involved in national politics?

Because initially, he's not super Trumpy, at least in his, like, kind of involvement in elections, right? Well, Thiel was, like, way back. I think he, you know, he's ambitious. And so he has shifted, you know, he has shifted his ambitions to sort of suit whatever the political moment is. You know, like founding founding Palantir around the time of the Bush, the George W. Bush years like that. I think he was, he was, if you talked to him back then at an official gathering, he would have sounded like a George Bush conservative and has sort of shifted to suit the time. But I will say like, he's been pretty out there for a long time. So like he was, he donated to a pretty hard right immigration, anti-immigration group called Numbers USA, which is very outside the mainstream

back in the 2000s, back in the Bush years when most Republicans and Democrats were talking about comprehensive immigration. George W. Bush was relatively dovish on immigration, and Thiel, I think, was very much outside of that school. He was much more in the kind of like Ron Paul universe. And he gravitated towards Ron Paul initially before supporting Donald Trump. And, you know, in the book, I talk about this, like a lot of people who are like really excited about Paul, because he had initially in 2016 gotten behind Paul. He funded this PAC. And a lot of the paul people were like really excited because they thought like we've got like we've got it like we finally have like a like a billionaire who's gonna like who gets it and and what they realized like at the end of it

is that no like he just saw what he saw was not that he wanted that like ron paul was right about everything but that there was this like social movement, this like the sort of like throw a bomb into the entire system thing. And that Donald Trump was a much better representative of that. Thiel got behind Trump relatively early, you know, before many of the,

before many people like either in mainstream politics or business supported him. And like, that's why when he endorsed Trump in 2016 at the Republican national convention, like that was a big deal because he was like the only, the only like sort of normal business person. And at the time, totally. And at the time, like, it was really interesting. Cause I'd been covering, like, I'm a tech reporter. That's, that's where I, that's how I came at this. And it was like, everyone was so like, how could Peter Thiel, he's a, he's an immigrant, he's gay. Um,

he's, he started all these like companies that are all about like, uh, doing commerce in different countries that are all about free trade. Um, like how is he getting behind this like proud Luddite? Like he had, he had said all these things about how, about how Donald Trump was like, you know, it was bad and distasteful. And I think that the reasons are, are like twofold. Like one is that Thiel's sort of view of stagnation that like, there's, there's something wrong with the world and we need to, we need to like get out of the way of technology so they can fix it. That's like very compatible withGA. It's a similarly kind of like – even though Thiel's a technologist, it's a reactionary ideology. It's saying life was better in the 1950s and 60 that the, that these kind of like shared cultural taboos about around like race and gender and stuff are like bad. And Trump was going around breaking those. So, I mean, like, I think actually he, his, his worldview is, is like pretty

compatible with, with Trumpism. And, and, and in that way way, it was like a revelation for both of them because it became a pretty important alliance in 2016. Yeah, that's a great point that the way that he had approached startups in Zero to One, where it's like you take an old industry and you completely destroy it and you replace it with your startup, that that is kind of what he saw Trump is doing with politics, that he's going to completely tear down the institutions, the political establishment, and create this new order in its place. Like you said, it was a really big deal that he endorsed him. He spoke at the RNC that year. He gave him a bunch of money, although what would turn out to be a relatively small sum

compared to what he would end up giving later. And I think I saw it got reported that he even had a temporary office in the Trump Tower to help pick out people to staff the administration. Yeah, after Trump was elected, Thiel had an important role, was on the transition committee, brought in a bunch of his close associates, including Blake Masters, who would later, you know, run for Senate, was part of that, that cohort that went into Trump Tower. You know, the interesting thing about that donation, he made it after the Access Hollywood tape. So like, it wasn't just the money. It was that Thiel was, was one of, was really like the first prominent person to just be like, it's okay. You know, it's okay that Trump said this. Because if you remember at the time, like a lot of Republicans went and condemned it

and so on, and Thiel condemned it in his own way, but he sort of spun it. And he gave this like, he had this like press conference where he, right around the time that he made this million dollar donation, where he essentially said like, I find a lot of this stuff distasteful, but Trump is our guy. And the, and the quote he used, which was repeated over and over again, which he actually cribbed from an Atlantic story, but was that you should, you should, we need to take Trump. He never, I don't know that he ever claimed it was an original line, but you know, it was, he didn't net coin it, but it, but it became, it was attributed to him.

And it was, you should not take Trump, literally, you should take him seriously. So it's like, who cares if he says a couple of weird things about, you know, women, like on the big stuff, he's right. That was how Thiel reframed it. And I think that helped like create a permission structure for a lot of people. has since like become part of like the narrative around Trump that you just sort of like, if you support him, you, you forgive some of the weird stuff or the sexism or the racism or whatever, because like, and this is how a lot of people in kind of like, um, on wall street and business and so on have kind of, um, since rationalized their support. Right. Yeah. I looking back, I really did not appreciate how important Peter Thiel was during the 2016 election, but it really comes through.

Hey, folks, we'll be back to my interview with Max Chafkin in a second. But first, I want to do everything you possibly can to make sure Peter Thiel doesn't get his way and his weird-ass protege J.D. Vance never makes it to the White House. Now is the time to volunteer. As we've said and continue to say, this election is going to be incredibly close and will come down to the margins. That's why we are very excited to announce that Vote Save America has set a big goal, 75,000 volunteer signups for their 2024 Organize or Else program by September 17th, which is National Voter Registration Day. Mark your calendars. Vote Save America provides the highest impact ways you can take action right now to support down ballot races in must-win

districts and build momentum for the Harris-Walls ticket. To put this in perspective, in 2020, Biden won by just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The margin of victory is tiny, but if we recruit enough volunteers, we can close the gap, secure a win for Kamala. You can help Vote Save America hit that if you volunteered with Vote Save America before, still make sure to sign up for this 2024 program so you're provided the latest actions. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash 2024 to sign up. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com. And this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Now back to the interview. So after Trump is elected, Thiel has a falling out with Trump as everybody who came into office with Trump does. Very common story. And then during 2020,

he kind of found this new rising far right star to back who was chris kobach so tell us about teal and kobach how they got linked up and what happened yeah kobach had been involved with that immigration group that i mentioned so they they had known each other for a very long time kobach was like teal teal the the the immigration stuff it's kind of weird because he's an immigrant and and right and silicon and you know silicon valley you, is an industry that where the, many of the founders are immigrants, many of the, a lot of the labor force, um, uh, was born in different countries. But yeah, I mean, he, he, Kobach was like a hard liner on this stuff. And I think Teal, the funny thing is like after, as, as the Trump presidency wound down, everyone sort of assumed that Thiel had backed away from Trump because he – and Thiel really just said nothing about it or gave very few interviews.

Everyone assumed he backed away because Trump was too crazy or too hardline or something, the kind of thing you might hear if you talk to one of the more one of the more like mainstream business people who are involved with, with Trump. But it was, it was really the opposite. It was that Trump was ineffective that he had, that he was not, in other words, not hardline enough. And like, in the book, I talk about this, like one of the reasons Teal kind of crashed out of, of the presidency and, and like had a falling out with Trump after the transition is because he was like pushing all these things that like, even the, even the most ideological people in the Trump administration thought were too extreme. Steve Bannon was like, it was just too crazy, you know? And it's like, if Steve Bannon is saying something is too crazy, um, you know, that's whatever, like that,

it tells you something. And so I think what with Kobach, um, and then later with masters and Vance, he was looking for people who were, and the phrase that I, what I heard when I was writing the book and reporting the book, and I started, um, in like 2019 was like Trumpism beyond Trump, like somebody like people who are going to be advocates for this worldview but are not going to be tied up in the cult of personality because from the – and like – which is kind of – you could argue and I think make a pretty compelling argument that there's no such thing as Trumpism beyond Trump. But I think – but there are – but the ideology was very exciting to Thiel, whereas the cult of personality I think was like a less – wasn't the draw for him. It was like breaking norms, hardline nationalism, the kind of authoritarian impulses to some extent that Trump embodied, not the fact that he was like this cool New York billionaire, like with his name on a lot of buildings. Right.

And if you look at Kobach, the things he's associated with, it gives you some pretty big hints to where he's going, right? Kobach recommends at one point that the Trump administration start a Muslim registry, which is pretty terrifying. He's a big like, quote unquote, election fraud guy, which I think you could read as saying that he basically wants to, you know, invalidate votes that don't go his way. And then Thiel executes this on this to an even greater degree, a much greater degree after the 2020 election, which he mostly sits out. And then in 2022, in those midterms, he spends $32 million, which is, I would argue, quite a lot,

over 16 different candidates. So it kind of looks to me like he's trying to set up this Peter Thiel Republican caucus. And a lot of them are primary challengers, which is to say his goal is not just to get Republicans elected, but to change the Republican Party. So when you look at these 16 people who he's backing, which include, of course, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, as you said, like what what is this kind of teal coalition look like that he's trying to put together? What do they represent? So I think a lot of that a lot of it is like the sort of ideological values associated with Donald Trump. So hardline immigration, um, uh, like, like cultural conservatism, like no, you know, got to stop the wokes or whatever. Um, the, the sort

of like extreme version of the anti-political correctness position that Teal laid out, you know, way back in the, in the eighties and nineties, um, and youth. I mean, you know, Teal is somebody who wants, you know, like I don't think it's an accident that like the candidates he's backing were younger, much younger. You know, Blake Masters, he's a little, I mean, he may be 40. I think he's like in his late 30s. You know, Vance is not super old. Kobach, I think, is a little older than those guys,

but certainly, you know, of a different generation. And I think the idea initially, really, was to kind of keep the ideology and ease out the man. Because back when he started that, back when he started this push, really, Trump was at his lowest point. You know, post-January 6th, like, you know, it did not look like Trump was going to be able to make a political comeback. And I think what became clear in 22 is that there's no version of that,

of pushing that ideology without Trump. And you had this kind of, during the 22 race, you had kind of an alliance of convenience form between Trump and Thiel, where Thiel made these kind of extreme candidates who, as you said, deny the election results, build the wall, own the libs, like that whole thing. And then Thiel gave them money, made them viable, and then Trump got behind them. And in doing so, managed to kind of edge out a bunch of more sort of establishment candidates. And the big story back then was kind of like, it wasn't Democrats versus Republicans. It was like Mitch McConnell and the kind of like more moderate, more electable type of Republicans versus the election deniers. And Teal, versus the, you know, election deniers and, and Teal, you know, I think, I don't know, I don't think he, he initially set out to do this, but it ended up being a part of Trump's

essential, like essentially like his return to influence in the Republican party, because it became clear that like, you couldn't win a primary race without getting his endorsement. Um, and so, and like, so Trump got behind Vance and Teal helped pay the bills. And the same thing with, with like masters who was, who is like, you know, Vance and Teal were not that close.

Blake masters was really close to Peter Teal. He had worked with him for like, you know, his whole entire life. Yeah. Masters lost in Arizona to, to Mark Kelly, you know,

an incumbent Vance won a much easier race. Like once Vance won his primary, the race was going to be solidify Trump as like, you know, the main attraction and Thiel as like a crucial financier or as, or a string puller behind the scenes. And Thiel is also the one who first introduces J.D. Vance and Trump and also helps to kind of clean up the relationship after Vance had called Trump like a dictator, Hitler and something, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thiel brought him to meet with Trump and, you know, became, yeah, became that connection point. The person essentially who not only vouched for Vance, but like I said, made Vance viable. Because like Vance, very little experience, you know, not a huge resume beyond like a best-selling book and a lot of media hits where he'd insulted Trump and Trump's followers.

So on the face of it, made him one of the Republican Party's rising stars. So there's something seemingly kind of odd in a lot of the people who Thiel backs in the party, in that they tend to be some of the most vocal Republican Party critics of the tech industry, right? J.D. Vance, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley. And that seems on its face surprising given that Thiel is, of course, himself of the tech industry. So can you explain what's happening there? I mean, it's odd and it's hard to reconcile to some extent, although let me suggest a few reasons why. So Thiel himself has been a critic of the tech industry. And he wrote this book, Zero to One, that you mentioned that was sort of all about

monopolies. And you could read it as a how-to manual where you're like, you should have a monopoly just like Google does. But Thiel was also pointedly calling Google a major competitor to Facebook and a factor in Thiel's professional life, a rival essentially to Thiel. He's sort of calling out a rival. a lot of what he's done is attempted to train regulatory fire and cultural anxiety and whatever else at his business rivals. Later at the National Conservatism Conference, this is like an annual gathering of the kind of like MAGA. It's like an intellectual part of the MAGA movement. Yarvin goes to these events. Anyway, Thiel gave a speech where he says that Google has been infiltrated

by the Chinese Communist Party and should be investigated. Kind of implied that the, he said the CIA should investigate this and not be, I forget the exact quote, but it's like, and not be super gentle or something, which like, you know, I think he was attempting to be provocative, but he's explicitly attacking a rival. And so I think part of it is that.

And I also think that Teal has like legitimate concerns, cultural concerns, not legitimate in the sense that I endorse them. I understand. Legitimate in the sense that they are actual beliefs that he feels. Yeah, about the way that like these big social networks, including Facebook, which he invested in, kind of like enforce cultural norms and so on.

Like it kind of goes against his idea that you should break the rules because they sort of enforce their own rules. So I think it's like a combination of those two things. But I also, and I also think even among these sort of teal acolytes who sound very like anti-tech, if you actually like look at what they want to do, it's a lot of things that would benefit

at least big sectors of their network in Silicon Valley. You're hearing this phrase more and more when you talk to conservative donors, but they talk about little tech versus big tech. They want to crack down on Apple and Google, but they want to protect the startups because that's how they make their money. That's where their money is. Right. Yeah.

Also, J.D. Vance is against regulating crypto, which is a strange view for an Ohio populace. It doesn't really make any sense. I don't think there are a lot of, like, autoworkers or whatever who want to, you know, who think it's, like, really important that the SEC not classify Ethereum as a security. But, like, there is a constituency that does care about that.

And that happens to be, like, J.D. Vance's donor base. And not just that, but like the world, he's not really a venture capitalist in the same way that Peter Thiel is, but it is kind of the world that he comes from. So like, I think when you look closely like at a lot of these guys who are even like, you know, raising grievances about the tech industry,

it's pretty careful. And it's often done in a way to protect their interest with an acknowledgement that some regulation is coming. Yeah, that has always been kind of my theory. Although with Thiel, it does seem like there is a, as you said, earnest ideological belief there too. And he left Facebook's board, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago. He said, I would rather have QAnon and Pizzagate than a ministry of truth, which is yikes. Let me ask you about Thiel's relationship with Trump right now, because it was reported in a few places that last April, and that he's refusing to donate to Trump and he will vote for him only reluctantly, even though he now has his protege

on the ticket. Like, why do you think he's still holding out? So there was a break. My understanding, anyway, is that there was a break in 22, partly because Masters and Vance would not go full, like were like not wholehearted enough. Trump felt that they, and you can see some of this, there was a documentary of Masters and there's a call between him and Trump where Trump is sort of like chastising him for like not being like enough of an election denier. He's like only, they're kind of going with election denialism light versus the sort of more muscular.

I think Kerry Lake, who's a political rival to Blake Masters, was more enthusiastic about election denial. They're both kind of election deniers, but they're gradients. And I think, and then the other thing is, these candidates, like Teal didn't have a great, these candidates didn't have great results. Like, Thiel, Masters lost.

J.D. Vance won, but he wildly underperformed the Republican governor. You know, he did not win by a huge margin. Like, I think, you know, I think Teal may have felt frustrated or whatever. You know, a lot of these Silicon Valley guys, even the, even the rich guys, like they tend to be pretty cheap. And so, so like, so like spending a huge sum of money and then not, and not seeing returns, you know, that, that is motivating. And then I also think that Teal, you know, there's, there's a family component. Teal, I wrote about this in the book, Teal's kids. I think in some ways he just doesn't, he stopped wanting to be in the limelight.

On the other hand, it's not like he stopped being influential. I think he's still, despite the fact that he hasn't written like a check to a super, a reportable campaign contribution written like a check to a super, a reportable campaign contribution, like a check to Trump or to a Trump aligned super PAC, I would not assume that he has stopped donating money to Trump aligned causes. Um, and I think he is still,

um, I think he was active in, in, in helping to get Vance on the ticket and, and, and advancing his interest. I mean, the weird thing that's happened is like Teal's, Teal's whole, Teal always seemed kind of like a little bit embarrassed to be a Trump supporter. And, and, and like this new group of Silicon Valley Trump supporters of which like Elon Musk is probably like the loudest and, you know, maybe best example, like there's no embarrassment. There's no like seriously, not literally, right? They seem prepared to take Trump, you know, literally as well as seriously and just like to totally embrace MAGAism. And that I think is, that is the thing about this election that to me is so strange and

jarring is that like back when I was writing the book, Teal during his like Trump support got kind of close to the alt-right and was having meetings with various alt-right figures that was like in secret. And like, it wasn't like, he wasn't like out and out endorsing like, or openly interacting with like white supremacists or anything like that. There was just a suggestion, maybe he had met with some, you know, edgy people. Whereas like Elon Musk is just like tweeting that stuff out. I mean, it's, it's just like an incredible shift. Like there's no, you know, like, like, like that's the thing that has been most amazing to watch is just how the Overton window has shifted in Silicon Valley towards like an open embrace of that this stuff rather than just being kind of secretive about it.

Yeah, right. And it being not just Peter Thiel and not even just Elon Musk, but like you mentioned, Andreessen and Horowitz, who are two huge, huge figures in the valley with a ton of money who have come out very pro-Trump. And I mean, who knows what will happen after this election, but I would certainly have my eyes on them as influential figures in the party going forward. Well, Max, thank you so much for coming on. It was a great and terrifying and fascinating to chat about Peter Thiel, someone who I know so much more about than, no, I would say I wanted to know a lot about him. I think it's important that we know about him, but I really appreciate you coming on to chat. Thanks for having me, Max.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

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