Panic World - New York hipsters and the antichrist

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Today we’re talking about billionaire Peter Thiel and his many fascinating, varied interests. You might know him for secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, but did you know that he is also pretty interested in New York’s comedy scene, its hipsters, and something about a biohacked Olympics? What is going on here? Claire Parker joins us to delve into the concept of “Thiel Bucks,” or the money he allegedly gives to willingly reactionary influencers and media figures.Our guest is comedian Claire Parker. You can find her on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube at @clairethescare, and check out her podcast Good Noticings wherever you listen and watch them. Her debut comedy special “Clare Parker’s 32” is also out now on YouTube. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership for just $5 a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you listen on Apple Podcasts, you can now also find us on COURIER+! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Friends, hello, my name is Mike Regnetta. I'm the host of a podcast called NeverPost, which is about the internet. Or really, it's about the world and why the world is the way that it is because of the internet. We ask big questions like, why do disgraced politicians join Cameo? Why is it scary and satisfying to block someone? Would you ever create an AI voice clone of a deceased loved one in a show that you don't need to be terminally online to enjoy? But it doesn't hurt. NeverPost is at neverpo.st and wherever you find podcasts.

Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful, most influential people alive. So why does he care about New York hipsters and what does that have to do with the Antichrist? You would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitant. Yes? I don't know. So today we're going to do our best to avoid a lawsuit because we were talking about someone today who loves lawsuits. Claire, I want to read you a quote to start, okay?

So imagine that you were talking to a friend, and this is something your friend told you, all right? When Charles Manson took LSD in the late 60s, and the murder started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an anti-hero in a Deutschevinsky book, and everything was permitted. Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson, but in my telling of the history,

everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson, and the hippies took over. Does that feel like a normal thing that someone who was normal would say or think? I guess I don't even know what the person's saying. That's a great point. That's a great point. That's exactly right.

To parse through. No, that's exactly right. That is a quote from Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, who's the subject of our episode today. Oh, good. Yeah. My name is Ryan Broderick.

With me, as always, is my personal surveillance state, my producer Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds or culture and eventually reality. And joining us today is Claire Parker from The Good Noticing Podcast. How you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

Oh, my God. I'm excited to be here and hopefully be sued soon. Yeah. No, thank you. I'm excited to see you listed as, you know, one of the defendants. No, I'll be a plaintiff. What you don't know is that Peter Thiel is my uncle and I stand with him. Okay, cool.

I think we should respect his visions. Well, so I want to start here. So you're a community. comedian, you work in New York, how would you sort of describe the difference nightlife pre and post-COVID in terms of vibes, I guess? Is there a difference? The nightlife. Well, because I do stand up, I feel like I was never like having fun.

I was always just in basements and Queens and like on the subway. And I've never been a fun person. I've always been like I'm funny. I'm not fun. So it's hard for me to say what the difference in nightlife has been. But I feel like. Well, I would say comedy counts as nightlife. Right.

The comedy, yeah. So I think the problem is like the comedy I grew up with or the comedy I came up with that a lot of that died. A lot of the venues died. And now there's new stuff. And so for me, the difference is now I have like 24-year-olds being like, are you just starting comedy? And I'm like, no.

Okay. Well, that actually kind of gets us close to what we're talking about, which is that one of the things that we'll be talking about today is Peter Thiel's interest in New York Nightlife and New York comedy and sort of New York media in general. He's interested in New York comedy. He's very interested in culture in ways that are confusing. and honestly, like, shouldn't matter to a guy this powerful. And we want to try and see if we can better understand

why he cares about the things he cares about. For instance, hipsters in New York. What's the deal? I feel like he's just this, like, evil gay man that I see on Twitter, right? Like, he's always saying things. And I think he, I feel like I haven't looked into him a ton. But I think he was, like, the first cresting, like, the white gays.

They've reached a parody of sorts where they're actually just as evil as a, as a straight white. I feel like I'm always seeing him say these insane things of being like, of course, the idiots must be murdered. And that is bad, but I'm the devil. Right.

So I like it. Yes, he's a great summary. Very concerned with the Antichrist. That's true. Yeah. Right. And I feel like,

but he also, I feel like a lot of like what I perceive as the bad actors in our world kind of have this hubris of, but I'm doing it big for God. Like I'm on the right side. We just have like a difference of ideas of how to, make the world a better place. I've always had this idea that he's like, no, the world's going to be worse, but I'm going to

be the best. Yes. And he has a lot of crazy ideas about like what people should be doing with their bodies. He was the one who wanted to start a biohacking Olympics where you could basically just do whatever you wanted to yourself and compete in it. And then compete. And apparently it is happening next month in Las Vegas. So it is set for May.

It's not if you don't know about it. Do you what I mean? And I think that that's why it's not. the Olympics. The thing about the Olympics is we've all heard of that. And so if we just close our ears, then it can't be the Olympics. Yes. It's just a thing for freaks in the desert. Yeah. Well, it's rich people love, you know, watching people compete. They, they, you know, and the rich guys that we have now really want to create like disgusting steroid influence muscle men for some reason. So like that's very hot right now, I think. So it makes sense. That's just a very

current example of his eccentric interest and investments that might seem random or beneath him, but I think we will discover today that's not the case. But Peter Till has been around for a while. We're going to start our story in 1996. Peter Thiel and David Sacks publish a book called The Diversity Myth, a book about how what they're calling at the time, affirmative action is bad and they focus on their experiences at Stanford. Two years later, he found PayPal. PayPal was Peter Thiel's idea of how to

get around like banking regulations around the world. PayPal is then sold to eBay in 2002 and Teal founds Palantir. And then Partifle, right? Which is another sort of surveillance state? I keep hearing that. Is Partifle owned by Palantir? I keep hearing that. No, it was started by former Palantir employees.

Ah. I have a better, what if we used bomb technology to force you to go to my birthday? I see. Yes. Yes. I'm seeing this right here. It is founded by Joy Tao and Shreya Murthy, who both met at Palanty. at Palantir. Wow. Okay. Great. Well, Peter Thiel was also interested in other forms of surveillance

because in 2004, he's the first outside investor for Facebook. He gives him half a million dollars and he becomes very wealthy. And then in 2015, just to kind of finish his LinkedIn profile here, Peter Thiel is one of the founding investors of Open AI. So he is very much the godfather of our entire moment. And yeah, and then by 2023, he's talking about the antichrist all the time. So, like, how familiar are you with like the kind of like tech bro libertarian guy who's like always trying to like make a sovereign country that he's like the king of? Like do you know about this whole scene? I'm on, I'm one of the last people on Twitter. So I think I like see it from a distance. I see the cryptocurrency. I read careless people. I feel like I understand this idea that like they used to

think they could like use technology to hack the world to make it better. And now they're like, actually, what if I was the philosopher king and everyone had to do indoor rock climbing? Right, right. Peter Thiel gave a lot of money for seesteading and these other weird projects. And this is something we see across this whole career, you know, pragmatic investments and him being a goofy asshole. In 2005, Peter Thiel is introduced to Eliza Yudkowski, who's like this crazy AI evangelist

blogger that everyone is like sort of obsessed, you know, that world is obsessed with right now. This is a really good description of Peter Thiel's personality from a piece and wired last year. They write, Peter Thiel had been long been obsessed with the possibility that one day computers would become smarter than humans and unleash a self-reinforcing cycle of like exponential technological progress, an old science fiction trope often referred to as a singularity. And then this AI guy, Yukowski, began reading science fiction at age seven and writing at age nine. At 11, he scored a 1410 on the SAT, which I guess is good, right? Who cares?

Can I also say, I've never in my life been like, and how would you stack up against a 10th grader? You know what I mean? But people love their SATs scores. Yeah, I don't remember mine. I don't think it was good, though. I don't. They had just introduced the essay, which I think helped me, like, kind of get some points back. But it was very good.

Well, you're not a sheep. I'm not a sheep. No, I'm an outsider. You're a free thinker. Yeah. And so basically these guys, the Eliza, Cali, Cal, Peter Thiel, all these kind of AI evangelists. They're spending the 2000s, like really obsessing over, you know, what if a supercomputer woke up and became alive and what would that mean? And they're also spending a lot of money on Silicon Valley

projects, kind of building social media. And they're going after kind of what they see is the liberal establishment. You know what's crazy to me about these guys is I saw I robot and I went, that seems about right. Like I'm always interested in these people be like, what would happen if the computers came alive? I'm like, Will Smith already told me. That's right. Why don't you know too? It's not going to be good. They're not going to be happy with us.

That movie is better than it should be, actually. It just seemed to hold true. Yeah. And also like I don't care. Like I don't worry about it. Like it's not something on my mind. Well, it's like, well, don't make it happen. Right.

Also that. It seems like a problem that we could just prevent by not doing it. Well, I guess like I suppose the unspoken thing there is like if they're like if we don't do it, someone else will, right? But even all the way back in the mid-2000s, Peter Thiel is sort of like having a tough time with the sort of wider world and their sort of perception of him. And one of the one of the sort of inciting incidents, I would say, between Peter Thiel and the quote-unquote liberal establishment would be in 2007 when Gawker outed Teal in a piece

that was titled Peter Thiel is totally gay people. This I knew. And then he comes back at them with whole. Hulk Hogan, right? Imagine a proxy word with Hulk. I know. So five years later, Gawker publishes the Hulk Hogan sex tape. The tape was filmed in 2006.

They posted on their website, Hogan sues them, and Peter Thiel funds the lawsuit. And thanks to the Department of Justice and the release of the Epsine files a couple months ago, we now know that Jeffrey Epstein offered to pay for that lawsuit. Fun fact. He's also talking at length to Peter Thiel during this period of time. They were real close. What else were they talking about? What were they talking about?

They were excited. So, okay, I'm trying to remember my extensive knowledge of the Epsom files at this point. Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Ebson were very excited about Brexit in 2016. They really wanted to sort of like watch the UK get demolished so they could get lower interest rates. Peter Thiel. I covered the Prince Andrew and he was like the special envoy. I remember those emails where they were like just. You can get really great deals when everything is collapsing.

There was a real sense of if we break it, we can buy it for pennies on the dollar and then rebuild it as our own. That's exactly it. And Peter Thiel appears to have visited Zorro Ranch several times and was sort of like an intermediary for like more of Silicon Valley. Like Epstein would meet Teal and then met other people in Silicon Valley through him. And then Jeffrey Epstein also connected the former prime minister of Israel with Peter Thiel and Palantir. So there seems to be sort of a lot of that going up. on at this point in time. Were you a Gawker reader, Claire?

Vagely. I feel like I was always aware of Gawker. I feel like I knew about it from like the comedy standpoint as terms of like people were like being funny. And less I think the personnel weren't interesting to me. I think I was in high school at the time. So the idea of like Peter Thiel being gay was a really crossing my mind. But I think maybe making fun of more like the celebrities and the sightings.

I know they were always doing like kind of like man on the streets here is like Alec Baldwin. You know what I mean? I feel like maybe the more pop culture filtered down. But I was definitely aware of it. as like a tent pole of funny blogging from New York, which I think I then was trying to, I was always, I was thrust into the world after Gawker. Oh, okay. Were you from?

I'm from New Jersey, but I would have gone, I would have graduated from college in like 2014. So I don't know when Gawker went down, but I think its heyday was a little bit predated me. Yeah, you would have entered New York like right as Gawker's ending. And it's funny. Like, I remember I was first working in newsrooms in like the early 2010s and like when Gawker would publish something big like the whole newsroom would just like go quiet like everyone was kind of afraid of gocker in a way and yeah the case goes to court in 2016 the jury awards holkoekin 140 million dollars in damages uh for the violation of privacy and then uh basically like a

couple months later it's revealed in Forbes that peter teale paid for the lawsuit um and he's uh spent $10 million on it. And then we get this sort of little cap here, which is, this is a quote from GQ. It marks a very scary point in our country's history. It's confirmation of a long-held assumption that we all hoped wasn't true, namely that there are no checks on what the truly wealthy can do to people. Let's just say that it's totally fitting that Teal is a Donald Trump delegate in California. And so, yeah, I mean, like, I do think, I mean, it's, it's, it's.

It is scary. It is, it, I, the end of Gocker freaked me out. I, I, I still sort of am freaked out about it. As a preview for where this is going, Teal, you know, he's looking for bargains. He's looking to change the world. So let me just ask you this. What's your familiarity with the Red Scare podcast? I'm familiar with them because I knew Comtown.

I was in a Comtown sketch. So I knew the Comtown guys. and I knew Dasha through Adam. And so I've always been aware of them as kind of like cool girls who then, and now, of course, I think years ago I, I muted and blocked Anna on Twitter because I was like sick of watching her defend Woody Allen in this way that I found like not even. I can't stand somebody who's like being hack and contrarian for the sake of it.

If you have fucked up beliefs and you're smart, like a Tim Dylan, I'm like early days Tim Dylan. I'm like, well, at least he's funny and he has a perspective. He's consistent. When I can see that you're just taking the opposite opinion just to be problematic, I'm bored. And I think I blocked her years ago because of that. Yeah.

I was not living in the U.S. like during most of the Trump administration. And so like all of that stuff, I like only learned about when I moved back at the end of 2019. And I was like, what the fuck is all of this? Like, and I guess it's funny.

I haven't thought of it as sort of like what kind of replaced Gawker at like, in like the hierarchy of New York media, New York kind of like entertainment. But it is. It is sort of what did replace it, actually. Like the Chapo, Comtown Red Scare kind of like scene. And that scene is what we're going to be talking about right after a word from our sponsors. Palantir.

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So are you familiar with the term teal bucks? That sounds like, no, but it does make me assume. Like, you know that scene of Donald Duck and Ducktails when he's like swimming through his gold coins? Like, that is what I think, but I bet it's less physical than that. I would guess that that is a more valuable sum of money because you can touch it than whatever Tealbox is, which I imagine exists in his cyber only nation state on an oil rig in the Pacific. It's actually almost the opposite. Yeah. Really?

It's the term that a lot of influencers and media people refer to, used to refer to the money that Peter Thiel gives them to be reactionary and contrarian. allegedly. Wow. So it's real money. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Teal bucks are basically this term that starts like circulating among like

podcasters in New York about like they're getting money from Peter Thiel to like make edgy podcasts. But he's fun in all kinds of stuff and you know all these people with a very peculiar worldview. For instance, he's got projects involving Tyler Cohen who writes a lot for the free press. Oh, my favorite blog. Yeah. What's your favorite article?

Yeah. What's your favorite? article on the free press. I like it when they talk about dating and then it comes to the conclusion where they're like, is dating hard? And they're like, yeah, probably because you're a fucking whore. Yeah, very helpful. Very helpful advice.

It started spamming me an article entitled Why Open Relationships Never Work. And it started flooding it to me on all different apps. See, that's the problem with the free press style section is they'll get me. And so I go, I don't know that you're wrong. And then as I'm reading and I go, okay, but we're coming at it from different angles. Totally different angles. Somehow your angle is Israel and my angle is just like inherits sexual power dynamics and the fact that time is fixed, but yours seems like Zionism.

Yeah, yeah. Also for context, Tyler Cohen is the guy who wrote that piece arguing that AI actresses would be good because they would be by definition virgins. See, exactly. Sometimes they get me with a really good point. Yeah. finally like virgin actresses yeah and oh we have a quote from it actually here which is about the a i actress tilly norwood tilly norwood doesn't need a hairstylist has no regrettable posts and if you wish

to see a virgin on screen this is this is one of your better chances that's because she's ai cool man have you asked yourself i hope i'm seeing a virgin on screen is that a question every time every single For me, as someone who covers a lot of pop culture gossip stuff, I'm like, I need them to actually be fucking for me to have something to talk about. You know what I mean? Like, if you're a version, then what kind of divorce did you go through? Like, it's just not as interesting for me to talk about your personal life. I have actually come around to the idea that, like, due to, like, the arts being gutted in every direction, music and movies and TV are like not good enough anymore on their own. And I actually do need the people who make them to do fucked up weird stuff in real life.

because like the lighting is not good in Hollywood anymore. Like, like music is all compressed and usually using AI. Like I want like go. Yeah, go attack a kid in Brazil. I don't care. That's more interesting. Yeah, I want to watch it through the light of the fact that Shaila Buff just was like homophobic in New Orleans. And now Honeyboy has some texture to it.

Yeah, that's it's adding texture to this stuff. That's exactly right. Look forward to that next, the next panic world where Shaila Bluff is our next. Yeah, sure. I mean, hey, I want to talk to him about stuff. Sure, yeah, I would talk to me. The most interesting thing about him to me is he secretly has a baby with me at Goth. That could have never happened if he was a virgin.

That's true. Yeah, they don't talk about that enough. I think she had to fly to Rome to help him recently. Anyways, because he was like off on some weird Catholic like vision quest. Okay, so in 2019. All roads lead back to J.D. Vance. Actually, this is perfect. Yeah.

So in 2019, Peter Thiel starts the National Conservative Conference or NatCon. J.D. Vance is a keynote speaker. They kind of like create this movement. that Vanity Fair calls the new right. They're like going back to those old weird bloggers we talked about. Eliza Yudkowski is one of them. Another one is Curtis Yarvin who's like this. God, he just like sucks really bad.

Dark Enlightenment is like these guys who believe that like you should like bring back feudalism, but you'd have computers basically. Curtis Yarvin has been blogging about it for 30 something years. And in 2022, Yarvin ends up as a guest on the Red Scare. It's a weird pairing, and it seems like it shouldn't matter to these guys. But quoting the Vanity Fairpiece, Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the cool kids start to abandon its values and worldview. So I want to get into how this all went down and how they were all connected. It's sort of in this like immediate post-COVID era that people start talking about the dime square scene.

Are you familiar with the dime square scene? Yes, I am. Could you, for our listeners, our viewers, could you sort of just brief over? review. What's your take on the Dimes Square scene? So Dimes Square, I believe, started because there was a diner called Dimes Diner or Dimes Restaurant or something and kind of where the Lower East Side meets China Town. And I think it's actually where if you've ever seen gangs of New York, I believe it's like geographically the same footprint.

I think that's the cross section of like that triangle down there. It's like there's five points that all converge and it used to be run by the Italians and the Irish and now it's run by like anorexic Catholic girls who fuck. So the Italians and the Irish. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a haunted piece of land. It's gone all the way around again where it's just the exact same people fighting over it.

And it is just like the group, it's very insular, but they think they run culture, but the culture kind of lives and dies. It's like there's two places dime square exists and it's like dime square the four blocks and then dime square a place on Twitter. And it feels much like Lena Dunham. It's like one of those cultures where every person who's in it. is also writing about it, which makes it feel bigger than it is. And if you have never heard about it, it would never affect you again. But if you have heard about it, it can be quite, I feel like, quicksandy and that you can quickly become obsessed with the cloud of it.

It's very skeptical and ironic. Is that fair? Yeah, I think so. And it's a weird one to talk about because, like, yeah, so you said, like Dimes is like basically like a grocery store kind of place, like a cafe grocery store. It was popular with NYU students who were self-publishing. a zine kind of newspaper in the pandemic called the drunken canal. Yeah.

It then gets sort of like co-opted or sort of absorbed by the Red Scare Girlies and that whole scene. And they start like building a scene around it. And so this is from a Vanity Fair article sort of trying to untangle this, where they talk about like the new right and Peter Thiel's influence there. And so they talk about how Honor Levy, the writer podcast we mentioned before, starts to get connected here. So they write,

Levy is an it girl in a downtown Manhattan scene. She is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene where right-wing politics had become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search

for moral grounding. She also described her cohort as a bunch of libertines. And on her podcast, you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind-bendingly ironic thrill

of tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex. Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they'll wear a Trump hat as an accessory, she said. The ones deep into the online scene, she said, want to be like Reni, like Lenny Riphantzol, Eddie Sedwick. And then she's asked if she would take the money from Peter Thiel and she says, of course, none of this is an accident. Yeah.

These people are taking money from Peter Thiel and trying to like create an art scene that feels like in line with Trumpism, basically. which is hard to do because I would say art cannot exist in the world of MAGA, but they're trying. And they end up with MPC Fest. Did you ever hear about this? Is N? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not heard of the fest. I've heard of the term. Okay. So in 2021, Peter Thiel funds the New People's Cinema Club Fest or NPC Fest. And it's a film festival in New York City that my buddy Joe wrote about years ago. Joe Bernstein, and he writes, the party on Eldridge Street could hardly be contained.

Bodies spilled out of the front door onto the sidewalk and joyous screams echoed from the roof. Inside, under the wood beams of the $7.5 million carriage house, a DJ played techno for a young and queer crowd. Among throngs of 20-somethings, a performance artist named Crackad Barney, roamed around in a Trump mask, breast-beared past a man, painted green from head to toe, wearing only a jockstrap and an alligator headpiece

shut inside a dog kennel. over the sound of a jazz band, the screams were now clear. This is being paid for by Peter Thiel. I guess I feel it's so much effort to come up with what. Do you know what I mean? I guess I like to take it back to the Olympics thing of and yeah, and if you had never written that article and nobody had ever listened, would it have ever happened?

You know what I mean? It's like these moments. It feels very everything exists to be written about and speculated. Like this lives for the commenters. It's like not for anybody there. There's no moment. There's nothing that I don't know. Everything feels so performance.

and like to be like are you I met this girl who was 25 and she was trying to impress me by telling me how she freaked out her grad school art teacher by like doing a ripped up political thing I remember being like oh yeah they weren't freaked out at all and that's how I feel about these parties but because then you can put them online and find young naive people from Ohio desperate to feel something they could be like this is a freaky shit man and you're like is it yeah body pain also like a lot of these people I feel like are like I think I can comfortably say it's like washed up. millennials who are like, we found a way to like be edgy again. Like we can bring back the vice magazine vibe that we lost when like everyone went woke basically. Yeah. And of course, it's a way to get money. I mean, it is like at the end of the day, these people who act so, it is so fun to have somebody pay for a party.

And if like you are that selfless and lacking in moral center, then you'll be like, I don't know, a night of drinking and all I have to do is watch like people get deported. That's fine. Like, I don't know. It's so, it's so hack in the most boring, obviously. way of ultimately I'm going where the money is and they think it's edgy, but it's that thing where like sometimes being edgy in a New York City crowd reverts due to like the most popular opinion, which is what 95% of people in America already thought. So like congrats. It's not it's

not countercultural. You're edgy in a group of 295 million. It's very hard to convince yourself that you're being countercultural when you're voting for a guy who won twice. Yeah. So yeah, in fact, the the head of this film festival, Trevor Bazil is a black queer director who was like working in an ice cream shop to pay bills. And Joe Bernstein writes in the piece, Bezile knew he had been cast for a part in someone else's vision of the future, but he accepted the role because he saw it because he saw in it the chance to pursue his own radical creative agenda, a dynamic nearly as old as art patronage itself.

Yeah. And I think when you surround yourself with people who are thinking similarly to you, you kind of lose touch with the power of your irony, the idea that like this is actually a statement we're part of, you know, this is going to be the future Dadaism. People are going to be studying this. And everyone around you is doing it too and you forget, like, you lose touch with reality and like what it was about in the first place. And then you have somebody come in and give you money. And I think, you know, the joke is like a lot of it is you're being held back. But you know, I mean, like, why don't you have any money? Because there's no good arts programs. And so

the structures that you're claiming don't matter and you're being ironic and flip it and apathetic towards have now placed you. And ironically, the DEI selection of like who can we use that'll like fuck over the identity politics questions of the left. And now you're being handed money by the man who's like paying you in order to keep the structures in place. Like it's all very. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it. And it's like he was right. Like there seemed to be no other way to get attention. Yeah. I just want to give you like one more detail about, um, Yeah. What he was up to before this festival.

So he was, had a breakdown during 2020, who amongst us didn't. And that started with an asset trip, but he realized that cancellation was a form of currency. So he started accounts that were constantly being banned. One was called All Triggers, No Warnings. And I'm going to read a little bit from this BuzzFeed post. He posted things that are so offensive, they are tricky to describe. Basil posted pro-Trump memes and anti-Trump memes, images of Jeffrey Epstein and AOC in Blackface, a drawing of a black man performing fallacious and a white penis at the summit of a milk craye challenge.

He took so many political stances that he seemed to be mocking the idea of having a political stance at all. I don't know. I guess you could say to yourself this is like an artistic statement about how nothing matters, but I have a hard time with, it's never satire when you're like, doing it. Do you know what I mean? I think we've gotten lost in this idea of like satirizing things, commenting on things when you're just being the fucked up thing. Yeah. He knew why they were using him. He was he was willing to go into the transaction to be used. But it's just so different to be a downtown scenester 20 something year old making shit posts and like being intentionally

edgy and then being like selected out of there by like all of the money on gods earth yeah yeah someone checked in with him the last night and he seemed to regret doing it he told his friend to rip the festival to shreds but this takes an even more tragic turn basil ends up dying after the film festival like that night um a friend who was with him said he was drunk and wheezing but refused help and they tried to monitor him as he slept but he fell asleep and he didn't wake up it's like a very sad story. Oh my God. Like it's like this really bleak thing, I think. That is really sad to like take this money with this like long term plan and then of course die on the night that like you sell out having never realized the other the back half of the plan, which is like the I'm going to get to it.

I think that's exactly right. That's like a great way to think about it. And this scene still exists. I mean, this is this scene is responsible for the clavicular fashion week event. The way I sort of see it is it's Peter Thiel trying to create a new form of cool, and that cool aligns with his politics. And so it's like, can you find a bunch of washed out New York hipsters that will say and do whatever you want for money? And it's like, yes, of course you can. And I think the joke there is you, by definition, in order to buy and fund this group of people, you have to find people who can't be successful in their own right. Because anybody who could fund their own stuff or get funding or be successful wouldn't need him. So you're like almost creating this like cohort of losers.

to then validate that you're cool. But I don't know. I guess it gets down to what is cool. I don't know. They're all cooler than me, I'm sure. It's not a bad take. Art News wrote at the time, you know, making about this, making kind of a similar argument.

But it hadn't really occurred to me, actually. The piece reads, Teal finds it beneficial both to fund explicitly new right personalities, so like right-wing personalities, but also to fund these edgy art world figures who can maybe push the idea that feminism is cringe, that slurs are edgy and interesting, and that if nothing else, political apathy is interesting.

And so, Teal is both funding the adjacent far-right project, but he's also funding the disengagement of people who would vote left. If you can infiltrate the sort of dirtbag left of the late 2010s and convince a huge chunk of them that having any beliefs at all is embarrassing, you just sort of eliminate any opposition that you might receive. It's unfortunately very genius. If you know, as we all do, that most New York hipsters... Can I say it's genius and it's also like a 30 rock episode.

It is a 30 rock episode. Yeah. Like where they get Tracy Jordan to go out and try to get black people to not vote. So, you know what I mean? It's genius in the sense that the oldest trick in the book is a... Like, I guess the idea of the wheel was genius. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I don't know that having a car today.

I'm like, good job. It's just fundable. Very fundable. Do you think it's worked? Claire, I'm just like curious from like New York comedy scene where like we're told that like comics have gotten like more more edgy and like the culture's changed. Like do you feel like this actually has impacted culture? It's hard for me to say because I find like I don't know. I really stand by what I said before of Dime Square is like an example of girls, which was like one of the lowest watched HBO shows of all time that like every viewer wrote a review.

It's like something like Dime Square. What are we talking about 200 people? You know what I mean? I think that's even too high. I think it's maybe. Like it's hard for me to say because I feel like when I look at like the last presidential election, I think the thing that probably stopped the most people I know from voting Democratic was like stronger ideology is this feeling of like I want like a leftist president.

But then of course, obviously like that's such a small minority. It's so hard. I feel like it's so hard for me to break out of the silo. I don't like when I think of a apathetic person, I think of like some video one of the news rooms just did where they went down to spring break and Tampa and ask everybody on the beat. like who's Ayatollah Khomeini and none of them knew. Well, hold on. There's a new Ayatollah Kamani, you know.

So like that's fair, actually. It's kind of hard to keep track. And they're like, well, the man or the symbol. Right, right, right. Because one can live on forever. But I feel like when I think about political apathy amongst the youth, I'm like, is it, I don't know who's watching. Like, I love the Kardashians, but you have to think like there's so many millions of

25 year olds who weren't going to vote either way. The idea that you have to go and like cut out six people in a consistently blue. Blue Borough feels to what end? Except for that, to him, it's important because all these people are ultimately losers who want to be cool, like the Elon Musk effect of like, can I get into the party? He really is like, who would I have wanted to know in college? Can I pay this girl to not only like me, but then say I'm right? I don't, you know what I mean?

It feels so small potatoes in the, when you think of the grand scheme of like Wisconsin, you know? I think that's right. I think that's right. And like from what I've heard from people like who still work in like traditional media in New York, like one of the kind of unfortunate side effects of all of this is that like older editors never left Twitter. Like they're still there too. And they're they're still very obsessed with like the question of like what is cool in New York. And so it has been actually, I've heard like fairly easy to convince the remaining people at the top of like New York media that like this is real. which is, I think, the problem, even though it's, like, clearly not real.

Like, these people are freaks and, like, nothing they do matters. And that's how I feel like, as someone who lives in New York and is the comedy scene, I'm kind of like, I don't, it's funny. People have, like, called me in my podcast. So I was like, oh, I started listening to you because I was looking for a not evil red scare. They came and found us. Yeah. And it is one of those things where I've met people who, like, I know someone who moved to Berlin

to try to escape how desperate they were to seem cool at Dime Square. And then came back and they're like, well, the only people that matter. of the people in Dimes Square. And then they were like, I had to leave the country because it was so stupid. But when I come back, I still want to be thought of as cool on that like one closed off street drinking whatever the cool drink is. So it's like, I don't know. They really are people that if all of us turned away, they wouldn't exist.

100%. There is that, you know, I was trying to think of the bar clandestino. That's the bar there all. Yes, that's the one. I was trying to think of like a cool name, but I've. I mean, the weird thing is, and this is true, a friend of mine was in the Dime Square play, which was sort of like this weird and dependent other thing happened. during like the early 2020s at the same time, which for people who are listening who don't know,

like there's this play that was being put on in like apartments around the city. And my friend was one of the actors in it. And it sort of dramatizes like these washouts in Manhattan sort of like in the period of one night. It's a good play. It's fun. And then I went to like one of the parties that the real dime square people were there, but then also the fake dime square actors in the play where it was it was deeply unfun. Like everyone there was so boring.

The joke is like if you want to talk about a New York City subculture of people in their 20s that are actually probably impacting elections. I think you look at a girl like Hallie K and jazz. And I go, they might have, I think they have more reach and more money being spent and more votes being created than the Dime Square people. Like the West Village girlies of like a key name. You know what I mean? Like it's funny.

And it's but because of course it's inside and it's no old person wants to think they're not down with the young cool artists who are going to reject them. Yes. What any of this has to do with the Andy Christ, that's after the break. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility, and Optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary.

Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. So my read on all of this is that Peter Thiel kills Gawker because he has a personal vendetta, but he also sort of understands the power that Gawker had in the early 2010s, the sort of cool, cachet clout that they had. And he sort of, and then he spends like the next decade and a half sort of building his own replacement of it. But at the same time, he's also grooming a future vice president. So he sort of helps J.D. Vance climb the ranks of politics. And he now, you know, you would think would be very happy about, you know, controlling everything.

But he's not because he's telling anyone that will listen that the anti-crisis is real and that like Satan walks among us. And also talking about how. Is it a dude or is it in essence? Do we know? It seems like it's a dude. It seems like it's an actual guy. And we got eyes on him or is he just like keep your eyes out open? I went too deep into this in order for this outline and try to streamline the crazy out.

It's like it's a real person, but I think. But if you start to name it and address it, you will become like this other person. So you can never actually like look at it directly. That's a very Catholic thing. That's a very Catholic idea. Hypothetically, if I grant Irving, not saying Peter Thiel would do this, but we're to say is like Greta Thumburg is the Antichrist, then like that would be giving power away is my understanding of reading too many articles

about this thing that breaks my brain. Does that make sense? So like it's real, but we can't ever, we can't ever get like, you know, it's like a ghost. We can't ever like shine the light directly at it. Yeah, I've got a couple quotes here from Teal about the Antichrist. So how might such an Antichrist rise to power, Teal asked by playing. by playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan, peace and safety.

In other words, it would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse. Like, for instance, a man who runs an AI surveillance company. That seems like someone who could be the Antichrist. I'm also, I'm interested as he's saying, like, beware of decadence. Yes. I can't imagine this man doesn't own a yacht. Oh, I'm sure he owns a yacht for his yacht. This is another description from the New York Times.

Teal, it's the opposite of the picture where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. In our world, the thing that has political residence is the opposite. The thing that has political residence is we need to stop science. We need to just say stop to this. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg. So that, yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, yeah. And yeah, it does feel like a lot of this, though, is him telling on himself.

Like, he's sort of going around telling everyone like, someone like me could be the Antichrist, but it's not me. And I'm scared that that guy is out there somewhere. And it's like, well, I mean. But isn't he also saying the Antichrist will convince you it's me, but that's because I'm Christ-like. Yes, also true. To me, the Antichrist is probably anybody who hates Claire Parker. So just like, if you hear stuff like that, just be careful. you're near the devil and the best thing you could do to fight off the devil I'd say is like love and worship Claire Parker right I also think he's probably reacting to like so okay my sort of I don't even call it tinfoil hat theory but like my sort of read is people like Peter Thiel are very interested in controlling how we feel about people like Peter Thiel and over the last year two years especially people have become a lot more vocal about how we feel about how we feel about.

about Peter Thiel and people like Peter Thiel, Luigi Mangione, the person who took a shot at Donald Trump, the person who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk. Like, we are in a moment, the person who just yesterday burned down a toilet paper factory because they didn't pay him a living wage. Like, we are at a moment of sort of large-scale civil unrest, and a lot of that is directed at, you know,

high-level right-wing elites. And Peter Thiel actually did have like a meltdown on Pierce Morgan about Luigi Mangione and was like very, very serious. scared. He did it because he said this healthcare executive was presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover. What would you say to them? I don't know what. I think like that is part of the crash out here. It's like I've done so much work and spend so much money to control how people see the world and it's not working and I'm kind of freaked out. That's that's my read on some of this. It's interesting. I can make somebody

but I can't make you like me. Right, exactly. Which is so pathetic and sad. Yeah, it's very sad. The question that I always have about the Dynum Square stuff is like, is there a world where like it eventually does have like does matter? Like do you think that like it will like these people will ever sort of like get the influence they kind of think they have?

I mean, I think like all movements you look back and like, you know, in 10, 20 years, there's going to be a prominent novelist, a prominent podcaster and maybe even a politician. you're going to be like, they were at the same play, 20 years ago. There's always those like, you know, Paris in the 1920s. There's always going to be a place where somebody's like, I can't believe all those geniuses were hanging around the same scene. And you're like, yeah, well, if you were in the scene, there was about 500 people and like 400 of them became duds, 30 of them now have normal lives and like two or three went on

to greatness. And then behind them is going to be some new weirder scene. That's probably going to be, you know, off shoot Austin, Texas or something. and they're all going to be like, yeah, what we do is like amputate our own fingers and add more stuff. We're like, oh, my God, these are the most important people in the world. And there's actually like two guys that actually did it. And it's like, you know what I mean? And then there's like a thousand think pieces.

I don't know. I feel this is just like a tale as old's time. There's always going to be a group of young things in New York that got an outsized critical reception because the people who write the thought pieces are adjacent to them. And, you know what I mean? the things that matter don't get as much press. Like who gets to speak and it is the person who's willing to move to New York City and call themselves important.

I think it's time to like give coolness to like a new city for a while. Like you know like Portland, Seattle, they took turns in the 90s 2000s. I think it's time like we pick like Cleveland or Cincinnati or some Minneapolis. Actually honestly, I could see Minneapolis. Oh, you don't love Milwaukee. Milwaukee. Yeah. Yeah.

My question going into. this was like, why would somebody with literally all that power possibly care about hipsters in New York City so much? With the Antichrist's focus, does it make any more sense to you now? Because I have a theory, but I want to see what you think. I feel if you could make Catholicism cool, I feel like there's like the dual things of who he wants to like him. And it's both cool kids in New York. And also, I feel like I was hard on them, but I'm also like 33 and I've never in my life been accepted by cool kids ever. And I've just made my peace with it and felt as they've become like weirdly Republican and evil. I'm like, oh, well, thank God they wouldn't take me because

I don't want to have to be doing ironic and nag of stuff. What are you talking about? You have a popular podcast. Yeah, but popular is not cool. You know what I mean? Like what I am is different than like Manhattan Lower East Side Cool. Don't tell me that. This is the coolest I've ever been in my life and I'm whole and I'm savoring every sip of it. But I think I wonder if I'm making like the thing like he wants to be cool for artists and then also he wants to be cool with God. And if you can somehow make the artist Catholic, you can like bend what religion thing. You know what I mean?

It's interesting. Like it's like so macro and micro that he wants like the girl at the bar to think he's cool and then also Jesus Christ and if he can like change what Jesus Christ is on earth through art. I love how straightforward that is. mine might be overly complicated but I'm curious for your opinion somebody unifying the world in like an anti-tech way

is promising salvation it's like trying to make a heaven on earth and that's actually really bad because heaven's supposed to be where heaven is so like anyone that like could be uniting could be cool could be believing in anything that is not like

we need to be like bringing about the singularity or making tech advancements is like really frightening. If there were young people who were about something now and it was antithetical to like tech being the center of everything, that that would actually be really threatening if you actually believe that like this is real and it could drive you to being like, and thus we must surveil all of them and like win them all over. I feel like I have such a hard time following because he is so inherently contradictory, that it's hard for me to even figure out which side of him is operating at any given time. Because even when you think about the fact if he believes in an antichrist and he believes in a heaven

that can't be here on earth, why work so hard to biohack and stay alive forever? Like if no matter what, even if you are the richest billionaire who owns the president, heaven would be better. It's so many opposites, so many double negatives. I almost sometimes I'm like, so you think the artists have heaven or you think the tech-based world has heaven and you think those are different or like it's hard to follow exactly what. I think that's exactly. We're so afraid of somebody committing terrorism here.

So the only solution is to go preemptively blow somebody else up. I think it's similar thinking. Okay. So I just read the Jakarta method. So I think everything I do, I like look through like a CIA op. So you're almost thinking. that this is very like, it's akin to like what we do in like Brazil and communist countries where we go in and we like create a fake right wing to create infighting in the country. So you think

Dimes Square is like liberal New York art scene in fighting so that there's nothing to oppose him. Yeah. Like I do think it can be both like on the one hand he like has come up with this cultural sciop to kind of make sure the downtown NYU future generation never comes for him. But I also do think he seems to want to be liked. You know what I mean? And which is always interesting to me because as someone who's gotten success on the internet, like my dream of success is like having enough money, you never have to go on a line again. And I'm like, if I had $100 billion, I have like 10 people I love, I would just be in a giant house with them somewhere eating dinner, the idea of trying to, of paying for somebody else's

party and like being in the news like that. I don't know. It's 100%. Exactly. Okay. Here's my new theory. I don't think he wants to be liked, but I think he's a smart man who realized it wasn't enough to have power. You have to have like cultural capital in this weird way. And this was

this attempt to buy it. Right. Claire, my last question for you is, uh, how many teal books would it take for you to like make a right wing pivot? Have you thought about it? Yeah. I thought you were saying, I'm like how much, how much reading? Yeah, how much reading, yeah. I guess enough to drive me absolutely insane. I'm trying to think because I guess much like the director and I think he's like a great cautionary tale against what I'm about to say there. I think everybody has a number where you go, well, with that amount of money, you do it once and then you do way more better. Like, you know what I mean? Like, what is one crazy podcast episode versus like if I could give $5 million to people who like need help on the street or something? But then the scary idea is,

yeah, but what if you don't survive that one podcast episode? And then you've like gone out the worst version of yourself. I don't know. Peter Thiel feels really tough. But I guess the other scary thing is I have a podcast that does advertising. And I couldn't tell you for sure. I've never touched Peter Thiel investment money. I don't think we have either. I think that's on our block. I think most of his stuff. I mean, I can't imagine Peter Palantir would actually want to advertise on this show.

I would love to record that ad. No, but I'm saying like what he invested in like bed sheets and you did. Do you know what I mean? Like that's what's so scary is I feel like you know what I mean? Okay. But like you're you did an ad for a smoothie company. It turns out they were bought out by Sequoia. And it turns out he invests in Sequoia.

And now you're like, it's, it's, it's how. It is hard. Because the moment drops don't really have a lot of advertising budget. If you are a small business that isn't funded by Peter Thiel and you'd like to advertise on this show, you can email Josh at Garbageday. Email and he'll set you up. Claire, I want to thank you for coming on. This is a great conversation. Thank you again. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

I'm at Claire the Scare on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And I just dropped my debut comedy special if you want to watch it. It's called Claire Parker's 32 on YouTube. And then I have a podcast called The Good Noticing's podcast where we actually touch on similar things. I feel like I've avoided Peter Thiel outright. But we're definitely also. We're wary of open AI. We're wary of Sam Altman.

So similar cultural deep dives, but a little less lowry sideish, I think. We try not to give those people too much power. Yeah. That's why we've waited like almost two years to ever talk about this stuff. But then you can't. I mean, we've talked about I did a deep dive on clavicular because I'm like, he's from my hometown. So I felt because then it's like that line of I don't want to give it any more power to talk about it. But if people can come here, get all the info they need and then not have to click another link,

would that be helpful? I don't know. It's a tricky world. Yeah, it is. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator. And our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis.

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