Tech Won't Save Us - How Peter Thiel Wields His Power in Silicon Valley w/ Moira Weigel

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Moira Weigel to discuss Peter Thiel’s history, how the network he cultivated has influenced Silicon Valley, and his recent move into funding Republican candidates.Moira Weigel is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic magazine. She also co-edited Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It. Follow Moira on Twitter at @moiragweigel.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Moira wrote about Peter Thiel and the importance of his network in The New Republic.Paris wrote about why Peter Thiel isn’t an outlier in Silicon Valley.Reason Magazine asked “wasn’t Peter Thiel supposed to be a libertarian?”In February 2020, Peter Thiel stepped down from Facebook’s board.Books mentioned: The Contrarian by Max Chafkin, From Counterculture to Cyberculture by Fred Turner, Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, The PayPal Wars by Eric Jackson, Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne.Support the show

The world after COVID, or in the ongoing wake of COVID, is only Peter Thiel's world if we let it be. When he says he's being evil, that's advertising. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Moira Weigel. Moira is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. She's also the co-editor of a collection called Voices from the Valley, Tech Workers talk about what they do and how they do it. In this week's conversation, we talk about a really important figure in Silicon Valley that I don't think gets enough attention for the influence that he's had on Silicon Valley and increasingly the influence that he's having on American politics, and that is obviously Peter Thiel. In the conversation, we go through many aspects of Thiel's history, including his

time as a conservative provocateur at Stanford University, his time at PayPal, at Palantir, and more recently as a funder of Republican politics, including Donald Trump, Blake Masters, J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and others. This is important to recognize because Thiel has a particular right-wing politics that I think has received a fair amount of attention, but he is often positioned as kind of an odd one out in Silicon Valley, as the representative of Silicon Valley conservatism, when actually, as Moyer explains, it's probably not so easy to say that he is an exception to a general liberal rule in Silicon Valley, and that there's actually far more people who think like Peter Thiel, and, you know,

we'll probably see even more moving forward. One of the things that Moira points out that I think is really important, and that we get to in the conversation, is that we often recognize the influence that Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog have had in Silicon Valley since its emergence, you know, around the 60s, 70s, that period, and then how it influences Steve Jobs and many other important figures, but how in the early 2000s, there is also a very influential group of people around Peter Thiel and PayPal who emerge from there, who have a particular right-wing politics, who become very influential figures in the Valley, and that maybe we haven't fully recognized the

degree to which the politics of the Valley have shifted away from that kind of libertarian ideal that comes from Stuart Brand to a more conservative politics that is represented more by Peter Thiel. And so, you know, you'll find out more about that in the conversation. But I think it's really important, especially as Peter Thiel becomes a more influential and more visible figure within US politics as he is funding these Republican candidates, but as he's also funding media ventures, things like Rumble, to spread that perspective or perspectives that benefit him, his worldview, and his politics, and to further elevate conservative voices. And just as a final point before we get to the conversation, something that we didn't get to

was how Peter Thiel recently exited his position in Facebook. And Moira thinks that that illustrates that he believes that the attention economy is coming to an end and something else is going to replace it. And I think that you'll see us kind of pick up on that idea in the conversation. But we don't explicitly talk about Peter Thiel's exit from Facebook and what that means for the attention economy. So I just wanted to fill in that gap. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues

who you think would learn from it. And this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is free for everybody because listeners like you support the work that goes into making it every single week. So if you like this conversation and if you like the show as a whole, you can join patrons like Kevin from Queens in New York, Melody from Montreal, Oscar Maria Grande, also from Montreal, Thomas from Vancouver, Kenneth from San Francisco, and Ben from France by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Moira, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat. I know that you've been looking into Peter Thiel and his associates like Alex Karp for quite a while. And I think that this is a figure who is quite important when thinking about Silicon Valley and the impact that he has had. But I think also maybe doesn't get the attention that he deserves sometimes in terms of that impact. And so I wanted to discuss that with you so the listeners can get a bit more insight on Peter Thiel and what he's been up to.

And so I think before we get into kind of this specific moments and areas of interest that I have, I wanted to start with a broader question. If you were to briefly describe Peter Thiel to someone, how would you describe him? What is important about him? Peter Thiel is a German-born venture capitalist who grew up in the United States and South Africa. He's known for being one of the founders of PayPal in the 1990s and an early investor in Facebook, and recently has also gained attention for being a co-founder of Palantir Technologies. He's become, since the 2016 election, in ways that I imagine we'll get into, sort of a stand-in or shorthand for a right-wing or right-libertarian side of Silicon Valley and a kind of favorite subject of certain long-form writers about technology and the Valley, including at times myself. He's a venture capitalist, but he's also recently emerged

as a kind of cultural entrepreneur in different ways that sort of using both his financial resources and his network to promote certain politics and understandings of the world. And not just a cultural entrepreneur, he's also a major political donor to the Republican Party at this point. So yeah, venture capitalist, co-founder of various important companies, and increasingly important donor to the Republican Party is the headline on Peter Thiel. I love that. And I think that hits on all the main aspects of who he is, right, in a very concise way. So I appreciate that. But I do want to dig into some of those moments, right, and some of those parts of Peter Thiel's history that are really illustrative of who he is and the impact

that he has had, right? Because you talk a lot about the importance of his network and how he brings people together and how that is a really key aspect of who he is and what he does. And I think that the first time that we really see that is when he is at Stanford University as a kind of provocative right-wing figure trying to get in on the, I guess, culture war period that was going on there. The kind of controversy about what happens on colleges is not a new thing that just came up in the past few years, but it's an ongoing thing, especially on the right. So can you talk about what he was at at Stanford University and why that is important, I think, in beginning his trajectory and where he goes from there.

Yeah, certainly. So Thiel was born in 1967, which means he's in college and law school at Stanford in the mid to late 1890s, in the mid to late 1980s to the early 1990s. And as you alluded to in your question, this is also a period of the first so-called culture wars, which have all sorts of different inputs to them. But Thiel arrived at Stanford in that period with an identity already as a conservative. He had been shaped by reading the National Review, which is the publication started by William F. Buckley. You know, I think we forget this. And by we, I suppose, I mean, the kind of people I imagine listen to this podcast. But conservative reaction is kind of always co-evolving since the 60s with progressive movements and left-wing movements.

At the same time that these new left campus movements were developing in the mid to late 1960s, there was also the early development of these new right movements. And there's an anecdote I love about how Richard Vigory, who became this very important Republican strategist who shows up briefly in the Teal story, how he was interning, I want to say, for some Republican senator, and he was sent to an ACLU event with a bunch of civil rights activists and new left activists and came back and said, we have to figure out how to do that. We've got to do that and build a right wing network to compete with that.

And so I say this just to highlight that there's this long history of right wing activism on campus, but also more specifically, right wing study and sort of selective appropriation of what left-wing movements are doing. And I think that will become important later on when we talk about Thiel and Karp and their sort of branding of themselves as a kind of avant-garde or cultural provocateurs. But all this to say, William F. Buckley and the National Review, ever since Buckley published his book in 1954 on God and Man at Yale had been an important face of the sort of bowtie-wearing, elite, conservative shock and dismay at the state of things on campus. And Thiel arrived, according to classmates whom Max Chafkin,

his biographer, interviewed for his recent book, The Contrarian. Thiel arrived at Stanford wanting to be the next William F. Buckley, having this vision of himself as a sort of next generation conservative media entrepreneur. And at the moment he arrived, as I said, you know, it's a moment where these culture wars that really take off in the late 80s and early 90s are heating up. And Stanford became a sort of focal point for these culture wars, perhaps similarly to, I don't know, the Bon Me episode at Oberlin in our more recent culture wars or the heckling of Charles Murray at Middlebury. You know, there are these totemic moments in the campus culture wars. These debates that were happening at Stanford in, I want to say, the late 80s and early 90s about revising their core humanities curriculum,

which is called Western Civ, their Western Civ curriculum became a focus of national media attention. You know, Newsweek ran huge stories on whether or not this canon great books class should be revised, whether it was a sign of the fall of Western civilization that now maybe you had to read Zora Neale Hurston, like one more book. I think it was literally Their Eyes Were Watching God that was one of the books in question, in addition to Plato and the Canon of Great White Men. And so it was sort of especially fertile territory for someone who's trying to launch a kind of career or at least build a profile as an aggrieved and embattled conservative on a college campus. And I should say, of course, well before the 1980s and 1990s

culture wars, there had also been the establishment of the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Stanford had these historic ties to the military industrial complex in Silicon Valley. I think there's this narrative that's perpetuated in the media and in public discourse that often says, you know, Silicon Valley was all liberal and college campuses were completely liberal until this new thing happened. And that's not the case. But anyway, Thiel shows up at Stanford in the 80s and becomes involved in these campus culture wars and becomes involved with organizations that were founded by right-wing donors and some of those networks coming out of the late 60s, the New Right Network. So like the

Intercollegiate Studies Institute is this important network that's established to connect conservative students on college campuses. So like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter are also coming up through ISI at Cornell and Dartmouth in roughly this period. And Thiel links up with conservative professors and student activists on Stanford's campus and co-founds the Stanford Review, which is a conservative student paper analogous broadly, again, to Dinesh D'Souza's Dartmouth Review that's also founded in this period with funding from similar donors, from the same donors. So Thiel, in this milieu at Stanford campus, already starts to build a reputation as, I would say, a right libertarian, a certain kind of conservative, and also provocateur, and through the Stanford Review, starts articulating some of his political

views and also assembling a kind of network of like-minded people around him. And as Andrew Granato, is someone who's written about this, I believe he was a Stanford student, I'm not certain, but Andrew Granato did this deep dive into Peter Thiel's Stanford review a few years ago. And as he shows, I mean, I haven't gone through that archive and it's very secretive actually, but as he shows in that piece, many, many key figures in Thiel's world are people with whom he crosses paths already at that stage in the late 1980s and early 1990s at Stanford, and it's remained an institution through which he cultivates relationships. Josh Hawley, although I don't

think Chaskin, the biographer, finds evidence that Thiel and Hawley met directly at the Stanford Review, Hawley is also a Stanford Review alum. It's an important feeder for the teal universe, which I imagine we'll continue to talk about. I should say, sorry, I've been talking too long. But another thing to note is that between undergrad and law school, he sort of befriends an enormous number of the people. And maybe befriend is the wrong verb based on how they tend to describe it. But he meets and connects with a number of the people who remain important in his universe for decades afterwards. But he did befriend Reid Hoffman while they were both undergraduates at Stanford. Reid Hoffman, I believe, voted Democrat and had

a persona as more of a liberal, more of a liberal persona, but they were friendly. I think they even ran for student government together on a shared ticket at one point. And it's at Stanford that Teal gets to know Keith Rabois, who was at law school with him there, and Alex Karp, who I believe was at law school too, also started a PhD. Well, they overlap there, but it's at the university and in this network of organizations around the Hoover Institution and the conservative campus movement that he starts to establish this identity that he has now and also to assemble the group of people who will be key to his career. Hoffman and Teal, the bipartisan ticket, I guess. Literally, yeah. I feel like in Max Tafkin's book, he has a description of it, but they ran for student

government. I think it was for like class representative or something. I want to say, I'm not sure if this fits with what I was just saying, or this needs to be said. But I think there's also often, I don't even know what I'm trying to say. It's like, it's hard to separate the personal and the political always. And in my view, it's always both. Everything is always both. And by all accounts, you know, I. Everything is always both. And by all accounts, I've never met Thiel, so what do I know? But he was also a kind of awkward and not very popular student. And it seems as if this so-called contrarian identity that he established for himself and the kind of home he found in these institutions that were supporting right-wing provocation and contrarianism

probably has something to do with his psychology and his personal social experiences. I think it's always tricky because certain right-wing figures do weaponize this idea of their own victimhood in really problematic ways. And I certainly would never call Peter Thiel a victim, but it does seem that he experienced a certain social alienation that then fed into this persona he developed as the right-wing provocateur. You definitely get that from reading Chafkin's book as well, right? It definitely suggests that that is the case, or at least that's one strand of understanding, you know, who he is and how he becomes who he is today. But you know, you talked about how he started the Stanford Review and how that served as one place where he grew a network and met a lot of connections through there that ended up being

people who he came to know and came to continue to be in touch with and to work with throughout his career, right? In 1995, he also published The Diversity Myth, which was a book that is along the lines of these kind of conservative talking points and conservative narratives that you would expect. So it seemed like he was headed down this direction of being one of these controversial right-wing figures, like a Dinesh D'Souza. But then he takes a shift into investing and becomes one of the founders of PayPal or Confinity, which becomes PayPal. So what do we make of that shift? And then how important is PayPal to cementing his position in Silicon Valley and in the tech industry?

So I just want to backtrack and say one more thing about Stanford, because I think, you know, I described him as a kind of provocateur and compared him to D'Souza. You know, Teal went to law school at Stanford, and it seemed like he was on the track for a career as a corporate lawyer. Coming out of that, Chafkin's book does say that classmates remember Teal wanting to be the next William F. Buckley, but it's not clear to me that he ever wanted to be a media entrepreneur per se. Rather, by publishing this conservative newspaper and participating in these conservative student networks, he sort of tapped into a network with powerful connections in New York law, corporate law, where he went briefly in Washington, D.C. He interviewed for a clerkship with Antonin Scalia, which he didn't get at various points when he's told his life story in a commencement speech at Hamilton, for instance.

That's like an important turning point for him where he doesn't get this thing that he wanted and that he was sort of gunning for and then went back to the Valley. So I just wanted to say in calling him a provocateur, I shouldn't overstate it. I don't think he literally wanted to be Dinesh D'Souza, but he was coming up through this network whose raison d'etre is to bring together future media personalities and political figures and sort of people who will work in finance and at law firms to build a certain kind of power network. I appreciate that clarification. And it's interesting to think what could have happened had he gotten that clerkship with Scalia and, you know, a whole

different trajectory that he would have been on. Yeah. The one other thing I wanted to say about the campus moment is that the culture wars that are happening in the late 80s and early 90s, right, end of the Cold War, where if you wanted to be super schematic about it, you might say that these Cold Warriors are needing to invent a new kind of enemy, and also that they need a pretext to defund the university. But that's a whole other conversation. In addition to these debates about the multicultural curriculum and political correctness on campus, the other big thing that's happening, of course, is anti-apartheid activism on campuses. And in Thiel's biography, although he has since disputed this on a number of occasions, his sympathies with South African apartheid, and remember, he had grown up partly in South

Africa, come up again and again. It's funny. The New Republic made me take out all the times I pointed out someone who was a white South African in his network, which was probably wise on the part of their legal readers. But a lot of his network at Stanford seems to have been shaped, let's say, by their sense of alienation by the campus movement against apartheid. So that's just another fact that seems to bear mentioning that, you know, if the Stanford Review is an institution that helps bring a lot of folks together, so too does anti-anti-apartheid seem to be a catalyst that brings together a lot

of this network in the early 90s. Yeah, certainly. There's another important figure whose connections to South Africa we talk about a lot and who was with Teal at PayPal once their companies came together to become PayPal and what it is today, which is Elon Musk. And so when he goes into PayPal, when he is working with this company, he's making a lot of promises around, it's going to strip governments of the power to control their money supplies. And there's all this libertarian language around it before it pivots and becomes just a major middleman, I guess, for financial transactions online. So what do we make of what he does at PayPal, and particularly the group of people who he surrounds himself with, who become a really important group of people in shaping Silicon Valley then after?

PayPal also, in a sense, starts at Stanford. And there's this kind of legend or one of these mythic anecdotes that circulates in Silicon Valley about how Max Levchin, who's, Marc Andreessen developed the Mosaic browser when he was there. Levchin came to the Valley interested in starting a business or getting involved in the tech industry, as many graduates of that program did. He was actually crashing for the summer with Scott Bannister, later married to Cyan Bannister, who's, I think, the first female partner at Founders Fund. And I say this just to highlight kind of how tightly knit this network is. But Levchin, crashing with Scott Bannister, the legend, the sort of mythic anecdote has it, it's the summer in Palo Alto, it's hot, the apartment where Levchin is staying doesn't have air conditioning. So he randomly goes to talks at Stanford for the air conditioning and just kind of nods off that he showed up at a talk that Thiel was giving, I believe,

through the Hoover Institute, where Thiel had some kind of fellowship or affiliation, arrives at this talk, realizes he's one of only five people in the audience, and that it feels too rude to go to sleep, and listens to Thal's talk. Teal is talking about questions about currency and how to, you know, free money from the control of governments. Levchin, listening to it, realizes that his expertise in cryptography is relevant to what Teal is talking about and goes up afterwards and they make a date to meet at Hobie's, this Palo Alto diner that's famous for tech meetups the next morning. And it's that conversation that they sort of make there, you know, nothing in paper, but they agree to start PayPal and Levchin has the technical skills

and Teal's going to put up the money, which I think is $500,000 or something to start. I could have that number wrong. I'll just cut in and say, you know, the language that Teal is using seems very reminiscent of what we hear from cryptocurrency folks today, just to, you know, make that connection for people. Yeah, it's a very direct line. And in your original question that I'm answering at too great and digressive length, you said something about, you know, this idea that PayPal was built kind of with this very grand libertarian vision of creating a financial system that would not be beholden to governments and currency controls, and then ends up being something that like eBay buys, and, you know, becomes a more mundane way of exchanging money. And perhaps we're seeing something like that in the tensions that people who know more about it than I do are pointing out around cryptocurrency and its centralization or

how the state interacts with it today. Part of what PayPal does is it brings together all this engineering talent from Urbana-Champaign with all these money guys from Stanford. And if you go through the ranks of the folks in the PayPal mafia, that's often the way it breaks down. They get together and start PayPal again with these very, I don't know if lofty is the word, but with a certain set of libertarian philosophies that's not literally down the hall. Maybe it's down the street. In the same complex, Elon Musk, that other South African child of mining money, is starting his company, x.com and Elon Musk and some of these beefs. Like I think one of the funny things about getting into this network is that it's not only friendship, but like these deep beefs that go back for decades and end up being important in all sorts of unexpected ways. But one of the beefs has to do with how Sequoia is perceived to be favoring Musk even after the merger of x.com and PayPal. But anyway, is then called Confinity, which was a word they made up

because their confidence is infinite. And X.com are pouring tons of money into competing. And Confinity in particular sees that as a fight they can't win because Elon Musk's company has the backing of Sequoia and has sort of deeper pockets behind it. I believe it's Ralph Botha, whose last name I've never said out loud. I think that's how you pronounce believe it's Ralph Botha, whose last name I've never said out loud. I think that's how you pronounce it. But Ralph Botha, this venture capitalist at Sequoia, who eventually helps broker a merger between the two companies. And the reason I want to point that out is that I think this was also an early moment where Thiel began to develop his philosophy of tech monopoly and that it's not worthwhile to compete in a

niche like this, but there's sort of a natural tendency to try to monopolize a service like payments and a rationality to monopoly, which he discusses at greater length much later in the book that he writes with Blake Masters, Zero to One. So Levchin and Thiel start PayPal, hire a bunch of folks from around the Stanford Review and the technical folks from Urbana-Champaign. Confinity, as it is then called, merges with ElonMuskX.com in the year 2000, I believe. There's all kinds of personality in fighting Thiel and Elon never really get along. There's this line in Max Chavkin's biography where they're described by a mutual friend who I think says, Peter thinks Elon is a fraud and a braggart and Elon thinks Peter is a

sociopath. Maybe they're both right. Right. It's the one time that you find yourself agreeing with them. But basically this merger happens. Elon Musk is originally in charge. Teal leaves these surrogates of his in place and kind of stages a coup while Elon is away traveling on his honeymoon. Teal takes over the company. They sell eventually to eBay, although in a major target of theirs while they were developing. And in this book, The PayPal Mafia that they commission about themselves, Eric Jackson, the author describes how in the PayPal office, there was always a picture of Meg Whitman's face on a dartboard that people would throw darts at. But anyway, they're eventually bought by eBay and a bunch of the executives as part of that deal have to stay on for a certain period of time, but Teal, without talking to the other executives about it, basically disappears pretty quickly after that, which is part of a pattern of, I don't know if dubious or shadowy behavior is the way to put it, but of leaving folks he'd been working with feeling surprised, let's say. But this group of people who he assembled at PayPal go on to found a number of really important companies, including Yelp and YouTube and LinkedIn. And so in that sense, the money they make from PayPal and the sort of social network that they build at PayPal remains enormously influential in the Valley to this day.

When you talk about that network that comes out of PayPal, this PayPal mafia that has all this money that goes on to create really key companies to the Valley, do they also bring that idea that Teal develops around the need to kind of create this monopoly to lose a lot of money and then monopolize? Because after that is conceived, I guess, in this PayPal moment, it seems that that becomes quite a defining feature of tech companies and the Valley itself. Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's hard for me to answer. And in trying to answer it, I'll probably put my finger on something I find tricky about talking about Teal in general, because as you asked the question, I find myself thinking, is it that Teal

sort of came up with this idea or did he just name it in a certain way when it's what Wall Street and sort of what the market and the Valley were already doing? Amazon comes to mind, of course. Amazon is also a company founded in the 90s that grasps this insight that Wall Street is valuing tech companies based on number of users, not profits, and that therefore it's possible to raise capital to expand while either losing money or not making very much money. I hesitate over whether idea is even the right noun to use for it. Is that an idea or is that a material reality about these companies that benefit from network effects. But it's certainly true that Thiel, both because he's sort of the absent or secretive center of

this entire network of people, but also because he self-fashions as an intellectual and goes to academic conferences and edits a book of philosophy papers and styles himself that way. He's certainly a person who is early to articulating this idea that, as I would put it, firms that benefit from network effects tend towards natural monopoly, and that therefore competition is actually not desirable, just as he and Elon, with the intervention of Sequoia, determined that it was not worthwhile for them to try to out-compete one another with their payment startups. I think that really captures it well, right? To illustrate that, it's not so much that this is something that Peter Thiel came up with. It was something that was already around and maybe he

gives it a name and so it gets associated with him in particular, even as Jeff Bezos is very much building a company that is firmly based on this idea. And it's something that is pervading the valley, but that he identifies it or writes about it. So it gets identified with him in particular, and the group of people who are around him. He is very, very comfortable being the bad guy. Indeed, that's his identity that he's, you know, what we would now call a troll, or I was calling a provocateur. And he's very comfortable with and embraces a certain philosophy in which power is sort of its own justification. Power justifies itself and other kinds of moral criteria or social or political considerations are not legitimate or intellectually serious. Again, this is someone who

is reported, though he now denies it, to have told people in undergrad, apartheid is a perfectly sound economic system, and therefore I'm anti-anti-apartheid. And so to the extent that this logic of monopoly that, as you say, powers and propels so many tech firms, if not all of our big tech firms today, is not unique to Thiel and it's certainly not his unique insight. He's pretty early in the curve and seeing how to exploit that in a certain sense. And above all, is very comfortable being identified with that and has an entire canon of thinkers he claims, although so often whenever he's talking about René Girard or whomever, I think you could just say Ayn Rand. Maybe it's just Ayn Rand is the only one he's ever actually talking about. We should take his intellectualism with a grain of

salt. But he has an entire ideology or philosophical vocabulary for describing why, you know, what he calls zero to one, this sort of Nietzschean heroic view of the founder justifies the accumulation of monopoly power in the hands of just a few people in a way that, you know, someone like Jeff Bezos will still say, oh, Amazon's great because it's good for small businesses who use it or it brings jobs to here or there. Teal is very comfortable with this language of power. Maybe we see that in the next part of Teal's life that I wanted to discuss, right? Because as you describe and as Max describes in the book, Peter Teal kind of co-found Palantir in 2003. And that is very much based on technologies that were developed from PayPal

that were then reoriented toward national security, finding terrorists, blah, blah, blah, right? And so that is used to found this company. And I think you see a very significant shift in the narrative or the justification around it, whereas PayPal is positioned as this very kind of libertarian company, you're taking the banking system away from the government, etc, etc. With Palantir, you're working very closely with the national security establishment, with militaries, with the state itself, which goes against at least how PayPal was framed. And when we talked before doing this interview, you talked about how Palantir is often positioned in terms of surveillance, right? This is the big problem. But you talk about what he does

with this company is much more fascist, and that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. So can you expand on that point? Yeah. To go back to the beginning, so Palantir is founded in 2003 or 2004. And as Max Chapkin tells the story in his book, the sort of spark of the idea comes to Teal when he's invited through his conservative connections that he's developed since his Stanford undergraduate days to an event at the Bush White House, at the George W. Bush White House in the wake of 9-11. And Thiel recognizes that with the new Department of Homeland Security programs and these new enormous global systems of surveillance and data gathering that we all know about now, thanks to Edward Snowden, that there's going to be a huge demand by different

government agencies for software that can kind of parse and organize this data, and also for ontologies and taxonomies that will make it possible to connect different sources of data and analyze them. At this time, Max Levchin and the technical team at PayPal had already developed something that they called the Igor system that was supposed to detect financial fraud, actors who are using PayPal for money laundering or fraud and so on. This is a bit of a short version of the story, but Thiel putting two and two together sees that the kinds of techniques they've developed for tracking fraud at PayPal could be useful and that there's basically a huge business opportunity to build software for the government. It's interesting to me because critics of Thiel

have described this as a kind of hypocrisy on his part, right? There was a big article in Reason magazine, perhaps in 2020, that had some headline that said, you know, Peter Thiel was supposed to be a libertarian. What happened? build software for the state and for government agencies, or at least to make a lot of money saying that he's going to build software for nation states as a kind of contradiction, or as intention with his libertarian political philosophy. Whereas I think that Thiel thinks that corporations should take over the apparatus of the state. And in that sense, I'm not sure that I think it's as inconsistent with his worldview as other critics and observers have suggested. But in any case, Thiel looks at this new sort of enormous system of global surveillance that the United States is spinning up in the wake of 9-11, realizes that there will be demand for

software that can help agencies parse it and make sense of it, and that the war on terror will be this big business opportunity. Take some of the ideas that Levchin or some of the techniques Levchin had developed at PayPal, although I should say, as TNR Legal made me say, I don't know how much of the exact software is the same, but comes up with this idea for the company Palantir that I believe he starts in 2003. And then he asks Alex Karp, his buddy from Stanford Law School, who's a very sort of eccentric character we could get into on his own, to be the CEO. And Karp, who's realized for reasons that make perfect sense to me, having spent time with his dissertation, that he doesn't want to be a philosophy professor, but rather wants to be an investor,

is doing fundraising already, I believe, but is connected to sort of tech investors in Europe and in the United States as well. I should highlight Karp as someone who learned German as a second language. His mom is Black and his dad's Jewish, so his background is different than Teal's, but he is a sort of Teutonophile, loves Germany, went to do his PhD there, speaks German, slightly crappy American accent, I'll say just to be a bitch, but speaks German quite well and so on. Anyway, Teal Taps Karp to be the CEO of Palantir. And they ran the company from the beginning as this sort of civilizational project in a sense that it's going to help the West, which I say in

quotation marks, I think the West is a very problematic idea. And for them include Saudi Arabia, but help the West win the war on terror. And they raise money around that both privately, and they get some funding from In-Q-Tel, which is the venture arm of the CIA, and sort of take Palantir from there. It's interesting because you talked about there, like the positioning of it, right? And I think what that kind of starts to get at is a larger political orientation that Peter Thiel has suggested in recent years, in particular, the need for the West or for the United States to challenge China in particular, and to not allow China to achieve technological supremacy

over the United States. So what do we see in that? And I guess the relationship between what is doing with Palantir? Two things come to mind. I think that if I were being cynical and shorthandy about it, I might observe that Teal has a tendency to focus on whoever, you know, the most lucrative enemy of the United States is in that moment. And in the early 2000s, it is Islamofascism, which again, I'm making air quotes, which you can't see on a podcast. But in the first case, it's the war on terror. And then he's pivoted towards a focus on China since 2015 or 2016, maybe a little bit later, since the mid-2010s, let's say. So I think one other thing that's striking, and again, is one of these things, I think there are a lot of things about Palantir, because people became aware of Palantir, because in my view, I became aware of Palantir this way,

because in 2016, Thiel became very visible in the Valley as a conservative and then as a Trump surrogate, and Palantir was his company. There were also these important exposés of how Palantir was working with ICE and CBP in the wake of the 2016 election, and that rightly attracted public ire to Palantir. But Palantir became a kind of object of criticism in this moment of growing worry about what Shoshana Zuboff named surveillance capitalism and the power of Google and Facebook and sort of attention-driven tech firms, you know, YouTube and Instagram and all the subsidiaries of Alphabet and Meta as well. So in a sense, I think that that led to Palantir's being sort of lumped in with these concerns about surveillance, whereas that's not exactly what Palantir does. Palantir is not a company that makes money by gathering data on

normal people, you know, on people, period. Palantir is a company that makes money by selling enterprises, both state agencies and private companies, ways of looking at and organizing the data that they have. So that is a fundamentally different kind of enterprise. It's pulling on social media data at times and on data gathered through surveillance, but it itself is not surveilling. And in connection with that, one of these things about Palantir that I think if you were just like a person reading Bloomberg and the New York Times during the Trump administration that felt confusing and felt confusing to me for a long time was that Palantirians from sort of rank and file to Alex Karp have this language about privacy and civil liberties and how Palantir is a company that protects civil liberties. And I think speaking just for myself early on as a more

casual observer of the company, I would just sort of scratch my head at that and say, what on earth are they talking about? But a fundamental part of their value proposition is that because they're building taxonomies and ontologies and ways of looking at data for different enterprises, they also can set controls on who accesses what in order to comply with different kinds of privacy regimes or different restrictions. And so they, this is a bit of a tangent, but through that develop this branding and identity around being into privacy and into civil liberties. And that is part of their branding as being invested in the West and Western values and first being a key instrument, according to them, in the fight against so-called radical Islam and now in the fight against China. I wanted to say that because I think that's the kind of thing that initially, and I met people who work for Palantir, and I would be sort of baffled, frankly, when they would say these things about privacy and really valuing civil liberties. And I guess I only came to understand what that was about as I spent more time talking to some Palantir formers. And then

also, you know, as we all learned more about the company and its business model when it filed in 2020. I mean, another whole thing that's interesting to talk about is like how much it works at all. You know, I think there was that piece in New York Magazine about whether it's all smoke and mirrors. And as Chaskin points out in his biography of Thiel, Palantir kind of gets an enormous amount of mileage out of this totally unsubstantiated claim that their technologies were central to the capture of Osama bin Laden. And so I think, as with all these highly secretive tech companies, there are a bunch of questions to be asked about what exactly the technology does and how it works. Sometimes I, as a scholar or critic, worry that by centering it in our critique, we actually are sort of like raising its stock prices in a certain way. At the same time, I think it's really important to recognize how these companies come to be embedded within powerful institutions.

There's a newish book by an academic called Sarah Brain called To Predict and Surveil. And she actually did sort of deep ethnographic work with the Los Angeles Police Department during the period that they were using Palantir for sort of dragnet surveillance purposes. And reading that book, I often found myself asking this question to myself of, you know, is the problem with Palantir how its software works? Or is the problem with Palantir the fact that the LAPD use it? You know, I think that it's important, as people who think about the social impacts of technology to recognize that the harms it enacts often have as much to do with the institutions they're being taken up by as with the technologies.

But that's a bit of an aggression. I wonder if that is also a way of understanding Thiel's recent engagement in politics in a more concerted way, in the sense that, you know, as you said, he becomes a more visible figure in 2015, 2016, as he is vocally supporting Donald Trump and funding the Republican Party, in particular Republican candidates, and now has made a point that he will be funding particular candidates who represent his view of what the Republican Party should be and what the politics of the United States could be, people like J.D. Vance, Blake Masters. So what do we make of Thiel's move into politics in such a concerted way and funding these candidates to represent his interests? Yeah, there's all these, you know, white men with high cheekbones. He has this particular type, except J.D. Vance. I don't

know how J.D. snuck in there. You know, it's hard. I found myself thinking while you were asking the question, this is like a goofy thing to say, but I was like, I'm more inclined to a functionalist interpretation of Peter Thiel than a psychological interpretation of Peter Thiel, where I think his psychology is impossible to know. And frankly, you know, the state of Peter Thiel's soul is his own problem. I don't, we don't need to concern ourselves with it. So he becomes super visible in 2016. He speaks at the Republican National Convention in a very prominent spot. He speaks about being a gay Convention in a very prominent spot. He speaks about being a gay Republican, which is a big deal. I believe there had been one openly gay speaker at the RNC before. You know, it's talked about in the media in the summer of 2016 as the first

openly gay Republican speaker at the RNC convention. He then, in October 2016, after the Access Hollywood tape leaked and Trump is, you know, on record saying that he likes to grab women by the pussy and, you know, the Republican establishment is kind of fleeing. Everyone mistakenly is thinking, oh, God, that has to be the death knell of his campaign. That's one took over the line. Teal doubles down and donates, I want to say, $1.5 million to him right after that happens. And so the speech and these donations catapult him into a national spotlight. But I, again, under the philosophy that

we should have a functionalist interpretation of Thiel rather than a psychological interpretation, it seems clear that he has ideological affinities with Trump and with Trumpism. But I also think that these donations and decisions are sort of contrarian investment bets, where he sees that he has an opportunity to back this candidate who almost no one in his world is backing. And frankly, by the standards of how much money Peter Thiel has, it's not that much money, $1.5 million, it's not very much. And he sees that if Trump wins, that will put him in the position all of a sudden to be his prime connection to the Valley and in a

really good position to negotiate the kinds of contracts that Palantir is going after. And Palantir had cultivated relationships with Michael Flynn and General McMaster and other sort of Trump world people beforehand. All this to say, you know, I think it's a tricky and unknowable and perhaps ultimately irrelevant question what Peter Thiel actually thinks. But I think it's useful to think about these political bets that he makes within the framework of investing, which is the framework he, by all accounts, uses to think about everything and that the investment in Trump is a kind of contrarian bet, you know, contrarian in the investor sense of going against dominant market trends

that pays off for him. Trump gets elected. No one else had thought it would happen. Thiel finds himself kind of the intermediary with Silicon Valley. He gets an office in Trump Tower. He gets close to Steve Bannon for a time. I should say that Thiel had had contacts, as do the Mercers, with folks around Breitbart and Bannon, the sort of anti-Hillary Clinton universe before. But I think when I look

at Thiel's pronouncements and donations, I think we can't ever take them quite at face value. We should see them as like bets or moves in a certain game of chess, which is not to say that he doesn't possibly have beliefs that we would find offensive or despicable. But I think, you know, he's not a philosopher. At the end of the day, he's an investor. And that's where his power matters. There are a lot of little boys who like Ayn Rand, only, you know, only one of them is Peter Thiel. And I mean, the thing with China is also hard to say, because the anti-China stance is a very Trumpist stance. But frankly, in my view, regrettably, it's also a very bipartisan stance right now.

I mean, it's hardly controversial to be anti-China in the United States right now. But yeah, he does position himself that way and tries to position himself in contrast to Google as sort of anti-China in the latter years of the Trump administration. Even though he was going and giving zero to one seminars at Tsinghua and, you know, visiting China. The book is so popular in China, actually. It sells like a million copies in China, literally. It's fascinating, though. I was just going to say that I do want to make this point where I think for someone like me and for certain critics of Thiel, there has been this attraction to him because since he does sort of self-style as an intellectual, he feels like a good peg to like hang our ideas pieces on. And so I have felt vexed in my own work and thinking about this, about how to think about

Thiel's ideas, because in a sense, they're enormously important because he and members of his network are powerful and have a lot of power to realize their ideas. On the other hand, as I said, a lot of little boys like Ayn Rand. And so I feel hesitant to attribute too much causal power to them in many cases. And by extension, I think, you know, he's someone who sort of made a career out of getting attention by being hated since he was at least in college. And so I think that when he makes a controversial statement and everyone rushes to say, oh, my God, how could you say that? It's important not to get pulled into his media game. And I think many people have become more sophisticated about that in the past four years. But I think that

there's a way that, yeah, when we're writing and thinking about him, we have to remember that saying, oh God, how could he say that only serves to aggrandize his mythology. Yeah, I think it's a really good point. As we end our conversation, I have two final questions that I think will sum up what we've been talking about in this conversation and getting these details about Peter Thiel's past. As we started this conversation, as I said at the beginning, you talked about how Peter Thiel's network is really important, right? The network that he has brought together, the network that he controls. And you described how in the 1970s, you know, there was a group of people who coalesced around Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, and then went on to be influential in the decades that followed. Steve Jobs is a

notable example, right? But then in the 2000s, you have the similar group that coalesced around Thiel, the PayPal mafia, but then these other people who he gets to know as well. And Brand's influence was a libertarian politics that many have cited in the Valley over many years. But do we underestimate the degree of Thiel's influence in the Valley and the right-wing politics that he espouses, have they become more broadly influential in the tech industry than we often recognize? I think a lot of what is often described as the Californian ideology, to quote the name of a famous and important article from the 90s, or this sort of mix of social liberalism and fiscal, if not conservatism, and libertarianism,

this sort of cocktail of values associated with the leadership class of Silicon Valley is often traced back to Stuart Brand, another libertarian white male Stanford graduate. But this group of people who come together around Brand from the late 60s onward. And the historian Fred Turner has a wonderful book on this subject called From Counterculture to Cyberculture, in which he argues that many of the beliefs and practices of the kinds of white leftists or hippies who sort of founded communes in Northern California during that period directly informed the development of personal computing technologies and this industry that grows up in the post-Cold War period in Silicon Valley. I interpret Teal and the PayPal mafia as a kind of next iteration, in a sense, of this process that Fred describes in that book.

My friend, Quince Labodian, who's a historian of neoliberalism, teases me. What does he say? Fred's book is called Counterculture to Cyberculture, and he teases me that mine is like Cyberculture to Cryptoculture. And a big point that Fred emphasizes about the Stewart Brand crew is that they both are creating new kinds of social networks and ways of living and experimenting with technology, but also creating media that mythologizes themselves doing this and creates a kind of culture and ideology to go along with the work they're doing. And in my view, the PayPal mafia, a moniker that comes from a 2007 profile of all of them, but this group of people we've been talking about that coalesces around Stanford and PayPal in the 90s and early 2000s. It's similar in many ways to the brand,

the brand mafia, but it's happening in a different historical moment, right? This isn't the end of the global 1960s when everyone's supposed to be committed to social revolution or personal transformation and change. This is the 80s. This is like the greed is good. It kind of everyone wants to go be an investment banker era. And I think that the beliefs of this group and their lack of interest in social movements or personal transformation, and then that sense as a substitute for social movements reflects that context. And they're similar. Yeah, I was holding up this book by Eric Jackson, but Teal is constantly self-publishing books or funding the publication of things about this group. They're building a mythos around themselves in a similar way, for sure. I think another idea I

haven't quite fully developed, but I do think there's something too and is worth exploring, is that this first generation, right? And we have Stuart Brand and Steve Jobs. I always say Job. Steve Jobs is inspired by him. And Shell Caffin, who's one of the first engineers at Amazon, had actually worked for Brand and like lived with him or traveled around with the van and the whole earth catalog. That first generation is making consumer Internet companies. Right. And Chris Cox at Facebook is also obsessed with the whole earth catalog. And I know Patrick Collison at Stripe also obsessed with the whole earth catalog and I know Patrick Collison at Stripe is obsessed with brand too and so there are a number of founders in the valley

who've remained very influenced by this brandy and idea of like making people tools and then they'll go build whatever communities and do whatever they're going to do with them and it's an idea that it makes sense that it meshes with a certain kind of socially permissive libertarian ideology, right? Because Facebook or Google or Stripe or Amazon makes money by giving us anything you might possibly want to buy in the largest product catalog in the world and giving people tools to set up whatever kinds of social media communities, whatever you want to search for, whether it's the KKK or BLM, you know, Google can make money off that search. There's a certain kind of cultural openness that I think meshes very naturally with that kind of consumer facing internet tech. Teal, interestingly,

although he starts with payments and PayPal is where he first makes his name and is, of course, an early investor to Facebook as part of this elaborate FU to Sequoia and the beginning of this like founder focused investment culture, which we didn't really touch on. But anyway, Palantir is enterprise software. It's selling enterprise software. They're not making money off of you and me and everyone wants to search for or broadcast or buy anything. They want to sell software to large corporations and governments. And I think there are technological changes, the rise of certain kinds of enterprise software in the cloud is something we could think about in connection with this. I think a lot about this question of like what comes after the attention economy or something once the attention economy has made as much money as it can make. I think certain things we're seeing in China with the new tech regulation have to do with that too. But anyway, I think that the PayPal mafia is

analogous in some ways to the Whole Earth Catalog group or the counterculture to cyberculture Stewart brand types, but they're building different kinds of companies and they have this different kind of political orientation and style of self-presentation. And I think that's partly the milieu and the times, as I said, and I think it is partly about how that change in the times is pointing towards new kinds of business models and, you know, the Silicon Valley of the new Cold War, however that will be. I think it's really interesting to frame

it as there was this group of people around Stuart Brand. And, you know, as you described, from counterculture to cyberculture, and now there is this new group of influential people that we haven't fully recognized, have had this kind of influence that, you know, maybe in retrospect, we're recognizing that more. But at the moment, it wasn't recognized and still hasn't been recognized as much because there's still a lot of emphasis placed on brand and whole earth and those kind of ideas that come out of it. Yeah, honestly, the framing of like, Peter Thiel is so conservative, who can believe it? Silicon Valley has a conservative, even when pieces that critique him take that framing, they actually serve to obscure

how kind of long running the political tendencies he represents have been in the Valley. Great point. So to end our conversation, a final question, right? Because we've talked about the influence that Peter Thiel has had in making these companies, but also in forming this network in having this group of people who he's close with, who he's associated with, and how this network has gone on to really create important companies that have transformed the way we live, the way we associated with, and how this network has gone on to really create important companies that have transformed the way we live, the way we engage with a whole load of different services and things like that in our lives, right? Now, we've also been through this experience of

the pandemic, which is not fully over yet. And in Max Chafkin's book, he cites an interview that Thiel did in August of 2020 with Die Weltbuch. I might be totally mispronouncing that. And he said that COVID-19 had created an opening. In a quote, he said, changes that should have taken place long ago did not come because there was resistance. Now the future is set free because of the pandemic. Do you think that in a post-pandemic world,

someone like Peter Thiel and the politics that he represents have a greater influence within Silicon Valley, but also in the kind of the I think at various points in the United States, anyway, the real breakdown of sort of basic social and government services during the pandemic, I don't know if it's quite that it's given more credence to or made more plausible some of the kinds of critiques of the nation state and its dysfunction that Thiel and people in his circle like Balaji Srinivasan have been advocating. I wonder also, I don't remember the exact quotation that you're citing, but I think also that COVID has produced a more bordered world again. China is still basically closed. Australia and New Zealand, as you know, are like significantly locked down. And we're also closing off Russia to the world at this moment, right? Now we're closing off Russia. So in a moment of deglobalization, you know, those who make

the technologies that make the borders stand to make a lot of money. And to the extent that borders themselves are created and monitored by surveillance and various kinds of software, because increasingly also, you know, borders surround people and follow us around, and it's not just a physical border. My pessimistic answer to the question is that I think that there are ways that as a major disruptive event, COVID has created a world and in the ways that it's heightened the sort of new Cold War tensions and the war is now creating this situation of heightened tension between Russia and the rest of the world. There are ways that this has created a moment of opportunity for Kiel and his worldview.

And I think, you know, the famous contrarian investing line, right, is to buy when there's blood in the streets. So I think that in that sense, COVID, in addition to literally making available a bunch of new government contracts to process a new kind of data for Palantir, has maybe created a moment of opportunity for those who like Teal or Srinivasan want to see a certain kind of continued sort of evisceration of the state and tech companies moving in and so on. On the other hand, I think we have to recognize that this kind of statement, and this comes back to my functionalist interpretation of Peter Thiel, we have to keep in mind that this kind of statement is like a marketing statement for himself. And so the world after COVID, or, you know, in the ongoing wake of COVID is only Peter Thiel's world if we let it be. And so I think that it's

always worthwhile to take his pronouncements about these things with a grain of salt. When he says he's being evil, that's advertising. I think that's a great point to leave it on and to leave the listeners with. Moira, I have really enjoyed chatting with you to getting your insight on Peter Thiel and this network that he has created. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paris. It was fun. Moira Weigel is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a founding editor

of Logic Magazine and the co-editor of Voices from the Valley. You can follow her on Twitter at Moira G. Weigel. You can follow me at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you you can find out more about that at Harbinger Media Network dot com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to Patreon dot com slash Tech Won't Save Us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.