The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business, and politics “Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel, the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency. It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including funding the lawsuit that destroyed the blog Gawker and strenuously backing far-right political candidates, notably Donald Trump for president in 2016. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast who knew almost a thousand podcasts we decided to make another one who saw that coming after 12 years anyway guys thanks for tuning in be sure to watch the video version of this it's free for an unlimited time on youtube you just go there you press the subscribe button to the show

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Twitter, Instagram, Tik TOK, all the places the cool kids are at. And you can see all the wonderful things that we're doing over there with the show and all the show features, et cetera, et cetera.

So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's

beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made, numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today, we have an amazing author. It's an honor to have him on. He's written a very interesting tome that I was just waiting for someone to write this book. I'm like, when is someone going to write a book about Peter Thiel? And he has done so. The book is out September 21st,

2021, The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin. He's written this book and put it out. You want to definitely pick it up. He is a features editor and tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. His work has also appeared in Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Inc., and the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Queens, New York with his wife and journalist and their children. Welcome to the show, Max. How are you? Hey, how's it going, Chris? Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. And quite the book here. It's quite thick and heavy and quite the interesting read because this is an interesting gentleman. So give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs.

Yeah, I am at Chafkin, C-H-A-F-K-I-N, on Twitter. I'm on Instagram at mchafkin. My website is maxchafkin.com. You can buy the book there or anywhere where books are sold. Order them up where those fine books are sold. I've never done that before, but that's fun. Yeah, yeah. You got the pitch there just down right.

That's what you always say. Order them where the fine books are sold, not in those alleyways. Stay away from the alleyways. There's needles and stuff you might hurt yourself in, broken glass. So anyway, guys, it's wonderful having you on the show. What motivated you to want to write this book? Yeah, so I'm basically a technology journalist. I've been kind of covering the world of tech, of Silicon Valley, for the past, I don't know, 15 years.

And over that period of time, whatever, it's been an interesting journey. There are lots of things you can talk about there. The industry, the tech industry has grown in just this incredible way. I think it went from being a backwater, basically, where there's a lot of cool stuff happening in tech, but it's not like where the action is. Obviously, the action is on Wall Street. It's these big companies and Facebook, a little kind of piddling social network. And over that time, of course, tech, and in particular, kind of these internet companies companies has gone from being, as I said, a sideshow to being, I would argue, the most significant industry in the world, both in terms of economic influence, obviously, like the, I think,

nine of the 10 publicly traded companies are tech companies. It's basically everything but Berkshire Hathaway and also culturally significant, like really the sort of center of influence. And so to me, that's the big story of this part of the 21st century. And as I'm covering this industry, talking to entrepreneurs over that period of time, Peter Thiel is this guy who's always a degree removed from pretty much every story. He is this kind of really interesting behind-the-scenes player. He's a venture capitalist, founder of PayPal, and then became famous as the Don, as it were, of the PayPal mafia, which is like a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who work together. And those people, that group includes Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Stoppelman, the YouTube guys, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

And so these guys are making all these moves. So Teal is this kind of incredibly influential businessman. And then in 2016, something kind of crazy happens, which is in the same month, it comes out that there's been this lawsuit against Gawker Media. At the time, it was a very big and influential publisher. And there's been this lawsuit going on, the wrestler Hulk Hogan for violation of privacy comes out. Peter Thiel is paying Hulk Hogan's legal bills, and he's doing it because he wants to destroy Gawker because eight years earlier, Gawker had outed him, had disclosed that he's gay, which he'd been out privately, but not in that public way. And as revenge, he had funded this lawsuit. Same month, it comes out that he is going to be a

delegate to Donald Trump in the Republican National Convention. And those two things together, I think, are really interesting. Both, obviously, the Gawker thing has all kinds of interesting, I don't know, angles that we could talk about. But of course, Silicon Valley is normally seen as a left or centrist sort of industry. Obviously, it's in California. The average tech worker probably votes for Democrats. At the time, even like the Republicans in Silicon Valley were not too excited about Donald Trump. And Thiel is coming out not just as a Trump supporter, but as a key supporter, somebody who's going to be at the convention, is going to speak at the convention, is going to endorse him. And that, to me, was really interesting because Thiel is an immigrant,

a gay immigrant technologist who had funded marijuana companies. It's basically all the things, it's basically the opposite, 180 degree opposite of Donald Trump, both in policy, you would think, and in terms of mannerisms, just kind of style. So those contradictions I thought were really interesting. And I thought it was a really cool opportunity to tell a story of a powerful person whose rise tracks the rise of the tech industry and who has these kind of crazy contradictions in there. And that's one of the things that always perplexed me about him too. Like you say, an immigrant, a gentleman who's gay, and it's like, you're going to go support Stephen Miller? Yeah. And the Donald Trump agenda of anti-immigrants, anti-gay, it was just extraordinary.

Let me ask you this off the bat. Is this a patriarchy thing or a pan-globalist thing where you reach the point where you're really just more about, he's more interested in just preserving his wealth and stuff because he embraced the alt-right? So I think it's really complicated and really interesting. Obviously, it's like a whole book to explain this, but I'll throw a couple of thoughts at you in response to that question.

Number one, yeah, I think Teal is a rich guy and he's an investor and he's like a real, he's somebody who's like really savvy about, and he's not the only one. I think a good comparison would be like the Koch brothers, but he's like really savvy about blending his political interests with his business interests. And I think that that's something that the Kochs did for a long time,

very successfully. And I think it's something that Thiel does. I think for Thiel, there's a business project and a political project. Those two projects are connected and they work in synergy. And there are lots of people, he's obviously not the only one who does that. But I think in Silicon Valley, that's he's unique. He's also ideological. And there's this feeling among tech people, I think, in 2016, where he couldn't really believe this stuff. He's probably just saying it. He doesn't actually like Trump.

That sort of happened, actually, with a lot of Trump supporters, I think. And I think the truth is, no, he actually likes Trump. So yes, there are lots of contradictions, but there are areas of common interest. Now, Thiel, despite being an immigrant, is very hawkish on immigration and has been for a really long time. And then I get into this in the book, but you can go back in his history, he's been funding hardline, hardcore anti-immigration types for over a decade. And so it's not totally inconsistent. The other thing, and I think this is totally misunderstood and missed to some extent by people who cover tech because they focus on the whatever, the cool gadgets and all that.

But the PayPal mafia, that's Thiel's crew, it really has its roots not at PayPal, but at the Stanford Review, which is this libertarian right wing magazine that Peter Thiel started as a young man, as an undergraduate at Stanford. It's nowadays you might use the phrase trollish to describe some of the impulses. It's this kind of provocative, we're trying to mess with the liberal establishment. And so he's basically his whole career been all about going after these so-called sacred piety things that as he sees it, the left believes. And so he wrote an entire book about quote unquote political correctness, basically arguing that Stanford was doing too much bending over backwards too much to help basically the interests of minorities and to put non-Western curriculum. So it's like this. So that's where he's coming from. And when you think about Donald Trump, that's exactly,

that is a big part of Donald Trump's appeal, big part of Donald Trump's appeal, both to somebody like Peter Thiel, but also I think your average kind of like man on the street Trump voter is like, he's a guy who's going to say the thing that's going to get you in trouble. And that is, I think that is a big part of Thiel's psyche and it's a big part of the Trump movement. And I think it's very interesting that like somebody who has had such a hand in some of these really influential companies that that would appeal to somebody like that. But I think that's the core of it. So yes, some of this I think is undoubtedly self-interest. Thiel is a brilliant investor. You should always look at the money. I think it's, as a business journalist,

like I think you should always look at the money with everybody, including the people who would yell at you if you even suggested that. But Teal is not somebody like that. He's somebody who really cares about moving money around and maximizing his wealth and things like that. So I think money is part of it, but ideology is another big part of it. And it's something you shouldn't underestimate. That's extraordinary. Now, the book is framed as a biography. Was there any input from Peter Thiel? So I approached it journalistically. And by that, I talked to everybody and anybody. And so that included Thiel's friends, former employees, people who worked at his investment firms, people who knew him socially. And of course, I approached Thiel himself and was

in touch with his representatives. And we met off the record. He didn't want to talk to me on the record. And so he, whatever, we had some interaction, but he did not participate in the book. It's not an authorized biography. And I was hoping he would talk to me on the record as a journalist. Obviously, that's what you want. But I also think that in some ways he's written a book. It's called Zero to One. It's a really good sort of explanation of his philosophy. And so there is a way to access Peter Thiel's thoughts. He's given a lot of speeches like it's not like he's hiding this stuff. number one, the ways in which kind of he has gotten to power and how he maintains his power, like the sort of behind the scenes influence, which is not something I think you get if you ask somebody directly. You can't just say, hey, how did you? You can, but you don't often get a very satisfying answer. So I think there's something that actually isn't there if you had just asked him directly. And I hope that this kind of journalistic approach is a virtue.

And I'll say one other thing about that. Teal has made a real effort to, you hinted at this at the top, to shape the narrative. And I think that's maybe a kind way of putting it, right? He destroyed a media outlet for writing things he didn't like, which is obviously not a narrative shaping approach that is available to most people. But of course, he's controlled the narrative. He's very influential. He's a billionaire. He is somebody who has a lot of access to shape the narrative. And I think it's important that kind of independent journalism be done about billionaires and people like this, because otherwise you're just getting like the, you're not getting the real story. You're just getting the kind of PR approach, which it's totally valid, but I don't think it's the only

way to learn things. Yeah, this guy is really interesting. So you would say it's a balanced journalistic sort of approach to this biography? Yes. Yes. Because I was going through some of the chapters and the first chapter is fuck you world. And some of the different aspects, but he's involved in the evil list, the deportation force. It's really interesting, but he's, his influence, correct me if I'm wrong, but his influence on the Facebook board, and I think he stands off of it now. I think they had to move him during the Trump years. He's on the Facebook board. He's still, is he still on the Facebook board? And one of the problems I had was he influenced Zuckerberg or Facebook to make it so that there was a story that came out where they were going to make it so that people who were being persecuted, who were of minority communities on Facebook would be protected and there could be reporting of them. And they made the inclusion that white people would also be in that protected community.

And and that backfired horribly in fact i've been suspended twice for calling out the white patriarchy or white people on the thing i can't type the word white in my facebook without getting suspended i have to do wh astrophe te because to my understanding max or not max i'm sorry peter leaned on stop it max I'm just kidding. But Peter leaned on Zuckerberg to include white people in that from his alt-white, alt influence. Is that correct? That story is not, that story is new to me. I think broadly speaking, or if it's not new, it's gone in one ear and out the other. I think broadly speaking, Teal has had a big influence on Facebook. Now, a couple of things are worth saying number one mark zuckerberg is the dictator of facebook it's yeah it's true at a lot of companies but it's more true at facebook because he is the founder the ceo the this kind of charisma i'm not charismatic

because he's not charismatic but he's like a well-known celebrity kind of visionary and he has this super voting stock that allows him to troll the board and basically fire board members at will. So Mark Zuckerberg is in control of Facebook. If you buy shares in that company, you are buying, you are not buying, it's not like a normal company. You can go to the annual meeting, but no one's listening to you or your ability to influence what's happening on that company is very limited, including for somebody like Peter Thiel. Now, Thiel, though, has been the longest serving outside Facebook board member. There have been, over the years, a couple of purges. I don't know if that's quite the right way to put it,

but there have been a bunch of board members who have been dismissed over the years. Thiel has hung on. And I think that's a testament to his friendship with Mark Zuckerberg. He was the first outside investor, the first person to really believe in Mark Zuckerberg, which go back to 2004, 2005, that is no small thing. Mark Zuckerberg did not look like a very successful person to the average. He's like a Harvard dropout who got in trouble for doing this vaguely, doing a gross thing with his classmates. That was Mark Zuckerberg. That's who he was. And Thiel saw that and somehow figured out this guy actually is brilliant. He's going to be an amazing CEO and helped set him up to be that. And so I think there's a bond there. And I think there's also a bit of an ideological alliance with Zuckerberg.

And Zuckerberg's politics are very hard to figure out. But I think he's I think Thiel has influenced Zuckerberg made him pretty libertarian in his feelings about how Facebook should relate to the world. And I also think that Thiel is pretty valuable to Facebook, because the company is constantly it's constantly getting attacked by everybody. But especially go back five years ago, and this has continued, the right has been putting a lot of pressure on Facebook to do more to support basically right-wing points of view and to say, hey, you're discriminating

against our points of view. And Thiel is very valuable there because he's somebody who Mark Zuckerberg can point to and say, look, you're saying I discriminate against you. I have the biggest Trump support in the business world, in the corporate world, at least, on my board. Like, this is not, like, Thiel is not, like, a mainstream Republican. He's like a Steve Bannon Republican, and he's on the Facebook board. So I think that's, so for all those reasons, he's valuable. He's an important ideological ally. And I think he has a big influence on Mark Zuckerberg, but he can't, like, make Facebook do anything because no one can make Facebook do anything, which arguably makes his position maybe even more significant. Because in a world where no one can influence Mark Zuckerberg except Mark Zuckerberg, then this person who's really close, who has this bond, is going to be important. Yeah. And what's interesting is you saw the rise of Donald Trump come through probably the leniencies that Facebook had where it was just wide open,

Miramar, et cetera, et cetera. What's interesting is you open up new revelations that are pretty secretive about his early life in South Africa and apartheid and stuff. Tell us a little bit about that because that's something new that you've uncovered that most people probably haven't heard about. Yeah, yeah. So he's had this kind of interesting... There are actually, weirdly, a lot of South Africans in Silicon Valley, but Elon Musk is a South African. So Thiel's family, working class, they're German immigrants, middle class kind of family. And his dad was basically a project manager at Mines. And so he had an advanced degree, but it's the kind of job that forces you to wear work boots sometimes

and things like that. And so they lived in, when they were in the US, they lived in this, you know, kind of very middle class or even lower middle class suburb of Silicon Valley, Foster City. You think he grew up in Silicon Valley, but Foster City is a long way from like the hardcore. It's a long way from the kind of research parks and the parts of Silicon Valley that you really associate with money. And as you say, his dad, who was working at these nuclear power plants, spent some time in South Africa and Southwest Africa, which is now called Namibia. But at the time, it was basically a colony of apartheid South Africa. And that's a weird background, just because if you know the history, so obviously, apartheid, the politics of apartheid are something that you would live day to day if you're a white person working there.

But also back then, we were talking about the mid 70s, South Africa was frantically trying to get nuclear weapons. And because it wanted to stop, it was worried about losing its position in the world. And so being like working in that industry at that time is definitely going to mean buying in to some politics that I think most of us nowadays would see pretty harshly. And I think when Thiel got to Stanford and starts this conservative newspaper, I think there's a, there's probably a sense that, you know, a bit of a, a bit of a a like a rude awakening to the politics of a university campus where at the time there was this big movement uh big anti-apartheid movement and running into that coming from a family where you know your dad worked within those circumstances i think would be would would lead to some to to some upheaval and it did and he became this conservative firebrand at Stanford. He convinced that Stanford and really all colleges were these bastions of liberal intolerance.

And that became the key to the book I mentioned called The Diversity Myth, which kind of established Thiel as a kind of this young right-wing firebrand. It's an identity that he left as he became an investor, but obviously never really went away and also connected him to all these other firebrand types. And I think that – I talked to a lot of former PayPal people, and they talked about the way that they all felt like they were part of this kind of tribe, us against the world. And that's powerful, right? That's like – people tend to – especially in Silicon Valley, they tend to fetishize this team of rivals. It's really good.

If you have a lot of different perspectives, that's going to be good. And it is, of course. And I think there are limits, and Teal has often run into those limits of conformity. But obviously, conformity, loyalty, those things can create their own momentum. And I think that's one thing that if you look at Teal's Rise, that's one thing that's different and unique about it. It's like it cuts against a lot of the kind of norm tropes that maybe read like business books, or this is what you should do, because Teal often does the exact opposite. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but it's always pretty interesting. Yeah, it's really wild about how he came up. It reminds me a lot of Stephen Miller and how he

went through high school and college. If you've read her name right now, but she wrote the book, a biography of him and he had this, he's been just really angry and bent at stuff all of his life starting in college. And what was funny was he even dated Mexican girls and you go, what was that trigger? Maybe it was just his upbringing, you know? Yeah. I don't know. I think, I do think there's been this long movement of – there's a long proud tradition – proud is maybe not the right word – of this kind of provocative conservatism, this kind of performative conservatism. And you see it in somebody – I'm not familiar with all those details, but I do know a little bit about Steve Miller because obviously he was in the Trump administration and whatever. But I do think you see it in that kind of narrative, and you see it in a lot of the kind of alt-right folks. And you also see it in Peter Thiel and these Stanford Review guys.

And I would argue that they helped create that model. Now, that model existed, and I think a couple years before Thiel's book came out, Dinesh D'Souza, who was, you know, one of the, you know, founding editors of the Dartmouth Review, which the Stanford Review is modeled against, wrote a very similar book called A Liberal Education. It's the same deal. It's just like attacking the, you know, college campuses, treating college campuses as these bastions of conformity. And that became a way in the 80s, which Thiel totally took advantage of to make your name. Like if you want to get an internship at the Department of Education, which Peter Thiel did as an undergraduate, being especially a Reagan era Department of Education,

being in that, swimming in that stream is a good way to do it. Being the kind of young, conservative provocateur. And so I think that's, I think Thiel helped create the model for the alt-right, for some of these young guys who were pissed off and who are using that to be super provocative online. And he was, like I said, swimming in a stream where that was a model. And I think, I bring up this point in the book, but there's been a lot of good stuff written about kind of activist conservative politics. But I don't think people have realized that like a lot of good stuff written about kind of activist conservative politics but i don't think people have realized that like a lot of that there's some thread between the activist conservative politics which kind of values tactics that are maybe slightly underhanded or whatever there are

all these stories of people sneaking into the university building and like copying the names of people to get out this this newspaper that the administration doesn't want them and what's called in silicon valley growth hacking and there's this this concept in Silicon Valley that you do what it takes to get your startup off the ground. Your startup is like a revolutionary movement. And so I think there are ways in which that way of thinking, the kind of conservative activism or activist mindset in general, kind of may have influenced the way that a lot of these startups and now, unfortunately, big companies behave. And I bring this up in the book, but I think that's a really important thing. This kind of ethos of disruption, of breaking the rules, of doing what it takes to get your

company off the ground, that's really, obviously, that's ethically, perhaps ethically at any point, but it becomes more problematic when you're talking about a really big, really powerful company. I don't think we have as much of a problem with a tiny startup doing something underhanded because it's just a tiny startup. They're doing what they have to do. But once it's like the world's third most valuable company or something that's like continuing to do the bad things, continuing to treat disruption, rule breaking as a goal, as an end in itself, I think that's when things get out of hand. And that's where I think I would argue that we're seeing end in itself, I think that's when things get out of hand. And that's where I think we're, I would argue that we're seeing that with a lot of stuff

that's happened with Facebook and also some of the other big tech companies. That's interesting. Yeah. I didn't know he got on the Department of Education with during the Reagan years. A book that you should read and everyone should read is Hate Monger about Stephen Miller by Jean Guerrero. That's who I was trying to remember her name earlier. I'm getting too old to remember stuff anymore, but there's an intertwining there.

And Stephen Miller came up out of Larry Elder. And speaking of topical news, did Peter Thiel support the Larry Elder or anybody else? No, no, but you don't have to look at, just like I was saying, the degrees of Peter Thiel, you don't have to go that far. So David Sachs, who was one of those early Stanford review guys, he co-wrote the book that I was talking about, Diversity Myth with Thiel, about kind of the dangers of, quote unquote, multiculturalism in college campuses. He and his wife were a major donor to the recall effort and certainly a major force pushing it and bringing some other tech money in. So Thiel smartly stayed out of it. And Thiel is very good,

I have to say, at battles, finding battles that he can win. And if he loses, finding ways to not necessarily take responsibility for that. But I think it's pretty telling. And maybe Gavin Newsom obviously won easily after weeks of hand-wringing and people were talking about how it was looking pretty bad. And I think Thiel obviously smartly stayed away from that one. He has messed around in California politics before. And I actually believe, I'd have to double check, I think he's donated to Gavin Newsom. Actually, David Sachs, guy funded the recall, pretty sure. But in any case, he stayed out of it. He's definitely focusing most of his energy on the Senate races, where they're also, I think, not necessarily like slam dunk elections, but I think they're fights that maybe are where there's more to be gained for him,

for somebody like Thiel than the Newsom recall. Yeah. And speaking to what you were saying earlier, I joined PayPal. I signed up for them back at the beginning. I don't know, maybe their first year or two. And back then it was like them against the banks. So like you say, they were fighting against what were at the time, the big guys. Now things have been really adopted and geez, even PayPal is picking up crypto now. Yeah. Wait, not now. I'm sorry to cut you off, but this is something I discovered in the book that I think is super interesting. So I'll just throw it out here. Early on, the ideology of PayPal was yes, yeah, buy stuff, buy, sell and stuff online. But really, the thing that like Thiel was like fixated on that he was talking to reporters about that he was talking to, you know, employees about was this idea that once you have a PayPal wallet, right, you have this kind of digital money that is going to be very hard to control. Remember, he's a libertarian, conservative political activist. And there are comments that you can go back and find where he's talking about how this is going to give everyone their own private Swiss bank account. And that's almost exactly what the way a lot of the crypto heads talk about crypto now as this way to get around government regulation, make it super hard for the government to stop you. And so I think I think there's a way to see Teal and PayPal as like the ideological precursor. Teal's like the ideological godfather to crypto. Those ideas were very much like part of what PayPal was trying to do. They got maybe sidetracked or something by

the need to survive. But the original plan was this kind of extreme libertarian vision about how money could be controlled or, you know, not controlled. Yeah. Which is interesting because crypto can overthrow the U.S. government. If it were to become, if cryptocurrency were to become the, you know, international standard, then there goes your treasuries right out the window and your Federal Reserve and everything else. But no, you're right. Come to think of it, PayPal went through the same mark that crypto did. For a lot of years, the IRS wasn't involved.

They didn't have their fingers. They didn't have any monitoring. And then one day, all of a sudden, my PayPal account, it's like, we're going to start reporting to the IRS. Same thing with the crypto. It almost seemed to have a 10-year run before the IRS showed up. We should start monitoring this stuff. And also money. I think Teal picked this up early and it's something that the crypto folks really appreciate. But money is power. And if you control, if you find ways, governments, that's one of the big things they do is they control money. And I think it's no accident

that the next company that Teal started after PayPal was Palantir, which is this defense contractor that started as an attempt to repackage a piece of technology or really an approach to security that PayPal developed, because PayPal was trying to stop money launderers. And Thiel had this notion that you could take that, sell it to the US government for the purpose of stopping terrorists. And remember, in 2001, 2002, 2003, the big focus of kind of US law enforcement was like data mining, we screwed up, we missed the warning signs, because we weren't looking at the data correctly. Here comes Peter Thiel, consummate entrepreneur. Hey, I've got a product to sell you. And that becomes Palantir, this major defense contractor.

Yeah. And it's definitely controversial. That was the next topic I was going to ask you about. So you led right into it. Pretty interesting with Palantir. People have had a lot of different issues with it. Who's the gentleman who's Edward Snowden, I think, isn't too happy about, is he? privacy-friendly data miner or something where they were like, we're data mining, but somehow we're data mining in a smart way, which is better than what the NSA was doing. I'm not sure if that's totally coherent, but that is what they tried to do. And I think backing up a bit, it was like, for a long time, just this, an idea, okay, like we're going to try to sell some software to the US government and trying to find some way to, how do you make the, how do you make something the government will buy? And so they went through a lot of things. What I think is troubling about Palantir to privacy advocates

are two things. One is that data mining itself is a problem for privacy. Because if you look at somebody's Facebook browsing or whatever, you can figure out a lot of stuff about them that they might not want to reveal. You can figure out their lot of stuff about them that they might not want to reveal you can figure out their sexual orientation you figure out they're cheating on their spouse you figure out if they're pregnant you probably can tell how many weeks pregnant they are based on exactly you know so there's all kinds of things right that like that you or there been there was a great article uh in the times magazine i don't know like 10 years ago by i think it was i can't remember who wrote but it was about how target knows who's pregnant based on what they're buying, which obviously like makes a lot of sense, but would you, but like you actually haven't disclosed that to them.

And so- You gotta buy diapers to throw them off. Yeah, you gotta just mix it up every now and then to, yeah, that's a good op sec. So in any case, there's this like broad concern that like, if you give a company access to a big firehose of data that's provided by the US military or by Twitter or Facebook or any company, you're going to run into, very quickly, you're going to run into privacy problems. And that was at the core of the Snowden, of some of what came out of the Snowden stuff, because they were looking at this metadata, which doesn't sound like that much,

but then it can turn into a huge source of data. And then the other thing about Palantir that I think troubles people is that it's a company that doesn't seem, that it has turned this kind of big brotherish approach into almost like a sales pitch. So they're almost bragging about what they can do with Palantir, which I think is, it's not necessarily good for privacy. It may be whether or not they can actually do bad stuff. It's, it maybe is creating a permission structure that might allow another bad actor to come along and do the bad thing. So as I go, like once you're data mining, like even if you're super careful, even if you're the best data miner in the world, and I'm not saying Palantir is, but even if they were right, it almost doesn't matter because another bad actor could come along and do the exact same thing, but do it worse. And what's stopping them? So that's

the sort of the broad issue that I think privacy advocates worry about. And there's a bunch of other private stuff that Palantir's up to that no one knows about that they won't talk about, right? With the U.S. government? You don't know. They have a lot of government contracts. They're backed by the CIA. It's very easy to- Go wrong. They have a lot of government contracts. They're backed by the CIA. It's very easy to put the tinfoil hat on. As a journalist, I like to focus on the stuff that I think in general, the things that are scandalous are not like the illegal things. They're the legal things.

It's often the most outrageous thing is the thing that's sitting there right in the open looking you in the face. And I think, yes, it's obviously worth trying to figure out if Palantir is also up to some other bad stuff. But I think it's worth scrutinizing the business that they talk about because it also raises a bunch of interesting... What's interesting, too, is you tie in the Cambridge Analytica influence from Peter Thiel's Palantir. And we all know how that turned out, at least those of us who read. Yeah, that's a really interesting thread in the book. There's some news there. The bottom line is, so Cambridge Analytica is this not necessarily very effective data mining company that got caught trying to steal or access improperly Facebook data from millions of people.

And as I talk about in the book, that idea came from a guy who worked at Palantir. Now, not the idea to steal it, but the approach that they followed was proposed by a Palantir, basically a Palantir sales guy, who was not working directly for Palantir. He was trying to drum up business, like, maybe this will turn into something, I don't know. And that leads to this really scandalous behavior that calls into question both security, information security, election security causes people to lose a lot of confidence in Facebook. And I think it came part of partly out of this kind of as I was talking about earlier, this aggressive business culture where you're like, you've got to do something a

little shady to to close a deal. No problem. We're going to do it. And so in a way, this employee, after it happened, Palantir says, oh no, this guy's a rogue employee. We had nothing to do with it, which is of course true, but it's also not the complete story. Because as I write in the book, and I talk to this engineer, there's an extent to which this is part of the kind of culture of the company. And of course, there are two sides to every story, who knows? But I think there's a pretty compelling case that Cambridge Analytica grew out of this culture of ethical squishiness. And again, it's one of these things where, is that such a problem if we're talking about a small company? Probably not. If we're talking about a company that is involved with highly sensitive data security, is funded by the

CIA, now has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts from the, if not billions of dollars in contracts from the US government, that starts to feel like maybe that should make us, I don't know, it doesn't have to make you uncomfortable, but I think it's worth at least looking at closely and scrutinizing. We should definitely always follow the money and see where it goes. This is a book, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I wanted someone to write this book because I was like, I want to know this guy better. I'm not going to read his stuff because he's just going to give me the PR version. Anything you want to tease out more on the book to readers before we go?

Yeah. So one thing that we haven't talked about that I think is really important, which is there's this feeling that a lot of people know Peter Thiel as this Trump supporter. And I think the book has a lot to say about how that happened and everything. But I also think it's worth thinking about where he's going and where this Trump movement is going, because Peter Thiel is right now basically trying to help run it, to harness or however you want to call it of the country that believes in the MAGA ideology. And Thiel is making a play right now with money, using money and influence to have a role in that future. And so you have he's funding these candidacies of these very extreme far right. And it's really they're almost calling it right left doesn't doesn't capture.

It's more like Trumpist candidates blake masters and jd vance blake masters is the coo of teal capital and the president of the teal foundation he works for peter teal wow jd vance um is was a partner at mithril which is one of peter teal's companies and now runs a venture capital firm called naria which like mithril has a kind of lord of the rings all the companies have lord of the rings names but teal is a major investor in that company they're investing alongside one of their so i i to say jd vance works for peter teal's maybe a stretch but obviously their financial interests are still very closely intertwined and these guys more importantly are really like ideological extensions of teal they believe the things that that he believes for the most part. And so this is like a really,

this is, and they could be on, they could be senators. So I think it's really important to ask ourselves, what does this guy actually believe? Because, and that's really what the book's about. And I think it's worth reading. I think it's worth talking about because his ideology and his ambitions, they are going to continue to have an impact on the country. If you were paying closer, if we had been paying attention, closer attention, I think, to what was happening on the alt-right and in the kind of teal verse in the lead up to Trump, it's possible that there would have been a more coherent response from Democrats because there really wasn't. I think it took

everybody by surprise. Yeah. And I just think it's, I think this is a really important ideological movement that bears watching because it's generating money, it's generating influence and it's influencing the culture. So for all those reasons, it's worth paying attention to. Were you able to cover what his thoughts were about January 6th and the whole thing? that one very close to the vest. But I can say a few things. There were people who completely cut ties with Trumpism after January 6th. Peter Thiel is not one of them. And Thiel's ideological, I don't want to get too deep down the rabbit hole. But when you look at who are the people who he's swimming with ideologically, these guys, Vance, Masters, Josh Hawley, they have been in general, Hawley was the guy who was one of the objectors that was trying to stop the vote on January 6th.

As he walked into the Capitol on January 6th, he held up the fist. It looks like a kind of a fist of solidarity at the would-be insurrectionists. I don't think he's totally distancing himself from that. And I think that there is a strain of tealism. I don't know if teal himself actually believes it. I don't know if it even matters. But there's a strain of this kind of extreme right nationalism that sort of regards January 6th as a trial for something new. And you're seeing this in the kind of far people talking about an American, we have an American Caesar. What does that mean? An American Caesar? It means a fascist dictator.

So there is this, and again, I don't know if Thiel actually himself believes it, but definitely people in his orbit are really at the very least kind of playing footsie with some very kind of extreme politics. Yeah, it's very dangerous. Shortly after January 6th, we've, we had Tom Hartman on, we went on a couple of times, the radio show host, and he hit me at the end of the show. He goes, you know what they call January 6th, don't you? And Iation, contrarianism, it's hard to know what people actually believe. Because do they really think it's practice or are they just trying to take the piss or something? And so there's some sense maybe it's all just a big show, but at some point it stops mattering, right? You don't need that many people to believe in violence to really create some horrible things. You don't need that many people to believe in in violence to to really create some horrible things you don't if you study fascism through history it's yeah it doesn't take much uh but it does

take violence it's been wonderful to have you on the show max very insightful and an incredible book very thick tome i love the coverage you did on him and it helps me understand what this man is about more because you you look at people like him and others that you're just like, you're really against what you are. Actions speak louder than words. And like you say, he can be as secretive as you want. You've been covered a lot about him, but his actions are going to definitely do it. So thank you very much for coming on the show and spending time with us today. Hey, thanks, Chris. It was really fun. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks, Max. Can you give us your plugs again so people can find you on the interwebs?

I will plug. So the book is called The Contrarian. You can buy it anywhere books are sold. I've got some links on my website, Max Chafkin, M-A-X-C-H-A-F-K-I-N.com. I am at Chafkin on Twitter. And yeah, definitely stay tuned. Hopefully we'll be covering this going forward. There you go. Well, he's got quite a few years left. You can do a second volume on the rest of, definitely stay tuned. Hopefully we'll be covering this going forward. There you go.

He's got quite a few years left. You can do a second volume on the rest of his life and whatever. So there you go, folks, order up the book. You can go to anywhere. Fine books are sold. Yeah.

September 21st, 2021. You're going to want to pre-order it. That's 2121. I just noticed that you want to take in a pre-order that. So you can be the first one on your block to read it. The contrarian Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. Definitely get that baby ordered up.

To see the video version of this, go to YouTube.com, Forge. That's Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. It will complete your life and everything you've been missing or maybe not. Go to Goodreadsface.com, Forge. That's Chris Voss. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places. We certainly appreciate it.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life,

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