Part One: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy
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- Call zone media. - Ah, what's dick my chanies? This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week we talk about the great decisions being made by the Democratic Party, which this week includes really, really burnishing their Dick Cheney credentials. We'll see how that works out in about three weeks. With me to talk about, you know, something related to this election.

Is our lovely, yeah, is our lovely guest today, a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and contributing editor at Wired, Noah Schachtman. Noah, welcome to the podcast program show. You gave this very confused look in between my first and last name. What was up with that? I wrote your, the stuff you wanted me to, because we have a different intro for you this time. I wrote it up at the top of the piece.

And so the top of the piece is just the words Peter Thiel, because that's the subject of our episodes. So at the top of my article, it says contributing writer, Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, Peter Thiel. And I was like, wait a second. So I had to like catch my brain and fix it in between. That's incredible. Look,

I welcome my new colleague. Yeah. Peter Thiel would be a great guest on the program, but I wouldn't do Peter Thiel for the. You know what? I might do Dick Cheney for the Peter Thiel episode. How about he does me? Yeah. Peter Thiel talks. Noah. Oh, man. So, yeah. Noah, how do you feel about being friendly with Dick Cheney? Is this a good decision? Is this going to work out for the Harris campaign?

You know, I am not incredibly bullish on the old befriending war criminal campaign strategy. It's the – Valid. I think it's in part a decision you make if like you don't understand Republicans because like I grew up loving – like with a family that loved George W. Bush, right? Like he was a hero in my household as a kid. Yeah.

And no one liked Dick Cheney. Like they didn't hate him, but like he was not a figure of admiration to anyone in my family. Like because he was that was kind of the point of Dick Cheney is he was like the

The guy behind the scenes that you don't need to like very much. It's just confusing to me that they think there's a bunch of Republicans out there who will change their vote based on this. It was wild at the DNC how credible it was that this rumor that George W. Bush was going to come out and speak at the DNC. I would have lost my mind. Everyone was like, oh, he's coming. He's coming. It was it was like more credible than Beyonce. What's happening here?

Hey, there's still time. There's still time. There's still time. There's still time. And you know who? I don't know if he's he's got a chance to be worse than George W. Bush. I wouldn't say he's there yet. Is Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel. And that's who we're going to talk about when we come back from the cold open to warm things up a little bit.

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Don't wait. Get up to 58% off your first year at Norton.com slash secure. Noah, so we're back. Peter Thiel, how would you describe in brief if someone is like, hey, I hear there's this Peter Thiel guy who's influencing elections or whatever. Who is he? How would you describe Peter Thiel? What would be your elevator like, oh, that's who this guy is? He's like the...

Power behind like the weirdest curtain. Yeah. I guess is how I would describe it. Like deeply strange, deeply influential. I think would be my elevator pitch. Yeah. Yeah. He's, I would say like, he's the guy whose money is responsible for getting, uh,

Oh, shit. What's his name? The hillbilly JD Vance started. He's the guy who, you know, like backed Trump pretty early on in 2016. He was the, you know, the billionaire who came up and endorsed him at the RNC that year and talked about how like he was supporting the Republicans as a gay man.

These are all facts about Peter Teterfield. I'm really glad you're able to forget J.D. Vance's name. That feels healthy to me. Yeah, it took a lot of work and a lot of gas station substances, but I managed to do it. I managed to do it. It was mixing Kratom, Clamato, and then one of those yellow jackets truckers take together. I reached a state of what I think the Buddhists call nirvana. And yeah, all knowledge of J.D. Vance fled from my mind.

Dude, I'm going to fucking throw up on my keyboard here. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's like in the weirdo, crypto, fascist right. If you follow the roots down far enough. It all comes back to Peter. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a couple of ways of looking at Teal. One of them is...

He is a capitalist Lenin. And what I mean by that, I'm not comparing the two like ideologically, but Lenin is a guy who grew up kind of in the upper middle class strata of his society and from an extremely early age, hated the system that he lived under because his brother was killed by the czar and dedicated himself to its destruction. And he went about destroying that system of

Very methodically and very effectively, right? Peter is a guy who grew up in the upper middle class strata of his culture, always seems to have hated the systems that ran the country he lived in and dedicated himself from an early age at getting resources and then kind of methodically destroying the system, which is representative democracy that he lived under.

That's one way of looking at Peter. The other is that Peter is a guy who is fairly intelligent, has OK instincts, but not as good as he thinks they are. And he's just kind of been careening from point to point, making gambles that have led him to this position where he is now backing the Republicans to the hilt in order to hopefully

crumble the system of democracy enough that like he gets to rule his own little bitty city somewhere on the West Coast. Right. Like one of them is Peter Thiel is the master plotter. And the other is that he's this kind of like reactive figure. And I don't actually know which is the better way to look at this guy. Some of it's got to come down to like

personal preference. But he's an interesting character and I think he's probably, of all of the figures on the right now, one of the ones that it's more, it's easiest to kind of respect at an intellectual level because he's very smart and he's

He's succeeded in a lot of his like the reason why the master plotter thing kind of has a lot of traction is he's he's been very successful in a lot of his goals over time. Like he's been willing to he's been able to he has a degree of like focus and discipline that's fairly rare on the right.

Yeah, it's pretty weird. Also, isn't he also like drinking the blood of younger people or something like that? We're going to talk about that later on in the series. It's unclear to me if he's ever drank any young people's blood, but he's definitely been accused of it and has like expressed an interest in it. I think the guy who definitely is drinking young people's blood is Brian Johnson that like likes

rich founder dude who's obsessed with reducing his biological age back to 17. He takes his son's blood as a supplement. Ew, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he brags about it. Yeah. Like, he's very open about that. Peter has always – Peter is on the record of saying, I don't do that. He was just kind of – he's invested in a lot of companies that did anti-aging stuff, some of which –

like we're looking into plasma replacement, right? But it's unclear if he ever did it. And if he didn't do it, it would be because like, he just didn't think it worked. He is a big advocate of taking a human growth hormone as a, an anti-aging supplement. So I think it's one of those things where if he doesn't, if he hasn't done the young people's blood thing, it's just because he decided the science wasn't there.

Or he's just so fucking roided out that he's just sit down. Yeah. The roids have given him enough blood. There's no more room for blood in Peter's body. So, Noah, like many of the worst things on this earth, Peter Thiel began in Germany, Frankfurt to be specific, where he was born on October 11th, 1967.

His father, Klaus, was a chemical engineer who the very next year, 68, got hired by a consulting firm that specialized in heavy industry, including oil and gas refining. The founder of the company, Arthur G. McKee, had owned a series of steel foundries in the Cleveland area where the Teals moved in 1968. So now at this point – and I think this is probably clear to most of our listeners –

In 1968, Cleveland is just a series of river fires with some suburbs attached, right? Like it's not the city we know and tolerate today. It's nothing but the Cuyahoga burning and a couple of drenched houses. And the reason the Cuyahoga is always on fire is guys like Arthur McKee who runs steel boundaries, you know?

So that is the Peter grows up with his dad kind of working in the destroying the planet industry like he's an oil and gas man working for an industrial magnate in fucking Cleveland. So Klaus works for a firm in Cleveland for a couple of years while he gets his graduate degree. And in 1971, when Peter was four, his parents have a second child, Patrick.

Now, Thiel's biographer, Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, which is a book that will be a sizable source for this, although I do have some disagree. I think Chafkin's a very good writer, good biographer. There's a couple of areas where I disagree with him that we'll talk about here. But yeah, he has described Klaus and Peter's mom, Suzanne, as fanatical Republicans who were absolutely gaga for Nixon.

That may be true. Chaifkin certainly knows more about this than me. However, Peter disagrees with that characterization of his parents. He doesn't seem to have considered them to have been fanatical Republicans or religious extremists. And Chaifkin also kind of paints them as like hardcore Christian conservatives.

Peter is an outspoken Christian. It's unclear to me, again, if this is just Peter disliking the description of himself and his parents as extremists, or if this is that Chafkin maybe doesn't have all of the context. We don't get a lot of detail about Teal's parents, so it's not perfectly clear, right? Chafkin describes his father as cold, bordering on cruel at times.

Again, this is a characterization Peter would disagree with, at least publicly.

In terms of like stories that paint that picture of his dad as cruel, I don't see a lot of really good detailed evidence about it. The story that Chafkin cites as kind of evidence of how cold and cruel Peter's dad was is a story that Peter tells a lot to biographers. I've seen this or to interviewers. I've seen this story recounted in a couple of different articles that interviewed Peter before Chafkin's biography came out.

And the story is that one day when Peter was a little kid, like maybe four or five, he was looking at a rug in the family home that was made from a cow hide. And he asked his dad, where did this rug come from? And Klaus matter of factly explained that it was made from a dead cow. Peter asked, like, what does it mean that something's dead? And his dad told him, quote, death happens to all animals, all people. It will happen to me one day. It will happen to you one day.

And Chafkin describes this as a moment of like brutal honesty. And he kind of insinuates that it may have done some damage to Peter, writing that he, quote, would return to the cow and the brutal finality of the thing again and again, even in middle age. Now, it does seem to be accurate that Peter is stuck in his mind. I just don't know that I consider that a brutal description of death. That seems like.

you know, kind of just factual, right? Like I had a conversation with my dad about death. That wasn't all that different from this, right? Like it happens to everything. It'll happen to me. It'll happen to you. Like, how else do you explain death to a kid? Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. That feels like pretty – like a pretty weak antecedent for everything that's about to transpire. I think what's going on here is that Peter is obsessed with death and dying, right? He's put a huge amount of money into like reversing aging and anti-sentence and all this kind of stuff. So like he clearly is a guy who's obsessed with his own mortality. Yeah.

And you're looking for evidence of that in his childhood. And he does tell this story. He told The New Yorker in 2011 that this was a, quote, "very, very disturbing day."

So obviously this does stick in his mind, but I don't know that that makes the case that his dad is like cold because this I just don't see it from that anecdote. You know, obviously that's one anecdote. We're talking about a whole childhood. So that doesn't mean that he was not cold. I just don't. I feel like what we may get from the fact that this story is.

fucks Peter up so much says less about his dad and more about like who Peter is as a person because I think most of us have this experience and like don't grow up dedicated to conquering mortality we're just kind of like oh yeah everything dies all right well I better figure out something I'm gonna do with my life right yeah yeah um

you know, like gas station drugs. That was my, that was my decision, which I think if Peter had gotten into that, just buy some of these trucker pills, Peter, you know? Yeah. Yeah. They'll keep you alive forever as well as HGH will. So anyway, Peter has never made peace with death or what he calls the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. Right.

I also love that. The ideology. It's not an ideology, man. It's just a fact. What? That's like seeing some people who are like staying back from a cliff's edge on a windy day and be like, oh, you've fallen for the ideology of dying in a fall. Come on. The ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. Yeah.

I think I've had conversations with anti-seatbelt guys about like the ideology of safety of like a nanny state culture. And it's like, no, man, I just don't want to die in a car crash.

This dude's all libertarian, right? Oh, yeah. As all hell. Well, you see, nowadays, I don't know if you'd call it that, but he definitely comes out of libertarianism. Yeah. And so and when I think of libertarians, I think of like people who never evolved past like second semester freshman dorm room ideology. And that feels very much like

Like the ideology of the inevitability of death feels very like third bong hit.

Freshman year dorm room. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Deep thoughts. Yeah. I agree with that. You know what? I will say for libertarians, I always have to give a little bit of pushback just because of where I come out there. You've got your two kinds. You've got your like dorm room. I'm going to read fucking Murray Rothbard and basically become a fascist. Whenever anyone suggests I pay my fair share in taxes, libertarians, but,

Which Peter is. No, no, no. My kind, the kind that I respect are I'm not I wouldn't say I'm there now, but I have I do have a degree of respect and love for like after the big hurricane in North Carolina. You had like several dozen guys who own their own helicopters and often built their own helicopters.

who like flew in just because they're like helicopter libertarians. I like my helicopter libertarians where it's like, I just don't trust the state. So I bought my own helicopter to do disaster rescue. Those guys are fine. Yeah. Yeah. Although are those the same guys that also were the militia that tried to interfere with those guys? Those guys were in trucks. Those guys were in trucks. That might be yet another different kind of libertarian. Yeah.

Helicopter male libertarians in your truck, libertarians. We're very pro-helicopter libertarian in this house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah, no, those guys are cool. Those guys are fine. Yeah. So yeah, that's Peter's kind of inciting incident, right? If you're making the Peter Thiel movie, you started with his dad explaining death to him while looking at this cowhide rug. Now, shortly after that conversation,

His dad decides to move the family away from Cleveland, usually a good decision, and live every engineer's dream, which is, of course, helping South Africa build a uranium mine. You know, what engineer doesn't want to live that? So...

The Thiel family moves to South Africa, kind of. Yeah, I mean, they're technically in South Africa. Peter's parents send him to an expensive whites only private school called Pridwyn. According to the school's website, it was founded in 1923 as a non-denominational school rooted in Christian ethics and values.

Today, the Pridwood website prominently features numerous stock photos of non-white kids. So it does seem like maybe things have been forced to move forward there. But when Peter went there, it would have taught racial separation as an obvious good and a necessity, right? This is, we're talking South Africa in the 70s, right? Yeah. Yeah.

After Pridwen, Peter went to a German language public school. He was a good student. He always does well in school. But these are not happy years for him, at least as Chafkin paints it.

Quote,

Now, as he noted here, I said that they moved to South Africa. They are though actually not in South Africa. They're in Namibia, which a big chunk of Namibia is governed and run by South Africa at this point, right? At the time, a lot of what we call Namibia today was known to South Africans as Southwest Africa, and it was governed under a military occupation as if it were essentially the little brother of the apartheid state.

The whole reason that South Africa has a uranium mine comes down to environmental regulations in Western nations around this period. Some of the very earliest waves of uranium had been mined in places like the US and Australia, but pretty quickly, once it becomes clear that we're going to need a lot of uranium, it also becomes clear that uranium mining is really bad for

for the environment. So we'd better do that a lot in Africa, right? Like a big, actually King Leopold's old colony in the Congo becomes a major source of uranium mining. And Namibia in this period becomes the fourth largest global producer of uranium during like the Cold War when we are using up quite a lot of the stuff.

So that's why South Africa is a big part of why South Africa is so hesitant to give up their occupation of Namibia is like Namibia has a shitload of uranium and South Africa wants that for several reasons, none of them good.

Now, the managing and engineering staff at the mine where Klaus worked was white. The workforce were largely migrants on one-year contracts. For white families, this was a good job. You had good access to medical care. You had nice houses. You're basically living in a company town that is built for the white employees of this mine. There's a country club there. There's quality schools there.

things are a lot uglier for the contract workers who are being brought in to do a lot of the heavy lifting at the mine.

Now, much of this ugliness came from the fact that South Africa was not allowed to be in southwest Namibia, right? They are not supposed to be occupying this chunk of Namibia. The UN had ordered them to leave in 1966. But by the time the Teals moved into the country, South Africa had yet to move their troops out. This is like 1971 or two, right? So they've overstayed their visa by quite a while. But you don't really need a visa if you have enough guns.

Yeah. This whole thing is fucking grim, man. Yeah. Apartheid uranium mine is just fucking grim. Peter's childhood is in an apartheid uranium mine? Like, I thought...

Elon Musk had like a kind of like supervillain origin story with the emerald mine. But the uranium mine really trumps this. Honestly, bro, I'll take an emerald mine over this any day of the fucking week. So in 1973, the ICC, the International Criminal Court, upheld that U.N. ruling and said again, South Africa, you've got to leave Namibia. This is not your country.

What are you doing there? To which South Africa says we are getting a lot of uranium and we're not going to leave. This leads to sanctions against the sale of minerals from mines in occupied Namibia, sanctions that are ignored by much of the West. And I'm going to read about that via a quote I found on the website Mining Sea. The decree warned that anyone found extracting and selling minerals from Namibia would be held liable.

Beneficiaries to Namibia's minerals, including Britain and the United States, except Sweden, did not honor the decree when uranium production from Rossing would satisfy Britain's 10% demand. So because uranium was so needed for this buildup, basically a lot of the West was like, no, fuck what the UN says. We're going to keep paying South Africa for their uranium because we really need it, right? Tale as old as time.

Now, the company that ran the mine where Klaus worked as a contractor was called Rio Tinto. And they had you're not going to be surprised to hear that this illegal uranium mine company has an evil history, but they have like a comically evil history. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like I've heard that name before. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So in the late 1930s, Rio Tinto had called on Francisco Franco to use his soldiers to crush left wing miners protesting against bad working conditions in Spain. The head of the company at the time, Sir Auckland Geddes, which is such an evil wine owner's name. What an amazing name.

Amazing evil miner. Sir Auckland Geddes, Jesus. Geddes bragged that, quote, miners found guilty of troublemaking are court-martialed and shot. Big fan of Franco, the leaders of Rio Tinto.

As another interesting side note, Noah, Rio Tinto was also a major source of raw materials for the Nazi rearmament campaign. These are the guys that build the Wehrmacht back up into fighting shape. Thank God. You know, where would we be without Rio Tinto? Oh, my God. It's like Lexcorp or something. Yes. Incredible. Yeah.

Now, by the early 70s, there were no more Nazis to arm. So Rio set about finding their next best equivalent, which is, of course, apartheid South Africa. Right now, since they're running in a legal uranium mine in occupied Namibia, they're like, why not go full fascist? And they decide to operate their facilities in Namibia like a concentration camp. And I'm going to quote from an article by the London Mining Network here.

Black workers constructing the Rossing uranium mine lived in appalling conditions in temporary camps, which researchers found akin to slavery. By akin to slavery, it means that actually leaving work for any meaning, for any reason, but being dismissed by your manager was a crime. Workers who misplaced or forgot their ID badge could be jailed.

Now, the fact that someone might get hired to consult at such a mine doesn't imply that they were involved with setting up or executing any of these policies, but it does suggest that one was broadly fine with them, as Max Chafkin writes.

A contract laborer on the construction project, the project Klaus's company was helping to oversee, who said workers had not been told they were building a uranium mine and were thus unaware of the risks of radiation. The only clue had been that white employees would hand out wages from behind glass, seemingly trying to avoid contamination themselves. The report mentioned workers dying like flies in 1976 while the mine was under construction.

So this is so bad. This is pretty evil. Pretty evil. So it's an illegal apartheid uranium mining concentration camp. Yeah. Yeah. That's Peter's dad's job and some of his earliest memories as a kid.

And he's disturbed by like Bessie the cow getting killed to be a rogue? He's disturbed by cows dying? What? I don't know, Peter, if you want to end death, the first step might be ending illegal uranium mines. Right. You just care about death as a concept. I cannot believe how cartoonish this is. It's so funny.

It's like the funniest backstory he could have. Just being the guy he is coming from this as a background. Like a lot of these guys, like Elon Musk, there's this period of time in Musk's backstory. He's like, oh, well, he has this kid who's moved around a bunch. His family sucks. His dad's this abusive monster. He's bullied as a kid.

It's a really sad, like I can see how he, you know, there's, I can see how a couple of different kinds of kid could have come out of this. Some of them who would have been a lot better than Musk was right. Maybe he wasn't always destined to be the kind of guy he is with Teal. You're like, oh yeah, no, this is, this childhood was tailor made to produce Peter Teal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. You know what else was tailor made to produce Peter Teal, Noah?

I bet I'm about to find out. Yeah. The sponsors of our show are attempting to breed clones of Peter Thiel in a tank. It's kind of like that. The fourth alien movie, Alien Resurrection, down to the fact that they are mixing Peter Thiel's genes with Sigourney Weaver. So let's see what happens, everybody. You know, we'll see what happens.

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We're back. And in the time that we were off air, the Peter Thiel Sigourney Weaver clones escaped containment in our sponsor's orbital base. Things do not seem to be going well. Sorry. Sorry.

Grave error. That was probably predictable. Anyway, we'll keep you updated on the situation. So we're talking about uranium mining in South Africa, which is getting South Africa in trouble. And it's one of those things where if it had just been about the money South Africa could make exporting uranium, it probably wouldn't have been worthwhile to piss off the whole international community to keep this mine open. But that's not the only reason why South Africa wants a uranium mine.

A big part of why they insisted on keeping this thing operational was that they are an unpopular apartheid government that is in the process of becoming a global pariah. They are dealing with something of an existential PR crisis because of all of like the racism and violence that the world is watching them do.

And the white rulers of the country decided the best way for them to gain long-term security for the regime was to get nuclear weapons, even if they had to break international law to do so, right? And South Africa does eventually construct a handful of very illegal nukes, right? They are not supposed to have these internationally. No one's supposed to be allowed to be –

arming themselves with new nukes. South Africa makes their nukes. And it does not, as you may be aware, keep the apartheid regime in power. You know, the government does, in fact, fall. And in a kind of unique historical case, before the government hands over power to the ANC, which is, you know, the party that takes over as apartheid goes out,

They disassemble all of their nuclear weapons. To this day, this makes South Africa the only nation to have ever made nuclear weapons and given them up voluntarily. Obviously, Ukraine had nuclear weapons when the USSR crumbled and gave those up. But South Africa actually makes their own nuclear weapons independently and then disassembles them and stops being a nuclear power. And that's a unique thing in history. Although they do it, I think, mainly for reasons of racism.

It's still pretty wild. I've never heard that before. Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting story. So while Peter's dad was – I don't know how you – again, how you want to parse out his complicity here, but he is adjacent to some very bad things, right? Yeah.

While his dad's doing this, Peter himself gets very little that seems to be good from his two and a half, three years in Africa. He mostly claims to have played alone a lot near the family house. He started to develop a habit for competitive chess and he became a voracious leader. Less than three years, after less than three years away, the family decides they just haven't had enough Cleveland and they move back. Yeah.

Then as soon as they're back in Cleveland, they're like, oh shit, Cleveland is still not a great place to live. The rivers have not stopped being on fire. So they move one last time to the Bay Area. Their specific final residence is Foster City, which is just northwest of San Jose and south of San Francisco proper. It's a fairly affluent town. And in the late 1970s, Thiel's family seems like they probably would have qualified as upper middle class, right? Yeah.

And this is what you tend to see with the first and second generation of tech industry giants. Guys like Gates and Jobs all come from or move to similar parts of California, and they're all kind of at a similar level of family affluence, right? Their parents are not like rich. They're not going to inherit generational wealth.

But they have their parents have enough money to shower their kids with attention and educational opportunities that really weren't available before. And in part because of some of the decisions guys like this make aren't going to be available after, you know, um,

He's not due as many kids. Now, in terms of the parenting situation, because Bill Gates' parents, doting, absolutely obsessed with his development and health. Steve's parents, again, doting, really, really like...

caring parents who were very much focused on their child doing well. It is unclear to me how much attention Peter gets. This is kind of an open question. It's left as an open question in Chafkin's book. Peter does not seem to embrace the claims that his parents were very strict or fanatical conservatives.

But we also get very little of them in his stories, right? Which is very different from like Steve Jobs told a lot of stories about his parents, right? And so did Gates. So I don't really know if this is a case of he didn't want to say much about his parents, that this is an area of insecurity for him, or if it's just he's not a guy who's super –

talkative about his background, which he definitely isn't. You know, that may just explain it, but it does seem that his parents are not kind of central to his feelings or ambitions in the same way that they really seem to have been for a lot of other like tech industry icons that came up at a similar place in period.

We do know as a child, Peter Thiel is a massive nerd. He is one of the first wave of like really big nerds. And he's particularly a fantasy nerd for his kind of fantasy and sci-fi. He reads the Lord of the Rings as a little kid. He falls in love with Tolkien.

Uh, he would later claim that he memorized the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I suspect is probably overstating things. That's a lot to memorize. Yeah. That's like 3000 words. Like, I mean, 3000 pages. Yeah. 3000 pages. Yeah. That's, that might be a little much. Um, I don't know how much I believe that, but, uh,

Did he just memorize the English or the Elvish and the Orcish? Yeah, did he have the Elvish down? Does he know the black speech by heart? Maybe that's all he speaks at home. Maybe that's why he couldn't talk about his folks that much. Yeah, very few journalists know the black speech. Yeah.

As you might imagine from a kid who at least probably met memorized passages from the Lord of the Rings, Peter gets bullied a lot, right? Not super surprising from this kid. He's also very small and skinny. And according to one peer, he gets pushed around a lot as a little kid. Um,

Um, this may have had something to do with what seems to have been a flair for escapism. In addition to loving Tolkien, Peter is one of the very first Dungeons and Dragons players, right? He and his, cause D&D has just come out while he is a kid and he is, he and his friends are playing it while it is very new. Um, they, they played every single weekend and this is, this may have caused a degree of like, uh,

conflict with his parents because there are at least some stories that his parents, they couldn't play. He couldn't play at his house because his parents being very strict, strict Christians thought that D and D was evil and,

Again, this is one of those things. Is that totally accurate? I don't know. He definitely played a lot of D&D. It may have been a kind of thing that he had to like skirt around his family because it is. And this is there's this thing that you get from Peter that everyone will say about him, which is that like he's a habitual contrarian. Whatever people are doing, he has to be doing the opposite.

There's this big moral panic against Dungeons and Dragons at the time. It very much fits in with that, that he would want to be playing this game that a lot of people in his life and like maybe even his parents consider to be evil. That is very like fitting with the guy Peter Thiel is like whatever the people around him are saying is bad. That's what Peter's going to want to do. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Outside of that, his main hobby seems to have been chess. He's extremely good at this. He was generally ranked number one by his school chess club. He plays a lot of speed chess. He probably could have been a professional chess guy, but he has some there's some quotes he makes later where he's like, I had to choose between chess and everything else in life. Right. I just get too obsessed with it.

George Packer writing for the New Yorker summarizes his chess kit was decorated with a sticker carrying the motto born to win on the rare occasions when he lost in college, he swept the pieces off the board. He would say, show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser. So maybe not a guy you want to play with, right? Jesus Christ. Yeah. A little bit of a dick. This is, this is the kind of guy who I don't know. Again,

I'm a big believer in the fact that everyone who's proud of their chess performance should get into the real game of skill. Warhammer 40,000. Show us your real skill, Peter. Paint some fucking orcs. Do you have Born to Win?

I have it actually tattooed. You can't see it. The camera blots out my tattoos, but I've got like one of those throat tattoos. I got a stick and poke when I was in prison that just says born to win. And it's got a picture of an orc on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It really makes me popular at the gaming store with the 14 year olds. Yeah.

So Chafkin has my favorite story of Peter in his chess phase because it is the one that makes me actually kind of hopeful that we can beat this guy eventually. Quote, once at a tournament, he was playing a scrimmage match for fun in between games and seemed to be only half paying attention. His opponent was inexperienced and not aware of what was happening. Put Peter in check.

Then he realized, to both of their surprise, that it was checkmate. Peter became visibly distraught and was unable to regain his composure for the rest of the tournament and lost the rest of the matches he played. A defeat, even a meaningless one, was too much to handle. Huh. Yeah. Okay. That's a little hopeful there, a little bit of motivation for you kids. Yeah. Maybe it wasn't so born to win. Yeah. Yeah.

So among the nerds, Peter was king. He was the most academically gifted of his friends and I suspect was the best at doing things like cooking up overpowered characters in Dungeons and Dragons. He had a fantastic memory and he expounded upon different short stories and novels by guys like Asimov and Clark with a faculty that would have embarrassed most adults. He's the kind of guy who can like quote passages of stories he likes from memory.

One of Peter's nerdy peers said that he and others were, quote, in awe of Teal, but added, I don't know that he had any close friends. So he's got like some peers, but maybe not a lot of people that he like actually entrusts any pieces of himself to in any meaningful way. Right. Again, a lonely person in a lot of ways.

Peter is generally described by the kids he spent time around the way wizards were in Peter's favorite fantasy novels as this like mysterious figure who can do great and terrifying things, but who's also fundamentally separate from all of the people around him. Right.

That's your characterization? You're calling him a wizard or he called himself a wizard? No, no, no. That's just kind of my description based on what other kids said about Peter, right? That he's like – we're in awe of him. He could do all these amazing things, but we didn't really understand him. He seemed to be like someone who was fundamentally separate. That's kind of like the way Gandalf is written in The Lord of the Rings, right? Wizards are these like mysterious and kind of frightening figures that you can't ever really get that – like they're kind of unknowable in certain senses, right? Yeah.

Um, that's just kind of the way other kids talked about Peter. Seems more sour man than Gandalf. He's definitely, I mean, he's going to build a company named Palantir. So yeah, that's probably a fair, fair note. Noah, uh, as he became a teenager, the bullying changed from physical violence to sillier shit that was also calculated to make him feel unwelcome and othered.

One example would be that a group of kids frequently stole for sale signs from around the neighborhood and set them up on Peter's lawn. And then they would harass him about it the next day at school being like, hey, when are you moving? Right. And like that actually legitimately does suck, Peter, if you're listening. That's like a really shitty thing those kids did to you. I'm sorry. That's a bummer. You know, you can like that's that's kind of like.

Probably more devastating than the physical violence, like people stealing lawn signs to like make it clear we want you and your family to leave. Like, yeah, I can see. I can see how that feeds into a guy becoming like Peter is. Yeah.

By the time the high school years come around, you've got this kind of misanthropic genius who spends his free time escaping reality and competing in order to show everyone how smart he is, right? The only times he wants to engage with other people is when he can beat them in a contest of wits. Otherwise, he likes to kind of focus on his fantasy worlds. One friend described his general attitude as, "'Fuck you, world.'"

I think we all knew or were to some degree kids like that, right? This is going to sound very familiar. Like as a kid who grew up like bullied and nerdy aspects of this are familiar to me. Um, sure. Well,

Peter also, it's interesting, maintains this attitude while managing to be the best student in his school, right? He is going to be the valedictorian. He is an exceptional student academically. So he has both this kind of anger at normal kids and the world around him, and also this attitude that's reinforced by the social structures of his world that like he's better than everyone else in an important way. Now, his classmates interviewed by Chafkin seem to suggest that Chafkin

Peter and kind of everyone at their school are obsessed with getting like this is a this is a school where the kids, you know, their parents are high achievers. Everyone is obsessed with getting into good colleges. This was seen as the path to success at the time. And Peter's parents, if they were strict, were probably pushing him hard to get the best grades possible so that he could get into the best school.

And this is going to be important later. He grows up being told by all the authority figures in his life what matters most is getting into a good college. That is like the number one priority you have to have as a kid.

I don't know. When I went to school, that was the priority that was really rammed home to me by my parents. So I don't have trouble believing that this is the case for Peter. And it's he's going to get very angry at this later in his life. This is going to be a major motivating factor in his life. The idea that like he was forced to value his

higher education, which he fundamentally thinks is not a valuable thing in the same way that his parents did. And he's really angry about it. He's kind of never forgiven the concept of academia for this.

He graduates in 85 as the valedictorian of San Mateo High. During the later years in public school, he had moved on from Tolkien and Asimov to Ayn Rand. And, you know, this kind of helps nurse the strain of vigorous anti-communist sentiment that would have, you know, this would have been a part of his upbringing anyway. We're talking like

Silicon Valley in the 70s, it's a lot of defense industry stuff is out there. It is not a radical left hotbed. So he probably didn't need the Ayn Rand to make him into an anti-communist, but this definitely makes him into like a libertarian anti-communist. During one article in 2011, he described his ideology as so strictly libertarian that for a time he was against all government spending.

which he's not now. He's very supportive of like the government spending money to research how rich people can live longer. So that's, that's good. It's nice to see that people can grow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know who else has evolved since, since the last time we talked about them is the sponsors of this podcast. You know, they're moving past their, their, their mistakes of like 20 minutes or so ago. Uh,

losing control of that orbital habitat to the Peter Thiel clones. And they're moving on, you know, to greater pastures, blowing up that orbital habitat primarily. So we'll check back in with them later.

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And we're back. Noah, have you seen Alien Resurrection? Are these Alien Resurrection jokes hitting? I don't know if anyone's seen that movie. I don't remember. I cannot recall this Alien movie. Oh, man, it's great. I feel like I saw some spinoff with a Roman name. Oh, God. Prometheus? Is that a name? Prometheus, yes. No, that's one of the ones that was made by Ridley Scott again, though.

I don't know, man. This was the fourth alien was the alien movie that was written by Joss Whedon as kind of a backdoor pilot for Firefly. It's a very strange movie, but it's got Ron Perlman in it. I don't know what to say in response to any of these words. No one knows what to say in response to Alien Resurrection other than it's the fourth movie in the Alien series. Great. Awesome. Yeah.

Probably shouldn't have hung so many jokes on the fourth alien movie. If you were a kid, go watch it. I feel like if you're hanging alien jokes, it's got to end with, you know, game over, man. Yeah. And that's kind of...

I am the Hudson in this series. Like, I'm realizing that I've let us I've gotten us into a or we're in this horrible disaster that I'm not going to get out of. And now I'm just firing my gun blindly at the ceiling trying to escape. No, and I have no idea what you're talking about. But someone in this he just brought up Hudson. Someone in the subreddit will be really excited that you're just keeping keeping going on. Oh, my God. Someone. It really is game over, man. Game over. Game over. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

So one particularly baffling segment from the Chafkin book involves Peter's senior yearbook quote, which he credited to The Hobbit.

The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. Now, you know, that seems like something a nerdy kid would do. And that's a perfectly fine yearbook quote. I would go so far as to say maybe even a little like stereotypical. But when it comes up in Chafkin's book, Chafkin actually, this is one of the areas where I think his analysis of Peter is a little unfair. Here's what Chafkin writes about Peter putting that quote in his yearbook.

Years later, he'd say that he memorized the entire passage, which continues, "...the chances, the changes are all yours to make. The mold of your life is in your hands to break." It would become, in a way, the motto of his life, though it was still at this point a confused life.

The passage is not, in fact, from Tolkien, who wrote The Hobbit, as well as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, books Teal obsessed over. It's from a theme song written by Jules Bass, creative genius behind the 1980s cartoon Thundercats, for the animated version of The Hobbit, which came out in 1977. Now, I think maybe because it's not clear to me that Peter was being dishonest or making a mistake. Like if he attributed that quote to The Hobbit,

That quote is from The Hobbit. It's from The Hobbit movie. But like, I don't know if you'd necessarily care to be that specific about this in like your fucking yearbook, right? This isn't an essay you're writing. I think like Chafkin kind of wanted to point this out as maybe like Teal not really being a Tolkien fan or something like that. It's kind of unclear to me. I don't think it's particularly weird that like an 18-year-old kid

would credit the Hobbit animated movie for a quote as the Hobbit instead of like specifying that like it was, it was, you know, not the book.

I think that that may be a little bit like reaching. But anyway, I guess you can see this as evidence that Peter wasn't a big Tolkien fan and just like the animated movies. But to be honest, if you are quoting from the fucking Hobbit animated movie of 1977, you're a pretty big Tolkien nerd, right? It was not a wildly popular movie, although better than the Hobbit movies we would later get, arguably. So.

Yeah. So there you go. I don't know. This whole thing seems like nerd, like, I think it's a little bit, a little bit of nerd fighting. Yeah. Oh, you're not actually memorizing the books. You're memorizing. No, that was from the animated movie. How dare you? It's not even canon. And he brings up that the song was written by the Thundercats guy to kind of like make it more. It's like, man, the Thundercats was fine. Like, we don't need to be shitting on the Thundercats here because of what Peter Thiel does in 2016. What are you talking about? Come on, man.

Come on, Chafkin. Look, I like Chafkin. I just disagree with him here. Wait, there was a Hobbit movie? I thought there was only a Lord of the Rings movie. No, there's definitely a Hobbit movie. We are not talking about the Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, Sophie. We're talking about the animated Hobbit movie, which is wonderful.

You know what? I did watch that one. I did watch that one. Oh, yeah. Noah, I'm going to recommend like half a hit of acid and just sink down into your couch and let it happen to you. Robert, from what I know of you, you would recommend a half a hit of acid in literally anything. You know, it keeps my hands steady when I'm driving, especially if I've got a trailer. You know, I don't trust anyone who toes on less than half a hit of acid. That's my advice, kids out there. Yeah, go and shooting. Oh, man. You don't even need tracers.

The acid provides that. So.

Anyway, whatever. I don't need we don't need to continue down this Peter Thiel. I just think like reading into somebody's yearbook quote. Yeah. We're reading it is like a little much. Yeah. Maybe Peter didn't specify the animated version. And then the yearbook editor was like, no, like, we'll just say The Hobbit. It's fine. Anyway, it's that much thought into your yearbook quote. Yeah, it's a yearbook. Come on. So.

So a much better story of Peter actually being a weirdo, which Chavkin does also share, comes from one of his few female friends who apparently shared with Peter at some point that she'd been the result of an unplanned pregnancy, right, that her parents had had her without meaning to. Peter wrote in her yearbook, quote, I could never even hypothetically have aborted you. Love, Peter Thiel.

That is an odd thing to write about your friend based on them sharing this with you. That is an odd line. Now, I will say that's not a cold statement. It's just weird, right? Like that is in a way kind of a warm statement, right? So I don't know. It doesn't entirely comport with like Peter can't connect with people, but it definitely comports with like,

Nobody, Peter doesn't quite talk like anyone else, right? Nobody else would say this to a friend. Yeah. Unless he wrote in everybody else's yearbook, like, I would have aborted you. I would have aborted you. That's everyone else's Peter Thiel signature. Big red X. Yeah. Now, Peter was accepted by Stanford and started his freshman year at the beginning of Reagan's second term.

Now, Stanford at this period was a major source of thinkers and doers among the conservative movement. The Hoover Institution, which is a right-wing think tank on campus, gave the world Martin Anderson, who helped create Reaganomics, right? He's like the author of Reaganomics as a concept. Many institute fellows were members of the Reagan administration.

Peter definitely seems to have seen this as kind of maybe the path he wanted for himself. And even though what's interesting to me is because he has this sort of emotional need to be seen as a contrarian, as the guy going against the grain, he will always frame higher education as time as Stanford is like this den of liberals and leftist

Rivalry right where it's like This is the school that gave us the Reagan administration right like Fucking Stanford is not a hot Bed of leftists you know There's like liberals and leftists on campus And leftist clubs but like one of the most influential Conservative think tanks in the country Is based out of Stanford right Um

I think the main reason why Peter has to kind of characterize college this way is that he just doesn't like college, right? He doesn't like Stanford. And he primarily seems to dislike Stanford, not because of a political thing, but because all of the kids there acted like kids, right? They're all teenagers. They're not quite grown up, which is what college students are. And this is annoying to Peter.

One of his chief bugbears was that there was a campus hide-and-seek game, which made him very angry, right? The fact that other people are like, well, he's trying to learn playing hide-and-seek. Peter doesn't like this. He avoids most parties. He does not date. Now,

He's gay, right? And that's certainly not nearly as acceptable a thing, even in a place like Stanford in this period of time. So it's not exactly weird. And that may play into kind of part of why he's so frustrated seeing all of his peers kind of date and socialize when, you know, that is not a thing that's safe for him. I think maybe that does play into it to some degree.

Whenever he could, rather than hang out with anyone he met on campus, he would go back home to hang out with his old friends from high school, right? Now, one of his Stanford peers suggests that he viewed other kids at the school as deeply unserious.

I think there's also an element of discomfort, insecurity, and meeting and trying to connect with new people. Whatever the case, Peter is the weird kid on campus. Every morning, he would leave his dorm room and walk to the water fountain to take a huge number of vitamins, one at a time. He seems to do this in a way that's like deliberately exhibitionist.

Classmate Megan Maxwell alleges that he kind of does this to confront other kids, right? To set himself apart. Everyone else is partying and drinking and doing drugs. And every morning, Peter gets out there and slowly takes all of his supplements so everyone can see him, right? Quote, it was like a ritual, she told Chafkin. He was a strange, strange boy. I don't think she's lying there. Yeah.

He studied philosophy at Stanford, and this is as an undergrad, and was particularly drawn to the work of Rene Girard, a professor and theorist of social sciences. Girard was particularly focused on the psychology of desire, or why people want things and how they decide they want things. From a 2021 article in The New Yorker by Anna Wiener,

Thiel was particularly taken with Girard's concept of mimetic desire. Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind, Girard wrote. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. Mimetic desire involves a surrender of agency. It means allowing others to dictate one's wants, and the theory goes can foster envy, rivalry, infighting, and resentment.

It also, Gerard wrote, leads to acts of violent scapegoating, which serve to preclude further mass conflicts by unifying persecutors against a group or individual. He thinks this is how people work, right? That like people's desires are largely based on this kind of like herd mentality, right? We're imitating other people's desires that we see.

We like surrender our agency to like let other people dictate wants for us. And this is kind of why scapegoating is natural and actually is kind of a necessary thing in order to avoid further mass violence, right? If you can scapegoat individuals for problems, you can avoid more widespread violence. I think one could kind of extrapolate this into Peter as a member of like the wealthy ruling class, seeing the scapegoating that conservatives do with migrants or trans people as a way to like

avoid a potential mass violence against his class, right? Like the wealthy. But maybe I'm reading a little bit too much into it there. No, he's the scapegoat author guy. Also the violence and the sacred guy.

Gerard, that actually makes so much sense. It makes a lot of sense. The fact that this gets brought, I mean, Teal brings up Gerard a lot. There's a lot of writing Teal has done where he quotes Gerard talking about mimetic desire. So it is not, Chavkin and others, you know, because I'm quoting directly from Anna's article here, like they're not going out on a limb, connecting a lot of what he does to Chavkin. This is like a foundational part of his thinking. He's the guy who wrote a book about like sacrifice rituals and he's- Yeah. He's-

This makes sense. I'm on board with that. I think we should do more human sacrifice in this country. I think we should. We need to be building more pyramids. We don't build enough. We built that one in where is it? Nashville, right? We

We should have a pyramid in every city and we should sacrifice people on them. That's all I'm saying. No, you're on board with this, right? I'm more of a ziggurat guy myself. You're a ziggurat guy? You've been gotten by big ziggurat, huh? The brickmakers have you in their thrall. I have, yeah. There's more material in a ziggurat. That's why they want it.

They're easy to walk up to. They are easy to walk up. Yeah. And then you can throw your human sacrifice off the top. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do like a ziggurat, a solid ziggurat, a good old fashioned step pyramid. Hell yeah. Yeah. Now, the concept of mimetic desire and the potential use of violent scapegoating would remain focuses of Peter's thinking on human nature, business and politics up to the present day.

Two years into his time on campus, he started a monthly magazine, The Stanford Review, with one of his high school friends who went to college with him. The Stanford Review was a right-wing rag. It featured articles accusing professors of being closet Marxists, columns complaining about non-white authors in a Western culture class, and some very weird takes on the AIDS epidemic. Here's an excerpt from a column in New York Magazine by Chaifkin.

The first issue featured a satirical column, Confessions of a Sexual Deviant, about a young straight man who'd chosen to be celibate. According to the review, it was almost impossible to visit a men's restroom without witnessing a gay sex act or to cross the quad without having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand.

In 1987, presenting homosexuality as an addiction, a columnist wrote that unnatural gay men had yielded to temptation so many times that the fires of lust burned within them, making it indeed difficult for them to control themselves. During Thiel's last year on campus, his close friend and review collaborator, Keith Raboy, stood outside the home of a Stanford residential fellow and shouted at the top of his lungs,

F word. You are going to die of AIDS. You are going to get what's coming to you. Two days later, the review published the rape issue with an impassioned defense of a student who pleaded no contest to statutory rape. So he's this is he's the guy that he's going to be the rest of his life by 87. We can say that there's a lot.

And because Peter doesn't like to talk about, and I, you know, we'll talk about the Gawker stuff later. I actually think he's less in the wrong on that than he tends to be painted as, which is not to say that he's in the right there, but like, he doesn't like talking about his sexuality. I get the, there's like a decent little chunk of, even up to this day, and this is not exactly Peter's kind of thing, but I've interviewed a couple of like,

gay conservatives who are celibate, they're like Catholic. They, they accept that they're homosexual. They're open about that, but they think it's immoral to do anything about it because they're also extremely Catholic and,

And I see shades of that, at least in Peter's thinking here. Like the fact that he is putting out these articles about celibacy and about like the unnatural and like evil lusts of the gay community and like AIDS very much feels in line with that to me here. But, you know, we just don't get a ton of Peter himself talking about. But you can see like he wouldn't be putting out these articles about like how

how AIDS is the, like by this guy yelling about how like AIDS is your fault, right? If you're gay, if he didn't, if there wasn't an element of that in his thinking, right? Yeah. This young man is extremely broken. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the, yeah, the,

The fact that you're defending a guy who pled no contest to statutory rape, the anger about condoms over a guy who pled no contest to statutory rape. I don't know. Now, look, I mean, you don't want to judge someone too much by their, you know, corny campus newspaper. If they move on from it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I say this as someone who started a corny campus newspaper. Yeah. Like, but I mean, that's really.

It's really beyond the pale, and it does seem to connect to who this dude is later, which is like this weird... There's so much like...

like hate both internal and external happening. You really get why he becomes the guy he becomes. Cause so much of Peter's modern politics is the, like the right wing hating the normies, like fuck the normies kind of politics. And like he, a big part of like the, just like how much anger there is at, at, you know, Marxists on campus, they're handing out columns in the quad. It's just like, whatever he sees, uh,

The people around him are fine with makes him angry. You know, there is a degree of that in being this kind of dude in Stanford in this period of time.

Now, the late 1980s are a period in which public rage over the injustices of apartheid had started to reach a fever pitch too, right? This is one of the most kind of salient public issues at the time is like the entire Western international community is kind of lining up against the apartheid regime. There were regular protests on campus and calls to divest the school from South African financial interests.

According to one source, Peter was not supportive of this. He was very angry that all of the kids on campus are anti-South Africa. And I want to read now, this is a very interesting chapter of his life, from a Medium post by one of his classmates at Stanford, Julia Lithcote Hames. She wrote this about an encounter in 1986. And this is going to be very relevant. Julie is a black woman.

We ran in different circles. His fiercely libertarian views were often a topic of conversation among those of us living in Branner Hall. One day I heard a rumor that Peter defended apartheid, which was then still the law of the land in South Africa, which I found morally repugnant.

To know that a fellow student, a dorm mate for that matter, might defend such a brutally oppressive race-based caste system gave me the willies. But I wanted to give Peter the benefit of the doubt, so I mustered the courage to go to his room and ask him about it. He said, with no facial affect, that apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently and moral issues were irrelevant. He made no effort to even acknowledge the pain the concept of apartheid could possibly raise for me, a black woman.

So that's and it's very in line with the kind of like, well, it works economically. The system is economically successful and that's all that matters. The moral the moral issues are irrelevant. Right. Just completely that kind of guy. I mean, how much of this is just like, that's my dad. Yeah. Well, I mean, how much of it is that's my dad. And just like this reflexive contrarian thing. All of these kids hate South Africa. I've been there. I know it's actually a good system because it works economically. Yeah.

Or to my dad. Yeah. Yeah. Great stuff. When Julie posted this in 2016, it went sort of viral and Peter issued a response through a spokesperson. Peter has no recollection of a stranger demanding his views on apartheid. He has never supported it, but he can easily see how a conversation might be misremembered 30 years later.

And that's interesting. Like, I don't recall talking to this stranger, but you can easily see how someone could misremember the conversation that I'm not sure happened. If I did it. If I did it. Yeah. Apartheid edition. Now, obviously, I don't know that Julie's recollection of events from 30 years ago is perfectly accurate. No one's are ever right. But there is some outside corroboration for aspects of Julie's story. And I'm going to quote from an article in NPR here.

Lithgut Hames' account of Thiel's opinion about apartheid was backed up by Megan Maxwell, a freelance editor who also attended Stanford with Thiel. Maxwell, who was also an African-American, told NPR that in a separate incident, Thiel also told her that morality and governments shouldn't be connected and that you shouldn't judge a government based on whether it fits your view of morality.

I don't know, man. Shouldn't shouldn't you like like isn't that part of how you should judge a government? Whether or not you think it's moral. So he's doing anti morality or a morality on the one hand. That shouldn't matter. It should just matter if it's economically efficient. Right. And then but but then gays are bad on the other hand.

Yeah, he's publishing other people who are writing about the immorality of homosexual life, right? Yeah. I think that would be interesting. Interesting, Peter. Yeah.

And part of what's going on here is like Peter is an outspoken Christian and he is up to the present day. And that means some very odd things for a guy who is also like gay and a libertarian. You know, that's going to like all those things. He's an outspoken Christian who doesn't believe that we should judge things by their morality. Yeah.

That's what he says here, because he definitely seems to, in other instances, believe that we should judge things based on whether or not they're his definition of moral. You know, part of and this is not just Peter, this is everyone. He's not consistent. Nobody is right like this. We found a point of inconsistency here. Sure. Now, Peter's present political situation, I will say when we're talking about

His classmates talking about 30 years ago, you should always read any quote about someone like this with the perspective of like the fact that his modern day political stances might be deep, like post facto coloring people's recollections of him. Right. As a kid, because nobody's memories are perfect.

So I did go looking for other accounts of the man at Stanford, and I found a few from former classmates of his on Quora. In one post, Chris Gray recalled, "...he was very interested in constitutional law and wanted to clerk at the Supreme Court. He was serious about religion. He went to the gym frequently to work out. Peter was always what I would describe as thoughtful and civil in his dealings with people, which is unusual in my experience. He had a stubborn side and did not typically change his mind about things."

And, you know, maybe he was more friendly to this guy because this guy was more simpatico to his beliefs. But a lot of that seems like pretty consistent with other stories you get about Peter. Chris also recalled that Peter was very interested in another thinker, Leo Strauss. I recall the most interesting thing Peter said was derived from his understanding of Strauss, which was that there are not really any facts, just values.

Another classmate, Lance Ishimoto, recalls Peter as an outspoken conservative who was a part of the Federalist Society and hung out with Greg Kennedy, Justice Kennedy's son. He went on to note, "...his entrepreneurial nature was also apparent from the way he and a friend decided to make their own version of Stanford Law sweatshirts and sell them at a price, $40, that was cheaper than the official ones at the bookstore, $75."

Yeah, so there you go. Peter got his B.A. in 1989 and then got his law degree from Stanford Law. Now, that's quite a lot of schooling for a guy that, as an adult, would declare his own personal war on the higher education system. From Chaikin and others, it certainly sounds as if some of this was related to his annoyance with liberal classmates. But I wonder if a larger reason wasn't the disillusionment he felt later because of his law career, which, as a spoiler, doesn't work out the way he'd hoped.

As Chris recalled, Peter was obsessed in this period as he's getting out of college, as he's finishing his law degree. The thing that he wants for his life is not to be an entrepreneur or a founder. It is to clerk for the Supreme Court. And one kind of assumes he's maybe hoping to eventually get on the Supreme Court.

George Packer, writing for The New Yorker, states, quote, And...

If we're looking for like the inciting incident of like Peter's turn towards evil for like his desire to destroy higher education, what makes him choose the path of becoming like a corporate founder, a venture capitalist, this is why, right? His first choice is he wants to be working in and around and with the Supreme Court and he gets shot down. He's not –

This guy who has always been the best at everything isn't good enough for Scalia or Kennedy. Right. And that that's kind of what sets him on the path that he's going to go down later, at least according to a lot of people who knew him at this point in time. Wow. Like Scalia, the font of Scalia of so much not good does one good thing and it backfires utterly and completely and fucks us all.

Yeah, and I wonder if it's just that they could see the, because like, even if you're Scalia, right, you don't really want to work every day with a reflexive contrarian.

Right. Like they're not that's not a guy who's always his whole thing is always I have to be doing a different thing than everyone else. Like I have to be smarter than everyone else. Everyone else who has to be wrong and I have to be right. You don't want to work with that guy. That guy sucks. Or maybe just his work wasn't good enough. Yeah. Or maybe maybe maybe his law shit wasn't good enough. Right. Like, I don't know. I know I'm not a lawyer. I don't have the ability to judge Peter Thiel's like writing on law, but.

But whatever the case, he – because he's the valedictorian of his high school. He does very well at Stanford. He's friends with Kennedy's kid. He's doing everything he should be doing to make this work, and it just doesn't work for him, right? And that does seem to be like the thing that fucks him up. Anyway, Noah, how are you feeling about Peter so far? I feel like right now we're at kind of like –

only somewhat harmful, toxic nerd stage. And if the story ended there, it'd be like, okay, fine. You know, go ahead, buddy. Now you get to grow up and live a normal life. Like I feel like you'd be a person. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I feel like there's still like, you know, the fate is not set at this point. Right.

Yeah, I would say the fate is not set. There's a lot of ways that this guy could go after this, but I also feel like you can tell... A guy who runs that kind of newspaper and whose goal is to work for Scalia or Kennedy probably isn't going to wind up being a guy you'd want to have dinner with. You know? No. But this isn't behind the...

Guys you don't want to have dinner with. No, no, no. We're not guaranteed he's going to become a bastard yet. So we'll be hitting that increasingly by part two. And I'm excited for you to see where Peter goes after this. Noah, where are you going to go after this?

I feel like I'm going to have like several shots of whiskey after this. I feel like I need it. Yeah, it's 1 p.m., so that's the right time for a nice stiff drink. It's 4 o'clock over here, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 4 o'clock somewhere. That's why I can start drinking.

All right. Well, I'm going to go listen to some Jimmy Buffett. You all also go listen to some Jimmy Buffett and then come back on Thursday for part two. I'm going to need six drinks if it's Jimmy Buffett.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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