Part Four: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy
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Oh, welcome back to Behind the Podcast, a bastard with Robert Evans and Noah Schachtman. Noah, how are you doing? Good question. Good. Good question. Mark.

How good can one feel in part four of the Peter Thiel saga? Great question, Noah. How can one feel great there? Yeah. I don't know. Great question, Noah. Contributing writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired. Wow. You did it. You did that so seamlessly. I did it last time, too. Unbelievable. Proud of you.

Yeah, so I think we should, I want to start here by saying there's yet another post on one of the subreddits accusing now Garrison and me both of sounding like we always have a nasal infection.

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L'Oreal Paris, because you're worth it. Learn more at L'OrealParis.com. And like, I'm sorry, those of you who don't have a low-grade sinus infection every year, but the rest of us have allergies. Yeah, Robert's allergic to grass. Come on. The world is poison to me. I don't know what to tell you. Like, I have eczema. I'm allergic to my own fucking skin. Get off his back. Get off my back.

Unbelievable. It's amazing you're still here. Thank you. Thank you, Noah. So true. It's only my relentless toughness. Robert and I are allergic to so many things. Yeah. It is incredible. Jesus Christ, people.

Imagine being really like this is I'm the person who has most been victimized by the internet because of how mean people are to me about my nose. I'm the main victim of cancel culture. Are you in a bubble currently? Yes, I live in a bubble. Yeah, I have to tase anyone who tries to get closer than 10 feet from me because I'm just a fragile little flower boy. Oh, shit.

So I noted last episode that Peter was simpatico with the Bush administration when it came to surveillance. His only real issue with them is they weren't mean enough to Muslims. In 2007, though, he gained another issue with the Bush administration, which was that, if you guys can remember back this far, right at the end of his last term in office, W announced massive support for a new immigration reform package, which was

Today, unfortunately, we would call like hopelessly leftist, right? Like the George W. Bush 2007 immigration reform package is like so much more progressive than you could get away with now. And part of it included a path to citizenship for undocumented Americans.

Bush's attempts to fix immigration, as he saw it, again, this was not seen as great by progressives in the day, but it's just kind of more than you can get away with now, didn't work out. And it didn't work out because there's this massive groundswell of rage from the right flank of his own party, right, that is furious that Bush is suggesting any mercy for people who had entered the country illegally.

Thiel saw this movement as promising, and he credited the failure of Bush-era immigration reform on an unprecedented internet campaign. Thiel money started to flow towards anti-immigration organizations reaching people online. One was a nonprofit called Numbers USA, which argued that the U.S. needed to reduce the number of immigrants allowed in every single year.

Numbers USA was founded and operated by Roy Beck, who himself had once worked for a guy named Dr. John Tanton, who had founded other earlier anti-immigration groups. Beck had worked for Tanton's US Inc., that's the anti-immigration organization, for a decade, and had helped Tanton organize a book. They vacationed together. These guys are very close, ideologically and personally.

Now, once Roy starts his Numbers USA Foundation, which is backed by Peter Thiel, he starts to downplay his relationship with Tanton because John Tanton, in addition to being Roy's friend, is a white supremacist. Here's the Southern Property Law Center writing about Tanton.

As long ago as 1988, a set of internal memoranda to the staffs of two groups he founded, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, FAIR, and U.S. English, were leaked and showed Tanton warning of a coming Latin onslaught, questioning whether Latinos were as durable as others and worrying that Latinos were outbreeding whites. A decade later, he told a reporter that whites would soon develop a racial consciousness and the result would be the war of all against all.

He hired and worked alongside Wayne Ludden, who has held other leadership positions in four white supremacist hate groups. He published and endorsed a racist book on immigration, and he published numerous white supremacists. Tanton compared immigrants to bacteria that will continue growing until the population crashes and sneered at immigrants defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.

There's a lot that's messed up there, you know? Yeah. Latin onslaught is the name of a sick Spanish language metal band. It's also Latin onslaught is the term I use for that, that period where Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen were both really starting to hit it in a big, in a big way. You know, I believe that's half Latin. That was the Latin onslaught. Yeah. It's Latin enough. So I, this, so,

Peter Thiel is an immigrant to this country, right? Born in Germany, yeah. Yeah, for sure. He's an anti-immigration immigrant.

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, though, like that's the thing that people always get like flipped out by. But that's like the core of the hardest anti-immigrant chunk of the U.S. population is immigrants and children of immigrants. Right. Like, you know, the Cuban community in Florida being one example. But like half of the fucking Border Patrol is Latino, you know, like and those guys are. Yeah. Am I right in remembering that Teal has said it like his citizenship is Latino?

Here and then also New Zealand? Yes, he kind of fudged getting New Zealand citizenship. People will argue that he wasn't actually there long enough to get it. But if you have enough money, you can get the citizenship and like...

New Zealand, if you want to offer me citizenship too, I'll take it. But it's kind of messed up that you gave it to Peter. Yeah. I mean, I could really use some New Zealand citizenship right about now. Yeah, fucking send us some New Zealand citizenship. Wait, is that like if you found enough companies that are named after Lord of the Rings? Yes, yeah. If you founded three companies named after Lord of the Rings cameras.

You get to go to New Zealand. No, seriously. Is he pro immigration to New Zealand, too? He's pro him having a safe valve. You know, that's, I think, all that it is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Also, how do how come all these people or some of these people, hardcore Catholic and

but also hardcore against the biggest hardcore Catholics on the planet, a.k.a. the South and Central American populations.

Uh, you know, that's a good question, in part because a lot of these guys actually kind of hate what most Catholics see as Catholicism, like the kind of trad cath, the trad cath movement today. They're all converts. They're all into aspects of like my whole family's Catholic and like the kind of shit these people will say about like, no, the Pope is invalid because this is this from 700 years ago. It's like shit like Catholics like, no, he's the Pope.

You listen to the Pope. That's all that matters. It's this kind of separation between what cultural Catholicism is

And like the fact that right now, the fucking in a I think it's in Pennsylvania, the Republicans are going after this nunnery because like a bunch of nuns are registered to vote there. And they're like, none of them live there. They're like the nuns are talking about countersuing them. And man, if the nuns are suing you, no born Catholic I have ever known would fuck with a group of nuns. You don't go against the nuns. You don't go against the nuns. They're frightening people.

Yeah. But even this Jew knows that. Yeah. These guys are not like they're they're not Catholic in the sense that Catholics are Catholic. They're Catholic in the sense that like people who become fans of Warhammer 40,000 because they don't get the joke are fans of Warhammer 40,000. That's the kind of Catholics they are. Right.

I feel like that was a very Alien 4 moment again. No, no, no, no. Everyone understands Warhammer. Do you have some sort of endorsement deal with Warhammer 40,000? No, I wish I did. I would take their money. But Games Workshop does not give out money.

That is the last thing that company does. Yeah. I feel like if you could score some of that sweet, sweet games workshop money, you might be able to find a cure for your allergies. I can do a whole podcast and all of the characters that are based on 19th century gay poets in Warhammer 40,000. More than you'd think. Go ahead.

Go off, King. Yeah. So Peter Thiel, he is – this guy, John Tanton, is directly connected to the dude. Thiel is not backing Tanton, but he's backing his protege, Roy Beck at Numbers USA, right? And that's not all. I'm going to continue that quote from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report revealed that over the course of some 20 years, Tanton had corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers, and leading white nationalist thinkers. He introduced leaders of FAIR, on whose board he still sits today, to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a racist outfit set up to encourage race betterment at a private club. He promoted the work of an infamous anti-Semitic professor, Kevin MacDonald, to both FAIR officials and a major donor.

At one point, pursuing his interest in eugenics, the utterly discredited science of breeding a better human race, he tried to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization. His concern, Tanton wrote in a letter of inquiry, was a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them. And again, Peter Thiel is putting money...

into all of the people adjacent to this guy, right? Like he is backing a lot of organizations that are next to him. Like this is just – you can see – and this is – he's very much – Thiel is very happy when like this Bush-era immigration reform package goes down in flames because he has been – one of the things he's most consistent on, again, since like the 2007-8 is –

wanting massive restrictions and particularly non-white immigration into the United States, which is not a libertarian stance and is really just kind of a far right racist stance. While bankrolling this like weirdo neo-monarchist who's trying to like convince the –

blogosphere right wing to abandon democracy. Yeah. And this is actually a writer on the same time because it's like 2008, nine that he starts getting involved with Yarvin. And it's 2008 that he first sends a million dollars to numbers USA through an intermediary. According to Chafkin, who notes, Teal didn't comment on the report at the time, but several sources familiar with his political activities have told me the reported donation was real.

So, you know, it doesn't look like it's a thing that's absolutely confirmed, but there's definitely like ties between him and Roy Beck and Beck is tied to Tanton. And this is all kind of part of this very long process of Teal backing different explicitly racist anti-immigration organizations.

Now, the next year, right around the time that J.P. Morgan started experimenting with Palantir, Peter Thiel published an article in the Cato Institute's journal with his seasteading buddy. This is the guy that he's backing at the Seasteading Institute. The theme of that issue was the idea of creating libertarian enclaves outside of existing states. Thiel submitted an essay, The Education of a Libertarian, where he channeled his friend Curtis Yarvin to write, I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.

He whined that the 1920s were the last gasp of hope for liberty because Americans then gave women the right to vote and created the welfare state. And these two innovations had made political victory impossible for libertarians. Libertarians can't win elections because women can vote and there's welfare and we'll never get those people to give us any votes, right? That's why he's so angry about this shit. Yeah. Girls will vote for us.

Oh, the ladies are too mean to us, so I can't play this game. This game is over. This game is stupid. I find whining about this shit so fascinating because we have all seen Peter and guys like him. They've only gotten wealth and power through the system that they claim to be oppressed by. It is the only place that they have ever been or would ever be a success.

These guys are the winners of our society. They are elevated by a system that is designed to produce and support them, but they still can't feel help, but feel like losers all the time, no matter what they do. And so like they turn their rage against the system. That is the only reason they're special. Don't act like a loser. Don't act like a fucking loser. Don't act like a fucking loser. It's just, it is the most loser shit to complain that,

we couldn't possibly win on an election because 51% of the population can vote. - Too many girls, too many girls voting, yeah. - Yeah, it's like, they're like, we won our D&D games and there were no girls involved in those. - Yeah, yeah. You don't win D&D, you win just by playing. But yes, I get your point.

Peter's frustrations were amplified by a public outcry against his complaints about women voting, right? Like people get angry at him for saying this and he is forced to come out and kind of backpedal and be like, I don't want to take away women's right to vote. I just recognize that this is a problem, right? And I want to find a shortcut to avoid democracy cramping my style, right? I don't want to stop women from voting, but we have to agree this is a problem that guys like me can't win as many elections because of the girls, right?

Now, another constant Teal irritant was the free press. As we talked about last episode, I do think his initial irritants with Valleywag comes from a semi-understandable place. But it took years of them reporting on his actual doings in a manner that I think was generally responsible journalism before Teal acted. Here's the shadowy and sighting incident of the Gawker lawsuit. According to Derek Thompson in an article with The Atlantic where he interviews Ryan Holiday, who's the guy who wrote the book on this.

In 2011, he is in Berlin and he takes a meeting with a then 26-year-old Thiel devotee, who you might call Mr. A. The young man essentially tells Thiel, I know you're obsessed with Gawker and I have an idea to destroy them. He says Thiel should create a shell company to fund investigators and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker and ultimately sue it into oblivion. He estimates that the plan will take up to five years and up to $10 million in funding, which is prophetic.

So it's this mysterious Mr. A who nobody knows the real name of, allegedly, who is the guy who like sits down with Teal and is like, hey, I think if you fight, if you just keep putting out, put money, you know, put it towards some people, maybe I can help you with this. Get that feeling this guy's kind of angling for a gig. Like we will figure out when Gawker slips up and we'll use that to stick the knife in them. Right.

Maybe that's the lawyer or something like that. I mean, like maybe that's like a lawyer just trying to get money. Maybe it's Ryan Holiday. Again, the reporter revealed this describes Mr. A as a professional son. In other words, someone who sought out and wormed his way into the confidences of father figures who could advance his career. And Teal, some people will say this is in part because he has crushes on some of these guys.

but Teal has a habit of finding generally handsome young men and putting them into his inner circle back. And this is kind of how JD Vance and Blake masters get into his circle. Right. And I, I don't know how much I'm trying to just kind of like stay out of it. Cause what matters is he's backing these people, not whether or not he thinks they're hot, but that is an allegation you'll hear that's made about this. Right. And,

I don't know. I'm sure that I'm sure that's not a non-factor. Sometimes you hear about this guy who like goes out and targets older men to try and like embolden his career. And it's like, I know how you can destroy Gawker. And maybe Peter, he's frustrated. He's angry that he can't do anything about this thing that's hurting his business. And then like this hot dude comes up with a plan to kill them. Right. Maybe that's some of what's going on.

According to the version of the story told by Holiday, Peter complained to Mr. A over their meal that he couldn't just outright destroy Gawker. And Mr. A said back, Peter, if everyone thought that way, what would the world look like? Right? If people didn't just destroy journalistic outlets because they could, where would we be as a society?

So if this is accurate, that is kind of a, not a, I don't know if it's a big if, but it is an if Peter, he, this guy is who succeeds in getting Peter to fund this operation to find a way to kill Gawker. And they eventually find the way to kill Gawker in an,

unlikely place the office of a florida dj named bubba the love sponge yeah here we go here's where bubba the love sponge comes in uh everyone's been waiting for this since we started talking teal you know speaking of bubba the love sponge you know who is a love sponge

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We're back. And boy, I hope we all enjoyed that ad from HIMS. HIMS. I think they sell testosterone now. Why not get involved? Or Ozimbic? Is it Ozimbic they're selling basically? Whatever. Give them some money. Give them some money. HIMS. Or don't. Back in 2006, Hulk Hogan. Do they sponsor us, Sophie? Have they given us money?

Come on, Hems. Get on the bastard's train. You know? Yeah. Ads like that every day. We'd shill for you. We'd shill for you. I'll sell Hems. I don't give a fuck. Back in 2000. Give us a Hems ad right now. Come on. Just go ahead. Do it. Hems, do you have enough testosterone? Probably, but you could have more. It's what all the celebrities do. They'll ship it to your door. Who gives a shit?

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Back in 2006, Hulk Hogan had been depressed over the state of his marriage. I love where this story starts, which is I had, again, just casually hearing it. I had thought that it was a case of like he was just cheating on Bubba with Bubba's wife. No, no, no. Hulk comes over because he's getting a divorce and he's just in a dark place and he needs his friend Bubba the Love Sponge. The Hulkster's in a dark place. The Hulkster's in a bad place. I really need some comfort. And Bubba the Love Sponge is like, Hulkster, you know what'll cheer you up? Fuck.

Fucking my wife. Why don't you go into my bedroom and fuck my wife? And the Hulk said, okay, but you're not going to film this, are you, brother? I know you always film people who have sex in your house. You're not going to film the Hulk's dick, are you? And...

But was like, of course, I'm not going to film you. And then, of course, he films the whole. And he takes the recording made in his house and he puts the recording in his desk at the radio station where he works.

Incredible. Like you do. Amazing shit. Yeah, that's incredible. So funny. This is such a funny case. Like a lot of good people lost their jobs, but this part of it's really funny. Yeah. Some people, yeah. Not all good people lost their jobs, but a lot of good people did.

So fast forward about six years. Obama is on his way to term number dose and Bubba gets in a conflict with a guy who Ryan Holiday describes as a this is the funniest term in the world. Rival DJ. Nothing, nothing sadder than the words rival DJ. Apparently Florida. Yeah. Rival Florida DJ. Yeah.

If this is, and again, there's some debate. I'm not saying this is absolutely what happened, but this is probably the most, it's certainly the most entertaining and probably the most credible story as to why this all happens. If this is accurate, the whole destruction of Gawker thing started with,

Because Bubba the Love Sponge and a rival Florida DJ had an argument over who was going to, like, get which time slot. And the rival DJ broke into his desk and stole the videos to, like, hold them for ransom, basically. And ultimately leaked the videos to Gawker to embarrass Bubba the Love Sponge. Hulk was only ever an accidental casualty. He was collateral damage. He was collateral damage. The poor Hulkster. Oh.

Oh, that's in the great Florida DJ war. Yeah, the great game of Florida DJs. He's Afghanistan. Wait, is the rival DJ Mr. A the secret? I mean, maybe the rival DJ was the secret hand behind it all. I'm going to say definitely.

I'm gonna say definitely in a way that makes iHeartMedia legally responsible if I'm wrong. Absolutely. Yeah, because if there's one DJ, all radio, all radio, iHeartMedia, boom. Right, of course, we've gotta be tied into this. Oh my God. Yeah, it all connects. Get out your Palantir crazy board. Call the CEO. We're gonna blow this thing wide open. Yeah, okay.

So, yeah, anyway, Gawker. Now, here is where Gawker because I mentioned how it's questionable their choice to out Peter, but probably in a court of law defensible because of who Peter is.

politically because of how influential he is. Again, that's why Peter doesn't sue over that. This is something they probably could have defended. What Gawker does next is something that is – it still was potentially defensible. We'll talk about it. Gawker makes some mistakes in their legal representation here.

But it's deeply questionable. This is a thing that I can say I'm leaning on this not being newsworthy, right? And what's not newsworthy is they publish the video. They don't just report on the fact that there's a Hulk Hogan sex tape. They publish the video under the title, even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work, but watch it anyway.

And that's just hard to defend in court. You're going to have to defend that, right? Although an incredible headline. An incredible headline. An incredible headline. Nobody said they were bad at headlines. No. I mean, incredible headline. Yeah. Publishing sex tapes is probably not the greatest idea. It's on the edge. It's on the edge. Yeah.

So this is something that is, again, this is potentially defensible. I'm not saying it's blanket not, but it is something you were probably going to have to defend in court, right? You have crossed a line that is going to open you up to some potential injury here.

Now, one reason why is that the sex that Hogan had with Bubba the Love Sponge's wife was not as a part of his job as, you know, Hulk Hogan, the public figure. Right. This is not something he did with a subordinate. This is not something he did on company property. Right. Like this is not something you can argue is an abuse of power on the Hulkster's part. You know, this is a consensual non monogamy. I guess you could call it really that just happened to get filmed.

So Hulk has an argument that what happened was a violation of his privacy. Now, Gawker, again, I think if they had just reported on the tape's existence, could have defended it. Making it available is a lot harder to defend. Teal's people set legal wheels in motion. And again, it's like 2012 when this article – when this video gets released. So that's like six years after the sex tape was filmed. And for a few years, the case kind of grinds forward. And part of why it grinds forward is Gawker doesn't know that Teal is backing Hulk Hogan. Right.

And, you know, the hoaxers got money, but the hoaxer does not have a major media company money. And the smart play, if you are a big corporation like Gawker sued by a guy, even a rich guy is delay. Make it as expensive for them as possible. Right. You run out the clock and eventually they will not want to keep burning cash in order to keep fighting you. I mean, if I may. I'm not sure Gawker was ever that big of a.

I think it was more – and listen, I got a little bit of skin in this game. Yeah. Gawker's lawyer at the time and then their president. Yeah. Somebody I worked with afterwards. But I would just say at the Daily Beast where we ran the joint together for a couple years is like – look, I think in general –

You got to – the First Amendment errors on the side of publishing, right? Yeah, right. Even creepy-ass shit. Absolutely. Like Hulk Hogan's dick. And so, I mean, I think what they were more pursuing was a – you know, what happens in any of these First Amendment cases where they're trying to put up their best defenses against getting sued, and those defenses take a while. Yeah. And I don't think it was – I mean –

This company was never a particularly huge company. They had insurance that protected them against litigation at some point. And, you know, they had, you know, depending on where the case landed, whether it was in New York or Florida or whatever, they had better defenses against the law because a lot of this stuff is weirdly state by state. And this is an early judge shopping case. Like the fact that they wind up in a Florida district with a very sympathetic judge is a big part of what hurts them. If it had been in a different district, they probably probably would have gone better for them.

I should note that, yeah, it's kind of like Holliday's argument as to how this went badly is that Gawker takes the standard strategy you would take, which is a bad strategy if Hogan has the kind of financing behind him that they couldn't have known he had. Right? Right.

Like the fact that there's so much more money behind this, which starts to become clear later in the case. Like it's the kind of thing people do not initially know. Gawker doesn't initially know that Teal is backing them and what Holiday will argue. And I think I think you're probably right, but I don't think it's wrong that if Gawker had known who was supporting the lawsuit, there are probably changes they would have made and how they pursued their defense. Right.

or at least how they pursued publicizing that Teal was involved, right? Yeah. Maybe you try to make that clear earlier, right? Right. Hulk Hogan sues company that publishes dick tape is one thing. Weirdo right-wing billionaire sues media company for no particular reason, but happens to use the sex tape as an excuse. That's a totally different thing.

Yeah, it's a totally different thing. And yeah, that's – and again, Holliday – I quote him a lot because he's the guy who like wrote the book on this case. He is kind of more on Teal's side than I am and than I think most reporters are. Although he's on Teal's side more and a gawker made a lot of major mistakes. And I don't entirely agree with Holliday here, but they do make a number of mistakes, right? There are some like issues with the way this legal defense goes down.

but also it's one of these things where, well, if you have Peter Thiel money and the ability to judge shop and shit in a way that a guy like Thiel does, it's, it's hard to imagine, uh,

he wouldn't eventually have gotten them on something, right? Well, certainly you're going to operate differently if you know that there's a right-wing billionaire that's built a Death Star. Trying to kill you. Yeah, exactly. Trying to destroy you. Just designed to destroy your planet. Like that's a very different kind of way to operate. Yeah.

And look, I think also just like growing up in the same era of media is like I think we all – a lot of us were kind of self-taught and kind of like relearning the rules as we went along. Right. You know, like –

You know, this was, you know, a major object lesson. And we would have all rolled a little bit differently if we had known that there are these like, you know, kind of like autocratic gazillionaires that were, you know, kind of out to destroy what we were about.

And this is the thing – this is one of the things that's so sad about this is that like a lot of the issues that – in terms of like we can – when we talk about like the areas in which Gawker made mistakes, a lot of them are just due to how young the company was, how new this whole branch of the media was and that we are all – because I was a part of a digital media company there. I like definitely –

I was learning and like learning by breaking a lot of the rules of journalism early on in my career too. Like we were trying to figure out how these things worked in a new era where there was suddenly both opportunity and money in a way that journalists had not been used to for a while, but also brand new pitfalls and threats, right? And this is- Well said. I don't think it was, you know, Gawker, if they had done things differently, might have been able to survive.

But someone was going to go down in flames for something like this as a result of the different period that we had entered into, right? I do kind of believe that. Maybe it wouldn't have had to be Gawker, but it was going to be somebody because there was just so much being tried that was new and that hadn't been adjudicated. Yeah.

You know, like that, that was always good. And it was the same thing. I think most of us expected it was going to come down over like whistleblower stuff, you know, WikiLeaks kind of shit as opposed to bubble the love sponge, but it was going to happen. Right. Right. So a big part of why the case goes against Gawker is there's this one, one of kind of the, the leading moments of this court case is that in court,

Gawker editor in chief, AJ Delario in a deposition kind of jokes that the only celebrity sex tape he wouldn't have considered news where they was one that featured a preschooler that does not go over well in court. It's not a great moment, although I don't think it actually changes the it's just why would you say that? I don't know. Anyway, I'm not going to he's he's suffered enough.

But it doesn't – this all goes very badly, right? I mean it goes as badly as it possibly could. Even though the case had not initially gone super well for Hulk, ultimately the fact that this judge is very sympathetic, it all goes their way. In the case, the plaintiff is awarded $140 million in damages. Gawker, as you have said, was never that big as a media company and this absolutely drives them into bankruptcy. Right.

Nick Denton sold the company off to Univision, which shuttered the embattled flagship site. And that is the end of Gawker, except for it's kind of sort of back. I don't know. I don't know how we want to like it didn't all die out. Right. But yeah, it's a and this is a scary moment. Many of the sites still live on in one way or another. My old site lives on in one way or another.

Yeah, the zombies of our youths as writers. Yeah. So Teal, you know, he gets one of the things that happens kind of the tail end of this is that it becomes clear to the people involved in the case and the people paying attention to it that Teal is the guy funding this.

I think it might have been Vogue, I think, that published – I may be getting that wrong. But it wasn't Gawker that published the first article being like, hey, Thiel's behind this. But right as the case is ending, it comes out that Peter Thiel is the guy who had backed this, right? And so Thiel is able – there's this like backlash against him. But he's also able to kind of go out in the open and take a victory lap.

He tells the New York Times, it's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence. I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people, even when there was no connection with the public interest. And like you back guys like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, whose politics is entirely dedicated to attacking little people who have no power, right? Destroying their lives for clout. Like you don't believe any of this shit, Peter. Yeah. Come on.

Now, the Gawker case was the first thing that put Teal on my radar in a big way, right? I wish I could say I was one of those guys who from the early days of Palantir knew he was dangerous, but it wasn't until this that I was like, oh shit, there's this Peter Teal guy and he seems like a real problem, right? Yeah. It's also notable that it's not entirely – I think that the surface summary of this, which is that Gawker outed Teal and then he destroyed them.

Right.

The time that he waited, how long this took, you know, the inevitability of it in some ways that like once this was set in motion, it couldn't be stopped is much more upsetting to me. Yeah. And also, it's not just his. I think it's more just like his class, you know, like the burgeoning tech oligarch class. Yeah. They really –

were made deeply uncomfortable by, by a brand of journalism that, that was sometimes fucked up and, and sometimes, you know, question their power. And, you know, that, that threatened them a lot more than the journalism that played by the rules a hundred percent of the time and never threatened their power. Yeah. And this, this idea to that journalism is, is,

has a chance at surviving now. There's suddenly like, because in this new media era, there was a lot of money comparatively for journalists, not a lot of money in objective terms, but there's a lot of money coming into journalism based on what journalists had gotten used to after like the early Craigslist era had killed local newspapers.

And so there's suddenly this lifeline for reporting and you have this explosion in sites that had started as kind of less legitimate. Gawker's early days is no one's find us our just like the earliest days of BuzzFeed, right? You know, it's kind of a clickbait site. And then they start this very serious, groundbreaking news organization that really does great work.

And it's terrifying to these guys who are like, oh shit, maybe we're going to deal with more of this than we ever had, as opposed to it all being on the out and dying. And so they kind of commit themselves to killing it. And this is that Silicon – Peter Thiel is the first of the Silicon elite to start flexing their muscles to destroy the independent media, right? And I'd say more than just Silicon Valley. I mean, look, this is now in the era when –

You know, I was running the Daily Beast and, you know, basically there would be no major story about a rich person that didn't come with a massive legal threat. Like none. Like 100% of the time. You could not write about a rich person's

I'm not talking about like their personal life. I'm talking about, you know, any company that they're involved in, right? Yeah. Their business interests, nothing would come without a legal threat. And so it was just a regular part of the publishing process, which was deal with legal considerations. And often it was the very same lawyers that were connected with the Gawker case that were then being hired by everybody else because they, you know, they had learned this one trick.

So, yeah, that's one weird trick. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, that stuff was real. And I don't know that it stopped us from from publishing any stories, but it definitely stopped.

Like it definitely slowed down the pace of stories for sure. And it definitely, I know, I definitely know of others where, you know, big stories got killed off because of the, because of legal threats for sure. A chilling effect, right? It has this chilling effect. And it's one of these things where this is part of what, this is part of what's so scary about doing media, right? Is you have to, in order to stay relevant and survive, you have to explore things. You have to try new things. And that also means that,

It doesn't necessarily mean – I'm not saying every journalist would have published the Bubba the Love Sponge video, but you are going to do things that are new and that you can't say are covered under the laws that supported you in the past when you're trying to adapt to changing circumstances. That's always going to create opportunities for people to destroy you if they're scared by what you're doing. Yeah, fair. Yep.

Yeah, I think that that gets at it, I hope, in a way that's pretty fair. Yeah. Speaking of destroying your enemies, you know who my enemies aren't, Noah? The people who advertise on this podcast? That's right. None of them are my enemies. None of them would ever sue journalists for reporting on their personal business. You know, and if they have, no, they didn't. You didn't see that. Deny the evidence of your eyes and ears. That's the behind the bastards promise.

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One of the results of the Gawker lawsuit is that Peter gets thrust in the public awareness and gets criticized in a much bigger way after this, right? He is no longer – he's kind of like, oh, he's just this smart founder. He's kind of a libertarian. He probably has a couple of different stances. Like, oh, this guy is like a dangerous right-wing dictator.

ghoul, right? Like that's, that's really people. And this happens right to that May of 2000 or March of 2016 is when the Gawker case, you know, gets closed in court. And obviously Peter becomes like the Republican party's biggest single funder, I think during this period. And it's all capped. I think it's easy. He's at least one of them. Um,

Because of the way money works and all of this, it's kind of hard to say that for a statement. But he's a major donor and he speaks at the 2016 RNC where he endorses Donald Trump and he makes a big deal about the fact that I am a gay Republican. The Republicans are welcoming now. They'll accept you. Unlike these evil liberals who aren't really tolerant. The Republicans accept me, a gay man.

And obviously, like that was the thing the Republicans were doing at the time, like Trump, because the Pulse nightclub shooting was like a Muslim who did it. Like I could really, you know, pretend to be defending gay people and hang up my anti-ISIS credentials. And it works because people are.

Make bad decisions a lot of the time. It's amazing. I mean, but it was such transparent bullshit at the time. Oh, it was it was so if you paid any attention. But most voters are like most people listen to podcasts. They're hearing every fourth word while they're doing the laundry. Right. Yeah. So they miss shit, you know? Yeah.

Okay. Yes. I mean, it was just, it was complete. It was transparent. I watched him give that speech at the RNC and it was like the, I felt coded in a thick layer of sick. It was nasty. Yeah. Bad man. Yeah. And it was also like, sure, dude.

The party of of of anti-gay policy and rhetoric for fucking decades is all of a sudden doing. Yeah. Just because what because they've got a candidate in a wig. It's like, come on, dude. Like, that is just not true. And it was just so obvious at the time. And this is like, you know.

a couple of years after gay marriage was legalized. Right, 2015. Not even a couple. It was just like a year, right? Yeah. And Peter gets married. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, you know, such a major advancement. It's wild to me. It's wild. I don't believe any... I do not believe one single person actually believes that stuff. I'm sorry. I don't. No. It's hard to. And like, Peter is...

I think the caveat to all of this, we talk about these philosophers he likes and these visions he has of the future. And it's like maybe all he really believes in is that Peter Thiel should always be on top. Right. Maybe that's all you actually need to know. That said, I also think we all make up –

elaborate justifications for the selfish things we want to do, you know, that just being a person too. So it's not, it's not worthless to look at like, well, how does Peter do that? Right. Because he has much more money and power than us. Right. Right. Yeah. It's like, Oh, this guy's a weirdo with authoritarian tendencies. I'm a weirdo with authoritarian tendencies. We got to get together somehow. Let me justify this by somehow claiming that because he's a New Yorker, uh,

And he's not totally afraid of gay people like the rest of the people up on that Republican stage. Therefore, I'll go with him. Therefore, it's fine. I think I think Peter's probably corrected a meaningless way that I don't think Donald Trump personally is bigoted against gay people. Right. I don't think he gives a fuck. But I think Donald Trump is willing to kill every gay person in this country for Donald Trump's power. Right. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. He's running more ads about.

like demonizing trans people than he is about any every other topic combined that is his number one closing argument is kill trans people it's crazy and it's you know

This is as much as because like it's come out. Peter Thiel is not supporting the Republicans in 2024. He's not making like public donations. Right. And the reporting around it is like, well, it's because of how angry he is that in 2022 they launched everything into these culture war crusades. And like he's really disappointed in that and like the focusing on gay people. There's stories that like his now deceased boyfriend like kind of talked him into stopping supporting Republicans because of how crazy they were at the Andy Gay stuff.

At the same time, his boy is exactly. And Blake Masters are both two of the biggest anti-gay, like Christian fucking lifestyle crusaders out there. And these guys are total teal creatures. So do I believe any of that? Yeah. No backsies, man. It's not like like if this guy's the uber genius, he likes to like portray himself as he can't be like, oh, whoops. How could I possibly know what you're doing? You know what you're doing? Yeah. Yeah.

So now this period after 2016, when Peter has really gone whole hog for Trump, people start reporting a lot more on all of these other weird investments he's doing, right? And they start reporting on his life extension fixation. Now, all of his life extension investments are made through his – a lot of them made through his nonprofit, Breakout Labs, which is supporting like unconventional solutions to major problems. Yeah.

And one of those major problems is extending human lifespan and ending aging. Now, people think this is kind of quirky of Peter. So they start looking into it and reporting on it. And Peter starts getting asked by journalists in interviews about this. In one interview with the Washington Post, he explained, I've always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing. I think that's somewhat unusual. Most people end up compartmentalizing and they're in some mode of denial and acceptance about death. They both have the result of making you very passive.

I worry the FDA is too restrictive. Pharmaceutical companies are way too bureaucratic. A tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of NIH spending goes to genuine anti-aging research. The whole thing gets treated like a lottery ticket. Part of the problem is that aging research doesn't always lend itself to being a great for-profit business, but it's still a very important area for philanthropic investment.

And, you know, one thing Peter comes around on is that government funding is OK if it's supporting things like anti-aging research that I might benefit from. Right. Like we don't need roads or schools, but I don't want to die. But also I love this idea that like, well, normal people aren't scared of death. Everyone's scared of death, Peter. We're just not babies about it. Deal with it, man. Fucking take it on the chin, motherfucker. God. Now, look, you can.

I think there's plenty of great arguments that like the way drugs are kind of okay in this country. I'm not saying there's not ways that the FDA could be better. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite Peter Thiel medical stories from that era that we reported on at the time was he was very upset with how the FDA was handling herpes drugs.

Oh, interesting. He bankrolled a series of quasi-legal, certainly sidestepping around U.S. safety rules. Let's just call them gray market. Takira's herpes? Herpes test in the Caribbean. I think it's like St. Kitts and Nevis. Oh, man, that's fun.

That's good. That's just good stuff. People were getting injected with like off, you know, with like untried non-approved drugs. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. He's getting black market valcyclovir for his fucking awesome. So good. Our headline at the time was a dying Dr. Peter Thiel and a rogue herpes vaccine trial gone wrong.

Oh, man, that's so funny. These are not words you want in the same sentence? No, no. Rogue herpes vaccine trial. Not an attractive series of words to have attached to your name. No, not attached to your anything. And also, you definitely don't want it to all go wrong.

No, no, no, no. Your rogue vaccine trial, you really want to work out? Yeah, you want that to go excellently. Yeah, you don't want to have made everyone at your fucking creepy beach parties take a bad herpes vaccine? No. Did he give everyone herpes? What happened there? I'm trying to remember. I'm just looking through. The name of the company was Rational Vaccines. God, I'm heaven. Oh, my God. I like that. Rational Vaccines. Yeah, uh-huh.

So host all the irrational ones out there. No institutional review board or IRB to monitor the safety of the trials. Why would you need that? No, no, no. Yeah. You definitely don't want to have a safe purpose. No, no, no. You don't need a control group. What's that useful for? Yeah. Didn't know how or where it was manufactured. Yeah.

whether it needed booster shots yeah this was all a little wackadoodle all the things that you would hope that they would know

Yeah. Yeah. You know, no, but look, I mean, I think a lot of billionaires do. I think that that is something not completely uncommon in the billionaire class is like, you know, I'm going to do, you know, I'm going to hack science or I'm going to or the science industrial complex. You know, I'm going to really disrupt science industry.

And what better way to do that than with a herpes? Yeah. Disrupt herpes by, I guess, not hurting it at all. Let's see. One trial recipient started getting ringing in his ears and slurred speech. Oh, my God. Yeah. Let's just give everyone something worse than herpes. Yeah.

Then a Colorado woman in her 40s said she got flu-like aches.

and numbness soon after the second shot. Numbness, not a good thing to get after a herpes shot. No, no, no. The symptoms were followed by a, quote, excruciating 30-day outbreak of herpes. Great. Wow. 30 days. That's a long time to have a herpes outbreak. Wow. I have new symptoms every day. That one later told Halford. This is terrifying. He really disrupted herpes. You know, before it was an incredibly manageable viral disease.

uh, illness that, that can be easily handled with medication. And now people have month long outbreaks. You did it again, Peter, you moved fast and you broke herpes. Sounds like they broke, uh, quite a few other things too. Jesus. Yeah. So funny. Okay.

Okay, so in August of 2016, the same month that Peter shows up at the RNC, Maya Kossoff published an article titled Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People's Blood. Now, this is not the first reporting on Peter Thiel's interest in blood, but I think because of the title, this is one that has like a big impact on, you know, how people like –

how that rumor starts to spread. Now, the actual ultimate source of this was an article published in the same week for Inc. Inc. Magazine by Jeff Bercovici, who put out an old interview he'd done a year before with Teal that touched on Peter's interest in what's called parabiosis. Quote,

which includes the practice of getting transfusions of blood from a younger person as a means of improving health and potentially reversing aging. I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice, and they found that it had a massive rejuvenating effect. And so that is one that, again, it's one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s, and then it got dropped altogether. I think a lot of these things have been strangely underexplored. Now, the reason parabiosis was underexplored is that it doesn't really work.

Right. Blood transfusions are amazing medicine for the reasons that you would think, like when people lose all their blood. Right. Great to be able to give people a blood transfusion when they have been shot and bled out. It's not going to make you young because, of course, it doesn't work that way because that's stupid. It's stupid that it would work that way. That's not how blood works and it's not how aging works. And you're silly for thinking it.

No, no. Unfortunately, nothing can stop aging except for apparently taking lots of HGH and testosterone. You know, Noah, do you have twelve thousand dollars a month? Because I could I can help you out with a plan here. Oh, yeah, I definitely got that. His name is his name is Vito. He'll meet you at the gym with a trash bag. And yeah, you too could have a trash bag full of gear. I can drain him of his blood.

Yeah, sure. When I don't care what happens to Vito, like he's a steroid dealer, like his, his life has no value. Like we're good either way there. Okay. So I can, I can do both. I could be covered. I could be belt and suspenders. Yeah. You can take Vito's blood. Although Vito's blood is going to be even more HGH and testosterone. I'm going to warn you about that right now. Your HGH gut is going to have its own gravitational pull like the moon or like Joe Rogan's HGH gut. Yeah.

Oh, I know. I know that's really that is really unfortunate. OK, so you're telling me so Vito take his blood. It's already been pre-HGH. You don't need any more. You literally can't fit more HGH in your blood than Vito has in his. And then you just sell that sack of gear to somebody else who wants to spend 12 grand on gear, you know?

It's a beautiful cycle. No, I'm going to double gear. I'm going to do the next time we do this podcast, I'm going to be ripping this fucking laptop apart. You're going to be dead lifting 1100 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. Bursting your colon out as you fucking do your, yeah. My dick is going to be the size of a thimble. Yeah. Yeah. You can read the Lord of the Rings in Braille and the acne on your back. Oh, it's going to be incredible. Yeah.

Take that. Oh, man. Yeah, so Bercovici reported that a Teal Capital employee, who was also Peter's personal health director, had ties to Jesse Karmazin, the founder of Ambrosia LLC. And I would, if we had more time, there's so much Peter to get into, we would talk more about all of these different grifters. Karmazin is very funny. Legally, I'm not calling him a grifter. I just don't think what he was trying to do really works. But he did provide the product that he claimed.

Ambrosia LLC was looking for volunteers over the age of 35 to receive blood transfusions from the young. Gawker reported around this time that they had gotten a tip. And again, this is right after the lawsuit has concluded that Teal spent $40,000 a quarter to get blood transfusions from an 18 year old. Now is Gawker just trying to take a shot at Peter because of what happened?

I there's not outside evidence of this, right? Nothing's ever come forward to make it clear that Teal definitely was taking the blood of the young, right? In interviews, Peter has always been consistent that he had, he never got around to starting it, right? He told a reporter that he hadn't quite started yet.

And he has since denied ever taking the blood of the young, telling that Andrew Sorkin at Dealbook on the record. I am not a vampire, which I have to say is something a vampire would say. He's like, I'm a killer, Bella. On one hand, only a vampire would say that, right? Because normal people don't have any reason to deny being vampires. Yeah, right.

I mean, that's that is that's pretty that still kind of rules. So I think there's a good chance he never actually did this, not because he wouldn't, but just because I think it became clear pretty early on that this didn't work. Right. Brian Johnson, the big life extension guy, took his son's blood for a while and I think has stopped because it just doesn't do anything anymore.

Peter is not I don't think Peter would care that people were calling him a vampire if this worked. Right. Because he's open. He takes HGH as like a life extension thing. Right. Like, I don't think he would hide it if he was on it. I think maybe it just the science was not there in any real way. And Peter's not going to do something like this. Like, it's it's not pleasant, probably. Like, you wouldn't want to get constant blood transfusions if you weren't convinced it did something.

Speak for yourself. Yeah. Some of us just like blood. From an article in Business Insider, quote, Teal told Bloomberg TV in 2014 that he was taking human growth hormone pills, also known as HGH.

Teal Toad Bloomberg TV that he believes HGH can help maintain muscle mass. So that's less likely to get bone injuries and arthritis and stuff like that as you get older, which is true. I'm sure there are some problems of aging that HGH helps you avoid, but HGH has side effects. You can get carpal tunnel from it. You can get muscle and joint pain. You get an increased risk of cancer.

Research has shown that people and animals whose natural levels of HGH are high are likely to die at a younger age than those with lower levels of HGH. So I don't know that I would take this gamble. I think this may just be a case of Peter wanting the cosmetic benefits of HGH. It makes you look jacked even if you don't spend all that much time working out. Yeah.

as opposed to Peter truly believes this is a life extension technology. I think it's probably more accurate that he convinced himself it's keeping him young because it has cosmetic benefits that he appreciates, right? Yeah. My stance on all this life extension stuff is that Peter Thiel will die one day. And as is the case with all of us, he will probably die sooner than he expects because that's just the way shit goes. Sorry, Peter. I recommend making peace with it. That's, you know, the only real way to handle this. Now,

I went back and forth with myself over how much to cover of each of Peter's evil interests. For example, in 2016, Peter was a mega donor to the Republican Party. But like most people who get involved with Trump, he soured on him quickly. And he avoided donating to Trump's reelection campaign in 2020 out of what he described as frustration with Trump's personality, right? I don't disagree with any of his policy, but I'm angry at how much he's become the story, right?

In 2022, he got back in the electioneering saddle and he backed J.D. Vance and Blake Masters with unprecedented donations. He gives more money to J.D. Vance than a single candidate had ever received for a congressional seat.

In all, Peter Thiel put $35 million in 2022 into 16 federal-level Republican candidates, and 12 of them win. But the overall performance of the GOP in those midterms is famously poor. And it's famously poor because a big part of their campaign rhetoric was spurred by irrational bigotry against LGBT and particularly T Americans. Peter would publicly state that this frustrated him. I think this has to do with the fact that there's a guy he's dating at the time who

Who is a like a gay male model and who will give later interviews. I think these are kind of actually right around this point where he says that, like, yeah, I I talked to him about this and like convinced him to stop. Right. Because I think these people are toxic and they're bad for us. I didn't think he should be doing this.

Um, this model's name was Jeff Thomas, as we'll talk about. He's, he's deceased now. Um, but you know, he would claim that like I talked to P and I, I don't see why Jeff would have necessarily lied about this. Other than that, I think Jeff was getting shit for his association with teal because of how much more aggressive Republicans were being at gay people. So maybe that's, was Jeff's reason to want to say this teal. Um,

is going to set out 2024, but he does. It's kind of worth noting that if you're trying to take seriously this idea that he stopped backing Republicans because of a toxic they were getting, he backs the most toxic of them in 2022. So I just don't know how much to take that. I don't think I should take that very seriously.

Now, I could say more about how Thiel's seasteading ambitions have metastasized to a broader quest by some Silicon Valley elites to create an independent network state ruled by big tech in a place like California. I probably should, but we'll leave it with this, which is that one of the major advocates of the network state movement is an investor named Balaji Srinivasan.

who Thiel suggested to Trump should lead the FDA in 2016. Thankfully, Lush didn't wind up leading the FDA, but this guy is a really dangerous dude. And he's taken some of these ideas, these Curtis Yarvin ideas that Thiel started to mainstream, and he's been twisting them into very dark directions.

In 2022, his book The Network State described a plan for tech oligarchs to make their own countries, escaping democracy at the same time. One of his chief plots was to conquer San Francisco. Here's a report from an article in the New Republic on Balaji's current advocacy.

What I'm currently really calling for is something like tech Zionism. He said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, Theodore Herzl, the spiritual founder of the state of Israel and Lee Kuan Yew, former authoritarian ruler of Singapore. What a collection. But,

Balaji then revealed his shocking idea for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray shirts. And if you see another gray on the street, you do the nod, he said during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. You're a fellow gray.

The gray shirts would feature Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos. White Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular. Grays would also receive special ID cards, providing access to exclusive gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly policemen's banquets to win them over. Grays should embrace the police, okay? All in on the police, said Srinivasan.

What does that mean? That means, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling or whatever should get a job at a tech company in security. In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example, did you want to take the sign off Elon's building? Some loser shit. Some fucking lame. Some loser shit.

absolute loser shit is stupid fucking X sign incredibly funny this is like it's like as if no Nazi ever got a blowjob mm-hmm

this is what yeah they would come up with the fucking greys get it's so it's we'll talk about like srinivasan yeah he deserves more all of this we're having to yada yada so much just because like peter is involved in so much you know i can't like responsibly this is like i think i'm trying to just give as much of an overview as i can here you should do more reading

Do you think the grays thing is like some kind of aliens thing? Like, yes, we're the grays. I mean, I think he recognizes that it takes advantage of kind of that symbology. But no, I think it's not even that creative. We're going to have something cool on our shirts, like a picture of Elon. Like a picture of fucking Elon or a doge, I'm sure. My God.

We're going to have the Y Combinator logo on and all the cops are going to love us because we're going to give them jobs. We're going to give the cops kids jobs. Their fail sons will get to work at our security companies. Yeah, that'll keep you guys safe. Yeah. So I'm going to move on to talk a little bit at the end here about Peter's war on higher education. He started his public life by authoring a book with David Sachs on the intellectual corruption in American academia. As a multibillionaire, he launched a program to prove higher education unnecessary.

The Teal Fellowship. The idea behind the much-ballyhooed fellowship was that Peter would pick 20 students per year and give them each $100,000 to drop out of school and do their own thing, trying to start a business with some support from the Teal Foundation. Basically, Peter pays for you to figure out a company you want to start, and your association with him makes it easy for you to get VC bucks. In keeping with his supreme weirdness as a dude, Teal announced the initiative by attacking the Catholic Church, kinda.

If you get into the right college, you'll be saved. If you don't, you're in trouble. As I've said, colleges are as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago. They're sort of charging people more and more. It's the system of indulgences. You have this priestly or professorial class that doesn't do very much work. And you basically tell people that if you get a diploma, you're saved. Otherwise, you go to hell. And like, that's such a weird way to look at it because it's not the professors who have made college expensive.

In part, it's like the same reason that people like you, these VC ghouls, you know, who are part of the administrator class who are sitting on the boards of these colleges want more money. Like it's not a random Marxist professor who has decided that college is going to cost $80,000 a semester. That guy doesn't benefit from that situation, right? Not at all. They're getting paid the same amount of money. Yes. I mean, yeah. Look, I remember when this came out and I was like, you know what?

It like I can sort of get down with the idea of like circumvent your. I don't believe college is best for it. I dropped out. Right. A lot of people benefit from not doing college. But this this going to war with college is such a weird movement.

It's such a weird thing to do in this situation. If you said, hey, this isn't worth – if college isn't worth it, take my money. That's worth it. Yeah. That I can see. But like college is a Catholic church. I don't buy it. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Now, depending on who you ask, the program could be viewed as a success or a failure because the program that comes out of this is that like Peter is going to pay $100,000 per student if you try to drop out of college, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not like colleges aren't trying to encourage their students to start companies through various programs, Brown says. None of those have been anywhere near as successful as giving these kids $100,000 and sending them out into the world. So that's one analysis of the program. Max Chaifkin, you won't be surprised to hear, gives a more critical summary of things. First off, he alleges the foundation was started in part for the media attention it would get, which would distract people from the fact that Peter's Founders Fund has lost a lot of investors after his hedge fund fell apart.

Peter launched the fellowship with a characteristic 5,000-word essay on what happened to the future, written by his partner at the Founders Fund, Bruce Gibney. It includes the line, we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters.

Thus, the fellowship was a small attempt to get the future back on track by encouraging ambitious geniuses to take big swings and not just work for the man making fake technology, solving fake problems. Chafkin points out that these kinds of fake technologies were precisely where the Founders Fund had invested its money for years.

Founders funded backed Facebook, a social network just like Twitter, as well as Path, Gowalla, and Slide, which were all social media companies. The last one, which had been started by Teal's PayPal co-founder Max Lebchin, was known for something called Superpoke, which allowed users to virtually slap, punch, and grope their Facebook friends and was about as far from the Randian ideal as one could imagine.

The fellowship did connect some young men with funding that wound up leading to profitable companies, but none of them gave us the flying car or anything but more of the same overvalued Silicon Valley bullshit. And Chafkin argues the program did damage to some of the young people in it. For one thing, the program tossed kids into the Bay Area with what amounted to a small sum of money and very little social support or institutional support. Ironically, the kinds of things that universities are decent at providing. Quote,

They showed up in California only to find out that the actual execution of the fellowship was basically an afterthought once Teal had achieved its marketing goal. There was no structure to speak of beyond that suggestion and the requirement that they not enroll in school or take a full-time job.

Some former fellows talked to Shavkin and made the very interesting point that the actual benefit of the fellowship was essentially the same as what you got out of an Ivy League school, access to powerful people and money. The Teal program, one fellow told, promised libertarian capitalism in a supportive community that would reward creativity rather than Machiavellian maneuvering.

What I found was comically not that, he said. It was college without the classes, a residential community, or studying. In short, most of what was enriching about college. It wasn't an attack on a credentialing system. It was another credential. And of course, yeah, yeah, I think that gets it right.

The greatest privilege of wealth is the ability to be taken seriously as a dilettante, right? You don't have to know anything. You don't have to earn your way in to show up with a bunch of money and be a serious player. Now, sometimes this works out. That's what James Cameron does with deep sea exploration, but he's a real, he becomes a legitimate expert, right? Like no one can argue that at this point, but James Cameron, very rarely is that how it works out. Usually, usually it works out like this, right? Right.

It's usually more like the dipshit who got everybody killed in the- Stockton Rush. Right. Stockton Rush. Yes. Peter represents the other side of the coin. And perhaps his longest lingering danger next to the career of J.D. Vance is his company, Palantir. And we're going to close by talking some about Palantir.

In the years since J.P. Morgan signed on and saw their whole C-suite get spied on, Palantir has spread over the globe. It gained a great deal of influence after the U.S. killed bin Laden, and some people insinuated that Palantir's tech had helped track the terrorist down. This appears to be untrue, but it's spread far and wide enough that you can find plenty of critical reporting on the company that will point out its alleged connection to bin Laden's death.

After Trunk took office, Peter saw his most nativist dreams come true in a way that meant big bucks for Palantir. They made a contract with ICE and Homeland Security Investigations for $38 million. This led to them providing software for a 2017 operation that targeted unaccompanied children and their families trying to enter the United States. This was the Kids in Cages scandal. And I'm going to read an excerpt from The Intercept next. I think Ryan Grimm wrote this one.

Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation provided at The Intercept show that this claim that Palantir Software is strictly involved in criminal investigations as opposed to deportations is false. The discrepancy between the private intelligence firm's public assertion and the reality conveyed in the newly released documents was first revealed by Mihente.

an advocacy organization that has closely tracked Palantir's murky role in immigration enforcement. Far from a detached support in cross-border criminal investigations, the materials released this week confirmed the role Palantir played in facilitating hundreds of arrests, only a small fraction of which actually led to criminal prosecutions. The document makes it clear that the operation, which would directly target the parents and other family members of children apprehended at the border, all with help of Palantir's case management app. The

The document continues to instruct that if sufficient information on parents or family members is obtained while investigating an unaccompanied child, a collateral case would be sent to the affected team for action. The instructions make it clear that enabled inquiries could result in charges against a child's family. Teams will be available immediately to conduct database checks and contact a suspected sponsor parent or family members to identify, interview, and if applicable, seek charges against the individuals.

and administratively arrest the subjects and anybody encountered during the inquiry who was out of status. So, the Palantir-aided campaign to hunt down and arrest family members of children who crossed the border alone was touted by the Trump administration's top immigration hardliners as a necessary measure to deter asylum seekers from making the journey north. Of

According to figures ICE provided The Intercept on Monday, the 2017 initiative led to 443 arrests, including 35 criminal arrests. Prosecutions, however, were much more difficult to come by, with ICE acknowledging that the campaign led to just 38 prosecutions related to alien smuggling or re-entry of removed aliens.

Karp, the avowed neo-Marxist, had initially expressed frustration at his company being involved in government overreach. In 2013, he told Forbes, I didn't sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair. But in the wake of reporting on his company's involvement in ICE, when some employees at Palantir pushed to divest themselves from working with ICE, Karp pushed to renew a $42 million ICE contract and attacked workers at Google and other Silicon Valley companies that had protested contracts with the military and law enforcement.

In the first couple years after Trump took office, Palantir acquired contracts potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the total revenue they'd received from the U.S. government during Obama's entire second term. Palantir has, at varying points, explored deals with the Saudis, and in January, Karp flew to Israel to express solidarity with the Israeli government and, one presumes, make the case for why the IDF should buy his company's products.

At the moment, Palantir's technology is also heavily used in Ukraine, where by some accounts it plays a major role in targeting decisions. Now, I am hesitant to rely on a lot of reporting that basically acts as advertisements for Palantir's technology, but there is some evidence that their algorithmic analysis has been useful in allowing Ukraine to more efficiently target and expend munitions on the battlefield.

It is not really possible for me to analyze how effective Palantir's technology is here, right? In part because information siloing in a war with this kind of stuff is so effective, but

I do worry about how much a lot of the reporting on the efficacy of Palantir in Ukraine, how much of it sounds like an ad. And I'm always very questionable about early reports that military and intelligence products are game-changingly effective, right? Because a lot of the time, that winds up being overblown, right? I can't say that it is. I don't know. This is something that will be adjudicated in the march of time, right? This is still going on. Yeah.

There was an article today from Reuters. Did you read that one? No, no. I mean, no, nothing today. Yeah, there was an article that came out today that Palatir was dumped by their Norwegian investor over their work with Israel. Oh, that's interesting. And we should probably talk more about that. It's just this is all coming out. Like, Karp recently visited Israel earlier at the start of this year to kind of make overtures directly to the Israeli government. Yeah.

Israel, most of their like AI targeting that's gotten so rightly covered is not through Palantir, but Palantir clearly wants to be in that business with Israel. Right. Like they're seeing what's going on in Gaza and like this is a place where we can make a lot of money. You know, it's just a case where I think they kind of got beaten to the punch on some of this stuff.

When it comes to what they've been doing in Ukraine, Palantir has played a big role in turning the war in Ukraine into what Center for Security and Emerging Technology Analyst Rita Konev described as an AI war lab.

It's possible that their technology has been helpful to Ukraine, but even in the most defensible use of Palantir's tech, there are troubling questions. From a write-up by CSET, national security officials and experts caution that these new tools may end up in the hands of adversaries. Rita Konev raised significant concerns about the long-term implications of the deployment of advanced technology in Ukraine. She stated, the prospects for proliferation are crazy. She also posed critical questions about the future implications.

Most companies operating in Ukraine right now said they align with U.S. national security goals. But what happens when they don't? What happens the day after, right? And what happens with governments who are engaged in stuff that's a lot more questionable than what Ukraine is doing, right? Like what we're talking about with them shopping around Israel. There's a lot of...

A lot of unknown questions about how this is going to work out. This is not, I hope this is like a ground level overview of what Palantir does, of why you should be paying attention to them. Nobody should take this as the final word on everything Palantir gets up to that's too big for even four parts of a podcast. But I think we've laid the groundwork and I think Noah, that's where we're going to have to roll out for the day.

Yeah. Wow. You know, usually these behind the bastards series, they end on such a positive note. Yeah. When the guy's still alive, it's a bummer. Yeah. Yeah.

I'll say a little. In this one, it's more like the AI machine is coming to kill you. Yeah. Which seems not as positive. Peter's going to help build the AI death machine that gets you targeted because you were once friends with a guy who looked up the wrong thing on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like a great idea.

I should note that in April of last year, Peter's quote unquote boyfriend, you know, he's married, but I think just kind of had probably probably was a consensual sort of sleeping around thing. There was this male model, Jeff Thomas, that he had been seeing. He put him up in a 13 million dollar mansion. He bought him a sports car. Thomas is the guy who claims he talked Peter out of supporting the Republicans in 2023. Yeah.

It's kind of unclear what was going on with them. Thiel has always been famous for throwing these very lavish, very decadent parties, right? Very much at odds with the whole religious conservative image that he had. There's definitely some texts and stuff that have come out about like the parties that he would plan with this guy.

There's some evidence they had a fight or maybe he had a fight. Peter had a fight with his husband. It may have been that Jeff got angry at him over his support of the right and that like that's part of why he pulled away from Teal because he like moved out of the house. We I just don't know who was on what side of this. But in 2023, Jeff committed suicide and we do not know why.

Um, we don't know what happened here. I'm bringing this up just because people are going to be like, why aren't you talking about this? But like, there's really not enough for me to say what happened here. Right. Um, but it is like a, a thing that you'll run into with Peter. I didn't want to just leave it out. Cause you know, that would seem like a weird hole to have in the story too. Um, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, it's cool stuff. It's also, it's, it's part worth noting for like the ethic, the ethics of Palantir that when Peter was interviewed about like how Israel has been using AI in a lot of their targeting, those resulted in heavy, massive civilian casualties. His basic statement was like, I don't think it's worth criticizing them on this. Uh,

You have to assume they know their business, right? Which like, man, a lot of innocent people have died as a result of this AI targeting shit. And I think that tells you where Peter sees the ethics in his industry, right? It doesn't really matter, you know? Right. Anyway.

Sorry to yada yada so much there, but like, how, how do you cover all of this in four episodes? We're already over time. So thank you, Noah. I appreciate you sitting here with us for this. Thank you. I think. Yeah. Do I think you, am I thinking you? I haven't thought. I never do. And I never will. Yeah. Okay. But thank you, Noah. Yeah.

Yeah. And people can follow you on the internet by, you're at your game. Yeah, Noah Shackman. S-H-A-C-H-T-M-A-N. Okay. Goodbye. Bye.

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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