← Behind the Bastards
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- [00:02]
Robert Evans
Call Zone Media. What's dying in darkness? My democracy. I'm Robert Evans, host of behind the Bastards. We're coming on recording this. The day that the Washington Post is getting attacked online for not endorsing anybody in the election, which I'm grateful for, because it means that no one has noticed that Cool Zone has also not put in our endorsement for the 2024 election, which is really good, because every year we adv people to vote for the same man, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now, to talk about our greatest president, and I think our greatest future president, Noah Shachtman. Noah, how are you feeling? Do you think Nixon's got it this year? You think he's going to pull out a win?
- [00:49]
Noah Shachtman
I thought you were saying I was your greatest future president.
- [00:53]
Robert Evans
Could be. You could be. You could be. But you need to be a little more Nixonian. Have you considered trying to destroy the world while drunk and only Henry Kissinger being the one that can stop you?
- [01:08]
Noah Shachtman
No, I haven't. So I guess I'm not qualified. Bummer.
- [01:12]
Robert Evans
That is a bummer. Noah. You are a contributing writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, and you're here to talk about P. Tizzy, which Peter Thiel does not go by and will probably. If he was not committed to destroying us after the first two episodes, that nickname is probably going to get us attacked.
- [01:31]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, you're definitely getting sued.
- [01:33]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we're done. We're done here, everybody. Yeah.
- [01:37]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [01:38]
Robert Evans
How do you feel about the news today? Is it good? You happy?
- [01:41]
Noah Shachtman
Happy about the news, The Washington Post thing?
- [01:45]
Robert Evans
I don't know. Whatever news is happening today, I assume something else went down, right? Somebody died.
- [01:51]
Noah Shachtman
I'm excited. The Yankees are playing in the World Series.
- [01:54]
Robert Evans
That's good. That's good. Bill Clinton called Kari Lake attractive. It's been an exciting week for everybody.
- [01:59]
Noah Shachtman
I mean, you know, tiger can't change his stripes, right?
- [02:06]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Yeah. If we want to call him a tiger.
- [02:08]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [02:09]
Robert Evans
Yeah. So, yeah, I guess let's get back into the old Peter Thiel game. I'm ready to talk about him. You ready to talk about him? Bum us out, Robert. Tell us all the things I will bums away. Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloan Glass, host of the new true crime podcast American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:02]
Noah Shachtman
From Audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring Comes the Unborn, a shocking true story.
- [03:09]
Robert Evans
My babies. Please. My babies.
- [03:12]
Noah Shachtman
One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.
- [03:16]
Robert Evans
She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids. Tried to burn her house out.
- [03:25]
Noah Shachtman
Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:32]
Robert Evans
It's been 30 years since the horror began. Nine, one, one. What's your emergency?
- [03:37]
Noah Shachtman
He said he was going to kill me.
- [03:39]
Robert Evans
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended, but what if we were wrong?
- [03:49]
Noah Shachtman
Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.
- [03:54]
Robert Evans
Listen to the Murder Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Beast Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Blacklit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets. Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a journalist, which, you know, 2/3 of us are in this call. December 7, 2007 ought to be a date that lives in infamy. That was my Pearl harbor joke. But it's also a joke referencing the Gawker lawsuit. Because that is the day that Gawker, via its tech website valleywag, published an article with the title Peter Thiel is totally Gay People. Now, Valleywag, which was, you know, again, like the tech imprint of Gawker, had been writing about Peter Thiel for a while and they had published articles kind of insinuating that Peter was gay. For quite a while. The company founder, Nick Denton, was, to his credit, someone who recognized early on that Peter was not just another rich investor guy, but somebody who was amassing significant power and had a weird ideology and should be covered. Unfortunately, the downside of it was that Nick's instincts were, you know, this was a messy time for digital media, shall we say, And Valleywag was not at this point entirely conducting itself in the best traditions of a journalistic enterprise. Right. And while I think an argument can be made, a strong one that Peter being gay, given his funding of the Republican Party, is to a degree relevant to the public interest, the way in which Valleywag reported on this initially was not a public interest story. Right. Like that title, Peter Thiel is. That's not a. That's not a we're getting out necessary information title. Right. That's kind of. That's being extremely catty. Right. By the way, our guest today is Noah Schachman, contributing writer at Rolling Stone.
- [06:48]
Noah Shachtman
Why are you slipping me in on the Caddy outing here?
- [06:51]
Robert Evans
So I introduced him this little. This much.
- [06:56]
Noah Shachtman
I haven't cataly outed anybody in weeks. Yeah, Robert, definitely did forget to introduce you last time.
- [07:04]
Robert Evans
No way. This time. But we redid it. We did it and it was fine. I got it this time. I'm just making sure Noah gets his credits because they're impressive.
- [07:12]
Noah Shachtman
Thank you, Sophie.
- [07:13]
Robert Evans
Thank you.
- [07:14]
Noah Shachtman
But I did give sticking up for.
- [07:16]
Robert Evans
Me your credits, Robert.
- [07:18]
Noah Shachtman
I would credit you too if I could.
- [07:20]
Robert Evans
I don't know. Do you remember this, Noah, when Gawker outed Peter? Because I didn't catch it really at the time, but I was a little baby at this point. No, I didn't need it.
- [07:29]
Noah Shachtman
I didn't either. But I did know the Nick Denton crew and Nick a little bit back then. And honestly, so many of the people involved were so fucking whacked out on powders and pills, they probably forgot they even did it.
- [07:45]
Robert Evans
All of the money that was going around in digital media back then, I think it would have been hard not to be whacked out on powders and pills. But this is not like the Post wouldn't have done this reporting in this way. Right. Or the New York Times. You can think of that what you will. But this was a little messy, I think probably. I mean, Peter never sues over this, but this is the inciting incident of why he gets angry at them. So I don't think this would have been something that could have been adjudicated in court. But it is something that if you're kind of going on, where does Peter Thiel have a right to privacy? Like, if you're arguing that because of his advocacy, you know, this is relevant, which I think is an argument that can be made strongly. You probably want to be a little bit clearer in making that argument than Peter Thiel is totally gay, folks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, again, that said, I don't think, like, the fundamental, like, issue here is that they outed him. I think it's just more that, like. Yeah, it's kind of a. Kind of a grody way to do it.
- [08:46]
Noah Shachtman
Did you say grody?
- [08:47]
Robert Evans
Grody. I did, I did. I am a high school girl in 2004. Wow. That would have been the late 90s, right? Yeah, I thought it was more of.
- [08:58]
Noah Shachtman
An 80s thing, but hey, you know.
- [08:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's probably more of an 80s thing. Yeah. So this had been. Valleywag had been kind of poking at Peter for a while. Right. They had been making before that article some kind of veiled claims about him being gay. And Valleywag is kind of certainly writing more on, like, the. What do you call it, tabloid end of things. Right. At this period of time, Gawker's going to professionalize in the period before they get sued into oblivion by Peter. But in 2007, they are still very much like New Kids on the Block. We don't really give a shit. Now, the question that comes to mind if you've read about Peter Thiel, is why did he get so offended at the fact that he was outed? Because by all accounts, he was pretty open in his personal life. It doesn't seem like this shocked even his Republican colleagues, people who had gone to teal parties, who knew him personally, who had gone to his nightclub. He didn't, like, go to extreme lengths to hide this fact about himself. Instead, what seems to have enraged him was not the specifics of the fact that he was outed, but this line from the Valleywag. The only thing that's strange about Thiel's sexuality, why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long? Now, I wouldn't really. That line doesn't stick out to me. But here's from an article in the Atlantic which interviewed Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book about the Gawker case. Here's what Ryan said about why that line in particular, like, tweaked Thiel. He thought Denton was implying that Peter had psychological problems. When you read the comment, it doesn't feel that way. But Thiel thought, here is the publisher of A media outlet, not just a blogger going after me. The blog post felt like the first article after years of negative Gawker coverage against Thiel.
- [10:52]
Noah Shachtman
I mean, look, I do think it feels weird when you're on the other side of it. And I think, you know, for those of us that like writing broadcast, right. It like you want to, you sometimes want to take a spin on the other side of the camera, so to speak, and see how that stuff feels. On the other hand, like, what's. He doesn't seem to have made it a secret, doesn't seem to have been a big deal. On the other, other hand, you know, I think outing people is fucked up and.
- [11:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [11:19]
Noah Shachtman
And so. And I feel like, you know, people's sexuality is like their own is their own choice. On the other, other, other hand, like, you know, if you're going to embrace some weirdo, like, you know, retro 17th century ideology about religion and power, then, you know, then you might have to grapple with it with its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. So I don't know. It's a tough one.
- [11:47]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it is. It is kind of a. Like this is I think a useful thing for people who are interested in the ethics of journalism to comment on. I do think it's interesting, like the specifics. Peter gets angry. This idea that he was mostly pissed that Gawker had maybe insinuated that he was not emotionally balanced. Now the other argument you'll hear here is that the primary real reason Peter was pissed about this is that it was fine for him to be gay and kind of open about it in his private life with the people who hung out around him, but not publicly open about it. Because who he really wanted to keep this from or maintain plausible deniability with is the Saudis. Right. He has a lot of business involvement in the Middle east and the Emirates as well as in Saudi Arabia. And he didn't want to be an out gay man traveling to and dealing with these countries. Right. Like, he felt that that would be damaging to his business interests. So that's the other argument that you'll hear and I'm sure it's probably a number of things. In any case, it doesn't. This is like, I think when I first was aware of this case, most of the casual reporting was like, you know, Peter Thiel got involved in wanting to sue Gawker into oblivion because they outed him. Right. Like that was the de de de a to B. I think it's a little less direct than that. And I Think this is the picture Chafkin paints, the picture Holliday paints, and Holliday's the guy who really seems to have gone into this the most is that this is what kind of gets Gawker on Peter's radar. It annoys him, but he's not committed to taking them down yet. Right. Like, that's not going to happen for years and years. So this is just kind of like the beginning of the conflict that they have in each other. So we're, we're going to move on here and later we will come back to the story. But like, yeah, this is, this is how he's kind of starting to get angry at Gawker. And I do think it's useful to. Holiday suggests that there's another reason why Peter's pissed as a result of this. And it has more to do philosophically with the kind of reporting that Gawker is doing and what they represent about. About the media in the digital age that Peter is kind of personally repelled by, maybe even frightened of. And I'm going to quote from an interview that he did again here. From 2007 up until 2012, Denton was on A Devil May Care, right, Of Breaking Rules as a media publisher. And that was so diametrically opposed to Peter's vision of quiet individuality, this belief that weirdos needed to be left alone if they were going to change the world. Peter saw that Gawker would punish people for that weirdness.
- [14:24]
Noah Shachtman
What? You're fucked up.
- [14:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I'm not sure how much. I mean, it's perfectly fine for. It's perfectly reasonable on Holiday's part to be like, yeah, Peter's doing this because that's just how he feels. I do think that's a very silly.
- [14:38]
Noah Shachtman
Come on, give me a break. What was Thiel's Stanford paper again? What were they doing?
- [14:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, the Stanford were. They were like, outing professors and stuff based on their political ideology. And like his best friend who wrote those anti AIDS columns, like, screaming about how he hopes that this fucking gay professor dies of AIDS or whatever. Like. Yeah, right.
- [15:00]
Noah Shachtman
And so now he's worried about what?
- [15:02]
Robert Evans
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that Gawker's making it unsafe to be weird, you know, And Holliday's more sympathetic to Peter in this than I certainly come out of. Like, if that is how Peter justified this to himself, it's stupid. Or maybe it's just Ryan kind of needing to find a more reasonable reason. I think there's.
- [15:28]
Noah Shachtman
Let me put it a different way, man. Like, okay, I've Been, as you can see from the gray hair. I've been involved in journalism for a long time and I've been involved in tech journalism for a long time. And back then was like the time of maximum subservience of tech journalism.
- [15:44]
Robert Evans
It was not a critical industry.
- [15:47]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, not at all. I mean, like, if you think the political press of 2025 towards future President Trump is bad, this is like, you know, that would be a pale imitation of the Silicon Valley press of that era. And so I think Valley Wag, in its own, you know, fucked up, weirdo way was like, the only people that were, like, bothering to. To penetrate or interrogate that or one.
- [16:11]
Robert Evans
Of the few people, they were reflexively. Yeah. Just completely subservient.
- [16:16]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. Now they're reflexively gross in some other ways. And I said, a friend of mine worked on that, but, like, you know, I feel like some of it was just like, how dare you actually, you know, not follow the rules of obeisance here? And how dare you not kiss my ass. That feels like more part of it.
- [16:38]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably like. I think that's probably a fair. Because this is actually what I came up in tech journalism. And yeah, it was a completely, like, Valleywag was one of the rare places where you would get people who were trying to be confrontational to these guys who were kind of worshiped at the time. You would have to go far to find really critical reporting on Zuckerberg, on fucking Steve Jobs, on a guy like Thiel. In this period of time, like 2007 is when that Forbes article on the PayPal mafia that we quoted from comes out where they're like, taking a picture of Peter and all of his friends and framing it like it's like a film poster and stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, I do think. And I do think that's important context for, like, we don't want to. I'm not, like, trying to deny how gross a lot of the. Especially today, a lot of, like, the way Valiwek framed things was. But it is important to note also the value of what they were doing that like, well, at least they were confronting these guys, you know, and it was 2007. It was a different era. Digital media was new. We can talk about, like, what the ideal way to confront them would have been, but, like, at least they were so. I don't know. It's a messy time. Nobody handled it perfectly.
- [17:53]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [17:54]
Robert Evans
Now, in terms of how Chafkin interprets this, because Chafkin gives a lot less slack to Peter and his argument is that, his argument is that after this Gawker article comes out, Peter is angry, but at the same sense of the, but in the same time he's, he's kind of liberated by the fact that he's been outed now and that this is a big part of why he becomes such an open not just in funding of the far right, but funding of a lot of his weird libertarian pet causes is now that he has been outed, like, well, maybe it's going to fuck with some of my business in the Middle east, but at least I can be who I am openly now. Right? And I think there's a good case to be made for that. Because it's after this article comes out that Peter starts, for example, sinking huge amounts of money in into seasteading, which is an art idea championed by weird libertarians who wanted to build their own cities independent of the government in the ocean. Peter backs the Seasteading Institute. He starts funding these guys who are doing little Burning man style events which actually do sound kind of cool, where they're living in the sea or rivers and stuff for days at a time. And he's funding this libertarian kind of fail son dude who's a major C steading advocate and he's giving like speeches and stuff. He's actually more into this. This is not just because when you've got teal money you can just be a dilettante about something that you're casually interested in. Peter is like giving speeches and writing essays about how seasteading he thinks might hold some of it's S e A. S E A. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like homesteading, but on the sea. Seasteading. Yeah.
- [19:40]
Noah Shachtman
Look, tell me again, how did we get from Peter once Peter Teele's tail is totally gay to Peter Thiel is totally seasteading.
- [19:49]
Robert Evans
Well, Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel, who has now been revealed as gay, can be revealed, can reveal himself also as a weirdo libertarian and be like, look, you know, I've been outed on this thing that I actually wanted to keep quiet. So I might as well be open about the fact that I think that we can replace governments by living on the ocean and building floating cities. Why not?
- [20:11]
Noah Shachtman
Again, like, I feel like at every step it's like, dude, this guy is like stuck in like second semester freshman year. Yeah, it's like he like took some bong hit that like he never quite recovered from.
- [20:26]
Robert Evans
We all took a bong hit. We didn't quite recover from Noah. Let's not judge him for that.
- [20:30]
Noah Shachtman
Guilty as fucking charged. I'm just saying that, like, his particular, like, techno libertarian, utopian. Dude, brah. What if we homesteaded on the sea?
- [20:41]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [20:41]
Noah Shachtman
And then no government could touch us. We could be pirates arrived.
- [20:47]
Robert Evans
This is the toughest part of the Peter Thiel story for me here, because I have to report on this and I don't like Peter, obviously. I wrote like 17, 18,000 words on why he's a bad guy. I also.
- [20:58]
Noah Shachtman
Are you a secret Steinsteader?
- [20:59]
Robert Evans
I think this kind of rules. I do think it kind of rules. I don't like it as a political thing is like we're going to replace all the governments. But I love the idea of. I like. Look, I watched too much seaQuest as a kid to not be attracted to the idea of taking to the ocean to build your. It's cool. I'm sorry. It's a cool idea. Like, fucking forgive me. Wow. I like it. I think it's neat.
- [21:27]
Noah Shachtman
Sorry. What is seaQuest?
- [21:30]
Robert Evans
What is sequel? Oh, my God. This is Alien for all. Unbelievable. No. So back in like the mid to late 90s when after Star Trek to the Next Generation really blew up, when it was kind of like season three or so starting to hit its stride, a TV show that was basically Star the Next Generation, but set in a future where humans had taken to the ocean to like, expand their living territory. And it was the lead actor, like their Picard was Roy Scheider, the sheriff from Jaws, and he like, ran this Jaws giant submarine city that traveled around and kept the peace in the underwater frontier. It was a good show. It was a good show. Yeah.
- [22:11]
Noah Shachtman
Wait, is Jaws on it too?
- [22:13]
Robert Evans
No, no, but there was a dolphin character. There was a talking dolphin. There was a talking dolphin, which there was supposed to be in the original Star Trek the Next Generation, I think there was what? That was something. Yeah. Cause Gene Roddenberry was a passadus. He was a believer that, like, once we have a nuclear war, dolphins and humans will, like, ascend together.
- [22:33]
Noah Shachtman
Hell, yeah.
- [22:34]
Robert Evans
Yeah. He might have been friends with that guy who raped that dolphin. I'm not saying he was in favor of raping dolphins, but there was a. John C. Lilly raped a dolphin. Yeah. What you guys know about John C. Lilly?
- [22:45]
Noah Shachtman
Peter Thiel raped a dolphin.
- [22:47]
Robert Evans
Yes. That is the allegation we're making on behind the Bastards. Thank you, Noah, for stating it. Because now you and the iHeartradio Corporation are both on the hook for making that statement.
- [22:59]
Noah Shachtman
Hey, in for a dollar, in for a fucking hundred dollar bill.
- [23:03]
Robert Evans
To be honest, I think the guys who think dolphins are equal to human beings. I don't think Peter Thiel cares about dolphins very much, else he would have different politics.
- [23:12]
Noah Shachtman
Dolphins are cool.
- [23:13]
Robert Evans
Although I also don't think he's molested a dolphin. So, you know, some of those pro dolphin guys did. Where do you stand on molesting dolphins? Email us, Sophie. Do we have any email? Technically. Okay, well, I'm not gonna read it again on our website. So we've hit about the point of 2008 or so. Peter is getting into funding seasteading. He's getting more open. He's starting to put out more money to like, libertarian causes.
- [23:39]
Noah Shachtman
Are dolphins allowed on the seastead?
- [23:42]
Robert Evans
You know, I think that's gonna vary from if I'm seasteading. Yes, dolphins are independent citizens with independent rights, but also they have to abide by our laws, which is gonna be hard for some dolphins because some dolphins are scummy. But that's a separate question. What? So this is right around the time 2008 or so that Peter Thiel starts reading the work of a fairly new blogger on like the right wing scene, this kind of underground hit who's particularly popular in the Bay Area tech industry scene, a guy named Curtis Yarvan, who at this point is writing under the name Mincius Moldbug. Now we did our episodes pretty recently on Mencius, so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail on him. But he advocates a return to monarchy based around small city states ruled by CEO kings. His idea is, wouldn't it be better if tech CEOs ran the world and it was a series of small city states that you could travel in between, which if you've ever had to use the. Like all of us have, if you ever used any of the products these companies make, the idea of them running an entire government is a nightmare. But Peter thinks, is starting to think in this period that maybe that's the right way to do things. And the open question always here is like, does he actually believe this is better for mankind? Because the thing you'll get in Chafkin's writing and in Peter's own writings, if you're trying to figure out why does he think this is. He has this belief that the tech industry has ground to a halt, that human innovation is frozen, right? That all of the stuff the tech industry is putting out are these bullshit little products and gadgets and stuff that don't actually take us forward in the way that we had dreamed of going when Peter was a young kid, which is To a degree. True. Although Peter's one of the guys funding and investing in these bullshit projects that absolutely don't take the species forward, make a lot of money. Does he believe that we need to do this in order to actually increase innovation again because capitalist democracy can't do it? Or is he just a guy who wants to be more powerful and he's like, well, if I'm a CEO, Katie, I'm more powerful, right? Yeah.
- [25:57]
Noah Shachtman
Isn't that the. I mean, that's the Occam's razor answer.
- [25:59]
Robert Evans
I mean, like, what?
- [26:00]
Noah Shachtman
The guy that in the future will fund, like the right wing YouTube is upset that tech isn't being innovative enough.
- [26:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [26:10]
Noah Shachtman
That's the real motivation here. I find that hard to believe.
- [26:13]
Robert Evans
That's what I always come back to is like. But he funded all of the bullshit projects. Like he's backing Facebook. He's like the first Facebook investor. There was never any chance that that was going to take us into Star Trek future. Right, Right.
- [26:30]
Noah Shachtman
I want to establish a multi planetary species. And the way I'm going to do it is by putting some money behind MySpace 2.0.
- [26:38]
Robert Evans
Yeah. This guy built a website to rate chicks on how hot they are. That's really gotta. That's gonna bring us to the hoverboards.
- [26:45]
Noah Shachtman
Oh, my gosh.
- [26:46]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [26:47]
Noah Shachtman
Put us right on the seaQuest. Did I say that right?
- [26:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Or put us on the seaQuest DSV. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. And also, everyone, RIP Roy Scheider. You know, if there's ever been a better drunk sheriff in film history, I haven't seen him, you know, go watch Jaws tonight, people. It's a nice Halloween movie. So Peter starts shotgunning money to Yarvin during this period of time as well. He invests like a million dollars, something like that, in the stupid tech company project Yarvan has. And I think there's probably an additional chunk of dark money that he. And this is where we can laugh about how inconsistent or unethical his motivations are. But the way he does this is smart because he recognizes I really like this guy's writing. This guy is putting out some stuff that's legitimately subversive on the, like, the role of democracy and how it's like doomed. That I think is useful towards where I want to see things go. And he's writing in such a way that is inherently attractive and magnetic to other tech bros. So I want to fund this guy as a way of like slipping this drug into the supply of the Silicon Valley power elite. That's going to warp the way they think about the world. And this is a very successful project. I don't know the degree to which all of that is a plan from the beginning, but he really like Yarvan, goes to parties at Peter's house and stuff. They are tight. And I think this is very much part of his cohesive, increasing plan that this is a guy who's a reflexive contrarian. He kind of hates ordinary people. He wants to be able to rule them. He certainly wants to be locked forever as someone who is above them. And he, I think, finds very attractive this idea of if we go back to a system that's this kind of Neo Monarchist system, I can be enshrined like the House of Windsor, as a permanent, especially if I never have to die, right? As a permanent power. And speaking of never dying, Nova, you know who can't die? Who cannot be killed. Absolutely cannot be killed. I've tried to kill them. They won't die. Is the sponsors of our podcast this podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. November is all about gratitude. This is the month to think about the people who support you, who have your back. That may include your therapist, but it should also include you. It could be hard to remember to be grateful to yourself with all of the difficulty and stress and trauma that we face on a daily basis just living our lives. So here's a reminder to be grateful to you. And one thing that being grateful to yourself can mean is considering therapy. If you've been in therapy, if you're considering therapy, you might consider giving BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists at any time for no added charge. So let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L P.com behind again. BetterHelp.com behind to show some gratitude to you. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind. Who did this? And why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloan Glass and I host the new podcast, American Homicide. Each week we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story on American Homicide. We'll go coast to coast and visit Places like the wide open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [31:16]
Noah Shachtman
In the quiet town of aa, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy. Akron seemed to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home, and twins on the way. What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
- [31:30]
Robert Evans
91 One Response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please. My babies.
- [31:35]
Noah Shachtman
One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine. They had her as one of the.
- [31:42]
Robert Evans
Suspects, but they could never prove it. You're going to go to jail if.
- [31:45]
Noah Shachtman
You don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling.
- [31:48]
Robert Evans
Myself, nobody's that crazy.
- [31:50]
Noah Shachtman
Crazy. Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go.
- [31:57]
Robert Evans
To protect our darkest secrets.
- [31:59]
Noah Shachtman
She went batshit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, and tried to.
- [32:05]
Robert Evans
Burn their house down.
- [32:07]
Noah Shachtman
Audio up presents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [32:15]
Robert Evans
Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this. Start your own country. I planted the flag and just kind of looked out of like, this is mine. I own this. It's surprisingly easy. 55 gallons of water for 500 pounds of concrete. Everybody's doing it.
- [32:33]
Noah Shachtman
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
- [32:35]
Robert Evans
I am the Queen of Ladonia.
- [32:36]
Noah Shachtman
I'm Jackson I, King of Capperburg. I am the supreme leader of the Grand Republic of Montonia.
- [32:41]
Robert Evans
Be part of a great colonial tradition. Well, why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves. What could go wrong?
- [32:48]
Noah Shachtman
No country willingly gives up their territory.
- [32:51]
Robert Evans
I was making rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God. What is that? Bullet. Bullet holes in it. We need help. We still have the off road portion to go. Listen to Escape from Zakistan. And we're losing daylight fast. That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been 30 years since the horror began. 91 1. What's your emergency? Someone.
- [33:23]
Noah Shachtman
He said he was gonna kill me.
- [33:25]
Robert Evans
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer. Maybe.
- [33:31]
Noah Shachtman
My dear Courtney, we're not done after.
- [33:34]
Robert Evans
All, in the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth. While fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong?
- [33:59]
Noah Shachtman
Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.
- [34:06]
Robert Evans
Listen to the Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We're back.
- [34:20]
Noah Shachtman
Noah told me Nova before the break.
- [34:24]
Robert Evans
Did I call you Nova?
- [34:25]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. Shit, that might be my new nickname.
- [34:29]
Robert Evans
There's a crap.
- [34:34]
Noah Shachtman
Because I too have a shiny helmet and I'm a third rate Marvel superhero.
- [34:39]
Robert Evans
Oh, no, you're a second rated easily. You're like above Morbius tier.
- [34:45]
Noah Shachtman
Wow, thank you, dude.
- [34:47]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I'm like Madame Web. You're like better than the Morbs. Yeah, you're Madame Web. You're a Madame Web style character. You know what? I'd go so far as Ant man, and you know why that's a big compliment is everybody likes Paul Rudd.
- [34:58]
Noah Shachtman
Everybody. It's true.
- [34:59]
Robert Evans
I assume everyone doesn't like Paul Rudd, but a lot of people do. He's very popular.
- [35:05]
Noah Shachtman
He's a dad in Brooklyn. I like him.
- [35:07]
Robert Evans
Oh, yeah, yeah. And speaking of Paul Rudd. Not at all. Because Paul Rudd has not aged in 30 years, has he? And Peter puts a lot of money into life expectancy extension projects. We connected it, we made it work. Yes, Specifically trying to steal the blood of Paul Rudd to figure out what's going on there. What's going on there? How could you still play as a 39 year old man?
- [35:29]
Noah Shachtman
It's incredible. He takes the blood of teenagers and Paul Rudd. Yeah, hold on. I want to give the Curtis Yarvin.
- [35:36]
Robert Evans
Thing that we're talking about before the break absolutely.
- [35:39]
Noah Shachtman
Isn't a little bit of it like Peter Thiel himself got sort of seed funding money as a weirdo reactionary writer back when he was a kid. And so he's just kind of like paying it forward to this next weirdo reactionary.
- [35:56]
Robert Evans
Yeah, paying it forward. I think credits Peter maybe with a degree of generosity, which is a weird term to use for like right wing bullshit. But I think maybe it's. I think maybe if I'm trying to psychoanalyze Peter and I'm not being fair here, but fuck it, it's my podcast. Peter was willing to take that money and preferred it to not having the money and not having like a Platform. But I also think he probably found it kind of like emasculating maybe to need someone else's money that, like his, his first plans had failed and that's why he had to take that, that right wing influencer grifter money in the first place. And I think maybe there's a satisfaction to him in having the shoe be on the other foot on now being the guy who is funding those influencers. Right. Obviously he sees the value in that kind of funding. Right. So I think he's always been kind of supportive of that. But. And maybe on the. If you're being, if you're giving him more credit as like being less of a dick. Although again, this is still an evil thing to do. Maybe it's that he genuinely is like, well, this money was there for me when I was a fledgling right wing shithead. I gotta pay it forward, you know, and invest in the career of another asshole.
- [37:06]
Noah Shachtman
But the difference here is Yarvin is specifically right. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Yarvin is like specifically promoting guys like Peter Thiel as.
- [37:19]
Robert Evans
Yes, God kings. Yes, right. God kings of the city states that are going to replace the United States as, as the doom of democracy comes down.
- [37:31]
Noah Shachtman
Right?
- [37:32]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah. They're all neo feudalists, right? At the end of the day, all they want is a fucking coat of arms and a goddamn fucking march. To listen to you go to the comments, you look up old czarist Russian band music and shit. You look in the comments about all these guys being like, oh, if only we could go back to the beautiful days of the Romanovs. All of those guys are no less intellectually courageous than fucking Peter Thiel. Right? They just dress it up a little less by masturbating over the fucking Czar. All of these guys just want a czar. Or they want to be the Tsar. Right. Or they want to be the Tsar's. I think Peter wants to be a grand duke or some shit. Right. The Tsar is probably a little bit too much exposure.
- [38:15]
Noah Shachtman
This would all be much funnier if you think of them all with those giant curly Q mustaches.
- [38:20]
Robert Evans
Absolutely.
- [38:20]
Noah Shachtman
Knee britches or like powdered wigs.
- [38:25]
Robert Evans
Or if you think about them all, we could just talk about what happened to the Tsars in a basement, but that's probably. Hey. So Peter starts throwing money into living forever. He invests a lot in a guy named Aubrey De Grey who's running something called the Methuselah Institute. And.
- [38:41]
Noah Shachtman
Wait, what?
- [38:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah. De Grey is like the most prominent. We could live Forever. If we just figure out the right things advocate up to the present day. He's still sort of one of the big names in this industry, depending on how you kind of read into things. I think he's a guy who got a lot more credit because I used to be interested in some of what he had to say. I think maybe I've come around to he's more of a con man in the modern era. That's not an allegation, but that's kind of my gut feeling about the dude. But certainly he is not a right wing figure in this period. De Gray, if anything, would be more on the progressive side of things in the early 2000s, like progressive left. So the fact that Peter is funding him, again, libertarians are kind of more aligned with the left in this period of time because of their opposition to the Bush party as a general rule. So the fact that Thiel, who is kind of a neocon in some ways, is funding a guy like De Grey would not have been seen as like, oh, it's this weird right wing billionaire foisting money. Right. Like, that's just not how it would have looked. He also puts money into cryogenics and he's. There's some interesting interviews with him where he's like, asked what he thinks would be a good human lifespan and he was like, I don't see why people shouldn't live forever. Right. But specifically, what's kind of important to note here is that Peter doesn't really have an interest in making sure people live forever. That's not what he's about. He wants to live forever. And he even makes some specific statements about how I don't agree with the ideology that death for every person is necessary.
- [40:19]
Noah Shachtman
Right, we talked about that at the top. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:22]
Robert Evans
And I think what's happening here is that again, Peter is this kind of, to his bones, contrarian. He rejects other people. And one of the things that bonds all people together, no matter how smart you are, how rich you are, who you are, is that everybody dies. And that, I think, is what's most offensive about death to Peter, is that it kind of forever locks him in as one of the herd. Right. Like you're not fundamentally above the rest of mankind if you die like everyone else. And I think that's the primary reason why he's so obsessed with this. You know, like he wants to be a pharaoh. He sees himself as like a pharaoh type. Right. That he is owed this kind of eternity of power and influence because he is so special. And the idea that like, nah, man. When it all comes down into it, you wind up in the dirt like everybody else. Like, that is the most offensive part of this to him. Even more than, like any fears about, you know, the final cessation of consciousness, it's being inextricably bound to everyone else who exists. That is like the worst part.
- [41:27]
Noah Shachtman
I think it's more than that, than just like scared little man child with too much money who is just like, oh, no, this might happen to me. And therefore I'm gonna support this guy who looks like a wizard who's gonna tell me that he does look like a wizard.
- [41:44]
Robert Evans
Had you looked up a picture of Aubrey De Grey or did you just guess that he looks like a wizard?
- [41:48]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, Just to remind myself this guy has got a beard.
- [41:51]
Robert Evans
Oh, man, he looks like such a wizard.
- [41:55]
Noah Shachtman
It's crazy.
- [41:57]
Robert Evans
So if we pull up that wizard ass motherfucker, it's wild.
- [42:01]
Noah Shachtman
It's like, honestly, it looks like one of those things. Like there's like a kid hiding inside the beard.
- [42:10]
Robert Evans
Gandalf the gray ass son of a bitch. We'll just have Malcolm throw a picture up while we're talking about it. Yeah, yeah. Find one that really makes him look like a fucking wizard.
- [42:20]
Noah Shachtman
There's really none that don't. That doesn't look. They are all wizard picks.
- [42:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [42:26]
Noah Shachtman
You know, I did. Did Teal fund this guy directly or did he fund him through the founders?
- [42:33]
Robert Evans
I think he think it's through the Founders Fund that he starts at Clarium. I think that's where most of his money comes in.
- [42:39]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, yeah. So I like, I ran across the edges of this when I was reporting back in the day. Yeah, I definitely, like, there's a couple of other Founders Fund partners who are also equally into, you know, wizardry and life extension and stuff like that. And I was doing a story on them specifically, they hired an in house meditation teacher and guru who claimed that he could personally enlighten them and bring them like universal consciousness and oneness with the Buddha. Yeah, I mean, as far as I can tell, it totally worked. Right? Right. I mean, what else would you do with your time than support the end of American democracy if you're enlightened? Yeah. So anyway. And yeah, they were all into Life Extension and all kinds of stuff like that. I didn't see Thiel at that time, but definitely, like, there was a lot of his people that were in there.
- [43:42]
Robert Evans
Well, and I think it's natural. You kind of get super rich in your early 20s and then your first concern after that, when you have more money than you could ever spend is like, well, I want to live long enough to spend all this. Right, Right.
- [43:56]
Noah Shachtman
I've got more money than God. I want to be God.
- [43:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah. I don't know. Some of it's probably that. I think, as a general rule, by the time you get really rich, you're usually maybe. Probably closer to your 30s than your early 20s for most of these guys. And that is when feelings of mortality, you start to. And you start to. Also at the early stages of aging, there is a lot that if you have shitloads of money for the right kind of drugs and the right kind of personal training and shit, you can kind of push off the early steps of aging significantly. And you can also do stuff like, you see this with both Thiel and with Elon Musk. Once they get rich, physically, they change a lot. Initially, you get the hair transplants like Jeff Bezos. You get on hgh, you get a personal trainer, and you start to convince yourself, wow, so much of what I. You know, when I was like a young kid just working, I couldn't have a body like this because I didn't have the resources to pay experts to maintain it for me. And I'm able to. What else is possible? Right, right. And I think that's probably part of what's going on there also.
- [44:59]
Noah Shachtman
Just getting a lot of money all at once breaks your brain.
- [45:03]
Robert Evans
Bad for you. That was a good part of, like, BoJack Horseman, right? Where there's that line where it's like the age at which you suddenly. At which you become a millionaire is the age that you' frozen at forever. You don't really progress mentally past that point.
- [45:16]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, may we all get to that point.
- [45:19]
Robert Evans
May we all get to that point. But hopefully when you're like, 40, right. As opposed to taking the Zuckerberg route. So at this point, all of these gifts that Peter has been giving, it's interesting. The primary thing that he's done at this stage for all of the money and the high ambitions is he is started, cashed out on, and abandoned PayPal. And then he has launched an investment firm called Clarium. And by the second bush term, Clarium is becoming a really big deal. By 2004, they had $260 million under management, and within a couple of years, the fund was worth more than $2 billion, which is double and triple digit growth for most of its early years. People will say it completely changed how venture capital works in the Valley because it was such a successful company that bets that Peter and his, because all of the people staffed there are his friends from PayPal and his right wing buddies at Stanford who were also in large part a lot of his buddies from PayPal. He's picking, he's finding guys who are starting companies. Some people will allege they're all guys he finds attractive. I don't know, I think that sometimes it's just people being like, oh, this guy's handsome, Peter's gay. That must be part of it. But I don't know that it actually is. But he's finding these other founders and he's bringing them in. It is noted there's a couple of things that make Peter's fund really different from other funds. For one, he's not interested in people constantly making moves. He's fine if you only make one investment a year. Right. And again, he doesn't really fire people. He's bad at that. He's bad at confrontation. You can kind of wind up shuffled off to a part of the company where you don't have much connection to Peter if you fuck up enough. But he doesn't like conflict. For as many sort of evil fucking confrontational things and people as this guy invests in, he personally doesn't seem to have much stomach for conflict, especially not with people he likes. So when it comes to what made Clarium super wealthy, one of the things that was hugely influential in their growth was backing one of the most toxic corporations on the planet, Opti Canada. Now Opti is an Israeli Canadian company that is involved in taking bitumen and extracting oil from it. And this is of all of the ways to get oil out of the ground. Bitumen extraction is like the most fucking poisonous, right? It is. This is the absolute worst way to get oil for the environment. It is a hideously toxic thing to do. And Peter and his company put a shitload of money behind this and it secures returns of like 60% for them. And this is the period. Peter is very much anti kind of climate change. I don't know how much he actually.
- [48:09]
Noah Shachtman
Sounds like he's pro climate change.
- [48:10]
Robert Evans
He's very pro climate change. Yeah, I think he's anti, anti, like, I think he would say anti the ideology of climate change. Right. And one of the things that's happened here is right around like 2006, 7 he, Elon Musk and David Sacks fund a movie called thank you for Smoking, which I actually just watched the day that Biden dropped out of the election. It still holds up. Yeah, it's a good movie. It's a Fucking. What's his name? The guy who played Two Face in the Chris Nolan Batman movies.
- [48:39]
Noah Shachtman
That guy?
- [48:40]
Robert Evans
Yeah, him. Yeah.
- [48:42]
Noah Shachtman
He was disturbingly handsome guy.
- [48:44]
Robert Evans
Incredible. And right at his. Aaron Eckert, right at his peak of him being a handsome, charming son of a bitch. It's a good movie. It's easily the best thing that those three guys were ever involved with. It's based off a book by William F. Buckley's son, which is Rhodesia lover William F. Buckley. But it's a good book. It is extremely libertarian and it is extremely early aughts. Libertarian. It's one of those things, I think if you take the ideology that the book's characters have completely seriously, then it's a lot less enjoyable. But it's impossible to really do that when you're watching it because there's just so many talented people involved. And it's a good script. Again, Aaron Eckert is just soaking up the screen and you've got fucking. J.K. simmons is kind of the antagonist. There's a lot of great people in that movie. Anyway, go watch thank youk for Smoking. It holds up like, believe me people. But you also, as you watch it, think like, this is pretty true to Peter's actual unironic beliefs about politics in the early 2000s. Right. As opposed to just like, well, this is a fun movie about like these absolutely amoral merchants of disinformation. Right, Right.
- [49:59]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, come on, stop being so serious. Wise it up. Have fun.
- [50:04]
Robert Evans
Right? Right. Right. We're never going to wind up behind power. Yeah, yeah, come on.
- [50:11]
Noah Shachtman
Lame.
- [50:13]
Robert Evans
Peter's putting money into thank you for Smoking and Bitumen Extraction. And he's also kind of. This is the period where he's really started to relish being the famous founder guy here. And he gets more open about everything in his life. And I'm going to quote from Chafkin's book the Contrarian here. He began telling close friends and then co workers that he was gay, socializing at bars or on the roof of his new house, often with the handsome young men he was hiring, many of whom were out. Thiel's self actualization would pay off. In August 2007, four months before the recession began and close to a year before most Americans realized the economy was collapsing, he sent a letter to investors declaring that the economic expansion was officially over. We've begun a long post boom phase that can be called the long goodbye, the letter said. And this is one of Peter's great successful predictions, right? Which is that he calls, he starts writing in 2007 about the global financial crash that's going to really hit in 2008. He is very much ahead of the curve on this. A few months after that 2007 letter, right at the start of 2008, just weeks after he'd been outed by Gawker, Peter sends out a 10,000 word essay to investors. And this is another thing that he's famous for as a hedge fund guy is he will periodically write these massive political and philosophical, sometimes even religious essays and send them out to all of his funders to explain their philosophy at the moment. And a lot of this is like, you gotta have a lot of confidence in your fucking dorm room ass musings. If you're sending this kind of shit out of people you're trusting to invest money in, I'm guessing a lot of these wound up just kind of like thrown into trash. So he predicts, correctly that there's this crash coming. But he also, I think because just of who he is, he over catastrophizes, right? The 2008 crash was really bad. He sees that coming. And he also thinks it's definitely going to cause a depression that no one is going to bail out anything and that the cycle of collapse will continue absolutely unabated. We'll go on like a runaway sort of freight train kind of deal, right? And so instead of doing what would have been the smart thing as an evil investor, which is shorting the housing market, right, have your people end their risky positions with like companies that owe a lot of money and fucking short the housing market, right, in order to make money off of what you can in the immediate term and kind of avoid the consequences of this cruel winter coming. Peter, he kind of continues in this apocalypse preacher Persona and states that he is recommending prayer and repentance in lieu of investment analysis, which is an insane thing to write to investors. Yeah, he's like, you should all repent to Christ. We're doomed. That's unbelievable.
- [53:04]
Noah Shachtman
Was it on a sandwich board?
- [53:07]
Robert Evans
Is he. What? Sorry?
- [53:08]
Noah Shachtman
Was it on sandwich.
- [53:09]
Robert Evans
Yeah, he's basically doing like a fucking. Yeah, sandwich board kind of thing, right? Like the end is nigh.
- [53:15]
Noah Shachtman
Is there any chance. Come on. Was there any chance that he was just. That was just a bit. You was just making a joke there.
- [53:21]
Robert Evans
I think he's being. I think maybe there's an element of that, but he doesn't his. Because what he does financially is also what you would do if you legitimately expected total collapse. He does initially short the dollar and there are initial high yields. He Bets against some companies that are taken up by large loans, and their yields in the first half of 2008 go up to five times their prior rate. At the height of this, they've got between 6.4 and $8 billion under management. This is a fund that back in 2002 or 3 was 260 million. So you can see why people are like, wow, this is the future of investing. What a genius Peter is. And he looks like a genius in the early stages of that financial collapse. But again, we're just talking about the first half of 2008 here now. He described his school of thought on these matters as being a global macro investor, which in his terms meant looking out at world events and basing your economic predictions on the vibe you felt about the times in large, as opposed to the specific situation each of those companies was in. He urged investors at Clarium to make one trade per week, which Chafin credits to his combination of indecisiveness and high tolerance for risk. Thiel argued that the world was heading to end times. Investment analysts often employ religious metaphors speaking of the second coming of bond yields or in equities apocalypse. But Thiel was not speaking metaphorically. The entire human order, he wrote, could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence, famine, disease, war and death. Against this future. It is far better to save one's immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal city of God, than it is to amass a fleeting fortune in the transient and passing city of man. And when you read it like that, it is kind of hard to see that as not like, I don't know, I mean you're going. If that's just totally tongue in cheek, you're really going far with it.
- [55:13]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, no, that is deep into the bit. I mean you are really committing.
- [55:17]
Robert Evans
You're far too committed to this bit. And it's not a great bit.
- [55:20]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. That is a whole life of Brian kind of bitch.
- [55:24]
Robert Evans
Right, Right.
- [55:25]
Noah Shachtman
Holy shit.
- [55:26]
Robert Evans
That's so weird. Yeah.
- [55:28]
Noah Shachtman
This is a deeply weird guy.
- [55:30]
Robert Evans
Yeah. It's such a fucking strange fella.
- [55:33]
Noah Shachtman
It's pretty weird when like the young blood transfer and like bankrolling the like roided out wrestlers lawsuit over the nudes are like sort of the bottom tier weird things you do. Like the really weird stuff is the stuff he says out and open to his own investors.
- [55:53]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [55:54]
Noah Shachtman
What the hell?
- [55:55]
Robert Evans
He's so strange. Oh, man.
- [55:59]
Noah Shachtman
Oh my God. I'm not going to be as rich as I'm personally not. May not be as rich as I might have been before. My, like, Wall street buddies aren't going to be able to rapaciously divide up loans the way they were before. Society is doomed.
- [56:13]
Robert Evans
We're all fucked. If you hate people and you fundamentally think that they're like messy little scum who need to be ruled, you can't imagine things would go bad. If you're scared about a financial collapse, you have to imagine they are on the edge of eating each other. Right. Because they're not any better than animals. Right? I'm not trying to shit talk animals. I'm just saying I think that's how Peter thinks about things. Right. I think animals are much better than people usually, but I think I'm accurately describing that's how I think Peter feels. I'm basing that off of vibes. Like Peter was basically thinking about the collapse of the world. Right. But I have as good a record with vibes as Peter does, at least. Sure, yeah. Yeah. Here's some ads. Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to who did this and why? And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where? Where the crime happened. I'm journalist Sloan Glass and I host the new podcast American Homicide. Each week we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit place like the wide open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, application, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [58:13]
Noah Shachtman
In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seemed to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home, and twins on the way. What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
- [58:27]
Robert Evans
911 response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please. My babies.
- [58:32]
Noah Shachtman
One woman, two lives. And the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine. They had her as one of the.
- [58:38]
Robert Evans
Suspects, but they could never prove it. You're going to go to jail if.
- [58:42]
Noah Shachtman
You don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling.
- [58:45]
Robert Evans
Myself, nobody's that crazy.
- [58:47]
Noah Shachtman
Crazy. Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.
- [58:56]
Robert Evans
She was went batshit crazy.
- [58:57]
Noah Shachtman
Shot and killed all their farm Animals. Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
- [59:02]
Robert Evans
Tried to burn their house down.
- [59:04]
Noah Shachtman
Audio up presents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [59:12]
Robert Evans
Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this. Start your own country. I planted the flag and just kind of looked at of like, this is mine. I own this. It's surprisingly easy. There are 55 gallons of water for 500 pounds of concrete. Everybody's doing it.
- [59:30]
Noah Shachtman
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
- [59:32]
Robert Evans
I am the queen of Ladonia.
- [59:33]
Noah Shachtman
I'm Jackson I, King of Capperburg. I am the supreme leader of the Grand Republic of Montonia.
- [59:38]
Robert Evans
Be part of a great colonial tradition. But why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves. What could go wrong?
- [59:45]
Noah Shachtman
No country willingly gives up their territory.
- [59:48]
Robert Evans
I was making rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God. What is that? Bullets? Bullet holes? Yeah. We need help. We still have the off road portion to go. Listen to Escape from Zakistan. And we're losing daylight fast. That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911. What's your emergency? Someone.
- [60:20]
Noah Shachtman
He said he was gonna kill me.
- [60:22]
Robert Evans
Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.
- [60:28]
Noah Shachtman
Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.
- [60:32]
Robert Evans
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Police politicians spun the truth, while fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong?
- [60:56]
Noah Shachtman
Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.
- [61:03]
Robert Evans
Listen to the Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everyone. I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer. Stan, Anya and I met through hockey, and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers. And on our new podcast, Moms who Puck, we're opening up about the chaos of our daily lives. Between the juggle of being athletes, raising children, and all the messiness in between, we're also turning to fellow athletes and beyond to learn about their parenthood journeys and collect valuable Advice like FIFA World cup winner Ashlyn Harris. I wish my village would have prepared.
- [61:49]
Noah Shachtman
Me for how hard motherhood was going to be.
- [61:53]
Robert Evans
And peloton instructor and ratchet Mom Club founder Kirsten Ferguson. And I remember going in there, a hot mess. So listen to Moms who Puck. A production of iHeart Women's Sports and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. And we're back. Anyway, that's all very weird that Peter is so kind of married to the fucking Bible as a hedge fund guy, but the weirdness does match. There's a real insight here, right in that Peter, again, he's going to fuck up on taking advantage of this. He extends it too far. I also think his fundamental analysis is correct, which is he argues in that paper that investors are going to be unable to as the housing market comes unwound and as these increasing contradictions in the way our economy is set up become impossible to ignore. And I think, although Peter won't admit this, climate change is a big part of that. Investors are going to be unable and unwilling to accept that things can't go continue growing at the rates that they'd always been growing. Right. That that's not possible. And rather than accept the inevitability of contraction or even collapse, they will start a process of massively overvaluing every asset, systematically causing an endless cascade of bubbles in every sector. And that is what happened. Right. That's today. That's the last 20 years. Right. Like, he's not fundamentally wrong, but he also overextends how bad it's going to be and how quickly it's going to be that bad. Right. And the other bad move here is that if you are a hedge fund guy, even though I think this is fundamentally not incorrect analysis, it's a bad thing to put out to the people investing money in you that I think the end times are coming. Right. That does not make people want to keep money with you. It doesn't make them want to invest more money with you. It kind of makes them want to build bunkers and maybe feel like they need some of that money liquid to build bunkers. Right?
- [63:59]
Noah Shachtman
Right.
- [63:59]
Robert Evans
Yeah. So Peter starts to panic. Increasingly later in 2008, as the signs get worse, he holds meetings to warn employees that he thinks every brokerage in the country is going to go under and there's going to be no currency. And like, he literally, he has his company Making sure they have at least a couple grand or a thousand or something on hand for every employee so that he can keep his employees fed if all of the currency collapses. They're talking about like buying gold bricks. Like this is like apocalypse hoarder nonsense.
- [64:30]
Noah Shachtman
Nice.
- [64:31]
Robert Evans
Like Peter is worried that his employee best friends who were his entire social group are going to starve to death and he has to make sure he has cash to pay for their food, which is actually kind of sweet. Like it does show Peter is to some extent capable of caring about other people if that's accurate. Not in a way that makes him a good guy, Noah, but like that is. There's a degree of care there.
- [64:59]
Noah Shachtman
I mean I think it's like who else will live to serve him if.
- [65:04]
Robert Evans
I need to have cash so I can buy food so I can maintain a degree of control over these other people so they have to continue being my friends. Maybe that's it. Probably.
- [65:11]
Noah Shachtman
Did they do anything else? Did they learn kung fu? Did they start shooting?
- [65:15]
Robert Evans
You have to assume. You have to assume there's some stuff. I can't imagine that you could believe this about the future and not be buying guns and stuff. Right?
- [65:26]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [65:27]
Robert Evans
Now Peter's strong belief that the tech bubble is going to burst and cause a depression causes him to change. So like clarium standard operating procedure is that we're going to bet against the future stability of the US economy. And that seems like that should have been the first half of 2008. That makes them a fuckload of money. Right. And in the second half it's going to cost them everything. Right. So because Peters word is law, very little is expected of his workers on a day to day basis. So life of the company is like pretty chill during these early apocalypse stages. According to Chafkin, people played a lot of chess and spent their free time debating over how they'd run a theoretical country if they had the freedom to build it from the ground up. Everyone spent a lot of time talking politics, although it was important that those politics always be of the right wing variety. An employee told me that it was uncommon to hear about talk about climate change denial and to see web browsers open to vdare, a far right website with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. Oh, we'll be talking about that. It gets a lot worse in terms of vitair shit my mans. This has been a good enough strategy for years, but Peter's inherent distrust of tech businesses is going to cause him to miss a lot of opportunities here as well as his belief that collapse is inevitable. He turns down a chance to invest in Tesla, which might be understandable given his history with Elon. Right. If I can be like, well, I get why you would miss this because you know what a mess he is, but that is undoubtedly it's a bad financial decision. To not get involved with Tesla in 2008 is a poor financial move, Right? He also turned down the money, the chance to put money into YouTube when it was still a startup. And that is a catastrophic rich. As a Tech founder, Missing YouTube is a big one.
- [67:08]
Noah Shachtman
That's also particularly funny because then later on he'll fund rumble the right wing YouTube. Yeah, right, yeah, I can get YouTube. But I got something even better. I got right wing YouTube with Russell Brand.
- [67:23]
Robert Evans
This is right around the same time he neglects to invest in YouTube is when he neglects to take part in the second funding round for Facebook. He misses a lot in a row here. And then 2008 comes about and after these initial successes, he bets on the idea he's made money the first half of 2008 of the collapse year by betting against the dollar. He has this belief that as the collapse starts to run away, he believes not only are some banks going to collapse, every bank is going to be nationalized. Right? And because he thinks that the government is going to have to take over all of the banks. I think this is just because he's also a libertarian. So his nightmare is like this, the government taking over everything. He decides, unlike all of the guys who make money off of the collapse, unlike all the big short guys, he decides not to short any banks because he thinks that since the government's going to nationalize them all, once they get nationalized, their stock value is going to soar. And so after predicting the collapse, he puts nearly $1 billion into stocks and all of these banks and like another one and a half billion or so into Google. And fucking of all of the places to put like $800 million fucking Yahoo. He puts $800 million into Yahoo.
- [68:38]
Noah Shachtman
Oh my God, that's awesome.
- [68:41]
Robert Evans
He's such a whiff. It's such a fuck up. Oh my God, it's so funny, man. It's so fucking funny.
- [68:49]
Noah Shachtman
That's incredible.
- [68:51]
Robert Evans
And I had again, as a general rule, I actually compared to most other guys, I respect Peter, not in a positive way, but just in a. It's dangerous not to. But I also had thought he had been much more successful than this. And it's so interesting to me that he fucks up on these big investments while getting the bigger picture kind of fundamentally. Right. Which is so humanizing. Right. Because that's such a human thing to do. I've been there myself, where you predict a big thing correctly and your micro response to that, you fuck up because of who you are. Right, right. That's so human. Yeah.
- [69:31]
Noah Shachtman
But still, I mean, I think all banks are going to fail, therefore I'm going to put a billion dollars into them. Is wild. That is wild.
- [69:41]
Robert Evans
Government's obviously going to nationalize every bank. Right? Yeah, yeah.
- [69:44]
Noah Shachtman
That's really sniffing too much of your own clue.
- [69:47]
Robert Evans
It is. And it's like this. It's this belief that, like I believe that the, you know, the fucking Democrats who are going to come into office are legitimately communists. They would never do the capitalist thing of propping up the banks and just giving these people free money to put a halt, like to paper over their fuckups. Right. Obviously they're going to make this bid for ultimate power and nationalize everything. Right. And you're like, no, nope, that's not what they did. Turns out they are just owned by bankers.
- [70:15]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, right.
- [70:16]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Peter. You guys won too much and now you've lost your money.
- [70:21]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. Just because you call every Democrat a socialist does not mean, in fact, that.
- [70:26]
Robert Evans
Every Democrat is a socialist, not what they are.
- [70:31]
Noah Shachtman
Good job.
- [70:32]
Robert Evans
So at the end of the year, and by the time Obama takes office, Peter has lost billions, putting him in a similar bucket to people who had failed completely to see that the crash was coming. After being up by five times in early to mid 2008, by the end of the year, he's down 5%. Then to make matters worse, once the collapse hits, he dumps a shitload of his holdings while stock prices are low because he assumes a depression is coming and nothing is going to rebound and he needs cash, then all of this shit does rebound. He misses out twice in a row. Here investors begin to abandon Clarium, which had been worth 8 billion almost, I think, at its height, and by the end of the year was down to $2 billion. Like by 2009, it's like a quarter of what it had been at its height. Right. Which is a major fuck up, you know?
- [71:22]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. Damn.
- [71:24]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Now this is where we also get back to Gawker. Right. Kind of 2008 or so here. I stated earlier that Ryan Holiday argues Peter responded to Gawker's confrontational tabloid expose style. Right. Which he saw as a danger to weird geniuses like him who moved the species forward. Chafkin makes a somewhat different argument. Quote, Thiel came to believe that the real reason for the mass redemptions, which is like all of the people taking their money out of Clarium, was Gawker Media. Some of Clarium's big investors, according to former employees, were Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime. Thiel has never explicitly acknowledged this, but he has hinted at why he may have wanted to keep his sexual orientation out of view. So he, he a bunch of people pull their money out of his fund in this period where he is making repeated fuck ups and he blames it on Gawker outing him. Right.
- [72:21]
Noah Shachtman
I invest $800 million in Yahoo of.
- [72:25]
Robert Evans
All places in 2008, homie.
- [72:28]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. And like somehow that's Nick Denton's fault.
- [72:32]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Nick Denton made you put a billion dollars into Yahoo, brother.
- [72:36]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, I let my own weird like the commies are coming to steal your underwear.
- [72:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah. It's so funny.
- [72:43]
Noah Shachtman
I acknowledge warp my brain and somehow that's Valleywag's form.
- [72:47]
Robert Evans
A billion dollars almost into Yah, like a billion dollars into Google almost. That's probably a smart, definitely a smart long term investment. Like yahoo. Yahoo In 2008 I was 20 and I knew that Yahoo was a bad investment.
- [73:01]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, no, Yahoo was crazy and Yahoo is crazy.
- [73:06]
Robert Evans
That's so fucking funny. Oh man.
- [73:10]
Noah Shachtman
Oh my God.
- [73:12]
Robert Evans
So I think the other reason he's angry at Gawker here is that Gawker is reporting on a lot of his fuck ups too. And I think in such a way that he kind of blames them for why investors start pulling out. Right. Gawker revealed our screw ups publicly in a way that hurt us. Right. And that by the way, again, this kind of view that like, oh, they outed him and so he destroyed them. That's, you know, that makes the case. Oh, the dangers of a petty billionaire seem clearer with that statement. But this is much more standard. Evil rich guy. They damaged my business interests by reporting on me screwing up and so I wanted them out. Right. That's perfectly normal rich guy evil bullshit. Right? Totally. Yeah. So this period though, you know, while he is apparently burning with rage at Gawker, the end of the Bush years, the start of the Obama era, it's not a wholly bad time for him either because while he's again, he's super rich, so he's insulated personally from any real consequences. And while his clarium investments fail and he stops being the lauded hedge fund genius of the new generation, Peter sees success in another venture which had been launched based on the Igor Software that he's depending. I've heard a couple of different versions of the story. One is that Levchin, his founder at PayPal Buddy, codes it. Some of them, the intercepts reporting says it was another guy at PayPal who coded it. I don't know which one of them coded it. But Igor is this software that they had started at PayPal to stop Russian scammers. Right. That there are allegations and lawsuits that it was kind of stolen in part from another company. But that's a story for another day. Peter is as obsessed with security and fighting terrorism as any neocon. And he starts to focus on the idea that like Igor might be useful for something besides fighting fraud. Perhaps this could also allow the government to hunt and kill terrorists. That had caused Peter to fear for his own life. Life. I'm going to have to go back in time here and I hate to jump around like this, but Peter's involved in too many things to not do this from time to time. So let's go back to July of 2004, right? When he and a conservative chaplain from Stanford organized a six day seminar with Rene Girard. The scapegoat philosopher Guy Thiel had attacked the Bush administration then for not being cruel enough to Muslims and had gone after the ACLU for their unhinged support of civil liberties at the expense. Expense of security. He had encouraged the creation of a new system which he built as a replacement for the un he was like instead of the un we should have an international consortium of public and private intelligence companies all working together to quote, forge the decisive path to a truly global Pax Americana, right? This American peace that intelligence agencies can bring us if we give them enough money and power to murder people with drones. It's so wild. Yeah. And Igor, at this point it's just a fancy way of what I call making a crazy board, right? That thing you see in movies and tv, True Detective, where you've got all the pictures connected by bits of string, right. Igor is a way of doing that on the computer, right. Where you're plugging in. And it also is pulling from. You can have it pull from. Oh, I know that we're looking for a guy who lives in this state and drives a blue car and has a dui. I want you to pull up from all of these records you have access to everyone who fits that. Right? And we can add them to the crates board, you know, and it was.
- [76:29]
Noah Shachtman
Like, look like starting at 911 especially there was like the fantasy, the uber fantasy of all these spook and Spook adjacent types and all tech types that wanted to make money off of them was that, you know, you could have sort of like, you know, the equivalent of maybe what we call an AI today, right. That like could basically predict terrorists were going to strike before they were going to strike. You know, they were going to call, you know, they were going to stop the next nine, 11 before the guys even, you know, had really hatched the plan. And so there had been a bunch of programs that started and failed, you know, before then. And you know, there are some that were in existence in law enforcement, but they were clunky, they were, you know, they're government software. So they didn't, they look shitty and they, you know, and they didn't work so well and then, and they didn't have real Silicon Valley talent like these guys did.
- [77:25]
Robert Evans
Yeah. So I think it could be a little hard for people to visualize what Igor did, what this software does. This software that comes Palantir does. So I'm going to quote from an article in Bloomberg by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman and Jordan Robertson here. The software combs through disparate data sources. Financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social media postings and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages and colorful, easy to interpret graphics that look like spider webs. So based on this technology, Peter founds Palantir that same year 2004. And Palantir is the name of the infamous seeing stones in the Lord of the Rings which are most famously the one is owned by the evil wizard Saruman. Right. So if you're naming your company that exists to provide this like seeing stone to the highest bidder, Palantir, that's explicitly evil. Right. This isn't like a case where like the good guys have their own seeing stones, it's just the bad guys. It's a bad thing to have. It connects you inevitably to Sauron, like anyway, very fun. I love fiction. Now Peter, one of the things that's interesting about fucking Palantir is that like with most of his companies, Peter has an interest in this. But he also has one of his close friends actually running shit, being the day to day guy organizing everything. And Peter's friend who helps him run Palantir is famously always described as his most liberal friend, a guy named Alex Karp, who Bloomberg identifies as a self described neo Marxist. Now I don't know about Alex. What the fuck do you mean? As the guy starting the capitalist spy for. How can you consider yourself a neo Marxist but also Some Marxists are bootlickers. So maybe that's the kind of guy that Alex Karp is.
- [79:17]
Noah Shachtman
I mean, look, there's plenty of people that, you know, are, you know, whatever.
- [79:21]
Robert Evans
The communists had spy agencies, right? Yeah, yeah.
- [79:25]
Noah Shachtman
Or no, what I was going to say is, you know, whatever the far left equivalent of a limousine liberal is, those people are definitely out there.
- [79:32]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Fucking CIA, socialist or something like that, I guess. Yeah. Okay, there you go. Keep going. There you go. So getting off the ground is slow going at first for Palantir. This is a hard thing. It's a really hard industry to break into. Right. Because intel agencies are first and foremost government agencies. And if you know anything about the government, getting a government agency to adopt a new software tool is a brutal thing to do. Right. It is very hard to convince them to make moves like that. It doesn't matter what kind of agency it is, this is always an uphill struggle. So in order to aid Palantir in kind of getting this buy in, they needed to really start to take off. Peter brought in some of the most ghoulish neocons he could find to apply pressure in D.C. and this included friend of the pod, John Poindexter, who old JP had worked for Ronald Reagan until he was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran Contra. He then got kind of quote unquote exonerated and gets hired by Dick Cheney to craft the Total Information Awareness Program. This was a Bush era intelligence mission with a seemingly kind of reasonable goal. Right. We're going to collect all of the data we can on everything happening, food prices, yada, yada, yada, and these different areas that we have military interests in. And we're going to have algorithms comb that data to spot patterns that might be indicative of terrorist groups operating beneath the surface. Right. It's one of those things that sounds reasonable on its face. If you look at how the war on terror went, none of this ever works out quite as well as they think it does. Right. But the smart guys in the room are all like, obviously this is how we win the war on terror back then, you know?
- [81:13]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. I mean, that was the whole shit. That was the whole thing for these guys was, you know, it was going to be, you know, what's the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report.
- [81:25]
Robert Evans
Right, yeah. We're going to know about it before they do.
- [81:28]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, yeah. And they were going to, you know, put money to the. Or they were going to, you know, feed the information, your goals, and they were going to feed you a red ball. That was the whole thing there. And, yeah, Palantir got every single last one of the, you know, members of this church, of this, like, you know, weird spying church to advocate for them. The other thing was, like, you couldn't walk into a train in D.C. without there being a Palantir.
- [81:55]
Robert Evans
A Palantir ad. Oh, yeah.
- [81:59]
Noah Shachtman
And like every guy that, you know, fucking hated Muslims and loved Star wars, was promoting.
- [82:07]
Robert Evans
It was crazy what a brand they have.
- [82:10]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [82:14]
Robert Evans
So they bring out John Poindexter. Now, it's important here to note that Igor, which is what Palantira sells compelling at this point, didn't gather or create new information of its own. Right. This is not a Big Brother system. This is a. An algorithm that works off of the extant Big Brother system. Right. Organizing all of the info that the existing surveillance operations can put at your disposal. Right. It's data mining, you know. Now, one early concern is that analysts using Igor would use the vast array of catalog data at their disposal to stalk and harass their ex girlfriends. Which, if you know how cops work, is a thing that happens constantly. Anytime you've got a database that a certain chunk of employees have access to, some of them are going to use it to stalk their girlfriends, right?
- [82:57]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, definitely.
- [82:57]
Robert Evans
This is a known issue. Palantir. One of the ways in which they sell themselves to a lot of these intel agencies is Alex Karp promises, we're going to make it impossible for cops to stalk their ex girlfriends because we're going to log every search request made into the system in a way that will allow you to audit them. Right. So a big part of their selling point is, like, we're going to actually provide accountability in the spook process. Right. Chafke describes this as a key part of the company's pitch, but he also writes, one of Palantir's former engineers recalled meetings during which government clients would suggest trying to use the database to look up an ex girlfriend immediately after hearing the whole privacy spiel. Palantir employees would never object to these requests, this person said. Instead, they would remind clients that searches were logged and then allow them to look up whoever they wanted, no matter how flimsy the preachers text. Yeah, that's how that always works, huh?
- [83:47]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah.
- [83:48]
Robert Evans
Every time.
- [83:49]
Noah Shachtman
Every time.
- [83:50]
Robert Evans
Every time.
- [83:51]
Noah Shachtman
You don't need a predictive algorithm to predict that one, do you?
- [83:55]
Robert Evans
Yeah. No. You shared out, you shared doubt. You give people a computer spying device, and they are going to stalk their girlfriends. Ex girlfriends. Yeah. Now, thanks to their famous friends and infinite cash reserves, Palantir managed to get contracts with The CIA and the nypd. But actual adoption on a wide scale wouldn't happen without corporate purchases, because no one in intelligence trusted a product that only the government used. Peter tried to force the government's hand here by selling other hedge funds, like selling Igor to other finance companies. Right. And he marketed it as Palantir Finance. We've got this software that the government's interested in using. It's the spy software. But you can use it to predict which kind of investments are going to work out best. Right. By gathering all of this data and using it to predict the future of finance. Now, this is a massive failure as an actual finance product because it doesn't work very well. People don't really make a lot of money off of Palantir Finance advising their trades, but it works out as a business decision because they're able to get a couple of different finance companies to buy into it, and then they can go back to the government and say, hey, look, this company and that company are already using it to make trades. Obviously, DC should be using this to fight terrorism. And the government's like, oh, well, some bank bought it, so I guess we should as well. Like, yeah, he's. Yeah.
- [85:13]
Noah Shachtman
And there's. I mean, look, in government, there's always like, you know, they're constantly being like, oh, we're falling behind. You know, the private sector really knows.
- [85:21]
Robert Evans
Even though they work, they wouldn't make a big fuck up.
- [85:23]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If only we could run government more effectively, like a business. Yeah. And I mean that. I mean, it's totally how it worked. It's totally how it worked. Our adversaries can use these tools freely. Why shouldn't we?
- [85:40]
Robert Evans
Why shouldn't we? And obviously, as soon as the public sector, as soon as actually the CIA and the FBI and the NYPD start putting money into Palantir, then even though Palantir Finance had kind of not done great, a lot of banks and finance agencies start to be like, oh, I guess, well, we have to get involved in it. The government's buying this stuff, so we've got to buy it. We've got to get. And so in 2009, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, future. Future subject of the pod purchases, like, makes a contract with Palantir now almost the instant they. And they're doing this as, like, a security measure. We have, like, a division in our company that's looking for evidence based on, like, the communications our employees have internally that we might have an employee who's breaking the law. Right. That's part of Compliance, Right. We want to be. There's a degree to which we're legally obligated to spy on our employees making investment decisions to make sure nobody's doing anything criminal. Right? Sure. So that's why they get this software. The instant they get it, their head of security who's using the Palantir software uses it to spy on the entire C suite for no real reason. Right. He loses his mind with power and starts stalking all of the people running the company. Yes. This guy's name was Peter Kavicia and he was a former Secret Service man who ran again a group in the company that was tasked with using algorithms to monitor implementation employees, and I'm going to quote again from Bloomberg. Aided by as many as 120 forward deployed engineers from the data mining company Palantir Technologies, Kavici's group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company issued smartphones, printer and download activity and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. Palantir software aggregated, searched, sorted and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior that Cavicius team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate secret secrets. Palantir's algorithm, for example, alerted the insider threat team. When an employee started badging into work later than usual, a sign of potential disgruntlement that would trigger further scrutiny and possible physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel. So that's nuts. But that's also what he's supposed to be doing. But right after. Right. As soon as they get access to this, Kavichiya goes rogue. And I'm going to continue with that quote. Former JP Morgan colleagues described the environment as Wall street meets Apocalypse now. With Kavichiya. As Colonel Kurtz ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above the breast of the bank's security team. People in the department were shocked that no one from the bank or Palantir set any real limits. They darkly joked that Caviccio was listening to their calls, reading their emails, watching them come and go. Some planted fake information in their communications to see if Cavicchia would mention it and meet, which he did. It all ended when the bank's senior executives learned that they too were being watched. In what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal.
- [88:34]
Noah Shachtman
Nice.
- [88:35]
Robert Evans
Very funny. Extremely funny.
- [88:38]
Noah Shachtman
Oh my God. So good. Because she deserved it more.
- [88:41]
Robert Evans
No, no, no. And just like the most predictable thing that could have happened, right? This is what happens every time you give these guys this toy. Cavici gets Fired. But the promise of Palantir remain undimmed, even though there is tremendous debate up to the present day as to whether or not much of what they do works. This is less the case now that they're doing. We'll talk about this some in the last episode. When it comes to providing targeting solutions based on data, I mean, the jury is still out on how well that's working in Ukraine, but certainly in this period, there's a big debate. Is any of this shit really work? Right. Palantir's going to take credit for the bin Laden assassination. Very unlikely they had anything to do with it, but they take oblique credit for it. And the software is swiftly adopted by police stations in cities like New York, Chicago and la. Palantir software was often used, allegedly to single out innocent individuals because the connections in their lives looked suspicious to the algorithm. And here's Bloomberg again. The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brain calls the secondary surveillance network, the web of who is related to who, friends with or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn't suspected of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates, says Brain, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big data policing at Princeton University and who's now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties, she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she says the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots and universities, and delivery information from Papa John's International and Pizza Hut llc. Now, this is not Pizza Terror Connection. Yeah, No, I do think that the government should have access to our Papa John's records, but mainly to make sure that, like, hey, man, you've ordered 14 extra large pizzas this month. Everything okay? You doing all right? Do you need. Do you need, like, a hug? Can we. Should we send a guy by your house to give you a hug?
- [90:49]
Noah Shachtman
The proper order of Papa John's orders is zero.
- [90:51]
Robert Evans
Zero.
- [90:53]
Noah Shachtman
Domino's orders is zero.
- [90:55]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Pizza Hut, man. Come on.
- [90:57]
Noah Shachtman
No pizza work. A proper number of orders is zero.
- [91:00]
Robert Evans
No, I like a good stuffed crust. I like a good stuff crust. Oh, yeah, once a year. I love a big Pizza Hut pizza. You know what? You know what's good, though, is those Shack Papa John's commercials, they get me every day.
- [91:13]
Noah Shachtman
Oh, yeah, okay.
- [91:14]
Robert Evans
No, no, you can't get me. You can't get me into a Papa John's. But you know what they don't get me to do? Still eat Papa John's. No, no, I would eat Shaq before I'd eat a Papa John's.
- [91:25]
Noah Shachtman
Wow. Funny.
- [91:27]
Robert Evans
This just in, it's gotta be pretty. Well, he's gotta have marbling, you know? Yeah, I've always endorsed cannibalism. I'm very pro Cannibalistic. Those freaks that said they wanted to eat mudang. I don't know who that is, Sophie. Well, but speaking of eating people, let's talk about the tragic case of Manuel Rios. He doesn't get eaten. I hope not. Manuel is a guy who grew up in East LA and had a lot of friends who joined a local gang, east side 18, in 2016. He was seated in a parked car with a friend who'd been jumped into the gang. When police rolled up, his friend ran. But Rios, who had not been breaking any lawsuits, didn't run. He was like, why the fuck would I run? Like, my buddy's in a gang. Like, of course he's going to flee. I'm not doing anything wrong. But because cops be how they are, he gets added to the LAPD's gang database, right? And Palantir's software because of how many other gang dudes that he just kind of socially knows because of where he lives, he gets identified as a high priority target and he starts getting stopped constantly by the cops. The police on autopilot with Palantir are driving Rios towards his gang friends, not away from them, worries Maria Saba, a neighbor and community organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities like East LA are algorithmically scraped for pre crime suspects. Data is destiny, says Saba. These are systemic processes. And when people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it pushes them to join. They internalize being told they're bad. And that's kind of the, you know, one of the. We will talk a lot more about Palantir even in part four, but that's like one of the really dark things about this is that it's masquerading as like this genius predictive, but all it's really doing is like, oh, you live in a poor neighborhood. A lot of your friends grew up to be in gangs. Cops should probably fuck with you constantly, you know, fuck with this guy constantly. Right. That's all it is. It's stop and frisk that you threw an algorithm over.
- [93:18]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. Or it almost reminds me of, like, you know how, like in the shitty day, shitty early days of like MapQuest and Google Maps, where it like you'd get some drivers that would just follow the directions no matter how unhinged or what they'd be.
- [93:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like, guys, use your eyes, homie. What's up? Yeah, what's up man? You know this.
- [93:45]
Noah Shachtman
Yeah. And instead it'd be like they just follow. They blame the algorithm.
- [93:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [93:51]
Noah Shachtman
Now if it's just going to cost you an extra 10 bucks on an Uber, that's one thing. But when it costs, you know, some poor kid getting harassed over and over again, that's something totally different. And that totally happened.
- [94:02]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Yeah, it sure did. So in 2011, Peter did an interview with Bloomberg. By this point, civil libertarians, which had been previously kind of Peter's constituency, had started blowing the horn over Palantir. Peter felt a need to make the case to his fellow libertarians on the need to embrace being spied on. He argued that data mining was less harmful than the crazy abuses and draconian policies the Bush administration had pushed after 9 11. And I would desperately love to hear which of those policies didn't you agree with Peter.
- [94:31]
Noah Shachtman
Right.
- [94:32]
Robert Evans
Because it seems like you think they didn't go far enough. Right. But he's like, look, if we want to avoid a police state, obviously you have to let me, Peter Thiel, build a surveillance state. That's all that can stop us from having an evil police state. Right. I'm a libertarian. That's why I'm selling this shit to the CIA to spy on us. It keeps liberty assured.
- [94:50]
Noah Shachtman
Police state.
- [94:51]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [94:53]
Noah Shachtman
I hadn't thought of this before, but I remember around this time libertarians in my life, or self professed libertarians in my life move from like really caring about this stuff to throwing up their hands and saying, well, privacy is dead.
- [95:05]
Robert Evans
Yeah, nothing you can do. It's the 911 effect. It's so much because a big part of this is like you have this kind of same thing that happens where you've got all these guys who in the early 2000s, kind of the early part of the Bush era, the late 90s, had been like atheist activists who were like super anti the religious Russian. And then after 9 11, they all get really racist against Muslims and it pushes them towards conservatives and it's like, oh guys, so you guys didn't have any principles ever? Right, Okay, I get it, I get it. Yeah.
- [95:38]
Noah Shachtman
And so. And on the data side it's like, oh yeah, we were really for civil liberties, but now that privacy is dead, you might as well Have.
- [95:46]
Robert Evans
It's all libertarian. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [95:49]
Noah Shachtman
What's the difference? Just let it happen. Or if someone's going to spy on you, let it be Peter T. Yeah, he's one of us, at least.
- [95:57]
Robert Evans
Yep. Speaking of Peter Thiel, Noah, you got anything to plug?
- [96:06]
Noah Shachtman
Yes, I have my new. I don't know. I have some. I tried to come up with a lame joke there on the front. No, I have nothing to plug, but you can find me at Noah Shachman. That's N o a h S h a C H T M a n at most social platforms.
- [96:23]
Robert Evans
Well, check out Noah and, you know, figure out. No, I'm not going to tell people to do anything illegal. Use your own crazy board.
- [96:34]
Noah Shachtman
Find out who I'm connected to.
- [96:35]
Robert Evans
Yeah, make a crate. Go make a crazy board. Go make a crazy board. Become. Put me at the center. Yeah, put someone in the center. May I also suggest instead, touch grass and pet a dog in a concentrate. Touch grass, pet a dog. Make a crazy board on your wall. Stop hanging out with your friends. Cut off all contact with your family. Don't do any of this. Live alone in a dark room. Just try to be more like Matthew McConaughey in True Detective. Right? Just as much like Matt, thank your daughter for dying and sparing you the sin of being a father. Do all that. Good, good Matthew McConaughey and True Detective stuff. Have fun with it. Don't eat.
- [97:11]
Noah Shachtman
Also don't eat.
- [97:12]
Robert Evans
Do not eat. Eat. Do not eat anything but amphetamines. Nothing but amphetamines. Cigarettes. All right, Just. Just chew them up. Make us make a cigarette shake every morning, okay? 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.
- [97:41]
Noah Shachtman
New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
- [97:44]
Robert Evans
Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards@IFLY Indoor skydiving, Everything's better when you fly together this holiday season. Share the dream of flight and make your celebrations unforgettable. For a very limited time, get 10 flights for over 50% off with iFly's.
- [98:07]
Noah Shachtman
Black Friday friends and family package.
- [98:10]
Robert Evans
Elevate your holiday festivities with magical memories for all ages. Go to iFlyworld.com to grab your Black Friday friends and family deal. That's iFlyworld.com sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloan Glass, host of the new true crime podcast American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the countries most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. Listen to American homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [98:57]
Noah Shachtman
From. Audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring Comes the Unborn. A shocking true story.
- [99:04]
Robert Evans
My babies. Please. My babies.
- [99:07]
Noah Shachtman
One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.
- [99:11]
Robert Evans
She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, Tried to burn their house down.
- [99:20]
Noah Shachtman
Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [99:27]
Robert Evans
It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911, what's your emergency?
- [99:32]
Noah Shachtman
He said he was gonna kill me.
- [99:34]
Robert Evans
In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended, but what if we were wrong?
- [99:44]
Noah Shachtman
Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.
- [99:49]
Robert Evans
Listen to the Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Beast Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black lit is for the page turners. For those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.