Part Two: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

Summary

Behind the Bastards: Part Two – How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

Hosted by Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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Introduction

In this gripping second part of the "Behind the Bastards" series, host Jack O'Brien delves deep into the controversial life and career of Peter Thiel, a figure whose actions and ideologies have significantly impacted modern democracy. Joined by Noah Schachtman, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Wired, the episode unpacks Thiel's transformation from a promising law graduate to a pivotal player in Silicon Valley and conservative politics.

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1. Early Career and Shift from Law to Right-Wing Politics

Jack O'Brien opens the discussion by exploring Thiel's initial foray into the legal profession and his subsequent departure from it. At [07:27], O'Brien remarks:

Jack O'Brien [07:27]: "Peter just doesn't have any interest in doing that. That's a regular life. That's an ordinary people kind of thing to do is like starting at kind of the bottom rung of your career and working your way up."

Thiel's dissatisfaction with his legal career led him to co-author The Diversity Myth alongside David Sacks in 1995, a publication aimed at critiquing multiculturalism on college campuses. This move marked Thiel's early alignment with right-wing intellectual circles, fueled by support from conservative think tanks like the John M. Olin Foundation.

Jack O'Brien [12:28]: "Peter's involved with these right-wing moneyed interests... He is a conservative pundit before he starts funding conservative causes."

Key Insight: Thiel was not a traditional founder who pivoted from business to politics; instead, he was actively recruited by established conservative entities seeking influential voices to challenge the liberal status quo.

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2. Founding and Managing PayPal

The conversation transitions to Thiel's pivotal role in co-founding PayPal, highlighting his management style and strategic innovations. Thiel's approach was marked by openness and a flat organizational structure, allowing for transparency and collective decision-making.

Jack O'Brien [37:25]: "His Hallmark Management MO at PayPal was the all hands open book session... that access to information coupled with the lack of offices created a flat structure where any idea could win the day."

One of PayPal's significant contributions under Thiel's leadership was the development of the CAPTCHA system, designed to combat online fraud by requiring users to distinguish letters from a background that machines couldn't easily interpret.

Jack O'Brien [45:27]: "Levchin calls the program Igor because of this guy that Kotenek had caught, and he builds this program, and it's for PayPal to stop fraud. This is what becomes Palantir."

Key Insight: Thiel's tenure at PayPal showcased his ability to foster innovation and implement effective anti-fraud measures, laying the groundwork for future ventures like Palantir.

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3. Conflict with Elon Musk and Departure from PayPal

A notable episode in PayPal's history was the clash between Peter Thiel and Elon Musk over company direction, particularly regarding technological platforms. Their personal animosity culminated in Thiel orchestrating a leadership coup, leading to Musk's ousting.

Jack O'Brien [40:56]: "Peter orchestrates a coup against Musk while Elon is on vacation."

Despite their disagreements, this conflict underscored Thiel's assertive nature and his ability to navigate power dynamics within a burgeoning tech company.

Key Insight: Thiel's strategic maneuvers at PayPal not only cemented his leadership but also demonstrated his willingness to eliminate rivals to maintain control.

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4. Founding Clarium Capital and Investment in Facebook

Post-PayPal, Thiel established Clarium Capital, a hedge fund that became instrumental in his early investment activities, including a pivotal stake in Facebook. Although he initially invested heavily, his skepticism about Facebook's long-term valuation led him to retreat, missing out on substantial profits.

Jack O'Brien [67:48]: "He thinks Facebook is overvalued, and so he fails to roll his investment forward. As a result, despite being famous as this early Facebook investor, he doesn't make much money off of Facebook."

Thiel's investment strategy often reflected a blend of foresight and ideological blind spots, where his understanding sometimes outpaced his ability to capitalize fully.

Key Insight: Thiel's early investment in Facebook demonstrated his keen eye for potential, yet his reluctance to commit entirely hindered his financial gains from the platform's success.

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5. Ideological Evolution Post-9/11

The aftermath of September 11 profoundly influenced Thiel's worldview, steering him towards neoconservative ideologies. He began to perceive liberal democracy as vulnerable, advocating for strategies to dismantle governmental structures in favor of libertarian ideals.

Jack O'Brien [73:19]: "He thinks that everything about liberal democracy, about civil rights has to change."

Thiel's participation in organizing symposiums and his writings during this period reflect a deepening alignment with political movements aimed at reshaping American governance and society.

Key Insight: Thiel's experiences post-9/11 catalyzed a shift towards more radical political stances, intertwining his business endeavors with broader ideological battles.

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6. Founding Palantir and Anti-Government Sentiments

Leveraging PayPal's anti-fraud technology, Thiel co-founded Palantir, a data analytics firm with significant government contracts. Despite his initial revolutionary aspirations to separate money from the state, Palantir became a tool for governmental oversight and intelligence.

Jack O'Brien [45:27]: "This app to build this kind of a crazy board system is what becomes Palantir."

Key Insight: Thiel's endeavor with Palantir illustrates a complex relationship between his libertarian ideals and the practical applications of his technological innovations within governmental frameworks.

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7. Thiel's Venture Capital Activities and Continued Influence

Through Clarium Capital and other investment vehicles, Thiel continued to shape Silicon Valley's landscape, backing startups that aligned with his vision of disrupting traditional power structures. His support for controversial figures and funding of media outlets further solidified his role as a significant influencer in both tech and political spheres.

Key Insight: Thiel's sustained investment activities reflect his commitment to fostering environments that challenge prevailing norms, reinforcing his status as a "gravedigger of democracy."

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Conclusion

Peter Thiel's journey from a disillusioned law graduate to a powerful entrepreneur and political mover is marked by strategic brilliance intertwined with ideological fervor. His actions at PayPal, investments in Facebook, founding of Palantir, and vehement political engagements paint a portrait of a man deeply invested in reshaping both technology and governance. This episode of "Behind the Bastards" sheds light on the intricate and often unsettling mechanisms through which Thiel wields his influence, positioning him as a formidable figure in the ongoing discourse about democracy and power.

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Notable Quotes

• "Peter just doesn't have any interest in doing that. That's a regular life."
  — Jack O'Brien [07:27]

• "His Hallmark Management MO at PayPal was the all hands open book session."
  — Jack O'Brien [37:25]

• "Peter orchestrates a coup against Musk while Elon is on vacation."
  — Jack O'Brien [40:56]

• "He thinks Facebook is overvalued, and so he fails to roll his investment forward."
  — Jack O'Brien [67:48]

• "He thinks that everything about liberal democracy, about civil rights has to change."
  — Jack O'Brien [73:19]

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Disclaimer: This summary is based on the transcript provided and aims to capture the essence of the podcast episode. For a complete understanding, listeners are encouraged to tune into the full episode of "Behind the Bastards."

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media.

[Jack O'Brien]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast that is entirely funded and supported by the film Alien Resurrection, which no one on this call but me has seen. I have picked a bit that no one can play off of because they simply don't remember the classic Ron Perlman film Alien Resurrection. What a tragedy. Speaking of works of art.

[Noah Schachtman]

Tragedies.

[Jack O'Brien]

No, I was going to say works of art. Noah. Noah Schachtman, contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Wired. How are you doing today? Happy. I'm doing sad.

[Noah Schachtman]

Better than a astronaut with a alien implanted into my gut.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, that's good.

[Noah Schachtman]

Does that take place in that movie?

[Jack O'Brien]

I guess if you consider anyone who's in space an astronaut. Yes. Yes, I do. Okay, then. Yes. Yes. That's essentially what's going on in that movie. There's a lot of cloning involved, though, which, you know, fingers crossed. Would you clone yourself if you could? You know.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely.

[Jack O'Brien]

You would.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, absolutely. Because then I could have somebody else do my job twice, even though I know that's not how that works.

[Jack O'Brien]

Wow. Yeah, we could.

[Noah Schachtman]

If you've read any Spider man comics, it never goes well.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Jack O'Brien]

And I do think that Spider man comics really, really are the. That's where I go to for my. All of my cloning related information. Specifically Spider Man.

[Noah Schachtman]

I used to work for a guy that had cloned dogs.

[Jack O'Brien]

Really?

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's so weird to me.

[Robert Evans]

I would never clone my dog. I love my dog. But it wouldn't be her. I know. It wouldn't be her. I'd be like, who's this imposter? Not Anderson.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. I don't know, folks.

[Noah Schachtman]

You would clone yourself, but not your dog.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

For efficiency purposes. I would just want somebody that could sit in the meetings I don't want to go to or sit in. Do, like, all the work things that don't appeal to me, and then I could just do the things I want to do.

[Noah Schachtman]

So the clone would have to grow up to be exactly your age and then slow down. Yeah, yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

Okay. Yeah. You would have to, like, accelerate its growth, really rob it of a childhood or. You're doing a clone, like, in that. Well, yeah. So you do not think clones are people, Sophie, because that's a very problematic attitude to have here.

[Robert Evans]

I'm like, it's not real. It has no feelings.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Again, the Spider man books would tell you, this way lies madness.

[Robert Evans]

Well, it's absolute madness. There's no way.

[Jack O'Brien]

If we get cloning at the same period of time, we get Peter Thiel's ideal breakdown of federal power so that there's all these isolated city states run at the whims of rich people. There's no way we will not get someone acting as a wellness influencer who starts an island where you can go hunt and murder a clone of yourself in order to gain unspecified mental health benefits. That's absolutely going like Joe Rogan is going to kill his clone in order to gain its power by eating its heart. That's a version of the future. That could be us in 10 years, people.

[Noah Schachtman]

I feel like that's just called Austin, Texas.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, it could be in Austin, Texas. I would say that's not a bad place to set it.

[Noah Schachtman]

I feel like that's happening right now.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, I mean, I killed him. A guy in Austin, Texas once who looked a lot like me, but that was less out of a desire to gain better mental health. And anyway. Noah, you ever killed anybody?

[Noah Schachtman]

Not that I can talk about on this podcast.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, that's the answer Peter Thiel would give, I'm sure. And we are getting back to Peter's story.

[Kat]

Did you know a 2018 study showed half of prenatal vitamins tested had unacceptable levels of heavy metals? I'm Kat, mother of three and founder of Ritual. When I was four months pregnant, I couldn't find a prenatal I could trust, so I created my own. Ours is made traceable third party tested for heavy metals and recently earned the purity award from the Clean Label Project. But don't just take my word for it. Get 25% [e-mail] podcast.

[Sloan Glass]

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.

[Audio Up]

From. Audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring Comes the Unborn. A shocking true story.

[Jack O'Brien]

My babies. Please. My babies.

[Audio Up]

One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.

[Jack O'Brien]

She went crazy. Shot and killed all her farm animals. Slaughtered them in front of the kids, Tried to burn their house down.

[Audio Up]

Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Sloan Glass]

911.

[Jack O'Brien]

What's your emergency?

[Robert Evans]

He said he was gonna kill me.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

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?

[Noah Schachtman]

Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

Listen to the Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Kat]

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 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 podcasts.

[Jack O'Brien]

Up to this point. The teal story is the tale of an isolated, super disciplined kid who didn't connect with his classmates. Or at least that's one version of it, right? I will say I don't know if that's right, because this vision of this kid who just like doesn't understand or get along with other people and is like separate from them, is at odds of a kid who hangs out with Judge Kennedy's son because he wants to clerk for Justice Kennedy, who socializes with the Federalist Society people, and who starts and operates a student newspaper with several friends. Right? That version of Thiel reads less like lonely victim of bullying and more maybe kind of a rich kid asshole who doesn't like to be associated with regular people. Right? It's not so much that he's lonely and separate, it's that he has separated himself because he wants to be better than them. Right?

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

I don't know which of these. Yeah, you can really make a case for either. If we're going for that latter interpretation of Thiel, it makes sense then to draw a line from his failed ambitions as a lawyer and his anger at the higher education system that had evidently prepared him poorly to succeed in his first ambition. Stanford had not made Peter into the kind of person who could clerk for the Supreme Court. And since that could not be representative of a fault of Peter's, maybe he just literally wasn't good enough. It has to have been the fault of higher education as a system, and Peter has made his anger at this everyone else's problem for the last 40 years. Now the other open question here is how did being gay influence Peter's development and the nation state sized chip on his shoulder in 2011? A writer for the New Yorker asked Peter more or less that same how did his homosexuality and status as an outsider influence the way he thinks about politics and business today? Here's his. I can come up with stories about how they're factors, but I'm not sure that they're interesting. The gay thing is that you're sort of an outsider. There are things about it that are problematic. There are things about it that can be positive, but it also feels contrived. Maybe I'm more of an outsider because I was a gifted and introverted child. Maybe it's some complicated combination of all these things. And maybe I'm not even an outsider. And I think that's interesting where he's like, maybe I'm just kind of full of shit with you people. And I've always. I've never been an outsetter. I just think I'm better than you. Right. And a lot of this is a crafted image of like, this is a more sympathetic vision of me. Right. Like he definitely has a. Takes some joy in playing the mastermind, manipulating the media. And he's not. Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

No, I mean, clearly not. Or maybe it's like, maybe it's a bit to appeal to actual outsiders, right?

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, maybe it's a bit to appeal to the real ones. One thing you can say about Peter is that very shortly after starting his career in law, he decided, I don't want to be a lawyer. In total, his career consisted of he clerks for a judge in Atlanta for a little while and then he becomes a first year associate at a corporate law firm. And he never makes it to year two. So he just hates the thing that he had studied to do in school. It seems like he hates it largely because he's not going to get a shortcut to being at the top of that. If he's going to get anywhere, he's gonna have to work himself up from maybe not the bottom, but like the middle. And Peter just doesn't have any interest in doing that. That's a regular life. That's an ordinary people kind of thing to do is like starting at kind of the bottom rung of your career and working your way up. He doesn't want to have to do that. He leaves this profession to start trading derivatives. What's the thing you do if you want to feel like you're better than everyone else? Try to get into finance and get mega rich. That's his next move. Law isn't going to be the thing I wanted, so I'm going to try to get wealthy this is not going to work out immediately well to him. The fact that finances the thing that he's doing, but it's not his first career choice, seems to rub him the wrong way. This is when we first get outside cite evidence that he's built a grudge against higher education. In the late 1990s, he gets together with a friend from his Harvard Review days, David Sacks, and co authors a book called the Diversity Myth, which was published in 1995 by the Independent Institute, a right wing think tank that made Peter a fellow. During this awkward period in his career, he was hard up for cash. His investment business isn't going well. He's not making money as a lawyer. The think tank gives him income. It helps him and David Sacks secure a series of op EDS in the Wall Street Journal mocking things like Indigenous People's Day and a broadside against multiculturalism that was anti western. Their book, which was endorsed by Dinesh D'Souza, had been funded in part by a $40,000 grant by the John M. Olin Foundation, a conservative nonprofit geared towards creating a counter intelligentsia that had also bankrolled some of D'Souza's early career. Peter got to do a book tour and a series of speaking engagements, and he found that he enjoyed asking aspects of life as a right wing intellectual. And this is really interesting to me because Peter doesn't start as a founder and get successful in business and then pivot to right wing politics. He is scouted by right wing moneyed interests by these guys working at think tanks and nonprofits funded by oil and gas billionaires and the like. He is scouted as this is a smart kid who is frustrated because the first thing he wanted to do didn't work out for him. We could get him into right wing politics. Right. He is a conservative pundit before he starts funding conservative causes.

[Noah Schachtman]

And this is as the opposite of what I thought the origin story was.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, it's so interesting because this is how for decades, if we want to ask the question, how did right wing politics get so deranged? How did the Republican party get so deranged? Well, it's because of this decades long, very dedicated, methodical effort to every time we can find an angry young man with a degree of like, skill and talent who has failed out of their first ambition, let's put a pile of cash in the front of their face and say like, hey, do you want to get into conservative media? Right. That's where all the daily wire guys come from. They're failed Hollywood screenwriters and stand up Comedians. Right. That's where Thiel gets into this from. He is a failed lawyer. Yeah. And they're like, hey, come be our Dinesh D'Souza. Right? Like, come be another Dinesh D'Sauza. That's his. Like. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, Peter, while he's kind of like having this flirtation with being a right wing intellectual, he tries to start a Bay Area public access talk show with a liberal friend of his, which biographer Chavkin describes as Crossfire, but way, way more pretentious. And I can't imagine that, like, can you? What is a more pretentious Crossfire?

[Noah Schachtman]

How does that even exist with like mid-90s production values?

[Jack O'Brien]

Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, like a fucking UHF crossfire. Incredible shit. I desperately wish they'd gotten out like eight episodes and those were on YouTube for me to just watch. Right. I want to see Peter Thiel's take on Crossfire.

[Noah Schachtman]

No. You think you want to see that?

[Jack O'Brien]

You definitely do not know. I for sure don't.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah, you would definitely gouge out at least one, if not both eyes.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, but I palmed in with an eye patch.

[Noah Schachtman]

That's true. But not two.

[Jack O'Brien]

Not two. No one does. So Thiel and Sacks, his book becomes a foundational work in the complaining liberals on campus are intolerant genre. Right. These are. That's. That's a big part of conservative media today. Intolerant liberals ruining college by being mean to conservatives. Thiel and Sachs are doing this in the 90s. Right. It is also an early work of DEI panic. Right. This is really where Chafkin gets a lot of credit from me. Because most of the articles that I read which talked about this period in Peter's life, mentioned that he'd co written the Diversity Myth, but they just described it as a book Peter and David Sacks wrote because they were so frustrated. Right. This genuinely came out of a place of. We were so angry about what we saw at Stanford that we just had to write this book about, like, this is real problem we saw coming up from higher education, all these fucked up things on campus that we just couldn't ignore anymore. And that's not true. The reality is that the diversity myth and the ideological careers of David and Peter were crafted, molded and funded by powerful moneyed interests looking for fighters to help them tear down the liberal status quo. And chief among the bugbears of these moneyed interests was people who thought that other cultures should get to exist in American intellectual life. Right. That's what made these rich guys angry. And they hired people like Peter and Thiel to yell about it. Now the book's. Yeah, yeah, fascinating shit. The book's Amazon description informs us. The authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not about learning more, it's actually about learning less. Now if you read there's a fun article because this has become like the modern, you know, this is also like most of conservative politics, politics today. Thiel got to write an article about this book he wrote as a young man for a website called the new criterion in 2023, which is coming out just as this panic that he and David had really tried to start much earlier over multiculturalism on campus became integral to conservative politics. So Peter goes in and basically does a victory lap. I was right all along. And he lists his examples of progressive mania that he saw in Stanford as the replacement of Shakespeare's the Tempest in one class with a play that had been writt by a modern author based on the Tempest. The inclusion of other works beyond the Western classic literature canon was in Thiel's eyes, a tendentious left wing anti Western crusade. As opposed to just like, I don't know, man, maybe it's good at a certain point to add in works that are influenced by and based on some of these classics instead of just having everyone read these classics ad nauseam. There's an intellectual value in discussing the works that they inspired that's kind of accepting that art and creativity is a living sort of thing as opposed to just being like, no, everyone just needs to memorize the Iliad. Well, maybe we could talk about some of the works that were influenced by it and you know, that have descended as a result of it because that's just kind of how education ought to work. At one point, listing examples of how progressive madness had warped educations at Stanford, Thiel complained that the campus refused to seal off glory holes during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Now, I don't know if this is true. I have not found any outside evidence that this is a thing that happened. In that 2023 article, Thiel does make a couple of valid points. He complains about the insane increase in tuition costs and how that's a part of the housing crisis. And he's not wrong there. Right? The fact that so many people are in educational debt is part of why it's hard for them to afford housing and to buy houses of their own. But what he's doing here, that's fucked up, is he's wrapping decisions made by people who aren't teachers, right? Teachers are not choosing to make college this expensive and they Are not the primary financial benefactors of college being that expensive, Right? It is the administrators of the school. It's not like your history professor isn't deciding what, like the campus is going to charge people for credit hours. You know, that's crazy. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

The glory hole thing is just. Is also just like.

[Jack O'Brien]

I feel like it's just bullshit. I feel like it's just bullshit. Yeah, I feel like there were probably a couple of glory holes on campus maybe, but I don't feel like the school was like, no, we love our glory holes. We're keeping those in.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's bananas. And then also, I mean, it is a little bit bananas that this guy was confronted for being kind of like pro apartheid South Africa by black classmates. And then his solution is what? That it was bad to have any diversity on copyright?

[Jack O'Brien]

It's bad to have any diversity in the course material. That if you're doing a Western class, you should only be reading old dead white men as opposed to. Well, number one, Western civilization includes a lot of people who are not white and exists up to the present day. So it's actually very valid to say, okay, Shakespeare is obviously part of the Western canon. Should we not also be looking at some non white authors who are in the Western canon who are writing and pivoting off of works started by Shakespeare and influenced by him? Right. Is that not a valid part of art education? Which I would say, well, yeah, that just seems like what you do, you know, I just do not believe that.

[Noah Schachtman]

This guy is actually this angry about it now.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, and that's part of why I really appreciate what Chafkin does here. Because once you read like, oh, and all of this was funded by some shady right wing think tank that gave them 40 grand to write a book to like, cause the funders hate colleges and liberal professors. Oh, okay, so this is made up, right? Like you were paid to be angry about this. That plays a role in why Peter is doing all of this, for sure. Alas, the late 1990s demanded more of Peter than a full time devotion to the culture war trenches. After quitting his law career, he'd been forced to live with mom and dad for a while, which I think was a miserable experience for him. And then he'd finally managed to get himself set up in a shitty little apartment thanks to all of those think tank paychecks. Peter was not happy with this life. He was not about to live as a poor man or even just a moderately comfortable conservative intellectual. He wanted to be one of the rich founders plucking A young angry man like he'd been from obscurity and funding them in their quest to write bullshit. And in order to become that kind of guy, the only way to make the money he needed was finance. He decides he's going to launch a hedge fund with a friend from his magazine days at Stanford, using money that he had begged from friends, family and friends of family. Now, he'd been trying to trade derivatives up to this point and that had not made him a bunch of money. The fact that he's able to get enough money from friends and family to start a hedge fund is evidence. Again, this is not a poor kid. This is not even a middle class kid, right? No matter what. A lot of provost came from a middle class family. I'm sorry if your family has enough money for you to start a mutual fund with their donations or hedge funds, sorry, that's not middle class. You're not necessarily millionaires, but your family and friends are of a different. If I had wanted to start a hedge fund at this age, my family and friends would not have been able to pay into it. They were struggling to pay rent. Peter was not initially good at running a hedge fund. In his first year operating, the NASDAQ went up by 40% and Peter's fund lost money, betting instead on currency. Part of this is because this is something Chafkin points out. Peter is kind of obsessed with George Soros. And George, I think around the time Peter's getting into hedge funds, makes a fortune shorting the British pound and kind of fucks up the currency of an entire nation with his betting. Peter both hates Soros because they're very different ideologically and also wants to be like him because he sees he wants that kind of like Soros is this right wing bugbear, this like monster in their nightmares. And Peter wants to be that for the left, right? So he's betting on currency, but he's just not any fucking good at it, right? So it gradually dawns on Peter that he probably isn't going to earn a reputation as one of the great hedge fund founders. And while he struggles with this, he watches the news, which is endlessly celebrating. This is the end of the 90s now, this parade of stories about guys like Marc Andreessen who made Early.com fortunes. Peter's obsessing over this and he's supplementing his income with lectures at Stanford. So he's writing about how evil the higher education system is and also reliant upon it for some of his money. When in 1998 at Stanford, he has a run in with someone who would be a crucial part of the next and most profitable phase of his life. This someone's name was Max Levchin. And max was a 23 year old student at Peter's alma mater who showed up one day for a lecture on currency. The two hit it off and wound up talking about Peter's hedge fund. Max mentioned that he was considering an investment in a company that made software for Palm pilots. Now you know what a Palm Pilot was.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Jack O'Brien]

I think I have to step back and explain this for our Zoomer audience because they're not going to have any fucking idea what I'm talking about. Imagine a smartphone that can't call people or text people or map your way. It doesn't have a gps, you can't message any. You can't use the Internet at all really on it in most functional ways and there's not any games on it. It also doesn't have a camera. Basically it's a small computer that keeps track of your calendar and if you can find out how to download a book in 1998, it can kind of be a shitty E reader. Right. Those are the things that Palm Pilots are doing at this point in time.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wasn't it also one of those things like you had to use one of like stylists?

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, they're fucking, they're awful. It really is like Steve Jobs hated the Palm Pilot because he very rightly was like this is never going to take off as a product because it sucks. It's a piece of shit. The only people who like these are like people with disposable income who want to impress folks by having an electronic gadget that most people don't have. Right. They're just not that there's not uses for a Palm Pilot, but it's not, not an indispensable device in the same way that a smartphone will become. You really can't exist in a lot of the modern economy if you don't have a fucking smartphone. Palm Pilots are never that indispensable, however, in masturbation jokes. Yes, yes, also that. Right, that was. Oh God, yeah. What a time that was. They really laid that one up for us perfectly. So palmpilots are a dead end tech wise, but they also are. They're not a failed product entirely. They do make money for a while and there's a lot in PalmPilot development that is going to feed in later to smartphones and the smartphone app ecosystem. Right. And that's going to be relevant because Max And Peter, they start talking about like, we want to create like an app for PalmPilot users. And specifically initially what PayPal is, is Max and Peter being like, what if PalmPilot users could send each other IOUs? Right? What if there was a way to do that? And Peter's his interest kind of evolves into what if we use. Because they're looking at the Internet and palmpilots have some ability to connect. It's a nightmarish pain in the ass compared to just the way your smartphone works. They do have a way of connecting. Peter is starting to look at this digital infrastructure that's being built up in this period and he gets this fascination with the idea of what if we create a digital bank that can separate money from the state. He sees PayPal not as just a business, but as an act of revolutionary praxis. If we're looking at Peter as a capitalist Lenin, this is his equivalent of the banks that Lenin had Stalin rob in order to fund. PayPal will allow us to take money from the state and build up our own war chest in order to destroy this liberal nanny state and create our libertarian paradise. It's a weapon, right? Peter sees PayPal as a weapon. At the time, he claims, I can't tell you what he believed at the time, all the reporting on him, and this is what people who knew him said, is that, yeah, he saw this as like, this is a way to separate money from the state. So I think it is probably credible that he sees this as an act of kind of revolutionary praxis.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wild, yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

In a 2007 article for Fortune magazine, Jeffrey O'Brien wrote Thiel figured a web based currency would undermine government tax structures. Getting there, however, would mean taking on established industries, commercial banking, for instance, which would require financial acumen and engineering expertise. That's one of the earlier. This is a revolutionary thing for him. I want to undermine the government by building this web based currency. Obviously that's not what PayPal becomes. PayPal is just a way to send your friends money. It is not separated. But also, Peter is not involved in PayPal after he sells it, as we'll talk about. One benefit of founding a company like PayPal was that Peter and his partner could bring in to work for them anyone they wanted and exclude anyone who annoyed. And as soon as the company gets off the ground, it becomes clear that this is non negotiable. For Peter, a big reason why he likes the idea of being a founder is he can make his own clubhouse and say, no girls allowed, right? And that's more literal than you might think. I'm going to read something that Levchin told forbes in that 2007 interview. This guy came in and I asked what he liked to do for fun. He said, I really enjoy playing hoops. I said, we can't hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wow.

[Jack O'Brien]

No basketball guys. Sophie would not have done well at PayPal. Nope. I know that hurts. Sophie. I know that you really had a lot riding on a PayPal career in 2007. So I'm sorry, would have been before 2007. You know what else has a lot riding on a PayPal career and I don't think it's going to work out for them is our sources, our sponsors. Sponsors. Jesus Christ. My head's not on straight today. Sophie, you can. You can tell that.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, it's not much different than any other day, but. Yep.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, hey, no, I'm. I'm normally breaking Dads Holiday magic is in the air at Ifly indoor Skydiving. Imagine unwrapping the experience of flying. Ifly is the perfect unique gift for anyone who wants to turn their dream of flying into a joyful reality. It's unforgettable fun for all ages. Save over 35% with iFly's limited time holiday gift voucher. Flight packages turn dreams into unforgettable moments with the gift of flight.

[Audio Up]

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[Sloan Glass]

That's iFlyworld.com 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, Long 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.

[Audio Up]

In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seem to have it all. A whirlwind romance, a new home, and twins on the way. But no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret. So Shocking. It would tear their world apart.

[Jack O'Brien]

9 1. One Response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please. My babies.

[Audio Up]

One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.

[Jack O'Brien]

They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.

[Robert Evans]

You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling.

[Kat]

Myself, nobody's that crazy.

[Audio Up]

Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.

[Jack O'Brien]

She went batshit crazy. Shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn their house down.

[Audio Up]

Audio represents the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this. Start your own country.

[Jack O'Brien]

I planted the flag and just kind of looked out of like, this is mine. I own this.

[Robert Evans]

It's surprisingly easy.

[Jack O'Brien]

55 gallons of water for 500 pounds of concrete.

[Robert Evans]

Everybody's doing it.

[Noah Schachtman]

I am King Ernest Emmanuel.

[Robert Evans]

I am the Queen of Lidonia.

[Audio Up]

I'm Jackson I, king of Capperburg.

[Noah Schachtman]

I am the supreme leader of the.

[Jack O'Brien]

Grand Republic of Montonia.

[Robert Evans]

Be part of a great colonial tradition.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves.

[Robert Evans]

What could go wrong?

[Noah Schachtman]

No country willingly gives up their territory.

[Jack O'Brien]

I was making rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God. What is that? Bullets? Bullet holes? We need help. We still have the off road portion to go.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to Escape from Zakistan, and we're losing daylight fast. That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Jack O'Brien]

Nine, one. One. What's your emergency? Someone. He.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

He said he was gonna kill me. Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.

[Noah Schachtman]

Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.

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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?

[Noah Schachtman]

Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home.

[Jack O'Brien]

I'll be waiting for you.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

Listen to the Murder Years Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack O'Brien]

And we're back. Okay, let's get back into the Peter Thiel story. So the early PayPal company culture is obsessed with work, but it also carries a little of Peter's growing antipathy towards college educations. One early employee claimed that the big difference between Google and PayPal was Google wanted to hire PhDs. PayPal wanted to hire people who got into PhD programs and dropped out.

[Robert Evans]

That is so interesting.

[Jack O'Brien]

Uh huh.

[Robert Evans]

That is so interesting.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this. And again, Peter's not a dropout, right? Like not like, for example, jobs. Right. He's not somebody who decides college isn't for me and bounces to do his own thing. He gets a degree and fails. So it's interesting that he's like, I am only going to hire people who were, I guess, slightly more on the ball than me about realizing college wasn't where they wanted to be. I guess PhD programs, you have spent a lot of time in college at that point. I don't know. You can interpret that how you want. Levchin describes early PayPal employees as geeky guys who didn't get laid very often. The least surprising thing I've ever heard about PayPal. If you're wondering what company's employees were fucking like crazy, PayPal is not going to be your first bet. Obviously it's Yahoo. I was going to say Lycos, but nobody's going to remember Lycos either. Here's another quote from that Forbes article. In the early days, when it came time to hire a high ranking female engineer, she turned out to be bad at ping pong. Levchin took that as a lack of competitive flair, but grudgingly hired her anyway. She quit within six months. Peter Nay never fails to rub that in. HE GRUMBLES oh, man, Peter, like, she can't play ping pong. There's no way she'll fit in here. I think you guys were just committed to making sure she wouldn't fit in there. Now one thing I find interesting is that for all of Peter's obsession with hierarchy, particularly as the rest of the world is concerned, he doesn't appear to have actually been that kind of manager. In other words, he is not a like, super dick, I have to be in charge only my way or the highway kind of guy, he actually, a lot of people say was kind of a very good manager in this period of time. I'm going to read another quote from Forbes here. His Hallmark Management MO at PayPal was the all hands open book session. Customer logs, revenue flow, fraud losses, burn rate. He'd display it all for every employee to see this access to information coupled with the lack of offices created a flat structure where any idea could win the day. That's not a bad way. That's a very effective way of running things. That's probably part of why PayPal works out. It's interesting to me that like, as obsessed ideologically as he is with hierarchy, Peter tends to run things as more of like an open book, flat organizational structure where we're all just kind of sitting together and bullshitting and arguing and whoever can make the best point. That's the idea that takes off. That's interesting to me.

[Noah Schachtman]

As long as you're good at ping.

[Jack O'Brien]

Pong, as long as you fit into his idea of the elites that he wants. Right. And maybe that is that I respect other people who I see as being at my level and so I can work with them on a kind of approaching an even basis. Just I can't respect anyone else. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

As long as you speak orcish, play ping pong.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Yes. As long as you can read the runes on the gates of Moria and hate basketball, you can be in Peter's clubhouse. So you will know that around the same time this is all happening. A guy who's in the news occasionally, some of you may have heard of him, he's in obscure figure, but he comes up now and again named Elon Musk. Started another company named X.com now, not the social networking site that we all refer to by that name at all times, of course. No, this was actually a different company, an earlier X.com and the gist of the story, I'm actually not going to talk a lot about Musk and Thiel at PayPal because in terms of popular culture knowledge of these guys, half of it is the big fight that they had at PayPal. Right. Musk and Thiel had both started payment companies that were doing very similar things and the market was not big enough to support them both as independent companies. So they had to merge in order to be valid as a business. The two don't get along and wind up fighting. But that's the thing that gets reported all the time. I just don't think it's that interesting. It's also as behind the bastards goes the fact that Peter Thiel is a dick to Elon Musk. Not really evil to dislike Elon Musk.

[Noah Schachtman]

Behind the heroes.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, I feel like we can understand why Peter might not have gotten along with Elon Musk. But basically what's happening here is that both of these Companies, X and PayPal, are funded by a lot of VC money, and they're kind of lighting it on fire. At this point, neither company is in the black, and the belief is that the only way they'll get there is if they merge. And this does work. They get pressured into it, but this is an effective way to build a business. Elon becomes the CEO for a period of time, but he and Peter do not get along. And Peter orchestrates a coup against Musk while Elon is on vacation. I'd relate that in more detail, but again, who can blame him? Now, the specific conflict seems to have arisen because Elon has this obsession with moving the company off of UNIX and towards a Microsoft platform, whereas Teal and his OGs are all very much like in the UNIX tank. Right. And so that's kind of the root of a lot of the conflicts between them. But the larger issue is that there's just a personality clash. They don't like each other. And one of the things that's really funny here is that as much as both of these guys suck, and they're both current right wing, influential right wing monsters, they both had each other's number 20 years ago. Their criticisms of each other are perfectly valid. Chafkin quotes a colleague who talked to each man about the other during this period. And this colleague said, musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart. Hey, guys, you're both right. You did it.

[Noah Schachtman]

Incredible.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, that's not bad.

[Noah Schachtman]

All right. I can't wait for the next Trump administration when they're around.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, that's kind of going over control.

[Noah Schachtman]

To dismantle the state.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah, that's kind of either no matter who wins, we lose, or maybe the Mr. Burns so many diseases that it kind of keeps the structure propped up.

[Noah Schachtman]

I guess it's Alien versus Predator.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, it's very Alien versus Predator. That's your call. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Again, I think it's Alien 4, but nobody's going to understand my references to you, Alien 4. So what? I do think that you can probably understand all politics via one of the Alien movies, as long as it's not the David Fincher one. You know, let's just keep alien 3. Shovel that aside. You know, Alien Resurrection, Alien, Aliens, all good politics. So, yeah, I think it's funny that these guys very clearly get who each other is in such a strong way. And they seem to have had a little bit of a rapprochement, in part because Peter is later going to save SpaceX with an investment, kind of. But once Peter ousts Musk, the two are at arm's length and they hate each other for years, right? They are very clearly enemies for a while. After this, Peter takes over for Musk as CEO. And in this role, he has a couple of strengths. He's noted by his employees as being a very supportive manager. He's the kind of guy who will give you a ton of freedom in the world to explore and try stuff out. Now, the downside of this is Peter actually doesn't like confrontation. He's terrible at firing people if he brings someone in, in part because I think he mostly hires people he likes. If they're bad or they fuck up, he'll shuffle them around. But he doesn't tend to just let people go. He's really bad at that, actually, which is interesting to me. Now, one of the big successes PayPal has in this period as a result of Peter's management style is that they develop develop innovative technology aimed at fighting online fraud. From a fairly early point in the business, around the year 2000, PayPal had started dealing with Russian scammers, creating shell accounts with stolen credit card numbers using bots. It actually goes back quite a while. This is again happening before 9 11. Thiel didn't want to crack down on this in a way that would make the service harder to use, because it being easy to use was part of the appeal, right? So instead what they needed to do was actually figure out where these networks were and shut down the network surgically. So he has Levchin design a program that forced users to copy letters displayed over a background that made them impossible for machines to read. This becomes the Captcha system, right? We all know that comes out of PayPal. Levchin is the guy who codes it. But Teal is a big part of why we get Captcha. Now, that's obviously very influential. We've all had to do, God knows, an infinite number of these fucking things, but that innovation alone only puts a dent in the online fraud problem. So near the end of 2000, a paid PayPal employee named John Kofanak, who's a former military intelligence man, started building what we today call the crazy board, right, where he's trying to do the little tiny bits of string to pictures of different fraud networks, try to map out these accounts of fraudsters who are attacking PayPal. And he does this all kind of in a very labor intensive way. Building this map is a real pain in the ass. But he does eventually isolate the main culprit of the bottom net defrauding them, a guy nicknamed Igor who had taken $20 million or so out of PayPal. Now, when this worked out, this is a very effective method of getting this guy. They decide we need a way to automate this process. It's too slow to build a crazy board the way Kothanek had. Let's have Levchin code a system by which you can map out links between different groups of bad actors so you can build an actual physical understanding of these networks in real time. Right. This app to build this kind of a crazy board system is what becomes Palantir. Right? Yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Levchin calls the program Igor because of this guy that Kotenek had caught, and he builds this program, and it's for PayPal to stop fraud. This is what becomes Palantir. This is the core of Palantir. Right. It comes from Igor. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting stuff.

[Noah Schachtman]

No, I just.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yes. And we will be talking a lot about Palantir in part three, Teal's management style. So, again, if you're looking at this, this is both, like, you should be hearing the dun, dun, dun, dun, dun dun music. Like, we can see the evil coming up here. But also, this is evidence that Peter's management style isn't bad. These are effective outcomes that make a lot of money. Right. He is capable of motivating and managing people and giving them the freedom they need to innovate. You have to acknowledge that about the guy.

[Noah Schachtman]

Totally.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. But that said, he also has a lot of blind spots. And these are well described in this quote from that Forbes article. In 2007, PayPal's losses were multiplying. It battled Russian fraudsters who were filching millions by cribbing credit card numbers. Customer service complaints flooded the phone lines and inboxes were often dealt with by simply not answering the phone or doing a mass deletion. Louisiana temporarily banned PayPal from doing business. Business in the state. MasterCard threatened to pull the plug because of the high number of chargebacks. Peter Thiel didn't know what a chargeback was, said Jawed Karim, an early engineer who went to found YouTube with fellow alumni Chad Hurley and Steve Chin and then sell it to Google. That's one of the fundamental things of any credit card payment system. Chargebacks almost killed the company. So there's also, in this very libertarian way, he doesn't understand very basic aspects of reality that are central to the thing he's trying to do. And it nearly kills them. Right. Like, you don't know what a chargeback is. And you are running a payment processing company. Like, that's a big, big blind spot. Right. I know what a chargeback is, and I'm just a guy who was bad at having a credit card, you know.

[Noah Schachtman]

Right. But he's not very far removed from just being like a pundit.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right, right. And when you understand that as his background. Right. That he doesn't really have a life outside of not making it as a lawyer and then being a right wing pundit. Oh, I get why you've got some blind spots, Peter. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah. So that's really interesting about the Palantir part like that. You know, I mean, they grew a giant company, you know, almost by accident out of this other one.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah. And that is like one of the more interesting stories with Thiel. Right. Because it doesn't come out of this. The fact that he's after 9 11, able to see like, oh, you know, this thing we've used to stop networks of scams, scammers you could probably sell to the government to try to stop terrorists after this big attack. That's some genuine insight. PayPal, it struggles with profitability, but they eventually break even after about 180 million had been poured into the idea. Now, under Elon And Peter Thiel, PayPal is never profitable. They hit break even, and as soon as they hit break even, they carry out an iPad. Right. Immediately after their IPO, the company is sold to eBay for one and a half billion dollars. And Peter leaves instantly. Right. The financially successful portion of PayPal's history he is not around for. In fact, the first thing he does after living is he basically, he's going to set up a venture capital fund and he's going to short PayPal. Right. He sells this thing off and he's like, I'm immediately going to bet against it.

[Noah Schachtman]

Oh my God.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. He has not at all. No loyalty or anything like that. He gets his money and he gets out. I am done. I have no more interest in this idea. I think in part because it's become clear at this point, by 2002, PayPal is not going to destroy capital. Destroy PayPal is not going to destroy liberal democratic governments. It's not going to create its own currency system. It's just going to be a way people use spend money on the Internet. That's not interesting to him right now. That's one part of why I think he gets into this shorting, betting against this thing he'd help to build is that 2002 is also right after 9 11, and Peter is one of many Americans who kind of loses his mind over 9 11, right. This is a deranging moment for him. And it also like, it fucks up the fact like he has this need to be seen as a contrarian, as separate as above the herd. Right. And it's interesting to me that for all of that he is very much in line with regular people like my parents when it comes to just losing his mind over this terrorist attack. It terrifies him. He's going to participate in a program by the Bush White House to bring Silicon Valley movers and shakers in closer contact with the Republican Party. This is the first. A lot of his friends from PayPal, people that had kind of seen him as like, he's a libertarian, he's a Silicon Valley libertarian, but libertarians were very anti Bush in this period. And the fact that Peter is willing to get in bed with the Republican Party, a lot of people is like, oh, I don't really know this guy like I thought I did. This does not make sense for the person I thought Peter was. And some of what's going on here is that the tech bubble has burst in this post 911 period, right? The period immediately after the attacks when the US is invading Afghanistan and spinning up towards invading Iraq is a bad time for big tech. The dot com bubble had burst and the economy in general had shit the bed partly as a result of the attacks. Peter, who has always had a good gut instinct for the momentum of the moment and culture, opted to spend a lot of the next two years fucking around. He gets from 2002 to 2004 that there's not really a great time to be investing in most things. He's just sold his first company, he's mega rich now. Some of what he's doing is just he's idly shorting his old business, the U.S. economy. But he's also just like doing the very understandable thing, which is partying for a while, you know. So this is also where Peter, you could kind of see this as he's getting some space and he starts to find himself. During this period. Chafkin writes that as CEO of PayPal, Peter had dressed down in a T shirt and old jeans. But as soon as he sold off his interest in the company, quote now Thiel had a wardrobe full of suits and a silver Ferrari Spider360 red. He told the New York Times magazine would have been over the top. He purchased a 10,000 square foot mansion in San Francisco and filled it with art, but also conference rooms a day to night Lounge and a kitchen meant for buffets. It was a place to work and host work. But Chafkin writes, there were no keepsakes, no magazines and no family photos. Teals homes, as one visitor remarked, referring to the Presidio mansion and a grand apartment that Peter acquired in New York City. Look like stage sets. And it's hard to tell someone actually lives in them. I feel like that's just being mega rich. You've got enough people to keep everything clean all the time and you own a lot of nice artwork. Yeah. Thiel invested money in a nightclub called Frisson after one of his friends bragged about a different nightclub in New York City that had co ed bathrooms. And so Frisson is largely based around its co ed bathrooms which are designed to provide couples with an easy way to fuck in a public bathroom. Because some people want that. That's at least the allegation from Chavkin's book that he builds this night because a friend is like, yeah, there's this fucking club in New York and you can have sex with your girlfriend in the bathrooms. And Peter's like, I need to own one of those in the West Coast.

[Noah Schachtman]

That's so Silicon Valley. It's like, yeah, yeah, yes, you've invented bathroom fucking.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, you've invented fucking in a club bathroom. Congratulations. Peter, like comes in one day dressed as Steve Jobs. Like I've had an incredibly great idea doing cocaine in a bathroom.

[Noah Schachtman]

Oh my God.

[Jack O'Brien]

This is going to revolutionize partying as a rich guy.

[Noah Schachtman]

Also for son is like the name of like a USA Network's like rom coms version of a club. Yeah, it's like that's where the guys from suits went to.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now it also hosted fine dining and I gotta say it works for a while. Although in a way that's creepy in retrospect. Chiefkin makes hay out of the celebrities that became regular quote. Lars Ulrich, Robert Redford. Kevin Spacey. What a party.

[Noah Schachtman]

Robert Redford.

[Jack O'Brien]

Cool, Fine. Yeah, Robert Redford. He's really the sandwich.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah, super cool. Lars Ulrich and Kevin Spacey.

[Jack O'Brien]

Lars Ulrich.

[Noah Schachtman]

Oh God. Because it's also like, that's like page 47.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah. Lars Ulrich and Kevin Space. God. Because yeah, that's like peak angry at fucking Napster. Lars Ulrich. And I'm not going to make allegations about Kevin Spacey given how litigious he is, but read something about Kevin Spacey. Just read something about Kevin Spacey and then make a guess as to what's going on in the bathrooms of Frisson. Casting for great movies. Obviously. So he tries his hand at publishing in this period too. And you are not going to guess what magazine he launches. What. What sport would Peter Thiel launch a magazine based around in 2002 or four, something like that?

[Robert Evans]

School Squash. I don't know. What are we.

[Jack O'Brien]

Squash. Okay, you got a guess, Noah?

[Noah Schachtman]

I mean, I thought you were giving us like the foreshadowing with pink pong.

[Jack O'Brien]

No, that would have been very. I would have respected the hell out of that if he had tried to get a ping pong magazine off the ground.

[Robert Evans]

What's that sport complain about all the time? Pickleball.

[Jack O'Brien]

No, not pickle. I don't really know that exists.

[Noah Schachtman]

Besides, pickleball is just like ping pong on a slightly larger court. Anyway.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Frisbee.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, it's ping pong for dads. Frisbee. Frisbee. No, Hanged by. I'm satisfied that none of you guessed. The magazine he launches is named American Thunder and it's about nascar.

[Robert Evans]

That sounds like a. First of all, that sounds like a dirty magazine.

[Jack O'Brien]

It may have been. It was a little bit pornographic. This is a psyop. Oh, yeah, he does this. The goal of this is he starts a NASCAR magazine and he hires only his right wing think tank friends to write in it. And their goal is to use NASCAR's cultural cachet with regular conservatives to push more of their extremist libertarian ideas to Republicans. That's the goal of American Funder. And it's wild to me. He puts $10 million into this magazine despite the fact that he is not interested in nascar. He brings his old Stanford Review buddies in. And the first issue, rather than like talking about NASCAR in a meaningful way, has like an essay about how the magazine is not going to embody any sense of political correctness, which at this. Maybe today that would work. At this point in time, the kind of people who buy a NASCAR magazine really just want to read about Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt. You know, like they're not interested in your rants.

[Noah Schachtman]

What if. Hold on, hold on.

[Jack O'Brien]

Wait.

[Noah Schachtman]

What if he had done that but with ping pong?

[Jack O'Brien]

That would be incredibly funny if he.

[Noah Schachtman]

Had just tried to red pill everybody through ping pong.

[Jack O'Brien]

His ping pong magazine is entirely about the gold standard. There's just a 45 page rant in here about euthanizing the poor. I was trying to buy a new racket. I still don't know what kind of table to get. Yeah. So yes, it seems to have been a badly disguised attempt to propagandize to normal working joes and this is embodied well by the magazine's Real Guys column. And here's how Chafkin describes that it was written not by an auto journalist, but by the online editor for the Weekly Standard, who devoted his first column to the idea that ESPN had been emasculated by namby pamby political correctness. The grub page where a normal magazine would have stuck the barbecue recipes included in. In its inaugural call.

[Noah Schachtman]

That's incredible.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. A possibly tongue in cheek anthropological discussion of why household cooking should be considered women's work. Everyday cooking is a chore few men ever get around to or even care to get around to. We are grateful that this is how things have worked out. So grateful we'll even help with the dishes from time to time. Fuck off. Just tell people how to fucking make a barbecue sauce, man. Come on. Nobody needs. Is this in their NASCAR magazine?

[Robert Evans]

Shut the fuck up. Jesus Christ.

[Jack O'Brien]

So it says a lot about the economics of magazines because if somebody hands me $10 million to start a media company, I think I could do a lot with $10 million. Peter's magazine is bankrupt by the end of 2005. It lasts about a year. So that's a pretty. I think even with magazine money, that's a pretty. You'd know more about this than me know, but that seems like a pretty fast burn rates.

[Noah Schachtman]

I mean, good on him, you know? Good on him. I'm sure there's some lavish photo shoots definitely. You know, featuring Camille Palia.

[Jack O'Brien]

Every NASCAR fan's favorite intellectual. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Lounging on top of a stock car. I'm sure there's some real, like, you know, a lot of like 90s technology devoted to, like, you know, Mussolini being photoshopped into Dale Earnhardt's machine.

[Jack O'Brien]

I wonder if we got. Because Dale Earnhardt famously helped lead a crusade against the use of Confederate flags at NASCAR events. I wonder if there's an angry column about that in this. I don't remember the exact year that that happened, though. Oh, yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's like bring back the General Lee.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. I wonder if that was a cause for these people.

[Noah Schachtman]

Dude. You know, the Dukes of Hazzard guys were in their. Somehow.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah. Jesus Christ. Peter Thiel's NASCAR magazine. The issues of that have to be a collector side at this point.

[Noah Schachtman]

Oh, my God. Read by exactly nobody.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. American Thunder is bankrupt by the end of the year. For song lasts a little bit longer. It makes it till 2008. Now, the fact that he's pouring money into these and all of them are loss leaders, you could say it doesn't hurt him. He's got plenty of money and neither of them have been about making a profit. Both were a. They were schemes to gain influence, right? The nightclub was a way of setting him up in the popular cool, hip celebrity set. And this magazine was an attempt to gain influence with the working class. Right? So the fact that neither of these make money doesn't disturb Peter, but he also knows that he's not going to be able to coast forever off of his PayPal money. And you know what? We here aren't going to be able to coast forever off of the money we already have from ads. So why don't you listen to a couple more.

[Kat]

Did you know a 2018 study showed half of prenatal vitamins tested had unacceptable levels of heavy metals? I'm Kat, mother of three and founder of Ritual. When I was four months pregnant, I couldn't find a prenatal I could trust, so I created my own. Ours is made traceable, third party, tested for heavy metals, and recently earned the purity award from the Clean Label Project. But don't just take my word for it. Get 25% [e-mail] podcast, whenever a homicide.

[Sloan Glass]

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.

[Audio Up]

In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy, Akron seem to have at 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.

[Jack O'Brien]

911 response. What's your emergency? My babies. Please. My babies.

[Audio Up]

One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.

[Jack O'Brien]

They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.

[Robert Evans]

You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now. Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling.

[Kat]

Myself, nobody's that crazy, crazy.

[Audio Up]

Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything. A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.

[Jack O'Brien]

She went batshit crazy. Shot and killed all her farm animals. Slaughtered them in front of the kids. Tried to burn her house down.

[Audio Up]

Audio represents the unborn. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Is your country falling apart? Feeling tired? Depressed? A little bit revolutionary? Consider this, start your own country.

[Jack O'Brien]

I planted the flag. I just kind of looked out of like, this is mine. I own this.

[Robert Evans]

It's surprisingly easy.

[Jack O'Brien]

55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.

[Robert Evans]

Everybody's doing it.

[Noah Schachtman]

I am King Ernest Emmanuel.

[Robert Evans]

I am the queen of Ladonia.

[Audio Up]

I'm Jackson, the first king of Capperburg.

[Noah Schachtman]

I am the supreme leader of the.

[Jack O'Brien]

Grand Republic of Montonia.

[Robert Evans]

Be part of a great colonial tradition.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, why can't I trade my own country? My forefathers did that themselves.

[Robert Evans]

What could go wrong?

[Noah Schachtman]

No country willingly gives up their territory.

[Jack O'Brien]

I was making rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warhead. Oh, my God. What is that? Bullets? Bullet holes. We still have the off road portion to go.

[Robert Evans]

Listen to Escape from Zakistan.

[Jack O'Brien]

And we're losing daylight fast.

[Robert Evans]

That's Escape from zaqistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Jack O'Brien]

Nine. One. One. What's your emergency? Someone.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

He said he was gonna kill me. Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer.

[Noah Schachtman]

Maybe, my dear Courtney, we're not done after all.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

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?

[Noah Schachtman]

Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home.

[Jack O'Brien]

I'll be waiting for you.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

Listen to the Murder Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

You're back. That was beautiful.

[Jack O'Brien]

Thank you. Thank you. I thought that was one of one of my better plugs by this point. Peter Thiel, the period, he's trying all this stuff out. He's also started a new company, an investment firm called Clarion Capital, which had been founded in 2002. Peter, not long after Clarium gets founded, is going to get it on the ground floor of investing in Facebook. He gets a 10% stake in the company. But that deal is also structured in some ways as a loan. This is one of those things that's covered a lot in the social network. Basically, he puts the stake in the company, which allows Facebook to survive in its early days, but he does so in such a way that in order to make the company viable, Zuckerberg has to ice out one of his other founders who has a 27% stake in the company, which he does. This is Zuck's big first betrayal, and you can see Peter is the puppet master in it. Again, these are all the kids who started Facebook. The fact that they are backstabbing each other at Peter Thiels and incitement, I'm not really all that interested in. It's like a mark of human evil. That just seems like the kind of thing that was always going to happen at Facebook. But you could see that Peter's the guy who corrupts Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know that I think that's really accurate. I think Mark was always willing to be corrupted. But that's one version of the story. Now, the play by play here has been covered enough in movies and our own episodes on Marky Mark. What I did learn reading Chafkin's recitation of events is that Peter is kind of. He kind of fucks up his Facebook investment. He gets in early on the ground floor, and he does make money, but he gets in on this first round and makes a profit. But when it comes time for another round of investments, he thinks the business is overvalued at something like 170 million. He thinks Facebook is overvalued, and so he fails to roll his investment forward. As a result, despite being famous as this early Facebook investment investor, he doesn't make much money off of Facebook.

[Noah Schachtman]

What?

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, he really does not make compared to what you would expect for normal people. He makes a lot of money off of Facebook, but for what you would expect. And based on how much, he does not make a lot because he bows out of subsequent rounds of investment because he doesn't believe in the company.

[Noah Schachtman]

His whole thing, investment number one, PayPal, which he then sells. Turns around in shorts.

[Jack O'Brien]

Kind of shorts. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

And then Facebook, which he does put money in, pits the founders against one another, maybe if they're doing anyway, and then doesn't really believe in it, so doesn't really maximize his investment.

[Jack O'Brien]

And this is. It's not. It would never be fair to say Peter has bad instincts because he is right about a lot. He's right that there's something in PayPal, but he's wrong about how much there is in PayPal. And this is actually going to be a real pattern in his investment investments where he'll understand something important, but not to the extent that allows him to actually make much money off of it. Or he'll get a guess. Right. But he won't commit to it to the extent that allows him to really profit from it. And I think that's a really interesting aspect of him. Right. That he has these good instincts in some ways, but that he also consistently fails to follow up on them enough. I find that very interesting and actually honestly kind of relatable, like as a guy who's made some of his bones predicting things and also I am aware of the things that I have been wrong about. I really find that kind of like. I get it, Peter. It's hard actually, you know. Yeah, totally. So as he's exploring life as a venture capitalist and kind of the early aughts, Peter continues his involvement with Stanford organizing a symposium on politics and the apocalypse. And this is prior to 2000. So the housing crisis is coming up. This is another one of those good predictions. Peter sees the housing crisis coming up. He sees that economic crumbling, but as opposed to just being like, oh, there's a housing collapse, it's going to be a real problem. And there will be some financial opportunities as a result of that problem, which the big short guys all see. Right. Peter sees the collapse coming, but he assumes the whole system is going to crumble. Right. He literally thinks the housing collapse is going to destroy the entire US government, basically. Right? What? Yeah, yeah. So again, he's like, you're right, but not in the way that allows you to like, but you also are wrong in a way that means that you can't really profit off of the initial rightness there. Right. You see the problem and then you massively overextend it because of your ideology. And so you fuck up at profiting from this moment in American history.

[Noah Schachtman]

So he like, Y2K the housing crisis, what year was. Did the Mayan say civilization was supposed to be destroyed? Like 2012.

[Jack O'Brien]

2012. 2012. So that was going around at this point in time.

[Noah Schachtman]

He was just a little early for the Mayan apocalypse.

[Jack O'Brien]

Maybe Kevin Spacey told him about the Mayan apocalypse during a dinner at Frassado.

[Noah Schachtman]

Thought that he's like, okay, there's all these like derivatives, they're problematic housing rate. You were giving mortgage loans to too many people, therefore collapse of all Western civilization.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yes. And I think it's because he sees that banks and stuff are going to go under, but he doesn't see that the government is going to respond in any way to bail them out and prop up the system. Right, right. Which is such an interesting shortcoming to not see that like the people running the system have a sense of self preservation. Right. Like what you say about it, like Obama or even if it had been Bush's, none of them had a desire in the entire financial system collapsing.

[Noah Schachtman]

No, definitely not.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Writing in 2021 for the New Yorker about this Politics and the Apocalypse symposium, Anna Weiner summarizes Thiel's contribution, later published in an essay titled the Straussian Moment was built on the premise that September 11 had upended the entire political and military framework of the 19 and 20th centuries, demanding a re examination of the foundations of modern politics. The essay drew from a grab bag of thinkers. It mediated on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and then combined ideas from the conservative political theorists Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, who wrote about the inadequacies of liberal democracy with the work of Girard to offer a diagnosis of modernity. A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars. Wrote today mere self preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment. And there's so much there. There's so much there.

[Noah Schachtman]

First of all, this guy is fucking messy.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, he's so messy.

[Noah Schachtman]

This guy is out of fucking control. It's like the whole point of terrorism is to overreact and this guy wants to overreact.

[Jack O'Brien]

We have to overreact. Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's so hard that he wants to overturn the Enlightenment.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's like what the fuck commands?

[Jack O'Brien]

I think it's because he's writing about like, America doesn't care for religious wars, but we've been forced once. Like, but Peter, you're a Christian culture warrior, right? Like you have these very weird ideas about Christianity and morality that you are kind of trying to force on people through your politics. That's a religious war, Right. To say that America doesn't care for religious wars and then to look out at 2020's US politics is a wild thing. Right? And it's. Yeah. Just a fascinating statement for him to make. Right. This idea that like. Yeah, yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

I mean, look, all the problems that we had after nine, 11 or a lot of them were because fragile men like him overreacted, freaked the fuck out, treated it like a religious war rather than as, you know, some kind of act of terrorism, treated as some kind of like, apocalyptic conflict.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, we have to engage in this clash. Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Oh, my God.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, it is. That's part of what's interesting to me is that again, for all the desire to be seen as this life, like contrarian, standing apart from the herd, he's just a neocon, like, at this period at least. Like, how else do you look at this, right? Because, like, a big part of him after this point and in this post PayPal period is he's still scared and frightened of 9 11. And he is obsessed with the idea that 911 has proved we need to give up freedom for security. This is where he really jettisons a lot of those libertarian ideas. Right. He describes the ACLU's attempt to. To protect civil liberties in the post 911 period as an unviable anachronism. He acknowledges that the 20th century included a great deal of programs that claimed to exist economically to develop the third World, but really just extracted or put more cash in the hands of dictators. But he also argues that this doesn't explain why people from the Global south would want to attack the West. His reasoning and his way of looking at Osama bin Laden is that this is a rich kid, right? And so all of these arguments about how, like, we can stop terrorism and we can stop these kind of conflicts between the west and other parts of the world by increasing economic development in those areas are bullshit because Osama bin Laden was rich. And like, what? The fact that Osama, like, Osama did not start the conflict that he was a part of here, right? And like, the fact that he was a rich kid, it makes sense in the way that, like you, Peter, were a rich kid who decided that you want to destroy democracy. Right? Like, that is the class of people who tend to become revolutionaries often come from a degree of financial privilege, because those are the people who have the time and the space to think about stuff like overthrowing the system in the. And who have the resources to go about doing it. This is not an uncommon story in history. The fact that bin Laden becomes this kind of guy is no weirder than the fact that Peter becomes this kind of guy. Right?

[Noah Schachtman]

Game recognizes game.

[Jack O'Brien]

Game recognizes game. And like, the fact that Osama bin Laden was not an aggrieved poor person doesn't mean that the economic betrayal of the Global south isn't an important factor in geopolitical Instability. It's a lot of what Peter says is that, like, you can't stop instability and conflict by helping to improve living standards in poor countries because Osama bin Laden did 9 11. Fucking nuts.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's like two sentences that have nothing to do with one another.

[Jack O'Brien]

Okay, Peter, it's unbelievable. Yeah. And it's such bushy and logic again for this guy who really wants to stand apart from the herd. This is just the kind of shit my parents were saying in 2005.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's also completely wild that then this guy goes on to basically be one of Glenn Greenwald Bald's big backers, right?

[Jack O'Brien]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's like some weird, like, twisted horseshoe. Also, it's like this guy. So this guy's basically just like more Christian Dick Cheney.

[Jack O'Brien]

More techie Dick Cheney. Yeah. More techie and probably more Christian. Yeah, you're probably. That's probably accurate.

[Noah Schachtman]

Dick Cheney with more frisson.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, with more frisson. Yeah. A little more Kevin Spacey too, probably. No, no, no, that's not an LA allegation we're making.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

So Thiel's analysis, I think, is inch deep here because he's in this period and I'll say somewhat understandably, because everyone was entirely focused still on 9 11. Now the problem for Peter is that, and this is kind of what bin Laden like. Peter falls into bin Laden's trap perfectly here. He sees 911 as this singular incident and it clearly terrifies him. And he writes that this proved to him and proved to the world that, quote, a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented levels of damage and death. And this is why everything about liberal democracy, about civil rights has to change. Right. Is that now we know it's possible for a small number of people to kill a large number of people. Right. And that that completely changes the game. Now, I don't think Peter's being entirely honest here because that's not what scared him about 9 11. The 21st century has been a century of air and drone strikes of small numbers of people murdering large numbers of people in countries all over the world. World. Peter doesn't care about these dead people because he's never going to get stuck in a war zone. Right. That's part of why he got a New Zealand citizenship for himself. Right. It's because he's not going to be anywhere close to a war. 911 shatters Peter Thiel. Not because it proves that small numbers of people can kill large numbers of people, but because it proved that a small number of people could kill a lot of rich people. Right? And I'm not doing the whole justifying 911 thing, but, like, 911 is a strike on the financial center of the country. A lot of CEOs, businessmen, people who were exempt, executives at big companies die in that attack. An attack on the World Trade Center. Peter can see himself as being a victim of that. He very well might have been in the World Trade center. Right? Like, that is the kind of thing that could have affected him. And that's why this scares him. Right? It's not that a lot of people or a small number of people can kill a lot of people. It's that I am not safe as a wealthy businessman. Right? Like, someone could kill, kill me. That's why this fucks him up.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's interesting that, like, you're the degree to which the people that really freaked out over 9 11, like, none of them actually lived in the places where 911 happened.

[Jack O'Brien]

No.

[Noah Schachtman]

Like, I say, this is a New Yorker. Like, New Yorkers did not freak out over 911. Like, but people, you know, from fucking uranium mine South Africa, who relocate to Palo Alto, they're the ones that lose their minds.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Because, oh, my God, I might have been in a place that was my entire life is about separating myself from the masses and gaining a sense of safety and value as a result of that. And I could have just died like everyone else. I also think that's why he's so scared of death. It's not just the cessation of his own being, but death. Inevitably, the fact that you will die, this is true of all of us, links you to. To everyone who ever has and ever will live. Right? It is one thing we all have in common. Everyone will die. And Peter hates the idea that he has anything to do with everyone else, that he has something in common with the rabble. That there is a thing that inevitably, inextricably binds him to a poor man in fucking Delhi. Right? They're both gonna die. And in fact, that guy living on the street of Delhi might live longer than Peter just because, you know, shit happens, right? Peter could be the victim of an attack someday, and then maybe he'll be outlived by a poor person, right? Peter cannot handle this reality. It drives him mad.

[Noah Schachtman]

My brain is fried right now.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

I'm just. I'm trying to make the logical inferences this dude makes. And I'm having trouble doing it. Like, I don't understand. Like, there are people, tons of people I disagree with, and I see how they get from a To B. This is like from A to the symbol for. You know, for boron or something. I don't understand, like, where it is he's even coming from.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's. Yeah, yeah. Because it is confusing, I think. What if I had to describe it, it's oppositional defiant disorder with main. Like, merging with main character syndrome. Right? Like, that's kind of how I would look at Peter here. Now, later, in that same essay, he thinks back. He goes back to the philosophical writings of Gerard on mimetics, arguing that the need to keep up with your neighbors leads to an ever escalating rivalry. He declares that the disturbing truth of mimesis has been suppressed and in the same breath notes that envy is a mortal sin in Catholicism. The conspiracism is weird here, but it's no weirder than what Thiel goes on to claim about ape anthropology. This is again an essay about 9 11. At the core of the memetic account, there exists a mystery. What exactly happened in the distant past when all the apes were reaching for the same object, when the rivalry between memetic doubles threatened to escalate into unlimited violence? I don't know. That moment occurred. Peter, what are you talking about, man?

[Robert Evans]

Weirdo.

[Jack O'Brien]

Stop this shit. Stop reading Gerard. What the fuck are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

Literally, stop reading Gerard.

[Jack O'Brien]

What he's saying here is that there's this because we want things, because we see other people having things or wanting things, and that forms through this memetic process, our system of desire, and that this truth has been suppressed by the secret masters of the world to some extent. And there's this mystery of, well, how did we avoid this kind of escalating sense of jealousy and rivalry for things escalate into this unlimited violence that would have destroyed the species. And the answer is we figured out how to scapegoat individuals in order to stop from mass killing. And Peter has to think in this way because he has this very narrow view of anthropology that's informed by Gerard's writing and this concept Gerard has of war of all against all, right? And that the only way to avoid this is to gradually drive the combatants to gang up against a scapegoat. Right? Now, among other things, if we're just talking about ape, if we're talking about anthropology, this is all ignoring the degree to which primates work together and collaborate, which is also like, as much a war. And conflict is certainly a part of primate evolution. You can find, like, apes, different kind species of simians go to war with each other in, like, a very Recognizable way. You can see that with like chimpanzees and the like. But they also collaborate and work together. Right. Like just picking the one side of things, like how they fight for resources and ignoring how they team up in order to get resources and make a better life for themselves is kind of cutting out half of existence.

[Noah Schachtman]

This is. Yeah, it's like, what do you only watch, like the first 10 minutes of 2001 on infinite loop?

[Jack O'Brien]

Yes, yes, yes. That's the whole basis of his understanding of like memetic reality. Reality. It's like, yeah, monkeys fight.

[Noah Schachtman]

It's so weird.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's really fucking.

[Robert Evans]

Noah and I have had the same face of just like the last 10 minutes again.

[Jack O'Brien]

Studying philosophy is sometimes a problem.

[Noah Schachtman]

This guy needs to take one walk in the woods.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Like, this guy needs to like, I don't know, like, read one of other book.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's the fucking having that experience of life. If he'd been in a car wreck as a younger man and had a bystander come and pull him out of the wreck could have changed his whole impression of humanity. But instead he's like, we're all apes and we need a scapegoat. Everyone's going to break down and be fighting and killing each other unless we like. And you kind of get the idea that, oh, so this war against Islam you see as a scapegoat and maybe now these kind of attacks you're kind of working on against the trans community, against all these different enemies of conservatism, you see this as like, I have to give people a scapegoat in order to stop them from taking the things I have because they're going to want the things I have because they've been influenced mimetically to desire the same things that I have received. I think that's really kind of a core aspect of his understanding of how the world works.

[Robert Evans]

Such a stream person.

[Jack O'Brien]

At the end, at the ending of this article, this very weird article, Peter comes around to the subject of monarchy arguing myth transfigured the murdered scapegoats into gods. So human beings created scapegoats so we could avoid murdering each other. And then we turned those scapegoats into our early pagan deities, which is like, again, weird. I don't get that at all. I guess there's some Greek gods who that kind of makes sense for, right? Like Prometheus maybe, but I don't know. How is Zeus a murdered scape? What's the murdered scapegoat? That's the basis of that or like, I don't know, man. I think you're maybe like, where's. How does Ahura Mazda fit into this kind of shit? Like, that just seems like a weird statement by a guy who hasn't read a lot about world religion.

[Noah Schachtman]

I feel like this whole fucking thing is like, dude was on ketamine and just like writing down whatever came to mind, like whether it linked together or not.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Cause it just doesn't. It feels very college level philosophy to me. And it also feels like a guy who's trying to justify being an asshole to other people and manipulating them as like, this is the only way that human beings work.

[Noah Schachtman]

Is he the scapegoat? Like, is. Poor little.

[Jack O'Brien]

I think he's afraid he could be. I think he's afraid he could be. Right. I think that's kind of what's going on here is that like, fundamentally he is try. Part of why he's into right wing politics is he wants to make sure he never is. That there's got to be a scapegoat and it might be him if he's not careful. So he's going to make sure it's someone else. Right.

[Noah Schachtman]

So it's. Cruelty is the point. But like in a good.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah. Yep. I think that might be it. Anyway.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah. This is the stunned silence that means right now. Just because, I mean, this is fucking dark and weird, even for this show. I'm sorry.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. It's getting into Peter Thiel's head is not a comfortable place to be.

[Noah Schachtman]

I don't like it here.

[Robert Evans]

No, he's not just weirdo. He's a sicko. He's a sicko.

[Jack O'Brien]

He is a sicko. He's a sicko. Or all of this is part of some cunning lie that he told a bunch of interviewers over years, in which case he's even more of a sicko.

[Robert Evans]

I was gonna say sicko times two.

[Noah Schachtman]

Then he's like Stephen King.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Noah Schachtman]

Yeah. Then he's creating that weird hotel in Colorado or whatever.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. He's not.

[Robert Evans]

He's not Stephen King. Nobody's Stephen King. Stephen King isn't even Stephen King.

[Jack O'Brien]

No, not since he quit the blow.

[Robert Evans]

Well.

[Jack O'Brien]

That'S why we're not going to get a Kujo sequel anytime soon. Unless there's already been a Kujo sequel. Yeah. Oh, I do want to see Peter Thiel read Kujo sequel.

[Robert Evans]

There you go.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's a good suggestion. Oh, man. That could have been his. That might have been what made him happy.

[Robert Evans]

And what we're only halfway through this saga, Robert. Oh, cool.

[Jack O'Brien]

We haven't even gotten really to Palantir. We've just laid the groundwork.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wait, maybe Trump is Cujo, too.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, Trump's his Cujo. That's right. That's right. And that Peter Thiel doesn't remember writing him. Yeah, it's my favorite Stephen King fact.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wait, is that true?

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Yeah. I think the quote from him was something like, kujo is a great book. I wish I could remember writing it. It was when he was really on the stuff, you know?

[Noah Schachtman]

Good for him.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah, man. That's how you know you're one of the greats if you write Cujo while fucking Snowblight.

[Noah Schachtman]

That's incredible.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, that's fucking awesome. Everyone go read the Stephen King book. Noah, you got anything you want to push?

[Noah Schachtman]

No. You can find me at Noah Shackman. That's N o a h S H a C H T M a n on your social platform platforms. I write for a bunch of different places. Rolling Stone, Wired, and New York Mag, and even got some for the Times coming up.

[Jack O'Brien]

Hell, yeah. Hell, yeah. Excited.

[Noah Schachtman]

Peter Thiel. Thank God.

[Jack O'Brien]

No. No. And listen, folks, if you're at home, don't do cocaine. Just go to your nearest gas station and ask them for whatever pill has the most amphetamines in it. Or buy that or don't take it. There's one called Addies, like Adderall, but it's just a shitload of caffeine and beer. Oh, yeah. The kind of shit that's legal to sell as energy pills is amazing.

[Robert Evans]

On that note, which one?

[Noah Schachtman]

Kratom.

[Jack O'Brien]

Kratom. Oh, Kratom's the best.

[Robert Evans]

Robert loves the Kratom.

[Jack O'Brien]

Imagine if someone. Imagine if someone took OxyContin and then just made it so it couldn't easily kill you. And also, it was sold unregulated in every gas station in the United States. That's Kratom.

[Noah Schachtman]

Wow.

[Jack O'Brien]

Good stuff. Yeah, it's what I take it all the time.

[Robert Evans]

He loves. He loves the Kratom.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's wonderful.

[Noah Schachtman]

Really?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Kratom.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's. It's a little bit caffeine, a little bit painkillery, but it won't shut down your lungs. Like, it's not a central nervous system depressant.

[Noah Schachtman]

Is that the tagline Kratom?

[Jack O'Brien]

It won't. It won't kill you in the same way that opiates kids do. It's great. I love it. Be careful with it, though, folks. It is a drug.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes episode every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Kat]

Have you heard about the 2018 study that showed half of prenatal vitamins tested had unacceptable levels of heavy metals? No. Well, now you have. I'm Kat, mother of three and founder of Ritual, the company making traceability the new standard in the supplement industry. I remember staring at my prenatal vitamins and finding all these things I was trying to avoid. High amounts of heavy metals, synthetic colorants, and unnecessary ingredients. So at four months pregnant, I quit my job and started Ritual because I believe that all women deserve to know what they're putting in their bodies and why I'm so proud of our prenatal vitamin. The ingredients are 100% traceable. It's third party, tested for microbes and had heavy metals and recently received the purity award from the Clean Label Project. You see, we trace like a mother because, let's be honest, no one cares quite like a mother. But don't just take my word for it. Trace for yourself with 25% [e-mail] podcast.

[Sloan Glass]

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.

[Audio Up]

From. Audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring Comes the Unborn. A shocking true story.

[Jack O'Brien]

My babies. Please. My babies.

[Audio Up]

One woman, two lives and a secret she would kill to protect.

[Jack O'Brien]

She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids, tried to burn their house down.

[Audio Up]

Listen to the unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

It's been 30 years since the horror began.

[Sloan Glass]

911, what's your emergency?

[Robert Evans]

He said he was getting Kill me.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

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?

[Noah Schachtman]

Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you.

[Jack Beast Thomas]

Listen to the Murder Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Kat]

Hey, I'm Jack Beast Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect originally 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 podcasts.