Part Three: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy

Robert tells Noah how Peter Thiel went to war against Gawker and also completely whiffed on profiting from the 2008 financial crash. Bonus: how Palantir enabled a bunch of creepy corporate security types to stalk their girlfriends, each other.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, What's dying in darkness? My Democracy? I'm Robert
Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. We're coming on recording this
the day that The Washington Post is getting attacked online
for not endorsing anybody in the election, which I'm grateful
for because it means that no one hasn't noticed that

(00:22):
Cool Zone has also not put in our endorsement for
the twenty twenty four election, which is really good because
every year, you know, we advise people to vote for
the same man, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now to talk about
our greatest president and I think our greatest future president.
Noah Shackman, Noah, how are you feeling? Do you think

(00:44):
Nixon's got it this year? You think he's going to
pull out a win.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
I thought you were saying I was your greatest future president.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
You could be, You could be, but you need to
be a little more Nixonian. You know, have you considered
trying to destroy the world while drunk and only Henry
Kissinger being the one that can stop you?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
No? I haven't, so I guess I'm not qualified.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, that is a bummer. No. You are a contributing
writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, and you're
here to talk about pe Tizzy, which Peter TiAl does
not go by. And well, probably if he was not
committed to destroying us after the first two episodes, that
nickname is probably going to get us attacked.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, you're definitely yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
We're done. We're done here everybody. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
How do you feel about the news today? Is it good?
You happy? Happy about the news?

Speaker 2 (01:43):
The Washington postling.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
I don't know whatever news is happening today. I assume
something else went down, right, somebody died.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm excited. The Yankees are playing in the world. Cheers.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
That's good. That's good. Bill Clinton called Kerry Lake attractive.
It's been an exciting week for everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
I mean, you know, tiger can't change the stripe.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
From yeah, yeah, if we want to call him a tiger,
yeah yeah, so uh yeah, let's uh, I guess let's
get back into the old Peter Teal game. I'm I'm
I'm ready to talk about him. You're ready to talk
about him? Yeah, I will bums away. If you're a journalist,

(02:29):
which you know two thirds of us are in this call.
December seventh, two thousand and seven ought to be a
date that lives an infamy. That was my my Pearl
Harbor joke, But it's also a joke referencing the Gawker lawsuit,
because that is the day that Gawker, via its tech
website Valley Wag published an article with the title Peter

(02:50):
Teal is totally gay people Now Valley Wag, which was
you know, the again, like the tech imprint of Gawker
had been writing about Peter Teel for a while, and
they had published articles kind of insinuating that Peter was
gay for quite a while. The company founder, Nick Denton, was,
to his credit, someone who recognized early on that Peter

(03:10):
was not just another rich investor guy, but somebody who
was amassing significant power and had a weird ideology and
should be covered. Unfortunately, the downside of it was that
Nick's instincts were, you know, this was a messy time
for digital media, shall we say, and Valleywag was not

(03:30):
at this point entirely conducting itself in the best traditions
of a journalistic enterprise. Right. And while I think an
argument can be made, a strong one that Peter being gay,
given his funding of the Republican Party, is to a
degree relevant to the public interest. The way in which
Valley Wag reported on this initially was not a public

(03:52):
interest story, right, Like that title, Peter Teal is to that,
that's not a we're we're getting out necessary information title, right,
that's kind of that's being extremely caddy right.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
By the way, our guest today is no chef.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
And why are you slipping me in on the caddy
outing here?

Speaker 1 (04:14):
I introduced him this this much.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
I haven't Catalie outed anybody in the Yeah.

Speaker 3 (04:23):
Robert definitely did forget to introduce you last time, but
we redid it. We did it, and it was fine.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
I got it.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
This time gets his credits because.

Speaker 4 (04:34):
They're thank you get your.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
Credits, Robert.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
I would credit you too if I could.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
Do you remember this, Noah, when when Gawker outed Peter,
because I didn't catch it really at the time, but
I was a baby at this point.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
I didn't. I didn't either, but I did know, you know,
the Nick Dent and Crewe and Nick a little bit
back then, and honestly, so many of the people involved
were so fucking whacked out on powders and pills you
probably forgot they even did it.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
All of the money that was going around in digital
media back then. I think it would have been hard
not to be whacked out on powders and pills, but
you could. This is not like the Post wouldn't have
done this reporting in this way, right, or the New
York Times. You can think of that what you will,
but like this was this was a little messy. I
think probably. I mean, Peter never sues over this, but
this is the inciting incident of what he gets angry

(05:29):
at them. So I don't think this would have been
something that could have been adjudicated in court. But it
is something that if you're kind of going on, where
does Peter Teal have a right to privacy? Like if
you're arguing that because of his advocacy, you know this
is relevant, which I think is an argument that can
be made strongly. You probably want to be a little

(05:51):
bit clearer in making that argument than Peter Teal was
totally gay folks. Yeah yeah, yeah, Now again, I I
that's that. I don't think like the fundamental issue here
is that they out at him. I think it's just
more that like, yeah, it's kind of a kind of
a grotty way to do it. Do you say grody?
I did? I did I am a high school girl

(06:13):
in two thousand and four. Wow, late nineties, right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
I thought it was more of an eighties thing, but hey,
you know.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah, it's probably more of an eighties thing. Yeah. So
the you know, this had been Valleywag had been kind
of poking at Peter for a while, right. They had
been making before that article some kind of veiled claims
about him being gay, and Valley Wag is kind of
certainly writing more on like the what do you call it,
tabloid end of things. Right at this period of time,

(06:44):
Goker is going to professionalize in the period you know,
before they get sued into oblivion by Peter, But in
two thousand and seven they are still very much like
new kids on the block. We don't really give a shit. Now.
The question that comes to if you've read about Peter
Teal is like, why did he get so offended at

(07:05):
the fact that he was outed? Because by all accounts,
he was pretty open in his personal life, Like, it
doesn't seem like this shocked even his like Republican colleagues,
people who had gone to Teal parties, who like knew
him personally, who had got to his nightclub, like he
didn't like, go to extreme lengths to hide this fact

(07:25):
about himself. Instead, what seems to have enraged him was
not the specifics of the fact that he was outed,
but this line from the Valley Wag article. The only
thing that's strange about teal sexuality. Why on earth was
he so paranoid about its discovery for so long? Now
I wouldn't really that didn't not line doesn't stick out
to me. But here's from an article in The Atlantic

(07:48):
which interviewed Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book about the
Gaker case. Here's here's what Ryan said about why that line,
in particular like tweaked Teal. He thought Denton was implying
that Peter had psychological problems. When you read the comment,
it doesn't feel that way. But Teal thought, here's the
publisher of a media outlet, not just a blogger, going

(08:08):
after me. The blog post felt like the first article
after years of negative Golcker coverage against Teal.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
I mean, look, I do think it like it feels
weird when you're on the other side of it, And
I think, like you know, for those of us like
write and broadcast right it like you wanna you sometimes
want to take a spin on the other side of
the camera, so to speak, and see how that stuff feels.
On the other hand, like what's he doesn't seem to

(08:34):
have made it a secret, doesn't seem to have been
a big deal. On the other other hand, you know,
I think outing people's fucked up and yeah and so
and I feel like, you know, people's sexuality is like
their own, uh is their own choice. On the other
other other hand, like you know, if you're going to
embrace some weirdo, like you know, retro seventeenth century ideology

(08:59):
about really and empower, then you know, then you might
have to grapple with its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. So, I
don't know, it's.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
A tough one, Yeah, it is. It is kind of
a tough like this is I think a useful thing
for people who are interested in the ethics of journalism
to comment on. I don't think it's interesting like the
specifics of why Peter gets angry, this idea that he
was mostly pissed that Goker had maybe insinuated that he
was not emotionally balanced. Now, the other argument you'll hear
here is that the primary real reason Peter was pissed

(09:31):
about this is that it was fine for him to
be gay and kind of open about it in his
private life with the people who hung out around him,
but not publicly open about it because who he really
wanted to keep this from or to re maintain plausible
deniability with is the Saudis Right, he has a lot
of business involvement in the Middle East and the Immirates

(09:54):
as well as in Saudi Arabia, and he didn't want
to be an out gay man traveling to in dealing
with these countries, right Like, he felt that that would
be damaging to his business interests. So that's the other
argument that you'll hear, and I'm sure it's probably a
number of things. In any case, it doesn't This is
like I think when I first was aware of this case,

(10:17):
most of the casual reporting was like, you know, Peter
Thiel got involved in wanting to sue Gawker and do
oblivion because they outed him, right like, that was the
DDT A to B. I think it's a little less
direct than that, And I think this is the picture
Chafkin page paints, the picture holiday paints and holidays. The
guys really seems to have gone into this. The most

(10:37):
is that this is what kind of gets Gawker on
Peter's radar and annoys him. But he's not committed to
taking them down yet, right, Like that's not going to
happen for years and years. So this is just kind
of like the beginning of the conflict that they have
in each other. So we're we're gonna move on here
and later we will come back to the story, but like, yeah,

(10:58):
this is this is how he's kind of kind of
starting to get angry at Gawker. And I do think
it's useful to holiday suggests that there's another reason why
Peter's pissed as a result of this, and it has
more to do philosophically with the kind of reporting that
Gawker is doing and what they represent about the media

(11:18):
in the digital age that Peter is kind of personally
repelled by, maybe even frightened of. And I'm going to
quote from an interview that he did again here from
two thousand and seven up until twenty twelve, Denton was
on a devil may care right of breaking rules as
a media publisher, and that was so diametrically opposed to
Peter's vision of quiet individuality. This belief that weirdos needed

(11:40):
to be left alone if they were going to change
the world. Peter saw that Gawker would punish people for
that weirdness.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
What yeah, I'm.

Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, I'm not sure how much. I mean, it's perfectly
fine for it's perfectly reasonable on Holiday's part to be like, yeah,
Peter's doing this because that's just how he feels. I
do think that's a very silly like.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
Give me a break. Yeah, what was teals uh Stanford
paper again? What were they doing?

Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah? Yeah, the Stanford where they were like outing professors
and stuff based on their political ideology and like his
best friend who wrote those anti AIDS columns like screaming
about how he hopes that this fucking gay professor dies
of AIDS or whatever, like.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, right, and so now, yeah, worried about what exactly?

Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, yeah, that that Dockers making it unsafe to be weird,
I you know, and Holidays more sympathetic to Peter in
this and that I then I certainly come out of
like if that is how Peter justified this to himself,
it's stupid or maybe it's just uh Ryan kind of

(12:46):
needing to find a more reasonable reason.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
I think there's yeah, put it in a different way, man, Like, Okay,
I've been as you can see from the gray hair,
I've been involved in journalism for a long time, and
I've been involved in tech journalism for a long time.
Back then was like the time of maximum subservience of
tech journalism.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
It was a critical industry. Yeah, not at all.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
I mean, like, if you think the political press of
twenty twenty five towards future press is bad, this is like,
you know, that would be a pale imitation of the
Silicon Valley press of that era. And so I think
Valley Bay Wagon its own you know, fucked up, weird
old way was like the only people that were like
bothering to penetrate or interrogate that or one of the

(13:33):
few people.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
They weren't socatively yeah, just completely subservient.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Yeah, now they were reflexively gross in some other ways.
And I said, yeah, yeah, a friend of mine worked
on that. But like, you know, I feel like some
of it was just like how dare you actually, you know,
not follow the rules of obeisance here? And how dare
you not kiss my ass? That feels like more part

(14:00):
of it.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably like, I think that's
probably a fair because this is actually what I came
up in tech journalism, And yeah, it was a completely
like Valleywag was one of the rare places where you
would get people who were trying to be confrontational to
these guys who were kind of worshiped at the time.
You would have to go far to find really critical

(14:21):
reporting on Zuckerberg, on fucking Steve Jobs, on a guy
like Teal. In this period of time, like two thousand
and seven is when that Forbes article on the PayPal
mafia that we quoted from comes out where they're like
taking a picture of Peter and all of his friends
and framing it like it's a like a film, like
a poster and stuff. So yeah, I do think and

(14:43):
I do think that's important context for like, we don't
want to I'm not like trying to deny how gross
a lot of the especially today, a lot of like
the way value Wig framed things was, but it is
important to note also the value of what they were
doing that like, well, at least they were confronting these guys,
you know, And it was it was two thousand and seven,
it was a different era. Digital media was new. We

(15:04):
can talk about like what the ideal way to confront
them would have been but like at least they were,
so I don't know, it's it's it's a it's a
messy time. Nobody's nobody. Nobody handled it perfectly now in
terms of how Chafkin interprets this, because Chafkin is a
lot it gives a lot less slack to Peter, and

(15:26):
his argument is that his argument is that like, after
this Gawker article comes out, Peter is angry but at
the same sense of the but at the same time
he's he's kind of like liberated by the fact that
he's been outed now, and that this is a big
part of why he becomes such an open not just
in funding of the far right, but funding of a

(15:48):
lot of his weird libertarian pet causes is now that
he has been outed, like, well, you know, maybe it's
gonna fuck with some of my business in the Middle East,
but at least I can be who I am openly now.
And I think there's a good case to be made
for that because it's after this article comes out that
Peter starts, for example, sinking huge amounts of money into

(16:09):
c steading, which is an art idea championed by weird
libertarians who wanted to build their own cities, independence of
the government in the ocean. Peter backs the Sea Steading Institute.
He starts funding these guys who are doing like little
burning Man style events which actually do sound kind of cool,
where they're like living in the sea or rivers and
stuff for days at a time. And he's funding this

(16:30):
this libertarian uh you know, kind of fail sun dude
who's a major c set steading advocate, and he's giving
like speeches and stuff. He's actually more into this. This
is not just because when you've got Teel money you
could just be a dilettante about something that you're casually
interested in. Peter is like giving speeches and writing essays

(16:51):
about how sea steading he thinks might hold some of it.
It's a sea yeah. Yeah, yeah, like homesteading, but on
the sea. Sea steading.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah. Look, tell me again, how did we get from
Peter toe is totally gay to Peter Teele is totally
sea stetting.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Well, Peter Teal Peter Teel, who has now been revealed
as gay, can be revealed can reveal himself also as
a weirdo libertarian and be like, look, you know, I've
been outed on this thing that I actually wanted to
keep quiet, So I might as well be open about
the fact that I think that we can replace governments
by living on the ocean and building floating cities. Why not?

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Again, Like, I feel like at every step it's like, dude,
this guy is like stuck in like second semester freshman year. Yeah,
it's like he like took some bong hit that like
he never quite recovered from.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
We all took a bong hit we didn't quite recover from. No,
let's not judge him for that is charged.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
I'm just saying that, like his particular like techno libertarian
you being dude, Yeah, what if we homestead it on
the sea? Yeah, and then no government could touch us?
We could be pirates?

Speaker 1 (18:06):
Are this is?

Speaker 2 (18:08):
Are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 (18:09):
This is the toughest part of the Peter Teel story
for me here because I have to report on this
and I don't like Peter obviously. I wrote like seventeen
eighteen thousand words on why he's a bad guy. I also,
I think this kind of rules. I do think it
kind of rules. I don't like it as a political thing.
It's like we're going to replace all the governments. But
I love the idea of I liked. Look, I watched

(18:32):
too much SeaQuest as a kid to not be attracted
to the idea of taking to the ocean to build Europe.
It's cool. I'm sorry, it's a cool idea. I like
fucking forgive me, wow, I like it. I think it's
neat what I'm sorry?

Speaker 2 (18:50):
What is se Quest? See?

Speaker 1 (18:52):
What is c God? Alien?

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Alien four?

Speaker 1 (18:56):
Albelievable? No. So back in like the mid to late
nineties when after after Star Trek to the Next Generation
really blew up when it was kind of like season
three or so starting to hit its stride, a TV
show that was basically Star Trek the Next Generation but
set in a future where humans had taken to the
ocean to like expand their living territory. And it was

(19:17):
the lead actor, like their picard was Roy Scheider, the
sheriff from Jaws, and he like ran this giant like
submarine city that traveled around and like kept the peace
in the underwater frontier. It was a good show. It
was a good show.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Yeah, Jaws on it too.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
No, No, But there was a dolphin character. There was
a talking dolphin. There was a talking dolphin which there
was supposed to be in the original Star Trek the
next Generation. I think there was watched that was something. Yeah,
because Gene Roddenberry was as he was a believer that like,
once we have a nuclear war, dolphins and humans will
like ascend together. Oh yeah, yeah, you might have been

(19:58):
friends with that guy who raped that dolphin. I'm not
saying he was in favor of raping dolphins, but there
was a John C. Lily raped a dolphin. Yeah, what
well do you guys know about John C. Lily?

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Peter Teele raped a dolphin.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yes, that is the allegation we're making on behind the bastards.
Thank you Noah for stating it, because now you you
and the iHeartRadio Corporation are both on are both on
the hook for making that statement for a dollar. To
be honest, I think the guys you think dolphins are
equal to human beings. I don't think Peter Teel cares

(20:31):
about dolphins very much, else he would have different politics.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Dolphins are cool, although I also.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Don't think he's molested a dolphins. So you know, some
of those pro dolphin guys did where do you stand
on molesting dolphins? Email Sophie, do you have any email technically, Okay, well,
I'm not going to read it.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
The contact page on our website.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
So we've hit about the point of two thousand and
eight or so, Peter is getting into funding Sea Steading.
He's getting more open, he's starting to put out more
money to like libertarian causes.

Speaker 2 (21:02):
Dolphins allowed on the sea stead you know, I.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Think that's going to vary from if I'm cea Steading. Yes,
dolphins are independent citizens with independent rights, but also they
have to abide by our laws, which is going to
be hard for some dolphins because some dolphins are scum.
But that's a separate question. What So, this is right
around the time two thousand and eight or so that

(21:27):
Peter Thiel starts reading the work of a fairly new
blogger on like the right wing scene, this kind of
underground hit who's particularly popular in the Bay Area tech
industry scene, a guy named Curtis Jarvin, who at this
point is writing under the name Menshus Moldbug. Now, we
did our episodes with you know, pretty recently on Minshus,
so I'm not going to go into a ton of

(21:47):
detail on him, but he advocates a return to monarchy
based around like small city states ruled by ceo kings,
Like that's his idea is like, it wouldn't it be
better if tech CEOs ran the world and like it
was a series of small city states that you could
travel in between, which if you've ever like had to
use the yeah, like all of us have. Have you

(22:08):
ever used any of the products these companies make, the
idea of them running an entire government is a nightmare.
But Peter thinks it's starting to think in this period
that maybe that's the right way to do things. And
I the open question always here is like does he
actually believe this is better for mankind? Because the thing
you'll get in Chaefkins writing and in Peter's own writings,

(22:29):
if you're trying to figure out, like why does he
think this is he has this belief that the tech
industry has ground to a halt, that human innovation is frozen, right,
that all of the stuff the tech industry is putting out,
or these like bullshit little products and like gadgets and
stuff that don't actually take us forward in the way
that you know, we had dreamed of going, you know

(22:51):
when Peter was a young kid, which you know is
to a degree true, although Peter's one of the guys
funding and investing in these bullshit projects that absolutely don't
take the species forward make a lot of money. So
does he believe that, like we need to do this
in order to actually increase innovation again because capitalist democracy
can't do it? Or does he? Is he just a

(23:15):
guy who wants to be more powerful and he's like, well,
if I'm a CEO, k I'm more powerful, right.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
And that I mean that's the okrans Razor answer. I mean,
like what the guy that in the future will fund
like the right wing YouTube is upset that tech isn't
being innovative enough.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Yeah, like you know.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
That that's just the real motivation here. I find that
hard to believe.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
That's what guy I always come back to is like,
but he funded all of the bullshit projects, Like he's
back in face, but he's like the first Facebook investor
that was there was never any chance that that was
going to take us into Star Trek future, right right right?

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, Like I I want to establish a multiplanetary species,
and the way I'm going to do it is by
putting some money behind two point.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
Zero Yeah, this guy built a website to rate chicks
on how hot they are. That's gonna that's really gotta
that's gonna bring us to the hover board's oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Got yeah on the SeaQuest.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Yeah, or put us on the sequest DSB. That's right.
That's thank you, thank you, And also everyone ri ip
Roy Scheider. You know, if there's ever been a better
drunk sheriff in film history, I haven't seen him. You
know the watch Go watch Jaws tonight, people. It's a
nice Halloween movie. So Peter starts shotgunning money to Yarvin
during this period of time as well. He invests you know,

(24:35):
like a million dollars something like that in the stupid
tech company project Yarvin has and I think there's probably
an additional chunk of dark money that he he could
And this is where this is. You know, we can
laugh about how inconsistent or an ethicle his like motivations are,
but the way he does this is smart because he
recognizes I really like this guy's writing. This guy is

(24:56):
putting out some stuff that's legitimately subversive on like the
role of democracy and how it's like doomed that I
think is useful towards where I want to see things go.
And he's right against such a way that is inherently
attractive and magnetic to other tech bros. So I want
to fund this guy as a way of like slipping

(25:18):
this drug into the supply of the Silicon Valley power
elite that's going to warp the way they think about
the world. And this is a very successful project. You know,
I don't know the degree to which all of that
is a plan from the beginning, but he really, like
like Yarvin, goes to parties at Peter's house and stuff

(25:38):
like they are tight, and I think this is very
much like a kind of part of his cohesive increasing
plan that like, this is a guy who's a reflexive contraryan.
He kind of hates ordinary people. He wants to be
able to rule them. He certainly wants to be locked
forever as someone who is above them. And he I
think finds very attractive idea of if we build go

(26:02):
back to a system that's this kind of neo monarchist system,
I can be enshrined like the House of windsor as
a permanent especially if I never have to die, right
as a permanent power and speaking of never dying, nova,
you know, who can't die, who cannot be killed. Absolutely
cannot be killed. I've tried to kill them. They won't die.

(26:23):
Is the sponsors of our podcast. We're backed before the
Yeah ship.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
That might be my new nickname.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
There's a crap.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Because I too have a shiny helmet and a third
rate Marvel super.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Oh no, you're a second rate easily. You're you're you're like,
you're like, you're like above Morbiustier. Wow. Yeah, better than
the MORBs. Yeah, you're Madam Webb. You're a Madam Webber
style character. You know what I do. I'd go so
far as ant man. And you know why that's a
big compliment is everybody likes Paul Rudd.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Everybody. It's true.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
I assume everyone doesn't like Paul Rudd, but a lot
of people do. It's very popular.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
He's a dad in Brooklyn. I like him.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Oh yeah yeah. And speaking of Paul Rudd, not at all.
Because Paul Rudd has not aged in thirty years and
Peter Peter puts a lot of money into life extension projects.
We connected it. We made it work, yes, specifically trying
to steal the blood of Paul Rudd to figure out
what's going on there, what's going on there? How you're
trying to play as a thirty nine year old man.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
It's incredibly takes a blood of teenagers and Paul Rudd, Yeah,
hold on, I want to give the Curtis Yarvin thing
that we're talking about before the is it a little
bit of it? Like, you know, Peter Teel himself got
sort of seed funding money as a weirdo reactionary right

(28:00):
back when he was a kid, and so he's just
kind of like paying it forward to this next weirdo reactionary.

Speaker 1 (28:07):
Yeah, paying it forward I think credits Peter maybe with
a degree of generosity, which is a weird term to
use for like right wing rullshit. But I think maybe
it's I think maybe if I'm trying to psychoanalyze Peter
and I'm not being fair here, but fuck it, it's
my podcast. Peter was willing to take that money and
preferred it to not having the money and not having

(28:27):
like a platform. But I also think he probably found
it kind of like emasculating maybe to need someone else's
money that like his first plans had failed and that's
why he had to take that right wing influencer grifter
money in the first place. And I think maybe there's
a satisfaction to him in having the shoeb be. On
the other foot, on now being the guy who is

(28:49):
funding those influencers, right, obviously he sees the value in
that kind of funding, right, So I think he's always
been kind of supportive of that, and maybe on the
if you're being you're giving him more credit as like
being less of a dick. All again, this is still
an evil thing to do. Maybe it's that he genuinely
is like, well, this money was there for me when
I was a fledgling right wing shithead. I got to

(29:12):
pay it forward, you know, and invest in the career
of another asshole.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
But here is Jarvin is specifically right, I mean, correct
me if I'm wrong, But Jarvin is like specifically promoting
guys like Peter Thiel.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
As yes God, yes, right, God, kings of the City
States that are going to replace the United States as
the doom of democracy comes down, right, Yeah, yeah, there
are neo feudalists right at the end of the day,
all they want is a fucking coat of arms and

(29:49):
a goddamn fucking march to listen to. You go to
the comments, you like, look up old czarist Russian the
band music and shit, you look at the it's about
all these guys being like, oh, if only we could
go back to the beautiful days of the Romanovs. All
of those guys are no less intellectually courageous than fucking
Peter teal Right, they just dress it up a little

(30:10):
less by masturbating over the fucking tzar. All of these
guys just want a tzar or they want to be
the czar, right, or they want to be you know,
the Czar's I think Peter wants to be a grand
duke or some shit.

Speaker 2 (30:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
The tsar is probably a little bit too much exposure.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
This would all be much funnier if you think of
them all with those giant curly Q mustaches, absolutely knee
breeches yeah yeah, powdered wigs.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
Yeah, or if you think about them all we could
just talk about what happened to the czars in a basement,
but you know that's probably ay. So Peter starts throwing
money into living forever. He invests a lot in a
guy named Aubrey de Gray who's running something called the
Methusla Institute, And yeah, Degray is like the most prominent

(30:57):
we could live forever if we just figure out the
right thing advocate up to the present day, he's still
sort of like one of the big names in this industry.
Depending on how you kind of read into things. I
think he's a guy who got a lot more credit
because I used to be interested in some of what
he had to say. I think maybe in I've come
around to it, he's more of a con man in the

(31:17):
modern era. That's not an allegation, but like that's kind
of my gut feeling about the dude. But he's certainly
he is not a right wing figure in this period. Degray,
if anything, would be more on the progressive side of
things in the early two thousands, like progressive left. So
the fact that Peter is funding him again, Libertarians are
kind of like more aligned with the left in this

(31:41):
period of time because of their opposition to the Bush
Party is a general rule, So the fact that Teal,
who is kind of a neocon in some ways, is
funding a guy like Degray might would not have been
seen as like, oh, it's this weird right wing billionaire
foisting money rights right, Like, That's just not how it
would have looked. He also puts money into cryogenics and
he's sure. There's some interesting interviews with him where he's like,

(32:04):
asked what he thinks would be a good human life span,
and he was like, I don't see why people shouldn't
live forever, right, But specifically he's what's kind of important
to note here is that Peter doesn't really have an
interest in making sure people live forever. That's not what
he's about. He wants to live forever. And he even
makes some specific statements about how I don't agree with

(32:26):
the ideology that death for every person is necessary, right, yeah,
And I think what's happening here is that, like again,
Peter is this kind of to his bones contrarian. He
rejects other people. And one of the things that bonds
all people together, no matter how smart you are, how

(32:46):
rich you are, who you are, is that everybody dies.
And that I think is what's most offensive about death
to Peter is that it it it kind of forever
locks him in as one of the herd, right, Like,
you're not fundamentally above the rest of mankind if you
die like everyone else. And I think that's the primary
reason why he's so obsessed with this, you know, like

(33:08):
he is he wants to be a pharaoh. He sees
himself as like a pharaoh type, right, that he has
owed this kind of eternity of power and influence because
he is so special. And the idea that like no man,
when it all comes down into it, you wind up
in the dirt like everybody else. Like that is the
most offensive part of this to him, even more than
like any fears about, you know, the the final cessation

(33:30):
of consciousness. It's it's being inextricably bound to everyone else
who exists.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
That is like more than that than just like scared
little man child with too much money who is just like,
oh no, this you know, this might happen to me,
and therefore I'm gonna like support this. Like guy who
looks like a wizard, who's gonna tell me, yeah, he.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
Does look like a wizard. Did you have you looked
up a picture of Aubrey de Gray or did you
just guess that he looks like a wizard.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
I just remind myself, this guy has got a beard.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Oh man, so fa, he looks like such a wizard.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
So they pull up that wizard ass, motherfucker.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
It's wild. It's like, yeah, honestly, it looks like one
of those things like there's like a kid hiding inside
the beard's.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Get off the gray ass son of a bitch.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, we'll just have Malcolm throw a picture up while
we're talking about it.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah. Yeah, find one that really makes him look like
a fucking wizard.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
There's really none that don't that doesn't They are all
wizard picks. Yeah, you know, I did did you fund
this guy directly or did he fund him through the founders.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
I think through the Founder's fund that he starts at Clarion.
I think that's where most of his money comes in. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Yeah, so I like sim like I ran across the
edges of this when I was reporting back in the day. Yeah,
I definitely. Like. There's a couple of other Founder's Fund
partners who are also equally into you know, wizardry and
life extension and stuff like that, and I was doing

(35:13):
a story on them. Specifically, they hired an in house
meditation teacher and guru who claimed that he could personally
enlighten them and bring them like universal consciousness and oneness
with the Buddha.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:28):
I mean, as far as I can tell, it totally worked, right,
I mean, what else would you do with your time
then support the end of American democracy if you're in Yeah. Yeah,
so anyway, and yeah, they were all into life extension
and all kinds of all kinds of stuff like that.
I didn't see Teal at that time, but definitely, like

(35:48):
there's a lot of his people that were in there.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Well, I think it's natural you kind of get super
rich in your early twenties and then you know, you
first concern after that, when you have more money than
you could ever spend, is like, well, I want to
live long enough to spend all this right.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
Right money than God. I want to be God.

Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, I don't know. Some of it's probably that, Like
I think, as a general rule, by the time you
get really rich, you're usually maybe probably closer to your
thirties than your early twenties for most of these guys.
And that is when feelings of mortality, you know, you
start to and you start to also at the early
stages of aging. There is a lot that if you
have shitloads of money for the right kind of drugs

(36:31):
and the right kind of like personal training and shit,
you can kind of push off the early steps of
aging significantly, and you can also do stuff like you
see this with both Teal and with Elon Musk. Once
they get rich physically, they change a lot. Initially, you know,
you can get the hair tramlance like Jeff Bezos, you
get on Hgah, you get a personal trainer, and you

(36:52):
start to convince yourself, wow, so much of what I
you know, when I was like a young kid just working,
I couldn't have a body like this because I didn't
have the resources to pay experts to maintain it for me.
And I'm able to what else is possible, right right,
And I think that's probably part of what's going on there.

Speaker 2 (37:10):
Also just getting a lot of money all once breaks
bad for you.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
That was a good part of like BoJack Horseman right
where there's that line where it's like the age at
which you suddenly at which you become a millionaire is
the age that you're like frozen at forever. You don't
really progress mentally past that point.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
May we all get to that point?

Speaker 1 (37:29):
May we all get to that point, you know, but
hopefully when you're like forty right as opposed to taking
the Zuckerberg route. So at this point, all of these
gifts that Peter you know, has been giving, it's interesting,
like he's a The primary thing that he's done at
this stage, right for all of you know, the money

(37:50):
and the high ambitions, is he has started cashed out
on and abandoned PayPal, and then he has launched an
investment firm called Clarium, and by kind of the the
second Bush term, Clarium is becoming a really big deal.
By two thousand and four, they had two hundred and
sixty million dollars under management, and within like a couple
of years, the fund was worth more than two billion dollars,

(38:12):
which is that it's double and triple digit growth for
most of its early years. It changes. People will say
it completely changed how venture capital works in the valley, right,
because it was such a successful company. The kind of
bets that Peter and his because all of the people's
staff there are his friends from PayPal and his like
right wing buddies at Stanford, right, who are also in

(38:34):
large part a lot of his buddies from PayPal, you know,
and he's kind of picking. He's finding guys who are
starting companies. Some people will allege their all guys he
finds attractive. You know. I don't know. I think that
sometimes it's just people being like, oh, this guy's handsome,
Peter's gay. That must be part of it. I don't
know that it actually is, but he's he's finding these
other founders and he's bringing them in. It is noted.

(38:57):
There's a couple of things that make Peter's fund really
different from other funds. For one, he's not interested in
people constantly making moves. He's fine if you only make
one investment a year, right. And again, he doesn't really
fire people. He's bad at that. He's bad at confrontation.
You can kind of wind up shuffled off to a
part of the company where you don't have much connection
to Peter if you fuck up enough. But like, he

(39:19):
doesn't like conflict. For as many sort of evil, fucking
confrontational things and people as this guy invests in, he
personally doesn't seem to have much stomach for conflict, especially
not with people he likes. So when it comes to
like what made Clarium super wealthy, one of the things
that was hugely influential in their growth was backing one

(39:40):
of the most toxic corporations on the planet, Opti Canada.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Now.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Opti is an Israeli Canadian company that is involved in
like taking bitchumen and extracting oil from it. And this is,
of all of the ways to get oil out of
the ground, bitumen extraction is like the most fucking poisonous,
right it is. This is the absolute worst way to
get oil for the environment. It is a hideously toxic

(40:06):
thing to do. And Peter and his company put a
shitload of money behind this, and it secures returns of
like sixty percent for them. And this is the period
Peter is very much anti kind of climate change. I
don't know how much he acts climate Chang's very pro
climate change. Yeah, I think he's anti anti like he's
I think he would say anti the ideology of climate change. Right.

(40:29):
And one of the things that's happened here is right
around like two thousand and six seven he he Elon
Musk and David Sachs fund a movie called Thank You
for Smoking, which I actually just watched the day that
Biden dropped out of the election. It still holds up. Yeah,
it's a good movie. It's it's a fucking what's his
name the guy who played two Face and the new
in the chrysn Ol in Batman movies. Yeah him.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, he was a disturbingly a handsome guy.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
Incredibly and like right, it is Aaron Eckert right at
his like the peak of him being a handsome, charming
son of a bitch. It's a good movie. Like it's
easily the best thing that those three guys were ever
involved with. It's based off a book by William F.
Buckley's son, which is Rhodesia Lover William F. Buckley. But

(41:14):
it's a good book, Like it is extremely libertarian, and
it is extremely early Aughts libertarian, and it's one of
those things. I think if you take the ideology that
the book's characters have completely seriously, then it's a lot
less enjoyable. But it's it's impossible to really do that
when you're watching it because there's just so many talented

(41:36):
people involved, and it's a good script. Again, Aaron eckert
is is just just soaking up the screen, and you've
got fucking JK. Simmons is kind of the antagon. There's
a lot of great people in that movie. Anyway, go
watch Thank You for Smoking. It holds up like believe
me people. But you also as you watch it think

(41:56):
like this is pretty true to Peter's actual unironic belief
about politics in the early two thousands, right, as opposed
to just like, well, this is a fun movie about
like these absolutely amoral merchants of disinformation, right.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
Right, yeah, come on, stop being so serious, why right?

Speaker 1 (42:15):
Right right? We're never going to wind up behind power
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:22):
Name.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
Peter's putting money into Thank You for Smoking and bitum
an extraction, and he's also kind of this is the
period where he's really started to relish being the famous
founder guy here, and he gets more open about everything
in his life. I'm going to quote from Chafkin's book
The Contrarian. Here, he began telling close friends and then
coworkers that he was gay, socializing in bars are on

(42:46):
the roof of his new house, often with the handsome
young men he was hiring, many of whom were out teel.
Self actualization would pay off. In August two thousand and seven,
four months before the recession began and close to a
year before most Americans realized the economy was collapsing, sent
a letter to investors declaring that the economic expansion was
officially over. We've begun a long post boom phase that

(43:06):
can be called the long Goodbye, the letter said. And
this is one of Peter's great successful predictions, right, which
is that he calls he starts writing in two thousand
and seven about the global financial crash that's going to
really hit in two thousand and eight. He is very
much ahead of the curve on this. A few months

(43:27):
after that two thousand and seven letter, right at the
start of two thousand and eight, just weeks after he'd
been outed by Gawker, Peter sends out a ten thousand
word essay to investors. And this is another thing that
kind of he's famous for as like a hedge fun guy,
is he will periodically write these massive political and philosophical
sometimes even religious essays and send them out to all

(43:47):
of his funders right to kind of explain their philosophy
at the moment. And a lot of this is like,
I have a lot of confidence in your fucking dorm
room ass musings. If you're sending this kind of shit
out of people are trusting to invest money in, I'm
guessing a lot of these wound up just kind of
like thrown into trash. But so he predicts correctly that

(44:08):
there's this crash coming. But he also I think, because
just of who he is, he over captastrophizes, right. The
two thousand and eight crash was really bad. He sees
that coming. He also thinks it's definitely going to cause
a depression, right, that no one is going to bail
out anything, and that the cycle of collapse will continue
absolutely unabated, will go on like a runaway sort of

(44:30):
freight train kind of deal.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
And so instead of doing what would have been the
smart thing as an evil investor, which is shorting the
housing market, right, tell you you have your people in
their risky positions with like companies that owe a lot
of money and fucking short the housing market, right in
order to make money off of what you can in
the immediate term and kind of avoid the consequences of
this cruel winter coming. Peter, he kind of continues in

(44:55):
this like apocalypse preacher persona and quote uh and states
that he is quote recommending prayer and repentance in lieu
of investments analysis insane things. They're right to investors. Yeah,
He's like, you should all repent to Christ. We're done.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
That's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
It's so sandwich board, is he what? Sorry? Yeah, Yeah,
he's basically doing like a fucking yeah sandwich board kind
of thing, right, is nigh.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Is there any chance, was there any chance that he
was just that was just a bit or he was
just kind of joke there.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
I think he's being I think maybe there's an element
of that, but he doesn't. His what he does financially
is also what you would do if you legitimately expected
total collapse, right, Like he does initially short the dollar,
and there are initial like high yields. Right Like he
bets against some companies that are taken up by large loans,
and their yields in the first half of two thousand

(45:54):
and eight go up to like five times their prior rate. Right.
Kind of at the height of this that between six
point four and like eight billion dollars under management, right,
and this is a fund that back in like two
thousand and two or three was two hundred and sixty million.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Right.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
So you can see why people are like, wow, this
is the future of investing. What a genius Peter is
And he looks like a genius in kind of the
early stages of that financial collapse. But again we're just
talking about the first half of two thousand and eight here. Now.
He described his school of thought on these matters as
being a global macro investor, which in his terms, meant
looking out at world events and basing your economic predictions

(46:31):
on kind of the vibe you felt about the times
in large, as opposed to the specific situation each of
those companies was in. He urged investors at Clarion to
make one trade per week, which chaf Can credits to
his combination of indecisiveness and high tolerance for risk. Quote.
Teal argued that the world was heading to end times.
Investment analysts often employ religious metaphors, speaking of the second

(46:54):
coming of bond yields or inequities apocalypse, but Teal was
not speaking metaphorically. The entire huge in order, he wrote,
could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence, famine, disease.
Wore a death against this future. It is far better
to save one's immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven,
in the eternal city of God, than it is to
a mass of fleeting fortune in the transient and passing

(47:14):
city of Man. And when you read it like that,
it's kind of hard to see that as not like,
I don't know, man, you're going If that's just totally
tongue in cheek, you're really going far with it.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, no, that is deep into the bit. I mean
you are really committing.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
You're you're far too committed to this bit, and it's
not a great bit.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Yeah, that is a whole life of Brian.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yeah right, right, Shit, that's so weird.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, this is this is a deeply weird guy.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
Yeah, it's such a fucking strange fella.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
It's pretty weird when like the young Blood transfer and
like bankrolling the like roided out wrestlers lawsuit over the
dudes are like sort of the bottom tier weird things
you do. Like the really weird stuff is the stuff
he says out and open to his own investors.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Yeah, well he's so strange.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Oh man, oh my god, I'm not going to be
as rich as I'm personally not, may not be as
rich as as I might have been before. My like
Wall Street buddies aren't going to be able to rapaciously
divide up loans the way they're were before. Yeure, society
is doomed.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
Were if you hate people and you fundamentally think that
they're like messy little scum who need to be ruled,
you can't imagine things would go bad. If you're scared
about a financial collapse, you have to imagine they are
on the edge of eating each other, right, because they're
They're not any better than animals, right, And I'm not

(48:45):
trying to shit talk animals. I'm just saying I think
that's how Peter thinks about things, right, I think animals
are much better than people usually. But that's I think.
I think I'm accurately describing. That's how I think Peter feels.
I'm basing that off of vibes, like Peter was basic
thinking about the collapse of the world. Right, But I
have as good a record with vibes as Peter does,

(49:07):
at least. Uh yeah, yeah, here's some ads and we're
bad anyway. That's all very weird that Peter is so
kind of married to the fucking Bible as a hedge

(49:28):
fund guy. But the weirdness does mask there's a real
insight here right in that Peter again, he's going to
fuck up on taking advantage of this. He extends it
too far. I also think his fundamental analysis is correct,
which is he argues in that paper that investors are
going to be unable to as the housing market comes
unwound and as these increasing contradictions in the way our

(49:51):
economy is set up become impossible to ignore. And I think,
although Peter won't admit this, climate change is a big
part of that, investors are going to be unable and
unwilling to accept that things can't continue growing at the
rates that they'd always been growing, right, that that's not possible,
and rather than accept the inevitability of contraction or even collapse,
they will start a process of massively overvaluing every asset systematically,

(50:16):
causing an endless cascade of bubbles in every sector. And
that is what happened, right, that's today, that's the last
twenty years. Right, Like, he's not fundamentally wrong, but he
also overextends how bad it's going to be and how
quickly it's going to be that bad.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
And the other bad move here is that if you
are a hedge fund guy, even though I think this
is fundamentally not incorrect analysis, it's a bad thing to
put out to the people investing money in you that
I think the end times are coming.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:47):
That does not make people want to keep money with you.
It doesn't make them want to invest more money with you.
It kind of makes them want to build bunkers and
maybe feel like they need some of that money liquid
to build bunkers, right right, Yeah, So Peter starts to
panic increasingly Later in two thousand and eight, as the
signs get worse, he holds meetings to Warren employees that

(51:08):
he thinks every brokerage in the country is going to
go under and there's going to be no currency, and
like he literally he has his company making sure they
have at least a couple grand or a thousand or
something on hand for every employee so that he can
keep his employees fed if all of the currency collapses.
They're talking about like buying gold bricks, like this is
like apocalypse hoarder nonsense. Nice, Like Peter is worried that

(51:32):
his employee best friends, who were his entire social group
are going to starve to death and he has to
make sure he has cash to pay for their food,
which is actually kind of sweet. Like it does show
Peter is to some extent capable of caring about other people,
if that's accurate, but not in a way that makes

(51:53):
them a good guy. But there's a degree of care there.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
I mean, I think it's like who else live to
serve him?

Speaker 1 (52:01):
Right right? I need to have I need to have cash,
so I can buy food, so I can maintain a
degree of control over these other people. So they have
to continue being my friends. Maybe that's it. Probably do
anything else?

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Did they learn kung food? They did they start shooting?

Speaker 1 (52:14):
You have to assume food. You have to assume there's
some stuff like you. I can't. I can't imagine that
you could believe this about the future and not be
buying guns and stuff right now. Peter's strong belief that
the tech bubble is going to burst and cause a
depression causes him to change, like clarium standard operating procedure

(52:35):
is that we're going to bet against the future stability
of the US economy, and that seems like that should
have been the first half of two thousand and eight.
That makes them a fuck load of money, right, and
in the second half it's going to cost them everything. Right. So,
because Peter's word is law, very little is expected of
his workers on a day to day basis, So life
of the company is like pretty chill during these early
apocalypse stages. According to chaef Gen, people played a lot

(52:58):
of chess and spent their free time to over how
they'd run a theoretical country if they had the freedom
to build it from the ground up. Quote. Everyone spent
a lot of time talking politics, although it was important
that those politics always be of the right wing variety.
An employee told me that it was common to hear
about talk about climate change denial and to see web
browsers open to v dare, a far right web site

(53:18):
with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. Oh,
we'll be talking about that. It gets a lot worse
in terms of Vdair's shit, my man's. This had been
a good enough strategy for years, but Peter's inherent distrust
of tech businesses is going to cause him to miss
a lot of opportunities here, as well as his belief
that like collapse is inevitable. He turns down a chance

(53:39):
to invest in Tesla, which might be understandable given his
history with Elon. Right, if I can, if I can
be like, well, I get why you would miss this,
because you know what a mess he is, right, but
that is undoubtedly it's a bad financial decision. To not
get involved with Tesla in two thousand and eight is
a poor financial mission, right. He also turned down the money,
the chance to put money into YouTube when it was

(54:01):
still a startup and that is a catastrophic bit as
a tech founder. Missing YouTube is a big one.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
That's also particularly funny because then later on he'll fund
Rumble the.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Right right Way YouTube.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Yeah right, yeah, so I think YouTube, but I got
assuming even better. I guess I got right wing YouTube
with Russell Brandan.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
And this is like, this is right right Around the
same time he neglects to invest in YouTube is when
he neglects to take part in like the second funding
round for Facebook. So he misses a lot in a
row here, and then two thousand and eight comes about
and right, and after these initial successes, he bets on
the idea. So he's he's made money the first half
of the financial of two thousand and eight, of the
collapse year, by betting on against the dollar. But then

(54:45):
he has this belief that as the as the collapse
starts to run away, he believes, not only are some
banks going to collapse, every bank is going to be nationalized,
right and because he thinks that the government is going
to have to take over all of the banks. I
think this is just because he's also a libertarian, so
his nightmare is like this, you know, the government taking
over everything. He decides unlike all of the guys who

(55:07):
make money off of, you know, the collapse. Unlike all
the big short guys, he decides not to short any
banks because he thinks that since the government's going to
nationalize them all, once they get nationalized, their stock value
is going to soar. And so after predicting the collapse,
he puts nearly a billion dollars into stocks and all
of these banks, and like another one and a half

(55:29):
billion or so into Google and fucking of all of
the places to put like eight hundred million dollars, fucking Yahoo.
He puts eight undred million dollars in such a whiff.
It's such a fuck up.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
It's so funny, man, It's so fucking funny. And I had, again,
as a general rule, I actually, compared to most of
our guys, I respect Peter, you know, not in a
positive way, but just in a like it's dangerous not to.
But I also had thought he had been much more
successful than this. And it's so interesting to me that

(56:06):
he fucks up on these big investments while getting the
bigger picture kind of fundamentally right, which is is so humanizing, right,
is that's such a human thing to do. I've been
there myself, where like you, you predict a big thing
correctly and your micro response to that you fuck up
because of who you are, right, right, that's so human.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
Yeah, but still, I mean, I think all banks are
going to fail, therefore I'm going to put a billion
dollars into them. Is wild? That is that.

Speaker 1 (56:41):
Government's obviously get to nationalize every bank, right.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Yeah, that's really sniffing too much of your own.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
Clue, it is. And it's like this, it's this failure,
it's this this belief that, like I believe that the
you know, the fucking Democrats who are going to come
into office are legitimately communists. They would never do the
capitalist thing of propping up the banks and just giving
these people free money to put a halt, like to
paper over their fuck ups. Right, Obviously they're going to

(57:07):
make this bid for ultimate power and nationalize everything, right,
And he's like, no, that's not what they did. Turns
out they are just owned by bankers. Yeah, sorry, sorry, Peter,
you guys won too much and now you've lost your money.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Just because you call every Democrat a socialist does not
mean in.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Fact, not what they are, not what they are. Good job,
So at the end of the year, and by you know,
the time Obama takes off as Peter has lost billions,
putting him in a similar bucket to people who had
failed completely to see that the crash was coming. After
being up by like five times in early to kind

(57:46):
of mid two thousand and eight, by the end of
the year, he's down five percent, right. And then, to
make matters worse, once kind of the collapse hits, he
dumps a shitload of his holdings while stock prices are
low because he assumes a deppression is and nothing is
going to rebound, and he needs cash. And then all
of this shit does rebound, and so he misses out

(58:06):
twice in a row. Here, investors begin to abandon Clarium,
which had been worth eight billion almost I think at
his at its height, and by the end of the
year was down to two billion dollars, like by two
thousand and nine, it's like a quarter of what it
had been at its height, right, which is a major
fuck up, you know, So yeah, fascinating stuff. Now, this

(58:27):
is where we also get back to Gawker, right kind
of two thousand and eight or so. Here I stated
earlier that Ryan Holiday argues Peter responded to Gawker's confrontational
tabloid expose style, right, which he saw as a danger
to weird geniuses like him who moved the species forward.
Chafkin makes a somewhat different argument quote Teal came to

(58:49):
believe that the real reason for the mass redemptions, which
is like all of the people taking their money out
of Clarium, was Gawker Media. Some of Clarium's big investors,
according to former employees, were Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled
by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime. Teal
has never explicitly acknowledged this, but he has hinted at
why he may have wanted to keep his sexual orientation

(59:10):
out of view. So he a bunch of people pull
their money out of his fund in this period where
he is making repeated fuck ups, and he blames it
on Gawker outing him right.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
I invest eight hundred million dollars in Yahoo places any Yahoo.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
In two thousand and eight.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Homide Yeah, and like somehow that's.

Speaker 1 (59:32):
Yeah, Nick Dayton made you put a billion dollars into Yahoo?

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Brother, Yeah, I let my own weird like them to
steal your underwear. Yeah. So phychology warp my brain and
somehow that's Valley Wags for.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
A billion dollars almost into yeah, like a billion dollars
into Google almost. That's probably a smart Yeah, definitely a
smart long term investment. But like Yahoo, Yahoo in two
thousand and eight, I was twenty and I knew that
Yahoo was a bad investments.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
Yeah. Yeahoo's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
That's so fucking funny. Oh man, my god. So I
think the other reason he's angry at Gawker here is
that Gker is reporting on a lot of his fuck
ups too, and I think in such a way that
he kind of blames them for why investors start pulling
out right, Gaker revealed our screw ups publicly in a

(01:00:25):
way that hurt us, right, and so and that, by
the way, again that this kind of view that like, oh,
they out at him and so he destroyed them. That's
you know, that makes the case like the dangers of
a petty billionaire seemed clearer with that statement. But this
is much more standard, evil rich guy, They damaged my
business interests by reporting on me screwing up, and so

(01:00:46):
I wanted them out right. That's perfectly normal, rich guy,
evil bullshit, right, Yeah, So this period, though, you know,
while he is apparently burning with rage at Gker the
end of the Bush years to start of the Obama era,
it's not a whole bad time for him either, because
while he's again he's super rich, so he's insulated personally
from any real consequences. And while his clarium investments fail

(01:01:08):
and he stops being like the lauded, you know, hedge
fund genius of the new generation, Peter ces success in
another venture which had been launched based on the Egor
software that he's depending on. I've heard a couple of
different versions of the story. One is that Levchin, his
founder at PayPal Buddy codes it some of them. The
intercept reporting says it was another guy at PayPal who

(01:01:30):
coded it. I don't know which one of them coded it.
But Igor is this software that they had started at
PayPal to stop Russian scammers. Right that there are allegations
and lawsuits that it was kind of stolen in part
from another company, But that's a story for another day.
Peter is as obsessed with security and fighting terrorism as
any neo coon, and he starts to focus on the

(01:01:51):
idea that like Egor, might be useful for something Besides
fighting fraud, perhaps this could also allow the government to
hunt and kill terrorists that had Peter to fear for
his own life. I'm going to have to go back
in time here, and I hate to jump around like this,
but Peter's involved in too many things to not do
this from time to time. So let's go back to
July of two thousand and four, right when he and

(01:02:13):
a conservative chaplain from Stanford organize a six day seminar
with Renee Girard. The scapegoat philosopher Guy Til had attacked
the Bush administration then for not being cruel enough to Muslims,
and had gone after the ACLU for their unhinged support
of civil liberties at the expense of security. He had
encouraged the creation of a new system, which he built
as a replacement for the UN. He was like, instead

(01:02:35):
of the UN, we should have an international consortium of
public and private intelligence companies all working together to quote
forge the decisive path to a truly global packs Americana. Right,
this American piece that intelligence agencies can bring us if
we give them enough money and power to murder people
with drones. It's so why yeah, and Igor at this point,

(01:02:59):
it's just a fancy way of what I call making
a crazy board, right, that thing you see in like
movies and TV, you know, True Detective where you've got
like all the pictures connected by bits of string. Right,
IGOR is a way of doing that on the computer
right where you're plugging it. And it also is pulling
from you can have it pull from. Oh, I know
that we're looking for a guy who drives a who
lives in the state and drives a blue car, and

(01:03:20):
as a DUI, I want you to pull up from
like all of these records. You have access to everyone
who fits that, right, and we can add them to
the crazy board, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:27):
And it was like, look, it's like starting at nine
to eleven especially, there was like the fantasy, the uber
fantasy of all these spook and spook adjacent types and
all tech types that wanted to make money off of them,
was that you know, you could have sort of like
you know, the equivalent of maybe what we call an
AI today, right that like could basically predict a terrorists

(01:03:51):
we're going to strike before they were going to strike,
you know, they were going to call you know, they
were going to stop the next nine to eleven before
the guys even you know, had really hatched the plan.
And so there have been a bunch of programs that
started and failed, you know, before then. And you know,
there were some that were in existence and law enforcement,
but they were clunky. There were you know, there were

(01:04:11):
government software. So they did they look shitty, and they
you know, and and and they didn't work so well.
And then and they didn't have real Silicon Valley talent,
like yeah, these guys did.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Yeah, So I think it could be a little hrd
for people to visualize what Igor did, what this software does,
this software becomes Palenteer does. So I'm going to quote
from an article in Bloomberg by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman,
and Jordan Robertson. Here, the software Clones combs through disparate
data sources, financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social
media postings, and searches for connections that human analysts might miss.

(01:04:48):
It then presents the linkages and colorful, easy to interpret
graphics that look like spiderwebs. So, based on this technology,
Peter founds Palenteer that same year, two thousand and four,
and Palaeer is the name of the infamous seeing stones
in the Lord of the Rings, which are you know,
the most famously the one is owned by the evil
wizards sorrowmon. Right, So if you're naming your company that

(01:05:12):
exists to provide this like seeing stone to the highest
bidder palateer, that's explicitly evil. Right. This isn't like a
case where like the good guys have their own seeing stones.
It's just the bad guys. It's a bad thing to have.
It connects you inevitably to Sauron. Like anyway, very fun.

(01:05:33):
I love fiction, now, Peter, one of the things that
interesting about fucking Pallenteer is that, like with most of
his companies, Peter has an interest in this, but he
also has one of his close friends actually running shit,
being the day to day guy organizing everything, and Peter's
friend who helps him run. Palenteer is famously always described

(01:05:54):
as his most liberal friend, a guy named Alex Karp,
who Bloomberg identifies as a self described neo Marxist. Now,
I don't know about Alex, you know, like, what the
fuck do you mean about as the guys starting the
capitalist spy firm? How can you consider yourself a neo Marxist?
But also some Marxists or boot liquors. So maybe that's

(01:06:14):
the kind of guy that Alex Karp is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Look, there's plenty of people that you know or yeah,
you know whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
The communists and spy agencies, right, yeah, yeah, Or.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
What I was going to say is, you know whatever
the far left equivalent of a limousine liberal is. Those
people are definitely out there.

Speaker 1 (01:06:31):
Yeah, the fucking CIA socialist or something like that. I guess, yeah,
there you oh, there you go. So getting off the
ground is slow going at first for Pallunteer, for this
is a hard thing. It's a really hard industry to
break into, right because intel agencies are first and foremost
government agencies, and if you know anything about the government,
getting a government agency to adopt a new software tool

(01:06:54):
is a brutal thing to do, right. It is very
hard to convince them to make moves like that. It
doesn't matter what kind of agency it is. This is
always an uphill struggle. So in order to aid Pallenteer
in kind of getting this buy in, they needed to
really start to take off. Peter brought in some of
the most ghoulish neocons he could find to apply pressure
in DC, and this included friend of the Pod John Poindexter,

(01:07:18):
who oh JP had worked for Ronald Reagan until he
was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran contra. He
then got kind of quote unquote exonerated and gets hired
by Dick Cheney to craft the Total Infraation Awareness Program.
This was a Bush era intelligence mission with a seemingly
kind of reasonable goal. Right, We're going to collect all

(01:07:40):
of the data we can on everything happening, food prices, YadA, YadA, YadA,
and these different areas that we have military interests in,
and we're going to have algorithms comb that data to
spot patterns that might be indicative of terrorist groups operating
beneath the surface. Right. It's one of those things that
sounds reasonable on its face. If you look at how

(01:08:02):
the War on Terror went, none of this ever works
out quite as way well as they think it does. Right,
But the smart guys in the room are all like, obviously,
this is how we win the war on Terror back then, you.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Know, yeah, I mean that was the whole ship. That
was the whole thing for these guys, yep was you
know it was going to be uh you know, what's
the Tom Cruise movie? Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Right, yeah, we're gonna know about it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
Yeah yeah. And they were going to you know, put
money to the or or they're gonna you know, feed
the information your goals and they're going to feed you
a red ball. That was the whole thing there. And yeah,
volunteer got every single last one of the you know,
members of this church of this like you know, weird
Spye church to advocate for them. The other thing was

(01:08:51):
like you couldn't walk into a train in d C
without there.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Being a oh yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
And and like every guy that you know and hated
Muslims and love Star Wars was promoting what.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
A brand they have, So they bring out John Poindex.
Now it's important here to note that EGOR, which is
what palent Heer is selling at this point, didn't gather
or create new information of its own. Right, This is
not a Big Brother system. This is a an algorithm
that works off of the extant Big Brother system, right,

(01:09:30):
organizing all of the info that the existing surveillance operations
can put at your disposal. Right, it's data mining, you know. Now,
One early concern is that analysts using EGOR would use
the vast array of catalog data at their disposal to
stalk and harass their ex girlfriends, which, if you know
how cops work, is a thing that happens constantly. Anytime
you've got a database that like a certain chunk of

(01:09:53):
employees have access to, some of them are going to
use it to stock their girlfriends.

Speaker 2 (01:09:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
This is a known issue here. One of the ways
in which they sell themselves to a lot of these
intel agencies is Alex KRP promises, We're going to make
it impossible for cops to stock their ex girlfriends because
we're going to log every search request made into the
system in a way that will allow you to audit them. Right. So,
I mean they're selling point. It's like we're going to
actually provide accountability in the spook process. Right. Chaef Get

(01:10:21):
describes this as a key part of the company's pitch,
but he also writes one of Palenteer's former engineers were
called meetings during which government clients would suggest trying to
use the database to look up an ex girlfriend immediately
after hearing the whole privacy spiel. Palenteer employees would never
object to these requests, this person said. Instead, they would
remind clients that searches were logged and then allow them
to look up whoever they want it, no matter how

(01:10:42):
flimsy the pretext. Yeah, that's how that always works. Ah,
every time.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
You don't need a predictive algorithm to predict that one,
do you? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
No, you shared out, you shared that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:58):
Get you give people a computer spot device and they
are going to stock their girlfriends ex girlfriends. Yeah. Now,
thanks to their famous friends and infinite cash reserves, Palaentteer
managed to get contracts with the CIA and the NYPD,
but actual adoption on a wide scale wouldn't happen without
corporate purchases because no one in intelligence trusted a product
that only the government used. Peter tried to force the

(01:11:21):
government's hand here by selling other hedge funds, like selling
Igor to other finance companies, right, and he marketed it
as Palenteer Finance. So we've got this software that the
government's interested in using. It is the spy software, but
you can use it to predict which kind of investments
are going to work out best. Right by gathering all
of this data and using it to predict the future

(01:11:41):
of finance. Now, this is a massive failure as an
actual finance product because it doesn't work very well. People
don't really make a lot of money off of Palenteer
finance advising their trades, but it works out as a
business decision because they're able to get a couple of
different finance companies to buy into it, and then they
can go back to the government and say, hey, look,
this company and that company already using it to make trades. Obviously,

(01:12:05):
DC should be using this to fight terrorism, right, And
the government's like, oh, well, some bank bought it, so
I guess we should as well, like.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Yeah, he's yeah, and there's they're I mean, looking government
there's always like, you know, they're constantly being like, oh,
we're falling behind. You know, the private sector really knows
even though.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
It works, they wouldn't make a big fuck up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:23):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, if only we could run government
more effectively like a business. Yeah, And I mean that,
I mean it's totally how it worked. It's totally how
it worked. Our adversaries can use these tools freely. Why
shouldn't we.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
Why shouldn't we? And obviously as soon as the public sector,
as soon as actually like the CIA and the FBI
and the NYPD start putting money into Palenteer, then even
though Palenteer finance had kind of not done great. A
lot of banks and finance agencies start to be like, oh,
I guess well, we have to get involved in the
government's buying this stuff. So we've got to buy it.
We've got to get and so in two thousand and nine,

(01:13:02):
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Diamond future future subject of the Pole,
gets purchases like makes a contract with Palenteer. Now almost
the instant they and they're doing this as like a
security measure. We want to we want we have like
a division in our company that's looking for evidence based

(01:13:22):
on like the communications our employees have internally that we
might have an employee who's breaking the law. Right, that's
part of compliance. Right, we want to be there's a
degree to which we're legally obligated to spy on our
employees making investment decisions to make sure nobody's doing anything criminal. Right. Sure,
So that's why they get this software. The instant they
get it, they're head of security who's like using the
Palenteer software, uses it to spy on the entire c

(01:13:45):
suite for no real reason, right, Like he loses his
mind with power and starts stalking all of the people
running the company. This guy's name was Peter Kovicia, and
he was a former secret serviceman who ran again a
group in the company that was taped with using algorithms
to monitor employees. And I'm going to quote again from
Bloomberg here. Aided by as many as one hundred and

(01:14:06):
twenty forward deployed engineers from the data mining company Palateer Technologies,
Kavicia's group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations
from company issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts
of digitally recorded phone conversations. Pellenteer software aggregated, searched, sorted,
and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior
that Kavichia's team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate secrets.

(01:14:29):
Pellenteer's algorithm, for example, alerted the Insider Threat team when
an employee started badging into work lated and usual, a
sign of potential disgruntlement that would trigger further scrutiny and
possible physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel. So
that's nuts, but that's also what he's supposed to be doing.
But right after, right as soon as they get access

(01:14:51):
to this, Kavicia goes rogue and I'm going to continue
with that quote. Former JP Morgan colleagues described the environment
as Wall Street meets Apocalypse now with Kovichia as Colonel
kurtz ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above
the breast of the bank's security team. People in the
department were shocked that no one from the bank or
Palenteers said any real limits. They darkly joked that Kovichia

(01:15:12):
was listening to their calls, reading their emails, watching them
come and go. Some planted fake information in their communications
to see if Kavichia would mention it at meetings, which
he did. It all ended when a bank's when the
bank's senior executives learned that they too were being watched,
and what began as a promising marriage of masters of
big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. Nice,

(01:15:35):
very funny, extremely funny. Oh my god, no, no, no,
and just like the most predictable thing that could have happened, right,
this is what happens. Every time you give these guys
this toy. Kavichia gets fired. But the promise of pallenty
remain undimmed, even though there is tremendous debate app to

(01:15:55):
the present day as to whether or not much of
what they do works. This is less the case now
that they're doing like we'll talk about this some in
the last episode, like when it comes to providing targeting
solutions based on data. I mean, there's the jury is
still out on how well that's working in like Ukraine,
But certainly in this period there's a big debate as
any of the shit really work. Right, Pallenteer's going to
take credit for the bin Laden assassination, very unlikely they

(01:16:19):
had anything to do with it, but they do kind of.
They take like oblique credit for it, and the software
is swiftly adopted by police stations and cities like New York,
Chicago and La Palateer software was often used allegedly to
single out innocent individuals because the connections in their lives
look suspicious to the algorithm. And here's Bloomberg again. The

(01:16:41):
platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brain calls the
secondary surveillance network, the web of who is related to,
who friends with or sleeping with whom. One woman in
the system for example, who wasn't suspected of committing any
crime was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same
network of associates, says Brain, who spent two and a
half years embedded with the LAPD while we searching her
dissertation on big data policing at Princeton University and who's

(01:17:03):
now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Anybody who logs into the system can see all these
intimate ties, she says, to widen the scope of possible connections,
she says, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data,
including social media for closure and toll road information, camera
feeds from hospitals, parking lots and universities, and delivery information
from Papa John's International and Pizza Hut LLC. Now this

(01:17:29):
is used. Yeah, no I no, I do think that
the government should have access to our Papa John's records,
but mainly to make sure like, hey man, you've ordered
fourteen extra large pizzas this month? Okay, do you like
a hug? Can we should send a guy by your
house to give you a hug?

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
The proper order of Papa John's orders is zero zero
Domino's orders is zero.

Speaker 1 (01:17:54):
Yeah, pizza hut Man, Come on.

Speaker 2 (01:17:56):
Noiza, a proper number of orders is zero.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
No. I like a good stuff crust. I like it
good stuff crust. Oh yeah, I love a big pizza
hut pizza. You know what?

Speaker 3 (01:18:08):
You know what's good though, is those those Shack Papa
John's commercials to.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
Get me everything.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
Wow, No, you can't get me. You can't get me
into a Papa John. You know what they don't get
me to do?

Speaker 3 (01:18:19):
Still eat Papa John's.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
No, No, I would eat shack before I eat a
Papa John's. Wow, he's gotta have marbling, you know. Yeah.
I've always endorsed cannibalism and very pro cannabally.

Speaker 3 (01:18:34):
It's one of those freaks that said they wanted to
eat Moodang.

Speaker 1 (01:18:38):
I don't know who that is, Sophie. Well, but speaking
of eating people, let's talk about the tragic case of
Manuel Rios. He doesn't get eaten, I hope not. H
Manuel is a guy who grew up in East la
and had a lot of friends who joined a local
gang east Side eighteen. In twenty sixteen, he was seated
in a parked car with a friend who'd been jumped
into the gang. When police rolled up, his friend ran,

(01:19:01):
but Rios, who had not been breaking any laws, didn't run.
He was like, why why the fuck would I run?
Like my buddy's in a gang, Like, of course he's
going to flee. I'm not doing anything wrong. But because
you know, cops be how they are, he gets added
to the LAPD's gang database right and Pallenteers software because
of how many other gang dudes that he's just kind
of socially knows, because of where he lives, he gets

(01:19:23):
identified as a high priority target and he starts getting
stopped constantly by the cops. Quote the police on autopilot
with Palenteer are driving Rios towards his gang friends, not
away from them. Worries Maria Saba, a neighbor and community
organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities
like East La are algorithmically scraped for pre crime suspects,

(01:19:43):
data is destiny, says Saba. These are systemic processes, and
when people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it
pushes them to join the internalized being told they're bad,
and that's kind of the you know, one of the
we will talk a lot more about Pollentteer, even in
part four. But that's like, one of the really dark
things about this is that it's masquerading as like this

(01:20:03):
genius predictive, but all it's really doing is like, oh,
you live in a poor neighborhood, a lot of your
friends grow up to be in gangs. Cops should probably
fuck with you constantly, you know, fuck with this guy constantly, right,
And that's all it is. It's stopping frisks that you
threw an algorithm over.

Speaker 2 (01:20:18):
Yeah, Or it almost reminds me of like, you know
how like in the shitty day, shitty early days of
like a map quest and Google Maps, where it like
you'd get some drivers that would just follow the directions
no matter how unhinged.

Speaker 1 (01:20:35):
A river yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:37):
Yeah, and it's like guys, use your.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
Eyes, homie, what's up, what's up? And you know this?

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
Yeah, And instead it'd be like they just follow. They
blame the algorithm.

Speaker 1 (01:20:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
Now, if it's just going to cost you an extra
ten bucks on an uber, that's one thing. But when
it costs you know, some poor kid getting harassed over
and over again, that's something totally different. And that mortally happened.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
Yeah, yeah, it sure did.

Speaker 2 (01:21:04):
So.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
In twenty eleven, Peter did an interview with Bloomberg. By
this point, civil libertarians, which had been previously kind of
Peter's constituency, had started blowing the horn over Pallanteer. Peter
felt a need to make the case to his fellow
libertarians on the need to embrace being spied on. He
argued that data mining was less harmful than the quote
crazy abuses entraconian policies the Bush administration had pushed after

(01:21:27):
nine to eleven, And I would desperately love to hear
which of those policies didn't you agree with, Peter, because
it seems like you think they didn't go far enough, right,
But he's like, look, if we want to avoid a
police state, obviously you have to let me, Peter Tiel,
build a surveillance state. That's all that can stop us
from having an evil police state. Right, what a libertarian.
That's why I'm selling this shit to the CIA and

(01:21:47):
to spy on us. Keeps liberty libertate.

Speaker 2 (01:21:51):
Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought of this before, but
I remember around this time libertarians in my life are
self professed libertarians in my life. Yeah, from like really
caring about this stuff to throwing up their hands and
saying what privacy is did?

Speaker 1 (01:22:05):
Yeah, nothing you can do. It's the nine to eleven effect.
It's so much because a big part of this is
like you have this kind of same thing that happens
where you've got all these guys who in the early
two thousand's kind of the early part of the Bush
era the late nineties had been like atheist activists who
were like super anti the religious right, and then after

(01:22:26):
nine to eleven they all get really racist against Muslims,
and it pushes them towards conservatives and it's like, oh, guy,
so you guys didn't have any principles ever, right, Okay,
I get it, I get it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:22:37):
And so and on the data side, it's like, oh, yeah,
we were really for civil liberties, but now that privacy
is dead, Yeah, you might as well have the Lotian
Yeah yeah, yeah, what's the difference. Just let it happen,
or if there's someone's going to spy on you, let it.

Speaker 1 (01:22:53):
Be Peter Teal. Yeah, here's one of us at least yep,
speaking of Peter Till Noah, you got anything to plug?

Speaker 2 (01:23:05):
Yes, I have my new I don't know I have
some I tried to come up with the lame chok
there on the front. No I have nothing a plug.
But you can find me at Noah Shackman. That's n
O A H S H A C H T M
A N yeah at most social platforms.

Speaker 1 (01:23:22):
Well check out Noah and you know figure out now.
I'm not gonna tell people to do anything illegal.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
Crazy board, Yeah, make it crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:23:36):
Go make a crazy board. Go make a crazy board
as a center.

Speaker 4 (01:23:39):
May also someone suggests instead touch grass and peta dog.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
And touch grass, peta dog, make a crazy board on
your wall. Stop hanging out with your friends. Cut off
all contact with your family. Many of them live alone
in a dark room. Just try to be more like
Matthew McConaughey and True Detective Right is much like matt
thank your daughter for dying and sparing you the sin
of being a father. Do all that good good Matthew

(01:24:07):
McConaughey and True Detective stuff. Have fun with it, but
don't have fun with you. Do not eat, do not
eat anything but amphetamines. Cigarettes, just just them up. Make
us make a cigarette shake every morning. Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:24:26):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (01:24:38):
Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes
every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards