Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, A podcast is entirely
Speaker 2: funded and supported by the film Alien Resurrection, which no
Speaker 2: one on this call but me has seen. I have
Speaker 2: picked a bit that no one can play off of
Speaker 2: because they simply don't remember the classic Ron Pearlman film
Speaker 2: Alien Resurrection. What a tragedy. Speaking of works of artes, no,
Speaker 2: I was gonna say works of arts. No, No ashactment
Speaker 2: contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Wired, How are you
Speaker 2: doing today?
Speaker 3: I'm doing sad better than a astronaut with an alien
Speaker 3: implanted into my gut? Question? Yeah, does that's that's? Does that?
Speaker 3: Does that take place in that movie?
Speaker 2: I guess they if you consider anyone who's in space
Speaker 2: an astrona yes, yes, I okay, then yes, yes, that's
Speaker 2: essentially what's going on in that movie. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of cloning involved, though, which you know, fingers crossed. Would
Speaker 2: you clone yourself if you could? You know? Absolutely you would?
Speaker 4: Okay, absolutely, because then I could have somebody else do
Speaker 4: my job twice, even though I know that's not on how
Speaker 4: that works?
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah we could.
Speaker 3: If you've writ any Spider Man comics, it never goes well.
Speaker 2: No, m M and I do think that Spider Man
Speaker 2: comics really really are the that that's where I go
Speaker 2: to for maya all of my cloning related information, specifically
Speaker 2: Spider Man.
Speaker 3: I should work for a guy that had cloned dogs. Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh that's so weird to me.
Speaker 1: I would never clone my dog. I love my dog,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't be her. I know it wouldn't be her.
Speaker 1: I'd be like, who's this impostor not Anderson?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Folks yourself, but not your dog.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: For efficiency purposes, you just want somebody that could sit
Speaker 4: in the meetings I don't want to go to or
Speaker 4: sit in do like all the work things that don't
Speaker 4: appeal to me, and then I could just do the
Speaker 4: things I want to do.
Speaker 3: So the clone would have to grow up to be
Speaker 3: exactly your age and then slow down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, you would have to like accelerate its growth
Speaker 2: really rob it of a childhood or you're or you're
Speaker 2: doing a clone like in that? Well yeah, so are you?
Speaker 2: You do not think clones are people, Sophie, because that's
Speaker 2: a very problematic attitude to have. Year I'm like, it's
Speaker 2: not real.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, again, the Spider Man books would would tell
Speaker 3: you this is this way lies madness.
Speaker 1: Well, it's absolute madness.
Speaker 2: There's no if we get cloning at the same period
Speaker 2: of time, we get like Peterteel's ideal, like breakdown of
Speaker 2: federal power so that like there's all these isolated city
Speaker 2: states run at the whims of rich people. There's no
Speaker 2: way we will not get someone like acting as a
Speaker 2: wellness influencer who starts an island where you can go
Speaker 2: hunt and murder a clone of yourself in order to
Speaker 2: gain like unspecified mental health benefits. That's absolutely going Like
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan is going to kill his clone in order
Speaker 2: to gain its power by eating its heart. That's a
Speaker 2: version of the future that could be us in ten years. People.
Speaker 3: I feel like that's just called Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it could be in Austin, Texas. I would say
Speaker 2: that's not a bad place to set.
Speaker 3: It, Like I feel like that's happening right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean I killed a guy in Austin, Texas once
Speaker 2: who looked a lot like me, but that was less
Speaker 2: out of a desire to gain better mental health. And anyway, Noah,
Speaker 2: you ever killed me, buddy.
Speaker 3: Not that I can talk about. On this podcast.
Speaker 2: Well that's the answer Peter Teal would give. I'm sure,
Speaker 2: and we are getting back to Peter's story. Up to
Speaker 2: this point. The Teal story is the tale of an isolated,
Speaker 2: super disciplined kid who didn't connect with his classmates, or
Speaker 2: at least that's one version of it, right. I will say,
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's right, because this vision of
Speaker 2: this kid who just like doesn't understand or get along
Speaker 2: with other people and it's like separate from them, is
Speaker 2: at odds of a kid who hangs out with Judge
Speaker 2: Kennedy's son because he wants to clerk for Justice Kennedy,
Speaker 2: who socializes with the Federalist Society people, and who starts
Speaker 2: and operates a student newspaper with several friends. Right, that
Speaker 2: version of Teal reads less like lonely victim of bullying
Speaker 2: and more maybe kind of a rich kid asshole who
Speaker 2: doesn't like to be associated with regular people. Right, It's
Speaker 2: not so much that he's lonely and separate, it's that
Speaker 2: he has separated himself because he wants to be better
Speaker 2: than them. Right, I don't know which of these. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can really make a case for either. If we're
Speaker 2: going for that latter interpretation of Teal. It makes sense, then,
Speaker 2: to draw a line from his the old ambitions as
Speaker 2: a lawyer and his anger at the higher education system
Speaker 2: that had evidently prepared him poorly to succeed in his
Speaker 2: first ambition. Stanford had not made Peter into the kind
Speaker 2: of person who could clerk for the Supreme Court, and
Speaker 2: since that could not be representative of a fault of Peter's,
Speaker 2: maybe he just literally wasn't good enough. It has to
Speaker 2: have been the fault of higher education as a system,
Speaker 2: and Peter has made his anger at this everyone else's
Speaker 2: problem for the last forty years now. The other open
Speaker 2: question here is how did being gay influence Peter's development
Speaker 2: and the nation state sized chip on his shoulder. In
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, a writer for The New Yorker asked Peter
Speaker 2: more or less that same question, how did his homosexuality
Speaker 2: and status as an outsider influence the way he thinks
Speaker 2: about politics and business today? Here's his response. I can
Speaker 2: come up with stories about how they're factors, but I'm
Speaker 2: not sure that they're interesting. The gay thing is that
Speaker 2: you're sort of an outsider. There are things about it
Speaker 2: that are problematic. There are things about it that can
Speaker 2: be positive, but it also contrived. Maybe I'm more of
Speaker 2: an outsider because I was a gifted and introverted child.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's some complicated combination of all these things. And
Speaker 2: maybe I'm not even an outsider. And I think that's
Speaker 2: interesting where he's like, maybe I'm just kind of full
Speaker 2: of shit with you people, and like I've always I've
Speaker 2: never been an outsider. I just think I'm better than you, right,
Speaker 2: And a lot of this is a crafted image of
Speaker 2: like this is a more sympathetic vision of me, right,
Speaker 2: Like he definitely has it takes some joy in playing
Speaker 2: the mastermind manipulating the media and yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean clearly not. And yeah, or maybe
Speaker 3: it's like maybe it's a bit to appeal to actual outsiders.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, maybe it's a bit to appeal to, yeah,
Speaker 2: the real ones. One thing you can say about Peter
Speaker 2: is that very shortly after starting his career in law,
Speaker 2: he decided I don't want to be a lawyer. In total,
Speaker 2: his career consistent of he clerks for a judge in
Speaker 2: Atlanta for a little while, and then he becomes a
Speaker 2: first year associate at a corporate law firm, and he
Speaker 2: never makes it to year two, so he just kind
Speaker 2: of hates the thing that he had studied to do
Speaker 2: in school. It seems like he hates it largely because
Speaker 2: he's not going to get a shortcut to being at
Speaker 2: the top of that. If he's going to get anywhere,
Speaker 2: he's gonna have to work himself up from maybe not
Speaker 2: the bottom, but like the middle. And Peter just doesn't
Speaker 2: have any interest in doing that. That's a regular life,
Speaker 2: that's an ordinary people kind of thing to do, is
Speaker 2: like starting it kind of the bottom rung of your
Speaker 2: career and working your way up. He doesn't want to
Speaker 2: have to do that, so he leaves this profession to
Speaker 2: start trading derivatives. Right, what's the thing you do if, like,
Speaker 2: you know, you want to feel like you're better than
Speaker 2: everyone else, Try to get into finance and get mega rich. Right,
Speaker 2: That's his next move is like, well, law isn't going
Speaker 2: to be the thing I wanted, so I'm going to
Speaker 2: try to get wealthy and the financ this is not
Speaker 2: going to work out immediately well to him, right, And
Speaker 2: the fact that finances, you know, the thing that he's doing,
Speaker 2: but it's not his first career choice, seems to rub
Speaker 2: him the wrong way, and this is when we first
Speaker 2: get outside evidence that he's built a grudge against higher education.
Speaker 2: In the late nineteen nineties, he gets together with a
Speaker 2: friend from his Harvard Review days, David Sachs, and co
Speaker 2: authors a book called The Diversity Myth, which was published
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five by the Independent Institute, a right
Speaker 2: wing think tank that made Peter a fellow. During this
Speaker 2: awkward period in his career, he was hard up for cash.
Speaker 2: His investment business isn't going well. He's not making money
Speaker 2: as a lawyer. The think tank gives him income. It
Speaker 2: helps him in David Sacks secure a series of op
Speaker 2: eds in The Wall Street Journal mocking things like Indigenous
Speaker 2: People's Day and a broad side against multiculturalism that was
Speaker 2: anti Western. Their book, which was endorsed by Denesh Desuza,
Speaker 2: had been funded in part by a forty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: grant by the John m Olin Foundation, a conservative nonprofit
Speaker 2: geared towards creating a counter intelligensia that had also bank
Speaker 2: rolled some of Dessuz's Earth career. Peter got to do
Speaker 2: a book tour and a series of speaking engagements, and
Speaker 2: he found that he enjoyed aspects of life as a
Speaker 2: right wing intellectual. And this is really interesting to me
Speaker 2: because Peter doesn't start as a founder and gets successful
Speaker 2: in business and then pivot to right wing politics. He
Speaker 2: is scouted by right wing like moneyed interests, by these
Speaker 2: guys working at think tanks and nonprofits funded by like
Speaker 2: oil and gas billionaires and the like. He is scouted
Speaker 2: as this is a smart kid who is frustrated because
Speaker 2: the first thing he wanted to do didn't work out
Speaker 2: for him. We could get him into right wing politics.
Speaker 2: Right he is a conservative pundit before he starts funding
Speaker 2: conservative causes. And this is a part is.
Speaker 3: The opposite of what I thought the origin story was.
Speaker 2: Well, it's so interesting because this is how for decades,
Speaker 2: if we want to ask the question, how did right
Speaker 2: wing politics get so deranged? How do the Republican Party
Speaker 2: get so deranged? Well, it's because of this decade's long,
Speaker 2: very dedicated, methodical effort to every time we can find
Speaker 2: an angry young man with a degree of like skill
Speaker 2: and talent who has failed out of their first ambition,
Speaker 2: let's put a pile of cash in the front of
Speaker 2: their face and say, like, hey, do you want to
Speaker 2: get into conservative media? Right that's where all the Daily
Speaker 2: Wire guys come from, their failed Hollywood screenwriters and standard comedians, right,
Speaker 2: that's where Teal gets into this from he is a
Speaker 2: failed lawyer. Yeah who and they're like, hey, come be
Speaker 2: our Danchet Suza, right, like, come be another Daneshta Susa.
Speaker 2: That's his Like yeah yeah. And in fact, Peter, while
Speaker 2: he's kind of like having this flirtation with being a
Speaker 2: right wing intellectual, he tries to start a Bay Area
Speaker 2: public access talk show with a liberal friend of his,
Speaker 2: which biographer Chafkin describes as Crossfire, but way way more pretentious.
Speaker 2: And I can't imagin that, Like, can you get what
Speaker 2: is a more pretentious crossfire that even exists with.
Speaker 3: Like mid nineties production value? God?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like a fucking uhf crossfire? Incredible shit. I
Speaker 2: desperately wish they'd gotten out like eight episodes and those
Speaker 2: were on YouTube for me to just watch. I want
Speaker 2: to see Peter Teal's take on Crossfire.
Speaker 3: No you think you want to see?
Speaker 2: No, I for sure don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you would definitely gouch out at least one, if
Speaker 3: not both eyes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but.
Speaker 2: That's true, but not too not to no one does
Speaker 2: so Teal in Sachs's book becomes a foundational work in
Speaker 2: the complaining liberals on campus are intolerant genre. Right, these
Speaker 2: are that's a big part of conservative media today, intolerant
Speaker 2: liberals ruining college I mean, mean to conservatives, and Sacks
Speaker 2: are doing this in the nineties. Right. It is also
Speaker 2: an early work of DEI panic.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: This is really where Chafkin gets a lot of credit
Speaker 2: for me, because most of the articles that I read
Speaker 2: which talked about this period in Peter's life mentioned that
Speaker 2: he'd co written The Diversity Myth, but they just described
Speaker 2: it as a book Peter and David Sachs wrote because
Speaker 2: they were so frustrated. Right, This genuinely came out of
Speaker 2: a place of we were so angry about what we
Speaker 2: saw at Stanford that we just had to write this
Speaker 2: book about, Like, this is real problem we saw coming
Speaker 2: up from higher education, all these fucked up things on
Speaker 2: campus that we just couldn't ignore anymore. And that's not true.
Speaker 2: The reality is that the Diversity Myth and the ideological
Speaker 2: careers of David and Peter were crafted, molded, and funded
Speaker 2: by powerful moneyed interests looking for fighters to help them
Speaker 2: tear down the liberal status quo. And chief among the
Speaker 2: bugbears of these moneyed interests was people who thought that
Speaker 2: other cultures should get to exist in American intellectual life. Right,
Speaker 2: That's what made these rich guys angry, and they hired
Speaker 2: people like Peter in Teal to yell about it. Now
Speaker 2: the books, yeah, yeah, fascinating shit. The book's Amazon description
Speaker 2: informs us the authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not
Speaker 2: about learning more, it's actually about learning less. Now, if
Speaker 2: you read there's a fun article, because this has become
Speaker 2: like the modern you know, this is also like most
Speaker 2: of conservative politics today. Teal got to write an article
Speaker 2: about this book he wrote as a young man for
Speaker 2: a website called The New Criterion in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, coming out just as this panic
Speaker 2: that he and David had really tried to start much
Speaker 2: earlier over multiculturalism on campus became integral to conservative politics.
Speaker 2: So Peter goes in and basically does like a victory
Speaker 2: lap I was right all along, And he lists his
Speaker 2: examples of progressive mania that he saw in Stanford as
Speaker 2: the replacement of Shakespeare's The Tempest and One Class with
Speaker 2: a play that had been written by a modern author
Speaker 2: based on the tempest. The inclusion of other works beyond
Speaker 2: the Western classic literature canon was, in Tel's eyes, a tendentious,
Speaker 2: left wing anti Western crusade, as opposed to just like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, maybe maybe it's good at a
Speaker 2: certain point to add in works that are influenced by
Speaker 2: and based on some of these like classics, instead of
Speaker 2: just having everyone read these classics, you know, ad nauseum.
Speaker 2: There's an intellectual value in discussing the works that they inspired.
Speaker 2: That's kind of accepting that art and creativity is a
Speaker 2: living sort of thing, as opposed to just being like, no,
Speaker 2: everyone just needs to memorize the Iliad. Well, maybe we
Speaker 2: could talk about some of the works that were influenced
Speaker 2: by it and you know, that have descended as a
Speaker 2: result of it, because that's just kind of how education
Speaker 2: ought to work. At one point, listing examples of how
Speaker 2: progressive madness had warped educations at Stanford, Teal complained that
Speaker 2: the campus refused to seal off glory holes during the
Speaker 2: height of the AIDS epidemic. Now, I don't know if
Speaker 2: this is true. I have not found any outside evidence
Speaker 2: that this is a thing that happened in that twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three article. Tiel does make a couple of valid points.
Speaker 2: He complains about the insane increase in tuition costs and
Speaker 2: how that's a part of the housing crisis. And he's
Speaker 2: not wrong there, right, Like the fact that so many
Speaker 2: people are in educational debt is part of why it's
Speaker 2: hard for them to afford housing and to like buy
Speaker 2: houses of their own. But what he's what he's doing
Speaker 2: here that's fucked up is he's rapping decisions made by
Speaker 2: people who aren't teachers.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Teachers are not choosing to make college this expensive, and
Speaker 2: they are not the primary financial benefactors of college being
Speaker 2: that expensive, right, It is the administrators of the school.
Speaker 2: It's not like your history professor isn't deciding what, like
Speaker 2: the campus is going to charge people for credit hours,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the glory whole thing is just is also just.
Speaker 2: Like I feel like it's just bullshit. I feel like
Speaker 2: it's just bullshit. Yeah, I feel like there were probably
Speaker 2: a couple of glory holes on campus maybe, but like
Speaker 2: I don't feel like the student the school was like, no,
Speaker 2: we love our glory holes. We're keeping those in.
Speaker 3: It's bananas. And then also, I mean it is a
Speaker 3: little bit bananas that this guy was like confronted for
Speaker 3: being kind of like pro apartheid South Africa by black classmates. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then his solution is what that it was bad
Speaker 3: to have any diversity on college.
Speaker 2: It's bad to have any diversity in like the course material.
Speaker 2: If you're doing a Western class, you should only be
Speaker 2: reading old, dead white men as opposed to like, well
Speaker 2: number one, Western civilization includes a lot of people who
Speaker 2: are not white and exists up to the present day.
Speaker 2: So it's actually very valid to say, like, Okay, Shakespeare
Speaker 2: is obviously part of the Western canon. Can should we
Speaker 2: not also be looking at like some non white authors
Speaker 2: who are in the Western canon who are right and
Speaker 2: pivoting off of works started by Shakespeare and influenced by him?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Is that not a valid part of art education? Which
Speaker 2: I would say, well, yeah, that just seems like what
Speaker 2: you do?
Speaker 3: You know, I just do not believe that this guy
Speaker 3: is actually this angry about it.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 2: Well, and that's part of why I really appreciate what
Speaker 2: Chafkin does here, because like, once you read like, oh
Speaker 2: and all of this was funded by some like shady
Speaker 2: right wing think tank that gave them forty grand to
Speaker 2: write a book to like because the funders hate colleges
Speaker 2: and liberal professors. Oh okay, so this is made up, right,
Speaker 2: Like you were paid to be angry about this. That
Speaker 2: plays a role in why Peter is doing all of this,
Speaker 2: for sure, last the late nineteen nineties demanded more of
Speaker 2: Peter than a full time devotion to the culture war trenches.
Speaker 2: After quitting his law career, he'd been forced to live
Speaker 2: with mom and dad for a while, which I think
Speaker 2: was a miserable experience for him, and then he'd finally
Speaker 2: managed to get himself set up in a shitty little
Speaker 2: apartment thanks to all of those think tank paychecks. Peter
Speaker 2: was not happy with this life. He was not about
Speaker 2: to live as a poor man or even just a
Speaker 2: moderately comfortable conservative intellectual. He wanted to be one of
Speaker 2: the rich founders, plucking a young, angry man like he'd
Speaker 2: been from obscurity and funding them in their quest to
Speaker 2: write bullshit. And in order to become that kind of guy,
Speaker 2: the only way to make the money he needed was finance.
Speaker 2: So he decides he's going to launch a hedge fund
Speaker 2: from his friend with a friend from his magazine days
Speaker 2: at Stanford using money that he had begged from friends,
Speaker 2: family and friends of family. Now, he'd been trying to
Speaker 2: trade derivatives up to this point, and that had not
Speaker 2: made him a bunch of money. The fact that he's
Speaker 2: able to get enough money from friends and family to
Speaker 2: start a hedge fund is evidence again, this is not
Speaker 2: a poor kid. This is not even a middle class kid, right,
Speaker 2: No matter what a lot of provoles came from a
Speaker 2: middle class family. I'm sorry if your family has enough
Speaker 2: money for you to start a mutual fund with their
Speaker 2: donations or hedge funds, sorry, like that's you know, you're
Speaker 2: not necessarily like millionaires, but your family and friends are
Speaker 2: of a different certainly, Like if I had wanted to
Speaker 2: start a hedge fund at this age, my family and
Speaker 2: friends would not have been able to pay into it
Speaker 2: right like they were struggling to pay rent. Peter was
Speaker 2: not initially good at running a hedge fund. In his
Speaker 2: first year operating, the Nasdaq went up by forty percent,
Speaker 2: and Peter's fund lost money betting instead on currency. Part
Speaker 2: of this is because this is something Chafkin points out,
Speaker 2: Peter's kind of obsessed with George Soros, and George I
Speaker 2: think kind of around the time Peter's getting into hedge funds,
Speaker 2: makes a fortune shorting the British pound and like kind
Speaker 2: of fucks up the currency of an entire nation with
Speaker 2: his you know, his betting right, and Peter both hates
Speaker 2: Soros because they're very different ideologically, and also wants to
Speaker 2: be like him because he sees he wants that kind
Speaker 2: of like Soros is this right wing bugbear, this monster
Speaker 2: in their nightmares, and Peter wants to be that for
Speaker 2: the left right. So he's betting on currency, but he's
Speaker 2: just not any fucking good at it right. So it
Speaker 2: gradually dawns on Peter that he probably isn't going to
Speaker 2: earn a reputation as one of the great hedge fund founders.
Speaker 2: And while he struggles with this, he watches the news,
Speaker 2: which is endlessly celebrating this is the end of the nineties, now,
Speaker 2: this parade of stories about guys like Marc Andreesen who
Speaker 2: made early dot com fortunes. Peter's obsessing over this, and
Speaker 2: he's supplementing his income with lectures at Stanford, so he's
Speaker 2: writing about how evil the higher education system is and
Speaker 2: also reliant upon it for some of his money. When
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety eight at Stanford, he is a run
Speaker 2: in with someone who would be a crucial part of
Speaker 2: the next and most profitable phase of his life. This
Speaker 2: someone's name was Max Levchin, and Max was a twenty
Speaker 2: three year old student at Peter's alma mater who showed
Speaker 2: up one day for a lecture on currency. The two
Speaker 2: hit it off and wound up talking about Peter's hedge fund.
Speaker 2: Max mentioned that he was considering an investment in a
Speaker 2: company that made software for palm pilots. Now, no, you
Speaker 2: know what a palm pilot was? Yes, I think we
Speaker 2: I have to step back and explain this for our
Speaker 2: zoomer audience because they're not going to have any fucking
Speaker 2: idea what I'm talking about. Imagine a smartphone that can't
Speaker 2: call people, or text people or like map your way
Speaker 2: to you know, it doesn't have a GPS. You also
Speaker 2: you can't message in it. You can't like use the
Speaker 2: Internet at all really on it in most functional ways,
Speaker 2: and there's not any games on it. It also doesn't
Speaker 2: have a camera. Basically, it's a small computer that keeps
Speaker 2: track of your calendar and if you can find out
Speaker 2: how to download a book in nineteen ninety eight, it
Speaker 2: can kind of be a shitty e reader, right, those
Speaker 2: are the things that palm pilots are doing at this
Speaker 2: point in time.
Speaker 3: Those are also one of those things like you had
Speaker 3: to use one of the like it's got to stainless.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, they're fucking they're awful. It really is like
Speaker 2: Steve Jobs hated the palm pilot because he very rightly
Speaker 2: was like, this is never going to take off as
Speaker 2: a product because it sucks. It's a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: The only people who like these are like people with
Speaker 2: disposable income who like want to impress folks by having
Speaker 2: an electronic gadget that most people don't have. Right, they're
Speaker 2: just now that there's not uses for all palm pilot,
Speaker 2: But it's not an indispensable device in the same way
Speaker 2: that a smartphone will become, right, Like, you really can't
Speaker 2: exist in a lot of the modern economy if you
Speaker 2: don't have a fucking smartphone. Palm pilots are never that.
Speaker 3: But indispensable. However, in masturbation.
Speaker 2: Jokes, yes, yes, also also that right, that was Oh god, yeah,
Speaker 2: what a time that was. They really laid that one
Speaker 2: up for us perfectly. Yep, So Palm pilots are a
Speaker 2: dead end tech wise, but they also are They're not
Speaker 2: a failed product entire They do make money for a while,
Speaker 2: and there's there's a lot in Palm Pilot development that
Speaker 2: is going to feed in later to smartphones and the
Speaker 2: smartphone app ecosystem, right, and that's going to be relevant because,
Speaker 2: like Max and Peter, they start talking about, like we
Speaker 2: want to create like an app for Palm pilot users,
Speaker 2: and specifically initially what PayPal is is Max and Penier
Speaker 2: being like, what if PalmPilot users can send each other
Speaker 2: io use, right, Like what if there was a way
Speaker 2: to do that? And Peter's his interest kind of evolves
Speaker 2: into what if we use Because they're looking at the
Speaker 2: internet and palm pilots have some ability to connect. It's
Speaker 2: a nightmarish pain in the ass compared to just like
Speaker 2: the way your smartphone works, they do have a way
Speaker 2: of connecting. Peter is start is starting to look at
Speaker 2: this digital infrastructure that's being built up in this period,
Speaker 2: and he gets this. He gets this fascination with the
Speaker 2: idea of what if we create a digital bank that
Speaker 2: can separate money from the state, Right, So he sees
Speaker 2: PayPal not as just a business, but as an act
Speaker 2: of revolutionary praxie. If we're looking at like Peter as
Speaker 2: like a capitalist Lenin, this is his equivalent of like
Speaker 2: the banks that Lenin had Stalin rob in order to
Speaker 2: fund the revolution. Right, PayPal will allow us to take
Speaker 2: money from the state and build up our own war
Speaker 2: chest in order to destroy this liberal nanny state and
Speaker 2: create our libertarian paradise. It's a weapon, right, Peter sees
Speaker 2: PayPal as a weapon time. Yeah, that is what he claims.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you what he believed at the time.
Speaker 2: All the reporting on him, and this is what people
Speaker 2: who knew him said, is that like, yeah, he saw
Speaker 2: this as like this is a way to separate money
Speaker 2: from the state. So I think it is probably credible
Speaker 2: that he sees this as an act of kind of
Speaker 2: revolutionary praxie.
Speaker 3: Wild. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In a two thousand and seven article for Fortune Magazine,
Speaker 2: Jeffrey O'Brien wrote, Teel figured a web based currency would
Speaker 2: undermine government tax structures. Getting there, however, would mean taking
Speaker 2: on established industries commercial banking, for instance, which would require
Speaker 2: financial acumen and engineering expertise. That's one of the earlier
Speaker 2: Like this is a revolutionary thing for him, Right, I
Speaker 2: want to undermine the government by building this web based currency.
Speaker 2: And obviously that's not what PayPal becomes. PayPal is just
Speaker 2: a way to like send your friends money. You know,
Speaker 2: it is not separated cat. But also Peter is not
Speaker 2: involved in PayPal after he sells it, as we'll talk about.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So one benefit of founding a company like PayPal was
Speaker 2: that Peter and his partner could bring into work for
Speaker 2: them anyone they wanted and exclude anyone who annoyed them.
Speaker 2: And as soon as the company gets off the ground,
Speaker 2: it becomes clear that, like this is non negotiable for Peter, right,
Speaker 2: Like A big reason why he likes the idea of
Speaker 2: being a founder is he can kind of make his
Speaker 2: own clubhouse and say no girls allowed.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And that's more literal than you might think. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: read something that Levchin told Forbes in that two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven interview. This guy came in and I asked
Speaker 2: what he liked to do for fun. He said, I
Speaker 2: really enjoy playing hoops. I said, we can't hire the guy.
Speaker 2: Everyone I knew in college you like to play hoops,
Speaker 2: was an idiot. Wow, no basketball guys, Sophie would not
Speaker 2: have done well at PayPal. Nope, I know that hurts, Sophie.
Speaker 2: I know that you really had a lot writing on
Speaker 2: a PayPal career in two thousand and seven, So I'm
Speaker 2: sorry it would have been you know what else has
Speaker 2: a lot writing on a PayPal career and I don't
Speaker 2: think it's going to work out for them. Is our sources,
Speaker 2: our sponsors, sponsors, Jesus Christ, My head's not on straight today, Sophie.
Speaker 2: You can tell that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not much different than any other day.
Speaker 2: But yep, well, hey, no, I'm normally breaking dads and
Speaker 2: we're back. Okay, let's so, let's let's get back into
Speaker 2: the Peter Teel story. So the early PayPal company culture
Speaker 2: is obsessed with work, but it also carries a little
Speaker 2: of Peter's growing antipathy towards college educations. One early employee
Speaker 2: claimed that the big difference between Google and PayPal was quote,
Speaker 2: Google wanted to hire PhDs. PayPal wanted to hire people
Speaker 2: who got into PhD programs and dropped out.
Speaker 1: That is so interesting. Uh huh, that is so interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's this. And again, Peter's not a dropout,
Speaker 2: right like he not like, like, for example, jobs, right.
Speaker 2: He's not somebody who decides college isn't for me and
Speaker 2: bounces to do his own thing. He gets a degree
Speaker 2: and fails. So it's interesting that he's like, I am
Speaker 2: only going to hire people who were, like I guess,
Speaker 2: slightly more on the ball than me about realizing college
Speaker 2: wasn't where they wanted to be. I guess PhD programs.
Speaker 2: You have spent a lot of time in college at
Speaker 2: that point. I don't know. You can you can interpret
Speaker 2: that how you want. Levchin describes early PayPal employees as
Speaker 2: geeky guys who quote didn't get laid very often. The
Speaker 2: least surprising thing I've ever heard about payment. If you're
Speaker 2: wondering what companies employees were fucking like crazy, PayPal's not
Speaker 2: going to be your first bet. Obviously it's Yahoo. I
Speaker 2: was gonna say Licos, but nobody's gonna remember Licos either.
Speaker 2: So here's another quote from that Forbes article. In the
Speaker 2: early days, when it came time to hire a high
Speaker 2: ranking female engineer, she turned out to be bad at
Speaker 2: ping pong. Levchin took that as a lack of competitive flare,
Speaker 2: but grudgingly hired her anyway. She quit within six months.
Speaker 2: Peter na never fails to rub that in. He grumbles, Oh, man, Peter,
Speaker 2: like she can't play ping pong, There's no way she'll
Speaker 2: fit in here. I think you guys were just committed
Speaker 2: to making sure she wouldn't fit in there.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: One thing I find interesting is that for all of
Speaker 2: Peter's obsession with hierarchy, particularly as the rest of the
Speaker 2: world is concerned, he doesn't appear to have actually been
Speaker 2: that kind of manager. In other words, he is not
Speaker 2: a like super dick, am I have to be in
Speaker 2: charge only my way or the highway kind of guy.
Speaker 2: He actually a lot of people say it was kind
Speaker 2: of a very good manager in this period of time.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read another quote from Forbes here. His
Speaker 2: hallmark management emo at PayPal was the all hands, open
Speaker 2: book session, customer logs, revenue flow, fraud, losses, burn rate.
Speaker 2: He display it all for every employee to see. This
Speaker 2: access to information, coupled with the lack of offices, created
Speaker 2: a flat structure where any idea could win the day.
Speaker 2: And that's not a bad way. That's a very effective
Speaker 2: way of running things. That's probably part of why PayPal
Speaker 2: works out, and it's interesting to me that like as
Speaker 2: obsessed ideologically as he is with hierarchy, Peter tends to
Speaker 2: run things as more of like an open book, flat
Speaker 2: organizational structure where we're all just kind of sitting together
Speaker 2: and bullshitting and like arguing and whoever can make the
Speaker 2: best point, that's the idea that takes off. That's interesting
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 3: As long as you're good at ping pong.
Speaker 2: As long as you as long as you fit into
Speaker 2: his idea of the elites that he wants, right, And
Speaker 2: maybe that is that I respect other people who I
Speaker 2: see as being at my level, and so I can
Speaker 2: work with them on a kind of approaching an even basis,
Speaker 2: just I can't respect anyone else.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as long as long as you speak Orkish.
Speaker 2: Play, Yeah, Yes, as long as you can read the
Speaker 2: runes on the Gates of Moria and hate basketball, you
Speaker 2: can be in Peter's clubhouse. So you will note that
Speaker 2: around the same time this is all happening, a guy
Speaker 2: who's in the news occasionally. Some of you may have
Speaker 2: heard of him. He's an obscure figure, but he comes
Speaker 2: up now and again named Elon Musk started another company
Speaker 2: named x dot com now not the not the social
Speaker 2: networking site that we all refer to buy that name
Speaker 2: at all times. Of course, No, this was actually a
Speaker 2: different company and EARLIERX dot com. And the gist of
Speaker 2: the story, I'm actually not going to talk a lot
Speaker 2: about Musk and Teal at PayPal because in terms of
Speaker 2: like popular culture knowledge of these guys, half of it
Speaker 2: is the big fight that they had at PayPal. Right,
Speaker 2: Musk and Teal had both started payment companies that were
Speaker 2: doing very similar things, and the market was not big
Speaker 2: enough to support them both as independent companies, so they
Speaker 2: had to merge in order to be valid as a business. Right,
Speaker 2: And the two don't get along and wind up like
Speaker 2: finding But like that's that's the thing that gets reported
Speaker 2: all the time. I just don't think it's that interesting.
Speaker 2: It's also as behind the bastards goes the fact that
Speaker 2: Peter Teal is a dick to Elon Musk, not really
Speaker 2: evil to dislike Elon Musk. Yeah, I feel like we
Speaker 2: can understand why Peter might not have gotten along with
Speaker 2: Elon Musk. But the the basically what's happening here is
Speaker 2: that both of these companies X and PayPal are funded
Speaker 2: by a lot of VC money and they're kind of
Speaker 2: lighting it on fire. At this point the company, neither
Speaker 2: company is in the black, and the belief is that like,
Speaker 2: the only way they'll get there is if they merge,
Speaker 2: and this does work. This is an effective They get
Speaker 2: kind of pressured into it, but this is an effective
Speaker 2: like way to build a business. Now, Elon becomes the
Speaker 2: CEO for a period of time, but he and Peter
Speaker 2: do not get along, and Peter orchestrates a coup against
Speaker 2: Musk while Elon is on vacation. I'd relate that in
Speaker 2: more detail, but again, who can blame him?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: The specific conflict seems to have arisen because Elon has
Speaker 2: this obsession with moving the company off of Unix and
Speaker 2: towards a Microsoft platform, whereas Teal and his ogs are
Speaker 2: all very much like in the Unix tank, right and
Speaker 2: so like that's kind of the root of a lot
Speaker 2: of the conflicts between them. But the larger issue is
Speaker 2: that there's just a personality clash. They don't like each other.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that's really funny here is
Speaker 2: that is as much as both of these guys suck,
Speaker 2: and they're both current like right wing influential, right wing
Speaker 2: like monsters, they both had each other's number twenty years ago,
Speaker 2: like their criticisms of each other are perfectly valid. Chafkin
Speaker 2: quotes a colleague who talked to each man about the
Speaker 2: other during this period, and this colleague said, Musk thinks
Speaker 2: Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a
Speaker 2: fraud and a braggart. Hey, guys, you're both right. You
Speaker 2: did it.
Speaker 3: Incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's not bad, all right.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for the next Trump administration when they're yeah,
Speaker 3: that's gonna be to dismantle the state.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's kind of an either no matter
Speaker 2: who wins, we lose or or maybe the mister burns
Speaker 2: so many diseases that it kind of keeps the structure
Speaker 2: propped up up.
Speaker 3: I guess yeah.
Speaker 2: That's that's your call. Yeah, okay, okay, I again, I
Speaker 2: think it's Alien four, but nobody's going to understand my
Speaker 2: references to Alien four. So what I do think that
Speaker 2: you can probably understand all politics via one of the
Speaker 2: Alien movies, as long as it's not the David Fincher one.
Speaker 2: You know, let's just keep Alien three shovel that aside,
Speaker 2: you know, Alien Resurrection, Alien Aliens, all good politics. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I think it's funny that these guys very clearly get
Speaker 2: who each other is in such a strong way, and
Speaker 2: they kind of they seem to have had a little
Speaker 2: bit of a rapprochma, in part because Peter is later
Speaker 2: going to save SpaceX with an investment kind of. But uh,
Speaker 2: once Peter ousts Musk, the two are at arms. Lincoln,
Speaker 2: they hate each other for years, right, They are very
Speaker 2: clearly enemies for a while. After this, Peter takes over
Speaker 2: Muscus CEO, and in this role he has a couple
Speaker 2: of strengths. He's noted by his employees as being a
Speaker 2: very supportive manager. He's the kind of guy who will
Speaker 2: give you a ton of freedom in the world to
Speaker 2: explore and try stuff out. Now, the downside of this
Speaker 2: is Peter actually doesn't like confrontation. He's terrible at firing
Speaker 2: people if he brings someone in, in part because I
Speaker 2: think he mostly hires people he likes. If they're bad
Speaker 2: or they fuck up, he'll shuffle them around. But he
Speaker 2: doesn't tend to just let people go. He's really bad
Speaker 2: at that actually, which is interesting to me. Now, one
Speaker 2: of the big successes PayPal has in this period. As
Speaker 2: a result of Peter's management style is that they develop
Speaker 2: innovative technology aimed at fighting online fraud. From a fairly
Speaker 2: early point in the business, around the year two thousand,
Speaker 2: PayPal had started dealing with Russian scammers creating shell accounts
Speaker 2: with stolen credit card numbers using bots. It actually goes
Speaker 2: back quite a while. This is again happening before nine
Speaker 2: to eleven. Teal didn't want to crack down on this
Speaker 2: in a way that would make the service harder to use,
Speaker 2: because it being easy to use was part of the appeal, right,
Speaker 2: So instead, what they needed to do is actually figure
Speaker 2: out where these networks were and shut down the network surgically.
Speaker 2: So he has Levchin design a program that forced users
Speaker 2: to copy letters displayed over a background that made them
Speaker 2: impossible for machines to read. This becomes the capture system, right.
Speaker 2: We all know that that is comes out of PayPal.
Speaker 2: Levchin is the guy who codes it, but Teal is
Speaker 2: a big part of like why we get capture now,
Speaker 2: that's obviously very influential. We've all had to do god
Speaker 2: knows an infinite number of these fucking things. But that
Speaker 2: innovation alone only puts a dentt in the online like
Speaker 2: fraud problem. So near the end of two thousand, a
Speaker 2: PayPal employee named John Kolthanak, who's a former military intelligence man,
Speaker 2: started building what we today call the crazy board. Right
Speaker 2: where he's he's trying to like do the little like
Speaker 2: string like time bits of string to pictures of different
Speaker 2: like fraud networks, try to map out these accounts of
Speaker 2: fraudsters who are attacking PayPal. And he does this. It's
Speaker 2: all kind of in a very like isolator, in a
Speaker 2: very like labor intensive way, like building this like map
Speaker 2: is a real pain in the ass, but he does
Speaker 2: eventually isolate the main culprit of the botnet, you know,
Speaker 2: defrauding them, a guy nicknamed Egor who had taken twenty
Speaker 2: million dollars or so out of PayPal. Now, when this
Speaker 2: worked out, this is a very effective method of getting
Speaker 2: this guy, they decide, like, we need a way to
Speaker 2: automate this process. Right, it's too slow to build a
Speaker 2: crazy board the way call Thinek had, So let's have
Speaker 2: Levchin code, a system by which you can map out
Speaker 2: links between different groups of bad actors, so you can
Speaker 2: build an actual physical understanding of these networks in real time. Right,
Speaker 2: this app to build this kind of a crazy board
Speaker 2: system is what becomes Palantier, right, yeah, yeah. Levchin calls
Speaker 2: the program Egor because of this guy that Kothanek had caught,
Speaker 2: and he builds this program and it's for PayPal to
Speaker 2: stop fraud. This is what becomes Palenter. This is the
Speaker 2: core of Palenteer, right, it comes from Igor.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very interesting stuff. Yes, and we will be talking
Speaker 2: a lot about Palatineer in Bart three. Teal's management style.
Speaker 2: So again, if you're looking at this, this is both
Speaker 2: like you should be hearing that music, like we can
Speaker 2: see the evil coming up here, but also this is
Speaker 2: evidence that like Peter's management style isn't bad. These are
Speaker 2: effective outcomes that make a lot of money.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He is capable of motivating and managing people and giving
Speaker 2: them the freedom they need to innovate. You know that
Speaker 2: you have to acknowledge that about the guy totally. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But that said, he also has a lot of blind spots,
Speaker 2: and these are well described in this quote from that
Speaker 2: Forbes article. In two thousand and seven, PayPal's losses were multiplying.
Speaker 2: It battled Russian fraudsters who are filching millions by cribbing
Speaker 2: credit card numbers. Customer service complaints flooded the phone lines
Speaker 2: and inboxes, where often dealt with by simply not answering
Speaker 2: the phone doing a mass deletion. Louisiana temporarily banned PayPal
Speaker 2: from doing business in the state. MasterCard threatened to pull
Speaker 2: the plug because of the high number of chargebacks. Peter
Speaker 2: Teel didn't know what a chargeback was, said Jawed Karim,
Speaker 2: an early engineer who went on to found YouTube with
Speaker 2: fellow alumni Chad Hurley and Steve Chin and then sell
Speaker 2: it to Google. That's one of the fundamental things of
Speaker 2: any credit card payment system. Chargebacks almost killed the company.
Speaker 2: So there's also, in this very libertarian way, he doesn't
Speaker 2: understand very basic aspects of reality that are central to
Speaker 2: the thing he's trying to do, and it nearly kills them. Right, Like,
Speaker 2: you don't know what a chargeback is and you are
Speaker 2: running a payment processing company, Like that's a big, big
Speaker 2: blind spot, right, I know what a chargeback is, and
Speaker 2: I'm just a guy who was bad at having a
Speaker 2: credit card.
Speaker 3: You know. Right. But he's not very far removed from
Speaker 3: just being like.
Speaker 2: A punt right, right, And when you understand that is
Speaker 2: his background, right, that he doesn't really have a life
Speaker 2: outside of not making it as a lawyer and then
Speaker 2: being a wagon pundit. I get while you've got some
Speaker 2: blind spots, Peter.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's really interesting about the Palin board, Like, yeah,
Speaker 5: that that you know, I mean, I grew a giant company,
Speaker 5: you know, almost by accident out of.
Speaker 3: The zone one.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And and that is like one of the
Speaker 2: more interesting stories with with Teal, right, because it doesn't
Speaker 2: come out of this.
Speaker 3: The fact that.
Speaker 2: He's after nine to eleven able to see like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, this thing we've used to stop networks of scammers,
Speaker 2: you can probably sell to the government to try to
Speaker 2: stop terrorists right after this big attack. You know, that's
Speaker 2: a that's that's some genuine insight. So PayPal, you know,
Speaker 2: it struggles with profitability, but they eventually break even after
Speaker 2: about one hundred and eighty million had been poured into
Speaker 2: the idea. Now under Elon and Peter Teal, PayPal is
Speaker 2: never profitable, right, they hit break even, and as soon
Speaker 2: as they hit break even, they carry out an ip
Speaker 2: Right immediately after their IPO, the company is sold to
Speaker 2: eBay for one and a half billion dollars, and Peter
Speaker 2: leaves instantly right the financially successful portion of PayPal's history,
Speaker 2: he is not around for him. In fact, the first
Speaker 2: thing he does after living is he basically he sets
Speaker 2: up he's going to set up like a venture capital fund,
Speaker 2: and he's going to short PayPal. Right, he sells this
Speaker 2: thing off and he's like, I'm immediately going to bet
Speaker 2: against it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He has absolutely not at all,
Speaker 2: no loyalty or anything like that. Right, Like, he gets
Speaker 2: his money and he gets out, I am done. I
Speaker 2: have no more interest in this idea, right And I
Speaker 2: think in part because it's become clear at this point
Speaker 2: by two thousand and two, PayPal is not going to
Speaker 2: destroy capital like destroy or so Kim. PayPal is not
Speaker 2: going to destroy like liberal democratic governments. It's not going
Speaker 2: to create its own currency system. It's just going to
Speaker 2: be the way people use spend money on the internet.
Speaker 2: And that's not interesting to him right now. Part of
Speaker 2: why I think he gets into this like shorting, betting
Speaker 2: against this thing he'd helped to build, is that two
Speaker 2: thousand and two is also right after nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: and Peter is one of many Americans who kind of
Speaker 2: loses his mind over nine to eleven, Right, this is
Speaker 2: a deranging moment for him, and it also like it
Speaker 2: fucks up the fact that he has this need to
Speaker 2: be seen as a contrarian, as separate, as above the herd, right.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting to me that for all of that,
Speaker 2: he is very much in line with like regular people
Speaker 2: like my parents. When it comes to just like losing
Speaker 2: his mind over this terrorist attack, it terrifies him. He's
Speaker 2: going to participate in a program by the Bush White
Speaker 2: House to bring Silicon Valley movers and shakers in closer
Speaker 2: contact with the Republican Party. This is the first he
Speaker 2: had a lot of his friends from PayPal, people that
Speaker 2: like had kind of seen him as like he's a libertarian,
Speaker 2: He's a Silicon Valley libertarian, but like libertarians were very
Speaker 2: anti Bush in this period. And the fact that Peter
Speaker 2: is willing to get in out of the Republican Party,
Speaker 2: a lot of people is like, oh, I don't really
Speaker 2: know this guy like I thought I did. This does
Speaker 2: not make sense where the person I thought Peter was.
Speaker 2: And you know, some of what's going on here is
Speaker 2: that the tech bubble has burst in this post nine
Speaker 2: to eleven period right, the period immediately after the attacks
Speaker 2: from the US is invading Afghanistan and spinning up towards
Speaker 2: invading Iraq is a bad time for big tech. The
Speaker 2: dot com bubble had burst, and the economy in general
Speaker 2: had shit. The bed is partly as a result of
Speaker 2: the attacks. Peter, who has always had a good gut
Speaker 2: instinct for the momentum of the moment and culture, opted
Speaker 2: to spend a lot of the next two years kind
Speaker 2: of fucking around, right. He like he gets from two
Speaker 2: thousand and two to two thousand and four that like, there,
Speaker 2: this is not really a great time to be investing
Speaker 2: in most things. And he's also he's just sold his
Speaker 2: first company. He's mega rich now, so some of what
Speaker 2: he's doing is just, you know, he's kind of idly
Speaker 2: shorting his old business the US economy. But he's also
Speaker 2: just kind of like doing the very understandable thing, which
Speaker 2: is partying for a while, you know. So this is
Speaker 2: also where Peter, you could kind of see this as
Speaker 2: he's getting some space and he starts to find himself
Speaker 2: during this period. Chaff Gin rights that as CEO of PayPal,
Speaker 2: Peter had dressed down in a T shirt and old jeans,
Speaker 2: but as soon as he sold off his interest in
Speaker 2: the company. Quote now Teal had a wardrobe full of
Speaker 2: suits and a silver Ferrari spider three p. Sixty read,
Speaker 2: he told The New York Times magazine would have been
Speaker 2: over the top. He purchased a ten thousand square foot
Speaker 2: mansion in San Francisco and filled it with art, but
Speaker 2: also conference rooms, a day to night lounge, and a
Speaker 2: kitchen meant for buffets. It was a place to work
Speaker 2: and host work, but chaf gin rights. There were no keepsakes,
Speaker 2: no magazines, and no family photos. Teal's homes, as one
Speaker 2: visitor remarked, referring to the Presidio mansion and a grand
Speaker 2: apartment that Peter acquired in New York City, looked like
Speaker 2: stage sets and it's hard to tell someone actually lives
Speaker 2: in them. I feel like that's just being mega rich.
Speaker 2: You've got enough be able to keep everything clean all
Speaker 2: the time, and you want a lot of nice star yeah.
Speaker 2: Teal invested money in an eye club called Frisson after
Speaker 2: one of his friend friends bragged about a different nightclub
Speaker 2: in New York City that had co ed bathrooms and
Speaker 2: so uh. Frissan is largely based around its co ed bathrooms,
Speaker 2: which are designed to provide couples with an easy way
Speaker 2: to fuck in a public bathroom because some people want that.
Speaker 2: That's at least, you know the allegation from Chapkins book
Speaker 2: that like he builds this night because a friend is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's this fucking club in New York and you have
Speaker 2: sex with your girlfriend in the bathrooms.
Speaker 3: And Peter's like, I.
Speaker 2: Need to own one of those in the in the
Speaker 2: West Coast.
Speaker 3: Uh, Silicon Valley. It's yeah, yeah, bathroom fuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've invented fucking in a club. Bathroom. Congratulations. Peter
Speaker 2: like comes in one day dressed as Steve Jobs, Like,
Speaker 2: I've had an incredibly great idea doing cocaine in a bathroom.
Speaker 2: This is going to revolutionized partying as.
Speaker 3: A rich guy for san is like the name of
Speaker 3: like a USA Networks, Uh like rom coms version of
Speaker 3: a club. Yeah, it's like that's when the guys from
Speaker 3: suits went to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Now it also hosted fine dining, and
Speaker 2: I gotta say it works for a while, although in
Speaker 2: a way that's creepy. In retrospect, Chief Gen makes hay
Speaker 2: out of the celebrities that became regulars. Quote Lars Ulrich,
Speaker 2: Robert Redford, Kevin Spacey, what a party?
Speaker 3: Robert Redford? Cool?
Speaker 2: Fine, yeah, Robert Redford, He's really the sandwich.
Speaker 3: Yeh, super cool. Yeah, Lars Ulrich and.
Speaker 2: Kevin Lars Alway in the period oh God, because it's
Speaker 2: also like that's like page yeah yeah, Lars Alric space
Speaker 2: God because yeah, that's like peak angry at fucking nabster.
Speaker 2: Lars Ulrich and I don't and I'm not gonna make
Speaker 2: allegations about Kevin Spacey, given to how litigious he is,
Speaker 2: but like, read something about Kevin Spacey. Just just read
Speaker 2: something about Kevin Spacey and then make a guess what's
Speaker 2: going on in the bathrooms of Frassan casting for great movies? Obviously,
Speaker 2: so he tries his hand at publishing in this period
Speaker 2: two and you are not going to guess what magazine
Speaker 2: he launches.
Speaker 3: What what sport?
Speaker 2: Would Peter Thiel launch a magazine based around in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two or four something like that school squash?
Speaker 3: I don't know, squash.
Speaker 2: Okay, you got a guess?
Speaker 3: Noah, I mean I thought you were giving us like
Speaker 3: the foreshadowing with Ping Pong.
Speaker 2: No, that would have been very I would have respected
Speaker 2: the hell out of that if he had tried to
Speaker 2: get a Ping Bong magazine off the ground about all
Speaker 2: the time, Pickle, no, not pick I don't know that exists.
Speaker 3: Just like Ping Pong won a slightly large record anywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Frisbee, it's ping pong for dads. Frisbee, Frisbee, no ball.
Speaker 2: I'm satisfied that none of you guessed. The magazine he
Speaker 2: launches is named American Thunder, and it's it's about Nascar.
Speaker 1: That sounds like, sounds like a dirty magazine.
Speaker 3: It may have been.
Speaker 2: It was a little bit pornographic. This is a psyop.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, he is.
Speaker 2: He does this. The goal of this is he starts
Speaker 2: a NASCAR magazine and he hires only his right wing
Speaker 2: think tank friends to write about in it, and their
Speaker 2: goal is to use NASCAR's cultural cachet with like regular
Speaker 2: conservatives to push more of their extremist like libertarian ideas
Speaker 2: to Republicans. Right, that's the goal of American Thunder. And
Speaker 2: it's wild to me he puts ten million dollars into
Speaker 2: this magazine despite the fact that he is not interested
Speaker 2: in Nascar. He brings his old Stanford Review buddies in
Speaker 2: and the first issue, rather than like talking about NASCAR
Speaker 2: in a meaningful way, has like an essay about how
Speaker 2: the magazine is not going to embody any sense of
Speaker 2: political correctness, which at this maybe today that would work.
Speaker 2: At this point in time, the kind of people who
Speaker 2: buy a NASCAR magazine really just want to read about
Speaker 2: Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhart. You know, like just sit
Speaker 2: in your rants, know.
Speaker 3: This, What if hold on, hold on? Wait, okay, what
Speaker 3: if he had done that but with pampon that would.
Speaker 2: Be incredibly funny, just like a red pill.
Speaker 3: Everybody throw ping pong.
Speaker 2: His Ping Pong magazine is entirely about the gold standard.
Speaker 2: There's just a forty five pay ranton here about euthanizing
Speaker 2: the poor. I was trying to buy a new racket.
Speaker 2: I still don't know what kind of table again. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so yes, this is It seems to have been a
Speaker 2: badly disguised tempt to attempt to propagandize to normal working jos.
Speaker 2: And this is embodied well by the magazine's Real Guys column.
Speaker 2: And here's how Chifkin describes that it was written not
Speaker 2: by an auto journalist but by the online editor for
Speaker 2: The Weekly Standard, who devoted his first column to the
Speaker 2: idea that ESPN had been emasculated by namby pamby political correctness,
Speaker 2: the grub page where a normal magazine would have struck
Speaker 2: the barbecue recipes included in its inaugural column.
Speaker 3: Incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a possibly tongue in cheek anthropological discussion of why
Speaker 2: household cooking should be considered women's work. Everyday cooking is ature.
Speaker 2: A few men ever get around to, or even care
Speaker 2: to get around to. We are grateful that this is
Speaker 2: how things have worked out. So grateful we'll even help
Speaker 2: with the dishes from time to time. Fuck, I just
Speaker 2: tell people how to fucking make a barbecue sauce.
Speaker 5: Man.
Speaker 2: Come on, somebody needs this in their NASCAR magazine.
Speaker 1: Up Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: So it says a lot about the economics of magazines,
Speaker 2: because like, if somebody hands me ten million dollars to
Speaker 2: start a media company, I think I can do a
Speaker 2: lot with ten million dollars. Peter's magazine is bankrupt by
Speaker 2: the end of two thousand and five. It lasts about
Speaker 2: a year, So that's a pretty I think even with
Speaker 2: magazine money, that's a pretty You know more about this
Speaker 2: than me, no, but that seems like a pretty fast
Speaker 2: burn rate.
Speaker 3: I mean, good on him, you know, good on him.
Speaker 3: I'm sure there's some lavish photo shoots, definitely, you know,
Speaker 3: featuring Camille Pallia.
Speaker 2: Uh, you knows favorite intellectually, yeah.
Speaker 3: After on top of a stock car. Yeah, I'm sure
Speaker 3: there's some real like you know, a lot of like
Speaker 3: nineties technology devoted to like you know, Mussolini U photoshopped
Speaker 3: into you know, Dale Earnhardt's machine.
Speaker 2: I wonder if we got because Dale Earnhardt famously like
Speaker 2: helped lead a crusade against like the use of Confederate
Speaker 2: flags at NASCAR events. I wonder if there's an angry
Speaker 2: column about that in this I don't remember the exact
Speaker 2: year that that happened, though, Uh.
Speaker 3: It's like bring back to General Lee.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I wonder if that was a cause for
Speaker 2: these people.
Speaker 3: Do you know that dukes of hazard guys were in
Speaker 3: there somehow? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jesus Chris Peterteel's NASCAR magazine. The issues of that
Speaker 2: have to be a collector side at this point. Ready, Yeah,
Speaker 2: American Thunder is bankrupt by the end of the year.
Speaker 2: Forssan lasts a little bit longer and makes it till
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight. Now, the fact that he's pouring
Speaker 2: money into these and all of them are lost lostly,
Speaker 2: you could say it doesn't hurt him. He's got plenty
Speaker 2: of money, and neither of him have been about making
Speaker 2: a profit. Both were away scheme, There were schemes to
Speaker 2: gain influence, right. The nightclub was a way of like
Speaker 2: setting him up in like the popular, like cool hip,
Speaker 2: celebrity set, and this magazine was an attempt to gain
Speaker 2: influence with the working class.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So the fact that neither of these make money doesn't
Speaker 2: disturb Peter. But he also knows that he's not going
Speaker 2: to be able to coast forever off of his PayPal money.
Speaker 2: And you know what, we here aren't going to be
Speaker 2: able to coast forever off of the money we already
Speaker 2: have from ads. So why don't you listen to a
Speaker 2: couple more You're back?
Speaker 1: That was beautiful, Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: I thought that was one of my better one of
Speaker 2: my better plugs. So by this point, Peter Thiel, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of the period he's trying all this stuff out.
Speaker 2: He's also started a new company, an investment firm called
Speaker 2: Clarion Capital, which had been founded in two thousand and two. Now, Peter,
Speaker 2: not long after Clarium gets found and is going to
Speaker 2: get in on the ground floor of investing in Facebook.
Speaker 2: He gets a ten percent steak in the company, but
Speaker 2: that deal is also structured in some ways as a loan.
Speaker 2: This is one of those things that's covered a lot
Speaker 2: in the social network right. Basically, he puts the steak
Speaker 2: in the company to which allows Facebook to survive in
Speaker 2: its early days, but he does so in such a
Speaker 2: way that in order to make the company viable, Zuckerberg
Speaker 2: has to ice out one of his other founders who
Speaker 2: has like a twenty seven percent steak in the company,
Speaker 2: which he does. This is Zuck's big first betrayal, and
Speaker 2: you can see Peter is kind of like the puppet
Speaker 2: master in it. Now again, these are all the kids
Speaker 2: who started Facebook. So the fact that they are backstabbing
Speaker 2: each other at Peter Teel's incitement, I'm not really all
Speaker 2: that interested in. It's like a mark of human evil.
Speaker 2: That just seems like the kind of thing that was
Speaker 2: always going to happen at Facebook. But you could see
Speaker 2: that like Peter's the guy who corrupts Mark Zuckerberg. I
Speaker 2: don't know, I think that's really accurate. I think Mark
Speaker 2: was always willing to be corrupted, but that's one version
Speaker 2: of the story.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The play by play here has been covered and off
Speaker 2: in movies in our own episodes on Marky Mark. What
Speaker 2: I did learn reading Chaefkin's recitation of events is that
Speaker 2: Peter is kind of he kind of fucks up his
Speaker 2: Facebook investment. He gets in early on the ground floor,
Speaker 2: and he does make money, but he loses his He
Speaker 2: gets in on this first round and makes a profit,
Speaker 2: but when it comes time for the second another round
Speaker 2: of investments, he thinks the business is overvalued and like
Speaker 2: like one hundred and seventy million, like, he thinks Facebook
Speaker 2: is overvalued, and so he fails to roll his investment forward.
Speaker 2: And as a result, despite being famous as this early
Speaker 2: Facebook investment investor, he doesn't make much money off of Facebook.
Speaker 3: What.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he really does not make shit compared to what
Speaker 2: you would expect, right for normal people. He makes a
Speaker 2: lot of money off of Facebook, right, but for what
Speaker 2: you would expect in base he does not make a
Speaker 2: lot because he kind of bows out of subsequent rounds
Speaker 2: of investment because he doesn't believe in the company.
Speaker 3: Right. He's really his whole, his whole thing. Okay, So
Speaker 3: like investment number one PayPal, which he then.
Speaker 2: Sells right, kind of shorts yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Then Facebook, which he does put money in, picks the
Speaker 3: founders against one another maybe if they're easy to do
Speaker 3: it anyway, and then doesn't really believe in it, so
Speaker 3: doesn't really maximize his.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is it's not It would never be
Speaker 2: fair to say Peter has bad instincts because he is
Speaker 2: right about a lot. He's right if there's something in PayPal,
Speaker 2: but he's wrong about how much there is in PayPal.
Speaker 2: And this is actually going to be a real pattern
Speaker 2: in his investments where he'll understand something important but not
Speaker 2: to the extent that allows him to actually make much
Speaker 2: money off of it, right, Or he'll he'll get a
Speaker 2: guess right, but he won't commit to it to the
Speaker 2: extent that allows him to really profit from it. And
Speaker 2: I think that's a really interesting aspect of him, right,
Speaker 2: that he he has these good instincts in some ways,
Speaker 2: but that he also consistently fails to follow up on
Speaker 2: them enough. I find that very interesting and actually honestly
Speaker 2: kind of relatable, like as a guy who's made some
Speaker 2: of his bones predicting things, and also I am aware
Speaker 2: of the things that I have been wrong about. I
Speaker 2: really find that kind of like, like, I get it, Peter,
Speaker 2: It's it's hard, actually, you know. So, as he's exploring
Speaker 2: life as a venture capitalists and kind of the early aughts,
Speaker 2: Peter continues his involvement with Stanford organizing a symposium on
Speaker 2: politics and the apocalypse and this is these are this
Speaker 2: is prior to two thousand and eight. So the housing
Speaker 2: crisis is coming up. This is another one of those
Speaker 2: good predictions. Peter sees the housing crisis coming up. He
Speaker 2: sees that economic like crumbling, but he as opposed to
Speaker 2: just being like, oh, there's a house collapse. It's going
Speaker 2: to be a real problem and there will be some
Speaker 2: financial opportunities as a result of that problem, which like
Speaker 2: the big short guys also right, Peter sees the collapse coming,
Speaker 2: but he assumes the whole system is going to crumble, right,
Speaker 2: Like he thinks he literally thinks the housing collapse is
Speaker 2: going to destroy the entire US government basically, right, what yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So again he's like, you're right, but not in the
Speaker 2: way that allows you to like, but you also like
Speaker 2: are wrong in a way that means that you can't
Speaker 2: really profit off of the initial rightness there, right, you
Speaker 2: see the problem and then you massively over extend it
Speaker 2: because of your ideology, and so you fuck up at
Speaker 2: profiting from this moment in American history.
Speaker 3: So he like y two ks yes, yes, yeah, in
Speaker 3: mind what ye do the mind say? Civilization was supposed
Speaker 3: to be destroyed like twelve.
Speaker 2: Twenty twelve, so that was that was going around at
Speaker 2: this point in time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was just a little for the Mayan apocalypt.
Speaker 2: Yah, maybe Kevin Space he told him about the Mayan
Speaker 2: apocalypse during a dinner at SAD.
Speaker 3: So he thought that. He's like, Okay, there's all these
Speaker 3: like derivatives or problematic housing rate you were giving mortgage
Speaker 3: launches too many people. Therefore collapse of all Western yes, civilization, Yes.
Speaker 2: And I think it's because he sees that banks and
Speaker 2: stuff are going to go under, but he doesn't see
Speaker 2: that the government is going to respond in any way
Speaker 2: to bail them out and prop up the system, right,
Speaker 2: which is such an interesting shortcoming to not see that,
Speaker 2: like the people running the system have a sense of
Speaker 2: self preservation, right, like whatever you say about it, like
Speaker 2: Obama and or you know, even if it had been
Speaker 2: bushes like. None of them had a desire in the
Speaker 2: entire financial system collapsing. You know, no, definitely not yeah.
Speaker 2: Writing in twenty twenty one for The New Yorker about
Speaker 2: this Politics and the Apocalypse Symposium, Anna Winer summarizes Teal's contribution,
Speaker 2: later published in an essay titled The Straussian Moment was
Speaker 2: built on the premise that September eleventh had upended the
Speaker 2: entire political and military framework of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Speaker 2: demanding a re examination of the foundations of modern politics.
Speaker 2: The essay drew from a grab bag of thinkers. It
Speaker 2: mediated on Thomas Hobbs and John Locke, and then combined
Speaker 2: ideas from the conservative political theorists Leo Strauss and Karl Schmidt,
Speaker 2: who wrote about the inadequacies of liberal democracy, with the
Speaker 2: work of Girard to offer a diagnosis of modernity. A
Speaker 2: religious war has been brought to a land that no
Speaker 2: longer cares for religious wars, Teele wrote, Today mere self
Speaker 2: preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew,
Speaker 2: to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from
Speaker 2: that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and
Speaker 2: amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment. There's so
Speaker 2: much there. There's so much there.
Speaker 3: First of all, this guy is fucking messy. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: it's this guy is out of fucking control. Yeah. Like
Speaker 3: the whole point of terrorism is to overreact, and this
Speaker 3: guy wants to overrea.
Speaker 2: We have to overreact.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so hard that he wants to overturn the Enlightenment. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like, well, what the fuck?
Speaker 2: I think it's because he's writing about like, America doesn't
Speaker 2: care for religious wars, but we've been forced ones. Like
Speaker 2: but Peter, you're a Christian culture warrior, right, Like you
Speaker 2: have these very weird ideas about Christianity and morality that
Speaker 2: you are kind of trying to force on people through
Speaker 2: your politics. That's a religious war, right like that To
Speaker 2: say that America doesn't care for religious wars and then
Speaker 2: to look out at twenty twenties US politics is a
Speaker 2: wild thing, right, and it's it's, yeah, just a fascinating
Speaker 2: statement for him to make, right.
Speaker 3: This idea that like yeah, yeah, I mean, look, all
Speaker 3: the problems that we had after nine to eleven, or
Speaker 3: a lot of them were because fragile men like him overreacted,
Speaker 3: freaked the fuck out, treated it like a religious war
Speaker 3: rather than as you know, some kind of active terrorism,
Speaker 3: treated as some kind of like apocalyptic conflict. Yeah, we
Speaker 3: have to engage in this clash. Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it is. That's part of what's interesting
Speaker 2: to me is that again, for all his desire to
Speaker 2: be seen as this like contrarian standing apart from the herd,
Speaker 2: he's just a neo cod like in this period at least, like,
Speaker 2: how else do you look at this? Right, Because like
Speaker 2: a big part of him after this point and in
Speaker 2: this post PayPal period is he's still scared and frightened
Speaker 2: of nine to eleven, and he is obsessed with the
Speaker 2: idea that nine to eleven has proved we need to
Speaker 2: give up freedom for security. This is where he really
Speaker 2: jettisons a lot of those libertarian ideas.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: He describes the acecluse attempt to protect civil liberties in
Speaker 2: the post nine to eleven period as an unviable anachronism.
Speaker 2: He acknowledges that the twentieth century included a great deal
Speaker 2: of programs that claimed to exist economically to develop the
Speaker 2: Third World, but really just extracted or put more hash
Speaker 2: in the cash in the hands of dictators. But he
Speaker 2: also argues that this doesn't explain why people from the
Speaker 2: global South would want to attack the rest the West.
Speaker 2: His reasoning way of looking at Osama bin Laden is
Speaker 2: that this is a rich kid, right, and so all
Speaker 2: of these arguments about how we can stop terrorism and
Speaker 2: we can stop these kind of conflicts between the West
Speaker 2: and other parts of the world by increasing economic development
Speaker 2: in those areas are bullshit because Osama bin Laden was rich,
Speaker 2: and like what much like the fact that Osama, like Osama,
Speaker 2: did not start the conflict that he was a part
Speaker 2: of here, right, and like the fact that he is
Speaker 2: a rich kid, it makes sense in the way that
Speaker 2: like you, Peter, were a rich kid who decided that
Speaker 2: you want to destroy democracy, right, Like that is the
Speaker 2: class of people who tend to become revolutionaries often come
Speaker 2: from a degree of financial privilege, because those are the
Speaker 2: people who have the time and the space to think
Speaker 2: about stuff like overthrowing the system in the moment, and
Speaker 2: you have the resources to go about doing it. This
Speaker 2: is not an uncommon story in history. The fact that
Speaker 2: bin Laden becomes this kind of guy is no weirder
Speaker 2: than the fact that Peter becomes this kind of guy right,
Speaker 2: game recognizes game, and like the fact that osamban Laden
Speaker 2: was not an a grief poor person doesn't mean that
Speaker 2: the economic betrayal of the global South isn't an important
Speaker 2: factor in geopolitical instability. It's a lot of what Peter
Speaker 2: says is that, like, you can't stop instability and conflict
Speaker 2: by helping to improve living standards in poor countries. Because
Speaker 2: Osama bin Laden did nine to eleven.
Speaker 3: It's like two sentences have nothing to do with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, peterbelievable. Yeah, it's it's shot and it's such
Speaker 2: bushy and logic. Again for this guy who really wants
Speaker 2: to stand apart from the herd. This is just the
Speaker 2: kind of shit my parents were saying in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five.
Speaker 3: It's also like completely wild. Then this guy goes on
Speaker 3: to basically be like one of Glenn Greenwald's big Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like some weird like twisted orseship. Also, it's like
Speaker 3: this guy, so this guy is basically just like more
Speaker 3: Christian Dick Cheney, more techy Cheney.
Speaker 2: Yeah, more techie, and probably more Christian. Yeah, you're probably
Speaker 2: that's probably accurate.
Speaker 3: More for song.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with more for song, Yeah, a little more Kevin
Speaker 2: Spacey too, probably Yeah, no, no, no, that's not an
Speaker 2: allegation we're making.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Deeals analysis I think is inch deep here because
Speaker 2: he's in this period, and I'll say somewhat understandably because
Speaker 2: everyone was entirely focused still on nine to eleven. Now,
Speaker 2: the problem for Peter is that, and this is kind
Speaker 2: of what Bin Laden like. Peter falls into ben Laden's
Speaker 2: trap perfectly here. He sees nine to eleven as this
Speaker 2: singular incident, and it clearly terrifies him. And he writes
Speaker 2: that this proved to him and proved to the world
Speaker 2: that quote, a tiny number of people could inflict unprecedented
Speaker 2: levels of damage and death. And this is why everything
Speaker 2: about liberal democracy, about civil rights has to change, Right,
Speaker 2: is that now we know it's possible for a small
Speaker 2: number of people to kill a large number of people, right,
Speaker 2: and that that completely changes the game.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I don't think Peter's being entirely honest here, because that's
Speaker 2: not what scared him about nine to eleven. The twenty
Speaker 2: first century has been a century of aaron drone strikes
Speaker 2: of small numbers of people murdering large numbers of people
Speaker 2: in countries all over the world. Peter doesn't care these
Speaker 2: dead people because he's never going to get stuck in
Speaker 2: a war zone.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: That's part of why he got a New Zealand citizenship
Speaker 2: for himself, Right, it's because he's not going to be
Speaker 2: anywhere close to a war. Nine to eleven shatters pedter Tiel.
Speaker 2: Not because it proves that small numbers of people can
Speaker 2: kill large numbers of people, but because it proved that
Speaker 2: a small number of people could kill a lot of
Speaker 2: rich people.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And I'm not doing all justifying nine to eleven thing,
Speaker 2: but like nine to eleven is a strike on the
Speaker 2: financial center of the country. A lot of CEO's businessmen,
Speaker 2: people who are executives at big companies die in that attack,
Speaker 2: an attack on the World Trade Center. Peter can see
Speaker 2: himself as being a victim of that. He very well
Speaker 2: might have been in the World Trade Center, right, Like
Speaker 2: that is the kind of thing that could have affected him.
Speaker 2: And that's why this scares him. Right, It's not that
Speaker 2: a lot of people are a small numbers who can
Speaker 2: kill a lot of people. It's that I am not
Speaker 2: safe as a wealthy businessman, right, Like someone could kill me.
Speaker 2: That's why this fucks him up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting that, like, you're the degree to which
Speaker 3: the people that really freaked out over nine to eleven, like,
Speaker 3: none of them actually lived in the places where nine
Speaker 3: to eleven happened. No, Like I say, this is a
Speaker 3: New Yorker, Like New Yorkers did not freak out over
Speaker 3: nine to eleven. Like, but people you know from vugging
Speaker 3: uranium mind South Africa who relocate to Palo Alto there
Speaker 3: to lose a mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because oh my god, I might have been in
Speaker 2: a place that was My entire life is about separating
Speaker 2: myself from the masses and gaining a sense of safety
Speaker 2: as and like value as a result of that. And like,
Speaker 2: I could have just died like everyone else. I also
Speaker 2: think that's why he's so scared of death. It's not
Speaker 2: just the cessation of his own being, but death inevitably.
Speaker 2: The fact that you will die, this is true of
Speaker 2: all of us, links you to everyone who ever has
Speaker 2: and ever will live, right, it is one thing we
Speaker 2: all have in common. Everyone will die. And Peter hates
Speaker 2: the idea that he has anything to do with everyone else,
Speaker 2: that he has every something in common with the rabble
Speaker 2: that there is a thing that inevitably, inextricably binds him
Speaker 2: to a poor man in fucking Deli. Right, they're both
Speaker 2: gonna die, and in fact, that guy living on the
Speaker 2: street of Delhi might live longer than Peter, just because
Speaker 2: you know, shit happens. Right, Peter could be the victim
Speaker 2: of an attack someday and then maybe he'll be outlived
Speaker 2: by a poor person.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Peter cannot handle this reality. It drives him mad.
Speaker 3: My brain is fried right now. Yeah, I'm just I'm
Speaker 3: trying to make the logical inferences to this dude makes
Speaker 3: and I'm having trouble doing it. Like I don't understand,
Speaker 3: Like there are people, tons of people I disagree with,
Speaker 3: and I see how they get from A to B.
Speaker 3: This is like from A to the symbol for you know,
Speaker 3: for boron or something. I don't understand where, like where
Speaker 3: it is is even coming from.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, yeah, because it is confusing. I think, what
Speaker 2: if I had to describe it, it's oppositional defiant disorder
Speaker 2: with main like merging with main character syndrome. Right, Like
Speaker 2: that's that's that's kind of how I would look at
Speaker 2: Peter here now. Later in that same essay. He thinks back.
Speaker 2: He goes back to the philosophical writings of Gerard on mimetics,
Speaker 2: arguing that the need to keep up with your neighbors
Speaker 2: leads to an ever escalating rivalry. He declares that the
Speaker 2: disturbing truth of mimesis has been suppressed, and in the
Speaker 2: same breath notes that envy is a mortal sin and Catholicism. Now,
Speaker 2: the conspiracism is weird here, but it's no weirder than
Speaker 2: what theater Teal goes on to claim about ape anthropology.
Speaker 2: This is again an essay about nine to eleven. At
Speaker 2: the core of the mimetic account, there exists a mystery
Speaker 2: what exactly happened in the distant past when all the
Speaker 2: apes were reaching for the same object, when the rivalry
Speaker 2: between memetic devils threatened to escalate into unlimited violence. I
Speaker 2: don't know at that moment occurred. Peter, what are you
Speaker 2: fucking talking about?
Speaker 3: Man?
Speaker 2: Stop this shit? Stop reading Gerard? What the fuck are
Speaker 2: you talking about?
Speaker 3: Bat? Really?
Speaker 1: Stop reading Gerard.
Speaker 2: What he's saying here.
Speaker 3: Is that.
Speaker 2: There's this because like we get our we want things
Speaker 2: because we see other people having things or wanting things,
Speaker 2: and that like forms throughout this memetic process, like our
Speaker 2: system of desire, and that like you know, this truth
Speaker 2: has been suppressed by the secret masters of the world
Speaker 2: to someun extent, And there's this mystery of like, well,
Speaker 2: how did you know, how did we avoid this like
Speaker 2: kind of escalating sense of like jealousy and rivalry for
Speaker 2: things escalate into this unlimited violence that would have destroyed
Speaker 2: the species. And the answer is, we figured out how
Speaker 2: to scapegoat individuals in order to like stop from mass killing. Right.
Speaker 2: And Peter has to think in this way because he
Speaker 2: has this very narrow view of anthropology that's informed by
Speaker 2: Girard's writing, and this concept Gerard has of like war
Speaker 2: of all against all, right, and that the only way
Speaker 2: to avoid this is to gradually drive the combatants to
Speaker 2: gang up against a scapegoat. Right now, among other things,
Speaker 2: if we're just talking about ape, and if we're talking
Speaker 2: about anthropology, this is all ignoring the degree to which
Speaker 2: primates work together and collaborate, which is also like as
Speaker 2: much a war and conflict is certainly a part of
Speaker 2: primate evolution. You can find like apes, different kind species
Speaker 2: of simians go to war with each other in like
Speaker 2: a very recognizable way. You can see that with like
Speaker 2: chimpanzees and the like. But they also collaborate and work together, right, Like,
Speaker 2: just picking the one side of things like how they
Speaker 2: fight for resources and ignoring how they team up in
Speaker 2: order to get resources and make a better life for
Speaker 2: themselves is kind of cutting out half of existence.
Speaker 3: This Yeah, it's like what do you only watch like
Speaker 3: the first ten minutes of two thousand and one on.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, that's his That's the whole basis of
Speaker 2: his like understanding of like mimetic reality. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: monkeys fight.
Speaker 3: It's so weird.
Speaker 2: It's really fucking no.
Speaker 1: And I have had the same face of just like
Speaker 1: ugh the last ten minutes.
Speaker 2: Again, studying philosophy is sometimes a problem.
Speaker 7: This guy needs to take one walk in the woods. Yeah,
Speaker 7: Like this guy needs to like, I don't know, like
Speaker 7: read one other book.
Speaker 2: It's a fucking having that experience of life. He'd been
Speaker 2: in like a car wreck as a younger man, and
Speaker 2: it had like a bystander come and pull him out
Speaker 2: of the ray could have changed his whole impression of humanity.
Speaker 2: But instead he's like, we're all apes and we need escapegold.
Speaker 2: Everyone's going to break down and be fighting and killing
Speaker 2: each other unless we like and you kind of get
Speaker 2: the idea that like, oh, so this war against Islam
Speaker 2: you see as like a scapegoat, and maybe now these
Speaker 2: kind of attacks you're you're kind of working on against,
Speaker 2: like the trans community, against all these different enemies of conservatism.
Speaker 2: You see this as like we I have to give
Speaker 2: people a scapegoat in order to stop them from taking
Speaker 2: the things I have, because they're they're going to want
Speaker 2: the things I have because like they've been influenced mometically
Speaker 2: to desire the same things that you know, I have received.
Speaker 2: I think that's like a really kind of a core
Speaker 2: aspect of his understanding of how the world works, such
Speaker 2: a person. At the end, at the ending of this article,
Speaker 2: this very weird article, Peter comes around to the subject
Speaker 2: of monarchy, arguing myth transfigure the murdered scapegoats into God.
Speaker 2: So human beings created scapegoats so we could avoid murdering
Speaker 2: each other, and then we turned those scapegoats into our
Speaker 2: early pagan deities, which is like, again, weird. I don't
Speaker 2: I don't get that at all. I guess there's there's
Speaker 2: like some Greek gods who that kind of makes sense
Speaker 2: for right, like Prometheus maybe, but that I don't know
Speaker 2: how how is zeus a murdered scape where it's the
Speaker 2: murdered scapegoat that's the basis of that? Or like I
Speaker 2: don't know, man, I think you're maybe like where's a
Speaker 2: how does a Hurrah Mazda fit into this kind of shit?
Speaker 2: Like that just seems like a weird statement by a
Speaker 2: guy who hasn't read a lot about world religion.
Speaker 3: I feel like this whole fucking thing is like dude
Speaker 3: was on ketamine and just like writing down whatever came
Speaker 3: to mind, like whether it linked together or not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't I don't know, yeah, because it
Speaker 2: just doesn't. It feels very college level philosophy to me.
Speaker 2: And it also feels like a guy who's trying to
Speaker 2: justify being an asshole to other people and manipulating them
Speaker 2: as like this is the only way that human beings work?
Speaker 3: Wait, is he the scapegoat? Like is poor little I
Speaker 3: think he's afraid he could be.
Speaker 2: I think he's afraid he could be. Right. I think
Speaker 2: that's kind of what's going on here, is that, like
Speaker 2: fundamentally he is try it part of why he's into right,
Speaker 2: wing politics is he wants to make sure he never
Speaker 2: is that there's got to be a scapegoat, and it
Speaker 2: might be him if he's not careful. So he's going
Speaker 2: to make sure it's someone else.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's cruelty, is the point, but like in
Speaker 3: a good way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yep, I think that might be it anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the stun silence that means right now.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is fucking dark and weird, even for
Speaker 3: this show.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Yeah, it's it's it's getting into Peter Thiel's head.
Speaker 2: Is not a comfortable place to be. I don't like
Speaker 2: it here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's not just a weirdo. He's a sicko.
Speaker 2: He is a sicko. He's a sicko or all of
Speaker 2: this is part of some cunning lie that he told
Speaker 2: a bunch of interviewers over years and case he's even
Speaker 2: more of a sick times too.
Speaker 3: Yeah there's Stephen King. Yeah yeah, he's creating like that
Speaker 3: weird hotel in Colorado or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not Stephen King.
Speaker 1: Nobody's Stephen King. Stephen King isn't even Stephen.
Speaker 2: King, No, not since he quit the blow. Well that's
Speaker 2: why we're not going to get a Kujo sequel anytime soon,
Speaker 2: unless there's Yeah, oh I do want to see Peter
Speaker 2: Peter Teal right, oh man, that could have been his
Speaker 2: that might have been what made him, would have made
Speaker 2: him happy?
Speaker 1: And what We're only halfway through the saga, Robert uh huh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh cool. We haven't even gotten really to Palante here,
Speaker 2: We've just laid the groundwork. Wait, maybe Trump is Kujo
Speaker 2: to Yeah, Trump, Trump's his Kujo. That's right, that's right,
Speaker 2: And that Peter Teal doesn't remember writing him. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: my favorite Stephen King fact.
Speaker 3: Is that true? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the quote from him was something like,
Speaker 2: Kusho is a great book. I wish I could remember
Speaker 2: writing it.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 2: It was when he was really on the stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: for him? Yeah, hell yeah, man. That's how you know
Speaker 2: you're one of the greats. If you write Kusho while
Speaker 2: fucking snowblinkes.
Speaker 3: That's incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fucking awesome. Everyone go read the Stephen King book. Noah,
Speaker 2: you got anything you want to push.
Speaker 3: Now, you can find me at Noah Shackman. That's n
Speaker 3: O A H s h A A c h T
Speaker 3: A man on your social platforms I write for a
Speaker 3: bunch of different places, is Rolling Stone, Wired, New York,
Speaker 3: Meg and even got some for The Times coming up.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, hell yeah, excited, Thank God, No no, And listen, folks,
Speaker 2: if you're at home, don't do cocaine. Just go to
Speaker 2: your nearest gas station and asked them for whatever pill
Speaker 2: has the most amphetamines in it.
Speaker 4: That or don't take it.
Speaker 2: There's one called addies like add are all, but it's
Speaker 2: just a ship lit a caffeine and B twelve. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the kind of ship that's legal to sell as energy
Speaker 2: pills is amazing. Creative is the best. Imagine if someone
Speaker 2: imagine if someone took OxyContin and then just made it
Speaker 2: so it couldn't easily kill you, and also it was
Speaker 2: sold unregulated in every gas station in the United States.
Speaker 2: That's creatim That's good stuff. Yeah, it's what I take
Speaker 2: it all the time. It's wonderful. Love it's it's a
Speaker 2: little bit caffeine, a little bit pain killery, but it
Speaker 2: won't shut down your lungs like it's not a central
Speaker 2: nervous system. Depress it. It won't kill you in the
Speaker 2: same way that opiates d It's great.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: Be careful with it, though, folks, it is a drug.
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