Speaker 1: Also media, What's dying in darkness? My Democracy? I'm Robert
Speaker 1: Evans hosted Behind the Bastards. We're coming on recording this
Speaker 1: the day that The Washington Post is getting attacked online
Speaker 1: for not endorsing anybody in the election, which I'm grateful
Speaker 1: for because it means that no one hasn't noticed that
Speaker 1: Cool Zone has also not put in our endorsement for
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four election, which is really good because
Speaker 1: every year, you know, we advise people to vote for
Speaker 1: the same man, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Now to talk about
Speaker 1: our greatest president and I think our greatest future president.
Speaker 1: Noah Shackman, Noah, how are you feeling? Do you think
Speaker 1: Nixon's got it this year? You think he's going to
Speaker 1: pull out a win.
Speaker 2: I thought you were saying I was your greatest future president.
Speaker 1: You could be, You could be, but you need to
Speaker 1: be a little more Nixonian. You know, have you considered
Speaker 1: trying to destroy the world while drunk and only Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger being the one that can stop you?
Speaker 2: No? I haven't, so I guess I'm not qualified.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a bummer. No. You are a contributing
Speaker 1: writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired, and you're
Speaker 1: here to talk about pe Tizzy, which Peter TiAl does
Speaker 1: not go by. And well, probably if he was not
Speaker 1: committed to destroying us after the first two episodes, that
Speaker 1: nickname is probably going to get us attacked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're definitely yeah.
Speaker 1: We're done. We're done here everybody. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the news today? Is it good?
Speaker 1: You happy? Happy about the news?
Speaker 2: The Washington postling.
Speaker 1: I don't know whatever news is happening today. I assume
Speaker 1: something else went down, right, somebody died.
Speaker 2: I'm excited. The Yankees are playing in the world. Cheers.
Speaker 1: That's good. That's good. Bill Clinton called Kerry Lake attractive.
Speaker 1: It's been an exciting week for everybody.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, tiger can't change the stripe.
Speaker 1: From yeah, yeah, if we want to call him a tiger,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, so uh yeah, let's uh, I guess let's
Speaker 1: get back into the old Peter Teal game. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm ready to talk about him. You're ready to talk
Speaker 1: about him? Yeah, I will bums away. If you're a journalist,
Speaker 1: which you know two thirds of us are in this call.
Speaker 1: December seventh, two thousand and seven ought to be a
Speaker 1: date that lives an infamy. That was my my Pearl
Speaker 1: Harbor joke, But it's also a joke referencing the Gawker lawsuit,
Speaker 1: because that is the day that Gawker, via its tech
Speaker 1: website Valley Wag published an article with the title Peter
Speaker 1: Teal is totally gay people Now Valley Wag, which was
Speaker 1: you know, the again, like the tech imprint of Gawker
Speaker 1: had been writing about Peter Teel for a while, and
Speaker 1: they had published articles kind of insinuating that Peter was
Speaker 1: gay for quite a while. The company founder, Nick Denton, was,
Speaker 1: to his credit, someone who recognized early on that Peter
Speaker 1: was not just another rich investor guy, but somebody who
Speaker 1: was amassing significant power and had a weird ideology and
Speaker 1: should be covered. Unfortunately, the downside of it was that
Speaker 1: Nick's instincts were, you know, this was a messy time
Speaker 1: for digital media, shall we say, and Valleywag was not
Speaker 1: at this point entirely conducting itself in the best traditions
Speaker 1: of a journalistic enterprise. Right. And while I think an
Speaker 1: argument can be made, a strong one that Peter being gay,
Speaker 1: given his funding of the Republican Party, is to a
Speaker 1: degree relevant to the public interest. The way in which
Speaker 1: Valley Wag reported on this initially was not a public
Speaker 1: interest story, right, Like that title, Peter Teal is to that,
Speaker 1: that's not a we're we're getting out necessary information title, right,
Speaker 1: that's kind of that's being extremely caddy right.
Speaker 3: By the way, our guest today is no chef.
Speaker 2: And why are you slipping me in on the caddy
Speaker 2: outing here?
Speaker 1: I introduced him this this much.
Speaker 2: I haven't Catalie outed anybody in the Yeah.
Speaker 3: Robert definitely did forget to introduce you last time, but
Speaker 3: we redid it. We did it, and it was fine.
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 3: This time gets his credits because.
Speaker 4: They're thank you get your.
Speaker 1: Credits, Robert.
Speaker 3: I would credit you too if I could.
Speaker 1: Do you remember this, Noah, when when Gawker outed Peter,
Speaker 1: because I didn't catch it really at the time, but
Speaker 1: I was a baby at this point.
Speaker 2: I didn't. I didn't either, but I did know, you know,
Speaker 2: the Nick Dent and Crewe and Nick a little bit
Speaker 2: back then, and honestly, so many of the people involved
Speaker 2: were so fucking whacked out on powders and pills you
Speaker 2: probably forgot they even did it.
Speaker 1: All of the money that was going around in digital
Speaker 1: media back then. I think it would have been hard
Speaker 1: not to be whacked out on powders and pills, but
Speaker 1: you could. This is not like the Post wouldn't have
Speaker 1: done this reporting in this way, right, or the New
Speaker 1: York Times. You can think of that what you will,
Speaker 1: but like this was this was a little messy. I
Speaker 1: think probably. I mean, Peter never sues over this, but
Speaker 1: this is the inciting incident of what he gets angry
Speaker 1: at them. So I don't think this would have been
Speaker 1: something that could have been adjudicated in court. But it
Speaker 1: is something that if you're kind of going on, where
Speaker 1: does Peter Teal have a right to privacy? Like if
Speaker 1: you're arguing that because of his advocacy, you know this
Speaker 1: is relevant, which I think is an argument that can
Speaker 1: be made strongly. You probably want to be a little
Speaker 1: bit clearer in making that argument than Peter Teal was
Speaker 1: totally gay folks. Yeah yeah, yeah, Now again, I I
Speaker 1: that's that. I don't think like the fundamental issue here
Speaker 1: is that they out at him. I think it's just
Speaker 1: more that like, yeah, it's kind of a kind of
Speaker 1: a grotty way to do it. Do you say grody?
Speaker 1: I did? I did I am a high school girl
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four. Wow, late nineties, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: I thought it was more of an eighties thing, but hey,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably more of an eighties thing. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the you know, this had been Valleywag had been kind
Speaker 1: of poking at Peter for a while, right. They had
Speaker 1: been making before that article some kind of veiled claims
Speaker 1: about him being gay, and Valley Wag is kind of
Speaker 1: certainly writing more on like the what do you call it,
Speaker 1: tabloid end of things. Right at this period of time,
Speaker 1: Goker is going to professionalize in the period you know,
Speaker 1: before they get sued into oblivion by Peter, But in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven they are still very much like
Speaker 1: new kids on the block. We don't really give a shit. Now.
Speaker 1: The question that comes to if you've read about Peter
Speaker 1: Teal is like, why did he get so offended at
Speaker 1: the fact that he was outed? Because by all accounts,
Speaker 1: he was pretty open in his personal life, Like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like this shocked even his like Republican colleagues,
Speaker 1: people who had gone to Teal parties, who like knew
Speaker 1: him personally, who had got to his nightclub, like he
Speaker 1: didn't like, go to extreme lengths to hide this fact
Speaker 1: about himself. Instead, what seems to have enraged him was
Speaker 1: not the specifics of the fact that he was outed,
Speaker 1: but this line from the Valley Wag article. The only
Speaker 1: thing that's strange about teal sexuality. Why on earth was
Speaker 1: he so paranoid about its discovery for so long? Now
Speaker 1: I wouldn't really that didn't not line doesn't stick out
Speaker 1: to me. But here's from an article in The Atlantic
Speaker 1: which interviewed Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book about the
Speaker 1: Gaker case. Here's here's what Ryan said about why that line,
Speaker 1: in particular like tweaked Teal. He thought Denton was implying
Speaker 1: that Peter had psychological problems. When you read the comment,
Speaker 1: it doesn't feel that way. But Teal thought, here's the
Speaker 1: publisher of a media outlet, not just a blogger, going
Speaker 1: after me. The blog post felt like the first article
Speaker 1: after years of negative Golcker coverage against Teal.
Speaker 2: I mean, look, I do think it like it feels
Speaker 2: weird when you're on the other side of it, And
Speaker 2: I think, like you know, for those of us like
Speaker 2: write and broadcast right it like you wanna you sometimes
Speaker 2: want to take a spin on the other side of
Speaker 2: the camera, so to speak, and see how that stuff feels.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, like what's he doesn't seem to
Speaker 2: have made it a secret, doesn't seem to have been
Speaker 2: a big deal. On the other other hand, you know,
Speaker 2: I think outing people's fucked up and yeah and so
Speaker 2: and I feel like, you know, people's sexuality is like
Speaker 2: their own, uh is their own choice. On the other
Speaker 2: other other hand, like you know, if you're going to
Speaker 2: embrace some weirdo, like you know, retro seventeenth century ideology
Speaker 2: about really and empower, then you know, then you might
Speaker 2: have to grapple with its inconsistencies and hypocrisies. So, I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's.
Speaker 1: A tough one, Yeah, it is. It is kind of
Speaker 1: a tough like this is I think a useful thing
Speaker 1: for people who are interested in the ethics of journalism
Speaker 1: to comment on. I don't think it's interesting like the
Speaker 1: specifics of why Peter gets angry, this idea that he
Speaker 1: was mostly pissed that Goker had maybe insinuated that he
Speaker 1: was not emotionally balanced. Now, the other argument you'll hear
Speaker 1: here is that the primary real reason Peter was pissed
Speaker 1: about this is that it was fine for him to
Speaker 1: be gay and kind of open about it in his
Speaker 1: private life with the people who hung out around him,
Speaker 1: but not publicly open about it because who he really
Speaker 1: wanted to keep this from or to re maintain plausible
Speaker 1: deniability with is the Saudis Right, he has a lot
Speaker 1: of business involvement in the Middle East and the Immirates
Speaker 1: as well as in Saudi Arabia, and he didn't want
Speaker 1: to be an out gay man traveling to in dealing
Speaker 1: with these countries, right Like, he felt that that would
Speaker 1: be damaging to his business interests. So that's the other
Speaker 1: argument that you'll hear, and I'm sure it's probably a
Speaker 1: number of things. In any case, it doesn't This is
Speaker 1: like I think when I first was aware of this case,
Speaker 1: most of the casual reporting was like, you know, Peter
Speaker 1: Thiel got involved in wanting to sue Gawker and do
Speaker 1: oblivion because they outed him, right like, that was the
Speaker 1: DDT A to B. I think it's a little less
Speaker 1: direct than that, And I think this is the picture
Speaker 1: Chafkin page paints, the picture holiday paints and holidays. The
Speaker 1: guys really seems to have gone into this. The most
Speaker 1: is that this is what kind of gets Gawker on
Speaker 1: Peter's radar and annoys him. But he's not committed to
Speaker 1: taking them down yet, right, Like that's not going to
Speaker 1: happen for years and years. So this is just kind
Speaker 1: of like the beginning of the conflict that they have
Speaker 1: in each other. So we're we're gonna move on here
Speaker 1: and later we will come back to the story, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is this is how he's kind of kind of
Speaker 1: starting to get angry at Gawker. And I do think
Speaker 1: it's useful to holiday suggests that there's another reason why
Speaker 1: Peter's pissed as a result of this, and it has
Speaker 1: more to do philosophically with the kind of reporting that
Speaker 1: Gawker is doing and what they represent about the media
Speaker 1: in the digital age that Peter is kind of personally
Speaker 1: repelled by, maybe even frightened of. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from an interview that he did again here from
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven up until twenty twelve, Denton was
Speaker 1: on a devil may care right of breaking rules as
Speaker 1: a media publisher, and that was so diametrically opposed to
Speaker 1: Peter's vision of quiet individuality. This belief that weirdos needed
Speaker 1: to be left alone if they were going to change
Speaker 1: the world. Peter saw that Gawker would punish people for
Speaker 1: that weirdness.
Speaker 2: What yeah, I'm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm not sure how much. I mean, it's perfectly
Speaker 1: fine for it's perfectly reasonable on Holiday's part to be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Peter's doing this because that's just how he feels. I
Speaker 1: do think that's a very silly like.
Speaker 2: Give me a break. Yeah, what was teals uh Stanford
Speaker 2: paper again? What were they doing?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, the Stanford where they were like outing professors
Speaker 1: and stuff based on their political ideology and like his
Speaker 1: best friend who wrote those anti AIDS columns like screaming
Speaker 1: about how he hopes that this fucking gay professor dies
Speaker 1: of AIDS or whatever, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, and so now, yeah, worried about what exactly?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that that Dockers making it unsafe to be weird,
Speaker 1: I you know, and Holidays more sympathetic to Peter in
Speaker 1: this and that I then I certainly come out of
Speaker 1: like if that is how Peter justified this to himself,
Speaker 1: it's stupid or maybe it's just uh Ryan kind of
Speaker 1: needing to find a more reasonable reason.
Speaker 2: I think there's yeah, put it in a different way, man, Like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I've been as you can see from the gray hair,
Speaker 2: I've been involved in journalism for a long time, and
Speaker 2: I've been involved in tech journalism for a long time.
Speaker 2: Back then was like the time of maximum subservience of
Speaker 2: tech journalism.
Speaker 1: It was a critical industry. Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 2: I mean, like, if you think the political press of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five towards future press is bad, this is like,
Speaker 2: you know, that would be a pale imitation of the
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley press of that era. And so I think
Speaker 2: Valley Bay Wagon its own you know, fucked up, weird
Speaker 2: old way was like the only people that were like
Speaker 2: bothering to penetrate or interrogate that or one of the
Speaker 2: few people.
Speaker 1: They weren't socatively yeah, just completely subservient.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now they were reflexively gross in some other ways.
Speaker 2: And I said, yeah, yeah, a friend of mine worked
Speaker 2: on that. But like, you know, I feel like some
Speaker 2: of it was just like how dare you actually, you know,
Speaker 2: not follow the rules of obeisance here? And how dare
Speaker 2: you not kiss my ass? That feels like more part
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably like, I think that's
Speaker 1: probably a fair because this is actually what I came
Speaker 1: up in tech journalism, And yeah, it was a completely
Speaker 1: like Valleywag was one of the rare places where you
Speaker 1: would get people who were trying to be confrontational to
Speaker 1: these guys who were kind of worshiped at the time.
Speaker 1: You would have to go far to find really critical
Speaker 1: reporting on Zuckerberg, on fucking Steve Jobs, on a guy
Speaker 1: like Teal. In this period of time, like two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven is when that Forbes article on the PayPal
Speaker 1: mafia that we quoted from comes out where they're like
Speaker 1: taking a picture of Peter and all of his friends
Speaker 1: and framing it like it's a like a film, like
Speaker 1: a poster and stuff. So yeah, I do think and
Speaker 1: I do think that's important context for like, we don't
Speaker 1: want to I'm not like trying to deny how gross
Speaker 1: a lot of the especially today, a lot of like
Speaker 1: the way value Wig framed things was, but it is
Speaker 1: important to note also the value of what they were
Speaker 1: doing that like, well, at least they were confronting these guys,
Speaker 1: you know, And it was it was two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: it was a different era. Digital media was new. We
Speaker 1: can talk about like what the ideal way to confront
Speaker 1: them would have been but like at least they were,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, it's it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: messy time. Nobody's nobody. Nobody handled it perfectly now in
Speaker 1: terms of how Chafkin interprets this, because Chafkin is a
Speaker 1: lot it gives a lot less slack to Peter, and
Speaker 1: his argument is that his argument is that like, after
Speaker 1: this Gawker article comes out, Peter is angry but at
Speaker 1: the same sense of the but at the same time
Speaker 1: he's he's kind of like liberated by the fact that
Speaker 1: he's been outed now, and that this is a big
Speaker 1: part of why he becomes such an open not just
Speaker 1: in funding of the far right, but funding of a
Speaker 1: lot of his weird libertarian pet causes is now that
Speaker 1: he has been outed, like, well, you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: gonna fuck with some of my business in the Middle East,
Speaker 1: but at least I can be who I am openly now.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a good case to be made
Speaker 1: for that because it's after this article comes out that
Speaker 1: Peter starts, for example, sinking huge amounts of money into
Speaker 1: c steading, which is an art idea championed by weird
Speaker 1: libertarians who wanted to build their own cities, independence of
Speaker 1: the government in the ocean. Peter backs the Sea Steading Institute.
Speaker 1: He starts funding these guys who are doing like little
Speaker 1: burning Man style events which actually do sound kind of cool,
Speaker 1: where they're like living in the sea or rivers and
Speaker 1: stuff for days at a time. And he's funding this
Speaker 1: this libertarian uh you know, kind of fail sun dude
Speaker 1: who's a major c set steading advocate, and he's giving
Speaker 1: like speeches and stuff. He's actually more into this. This
Speaker 1: is not just because when you've got Teel money you
Speaker 1: could just be a dilettante about something that you're casually
Speaker 1: interested in. Peter is like giving speeches and writing essays
Speaker 1: about how sea steading he thinks might hold some of it.
Speaker 1: It's a sea yeah. Yeah, yeah, like homesteading, but on
Speaker 1: the sea. Sea steading.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, tell me again, how did we get from
Speaker 2: Peter toe is totally gay to Peter Teele is totally
Speaker 2: sea stetting.
Speaker 1: Well, Peter Teal Peter Teel, who has now been revealed
Speaker 1: as gay, can be revealed can reveal himself also as
Speaker 1: a weirdo libertarian and be like, look, you know, I've
Speaker 1: been outed on this thing that I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: keep quiet, So I might as well be open about
Speaker 1: the fact that I think that we can replace governments
Speaker 1: by living on the ocean and building floating cities. Why not?
Speaker 2: Again, Like, I feel like at every step it's like, dude,
Speaker 2: this guy is like stuck in like second semester freshman year. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like he like took some bong hit that like
Speaker 2: he never quite recovered from.
Speaker 1: We all took a bong hit we didn't quite recover from. No,
Speaker 1: let's not judge him for that is charged.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying that, like his particular like techno libertarian
Speaker 2: you being dude, Yeah, what if we homestead it on
Speaker 2: the sea? Yeah, and then no government could touch us?
Speaker 2: We could be pirates?
Speaker 1: Are this is?
Speaker 2: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: This is the toughest part of the Peter Teel story
Speaker 1: for me here because I have to report on this
Speaker 1: and I don't like Peter obviously. I wrote like seventeen
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand words on why he's a bad guy. I also,
Speaker 1: I think this kind of rules. I do think it
Speaker 1: kind of rules. I don't like it as a political thing.
Speaker 1: It's like we're going to replace all the governments. But
Speaker 1: I love the idea of I liked. Look, I watched
Speaker 1: too much SeaQuest as a kid to not be attracted
Speaker 1: to the idea of taking to the ocean to build Europe.
Speaker 1: It's cool. I'm sorry, it's a cool idea. I like
Speaker 1: fucking forgive me, wow, I like it. I think it's
Speaker 1: neat what I'm sorry?
Speaker 2: What is se Quest? See?
Speaker 1: What is c God? Alien?
Speaker 3: Alien four?
Speaker 1: Albelievable? No. So back in like the mid to late
Speaker 1: nineties when after after Star Trek to the Next Generation
Speaker 1: really blew up when it was kind of like season
Speaker 1: three or so starting to hit its stride, a TV
Speaker 1: show that was basically Star Trek the Next Generation but
Speaker 1: set in a future where humans had taken to the
Speaker 1: ocean to like expand their living territory. And it was
Speaker 1: the lead actor, like their picard was Roy Scheider, the
Speaker 1: sheriff from Jaws, and he like ran this giant like
Speaker 1: submarine city that traveled around and like kept the peace
Speaker 1: in the underwater frontier. It was a good show. It
Speaker 1: was a good show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jaws on it too.
Speaker 1: No, No, But there was a dolphin character. There was
Speaker 1: a talking dolphin. There was a talking dolphin which there
Speaker 1: was supposed to be in the original Star Trek the
Speaker 1: next Generation. I think there was watched that was something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Gene Roddenberry was as he was a believer that like,
Speaker 1: once we have a nuclear war, dolphins and humans will
Speaker 1: like ascend together. Oh yeah, yeah, you might have been
Speaker 1: friends with that guy who raped that dolphin. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying he was in favor of raping dolphins, but there
Speaker 1: was a John C. Lily raped a dolphin. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: well do you guys know about John C. Lily?
Speaker 2: Peter Teele raped a dolphin.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is the allegation we're making on behind the bastards.
Speaker 1: Thank you Noah for stating it, because now you you
Speaker 1: and the iHeartRadio Corporation are both on are both on
Speaker 1: the hook for making that statement for a dollar. To
Speaker 1: be honest, I think the guys you think dolphins are
Speaker 1: equal to human beings. I don't think Peter Teel cares
Speaker 1: about dolphins very much, else he would have different politics.
Speaker 2: Dolphins are cool, although I also.
Speaker 1: Don't think he's molested a dolphins. So you know, some
Speaker 1: of those pro dolphin guys did where do you stand
Speaker 1: on molesting dolphins? Email Sophie, do you have any email technically, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to read it.
Speaker 3: The contact page on our website.
Speaker 1: So we've hit about the point of two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight or so, Peter is getting into funding Sea Steading.
Speaker 1: He's getting more open, he's starting to put out more
Speaker 1: money to like libertarian causes.
Speaker 2: Dolphins allowed on the sea stead you know, I.
Speaker 1: Think that's going to vary from if I'm cea Steading. Yes,
Speaker 1: dolphins are independent citizens with independent rights, but also they
Speaker 1: have to abide by our laws, which is going to
Speaker 1: be hard for some dolphins because some dolphins are scum.
Speaker 1: But that's a separate question. What So, this is right
Speaker 1: around the time two thousand and eight or so that
Speaker 1: Peter Thiel starts reading the work of a fairly new
Speaker 1: blogger on like the right wing scene, this kind of
Speaker 1: underground hit who's particularly popular in the Bay Area tech
Speaker 1: industry scene, a guy named Curtis Jarvin, who at this
Speaker 1: point is writing under the name Menshus Moldbug. Now, we
Speaker 1: did our episodes with you know, pretty recently on Minshus,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to go into a ton of
Speaker 1: detail on him, but he advocates a return to monarchy
Speaker 1: based around like small city states ruled by ceo kings,
Speaker 1: Like that's his idea is like, it wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: better if tech CEOs ran the world and like it
Speaker 1: was a series of small city states that you could
Speaker 1: travel in between, which if you've ever like had to
Speaker 1: use the yeah, like all of us have. Have you
Speaker 1: ever used any of the products these companies make, the
Speaker 1: idea of them running an entire government is a nightmare.
Speaker 1: But Peter thinks it's starting to think in this period
Speaker 1: that maybe that's the right way to do things. And
Speaker 1: I the open question always here is like does he
Speaker 1: actually believe this is better for mankind? Because the thing
Speaker 1: you'll get in Chaefkins writing and in Peter's own writings,
Speaker 1: if you're trying to figure out, like why does he
Speaker 1: think this is he has this belief that the tech
Speaker 1: industry has ground to a halt, that human innovation is frozen, right,
Speaker 1: that all of the stuff the tech industry is putting out,
Speaker 1: or these like bullshit little products and like gadgets and
Speaker 1: stuff that don't actually take us forward in the way
Speaker 1: that you know, we had dreamed of going, you know
Speaker 1: when Peter was a young kid, which you know is
Speaker 1: to a degree true, although Peter's one of the guys
Speaker 1: funding and investing in these bullshit projects that absolutely don't
Speaker 1: take the species forward make a lot of money. So
Speaker 1: does he believe that, like we need to do this
Speaker 1: in order to actually increase innovation again because capitalist democracy
Speaker 1: can't do it? Or does he? Is he just a
Speaker 1: guy who wants to be more powerful and he's like, well,
Speaker 1: if I'm a CEO, k I'm more powerful, right.
Speaker 2: And that I mean that's the okrans Razor answer. I mean,
Speaker 2: like what the guy that in the future will fund
Speaker 2: like the right wing YouTube is upset that tech isn't
Speaker 2: being innovative enough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like you know.
Speaker 2: That that's just the real motivation here. I find that
Speaker 2: hard to believe.
Speaker 1: That's what guy I always come back to is like,
Speaker 1: but he funded all of the bullshit projects, Like he's
Speaker 1: back in face, but he's like the first Facebook investor
Speaker 1: that was there was never any chance that that was
Speaker 1: going to take us into Star Trek future, right right right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I I want to establish a multiplanetary species,
Speaker 2: and the way I'm going to do it is by
Speaker 2: putting some money behind two point.
Speaker 1: Zero Yeah, this guy built a website to rate chicks
Speaker 1: on how hot they are. That's gonna that's really gotta
Speaker 1: that's gonna bring us to the hover board's oh yeah.
Speaker 2: Got yeah on the SeaQuest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or put us on the sequest DSB. That's right.
Speaker 1: That's thank you, thank you, And also everyone ri ip
Speaker 1: Roy Scheider. You know, if there's ever been a better
Speaker 1: drunk sheriff in film history, I haven't seen him. You
Speaker 1: know the watch Go watch Jaws tonight, people. It's a
Speaker 1: nice Halloween movie. So Peter starts shotgunning money to Yarvin
Speaker 1: during this period of time as well. He invests you know,
Speaker 1: like a million dollars something like that in the stupid
Speaker 1: tech company project Yarvin has and I think there's probably
Speaker 1: an additional chunk of dark money that he he could
Speaker 1: And this is where this is. You know, we can
Speaker 1: laugh about how inconsistent or an ethicle his like motivations are,
Speaker 1: but the way he does this is smart because he
Speaker 1: recognizes I really like this guy's writing. This guy is
Speaker 1: putting out some stuff that's legitimately subversive on like the
Speaker 1: role of democracy and how it's like doomed that I
Speaker 1: think is useful towards where I want to see things go.
Speaker 1: And he's right against such a way that is inherently
Speaker 1: attractive and magnetic to other tech bros. So I want
Speaker 1: to fund this guy as a way of like slipping
Speaker 1: this drug into the supply of the Silicon Valley power
Speaker 1: elite that's going to warp the way they think about
Speaker 1: the world. And this is a very successful project. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know the degree to which all of that
Speaker 1: is a plan from the beginning, but he really, like
Speaker 1: like Yarvin, goes to parties at Peter's house and stuff
Speaker 1: like they are tight, and I think this is very
Speaker 1: much like a kind of part of his cohesive increasing
Speaker 1: plan that like, this is a guy who's a reflexive contraryan.
Speaker 1: He kind of hates ordinary people. He wants to be
Speaker 1: able to rule them. He certainly wants to be locked
Speaker 1: forever as someone who is above them. And he I
Speaker 1: think finds very attractive idea of if we build go
Speaker 1: back to a system that's this kind of neo monarchist system,
Speaker 1: I can be enshrined like the House of windsor as
Speaker 1: a permanent especially if I never have to die, right
Speaker 1: as a permanent power and speaking of never dying, nova,
Speaker 1: you know, who can't die, who cannot be killed. Absolutely
Speaker 1: cannot be killed. I've tried to kill them. They won't die.
Speaker 1: Is the sponsors of our podcast. We're backed before the
Speaker 1: Yeah ship.
Speaker 2: That might be my new nickname.
Speaker 1: There's a crap.
Speaker 2: Because I too have a shiny helmet and a third
Speaker 2: rate Marvel super.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you're a second rate easily. You're you're you're like,
Speaker 1: you're like, you're like above Morbiustier. Wow. Yeah, better than
Speaker 1: the MORBs. Yeah, you're Madam Webb. You're a Madam Webber
Speaker 1: style character. You know what I do. I'd go so
Speaker 1: far as ant man. And you know why that's a
Speaker 1: big compliment is everybody likes Paul Rudd.
Speaker 2: Everybody. It's true.
Speaker 1: I assume everyone doesn't like Paul Rudd, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people do. It's very popular.
Speaker 2: He's a dad in Brooklyn. I like him.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah yeah. And speaking of Paul Rudd, not at all.
Speaker 1: Because Paul Rudd has not aged in thirty years and
Speaker 1: Peter Peter puts a lot of money into life extension projects.
Speaker 1: We connected it. We made it work, yes, specifically trying
Speaker 1: to steal the blood of Paul Rudd to figure out
Speaker 1: what's going on there, what's going on there? How you're
Speaker 1: trying to play as a thirty nine year old man.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly takes a blood of teenagers and Paul Rudd, Yeah,
Speaker 2: hold on, I want to give the Curtis Yarvin thing
Speaker 2: that we're talking about before the is it a little
Speaker 2: bit of it? Like, you know, Peter Teel himself got
Speaker 2: sort of seed funding money as a weirdo reactionary right
Speaker 2: back when he was a kid, and so he's just
Speaker 2: kind of like paying it forward to this next weirdo reactionary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, paying it forward I think credits Peter maybe with
Speaker 1: a degree of generosity, which is a weird term to
Speaker 1: use for like right wing rullshit. But I think maybe
Speaker 1: it's I think maybe if I'm trying to psychoanalyze Peter
Speaker 1: and I'm not being fair here, but fuck it, it's
Speaker 1: my podcast. Peter was willing to take that money and
Speaker 1: preferred it to not having the money and not having
Speaker 1: like a platform. But I also think he probably found
Speaker 1: it kind of like emasculating maybe to need someone else's
Speaker 1: money that like his first plans had failed and that's
Speaker 1: why he had to take that right wing influencer grifter
Speaker 1: money in the first place. And I think maybe there's
Speaker 1: a satisfaction to him in having the shoeb be. On
Speaker 1: the other foot, on now being the guy who is
Speaker 1: funding those influencers, right, obviously he sees the value in
Speaker 1: that kind of funding, right, So I think he's always
Speaker 1: been kind of supportive of that, and maybe on the
Speaker 1: if you're being you're giving him more credit as like
Speaker 1: being less of a dick. All again, this is still
Speaker 1: an evil thing to do. Maybe it's that he genuinely
Speaker 1: is like, well, this money was there for me when
Speaker 1: I was a fledgling right wing shithead. I got to
Speaker 1: pay it forward, you know, and invest in the career
Speaker 1: of another asshole.
Speaker 2: But here is Jarvin is specifically right, I mean, correct
Speaker 2: me if I'm wrong, But Jarvin is like specifically promoting
Speaker 2: guys like Peter Thiel.
Speaker 1: As yes God, yes, right, God, kings of the City
Speaker 1: States that are going to replace the United States as
Speaker 1: the doom of democracy comes down, right, Yeah, yeah, there
Speaker 1: are neo feudalists right at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: all they want is a fucking coat of arms and
Speaker 1: a goddamn fucking march to listen to. You go to
Speaker 1: the comments, you like, look up old czarist Russian the
Speaker 1: band music and shit, you look at the it's about
Speaker 1: all these guys being like, oh, if only we could
Speaker 1: go back to the beautiful days of the Romanovs. All
Speaker 1: of those guys are no less intellectually courageous than fucking
Speaker 1: Peter teal Right, they just dress it up a little
Speaker 1: less by masturbating over the fucking tzar. All of these
Speaker 1: guys just want a tzar or they want to be
Speaker 1: the czar, right, or they want to be you know,
Speaker 1: the Czar's I think Peter wants to be a grand
Speaker 1: duke or some shit.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The tsar is probably a little bit too much exposure.
Speaker 2: This would all be much funnier if you think of
Speaker 2: them all with those giant curly Q mustaches, absolutely knee
Speaker 2: breeches yeah yeah, powdered wigs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or if you think about them all we could
Speaker 1: just talk about what happened to the czars in a basement,
Speaker 1: but you know that's probably ay. So Peter starts throwing
Speaker 1: money into living forever. He invests a lot in a
Speaker 1: guy named Aubrey de Gray who's running something called the
Speaker 1: Methusla Institute, And yeah, Degray is like the most prominent
Speaker 1: we could live forever if we just figure out the
Speaker 1: right thing advocate up to the present day, he's still
Speaker 1: sort of like one of the big names in this industry.
Speaker 1: Depending on how you kind of read into things. I
Speaker 1: think he's a guy who got a lot more credit
Speaker 1: because I used to be interested in some of what
Speaker 1: he had to say. I think maybe in I've come
Speaker 1: around to it, he's more of a con man in the
Speaker 1: modern era. That's not an allegation, but like that's kind
Speaker 1: of my gut feeling about the dude. But he's certainly
Speaker 1: he is not a right wing figure in this period. Degray,
Speaker 1: if anything, would be more on the progressive side of
Speaker 1: things in the early two thousands, like progressive left. So
Speaker 1: the fact that Peter is funding him again, Libertarians are
Speaker 1: kind of like more aligned with the left in this
Speaker 1: period of time because of their opposition to the Bush
Speaker 1: Party is a general rule, So the fact that Teal,
Speaker 1: who is kind of a neocon in some ways, is
Speaker 1: funding a guy like Degray might would not have been
Speaker 1: seen as like, oh, it's this weird right wing billionaire
Speaker 1: foisting money rights right, Like, That's just not how it
Speaker 1: would have looked. He also puts money into cryogenics and
Speaker 1: he's sure. There's some interesting interviews with him where he's like,
Speaker 1: asked what he thinks would be a good human life span,
Speaker 1: and he was like, I don't see why people shouldn't
Speaker 1: live forever, right, But specifically he's what's kind of important
Speaker 1: to note here is that Peter doesn't really have an
Speaker 1: interest in making sure people live forever. That's not what
Speaker 1: he's about. He wants to live forever. And he even
Speaker 1: makes some specific statements about how I don't agree with
Speaker 1: the ideology that death for every person is necessary, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think what's happening here is that, like again,
Speaker 1: Peter is this kind of to his bones contrarian. He
Speaker 1: rejects other people. And one of the things that bonds
Speaker 1: all people together, no matter how smart you are, how
Speaker 1: rich you are, who you are, is that everybody dies.
Speaker 1: And that I think is what's most offensive about death
Speaker 1: to Peter is that it it it kind of forever
Speaker 1: locks him in as one of the herd, right, Like,
Speaker 1: you're not fundamentally above the rest of mankind if you
Speaker 1: die like everyone else. And I think that's the primary
Speaker 1: reason why he's so obsessed with this, you know, like
Speaker 1: he is he wants to be a pharaoh. He sees
Speaker 1: himself as like a pharaoh type, right, that he has
Speaker 1: owed this kind of eternity of power and influence because
Speaker 1: he is so special. And the idea that like no man,
Speaker 1: when it all comes down into it, you wind up
Speaker 1: in the dirt like everybody else. Like that is the
Speaker 1: most offensive part of this to him, even more than
Speaker 1: like any fears about, you know, the the final cessation
Speaker 1: of consciousness. It's it's being inextricably bound to everyone else
Speaker 1: who exists.
Speaker 2: That is like more than that than just like scared
Speaker 2: little man child with too much money who is just like,
Speaker 2: oh no, this you know, this might happen to me,
Speaker 2: and therefore I'm gonna like support this. Like guy who
Speaker 2: looks like a wizard, who's gonna tell me, yeah, he.
Speaker 1: Does look like a wizard. Did you have you looked
Speaker 1: up a picture of Aubrey de Gray or did you
Speaker 1: just guess that he looks like a wizard.
Speaker 2: I just remind myself, this guy has got a beard.
Speaker 1: Oh man, so fa, he looks like such a wizard.
Speaker 2: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: So they pull up that wizard ass, motherfucker.
Speaker 2: It's wild. It's like, yeah, honestly, it looks like one
Speaker 2: of those things like there's like a kid hiding inside
Speaker 2: the beard's.
Speaker 1: Get off the gray ass son of a bitch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll just have Malcolm throw a picture up while
Speaker 3: we're talking about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, find one that really makes him look like
Speaker 1: a fucking wizard.
Speaker 2: There's really none that don't that doesn't They are all
Speaker 2: wizard picks. Yeah, you know, I did did you fund
Speaker 2: this guy directly or did he fund him through the founders.
Speaker 1: I think through the Founder's fund that he starts at Clarion.
Speaker 1: I think that's where most of his money comes in. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I like sim like I ran across the
Speaker 2: edges of this when I was reporting back in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I definitely. Like. There's a couple of other Founder's Fund
Speaker 2: partners who are also equally into you know, wizardry and
Speaker 2: life extension and stuff like that, and I was doing
Speaker 2: a story on them. Specifically, they hired an in house
Speaker 2: meditation teacher and guru who claimed that he could personally
Speaker 2: enlighten them and bring them like universal consciousness and oneness
Speaker 2: with the Buddha.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, as far as I can tell, it totally worked, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, what else would you do with your time
Speaker 2: then support the end of American democracy if you're in Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so anyway, and yeah, they were all into life extension
Speaker 2: and all kinds of all kinds of stuff like that.
Speaker 2: I didn't see Teal at that time, but definitely, like
Speaker 2: there's a lot of his people that were in there.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's natural you kind of get super
Speaker 1: rich in your early twenties and then you know, you
Speaker 1: first concern after that, when you have more money than
Speaker 1: you could ever spend, is like, well, I want to
Speaker 1: live long enough to spend all this right.
Speaker 2: Right money than God. I want to be God.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. Some of it's probably that, Like
Speaker 1: I think, as a general rule, by the time you
Speaker 1: get really rich, you're usually maybe probably closer to your
Speaker 1: thirties than your early twenties for most of these guys.
Speaker 1: And that is when feelings of mortality, you know, you
Speaker 1: start to and you start to also at the early
Speaker 1: stages of aging. There is a lot that if you
Speaker 1: have shitloads of money for the right kind of drugs
Speaker 1: and the right kind of like personal training and shit,
Speaker 1: you can kind of push off the early steps of
Speaker 1: aging significantly, and you can also do stuff like you
Speaker 1: see this with both Teal and with Elon Musk. Once
Speaker 1: they get rich physically, they change a lot. Initially, you know,
Speaker 1: you can get the hair tramlance like Jeff Bezos, you
Speaker 1: get on Hgah, you get a personal trainer, and you
Speaker 1: start to convince yourself, wow, so much of what I
Speaker 1: you know, when I was like a young kid just working,
Speaker 1: I couldn't have a body like this because I didn't
Speaker 1: have the resources to pay experts to maintain it for me.
Speaker 1: And I'm able to what else is possible, right right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's probably part of what's going on there.
Speaker 2: Also just getting a lot of money all once breaks
Speaker 2: bad for you.
Speaker 1: That was a good part of like BoJack Horseman right
Speaker 1: where there's that line where it's like the age at
Speaker 1: which you suddenly at which you become a millionaire is
Speaker 1: the age that you're like frozen at forever. You don't
Speaker 1: really progress mentally past that point.
Speaker 2: May we all get to that point?
Speaker 1: May we all get to that point, you know, but
Speaker 1: hopefully when you're like forty right as opposed to taking
Speaker 1: the Zuckerberg route. So at this point, all of these
Speaker 1: gifts that Peter you know, has been giving, it's interesting,
Speaker 1: like he's a The primary thing that he's done at
Speaker 1: this stage, right for all of you know, the money
Speaker 1: and the high ambitions, is he has started cashed out
Speaker 1: on and abandoned PayPal, and then he has launched an
Speaker 1: investment firm called Clarium, and by kind of the the
Speaker 1: second Bush term, Clarium is becoming a really big deal.
Speaker 1: By two thousand and four, they had two hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty million dollars under management, and within like a couple
Speaker 1: of years, the fund was worth more than two billion dollars,
Speaker 1: which is that it's double and triple digit growth for
Speaker 1: most of its early years. It changes. People will say
Speaker 1: it completely changed how venture capital works in the valley, right,
Speaker 1: because it was such a successful company. The kind of
Speaker 1: bets that Peter and his because all of the people's
Speaker 1: staff there are his friends from PayPal and his like
Speaker 1: right wing buddies at Stanford, right, who are also in
Speaker 1: large part a lot of his buddies from PayPal, you know,
Speaker 1: and he's kind of picking. He's finding guys who are
Speaker 1: starting companies. Some people will allege their all guys he
Speaker 1: finds attractive. You know. I don't know. I think that
Speaker 1: sometimes it's just people being like, oh, this guy's handsome,
Speaker 1: Peter's gay. That must be part of it. I don't
Speaker 1: know that it actually is, but he's he's finding these
Speaker 1: other founders and he's bringing them in. It is noted.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of things that make Peter's fund really
Speaker 1: different from other funds. For one, he's not interested in
Speaker 1: people constantly making moves. He's fine if you only make
Speaker 1: one investment a year, right. And again, he doesn't really
Speaker 1: fire people. He's bad at that. He's bad at confrontation.
Speaker 1: You can kind of wind up shuffled off to a
Speaker 1: part of the company where you don't have much connection
Speaker 1: to Peter if you fuck up enough. But like, he
Speaker 1: doesn't like conflict. For as many sort of evil, fucking
Speaker 1: confrontational things and people as this guy invests in, he
Speaker 1: personally doesn't seem to have much stomach for conflict, especially
Speaker 1: not with people he likes. So when it comes to
Speaker 1: like what made Clarium super wealthy, one of the things
Speaker 1: that was hugely influential in their growth was backing one
Speaker 1: of the most toxic corporations on the planet, Opti Canada.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Opti is an Israeli Canadian company that is involved in
Speaker 1: like taking bitchumen and extracting oil from it. And this is,
Speaker 1: of all of the ways to get oil out of
Speaker 1: the ground, bitumen extraction is like the most fucking poisonous,
Speaker 1: right it is. This is the absolute worst way to
Speaker 1: get oil for the environment. It is a hideously toxic
Speaker 1: thing to do. And Peter and his company put a
Speaker 1: shitload of money behind this, and it secures returns of
Speaker 1: like sixty percent for them. And this is the period
Speaker 1: Peter is very much anti kind of climate change. I
Speaker 1: don't know how much he acts climate Chang's very pro
Speaker 1: climate change. Yeah, I think he's anti anti like he's
Speaker 1: I think he would say anti the ideology of climate change. Right.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that's happened here is right
Speaker 1: around like two thousand and six seven he he Elon
Speaker 1: Musk and David Sachs fund a movie called Thank You
Speaker 1: for Smoking, which I actually just watched the day that
Speaker 1: Biden dropped out of the election. It still holds up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good movie. It's it's a fucking what's his
Speaker 1: name the guy who played two Face and the new
Speaker 1: in the chrysn Ol in Batman movies. Yeah him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a disturbingly a handsome guy.
Speaker 1: Incredibly and like right, it is Aaron Eckert right at
Speaker 1: his like the peak of him being a handsome, charming
Speaker 1: son of a bitch. It's a good movie. Like it's
Speaker 1: easily the best thing that those three guys were ever
Speaker 1: involved with. It's based off a book by William F.
Speaker 1: Buckley's son, which is Rhodesia Lover William F. Buckley. But
Speaker 1: it's a good book, Like it is extremely libertarian, and
Speaker 1: it is extremely early Aughts libertarian, and it's one of
Speaker 1: those things. I think if you take the ideology that
Speaker 1: the book's characters have completely seriously, then it's a lot
Speaker 1: less enjoyable. But it's it's impossible to really do that
Speaker 1: when you're watching it because there's just so many talented
Speaker 1: people involved, and it's a good script. Again, Aaron eckert
Speaker 1: is is just just soaking up the screen, and you've
Speaker 1: got fucking JK. Simmons is kind of the antagon. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of great people in that movie. Anyway, go
Speaker 1: watch Thank You for Smoking. It holds up like believe
Speaker 1: me people. But you also as you watch it think
Speaker 1: like this is pretty true to Peter's actual unironic belief
Speaker 1: about politics in the early two thousands, right, as opposed
Speaker 1: to just like, well, this is a fun movie about
Speaker 1: like these absolutely amoral merchants of disinformation, right.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, come on, stop being so serious, why right?
Speaker 1: Right right? We're never going to wind up behind power
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: Name.
Speaker 1: Peter's putting money into Thank You for Smoking and bitum
Speaker 1: an extraction, and he's also kind of this is the
Speaker 1: period where he's really started to relish being the famous
Speaker 1: founder guy here, and he gets more open about everything
Speaker 1: in his life. I'm going to quote from Chafkin's book
Speaker 1: The Contrarian. Here, he began telling close friends and then
Speaker 1: coworkers that he was gay, socializing in bars are on
Speaker 1: the roof of his new house, often with the handsome
Speaker 1: young men he was hiring, many of whom were out teel.
Speaker 1: Self actualization would pay off. In August two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: four months before the recession began and close to a
Speaker 1: year before most Americans realized the economy was collapsing, sent
Speaker 1: a letter to investors declaring that the economic expansion was
Speaker 1: officially over. We've begun a long post boom phase that
Speaker 1: can be called the long Goodbye, the letter said. And
Speaker 1: this is one of Peter's great successful predictions, right, which
Speaker 1: is that he calls he starts writing in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven about the global financial crash that's going to
Speaker 1: really hit in two thousand and eight. He is very
Speaker 1: much ahead of the curve on this. A few months
Speaker 1: after that two thousand and seven letter, right at the
Speaker 1: start of two thousand and eight, just weeks after he'd
Speaker 1: been outed by Gawker, Peter sends out a ten thousand
Speaker 1: word essay to investors. And this is another thing that
Speaker 1: kind of he's famous for as like a hedge fun guy,
Speaker 1: is he will periodically write these massive political and philosophical
Speaker 1: sometimes even religious essays and send them out to all
Speaker 1: of his funders right to kind of explain their philosophy
Speaker 1: at the moment. And a lot of this is like,
Speaker 1: I have a lot of confidence in your fucking dorm
Speaker 1: room ass musings. If you're sending this kind of shit
Speaker 1: out of people are trusting to invest money in, I'm
Speaker 1: guessing a lot of these wound up just kind of
Speaker 1: like thrown into trash. But so he predicts correctly that
Speaker 1: there's this crash coming. But he also I think, because
Speaker 1: just of who he is, he over captastrophizes, right. The
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight crash was really bad. He sees
Speaker 1: that coming. He also thinks it's definitely going to cause
Speaker 1: a depression, right, that no one is going to bail
Speaker 1: out anything, and that the cycle of collapse will continue
Speaker 1: absolutely unabated, will go on like a runaway sort of
Speaker 1: freight train kind of deal.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so instead of doing what would have been the
Speaker 1: smart thing as an evil investor, which is shorting the
Speaker 1: housing market, right, tell you you have your people in
Speaker 1: their risky positions with like companies that owe a lot
Speaker 1: of money and fucking short the housing market, right in
Speaker 1: order to make money off of what you can in
Speaker 1: the immediate term and kind of avoid the consequences of
Speaker 1: this cruel winter coming. Peter, he kind of continues in
Speaker 1: this like apocalypse preacher persona and quote uh and states
Speaker 1: that he is quote recommending prayer and repentance in lieu
Speaker 1: of investments analysis insane things. They're right to investors. Yeah,
Speaker 1: He's like, you should all repent to Christ. We're done.
Speaker 2: That's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's so sandwich board, is he what? Sorry? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's basically doing like a fucking yeah sandwich board kind
Speaker 1: of thing, right, is nigh.
Speaker 2: Is there any chance, was there any chance that he
Speaker 2: was just that was just a bit or he was
Speaker 2: just kind of joke there.
Speaker 1: I think he's being I think maybe there's an element
Speaker 1: of that, but he doesn't. His what he does financially
Speaker 1: is also what you would do if you legitimately expected
Speaker 1: total collapse, right, Like he does initially short the dollar,
Speaker 1: and there are initial like high yields. Right Like he
Speaker 1: bets against some companies that are taken up by large loans,
Speaker 1: and their yields in the first half of two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight go up to like five times their prior rate. Right.
Speaker 1: Kind of at the height of this that between six
Speaker 1: point four and like eight billion dollars under management, right,
Speaker 1: and this is a fund that back in like two
Speaker 1: thousand and two or three was two hundred and sixty million.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So you can see why people are like, wow, this
Speaker 1: is the future of investing. What a genius Peter is
Speaker 1: And he looks like a genius in kind of the
Speaker 1: early stages of that financial collapse. But again we're just
Speaker 1: talking about the first half of two thousand and eight here. Now.
Speaker 1: He described his school of thought on these matters as
Speaker 1: being a global macro investor, which in his terms, meant
Speaker 1: looking out at world events and basing your economic predictions
Speaker 1: on kind of the vibe you felt about the times
Speaker 1: in large, as opposed to the specific situation each of
Speaker 1: those companies was in. He urged investors at Clarion to
Speaker 1: make one trade per week, which chaf Can credits to
Speaker 1: his combination of indecisiveness and high tolerance for risk. Quote.
Speaker 1: Teal argued that the world was heading to end times.
Speaker 1: Investment analysts often employ religious metaphors, speaking of the second
Speaker 1: coming of bond yields or inequities apocalypse, but Teal was
Speaker 1: not speaking metaphorically. The entire huge in order, he wrote,
Speaker 1: could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence, famine, disease.
Speaker 1: Wore a death against this future. It is far better
Speaker 1: to save one's immortal soul and accumulate treasures in heaven,
Speaker 1: in the eternal city of God, than it is to
Speaker 1: a mass of fleeting fortune in the transient and passing
Speaker 1: city of Man. And when you read it like that,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to see that as not like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, you're going If that's just totally
Speaker 1: tongue in cheek, you're really going far with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that is deep into the bit. I mean
Speaker 2: you are really committing.
Speaker 1: You're you're far too committed to this bit, and it's
Speaker 1: not a great bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is a whole life of Brian.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, right, Shit, that's so weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is a deeply weird guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such a fucking strange fella.
Speaker 2: It's pretty weird when like the young Blood transfer and
Speaker 2: like bankrolling the like roided out wrestlers lawsuit over the
Speaker 2: dudes are like sort of the bottom tier weird things
Speaker 2: you do. Like the really weird stuff is the stuff
Speaker 2: he says out and open to his own investors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well he's so strange.
Speaker 2: Oh man, oh my god, I'm not going to be
Speaker 2: as rich as I'm personally not, may not be as
Speaker 2: rich as as I might have been before. My like
Speaker 2: Wall Street buddies aren't going to be able to rapaciously
Speaker 2: divide up loans the way they're were before. Yeure, society
Speaker 2: is doomed.
Speaker 1: Were if you hate people and you fundamentally think that
Speaker 1: they're like messy little scum who need to be ruled,
Speaker 1: you can't imagine things would go bad. If you're scared
Speaker 1: about a financial collapse, you have to imagine they are
Speaker 1: on the edge of eating each other, right, because they're
Speaker 1: They're not any better than animals, right, And I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to shit talk animals. I'm just saying I think
Speaker 1: that's how Peter thinks about things, right, I think animals
Speaker 1: are much better than people usually. But that's I think.
Speaker 1: I think I'm accurately describing. That's how I think Peter feels.
Speaker 1: I'm basing that off of vibes, like Peter was basic
Speaker 1: thinking about the collapse of the world. Right, But I
Speaker 1: have as good a record with vibes as Peter does,
Speaker 1: at least. Uh yeah, yeah, here's some ads and we're
Speaker 1: bad anyway. That's all very weird that Peter is so
Speaker 1: kind of married to the fucking Bible as a hedge
Speaker 1: fund guy. But the weirdness does mask there's a real
Speaker 1: insight here right in that Peter again, he's going to
Speaker 1: fuck up on taking advantage of this. He extends it
Speaker 1: too far. I also think his fundamental analysis is correct,
Speaker 1: which is he argues in that paper that investors are
Speaker 1: going to be unable to as the housing market comes
Speaker 1: unwound and as these increasing contradictions in the way our
Speaker 1: economy is set up become impossible to ignore. And I think,
Speaker 1: although Peter won't admit this, climate change is a big
Speaker 1: part of that, investors are going to be unable and
Speaker 1: unwilling to accept that things can't continue growing at the
Speaker 1: rates that they'd always been growing, right, that that's not possible,
Speaker 1: and rather than accept the inevitability of contraction or even collapse,
Speaker 1: they will start a process of massively overvaluing every asset systematically,
Speaker 1: causing an endless cascade of bubbles in every sector. And
Speaker 1: that is what happened, right, that's today, that's the last
Speaker 1: twenty years. Right, Like, he's not fundamentally wrong, but he
Speaker 1: also overextends how bad it's going to be and how
Speaker 1: quickly it's going to be that bad.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And the other bad move here is that if you
Speaker 1: are a hedge fund guy, even though I think this
Speaker 1: is fundamentally not incorrect analysis, it's a bad thing to
Speaker 1: put out to the people investing money in you that
Speaker 1: I think the end times are coming.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That does not make people want to keep money with you.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make them want to invest more money with you.
Speaker 1: It kind of makes them want to build bunkers and
Speaker 1: maybe feel like they need some of that money liquid
Speaker 1: to build bunkers, right right, Yeah, So Peter starts to
Speaker 1: panic increasingly Later in two thousand and eight, as the
Speaker 1: signs get worse, he holds meetings to Warren employees that
Speaker 1: he thinks every brokerage in the country is going to
Speaker 1: go under and there's going to be no currency, and
Speaker 1: like he literally he has his company making sure they
Speaker 1: have at least a couple grand or a thousand or
Speaker 1: something on hand for every employee so that he can
Speaker 1: keep his employees fed if all of the currency collapses.
Speaker 1: They're talking about like buying gold bricks, like this is
Speaker 1: like apocalypse hoarder nonsense. Nice, Like Peter is worried that
Speaker 1: his employee best friends, who were his entire social group
Speaker 1: are going to starve to death and he has to
Speaker 1: make sure he has cash to pay for their food,
Speaker 1: which is actually kind of sweet. Like it does show
Speaker 1: Peter is to some extent capable of caring about other people,
Speaker 1: if that's accurate, but not in a way that makes
Speaker 1: them a good guy. But there's a degree of care there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's like who else live to
Speaker 2: serve him?
Speaker 1: Right right? I need to have I need to have cash,
Speaker 1: so I can buy food, so I can maintain a
Speaker 1: degree of control over these other people. So they have
Speaker 1: to continue being my friends. Maybe that's it. Probably do
Speaker 1: anything else?
Speaker 2: Did they learn kung food? They did they start shooting?
Speaker 1: You have to assume food. You have to assume there's
Speaker 1: some stuff like you. I can't. I can't imagine that
Speaker 1: you could believe this about the future and not be
Speaker 1: buying guns and stuff right now. Peter's strong belief that
Speaker 1: the tech bubble is going to burst and cause a
Speaker 1: depression causes him to change, like clarium standard operating procedure
Speaker 1: is that we're going to bet against the future stability
Speaker 1: of the US economy, and that seems like that should
Speaker 1: have been the first half of two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: That makes them a fuck load of money, right, and
Speaker 1: in the second half it's going to cost them everything. Right. So,
Speaker 1: because Peter's word is law, very little is expected of
Speaker 1: his workers on a day to day basis, So life
Speaker 1: of the company is like pretty chill during these early
Speaker 1: apocalypse stages. According to chaef Gen, people played a lot
Speaker 1: of chess and spent their free time to over how
Speaker 1: they'd run a theoretical country if they had the freedom
Speaker 1: to build it from the ground up. Quote. Everyone spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time talking politics, although it was important
Speaker 1: that those politics always be of the right wing variety.
Speaker 1: An employee told me that it was common to hear
Speaker 1: about talk about climate change denial and to see web
Speaker 1: browsers open to v dare, a far right web site
Speaker 1: with a long record of publishing white nationalist writing. Oh,
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about that. It gets a lot worse
Speaker 1: in terms of Vdair's shit, my man's. This had been
Speaker 1: a good enough strategy for years, but Peter's inherent distrust
Speaker 1: of tech businesses is going to cause him to miss
Speaker 1: a lot of opportunities here, as well as his belief
Speaker 1: that like collapse is inevitable. He turns down a chance
Speaker 1: to invest in Tesla, which might be understandable given his
Speaker 1: history with Elon. Right, if I can, if I can
Speaker 1: be like, well, I get why you would miss this,
Speaker 1: because you know what a mess he is, right, but
Speaker 1: that is undoubtedly it's a bad financial decision. To not
Speaker 1: get involved with Tesla in two thousand and eight is
Speaker 1: a poor financial mission, right. He also turned down the money,
Speaker 1: the chance to put money into YouTube when it was
Speaker 1: still a startup and that is a catastrophic bit as
Speaker 1: a tech founder. Missing YouTube is a big one.
Speaker 2: That's also particularly funny because then later on he'll fund
Speaker 2: Rumble the.
Speaker 1: Right right Way YouTube.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, so I think YouTube, but I got
Speaker 2: assuming even better. I guess I got right wing YouTube
Speaker 2: with Russell Brandan.
Speaker 1: And this is like, this is right right Around the
Speaker 1: same time he neglects to invest in YouTube is when
Speaker 1: he neglects to take part in like the second funding
Speaker 1: round for Facebook. So he misses a lot in a
Speaker 1: row here, and then two thousand and eight comes about
Speaker 1: and right, and after these initial successes, he bets on
Speaker 1: the idea. So he's he's made money the first half
Speaker 1: of the financial of two thousand and eight, of the
Speaker 1: collapse year, by betting on against the dollar. But then
Speaker 1: he has this belief that as the as the collapse
Speaker 1: starts to run away, he believes, not only are some
Speaker 1: banks going to collapse, every bank is going to be nationalized,
Speaker 1: right and because he thinks that the government is going
Speaker 1: to have to take over all of the banks. I
Speaker 1: think this is just because he's also a libertarian, so
Speaker 1: his nightmare is like this, you know, the government taking
Speaker 1: over everything. He decides unlike all of the guys who
Speaker 1: make money off of, you know, the collapse. Unlike all
Speaker 1: the big short guys, he decides not to short any
Speaker 1: banks because he thinks that since the government's going to
Speaker 1: nationalize them all, once they get nationalized, their stock value
Speaker 1: is going to soar. And so after predicting the collapse,
Speaker 1: he puts nearly a billion dollars into stocks and all
Speaker 1: of these banks, and like another one and a half
Speaker 1: billion or so into Google and fucking of all of
Speaker 1: the places to put like eight hundred million dollars, fucking Yahoo.
Speaker 1: He puts eight undred million dollars in such a whiff.
Speaker 1: It's such a fuck up.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: It's so funny, man, It's so fucking funny. And I had, again,
Speaker 1: as a general rule, I actually, compared to most of
Speaker 1: our guys, I respect Peter, you know, not in a
Speaker 1: positive way, but just in a like it's dangerous not to.
Speaker 1: But I also had thought he had been much more
Speaker 1: successful than this. And it's so interesting to me that
Speaker 1: he fucks up on these big investments while getting the
Speaker 1: bigger picture kind of fundamentally right, which is is so humanizing, right,
Speaker 1: is that's such a human thing to do. I've been
Speaker 1: there myself, where like you, you predict a big thing
Speaker 1: correctly and your micro response to that you fuck up
Speaker 1: because of who you are, right, right, that's so human.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but still, I mean, I think all banks are
Speaker 2: going to fail, therefore I'm going to put a billion
Speaker 2: dollars into them. Is wild? That is that.
Speaker 1: Government's obviously get to nationalize every bank, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really sniffing too much of your own.
Speaker 1: Clue, it is. And it's like this, it's this failure,
Speaker 1: it's this this belief that, like I believe that the
Speaker 1: you know, the fucking Democrats who are going to come
Speaker 1: into office are legitimately communists. They would never do the
Speaker 1: capitalist thing of propping up the banks and just giving
Speaker 1: these people free money to put a halt, like to
Speaker 1: paper over their fuck ups. Right, Obviously they're going to
Speaker 1: make this bid for ultimate power and nationalize everything, right,
Speaker 1: And he's like, no, that's not what they did. Turns
Speaker 1: out they are just owned by bankers. Yeah, sorry, sorry, Peter,
Speaker 1: you guys won too much and now you've lost your money.
Speaker 2: Just because you call every Democrat a socialist does not
Speaker 2: mean in.
Speaker 1: Fact, not what they are, not what they are. Good job,
Speaker 1: So at the end of the year, and by you know,
Speaker 1: the time Obama takes off as Peter has lost billions,
Speaker 1: putting him in a similar bucket to people who had
Speaker 1: failed completely to see that the crash was coming. After
Speaker 1: being up by like five times in early to kind
Speaker 1: of mid two thousand and eight, by the end of
Speaker 1: the year, he's down five percent, right. And then, to
Speaker 1: make matters worse, once kind of the collapse hits, he
Speaker 1: dumps a shitload of his holdings while stock prices are
Speaker 1: low because he assumes a deppression is and nothing is
Speaker 1: going to rebound, and he needs cash. And then all
Speaker 1: of this shit does rebound, and so he misses out
Speaker 1: twice in a row. Here, investors begin to abandon Clarium,
Speaker 1: which had been worth eight billion almost I think at
Speaker 1: his at its height, and by the end of the
Speaker 1: year was down to two billion dollars, like by two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, it's like a quarter of what it
Speaker 1: had been at its height, right, which is a major
Speaker 1: fuck up, you know, So yeah, fascinating stuff. Now, this
Speaker 1: is where we also get back to Gawker, right kind
Speaker 1: of two thousand and eight or so. Here I stated
Speaker 1: earlier that Ryan Holiday argues Peter responded to Gawker's confrontational
Speaker 1: tabloid expose style, right, which he saw as a danger
Speaker 1: to weird geniuses like him who moved the species forward.
Speaker 1: Chafkin makes a somewhat different argument quote Teal came to
Speaker 1: believe that the real reason for the mass redemptions, which
Speaker 1: is like all of the people taking their money out
Speaker 1: of Clarium, was Gawker Media. Some of Clarium's big investors,
Speaker 1: according to former employees, were Arab sovereign wealth funds controlled
Speaker 1: by governments that considered homosexuality to be a crime. Teal
Speaker 1: has never explicitly acknowledged this, but he has hinted at
Speaker 1: why he may have wanted to keep his sexual orientation
Speaker 1: out of view. So he a bunch of people pull
Speaker 1: their money out of his fund in this period where
Speaker 1: he is making repeated fuck ups, and he blames it
Speaker 1: on Gawker outing him right.
Speaker 2: I invest eight hundred million dollars in Yahoo places any Yahoo.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight.
Speaker 2: Homide Yeah, and like somehow that's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Nick Dayton made you put a billion dollars into Yahoo?
Speaker 2: Brother, Yeah, I let my own weird like them to
Speaker 2: steal your underwear. Yeah. So phychology warp my brain and
Speaker 2: somehow that's Valley Wags for.
Speaker 1: A billion dollars almost into yeah, like a billion dollars
Speaker 1: into Google almost. That's probably a smart Yeah, definitely a
Speaker 1: smart long term investment. But like Yahoo, Yahoo in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, I was twenty and I knew that
Speaker 1: Yahoo was a bad investments.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeahoo's crazy.
Speaker 1: That's so fucking funny. Oh man, my god. So I
Speaker 1: think the other reason he's angry at Gawker here is
Speaker 1: that Gker is reporting on a lot of his fuck
Speaker 1: ups too, and I think in such a way that
Speaker 1: he kind of blames them for why investors start pulling
Speaker 1: out right, Gaker revealed our screw ups publicly in a
Speaker 1: way that hurt us, right, and so and that, by
Speaker 1: the way, again that this kind of view that like, oh,
Speaker 1: they out at him and so he destroyed them. That's
Speaker 1: you know, that makes the case like the dangers of
Speaker 1: a petty billionaire seemed clearer with that statement. But this
Speaker 1: is much more standard, evil rich guy, They damaged my
Speaker 1: business interests by reporting on me screwing up, and so
Speaker 1: I wanted them out right. That's perfectly normal, rich guy,
Speaker 1: evil bullshit, right, Yeah, So this period, though, you know,
Speaker 1: while he is apparently burning with rage at Gker the
Speaker 1: end of the Bush years to start of the Obama era,
Speaker 1: it's not a whole bad time for him either, because
Speaker 1: while he's again he's super rich, so he's insulated personally
Speaker 1: from any real consequences. And while his clarium investments fail
Speaker 1: and he stops being like the lauded, you know, hedge
Speaker 1: fund genius of the new generation, Peter ces success in
Speaker 1: another venture which had been launched based on the Egor
Speaker 1: software that he's depending on. I've heard a couple of
Speaker 1: different versions of the story. One is that Levchin, his
Speaker 1: founder at PayPal Buddy codes it some of them. The
Speaker 1: intercept reporting says it was another guy at PayPal who
Speaker 1: coded it. I don't know which one of them coded it.
Speaker 1: But Igor is this software that they had started at
Speaker 1: PayPal to stop Russian scammers. Right that there are allegations
Speaker 1: and lawsuits that it was kind of stolen in part
Speaker 1: from another company, But that's a story for another day.
Speaker 1: Peter is as obsessed with security and fighting terrorism as
Speaker 1: any neo coon, and he starts to focus on the
Speaker 1: idea that like Egor, might be useful for something Besides
Speaker 1: fighting fraud, perhaps this could also allow the government to
Speaker 1: hunt and kill terrorists that had Peter to fear for
Speaker 1: his own life. I'm going to have to go back
Speaker 1: in time here, and I hate to jump around like this,
Speaker 1: but Peter's involved in too many things to not do
Speaker 1: this from time to time. So let's go back to
Speaker 1: July of two thousand and four, right when he and
Speaker 1: a conservative chaplain from Stanford organize a six day seminar
Speaker 1: with Renee Girard. The scapegoat philosopher Guy Til had attacked
Speaker 1: the Bush administration then for not being cruel enough to Muslims,
Speaker 1: and had gone after the ACLU for their unhinged support
Speaker 1: of civil liberties at the expense of security. He had
Speaker 1: encouraged the creation of a new system, which he built
Speaker 1: as a replacement for the UN. He was like, instead
Speaker 1: of the UN, we should have an international consortium of
Speaker 1: public and private intelligence companies all working together to quote
Speaker 1: forge the decisive path to a truly global packs Americana. Right,
Speaker 1: this American piece that intelligence agencies can bring us if
Speaker 1: we give them enough money and power to murder people
Speaker 1: with drones. It's so why yeah, and Igor at this point,
Speaker 1: it's just a fancy way of what I call making
Speaker 1: a crazy board, right, that thing you see in like
Speaker 1: movies and TV, you know, True Detective where you've got
Speaker 1: like all the pictures connected by bits of string. Right,
Speaker 1: IGOR is a way of doing that on the computer
Speaker 1: right where you're plugging it. And it also is pulling
Speaker 1: from you can have it pull from. Oh, I know
Speaker 1: that we're looking for a guy who drives a who
Speaker 1: lives in the state and drives a blue car, and
Speaker 1: as a DUI, I want you to pull up from
Speaker 1: like all of these records. You have access to everyone
Speaker 1: who fits that, right, and we can add them to
Speaker 1: the crazy board, you know.
Speaker 2: And it was like, look, it's like starting at nine
Speaker 2: to eleven especially, there was like the fantasy, the uber
Speaker 2: fantasy of all these spook and spook adjacent types and
Speaker 2: all tech types that wanted to make money off of them,
Speaker 2: was that you know, you could have sort of like
Speaker 2: you know, the equivalent of maybe what we call an
Speaker 2: AI today, right that like could basically predict a terrorists
Speaker 2: we're going to strike before they were going to strike,
Speaker 2: you know, they were going to call you know, they
Speaker 2: were going to stop the next nine to eleven before
Speaker 2: the guys even you know, had really hatched the plan.
Speaker 2: And so there have been a bunch of programs that
Speaker 2: started and failed, you know, before then. And you know,
Speaker 2: there were some that were in existence and law enforcement,
Speaker 2: but they were clunky. There were you know, there were
Speaker 2: government software. So they did they look shitty, and they
Speaker 2: you know, and and and they didn't work so well.
Speaker 2: And then and they didn't have real Silicon Valley talent,
Speaker 2: like yeah, these guys did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think it could be a little hrd
Speaker 1: for people to visualize what Igor did, what this software does,
Speaker 1: this software becomes Palenteer does. So I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article in Bloomberg by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman,
Speaker 1: and Jordan Robertson. Here, the software Clones combs through disparate
Speaker 1: data sources, financial documents, airline reservations, cell phone records, social
Speaker 1: media postings, and searches for connections that human analysts might miss.
Speaker 1: It then presents the linkages and colorful, easy to interpret
Speaker 1: graphics that look like spiderwebs. So, based on this technology,
Speaker 1: Peter founds Palenteer that same year, two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and Palaeer is the name of the infamous seeing stones
Speaker 1: in the Lord of the Rings, which are you know,
Speaker 1: the most famously the one is owned by the evil
Speaker 1: wizards sorrowmon. Right, So if you're naming your company that
Speaker 1: exists to provide this like seeing stone to the highest
Speaker 1: bidder palateer, that's explicitly evil. Right. This isn't like a
Speaker 1: case where like the good guys have their own seeing stones.
Speaker 1: It's just the bad guys. It's a bad thing to have.
Speaker 1: It connects you inevitably to Sauron. Like anyway, very fun.
Speaker 1: I love fiction, now, Peter, one of the things that
Speaker 1: interesting about fucking Pallenteer is that, like with most of
Speaker 1: his companies, Peter has an interest in this, but he
Speaker 1: also has one of his close friends actually running shit,
Speaker 1: being the day to day guy organizing everything, and Peter's
Speaker 1: friend who helps him run. Palenteer is famously always described
Speaker 1: as his most liberal friend, a guy named Alex Karp,
Speaker 1: who Bloomberg identifies as a self described neo Marxist. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know about Alex, you know, like, what the
Speaker 1: fuck do you mean about as the guys starting the
Speaker 1: capitalist spy firm? How can you consider yourself a neo Marxist?
Speaker 1: But also some Marxists or boot liquors. So maybe that's
Speaker 1: the kind of guy that Alex Karp is.
Speaker 2: Look, there's plenty of people that you know or yeah,
Speaker 2: you know whatever.
Speaker 1: The communists and spy agencies, right, yeah, yeah, Or.
Speaker 2: What I was going to say is, you know whatever
Speaker 2: the far left equivalent of a limousine liberal is. Those
Speaker 2: people are definitely out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the fucking CIA socialist or something like that. I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: there you oh, there you go. So getting off the
Speaker 1: ground is slow going at first for Pallunteer, for this
Speaker 1: is a hard thing. It's a really hard industry to
Speaker 1: break into, right because intel agencies are first and foremost
Speaker 1: government agencies, and if you know anything about the government,
Speaker 1: getting a government agency to adopt a new software tool
Speaker 1: is a brutal thing to do, right. It is very
Speaker 1: hard to convince them to make moves like that. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter what kind of agency it is. This is
Speaker 1: always an uphill struggle. So in order to aid Pallenteer
Speaker 1: in kind of getting this buy in, they needed to
Speaker 1: really start to take off. Peter brought in some of
Speaker 1: the most ghoulish neocons he could find to apply pressure
Speaker 1: in DC, and this included friend of the Pod John Poindexter,
Speaker 1: who oh JP had worked for Ronald Reagan until he
Speaker 1: was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran contra. He
Speaker 1: then got kind of quote unquote exonerated and gets hired
Speaker 1: by Dick Cheney to craft the Total Infraation Awareness Program.
Speaker 1: This was a Bush era intelligence mission with a seemingly
Speaker 1: kind of reasonable goal. Right, We're going to collect all
Speaker 1: of the data we can on everything happening, food prices, YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: and these different areas that we have military interests in,
Speaker 1: and we're going to have algorithms comb that data to
Speaker 1: spot patterns that might be indicative of terrorist groups operating
Speaker 1: beneath the surface. Right. It's one of those things that
Speaker 1: sounds reasonable on its face. If you look at how
Speaker 1: the War on Terror went, none of this ever works
Speaker 1: out quite as way well as they think it does. Right,
Speaker 1: But the smart guys in the room are all like, obviously,
Speaker 1: this is how we win the war on Terror back then, you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, I mean that was the whole ship. That
Speaker 2: was the whole thing for these guys, yep was you
Speaker 2: know it was going to be uh you know, what's
Speaker 2: the Tom Cruise movie? Uh?
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, we're gonna know about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And they were going to you know, put
Speaker 2: money to the or or they're gonna you know, feed
Speaker 2: the information your goals and they're going to feed you
Speaker 2: a red ball. That was the whole thing there. And yeah,
Speaker 2: volunteer got every single last one of the you know,
Speaker 2: members of this church of this like you know, weird
Speaker 2: Spye church to advocate for them. The other thing was
Speaker 2: like you couldn't walk into a train in d C
Speaker 2: without there.
Speaker 1: Being a oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And and like every guy that you know and hated
Speaker 2: Muslims and love Star Wars was promoting what.
Speaker 1: A brand they have, So they bring out John Poindex.
Speaker 1: Now it's important here to note that EGOR, which is
Speaker 1: what palent Heer is selling at this point, didn't gather
Speaker 1: or create new information of its own. Right, This is
Speaker 1: not a Big Brother system. This is a an algorithm
Speaker 1: that works off of the extant Big Brother system, right,
Speaker 1: organizing all of the info that the existing surveillance operations
Speaker 1: can put at your disposal. Right, it's data mining, you know. Now,
Speaker 1: One early concern is that analysts using EGOR would use
Speaker 1: the vast array of catalog data at their disposal to
Speaker 1: stalk and harass their ex girlfriends, which, if you know
Speaker 1: how cops work, is a thing that happens constantly. Anytime
Speaker 1: you've got a database that like a certain chunk of
Speaker 1: employees have access to, some of them are going to
Speaker 1: use it to stock their girlfriends.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: This is a known issue here. One of the ways
Speaker 1: in which they sell themselves to a lot of these
Speaker 1: intel agencies is Alex KRP promises, We're going to make
Speaker 1: it impossible for cops to stock their ex girlfriends because
Speaker 1: we're going to log every search request made into the
Speaker 1: system in a way that will allow you to audit them. Right. So,
Speaker 1: I mean they're selling point. It's like we're going to
Speaker 1: actually provide accountability in the spook process. Right. Chaef Get
Speaker 1: describes this as a key part of the company's pitch,
Speaker 1: but he also writes one of Palenteer's former engineers were
Speaker 1: called meetings during which government clients would suggest trying to
Speaker 1: use the database to look up an ex girlfriend immediately
Speaker 1: after hearing the whole privacy spiel. Palenteer employees would never
Speaker 1: object to these requests, this person said. Instead, they would
Speaker 1: remind clients that searches were logged and then allow them
Speaker 1: to look up whoever they want it, no matter how
Speaker 1: flimsy the pretext. Yeah, that's how that always works. Ah,
Speaker 1: every time.
Speaker 2: You don't need a predictive algorithm to predict that one,
Speaker 2: do you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: No, you shared out, you shared that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Get you give people a computer spot device and they
Speaker 1: are going to stock their girlfriends ex girlfriends. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: thanks to their famous friends and infinite cash reserves, Palaentteer
Speaker 1: managed to get contracts with the CIA and the NYPD,
Speaker 1: but actual adoption on a wide scale wouldn't happen without
Speaker 1: corporate purchases because no one in intelligence trusted a product
Speaker 1: that only the government used. Peter tried to force the
Speaker 1: government's hand here by selling other hedge funds, like selling
Speaker 1: Igor to other finance companies, right, and he marketed it
Speaker 1: as Palenteer Finance. So we've got this software that the
Speaker 1: government's interested in using. It is the spy software, but
Speaker 1: you can use it to predict which kind of investments
Speaker 1: are going to work out best. Right by gathering all
Speaker 1: of this data and using it to predict the future
Speaker 1: of finance. Now, this is a massive failure as an
Speaker 1: actual finance product because it doesn't work very well. People
Speaker 1: don't really make a lot of money off of Palenteer
Speaker 1: finance advising their trades, but it works out as a
Speaker 1: business decision because they're able to get a couple of
Speaker 1: different finance companies to buy into it, and then they
Speaker 1: can go back to the government and say, hey, look,
Speaker 1: this company and that company already using it to make trades. Obviously,
Speaker 1: DC should be using this to fight terrorism, right, And
Speaker 1: the government's like, oh, well, some bank bought it, so
Speaker 1: I guess we should as well, like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's yeah, and there's they're I mean, looking government
Speaker 2: there's always like, you know, they're constantly being like, oh,
Speaker 2: we're falling behind. You know, the private sector really knows
Speaker 2: even though.
Speaker 1: It works, they wouldn't make a big fuck up.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, if only we could run government
Speaker 2: more effectively like a business. Yeah, And I mean that,
Speaker 2: I mean it's totally how it worked. It's totally how
Speaker 2: it worked. Our adversaries can use these tools freely. Why
Speaker 2: shouldn't we.
Speaker 1: Why shouldn't we? And obviously as soon as the public sector,
Speaker 1: as soon as actually like the CIA and the FBI
Speaker 1: and the NYPD start putting money into Palenteer, then even
Speaker 1: though Palenteer finance had kind of not done great. A
Speaker 1: lot of banks and finance agencies start to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess well, we have to get involved in the
Speaker 1: government's buying this stuff. So we've got to buy it.
Speaker 1: We've got to get and so in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: JP Morgan CEO Jamie Diamond future future subject of the Pole,
Speaker 1: gets purchases like makes a contract with Palenteer. Now almost
Speaker 1: the instant they and they're doing this as like a
Speaker 1: security measure. We want to we want we have like
Speaker 1: a division in our company that's looking for evidence based
Speaker 1: on like the communications our employees have internally that we
Speaker 1: might have an employee who's breaking the law. Right, that's
Speaker 1: part of compliance. Right, we want to be there's a
Speaker 1: degree to which we're legally obligated to spy on our
Speaker 1: employees making investment decisions to make sure nobody's doing anything criminal. Right. Sure,
Speaker 1: So that's why they get this software. The instant they
Speaker 1: get it, they're head of security who's like using the
Speaker 1: Palenteer software, uses it to spy on the entire c
Speaker 1: suite for no real reason, right, Like he loses his
Speaker 1: mind with power and starts stalking all of the people
Speaker 1: running the company. This guy's name was Peter Kovicia, and
Speaker 1: he was a former secret serviceman who ran again a
Speaker 1: group in the company that was taped with using algorithms
Speaker 1: to monitor employees. And I'm going to quote again from
Speaker 1: Bloomberg here. Aided by as many as one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty forward deployed engineers from the data mining company Palateer Technologies,
Speaker 1: Kavicia's group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations
Speaker 1: from company issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts
Speaker 1: of digitally recorded phone conversations. Pellenteer software aggregated, searched, sorted,
Speaker 1: and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior
Speaker 1: that Kavichia's team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate secrets.
Speaker 1: Pellenteer's algorithm, for example, alerted the Insider Threat team when
Speaker 1: an employee started badging into work lated and usual, a
Speaker 1: sign of potential disgruntlement that would trigger further scrutiny and
Speaker 1: possible physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel. So
Speaker 1: that's nuts, but that's also what he's supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1: But right after, right as soon as they get access
Speaker 1: to this, Kavicia goes rogue and I'm going to continue
Speaker 1: with that quote. Former JP Morgan colleagues described the environment
Speaker 1: as Wall Street meets Apocalypse now with Kovichia as Colonel
Speaker 1: kurtz ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above
Speaker 1: the breast of the bank's security team. People in the
Speaker 1: department were shocked that no one from the bank or
Speaker 1: Palenteers said any real limits. They darkly joked that Kovichia
Speaker 1: was listening to their calls, reading their emails, watching them
Speaker 1: come and go. Some planted fake information in their communications
Speaker 1: to see if Kavichia would mention it at meetings, which
Speaker 1: he did. It all ended when a bank's when the
Speaker 1: bank's senior executives learned that they too were being watched,
Speaker 1: and what began as a promising marriage of masters of
Speaker 1: big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. Nice,
Speaker 1: very funny, extremely funny. Oh my god, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: and just like the most predictable thing that could have happened, right,
Speaker 1: this is what happens. Every time you give these guys
Speaker 1: this toy. Kavichia gets fired. But the promise of pallenty
Speaker 1: remain undimmed, even though there is tremendous debate app to
Speaker 1: the present day as to whether or not much of
Speaker 1: what they do works. This is less the case now
Speaker 1: that they're doing like we'll talk about this some in
Speaker 1: the last episode, like when it comes to providing targeting
Speaker 1: solutions based on data. I mean, there's the jury is
Speaker 1: still out on how well that's working in like Ukraine,
Speaker 1: But certainly in this period there's a big debate as
Speaker 1: any of the shit really work. Right, Pallenteer's going to
Speaker 1: take credit for the bin Laden assassination, very unlikely they
Speaker 1: had anything to do with it, but they do kind of.
Speaker 1: They take like oblique credit for it, and the software
Speaker 1: is swiftly adopted by police stations and cities like New York,
Speaker 1: Chicago and La Palateer software was often used allegedly to
Speaker 1: single out innocent individuals because the connections in their lives
Speaker 1: look suspicious to the algorithm. And here's Bloomberg again. The
Speaker 1: platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brain calls the
Speaker 1: secondary surveillance network, the web of who is related to,
Speaker 1: who friends with or sleeping with whom. One woman in
Speaker 1: the system for example, who wasn't suspected of committing any
Speaker 1: crime was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same
Speaker 1: network of associates, says Brain, who spent two and a
Speaker 1: half years embedded with the LAPD while we searching her
Speaker 1: dissertation on big data policing at Princeton University and who's
Speaker 1: now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 1: Anybody who logs into the system can see all these
Speaker 1: intimate ties, she says, to widen the scope of possible connections,
Speaker 1: she says, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data,
Speaker 1: including social media for closure and toll road information, camera
Speaker 1: feeds from hospitals, parking lots and universities, and delivery information
Speaker 1: from Papa John's International and Pizza Hut LLC. Now this
Speaker 1: is used. Yeah, no I no, I do think that
Speaker 1: the government should have access to our Papa John's records,
Speaker 1: but mainly to make sure like, hey man, you've ordered
Speaker 1: fourteen extra large pizzas this month? Okay, do you like
Speaker 1: a hug? Can we should send a guy by your
Speaker 1: house to give you a hug?
Speaker 2: The proper order of Papa John's orders is zero zero
Speaker 2: Domino's orders is zero.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pizza hut Man, Come on.
Speaker 2: Noiza, a proper number of orders is zero.
Speaker 1: No. I like a good stuff crust. I like it
Speaker 1: good stuff crust. Oh yeah, I love a big pizza
Speaker 1: hut pizza. You know what?
Speaker 3: You know what's good though, is those those Shack Papa
Speaker 3: John's commercials to.
Speaker 2: Get me everything.
Speaker 1: Wow, No, you can't get me. You can't get me
Speaker 1: into a Papa John. You know what they don't get
Speaker 1: me to do?
Speaker 3: Still eat Papa John's.
Speaker 1: No, No, I would eat shack before I eat a
Speaker 1: Papa John's. Wow, he's gotta have marbling, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've always endorsed cannibalism and very pro cannabally.
Speaker 3: It's one of those freaks that said they wanted to
Speaker 3: eat Moodang.
Speaker 1: I don't know who that is, Sophie. Well, but speaking
Speaker 1: of eating people, let's talk about the tragic case of
Speaker 1: Manuel Rios. He doesn't get eaten, I hope not. H
Speaker 1: Manuel is a guy who grew up in East la
Speaker 1: and had a lot of friends who joined a local
Speaker 1: gang east Side eighteen. In twenty sixteen, he was seated
Speaker 1: in a parked car with a friend who'd been jumped
Speaker 1: into the gang. When police rolled up, his friend ran,
Speaker 1: but Rios, who had not been breaking any laws, didn't run.
Speaker 1: He was like, why why the fuck would I run?
Speaker 1: Like my buddy's in a gang, Like, of course he's
Speaker 1: going to flee. I'm not doing anything wrong. But because
Speaker 1: you know, cops be how they are, he gets added
Speaker 1: to the LAPD's gang database right and Pallenteers software because
Speaker 1: of how many other gang dudes that he's just kind
Speaker 1: of socially knows, because of where he lives, he gets
Speaker 1: identified as a high priority target and he starts getting
Speaker 1: stopped constantly by the cops. Quote the police on autopilot
Speaker 1: with Palenteer are driving Rios towards his gang friends, not
Speaker 1: away from them. Worries Maria Saba, a neighbor and community
Speaker 1: organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities
Speaker 1: like East La are algorithmically scraped for pre crime suspects,
Speaker 1: data is destiny, says Saba. These are systemic processes, and
Speaker 1: when people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it
Speaker 1: pushes them to join the internalized being told they're bad,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the you know, one of the
Speaker 1: we will talk a lot more about Pollentteer, even in
Speaker 1: part four. But that's like, one of the really dark
Speaker 1: things about this is that it's masquerading as like this
Speaker 1: genius predictive, but all it's really doing is like, oh,
Speaker 1: you live in a poor neighborhood, a lot of your
Speaker 1: friends grow up to be in gangs. Cops should probably
Speaker 1: fuck with you constantly, you know, fuck with this guy constantly, right,
Speaker 1: And that's all it is. It's stopping frisks that you
Speaker 1: threw an algorithm over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or it almost reminds me of like, you know
Speaker 2: how like in the shitty day, shitty early days of
Speaker 2: like a map quest and Google Maps, where it like
Speaker 2: you'd get some drivers that would just follow the directions
Speaker 2: no matter how unhinged.
Speaker 1: A river yeah yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's like guys, use your.
Speaker 1: Eyes, homie, what's up, what's up? And you know this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And instead it'd be like they just follow. They
Speaker 2: blame the algorithm.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, if it's just going to cost you an extra
Speaker 2: ten bucks on an uber, that's one thing. But when
Speaker 2: it costs you know, some poor kid getting harassed over
Speaker 2: and over again, that's something totally different. And that mortally happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it sure did.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, Peter did an interview with Bloomberg. By
Speaker 1: this point, civil libertarians, which had been previously kind of
Speaker 1: Peter's constituency, had started blowing the horn over Pallanteer. Peter
Speaker 1: felt a need to make the case to his fellow
Speaker 1: libertarians on the need to embrace being spied on. He
Speaker 1: argued that data mining was less harmful than the quote
Speaker 1: crazy abuses entraconian policies the Bush administration had pushed after
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, And I would desperately love to hear
Speaker 1: which of those policies didn't you agree with, Peter, because
Speaker 1: it seems like you think they didn't go far enough, right,
Speaker 1: But he's like, look, if we want to avoid a
Speaker 1: police state, obviously you have to let me, Peter Tiel,
Speaker 1: build a surveillance state. That's all that can stop us
Speaker 1: from having an evil police state. Right, what a libertarian.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm selling this shit to the CIA and
Speaker 1: to spy on us. Keeps liberty libertate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought of this before, but
Speaker 2: I remember around this time libertarians in my life are
Speaker 2: self professed libertarians in my life. Yeah, from like really
Speaker 2: caring about this stuff to throwing up their hands and
Speaker 2: saying what privacy is did?
Speaker 1: Yeah, nothing you can do. It's the nine to eleven effect.
Speaker 1: It's so much because a big part of this is
Speaker 1: like you have this kind of same thing that happens
Speaker 1: where you've got all these guys who in the early
Speaker 1: two thousand's kind of the early part of the Bush
Speaker 1: era the late nineties had been like atheist activists who
Speaker 1: were like super anti the religious right, and then after
Speaker 1: nine to eleven they all get really racist against Muslims,
Speaker 1: and it pushes them towards conservatives and it's like, oh, guy,
Speaker 1: so you guys didn't have any principles ever, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: I get it, I get it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so and on the data side, it's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: we were really for civil liberties, but now that privacy
Speaker 2: is dead, Yeah, you might as well have the Lotian
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, what's the difference. Just let it happen,
Speaker 2: or if there's someone's going to spy on you, let it.
Speaker 1: Be Peter Teal. Yeah, here's one of us at least yep,
Speaker 1: speaking of Peter Till Noah, you got anything to plug?
Speaker 2: Yes, I have my new I don't know I have
Speaker 2: some I tried to come up with the lame chok
Speaker 2: there on the front. No I have nothing a plug.
Speaker 2: But you can find me at Noah Shackman. That's n
Speaker 2: O A H S H A C H T M
Speaker 2: A N yeah at most social platforms.
Speaker 1: Well check out Noah and you know figure out now.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna tell people to do anything illegal.
Speaker 2: Crazy board, Yeah, make it crazy.
Speaker 1: Go make a crazy board. Go make a crazy board
Speaker 1: as a center.
Speaker 4: May also someone suggests instead touch grass and peta dog.
Speaker 1: And touch grass, peta dog, make a crazy board on
Speaker 1: your wall. Stop hanging out with your friends. Cut off
Speaker 1: all contact with your family. Many of them live alone
Speaker 1: in a dark room. Just try to be more like
Speaker 1: Matthew McConaughey and True Detective Right is much like matt
Speaker 1: thank your daughter for dying and sparing you the sin
Speaker 1: of being a father. Do all that good good Matthew
Speaker 1: McConaughey and True Detective stuff. Have fun with it, but
Speaker 1: don't have fun with you. Do not eat, do not
Speaker 1: eat anything but amphetamines. Cigarettes, just just them up. Make
Speaker 1: us make a cigarette shake every morning. Okay.
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