Behind the Bastards - Part Four: How Peter Thiel Became the Gravedigger of Democracy
Aired: 2024-11-07
Duration: 01:33:45


=== Peter Teal Saga Part Four (04:56) ===

[00:00:01]  Cool zone media.
[00:00:04]  Oh, welcome back to Behind the Podcast, a bastard with Robert Evans and Noah Schachtman.
[00:00:13]  Noah, how are you doing?
[00:00:16]  Good question mark.
[00:00:18]  Good.
[00:00:18]  Good question mark.
[00:00:19]  How good can one feel in part four of the Peter Teal saga?
[00:00:28]  Great question, Noah.
[00:00:30]  I feel great there.
[00:00:31]  Yeah.
[00:00:31]  I don't know.
[00:00:32]  Great question, Noah, contributing writer at Rolling Stone, contributing editor at Wired.
[00:00:39]  Wow, you did it.
[00:00:40]  You did that so simple.
[00:00:41]  I did it last time, too.
[00:00:43]  Unbelievable.
[00:00:46]  Yeah, so I think we should, I want to start here by saying there's yet another post on the one of the subreddits accusing now Garrison and me both of sounding like we always have a nasal infection.
[00:00:59]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:01:01]  Guaranteed human.
[00:01:03]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:01:12]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:01:14]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:01:16]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:01:18]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:01:23]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:01:24]  Trust me, babe.
[00:01:25]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:35]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:40]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:43]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:01:50]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:01:54]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:01:57]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:06]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:02:11]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:02:14]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:02:17]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:02:19]  That's so funny.
[00:02:20]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:02:28]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:02:37]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:02:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:02:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:02:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:02:47]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:02:54]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:02:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:03:03]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:03:05]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:03:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:03:08]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:03:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:03:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:03:28]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:03:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:03:35]  Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:03:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:03:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:03:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:03:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:03:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:03:48]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:03:55]  And like, I'm sorry, those of you who don't have a low-grade sinus infection every year, but the rest of us have allergies.
[00:04:01]  Yeah, Robert's allergic to grass.
[00:04:03]  Come on.
[00:04:04]  The world is poisoned to me.
[00:04:06]  I don't know what to tell you.
[00:04:07]  Like, I have eczema.
[00:04:08]  I'm allergic to my own fucking skin.
[00:04:10]  Get off his back.
[00:04:12]  Get off my back.
[00:04:15]  Thank you.
[00:04:16]  Thank you, Noah.
[00:04:17]  It's only my relentless toughness.
[00:04:20]  Robert and I are allergic to so many things.
[00:04:23]  Yeah, which is incredible.
[00:04:25]  People.
[00:04:26]  Imagine being really like this is this is I'm the person who is has most been victimized by the internet because of how mean people are to me about my nose.
[00:04:36]  It's it's I'm the main victim of cancel culture.
[00:04:39]  You know, are you in a bubble currently?
[00:04:42]  I live in a bottle bubble.
[00:04:44]  Yeah, I have to like tase anyone who tries to get closer than 10 feet from me because I'm just a fragile little flower boy.

=== Anti-Immigration Immigrant Ideology (06:02) ===

[00:04:57]  So I noted last episode that Peter was sympatica with the Bush administration when it came to surveillance.
[00:05:04]  His only real issue with them is that they weren't mean enough to Muslims.
[00:05:07]  In 2007, though, he gained another issue with the Bush administration, which was that, if you guys can remember back this far, right at the end of his last term in office, W announced massive support for a new immigration reform package, which today, unfortunately, we would call like hopelessly leftist, right?
[00:05:27]  Like the George W. Bush 2007 immigration reform package is like so much more progressive than you could get away with now.
[00:05:34]  In part, it included a path to citizenship for undocumented Americans.
[00:05:38]  Bush's attempts to fix immigration, as he saw it.
[00:05:42]  Again, this was not seen as, you know, great by progressives in the day, but it's just kind of more than you could get away with now, didn't work out.
[00:05:50]  And it didn't work out because there's this massive groundswell of rage from the right flank of his own party, right?
[00:05:58]  That is furious that Bush is suggesting any mercy for people who had entered the country illegally.
[00:06:03]  Thial saw this movement as promising, and he credited the failure of Bush-era immigration reform on an unprecedented internet campaign.
[00:06:11]  Teal money started to flow towards anti-immigration organizations reaching people online.
[00:06:17]  One was a nonprofit called Numbers USA, which argued that the U.S. needed to reduce the number of immigrants allowed in every single year.
[00:06:24]  Numbers USA was founded and operated by Roy Beck, who himself had once worked for a guy named Dr. John Tanton, who had founded other earlier anti-immigration groups.
[00:06:34]  Beck had worked for Tanton's U.S. Inc., that's the anti-immigration organization, for a decade, and had helped Tanton organize a book.
[00:06:42]  They vacationed together.
[00:06:43]  These guys are very close, ideologically and personally.
[00:06:47]  Now, once Roy starts his Numbers USA foundation, which is backed by Peter Thiel, he starts to downplay his relationship with Tanton because John Tanton, in addition to being Roy's friend, is a white supremacist.
[00:07:00]  Here's the Southern Property Law Center writing about Tanton.
[00:07:04]  As long ago as 1988, a set of internal memoranda to the staffs of two groups he founded, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, FAIR, and U.S. English, were leaked and showed Tanton warning of a coming Latin onslaught, questioning whether Latinos were as durable as others and worrying that Latinos were outbreeding whites.
[00:07:23]  A decade later, he told a reporter that whites would soon develop a racial consciousness, and the result would be the war of all against all.
[00:07:31]  He hired and worked alongside Wayne Lutton, who has held other leadership positions in four white supremacist hate groups.
[00:07:37]  He published and endorsed a racist book on immigration, and he published numerous white supremacists.
[00:07:41]  Tanton compared immigrants to bacteria that will continue growing until the population crashes and sneered at immigrants defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.
[00:07:51]  There's a lot that's messed up there.
[00:07:54]  Latin onslaught is the name of a sick Spanish language metal band.
[00:07:58]  It's also Latin Onslaught is the term I use for that period where Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen were both really starting to hit it in a big way.
[00:08:09]  I believe that's half Latin enough.
[00:08:10]  That was the Latin onslaught.
[00:08:12]  Yeah, it's Latin enough.
[00:08:18]  Peter Thiel is an immigrant to this country, right?
[00:08:24]  Born in Germany, yeah, yeah.
[00:08:25]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:08:26]  He's an anti-immigration immigrant.
[00:08:30]  Yeah, I mean, to be honest, though, like that's the thing that people always get like flipped out by, but that's like the core of the hardest anti-immigrant chunk of the U.S. population is immigrants and children of immigrants, right?
[00:08:43]  Like, you know, the Cuban community in Florida being one example, but like half of the fucking Border Patrol is Latino, you know?
[00:08:50]  Like, and those guys are, yeah.
[00:08:52]  Am I right in remembering that Teal has like his citizenship is here and then also New Zealand?
[00:08:59]  Yes, he kind of fudged getting New Zealand citizenship.
[00:09:02]  People will argue that he wasn't actually there long enough to get it, but if you have enough money, you can get the citizenship.
[00:09:08]  I'm like, you know, New Zealand, if you want to offer me citizenship too, I'll take it.
[00:09:12]  But it's kind of messed up that you gave it to Peter.
[00:09:14]  Yeah.
[00:09:15]  Man, I could really use some New Zealand citizenship right about now.
[00:09:18]  Send us some New Zealand citizenship.
[00:09:20]  Wait, is that like if you found enough companies that are named after Lord of the Rings?
[00:09:24]  Yes.
[00:09:24]  Yeah.
[00:09:25]  There's a certain, if you founded three companies named after Lord of the Rings.
[00:09:32]  You get to go to New Zealand.
[00:09:33]  No, seriously, is he pro immigration to New Zealand too?
[00:09:37]  He's pro him having a safe valve.
[00:09:40]  You know, that's, I think, all that it is, right?
[00:09:43]  Yeah.
[00:09:43]  Yeah.
[00:09:45]  Also, how do, how come all these people or some of these people hardcore Catholic, but also hardcore against the biggest hardcore Catholics on the planet, aka the South and Central American populations?
[00:10:04]  You know, that's a good question, in part because a lot of these guys actually kind of hate what most Catholics see as Catholicism.
[00:10:10]  Like the kind of trad cath, the trad cath movement today, they're all converts.
[00:10:16]  They're all into aspects of like, my whole family's Catholic.
[00:10:18]  And like the kind of shit these people will say about like, no, the pope is invalid because this is from 700 years ago.
[00:10:24]  It's like shit.
[00:10:24]  Like Catholics are like, no, he's the Pope.
[00:10:28]  You listen to the Pope.
[00:10:29]  You know, that's all that matters.
[00:10:32]  It's this kind of separation between what cultural Catholicism is and like the fact that right now the fucking in I think it's in Pennsylvania, the Republicans are going after this nunnery because like a bunch of nuns are registered to vote there and they're like, none of them live there.
[00:10:49]  The nuns are talking about counter suing them.
[00:10:51]  And man, if the nuns are suing you, no born Catholic I have ever known would fuck with a group of nuns.
[00:10:57]  You don't go terrifying nuns.
[00:10:59]  You don't go against the nuns.

=== Nuns Warhammer Libertarians (04:58) ===

[00:11:00]  They're frightening people.
[00:11:02]  Yeah.
[00:11:03]  Even this Jew knows that.
[00:11:05]  Yeah.
[00:11:06]  These guys are not like they're not Catholic in the sense that Catholics are Catholic.
[00:11:09]  They're Catholic in the sense that like people who become fans of Warhammer 40,000 because they don't get the joke are fans of Warhammer 40,000.
[00:11:17]  That's the kind of Catholics they are, right?
[00:11:19]  Anyway.
[00:11:20]  I feel like that was a very alien floor moment again.
[00:11:23]  No, no, no.
[00:11:23]  No, everyone understands Warhammer.
[00:11:25]  Do you have some sort of endorsement deal with Warhammer 40,000?
[00:11:29]  No, I wish I did.
[00:11:30]  I would take their money.
[00:11:31]  But Games Workshop does not give out money.
[00:11:35]  I feel like that is the last thing that company does.
[00:11:37]  Yeah.
[00:11:38]  I feel like if you could score some of that sweet, sweet games workshop money, you might be able to find a cure for your allergies.
[00:11:47]  I can do a whole podcast and all of the characters that are based on 19th century gay poets in Warhammer 40,000.
[00:11:54]  More than you'd think.
[00:11:56]  Go ahead.
[00:11:57]  So.
[00:11:57]  Go off, King.
[00:11:59]  Yeah.
[00:12:00]  So Peter Thiel, he is this guy, John Tanton, is directly connected to the dude.
[00:12:07]  Thiel's not backing Tanton, but he's backing his protege, Roy Beck at Numbers USA, right?
[00:12:13]  And that's not all.
[00:12:14]  I'm going to continue that quote from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
[00:12:16]  The report revealed that over the course of some 20 years, Tanton had corresponded with Holocaust deniers, former Klan lawyers and leading white nationalist thinkers.
[00:12:23]  He introduced leaders of FAIR, on whose board he still sits today, to the president of the Pioneer Fund, a racist outfit set up to encourage race betterment at a private club.
[00:12:32]  He promoted the work of an infamous anti-Semitic professor, Kevin McDonald, to both FAIR officials and a major donor.
[00:12:38]  At one point, pursuing his interest in eugenics, the utterly discredited science of breeding a better human race, he tried to find out if Michigan had laws allowing forced sterilization.
[00:12:47]  His concern, Tanton wrote in a letter of inquiry, was a local pair of sisters who have nine illegitimate children between them.
[00:12:53]  And again, Peter Thiel is putting money into all of the people adjacent to this guy, right?
[00:13:01]  Like he is backing a lot of organizations that are next to him.
[00:13:05]  Like this is, this is just, you can see, and this is, he's very much, Thiel is very happy when like this Bush era immigration reform package goes down in flames because he has been one of the things he's most consistent on, again, since like the 2007, 8 is wanting massive restrictions and particularly non-white immigration into the United States, which is not a libertarian stance and is really just kind of a far-right racist stance.
[00:13:35]  While bankrolling this like weirdo neo-monarchist who's trying to like convince the blogosphere right wing to abandon democracy.
[00:13:50]  Yeah.
[00:13:50]  And this is actually a right around the same time because it's like 2008, nine that he starts getting involved with Yarvin.
[00:13:54]  And it's 2008 that he first sends a million dollars to numbers USA through an intermediary.
[00:13:59]  According to Chafkin, who notes, Thiel didn't comment on the report at the time, but several sources familiar with his political activities have told me the reported donation was real.
[00:14:08]  So, you know, it doesn't look like it's something that's absolutely confirmed, but there's definitely like ties between him and Roy Beck.
[00:14:14]  And Beck is tied to Tanton.
[00:14:16]  And this is all kind of part of this very long process of Thiel backing different explicitly racist anti-immigration organizations.
[00:14:24]  Now, the next year, right around the time that J.P. Morgan started experimenting with Palantir, Peter Thiel published an article in the Cato Institute's journal with his Seasteading buddy.
[00:14:34]  This is the guy that he's backing at the Seasteading Institute.
[00:14:37]  The theme of that issue was the idea of creating libertarian enclaves outside of existing states.
[00:14:42]  Thiel submitted an essay, The Education of a Libertarian, where he channeled his friend Curtis Yarvin to write, I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.
[00:14:52]  He whined that the 1920s were the last gasp of hope for liberty because Americans then gave women the right to vote and created the welfare state.
[00:15:00]  And these two innovations had made political victory impossible for libertarians.
[00:15:05]  Libertarians can't win elections because women can vote and there's welfare and we'll never get those people to give us any votes, right?
[00:15:13]  That's why he's so angry about this shit.
[00:15:15]  Yeah.
[00:15:15]  The natives are too mean to us, so I can't play this game.
[00:15:22]  Yeah.
[00:15:22]  This game is over.
[00:15:23]  This game is stupid.
[00:15:25]  I find whining about this shit so fascinating because we have all seen Peter and guys like him.
[00:15:29]  They've only gotten wealth and power through the system that they claim to be oppressed by.
[00:15:35]  It is the only place that they have ever been or would ever be a success.
[00:15:40]  These guys are the winners of our society.
[00:15:42]  They are elevated by a system that is designed to produce and support them, but they still can't feel, help but feel like losers all the time, no matter what they do.
[00:15:51]  And so like they turn their rage against the system that is the only reason they're special.
[00:15:55]  Don't act like a loser.
[00:15:57]  Don't act like a fucking loser.

=== Destroy Gawker Act F***ing Loser (04:43) ===

[00:15:59]  There you go.
[00:15:59]  Don't act like a fucking loser.
[00:16:01]  It's just, it is the most loserish shit to complain that we couldn't possibly win on an election because 51% of the population.
[00:16:10]  Too many girls voting.
[00:16:12]  Yeah.
[00:16:12]  Yeah.
[00:16:13]  And it's like, they're like, we won our D ⁇ D games and there were no girls involved in those.
[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:19]  You don't win D ⁇ D. You win just by playing.
[00:16:21]  But yes, I get your point.
[00:16:22]  Peter's frustrations were amplified by a public outcry against his complaints about women voting, right?
[00:16:29]  Like people get angry at him for saying this and he is forced to come out and kind of backpedal and be like, I don't want to take away women's right to vote.
[00:16:35]  I just recognize that this is a problem, right?
[00:16:38]  And I want to find a shortcut to avoid democracy cramping my style, right?
[00:16:42]  I don't want to stop women from voting, but we have to agree this is a problem that guys like me can't win as many elections because of the girls.
[00:16:50]  Now, another constant Teal irritant was the free press.
[00:16:54]  As we talked about last episode, I do think his initial irritants with Valley Wag comes from a semi-understandable place.
[00:17:02]  But it took years of them reporting on his actual doings in a manner that I think was generally responsible journalism before Teal acted.
[00:17:09]  Here's the shadowy and sighting incident of the Gawker lawsuit, according to Derek Thompson in an article with The Atlantic where he interviews Ryan Holliday, who's the guy who wrote the book on this.
[00:17:18]  In 2011, he is in Berlin and he takes a meeting with a then 26-year-old Teal Devotee, who you might call Mr. A.
[00:17:26]  The young man essentially tells Teal, I know you're obsessed with Gawker and I have an idea to destroy them.
[00:17:31]  He says Teal should create a shell company to fund investigators and lawyers to find causes of action against Gawker and ultimately sue it into oblivion.
[00:17:40]  He estimates that the plan will take up to five years and up to $10 million in funding, which is prophetic.
[00:17:47]  So it's this mysterious Mr. A, who nobody knows the real name of, allegedly, who is the guy who like sits down with Teal and is like, hey, I think if you fought, if you just keep putting it up, put money, you know, put it towards some people, maybe I can help you with this.
[00:18:02]  You get that feeling this guy's kind of angling for a gig.
[00:18:05]  Like we will figure out when Gawker slips up and we'll use that to stick the knife in them, right?
[00:18:11]  Maybe that's the lawyer or something like that.
[00:18:14]  I mean, like, maybe that's like a lawyer just trying to get away from it.
[00:18:16]  Maybe it's Ryan Holliday, who's again, the reporter revealed this, describes Mr. A as a professional son.
[00:18:24]  In other words, someone who sought out and wormed his way into the confidences of father figures who could advance his career.
[00:18:29]  And Teal, some people will say this is in part because he has crushes on some of these guys, but Teal has a habit of finding generally handsome young men and putting them into his inner circle, backing.
[00:18:41]  This is kind of how JD Vance and Blake Masters get into his circle, right?
[00:18:46]  And I don't know how much I'm trying to just kind of like stay out of it because what matters is he's backing these people, not whether or not he thinks they're hot, but that is an allegation you'll hear that's made about this, right?
[00:18:57]  And I don't know.
[00:18:58]  I'm sure that I'm sure that's not a non-factor sometimes.
[00:19:01]  Like you hear about this guy who like goes out and targets older men to try and like embolden his career and is like, I know how you can destroy Gawker.
[00:19:09]  And maybe Peter, he's frustrated.
[00:19:11]  He's angry that he can't do anything about this thing that's hurting his business.
[00:19:15]  And then like this hot dude comes up with a plan to kill them, right?
[00:19:19]  Maybe that's some of what's going on.
[00:19:22]  According to the version of the story told by Holiday, Peter complained to Mr. A over their meal that he couldn't just outright destroy Gawker.
[00:19:30]  And Mr. A said back, Peter, if everyone thought that way, what would the world look like?
[00:19:35]  Right?
[00:19:36]  If people didn't just destroy journalistic outlets, like because they could, where would we be as a society?
[00:19:43]  So, if this is accurate, and that is kind of an, I don't know if it's a big if, but it is an if.
[00:19:49]  Peter, he, this guy is who succeeds in getting Peter to fund this operation to find a way to kill Gawker.
[00:19:55]  And they eventually find the way to kill Gawker in an unlikely place, the office of a Florida DJ named Bubba the Love Sponge.
[00:20:04]  Yeah, here we go.
[00:20:06]  Here's where Bubba the Love Sponge comes in.
[00:20:09]  Everyone's been waiting for this since we started talking teal, you know?
[00:20:13]  Speaking of Bubba the Love Sponge, you know who is a love sponge?
[00:20:18]  The sponsors of this podcast.
[00:20:20]  That's right.
[00:20:20]  The sponsor of this podcast.
[00:20:22]  I think that's a come joke.
[00:20:23]  So everyone enjoy that and go over that.
[00:20:26]  Please be ads for the kills.
[00:20:29]  Or just come?
[00:20:30]  Yeah, one of the two.
[00:20:33]  What's up, everyone?
[00:20:34]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:20:35]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.

=== Hulk Hogan Rival Tape Hymns (14:34) ===

[00:20:43]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:20:46]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:20:50]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:20:54]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:20:57]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:21:01]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:21:06]  Yeah.
[00:21:06]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:21:09]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:21:11]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:21:19]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:21:22]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:21:28]  Just hang in there.
[00:21:29]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:21:31]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:21:32]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:21:34]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:21:43]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:21:47]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:21:51]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:21:53]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:21:57]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:22:01]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:22:06]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:22:11]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:22:13]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:22:15]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:22:17]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:22:20]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:22:22]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:22:24]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:22:29]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:22:30]  Trust me, babe.
[00:22:31]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:22:41]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:22:47]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:22:51]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:22:57]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:23:06]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:23:12]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:23:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:23:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:23:20]  That's so funny.
[00:23:21]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:23:29]  Say you love me.
[00:23:32]  You know.
[00:23:34]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:23:42]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:23:47]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:23:54]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:24:00]  From power to parenthood.
[00:24:02]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:24:06]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:24:08]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:24:10]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:24:15]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:24:21]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:24:24]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:24:30]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:24:32]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:24:35]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:24:45]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:24:51]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:24:57]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:25:00]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:25:04]  I doctored the test once.
[00:25:05]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:25:08]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:25:12]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:25:15]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:25:17]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:25:19]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:25:21]  My mind was blown.
[00:25:23]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:25:25]  This is Love Trap.
[00:25:27]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:25:29]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:25:33]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:25:40]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:25:44]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:55]  We're back.
[00:25:55]  And boy, I hope we all enjoyed that ad from Hims.
[00:25:58]  Hymns.
[00:25:59]  I think they sell testosterone now.
[00:26:03]  Why not get involved?
[00:26:04]  Or Ozimbic?
[00:26:05]  Is it Ozimbic they're selling, basically?
[00:26:07]  Whatever.
[00:26:08]  Give them some money.
[00:26:08]  Give them some money.
[00:26:09]  Hymns.
[00:26:10]  Or don't.
[00:26:11]  Back in 2006, Hulk Hogan.
[00:26:13]  Do they sponsor us, Sophie?
[00:26:14]  Have they given us money?
[00:26:15]  Come on, Hims.
[00:26:16]  Get on the bastard's train, you know?
[00:26:19]  Yeah.
[00:26:19]  Ads like that every day.
[00:26:21]  We'd chill for you.
[00:26:22]  We'd chill for you.
[00:26:23]  I'll sell him.
[00:26:24]  I don't give a fuck.
[00:26:26]  Back in the middle.
[00:26:26]  Give us a hymns ad right now.
[00:26:28]  Come on.
[00:26:29]  Hymns.
[00:26:30]  Do you have enough testosterone?
[00:26:32]  Probably, but you could have more.
[00:26:33]  It's what all the celebrities do.
[00:26:35]  They'll ship it to your door.
[00:26:36]  Who gives a shit?
[00:26:38]  How about give us one of those like sheepish, like, fuck, I have to do this house read kind of version of hymns that sometimes I may or may not hear on podcasts.
[00:26:48]  Do you feel bad about your body?
[00:26:49]  Well, you probably should.
[00:26:51]  So get autozimbic, the drug that is probably fine for you.
[00:26:56]  No one really knows yet.
[00:26:58]  It's a little like vaping.
[00:26:59]  Try it out.
[00:27:00]  We'll see what happens.
[00:27:03]  Anyway, back in 2006, Hulk Hogan had been depressed over the state of his marriage.
[00:27:08]  I love where this story starts, which is I had, again, just casually hearing it, I had thought that it was a case of like he was just cheating on Bubba with Bubba's wife.
[00:27:16]  No, no, no.
[00:27:17]  Hulk comes over because he's getting a divorce and he's just in a dark place and he needs his friend Bubba the Love Sponge.
[00:27:23]  And Bubba's in a dark place.
[00:27:25]  The hulkster's in a bad place.
[00:27:27]  I really need some comfort.
[00:27:29]  And Bubba the Love Sponge is like, Hulkster, you know, it'll cheer you up.
[00:27:33]  Fucking my wife.
[00:27:34]  Why don't you go into my bedroom and fuck my wife?
[00:27:37]  And the Hulk said, Okay, but you're not going to film this, are you, brother?
[00:27:41]  I know you always film people who have sex in your house.
[00:27:44]  You're not going to film the Hulk's dick, are you?
[00:27:46]  And Bubba was like, Of course, I'm not going to film you.
[00:27:50]  And then, of course, he films the Hulk having sex with this bike.
[00:27:54]  And he takes the recording made in his house and he puts the recording in his desk at the radio station where he works.
[00:28:03]  Incredible.
[00:28:05]  Amazing shit.
[00:28:07]  Yeah, that's incredible.
[00:28:09]  So funny.
[00:28:10]  This is such a funny case.
[00:28:11]  Like a lot of good people lost their jobs, but this part of it's really funny.
[00:28:15]  Yeah.
[00:28:16]  Some people, yeah, not all good people lost their jobs, but a lot of good people did.
[00:28:20]  So fast forward about six years, Obama is on his way to term number dose, and Bubba gets in a conflict with a guy who Ryan Holiday describes as a, this is the funniest term in the world, rival DJ.
[00:28:33]  Yeah.
[00:28:34]  Nothing sadder than the words rival DJ.
[00:28:38]  Rival Florida DJ.
[00:28:39]  Yeah, rival Florida DJ.
[00:28:42]  Yeah.
[00:28:43]  If this is, and again, there's some debate.
[00:28:45]  I'm not saying this is absolutely what happened, but this is probably the most, it's certainly the most entertaining and probably the most credible story as to why this all happens.
[00:28:53]  If this is accurate, the whole destruction of Gawker thing started because Bubba the Love Sponge and a rival Florida DJ had an argument over who was going to like get which time slot.
[00:29:04]  And the rival DJ broke into his desk and stole the videos to like hold him for like them for ransom, basically, and ultimately leaked the videos to Gawker to embarrass Bubba the Love Sponge.
[00:29:16]  Hulk was only ever an accidental casualty in this whole collateral damage.
[00:29:21]  He was collateral damage.
[00:29:23]  The poor Hulkster.
[00:29:24]  Oh, that's in the great Florida DJ.
[00:29:28]  Yeah, the great game of Florida DJs.
[00:29:31]  He's Afghanistan.
[00:29:38]  Is the rival DJ Mr. A?
[00:29:40]  The secret?
[00:29:41]  Maybe maybe the rival DJ was behind it all.
[00:29:45]  I'm going to say definitely.
[00:29:46]  I'm going to say definitely in a way that makes iHeartMedia legally responsible.
[00:29:50]  If I'm wrong, absolutely.
[00:29:52]  Yeah, because if there's one DJ, all radio, radio, iHeartMedia, boom, right?
[00:29:59]  Of course, we've got to be tied into this.
[00:30:01]  Oh, my God.
[00:30:02]  Yeah.
[00:30:02]  Sophie.
[00:30:04]  Get out your Palantir Crazy Board.
[00:30:06]  Call the CEO.
[00:30:07]  We're going to blow this thing wide open.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:11]  So, yeah.
[00:30:12]  Anyway, Gawker, now here is where Gawker, because I mentioned how it's questionable their choice to out Peter, but probably in a court of law defensible because of who Peter is, you know, politically, because of how influential he is.
[00:30:25]  Like, you again, that's why he does, Peter doesn't sue over that.
[00:30:28]  This, this is something they probably could have defended.
[00:30:30]  What Gawker does next is something that is, it still was potentially defensible.
[00:30:36]  We'll talk about it.
[00:30:36]  Gawker makes some mistakes in their legal representation here, but it's deeply questionable.
[00:30:42]  This is a thing that I can say I'm leaning on this not being newsworthy, right?
[00:30:48]  And what's not newsworthy is they publish the video.
[00:30:51]  They don't just report on the fact that there's a Hulk Hogan sex tape.
[00:30:55]  They publish the video under the title, even for a minute, watching Hulk Hogan have sex in a canopy bed is not safe for work, but watch it anyway.
[00:31:03]  And that's just hard to defend in court.
[00:31:05]  You're going to have to defend that, right?
[00:31:07]  Although an incredible headline.
[00:31:09]  An incredible headline.
[00:31:10]  An incredible headline.
[00:31:11]  Nobody said they were bad at headlines.
[00:31:13]  No.
[00:31:13]  I mean, an incredible headline.
[00:31:15]  Yeah.
[00:31:16]  Publishing sex tapes is probably not.
[00:31:18]  It's on the edge.
[00:31:20]  Yeah.
[00:31:21]  So this is something that is, again, this is potentially defensible.
[00:31:25]  I'm not saying it's blanket knot, but it is something you were probably going to have to defend in court, right?
[00:31:32]  You have crossed a line that is going to open you up to some potential injury here.
[00:31:37]  Now, one reason why is that the sex that Hogan had with Bubba the Love Sponge's wife was not as a part of his job as, you know, Hulk Hogan, the public figure, right?
[00:31:48]  This is not something he did with his subordinate.
[00:31:50]  This is not something he did on company property, right?
[00:31:53]  Like, this is not something you can argue is an abuse of power on the Hulkster's part.
[00:31:57]  You know, this is a consensual non-monogamy, I guess you could call it, really, that just happened to get filmed.
[00:32:05]  So, Hulk has an argument that what happened was a violation of his privacy.
[00:32:09]  Now, Gawker, again, I think if they had just reported on the tape's existence, could have defended it.
[00:32:12]  Making it available is a lot harder to defend.
[00:32:16]  Teal's people set legal wheels in motion.
[00:32:18]  And it's again, it's like 2012 when this article, when this video gets released.
[00:32:22]  So that's like six years after the sex tape was filmed.
[00:32:25]  And for a few years, the case kind of grinds forward.
[00:32:27]  And part of why it grinds forward is Gawker doesn't know that Teal is backing Hulk Hogan.
[00:32:33]  And, you know, the Hulkster's got money, but the Hulkster does not have a major media company money.
[00:32:38]  And the smart play, if you are a big corporation like Gawker, sued by a guy, even a rich guy, is delay, make it as expensive for them as possible, right?
[00:32:49]  You run out the clock, and eventually they will not want to keep burning cash in order to keep fighting you.
[00:32:55]  I mean, if I may, I'm not sure Gawker was ever that big of a company.
[00:32:59]  I think it was more, and listen, I got a little bit of skin in this game.
[00:33:02]  Yeah.
[00:33:02]  Gawker's lawyer at the time and then their president.
[00:33:05]  Yeah, somebody I worked with afterwards.
[00:33:08]  But I would just say at the Daily Beast, where we ran the talk together for a couple years, is like, look, I think in general, you got to err.
[00:33:18]  The First Amendment errors on the side of publishing, right?
[00:33:20]  Even writing creepy ass dick.
[00:33:25]  And so, I mean, I think what they were more pursuing was a, you know, what happens in any of these First Amendment cases where they're trying to put up their best defenses against getting sued.
[00:33:38]  And those defenses take a while.
[00:33:40]  And I don't think it was, I mean, this company was never a particularly huge company.
[00:33:44]  They had insurance that protected them against litigation at some points.
[00:33:48]  And, you know, they had, you know, depending on where the case landed, whether it was in New York or Florida or whatever, they had better defenses against the law because a lot of this stuff is weirdly state by state.
[00:33:59]  And this is an early judge shopping case.
[00:34:01]  Like the fact that they wind up in a Florida district with a very sympathetic judge is a big part of what hurts them.
[00:34:07]  If it had been in a different district, they probably would have gone better for them.
[00:34:11]  I should note that, yeah, it's kind of like Holiday's argument as to how this went badly is that Gawker takes the standard strategy you would take, which is a bad strategy if Hogan has the kind of financing behind him that they couldn't have known he had, right?
[00:34:28]  Like the fact that there's so much more money behind this, which starts to become clear later in the case.
[00:34:34]  Like it's the kind of thing people do not initially know.
[00:34:36]  Gawker doesn't initially know that Teal is backing them and what Holiday will argue.
[00:34:41]  And I think you're probably right, but I don't think it's wrong that if Gawker had known who was supporting the lawsuit, there are probably changes they would have made in how they pursued their defense, or at least how they pursued publicizing that Teal was involved, right?
[00:34:56]  Yeah.
[00:34:57]  Like maybe you try to make that clear earlier, right?
[00:34:59]  Right.
[00:35:00]  You know, Hulk Hogan sues company that publishes dick tape is one thing.
[00:35:07]  You know, weirdo right-wing billionaire sues media company for no particular reason, but, you know, happens to use the sex tape as an excuse.

=== Wing Billionaire Brand Strategy (09:49) ===

[00:35:18]  That's a totally different thing.
[00:35:19]  Yeah, it's a totally different thing.
[00:35:20]  And yeah, that's, and again, I, Holiday, I quote him a lot because he's the guy who like wrote the book on this case.
[00:35:27]  He is kind of more on Teal's side than I am.
[00:35:31]  Than I think most reporters are.
[00:35:32]  Although he was on Teal's side, Morina, Gawker made a lot of major mistakes.
[00:35:36]  And I don't entirely agree with Holiday here, but they do make a number of mistakes, right?
[00:35:40]  There are some like issues with the way this legal defense goes down.
[00:35:44]  But also, it's one of these things where, well, if you have Peter Thiel money and the ability to judge shop and shit in a way that a guy like Teal does, it's hard to imagine he wouldn't eventually have gotten them on something, right?
[00:35:57]  Well, certainly you're going to operate differently if you know that there's a right-wing billionaire that's built in death.
[00:36:05]  Trying to kill you.
[00:36:05]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:06]  Trying to destroy.
[00:36:09]  Like that's a very different kind of way to operate.
[00:36:13]  And look, I think also just like growing up in this same era of media is like, I think we all, a lot of us were like kind of self-taught and kind of like relearning the rules as we went along.
[00:36:24]  Right.
[00:36:26]  You know, like, you know, this was, you know, a major object lesson.
[00:36:34]  And we would have all rolled a little bit differently if we had known that there are these like, you know, kind of like autocratic gazillionaires that were, you know, kind of out to destroy what we were about.
[00:36:48]  And this is the thing, this is one of the things that's so sad about this is that like a lot of the, a lot of the issues that, you know, in terms of like we can, when we talk about like the areas in which Gawker made mistakes, a lot of them are just due to how young the company was, how new this whole branch of the media was, and that we are all, because I was a part of a digital media company there.
[00:37:09]  I, I like definitely, I was learning and like learning by breaking a lot of the rules of journalism early on in my career too.
[00:37:17]  Like we were trying to figure out how these things worked in a new era where there was suddenly both opportunity and money in a way that journalists had not been used to for a while, but also brand new pitfalls and threats, right?
[00:37:29]  And this is well said.
[00:37:32]  I don't think, I don't think it was, you know, Gawker, if they had done things differently, might have been able to survive, but someone was going to go down in flames for something like this as a result of the different period that we had entered into, right?
[00:37:46]  I do kind of believe that.
[00:37:48]  Maybe it wouldn't have had to be Gawker, but it was going to be somebody because there was just so much being tried that was new and that hadn't been adjudicated, you know?
[00:37:57]  Like that, that was always good.
[00:37:59]  And it was the same thing.
[00:38:00]  I think most of us expected it was going to come down over like whistleblower stuff, you know, WikiLeaks kind of shit, as opposed to Public Love Sponge, but it was going to happen, right?
[00:38:09]  Right.
[00:38:10]  So a big part of why the case goes against Gawker is there's this one of kind of the leading moments of this court case is that in court, Gawker editor-in-chief, AJ Delario, in a deposition kind of jokes that the only celebrity sex tapey wouldn't have considered newsworthy was one that featured a preschooler.
[00:38:30]  That does not go over well in court.
[00:38:32]  It's not a great moment, although I don't think it actually changes the, it's just, why would you say that?
[00:38:37]  I don't know.
[00:38:37]  Anyway, I'm not going to, he's, he's suffered enough.
[00:38:41]  But it doesn't, this all goes very badly, right?
[00:38:44]  I mean, it goes as badly as it possibly could.
[00:38:46]  Even though the case had not initially gone super well for Hulk, ultimately, you know, the fact that this judge is very sympathetic, it all goes their way.
[00:38:54]  In the case, the plaintiff is awarded $140 million in damages.
[00:38:58]  Gawker, as you have said, was never that big as a media company.
[00:39:02]  And this absolutely drives them into bankruptcy.
[00:39:06]  Nick Denton sold the company off to Univision, which shuttered the embattled flagship site.
[00:39:11]  And that is the end of Gawker, except for it's kind of sort of back.
[00:39:15]  I don't know.
[00:39:16]  I don't know how we want to like it didn't all die out, right?
[00:39:20]  But yeah, it's a, and this is a scary moment.
[00:39:23]  No, many of the sites still live, live once, in one way or another.
[00:39:28]  Old site lives on in one way or another.
[00:39:31]  Zombie yeah, the zombies of our uh our, youths as as writers yeah, um.
[00:39:37]  So uh Teal, you know he gets.
[00:39:40]  One of the things that happens kind of at the tail end of this is that it it becomes clear to the people involved in the case and the people paying attention to it that Teal is the guy funding this.
[00:39:49]  I think it might have been Vogue, I think that published.
[00:39:52]  I may be getting that wrong, but it wasn't Gawker that published the first article, being like hey, Teal's behind this.
[00:39:57]  But right as the case is ending, it comes out that Peter Teal is the guy who had backed this right, and so Teal is able there's this like backlash against him, but he's also able to kind of go out in the open and take a victory lap, he tells the NEW YORK Times it's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence.
[00:40:14]  I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest and, like you, back guys like Jd Vance and Blake Masters whose politics is entirely dedicated to attacking little people who have no power right, destroying their lives for clout.
[00:40:35]  Like you don't believe any of this, Peter.
[00:40:37]  Yeah um now, the Gawker case was the first thing that put Teal on my radar in a big way.
[00:40:42]  Right, you know, I I wish I could say I was one of those guys who, from the early days of Palantir, knew he was dangerous, but it wasn't until this that I was like oh, there's this Peter Teal guy and he seems like a real problem right yeah, it's also notable that like, it's not entirely.
[00:40:55]  I think that the the surface summary of this, which is that Gawker outed Teal and then he destroyed them, is not entirely what happened.
[00:41:04]  Right, Gawker was damaging to his business interests for years, and so he he laid out a painstaking and slow and funded a painstakingly slow path to taking them out.
[00:41:16]  Right, which I think is a scarier story, you know, just than that he was angry that they'd outed him and so he slapped them down.
[00:41:22]  The time that he waited, how long this took, you know the inevitability of it in some ways, that like, once this was set in motion, it couldn't be stopped is is much more upsetting to me.
[00:41:32]  Yeah, and also, it's not just his, I think it's more just like his class, you know that, like the burgeoning tech oligarch class.
[00:41:41]  Yeah um, they really were made deeply uncomfortable yeah, by um, by a brand of journalism that that um was sometimes up and and sometimes, you know, questioned their power, and you know that that threatened them a lot more than the journalism that pointed by the rules 100 of the time and never uh, threatened their power.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, and this, this idea too, that journalism is, has a chance at surviving.
[00:42:12]  Now there's suddenly, like because in this new media era, there was a lot of money comparatively for journalists not a lot of money in objective terms, but there's a lot of money coming into journalism based on what journalists had gotten used to after like, the early Craigslist era had killed local newspapers, and so there's suddenly this lifeline for reporting and you have this explosion in sites that had started as kind of less legitimate Gawker's early days is no one's finest hour, just like um,
[00:42:40]  the earliest days of uh uh uh Buzzfeed right, you know, it's kind of a clickbait site and then they start this very serious, groundbreaking news organization that really does great work and it's terrifying to these guys who are like oh, maybe we're going to deal with more of this than we ever had, as opposed to it all being on the out and dying, and so they kind of commit themselves to killing it.
[00:43:03]  And this is that Silicon this is Peter Teal is the first of the silicon elite to start flexing their muscles to destroy the independent media right, and i'd say more than just Silicon Valley.
[00:43:15]  I mean look, you know, this is now an era when, you know, I was running the Daily Beast and and um, And, you know, basically there would be no major story about a rich person that didn't come with a massive legal threat.
[00:43:31]  Yeah.
[00:43:32]  None.
[00:43:32]  Like 100% of the time.
[00:43:34]  You could not write about a rich person's.
[00:43:37]  I'm not talking about like their personal life.
[00:43:39]  I'm talking about any company.
[00:43:40]  Their business involved, right?
[00:43:42]  Yeah, their business interests.
[00:43:43]  Nothing would come without a legal threat.
[00:43:45]  And so it was just a regular part of the publishing process, which was deal with legal considerations.
[00:43:53]  And often it was the very same lawyers that were connected with the Gawker case that were then being hired by everybody else because they, you know, they had learned this one trick.
[00:44:05]  So yeah, this one weird trick.
[00:44:07]  Yeah.
[00:44:08]  Yeah.
[00:44:08]  And so, you know, that stuff was real.
[00:44:10]  And I don't know that it stopped us from publishing any stories, but it definitely stopped, like it definitely slowed down the pace of stories for sure.
[00:44:21]  And it definitely, I know, I definitely know of others where, you know, big stories got killed off because of the, because of the legal threats for sure.
[00:44:30]  A chilling effect, right?
[00:44:32]  It has this chilling effect.
[00:44:33]  And it's one of these things where this is part of this is part of what's so scary about doing media, right?
[00:44:38]  Is you have to, in order to stay relevant and survive, you have to explore things.
[00:44:42]  You have to try new things.
[00:44:44]  And that also means, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm not saying every journalist would have published the Bubba the Love Sponge video, but you are going to do things that are new and that you can't say are covered under the laws that supported you in the past when you're trying to adapt to changing circumstances.
[00:45:02]  And that's always going to create opportunities for people to destroy you if they're scared by what you're doing.

=== Enemies Sue Journalists Way Pretty (04:53) ===

[00:45:07]  Yep.
[00:45:07]  Fair.
[00:45:08]  Yep.
[00:45:08]  Yeah.
[00:45:08]  I think that that gets at it, I hope, in a way that's pretty fair.
[00:45:12]  Yeah.
[00:45:12]  Speaking of destroying your enemies, you know who my enemies aren't, Noah?
[00:45:18]  The people who advertise on this podcast.
[00:45:21]  That's right.
[00:45:21]  None of them are my enemies.
[00:45:22]  None of them would ever sue journalists for reporting on their personal business.
[00:45:26]  You know, we guarantee.
[00:45:27]  And if they have, no, they didn't.
[00:45:30]  You didn't see that.
[00:45:31]  Deny the evidence of your eyes and ears.
[00:45:33]  That's the behind the bastards promise.
[00:45:37]  What's up, everyone?
[00:45:38]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:45:39]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:45:46]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:45:50]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:45:53]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:45:58]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:46:01]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
[00:46:03]  Look for up and coming talent.
[00:46:05]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:46:10]  Yeah.
[00:46:10]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:46:13]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:46:14]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:46:23]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:46:25]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:46:32]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:46:34]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:46:36]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:46:37]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:46:47]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:46:51]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:46:54]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:46:57]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:47:00]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:47:04]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:47:06]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:47:10]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:47:15]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:47:17]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:47:18]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:47:21]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:47:24]  I said, oh hell no.
[00:47:25]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:47:28]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:47:32]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:47:34]  Trust me, babe.
[00:47:35]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:47:44]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:47:50]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:47:55]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:48:00]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:48:10]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:48:15]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:48:18]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:48:21]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:48:23]  That's so funny.
[00:48:24]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:48:33]  Say you love me.
[00:48:36]  You know I.
[00:48:37]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:45]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:48:51]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:48:57]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:49:04]  From power to parenthood.
[00:49:06]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:49:09]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:49:11]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:49:14]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:49:18]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:49:25]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:49:27]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:49:34]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:49:36]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:49:39]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:49:48]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:49:55]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.

=== Herpes Transparent Donald Trump (11:51) ===

[00:50:00]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:50:04]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:50:07]  I doctored the test once.
[00:50:09]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:50:12]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:50:16]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.
[00:50:18]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:50:21]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:50:23]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:50:25]  My mind was blown.
[00:50:27]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:50:28]  This is Love Trap.
[00:50:30]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:50:32]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:50:37]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:50:43]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:50:48]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:50:57]  Ah, we're back.
[00:50:59]  So one of the results of the Gawker lawsuit is that Peter gets thrust into public awareness and gets criticized in a much bigger way after this, right?
[00:51:09]  He is no longer this kind of like, oh, he's just this smart founder.
[00:51:12]  He's kind of a libertarian.
[00:51:13]  He probably has a couple of different stances.
[00:51:15]  Like, oh, this guy's like a dangerous right-wing ghoul, right?
[00:51:18]  Like, that's really people.
[00:51:19]  And this happens right, May of 2000, March of 2016 is when the Gawker case gets closed in court.
[00:51:27]  And obviously, Peter becomes like the Republican Party's biggest single funder, I think, during this period.
[00:51:34]  And it's all capped.
[00:51:35]  I think it's easy.
[00:51:36]  He's at least one of them.
[00:51:38]  Because of the way money works and all of this, it's kind of hard to say that for a statement, but he's a major donor and he speaks at the 2016 RNC where he endorses Donald Trump and he makes a big deal about the fact that I am a gay Republican.
[00:51:50]  The Republicans are welcoming now.
[00:51:53]  They'll accept you.
[00:51:54]  Unlike these evil liberals who aren't really tolerant, the Republicans accept me a gay man.
[00:52:00]  And obviously, like that was the thing the Republicans were doing at the time.
[00:52:03]  Like Trump, because the Pulse Nice Club shooting was like a Muslim who did it.
[00:52:07]  Like I could really, you know, pretend to be defending gay people and hang up my anti-ISIS credentials.
[00:52:14]  And it works because people make bad decisions a lot of the time.
[00:52:19]  It's amazing.
[00:52:20]  I mean, but it was such transparent bullshit at the time.
[00:52:23]  Oh, it was, it was so, if you paid any attention, but most voters are like most people who listen to podcasts.
[00:52:29]  They're hearing every fourth word while they're doing the laundry, right?
[00:52:32]  Yeah.
[00:52:32]  So they miss shit, you know?
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:34]  Okay.
[00:52:35]  Yes.
[00:52:36]  I mean, it was just, it was complete transparent.
[00:52:38]  It was transparent.
[00:52:39]  I watched him give that speech at the RNC and it was like the, I felt coated in a thick layer of sick.
[00:52:45]  It was nasty.
[00:52:47]  Yeah.
[00:52:47]  Bash.
[00:52:49]  Yeah.
[00:52:49]  And it was also like, sure, dude, the party of anti-gay policy and rhetoric for fucking decades is all of a sudden doing a 180 just because they've got a candidate in a wig.
[00:53:11]  It's like, come on, dude.
[00:53:12]  Like, that is just not true.
[00:53:16]  And it was just so obvious at the time.
[00:53:20]  And this is like, you know, a couple of years after gay marriage was legalized.
[00:53:26]  2015.
[00:53:27]  We're not even a couple.
[00:53:28]  It was just like a year, right?
[00:53:29]  Yeah.
[00:53:30]  And Peter gets married.
[00:53:31]  Yeah.
[00:53:32]  Yeah.
[00:53:33]  And it's like, you know, such a major advancement.
[00:53:38]  It's just, it's wild to me.
[00:53:39]  It's wild.
[00:53:40]  I don't believe any, I do not believe one single person actually believes that stuff.
[00:53:44]  I'm sorry.
[00:53:44]  I don't.
[00:53:44]  No, it's hard to.
[00:53:46]  And like, Peter is, I think the caveat to all of this is we talk about these philosophers he likes and these visions he has of the future.
[00:53:55]  And it's like, maybe all he really believes in is that Peter Thiel should always be on top.
[00:53:59]  Right.
[00:54:00]  Maybe, maybe that's all you actually need to know.
[00:54:04]  That said, I also think we all make up elaborate justifications for the selfish things we want to do.
[00:54:11]  You know, that just being a person, too.
[00:54:13]  So it's not, it's not worthless to look at like, well, how does Peter do that?
[00:54:17]  Right.
[00:54:17]  Because he has much more money in power than us.
[00:54:19]  Right.
[00:54:21]  Yeah.
[00:54:21]  It's like, oh, this guy's a weirdo with authoritarian tendencies.
[00:54:26]  I'm a weirdo with authoritarian tendencies.
[00:54:28]  We got to get together somehow.
[00:54:30]  Let me justify this by somehow claiming that because he's a New Yorker and he's not totally afraid of gay people like the rest of the people up on that Republican stage.
[00:54:41]  Therefore, I'll go with him.
[00:54:42]  Therefore, it's fine.
[00:54:45]  I think Peter's probably correct in a meaningless way that I don't think Donald Trump personally is bigoted against gay people, right?
[00:54:52]  I don't think he gives a fuck, but I think Donald Trump is willing to kill every gay person in this country for Donald Trump's power, right?
[00:54:58]  Yeah.
[00:54:58]  Right now, he's just doing more.
[00:55:00]  Yeah.
[00:55:00]  Yeah.
[00:55:01]  He's running more ads about like demonizing trans people than he is about any every other topic combined.
[00:55:07]  That is his number one closing massive kill trans people.
[00:55:11]  It's crazy.
[00:55:13]  And it's, you know, this is as much as because like it's come out, Peter Thiel's not supporting the Republicans in 2024.
[00:55:19]  He's not making like public donations, right?
[00:55:21]  And the reporting around it is like, well, it's because of how angry he is that in 2022, they launched everything into these culture war crusades.
[00:55:29]  And like, he's really disappointed in that and like the focusing on gay people.
[00:55:33]  There's stories that like his now deceased boyfriend kind of talked him into stopping supporting Republicans because of how crazy they were at the anti-gay stuff.
[00:55:44]  At the same time, his boyfriend exactly and Blake Masters are both two of the biggest anti-gay, like Christian fucking lifestyle crusaders out there.
[00:55:54]  And these guys are total teal creatures.
[00:55:57]  So do I believe any of that?
[00:55:58]  No vaccies.
[00:55:59]  Yeah.
[00:55:59]  No vaccies, man.
[00:56:01]  It's not like, like, if this guy's the Uber genius he likes to like portray himself as, he can't be like, oh, whoops, how could I have possibly?
[00:56:09]  You know what you're doing.
[00:56:11]  Yeah.
[00:56:11]  Yeah.
[00:56:12]  So now this period after 2016, when Peter has really gone whole hog for Trump, people start reporting a lot more on all these other weird investments he's doing, right?
[00:56:22]  And they start reporting on his life extension fixation.
[00:56:25]  Now, all of his life extension investments are made through his, a lot of them made through his nonprofit Breakout Labs, which is supporting like, you know, unconventional solutions to major problems.
[00:56:37]  And one of those major problems is extending human lifespan and ending aging.
[00:56:42]  Now, people think this is kind of quirky of Peter, so they start looking into it and reporting on it.
[00:56:46]  And Peter starts getting asked by journalists in interviews about this.
[00:56:49]  In one interview with the Washington Post, he explained, I've always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing.
[00:56:55]  I think that's somewhat unusual.
[00:56:57]  Most people end up compartmentalizing and they're in some mode of denial and acceptance about death, but they both have the result of making you very passive.
[00:57:03]  I worry the FDA is too restrictive.
[00:57:06]  Pharmaceutical companies are way too bureaucratic.
[00:57:08]  A tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of NIH spending goes to genuine anti-aging research.
[00:57:13]  The whole thing gets treated like a lottery ticket.
[00:57:15]  Part of the problem is that aging research doesn't always lend itself to being a great for-profit business, but it's still a very important area for philanthropic investment.
[00:57:24]  And you know, one thing Peter comes around on is that government funding is okay if it's supporting things like anti-aging research that I might benefit from, right?
[00:57:31]  Like we don't need roads or schools, but I don't want to die.
[00:57:35]  But also, I love this idea that, like, well, normal people aren't scared of death.
[00:57:38]  Everyone's scared of death, Peter.
[00:57:39]  We're just not no babies about it.
[00:57:41]  Deal with it, man.
[00:57:43]  Fucking take it on the chin, motherfucker.
[00:57:46]  God.
[00:57:46]  Now, look, you can argue.
[00:57:49]  I think there's plenty of great arguments that like the way drugs are kind of okay in this country as well.
[00:57:56]  Saying there's not ways that the FDA could be better.
[00:57:58]  Yeah.
[00:57:58]  Yeah.
[00:58:00]  One of my favorite Peter Thiel medical stories from that era that we reported on at the time was he was very upset with how the FDA was handling herpes drugs.
[00:58:15]  And so he bankrolled a series of quasi-legal, certainly sidestepping around U.S. safety rules.
[00:58:25]  Let's just call them gray markets.
[00:58:26]  Takira's herpes.
[00:58:28]  Herpes tests in the Caribbean.
[00:58:30]  I think it likes kits and Nevis.
[00:58:33]  Oh, man, that's fun.
[00:58:34]  That's good.
[00:58:35]  That's just good stuff.
[00:58:35]  He's injected with like off, you know, with like untried non-automatic drugs.
[00:58:42]  Yeah, awesome.
[00:58:43]  Awesome.
[00:58:43]  He's getting black market Valcyclovir for his fucking awesome.
[00:58:47]  So good.
[00:58:48]  Our headline at the time was a dying doctor, Peter Thiel, and a rogue herpes vaccine trial gone wrong.
[00:58:56]  Oh, man, that's so funny.
[00:59:00]  No, no, rogue herpes vaccine trial.
[00:59:03]  Not an attractive series of words to have attached to your name.
[00:59:07]  No, not attached to your anything.
[00:59:09]  And also, you definitely don't want it to all go wrong.
[00:59:12]  No, no, no, no.
[00:59:14]  Your rogue vaccine trial.
[00:59:16]  You really want to work out.
[00:59:17]  Yeah, you want that to go excellently.
[00:59:19]  Yeah.
[00:59:19]  You don't want to have made everyone at your fucking creepy beach parties take a bad herpes vaccine?
[00:59:26]  No.
[00:59:26]  Did he give everyone herpes?
[00:59:28]  What happened there?
[00:59:30]  I'm trying to remember.
[00:59:31]  I'm just looking through.
[00:59:32]  The name of the company was Rational Vaccines.
[00:59:35]  God in heaven.
[00:59:36]  Oh, my God.
[00:59:37]  I like that.
[00:59:38]  Rational vaccines.
[00:59:39]  Yeah.
[00:59:41]  So host all the irrational ones out there.
[00:59:44]  No institutional review board or IRB to monitor the safety of the trials.
[00:59:49]  Well, why would you need that?
[00:59:50]  No, no, no, no.
[00:59:51]  Yeah.
[00:59:51]  You definitely don't want to have a safe herpes.
[00:59:54]  No, no, no.
[00:59:55]  You don't need a control group.
[00:59:56]  What's that useful for?
[00:59:58]  Yeah.
[01:00:00]  Didn't know how Aware was manufactured.
[01:00:04]  Whether it needed booster shots.
[01:00:08]  Yeah, no, this was all the things that you would hope that they would know.
[01:00:15]  Yeah, You know.
[01:00:18]  No, but look, I mean, I think a lot of billionaires do.
[01:00:22]  I think that that is something not completely uncommon in the billionaire classes.
[01:00:26]  Like, you know, I'm going to do, you know, I'm going to hack science or I'm going to, or the science industrial complex.
[01:00:35]  You know, I'm going to really disrupt science.
[01:00:39]  And what better way to do that than with the herpes?
[01:00:43]  Yeah, disrupt herpes by, I guess, not hurting it at all.
[01:00:49]  Let's see.
[01:00:49]  One trial recipient started getting ringing in his ears and slurred speech.
[01:00:56]  Oh, my God.
[01:00:57]  Yeah.
[01:00:58]  Let's just give everyone something worse than herpes.
[01:01:02]  Then a Colorado woman in her 40s said she got flu-like aches and numbness soon after the second shot.
[01:01:11]  Numbness, not a good thing to get after herpes.
[01:01:14]  No, no.
[01:01:14]  The symptoms were followed by a, quote, excruciating 30-day outbreak of herpes.
[01:01:20]  Great.
[01:01:20]  Wow.
[01:01:21]  30 days.
[01:01:22]  That's a long time to have a herpes outbreak.
[01:01:24]  Wow.
[01:01:25]  I have new symptoms every day.
[01:01:27]  That woman later told Halford.
[01:01:29]  This is terrifying.
[01:01:31]  He really disrupted herpes.
[01:01:32]  You know, before it was an incredibly manageable viral illness that could be easily handled with medication.
[01:01:40]  And now people have month-long outbreaks.
[01:01:42]  You did it again, Peter.
[01:01:44]  You moved fast and you broke herpes.
[01:01:49]  Sounds like they broke quite a few other things too.

=== Blood HGH Toxic Vito Transfusions (09:04) ===

[01:01:51]  Jeez.
[01:01:52]  Yeah.
[01:01:53]  So funny.
[01:01:54]  Okay.
[01:01:55]  So in August of 2016, the same month that Peter shows up at the RNC, Maya Kossoff published an article titled, Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People's Blood.
[01:02:07]  Now, this is not the first reporting on Peter Thiel's interest in blood, but I think because of the title, this is one that has like a big impact on, you know, how people like how that rumor starts to spread.
[01:02:18]  Now, the actual ultimate source of this was an article published in the same week for Inc. magazine by Jeff Bercovichi, who put out an old interview he'd done a year before with Teal that touched on Peter's interest in what's called parabiosis, quote, which includes the practice of getting transfusions of blood from a younger person as a means of improving health and potentially reversing aging.
[01:02:39]  I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting.
[01:02:42]  This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that it had a massive rejuvenating effect.
[01:02:47]  And so that is one that, again, it's one of these very odd things where people had done these studies in the 1950s and then it got dropped altogether.
[01:02:53]  I think a lot of these things have been strangely underexplored.
[01:02:56]  Now, the reason parabiosis was underexplored is that it doesn't really work, right?
[01:03:01]  Blood transfusions are amazing medicine for the reasons that you would think, like when people lose all their blood, right?
[01:03:08]  Great to be able to give people a blood transfusion when they have been shot and bled out.
[01:03:12]  It's not going to make you young because of course it doesn't work that way.
[01:03:16]  Because that's stupid.
[01:03:18]  It's stupid that it would work that way.
[01:03:20]  That's not how blood works and it's not how aging works.
[01:03:23]  And you're silly for thinking it.
[01:03:26]  No, no.
[01:03:28]  Unfortunately, nothing can stop aging except for apparently taking lots of HGH and testosterone.
[01:03:35]  You know, Noah, do you have $12,000 a month?
[01:03:38]  Because I can help you out with a plan here.
[01:03:40]  Oh, I've got it, I've definitely got that.
[01:03:43]  His name is Vito.
[01:03:44]  He will meet you at the gym with a trash bag.
[01:03:47]  And yeah, you too could have a trash bag full of gear.
[01:03:50]  I can drain him of his blood.
[01:03:52]  Yeah, sure.
[01:03:52]  When I don't care what happens to Vito, like he's a steroid dealer.
[01:03:55]  Like his life has no value.
[01:03:57]  Like, we're good either way there.
[01:03:59]  Okay, so I can do both.
[01:04:01]  I could be cumbered.
[01:04:01]  I could be belt and suspenders.
[01:04:03]  Yeah, you can take Vito's blood.
[01:04:04]  Although Vito's blood is going to be even more HGH and testosterone.
[01:04:07]  I'm going to warn you about that right now.
[01:04:11]  Are you kidding me?
[01:04:11]  Your HGH gut is going to have its own gravitational pull, like the moon or like Joe Rogan's HGH gut.
[01:04:21]  Oh, I know.
[01:04:23]  I know.
[01:04:24]  That's real.
[01:04:24]  That is really unfortunate.
[01:04:26]  Okay, so you're telling me, so Vito, take his blood.
[01:04:29]  Take your blood.
[01:04:30]  It's already been pre-HGH.
[01:04:32]  You don't need any more.
[01:04:33]  You literally can't fit more HGH in your blood than Vito has in his.
[01:04:37]  And then you just sell that sack of gear to somebody else who wants to spend 12 grand on gear.
[01:04:42]  You know, it's a beautiful song.
[01:04:44]  I'm going to double gear.
[01:04:45]  Yeah.
[01:04:45]  Dude, the next time we do this podcast, I'm going to be ripping this fucking laptop apart.
[01:04:49]  You're going to be deadlifting 1,100 pounds.
[01:04:52]  Yeah.
[01:04:52]  Yeah.
[01:04:53]  Bursting your colon out as you fuck do your yeah.
[01:04:57]  My dick is going to be the size of a thimble.
[01:05:00]  Yeah.
[01:05:03]  Yeah.
[01:05:03]  You can read the Lord of the Rings and Braille and the acne on your back.
[01:05:08]  Oh, it's going to be incredible.
[01:05:11]  Take it out.
[01:05:12]  Oh, man.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  So Berco Vicci reported that a Teal Capital employee who was also Peter's personal health director had ties to Jesse Carmason, the founder of Ambrosia LLC.
[01:05:24]  And I would, if we had more time, there's so much Peter to get into.
[01:05:27]  We would talk more about all of these different grifters.
[01:05:30]  Carmason is very funny.
[01:05:32]  Legally, I'm not calling him a grifter.
[01:05:33]  I just don't think what he was trying to do really works, but he did provide the product that he claimed.
[01:05:38]  Ambrosia LLC was looking for volunteers over the age of 35 to receive blood transfusions from the young.
[01:05:44]  Gawker reported around this time that they had gotten a tip.
[01:05:47]  And again, this is right after the lawsuit has concluded that Teal spent $40,000 a quarter to get blood transfusions from an 18-year-old.
[01:05:54]  Now, is Gawker just trying to take a shot at Peter because of what happened?
[01:05:58]  There's not outside evidence of this, right?
[01:06:00]  Nothing's ever come forward to make it clear that Teal definitely was taking the blood of the young, right?
[01:06:07]  In interviews, Peter has always been consistent that he hadn't, he never got around to starting it, right?
[01:06:13]  He told a reporter that he hadn't quite started yet, and he has since denied ever taking the blood of the young, telling that Andrew Sorkin at Deal Book on the record, I am not a vampire, which I have to say is something a vampire would say.
[01:06:26]  He's like, I'm a lawyer, Bella.
[01:06:28]  On one hand, only a vampire would say that.
[01:06:31]  Right.
[01:06:31]  Because normal people don't have any reason to deny being vampires.
[01:06:35]  Yeah.
[01:06:35]  Right.
[01:06:36]  I mean, that's that is that's pretty that still kind of rules.
[01:06:38]  So I think there's a good chance he never actually did this, not because he wouldn't, but just because I think it became clear pretty early on that this didn't work, right?
[01:06:47]  Brian Johnson, the big life extension guy, taught like took his son's blood for a while and I think has stopped because it just doesn't do anything.
[01:06:55]  Peter is not, I don't think Peter would care that people were calling him a vampire if this worked, right?
[01:07:00]  Because he's open about he takes HGH as like a life extension thing, right?
[01:07:04]  Like I don't think he would hide it if he was on it.
[01:07:07]  I think maybe it just, the science was not there in any real way.
[01:07:11]  And Peter's not going to do something like this.
[01:07:13]  Like, it's not pleasant, probably.
[01:07:15]  Like, you wouldn't want to get constant blood transfusions if you weren't convinced it did something.
[01:07:21]  Speak for yourself.
[01:07:22]  Yeah.
[01:07:23]  Some of us just like blood.
[01:07:25]  From an article in Business Insider, quote, Thiel told Bloomberg TV in 2014 that he was taking human growth hormone pills, also known as HGH.
[01:07:32]  Thiel told Bloomberg TV that he believes HGH can help maintain muscle mass.
[01:07:36]  So that's less likely to get bone injuries and arthritis and stuff like that as you get older, which is true.
[01:07:42]  I'm sure there are some problems of aging that HGH helps you avoid, but HGH has side effects.
[01:07:48]  You can get carpal tunnel from it.
[01:07:49]  You can get muscle and joint pain.
[01:07:51]  You get an increased risk of cancer.
[01:07:53]  Research has shown that people and animals whose natural levels of HGH are high are likely to die at a younger age than those with lower levels of HGH.
[01:08:03]  So I don't know that I would take this gamble.
[01:08:06]  I think this may just be a case of Peter wanting the cosmetic benefits of HGH.
[01:08:11]  It makes you look jacked, even if you don't spend all that much time working out.
[01:08:17]  As opposed to Peter truly believes this is a life extension technology, I think it's probably more accurate that he convinced himself it's keeping him young because it has cosmetic benefits that he appreciates, right?
[01:08:28]  Yeah.
[01:08:29]  My stance in all this life extension stuff is that Peter Thiel will die one day.
[01:08:33]  And as is the case with all of us, he will probably die sooner than he expects because that's just the way shit goes.
[01:08:39]  Sorry, Peter.
[01:08:40]  I recommend making peace with it.
[01:08:42]  That's, you know, the only real way to handle this.
[01:08:45]  Now, I went back and forth with myself over how much to cover of each of Peter's evil interests.
[01:08:51]  For example, in 2016, Peter was a mega donor to the Republican Party.
[01:08:55]  But like most people who get involved with Trump, he soured on him quickly and he avoided donating to Trump's reelection campaign in 2020 out of what he described as frustration with Trump's personality, right?
[01:09:06]  I don't disagree with any of his policy, but I'm angry at how much he's become the story, right?
[01:09:11]  In 2022, he got back in the electioneering saddle and he backed JD Vance and Blake Masters with unprecedented donations.
[01:09:18]  He gives more money to JD Vance than a single candidate had ever received for a congressional seat.
[01:09:25]  In all, Peter Thiel put $35 million in 2022 into 16 federal-level Republican candidates, and 12 of them win.
[01:09:33]  But the overall performance of the GOP in those midterms is famously poor.
[01:09:37]  And it's famously poor because a big part of their campaign rhetoric was spurred by irrational bigotry against LGBT and particularly T Americans.
[01:09:46]  Peter would publicly state that this frustrated him.
[01:09:48]  I think this has to do with the fact that there's a guy he's dating at the time who is a like a gay male model and who will give later interviews.
[01:09:59]  I think these are kind of actually right around this point, where he says that like, yeah, I talked to him about this and like convinced him to stop, right?
[01:10:09]  Because I think these people are toxic and they're bad for us.
[01:10:11]  And I didn't think he should be doing this.
[01:10:14]  This model's name was Jeff Thomas.
[01:10:16]  As we'll talk about, he's deceased now.
[01:10:19]  But, you know, he would claim that like, I talked to P, and I don't see why Jeff would have necessarily lied about this.
[01:10:25]  Other than that, I think Jeff was getting shit for his association with Teal because of how much more aggressive Republicans were being at gay people.
[01:10:33]  So maybe that's Jeff's reason to want to say this.
[01:10:37]  Teal is going to set out 2024, but he does.
[01:10:41]  It's kind of worth noting that if you're trying to take seriously this idea that he stopped backing Republicans because of how toxic they were getting, he backs the most toxic of them in 2022.
[01:10:50]  So I just don't know how much to take that.
[01:10:52]  I don't think I should take that very seriously.

=== College Fellowship Program Srinivasan (09:28) ===

[01:10:55]  Now, I could say more about how Thiel's seasteading ambitions have metastasized to a broader quest by some Silicon Valley elites to create an independent network state ruled by big tech in a place like California.
[01:11:07]  I probably should, but we'll leave it with this, which is that one of the major advocates of the network state movement is an investor named Balaji Srinivasan, who Thiel suggested to Trump should lead the FDA in 2016.
[01:11:20]  Thankfully, Balaji didn't wind up leading the FDA, but this guy is a really dangerous dude.
[01:11:28]  And he's taken some of these ideas, these Curtis Yarvin ideas that Thiel started to mainstream, and he's been twisting them into very dark directions.
[01:11:36]  In 2022, his book, The Network State, described a plan for tech oligarchs to make their own countries, escaping democracy at the same time.
[01:11:44]  One of his chief plots was to conquer San Francisco.
[01:11:47]  Here's a report from an article in the New Republic on Balaji's current advocacy.
[01:11:52]  What I'm currently calling for is something like tech Zionism, he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, Theodore Herzl, the spiritual founder of the state of Israel, and Lee Kuan Yew, former authoritarian ruler of Singapore.
[01:12:08]  What a collection.
[01:12:09]  Balaji then revealed his shocking idea for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray shirts.
[01:12:17]  And if you see another gray on the street, you do the nod, he said during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast.
[01:12:23]  You're a fellow gray.
[01:12:25]  The gray shirts would feature Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos.
[01:12:29]  White combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.
[01:12:32]  Grays would also receive special ID cards, providing access to exclusive, gray-controlled sectors of the city.
[01:12:38]  In addition, the Greys would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly policemen's banquets to win them over.
[01:12:44]  Gray should embrace the police, okay?
[01:12:46]  All in on the police, said Srinivasan.
[01:12:49]  What does that mean?
[01:12:49]  That means, as I said, banquets.
[01:12:51]  That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling or whatever should get a job at a tech company in security.
[01:12:57]  In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays.
[01:13:01]  Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings.
[01:13:06]  For example, did you want to take the sign off Elon's building?
[01:13:10]  Some losers.
[01:13:11]  So fucking lame.
[01:13:13]  This is some loser shit.
[01:13:16]  Absolute loser shit.
[01:13:17]  A stupid fucking X sign.
[01:13:20]  Incredibly fun.
[01:13:21]  This is like, it's like as if no Nazi ever got a blowjob.
[01:13:28]  This is what they would come up with.
[01:13:31]  The fucking Greys.
[01:13:33]  It's so funny.
[01:13:35]  Let's talk about Srinivasan's son.
[01:13:37]  Yeah.
[01:13:38]  He deserves more.
[01:13:39]  All of this, we're having to yada yada so much just because like Peter is involved in so much.
[01:13:44]  You know, I can't responsibly.
[01:13:46]  This is like, I think I'm trying to just give as much of an overview as I can here.
[01:13:51]  You should do more reading.
[01:13:52]  Do you think the Greys thing is like some kind of aliens thing?
[01:13:56]  Like, yes, we're the Greys.
[01:13:57]  Like, I think, I mean, I think he's, he recognizes that it takes advantage of kind of that symbology, but no, I think it's not even that creative.
[01:14:05]  We're going to have something cool on our shirts, like a picture of Elon.
[01:14:08]  Like a picture of fucking Elon or a doge, I'm sure.
[01:14:12]  My God.
[01:14:13]  We're going to have the Y Combinator logo on, and all the cops are going to love us because we're going to give them jobs.
[01:14:18]  We're going to give the cops kids jobs.
[01:14:19]  Their fail sons will get to work at our security companies.
[01:14:22]  Yeah, that'll keep you guys safe.
[01:14:24]  Yeah.
[01:14:25]  So I'm going to move on to talk a little bit at the end here about Peter's war on higher education.
[01:14:29]  He started his public life by authoring a book with David Sachs on the intellectual corruption in American academia.
[01:14:35]  As a multi-billionaire, he launched a program to prove higher education unnecessary.
[01:14:42]  The Teal Fellowship.
[01:14:43]  The idea behind the much Ballyhood Fellowship was that Peter would pick 20 students per year and give them each $100,000 to drop out of school and do their own thing, trying to start a business with some support from the Thiel Foundation.
[01:14:55]  Basically, Peter pays for you to figure out a company you want to start, and your association with him makes it easy for you to get VC bucks.
[01:15:03]  In keeping with his supreme weirdness as a dude, Thiel announced the initiative by attacking the Catholic Church, kinda.
[01:15:09]  If you get into the right college, you'll be saved.
[01:15:12]  If you don't, you're in trouble.
[01:15:13]  As I've said, colleges are as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago.
[01:15:17]  They're sort of charging people more and more.
[01:15:18]  It's the system of indulgences.
[01:15:20]  You have this priestly or professorial class that doesn't do very much work.
[01:15:23]  And you basically tell people that if you get a diploma, you're saved.
[01:15:26]  Otherwise, you go to hell.
[01:15:27]  And like, that's such a weird way to look at it because it's, it's not the professors who have made college expensive.
[01:15:33]  In part, it's like the same reason as the people like you, these VC ghouls, you know, who are part of the administrator class who are sitting on the boards of these colleges want more money.
[01:15:44]  Like, it's not a random Marxist professor who has decided that college is going to cost $80,000 a semester.
[01:15:51]  That guy doesn't benefit from that situation, right?
[01:15:54]  Not at all.
[01:15:55]  They can pay the same amount of money.
[01:15:56]  Yes.
[01:15:57]  I mean, yeah.
[01:15:57]  Look, I remember when this came out, and I was like, you know what?
[01:16:01]  It like I can sort of get down with the idea of like, circumvent your best for I dropped out, right?
[01:16:10]  A lot of people benefit from not doing college, but this going to war with college is such a weird movement.
[01:16:19]  Such a weird thing to do in this.
[01:16:22]  If you said, hey, this isn't worth, if college isn't worth it, take my money, that's worth it.
[01:16:27]  Yeah, you can see.
[01:16:28]  But like, college is a Catholic church, I don't buy.
[01:16:32]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:16:34]  I don't know.
[01:16:36]  Now, depending on who you ask, the program could be viewed as a success or a failure.
[01:16:41]  Because the program that comes out of this is that like Peter's going to pay $100,000 per student if you try to drop out of college, right?
[01:16:50]  From an article on the website Education Surge, a columnist for Bloomberg, who is himself a venture capitalist, Aaron Brown, recently did an analysis of the 271 people who have received a Teal fellowship since the program began.
[01:17:01]  And it turns out 11 of them have gone on to start new companies now valued at more than a billion dollars, making them what are called unicorns in the industry.
[01:17:09]  He sees that as a pretty remarkable record for finding unicorns.
[01:17:12]  It's not like colleges aren't trying to encourage their students to start companies through various programs, Brown says.
[01:17:18]  None of those have been anywhere near as successful as giving these kids $100,000 and sending them out into the world.
[01:17:24]  So that's one analysis of the program.
[01:17:26]  Max Chafkin, you won't be surprised to hear, gives a more critical summary of things.
[01:17:31]  First off, he alleges the foundation was started in part for the media attention it would get, which would distract people from the fact that Peter's Founders Fund has lost a lot of investors after his hedge fund fell apart.
[01:17:41]  Peter launched the fellowship with a characteristic 5,000-word essay on what happened to the future, written by his partner at the Founders Fund, Bruce Gibney, and includes the line, we wanted flying cars and we got 140 characters.
[01:17:54]  Thus, the fellowship was a small attempt to get the future back on track by encouraging ambitious geniuses to take big swings and not just work for the man making fake technology, solving fake problems.
[01:18:06]  Chafkin points out that these kinds of fake technologies were precisely where the Founders Fund had invested its money for years.
[01:18:12]  Founders Fund had backed Facebook, a social network just like Twitter, as well as Path, Gowala, and Slide, which were all social media companies.
[01:18:18]  The last one, which had been started by Teal's PayPal co-founder, Max Lebchen, was known for something called Super Poke, which allowed users to virtually slap, punch, and grope their Facebook friends and was about as far from the Randian ideal as one could imagine.
[01:18:32]  The fellowship did connect some young men with funding that wound up leading to profitable companies, but none of them gave us the flying car or anything but more of the same overvalued Silicon Valley bullshit.
[01:18:43]  And Chafkin argues the program did damage to some of the young people in it.
[01:18:47]  For one thing, the program tossed kids into the Bay Area with what amounted to a small sum of money and very little social support or institutional support.
[01:18:55]  Ironically, the kinds of things that universities are decent at providing.
[01:18:58]  Quote, they showed up in California only to find out that the actual execution of the fellowship was basically an afterthought once Teal had achieved its marketing goal.
[01:19:07]  There was no structure to speak of beyond that suggestion and the requirement that they not enroll in school or take a full-time job.
[01:19:14]  Some former fellows talked to Schaefkin and made the very interesting point that the actual benefit of the fellowship was essentially the same as what you got out of an Ivy League school, access to powerful people and money.
[01:19:25]  The Teal program, one fellow told, promised libertarian capitalism and a supportive community that would reward creativity rather than Machiavellian maneuvering.
[01:19:33]  What I found was comically not that, he said.
[01:19:35]  It was college without the classes, a residential community, or studying.
[01:19:39]  In short, most of what was enriching about college.
[01:19:42]  It wasn't an attack on a credentialing system.
[01:19:44]  It was another credential.
[01:19:46]  And of course, yeah, I think that gets it right.
[01:19:50]  The greatest privilege of wealth is the ability to be taken seriously as a dilettante, right?
[01:19:55]  You don't have to know anything.
[01:19:57]  You don't have to earn your way in to show up with a bunch of money and be a serious player.
[01:20:01]  Now, sometimes this works out.
[01:20:03]  That's what James Cameron does with deep sea exploration, but he's a real, he becomes a legitimate expert, right?
[01:20:08]  Like, no one can argue that at this point.
[01:20:10]  But James Cameron, very rarely is that how it works out.
[01:20:13]  Usually, usually it works out like this, right?
[01:20:16]  It's usually more like the dipshit who got everybody killed in the middle of the day.
[01:20:19]  Exactly.
[01:20:20]  Exactly.
[01:20:21]  Right.
[01:20:21]  Stocked in rush.
[01:20:22]  Yes.

=== Ukraine Karp Targeting Palantir ICE (09:46) ===

[01:20:23]  Peter represents the other side of the coin.
[01:20:25]  And perhaps his longest lingering danger next to the career of JD Vance is his company, Palantir.
[01:20:31]  And we're going to close by talking some about Palantir.
[01:20:33]  In the years since J.P. Morgan signed on and saw their whole C-suite get spied on, Palantir has spread over the globe.
[01:20:40]  It gained a great deal of influence after the U.S. killed bin Laden, and some people insinuated that Palantir's tech had helped track the terrorists down.
[01:20:47]  This appears to be untrue, but it spread far and wide enough that you can find plenty of critical reporting on the company that will point out its alleged connection to bin Laden's death.
[01:20:55]  After Trump took office, Peter saw his most nativist dreams come true in a way that meant big bucks for Palantir.
[01:21:02]  They made a contract with ICE and Homeland Security Investigations for $38 million.
[01:21:07]  This led to them providing software for a 2017 operation that targeted unaccompanied children and their families trying to enter the United States.
[01:21:15]  This was the Kids in Cages scandal.
[01:21:17]  And I'm going to read an excerpt from The Intercept next.
[01:21:19]  I think Ryan Grimm wrote this one.
[01:21:21]  Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation provided at the Intercept show that this claim that Palantir's software is strictly involved in criminal investigations as opposed to deportations is false.
[01:21:32]  The discrepancy between the private intelligence firm's public assertion and the reality conveyed in the newly released documents was first revealed by Mijente, an advocacy organization that has closely tracked Palantir's murky role in immigration enforcement.
[01:21:46]  Far from a detached support in cross-border criminal investigations, the materials released this week confirm the role Palantir played in facilitating hundreds of arrests, only a small fraction of which actually led to criminal prosecutions.
[01:21:58]  The document makes it clear that the operation, which would directly target the parents and other family members of children apprehended at the border, all with help of Palantir's case management app.
[01:22:06]  The document continues to instruct that if sufficient information on parents or family members is obtained while investigating an unaccompanied child, a collateral case would be sent to the affected team for action.
[01:22:17]  The instructions make it clear that enabled inquiries could result in charges against a child's family.
[01:22:22]  Teams will be available immediately to conduct database checks and provide and contact suspected sponsor, parent, or family members to identify, interview, and if applicable, seek charges against the individual and administratively arrest the subjects and anybody encountered during the inquiry who is out of status.
[01:22:40]  So the Palantir-Aided campaign to hunt down and arrest family members of children who crossed the border alone was touted by the Trump administration's top immigration hardliners as a necessary measure to deter asylum seekers from making the journey north.
[01:22:54]  According to figures ICE provided the intercept on Monday, the 2017 initiative led to 443 arrests, including 35 criminal arrests.
[01:23:03]  Prosecutions, however, were much more difficult to come by, with ICE acknowledging that the campaign led to just 38 prosecutions related to alien smuggling or re-entry of removed aliens.
[01:23:12]  Karp, the avowed neo-Marxist, had initially expressed frustration at his company being involved in government overreach.
[01:23:19]  In 2013, he told Forbes, I didn't sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair.
[01:23:24]  But in the wake of reporting on his company's involvement in ICE, when some employees at Palantir like pushed to divest themselves from working with ICE, Karp pushed to renew a $42 million ICE contract and attacked workers at Google and other Silicon Valley companies that had protested contracts with the military and law enforcement.
[01:23:42]  In the first couple years after Trump took office, Palantir acquired contracts potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the total revenue they'd received from the U.S. government during Obama's entire second term.
[01:23:54]  Palantir has, at varying points, explored deals with the Saudis.
[01:23:57]  And in January, Karp flew to Israel to express solidarity with the Israeli government and, one presumes, make the case for why the IDF should buy his company's products.
[01:24:06]  At the moment, Palantir's technology is also heavily used in Ukraine, where by some accounts it plays a major role in targeting decisions.
[01:24:13]  Now, I am hesitant to rely on a lot of reporting that basically acts as advertisements for Palantir's technology, but there is some evidence that their algorithmic analysis has been useful in allowing Ukraine to more efficiently target and expend munitions on the battlefield.
[01:24:28]  It is not really possible for me to analyze how effective Palantir's technology is here, right?
[01:24:34]  In part because information siloing in a war with this kind of stuff is so effective.
[01:24:39]  I do worry about how much a lot of the reporting on the efficacy of Palantir in Ukraine, how much of it sounds like an ad.
[01:24:46]  And I'm always very questionable about early reports that military and intelligence products are game-changingly effective, right?
[01:24:55]  Because a lot of the time that winds up being overblown, right?
[01:24:58]  I can't say that it is.
[01:24:59]  I don't know.
[01:25:00]  This is something that will be adjudicated in the march of time, right?
[01:25:04]  This is still all going on.
[01:25:06]  There was an article today from Reuters.
[01:25:08]  Did you read that one?
[01:25:09]  No, no, I mean, no, nothing today.
[01:25:11]  Yeah, there was an article that came out today that Palantir was dumped by their Norwegian investor over their work with Israel.
[01:25:17]  Oh, that's interesting.
[01:25:19]  And we should probably talk more about that.
[01:25:22]  It's just this is all coming out.
[01:25:24]  Like Karp recently visited Israel earlier at the start of this year to kind of make overtures directly to the Israeli government.
[01:25:31]  Israel, most of their like AI targeting that's gotten so rightly covered is not through Palantir, but Palantir clearly wants to be in that business with Israel, right?
[01:25:41]  Like they're seeing what's going on in Gaza and like this is a place where we can make a lot of money.
[01:25:47]  You know, it's just a case where I think they kind of got beaten to the punch on some of this stuff.
[01:25:51]  When it comes to what they've been doing in Ukraine, Palantir has played a big role in turning the war in Ukraine into what Center for Security and emerging technology analyst Rita Konev described as an AI war lab.
[01:26:04]  It's possible that their technology has been helpful to Ukraine, but even in the most defensible use of Palantir's tech, there are troubling questions.
[01:26:10]  From a write-up by CSET, national security officials and experts caution that these new tools may end up in the hands of adversaries.
[01:26:17]  Rita Kunayev raised significant concerns about the long-term implications of the deployment of advanced technology in Ukraine.
[01:26:22]  She stated, the prospects for proliferation are crazy.
[01:26:26]  She also posed critical questions about the future implications.
[01:26:29]  Most companies operating in Ukraine right now said they align with U.S. national security goals.
[01:26:34]  But what happens when they don't?
[01:26:35]  What happens the day after?
[01:26:37]  Right.
[01:26:38]  And what happens with governments who are engaged in stuff that's a lot more questionable than what Ukraine is doing, right?
[01:26:45]  Like what we're talking about with them shopping around Israel.
[01:26:48]  There's a lot of unknown questions about how this is going to work out.
[01:26:52]  This is not, I hope this is like a ground level overview of what Palantir does, of why you should, you know, be paying attention to them.
[01:27:00]  Nobody should take this as the final word on everything Palantir gets up to.
[01:27:03]  That's too big for even four parts of a podcast.
[01:27:05]  But I think we've laid the groundwork.
[01:27:07]  And I think, Noah, that's what we're going to have to roll out for the day.
[01:27:11]  Yeah.
[01:27:12]  Wow.
[01:27:13]  You know, usually these Behind the Bastards series, they end on such a positive note.
[01:27:19]  Yeah.
[01:27:19]  Well, when the guy's still alive, it's a bummer.
[01:27:24]  I'll say this one.
[01:27:25]  It's more like the AI machine is coming to kill you.
[01:27:29]  Yeah.
[01:27:30]  Yeah.
[01:27:30]  Not as positive.
[01:27:31]  Peter's going to help build the AI death machine that gets you targeted because you were once friends with a guy who looked up the wrong thing on the internet.
[01:27:38]  Yeah.
[01:27:41]  I should note that in April of last year, Peter's quote-unquote boyfriend, you know, he's married, but I think just kind of had probably, probably was a consensual sort of sleeping around thing.
[01:27:52]  There was this male model, Jeff Thomas, that he had been seeing.
[01:27:55]  He put him up in a $13 million mansion.
[01:27:57]  He bought him a sports car.
[01:27:58]  Thomas is the guy who claims he talked Peter out of supporting the Republicans in 2023.
[01:28:05]  It's kind of unclear what was going on with him.
[01:28:07]  Teal has always been famous for throwing these very lavish, very decadent parties, right?
[01:28:11]  Very much at odds with the whole religious conservative image that he had.
[01:28:15]  There's definitely some texts and stuff that have come out about like the parties that he would plan with this guy.
[01:28:21]  There's some evidence they had a fight or maybe he had a fight.
[01:28:23]  Peter had a fight with his husband.
[01:28:26]  It may have been that Jeff got angry at him over his support of the right and that like that's part of why he pulled away from Teal because he like moved out of the house.
[01:28:34]  I just don't know who was on what side of this, but in 2023, Jeff committed suicide and we do not know why.
[01:28:42]  We don't know what happened here.
[01:28:44]  I'm bringing this up just because people are going to be like, why aren't you talking about this?
[01:28:47]  But like, there's really not enough for me to say what happened here, right?
[01:28:53]  But it is like a thing that you'll run into with Peter.
[01:28:56]  I didn't want to just leave it out because, you know, that would seem like a weird hole to have in the story, too.
[01:29:02]  Yeah.
[01:29:04]  Yeah.
[01:29:05]  It's cool stuff.
[01:29:06]  It's also, it's part worth noting for like the ethics of Palantir that when Peter was interviewed about like how Israel has been using AI in a lot of their targeting that has resulted in heavy, massive civilian casualties, his basic statement was like, I don't think it's worth criticizing them on this.
[01:29:23]  You have to assume they know their business, right?
[01:29:25]  Which like, man, a lot of innocent people have died as a result of this AI targeting shit.
[01:29:30]  And I think that tells you where Peter sees the ethics in his industry, right?
[01:29:35]  Doesn't really matter, you know?
[01:29:38]  Anyway, sorry to yada yada so much there, but like, how, how do you cover all of this in four episodes?
[01:29:45]  We're already over time.
[01:29:46]  So thank you, Noah.
[01:29:47]  I appreciate you sitting here with us for this.
[01:29:52]  Thank you.
[01:29:53]  I think.
[01:29:54]  Yeah.
[01:29:54]  Do I thank you?
[01:29:55]  Am I thinking you?
[01:29:57]  I haven't thought.
[01:29:58]  I never knew.
[01:29:59]  Never will.
[01:30:00]  Yeah.
[01:30:01]  Okay.
[01:30:03]  But thank you, Noah.
[01:30:05]  Yeah.
[01:30:06]  And people, people can follow you on the internet, right?

=== Goodbye Ago Moda Moda Next (03:35) ===

[01:30:10]  You're at your game.
[01:30:12]  Yeah, Noah Shackman, S-H-A, C-H-G, a man.
[01:30:16]  Okay.
[01:30:17]  Goodbye.
[01:30:18]  Goodbye.
[01:30:18]  Bye.
[01:30:20]  Joy Mongo.
[01:30:25]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:30:29]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:30:38]  Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube.
[01:30:41]  New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
[01:30:44]  Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behind the bastards.
[01:30:51]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:30:59]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:31:02]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:31:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:31:06]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:31:10]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:31:12]  Trust me, babe.
[01:31:13]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:31:22]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:31:27]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:31:30]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:31:38]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[01:31:41]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
[01:31:44]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:31:53]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:31:58]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:32:01]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:32:04]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:32:06]  That's so funny.
[01:32:08]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[01:32:15]  Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:32:23]  What's up, everyone?
[01:32:24]  I'm Ago Moda.
[01:32:25]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:32:29]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:32:33]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:32:34]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:32:41]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:32:43]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:32:50]  Yeah, it would not be right.
[01:32:53]  It wouldn't be that.
[01:32:54]  There's a lot of life.
[01:32:55]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:33:02]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:33:10]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:33:13]  I doctored the test once.
[01:33:15]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:33:20]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:33:22]  Grego Lesby and Michael Manchini.
[01:33:24]  My mind was blown.
[01:33:26]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:33:27]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:33:29]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:33:30]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:33:35]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:33:41]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:33:44]  Guaranteed human.