Premium Episode 151: Peter Thiel feat Max Chafkin (Sample)
Paypal, Palantir, and the destruction of Gawker media over the Hulk Hogan sex tape. We explore the oeuvre of conservative tech mogul Peter Thiel, who has had a big influence on the MAGA movement. In the process, we interview Max Chafkin, author of ‘The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power’.
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Max Chafkin: http://twitter.com/chafkin
Max Chafkin's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609711/the-contrarian-by-max-chafkin/
Episode music by Pontus Berghe
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 151 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Peter Thiel episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week's topic is a longtime listener request.
We're going to be tackling the dark archangel of tech investors himself, Peter Thiel.
Among his crowning accomplishments, co-founding PayPal, the infamous Palantir Technologies, and shutting down media outlet Gawker with the help of Hulk Hogan, our guest is Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian, Peter Thiel, and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power.
He'll help us understand how Thiel evolved into a key player in Silicon Valley during the Trump administration and what he's been up to these days.
I did not know that Peter Thiel was involved in the Hulk Hogan sex tape with Gawker.
Have you guys ever watched that sex tape?
No.
No, but Jake has and he's about to tell us about Sushi.
I have many times.
My whole friend group quotes it consistently.
Sushi and sweat.
It is one of the funniest sex tapes that's ever... There's... The more you watch it, the more late... And it's not about the sex... There's barely any... There's really no sex in it.
It's what Hulk says... Go ahead.
...throughout the course... I know you want to say it, so tell us what he says.
...throughout the course of the tape.
I mean, there's just so many amazing things.
I mean, like, after they get done fucking, like, Hulk sits up and he's like, Oh, man.
I just ate an hour ago.
I'm sweating like a pig.
He's sweating.
And he ate too much sushi, specifically, right?
He gets a phone call.
He's like, I gotta go meet Nick at midnight, which is his son.
He's talking about having to go meet his son at midnight.
There's so many incredible, weird Moments and like an insight into his psyche.
I don't know.
What you don't understand is that Bubble the Love Sponge is both a fan of having his wife fucked, but also a fan of absurdist theater.
And so he was like, Hulk, you do your best.
You're meeting your son at midnight.
You've eaten too much sushi.
You're sweating.
I mean, this is great stuff, you know?
I just ate like a fucking pig an hour ago.
Sweatin'.
Beckett presents the Hulk Hogan sex tape.
It really is more of an absurdist play than it is a sex tape.
That's an accurate call.
Listen, you know, I think that already so many of my childhood memories have been ruined, so I'm not going to let anyone take away WrestleMania from me anymore.
I'm not going to let anyone take away the Earthquake Hulk Hogan storyline away from me.
So I think I'm just going to skip this one.
Are you a Hulkamaniac?
I mean, as a kid, of course, I was enthralled by WWF, the bizarre showmanship, the massive bodies and the dramatic storylines, of course.
It was one of the few things, you know, on television that wasn't a cartoon, that was like flashy enough for a young child's sort of attention span.
Us Ultimate Warrior fans love to bully and beat up people like you with your crosses saying, oh, eat your vitamins, say your prayers.
You know, I never got into wrestling.
It was always like too macho for me.
I love it.
I don't know.
I never really, I never got into it.
I had a lot of friends who were into it.
You're just too straight, dude.
You know what I was more into?
The pink, like, polyurethane, like, wrestlers that came in, like, the can.
Do you guys remember those?
They were, like, basically these, like, flesh-colored little, like, rubber muscle men that, like, came in a big fucking, you know, big fucking can.
And you could buy, like, booster packs, like, little bags of a few of them, and you would try to collect them.
Yeah, no, there were so many... Yeah, that's what I... I was into that.
Oh yeah, they had collections of those, like fantasy ones and all kinds of weird ones, but it was always that format, the little rubber dolls.
I loved little guys, you know, just having like collections of like, you know, little guys.
How many can I fit under my armpits?
How many can I put in my nose?
So anyway, I recently felt inclined to increase my understanding of our tech overlords who watch over us and determine what we can say and how many people are allowed to hear it.
So I picked up The Contrarian because it is so far the most comprehensive biography of the man, Peter Thiel, the man who is described as the Conservative conscience of Silicon Valley.
This is, of course, based on, I think, a fairly flawed belief that Silicon Valley is populated by a bunch of like hippies or lefties or something when it seems to be more mostly people who are just Sociopathically sort of libertarian or, you know, just just hate any kind of regulation at all and think that they are the masters of the universe.
Conscience is really wish casting.
He's way more like the id.
Yes.
You know, I would say it is a really fascinating read because he's a really inscrutable guy.
And he's not like he's not really it's not like an Elon Musk who likes to be online or likes to be on camera a lot.
He's very private, which made reporting on it kind of a challenge, but I think that Max Chafkin does a really great job.
So you don't think Peter Thiel would ever, like, go on SNL and do any skits about himself or anything?
No, no.
Peter Thiel literally shut down a massive news outlet for basically saying, outing him as gay.
Which, you know, not obviously, you know, whatever, no comment on, like, that outing or whatever, but that's what he did in response.
Yeah, but yeah, it's also like, you know, reading this book, you get really appreciation of this guy, as secretive as he is, just has a massive impact on like the technological and political world we now live in every single day.
Yep.
So before we speak to the author, I thought I'd go over some of the more fascinating tidbits I picked up from the book and related reporting.
So Peter Thiel attended Stanford University in the 80s, which he just hated.
He was good at chess, apparently, but he was also really, really pissy whenever he lost.
He was at one point nationally ranked.
Wow.
But he was very, very introverted, didn't have any close friends.
What really infuriated him, though, was the university's supposedly liberal, politically correct ethos.
And this led him to found the Stanford Review in 1987.
This was a conservative, and still is, a conservative libertarian publication that also worked to troll liberals and their detested values.
Yeah, these people pioneered the diaper.
In these early days, along with Stanford Review alumnus David Sachs, he wrote the book The Diversity Myth, Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus.
So this was part of the, I guess, the early version of the political correctness scare, which has been happening like forever and ever.
There's another one called God and a Man at Yale.
It's just There's always this general fear that the universities are where weirdo liberal ideas breed and then make conservatives feel bad about themselves.
I had no idea that that shit has been going on this long.
Like, why do they pretend it's new?
It's like... They gotta rebrand it.
They gotta rebrand it.
You gotta sell the next toothpaste that has a slightly different flavor.
This one's more tooth whitening, but every year people have to buy fucking toothpaste.
Guys, wait a minute.
Hold on.
Have we been fighting the same dumb shit like culture war like for the last like 70 years?
Jake is like the Sisyphus who doesn't notice the rock rolling back down.
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