Peter Thiel backed some of the largest tech companies in the world. After conquering Silicon Valley, Thiel set out to achieve real power. Throwing his weight behind a roster of far-right politicians, Thiel's influence will be felt for generations.
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00:00I'm Peter Thiel. I build companies and I support people who are building new things from social
00:11networks to rocket ships. Peter Thiel is this very important behind-the-scenes figure in the
00:19technology industry. He's a venture capitalist. He's an entrepreneur. Most people who live in
00:25the world have touched or used or been affected by some product that Peter Thiel either created
00:31or played like an huge role in creating. He is at the nexus of so many interesting companies that
00:40are defining not just Silicon Valley but the world. Anytime you're talking to like a new interesting
00:46company you don't have to like look that far to find some sort of connection to Thiel. Thiel who's
00:53well very well known as the first outside investor in Facebook as one of Silicon Valley's most closely
00:59watched individuals. Thiel is also a genius. Literally. As a child he was a math phenom and chess
01:05champion. Peter Thiel. He's also become quite important in the world of national politics.
01:12Big funder of Trump. Basically personally bankrolling at least a couple of U.S. Senate candidacies.
01:18I mean Peter Thiel's powerful because he's a billionaire. He's a billionaire and he invests
01:23his money in companies that are going to make more profit off of policing, off of surveillance,
01:28off of the militarization of the border. He's been called the king of tech-topia. He's now
01:36backing DNA manipulation. Meat grown in labs and a startup island off the coast. There have been articles
01:45about you with young blood and doing all sorts of crazy things. I want to publicly tell you that I'm not a vampire.
01:51You're not a vampire. I'll say it. Yes, on the record, I'm not a vampire. Have you ever tried it,
01:54by the way? I have never tried being a vampire.
01:56You never get free. Bam to the slaughter. What you gon' do when there's blood in the water? The price of your greed is your son and your daughter. What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
02:12Look me in my eyes. Tell me everything's not fine. All the people ain't happy. And the river has run dry.
02:24You thought you could go free. But the system is done for. If you listen, look closely. Is it not that you'll find? No. You'll never get free.
02:39Bam to the slaughter. What you gon' do when there's blood in the water? The price of your greed is your son and your daughter. What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
02:51What you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
02:53When there's blood in the water
03:06This is probably a very unfashionable category to use, but if you said, what's the political category you would use to describe a founder?
03:22And I think, you know, most founders, they're sort of like a king.
03:27You know, it's obviously not a democracy, it's not a republic.
03:31It's sort of like a king.
03:35What do you think motivates Teal?
03:38Money. Money and power.
03:41Fame is not necessarily the thing that motivates him, but the ability to influence events is a real trigger point for him.
03:50So, Star Trek or Star Wars?
03:54Obviously Star Wars. That's the capitalist one.
03:56It's all about Han Solo trying to get the money to pay off his loans.
04:01Star Trek is a communist show in which you basically have no money since everything can be made by the transporter.
04:06Back when my parents came to America, they brought me here as a one-year-old.
04:15Opportunity was everywhere.
04:18The future felt limitless.
04:20He was born in Germany.
04:24He came to the U.S. when he was a little boy.
04:28Parents were very strict, conservative, evangelicals, middle-class existence.
04:34His dad was an engineer and basically bounced around the country and the world working on mining projects.
04:41My dad was an engineer.
04:44My mom ended up being a homemaker after I was born.
04:47They were very focused on education.
04:48Went to seven different elementary schools as a kid.
04:51I think of myself as always having been both in some ways a little bit of an outsider and a little bit of an insider.
04:57So it was some sort of combination of that insider-outsider perspective that I think shaped things a lot.
05:04My book is called The Contrarian, and I picked that because, first of all, it's kind of how Thiel sees himself.
05:13I think his identity as a contrarian is probably more important to him than his identity, you know, as a gay man or as an immigrant or maybe even as an American.
05:21Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and I believe they are antonyms.
05:27He was and is introverted and a bit of a loner, somebody who is, I think, most comfortable dwelling, you know, in his own head.
05:38The people he went to school with, one thing they like to do was drive around and, like, pick up for sale signs from other people's houses
05:46and then set them all up on Peter Thiel's, you know, lawn and say, like, I hear you're moving.
05:51It's like, what a way to, you know, other somebody to make them feel like an outsider.
05:57You know, I probably am a bit of an outsider in many ways, and that has good things and bad things about it.
06:03It does have the tremendous benefit of forcing you to really think about what's going on with institutions, with our society,
06:11and then look for ways to make them better.
06:14The only thematic mistake, parenthetically, that you made is when you moved your knight to the side.
06:25You never want to do that.
06:29Thiel played chess.
06:31He was a nationally ranked chess player.
06:33As a boy, he had a sticker on his chess board that said,
06:37Born to Win.
06:37And one time that Thiel lost a chess match in high school, it was, like, by accident.
06:44The boy he was playing just kind of stumbled into Checkmate.
06:48He just completely lost it from that moment on.
06:51Basically, he was, like, completely thrown off his game because he's just so used to winning.
06:57He got great grades.
06:59He's the kind of person who, you know, was writing in, like, his friend's yearbooks
07:03about, like, how his grades were better than their grades and wanted to be the best, you know, A+, 100%.
07:09He's not a very sociable, intentionally likable guy.
07:14He doesn't go out of his way to try to make people comfortable.
07:18It's almost the reverse.
07:20He delights in debating and kind of picking at someone who has put forth an argument that he disagrees with.
07:28And he's a very deep thinker.
07:29He's very thoughtful.
07:30He's the standout, and it was that way when he went to Stanford during the late 80s.
07:36And he's always been a very private person.
07:39He was never surrounded by a big group of friends.
07:41He was never the life of a party.
07:42He celebrated his first semester at Stanford when he got a 4.0 by finding another guy who had a 4.0
07:50and then arguing with him about why his 4.0 was better.
07:54He thought that Stanford would be perfect for him.
07:57You know, he expected to be sort of welcomed by, you know, sort of like-minded, you know, type A, intellectuals, people, and also conservatives.
08:06And instead, you know, it was greeted by, like, people expressing, you know, socialist and even Marxist ideas.
08:12So it was way more liberal than Peter Thiel had anticipated.
08:15He ended up kind of like processing all that as political.
08:19It was like him as a conservative against these, you know, left-wing crazy people.
08:24For months at Stanford, students protested a program called Western Civilization.
08:30Stanford's faculty debated whether Western Civ was biased.
08:34Finally, last month, the faculty senate decided the program was biased.
08:38The notorious chant was, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go.
08:42It was not a demand for inclusion.
08:44It was a demand for exclusion.
08:45This is no field day for Moscow or its sympathizers.
08:48I grew up in the late 70s, 80s, at a time when there was a specter of communism, totalitarianism, and in some sense, libertarianism was the opposite of a totalitarian state.
09:01I started an independent student newspaper called the Stanford Review.
09:05It was a sort of libertarian paper where we challenged a lot of the campus taboos and created some space for some dissenting voices.
09:14You know, I've often said that our greatest political problem is the problem of political correctness, you know, properly understood, because that's how we limit the debate, how we aren't allowed to, you know, consider all the possibilities.
09:29And certainly, certainly, I think the universities share, you know, a lot of blame for this.
09:34The multicultural side is the side where we look for the victims.
09:37The politically correct side is the side where we go after the victimizers.
09:41The two are inextricably interconnected.
09:44The way these speech codes work in practice is that you, as a student, will err on the side of silence.
09:50They are incredibly inhibiting of controversial discourse.
09:55The idea with the Stanford Review was basically to try to push the buttons of their liberal classmates and faculty.
10:02Today, we kind of have a vocabulary for this now.
10:05I think we call it trolling, where it's like publishing columns, statements, jokes, or whatever that seem to walk right up to the line on things like race or gender or gender identity or even cross it.
10:21You know, running a libertarian newspaper was an incredible experience as a manager.
10:25You sort of had to deal with some very stubborn, headstrong, talented people.
10:30And I think that prepared me well for any challenge that you might encounter in business.
10:35After graduating from Stanford Law School, Thiel had these grand ambitions, which he was perfectly positioned to take advantage of.
10:49He'd done everything right.
10:51He'd gotten the top grades.
10:52He'd checked every box.
10:54I did well enough in law school to be hired by a big New York law firm.
10:58But it turned out to be a very strange place.
11:00Because from the outside, everybody wanted to get in.
11:04And from the inside, everybody wanted to get out.
11:07He got a really good clerkship right out of law school.
11:10And then he got a job at Sullivan and Cromwell, which is like, you know, one of the top white sheet law firms.
11:15His great goal, his pie in the sky, was getting a clerkship at the Supreme Court.
11:21Just as I was leaving the law firm, I got an interview for a Supreme Court clerkship.
11:27And this is sort of the top prize that you can get as a young lawyer.
11:31It was the absolute last stage of the competition.
11:34But I lost.
11:36And at the time, I was totally devastated.
11:39It seemed just like the end of the world.
11:41Thiel is used to working hard and winning.
11:44The fact that he did not win the Supreme Court justice clerkship was a huge blow to him.
11:50It definitely set him on a different path.
11:52About a decade later, I ran into an old friend, someone who had helped me prepare for the Supreme Court interview, whom I hadn't seen in years.
12:01His first words to me were not, you know, hi, Peter, or how are you doing, but rather, so aren't you glad you didn't get that clerkship?
12:10And if I hadn't lost that last competition, we both knew that I never would have left the track laid down since middle school.
12:20I wouldn't have moved to California and co-founded a startup.
12:23I wouldn't have done anything new.
12:25By the late 90s, Thiel was in some ways kind of a failure, kind of lost.
12:30And so he hadn't been a very successful or remarkable, you know, lawyer.
12:36He gets a job in finance.
12:37But again, that doesn't last very long either.
12:39And comes back to Silicon Valley.
12:42But right at that time that he came back, something big was happening, which is the tech industry.
12:47What is Newton?
12:48Newton is digital.
12:49Oh!
12:55If you really wanted to make money, the way to do it was to find a tech founder.
12:59So how did you come up with the idea for PayPal?
13:03We were looking at all the new payments companies where people were trying to start on the internet in the 90s.
13:07And we realized that you had to do something with real money.
13:11And you had to do something where you could get people involved who weren't signed up yet.
13:17He was giving a talk to a very small group of students at Stanford about currency trading.
13:23And a guy named Max Upchin was this incredible coder, self-taught.
13:29And he was also really interested in cryptography.
13:31And over breakfast, Max Upchin basically pitches him his idea, which is to create software for Palm Pilots.
13:38The big PayPal insight that we sort of came up with in the summer of 99 was the idea of linking money and email.
13:44You want to be doing something where you think it's going to actually change the world, make the world a dramatically better place.
13:50PayPal, like, invented online payments.
13:56Like, we would never have been able to split a check or, you know, pay the babysitter or whatever if Peter Thiel and Max Upchin hadn't come in around and invent this thing.
14:06Thiel is a really great opportunist and a great investor.
14:08And I think basically picked, like, a pretty obvious opportunity with a really smart partner who could build the software.
14:14You always want to get the team, the technology, and the business strategy.
14:18So you have to get all three of those to work.
14:20He was never a front man like some of his colleagues that had also succeeded while working with him at PayPal.
14:32These were all young, bright, wealthy, and very ambitious men, all men, who wanted to make their mark on the world.
14:42Fortune magazine does a photo shoot and comes with the idea, really good idea, to get all these guys and dress them up in Godfather outfits and basically stage it like a Godfather shoot.
14:56And amazingly, they all showed up with Peter Thiel as, like, Don Corleone and Max Levchin as co-founder at PayPal and the rest of the other guys, you know, Reid Hoffman and the YouTube guys and the Yelp guys.
15:10The PayPal Mafia is a group where loyalty is the thing that is rewarded and the people who are loyal become more successful and are given, you know, more money to start companies and are given better jobs and so on.
15:24And so in that way, it really is like, you know, like a mafia.
15:31Good startups by nature push the envelope.
15:33That pushing the envelope, breaking the rules is a good thing.
15:36And it becomes amoral.
15:39I mean, a growth and wealth and dominance starts to justify almost any action.
15:45The vision behind PayPal and the vision that Peter Thiel was sort of was pushing towards was you could basically put it into a bank account and go on your merry way.
15:55But you could choose to keep it in PayPal.
15:57And once you did that, that would be basically untrackable money.
16:01And there's an interview in WIRED where he's he's going on and on about how the revolutionary potential and the way this will erode the sovereignty of the nation state.
16:09That's a pretty radical statement.
16:12When I was starting PayPal, where, you know, we had this sort of vision that we were going to lead this financial revolution, a libertarian revolution against all central banks.
16:20We're going to liberate money from government control.
16:23And we're going to go to this trans-political technological level to to transform things.
16:28PayPal, and this is true of all digital currency efforts, big ones anyway, inevitably attracted money launderers and criminals.
16:39They weren't checking IDs.
16:41They weren't doing anything to make sure that the money wasn't being used in an improper way initially.
16:46This was a huge problem for PayPal.
16:48And they developed this network analysis approach where they would basically draw a big spider web showing transactions and where the transactions were coming from.
16:58And they basically started turning over information to the FBI and the FBI, you know, made a bunch of money laundering cases based on the information that PayPal was giving them.
17:10And there are stories from that era of, yeah, the FBI being, you know, sort of embedded in the PayPal office, which of course is a kind of a weird thing for a libertarian.
17:21And I mean, getting fraud under control was, I think, what allowed PayPal first to survive and allowed them to go public and ultimately, yeah, created Palantir.
17:40The deal was freaked out by 9-11, I think just like many people.
17:59It had a kind of a personal dimension.
18:02When PayPal was going public, he and another executive were on a plane that was flying out of New York on September 10th.
18:09He felt like that he was in close proximity to the actual terrorists, but he also processed it in a political way.
18:16I think the threat of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. may be really a long-term thing.
18:21The World Trade Center may not have been an isolated instance, and this is going to be a real problem.
18:25What we need to understand is that the Islam extremists have declared war on us.
18:30If you don't like America, leave this country. We're proud to be Americans.
18:34USA! USA!
18:35The terrorist attacks have united much of America, but some Arab Americans are feeling left out, fearful they could become the next target of misguided anger.
18:45After 9-11, the U.S. government felt that we had missed warning signs, that there were these hijackers in the United States taking flying lessons, buying plane tickets,
19:00and that if you had just somehow kind of like filtered through the data, looked through everyone's background and saw that, you know, where these guys were from and the profile,
19:11that you might have been able to surveil them and maybe ultimately stop the attacks.
19:16Thiel saw a business opportunity, which was to take the approach that PayPal had used for money laundering and sell it to the U.S. government.
19:25Our brave men and women in uniform put their lives on the line every day to protect our way of life.
19:31Palantir, protecting the protector since 2004.
19:34Something like Palantir is the key to stopping major terrorist attacks.
19:39I don't think we're going to do it by projecting military force throughout the world.
19:42I think we will do it by sort of very cleverly uncovering these conspiracies before they come together.
19:51Co-founded by Peter Thiel back in 2003, its mission, providing software the customers use to integrate volumes of data,
19:59from images to spreadsheets, into a central platform where it can then be securely analyzed and interpreted.
20:06Consider it just like a big power strip, and Palantir just allows the customer to plug in as many plugs as they want, right?
20:14Now, the data that they use can be publicly available, like U.S. sensor data, driver's license plates.
20:22It could be the person's individual location history, where they last texted someone.
20:27It could be really anything that that customer has access to, and that's where it gets a little tricky.
20:32Favorite writers?
20:35Tolkien.
20:36Okay.
20:36I'm still, like, I was powerfully shaped by Tolkien as a kid, so that's still the absolute favorite.
20:44Palantir's name refers to the all-seeing stones of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that allows the user, evil wizard Sauron,
20:55to see what the enemies are doing and kind of how, how, what's going on.
21:00It's kind of interesting, of course, that Thiel picked something that's kind of like a tool for evil to describe his company.
21:06But I think that was kind of deliberate, because part of what made Palantir attractive, like, both to government and to companies, is this, is like the edginess,
21:17is the idea that, like, maybe this technology is, is too good.
21:21Maybe it's too scary.
21:23Maybe it's the kind of thing that if it were not handled well, could be abused.
21:26And this is why Palantir ultimately, you know, leads to its success.
21:32As Palantir prepares to go public, we'd like to take a moment to celebrate all the accomplishments throughout the years of spying, targeting, and murdering people across the globe.
21:45Thiel is famously a libertarian.
21:47But what kind of libertarian starts a data mining defense contractor that takes money from the CIA, that its whole business is, like, just gathering huge amounts of data, you know, on behalf of the U.S. government and, you know, big intelligence agencies, as Thiel has done with Palantir?
22:05How does somebody who's an immigrant, you know, come to support a candidate like Trump, who ran to build the wall and to toss out the immigrants?
22:13That's a contradiction.
22:14It's not a lack of judgment that leads Americans to vote for Trump.
22:22We're voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.
22:29When Trump made that, um, grab him by the, you know, post-y comment, a lot of people wondered whether this comment by Trump would actually sink his campaign.
22:38And Thiel comes in with $1.25 million.
22:41Now, at the time, you know, he told people close to him who shared with me that he considered it the least controversial of, of, of, of many of his, of any of his decisions.
22:51I don't agree with everything Donald Trump has said and done.
22:55And I don't think the millions of other people voting for him do either.
22:59Nobody thinks his comments about women were acceptable.
23:04I agree.
23:05They were clearly offensive and inappropriate.
23:08When, when I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union.
23:15And we won.
23:19Now we are told, now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.
23:27This is a distraction from our real problems.
23:30Who cares?
23:30Of course, every American has a unique identity.
23:43I am proud to be gay.
23:45I am proud to be a Republican.
23:48But most of all, I am proud to be an American.
23:51I am proud to be a Republican.
24:21No one in this race is being honest about it, except Donald Trump.
24:27Thiel had been, you know, a really important Trump supporter.
24:32What he brought to Trump initially during the election was credibility, that a real business guy believes in Trump.
24:39That was valuable.
24:40Silicon Valley comes to Trump Tower today.
24:43President-elect Donald Trump hosting a tech summit, bringing together leaders from some of America's top companies.
24:48He sat down with tech giants from Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and more.
24:53They discussed innovation, immigration, trade, and government regulation.
24:58We're going to be there for you, and you'll call my people, you'll call me.
25:01It doesn't make any difference.
25:02We have no formal chain of command.
25:04So, on December 14, 2016, in a little over a month after the election, Thiel convenes this meeting in Trump Tower with basically the CEOs of the biggest tech companies in the United States.
25:17I think Trump was really aware of the value that Thiel brought to him, and you saw it in the meeting.
25:24This is a truly amazing group of people.
25:27I won't tell you the hundreds of calls we've had asking to come to this meeting.
25:32And I will say Peter was sort of saying, no, that company's too small.
25:37And these are monster companies.
25:39But I want to thank, I want to start by thanking Peter because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it.
25:46And, of course, he's known for that in a different way.
25:48And in the body language, you know, Trump, you know, kind of grabs his hand, and there's this awkward kind of moment of, like, bro tenderness, where he's sort of, like, Thiel's looking there, like, you know, just, like, never been more uncomfortable in his entire life.
26:05These tech CEOs had opposed Donald Trump, you know, either personally or in public.
26:10But once the cameras leave, nobody calls him on the plan to ban Muslims from coming to the United States.
26:16Many of them had publicly deplored.
26:18Nobody calls him on the trade war with China, which, again, they were officially supposed to be opposed to.
26:24They basically moved to, like, try to work together.
26:26And it was just all bullshit.
26:29They were much closer politically and ideologically to Thiel than most people realized.
26:35And just as willing as he was to work with people in power.
26:40Deportation, up, up!
26:42Liberation, down, down!
26:43With deportation, up, up!
26:45Politicians on both sides of the aisle say that technology is going to make things better and faster and easier.
26:54But actually, they're facilitating human rights abuses.
26:57We will begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country.
27:04If you don't want your child to be separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally.
27:09It's not our fault that somebody does that.
27:15Many children have been separated from their parents.
27:18The numbers aren't clear.
27:19The New York Times previously reported that, quote, more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents, including more than 100 under the age of 4.
27:2914,000 people have been updated, with more than 200 or more than 200 men.
27:30And we're not clear.
27:31The New York Times, the New York Times had been道comable.
27:32This is what we're doing.
27:33Okay.
27:34I've seen that there was more and more raids happening directly in people's homes, directly
27:38in people's workplaces, particularly under the Trump administration.
27:41and this made us really want to do a lot of research
27:44into how that was happening.
27:46People on the ground calling us and being like,
27:48how did they get my address?
27:50How did they know he was my cousin?
27:52How did they know what car I was driving
27:54or where I had driven the last couple of days?
28:00Palantir, don't send the ice.
28:02We will not be complicit.
28:05The data mining firm Palantir faces backlash
28:08over its partnership with ICE.
28:10One of the first concrete examples
28:12that we saw where Palantir software was being used
28:16was in an operation where ICE was trying
28:19to prosecute the sponsors of unaccompanied kids
28:22that were crossing the border.
28:25And ICE decided to use Palantir software
28:28to create charges against the sponsors.
28:33The main product that Palantir offers ICE
28:36is the integrated case management system.
28:38And this is basically a custom made software where ICE can then
28:42use all of the data it has to then create files on people to be able
28:46to go after them for deportation proceedings or to try to press charges against them.
28:52Fear tonight after what was the largest workplace immigration raid in a single state in U.S. history.
28:58Some undocumented immigrants in Mississippi locked themselves in their homes today.
29:03ICE officials say 680 people were arrested yesterday at food processing plants around the state.
29:09I don't want my dad.
29:12Today we saw the aftermath of the ICE raids in Mississippi.
29:15Children begging to see their parents.
29:18My dad didn't do nothing. He's not a criminal.
29:21Immigration officials couldn't say for sure whether any of the nearly 400 people still in custody
29:28are single parents who have no one to take care of their children.
29:32Under the Trump administration there's a huge expansion of the tip line where regular people were
29:40encouraged to call in and, you know, use terror against their neighbor, their loved one, their employees.
29:47And so the Falcon tip line was one of the places where information came in for this raid and that was one of Palantir's products for ICE.
29:55It's imperative from a libertarian perspective that we use these technologies to try to narrowly focus on suspicious behavior and prevent it before it happens.
30:09And that's how we will have a world that protects more civil liberties in one way or another.
30:15Palantir would say, hey, this data is already out there.
30:20Our software just pulls it together so that you can see it all at once and make a smart decision based on information that's out there.
30:28So the way that ICE is using data and technology to expand its power, to expand its reach, to no longer need warrants to get information and just use a data broker to try to access it,
30:40impacts all of us because services that are provided by Palantir become models for different local police departments, right?
30:47Across the country we've seen cities like Los Angeles or New Orleans start to use Palantir services in their policing to horrible consequences.
30:57If ICE is able to get away with it, better believe that in just a couple of years your local police department is going to be using it and then it's going to be used against everyone.
31:09The Los Angeles Police Department used Palantir in high crime rate areas in the hopes of predicting where problems could erupt and then stopping it.
31:19And what police officers would do would be to collect pictures of people in an area known for gang activity, put them in their database and gradually start filling out profiles on each of these individuals, whether or not it had been proven they were part of a gang or not.
31:35They were also able to get access to their cell phone records, their license plates of cars that they owned and drove, and then continue to track those people.
31:48Police in Los Angeles are trying to predict the future.
31:52We know where crime happened yesterday, but where is it going to happen tomorrow and the next day.
31:57And they're not alone. More and more departments are using data-driven algorithms to forecast crime.
32:03And there was one individual that we spoke to for a feature that we wrote who said he was not part of a gang in LA and he had worked really hard to get out of a gang.
32:14Nevertheless, he was hanging out with someone who had just been jumped in and his picture was taken by an LAPD officer and he laughed and said,
32:25Well, welcome to the gang database.
32:33Doing this work can sometimes feel hard because you don't want to be telling people all of the ways that the government or the police could have access to information about you.
32:42But this is actually not about trying to create more paranoia. This is actually about trying to create more power in communities.
32:48And the way you do that is you peel back the curtain, you actually unveil what's happening.
32:52You expose the companies, you expose the billionaires that are behind it.
32:56There are people who are terrified of saying anything that could even be vaguely interpreted as negative to neutral about Peter Thiel.
33:09He is known as a vengeful person. He secretly bankrolled and bankrupted Gawker, which is a publication for its role in publicizing sex tapes of Hulk Hogan.
33:22Essentially, for revenge, Gawker had outed Peter Thiel, you know, almost a decade earlier, had published a story saying that he was gay and Thiel basically was using that as a justification for funding this case that ultimately bankrupted, you know, a media entity.
33:39Knowing what you know now, do you have any regrets about writing that story?
33:43I have no regrets about writing that story.
33:45Why not?
33:46First of all, I don't believe I outed Peter Thiel. I believe Peter Thiel outed himself to a wide circle of people within Silicon Valley, who then took it upon themselves to say,
33:54Well, this is okay for us to know, but the unwashed masses should not know such, you know, such a detail about one of our own.
34:01Gawker had outed him as being gay. And that was something that Peter held very, very privately. He was a very private person. And this upset him. And he held on to that grudge. And he struck back. And the amount of force that he brought to bear on that, you know, hobbled and ultimately bankrupted, you know, Gawker.
34:22Well, do you think what happened to Gawker could happen to other news publications? I mean, wealthy, powerful people seek revenge against a news organization because of something they didn't like and use their influence and money to take them out?
34:36You know, they shouldn't, wealthy people shouldn't do that. I think if they try, they won't succeed. You know, it's, it's the, the, you know, Gawker was, it was a pretty flimsy business. It was, it was a bad business. It didn't make that much money. But they could have withstood all the lawsuits.
34:53You know, they lost because of an enormous verdict that came in against them.
34:58Money speaks and billionaires have power. And, you know, unless we want to restrict them in their funding of political campaigns and in other things that they can do with their money, you know, they're going to spend their money as a substitute for speech.
35:13It's not an understatement at all to say that there is a huge amount of fear and mystique around him because he doesn't always work directly.
35:26He pursued this audacious revenge plot to, to destroy a media outlet, you know, completely, you know, in secret. So he's somebody who's always sort of, who's never transparent.
35:39And in fact, he thinks that transparency is like a bad thing, like on a moral or ethical or cosmic scale.
35:46ProPublica article highlighting how tech mogul Peter Thiel turned a Roth IRA account into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank.
35:59Most IRAs have a limit of $6,000 a year in annual contributions. That was installed just to prevent this kind of abuse.
36:06What a brilliant move right at the outset to see that this could be done.
36:15There's a set of billionaires and super rich people that are shielding fortunes from taxation.
36:23But what we found is that Peter Thiel at least appears to be in a league of his own.
36:28The Roth IRA was created by Congress in 1997. The idea was that you would allow people to put a couple thousand dollars into this special account and invest it.
36:39If the investment goes up in value and you sell the investment, you get to keep all the profit tax-free.
36:45Peter Thiel and some other billionaires have now transformed that into this tax shelter for these multi-billion dollar fortunes.
36:51Speaking of big money and where does it go, some of the wealthiest people in the US like Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg and Elon Musk pay little or sometimes nothing in federal income taxes compared to the massive amounts of money that they make each year.
37:10Back in 1999, before Peter Thiel was a billionaire, he opened a Roth IRA account and he used the money inside of it to buy 1.7 million shares of PayPal.
37:23So at a cost of a tenth of a penny per share.
37:26At the most basic level, Peter Thiel's power flows from his wealth and you can't understand how he got so rich without understanding the Roth IRA.
37:36In 2002, suddenly he has $28 million to play with. Pretty soon after that, he was an early investor in Facebook.
37:42If he'd had to pay taxes, maybe he wouldn't have been able to buy as many early shares of Facebook.
37:47Did she offer you some water? Oh yeah, we're cool.
37:50She's on the way. Come on in. It must be Mark.
37:53Hi.
37:57We took a look at everything and congratulations.
38:00We're gonna start you off with a $500,000 investment.
38:06You were an early investor in Facebook and the Facebook movie has just come out.
38:10Well, there are a number of factual inaccuracies about the movie.
38:14It certainly portrays the people in a much worse light than I know of them having worked with a number of these people for the last six years.
38:20I think it's an incredibly dedicated, awesome team of people that has created tremendous value for themselves, their investors and the world at large.
38:31So after Zuckerberg takes Thiel's money, they reincorporate the company and they set it up so that Zuckerberg would have complete power over Facebook in perpetuity.
38:41It became the new normal where the CEO founder will have absolute control indefinitely.
38:53Thiel is one of the key people who made Facebook happen.
38:57He's the longest serving board member, one of the closest confidants to Mark Zuckerberg, probably a mentor to Zuckerberg.
39:03He was massively influential on my thinking, right?
39:06I mean, like a lot of the early lessons that I took on how to think about strategy came from Peter.
39:13Peter Thiel, big investor in Facebook, board member, advising Mark Zuckerberg, don't give in to the pressure.
39:18Stick to the decision to continue with political advertising, even after all the criticism.
39:24We have created the situation where, you know, a handful of companies control like enormous swaths of our data.
39:34And so with respect to Thiel, the two most important companies are Facebook, the largest media entity in human history,
39:42has, you know, data on billions of people, like half the world's population, maybe more.
39:48And Palantir, which not only has access to huge amounts of data through the U.S. government and through, you know, U.S. allies,
39:54but has, you know, relationships with intelligence agencies in the military and huge companies.
39:59So Thiel has all this incredible influence.
40:02You know, I think my future is going to continue to be in the tech industry.
40:06That's what I'm good at. That's what I enjoy doing.
40:09I always have a, I always have this view of a somewhat schizophrenic view of politics,
40:14where I think it's a, it's a horrible business. It's incredibly destructive.
40:19A lot of it is like trench warfare on the Western Front, where there's crazy amounts of carnage and nothing ever changes.
40:25Um, and then that's on, that's one part of my schizophrenic view.
40:29The other part is that it's really important.
40:31There's some problems that can't be solved outside of this political arena.
40:35And, uh, the way I deal with my schizophrenia is that I occasionally get involved, but don't want to make it a full-time thing.
40:43After Trump lost the election in November 2020, Thiel basically moved to support the faction of the Republican Party that argues that he didn't lose.
40:54We are up against a media that lies to us.
40:57Schools that teach our kids to hate our country.
41:01And corporations that have gotten so big, they think they're bigger than America.
41:06It's time to put this country first.
41:09We need to enforce the law, and we need to finish the wall.
41:13Masters is basically a long-time aide to Peter Thiel.
41:20He was the co-author of Zero to One, Thiel's book.
41:23So he's like Thiel deputy, and he's running as this, like, you know, hard right Trumpist, talking about building the wall and basically finishing Trumpism.
41:32And also, of course, he's promoting a handful of positions that don't seem entirely consistent with, like, being a populist, but are certainly consistent with being, like, buddies of Peter Thiel.
41:43You know, it's no secret that Peter Thiel is supporting me in my campaign.
41:48He maxed out in hard dollars, $5,800.
41:51And, of course, he's funding a super PAC that is pro-me.
41:55I think he put $10 million in.
41:57You're a venture capitalist, a graduate of Stanford.
42:00You work for a billionaire.
42:01Are you a tool of Peter Thiel to advance the interests of billionaires here in Washington, D.C.?
42:08Democrats are very good at hiding the source of money and dark money.
42:13They play that game.
42:14When someone like Peter Thiel, on the other hand, wants to support a candidate, you know, he does write one check, and that becomes, you know, national news.
42:22I think it's way more transparent.
42:23Peter has also thrown his weight behind someone by the name of J.D. Vance.
42:28The leaders of this country have decided they're going to reward their friends with special tax breaks and not the companies right here in Middletown, Ohio.
42:35Now, J.D. was a longtime employee of Peter's at one of his venture firms.
42:42Every issue, I believe, traces back to this fact.
42:45On the one hand, the elites in the ruling class of this country are robbing us blind.
42:50And on the other hand, if you dare complain about it, you are a bad person.
42:55And I'm here to tell you, we need a new politics for a new generation.
42:59The old way of doing things ain't working.
43:01With Peter Thiel's recent entrance into the political realm as a major, major donor, one thing that's been going through my head is Congress holds the power to essentially break Peter Thiel's Roth IRA.
43:20It only takes one U.S. senator to stop a lot of these things from going through. That's enormous power.
43:29Thiel's network of people makes him powerful. So does the money to back it up.
43:35You have sort of like the inner circle, the PayPal mafia. Then you have people who maybe run a company backed by somebody in the PayPal mafia or run a company backed by Thiel or run an investment firm that's largely backed by Thiel.
43:50And then you have these kind of like outer rings, which are like employees or even aspirants, like people who just like read Peter Thiel's books and are obsessed with him and just like watch every one of his YouTube videos and spend, you know, their later teens and early 20s, like doing whatever they can to get on the inside.
44:06And Thiel saw this and created kind of an on-ramp to bring them into the inside, which is the Thiel Fellowship.
44:11Peter Thiel made billions co-founding PayPal and investing in Facebook.
44:16Now he wants Americans to think twice before going to college mindlessly.
44:21I think we need to have a broader debate about college.
44:23And we have this runaway student debt problem was 300 billion in 2000.
44:26It's now 1.6, 1.7 trillion dollars today.
44:29Students can't pay off their debt if they go to a lesser college, especially.
44:33And then you basically tell people that if you get a diploma, you're saved.
44:37You know, otherwise you go to hell.
44:39You know, you go to Yale or you go to jail.
44:41Peter has a rather exciting announcement to make here at Disrupt.
44:46Well, we've been offering grants of up to $100,000 to up to 20 people under age 20 for starting something new.
44:56For dropping out of school.
44:57Stopping out of school.
44:58He paid college students from top universities $100,000 to drop out of those universities for two years and build something.
45:11At this point, there are hundreds of Thiel Fellows that have gone through this.
45:17So he has this whole new generation of people who are very grateful to him as a mentor, as a funder, as someone who inspired them to take the jump.
45:31It's about 4.16 in the morning.
45:33Arrived at the airport.
45:34Ready to go.
45:35I'm working on a product called Bambina and I'm tracking vital signs in babies.
45:40Hive is a crowdsourced supercomputer.
45:42Prime is a modular wheelchair, which is easily customizable.
45:46I have created an algorithm that I named DocBot.
45:49And I'm here to end cancer.
45:51Basically every year, 20 or so young people become Thiel Fellows.
45:55We have to convince the judges that our ideas are worth a six-figure investment.
46:00My mom actually took me aside and she said, Alex, drop out of school.
46:03My parents told me, you're an idiot if you drop out.
46:06If I get the fellowship, I'll definitely drop out of school.
46:09Good luck.
46:10And whether or not you end up receiving a Thiel Fellowship, know that your work's important.
46:16A lot of them don't go anywhere, right?
46:18Many startups fail, but some of them have.
46:21And it creates this kind of on-ramp and a way to broaden the network.
46:25You create all these mini-Peter Thiels, young people who basically put their lives on hold and gave up going to Harvard to work for Peter Thiel.
46:35There's no right time or wrong time to be an entrepreneur.
46:38The time is when people find something they're incredibly passionate about, and that's when they should start and do it.
46:44We have nothing against education. We think education is a good thing.
46:48He also has, I think personally, right, like, has a desire to, like, somehow defy his own biology.
47:02Thiel's ideology isn't just like, you can break all the rules and be rich and famous.
47:06It's like, you can break all the rules, be rich and famous, and be immortal.
47:09The other cliche goes like this. Live each day as if it were your last.
47:17The best way to take this advice is to do exactly the opposite. Live each day as if you will live forever.
47:25Arguing that this is like an area of science that everyone has sort of ignored and people are, like, trying to cure cancer or trying to, like, you know, come up with treatments for malaria, but what they really should be trying to cure is death.
47:36What are you doing differently? Are you taking immortality pills, some super exercise regimen?
47:42I'm investing in a lot of biotechnology companies. I think on the nutrition side, the, you know, there are some very basic things, I think, that can be done.
47:51You should not eat sugar. That's probably the one nutritional rule.
47:54Do you not eat sugar?
47:55I still eat some, but not as much as I used to.
47:58The main drastic thing that I'm doing is I'm on HGH, the human growth hormone stuff.
48:04On a daily basis.
48:05On a daily basis.
48:06Among the kind of, like, types of research that Teal was funding into life extension, one of them is called parabiosis.
48:16It's a fringe idea that you can take blood from younger individuals and transfuse it into older individuals,
48:24and that somehow that will, like, basically allow these older individuals to, like, repair their bodies and live longer.
48:35The quality won't be high until, um, and, um, the quality won't be high until we have a lot of people opt into the network.
48:45So that presents a little bit of a, a, a unique...
48:48Everything okay?
48:49I don't know.
48:50So, Gavin, Bryce is...
48:53Very discreet.
48:54Keep going.
48:55This is great.
48:56Uh, is Bryce your assistant?
48:57No, of course not.
48:58He's my transfusion associate.
49:00Which is?
49:01Are you really not familiar with parabiosis?
49:04I can't say that I am.
49:05Well, the science is actually pretty fascinating.
49:08Regular transfusions of the blood of a younger, physically fit donor can significantly retard the aging process.
49:14And Bryce is a picture of health.
49:17Just look at him.
49:18He looks like a Nazi propaganda poster.
49:21Okay, like, maybe Peter Thiel's, like, a literal vampire.
49:25It's not true, but it does have, I think, metaphoric value.
49:30He is someone who has created these big companies that are, like, sucking our data and maybe taking with it, like, a little bit of our humanity.
49:40So he's not a vampire, but there are things that are vampiric, I think, about both how Thiel has done business and about many of the businesses he's, he's been involved in creating.
49:51The young people who, who follow Thiel, who start these tech companies, they genuinely believe that conquering death, that they might live forever or that they might live, you know, for hundreds of years or something like that.
50:02Thiel's done a lot of real good for the world.
50:05Many of these technologies have genuinely made our lives better.
50:08But once you start saying it's the answer to everything, it's going to make us gods, um, you know, that's a little bit scary.
50:14It's going to be a little bit scary.
50:44One, two, three, four, four, four, five, six, seven, seven, eight.
50:46I don't think so, but it's the answer to everything that, like, a little bit scary.
50:47It's just a quick start.
50:48One.
50:49One, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
50:51One.
50:53One, three, seven, eleven.
50:54Two, six, seven, nine.
50:56Two, seven, seven, eight.
50:59Two, seven, nine.
51:01One, seven, ten, eleven.
51:04One, twelve.
51:06Two, seven, eleven.
51:07One, seven, seven, seven, thirteen.
51:12One, eleven.
51:13I'll see you next time.