Peter Thiel went on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Friday and shared his eccentric “thoughts” on a wide range of topics. Given Thiel’s reputation as libertarian philosopher king, PayPal mafia member, defense contractor, former Trump lover, and political megadonor, listeners might have assumed that a meeting of these minds would be fascinating. If you find two men who think they’re far smarter than they are talking at length about the weather fascinating, well, the episode delivered.
The main problem with Thiel is that—as colorful and nefarious as he sounds on paper—he is extremely boring to listen to. Hearing him drone on about political and technological concepts is the auditory equivalent of watching paint dry and, despite the fact that his remarks often give the impression that he’s open-sourcing designs for a rightwing plot against America, my eyes can’t help but glaze over at the sound of his voice.
That said, Thiel is still interesting—not because of his personality, but because of the ideas and the political forces that he represents. There are few people who have attempted to exert their will in America’s political and cultural conversation more than Thiel, and as such, whether he’s charismatic or not, it’s pretty important to hear what he has to say.
Rogan and Thiel’s conversation starts with a discussion of the many “problems” facing America. Thiel’s top concern is typical for someone in his socio-economic bracket: the federal deficit. “Yeah. I mean, there are a lot [of problems] that are pretty obvious to articulate, and they’re much easier to describe than solve. Like we have a crazy, crazy budget deficit,” Thiel offered. Currently, the U.S. government is $34 trillion in debt, a fact that conservative politicians and commentators have long been obsessed with, even though economists are split on whether it’s actually even a problem.
What can we do about the deficit? Again, Thiel gives a typical rich person answer: The solution to America’s budgetary woes isn’t to modernize programs that were created last century, trim some of the financial fat appended to the Pentagon (Thiel’s employer), or god forbid, raise taxes on insanely wealthy people like Thiel, but, as Thiel puts it, to figure “out ways to gradually dial back a lot of these government benefits” (i.e., make cuts to programs like Social Security, the social safety net that millions of non-rich Americans rely on).
As a known right-winger, Thiel also spends an obligatory amount of time hating on that bastion of corrupt liberalism known as California. “The rough model I have for how to think of California is that it’s kind of like Saudi Arabia,” says Thiel. “And you have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You know, not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything. And then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California and the oil pays for everything. And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector.”
However, while Thiel paints a comically grim portrait of California, he can’t ultimately seem to come up with a location that beats it. After rattling off a list of cities and cataloging their apparent faults, he finally admits that when it comes to California’s coastal climate: “I’m a sucker for the weather.” You get the feeling that he’s really only dumping on the state to impress his right-wing pals.
Other important conversational junctures: Is climate change real? Thiel’s response is a full 17 seconds of stammers before admitting: “It’s possible climate change is happening.”
The declining birthrate? Thiel seems to agree with Elon’s position that it’s bad: “Once you get an inverted demographic pyramid, at some point do you vote for benefits for the old or for the young? If the people with kids get financially penalized and the people without kids vote benefits for themselves, it will be very difficult to flip back.”
Thiel and Rogan grouse about a whole lot of different topics in the three-plus hours that the conversation runs (UFOs, ancient civilizations, and AI are also discussed), but it isn’t until about two hours into this interminable dialogue, that the subject turns to Jeffrey Epstein and related conspiracy theories, that Thiel finally said something interesting.
Indeed, Thiel spent a weird amount of time vamping about former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his ties to Epstein. He avoided the darker conspiracy theories about the dead pedophile, seeming to brush off claims that he may have been a dual intelligence agent working for the U.S. and Israel. Instead, he focused on Gates’ affiliations with the creep. To Thiel, it seems most likely that Gates’ relationship with Epstein evolved out of his marital problems with Melinda, and that Epstein may have advised the Microsoft boss on how to funnel his money into “left-wing philanthropy” organizations to avoid giving most of it to his wife in a divorce settlement. His theory was: “Bill and Melinda get married in 1994, they don’t sign a prenup, and, you know, something’s going wrong with the marriage,” Thiel said. “And maybe Melinda can get half the money in a divorce. He doesn’t want her to get half the money. What do you do?”
“The alternate plan is something like… You commit the marital assets to this nonprofit and then it sort of locks Melinda into not complaining about the marriage for a long, long time,” Thiel continued. “And so there’s something about the left-wing philanthropy world that was…some sort of Boomer way to control their crazy wives.”
Thus, Thiel somehow manages to make the Jeffrey Epstein saga into a conspiracy related to “left-wing philanthropy”—an impressive feat, given how many terrible things Epstein has been accused of that have nothing to do with “leftism” or philanthropy. It’s unclear why, of all the conversational junctures in their marathon conversation, Thiel seems to have been so interested in this particular subject, though it may just be that he finds conspiracy theories just as intriguing as the rest of us.
Thiel, himself, admits to having met with Epstein several times. When asked by Rogan who introduced him, Thiel—who spends an unbelievable amount of the conversation stammering his way through answers— comically delivers an answer as succinct and fact-oriented as a lawyer: “It was [LinkedIn founder] Reid Hoffman in Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014.”
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