New York hipsters and the antichrist
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Every Sunday, we cover the week's tech news. On This Week in Tech, hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me this week as Herbert Jin from The Wall Street Journal and Paris Martineau from Consumer Reports join Ian Thompson. And we'll talk about, of course, OpenAI and Anthropic. They got together with a bunch of religious leaders and decided what religion AI is. They've also figured out how to keep it from blackmailing you. You just say, well, that would be wrong. This Week in Tech, you'll find it at twit.tv and wherever you get your podcasts.
Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful, most influential people alive. So why does he care about New York hipsters, and what does that have to do with the Antichrist?
You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
So today we're going to do our best to avoid a lawsuit because we were talking about someone today who loves lawsuits. Claire, I want to read you a quote to start. Okay. So imagine that you were talking to a friend and this is something your friend told you. All right. When Charles Manson took LSD in the late 60s and the murder started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoevsky book and everything was permitted. Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson, but in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over. Does that feel like a normal thing that someone who was normal would say or think?
I guess I don't even know what the person's saying.
That's a great point.
That's a great point. That's exactly right.
No, that's exactly right.
That is a quote from Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, who's the subject of our episode today.
Oh, good.
Yeah. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is my personal surveillance state, my producer, Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality.
Who is Peter Thiel and why is he influential?
And joining us today is Claire Parker from The Good Noticing Podcast. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Oh, my God. I'm excited to be here and hopefully be sued soon.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, thank you. I'm excited to see you listed as, you know, one of the defendants.
No, I'll be a plaintiff. What you don't know is that Peter Thiel is my uncle and I stand with him. And I think we should respect his visions.
Well, so I want to start here. So you're a comedian, you work in New York. How would you sort of describe the difference nightlife pre and post COVID in terms of vibes, I guess? Is there a difference?
The nightlife? Nightlife. Well, because I do stand up. I feel like I was never like having fun. I was always just in basements and Queens and like on the subway. And I've never been a fun person. I've always been like, I'm funny. I'm not fun. So it's hard for me to say what the difference in nightlife has been, but I feel like, well, I would, I would say comedy counts as nightlife, right? Comedy. Yeah. So I think the problem is like the comedy I grew up with or the comedy I came up with that a lot of that died. A lot of the venues died and now there's new stuff. And so for me, the difference is now I have like 24 year olds being like, Are you just starting comedy? And I'm like, no.
Okay. Well, that actually kind of gets us close to what we're talking about, which is that one of the things that we'll be talking about today is Peter Thiel's interest in New York nightlife and New York comedy and sort of New York media in general.
He's interested in New York comedy.
He's very interested in culture in ways that are confusing and honestly, like shouldn't matter to a guy this powerful. And we want to try and see if we can better understand why he cares about the things he cares about. For instance, hipsters in New York. What's the deal?
I feel like he's just this like evil gay man that I see on Twitter, right? Like he's always saying things. And I think he, I feel like I haven't looked into him a ton, but I think he was like the first cresting, like the white gays, they've reached a parody of sorts where they're actually just as evil as a, as a straight white.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:15
2
Who is Peter Thiel and why is he influential?
2:15–7:57
3
What is Peter Thiel's connection to New York's hipster culture?
7:57–10:02
4
How has the nightlife scene in New York changed post-COVID?
10:02–43:26
5
How did Peter Thiel fund Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker?
43:26–53:10