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Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What is Peter Thiel's connection to New York's hipster culture?
In 2005, Peter Thiel is introduced to Eliza Yudkowsky, who's like this crazy AI evangelist blogger that everyone is like sort of obsessed, you know, that world is obsessed with right now. This is a really good description of Peter Thiel's personality from a piece in Wired last year.
They write, Peter Thiel had been long been obsessed with the possibility that one day computers would become smarter than humans and unleash a self-reinforcing cycle of exponential technological progress, an old science fiction trope often referred to as a singularity. And then this AI guy, Yudkowsky, began reading science fiction at age seven and writing at age nine.
At 11, he scored a 1410 on the SAT, which I guess is good, right?
Yeah. Who cares? Can I also say, I've never in my life been like, and how would you stack up against a 10th grader? You know what I mean? But people love their SAT scores.
Yeah, I don't remember mine. I don't think it was good, though. They had just introduced the essay, which I think helped me kind of get some points back, but it wasn't very good.
Well, you're not a sheep.
I'm not a sheep. No, I'm an outsider.
You're a free thinker. Yeah.
And so basically these guys, the Eliza Yukowski, Peter Thiel, all these kind of AI evangelists, they're spending the 2000s like really obsessing over, you know, what if a supercomputer woke up and became alive and what would that mean?
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Chapter 4: How has the nightlife scene in New York changed post-COVID?
Right. But even all the way back in the mid 2000s, Peter Thiel is sort of like having a tough time with the sort of wider world and their sort of perception of him. And one of the one of the sort of inciting incidents, I would say, between Peter Thiel and the quote unquote liberal establishment would be in 2007 when Gawker outed Thiel in a piece that was titled Peter Thiel is totally gay people.
This I knew, and then he comes back at them with Hulk Hogan, right? Imagine a proxy war with Hulk Hogan.
I know. So five years later, Gawker publishes the Hulk Hogan sex tape. The tape was filmed in 2006. They post it on their website. Hogan sues them, and Peter Thiel funds the lawsuit. And thanks to the Department of Justice and the release of the Epstein files a couple months ago, we now know that Jeffrey Epstein offered to pay for that lawsuit. Fun fact.
He's also talking at length to Peter Thiel during this period of time. They were they were real close. What else were they talking about? What were they talking about? They they were excited. So, OK, I'm trying to remember my extensive knowledge of the Epstein files at this point. Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein were very excited about Brexit in 2016.
They really wanted to sort of like watch the UK get demolished so they could get lower interest rates. Peter Thiel.
I covered the Prince Andrew and he was like the special envoy. And I remember those emails where they were like, just bomb them. You can get really great deals when everything is collapsing. There was a real sense of if we break it, we can buy it for pennies on the dollar and then rebuild it as our home.
That's exactly it. And Peter Thiel appears to have visited Zorro Ranch several times and was sort of like an intermediary for like more of Silicon Valley. Like Epstein would meet Thiel and then met other people in Silicon Valley through him. And then Jeffrey Epstein also connected the former prime minister of Israel with Peter Thiel and Palantir.
So there seems to be sort of a lot of that going on at this point in time. Were you a Gawker reader, Claire?
Vaguely. I feel like I was always aware of Gawker. I feel like I knew about it from, like, the comedy standpoint in terms of, like, people were, like, being funny. And less, I think, the personnel weren't interesting to me. I think I was in high school at the time, so the idea of, like, Peter Thiel being gay wasn't really crossing my mind.
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Chapter 5: How did Peter Thiel fund Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker?
I mean, I think like all movements, you look back and like, you know, in 10, 20 years, there's going to be a prominent novelist, a prominent podcaster, and maybe even a politician. You're going to be like, they were at the same play 20 years ago. There's always those like... you know, Paris in the 1920s.
There's always going to be a place where somebody is like, I can't believe all those geniuses were hanging around the same scene. And you're like, yeah, well, if you were in the scene, there was about 500 people and like 400 of them became duds. 30 of them now have normal lives and like two or three went on to greatness. And then behind them is going to be some new weirder scene.
That's probably going to be, you know... offshoot Austin, Texas or something. And they're all going to be like, yeah, what we do is like amputate our own fingers and add more stuff. Or we're like, oh my God, these are the most people, important people in the world. And there's actually like two guys that actually did it. And it's like, you know what I mean?
And then there's like a thousand think pieces. I don't know. I feel... I feel this is just like a tale as old as time. There's always going to be a group of young things in New York that got an outsized critical reception because the people who write the thought pieces are adjacent to them. And, you know, I mean, the things that matter don't get as much press, like who gets to speak.
And it is the person who's willing to move to New York City and call themselves important people.
I think it's time to like give coolness to like a new city for a while. Like, you know, like Portland, Seattle, they, they took turns in the nineties, two thousands. I think it's time. Like we pick like Cleveland or Cincinnati or some Minneapolis, Minneapolis. Actually, honestly, I could see Minneapolis. Milwaukee. Yeah.
Yeah. My question going into this was like, why would somebody with literally all that power possibly care about about hipsters in New York City so much. With the Antichrist focus, does it make any more sense to you now? Because I have a theory, but I want to see what you think.
I feel if you could make Catholicism cool...
feel like there's like the the dual things of who he wants to like him and it's both cool kids in new york and like also i feel like i was hard on them but i'm also like 33 and i've never in my life been accepted by cool kids ever and i've just made my peace with it and felt as they've become like weirdly republican and evil i'm like oh thank god they wouldn't take me because i don't want to have to be doing ironic mega stuff um what are you talking about
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