The Week Trending: Brand It Like Beckham, Shrinking Chocolate, & McGregor On Fallon
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Last Word. With Life Pharmacy. Over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help. Life Pharmacy. Live better together.
Joining us for the week trending, Elaine Burke and Lorcan Nighan. Elaine, of course, is the host of the For Tech's Sake podcast and also is on our weekly Last Word on TV and streaming. And Lorcan Nighan is head of training at the Communications Clinic. Elaine, there's been an enormous amount of fuss this week. A story broken by Wired magazine in the United States. about Peter Thiel and his pals wanting to come to Ireland for a secret meeting in August at a hotel in Wicklow, the Powers Court Hotel. Tell us about this.
Yeah, so this has come to light. And the reason why you've got the likes of Wired reporting on it, because a hacktivist found this information through a poorly secured website hosted at Dialogue.org. And sometimes if you've got an unsecure website, people can find out information about maybe people that you've sent emails to or have membership with your organisation. So that's what's kind of transpired here. Now, they have a list of over 200 people that were apparently invited to this event to take place in August in Ireland. And what sort of event is it supposed to be? It is essentially like a conference, but it's one of those conferences where the promise to attendees is that things that are being discussed there will not be traceable back to you and you can be a bit more frank and open, I suppose, in what you're talking about.
And some of the topics that are in the data dump to be revealed to be part of these kind of events are Like how to survive World War III, how to build a cult.
So some strange... Real Peter Thiel stuff because he wanted to do seasteading at one stage, isn't it? Build these sort of floating islands that he would be able to go to in the event of Armageddon.
Yeah, I think these elite groups tend to love big fantastical ideas that include only them and that only they will be able to escape to such islands or to such planets when everything goes to crap.
Yeah, but Taylor in some respects is more worrying than Musk. He's the guy who runs Palantir, isn't he? Maybe just explain what Palantir is.
Yeah, so... Peter Thiel, like Elon Musk, comes from that early wealth foundation in Silicon Valley. From PayPal, yeah.
What leaked invite list reveals about Peter Thiel’s planned Ireland conference?
The PayPal IPO essentially minted these millionaires, billionaires, and now a trillionaire. And Peter Thiel has been under the radar for a long time for anyone who's not part of the tech press, maybe. But his companies don't curry a lot of good sentiment. So Palantir... is heavily involved in technology surveillance, essentially. And they've sold their services to ICE in the US. They've sold their services to the Israeli military. But they've also sold their services to the NHS in the UK. And there's a lot of consternation about its involvement with those kind of like public services, because people don't necessarily want their public data to be wrapped up in a company that embodies this idea of surveillance culture and using technology to heavily surveil and
manipulate, possibly have ideas of controlling people.
Okay, but he also has some weird ideas about the way the world should go.
I mean... Yeah, he's hosted an event in the Vatican or like right on the fringes of the Vatican about the Pope being the Antichrist. Yeah, and he has said on the record before that he believes that technology can be used to shape society and you don't need democracy because we can just rule everything through technology.
How were the meeting details discovered and what did the data leak show?
And Larkin, who are his cronies?
I think who the cronies are, some of them you would expect from this list now and from this link, he'd be linked to a lot of different politicians, but the people who are invited to this are the likes of Senator Ted Cruz, the likes of Jared Kushner that you would expect. But then like when you look at it further, there's a lot of kind of what would be seen as the more moderate centrist Democrats who are popping up on the list as well. You've got Cory Brooker.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:17
2
What leaked invite list reveals about Peter Thiel’s planned Ireland conference?
2:17–3:34
3
How were the meeting details discovered and what did the data leak show?
3:34–15:16
4
Who are the notable attendees and why does the guest list worry critics?
15:16–23:02
Speakers
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