New York hipsters and the antichrist

Today we’re talking about billionaire Peter Thiel and his many fascinating, varied interests. You might know him for secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, but did you know that he is also pretty interested in New York’s comedy scene, its hipsters, and something about a biohacked Olympics? What is going on here? Claire Parker joins us to delve into the concept of “Thiel Bucks,” or the money he allegedly gives to willingly reactionary influencers and media figures. Our guest is comedian Claire Parker. You can find her on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube at @clairethescare, and check out her podcast Good Noticings wherever you listen and watch them. Her debut comedy special “Clare Parker’s 32” is also out now on YouTube. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership for just $5 a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you listen on Apple Podcasts, you can now also find us on COURIER+! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

• 0:12Ryan Broderick?

  Uh.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  You're hesitant.

• 0:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, I.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Yes?

• 0:15Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know. I. So today, we're gonna 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 murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned, was that you could be like an anti-hero 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?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I guess I don't even know what the person's saying.

• 1:02Ryan Broderick?

  That's a great point.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Can I tell you?

• 1:05Ryan Broderick?

  That's a great point. That's exactly right.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  It's really hard for me to just to parse through.

• 1:07Ryan Broderick?

  No, that's exactly right.

• 1:27Ryan Broderick?

  That is a quote from Peter Thiel.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  The founder of Palantir, who's the subject of our episode today.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 1:35Ryan Broderick?

  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. And joining us today is Claire Parker from the Good Noticing Podcast. How you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Oh, my God. I'm excited to be here and hopefully be sued soon.

• 1:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, thank you. I'm excited to see you listed as, you know, one of the defendants.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  No, I'll be a plaintiff. What you don't know is that Peter Thiel is my uncle, and I stand with him.

• 2:03Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  And I think we should respect his visions.

• 2:07Ryan Broderick?

  Well, so I want to start here. So you're a comedian. You work in New York. How would you sort of describe the? The difference nightlife pre and post COVID in terms of vibes, I guess. Do you, is there a difference?

• 2:21Speaker 02

  The nightlife, well, because I do stand up, I feel like I was never like having fun. I was always just in basements in 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.

• 2:37Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I would, I would say comedy counts as nightlife, right?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  The 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.

• 2:54Ryan Broderick?

  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.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  He's interested in New York comedy.

• 3:06Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  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, oh, the white gays. They've reached a parody of sorts where they're actually just as evil as a, as a straight white. I feel like I'm always seeing him say these insane things of being like, of course, the idiots must be murdered. And that is bad, but I'm the devil.

• 3:48Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  So I like it.

• 3:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. That's a great ass summary. Very concerned with the Antichrist. That's true. Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Right. And I feel like, but he also, I feel like a lot of like what I perceive as the bad actors in our world kind of have this hubris of, but I'm doing it big for God. Like I'm on the right side. We just have like a difference of ideas of how to make the world a better place. I've always had this idea that he's like, no, the world's going to be worse, but I'm going to be the best.

• 4:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Um, and he has a lot of crazy ideas about like what people should be doing with their bodies. He was the one who wanted to start a biohacking Olympics where you could basically just do whatever you wanted to yourself and compete in it.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  And then compete.

• 4:30Ryan Broderick?

  And, and apparently it is happening next month in Las Vegas. So it is, it is set for May.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  It's not if you don't know about it.

• 4:37Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? And I think that that's why it's not the Olympics. The thing about the Olympics is we've all heard of that. And so if we just close our ears, then it can't be the Olympics.

• 4:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  It's just a thing for freaks in the desert.

• 4:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, it's rich people love, you know, watching people compete. They, you know, and the rich guys that we have now really want to create like disgusting steroid influenced muscle men for some reason. So like, that's very hot right now, I think. So it makes sense. That's just a very current example of his eccentric interests and investments that might seem random or beneath him, but I think we will discover today that's not the case. But Peter Thiel's been around for a while. We're going to start our story in 1996. Peter Thiel and David Sacks publish a book called The Diversity Myth, a book about how what they're calling at the time affirmative action is bad and they focus on their experiences at Stanford.

• 5:33Ryan Broderick?

  Two years later, he found PayPal. PayPal was Peter Thiel's idea of like how to get around like banking regulations around the world. PayPal is then sold to eBay in 2002 and Thiel found Palantir.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  And then Partyful, right? Which is another sort of surveillance state.

• 5:50Ryan Broderick?

  I keep hearing that. Is Partyful owned by Palantir? I keep hearing that.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  No, it was started by former Palantir employees. I have a better, what if we used bomb technology to force you to go to my birthday?

• 6:00Ryan Broderick?

  I see. Yes, yes, I'm seeing this right here. It is founded by Joy Tao and Shreya Murthy, who both met at Palantir. Wow, okay, great. Well, Peter Thiel was also interested in other forms of surveillance because in 2004, he's the first outside investor for Facebook. He gives them half a million dollars and he becomes very wealthy. And then in 2015, just to kind of finish his LinkedIn profile here, Peter Thiel is the, one of the founding investors of OpenAI. So he is very much the, the godfather of our entire moment. And yeah, and then by 2023, he's talking about the Antichrist all the time. So like,

• 6:44Ryan Broderick?

  How familiar are you with like the kind of like tech bro libertarian guy who's like always trying to like make a sovereign country that he's like the king of like do you know about this whole scene?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  I'm on, I'm one of the last people on Twitter. So I think I like see it from a distance. I see the cryptocurrency. I read careless people. I feel like I understand this idea that like they used to think they could like use technology to hack the world to make it better. And now they're like, actually, what if I was the philosopher king and everyone had to do indoor rock climbing?

• 7:14Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right. Peter Thiel gave a lot of money for seasteading and these other weird projects. And this is something we see across his whole career, you know, pragmatic investments and him being a goofy asshole. 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 like exponential technological progress, an old science fiction trope often referred to as the singularity. And then this AI guy Yudkowsky

• 7:58Ryan Broderick?

  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?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  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? Like, but people love their SAT scores.

• 8:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't remember mine. I don't think it was good, though. I don't, they had just introduced the essay, which I think helped me like kind of get some points back, but it wasn't very good.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Well, you're not a sheep.

• 8:24Ryan Broderick?

  I'm not a sheep. No, I'm a, I'm a, I'm an outsider.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  You're a free thinker.

• 8:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And so basically, these guys, the, the Eliza Yudkowsky, 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? And they're also spending a lot of money on Silicon Valley projects, kind of building social media, and they're going after kind of what they see as the liberal establishment.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  You know what's crazy to me about these guys is I saw iRobot and I went, that seems about right. Like, I'm always interested in these people be like, what would happen if the computers came alive? I'm like, Will Smith already told me.

• 9:05Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Why don't you know too? It's not gonna be good. They're not gonna be happy with us.

• 9:10Ryan Broderick?

  That movie is better than it should be, actually.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  It just seemed to hold true.

• 9:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's like, and also, like, I don't ca- like, I don't worry about it. Like, it's not something on my mind.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Well, it's like, well, don't make it happen, then.

• 9:22Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  It seems like a problem that we could just prevent by not doing.

• 9:25Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Well, I guess, like, I suppose the unspoken thing there is, like, if they're like, if we don't do it, some- someone else will, 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."

• 9:58Speaker 02

  This I knew, and then he comes back at them with Hulk Hogan, right?

• 10:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, so-

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Imagine a proxy war with Hulk Hogan.

• 10:03Ryan Broderick?

  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, um, they were excited. So, okay, I'm trying to remember my extensive, uh, knowledge of the Epstein files at this point. Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein were very excited about Brexit in 2016.

• 10:46Ryan Broderick?

  They really wanted to sort of like watch the UK get demolished so they could get lower interest rates. Peter Thiel.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  I covered the Prince Andrew and he was like the special envoy. I remember those emails where they were like, "Just bomb them. You can get really great deals when everything's 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 own.

• 11:06Ryan Broderick?

  That's exactly it. And Peter Thiel appears to have visited Zoro 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?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Vaguely. I feel like I was always aware of Gawker. I feel like I knew about it from like the comedy standpoint as 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. But I think maybe making fun of more like the celebrities and the sightings. I know they were always doing like, kind of like man on the streets here is like Alec Baldwin. You know what I mean? I feel like maybe the more pop culture filtered down, but I was definitely aware of it as like a tent pole of funny blogging from New York, which I think I then was trying to, I was always, I was thrust into the world after Gawker.

• 12:09Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay. Where are you from?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  I'm from New Jersey, but I would have gone, I would have graduated from college in like 2014. So I don't know when Gawker went down, but I think its heyday was a little bit predated me.

• 12:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you would have entered New York like right as Gawker is ending. And I, it's funny, like I remember, I was first working in newsrooms in like the early 2010s and like when Gawker would publish something big, like the whole newsroom would just like go quiet. Like everyone was kind of afraid of Gawker in a way. And yeah, the case goes to court in 2016. The jury awards Hulk Hogan $140 million in damages for the violation of privacy. And then basically like a couple of months later, it's revealed in Forbes that Peter Thiel paid for the lawsuit and he's spent $10 million. On it. And then we get this sort of little cap here, which is, this is a, this is a quote

• 13:01Ryan Broderick?

  from GQ. It marks a very scary point in our country's history. It's confirmation of a long-held assumption that we all hoped wasn't true. Namely, that there are no checks on what the truly wealthy can do to people. Let's just say that it's totally fitting that Thiel is a Donald Trump delegate in California. And so, yeah, I mean, like, I do, I mean, it's, it is scary. It is, it, I, the, the end of Gawker freaked me out. I, I, I still sort of am freaked out about it. As a preview for where this is going, Thiel, you know, he's looking for bargains. He's looking to change the world. So let me just ask you this. What's your familiarity with the Red Scare podcast?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  I'm familiar with them because I knew Come Town. I was in a Come Town sketch. So I knew the Come Town guys and I knew Dasha through Adam. And so I've always been aware of them as kind of like cool girls who then, and now, of course, I think years ago, I, I muted and blocked Anna on Twitter because I was like sick of watching her defend Woody Allen in this way that I found like not even, I, I can't stand somebody who's like being hack and contrarian for the sake of it. If you have fucked up beliefs and you're smart, like a Tim Dillon, I'm like, early days, Tim Dillon, I'm like, well, at least he's funny and he has a perspective.

• 14:15Ryan Broderick?

  He's consistent.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  When I, when I can see that you're just taking the opposite opinion just to be problematic, I'm bored. And I, I think I blocked her years ago because of that. Yeah.

• 14:24Ryan Broderick?

  I was not living in the US like during most of the Trump administration. And so like, all of that stuff, I like only learned about when I moved back at the end of 2019. And I was like, what the fuck is all of this? Like, and I guess, it's funny, I haven't thought of it as sort of like, what kind of replaced Gawker at like, in like, the hierarchy of New York media, New York, kind of like entertainment. But it, it is, it is sort of what did replace it, actually. Like, the Chapo, Come Town, Red Scare, kind of like scene. And that scene is what we're going to be talking about, right after a word from our sponsors. Palantir.

• 15:04Speaker 03

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• 16:35Ryan Broderick?

  So are you familiar with the term teal bucks?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  That sounds like it. No, but it does make me assume like, you know, that scene of Donald Duck and DuckTales when he's like swimming through his?

• 16:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  His gold coins. Like, that is what I think, but I bet it's less physical than that. I would guess that that is a more valuable sum of money because you can touch it than whatever teal bucks is, which I imagine exists in his cyber-only nation state on an oil rig in the Pacific.

• 17:00Ryan Broderick?

  It's actually almost the opposite.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Really?

• 17:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. It's, um, it's the term that a lot of influencers and media people refer to, uh, use to refer to the money that Peter Thiel gives them to be reactionary and contrarian, allegedly.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Wow. So it's real money?

• 17:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 17:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Teal Bucks are basically this term that starts like circulating among like podcasters in New York about like they're getting money from Peter Thiel to like make edgy podcasts. But he's fun in all kinds of stuff and you know, all these people with a very peculiar worldview. For instance, he's got projects involving Tyler Cohen, who writes a lot for the Free Press.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Ah, my favorite blog.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  What's your favorite article?

• 17:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, what's your favorite article on the Free Press?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  I like it when they talk about dating and then it comes to the conclusion where they're like, is dating hard? And they're like, yeah, probably because you're a fucking whore.

• 17:54Ryan Broderick?

  Very helpful, very helpful advice.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  It started spamming me an article entitled, Why Open Relationships Never Work, and it started flooding it to me on all different apps.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  See, that's the problem with the Free Press style section is they'll get me. And so I go, I don't know that you're wrong. And then as I'm reading and I go, okay, but we're coming at it from different angles.

• 18:14Ryan Broderick?

  Totally different angles.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Somehow your angle is Israel and my angle is just like, dude, hair and sexual power dynamics and the fact that time is like fixed, but yours seems like Zionism.

• 18:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. Also for context, Tyler Cohen is the guy who wrote that piece arguing that AI actresses would be good because they would be by definition virgins.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  See, exactly. Sometimes they get me with a really good point.

• 18:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, finally, like virgin actresses. Yeah. And oh, we have a quote from it actually here, which is about the AI actress Tilly Norwood. Tilly Norwood doesn't need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on screen, this is, this is one of your better chances. That's because she's AI. Cool, man.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Have you ever asked yourself, I hope I'm seeing a virgin on screen? Is that a question?

• 19:06Ryan Broderick?

  Every time, every single time.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  For me, as someone who covers a lot of pop culture gossip stuff, I'm like, I need them to actually be fucking for me to have something to talk about. You know what I mean? Like, if you're a virgin, then what kind of divorce did you go through? Like, it's just not as interesting for me to talk about your personal life.

• 19:21Ryan Broderick?

  I have actually come around to the idea that like due to like the arts being gutted in every direction, music and movies and TV are like not good enough anymore on their own. And I actually do need the people who make them to do fucked up weird stuff in real life because like the lighting is not good in Hollywood anymore. Like, like music is all compressed and usually using AI. Like, I want, like, go, yeah, go attack a kid in Brazil. I don't care. That's, that's more interesting.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I want to watch it through the light of the fact that Shia LaBeouf just was like homophobic in New Orleans. And now Honey Boy has some texture to it.

• 19:55Ryan Broderick?

  That's it. It's adding texture to this stuff. That's exactly right. Um, look forward to that next, the next panic world where Shia LaBeouf is our guest. Yeah, sure. I mean, hey, I, I want to talk to him about, um, stuff. Sure. Yeah, I would talk to him.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Send it my way. The most interesting thing about him to me is he secretly has a baby with Mia Goth. That could have never happened if he was a virgin.

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  That's true. They don't, yeah, they don't talk about that enough. I think she had to like fly to Rome to help him recently. Anyways, because he was like off on some weird Catholic like vision quest. Um, okay. So in 2019.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Peter Thiel, all roads lead back to J D Vance and Peter Thiel.

• 20:25Ryan Broderick?

  Actually, this is perfect. Yeah. So in 2019, Peter Thiel starts the National Conservative Conference or NatCon. J D Vance is a keynote speaker. They kind of like create this movement that Vanity Fair calls the new right. They're like going back to those old weird bloggers we talked about. Eliza Udkowski is one of them. Another one is Curtis Yarvin, who's like this, God, he just like sucks really bad. Dark Enlightenment is like these guys who believe that like you should like bring back feudalism, but you'd have computers, basically. Curtis Yarvin has been blogging about it for 30 something years. And in 2022, Yarvin ends up as a guest on the Red Scare. It's a weird pairing and it seems like it

• 21:09Ryan Broderick?

  shouldn't matter to these guys, but quoting the Vanity Fair piece, Yarvin has mused that the liberal regime will begin to fall when the cool kids start to abandon its values and worldview. So I want to get into how this all went down and, you know, how they were all connected. It's sort of in this like immediate post-COVID era that people start talking about the dime square scene. Are you familiar with the dime square scene?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Yes, I am.

• 21:32Ryan Broderick?

  Could you, for our listeners, our viewers, could you sort of just brief overview? What's your take on the dime square scene?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So dime square, I believe, started because there was a diner called Dimes Diner or Dimes Restaurant or something and kind of where Lower East Side meets Chinatown. And I think it's actually where, if you've ever seen Gangs of New York, I believe it's like geographically the same footprint. I think that's the cross section.

• 21:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's that little pair, like that triangle down there. Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  It's like there's five, five points that all converge and it used to be run by the Italians and the Irish and now it's run by like anorexic Catholic girls who fuck.

• 22:05Ryan Broderick?

  So the Italians and the Irish. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  It's a haunted piece of land.

• 22:10Ryan Broderick?

  It's gone, it's gone all the way around again where it's just the exact same people fighting over it.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  And it is just like, the group is very insular, but they think they run culture, but the culture kind of lives and dies. It's like, there's two places dime square exists and it's like dime square, the four blocks and then dime square, a place on Twitter. And it's, it feels much like Lena Dunham. It's like one of those cultures where every person who's in it is also writing about it, which makes it feel bigger than it is. And if you have never heard about it, it would never affect you again. But if you have heard about it, it can be quite, I feel like, quick sandy in that you can quickly become obsessed with the cloud of it. It's very skeptical and ironic. Is that fair?

• 22:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think so. And it's a weird one to talk about because like, yeah, so you said like dimes is like, basically like a, like a grocery store kind of place, like a cafe grocery store. It was popular with NYU students who were self-publishing a zine kind of newspaper in the, in the pandemic called the Drunken Canal. It then gets sort of like co-opted or sort of absorbed by the Red Scare Girlies and that whole scene. And they start like building a scene around it. And so this is from a Vanity Fair article, sort of trying to untangle this, where they talk about like the new right and the, and Peter Thiel's influence there. And so they talk about how Honor Levy, the, the writer podcast we mentioned before, starts to get connected here.

• 23:38Ryan Broderick?

  So they write, Levy is an it girl in a downtown Manhattan scene. She is named in a New York Times story that tries to describe that scene where right wing politics had become an aesthetic pose that mingles strangely with an earnest search for moral grounding. She also described her cohort as a bunch of libertine's and on her podcast, you can get a window into a world of people who enjoy a mind bendingly ironic thrill of tut tutting each other for missing church or having premarital sex. Most of the girls downtown are normal, but they'll wear a Trump hat as an accessory, she said. The ones deep into the online scene, she said, want to be like Rennie, like Lenny Reifenshall, Eddie Sedwick. And then she's asked if she would take the money from Peter Thiel, and she says, of

• 24:22Ryan Broderick?

  course. None of this is an accident.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:26Ryan Broderick?

  These people are taking money from Peter Thiel and trying to like create an art scene that feels like in line with Trumpism, basically, which is hard to do because I would say art cannot exist in the world of MAGA, but they're trying. And they end up with NPC Fest. Have you, did you ever hear about this?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Is N like the non-playable character? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not heard of the fest. I've heard of the term.

• 24:51Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So in 2021, Peter Thiel funds the New People's Cinema Club Fest or NPC Fest. And it's a film festival in New York City that my buddy Joe wrote about years ago, Joe Bernstein. And he writes, "The party on Eldridge Street could hardly be contained. Bodies spilled out of the front door onto the sidewalk and joyous screams echoed from the roof. Inside, under the wood beams of the $7.5 million carriage house, a DJ played techno for a young and queer crowd. Among throngs of 20-somethings, a performance artist named Crackhead Barney roamed around in a Trump mask, breasts bared past a man painted green from head to toe, wearing only a jockstrap and an alligator headpiece, shut inside a dog kennel. Over

• 25:33Ryan Broderick?

  the sound of a jazz band, the screams were now clearer. This is being paid for by Peter Thiel."

• 25:38Speaker 02

  I guess I feel it's so much effort to do, come up with what, do you know what I mean? Like, I guess I like to take it back to the Olympics thing of, and yeah, and if you had never written that article and nobody had ever listened, would it have ever happened? You know what I mean? It's like these moment, it feels very, everything exists to be written about and speculated, like this lives for the commenters. It's like not for anybody there. There's no moment. There's nothing that. I don't know, everything feels so performative and like to be like, are you, I met this girl who was 25 and she was trying to impress me by telling me how she freaked out her grad school art teacher by like doing a ripped up political thing. I remember being like, oh yeah, they weren't freaked out at all. And that's how I feel about these parties.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  But because then you can put them online and find young naive people from Ohio desperate to feel something. They could be like, this is freaky shit, man. And you're like, is it?

• 26:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Body paint?

• 26:26Ryan Broderick?

  Also, like a lot of these people, I feel like are, like, I think I can comfortably say this, like washed up millennials who are like, we found a way to like be edgy again. Like, we can bring back the Vice magazine vibe that we lost when like everyone went woke, basically.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And of course, it's a way to get money. I mean, it is like, at the end of the day, these people who act so, it is so fun to have somebody pay for a party. And if like you are that selfless and lacking in moral center, then you'll be like, I don't know, a night of drinking and all I have to do is watch like people get deported. That's fine. Like, I don't know, it's so, it's so hack in the most boring, obvious way of ultimately I'm going where the money is. And they think it's edgy, but it's that thing where like sometimes being edgy in a New York City crowd reverts you to like the most popular opinion, which is what 95% of people in America already thought. So like, congrats.

• 27:16Ryan Broderick?

  It's not, it's not countercultural.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  You're edgy in a group of 295 million.

• 27:20Ryan Broderick?

  It's very hard to convince yourself that you're being countercultural when you're voting for a guy who, who won twice. Yeah. So yeah, in fact, the, the head of this film festival, Trevor Bazile, is a black queer director who was like working in an ice cream shop to pay bills. And Joe Bernstein writes in the piece, Bazile knew he had been cast for a part in someone else's vision of the future, but he accepted the role because he saw it, because he saw in it the chance to pursue his own radical creative agenda, a dynamic nearly as old as art patronage itself.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think when you surround yourself with people who are thinking similarly to you, you kind of lose touch with the power of your irony, the idea that like, this is actually a statement, we're part of, you know, this is going to be the future Dadaism. People are going to be studying this. And everyone around you is doing it too. And you forget, like you lose touch with reality and like what it was about in the first place. And then you have somebody come in and give you money. And I think, you know, the joke is like, a lot of it is. You're being held back by, you know, I mean, like, why don't they have any money? Because there's no good arts programs.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  And so the structures that you're claiming don't matter and you're being ironic and flippant and apathetic towards have now placed you. And ironically, the DEI selection of like, who can we use that'll like fuck over the identity politics questions of the left? And now you're being handed money by the man who's like paying you in order to keep the structures in place. Like, it's all very...

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's it. And it's like, he was right. Like, there seemed to be no other way to get attention.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Just want to give you like, one more detail about

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  what he was up to before, before this festival. So, he was, had a breakdown during 2020, who amongst us didn't? And that started with an acid trip, but he realized that cancellation was a form of currency. So, he started accounts that were constantly being banned. One was called All Triggers No Warnings, and I'm going to read a little bit from this BuzzFeed post. He posted things that are so offensive, they are tricky to describe. Basil posted pro-Trump memes and anti-Trump memes, images of Jeffrey Epstein and AOC in blackface, a drawing of a black man performing fellatio on a white penis at the summit of a milk crate challenge.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  He took so many political stances that he seemed to be mocking the idea of having a political stance at all.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  I don't know. I guess you could say to yourself, this is like an artistic statement about how nothing matters, but I have a hard time with, it's never satire when you're like, doing it. Do you know what I mean? I think we've gotten lost in this idea of like satireizing things, commenting on things when you're just being the fucked up thing.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, he knew why they were using him. He was, he was willing to go into the transaction to be used, but it's just so different to be...

• 30:18Ryan Broderick?

  A downtown scenester, 20 something year old, making shitposts and like being intentionally edgy and then being like selected out of there by like all of the money on God's earth. Yeah. Yeah, someone checked in with him the last night and he seemed to regret doing it. He told his friend to rip the festival to shreds, but this takes an even more tragic turn. Bazile ends up dying after the film festival like that night. A friend who was with him said he was drunk and wheezing but refused help and they tried to monitor him as he slept, but he fell asleep and he just, and he didn't wake up. It's like a really sad story.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 30:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like, it's like this really bleak thing, I think.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  That is really sad to like take this money with this like long-term plan and then of course die on the night that like you sell out having never

• 31:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  realized the other, the back half of the plan, which is like the, I'm gonna get to it.

• 31:09Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly right. Um, that's like a great way to think about it. And this scene still exists. I mean, this is, this scene is responsible for the clavicular fashion week event. The way I sort of see it is it's Peter Thiel trying to create a new form of cool and that cool aligns with his politics. And so it's like, can you find a bunch of washed out New York hipsters that will say and do whatever you want for money? And it's like, yes, of course you can.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  And I think that the joke there is you by definition, in order to buy and fund this group of people, you have to find people who can't be successful in their own right. Cause anybody who could fund their own stuff or get funding or be successful wouldn't need him. So you're like almost creating this like cohort of losers to then validate that you're cool. But I don't know, I guess it gets down to what is cool. I don't know. They're all cooler than me, I'm sure.

• 31:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's not a bad take. Art News wrote at the time, uh, you know, making us about this, making kind of a similar argument. But when I, it hadn't really occurred to me actually. The, the piece reads, Thiel finds it beneficial both to fund explicitly new right personalities, like right wing personalities, but also to fund these edgy art world figures who can maybe push the idea that feminism is cringe, that slurs are edgy and interesting, and that if nothing else, political apathy is interesting. And so, Thiel is both funding the adjacent far-right project, but he's also funding the disengagement of people who would vote left. If you can infiltrate the sort of dirtbag left of the late 2010s and convince a huge chunk

• 32:42Ryan Broderick?

  of them that having any beliefs at all is embarrassing, you just sort of eliminate any opposition that you might receive. It's unfortunately very genius. If you know, as we all do, that most New York hipsters-

• 32:57Speaker 02

  And I think it's genius and it's also like a 30 Rock episode.

• 32:59Ryan Broderick?

  It is a 30 Rock episode, yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Like where they like get Tracy Jordan to go out and try to get black people to not vote. So, you know, it's genius in the sense that the oldest chick in the book is like, I guess the idea of the wheel was genius.

• 33:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  I don't know that having a car today, I'm like, good job. It's just fundable.

• 33:16Ryan Broderick?

  Very fundable.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Do you think it's worked? Claire, I'm just like curious from like New York comedy scene where like, we're told that like comics have gotten like more and more edgy and like the culture's changed. Like, do you feel like this actually has impacted culture?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  It's hard for me to say because I find like, I don't know. I really stand by what I said before of Dime Square is like an example of Girls, which was like one of the lowest watched HBO shows of all time, that like every viewer wrote a review. It's like something like Dime Square, what are we talking about 200 people? You know what I mean? There is such a small-

• 33:45Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's even too high. I think, I think it's maybe-

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Like, it's hard for me to say because I feel like when I look at like the last presidential election, I think the thing that probably stopped the most people I know from voting Democratic was like stronger ideologies, this feeling of like, I want like a leftist president. But then, of course, obviously like that's such a small minority. It's so hard. I feel like it's so hard for me to break out of the silo. I don't, like, when I think of a apathetic person, I think of like a, some video, one of the newsrooms just did where they went down to spring break in Tampa and asked everybody on the beach, like, who's Ayatollah Khomeini? And none of them knew.

• 34:20Ryan Broderick?

  Well, hold on, there's a new Ayatollah Khomeini now. So like, that's, that's fair, actually. It's kind of hard to keep track.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  And they're like, well, the man or the symbol.

• 34:28Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right, right.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Because one can live on forever. But I feel like when I think about political apathy amongst the youth, I'm like, is it, I don't know, who's watching, like, I love the Kardashians, but you have to think like, there's so many millions of 25 year olds who weren't going to vote either way. The idea that you have to go and like, cut out six people in a consistently blue borough feels to what end? Except for that, to him, it's important because all these people are ultimately losers who want to be cool. Like the Elon Musk effect of like, can I get into the party? He really is like, who would I have wanted to know in college? Can I pay this girl to not only like me, but then say I'm right? I don't, you know what I mean? It feels so small potatoes in the, when you think of the grand scheme of like, Wisconsin, you know?

• 35:11Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's right. You funded Facebook. I think that's right. And like, from what I've heard from people like who still work in like, traditional media in New York, like, one of the kind of unfortunate side effects of all of this is that like, older editors never left Twitter, like, they're still there too. And they're, they're, they are still very obsessed with like, the question of like, what is cool in New York? And so it has been actually, I've heard, like, fairly easy to convince the remaining people at the top of like, New York media that like, this is real, which is, I think, the problem, even though it's like, clearly not real. Like, these people are freaks and like, nothing they do matters, but.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  And that's how I feel like, as someone who lives in New York and is the comedy scene, I'm kind of like, I don't, it's funny, people have like, called me in my podcast hosts, they're like, oh, I started listening to you because I was looking for a not evil red scare. They came and found us.

• 36:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  And it is one of those things where I've met people who like, I know someone who moved to Berlin to try to escape how desperate they were to seem cool at Dime Square and then came back and they're like, well, they're the only people that matter to people in Dime Square. And then they're like, I had to leave the country because it was so stupid. But when I come back, I still want to be thought of as cool on that, like, one closed off street, drinking whatever the cool drink is. So it's like. I don't know. They really are people that if all of us turned away, they wouldn't exist.

• 36:27Ryan Broderick?

  A hundred percent. There is that, yeah, I was trying to think of the bar, clandestino. That's the bar they're all.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yes, that's the one. I was trying to think of like a cool name, but I've.

• 36:36Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, the weird thing is, and this is true, a friend of mine was in the Dime Square play, which was sort of like this weird independent other thing happening during like the early 2020s at the same time, which for people who are listening who don't know, like there is this play that was being put on in like apartments around the city and my friend was one of the actors in it. It sort of dramatizes like these washouts in Manhattan, sort of like in the period of one night. It's a good play. It's fun. And then I went to like one of the parties that the real Dime Square people were there, but then also the fake Dime Square actors in the play where it was, it was deeply unfun. Like everyone there was so boring.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  The joke is like, if you want to talk about a New York City subculture of people in their twenties that are actually probably impacting elections, I think you look at a girl like Hallie Kait and Jazz and I go, they might have, I think they have more reach and more money being spent and more votes being created than the Dime Square people, like the West Village girlies of like a Kit Kean. You know what I mean? Like, it's funny and it's, but because of course it's inside and it's, no old person wants to think they're not down with the young, cool artists who are going to reject them.

• 37:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. What any of this has to do with the Antichrist, that's after the break.

• 37:47Ryan Broderick?

  So my read on all of this is that Peter Thiel kills Gawker because he has a personal vendetta, but he also sort of understands the power that Gawker had in the early 2010s, the sort of cool cachet clout that they had. And he sort of, and then he spends like the next decade and a half sort of building his own replacement of it. But at the same time, he's also grooming a future vice president. So he, he sort of helps J D Vance climb the ranks of politics. And he now, you know, you would think would be very happy about, you know, controlling everything, but he's not because he's, uh, he's telling anyone that will listen that the Antichrist is real and that, uh, like Satan walks among us.

• 38:33Ryan Broderick?

  And also talking about how

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Is it, is it a dude or is it an essence? Do we know?

• 38:38Ryan Broderick?

  Seems like it's a dude. Seems like it's an actual guy.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  And we got eyes on him or is he just like, keep, keep your eyes out open?

• 38:45Speaker 03

  I went too deep into this in order for this outline and try to streamline the crazy out. It's like, it's a real person, but I think, but if you start to name it and address it, you will become like this other person. So you can never actually like, look at it directly.

• 39:01Ryan Broderick?

  That's a very Catholic thing. That's a very Catholic idea.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Hypothetically, if I grant Irving, not saying Peter Thiel would do this, but were to say is like, Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, then like, that would be giving power away is my understanding of reading too many articles about this thing that breaks my brain. Does that make sense? So like, like it's real, but we can't ever, we can't ever get like, you know, it's like a ghost. We can't ever like shine the light directly at it.

• 39:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I've got a couple of quotes here from Thiel about the Antichrist. So, "How might such an Antichrist rise to power?" Thiel asked. "By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist slogan, peace and safety. In other words, it would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse. Like, for instance, a man who runs an AI surveillance company. That seems like someone who could be the Antichrist."

• 39:56Speaker 02

  And also I'm interested, he's saying like, beware of decadence?

• 40:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I can't imagine this man doesn't own a yacht.

• 40:02Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I'm sure he owns a yacht for his yacht.

• 40:07Ryan Broderick?

  This is another description from the New York Times. "Thiel, it's the opposite of the picture where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is we need to stop science. We need to just say, stop to this. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg." So that, that's, that's, that's Grant's idea that it could be Greta.

• 40:35Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, it's, it does feel like a lot of this, though, is him telling on himself. Like he's sort of going around telling everyone like, someone like me could be the Antichrist, but it's not me. And I'm scared that that guy is out there somewhere. And it's like, well.

• 40:49Ryan Broderick?

  I mean.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  But isn't he also saying the Antichrist will convince you it's me, but that's because I'm Christlike?

• 40:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, also true.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  To me, the Antichrist is probably anybody who hates Claire Parker. So just like, if you hear stuff like that,

• 41:02Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Just be careful. You're near the devil and the best thing you could do to fight off the devil, I'd say is like, love and worship Claire Parker.

• 41:09Ryan Broderick?

  Right. I also think he's probably reacting to like, so, okay, my, my sort of, I don't even, I wouldn't even call it tin foil hat theory, but like my sort of read is people like Peter Thiel are very interested in controlling how we feel about people like Peter Thiel. And over the last year, two years, especially, people have become a lot more vocal about how we feel about Peter Thiel and people like Peter Thiel, Luigi Mangione, the person who took a shot at Donald Trump, and the person who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk. Like, we are in a moment, the person who just yesterday burned down a toilet paper factory because they didn't pay him a living wage.

• 41:51Ryan Broderick?

  Like, we are at a moment of sort of large scale civil unrest and a lot of that is directed at, you know, high level right wing elites. And Peter Thiel actually did have like a meltdown on Piers Morgan about Luigi Mangione and was like, very scared.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  He did it because he said this healthcare executive is presiding over a healthcare system which kills thousands of Americans by denying them cover. What would you say to them?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Um.

• 42:18Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, I, I, I don't know what. I think like, that is part of the crash out here. It's like, I've done so much work and spent so much money to control how people see the world and it's not working and I'm kind of freaked out. That's, that's my read on some of this.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I can make somebody president, but I can't make you like me.

• 42:38Ryan Broderick?

  Right, exactly.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Which is so pathetic and sad.

• 42:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's very sad. The, the question that I always have about the dinosaur stuff is like.

• 42:46Ryan Broderick?

  Is there a world where like it like it eventually does have like does matter? Like, do you think that like it will like these people will ever sort of like get the influence? They they kind of think they have?

• 42:56Speaker 02

  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 gonna be like, they were at the same place 20 years ago? There's always those like, you know, Paris in the 1920s. There's always gonna be a place where somebody's 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 gonna be, you know, offshoot Austin, Texas or something. And they're all gonna be like, yeah, what we do is like amputate our own fingers and add more stuff.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 what I mean? The 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.

• 44:10Ryan Broderick?

  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 90s, 2000s. I think it's time like we pick like Cleveland or Cincinnati or some Minneapolis. Minneapolis, actually, honestly, I could see Minneapolis.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Oh, you know what I love?

• 44:30Ryan Broderick?

  Milwaukee, yeah.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. My question going into this was like, why would somebody with literally all that power possibly care about hipsters in New York City so much?

• 44:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  I feel if you could make Catholicism cool. I think there's like the dual things of who he wants to like him. And it's both cool kids in New York. And 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 so 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 MAGA stuff.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  What are you talking about? You have a popular podcast.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, but popular is not cool. You know what I mean? Like what I am is different than like Manhattan, Lower East Side cool.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Don't tell me that. This is the coolest I've ever been in my life and I'm whole and I'm savoring every sip of it.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  But I think, I wonder if by making like the thing, like he wants to be cool for artists. And then also he wants to be cool with God. And if you can somehow make the artist Catholic, you can like bend what religion thing. You know what I mean? It's interesting. Like it's like so macro and micro that he wants like the girl at the bar to think he's cool. And then also Jesus Christ. And if he can like change what Jesus Christ is on earth through art.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  I love how straightforward that is. Mine might be overly complicated, but I've been curious for your opinion.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  No, go for.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Somebody unifying the world in like an anti-tech way is promising salvation. It's like trying to make a heaven on earth. And that's, and that's actually really bad because heaven's supposed to be where heaven is. So like anyone that like could be uniting, could be cool, could be believing in anything that is not like, we need to be like bringing about the singularity or making tech advancements is like really frightening. If there were young people who are about something now, and it was antithetical to like tech being the center of everything, that that would actually be really threatening

• 46:47Speaker 03

  if you actually believe that like. This is real and it could drive you to being like, and thus we must surveil all of them and like win them all over.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  I feel like I have such a hard time following because he is so inherently like contradictory, but it's hard for me to even figure out which side of him is operating at any given time. Because even when you think about the fact that he believes in an antichrist and he believes in a heaven that can't be here on earth, why work so hard to biohack and stay alive forever? Like if what, no matter what, even if you are the richest billionaire who owns the president, heaven would be better. It's so many opposites, so many double negatives that I almost sometimes I'm like, so you think the artists have heaven or you think the tech-based world has heaven? And you think those are different or like, it's hard to follow exactly what.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  I think that's exactly it. We're so afraid of

• 47:41Speaker 03

  somebody committing terrorism here. So the only solution is to go preemptively blow somebody else up. I think it's similar thinking.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Okay, I just read the Jakarta method. So I think everything I do, I like look through like a CIA op. So you're almost thinking that this is very like, it's akin to like what we do in like Brazil and communist countries where we go in and we like create a fake right wing to create infighting in the country. So you think Times Square is like liberal New York art scene infighting so that there's nothing to oppose him?

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Like, I do think it can be both. Like, on the one hand, he like has come up with this cultural psy-op to kind of make sure the downtown NYU future generation never comes for him. But I also do think he seems to want to be liked. You know what I mean? Which is always interesting to me because as someone who's gotten success on the internet, like my dream of success is like having enough money, you never have to go online again. And I'm like, if I had a hundred billion dollars, I have like 10 people I love. I would just be in a giant house with them somewhere, eating dinner. The idea of trying to, of paying for somebody else's party and like being in the news like that. I don't know, it's.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Well, 100% exactly.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Okay, here's my new theory. I don't think he wants to be liked, but I think he's a smart man who realized it wasn't enough to have power. You have to have like cultural capital in this weird way. And this was his attempt to buy it.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Right. Claire, my last question for you is, how many teal books would it take for you to like make a right wing pivot? Have you thought about it?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Books? I thought you were saying books. I'm like, how much, how much reading?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, how much reading? Yeah.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  I guess enough to drive me absolutely insane. I'm trying to think because I guess much like the director and I think he's like a great cautionary tale against what I'm about to say. There I feel like everybody has a number where you go, well, with that amount of money, you do it once, then you do way more better. Like, you know what I mean? Like, what is one crazy podcast episode versus like if I could give $5 million to people who like need help on the street or something. But then the scary idea is, yeah, but what if you don't survive that one podcast episode and then you've like gone out the worst version of yourself? I don't know. Peter Thiel feels really tough. But I guess the other scary thing is I have a podcast that does advertising and I couldn't tell you for sure. I've never touched Peter Thiel investment money.

• 49:57Ryan Broderick?

  I don't think we have either. I think that's on our blog. I think most of his stuff. I mean, I don't, I can't imagine Peter Palantir would actually want to advertise on this show, but.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  I would love to record that ad.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  No, but I'm saying like what he invested in like bed sheets and you do, do you know what I mean? Like, that's what's so scary is I feel like, you know what I mean? Okay, but like you're, you did an ad for a smoothie company. It turns out they were bought out by Sequoia and it turns out he invested in Sequoia and now you're like, it's, it's hard.

• 50:24Ryan Broderick?

  It is hard.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Because the stocks don't really have a lot of advertising budget.

• 50:29Ryan Broderick?

  If you are a small business that isn't funded by Peter Thiel and you'd like to advertise on this show, you can email josh@garbage day dot email and he'll set you up. Claire, I want to thank you for coming on. This was a great conversation. Thank you again. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  I'm at Claire the Scare on Tik Tok and Instagram and YouTube and I just dropped my debut comedy special. If you want to watch it, it's called Claire Parker's 32 on YouTube. And then I have a podcast called The Good Noticing Podcast where we actually touch on similar things. I feel like I've avoided Peter Thiel outright, but we're definitely also, we're wary of OpenAI. We're wary of Sam Altman. So similar, similar cultural deep dives, but a little less lowry side-ish, I think.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  We try not to give those people too much power.

• 51:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's why we've like waited like almost two years to ever talk about this stuff.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  But then you can't. I mean, we've talked about, I did a deep dive on clavicular because I'm like, he's from my hometown. So I felt, because then it's like that line of, I don't want to give it any more power and talk about it. But if people can come here, get all the info they need and then not have to click another link, would that be helpful? I don't know. It's a tricky world.

• 51:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it is. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales at Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to

• 52:17Ryan Broderick?

  talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com slash at Panic World Pod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.