If you had billionaire investor and political activist Peter Thiel sit down with you for a 3.5 hour interview, what would you ask him about? One would think at least one of the topics of discussion would be Palantir – the tech company he set up after making his money from PayPal – which is devoted to data analytics/surveillance on a mass scale, and is currently worth around $80 billion due to its heavy integration within US intelligence and defense organizations as well as use by the corporate community (the company takes its name from the Elvish “seeing stone” in Lord of the Rings that shows faraway events and can look into the future).
You know, the company that in many ways succeeded the Total Information Awareness Office, beloved of conspiracy theorists everywhere in the first decade of this millennium, after it was shut down due to concerns about its all-seeing reach.
You would think that Joe ‘never met a conspiracy I didn’t like’ Rogan would have been drooling at the chance to dive down that rabbit hole. But no, he never brings the topic up once in the whole 210 minute interview (embedded below for convenience).
Well at least there was another topic currently hot in the news that they could discuss: Donald Trump’s running mate pick JD Vance, which the former president had just announced a few weeks before the interview. Here was something to really pick apart: JD Vance was mentored in his first jobs by Peter Thiel a decade previously, had even named his own venture capital firm (‘Narya’) after an object from the Lord of the Rings, just as Thiel was wont to do, and Thiel was basically his political sponsor, having reportedly contributed $15 million to Vance’s successful run for the US Senate in 2022, even personally introducing him to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Plenty there for Joe Rogan to dig into: was Thiel buying his way into the White House, and likely to be a ‘king in the shadows’ if Trump died during a second presidency?
And perhaps, digging even further, questioning Thiel and Vance’s shared, bizarre ideology about the need for US democracy to come to an end, and for corporate-run technology zones to become the new political landscape (more on that in a later essay I’m currently writing)?
Zero discussion. Radio silence from Joe Rogan.
Instead, the long discussion (made even longer by Thiel’s jagged speaking style…as one commenter notes, it was like the video was buffering the entire time) covered topics ranging from Christopher Dunn’s ‘Giza Power Plant’ theory regarding the Great Pyramid through to UFOs, extraterrestrials as being angels or demons, and mind control (see the full ‘chapter’ list in the YouTube comments section).
Sure, that’s not an overly surprising list of discussion topics for Joe Rogan given his interests (which are also likely similar to many readers of this site), but it certainly seems a strange list for a guest like Thiel (especially given the more important and relevant topics omitted from the interview, as I mentioned above).
More discussion on the ‘why’ behind these topics being discussed below, but first, here’s the full interview:
To understand why Thiel’s interview with Rogan covered so many ‘out there’ topics, it’s worth pointing out that Thiel’s biography is literally titled The Contrarian. It is perhaps one of the main philosophies that he has himself used to build his own identity (whether that is for marketing/branding purposes, or he truly believes it, is up in the air – see below for more on that): to be seen as a free-thinker, to consider ideas that most people dismiss (both in business, and more generally), and to not follow the herd. “Maybe I do always have this background program running where I’m trying to think of, ‘O.K., what’s the opposite of what you’re saying?’ and then I’ll try that,” he is quoted as saying in the The Contrarian.
As such, one of his companies, Founders Fund, has sponsored the Hereticon conference, “a conference for thoughtcrime”, in which speakers discuss topics such as geo-engineering, transhumanism, parapsychology, the scientific search for immortality, and “in a hidden room plastered in newspaper clippings of sightings and secret bases, there may be a talk or two on UFOs and literally a séance. Let’s get weird.”
And during the Joe Rogan interview (around the 55 minute mark), we get an odd little exchange where Joe says “I know we met, what was that guy’s name at your place, the guy who did Chariots of the Gods“, and Thiel responds “Oh von Däniken. Yeah, you thought he was too crazy – you like [Graham] Hancock but you don’t like von Däniken.” Later (around 2:41:00), Thiel also drops Jacques Vallee’s name into one of the discussions – so he’s definitely familiar with authors and researchers in these fringe topics to the point of knowing their names, and even apparently has some of them over at his house at times (at least in von Däniken’s case).
The value Thiel sees in being contrarian seems emblematic of our entire culture in recent years. When I created The Daily Grail some 25 years ago, it was in part because many of these topics seemed to be ignored, and I thought it was important that they had a place where they were at least discussed and debated (even if they ultimately proved to be wrong). Now, in 2024, there is hardly a topic that we cover that doesn’t regularly make mainstream or large media websites, and scrolling through social media is just an endless list of contrarian takes, from ‘UFO Twitter’ to endless anti-climate science rants.
Where I disagree with Thiel’s approach however – and indeed most of modern culture’s contrarianism – is that being contrarian should just be a tool through which you can play devil’s advocate and entertain heretical ideas, just in case there’s something more to them (and also, it’s sometimes just good exercise for the mind to break out of conventional thinking and take different perspectives). It shouldn’t be used as part of your central identity, either just for the sake of being contrarian, or to help prop up personal beliefs/ideologies that you should be discarding and moving on from. In Thiel’s case, for example, he seems to have a large number of ultra-conservative views from his youth that he uses his contrarianism to shield and protect.
Or perhaps it’s all just cover. Why, I thought to myself, would Peter Thiel – who is quite obviously not a fluid speaker, and instead is known for staying largely in the shadows – appear on the world’s biggest podcast and discuss all these weird topics? Why is the money man behind JD Vance, a leading mentor to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Sam Altman of OpenAI, associate of Elon Musk, investor in some of the world’s most successful tech ventures and founder of Palantir, talking about all these strange ideas? Perhaps the clue comes from the final pages of Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, where Chafkin notes the many times in his research for the book where “Thiel’s most deeply held beliefs seemed at odds with his Machiavellian actions.”
“That these inconsistencies mostly have gone unnoticed,” Chafkin notes, “and that Thiel is regarded as a contrarian freethinker rather than a calculating operator, is a testament to his singular facility for personal branding.”
He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jungle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’ ”
