Peter Thiel’s Blood Begins Pumping When Speaking About Jeffrey Epstein

Peter Thiel went on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Friday and shared his eccentric “ideas” on a variety of matters. Given Thiel’s repute as libertarian philosopher king, PayPal mafia member, defense contractor, former Trump lover, and political megadonor, listeners may need assumed {that a} assembly of those minds can be fascinating. In case you discover two males who assume they’re far smarter than they’re speaking at size concerning the climate fascinating, effectively, the episode delivered.

The primary downside with Thiel is that—as colourful and nefarious as he sounds on paper—he’s extraordinarily boring to take heed to. Listening to him drone on about political and technological ideas is the auditory equal of watching paint dry and, even though his remarks usually give the impression that he’s open-sourcing designs for a rightwing plot against America, my eyes can’t assist however glaze over on the sound of his voice.

That stated, Thiel continues to be attention-grabbing—not due to his character, however due to the concepts and the political forces that he represents. There are few individuals who have tried to exert their will in America’s political and cultural dialog greater than Thiel, and as such, whether or not he’s charismatic or not, it’s fairly necessary to listen to what he has to say.

Rogan and Thiel’s dialog begins with a dialogue of the numerous “issues” going through America. Thiel’s prime concern is typical for somebody in his socio-economic bracket: the federal deficit. “Yeah. I imply, there are quite a bit [of problems] which are fairly apparent to articulate, they usually’re a lot simpler to explain than resolve. Like we now have a loopy, loopy finances deficit,” Thiel supplied. Presently, the U.S. authorities is $34 trillion in debt, a incontrovertible fact that conservative politicians and commentators have lengthy been obsessive about, despite the fact that economists are split on whether or not it’s really even an issue.

What can we do concerning the deficit? Once more, Thiel offers a typical wealthy individual reply: The answer to America’s budgetary woes isn’t to modernize packages that had been created final century, trim among the financial fat appended to the Pentagon (Thiel’s employer), or god forbid, increase taxes on insanely rich individuals like Thiel, however, as Thiel places it, to determine “out methods to step by step dial again quite a lot of these authorities advantages” (i.e., make cuts to packages like Social Safety, the social security web that hundreds of thousands of non-rich People depend on).

As a identified right-winger, Thiel additionally spends an compulsory period of time hating on that bastion of corrupt liberalism often known as California. “The tough mannequin I’ve for the way to consider California is that it’s type of like Saudi Arabia,” says Thiel. “And you’ve got a loopy faith, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You understand, not that many individuals imagine it, but it surely distorts every thing. After which you have got like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you’ve got the large tech firms in California and the oil pays for every thing. After which you have got a totally bloated, inefficient authorities sector.”

Nevertheless, whereas Thiel paints a comically grim portrait of California, he can’t in the end appear to give you a location that beats it. After rattling off a listing of cities and cataloging their obvious faults, he lastly admits that on the subject of California’s coastal local weather: “I’m a sucker for the climate.” You get the sensation that he’s actually solely dumping on the state to impress his right-wing buddies.

Different necessary conversational junctures: Is local weather change actual? Thiel’s response is a full 17 seconds of stammers earlier than admitting: “It’s attainable local weather change is occurring.”

The declining birthrate? Thiel appears to agree with Elon’s position that it’s unhealthy: “When you get an inverted demographic pyramid, in some unspecified time in the future do you vote for advantages for the previous or for the younger? If the individuals with youngsters get financially penalized and the individuals with out youngsters vote advantages for themselves, it is going to be very tough to flip again.”

Thiel and Rogan grouse about a complete lot of various matters within the three-plus hours that the dialog runs (UFOs, historic civilizations, and AI are additionally mentioned), but it surely isn’t till about two hours into this interminable dialogue, that the topic turns to Jeffrey Epstein and associated conspiracy theories, that Thiel lastly stated one thing attention-grabbing.

Certainly, Thiel spent a bizarre period of time vamping about former Microsoft CEO Invoice Gates and his ties to Epstein. He prevented the darker conspiracy theories concerning the useless pedophile, seeming to brush off claims that he might have been a dual intelligence agent working for the U.S. and Israel. As an alternative, he targeted on Gates’ affiliations with the creep. To Thiel, it appears almost certainly that Gates’ relationship with Epstein advanced out of his marital issues with Melinda, and that Epstein might have suggested the Microsoft boss on easy methods to funnel his cash into “left-wing philanthropy” organizations to keep away from giving most of it to his spouse in a divorce settlement. His idea was: “Invoice and Melinda get married in 1994, they don’t signal a prenup, and, you understand, one thing’s going flawed with the wedding,” Thiel stated. “And possibly Melinda can get half the cash in a divorce. He doesn’t need her to get half the cash. What do you do?”

“The alternate plan is one thing like… You commit the marital belongings to this nonprofit after which it form of locks Melinda into not complaining concerning the marriage for an extended, very long time,” Thiel continued. “And so there’s one thing concerning the left-wing philanthropy world that was…some form of Boomer approach to management their loopy wives.”

Thus, Thiel in some way manages to make the Jeffrey Epstein saga right into a conspiracy associated to “left-wing philanthropy”—a powerful feat, given what number of horrible issues Epstein has been accused of that don’t have anything to do with “leftism” or philanthropy. It’s unclear why, of all of the conversational junctures of their marathon dialog, Thiel appears to have been so on this specific topic, although it might simply be that he finds conspiracy theories simply as intriguing as the remainder of us.

Thiel, himself, admits to having met with Epstein a number of instances. When requested by Rogan who launched him, Thiel—who spends an unbelievable quantity of the dialog stammering his manner by way of solutions— comically delivers a solution as succinct and fact-oriented as a lawyer: “It was [LinkedIn founder] Reid Hoffman in Silicon Valley launched us in 2014.”