Transcripts:
One of your p primary sponsors was is a guy Peter Teal, right? What do you owe somebody if you do like if you get into office if somebody like donates a lot of money to your campaign? Like how does that relationship work after that? >> I think the attitude is you don't owe them anything.
I see a lot of crazy stuff on the internet about Peter Teal. You know, he's always been a friend of mine. He's always been one of the smartest people I've ever met. Like just a very just a very thoughtful dude. But he's he's literally never asked me once for anything. It's an honor to serve, but it's also a sacrifice to serve.
And if people were going to write me a check, great. But I don't owe them anything. Um, >> so he just believed in you. He believed in me. American oligarchy has reached a pretty terrifying new level. >> It's been bound to happen. The moment where we all share this earth with the first trillionaire. >> Netflix is announcing a definitive agreement to buy Warner Brothers in a multi-billion dollar deal.
>> What are the pros of Chat GBT? It can like really do a lot of stuff. People are asking it for like healthcare advice, how to learn stuff. >> And do you use Chat GBT when when raising your baby? >> I I I do. I cannot imagine having gone through the like figuring out how to raise a newborn without CHP.
Clearly, people did it for a long time. No problem. >> Yes. >> But Yeah. >> So, so I know like it's clearly was possible. >> Yes, it was possible. >> As prices skyrocket all over the country and income inequality widens, the story stays as cliche as ever. A tiny handful of the most annoying people imaginable get rich off our tax dollars, merging their great empires to create even greater ones in their endless quest to own everything.
I mean, these guys have all the money and power in the world, right? What are they even doing with such endless resources? Oh, that's that's pretty cool, I guess. Well, apparently not paying their taxes or solving world hunger, despite whatever promises made by Rocket Boy. Remember when this guy asked for a dollar amount in a detailed plan that would solve world hunger? And when the World Food Program gave him exactly that, he suddenly stopped replying and never brought it up in public again.
Do you know how hard it is to get Elon Musk to stop talking? But some guys take it a step further. If your name happens to be Peter Teal, for example, then you're operating on a totally different playing field than these freaks. You're still up to your typical billionaire shenanigans, of course, but you're also doing side quests like hosting numerous seminars where the main topic is the Antichrist.
You know, the real regular stuff. He's just like me and you. I don't think it gets more dystopian than extremely rich weapons dealer obsessed with the Antichrist. I mean, if you were to write that in a script, it'd probably be thrown out for being too on the nose. While dishing out spy tech to various militaries and countless federal agencies, Teal pushes forward on his own personal quest to uncover the true harbingers of the apocalypse.
As of this moment, he's found the antichrist to be emboldened by such wicked and unholy concepts as environmentalism and uh regulating Silicon Valley. Is that is that in the Bible? In Teal's own words, the Antichrist is an evil king or tyrant or anti- messiah who appears in the end times. Now, I want you to just pause for a moment here.
Just close your eyes and imagine who he could be thinking about when he says that. Who do you think it fits that definition? Because Teal certainly has some names in mind. Did you think of someone? Okay. Did you think of Greta Thunderberg? According to Peter Teal, the agent of the Antichrist might just be a 22-year-old froggy hatwearing Swedish activist who committed the unthinkable crime of delivering food to starving refugees directly to a blood soaked part of the world that Peter Teal happens to profit from. You know, I'm guessing
that's just a coincidence. Technically, to be fair, his exact words were that Greta was a legionnaire or shadow of the Antichrist. So, not necessarily the Antichrist itself, but something close to it, I guess. But sure, it's this kid that fits the mold and definitely not the guy who told the president's second in command to essentially ignore the words of the pope despite both men being supposedly Catholic.
Because who knows, maybe the pope is the true antichrist, right? I mean, if you ask me, Vance probably shouldn't be meeting with any pope on account of what happened last time. In this third and final installment of our Peter Teal saga, we'll be exploring his more vindictive side. We'll see Teal rise from one of the lowest points of his life to solidify himself as one of the most powerful figures in American politics, ravaging entire media outlets along the way and installing his own personal minions wherever he sees fit. Join me in
shining a bright spotlight on theunchecked influence that Peter Teal has cultivated and continues to wield to this very day. After all, in his words, being evil is far preferable to being incompetent. But before any of that, it's sponsor time. I think you're aware of how it works around here by now.
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I I don't know how to end these. I'm sorry. I want you to imagine for a second that you are Peter Teal. I know you may need to set your morality to the side, but picture this. It's the early to mid 2000s. You are on top of the world. Your data analytics company has bought you a seat at the table with highranking government executives.
You're riding high off your other main company, selling to eBay for a staggering $1.5 billion, earning you personally a $60 million payday that you then sink into what will become one of the most valuable corporations of the 21st century. Meanwhile, your hedge fund is being called by SFGate one of the nation's most successful and daring hedge funds with 2.1 billion in assets.
You're getting invited to speak at conferences and being praised as a kind of investing savant. More glowing profiles are being written about you than you know what to do with. The stuck up mainstream institutions you've always loathed are finally lauding your name. From the New York Times to Fortune to Forbes, which went so far as to call you the philosopher king of hedging.
Within the confines of Silicon Valley and those who report on its power brokers, you are seen as a god. But uh-oh, what's this? Someone's at the door. Who could it be? The worldwide financial crisis of 2008. H not not who I was expecting for some reason. For perhaps the first time in his life, Peter Teal was beginning to struggle.
Whatever struggling means for a guy in his tax bracket. Anyway, in November of '08, TechCrunch reported that despite a previous return of 58% on investments that year, Teal's bets turned sour in October with Clarium Capital, his company, experiencing an 18% hit that one month alone, wiping out all gains for that year and landing Clarium in the negatives.
Snacks Chaffkin wrote in the contrarian that the Clarium investors had received an ominous letter from Teal himself just a few months before Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street institution that Chaffkin notes had survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, and 9/11, came crashing down and triggered the crisis. Speaking in such extreme terms that almost sounded biblical, Teal warned investors that the entire human order could unravel in a relentless escalation of violence, famine, disease, war, and death. Against this future, he wrote,
"It is far better to save one's immortal soul, and accumulate treasures in heaven, in the eternal city of God, than it is to amass a fleeting fortune in the transient and passing city of man." And I'll be honest, hearing those words from the guy in charge of my investmentportfolio probably wouldn't fill me with the most confidence. I won't lie to you.
But even as his prediction of a recession rang true, Chaffkin reports that Teal was unprepared to weather the storm. Precisely, he wrote, "Because he could not convert his big idea into a trading strategy. And by the end of 2008, Teal was down roughly 5%, triggering pensions and sovereign wealth investors to pull their money out of Clarium, effectively ending his career as a professional hedge fund manager, in the words of Chaffkin.
But even outside of his reputation as an investor, cracks were beginning to appear in Teal's personal life. See, Teal is someone who has always benefited from scheming in the shadows. And the more he spoke openly, the more he seemed to gross people out. In 2009, Teal wrote an infamous article for the libertarian Kato Institute that appeared to decry women having the right to vote as one of the reasons democracy hasn't worked.
writing, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare of beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women to constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of a capitalist democracy into an oxymoron." The Huffington Post reported in 2016 that Teal did later clarify his statement with, "Well, I don't think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
" The post points out here that he didn't actually walk back his initial statement ever. Instead, the post said it was Teal's hope that readers would latch on to a different part of his essay. Charged with the prospect of moving beyond politics, Teal had pointed to three new technological frontiers that may one day provide us a kind of escape.
Outer space, cyerspace, and the most bizarre of all, seasteading. Now, if you haven't heard of seasteading ever before in your life, that's because it was a ludicrous fringe idea conjured up by free market economist Milton Freriedman's grandson, Patri Freriedman. These days, you can find Petri making headlines for his bold efforts to create what the Financial Times called cities that run like a for-profit company rather than democratically elected officials.
In Freriedman's ideal vision of society, a private venture-backed company is the city operator and its directors design the laws and they earn revenue through some combination of rents, taxes, and service fees. But in order to achieve this dream of starting a corporation style city, Petri and his friends would need to find a big enough plot of land.
And they've already started scouting. He admits that in Africa, we are looking at land parcels large enough that there will be people living there. in which case we will offer relocation bonuses to pay for anybody who wants to move out of the zone. What's the matter, guys? You don't want to live in a technocratic corporate oligarchy state.
All right, then pack your [ __ ] and get the [ __ ] out, I guess. When the author of this piece asked Freriedman about fears that this could bring about technofascism, Freriedman bluntly replied, "I mean, we are funding companies that will operate non-democratic cities, and if you're not into that, you shouldn't move there." Awesome, man.
What about the people that are there? Anyway, that's how the project is looking currently. But the same Financial Times piece also makes sure to note where Freriedman's scheme received its first bit of funding in the form of a half a million dollar donation in 2008. Back then, Freriedman had set up what he called the Seasteading Institute, which sought to establish such autonomous cities as floating societies at top platforms in international waters.
you know, where you don't have to concern yourself with pesky international laws and whatnot. Giving the residents, in the words of Max Chaffkin, the freedom to experiment with elicit substances and enjoy any other pleasure currently denied by the world's 200 odd countries. Freriedman teamed up with some other like-minded maniacs, I mean libertarians, to write a paper weighing the pros and cons of incinerating human feces on the island, the possibility of using expensive Chinese-made cruise missiles to defend against attacks from hostile naval
fleets, and of course, what it would be like to create a society free of taxation. You wonder why Peter Teal would be down for something like that. As would be impossible for anyone to predict at the time, the concept of seasteading it didn't exactly pan out in the long run, especially as questions of logistics began to pile up, even as the movement gained significant approval from Teal and Freriedman's fellow libertarians.
Business Insider reported in 2018 that because the United Nations grants every member state control from its shoreline up to 200 miles out to sea, these new floating societies would need to be constructed pretty far out into the ocean, further isolating them from other nations and raising the costof operations significantly.
Not to mention the headache of moving a large number of people all the way out there. The institute itself determined it would need at least 225 million just to build the seastead. And then they would need another 8 million a year to keep it functioning, which it wasn't looking the most promising against a crowdfunding effort that had only raised about 27 grand by 2013.
Within the next few years, seasteading was considered a joke by the majority of civil society. Even Teal himself wound up admitting in an interview that engineering floating libertarian utopias out in the middle of the ocean was not quite feasible. But such a realization only popped into his mind, I guess, after he burned millions of dollars on the hopeless venture and was mocked relentlessly for having any hope in it whatsoever.
While this ridicule came from a number of sources, there was one in particular that Teal had a personal and visceral hatred of. If you've never heard of Gawker Media, there's a reason for that. A reason that will reveal itself to us very soon. But if you do happen to be familiar with the publication, then you might know them as the irreverent flamethrowing media network that by 2012 was the proud parent company overseeing a fleet of various websites, including Wonette, which covered politics, Jezebel, which was mostly women's commentary, Dead
Spin, sports, Gizmodo, tech, Kotaku, video games, Fleshbot, porn, and most relevant to our story today, Valley Wag, a blog that took pride in their needling criticism of Silicon Valley tech lords. This is where Peter Teal found his mortal enemy, Nick Denton, founder and managing editor of the flagship site.
While Chaffkin notes that Volleywag wasn't near as large or consequential as Gawker's other sites, Denton considered it his pride and joy, personally taking over blogging duties in 2006. As an Oxford educated journalist who had previously covered the tech world for the Financial Times, Denton had a keen understanding of the valley as the center of the world, for better and for worse.
But as far as Valley Wag writers were concerned, it was mostly for the worse. As an effective tabloid, it was their job to almost exclusively focus on the negative side of the burgeoning tech world, publishing blistering reports of its top leaders. But Chfkin explains here that there was a reason for that, too.
Back in the day, mainstream outlets tended to be a lot less critical of valley figureheads like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, particularly because it was flattery that got you access to these titans. If you wanted to be the first to review a new product or get your foot in the door at an exclusive event, there was a limit on what exactly you were allowed to say.
Chaffkin notes that, for example, reporters guilty of negative coverage of Apple would routinely be banned from launch events, taken off lists for review units, and worst of all, shunned by Steve Jobs, who maintained close personal relationships with the very reporters who were supposed to be holding his company accountable to investors and the public.
Denton aimed to flip this dynamic on its head, taking Valleywag in the complete opposite direction. its writers being utterly unafraid of backlash, sometimes to the point of recklessness. In the years they were operational, Volleywag happily aired out the personal affairs of powerful figures like Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.
They'd leak private correspondents, highlight stories of sex and hypocrisy, and readily go where other publications wouldn't dare. This mentality is what led Gawker to break the story of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's crack addiction to reignite rumors of Bill Cosby's sexual assaults. And it published the first anonymous claims against Kevin Spacy and Louis CK.
In their mind, as long as something was true, it was fair game. But it was also this move fast and break things approach that led to some other more heinous stories being published during these years as well, which included leaked nude photos of celebrities and the publishing of sex tapes against the subject's will, which is pretty heinous, inexcusable [ __ ] I'm not here to defend the integrity or lack thereof that Gawker possessed.
Even Nick Denton himself agreed with NBC's assessment of Gawker as snarky, sexual, shameless, and mean. But it is important to understand that these latter reasons I just gave weren't exactly the reasons why Teal despised them. He had had it out for Gawker long before they started flirting with the more inexcusable forms of content.
And those reasons were entirely personal. As far as Valley Wag was concerned, Peter Teal considered them, and this is an exact quote, the Silicon Valley equivalent of al-Qaeda. even doubling down on the comparison when he said its employees should be described as terrorists, not writers or reporters. Again, Valley Wag. He's talking about the one that went after his friends, not Gawker as a whole. Justneed to point that out.
Though he acknowledged that terrorism is obviously a charged analogy, Tiel maintained that it's like terrorism in that you're trying to be gratuitously meaner and more sensational than the next person, like a terrorist who is trying to stand out and shock people. It's an interesting theoretical question. and he added whether if Valleywag went away something else would fill in to replace it.
But why would Teal be asking a question like that? Sure, he didn't enjoy their lambasting of his politics and seasteading, but there was also something more personal bubbling beneath the surface for Teal. And to understand that something, we need to go back to the source published almost 20 years ago. Peter Teal is totally gay, people. Those were the six words that came screaming across Teal's screen one fateful morning in December 2007.
It was a story published by Valleywag contributor Owen Thomas, a man who had been dropping occasional hints at Teal's sexuality in previous pieces, but decided on this day to come out and finally say outright what he had been implying all along. It was a brief article and Chaffkin notes that it had been Denton's idea to publish.
Denton and Thomas, both fellow gay men, were personally of the mind that the closet should be thrown wide open. With Thomas later remarking that I see the whole assumption that there is a closet that people are in or out of as a problematically reifying heteronormativity, arguing that in his view, hiding one's sexuality actually reinforces inequality and discrimination.
Here's what the piece said. How many outgay VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Teal. his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has no way to fit into the old establishment. That frees him or her to build a different, hopefully better system for identifying and rewarding talented individuals and unleashing their work on the world.
That's why I think it's important to say this. Peter Teal, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. More power to him. Chafkin also points out that Denton and Thomas were hardly alone in this style of reporting at the time. Back then, it was actually pretty common to see celebrities sexualities being openly discussed on the front page of tabloids without magazine including Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster as celebrities who were widely known to be gay but who'd never made it explicit.
On its cover under the headline the glass closet. What's more is that Thomas never felt like he and Denton were necessarily outing Teal in the conventional sense, as just about everyone with close business dealings with Teal knew about his sexuality anyway. By this point, Teal had been in a long-term relationship with Black Rockck Vice President Matt Danzen and had been spotted with him at Christmas parties.
Teal's Frenster profile, according to Thomas, reportedly made clear that he was into men. As one longtime employee of Teal said, it wasn't even an open secret that Teal was gay. It was just open. What Thomas took particular issue with was the way people treated Teal as if he were straight.
As he saw it, Teal was not in the closet, but his peers had effectively chosen to closet him anyway, telling Max Chaffkin, "It's a strangely conservative industry. Let's just talk about that." The piece only generated about a,000 page views when it was first published, and no one working at Clarium seemed to take note of it whatsoever.
Besides, Teal was used to being featured in big mainstream news outlets by that point in his career. So, a little blip like this on Valleywag shouldn't have gotten under his skin, but it did very much so. And it was the comment left by Denton underneath the article that pushed him over the edge.
Denton wrote, "The only thing that's strange about Teal's sexuality, why on earth was he so paranoid about his discovery for so long?" It was this implication that Teal was not just gay, but psychologically unstable for wanting to keep his sexuality somewhat private that struck a particular chord within the man. Though he didn't show it right then, Gawker would learn of the formidable enemy it had made.
But all of that was to come later. For right now, Teal was to b his time, play the long game, set meetings, arrange dinners, and ultimately do what he's always done best. Scheme from the shadows. and he couldn't do it alone. In April 2011, Peter Teal met in Germany for what would become one of the most consequential meetings of his life and unbeknownst to them, the lives of just about everyone working at Gawker.
Teal had been in the process of shopping around ideas to get back at the publication for years when he finally sat down with one Aaron Duza, an intellectual property law expert who believed he could assist with Teal's al-Qaeda problem, to use Peter's terminology. What Dusa proposed was for Teal to use him as a cutout to get backat Gawker and Nick Denton.
The plan, according to Chaffkin, was for Dusa to set up a shell company that would anonymously fund lawsuits against Gawker, overwhelming it with litigation until it shut down. The venture was going to be expensive, and Duza made the wild move of suggesting a $10 million price tag, but before the end of the night, Teal was in.
Just to give you an idea of how little that kind of money actually matters to a guy like Teal. Although Teal and Duza weren't exactly clear on the details of their own plan just yet, they knew that whatever they did to go after the outlet, it ultimately needed to be legal, which in Teal's words placed a big limitation on what they were actually allowed to do.
They considered spying on employees, bribing writers in an attempt to sabotage the company and humiliate Denton, even bugging the newsroom. But that would all be extremely risky and could potentially blow up in their faces if they were ever found out. Despite being a literal professional hedge fund manager, Teal wasn't ready to go that far out on a limb.
Although Chvkin does site one Gawker employee who remembers being approached by Palunteer executives around this time and recalls the way they questioned him on their servers. What security vendors did Gawker use? How many people worked at the office overnight? It was only later, Chaffkin writes, that it occurred to this employee he'd divulged enough to mount a successful hack.
I'm sure it was all fine, though. The bottom line is that Teal was happy to take his time going a safer route if it meant achieving the most effective knockout blow. Now, if you want the Peter Teal side of the story, look no further than Ryan Holliday's book, Conspiracy, which covers the assault on Gawker at great length.
And although it is fairly entertaining, it also does a lot to portray Teal in the most sympathetic terms imaginable, I would say. I mean, here he is literally promoting the book himself on stage, sitting across from the author, just to give you an idea of the kind of bias we might be dealing with here. But Holiday was given plenty of access to Teal in writing this book, and it remains a decently solid source of information as long as you ignore Holiday's constant and exhaustive comparisons of Teal to Makia every other page. I mean, even the reviews complain
about this. So, I know I'm not going crazy, but as Holiday put it, it was paramount to Peter that he not be associated with the plan in any way, which is why Duza was there to take the fall if something goes wrong. From there, the search for a legal team was on. But Duza needed to be discreet, which is why his pitch normally consisted of, "Hey, I've been charged to take down a major media outlet by a group of wealthy individuals who will fund causes of action.
Would you be interested?" They eventually did find someone interested Charles Harder, a veteran entertainment lawyer who would cut his teeth defending the likes of George Clooney, Sandra Bulock, Kate Hudson, and others. But what makes Harter an excellent choice is that he wasn't concerned about who was funding Duza's scheme.
As Holiday reports, Harter doesn't ask directly. Not then, not ever, who is behind this. He seems entirely comfortable with being the hatchet man for an unknown entity with unknown motivations. The way it worked, Holiday explains, is that money would be wired from Peter's people to Duza. Duza wires it to Harter.
In the business of bringing down Gawker, Duza was the president. Harter was the CEO and Teal, the majority shareholder who expected his men to mind his money and find the returns he's after. But there's another character Holiday forgets to include, Charles Johnson, who Max Chaffkin describes as a notorious alt-right troll and a friend of Teals, who would come to serve as an important political adviser and confidant, probably due in part to the way he knew how to flatter.
Johnson apparently began calling the billionaire sense to Chaffkin. Johnson was just as significant to the plot against Gawker as Duza was. Instead of Duza's plan to meticulously identify bulletproof cases, Chaffkin wrote Johnson favored total war. After being accosted by the site himself in the past, he was hellbent on burning down Gawker no matter the cost.
And with Teal's blessing, Johnson began crisscrossing the country, looking for anyone anywhere who'd been agrieved by Gawker. The group was on the hunt for anyone with a winnable case against the outlet. And over the years, Carter brought several cases against Gawker that included one from a man who claimed to have invented email and who had been mocked by the website, another from an independent journalist whom Gawker had suggested might be suffering from a paranoid freakout, and others that Jaffkin notes. But none of these efforts
came anywhere close to the efficacy or intrigue as the one eventually brought by Terry Boella, a man you probably know best as Hulk Hogan. Oh god, man. whereit even begin with this one. I don't think he needs any introduction, right? >> Let Trumpia run wild, brother. >> Six-time WWE champion, iconic entertainer, symbol of American prowess at the height of the Cold War.
Hulk Hogan's larger than life persona precedes him for better or for worse other times. But by the late 2000s, Hogan's family life was coming apart at the seams. His marriage was over in all but name. His daughter's music career that he had poured millions of dollars into was going nowhere. And in 2007, his son wrapped his car around a tree in a drunk driving accident that left a passenger permanently brain damaged.
That same summer is when Hogan received a call from his wife, officially telling him that she was never coming back. It was against this backdrop that Hogan turned to an old friend for comfort. Bubba the Love Sponge. Yes, that is his legal name. While we don't need to waste too much time on his backstory, Holiday gives us the rundown on Bubba's career as a shock jock known for killing a live pig on the radio, for having porn stars use sex toys on each other for his listeners benefit, and for calling the 2010 Haiti earthquake a cleanse. But
Bubba was also a very close confidant of Hogan's. He was there when the wrestller's father died. and he was going to be there again for this tragedy as well, willing to do anything he could to help out his friend in a time of crisis. And so is his wife. See, Bubba and his wife Heather had long been in an open marriage.
So, it didn't come as too much of a shock when Bubba presented his pal with an unconventional offer. My wife wants to [ __ ] you was the message. And it didn't take much to convince the Hulkster. But as Holiday writes, even as Bubba gave him his word that there were no strings attached and that nothing was to be filmed, not a word is said about how the summer before the husband and wife had paid a handyman to install a small camera on the wall over the wet bar in the bedroom.
They didn't tell him that at some point in the evening, one of them had walked to the closet where the camera was hardwired, inserted a DVD, and pressed the record button in incredibly consequential detail that was never made apparent to Hogan throughout the affair, even after moving in with Bubba and his wife. By the time the affair was over, Holiday writes, Hogan moved on in ignorance of the event that would soon send his life spiraling into chaos.
It's not that it wasn't already about as chaotic as it could get, though. At one point, he told a reporter that things were bad enough that he can emphasize with OJ Simpson. He could see himself turning his home into that bloody crime scene, Holiday wrote. Nevertheless, Hogan managed to rebuild his life over the next few years, just in time for things to come crashing back down in March 2012, when rumors of a Hulk Hogan sex tape began floating around on TMZ.
That September is when a package showed up at Gawker's headquarters addressed to then editor AJ Delerio. It was an unedited 30inut tape of Hogan having sex with Bubba's wife. Delario ordered it to be cut down in a one-minute highlight reel in his words and decides to take it public. Instantly, Hogan demands it be taken down, but Gawker refuses.
Hogan goes to the media and suddenly catches the attention of Charles Harter, who takes him on as a client. Just like that, Peter Teal had found his perfect vehicle. It didn't take long for Harter to file a suit against Bubba for his part in recording the encounter. Though, he quickly amended the complaint to include Denton and Doerio.
He was asking for $100 million in damages. While most of the public assumed this to be an entire event staged by Hogan, this was in fact very real. And Chaffkin writes that Hogan had actually been working to suppress another more damaging audio recording in which he used racial slurs. Turns out Hogan had used the n-word to describe his daughter's romantic partner, unwittingly admitting on tape that he was racist to a point.
Hogan apologized for the comments and stated that it wasn't who he was. While meanwhile, Chaffkin writes, "Nick Denton had begun to negotiate with Hogan's team on discussing a settlement, as they had done with similar sex tape related cases in the past. But as time dragged on and Hogan continued to refuse massive milliondoll paydays, it became quite clear to Gawker employees that something was going on, like someone was playing a game.
" In the words of one employee, one of the strangest moves from the get-go was Hogan dropping the claim that Gawker had caused him emotional distress. But in retrospect, this was a highly calculated move that actually hurt Gawker's chances of obtaining liability insurance. As Chaffkin points out, normally plaintiffs don't want to bankrupt a defendant if they hope to collect a judgment or settlement.
But Hogan was suddenly acting as if Gawker's bankruptcy rather than a large cash payment were his goal. Why would he tryto limit Gawker's ability to pay him? Another mystery, Harter's firm had few cases, but seemed to have an unlimited budget. At court appearances, Hogan's lawyers would stay at the city's nicest hotel.
Where was the money coming from? Was someone compensating Hogan for pursuing the lawsuit? Maybe if Gawker understood what was truly unfolding behind the scenes, they'd be better prepared to tackle what was in front of them. It would have given them plenty of material to write about after all, and it wouldn't have exactly reflected the best on Teal.
It also would have shifted Gawker's legal strategy. But the reality was that Peter Teal maintained the upper hand at all times. Unfairly so, I should add. Unlike Denton, Teal actually knew who his enemy was. And also unlike Denton, he had an infinite pool of money to pull from. The yearslong endeavor did in fact costing Teal about $10 million in the end, or rather about 0.
37% of his net worth at the time. Denton, on the other hand, didn't exactly have $100 million lying around. And because of Florida state law where the case was being fought, it looked like they weren't going to be able to appeal if things didn't go their way. As Holiday explains, in order to appeal a civil verdict, petitioners have to post superseded bond equal to the amount of the verdict, essentially proving they could pay what they would owe if their appeal was not successful.
The cap was $50 million. If Hogan could actually get to a trial, if he could get this case in front of a jury, and if that jury sided with him in any substantive way, Gawker would be finished. But even with the odds looking very much in their favor, Teal and Harter weren't taking any chances.
Teal began to put together expensive mock trials in an attempt to gauge their best approach, see what arguments would work best, and understand what types of jurors would be most receptive. Duza later admitted to Holiday that it became very clear that the kind of jurors we wanted were overweight women. Most people can't emphasize with the sex tape, but overweight women are sensitive about their bodies and feel like they have been bullied on the internet.
Men don't have that problem. They haven't been body shamed, he said. And the jury they ended up assembling was not one made up of Gawker's peers, Holiday wrote. By the end of it, three of the people sitting in that box would be overweight women. A fourth looks like a conservative married woman.
The two men are not young hipsters. This is a jury who would say during the selection process that they got most of their news from Fox News, not from Twitter. It is a jury whose fellow residents 8 months later would go for Donald Trump in the presidential election with a shade over 48% of the vote. Finally, on March 18th, 2016, Harter alongside beloved American icon Hulk Hogan would make their case to that very jury.
And after just 6 hours of deliberating, they delivered the death blow. $141 million in damages. The publication was finished. Denton financially ruined. Countless employees who had nothing to do with the Hogan tape or Teal's outing many years before were suddenly out of a job, unable to support their families. the way they had been.
Gawker filed for bankruptcy that June around the time Peter Teal felt comfortable enough to go public and brag about what D had done. He was proud of it and in fact described the dismantling of Gawker as his finest act of philanthropy. Gamergate warriors who had long despised Gawker and its affiliates celebrated and for a little while # thank you Peter trended on Twitter.
But the fact that one man, someone with endless time and money at his disposal, was allowed to go out and ruin an entire media empire just because he felt like it doesn't exactly set the greatest precedent going forward. In my mind, it doesn't feel like something someone should be able to do in a normal functioning society.
But it could also be argued that this society was set up in part to skew in favor of people like Teal first and foremost with Teal himself playing a significant role in upholding those very mechanisms of power thanks to his foray into a different world of shamelessness and opportunism beyond the confines of a catty tabloid, the world of politics.
The same month Gawker gave its death rattle, Peter Teal took his victory lap on stage at the Republican National Convention, where he flaunted his identity as a proud gay Republican. He wasn't just a speaker either. He was an official Trump delegate, an honorable title, and a fact that we can see spelled out quite plainly in Jeffrey Epstein's emails, but that's unrelated.
What's important to note here is that this was the culmination of all of Teal's efforts to fund and support various right-wing candidates since at least the 2012 election where he propped up and subsequently stole the support of Libertarian candidate Ron Paul. His initial pick for 2016 had been Huelet Packard CEO Carly Fiorina before jumpingship to Lion Ted Cancun Cruz.
>> You're a principal and single biggest liar. You probably are worse than Jeb Bush. But when neither of those losers panned out, the writing on the wall became clear. In order to gain further influence in Washington, Teal would need to make the biggest hedge of his life by being the first and only Silicon Valley power broker to throw his weight behind a polarizing real estate mogul.
A bet he was rewarded for heavily with this awkward hand thing he did with Trump shortly after the win. But if you were around back then, you'd know Trump's first win was anything but uncontroversial. >> New details are emerging about how the shadowy data firm Cambridge Analytica worked to manipulate voters across the globe.
>> Founded in London in 2013, Cambridge Analytica was established by Alexander Nicks to try and predict the personality types of Facebook users based on their personal data. Yeah, it sounds really cool, right? Well, Steve Bannon seemed to think so, which is why he helped raise money for it alongside the Mercer family, some of the biggest movers and shakers within the Republican party.
The idea was to use people's data to market specific political ads on Facebook that they might be most receptive to. But because they couldn't get the data straight from Facebook, Nyx recruited a researcher by the name of Alexander Kogan to create an app that would harvest the Facebook data of 87 million Americans.
ultimately in support of Donald Trump who would rely on using targeted Facebook ads to raise money and turn out voters spending around $100 million on the social media platform. The original idea to create an alternative app had come from a Palunteer employee in London as reported by the New York Times in 2018. As Amnesty International determined, Cambridge Analytica was able to access data that included status updates, likes, and even private messages.
As the Times pointed out, when the scheme blew wide open, Teal was seen as especially compromised. After all, he had founded Palunteer, was an angel investor in Facebook who still sat on its board of directors, and had been one of Trump's most ardent defenders. He was obviously put in an awkward position.
And while Palanteer initially put out a statement arguing it had never been in a relationship with Cambridge Analytica, nor have we ever worked on any Cambridge Analytica data, they were forced to revise this position later, clarifying that actually that employee I mentioned wasn't acting on behalf of Palunteer when he advised Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wy on data scraping.
According to Max Chaffkin, Wy would end up testifying that he saw Palunteer engineers in the Cambridge Analytica offices where they were given Cambridge Analytica login and helped build additional apps to harvest more private data from Facebook users. Wired reported in 2017 that Cambridge went on to conduct hundreds of thousands of voter surveys for the Trump campaign to better understand the likely Trump voter and sent a full-time staffer to the New York headquarters who could relay these findings to senior staff.
Based on these surveys, RNC data, data the Trump team collected itself, and commercially available information from data brokers, Cambridge Analytica's chief product officer developed with his team a heat map of the country to pinpoint where Trump should visit to maximize his impact on potentially persuadable voters.
In 2022, Facebook's parent company, Meta, agreed to finally settle the Cambridge Analytica scandal for a sum of $725 million, a cut of which could have been yours, by the way, if you had a Facebook account between the years 2007 and 2022, if only you had filled out the application by August of 23. Yeah, I got some FOMO, too. Teal enjoyed a cushy spot on the executive committee of Trump's 2016 transition team regardless and was allowed to recommend potential employees who could disrupt the administrative state.
It kind of sounds familiar. In fact, Hill was so ready to get in there and break things that he turned over a list of 150 potential names for Trump to consider adding to the bureaucracy. At first, he wanted Trump's science adviser to be this guy who once compared the demonization of fossil fuels to Hitler's treatment of the Jews.
Then another recommendation he gave was this dude who had written an entire book going after political correctness and the globalists, though Max Schaffan argues that what he really meant by globalists was Jews, whom he considered belligerent by nature. His choice to lead the FDA was a guy who didn't think regulation trials for drugs were necessary.
you know, the main thing the FDA does. Even Steve Bannon admitted Peter Teal's idea of disrupting government is out there. People thought Trump was a disruptor. They had no earthly idea what was being pitched by Teal. He said Trump didn't end up going with many of Teal's picks in the end, though, at least not thisfirst time around.
In fact, Teal kind of fell out of the president's inner circle around the time Bannon was ousted as White House chief strategist. As Dan Freriedman and David Korn determined, Trump's first term left Teal disappointed. Teal hoped Trump would burn everything down. But it turned out he was either too unwilling or too stupid to do so. Maybe both.
Either way, the rift became wider by 2023 when the then presidential hopeful asked Teal for a donation of $1.25 25 million to fund his 2024 bid. In what three sources confirmed was a contentious phone conversation per the Washington Post, Teal refused. Taking it a step further, Teal famously announced that he'd be sitting out the 2024 election entirely.
In part because of all the flack he had caught in the 2022 midterms when he played a massive role in funding two candidates for US Senate. One was Blake Masters, a venture capitalist and longtime ally of Teal. They even wrote a book together in 2014. Though the two had been very close for a very long time, it was master's views on gay marriage that garnered the most controversy for both men along the campaign trail.
After all, if it weren't for a $15 million donation from Peter Teal, a gay mans wouldn't have made it anywhere. Not that he went very far, though, losing the general in November despite another jolt of $2.5 million teal bucks just a couple weeks before the election. But I think we know by now that at his core, Peter Teal is a man who spreads his bets around.
Doesn't put all of his eggs in one basket. Sure, Blake Masters may not have offered Teal much of a return on his investment, but someone else did. >> Here, CBS News projects that in the state of Ohio, JD Vance will be the next Republican senator. Over the course of his 41 years on Earth, James Donald Bowman would change his name and identity several times before finally morphing into Vice President J. Dance.
Brought up in a world of turmoil and poverty in the Appalachian town of Middleton, Ohio, Vance never really had much of a consistent father figure growing up. His parents, Donald and Beverly, divorced around the time he began walking, he wrote. And with Donald out of their lives, Beverly changed his name to James David.
He became James David Hamill after his mother remarried for a third time, but switched over to his grandmother's last name, Vans, shortly before graduating law school. These are just a few of the thrilling revelations spelled out in his apparently best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, which I only own because they were selling it for a dollar at a library book sale by my house.
the only ethical way to consume hillbilly allergy short of stealing it as far as I'm concerned. But it wasn't just Vance's name that appeared to blow with the wind. So did his political and religious convictions as Vance wrote about extensively in Hillbilly and as author Jacob Silverman summed up more succinctly in his book Gilded Rage.
Vance had grown up steeped in evangelical Christianity. But in college, he drifted into Sam Harris style atheism, a common enough path for a young man in the place and time. His colleagues saw him as politically conservative, but not radically so. That would change, as journalist Gil Duran wrote shortly after Vance clinched the VP nomination.
Stories about Vance tend to focus on his hardcrable Ohio roots. But his relationship with Peter Teal and his stint in San Francisco are key to understanding his politics. For a guy as politically malleable as Vance, being able to witness Teal lay out his ideology at Yale in 2011 was akin to finding what Silverman called a final form.
Vance himself would go on to write in 2020 that Peter's talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed that I was obsessed with achievement in say not as an end to something meaningful but to win a social competition through Peter Teal. Vance was introduced to the work of contemporary philosopher Renee Gerard and his theory of mimemetic desire.
The idea that all human desire imitates the desires of others almost always without awareness. According to the colloquium on violence and religion, Silverman writes that in Gerard's view, because the frenzy of competition could spill over into violence, the solution was the scapegoat mechanism, finding an outside force against which rivals could unite and enact violence.
Vance himself has reflected on the power of scapegoating before, arguing in the past that efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim is a moral failing projected violently upon someone else. Yet here he is, just a few short years after writing those words, relying on the scapegoating of Haitian and Somali immigrants to further his own political career. Interesting how that happens.
>> I don't know who I'm going to vote for. I'm definitely not going to vote for Trump because I think that he's projecting very complex problems ontosimple villains. >> In just under a decade, Vans has experienced one of the biggest heel turns I think I've ever witnessed in modern American politics.
He went from having his award-winning book lauded by liberal elites, even being adapted into an Oscar nominated film directed by Ron Howard to supporting policies that directly harm the very rural communities he grew up in. He went from calling Donald Trump America's Hitler in private and a cultural heroine in public to being the air parent to the empire of zealots the president has cultivated.
Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? I'm JD Vance and I approve this message. begging the question of how did we get here? Well, I think as you've gathered a lot of it had to do with our pal Peter Teal. It was Teal who Vance had reached out to following his talk at Yale. And it was Teal who took the future vice president under his wing after graduating.
Vance officially moved to San Francisco around 2014 and found a job working at Myithil Capital, another Tealfounded VC that took its name from Tolken. From there, the two only grew closer. Teal wrote a promotional blurb for Hillbilly Elegy in 2016 and went on to fund Vance's own VC in 2019, Naria Capital, which also took its name from [ __ ] Tolken.
Dude, oh my god, what is wrong with these guys? We get it. But it wasn't until Vance began flirting with a Senate run that Teal really turned on the money spigot, fueling Vance's campaign to the tune of 8 figures, a lucrative investment that Vance absolutely needed in order to get over the finish line in a competitive Republican field that saw multiple candidates vying for Trump's approval.
Despite his past comments, Vance still had a leg up thanks to Teal, who brokered a truce between the two men at Mara Lago. According to Silverman, like Masters, Vance also benefited from a few lastminute cash infusions from Teal that gave the campaign the shot in the arm it very much needed.
While his relationship to Trump may be accurately identified as blatant and shallow opportunism, it was Peter Teal who made such an otherwise impossible alliance possible. It is for that reason that JD Vance owes his current position in power to Peter Teal more than any other single person. But what were some of the other ways in which the billionaire molded his young Appalachian protege? Well, it was also through Teal that Vance met software developer and blogger Curtis Yarvin, a self-described reactionary extremist, as written by Duran, and the Telever's very
own house political philosopher, as Chaffkin put it. In his book, Silverman depicted Yarvin as a reactionary monarchist writer whom Teal had sponsored for years and who argued for an American dictator or CEO views which Yarvin has made extremely clear himself. >> Another word for monarch in the 20th century contest is obviously a despot or a dictator >> or yes or a CEO.
Born in 1973, Curtis Yarvin attended several Ivy League schools and began writing under the pseudonym Menchious Moldbug in 2007, detailing his worldview on two main blogs, Unqualified Reservations and Gray Mirror. And I'll be honest, we could sit here and talk about this dude for an entire video if we really wanted to, but I don't.
If you want the true deep dive on Yarvin, I'd recommend the Behind the Bastards podcast or any of the coverage done by Sam Cedar and the Majority Report. linked down below in the description. But for the general rundown, I think we should start at the intro of Gil Duran's piece in the New Republic, which highlights a 2008 post from Yarvin where he suggests converting nonproductive members of society into biodiesel to fuel munes.
Now, he claims this is a joke, but says he is serious about the need to find what he calls a humane alternative to genocide. That is the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder, the removal of undesirable elements from society, but without any of the moral stigma. One of the most scaring the hose sentences ever crafted.
Maybe at its most basic, Yarvin's whole shtick is saying democracy cannot work and that we must instead allow an all-encompassing monarch to take control of the state if we ever want things to change. Yarvin believes that America should be run by a monarch, not unlike the way a CEO runs a tech startup. In his own words, it's time Americans get over their dictator phobia.
What is government? A government is just a corporation which owns a country. Nothing more, nothing less. You have to say, well, what is a system actually? And it includes a lot of things that are called NOS's, things that are called universities, things that are funded by the state. Um it's a very very large system and it all needs to be destroyed.
And finally, you need a CEO and a national CEO is what's called a dictator. Um it's the same thing. There's no difference between CEO and dictator. If Americans want to change their government, we're going to have to get over dictator phobia. In Yaravven'sideal society, governments would be broken down into smaller ones called patchworks, which he outlined in 2008 by writing, "As the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds of thousands of sovereign and independent mini
countries. Each governed by its own joint stock corporation without regard to the residents opinions. Each patchwork would be ruled by a realm or rather a corporation with absolute power. According to Duran, who provided this example from another one of Yarvin's essays, the realm of having sovereign power can compel the resident to comply with all promises.
Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal, but it could. And San Francisco likewise can promise not to cut off its residents hands until it is blew in the face. But since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.
Duran points out that Yarvin has also drawn eye for calling slavery a natural human relationship akin to that of a patron and client. Despite insisting he isn't a white nationalist, Yarvin wrote in 2007 of white nationalism that he is not exactly allergic to the stuff, as should be the case of any intellectual. Anyone who takes this as an endorsement of white nationalism is an idiot, he wrote.
But this was in 2007. If you fast forward to 2025, Yarvin is hardly shy in discussing what led him to the realization that things were going to happen and history had not ended. Not unlike 12-year-old boys scrolling Tik Tok today. Yarvin seems to have been particularly touched by an edit he once saw on YouTube.
to describe the first moment in which I realized that like things were going to happen and history had not ended. It was like 2005 or something. YouTube was a new thing and um and I saw this video. I'm sure it's long since disappeared, but it was really just like kind of burned a hole in me. It was actually just a sequence of photos sort of presented with a kind of slow animated zoom in dissolve zoom in dissolve sad piano music sort of over it.
The you know the even photos and the odd photos all matched and the um the uh the even photos were um sort of brightly colored pictures of just like general western you know decadence, decay, rot, filth. You know we've all seen these things. and then interspersed between them formal dress portraits of Nazi officers.
And I'm just like, you watch this thing, you're just like filth degeneration, bright optimistic young man in Nazi uniform, filth degeneration, bright optimistic young man in Nazi uniform. And you're just like, >> yeah, that's the thing. And like basically >> that's the coming thing. It's a form because it's the reaction.
It's it's breaking in a way. It's just it's a totally forbidden thing and that you watch it and you're just like, "Wait a second. Something's wrong here." It wasn't until 2013 that Yarvin would finally reveal himself to the wider public as a real person and not just some anonymous writer with mold bug in his username.
That was the year TechCrunch revealed him to be the co-founder of a startup called Ton Corporation to spearhead, a decentralized personal server platform with a mission to rebuild computing from first principles. One of its earliest investors was Peter Teal. It's hard to know exactly when and how the billionaire first came into contact with Yarvin, as this same TechCrunch article also noted that the blogger had been slated to speak at a conference for the Seasteading Institute in 2009, but had his appearance abruptly cancelled. The
New Yorker more recently reported on emails that had been exchanged between the two men in 2014, where Teal reportedly asked Yarvin, "How dangerous is it that we are being leaked?" Following up with one reassuring thought, one of our hidden advantages is that these people, social justice warriors, wouldn't believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head.
This is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the left. Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kind of know it. What Teal is doing here is essentially laughing in all of our faces. But like I said, it's not just Teal who took a liking to Curtis Yarvin. >> So, I mean, I think that there there are two different ideas here, right? So, so one is is like, you know, I I there's this guy Curtis Jarvin who's written um about some of these things.
I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need we need like a debathification program uh but like a dewokation program in the United States, right? While Vance has never come out with fullthroated support of Yarvin's more out there ideas, he has made statements that bear striking resemblance to what the blogger himself has said about the need to attack universities and other legitimate sources of information that make up what Yarvin calls the cathedral. LastFebruary, Politico's Ian Ward asked
Yarvin about the newly elected vice president, and Yarvin said he had seen him recently. I bumped into him at a party. He said, "Yarvin, you reactionary fascist." I was like, "Thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I'm glad I didn't stop you from getting elected." "He said that to you?" Ward asked.
That's what he said. I don't think he meant it in a bad way, but I don't think he meant it in a good way either. >> I'm I I'm into winning and into ideas. I like both winning and ideas. >> I always think of you as kind of an applied philosopher, but you don't like the term philosopher. >> It sounds really lame, actually.
We are witnessing Peter Teal's bets paying off in a huge way. His companies are doing better than ever. His projects are in the process of being realized. His friends are the most influential people in government. Peter Teal gave away millions so that they could enjoy such powerful positions. And now they owe him for the next 3 years.
It's hard to imagine just how much richer the Peter Thiels of the world will get. It's hard to predict the future. But I think one thing we can all bet on is that the rich will keep getting richer while the majority of the country scrambles to make ends meet. We're about a year in now. Prices have not gone down. Income inequality hasn't gotten better.
But Palanteer shares are up 150% in the past year alone, 3,000% in the past three. The future of warfare appears to be moving more in the direction of AI with teal acolyte Palmer Lucky enjoying countless government contracts through his Tolken named weapons company and Deril. Teal's fellow Palunteer co-founder Joe Lndale now feels comfortable enough to openly express that the original purpose of Palunteer was to kill communists.
Whatever constitutes a communist in the mind of Joe Lansdale and the other hobbits at Palanteer is up to them to determine. I assume Teal's old frenmy from the PayPal era is on a rocket ship of his own to become wealthier than any other single human being in history. And his protege is gearing up for what feels like an inevitable presidential run in 2028, having received a few endorsements before even declaring himself a candidate.
We are going to get my husband's friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding win possible. Throughout the years, Peter Teal has remained steadfast in his quest to solve a number of problems, one of which being death. During the 2010s, he was mocked relentlessly by his old foes at Gawker for investing in various life extension efforts.
Whether it be taking medication, receiving blood transfusions from young donors, or putting millions into the research of anti-aging scientists like Aubrey Deg Gray and Cynthia Kenyon, who are reported to have met with the country's top tech leaders as early as 2004 to discuss experiments having to do with beating mortality. Teal isn't the only Silicon Valley overlord to put money into such efforts.
So has Google's Larry Page and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who the Washington Post reported burned $430 million on anti-aging research, telling his biographer that death has never made any sense to me. How can a person be there and then just vanish? Just not be there. Teal has been especially generous to the Methusela Foundation, which The Guardian notes is a nonprofit that aims to make 90 the new 50 by 2030.
The article points out that Peter Teal himself hopes to live to 120 and has explored a range of vehicles that could possibly get him there. To Teal, death is something that must be conquered. There are all these people who say that death is natural. It's just a part of life. And I think that nothing can be further from the truth, he said in 2012.
Despite the science not looking particularly hopeful, blood transfusions haven't exactly shown any clinical signs of extending life to 120 years, Teal has made the bold claim that one day it will be possible to reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.
Perhaps this is why he's decided to freeze his body after death, hoping to be revived later after the cure to whatever killed him is discovered. But I'm not sure Peter Teal needs life extension technology to live forever. His impact on the country and the world will continue to be felt for generations to come.
He and his billionaire cronies have extracted unprecedented amounts of resources from our planet and will continue to do so as long as they are allowed by our government. the same government they've worked tirelessly to court and install. Whether he's operating from the shadows or spewing his ideology behind a podium, whether he's pulling the strings of a court case behind the scenes or arguing his contradictory world view to a camera, the boundless influence of Peter Teal will continue to be felt for decades and centuries to come. For better or for
worse, but mostly for worse.Come on. Come on.
