Peter Thiel's Not-So-Secret Society and the Evil Billionaire Hall of Fame With Adam Conover

[Music] It's the summer of 1877, and you are drafting what you call your confession of faith. You are Cecil Rhodes, and you're sitting in a room at Oxford, writing down your plan to take over the world. At this moment, you're a nobody. You have no money, you have weak lungs, no office, no party, no title. What you do have is an idea for a secret society that would work to bring the entire globe under British rule. You do not mean this as a figure of speech. You write the words down plainly. A society, you say, not openly acknowledged for the extension of one people's rule across the whole of earth. Months from now you will put it in your will and leave every pound you own to the founding of it, and you will name the lands you mean to take. Africa, the entire continent. South America, also the whole continent. The Holy Land, the islands of the Pacific. The recovery of the United States. You want to do all these things, but first you need money. You find yourself in South Africa during the diamond rush. You buy out every rival mine one minute at a time until you own them all. When you're done, a single company you control debirs hold nine of every ten diamonds on earth. But it isn't about the money for its own sake. It's about your plan. You become prime minister of the Cape. You charter a company of men, send them north with rifles, and seize a piece of Africa you named Rhodesia. You write the laws there that keep the native population powerless. You say out loud in parliament that the African is to be treated as a child. Years later the country and its people will name themselves Zimbabwe. But then your health breaks and you die in a cottage by the sea at age 48 with a fortune of six million pounds and your plan to conquer the world languishing in your will, a project for others to finish. The men who open your will take a look at your grand design to rule the planet from the shadows and are embarrassed. They decide instead to use your money to found a scholarship. The students who win it will be called Rhodes Scholars. This is Wait a Second Peter Teal Secrets Society. Welcome to the show. I'm Jason Concepcion as always that's Tyler Parker. Today we are delighted to be joined by actor writer and comedian Adam Conover. Hey thanks for having me. Adam, are you a part of any secret societies? Hey we not that I know of. I mean I started a few in middle school. I was into the silly version of the Illuminati. It was a lot more fun back then. It was just a fantasy. It was a good type of no not in real life. Well we were having you here today to discuss the recent revelations around Peter Teal's dialogue to the secret society. He co-founded in 2006 along with Orrin Hoffman and Raffi Grinberg. The best way to discuss it is to talk about the people that are involved in it. It's been active for about 20 years. It has been very secretive. No press releases about what they talk about. It has various meeting spaces around the world. There was a meeting in Dublin that I think is scheduled. They bought some property in Washington DC for these gatherings. The membership is eclectic. More than 200 people from a variety of powerful influential spaces. There is the Scott Bessent, the current Treasury Secretary. There is the current commander of NATO, Thanos from the Marvel movies. Yes, the Marvel movies. The risk here is your own. Yes, and a Cory Booker of various security researchers. As recline New York Times Oped writer and podcaster. Only a few of these folks have issued statements on their membership or what they believe. Some of our members are attendees. Like, Cline said he's not a member. He's attended to the conference. Sophia Bush said she was saying yes to any opportunity to put up this conference. Yes. So, did you take on this? I mean, I've been invited to their events. Have you? Did you? Did you have a look? Yeah, they invited me to one. I hadn't decided I was going to go yet. I had not heard of it. I was like, okay, it looks like there's hundreds of conferences like this around the country. I've been to other conferences where it's like, oh, we're going to have thought leaders in a couple. Here's an academic. Here's a journalist. Here's another person. Here's a tech person. You get together in chat. Some of them are like, we like to bring together people who are ideologically different or whatever. Yes. Yeah, and they're networking events. And so I got the invitation to the thing. And I was like, yeah, this is a classic networking event. There's some like, you know, government people, etc. It's very expensive to go. How much do you attend? Their sticker price is like in the low five figures. But they, but they're all in the water. I mean, look, it's a, it's a, it's a country. It appears to be a country club kind of. Right. There's 13K, I think, in the wired pieces. But that, I guess, the staff have, they price it by hand and serve for specific people. It's specifically different. But I guess I'm enjoying the 70% of the attendees or something like that or on some, yeah, like Stanley McChrystal, retired general, does he have 13K just like laying around to attend this? A lot of people are being paid by the way, their way is being paid by their organization, by their university or their tech company or anthropic or whatever it may be. I mean, I'll give you my take, which is that like it's, I don't believe this is a secret society. It's one of many, many, many conferences like this. Like Davos is very similar. Yes. It happens to be more secretive than most of them, which is probably not great. Right. It is also the idea of elite events, you know, events for elites coming together and discussing things is like, generally problematic. Right. I agree. Like invite only conferences make a lot of sense. But when you're, you know, what is the purpose of the invitation, et cetera, et cetera. And so the revelations about this conference in particular that they were ranking people according to how important they were, how famous they were, how many assets they managed to do an asset manager stuff like that. That's gross. First of all, right. And second of all, the fact that the emphasis is on secrecy and exclusivity. And then they, all of this information was leaked in the most sort of like bone headed way. Like I, I, I, yes, I didn't read in detail about it, but it did not look like this was a devious hack. This looked like it was, oh, it was, did view source on a web page or something. Yes. The hacker whose handle is Maya, arson crime. All stylized all lowercase specifically. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think tipped off to the fact that the, the directory on the website was un, unencrypted. Yeah. And went in there and I think did a version of what you said and got a lot of information from the source code now. But from the way it was explained, it required no sweating, whatsoever. No maneuvering of any kind really. It just, it's there. It was quite easy to do. Some of the details that were then leaked was to your point. There was an in, an internal ranking system. So not front facing to the participants or the members. A, A, B or C with C, counterintuitively being the like the lower value and, uh, no, but C is for the best, right? Well, let me see. Yeah, I thought C was the highest. Most famous people landed C, less or known figures rank A, the grade tracks usefulness to the room, not prestige. Got it. Okay. So I guess it depends on how you, how you look at it. There's a value ad score on top of the letter grade each member gets a wonderful score depending on how much value they bring to the conversations. There was a dating function profiles included a looking for love field. There's a romantic matching feature and a dating dialogue. I find that very interesting. I did not hurt any part of that in the pitch. So yeah, we will discuss that a more after we kind of run through these details. There's a really interesting dimension. That's an interesting dimension. There was a stipulation of no government emails. So yeah, it's only personal emails, which I mean, I think was to bypass archive laws like, yeah, if you use someone's government email, it's like very complicated. Right. They got, yeah, it's some of the some of the session titles were building a cult. How's your sex life question, Mark? Navigating World War three. Yeah. Which I think when you add to the secrecy element is a little concern. It is. So again, my take is and I've been to small group discussion conferences. Right. And they're generally like they're generally they're generally jerk off sessions. They're generally people sitting around for 45 minutes and going, Oh, what do I think? Oh, yeah, World War two, geopolitics. Sure is crazy. And then they go, I'll have dinner. And then they have drinks. And then they say, good to see let's exchange phone numbers. And that's the point. Right. But if you're going to have a secret conference and you're going to have what sounds to me like a tongue in cheek tongue. how to build a cult, and then you're gonna leak it. This adds up to something that looks very, very bad, right? And I think, to me, it looks like this is something that is banal fundamentally, and that doesn't mean that it's not bad, right? It doesn't mean that banality can't result in something bad. But they did it in such a way that it looked like they had something to hide when in fact, they're just trying to create exclusivity. Because exclusivity fundamentally is bullshit, right? Like, have you guys heard of it? That's what the people are paying for to feel like they're in the exclusive environment. I don't disagree with any of this. Have you guys ever gotten on a raya? Have you ever-- Yes. Briefly was on raya. I was also very briefly on raya because I was like, "Look, people were like, why don't you go on raya?" I checked it out. First of all, it was like $100 a month or something. And second of all, people were paying $100 for raya a month? I think to juice your profile. Yeah, there's multiple levels. But the cheapest level is probably five times as much as can you. Raya so racked is worth $150 a month or whatever. None of the people, like, you can hit like as many profiles as you like. People do not reply because the reason they're on raya is they wanted to feel important enough to get into raya. They wanted to apply to raya and then be like, well, now I'm in. They don't give a fuck what's actually happening on the platform. And that's how exclusivity works. I want to get into the exclusive club. Once I'm in there, who cares? It's not that great. And this is like what they're doing here is they're trading on exclusivity and secrecy in order to make people feel important, not because they're doing something necessarily nefarious. Now, the banality of it is like, you know, people like Ezra Klein, you know, rubbing elbows with, you know, other elites, right? Like on the regular, is that bad for society? I think we could, you can really argue, yes. But, you know, it's a, it's a great nation. Sometimes I go to events like this because I'm like, there's going to be some fucking weirdos there. And I want to be so weird. You know, it is, it is interesting to hear what weirdos have to say. And I think often very bracing to discover that the front facing personality of a person is actually what they believe. And you can find that out at things like this. I've had an anecdote for years. I talked to a guy from a ride hailing company, right, at a conference like that. I was, I happened to be in a room with a guy who was a, worked for a ride hailing company and told me ride handling, ride, ride, ride hailing, ride hailing, ride hailing, a ride sharing company, ride sharing company. And was saying such sort of, to me, wild shit about what they thought the future of self-driving cars would be. And I was listening to this going like, you're full of shit. This was years ago. I was like, you're full of shit. It's not going to be like, like you're saying. He was saying, we're all going to buy our own cars and rent them out to them, right? Like, like, I'm going to, I'm going to buy a self-driving car and I'm going to lease it out to one of these companies to drive around when I'm like, I'm not fucking doing that. No, neither is anybody else. But hearing that that's what they thought, that was like interesting to me, right? And that's like something that I've used to inform my work sense. So here's my theory on what this organization starts. Yeah. I think an important detail about Peter Teal, as he once said, that he fundamentally does not believe that freedom and democracy can coexist. And then we-- This was a 2009 paper that he wrote where he first posited that data. It was also obsessed with the anti-Christ and clearly secrecy. So I think that what happened is, so this was founded in 2006, Teal at this time had just made big money from Facebook, but was not yet a billionaire. And my theory is that, you know, seeing this kind of CEO disease start to settle in where a person accrues wealth, they accrued power, they accrued influence, and they stopped getting actual opinions from people because their own opinion is so life-changing and important to the people around them that it becomes impossible to get real information. So I think Peter Teal is seeing this happen himself and is like, you know what, I'm going to just start--I'm going to start this group that gives me cross-domain opinions from people in the military and people in tech and people in entertainment and people who are opinion writers so I can get what people really think about things. And I think that's how it started. And then the secrecy settled in. He becomes more wealthy, more powerful. You know, this group buys property around DC. So clearly there's some sort of influence thing happening here too, like a lobbying element to it. And I think, you know, Peter Teal is an extremely smart guy. I think what another element of what dialogue is is one, when you look at the dating part of it, there's clearly some sort of ambient intelligence gathering operation about these people, right? Not in the spies in the CIA sense, but for whatever Teal's own use, like what are people into? Like who's hooking up with who? Like what are you willing to put down? What? That information is going to be valuable to him somehow. Two, there's the lobbying element, I think. You know, there's the idea of, you know, can I influence decisions in Washington and other centers of decision-making power? And then the third, now this is the conspiratorial leap. I also think an element of this is, it solidifies Teal's place in the hierarchy within this scheme. Like if you look at who has been hurt by these revelations, it's not Peter Teal. Peter Teal's like, I'm at the center of this. I'm at the top of this. Nobody thinks any crazier thing about me than already exists out there. It doesn't make me look bad. It makes, as a client, look terrible. It makes Thanos look weird. It makes, you know, we got to read Thanos' self-written bio at the end of this. It makes so much, right? It makes the Secretary General of NATO look like what is he doing? And it makes me look just like a very powerful guy at the center of all of this. And I think that too advances Peter Teal's position within this kind of scheme of elite power-brokering. I mean, there's levels of this, right? If someone throwing an event, first of all, is always throwing the event to improve their own position and to learn about other people. When I was an open-mic comic, I started a stand-up show so I could book other comics. And they would want to get on my show and they would owe me something, not in a big way, but then they book you on their show and then you get to know the comics better and they go, "Oh, we're on Adam's show, that's a good show," right? So on some level, he's doing that. Like, he wants people initially to go, "Oh, hey, were you invited to Peter Teal's thing?" "Oh, yeah, I met that person at Peter Teal's thing," right? And then, yeah, he gets to generate some amount of. He becomes familiar with all these people, right? They have their little notes that they keep on them and they have some sort of track record with the person. And I think you're absolutely right about the reason that he would want to talk to these people in the first place because he's in a bubble and he's. And he like, "I can have my little salon." Like, that's something that rich wealthy people have done forever. I also think a really key part of this, though, is that Peter Teal in many ways is like the anti-Elon Musk, where Elon does everything in public and he wants to be famous. And Peter Teal wants to be powerful, but secretive, except that I believe he probably likes the media perception of him as being a shadowy, illuminati figure. Oh, I think that's right. And so even the revelation of, "Oh, Peter Teal is a secret society," plays into his all-powerful mystique. When in reality, he's just another fucking guy who started PayPal. He's just some. Like he's not a super genius, right? He's not a pal. He's not like pulling the strings. He's not running the illuminati. He's just yet another billionaire. Our two billionaires have way more power than they should. Absolutely. Do they control way more than they should? Absolutely. Do they make decisions behind closed doors that affect all of us? Absolutely. And it's not like when we build it up into that he's like, you know, one of the. That there's some. Remember an Evangelion with like the board of people who are like, "We aren't telling it, you know, they're like the shadowy board of people who are controlling the world?" When we build up that mythology, that actually gives them power. And so that's part of why I might take is like, "It's just a fucking conference." And that's bad in the way that all of these conferences are. Bad to some degree, right? I would push back in this way. Okay. In that, I don't disagree with anything you said. Like he's a man, he bleeds, he's a guy. Yeah. Started a conference. Yeah. At the same time, I think part of what makes it difficult to grapple with guys like Teele, the influence they have, the influence of money on politics, etc. Is that like, it's just impossible to comprehend how much money billions of dollars is. And like what you can do with it and the things that you can buy with it, the amount of influence that you can actually affect with it. And the fact that we can't possibly comprehend how much money that is and what to do with it, leaves to the exact thing you're talking about, which is natural mytholization. Because you can't, I can't, I have to imagine. I have to take a creative leap to try and put myself in the shoes of a guy who started this and now has, I think like 40x as much money as he had in 2006. It's literally unimaginable. I can't imagine it. Do you want to talk a little bit about just the actual way that these things are structured? Because I think, whenever I first heard about this sort of thing in a conference, I just, I'm imagining a lecture basically in my head. But reading more about this, these are, the format is very small. It's very small groups. They're basically these like facilitated breakout discussions in tinier groups with assigned seating. So part of that grading system, part of that stuff goes towards okay, and the matchmaking stuff goes towards okay, these are the types of people that this person should sit by. That's correct. So yes, they're small groups. They give everybody some sort of handout that basically says, hey, no monologuing, let the conversation flow. And don't say too many things that are going to sort of reflect your staff. Right, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't want you to make people, yeah. Right, don't, don't signal how much wealth and power you have. They want because they're bringing together people from different backgrounds who have different, like if they're bringing together someone who like literally is high up in the military currently, and they're bringing together a tech person and they're bringing together a journalist, right? Like Ezra Klein is the journalist. Still he's making, you know, a hundred, a hundredth of what some of those people are making. They all have different statuses in life. And so they're trying to like level people in those groups. I've been like conference like this. And they're trying to get people out of their social box, you know, and a lot of times this sort of conference is like, hey, you, what do you guys want to talk about? You come up with the conference. And again, that leads to like a lot of like masturbation in terms of like, what is the effective AI going to be on job loss or whatever? And maybe that conversation is interesting. Maybe it isn't. But again, you're right that they sort of will pair people up socially in order to be like, oh, this is this person would be interesting in conversation with that person. And at the same time, as you can say, oh, there's some high-minded reason for doing that. Well, it's also social, right? It's also about creating the connection and the lines of power, right? So Teal apparently never was present at any of these gatherings. Oh, well, that was. Nor is he brought up, which I, what do you make of that? Because how is he then harvesting the value from these conversations? I guess I would imagine that he has people that are there that would update him about the tenor of the conversations. I guess there's a world in which these are recorded somehow serotonously, although I guess that's pretty dodgy when you have the commander of NATO there. But what do you make of that? The fact that he never personally, at least according to the reporting that we have, which is notably fragmentary, was never there and was never or rarely brought up in conversation. I mean, first of all, I got like Peter Teal is going to be invested or involved in a million things that he actually knows nothing about or it doesn't participate in or help start. Now, because there's only, you know, he's only awake for 16 hours a day like anybody else. Like he can't literally go everywhere and be, you know, be everywhere. And sometimes you do hear people making these connections where like this person is associated with Peter Teal. Well, Peter Teal probably hasn't thought about that person in 15 years or whatever, right? So to me, I, and I'm completely speculating. Yes, of course. But I think your original supposition was right that when it started, he was like, oh, I'd like to bring these people on and he got bored. He did something else in the conference kept going because it was like useful and he's like invested in or has the startup cap. Who knows if it's a, you know, a nonprofit or a for profit enterprise, but that, yeah, he's sort of like passively involved. And it's like one of the many things that he has his, you know, how like sometimes you'll hear about like a celebrity owns a restaurant and then you're like, this celebrity doesn't own the restaurant. Celebrity owns 3% of the word restaurant and went to the opening, you know, it could be that or it could be more and we don't really have a way of knowing, you know. As Recline released a 2000 word, I'm definitely not mad statement about this. Please don't print that. It starts enough people have asked me about Peter Teal and the dialogue story that it's worth saying what it is, at least what I saw it to be so dialogue as a conference. I went in 2018 and once in 2022, no one ever asked me to keep it or my presence of secret. My understanding was Teal was one of its founders, but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with dialogue. And so I think that you're right to an extent about that. It is, it is the secrecy element though that like why not just be like Davos? Hey, it's rich, powerful people getting together talking about money. Then people can be annoyed by it. When they go, they can decide to do what Rutger Breggman did. Remember that he called out the conference on stage. He's probably never been invited back. Or maybe he has because they thought that was awesome. Or you could go and be corrupted by the influence of the billionaires or you could be somewhere in between. And that's like a decision that each person who goes has to make, right? But it's more public. I would agree that would be better. They wouldn't have this problem right now. It's a self-created problem. I agree it's a self-created problem, which is why again, my conspiratorial angle is he loves the problem. I think he likes the problem. At your point, I think he likes this kind of Paul of secrecy, this kind of like the vision of him as a dark lord pulling strings who would then flee Argentina because of the rising political climate. And he likes the idea that people associated with him when it is revealed they are associated with him would take a hit, not him. As recline releasing a 2000 word, hey. Joseph Gordon Levin had to put out a statement, right? And it was like an okay statement, but it's like people are pissed at Joseph Gordon Levin now. And it's a difficult thing because like again, I've gone to things like this and been like, well, I'm going to go and be myself. And maybe I can yell at somebody who I disagree with. And maybe I'll hear some wild shit and that'll inform me when you're opposed to people it's often useful to hear what they say. I agree. But then at the same time, and this is the question I would put to Ezra or that I hope he's thinking about, would be like, if you go to these things regularly, like if you go to an event like, you know, he went to, he went twice, he goes to tons of other conferences. So does everybody else in this position? You're going to these conferences where the terms are being set by Peter Teal, right? And his like, right? And the other billions and the other people who are putting it together. And so they're sort of like setting the table for what the ground level of discussion is for what the terms are, for what the presumptions are. And you have to ask yourself, like, what might I be insidiously accepting without meaning to what is my participating in growing? What is my presence on it? Could be as well. Yeah, absolutely. And you have to make a, you have to make a judgment about that. And that's what I've done every time I go to something like this. I'm like, okay, who's actually putting it on? Right. And how do I feel about this person? Do you think it's possible to, you know, I think LA is interesting in the sense that there is a lot of kind of vertical movement between class stratus here, you know, the writer who interacts with the millionaire producer who interacts with the billionaire, whoever, and it, and it moves like that. And do you think there's any value to conferences like these and like, what is the real world application? I do think, I do think that it's important to live in a world where I'm a nix fan. I just saw the nix one in the title. I think that there is something weirdly that beautiful is the wrong word, but like weirdly incredible about like the social Democrat leftist mayor of New York being a nix, this fan of the same team as like ostensibly Donald Trump. Like there's something. Yeah. Is there any value that we can, that we can glean from that that can help society? I don't know, but like putting people of various views together in a format like this. Do you think it's a, has it added any value to your life? And is it, you know, I've only gone to this sort of things, sort of like experimentally and say like, okay, I was invited. Let's go see what the fuck is going on. And I have occasionally gotten something out of it. I find that the presentation of we bring together people from different groups to have a discussion is really up its own ass for most, for the most part. And I think the one of the problems with it that you're making me realize is it's generally when we're bringing together people from different elites or from different social strategies. It's usually the elites bringing in the poor people, right? And that does end up like infesting the poor people's mindset. I know writers who, they're wonderful writers, they come from difficult backgrounds, right? They are brought into Hollywood. And oh, do they love being friends with David Zoslov? You know, and like that makes them feel that they have value. - Front row with the big Nick's fan, David Zoslov. - Exactly. And like, look, if I had my David Zoslov, I'd shake his hand and I'd be like, "Hey, sir, do you want to do another show sometime?" - Yeah. - Or I've never worked with him specifically, but when he was running Warner Brothers, that was the same network he's doing on the whole show. So like, yeah, you gotta have some level of interaction. But there are also folks who, they get so wrapped up in the elite approval that it does change them. That's human nature. That's gonna happen to some percentage of people. What I think would be more valuable or what we could see more of, is it going in the other direction? I'd like to see the elites go slum it and hang out with everybody else. So what you said about Zoran made me realize what was cool about the Nick specifically is Zoran went to a queer bar in Bushwick, to watch the next game. There were people who I know from comedy on their Instagrams going, "Here I am with Zoran," 'cause he just went to some fucking bar. And he also went to the game and he also spoke at the parade. And so he lowered himself. - When he went to the game, he said him nosebleeds too. That was also appointed. - And that's a pointed symbol. And it's also he wants to remember who he is and who he's a part of. And he wants to be of the people. And what you don't often see guys like Tiel or even Ezra do is do the same thing, right? And go to the place where everybody else is. When you bring people to you, you're making them more like you, rather than you being willing to. So when I see these guys say, "We're bringing together different people." I'm like, "You're bringing people from different backgrounds into your room. You're not going to their room." And I think you should. - Now let me, here is my hypothesis on the secrecy. Just the general secrecy around Tiel. I think he's a guy with weird views. I think he's a guy with unpopular views and he understands they're unpopular. He's not a fan of democracy. He is promoting this anti-Christ reading which is heavily based on, this sounds crazy to say. But it's heavily based on European law from the rise of the Nazis period and philosophers who were active at that time. - He's saying that Greta Thurneberg is a legionaire of the anti-Christ. - Also because she's preaching about the environment, he feels that this makes someone the anti-Christ. - As a brief, like in this philosophy, an anti-Christ as a person who's capable of marshalling tremendous attention in order to create this kind of souronic security state around them, which seems to be what he's doing, whatever this is. And so I think that the secrecy is an effect of the fact that Tiel understands, hey, like I believe some weird shit, people don't like it. And when I say it to people, they act weird. And so maybe I'll just like, you know, like selectively choose who I will open myself up to. And I'm going to kind of drop that veil of secrecy and everything I do just to be like very guarded about like how like truly weird I am now. We said, you know, we've been talking about how this is just a conference. And I agree with that on a base level. This is probably very banal. I believe as a client statement that like he went to this, there was nothing weird going on. It was just a conference. At the same time, I think that Tiel is very aware of, I'm the billionaire that's interested in the anti-Christ. He must understand that people think that is weird. He must understand that there is a certain effect that happens where, you know, when you're in a room that is elite, it can feel very normal. You're sitting there and being like, you know, I don't know, you know, I'm at this party and I don't understand what the big deal is. And then you leave the party and the effect of FOMO is such like a lens that makes it the place seem more than what it is, but it is that effect, the feeling that it's more than what it is, that is really real and is real for a much larger segment of the population than the people who are just in that room. And I think Tiel plays with that. I think he plays with the idea that I think he maybe likes the idea that people who are ideologically opposed to me like Ezra Klein will be sullied by their attachment to me when it is revealed that they are somehow attached to me. I think he enjoys that. - Yeah, I mean, when people are invited to this event, I don't think they're being invited to say, hey, let's get Ezra Klein or whoever else to spread our evil message of, we've got, we're gonna try to inspect something in the public, right? - Here we go. - They're just like, no, we're gonna bring these people together as a normal social power game for the same reason any elite person might throw an event for a bunch of power brokers and socially important people to try to be in the center of the room. But also, yeah, by bringing people like that into their world, they justify themselves, they normalize themselves, right? I think the only reason I like push back against, some of the framing I see about the story on social media is because it is just a conference, it is just banal, and that can be evil, right? That, the evil of it is banal. And when I see people who are sort of on my side or broadly opposed, I fucking hate Peter Teal. He's done incalculable evil, right? But when we start thinking conspiratorially and making up conspiratorial stories, we are actually falling into his trap because he likes us to think of him that way. The evil people, the powerful people of the world would love us to build them into the masterminds, right? When in reality, they're just doing the same shit that Rich Elite's have all was done. What are they doing in the country club, right? That's in your town. They're not deciding what babies to eat, right? You know what they're doing? They're hoarding land and money, right? What is the problem with the Hollywood Country Club? Is that there should be fucking apartment buildings there instead of a golf course, right? And what are they doing when they, in there, they're just playing golf, right? And they're exchanging phone numbers and saying, "Good, you know, nice to see you." And that's banal in a boring way. That's evil in a boring way. - Well, I think it's like you start sharing spaces with these people in developing relationships and so you don't go into it thinking like, "Oh, we're going to be these like-minded people that are working towards a common goal." It's, "Yo, I know Jeff." And he's like, "He's big up and all that stuff." I can, yeah. - He's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. - He's good. Y'all hang out, he's cool. - Yeah. - That's a weird reason, but otherwise he's fine. Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. I don't disagree with any of that, but I do think that there is a image that Teal plays with and that there's a world in which the way dialogue is perceived as part of that. That's all. - Yeah. And they created the perception that people now have, right? By wanting to be secret in order to seem exclusive. - For, again, I think a boring reason, they're trying to make elite people feel special. That's the main reason, you know? Why is it hard to get into the secret club? You know, it's a fucking Soho house on steroids. That's all it is. Ooh, I can't get in. What goes on? Well, that's what they want you to think. But by doing that to such an extreme degree, they've created now the conditions under which they can have a leak and embarrass all these people and look like a more shadowy conspiratorial event that they actually are. - I've compiled the roster of the all-time evil billionaires. - No, great, great. And I'm going to read it to you now. Spoiler in this extremely elite group, Teal does not really rate in the top 10, or the upper half of the top 10, but I'm gonna give you the group and-- - He's getting minutes, though. - He's getting minutes, he's coming off the bench and just like moving the ball. - Right. - So-- - Yeah, but we gotta think about the great, see all-time greats. - Yeah, we gotta think about the all-time greats. We'll start here with the S tier, number one, King Leopold II of Belgium. (laughing) He ran the Congo as his personal wife, extracting rubber from there at industrial scales. The death toll was estimated in the millions. It was very, very brutal if you ever want to look it up. - Before you came, before you-- - Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I was just gonna say, now, we can argue about whether he was, he was a monarch in control of like the entire assets of the state of Belgium. Does that make him a billionaire? I think like if you counted up, he was, but is he technically a billionaire? Hard to say, but I'm gonna put him at the top. - I was just gonna say, just as a nod to you, because I think that the listeners should know this, you have labeled King Leopold plus the next two on the list as quote, franchise villains. - I think these are your franchise villains. - These are franchise villains. - Absolutely. - Which I think is an important distinction when you're to let you can-- - I mean, listen, people who refuse to extract rubber at the extortion at prices that King Leopold set had their limbs chopped off, this happened. It, you know, to millions and millions of people, it was horrendous, King Leopold. Not to mention was involved in a Epstein-like scandal of its day that it was, you can't even get it to-- - The original-- - With that part of it. - The original kind of prospect that really breaks the spreadsheet. - I mean, he was just incredible. So that's number one. Where do we stand on like royalty being technically a billionaire in this list? I mean, you know, it's funny because a lot of royals, depending on what country they ran, were actually massively in debt to various business people. They'd be like, they'd look wealthy, but in reality, you know, I mean, the king of England doesn't like, he doesn't control, yes, some amount of family money, but like, and then if you look at the 19th century, there's a whole lot of, you know, countries, what are spains in hawk to the, whatever. So, how do you say? Number two on the list, the Sacklers, the entire family. Yeah. So, you know, Purdue Farmer, you know, Purdue Stocksie Conten, documented role in fueling the opioid epidemic, which they knew was happening and they looked the other way. Yeah. Took roughly 10.7 billion in distributions while this was going on from the company, agreed to a 7.4 billion dollar settlement, which they then fought every inch of the way. And, you know, I think it's a deep roster. Like, if you're looking to build a team, you've got the entire family there, the Sacklers. Number two, what do we think? I think they're very evil. And I think that King Leopold, you know, a little bit hard for me to like relate to his mindset. You can't get in there. It's a little bit far from my experience. Yeah. We don't got to go anywhere for a while. I think the Sacklers are a really good example because I think they play into what I'm talking about, which is if you went and talked to one of the Sacklers, they'd be like, "No, I'm just a businessman. I was just building a company." And then like, "What? I'm not supposed to get paid by my company." Like, this is normal shit. Like, what are you talking about? I'm not evil. I'm just some guy. And that is the way evil works, you know? And it's the job of the rest of us to stop people from doing that, you know? Because that's what like, it's human nature is to be that evil when presented with that opportunity. And it's like actually a normal thing. They've got their name on it. Of course, think about it. So many museums. It's kind of like a. The Sackler Wing. It's just insane. For poisoning a good portion of the country. You know what's really funny is if you go to where the best art is, it's usually an evil place. Yes. Like, you know? I'm different from what it is always. You know, one of the best art collections in America, I was in Houston doing stand-up with my friends and said, "Hey, Houston's got really great art." And I'm like, "Why is that?" Oh, the oil industry. You go to the Netherlands, go to Amsterdam. Beautiful city. Went and looked at all that art. Oh, all the rents, all the Dutch masters. And then they had one painting that someone did of like the coffee plantations in Java that like funded all of the patronage of the Rembrandt's. Right? And like one little reference to, "Ah yes, this is what was going on." Because they, you know, they fucking destroyed entire other nations in order to make that. This is a good transition, too. Oh, yeah. Number three, Henry Clay Frick. He was Andrew Carnegie's enforcer. He ran the homestead steelworks for Carnegie. When a strike broke out there, he brought in the Pinkertons and many, many strikers died. And this guy absolutely loved art. He was, he was nicknamed the ghoul with the Vermeer. His mansion. Now, a beloved art museum. Yeah. No, I literally was in New York last weekend. My friend was like, "You should go to the Frick. I didn't go." But I was like, "Oh, yeah, the Frick. It'll be Frick and great. I didn't know it would be." I mean, I've done, you know, events at the Getty here. Right. And it's like, "Oh, what a beautiful place." And, you know, I made waves because I was doing one of these events. And I was the opening speaker. And I was like, "Let's talk about what like Getty actually fucking did for a second." Because this was like about labor and politics. And I was like, "This man killed people in order to build this marble tomb to himself. And that's what we have to keep in mind." Now we go to the, to the eight year, this second grouping here. We start with Andrew Carnegie, yes. Quote perennial contenders. Perennial contenders, yes. So Carnegie built his steel fortune, employed Frick to kill strikers. But kind of invented the philanthropy redemption arc of the kind of like early, a millionaire and billionaire, gilded age set of like, "Hey, everybody hates me because I killed all these strikers and made all this money. What if I gave my money away?" And creative museums. Yeah. And libraries. And libraries, it's one, it helps the public too. It's a wonderful tax break. Let's not forget that. And it keeps my name kind of like spoken down through the ages. I mean, literally there are libraries in LA where it's like, "Oh, that's a Carnegie library." That's like one of the nice ones there's one in East Hollywood near me. And it's like a really nice building. Not that much space for books. The building's very pretty. But yeah, I mean, he, like they're literally still called Carnegie libraries today. You could like look at a list of where they are in America. And like, it's amazing the degree to which people are still like, "Oh, and you're Carnegie was a great man." Because he, he, he did that himself. He just created. He bought himself that image, which comes about your point about Peter Teal. There's no way that Peter Teal's image isn't self-created. All these guys have the power to do it. I did a video a couple years ago about Avan Shennard, the Patagonia billionaire, has also done the same thing and it has worked so well on liberals where they're like, "Oh, no, he just love him. Yeah. He's a great guy." No, yeah, he donated all of his money. No, he donated it to a foundation that he and his family solely controlled. So, let's just, clever, clever estate planning by a, you're going to. Exactly. Great estate plan. They'll fly on PJs for the rest of their lives on that nonprofit, you know. Number five, Cornelius Vanderbiltz, the original Robert Barron, Roads and Shipping Monopolis, allegedly a set of his rivals that he wouldn't bother suing them because the law is too slow. He'd rather ruin them. Yes. Just kind of like your classic gilded age, villain number six, John D. Rockefeller. The oil, the oil guy, standard oil at one point controlled 90% of oil refining in America. The government used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break him up. We'd love to bring the Sherman Antitrust Act back one of these days. Oh my goodness. Are we not in a gilded age, truly? When you look at a new technology comes along, somebody then creates a monopoly over 90% of this thing that requires, that the world now requires to run the way that it does. That sounds a little bit like 2026 to me. And then we can end here. Henry Ford, of course, revolutionized the manufacturing process was also like one of the craziest anti-Semites ever loved Hitler. He was so efficient. Big, big fan of Hitler wanted to help the Nazis become even more efficient and was probably very sad when we went to war against them. Just like an incredible heel turn that nobody really expected from Henry Ford. Hitler had a pick of Henry Ford on his bedside table. Love Henry Ford. You got to put him up there. Now we get to the teals, the Elon Musk's. Will rise. It is expected that the cuts to USAID will cause up to 14 million excess deaths by 2030. That might be the most deaths caused by a billionaire. So expect Mr. Musk to shoot up this list. Now we're starting to get a lot more playing time. We then have to wonder like is the first trillionaire does he really count? And now people might say what about Jeffrey Epstein? I agree, but here's the thing. We actually don't know. And this is a problem. We don't know how much money this guy had. How do we still not know the exact assets under control of Jeffrey Epstein, but we don't know. Was he a billionaire? Was he a true billionaire? Was he a hundred millionaire? Was he a high hundred millionaire? We don't know. And so hard to put him in there. It is our list. Top seven most even billionaires of all time. I agree with that. I think the we will have to see how many people Elon kills by the end of his life and put him up against the sackless because it's going to be an incredible neck and neck towel. Elon's story isn't over yet. He keeps doing more evil stuff. He's not it's not over. It's no. It's only half time for Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. He's really going to start like shooting the ball now. Yeah. He's going to really start putting up. Okay. Let's go to the doomscroll. Okay. Welcome to Doomscroll. Adam, the story just kind of keep track on some stories. Some stuff we've had our eyes on in the past. Some stuff just kind of made us raise our eyebrows a little bit. The ozemic maker got hit by two ransom attempts. The initial pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the maker of ozemic and wagovie. They're dealing with fallout from two separate cyber attacks after hackers demanded to combine $75 million and walked away empty handed. This first group known as Fulcrumsec, they claimed to have breached the company earlier this month. They demanded 25 mil. There's a second hacker called the users 007, which I just I like it. They never stopped being nerds. They claimed to have independently broken the exact same time that Fulcrumsec did. They say they want 50 mil. They exchanged for what like they broke it and did what? They stole clinical trial information patient data, but I think the most important thing, the real treasure chest here is the company's internal AI models that they use to model new drugs. Oh, wow. So, you know, you could imagine the uses for that from the scary like terrorists creating bio weapons to competitors creating competitive drugs. And Novo Nordisk can't pay 25 million. That's a drop of the buck for they invented their weight loss pill. Yes. The theory is that they kind of strung the ransom people along until they could make a public statement. [BLANK_AUDIO] prepare their investors for the fact that this happened and then harden their internal defenses. The plan was to be like, "Yeah, we're gonna pay, we're gonna pay," and then they're not gonna pay. And then just cut it off. They went silent on both groups on June 11th and then announced the thing right at, you know, it was, yeah. Okay, so are you team ozempic or team hackers? That's. It depends on what floor. I have a team, I have team ozempic because having a. Not for vanity, but for health reasons, okay. I think it's very important for people who are struggling with diabetes. And I also think having like a frontier drug creation AI model, just like loosen the world is not good. It's scary. I don't want that. Chat GPT. Make me super ozempic. Yeah, yeah. What's that? Well, let's stick with pharmaceuticals. So, um. Oh, this is great. Yeah. So, there's millions of Americans right now are waiting for access to a powerful new obesity drug from Eli Lilly. This drug is called. Retatch. Retatch-retied? Retatch-retied. Retatch-retied. I'd say it's a prototype. Retatch-retied. Uh. but. Uh. one quote, very well connected 79 year old was able to have skipped the line and gotten it. Stat news is reporting that an unnamed patient in the White House received early access to Eli Lilly's experimental weight loss drug. No. Yes. And they got it through the FDA's compassionate use program, they say, which is reserved for patients with serious or life threatening conditions. No. Come on. The request was filed by a senior. Yes. National Institute of Health, Clinician in April, and cited diagnoses of severe obesity, obstructive sleep apnea, and a lung condition. Stat asked the White House about this whether the patient was President Trump, who was 79 in April, the White House did not say no to stat. It just referred them to health and human services, which also declined to answer the question. Uh. but. I mean, I have a good Donald Trump and I see obstructive sleep apnea. It's for sure. It's for sure. Yeah. Surprise that guy doesn't walk around with a CPAP on his face. Absolutely. He'd probably be feeling a lot better if he just had an oxygen tank. No, it's not. Yeah. What is it? Refractive obesity, I think is what the term is. Apparently, it refers to a type of obesity that does not respond to any of the drugs that are currently available on the market. So the guy's on the stuff, apparently, if it is indeed, we think it is, but apparently his obesity is not responding to any of the GLP ones. It's such an intense obesity. I think the hunger is so insatiable. It's just not turning him away from the big mass. Yeah, I know. It's supposed he's looking at it as much as I can. I still want to eat it. So, I want to eat the big mass. Okay, what's that? We got a mythos update andthropics clawed mythos. They recently broke into all of NSA's classified systems. It only took a few hours. Was it a contest? Okay. According to this was reports this week that came out of a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. The biggest issues though, there's a rift between the government and anthropic and it seems like that has sort of less to do with that stuff and more just the personalities that play a few weeks back inthropic revokes access to clawed mythos 5 and Fabel 5, which is this new fancy name they had given their most powerful kind of thing. They did this due to a government directive sag national security concerns. We talked about that in the past episode. Since then, words leaked that these two sides just they can't talk to each other. It seems as if there have been, first of all, AI should be regulated. We agree with that. Yes. The most America. The current administration has been very wishy washing on that when they came in immediately overturned the Biden era strictures on AI and we're like, "Age, laissez faire, let's go." Now they're cracking down on inthropic when they have created this apparently frontier model that's very good at cyber stuff. But a new report from Axios appears to say that a big factor in the banning of these models was just like the Trump administration hates these guys that work at a property. Just like personally does not like them is extremely dismissive of them. Those like their weird woke lefties who are in the thrawl to their AI god. This shit goes back to them wanting to use like mythos in weapons and in inthropic saying that they would not allow that. That's when they become a supply chain risk according to Hexath and then one of the quotes in the Axios pieces. This is an unnamed administration official quote. Everybody said anthropic was a bad actor. Some of us said it was time to give them a chance. Now those people are questioning that they meaning inthropic screwed us. It's so funny how again this comes back to it. These are all just guys at the end of the day. Yeah. And they don't like each other. And that's what's nice about seeing like Elon Musk be so on tilt in public all the time is you're like, "Oh, he just fucking hates Sam Altman and he's on a drug binge and he got mad and he sends some emails." Like that is what it comes down to at the end of the day. Like these guys, they have the same 16 hours a day. The rest of us do. They're not super geniuses. They're just people who are just, Sam Altman is just a fucking manager of a company. So is the guy who runs Altman, anthropic. And so yeah, and they call the White House on the phone and they don't get along. Like it's not, I love how as much as they're trying to replace people, the whole world is just people knowing each other at the end of the day. That's what I like about stories like this. Yes. What is next? So Ukrainian drones are exposing some gaps in Russia's defense. Analysts are calling this the largest drone attack on Moscow since the war began. Ukrainian UAVs struck the Russian capital on June 18th. They blew up a major oil refinery and forced evacuations at the country's largest airport. So they got a dense skyline over in Moscow apparently and these drones are able to get some nice cover from the radar and blow and shit up. The video from that raid on Moscow is insane because like there's a highway and just cars going by and then there's just like dudes with shoulder launch like man pads like shooting over the traffic just being like, I don't know, there's one shooting over multiple cars and then there's a video I urge you to look up because it's fucking crazy. So the attack was centered on like oil production facilities around Moscow. Obviously Russia, huge landmass, nine time zones, they need gas. And one of these man pads misses a drone because like hits a vat of gasoline and sends the lid fully intact like like it popped up five, six hundred feet straight up in the air like a cartoon. And this was just a guy who missed with like a shoulder launched anti aircraft missile. And I just had me thinking like, God, first of all, we are in a dystopia. This shit is happening. It's crazy that this is happening right now. And the implications of it are crazy for the world and for us. And just the fact that like one of the most guarded capitals in on the planet is vulnerable like this is makes you think. I mean, it's crazy. You know, Russian systems are designed for large metal targets. You know, like we used to have for cruise missiles, things like that. And you know, they're planning on plastic plywood. I watched this like Ukrainian propaganda video of like how many of the guys they're killing in Ukraine. And it is it was one of the most truly sci-fi dystopian things I've ever seen because it's a bunch of like middle-aged Russian soldiers in a field like walking around, walking forward, just going like as the drone comes in and like, merks them. And it's just like from the Jones P.O.V. From the Jones P.O.V. And it's like no bullshit, a 10 minute supercut of that. And it is just like. This is the world we live in. It's crazy. Well, I don't understand and I don't follow foreign policy as closely as I do other issues. But the pattern for like a couple years now has been you hear about something happening in Russia/Ukraine that is the craziest news store you've ever heard. And then you're like, what's going on with the war? That's pretty much the same. Well, tell them the like the word that where they it's a truck and they're getting all the different operations later. This is one of my favorite things. Well, it does seem like recent, the recent developments are this. Ukraine has developed a middle strike capacity, which is they previously they had long strike capacity and they had the ability to affect the front lines. Now they have this ability to hit like supply lines as they try to feed men and material to the front. And this has really affected the war recently. Russia may respond and may catch up or whatever. But there was this raid last year, year and a half ago called Operation Spiderwebs. And they hired trucking from inside Russia to take a load deep into the interior of Russia. The guys didn't know what it was. They're just like, hey, can you drive this? Can you drive this? This rig somewhere, they get a close to their target and they tell the driver like, "Oh, pull over here, you're going to meet the guy who's going to take the load." The top of the truck opens up, drones fly out. The drones are programmed on time. There's no feed to a central station. The drones just understand visually where they are. The target was the Russian nuclear bomber fleet of which they took out several planes and struck thousands of kilometers into Russia using this technique of just a guy's hired to do a thing. Russian taskrabbit, like, "Yo, take this there." It is crazy. One of the things that's interesting in terms of what it means is the American leadership in world affairs as a hegemon has been based on, "Oh, we have the most high-tech shit. We have like shit. Nobody can develop stuff that we have. We have the craziest, most high-tech laser-guided, whatever." Ukraine is getting this edge based on stuff that's like $8,000 per drone. It's very, very cheap. They're leading on this and it is kind of like up completely upended the way the world does war. The fact that Iran held us off basically beat us with a fraction of the GDP that was brought to bear. This is world-changing stuff and it's very crazy. Very crazy. Innovation is not just the technology that you have. It's what you do with the technology that you already have. Why is Nintendo PlayStation every year, right? Even though the hardware is not that good? Because they do something more interesting with it. That's a great point. It's the same with war, right? It's the same with what do you do with the thing you actually have? It also strikes me though, is that what you're describing is, I remember a couple years ago seeing, there's a nonprofit called Stop Killer Robots that was trying to get regulation around like assassination drones. That would be great. That would be great. Yeah. I had a short film about like Imagine an assassination drone coming in and blowing up particular person. And we're like everything that they predicted is coming to me. And how could you ever put that back in the bottle? It's not going to go back in the bottle. And if God forbid, we ever go to war with whoever, this stuff will happen here and it's very scary. What's next? Catherine Lannasa. Oh, I love the sound. No, she's Diana from the pit. She's been, she was once married to Dennis Hopper. She was the fourth of Hopper's five wives. Okay. Stay with me here. I love having like celebrity relationship, guys have explained to me because I don't follow it at all. It's very funny. Yeah. Okay. No, this was from 89 to 92. They're married. Okay. She told W Magazine that she was repeatedly visited by his ghost after he died in 2010. She says, we've been divorced for a very long time, but I was the, this is why her explanation for why she feels he was visiting her a lot. We've been divorced for a very long time, but I was the last wife that he'd been with that he wasn't currently divorcing. So I think we can say it again, just so people can unwrap it because it is a little naughty. So I think what she's saying is when Dennis Hopper died, he was trying to divorce the woman he was married to at that time. So he wanted to visit her. He hated that bitch. Right. He didn't like her. He's, he was game to me. Right. Because we were on good to weird right. That's exactly right. Love that. I think that level of intimacy when you're dying is maybe only something you can do with a partner. Apparently, it's scary. It was scary at first. He was in a wheelchair and he was like falling down at the Academy Awards. This was in the vision. In the vision. Or the visitation I should say. But the last time he came to her in a dream, he told her that he was okay. She said they were, we were both in a cafeteria in Greece. He told me that he was okay and that he wasn't in pain anymore and he was good and I never heard from him again. It's so found. Do you believe it? Anybody here believe in ghosts? Oh, hell yeah. God no. Okay. I believe people see things that are, you know, because the human mind is insane. But yeah, no. I think here's my take. I believe in ghosts. You do? Hell yeah. The reason why horror movies don't scare me, I can wash my two AM, go right to sleep. Especially the ghost ones is because I think ghosts are essentially, it's a positive story guys. It's even like the haunting of Hill House or whatever. If ghosts exist, death is not the final thing. Life goes on. Isn't that a part, even if the ghost is haunting you and saying crazy shit and you see like visions of like a bloody person in the mirror. At least I can get a ghost. A child on fire? Yeah. I'm not going to be, and I'm not going to be a weirdo unless I want to. If I want to be where I'm a ghost and I've earned that right, but I'm not going to, yeah. And moaning like, is that scary in the moment? Yes, but here is the headline. Death is not the end. And I think that's very positive. You have an opportunity. This is, what Lino says saying to you is you will have an opportunity when you die to haunt people who might have wronged you. This is a very uplifting message. To visit the person who you were married to, who you were not divorcing at the time. And I think that is a beautiful, I think that's a beautiful story and a beautiful place to it. No, I think it's beautiful that there's nothing after death. You just wink out, you're gone. You don't have to worry about anything. I'm going to be like, well, this is your fucking problem now. I'm keep laughing open. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks Adam. Yeah. It's been wonderful. [MUSIC]