Peter Theil - Off the Record Segment

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Hey there, everybody.

We are releasing another one of these off-the-record segments.

This one is the Peter Teal segment.

We release these every week for our patrons.

And this one, in particular, we thought was very interesting because what comes up in the Peter Thiel episode that we didn't get a chance to cover in the main show was Peter Thiel's connection to Jeffrey Epstein, something that we thought Joe Rogan would be very interested in.

So we wanted to play that for you here.

It's the entire off-the-record segment.

I talked about this with the Graham Hancock that we released a couple of weeks ago.

There is a bunch of extra content while we're on break.

You can go, if you became a patron, you could listen to a ton of episodes that we have already put out.

These are essentially mini sodes that are about a half an hour to 45 minutes long.

They cover all the pieces that we thought were amusing, that we thought that were funny, et cetera, et cetera, that we just couldn't fit into the main show.

So we hope you enjoy this Peter Thiel episode.

Recognize that, like we suggested on the Graham Hancock episode, this doesn't have as many citations.

This isn't as fact-checky as that stuff is.

This is a little more off the cuff.

So be ready for that.

All right, we're going to leave you with this.

Hope you enjoy this Peter Thiel episode.

Like we suggest, tons of content for patrons if you want to become a patron.

And we just released on our patron feed to Roswell Filing Clerk and above, we just released another bonus episode, the July bonus episode, which is a record on a long time ago 2014 recording with Brian Dunning.

So, if you want to check that out, you can become a patron and you can listen to that right now.

All right, we're going to leave you right now to listen to our off-the-record segment, Peter Thiel.

My problem with that is I think plants are smart.

Oh my God.

What was that?

Where'd you get the money?

What'd you do?

What are you doing down there?

Why do people say you have UFOs?

Like, what is the tax bracket of someone who makes a million dollars a year?

They're so vitamin rich.

Oh my God, that's so crazy.

All right, Marsh, here we are behind the curtain, gloves off.

What did you think of Peter Thiel?

So this is the first time I've ever seen Peter Thiel talk.

I've heard some stuff of his.

I've heard an essay of his.

I think it was Noah did an essay for Citation Need, even possibly going through a Peter Thiel thing he's written.

And I was surprised by...

I think there's an intensity to the way he speaks that in somebody I, if I knew them better, would argue that that intensity is chemically induced.

I don't know Peter Thiel well enough to make an assumption like that.

But there was certainly, he seemed like very...

tense

and jacked in the way he was speaking.

And just that those moments and that one moment that we highlighted that we had to leave in full where he gets asked a very simple follow-up question and it's a 37 second silence.

It just, yeah, it really surprised me how completely detached he seems to be from what the rest of us would agree is reality, especially for someone who has such a massive behind the scenes level of influence in your government and therefore the way the world works.

Yeah, I mean, when you look at the connections between Peter Thiel and J.D.

Vance and you see the rise of J.D.

Vance from nobody to senator, from senator to vice president in a very short amount of time,

you know,

that's something to definitely look at and pay attention to, I think, and especially because of, you know, all the backing and all the really close contact with Thial.

And I think, you know, Peter Peter Thial is, is one of these guys that Joe has on.

He's been sort of surrounding himself with the ultra-rich.

And we wanted to go back very specifically and listen to Teal after Musk because

I was curious as to what Teal was going to talk about in comparison.

And was he going to bring something that was his pet project?

And clearly it was regulation.

I think that was his pet project that he wanted to bring to talk about, talk to Joe.

I think Teal is easier to listen to than Musk.

I will say that.

Teal is easier to listen to than Musk.

And I, I, you know, he seems, what he reminds me of is somebody who's like,

I don't know, trying to impress a professor.

You know what I mean?

Like it's somebody who's talking in a class and feels like he's trying to impress a professor rather than just having a down-to-earth conversation with a pretty regular guy.

I think he's having a conversation that he's.

he's sort of grandstanding a lot throughout.

Yes.

And that's okay to have.

I mean, it's okay to have those conversations, but I don't think, I think Peter Thiel's metaphors and the ways, the ways in which he tries to tie subjects together is severely lacking to have that kind of weight.

Yeah, yeah.

He'll use terms like my hermeneutic of suspicion.

You're like, okay, let's dial it down a little bit, amen.

Come on.

Malthusian, if you will, Malthusianism.

Yeah.

Okay.

So let's get started.

We're going to jump right in.

I teased this in the main episode.

This is about Social Security and it's being a Ponzi scheme.

You know,

I think my answers are probably all in the in the, you know, in the in the very libertarian direction.

So it would be sort of figure out ways to have smaller governments, figure out ways, you know, you know, to increase the age on Social Security, means test Social Security so not everyone gets it, just figure out ways to gradually dial back, you know, a lot of these government benefits.

And then that's, you know, that's insanely unpopular.

So it's

completely unrealistic on that level.

That bothers people that need Social Security.

Well, I said means tested.

Means tested.

So people who don't need it don't get it.

Right.

So Social Security, like even if you're very wealthy, I don't even know how it works.

Do you still get it?

Yeah, basically anyone who pretty much everyone gets it because it was originally rationalized as

sort of a pension system, not as a welfare system.

And so the fiction was you pay Social Security taxes and then you're entitled to get a pension out in the form of Social Security.

And because it was We told this fiction that it was a form of

pension system instead of an intergenerational Ponzi system or something, something like that.

You know, the fiction means everybody gets paid social security because of the pension system.

Whereas if we were more honest and said it's, you know, it's just a welfare system, maybe you could start dialing, you could, you could, you could probably rationalize in a lot of ways.

So what he wants to do is dial back common people benefits from the government.

That's really what he wants to do.

He's not talking about benefits from the government that benefit billionaires and corporations.

He's talking about dialing back

the basic benefits that all of us pay 6% of of our salary to every week yeah exactly like his answer isn't to undo like huge tax cuts on the wealthy or to choose or to to close tax loopholes on things like capital gains and offshore finance or anything like that it's uh we need your nana to need less money to keep eating on i'm afraid yeah Yeah.

And it's not a Ponzi scheme.

It's solvent and it has been forever.

And it would be if we kept with normal immigration numbers, it would be fine.

If our population declines, yeah, there might be a problem in the future.

But But

if we keep with immigration numbers, it should be okay.

What billionaires want, and

this is why it's a big topic for Elon too, is they want your money for more and different tax cuts for themselves and for their businesses.

They want that money somewhere else.

That money has been tied up in Social Security for so long, they want to see that money go somewhere else.

They're talking about, you know,

there's a couple of these

that are talking about Social Security, and you can clearly see that these are very wealthy people.

Joe didn't even know how Social Security works.

Joe has no need for Social Security.

He will never need it.

He has so much money that has been wrapped up in this show for so long,

he'll draw it, but he won't know anything about it.

He won't understand how it works at all.

So again, this is two people who have no right to talk about this talking about this.

Next up, another piece about Social Security.

I think there's some guaranteed minimum you get, and then

and then if you put more in, you get somewhat more, and then it's capped at a certain amount.

And even that's why that's why that's why Social Security taxes are capped at something like $150,000 a year.

And then

this is one of the really big tax increase proposals that's out there is to uncap it, which would effectively be a 12.4% income tax hike

on all your income.

Just to Social Security?

Sure, because the argument is

the sort of progressive left Democrat argument is

that it's, you know, why should you have a regressive Social Security tax?

Why should you pay 12.4% or whatever the Social Security tax is?

Half gets paid by you, half gets paid by your employer, but then it's capped at like 140, 150K, some level like that.

And why should it be regressive where if you make 500K or a million K a year, you pay zero tax on your marginal income?

And that makes no sense if it's a welfare program.

If it's a retirement savings program and your payout's capped, then if you don't need to put in more, then you get out.

Aaron Powell, well, that's logical, but there's not a lot of logic going on with the way people are talking about taxes today.

No, it makes sense.

That's like you're talking about it as if it's a Ponzi scheme.

If you tax correctly, it's not a Ponzi scheme, right?

Like you suggest.

Also, I want to point this out because they seem to be glossing over this.

This is an income.

tax.

This is where income comes in.

So not a lot of super rich people have big incomes.

Look at Jeff Bezos.

He gets paid like something like $100,000 a year.

I don't know what the exact number is, but it's a small number, a small amount of money per year from amazon but he holds an immense amount of amazon stock that he then borrows money and essentially uses that money to ship to to to live an extravagant lifestyle and then he pays very little on income tax well income tax is one of the highest brackets that you can get taxed in our country and so it's a really high tax rate so teal would would never actually feel the sting anyway It would only be on people who earn income.

Yeah, exactly.

And arguably, you could say that's that's by design because like these laws are typically drafted with a load of input and pressure from lobbyists and lobby groups to set where the thresholds are and what taxes apply when.

And like, listeners, when was the last time you hired a lobbyist?

Yeah, that's, that's why these financial laws often don't favor you because you can't afford a lobbyist.

I can't afford a lobbyist.

Peter Thiel can afford a vice president.

Every time Joe has a billionaire on, they seem to talk about taxes and they seem to talk about the government and how the government should be spending its money.

A billionaire is the worst person to talk to about this sort of thing.

A billionaire is, you know, they're going to talk about how you fix the government tax system, but they are talking about it from a very specific point of view.

And billionaires have their money invested in lots of different things.

So they're going to give you points of view that may be very skewed towards their investments in these things.

So they may be telling you something that's very motivated, using motivated reasoning to tell you about certain things that would make you convinced that, oh, well, you know,

this is an important thing, when really it's just making sure that their pocket is fatter.

This happens all the time with people.

And it's also, there's also like, I think a little bit of survivorship bias that such a few amount of people become billionaires that when they start talking about it, they have big gaping holes in their logic about how things should work.

We shouldn't be listening to them when it comes to economic policy.

They should be the last people we should be listening to because they are constantly motivated to try to change economic policy to favor them.

Get them out of the conversation.

Start talking to people, economics professors, people who understand economics, people who are in government, who aren't like in the

lobbyist pocket.

That's who we should be having conversations about, who should be taxing, not billionaires.

Yeah, exactly.

Don't let your economic policy be dictated by someone who, by dint of where they are in the world, has almost no ability to understand the value of things.

Because if you have over a certain amount of money, it is practically infinite money and nothing matters anymore.

You can go off and buy a million-dollar house tomorrow and not notice that you've spent that money.

So the value of things is completely gone when you've got that amount of kind of distortive wealth.

It's funny to even think about these guys even owning a million-dollar house, right?

Like a million-dollar house to them would be nothing.

It'd be a tiny shack.

It'd be a ranch that they go to with one room.

All right.

So now we're going to talk a little bit about a geopolitical double standard.

And then the and then sort of the geopolitical problem with nuclear power was you either, you know,

you need a double standard where we have nuclear power in the U.S., but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the U.S.

gets to keep its nuclear weapons.

We don't let 100 other countries have nuclear weapons.

And that's an extreme double standard, probably a little bit hard to justify.

Or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either.

Or you just have international collaboration and non-proliferation agreements.

Again,

it's not one of these two choices.

This could have almost gone in the toolbox section.

This is a false dichotomy.

You can just have agreements not to do that.

And that is what we do in the world.

There's an article from MIT, which I'll link in the show notes, which talks about how it says here, Germany, Japan, and South Korea are U.S.

allies who are not eager to make themselves targets for nuclear armed states.

And instead, they work with the U.S.

on defense matters.

So should the U.S.

support a waiver, those countries might be more likely to pursue their own programs and get their own nuclear weapons for that reason.

Yeah, and we just incentivize people to use it as power and not as weapons.

We had this deal with Iran.

During Trump's last term, he wound up breaking that deal, but we had a nuclear deal with Iran so that they could use this nuclear research to look into using it as power.

And then we had, you know, before anybody sends any messages and says, oh, you know, well, it was a bad deal or whatever it was that Trump said,

what they'll often say is that we gave them $100 billion.

Well, we didn't.

We unfroze their assets.

They had assets and we unfroze those assets.

So it's not like we reached into our pockets and gave them $100 billion.

We just unfroze the assets that were frozen in different places for Iran.

And then we also wound up repealing sanctions to help give them, again, more money that they could then use.

And then we had a monitor.

policy in place that and just to make sure Iran complied with this.

And then they would be able to use this

as power.

And then we would pay attention to it and make sure they weren't using it as weapons.

And they were happy to have their assets unfrozen and use it for power.

And we were happy to make sure that they weren't making bombs.

And now Trump wants that back.

He broke it his first term.

Now he wants it back again.

So he's sending over people to talk to the

Iranian people to try to get it back again.

But it was a good deal.

It was a good deal for everybody.

They were going to get power.

They were going to be help reintegrate them back into sort of the world economy and they weren't going to make nukes and everybody was going to be happy with it.

All right.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about how society can become risk averse and then feminized.

There's always a big picture question.

People ask me, you know,

if I'm right about this picture of, you know, the slowdown in tech, this sort of stagnation in many, many dimensions.

And then there's always a question, you know, why did this happen?

And my cop-out answer is always why questions are over-determined.

Because, you know,

it can be, there are multiple reasons.

And so it could be why it could be we became a more feminized, risk-averse society.

It could be that the education system worked less well.

It could be that we were just out of ideas.

The easy ideas have been found.

The hard ideas, the cupboard, nature's cupboard was bare, the low-hanging fruit had been picked.

So it can be over-determined.

So I just think this idea that women are less risk-averse can only be held by someone who's never talked to women who date men.

Genuinely.

Because every time time a woman goes on a Tinder date, she's taking a bigger risk than most of the nuclear physicists on the Manhattan Project, genuinely.

Yeah.

Joe's show very often could just be, you know, have a tagline, just two rich guys jabbering about misogyny.

That's basically, I mean, like, there's so many segments that are like this, where there is clearly a constant jab towards.

uh towards anything feminine and then they kind of try to always have to try to make that weaker that's just something that's just something it that's built in his dna that that is and I wonder, too, if this is also a calculated and measured response to get him on

Joe's good side.

Because if he brings these things, these sort of undertone of misogyny, he gets on Joe's good side and can talk about whatever he wants.

Maybe it wouldn't put it, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it wasn't that, if it's just this is how Peter Thiel also sees the world.

He's just pronouncing.

I'm not saying that that's, that it's, that it is that, but it could be that, you know, maybe he's clever or maybe he's just not a good person.

Either one.

Okay, next up, we're going to talk about Egypt because we got to do a little bit of

old archaeology stuff and this is that portion.

And I think while the rest of the world was essentially operating at a much lower vibration, there were people in Egypt that were doing some extraordinary things.

I don't know how they got the information.

Maybe they did get it from visitors.

Maybe they did, but there's no real compelling evidence that they did.

I think there's much more compelling evidence that a cataclysm happened.

When you look at the Younger Dryas impact theory, it's all entirely based on science.

It's entirely based on core samples and iridium content and

also massive changes in the environment over a very short period of time, particularly the melting of the ice caps in North America and just impact craters all around the world that we know something happened roughly 11,000 years ago and probably again 10,000 years ago.

Did he say vibration to start with?

Let's talk about vibrations.

Yes, absolutely.

What is happening on this show?

also, this is like correlation without causation.

There's so many leaps of logics.

We get from craters to they had lost tech to build the pyramids.

Like just because those things happened around a certain time doesn't mean it automatically blew out all the life in the world.

Like that's just a silly thing to think or blew out all the tech in the world.

Yeah.

Yeah, Joe, Joe just really wants this, the pyramids to be something.

He very much wants it.

Did you see this week the

big hullabaloo over the pyramids where they had done some sort of sonic resonance or some sort of LIDAR or something underneath the pyramids, and they saw it.

Yeah,

I'm waiting for it to appear on Joe's show, but I suspect I'll be digging deeply into it.

That Flint Dibble did a whole video on it.

I hadn't watched it, but it was an hour-long live stream he did where he talked about those particular pylons that are underneath the

pyramids that they're seeing in these radar

vision, radar radar maps underneath.

So we'll get to it eventually.

I'm sure we're going to get to it.

Oh, we're going to do the Graham Hancock flidibble kind of area of Rogan for sure, I'm sure.

I'm dying to wait to hear Joe's take on the signal thing that just broke yesterday.

The signal talking about, because he had Evan Hafer in, and Evan Hafer was like, man, I'm just happy to have these people in that know what it's like to be boots on the ground.

You got Tulsi, you got JD, you got Heg Seth, all these people.

They know what it's like.

he's wanting.

He's going to sit that

absolute clowns use Signal to talk about a military plan.

Like, it is so funny to see that.

I am dying to hear Joe's take on that particular thing.

I don't know if he'll ever bring it up, but I am dying to, if you're a listener and you hear Joe's take, send it to me.

I'm dying to see what it is.

Yeah, I mean, we use Signal to plan this show.

We don't use Signal to plan incursions into foreign states or a bombing campaign.

I will invite Heg Seth to our next show, though.

All right.

Now we're going to talk about history and how there could be a progressive view of history.

The sort of naive, the progressive views, things always just got monotonically better.

And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history where even the Roman Empire didn't decline.

And even, you know, this,

one sort of stupid way to quantify this stuff is with pure demographics.

And so it's the question, how many people lived in the past?

And

the rises and falls of civilization story is there were more people who lived in the Roman Empire because it was more advanced, it could support a larger population, and then the population declined.

You know, the city of Rome maybe had a million people at its peak, and then by, you know, I don't know, 650 AD, maybe it's down to 10,000 people or less.

You have this complete collapse in population.

And then the sort of alternate, purely progressive view is the population has always just been monotonically increasing because it's a measure of how, in some sense, things in aggregate have always been getting better.

This is not the progressive view of history.

There's nobody who thinks that the population of the world has always been, you know, monotonically, slowly growing and has never gone backwards.

Just nobody holds that view.

This is a complete straw, man.

We know, for example, the Spanish flu infected 500 million people up to like 1918 and killed something like 50 million people on a global population of 1.8 billion.

So the Spanish flu alone killed 3% of the world, basically.

And nobody disputes that, apart from maybe Rogan and some of his listeners who don't believe it because COVID wasn't that bad.

Well, yeah, I mean, like the Black Death didn't kill half of the population of the planet or something like that, an intense amount.

This is just a way to make it sound like progressive views are kooky.

So he's attaching something that you suggest is a straw man.

So you could say, well, aren't these progressives just kooky people?

You can't even trust them when it comes to history, et cetera.

Yeah.

All right.

Now we're going to circle back to advanced civilizations again.

This is another quick clip from that.

The one place where I differ is

I do think our civilization today is, on some dimensions, way more advanced than any of these past civilizations were.

I don't think any of them had nuclear weapons.

I don't think any of them had

spaceships

or anything like that.

And so the failure mode is likely to be somewhat different from these past ones.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, it does make sense.

It does make sense.

It makes a lot of sense.

It makes an awful lot of sense.

I I should have put this in the what was good about the episode.

They're right.

You're right.

We are watching a show where two guys act like it is profound to say that ancient people didn't have nukes, didn't have spaceships.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a continuation of that same conversation.

I think technology progressed in a different direction.

That's what I think.

I think structural technology, building technology, at somehow or another achieved levels of competence that's not available today.

When you look at the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, there's 2,300,000 stones in it.

The whole thing points to due north, south, east, and west.

It's an incredible achievement.

The stones, some of them were moved from a quarry that was 500 miles away through the mountains.

They have no idea how they did it.

Massive stones.

The ones inside the king's chamber, where they're like the biggest ones are like 80 tons.

It's crazy.

The whole thing's crazy.

Like, how did they do that?

Like, whatever they did, they did without machines, supposedly.

They did without the use of the combustion engine.

They didn't have electricity.

And yet they were able to do something that stands the test of time, not just so you could look at it.

You know, like you can go to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon.

It's gorgeous.

It's amazing.

It's incredible.

But I can understand how people could have built it.

The pyramids is one of those things that you just look at and you go, what the fuck was going on here?

So he can see how like the Greeks could build stuff, but not brown people.

How could brown people build a big pile?

I mean, the pyramids is like a pile shape.

It's like you put the most of it at the bottom and the least of it at the top and you'll naturally arrange yourself into a triangle.

And there's obviously there's a lot more to it than that.

But they talk about, he talks about like, oh, it's, you know, it's perfectly aligned to all these different cardinal directions and things.

But like, I don't think if we break down every one of those things, it's kind of, it's assuming that people back then were less practical and less intelligent.

People back then were just as intelligent.

They just had less of a grounding in the basic facts from like the accumulation of history that we've had.

It's the standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing.

So like, how do they get it to be perfectly aligned or so well aligned?

Well, it's not hard to know which direction south is.

We've known that for a very long time.

You've got a sun to tell you that.

You can kind of watch the movement of the sun.

We can always figure that out.

There's other stars as well.

If you go to astronomy.com, they even explain that the corners of the great pyramid of Giza align well with the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west.

Researchers have spent years trying to understand how the builders were able to align the pyramid so precisely.

And most accept that the ancient engineers used the motion of the sun, which has been there for a while.

So, yeah,

it's impressive that they did it, but it's not mysterious.

It's not magical.

It's not a sign that something else has to have come along and shown them how to do it.

You're just underestimating how ingenious people have always been.

Yeah, that's a great point.

One of the things that he says too is, you know, oh, there's all these, you know, 2 million stones, et cetera.

You know, how do they get them all there?

It's like, most of them are quarried right there.

Most of them were quarried literally right there.

And then they moved the really big ones, these granite ones that he's suggesting.

They move these by boat.

So they didn't just drag, like he, the way he makes it seem is that they had to drag these things through a mountain range.

They didn't.

They just cut them and then they put them in a boat.

They sailed them up to where this is and then they pulled them out and then they had to transport them from there, sure.

But, you know, this idea that you can't get them there somehow is silly.

And, you know, like, I think he just needs to talk to Mel Gibson in the future because that guy used Dragon Ball Z powers to move them different places and then we'll find the answer.

He just hasn't had the answer yet, Marsh.

That is true.

still too early.

He hasn't talked to Mel.

All right.

Next up, we're going to talk, oh, this is a really strange bit about gods and kings.

I don't know if this is an alternate history theory, but I'm always into the James Frazier, Golden Bough, Rene Girard, violence, sacred history, where

you have always this question about the origins of monarchy and kingship.

And

the sort of Gerard-Frazier intuition is

that

it is something like

if every king is a kind of living god, then we have to also believe the opposite, that maybe every god is a dead or murdered king, and that somehow societies were organized around scapegoats.

The scapegoats were, you know, there was sort of a crisis in the archaic community.

It got blamed on a scapegoat.

The scapegoat was attributed all these powers.

And then at some point, the scapegoat, before he gets executed, figures out a way to postpone his execution and turn the power into something real.

And so there's sort of this very weird adjacency between

the monarch and the scapegoat.

And

then, you know, I don't know, the sort of riff would be that the first pyramid did not need to be invented.

It was just the stones that were thrown on a victim.

And then it somehow, and that's the original.

The stones that were thrown on a victim.

A community stones a victim to death.

Tribe runs after a victim.

You stone him to death.

You throw stones on the victim.

That's how you create the first tomb.

There's so much weird about this.

There's so much weird about this.

So why would it be possible?

Why would it possibly be true that all kings are fallen gods and all

like all kings are living gods and therefore all gods are dead kings and murdered kings?

Like, why would that make, there's nothing about that that would suggest that it's true.

He's just speculating about that.

It's not based in anything.

Why is he speculating that pyramids started off as a pile of murder stones?

Why does that have to be true?

Like a pyramid as a structure, as I said, is a pile, but like it's a fairly easy structure to build.

Things naturally form into triangles through the act of gravity.

Like it's not a leap to say that people would see that that was possible and would pile things that way.

Nothing that Peter Thiel is saying here is based on anything at all.

But this is the guy who was saying that climate science is spurious.

Where's your standards here?

The one thing he does touch on that's kind of a little bit interesting.

He talks about substitution rituals.

And I think this is kind of what he's alluding to.

This is an article we actually published in The Skeptic Magazine as well by a writer called Hadar Rubin.

And in ancient Mesopotamia, rather than in Egypt, there was a ritual where if there was an eclipse, it would mean that the king was prophesied death, or an upcoming eclipse would be the prophecy that the king would die.

And so to get around that prophecy, they'd invent this ritual where they'd take a criminal who was on like death roll, essentially, the equivalent of death roll, and they would substitute that criminal into the king's place for a couple of days and then treat that criminal as the king and then kill that criminal.

And then therefore the king would have escaped the real king would have escaped the prophesied death because you've killed the criminal after you've made them king.

The criminal will kind of consent to that because they get to have a sweet couple of days out of prison before they get killed.

And then after the eclipse, the king resumes the throne, having felt like, oh, we've dodged a prophecy at that point.

So it sort of feels like Teal is referring to that maybe, but that he believes it really is something, that there's something valid to it.

It's really hard to understand what he's talking about, but I assume he's seen something like that and just kind of wrapped it into his gods are living kings and

gods are dead kings and kings are living gods kind of tautology.

All right.

Next up, we're going to talk a little bit about Darwin and biology.

What do you think the factor was?

There's a lot of debate about this, like the factor was that separated us from these animals and why we became what we became, because we're so vastly different than any other primate.

So what do you think took place?

Like the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil record.

We don't know what the fuck happened.

There's a lot of theories, the throwing arm, cooking meat.

There's a lot of theories, but we really have no idea.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, well, again,

let me do sort of a linguistic riff.

I think Aristotelian, Darwinian biology, Aristotle, you always differ things by put them in categories.

And

man, I think the line Aristotle has is something, man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation.

And

I would say

that we are these giant imitating machines.

And of course, the Darwinian riff on this is, you know, to imitate is to ape.

And so we differ from the ape, we're more ape-like than the apes.

We are far better at aping each other than the apes are.

So Teal is throwing around that sentence.

It's so ridiculous.

He's throwing out these complex wording, your Aristotelian, Darwinian biology.

And he's like, Aristotle, you know, puts things in categories and Darwin, you know, was with different animals and things.

So Aristotle is saying, well, we are different from the animals because we have imitation and animals don't.

And again, this is a false dichotomy.

There are animals in between the two who can do imitation.

Chimps can do imitation.

There are other animals.

Birds can pick up habits from other birds, pick up traits from other birds.

Crows, I think, can learn from other birds.

So like, this is another one of those false dichotomies.

But he's just throwing around around these words to sort of hide the fact that he's not really saying anything of any particular import.

He's saying, like, let's play with linguistics.

He's just doing like word association riffs.

But Joe's question was, why did we evolve bigger brains?

And his answer is, we like to copy each other,

which is not an answer to that question.

Like, unless he's saying that someone developed a bigger brain and then someone else went, that's a good idea.

I'll do that as well.

That's exactly it.

It's keeping up with the Joneses.

I think.

I think that's what it is.

It's a, you know, your significant author asks, well, why don't we have a bigger brain?

And then you put one on credit.

That's how it works.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Next is another piece of that.

This is literally the next section right after that.

Well, you can always, man, you can always tell these retrospective just-so stories and how this all worked out.

But it would seem, the naive retrospective story would be that,

you know, there are a lot of ways that humans are, I don't know, less strong than the other apes, or, you know,

all these ways where we're, in some sense, weaker.

Physically, physically.

But maybe it was just this basic trade-off.

Yeah, more of your energy went into your mind and into your brain.

And then, you know,

your fist wasn't as strong, but you could build a better axe.

And that made you stronger than an ape.

And that's

where, you know, a brain with

less energy was spent on growing a hair to keep warm in the winter.

And then you use your brain to build an axe and skin a bear and get some fur for the winter or something like that.

Yeah, I guess.

It's just, but it's just such a leap.

It's such a leap and different than any other animal.

Like, and like, what was the primary motivating factor?

Like, what was the thing?

You know, McKenna believes it was psilocybin.

You know, I'm sure you probably ever heard that theory, McKenna's stoned ape theory, which is a fascinating one.

But there's a lot of different theories about what took place.

I just love this.

Teal's thing is like, yeah, you know what?

Don't grow hair.

Save that energy to make an axe instead.

That's the top tip.

I titled this clip as well, Why Are We Hairless and Smart?

And I was going to title it, well, 50% of that.

We got half of that.

But yeah, so that is what Peter Thiel's suggestion.

And Joe's thing is, that sounds like a leap.

I reckon it was drugs.

It's amazing, man.

God, I also, can I just say, like, why?

Settle on this to talk about with a tech billionaire?

Like, why is he having, he has a tech billionaire in front of him.

Talk about investment strategy, talk about entrepreneurial spirit, talk about his vision for wealth in the future, talk about what made him invest in PayPal, what made him invest in Facebook, what did he see in those investments that made him see that that might be a future thing that could make him a lot of money, whatever it is.

You know, this is a guy who has a lot of

very specific knowledge about something, but you choose to go completely outside of his area of expertise to talk about why humans

differed from the previous

sort of evolutionary tree and developed a bigger brain?

It's like, dude, you have a Weinstein in there all the time.

You can talk to him about this.

He probably knows, or at least he has a better idea on why it might have happened.

He could have a dozen different ideas that could revolutionize evolutionary theory because that's how he is.

That's the type of thing he likes to talk about.

I don't think we should be recommending Joe gets Brett Weinstein back on the show.

We should be against that.

But this is the problem, I think, with Joe.

You know, Joe's very proud of having these free flow flow conversations where he just spitballs into different things.

And I can understand the value.

I can stand the appeal of that rather to like spiral through lots of different topics.

But this is kind of an evidence that he should probably have in mind a couple of directions to go because otherwise he'll keep going back to the same directions he's interested in.

or he won't have put the thought in to ask the interesting question at the time.

It's like Joel would probably get, it feels like he'd get like Roger Federer on the show and ask him about like quantum physics.

And then the next week have Stephen Hawking on the show and ask him about world-class tennis.

It's like, if you'd have just done some thinking, you'd have switched around the way that you're asking those questions.

And it would have been in any way relevant.

Well, or you're getting, or you're getting like a take of like a national security advisor, a vice president, three billionaires, and

a stand-up comedian on why humans have a bigger brain than our previous ancestors.

None of those are great opinions.

None of those are really breaking any ground.

There's plenty of things you can talk about.

These are important people he's talking to.

I would totally forgive this kind of chatter.

If it was you and I or me and a buddy just having a conversation on a podcast and it was just a shooting the shit conversation, just playing, like thinking about the world sort of thing, you know, the stuff you used to do and you used to get high with your friends and shit chat.

I would totally forgive it.

But you're missing the boat on all these really important people that you're having on your show that are doing tons of really important things to our society.

And you're talking to them about this.

That's my only gripe.

Well, in fairness to him, he does bring some

topics up that are incredibly relevant to Peter Thiel and things that Peter Thial has an awful lot of personal information on and personal experience on.

So maybe we should code it into our next clip.

Is that what you're doing?

Let's talk a little bit about Peter Thiel and then

we're going to talk about sex scandals.

We're going to move our way into Epstein.

And probably, I don't know, man, I spent too much time thinking about

all the Epstein variants.

Probably the sex stuff is overdone and everything everything else is underdone.

It's like a limited hangout.

We get to talk about the crazy underage sex and

not about all the other questions.

It's like when Alex Acosta testified for labor secretary under, and he was the DA who had prosecuted Epstein in 08, 09 and got him sort of the very light 13-month or whatever sentence.

And

it was a South Florida DA or whatever he was.

And Acosta was asked, you know,

why did he get off so easily?

And under congressional testimony, when he was up for labor secretary 2017, it was he belonged to intelligence.

And then, you know,

and so it's, yeah,

the question isn't about the sex with the underage women.

The question is, is really about, you know,

why was he so protective?

And then, you know,

I went down all these rabbit holes.

Was he working for the Israelis or the Mossad or all this sort of stuff?

And I've come to think that that was very secondary.

It was obviously it was just the U.S.

I want to play this little clip for us.

It's from C-SPAN.

I'm going to link it in the show notes, but I want to play it.

This is when Acosta is asked about very specifically about that question.

Richard Lardner from the Associated Press, Mr.

Secretary, were you ever made aware at any point in your handling of this case if Mr.

Epstein was an intelligence asset of some sort?

So there has been reporting to that effect.

And let me say, there's been reporting to a lot of effects in this case,

not just now, but over the years.

And again,

I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.

This was a case that was brought by our office.

It was brought based on the facts.

And I look at that reporting and others.

I can't address it directly because of

our guidelines.

But I can tell you that a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.

See, you can hear

in that little clip, that does not sound as

it doesn't sound as forceful as Peter is saying.

He's definitely talking around it in a way to be like, yeah, there's reporting to that, but we can't really talk about it because I'm part of the government now and I can't really have that kind of conversation.

But I just want to say like some reporting is just going down rabbit holes.

And so it sounds to me like he's saying it's not.

Now, should we believe everything the government says?

No, we shouldn't believe everything the government says.

Absolutely not.

But I also recognize, too, it doesn't, certainly doesn't sound the way Peter made it out to sound.

And

you know, I also want to say too, like this.

particular episode surprised me when I looked through the comments.

Normally I look through the comments on YouTube and I'll just see a ton of people being like, this is such amazing work.

You need to do this.

You're the best journalist in the business, Joe Rogan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is the top comment, 2,900 up thumbs on this comment.

Here it is.

Quote, I find it funny that Joe is talking about this billionaire, they spelled billionaire wrong, elite Epstein and the CIA without ever mentioning Teal himself is involved in all those areas, does not actually ask any direct question about the personal involvement and experience in those circles and conspiracies, end quote.

So somebody in his audience, and this was up thumb to the top, right?

So this is the most, this is the most upthumbed comment is at the top.

And the first four or five are all very critical of Peter Thiel.

This is the first time I've seen that

on any of his posts.

So it's something to think about.

I think it is reflective of something we've seen already, which is Joe has this strategic lack of curiosity when he's talking to somebody who could actually answer some of the questions he has elsewhere.

So

when he's wondering about why billionaires are so motivated to continue getting more and more money and possessions, he lacks that curiosity when he's talking to a billionaire.

He spends other parts of his show talking, you know, other episodes, talking at length about how weird the whole thing with Epstein is.

We saw him with Ian Carroll talking about, I want to go through Epstein's island brick by brick and

dig through the walls and dig underground to see what the evidence is.

He wants to know what's kind of going on.

And then when he's talking to somebody who we'll find out in a moment, literally talks about knowing Epstein and associating with Epstein, Joe seems to be very quick to accept Thiel's version of events.

And I think

I've mentioned before, I think we've talked about before, one of the impressions I'm getting from the time we've now spent watching Rogan is for it, for all that is, it's this hyper-masculine space where raw masculinity is kind of celebrated.

This is the most conflict-averse space I think I've ever encountered.

There is no conflict here in almost any of the conversations.

Do not rock the boat at any point.

It's pretty rare.

Once in a while, he'll push back, but it's pretty rare.

All right, we're going to continue on this sex scandal scandal pathway.

But don't you think that's an effective strategy for controlling politicians, getting them involved in sex scandals?

I mean, that's always been one of the worst things that can happen to a politician.

Look at Monica Lewinsky.

A very simple one.

Consensual, inappropriate sexual relationship between a president and a staffer, and it almost takes down the presidency.

It causes him to get impeached.

Powerful motivators.

So Bill Clinton wasn't framed and he wasn't honeytrapped.

Bill Clinton made all of the choices.

Monica Lewinsky was incredibly young.

She was like in her early 20s.

She was incredibly, she was a massive power differential in that he was the most powerful person in the country and she was an intern.

He had all of the power and he pursued this and he made that happen.

The way that Joe is talking about this, yet again, his version of events lessens the blame on the powerful man and places it somewhere else.

It almost took down the presidency.

You know, getting involved in sex scandals.

Bill Clinton didn't, like, nobody got Bill Clinton involved in his sex scandal.

Bill Clinton had sex with an intern, and that's, that's what this scandal was.

Now we're going to bring Bill Gates into this conversation.

What do you have a theory on what was Bill Gates' complicity with Epstein?

I think he likes Pussey.

I think he's a man.

I think he likes power.

He likes monopoly.

I mean, he's incredibly effective with Microsoft.

And for the longest time, he was thought of as a villain, right?

He was this antitrust villain.

He was this guy who was monopolizing this operating system and

controlling just this incredible empire.

And he had a real bad rap.

And then I think he wisely turned towards philanthropy.

But

do you think that he needed upstream?

I think it's very difficult for a very famous, very high-profile person to fuck around.

I think it's very difficult.

I think you have to worry about people telling people.

You worry about it taking you down if you're having affairs.

If you're running some philanthropy organization, you're supposed to be thought of as this guy who's like this wonderful person who's trying to really fix all the problems in the world, but really, he's just flying around and banging all all these different chicks.

You have to figure out a way to pull that off.

And this is what Eric Weinstein and I, we've had discussions about this.

And Eric's position is that there are people in this world that can provide experiences for you and safely for people that are in that kind of a group.

And that makes sense.

It makes sense that if you pay people enough and you have people motivated in order to like establish these relationships and make sure that these things happen, when you get very high profile, you can't just be on a fucking dating app.

And if you're a guy who likes to bang checks what are you going to do man everything is everything is a conspiracy i mean the dude just cheated on his wife that's all that happened here's a quote from an article asked if he had ever been unfaithful in his marriage the 66 year old philanthropist said i certainly made mistakes and i take responsibility but didn't elaborate i don't think delving into the particulars at this point is constructive but yes i cause pain and i feel terrible about that gates told this reporter so or

i was on a talk show i think at the time so this is is, there's a link in the show notes.

You can read this article, but yet he says he was unfaithful in his marriage.

You know, you don't have to hide it.

Like, these people seem to think, like, oh my gosh, you know, Epstein's got to get this sort of like curated experience.

So he has all the dirt on Bill Gates.

When it's like, Bill Gates can just find somebody and he can just meet somebody and he can just have an affair because that happens literally all the time.

And it happens to rich people all the time.

I think that's true.

Although it also wouldn't surprise me if that is one of the things that Epstein was identifying in Gates, if Epstein did introduce him to someone like that, that wouldn't surprise me because what we know about someone like Epstein is that they are manipulative.

They identify people's weaknesses and they will target their approach at those weaknesses in order to ingratiate them into their world and pull them into that world.

So it like, I have no information on Bill Gates, but it wouldn't surprise me if Epstein did introduce him to somebody he would have an extramarital affair with or have whatever with.

It doesn't necessarily mean that it was anything more sinister than that.

It doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't.

That's for investigators to look into and figure out.

So it doesn't have to be part of this big like honey trap.

It doesn't have to be part of this, as Ian Carroll was saying, like this Mossad-Israeli scheme in order to

blackmail the world's richest people.

It could just be that

Epstein wanted to be in those circles and could identify

what need he could fill for people and do that to get into

their trust.

That's perfectly valid.

All right, we're going to talk, we're going to continue on here, but we're going to talk about Gates more here.

You know, when Mr.

Gates is just wearing sweaters and looks like Mr.

Rogers, that something fishy is going on.

People have that sort of intuition.

They trust Jeff Bezos in his tight shirt, hanging out with his girlfriend on a lot more.

Or

Elon Musk, the vice signaling is safer than virtue signaling.

Yeah.

Because

if you're virtue signaling, our intuition is something really, really, really sketchy.

Suspicious.

We get suspicious.

And I think rightly so.

I think this is not rightly so.

I think this is incredibly stupid as a rubric to be running from.

They're arguing that it's more trustworthy if you're just publicly malevolent than if you're publicly nice.

But it's not, because if you're malevolent at all,

if you're vice at all, then that's not as trustworthy.

But also, it's making out that Elon Musk isn't constantly virtue signaling.

He's always virtue signaling.

It's just the things he's signaling towards are people that are things that people like Joe and Peter agree with, so they don't call them virtue signals.

Like Elon Musk wore a dark MAGA hat.

That is a virtue signal to say, I agree with the things that you agree with.

I am on your side on these topics.

That's just virtue signaling.

Yeah.

Well, he constantly screams about free speech too, while doing a ton of things that silence.

certain voices on Twitter.

He's virtue signaling about free speech all the time, but he never follows through on it.

He doesn't get, like, Twitter isn't the Wild West.

Twitter is his curated Wild West.

Oh, and this next clip, this next clip is, is my second favorite behind the massive long pause because we've had this conversation about Epstein and the value of Epstein and what he was doing for people like Bill Gates.

And when Joe has spent a lot of time talking about Epstein and Israel and all this kind of stuff.

So like we're getting into some deep Epstein stuff.

And in the middle of that conversation, we find out how closely Peter Thiel knew Epstein.

It suddenly comes up and it's brilliant.

There's a moment in here where Joe asked a question and I had to pause, laugh, and then send you a summary immediately.

All right, here we go.

Here's that conversation.

I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes.

And

there were probably

these complicated ways

you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially

in a marital

context that I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about.

When you were introduced to him,

I don't think Epstein would have been able to

comment on super string theory or something like that.

But I think this sort of thing he might have actually been pretty expert on.

When you were introduced to him, how was he described to you?

He was described as one of the smartest tax people in the world.

Interesting.

And

I probably

was my moral weakness that I was going to say.

But how could you have known back then?

He had never been arrested.

This was 2014.

It was post-arrest.

Oh, so his arrest was the first arrest, right?

Which was like 2008.

20708.

Okay.

Okay.

And so

you assume he didn't go to jail for that long.

Right.

It was probably not as serious as alleged.

There was certainly the illusion that there were all these other people that I trusted.

Reed, who introduced us, was, you know, he started LinkedIn.

He was, you know, maybe too focused on business networking, but

I thought he always had good judgment in people.

LinkedIn lunatics.

Oh my God.

So like Joe is literally, you know, oh, well, you could never, how could you, how could you have known what Epstein was like?

Like, you never, like, you hung out with him before he was convicted.

And Teal's like, no, no, no, no.

This was, this was after he was convicted of being a paedophile, which he was, which is what his first conviction absolutely was.

But Teal has to explain this away.

Like, oh, it's just probably because he was out so quickly, I assume it's just that it wasn't as bad as the charges made out.

It was one of those times when they charged him for something, but then let him out.

So they would just have been exaggerating.

It's one of the times where the law was exaggerating about how bad you actually were.

Plus, you know, he was pretty good at tax.

So you do have to give the paedophile a pretty decent amount of leeway for how good he was at doing taxes and things like that.

So the thing to bear in mind, right?

He says, Oh, maybe that was my moral advice.

And yeah, it was, it was.

So, maybe he was introduced to you as a tax expert, which to my understanding, it's not like Jeffrey Epstein was like a world's foremost leader in tax kind of law or anything like that.

But, like, he was introduced to you as a tax, as a tax expert because he and the people around you knew that that's what would get Peter Thiel most interested in him.

Certainly, the

hookups with

women and underage women wasn't something Peter Thiel would have been interested in because Peter Thiel's gay.

So, like, we'll go down the tax line and that's the thing that you're interested in.

And even now at the end of that clip, Thiel is maintaining that the person who introduced him has good judgment in people.

The guy who introduced you to Jeffrey Epstein says, this guy's a really good guy to know.

He's really good at tax.

But, you know, he's got good judgment.

I always thought you had good judgment in people.

Not everybody dads a thousand.

Okay.

Come on, Marsh.

Not everybody dats.

I introduced you to Tom.

So come in, come on.

That is very true.

That is very true.

And we don't know what Tom's been convicted.

He's never been convicted convicted of anything to my knowledge

amazing just think about it have think of joe's reactions to all of this he's

yeah

Joe is not at all fazed about this this is someone who talks about how evil Jeffrey Epstein was he talks about that all the time yeah he links it to like Bill Gates hanging out with Epstein and how creepy that was and all these other people who were around Epstein isn't it so creepy that he was doing that I want to go through his island home brick by brick to find all of the footage I want the flight logs I want the client list revealed revealed.

If you want to know the client list, ask this guy.

That's the guy in front of you.

He's literally right here.

All right.

So there's still a little more Epstein stuff we've got to get through.

This is the last Epstein clip.

Yeah, I think there were probably different things that were pitched for different people.

Sure.

You know, I was pitched on the taxes.

I think

there were probably other people that were

more prone to the, you know,

the social club part.

And then there were probably people, yeah, and there was probably a fairly fairly limited group where it was, yeah, off the charts bad stuff.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to know what the fuck was really going on?

And maybe one day we will.

Maybe one day some Whitney Webb type character will break it all down to us and explain to us in great detail exactly how this is formulated and what they were doing and how they were getting information out of people.

But I think people have to age out.

They have to die.

Joe, if you want to know what's going on, ask Peter Thiel.

He's clearly involved.

Let's carry this conversation.

Just before this bit as well, there's a bit that we didn't cover in a clip, but Joe talks about how many of his friends knew Epstein and how many and how Epstein like picked himself at different friends of Joe's in different ways.

It's like, Joe, if you really want to know what's going on with Epstein, ask some of the many, many people that you know who hung out with Epstein an awful lot.

You're calling for the release of the Epstein files.

You don't need to.

You can just pick up your address book and write Epstein client list on the front page and you'll have them, Joe.

You know, maybe ask a question like, hey, Peter, you were turned on to him because of taxes.

You say, what did he do for your taxes?

Like, what kind of stuff did he do for your taxes?

I mean, just ask that question, right?

Because he said he has a claim.

Okay, well, what did he do for you?

Instead, he's just like, oh, yeah, I totally believe that.

And we're not even going to go there.

We're not even going to talk about it.

We're not even going to move in into this.

You know, there's a bunch of good conspiracy questions you could be asking him if the conspiracy was the most important thing.

But what the conspiracy is, is a vehicle to dislike people he wants to dislike.

That's what all conspiracies are really based in.

And that's what this is.

He's going to take the people who are sitting in front of him and they get to, they get carte blanche.

They don't get any, nobody's going to question any of their motives.

Nobody's going to question any of the problems, but anybody else is an absolute demon that's on that list.

Yeah, completely.

All right.

Thank you, patrons.

We very much appreciate it.

We released this last week our

David Pacman show to Roswell Filing Clerks and Above.

So anybody who is a Roswell filing clerk or above got a full whole episode dedicated to David Pachman.

This was a 2020 episode that we covered, so you can go check that out.

It was a lot of fun.

Let us know because we're going to have this upcoming month, we're going to have a suggestion box that we're going to ask you to put into.

So please keep your eye out for that.

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