The world after COVID, or in the ongoing wake of COVID, is only Peter Thiel's world, if we let it be.

When he says he's being evil, that's advertising.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Moira Weigel.

Moira is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a faculty associate at the Berkman-Kline Center, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. She's also the co-editor of a collection called Voices from the Valley. Tech workers talk about what they do and how they do it.

In this week's conversation, we talk about a really important figure in Silicon Valley that I don't

think gets enough attention for the influence that he's had on Silicon Valley and increasingly

the influence that he's having on American politics. And that is obviously Peter Thiel.

In the conversation, we go through many aspects of Teal's history, including his time as a

conservative provocateur at Stanford University, his time at PayPal, at Palantir,

and more recently as a funder of Republican politics, including Donald Trump, Blake Masters,

J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and others. This is important to recognize because Teal has a particular

right-wing politics that I think has

received a fair amount of attention, but he is often positioned as kind of an odd one-out

in Silicon Valley, as the representative of Silicon Valley conservatism. When actually, as

Moyer explains, it's probably not so easy to say that he is an exception to a general liberal rule

in Silicon Valley and that there's actually far more people who think like Peter Thiel and

you know, we'll probably see even more moving forward. One of the things that Morer points out that I

think is really important and that we get to in the conversation is that we often

recognize the influence that Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog have had in Silicon Valley

since its emergence, you know, around the 60s, 70s that period, and then how it influences Steve Jobs

and many other important figures, but how in the early 2000s, there is also a very influential group of people around Peter Thiel and PayPal

...