Peter Thiel is discussed in three episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, in each case as a funder or emblem of projects that route around conventional institutions rather than as a participant in the program. The excerpts identify him by his business affiliations and by the causes he has financed: the Seasteading Institute, later ventures to build for-profit city-states, and a scholarship program that pays students not to attend college.
Seasteading
In the 2009 episode on seasteading, Bob Zadek asked Patri Friedman, co-founder of the Seasteading Institute, about the institute’s backers. Friedman answered that the institute’s initial funding came from Peter Thiel, whom he described as the founder of PayPal, the first investor in Facebook, and an early investor in LinkedIn Seasteading (2009).
Friedman characterized Thiel’s motive in terms of temperament rather than a specific policy program. He said Thiel is a free-market kind of guy who has basically given up on conventional politics as a way of changing or fixing things, and that as a technological entrepreneur he sees possibilities for fixing the problems with human society through new technology. Friedman placed seasteading within that outlook, describing the argument that politicians are corrupt because they do not have any competition, because new countries cannot be started, and because current countries do not compete for citizens. On that account, technology that lets people do country startups would both teach new ways of running a country and force existing countries to improve in order to compete Seasteading (2009).
The excerpt does not record Thiel saying anything, and it does not state what he contributed beyond the institute’s initial funding.
Higher education
Thiel reappears in the 2012 episode on student loans, in a passage where Arvin Vora, author of Lies, Damn Lies, and College Admissions and a congressional candidate, was discussing the social pressure that sends high-achieving students to college by default. Vora named Thiel as the most notable example of someone disgusted by the belief that the most self-directed and brilliant people, the ones who would do best as entrepreneurs, are automatically sent to college. According to Vora, Thiel set up his own scholarship program paying $50,000 a year for two years, with the requirement that the recipient not go to college for those two years; Vora described the program as competitive and requiring an application America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Vora’s point in raising the program was not confined to students who end up in jobs unrelated to their degrees. He said the question is not whether education is worth $200,000, since he considers education infinitely valuable, but whether it is worth $200,000 more than what a student could get independently, or independently plus hiring the same professors as tutors. He argued that some of the best and brightest should not be going to college in the first place because they can do better on their own America’s Student Loan Problem (2012).
Bob Zadek’s contributions in that segment concerned the subsidy structure and the social pressure surrounding degrees, including his remark that taxpayers subsidize degrees held by waitresses, bartenders and airport baggage handlers. Those framings are Bob’s; the Thiel scholarship is introduced and described by Vora.
For-profit city-states
In the 2022 episode, Friedman returned to discuss a plan to accelerate free cities, and Thiel appears again as an anchor investor. Friedman said his first fund was 13 million and that the second fund, also anchored by Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan, was going to be 100 million, with funds growing as projects require more capital Patri Friedman’s Plan to Accelerate the Free Cities of the Future (2022).
Friedman was explicit that the mission, not the return, is what draws the money. He said all of his investors are in it because they want the world to change in this direction, that they think people starting new jurisdictions with different laws will be better for humanity, and that they want to see the impact of rezoning land with better laws and institutions. He added that building a city on the scale of Singapore would take at least tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, of dollars, and that the only way to get that capital is for the projects to be profitable. His formulation was that all of the investors are in it for the mission, but that for the mission to succeed the projects have to make money; he said that is nobody’s primary motive and that nobody would invest in them just for that purpose because it is too crazy Patri Friedman’s Plan to Accelerate the Free Cities of the Future (2022).
The excerpt does not state what role, if any, Thiel plays beyond anchoring the fund, nor does it record any statement by him.
Across episodes: Thiel as recurring funder
Across the three episodes the excerpts show a consistent role rather than a developing argument: Thiel is named as the money behind exit-oriented projects, and the description of his reasoning is supplied by others. In 2009 Friedman described him as having given up on conventional politics and as seeing technology as the route to fixing social problems, and named him the Seasteading Institute’s initial funder Seasteading (2009). In 2022 Friedman named him, alongside Balaji Srinivasan, as an anchor of a second fund an order of magnitude larger than the first, while insisting that mission rather than profit motivates the investors Patri Friedman’s Plan to Accelerate the Free Cities of the Future (2022). The 2012 appearance is a different application of the same theme: Vora cited Thiel’s scholarship as an institutional alternative to the default assumption that talented students go to college America’s Student Loan Problem (2012). What changed between the earlier and later treatments is scale and vehicle — from an institute’s initial funding to nine-figure funds for for-profit city projects — not the characterization of Thiel’s motives, which in both cases comes from Friedman.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts contain no statement by Peter Thiel and no extended account of his own views in his own words; everything attributed to him is secondhand. They do not state his title at any company, the date or structure of the scholarship program beyond Vora’s description, the size of his contribution to the Seasteading Institute, or the terms of his participation in the later funds. They also do not say whether he ever appeared on the program, and the 2022 excerpt breaks off mid-sentence in Bob Zadek’s next question, so nothing after that point is recorded.