Peter Thiel Compares California to Saudi Arabia In Wild Take On Joe Rogan’s Podcast: ‘You Have a Crazy Religion’

Tech billionaire and GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel joined Joe Rogan’s popular podcast on Friday for a three-hour-long discussion, during which Thiel (in all seriousness) compared California to Saudi Arabia.

Thiel, who was educated at Stanford and made his fortune in Silicon Valley, tore into California and compared it to the despotic, oil-dependent Saudi kingdom.

“You know, there’s always sort of a right-wing or libertarian critique of California that, you know, it’s it’s such a ridiculous place. It should just collapse under its own ridiculousness. And, it doesn’t quite happen,” Thiel began, before lauding California’s economic might:

You know, the macroeconomics of it are pretty good. You know, 40 million people. The GDP is around 4 trillion. It’s about the same as Germany with 80 million or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California. Same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP.

So there’s some level on which, you know, California as a whole is working, even though it doesn’t work from a governance point of view, doesn’t work for a lot of the people who live there.

Thiel then went on to compare the liberal culture of California to Wahhabism – the strict interpretation of Sunni Islam widely practiced in Saudi Arabia.

“And, the rough model I have for how to think of California is that it’s kind of like Saudi Arabia and you have a crazy religion. Wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia,” he said, adding:

You know, not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything. And then, and then you have like, oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California, and the oil pays for everything. And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector. And, and you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make, lots of money and sort of the government and real estate are ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the, you know, the big tech, the big tech money in California and, and it’s like, it’s it’s not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it’s it’s pretty stable.

And people have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous, it’s going to collapse in a year. Now they’ve been saying that for 40 or 50 years. But, you know, if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that’s that’s the way to, that’s that’s the way you have to think of California.

Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal, poured tens of millions of dollars into JD Vance and Blake Masters’s GOP senate campaigns in 2022.

Watch the clip above.