Peter Thiel's Founders Fund just launched a card game show. It’s called MAFIA the GAME. The players are Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, and a rotating bench of the firm's favorite eccentrics. The moderator is the firm's own marketing chief. They shot it at Tosca Cafe, the same San Francisco bar where the PayPal Mafia once posed for a magazine spread, so the joke’s deliberate. Laugh if you want. but remember what the format’s designed to do.
Reality television has spent 30 years running the same trick. It takes someone, usually a man, you'd keep at arm's length and makes him a regular guest in your living room until the strangeness stops registering. Ozzy Osbourne was a degenerate who bit the head off a bat onstage. MTV handed him a camera crew, and inside a season, he was the loveable, bumbling dad who couldn't find the remote. The fangs receded. The cuddliness arrived. The Kardashians started with a leaked sex tape and finished with a beauty empire and a family the country tracks like the tides. Hogan Knows Best took a man whose bloodstream ran mostly on steroids and sold him as a poolside patriot. The Apprentice found a developer with a wake of bankruptcies and repackaged him as the very face of competence. Eleven years later, he runs the country, and by most measures, into the ground.
The method works every time. Point a camera at someone long enough and familiarity does the laundering. You stop asking what he does and start wondering how his weekend went.
That’s the service MAFIA the GAME provides, and the invoice arrives later. These players aren’t washed-up wrestlers or tabloid casualties. They hold the capital, the surveillance hardware and the line to the Oval Office. The show wants you to be fond of them before you think to ask what they’re building.
Two of them make the stakes obvious. Sam Altman runs the most powerful AI company in the world. He also founded the venture that wants to scan the iris of every person on earth to certify they’re not a machine. He has the president's number and a data-center footprint the size of a small country. The game show would like you to know he’s a gracious loser who got killed off early and still named the murderers on his walk back to the couch. Palmer Luckey builds autonomous weapons for a paycheck. His firm, Anduril, holds contracts to put thinking machines on the battlefield, and his confessed ambition is to vanish onto a Fijian island for six weeks and compete on Survivor. A man who arms drones for the Pentagon and yearns for tribal council is exactly the man you want made cozy over a friendly round of cards.
Bryan Johnson is the comprehensible one. His failing is vanity, and vanity we know by sight. He spends $2 million a year trying not to die. He swallows a hundred pills before bedtime. He once had his teenage son's plasma pumped into his own veins to test whether youth could be transferred upward. He charts his nighttime erections by the hour and publishes that too, because to Johnson a body is a dashboard. He’s about to turn 49 and looks it. Johnson is, as we say in Ireland, an absolute whore for attention. Johnson only wants your eyes on him, and he’ll spend his son's blood to hold them there. Altman and Luckey are different beasts with different agendas.
Nevertheless, the format flatters all of them the same way. Seated around a table, lying to friends for sport, they look like normal guys having fun. Deception’s the object of the game, and they excel at it, which the producers find adorable and you should find educational.
Enjoy the tension and the drama. Clock who bluffs well and who buckles. Then recall that the skill that wins a parlor game is the very same skill that wins a defense contract, an identity database, and an audience too amused to raise a hand.