[START OF LECTURE]

PETER THIEL

Good evening. Thank you for having me. Many of you know me from public life as a technology investor, entrepreneur.

In private, a small-o Orthodox Christian, humble classical liberal with just one seemingly minor deviation from classical

liberal orthodoxy.

I am worried about the Antichrist.

Now, I'm not a preacher, I'm not going to be talking that much about Christ over the next four weeks. I'm sure you think

about Christ every day, maybe even more on Sundays. And if you want to learn more about him, you should go to

church.

But it's Monday now, and I'm asking for two hours of your time to think about a small, strange, even exceptional part of

the Bible and what it can tell us about the exceptional period in which we live. The exceptions in history are definitionally

rare, but I believe one can learn a lot from them.

The title of the first lectures comes from Daniel 12:4: "Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased."

Daniel was talking about the increased knowledge of God that will proceed the end-times, which was understood as

knowledge of the whole, not of specialized theology separate from other fields, but of everything.

In this lecture, I'll focus a lot on progress in science and technology, because it's my bread and butter. But also because

I think it holds the key to understanding this passage of Daniel's, and thereby understanding our apocalyptic time.

Now, the Bible seemingly discourages this kind of a project. Matthew 24:36: "But that day and hour knoweth no man, no

not the angels of heaven, but my father only." And so I will not imitate the Millerites, who thought the apocalypse would

take place in 1843 or 1844. Samuel Snow later narrowed down to October 22nd, 1844. The Great Disappointment

ensued.

I don't want to set your expectations quite so high and be a great disappointment to you all. But perhaps, if you don't

want to be too agnostic, you certainly don't want to be too nihilistic. It seems to me unambitious saying you can know

nothing at all. Matthew gives us room to speculate. Surely the day and the hour, might we know the week, the month?

Surely the century isn't too much to ask.

Technically, by the way, the Millerites didn't even violate Matthew 24:36. They guessed the day, but not the day and the

hour. And perhaps, though for all of their faults, a world with people like the Millerites is safer, if not always saner.

Josef Pieper writes in 1953: the name Antichrist rings strangely on the modern ear. In 2025, it sounds downright

antediluvian. Our ancestors would not have just been shocked by our amnesia, they would have seen it as a sign of

imminent apocalypse. For all of history, the watched kettle has never boiled. It does not follow that the unwatched kettle

will not boil.

And this is prefiguring the next three, four lectures. I’m going to organize things around by asking certain kinds of

questions. This one I’m going to focus on in tonight’s lecture. What is Antichrist’s relationship to Armageddon?

This picture is from William Blake, 1805. The Great Red Dragon and Beast from the Sea.

A basic definition of the Antichrist. Some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more

generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic

interpretation of Antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-Messiah who appears in the end-times.

The Book of Daniel talks of a king who will rule over a renewed Roman Empire at the end of days. The Book of

Revelation describes Antichrist as a beast from the sea at the head of a world government, who persecutes Christians

in great tribulation for Christ’s return.

Now already by the 18th century, speculating about the Antichrist was seen as ridiculous. Henrich Corrodi, a Swiss

reformed minister, wrote in 1781, Critical History of Millennarian Thoughts. A sort of overview of these millennarian

movements.

He identified two reasons to study apocalyptic movements. First, to prevent us from having relapses, and second, for

the sheer merriment that the absurd beliefs of the past bring us today. And of course, this is sort of a very evocative

painting, but it also can sort of easily be dismissed as a medieval fantasy.

The one very important thing I’m going to try to convince you of in today’s lecture is my answer to this question, that the

Antichrist and Armageddon have a discernible relationship even or especially in late modernity in our time. And in doing

so, try to convince you that the Antichrist is not just a medieval fantasy. You can ask the question, when will the

Antichrist arrive?

This is from a medieval, Liber Floridus, 1120, manuscript. And shows the Antichrist riding to power aboard Leviathan,

beast from the sea.

There’s a historical dimension that maybe comes after Christ. And so in the Middle Ages, the Antichrist has many

ministers of his malice: Antiochus, Nero, Domitian. Even Illich, a sort of mid-20th century Catholic thinker. There will be

many forerunners of Christ and will be many forerunners of Antichrist.

The paradox is someone like Friedrich Nietzsche, who wanted to return to pre-Christian times but defined himself as the

Antichrist, placing himself in history relative to Christ.

In some ways, the Antichrist theme forces us to look more to the future and put aside debates in the past. And that’s

what I always think is one of the ways in which this is a very healthy corrective to many of the kinds of debates we have.

What can we say about the katechon, the mysterious force that delays the Antichrist, mentioned in 2 Thessalonians 2:6,

can be identified with katechon.

And what do we make of the prophecy in Daniel 12:4, many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased.

Globalization. Empire. Technology. Science. What is the Antichrist's relationship to empire? What is the Antichrist’s

relationship to Jesus Christ?

This is a fresco from Signorelli from around 1500. It’s a cathedral about 90 minutes north of Rome.

And of course, there are all these sort of different ideas that it gets at. A certain number of biblical passages suggest the

Antichrist is both opposed to and uncannily similar to Christ. Matthew 24:24. For there shall arise false Christs and false

prophets and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch that if it were possible, they will deceive the very elect.

Why will the elect be deceived? What does that imply what the Antichrist will preach, do and say? Might he present as a

Christian, more Christian than Christ, a humanitarian, vegetarian, etc, etc.

There’s all sorts of tangents we can go down. The Eastern Orthodox traditions often have them as a vegetarian. And

escotological writings in the Eastern Orthodox were sort of banned in Nazi Germany, because you know Mr. H was a

vegetarian and it was a little bit too close for comfort. Orthodox writings in the Antichrist were censored, among other

things.

You have the picture here with the Antichrist ministering with the devil whispering to his ear. It somehow looks very

much like Christ. It looks sort of an evil opposite. In the middle is a false miracle of a sick man rising from his bed. Right

in the middle of the picture, two old men being beheaded, the two witnesses the last days who be murdered by the

beast in Revelation 11:3-14.

The top right, these figures in black are constructing and defending a high Renaissance church. It’s deliberately visually

asymmetrical sort of anti-church. The top left, the Antichrist attempts a pseudo-ascension into heaven, and the

Archangel Michael comes down to kill him.

One of the sort of Renaissance conventions was, the artist would paint himself into the picture. And look at what was

the single most important thing in the picture. And the bottom left corner in black is the portrait of Signorelli and what he

is looking at? He’s looking out at the viewer. And so it’s the most important thing in the picture; how will the viewer, how

will you respond to the Antichrist?

That’s enough on art history.

This will be a little more the last lecture of who is the Antichrist. I know that’s what you want. We have a sort of a whole

litany of different characters we will encounter in different ways. Is it a type of person, a system, the final global tyrant,

its government structure, the church, the Pope? We’ll touch on these things in different ways, but really have to wait for

lecture four.

Backing up a bit. In some sense, what we all want to somehow have is knowledge of the whole. The university was

supposed to be this holistic place where you study the whole universe and you made sense of the whole. It’s not

supposed to be this sort of divided, segmented place.

The individual departments made up a whole that would make sense of the whole world. And in early modernity, you

can still imagine someone like Francis Bacon or Goethe in the 18th century could pretty much understand everything

and make sense of everything.

This has gotten harder and harder and harder to do. This sort of hyper specialization of late modernity. It’s like the pin

factory in Adam Smith where you’re making pins, a hundred different people making pins. Nobody understands how to

actually make a pin. In some ways, there’s this sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge. All these parts are

divided.

And what I hope to do intellectually in a way is, try to integrate, bring back history, theology, politics, science, tech. You

know, how do we connect all these things and make sense of them.

And of course, one holistic dimension, is questions about the whole. One of the kinds of questions I like to ask are the

questions about the progress of the whole.

A big part of university self-identity is that it contributes to progress. And then it’s not just some sort of classical cycles

and you have a progressive revelation. You have progress in science and technology. You stand on the shoulders of

giants. You’re able to see further. And so you progress towards something greater.

The picture here is the frontispiece of Francis Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, which is sort of his big masterpiece. And the

quote on the bottom: multipet ancibunt et augavetur sientia is from Daniel 12:4: "many shall run to and fro, and

knowledge shall be increased."

And you sort of have the two columns of the gates of Hercules. You have the era of exploration, globalization.

Knowledge is increased as people spread out throughout the whole world. So it was sort of a Bacon version of Daniel

12:4. And of course, [there are] all sorts of questions you can have in this.

This progress was understood to be good. Science would relieve man's estate. And in Bacon's telling, modern science

would mean the end of the old world. It was apocalyptic, the end of the world ruled by the violence of nature and the

vagaries of chance, and the birth of a new world.

It's sort of complicated, but it was inspired by, in some ways, a challenge to the Christian idea of progress. So when

Daniel speaks of knowledge increasing, he also meant primarily knowledge of God, knowledge of the whole. It's not an

eternal recurrence, not a cycle. History progresses towards understanding. It's not like classical Greece or the Pagans,

where everything is timelessly eternal.

When Thucydides writes his book on the Peloponnesian War, he can make up Pericles' speeches because the details

don't matter. The things that repeat, the cycles, are what matters. It's the rising Athens against the established Sparta.

And then you'd say it's the same with Wilhelmine Germany and the established Britain at the start of the 20th century.

Or perhaps the rising China and the established America today. It's always a cycle. Nothing fundamentally new ever

happens.

By contrast, Daniel speaks of events that are one-time and world historical. I always think of him as the first historian.

There's a succession of different kingdoms, sort of culminates in something like the Roman Empire. The end of the

world empire is the end of the world.

And there's a progressive revelation. The word of God is not completely final. Knowledge increases, the New Testament

supersedes the old. I always think it's the first time that the new is better simply because it's new. And it's a lot of ways

you have to define it, but the God of the New Testament in some sense is the world's first progressive.

This is sort of my standard Thiel-spiel speech that I've given in different forms for 15 to 20 years. But I'll do a recap on a

lot of this. Modernity progressed incredibly fast from 1750 to 1970. You have this incredible explosion of science,

technology. Candles to incandescent lightbulbs. Dirt roads to railroads to rockets. In the 20th century alone, US

lifespans grew 30 years. It's genuinely very fast, dizzying, hard to make sense of, and palpable.

That's certainly one of the big picture holistic questions that we can ask about the progress of the whole. What does the

shape of this look like? Is the singularity something that was in the past, sort of an S curve? Doesn't mean it's

completely flat but sort of rolling over. Or is it just getting started and is this sort of accelerating progress in the future?

Even this sort of holistic question, that's so important, is one that I submit cannot be addressed in any sort of intellectual

university context. If all you can do here is even ask the question, you've made [a] progress beyond all these sort of

fragmented universities, multiversities, these hyper-fragmented pin factories from Adam Smith.

And so, we can try to find a way to integrate knowledge by asking what is the shape of progress? Now, all these

different quick cuts we can do of this. If you measure inputs, science continues to grow like a colony of rabbits. These

are charts that are full of prices, science since Babylon and its scientific journals going up exponentially. 100 journals at

the beginning of the 19th century. 10,000, you know, 100 years later. The number of universities, PhDs. Of course this

is a very ambiguous thing because even if you believe progress is happening linearly, if the number of PhDs has gone

up dramatically, then you actually have diminishing returns.

If we have [maybe] a hundred times as many people in the world today with PhDs in the sciences as in 1925 as had

them 100 years ago. And if progress is still as fast as it was 100 years ago, you should conclude that the average

person with a PhD is 99% less productive. Measuring inputs is sort of a little bit of Marxist labor theory value. We are

more interested in the outputs. And so, as inputs go up and up, at some point, you have to suspect that there are

diminishing returns.

It is almost by definition incredibly hard to really know what is going on. Because this knowledge has gotten so

specialized. And how do you know what's going on in string theory or quantum computing or all these different fields,

each of which takes a lifetime to master?

One of my shortcuts, it’s not a very scientific shortcut, is I always think if there are things that you’re not allowed to say,

the shortcut is: they’re simply true. It’s not 100% accurate but that’s kind of a shortcut. Anything you’re not allowed to

say is simply true.

Pictured here is Bob Laughlin. He is a Stanford physics professor, he got a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998. And he

suffered from the supreme delusion that once he got a Nobel Prize, he would have academic freedom. Of course there

are all these things we're not supposed to talk about in sciences. We're not supposed to question climate change or

Darwinism or stem cell research. There are all sorts of things you probably shouldn't do.

But he had a far more controversial thing that he wanted to go after. He was convinced that most of the other people

working in the sciences were frauds. They were just stealing money from the government. He worked in high

temperature superconductors. He told me once that there were about 50,000 papers that had been published on high

temperature superconductivity. And that 25 out of 50,000 were any good.

They sort of organized a public hearing at Stanford where they decided to denounce everybody in the Biology

department for being, "these people have been stealing too much money from the government and weren't doing

anything." I don't even need to tell you how the Laughlin story ended. People who were getting PhDs needed to find a

different advisor, funding promptly got cut off, etc. etc.

This is where I always have this intuition that perhaps the fact that it's so hard to know what's going on should tell us

that maybe the sciences are in even worse shape than the humanities.

The governmental analogy I always give is: which part of the government runs the best or the worst? Is it the Post

Office, the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the NSA? And obviously, the most screwed up part is the NSA because at

the Post Office and DMV, you can see people aren't doing anything. They're honestly looking around. And that's sort of

roughly what is true of all the humanities departments. The sciences are the truly corrupt part where nobody knows

what is going on.

There's a Stanford versus Harvard version of this. Where we had Claudine Gay, the DEI person, who got fired at

Harvard for plagiarizing stuff. All these conservatives focused on her. There was a parallel firing at Stanford with Marc

Tessier-Lavigne, the old straight white male neurobiologist who, as far as I could tell, had stolen tens of millions of

dollars and engaged in fraudulent dementia research. That's just way too hard to figure out.

First cut, the sciences are, something's going very wrong. And then of course, if we try to, with all these different

productionist ways, there's all this dizzying progress in science. At some point filter into GDP, wages, general prosperity,

and we have this sense that you know, wages have been kind of flat for four or five decades. The younger generation is

finding it very hard to do even as well as their parents and surplus. Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen's race where

people have to run faster and faster in order to stay in the same place -- that's not what you think of as what a

technologically accelerating world should look like.

And then of course, there are all these anecdotal ways you can point to where we're stuck. Or progress isn't happening

as fast. Or even maybe our expectations of progress have slowed down.

The literal speed is always: we had faster ships in the 16th and 17th century every decade. We had faster ships, then

faster railroads in the 19th century, faster cars and planes in the 20th century. The first jet flight in 1951, Concorde '71

gets decommissioned in 2003. And now even with all the low tech airport security measures, it probably takes you

longer than during 1960 to go from city to city. There's the health area, where Nixon declares war on cancer in 1971. He

promises a cure by '76, by the American Bicentennial. Now we are at this point something like 54 years after 1971. So

by definition we're 54 years closer to a cure than we were 54 years ago, but our expectations have probably gone

down. You cannot imagine a politician declaring war on Alzheimer's.

Of course, there's a much larger arc where the expectations just collapsed. Early in Germany, Francis Bacon,

Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin. Science was going to succeed in indefinite life extension, radical life extension, mastery

over death. Then it gradually got reduced and reduced. In the 21st century, I think this would have been shocking to

people like Benjamin Franklin or Francis Bacon, if you said that the progress at this point would be in something like a

Kevorkian suidice machine. And that the way the 21st century achieved mastery over death is in the form of euthanasia.

Again, I don't want to comment on the morality of it, just that this is probably an indication that the progress isn't going

that fast at all.

This in some ways Jonathan Swift of Gulliver's Travels is supposed to be the anti-Bacon book where science doesn't

quite work. These scroll bugs of people who live a really long time, but sort of aging and senility and living in misery

anyways. Swift's meditation on Revelation 96. In those days, shall men seek death and shall not find it and shall desire

to die and death shall flee from them. There's some progress but even people that have longer lives are not necessarily

healthier.

It's harder to remember dreams like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber who wrote the book The American Challenge in

1967. This is what an accelerating futuristic world would look like. "By the year 2000, America will be a post-industrial

society. And then of course, with all this productivity growth, all this technology, all this science, there will only be four

work days a week and seven hours per day. The year comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With

weekends and holidays, this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days a year."

My riff on this is that we reached the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock began three weeks later and with the benefit of

hindsight, that's when the hippies took over. There is all sorts of stuff we can say about the world of computers and

software and internet and AI. The claim of this chart is not that it's a complete stagnation, not absolute stagnation. But

that it has gotten narrow to this world of bits, a narrow kind of progress in the virtual world. And of course, even the

definition of technology. If you were sitting here in 1967, the year I was born, technology meant computers. But also

medicine and rockets and supersonic jets and underwater cities and the Green Revolution in agriculture. Now

technology just means IT, something like this.

When we try to come up with pictures of the future, they are all pretty scary. I used to be a science fiction fan, but it's

just too depressing. I don't even watch any of this stuff, haven't read any of these books in years beyond count. The one

ad hominem argument I always make for people who are conservative Christians, I don't know, a bad memetic-type of

argument: just stop telling all these anti-tech stories. You're worse at it than liberal Hollywood. In some ways, you might

say something about the culture, but perhaps also something about this strange art.

Now the question that I always get asked is: we had all this incredible progress, knowledge has been increased, then

why has it slowed? And you know, why questions are always overdetermined. Maybe the low hanging fruit was picked,

maybe there's too many regulations, too much red tape, maybe the education institutions are messed up.

But the answer I've come to think is an incredibly important one is that, and it was not very obvious to people in the

18th, 19th centuries, but there was a latent dual use problem becoming in science. It was progress and increased

knowledge, but the knowledge could be used in both utopian and dystopian, both for good and for bad. The end of in a

Hegelian sense always has this dual meaning. The end of means a culmination and a termination. Somehow the

becoming project somehow reach some strange finale once and for all.

There's imitations of this, but I don't know, when Samuel Colt designed the first revolver in 1831, the advertising slogan

he comes up with is: God created men, Colonel Colt made them equal. We got the machine gun six years later. Alfred

Nobel invents dynamite, he has implied a little bit of bad conscience about it. Then certainly in World War 1, the hail of

machine gun gunfire, the song wounded our faith in science and tech. And then the atom bomb somehow blew it up

entirely. And in some sense in 1945, science and tech became apocalyptic. It left us with a question.

I'm going to put up this video produced by the National Committee on Atomic Information.

Peter plays the first 2 and a half minutes then the final 15 seconds. (source)

Since 1945, these apocalyptic fears have proliferated. It was probably a little bit of a sigh of relief in the 1990s, but since

then it has picked up. The Antichrist is...we'll get back to the Antichrist in a little bit.

Hopefully, people will not find this part controversial. You just need to open a newspaper or look at the internet or

wherever you get your news to read about the apocalypse. And the Silicon Valley term is existential risk. It's AI of

course, it's climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, all sorts of different dimensions to this. Maybe fertility collapse.

It's strangely like the post-modern multiversity. People tend to compartmentalize these risks too much. And so the anti-

AI effective altruists don't talk much about climate change, Greta doesn't talk about bioweapons and on and on. If

anything, these people are not apocalyptic enough.

One of the kinds of questions you can ask is: is the apocalypse we read about in the newspapers or the internet, the

same as the one that we read about in the Bible? There's all these things, Revelations 13:13, fire raining down from

heaven or Matthew 24:19, this is the fertility collapse verse, being wo to them that are with child and to them that give

stuck in those days. So it's like at some point, people will not want to have kids anymore.

And the rough answer I always give on this, is that if you are an atheist or a fundamentalist, you have a minor

disagreement about the secondary question of whether or not God exists. But the fundamentalists, the atheists agree

on the most important thing, which is that all violence comes from God. If you're not an atheist or a fundamentalist, you

do not externalize humanity's violence by scapegoating God.

If you believe violence comes from us, then you are going to be pushed to think that these existential risks, these

apocalyptic risks are maybe one and the same. You could say that the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible, you

shouldn't think of them in a mystical way. You should think of them as, let's put some qualifiers on this, almost just

rational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not

changed or improved. And in which people have ever more power.

If we have this litany of existential risks, I would like to always add one more existential risk to the list, that of the

totalitarian one world government. If we're in the Middle Ages, the natural question in a world on the brink of

Armageddon would be: where's the Antichrist? He must surely be around the corner. And so, let's get back to what is

the relationship between Antichrist and Armageddon.

I always think the lack of engagement with science, technology, the means for Armageddon, is where most of these

Christian accounts of the Antichrist end-times are the weakest. There are all sorts of quite good novels, fictional books.

The two best ones in my mind on the Antichrist are Vladimir Solovyov's War, Progress, and the End of History from

1900. A sort of Eastern Orthodox one. Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World from 1908.

And all sorts of details that seem prescient, that are not that badly dated. In Benson, the Antichrist is a Jewish socialist

senator from the state of Vermont. And you know in Solovyoy, you think it's this Eastern emperor, like Xi Jinping, it's like

the second coming of Genghis Khan. But that turns out the East is too racist and nationalist and then it turns out it's

some sort of Western public intellectual, a la Nietzsche, who people actually read his books or something like that.

But both of these books have an incredible plot whole, which is: how does the Antichrist actually come to power? This

sort of demonium ex machina, some sort of fake device. In Benson, it's just hypnotic speeches where the Antichrist

gives the speeches and nobody remembers a word he says. In Solovyoy, it's a hypnotically best-selling book. But it's

sort of the omnipotence of speech alone. I think you have to have a more straightforward answer for how the Antichrist

will take over the world.

We have sort of an answer in late modernity, which is that the Antichrist will come to power by talking about

Armageddon non-stop. Matthew 24:6 You shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. If you think of it not in the timelessly

internal but in the one-time world historical way, it's sequence. The rumors come after the wars or they're escalations

from the wars. In some ways, we got the answer already in Los Alamos. The Antichrist comes to power by talking

constantly about Armageddon, about rumours of wars and scaring you into giving him control over science and

technology.

Oppenheimer. "We need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head." Also Oppenheimer: "Many have said that

without world government there could be no permanent peace, and without peace there would be atomic warfare. I

think one must agree with this."

I'm also going to pick on Nick Bostrom, sort of the EA leader. The Vulnerable World Hypothesis is an essay he wrote in

2018/2019. It's about what we do about these Black Swan-type of events. He has a four-step program for you to do.

Number one, restrict technological development. Number two, ensure that there does not exist a large population of

actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives. This is pretty powerful cultural engineering.

Number three, establish extremely effective preventative policing. And number four, establish effective global

governance. And in the footnote, he points out that number one and two don't really work by themselves. You need to

do the extremely effective preventative policing and the effective global governance.

There is another book that fits this thesis even better. It's from the East Bay rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky. I'm

embarrassed about all the ways I was once affiliated with these various people. How deranged and crazy they've all

gone. It was started with these Baconian aspirations of transformative technology, we're going to build it, it's going to

change the world. And then it's somehow ended in some sort of black pill thing that's probably more depressed and

more than Luddite than Greta.

The title of the book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. There are all these excerpts but basically every single one is

a repeat of the 1946 video, One World or None.

"It's not a matter of if your country outlaws super intelligence inside its own borders. Any country then being safe while

chaos rages behind. Super intelligence is not a regional problem because it does not have regional effects. If anyone

anywhere builds superintelligence, everyone everywhere dies. So it should not be legal. Humanity probably can't

survive if it goes on being legal. People that continue publishing research into more efficient and powerful AItechniques."

And over and over again, it needs to be done on a worldwide basis. "All over the earth. It must become illegal for AI

companies to charge ahead with developing artificial intelligence as they can do it. If it stays legal in Singapore,

someone will do it in Singapore. If it stays legal in South Africa, someone will do it in South Africa."

On and on, you sort of get the picture. There's all sorts of different ways, One World or None, Antichrist or Armageddon,

that I'm tempted to think about this and here's one sort of application. In terms of how does one think about the current

geopolitical moment. How does one think about the nature of the conflict between the United States and China, the

West and China.

You don't really know how it's going to go. You can ask, are we heading for World War III or Cold War II? And if you sort

of reflect on the history of the two World Wars and the first Cold War. But first, if there ever was an unjust war, World

War I is an unjust war. If there ever was a just war, World War II was probably a just war, with certain caveats. World

War I is really insane. World War II was about as justified as a war can be.

I think we can say that if you had an all out World War III or war between nuclear powers involving nuclear weapons, it

would simply be an unjust war. A total catastrophe, possibly literal Armageddon, the end of the world. So World War III

will be an unjust war. But then if you have a Cold War, you have to distinguish between, can you have a just peace and

an unjust peace.

Somehow, it's very strange how the first Cold War from '49 to '89 ended. But it ended with roughly, what I think of as, a

just peace. Where somehow you didn't have a nuclear war. And somehow our side, which I think was more the good

side, basically won. And you ended up not with a perfect peace, but more or less a just peace.

And so if we have World War III, it will be an unjust war. If we have Cold War II, maybe it can end in a just peace or an

unjust peace. Reflecting on this material and thinking about it, it's obviously not written in stone and there's a lot of

different ways this stuff can go. But I keep thinking that, if you had to put odds on it, aren't the odds that we're trending

towards the fourth quadrant this time. The fourth possibility that Cold War II will end an unjust peace.

And it's because the Antichrist talks about Armageddon non-step. We're all scared to death that we're sleepwalking into

Armageddon. And then because we know World War III will be an unjust war, that pushes us. We're going hard towards

peace at any price.

What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don't think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes

much more likely that you get an unjust peace. This is, by the way, the slogan of the Antichrist: 1 Thessalonians 5:3. It's

peace and safety. Sort of the unjust peace. And then what Christ says in Matthew 24:6, the full verse. And you shall

hear of wars and rumours of wars, see that ye be not trouble. If you're too troubled, will we always end up with very

unjust peace or something like this.

Let me conclude on this choice of Antichrist or Armageddon. And again, in some ways the stagnation and the existential

risks are complementary, not contradictory. The existential risk pushes us towards stagnation and distracts us from it.

This is, by the way, the picture of the UN Security Council. It shows this mural which we strangely never see in photos

of the Security Council. It has its Christian or antichristic thing, Christ is replaced in the center by a Phoenix. And you

have all these sorts of images of liberation, slaves being freed, music becoming composed, and all sorts of different

people getting along with each other.

There's a lot of different directions one can go with this. But I want to briefly touch on two much bigger questions. One is

reason and revelation, reason and faith. And then another one on the question of freedom and history.

There's always a sort of anti-revelation, anti-faith argument that goes something like this: you should be rational,

anything you can know by that's worth knowing you can know by reason alone. And then if you add something that's

simply rational, keep adding it. But if you add something that's not simply rational, it involves some kind of faith, it's

maybe superrational but it's probably subrational or totally irrational. As soon as you move beyond reason, you're going

to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or something like that. And then, anything goes.

The counter argument to this though, I always think you need exactly just one counter example of something that's

pretty reasonable, but where somehow, the biblical language or the faith or the revelation nevertheless adds to

something different. And I'm going to give you one counter example.

We could have discussed all of this in secular language, a lot we did. But the philosophical philosophical rational

question, One World or None, in a sense is the same question as Antichrist or Armageddon. In one sense it's

completely the same question, the reason is completely continuous with the biblical account.

And then on another level, I think they are really, really different. Because one world or not, the philosophical question,

there's only one answer: you will go straight for one world. You will always go straight to one world. You know, do you

want to be red or dead? You ask your average atheist philosopher, where do I sign up for the Communist party?

You always will get to one answer. Whereas the Christian question, the biblical question, Antichrist or Armageddon, it

tells you, you need to find a third way. The answer is neither. Both answers are equally intolerable and you must find a

narrow third way between them. And so, somehow they're the same question, they're completely continuous and they

are completely discontinuous. And the philosophical formulation leads to insanity. The theological one leads to

moderation.

Another big picture question you can always ask is: does the Bible offer you a third way? And there are sort of all these

various people who are too grooved in Calvinism, Determinism, Pessimism, or something like this. Why are you even

trying to avoid the Antichrist? Maybe that'll make it faster for Christ to come back. It doesn't say in the Bible that you

have to have the Antichrist here to define God's word to try to stop him. You are putting off the invitable, etc. etc.

I want to at least suggest there is at least some freedom in history. These things are not completely written in stone.

The full passage from Daniel 12:4. "But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the

end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased."

There's some way I've suggested, you know, the dangers of technology, globalization of technology are linked and

there's a danger that the bad tech will tempt people into totalitarian globalization.

But the book was sealed. It could not be understood in its time, and if we can understand it today, better than people

could in 1900 or than Daniel could when he wrote these words, it's not just for some sort of contemplative meditative

thing. The point is not to understand this and do some yoga while the lions come and eat you up or something. It is, you

know, why does this message get unsealed in the time of the end? And it's surely because there's something we can do

about it or called to try to change. These things are not set in stone.

One way I read all these sorts of accounts of the Bible is: it is what will happen. Maybe it's the natural course of things,

maybe it's the logical thing. It's what will happen without a miracle. When Jonah goes to Nineveh and announces,

Jonah 3:4: "40 days from now Nineveh will be destroyed." It's not that God changed his mind. The way we've

interpreted it, it was just a conditional prophecy. If Nineveh would not repent, it would be destroyed, but a miracle is

possible.

Or let me give an even more provocative one. As late an hour as Christ in Gethsemane in the night before he gets

arrested and then betrayed and crucified. It's a garden outside Jerusalem. He asked the disciples to pray. And they

keep falling asleep. And he wakes them up, no, it's really important that you pray. And they fall asleep again.

This cycles and repeats and he eventually gets arrested. Isn't the right way to understand this in a counterfactual way?

That and I wonder if they had stayed awake and prayed, Christ might have been saved or that history could have gone

differently.

In conclusion, I would urge you, in response to my lecture tonight, which is this talk, not just to push the snooze button.

[END OF LECTURE]

[START OF INTERVIEW]

PETER ROBINSON

In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should begin by saying that Peter and I have been friends for over three

decades. So you're going to hear a conversation among friends. Which is not to say that he doesn't often rewrite my

questions before he even answers them.

I'd like to ask you a couple of questions. I want to make sure that I've got the main points of the argument. And then if

we have time, a couple of questions about the present moment and about you.

Your point of departure, the book of Daniel. Daniel 12:4, many shall run to and from and knowledge shall be increased.

Most scholars date Daniel from the sixth century before Christ. That makes the book of Daniel a work of the late Iron

Age. A text composed for a tribal people something like 2,400 years ago. And your premise is that that text remains not

only valid, but important for us today. Defend that assertion.

PETER THIEL

Well I'm not going to try to repeat my whole speech. Maybe one cut on this is, it's relevant but not in a timeless and

eternal way. Let's say I don't know the Ten Commandments which are these timeless and eternal rules of conduct for

people.

Whereas what I think what's interesting about Daniel is it's one time in world historical. There is one history and in my

telling, Daniel was the first historian. That in some ways was implicit in the biblical account. There's some creation, you

know, there's an alpha and omega. There's some meaning to history, some pattern to history. And it is not some

external cycle, some eternal recurrence. Every moment in history happens only once. Your individual life is unique. The

choices you have are unique.

I think it was de Lubac who said Christitnaity is not one of the great things of history, but you know, history is one of the

great things of Christianity, or the whole Judeo-Christian inspiration.

PETER ROBINSON

You're touching on what I take to be the second major premise here, which is the linearity of history. If history does have

an endpoint, we can say for certain that we're 2,400 years closer to it than when Daniel was written. But that's a big

assumption right there.

You mentioned in your talk that in the pagan world and in Pericles, you get a feeling that history is circular. One of the

basic findings of comparative religion is that Asian religions are characterized by recurring cycles: birth, death, decay,

rebirth, and so on. History with events and civilizations repeating themselves. And in the West, the Hebrew scriptures,

the New Testament, history is going someplace. Chesterton said Buddhism is centripetal but Christianity is centrifugal, it

breaks out.

Okay, but in accepting that history is linear, you're choosing the Western tradition, not as a matter of aesthetics, but

you're saying that tradition is true. It conforms to reality. The corollary of which is, the Asian tradition, which is a product

of its own centuries of human thought and experience is wrong.

Where do you get off?

PETER THIEL

The way I illustrate this is just starting with this idea of progress in science and technology. Is there a linearity to science

and tech? Is there a linearity to knowledge? I think it is somehow this idea that has its origin in knowledge. This idea

has its origin in the Judeo=Christian account.

But I don't know. I don't think anybody can really think of the world in a different way. I mean today in our world, we all

believe there's some kind of directionality to history. And it's very odd to think that all this stuff will get unlearned or

something like that. So we all believe in this and the details matter a lot. Is there progress in other areas? Is it simply all

utopian? Can we progress towards dystopia? So there's a lot of different dimensions to that.

But, man, I don't know how you function in 2025 if you believe that everything is just timeless and eternal.

PETER ROBINSON

Let's go to the basics of the argument, the Antichrist. You yourself in this lecture just now, granted that a number of

figures have argued that the Antichrist is not an individual but an institution. Luther and Calvin both identified the

Antichrist not as individual Popes but as the Papacy, the office of the Papacy.

And then we get other authorities arguing that the Antichrist won't be a single individual but many individuals. The first

letter of John, children, it is the last hour and just as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, even now many

Antichrists have arisen.

And yet you argue pretty explicitly for the single individual, not institution, is compelling. Where does that come from?

Why do you settle on that interpretation of Antichrist?

PETER THIEL

There's a lot of history to this. I think this is what the church fathers tend to believe, what people in the Middle Ages tend

to believe. It's probably also broadly what evangelical Christians believe. There were obviously some exceptions, the

Calvinists. They did it way in the past with Nero, sort of the preterist interpretation. Some of the reformers in the 16th

century, the Lutherans, the Anglicans, identified the Pope as the Antichrist.

There are all sorts of complicated debates one can have about it. In doing these lectures and giving the version of this a

few times, we've encountered all sorts of people. We did encounter a Lutheran minister from rural Texas, who still

believed that the Pope was the Antichrist. I pushed him, you know, have you preached on this in your church, and no he

hadn't. I'm supposed to preach on Christ not the Antichrist, but maybe there's some other reasons he hadn't done so.

And he had some surprisingly good scriptural arguments.

But the place where I anchor on is: maybe the Antichrist is too hard to sort out whether it's, was it just Nero in the past

or was it Pope Leo X in the 16th century? Or is it a future world leader? The part that seems to be much more

accessible are these questions about Armageddon, existential risk, things like this. And that's also where I think the

history is very, very different.

In the 18th century, it was inconceivable that humanity could destroy the world. And so, if the apocalypse has this

dimension where it somehow became much more real in the 20th or 21st century, then perhaps that's why I'm also

inclined to say that there's something special about our time and then extend that to these other teachings.

PETER ROBINSON

Here's Cardinal Newman. This is John Henry Newman, now a saint, soon to be declared a doctor of the church. An

1835 series of sermons called the Patristical Idea of the Antichrist. He's studied the thinking, the view of the Antichrist

among the church fathers, which is from the time of Christ to the eighth century essentially.

Quoting Newman, the subject may be summed up as follows, that the coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by

a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil called by St. Paul an apostasy, a falling away. In the midst of which a

certain terrible man of sin and child of predition, the special and singular enemy of Christ or Antichrist will appear. Close

quote. So that's a summary of your position.

PETER THIEL

I even modeled these lectures on Newman. Newman did four, so I'm doing four. I'm happy about it. By the way, the

liturgical year tradition, there were four advent sermons that he did in 1835, and the advent at the time, before

Christmas, was the season when you were supposed to do sermons on the end-times. There was this count this year

thing, maybe we're going to have a winter where the world comes to an end and there's no renewal. Or maybe we're

heading towards an ending without a beginning. That's sort of why Newman did them at that time.

There's all sorts of levels one can look at it. The Anglican Church in 1835, it was still a doctrine of the Anglican Church

that the Pope was the Antichrist. He doesn't really talk that much about the Pope, but by pushing the Antichrist to this

future political one world leader, Newman is subtly, sotto voce, Newman is saying maybe the Pope is not the Antichrist.

But there were still a lot of people in the Anglican Church who still officially believed that in 1835.

There's sort of a long history of these things. There's the ways people thought about this in the early church and the

Middle Ages. And there was probably some ways that people overdosed on the Antichrist in the early Reformation in

the 16th to middle of the 17th century. The Lutherans, the Anglicans. Maybe if you have a schism with the church, it's

kind of a bad thing to do. And then you have to justify it by saying that the church is really, really bad.

And there was a logic or psychological logic that naturally pushed Luther to saying the Pope was not just a little bit bad,

but must have been the worst person ever. Because if the Pope wasn't the worst person ever, what's that tell you about

Luther or King Henry VIII.

And then maybe if you want to have a year where the Antichrist stuff gets really off-ramped. We're going to cut it down

to one year. It's 1648. It's the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years' War where these questions are too

divisive. If we are constantly fighting each other over who the Antichrist is, it's too destructive. Questions of the

Antichrist, maybe questions of religion altogether should just be relegated to the private sector.

The riff I always have is that in some ways, you can think of the Enlightenment as this long period of peaceful slumber

that took place. And there were good reasons to ramp that question off in 1648. So that's the good reason that it got

ramped off.

But then the bad reason that these questions maybe got ramped off is at some point they became too relevant. You off

ramp them because they make people angry and they see the Antichrist everywhere. Rene Girard always had this

observation, that he thought the end- times sermons, like the one Newman gave in 1835…the year where people

stopped giving those sermons in the Catholic Church is 1945. Because once you have nuclear weapons and it looks

like the end of the world is real, the church needs to reassure people and tell them there's nothing going on here.

So I understand the 1648 move. I think the 1945 move is more problematic. I would argue that in our time we should

maybe bring back both.

PETER ROBINSON

Folks, you can decide anytime you want, the extent to which you agree with him, but you got to admit there are not

many minds that can go from an Antichrist to the Treaty of Westphalia.

So I would like to sum up the argument to the moment before you give your lecture. The situation runs as follows. The

plot hole, you went through that relatively quickly this evening, but that strikes me as absolutely central. Solovyov writes

his story about the Antichrist in 1900. You read the story and the problem is you can't figure out how the Antichrist figure

achieved his dominance. You're quite right it is a plot hole. Likewise, Robert Hugh Benson, 1907, you read the book and

the Antichrist is simply there. He has simply somehow already risen and commanded the allegiance of people around

the world. It just skips over. These are plot holes.

PETER THIEL

They're both pre-World War I. And I mean, maybe they should have realized that World War I is going to be a disaster.

You could have learned it by looking at the US Civil War. There was a way this stuff had gone in a very, very dangerous

direction. But yeah, I think almost nobody really thought in those terms in 1900 or 1908.

PETER ROBINSON

So we have a tradition that goes back 2,000 years, that we must watch for a terrible man of sin. But for 2,000 years,

right up through Solovyov and Benson, we had no idea how such a terrible man might arise. And your contribution is

that now we do. Fair?

PETER THIEL

Well, I don't know if it's just mine, but yeah. I would say it has a very different character. It's something like the film from

1946, One World or None. Like why should we all submit to this very oppressive one world government. If you said that

in 1900 or 1908. And 1946, there is an argument that didn't exist before. It's not like your Antichrist argument is not

simply wrong, right? It's very, very dangerous. There are parts of this technology that are scary and dangerous. You

know, the Eliezer, the AI arguments are not simply categorically wrong. It just has this frying pan into the fire kind of

dynamic to it.

PETER ROBINSON

Litany of stagnation. Universities, we have 100 times more PhDs than a century ago, but nobody would argue we're

getting 100 times as much scientific progress or economic growth. You've said elsewhere young Americans today

expect to be worse off than their parents, and I believe them. Technology, I'm quoting you again, across my career as a

technology entrepreneur and investor, I've come to believe that we are living in a scientific and technological stagnation.

However, Peter, I'm here to inform you this evening that you're completely mistaken. And I'm going to quote Marc

Andreessen in his famous techno-optimist manifesto.

PETER THIEL

You are trying to trigger me.

PETER ROBINSON

Okay I'll look away. "We believe...", this is Marc, "we believe…"

PETER THIEL

Is this a statement of faith?

PETER ROBINSON

"We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe

artificial intelligence can save lives. We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our philosopher stone. We are

literally making sand think."

Peter Thiel, why doesn't the development of artificial intelligence overturn your entire argument about stagnation?

PETER THIEL

Where should I start? I'm tempted to be triggered in some nasty ad hominem argument, but I can't resist so I'll do that. I

don't know, this is just pure Silicon Valley gobbledygook propaganda. I wouldn't give someone who said things like that

too much money to invest.

Because even if it's propaganda, even if whoever, Andreessen or whoever wrote that for him. Even if they made it up,

the danger with propaganda is you always start to believe it. You always start to believe your own propaganda. The way

that propaganda would be applied, it's so cornucopian. You can make money anywhere, you just throw money around.

You just need to, I don't know, open a shingle on Market Street in San Francisco. And go and give every homeless

person who comes along money to invest in AI. I think there are a lot of levels on which one can be skeptical.

If we're going to not have this sort of crazed corporate utopianism versus effective altruist luddism, luddite thing. If you

try to have some more nuanced version of this, you try to quantify it. How big is the AI revolution? How much is it going

to add to GDP? Add to living standards? Things like that. My placeholder is, it's looking probably on roughly the scale of

the internet from 1990 to the late 90s. Maybe it can add 1% a year to GDP. There are big error bars around that. And I

think the internet was quite significant. It was not quite as transformative as that. People talked about the internet in

very similar terms in 1999. That's another way where it sounds like roughly the right scale.

The place where it's very different, where it feels, both true of the internet and maybe it's true of AI. Maybe a place

where I would agree with Andreessen. The negative part of the statement is, but for AI, nothing else is going on. He's

not talking about going to Mars, so it doesn't sound like he believes Elon's about to go to Mars. I think there's a negative

part, if AI was not happening, wow, we are really stuck. Things are really stagnant. And maybe that's why people have

to be so excited about this one specific vector of technological progress. Because outside of that, to a first

approximation, things are totally, totally stagnant. Maybe even the internet has run out of steam but for AI. So that's

another framing.

Now, the thing that strikes me is very different from '99, if I had to give a difference, again I'm too anchored and rooted

in the late 90s. But the late 90s, it was broadly optimistic. And there were a lot of people who thought about it just like

Andreessen does. Nobody feels that personally. It's like you can't start a dot-com company from your basement in

Sacramento. You can't start an AI company, you have to do it in San Francisco. You have to do it in Silicon Valley. It has

to be at an enormous scale. Most things aren't big enough. And then there are layers and layers and layers where it

feels incredibly non-inclusive. Maybe people just updated from the internet because maybe the internet turned out to

have a lot of winner-take-all dynamics.

But certainly the felt sense in 2025 is way less optimistic than it was in '99. And then if I had to score the Antichrist.

Again, my thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strange Love, a scientist who did

all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's

someone like Greta or Eleezer. It's not Andreessen by the way. I think Andressen is not the Antichrist. Because you

know, the Antichrist is popular. I'm trying to say some good things about Andressen here, come on.

But the thing that strikes me as very different from '99 is, man, the politics are so much more opposed to AI than they

were opposed to the internet in 99. There's so much more pushback. And again, I don't like the Luddites, I don't like the

effective altruists, you have to steelman a little bit more, and they are tapping into some real fears. On some level, it

tells you that Andreessen is just engaged in enormous hyperbole.

PETER ROBINSON

All right. So our technology now scares us and in one way or another that leads us to slow it down, to treat it with

mistrust. Got it.

The next step in the argument is this movement toward one worldism. You quoted J. Robert Oppenheimer, I'll give you

another Oppenheimer quotation. "Many have said that without world government, there could be no permanent peace. I

think one must agree with this." That's J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Let me quote a second figure. This is my second attempt to cheer you up this evening. I hope this one goes a little

better. You may have heard of this figure. This is Donald J. Trump at the United Nations in 2019. "The future does not

belong to globalists. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who honor the differences that make

each country special and unique." Why doesn't the election and now still more the re-election of Donald Trump overturn

your argument about the risk of global government?

PETER THIEL

Man there's so many levels in which this is wrong. At the very best, you shouldn't have even the most fanatical Trump

supporter. You know, no politician, not even Reagan, will solve all problems for all time. Maybe we both were sort of

delusional about Reagan in the 80s. There was some moment in the 1980s when we thought that Reagan had

permanently solved the deepest problems in the world for all time. And that's too high a bar. That was too high a bar for

Reagan. That's an unfairly high bar you're giving to Mr. Trump. You're just trying to make a subtle anti-Trump argument

and I'm not going to let you do that.

PETER ROBINSON

Let me close with a couple of questions, a little more informal. Here's what the world knows about you: from a kid who

grew up in Foster City to, well, Alex Karp, I think it was last week he described you as the most important venture

capitalist who ever lived. Speaking of setting high bars.

This world, this group knows that story. But the Peter Thiel who pours over the book of Daniel, the Peter Thiel who

studies Armageddon and Antichrist, where did this come from? How long have you been interested in this? And how did

you find your way into thinking through this problem?

Maybe other people are onto this, but as far as I can tell, this is an original announcement or observation that now we

can see how the Antichrist might emerge and this is a new moment in history. That's really quite a big deal. How did the

kid from Foster City come up with this stuff?

PETER THIEL

Man, I'm so bad at all this introspection stuff. I don't do introspection, I don't like it. I'll do my introspection, I'll do a meta

version, an introspection of why I don't introspect.

You know, one of the cultural manifestations of the stagnation, sort of dated to the early 70s. We went from outer space

to inner space. It was psychology and meditation and yoga and psychedelic drugs and Jordan Peterson and incels

playing video games and naval gazing and identity politics. And this sort of collapse into ourselves. From exploring the

universe to this inner world, which I think is much more boring, much less interesting. That in my mind, that's a symptom

of the stagnation. I don't introspect.

Maybe I should. I don't know. It's always like a question you can ask about Elon. Would Elon benefit from therapy? And

I think my categorical answer is, as an investor in his company, I really hope he never gets therapy. If I was better at

answering your question, it would be really boring. Let's move on.

PETER ROBINSON

A couple of last questions. You referred just once to Rene Girard and, I don't want to anticipate coming lectures, but I

believe you'll be referring to Rene again. Briefly, you got to know Rene. I lived across the street from Rene. We were

neighbors. You got to know him as an undergraduate and came to know him well. Just place him for this audience. Who

was Rene Girard and what was his importance?

PETER THIEL

Man, it's always hard to summarize. He was this polymath thinker who tried to connect and integrate a lot of different

fields. And was in some ways, the Bible and anthropology and history. And it was this incredible holistic picture of the

whole world. And there were parts about it that were very powerful. There were parts of it that probably are existentially

troubling. We're all memetic and there's all these ways that we're often caught up in these crazy social dynamics.

But yeah, I don't know, probably in the 80s when I went to Stanford, I had this thought that you'd have a whole bunch of

professors at a university who were like that. And it was, I don't know, it was a category that was almost extinct then and

I think just doesn't exist anymore.

PETER ROBINSON

All right. Last question before we turn to the questions from the audience. I'm sorry to say this is a question I wish I

didn't have to ask, but I feel that in light of recent events, it's mandatory.

The nuclear threat, the dangers of one world government, those are sort of external exogenous threats, things that

people could impose on us. What about what we might do to ourselves?

Here's the 97-year-old Jewish novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick in a recent interview, quote, This is a good country.

It's a great country and now it's disintegrating. Where does the murder of Charlie Kirk fit into your view of the end-

times?

PETER THIEL

I don't know if I have a great narrative how to connect all these things. There's obviously some way that you have all

this super small scale violence, and this very large scale violence. There's some intuition that, maybe things that

happen can snowball and escalate. And that if you're not careful, you know, there are ways even some individual

microaggression death can somehow escalate to Armageddon.

There's some intuition that these things are connected. And then at the same time, I want to always say we should not

always just be anchored on the fear of Armageddon, the fear of violence, the fear of these things. What I find so

depressing about the Charlie Kirk murder is: I don't think he was really pushing the envelope and saying things

incredibly controversial. And like, how in the world are we ever going to solve our problems if something like that is way,

way beyond the pale.

There's some version where the internet is deranging us and polarizing us and things like that. And I worry that we're in

a world where, man, we can't think anywhere outside the box. We're in this tiny narrow Overton window and if even

what Charlie Kirk is doing is so dangerous and so triggering that we can't have it, wow, then we're really never going to

solve things.

I don't know, maybe what I'm doing is safer. But yeah, if you're not supposed to have polarizing language, I'm sort of not

sure I'm allowed to talk about the Antichrist either. That's what I find really disturbing about it.

PETER ROBINSON

That concludes Act two. Peter's putting on a three act play tonight. Act three, questions from you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[START OF AUDIENCE Q&A]

SAM WOLFE

Peter, I just want to start with a very frequent question here, which is what is so interesting to you about this particular

topic? You know, you're a Christian, but why this random, small part of the Bible? Why spend eight hours across the

space of four weeks talking about this?

PETER THIEL

There's a certain version of this question I always get. Should we talk more about Christ than the Antichrist and yes, I

think people probably should. You have to think of this as a tiny, tiny corrective, this way in which no one's talking about

this stuff.

I don't know, I've been doing a deep dive on this in different ways for the last few years and it's incredibly generative

and it leads to sort of a lot of interesting questions. What's going on with China? What are the risks? Is the risk really

World War III or is it a Cold War II ending in an unjust peace? So there's something about it that, yeah, it's not been

asked and it has a lot of powerful applications.

SAM WOLFE

We also got several questions about Xi Jinping, Putin, and asking you about World War III versus Cold War II framing.

Can you say a little bit more about that and how it might change your view of something like Taiwan, for example.

PETER THIEL

Let me articulate one dimension of an unjust peace. This is maybe slightly polemical, but you know, one of the things

that's disturbing and that sort of powerfully works about communist China is, maybe it's not quite slavery, but it's like

indentured servitude. If you look at it by the labor standards of the Western world, it's uncomfortably close to slavery.

And something like this, does work pretty powerfully as a business model, as an economic model. I remember visiting

the Foxconn factory in 2015, a decade ago, and you know the people get paid about a dollar and a half, $2 an hour, you

work 12 hours a day. You sleep in a dorm room with two bunk beds. There are eight people in the dorm room, so

someone's sleeping in your bed while you're working and vice versa. It's how you fit eight people into one dorm room.

There were nets around the building as a health measure to stop people from jumping off the roof.

And there's a way something like Foxconn, you know, it's like a blocker corporation. If all these people worked directly

for Apple, Apple Computer would be sued to death. And so it's really important for this weird, separate company to be

doing all the dirty work that's needed to make the iPhones.

There are all these ways that this unjust peace isn't just in the future, but there's all these ways we are entangled with it.

And this was not the dynamic in the first Cold War. There was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Soviet Union. There

were very few people in the Western world who profited, benefited from it. You had, what's his name? Armand Hammer.

There was this one oil man who supposedly made lots of money, but then I think when he died, he was bankrupt. So it

didn't work for Mr. Hammer, really. But there was very, very little trade.

And then there's probably a sort of non-partisan, both sides. There's a Mitt Romney, Bush Republican where it's good

for corporations, it's good for their quarterly earnings to go with slave labor. And then the social democratic, Labor Party,

Democratic Party. They used to be, in the 70s and 80s, they used to be in favor of workers. And at this point, they're in

favor of welfare or, you know, old people. And it's like, okay, it's better the welfare state's more affordable if we get

cheap BYD cars from China. And if you have all these people working in near slave conditions. So there's certain ways

that both the center left and the center right parties in the US, and throughout the Western world are deeply entangled

with this incredibly unjust arrangement.

Obviously there's a big fault line over Taiwan. It is the AI chips. This is an important technology. The Middle East was a

zone of conflict in the Cold War. Maybe 25, 30% of the world's oil was in the Middle East. We have 100% of the

advanced AI logic chips being made in Taiwan. And then, I don't know, do you just sell the 25 million people in Taiwan

into slavery or did we already do that in the 1970s? Because when we normalized relations with China, we moved the

embassy from Taipei to Beijing, we acknowledged it was one China. And so there was already some kind of unjust

peace that was part of the deal in the 1970s.

There's sort of all these ways that it can still be changed, it can still go in a lot of ways. But I want to say we are sort of, I

don't know, half pregnant with this unjust peace.

Then of course there's the Cold War history that, when I reflect on it, it's really amazing, almost miraculous how the

Cold War ended. You had some weird combination of these somewhat crazy left-wing anti-war activists and then you

had the right of center, right-wing Reagan Thatcher cold warrior people. And the anti-war people made sure nuclear

weapons were never used and the Reagan Thatcher people were not into appeasement. And they somehow learned

that lesson from World War II. And the anti-war people had learned the lesson from World War I that you don't have hair

trigger escalations. And somehow, we got to this almost miraculous resolution in 1989. This setup feels so different at

this point.

I don't even want to go out of my way talking against China or something like that. It doesn't feel particularly safe. It's

not how it works. There was a recent item on Palantir, where a bunch of defense companies' executives got banned

from China, and the Palantir people did not get banned. And I talked to the CEO and said, should I be complaining

about the fact that I haven't been banned from China? And it's like well, you know, they just banned the people who

were selling stuff to Taiwan and we haven't sold anything to Taiwan. Well, maybe we shouldn't sell things to Taiwan

because they're probably just going to lose. You know, they're not going to defend themselves. Is this really the fight we

want to pick? There's a lot of stuff where, even someone as relatively hawkish as myself, doesn't really want to have a

Reagan-like cold war with China.

What does that tell you?

PETER ROBINSON

Can I just say before we leave China, Xi Jinping is an illustration, at least in miniature, at least locally of your argument

about the Antichrist. Xi Jinping in his rhetoric to the Chinese says: this is a hard country to hold together. It has fallen

apart violently a number of times over the years. My generation is still a living memory, the cultural revolution in which

millions died, were surrounded by enemies. You must give me power because I save you from your worst fears. That's

a prototypical Antichrist. Yes?

PETER THIEL

I don't even know exactly how it's articulated. I think it's a little bit less positive and it's more like, if you complain

something very bad happens to you and nobody really complains. There are all sorts of things about it that are quite

tricky. But there are ways that I don't think Putin or even Xi are great Antichrist candidates on a global basis. You want

something that actually can be charismatic on a global level. Soviet Communism was in some ways pretty charismatic. I

don't think Xi Jinping is thought of as charismatic. It doesn't actually get translated. So yeah, he might be the second

coming of Mr. H. He's a nationalist and a socialist, probably very racist. I'm not sure he's quite a full-blown Antichrist.

SAM WOLFE

Staying on the topic of geopolitics, Jacob asks, what role does the state of Israel or the Jews play in your framing of

Antichrist?

PETER THIEL

I think we'll talk about this in some of the other lectures. Dispensationalism was this movement in evangelical

Christianity which interpreted the recreation of Israel as linked to these various end-times prophecies. There are all

these different ways Israel gets interpreted in the Old Testament. For most of the Middle Ages, even most of the

mainstream reformers interpreted Israel as applying to the church. But there are certain passages where it sounds more

specific to country. At least in Isaiah 11:12, where it's the Jews will be dispersed to the ends of the earth and they'll

come back, and something like Israel will be recreated. That sounds like a second worldwide dispersion, not just

Babylonian captivity.

There's this very mysterious, long history of how this got interpreted in this sort of end-times, eschatological way. In the

time of Oliver Cromwell in 1656, he had issued an edict to let the Jews back into Great Britain after 360 years. Because

they had to be dispersed to the ends of the earth before Israel could be recreated. It was Cromwell's interpretation of

this prophecy and then somehow there's some weird way that it can be interpreted as culminating in 1948.

I think the place where I am not as excited about the Israel question, both pro or con, is I keep thinking that even though

there's things about it that are very striking, I keep thinking that you should think of Israel as basically a MacGuffin,

which is a Hollywood plot device. It's a very shiny object that has absolutely nothing to do with the larger plot.

There's something going on, there's something very striking about these things. The end-times question you'd have to

ask is, how will Israel relate to the one world state? Will it control it? Will it resist it? And my intuition is that Antichrist-

Armageddon questions are much more important than the MacGuffin that is the Israel question.

SAM WOLFE

Pablo asks, at Stanford you had a course named Progress or Stagnation. And there was a course by Leo Strauss at

Chicago called Progress or Return. Is return a possible way out of our stagnation? A sort of Nietzschean

repaganization.

PETER THIEL

I've overdosed on all the Strauss stuff over the various years and it's always super complicated. All these books are

written in code and you have to decode it. And then even once you decode it, it's sort of interesting, you're never quite

sure whether the argument is good or not. But I'll go down one rabbit hole of one of these that Sam and I figured out

over the last few months.

It's Heinrich Meyer, who's probably one of the top Straussian professors, and he wrote a book on Nietzsche's The

Antichrist. This commentary on Nietzsche's book, The Antichrist by this Straussian. So we're interested in all things

Antichrist. We read the book and he'd done this incredible survey on John Henry Newman, all these things on the

Antichrist. He was very, very knowledgeable about it. We went through and read the book.

What we figured out, and I don't think this is anything with Acts 17. But the basic tenor of the book, by the way, is that

the Antichrist is just silly and only stupid people talk about Antichrist. But the one detail he has is there are 17 mentions

of the word Antichrist, and that is the Pythagorean number for nature. So the coded message of the book is that nature

is the Antichrist. This is the way you're supposed to interpret Strauss: is that anytime Strauss uses nature, natural right

in history. Every time the word nature occurs, it's supposed to have an anti-Christian, anti-theological dimension to it.

And you should figure out why that is. And this was in some ways why Nietzsche wanted to have a return to nature,

away from the sort of unnatural. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw. This Christian world's too nice, it's too unnatural, or

something like this.

But I don't know. I don't think it works on all these levels. What's always interesting about people like maybe Strauss,

but certainly like Nietzsche, all these things: even though it's meant to be anti-Christian or pagan, it's always really,

really adjacent to the other thing. You know, it's Oswald Spengler, who writes this book The Decline of the West. It's

again this pagan account where civilizations have a life cycle and they rise and fall. And so in one sense, it's just this

boring pagan natural cycle of rise and decline of civilizations, and the Western world is now in decline. The Decline of

the West in 1918 is Spengler's masterpiece.

But at the margins of the book, it also toys with the opposite idea that because the West was this civilization that

aspired to be infinite and it took over the whole world, the end of the West is the end of the world. This is also, you

know, the idea in Nietzsche that somehow you're not going to have this eternal recurrence, but maybe, you will have an

end that's not a beginning.

And so I think Nietzsche, Spengler, all these people are interesting, in part because of the anti-Christian thing. But really

because they're so close to the Christian alternative.

SAM WOLFE

I'm going to paraphrase Chloe's question here because there are a lot that are sort of along these lines. Is the

gerontocracy the Antichrist? Is there something antichristic about parents sacrificing future generations for their current

well-being, economic prosperity, etcetera.

PETER THIEL

We'll talk about this more in one of the later lectures. But I'm more tempted to say that the Antichrist is sort of a youthful

kind of a figure. Maybe the gerontocracy is a very decayed way of stopping it or something like this. But yeah, if you

think of the Antichrist as some charismatic youth movement or something like that. The gerontocratic stuff, it's

katechontic. It's sort of a bad katechon, bad restrainer. Biden is not what you think of as the Antichrist, even though he's

a Democrat.

SAM WOLFE

Along those lines on the nature of the Antichrist. Karen asks, I'm curious if Peter has thoughts on McLuhan's idea that

like Christ, Antichrist is encompassing and touches everyone. The quote is Satan is a great electrical engineer. Must the

Antichrist be an individual or could it have network characteristics?

PETER THIEL

Yeah, it can be all these things. I think one of the reasons that I'm hesitant...there are all these ways where its uncannily

similar and diametrically the opposite of Christ. But that's why I want to approach it much more indirectly. Because if it's

like Christ and Antichrist, that is important, but we should try to approach it more indirectly. How do you get a world

system of governance? How could one person take over the world? How could you have a system that does this, and I

want to approach it through that lens more.

SAM WOLFE

Ariel asks, could new network states that compete for citizens be the solution to this problem? You've written about and

been interested in seasteading and various foreign passports, etcetera.

PETER THIEL

I think there are all sorts of bland libertarian ways of pushing against the one world state. I just don't know if they ever

quite work. And so yes, the bland libertarian argument I have is that if you had a one world state, the marginal tax rates

would be very, very high. And this would be extremely bad. And I believe that's a rational argument. It's one that I

personally find very motivational. I also think it somehow doesn't quite convince people.

SAM WOLFE

Sam, not me, asks about your contributions to society through PayPal and Palantir. He's sort of commenting on

something a lot of the questioners have commented on, which is what are we supposed to do in response to these

lectures and how do you think about your own career through the framework of what you've been talking about today?

PETER THIEL

I'm always so hesitant to be too programmatic. I don't like giving anything resembling moral advice or anything like that,

I think advice of any sort. We're just in a world that's drenched with simplistic, programmatic advice. What has worked

for me is to, you know, try to be thoughtful, to try to think of what you can do in a particular situation.

If I were to talk about PayPal, this is one of the ways it's always tricky about how people talk about companies. Because

it's either incredibly narrow, idiosyncratic war stories that don't mean anything. Or it's in this timeless and eternal way

that doesn't work either.

It was some great people and then we had this idea of combining email with money and it was just the right thing in

1999. It would not have been possible 10 years earlier. A few years later, it was done. It was probably not even possible

after 9/11 because all the KYC rules changed so much. And then it's very, very complicated how to talk about it in a way

that's helpful because either you end up being either way too particular or you abstract it in such a way that it's not

interesting.

I don't know, I hope people will think for themselves.

SAM WOLFE

We'll take one more. Mackay asks, I'm a recent convert to Christianity. I converted through delivery from stress. Isn't

Jesus the good news? Isn't this subject cause for worry to reflection, more panic? Peter, are you just trying to scare us

all?

PETER THIEL

I always think you're not supposed to be extremely optimistic or extremely pessimistic. I don't think it's a Christian or a

very healthy view to think that everything's going to be fine or everyone's going to be doomed or anything like this.

Maybe that's true from God's point of view. That's not our point of view. We're in the middle of things. We're in this world

where I believe our choices, our decisions matter. If you're too optimistic or too pessimistic, those always converge on

being lazy. Like extreme pessimism, nothing you can do, extreme optimism, nothing you need to do. And the common

denominator is laziness. I believe sloth was one of the seven mortal sins in medieval Catholicism. I think it still is in

modern Catholicism.