[START OF LECTURE]
PETER THIEL
Thank you. Let's see. Recapping where we are.
In lecture 1, we went over the ways in which early modern optimism about rapidly progressing science transitioned into
apocalyptic pessimism about a stagnant science in late modernity. Then, in last week’s lecture, we introduced the idea
of empire and its ambiguous role—as restrainer, or Katechon, and as enabler, or accelerator, of the Antichrist.
And tonight I’ll continue this investigation by asking the seemingly narrow question of the velocity of the Antichrist. What
I mean by that is: the Bible says that one man will take over the entire world. He only has one lifetime to do that. How
on earth can he achieve that? It sounds like medieval fantasy.
But before I get to that, I want to recap last week's material with a short digression. I told you that Carl Schmitt made the
mistake of not talking about the Antichrist. Now, I want to argue that someone else made the same mistake—perhaps
the person you'd least expect in the entire world.
Pictured here is Pope Benedict. He was Pope from 2005 to 2013. Delivering the Regensburg address and laying down
his papal pallium to Celestine V. Formerly known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he becomes Pope in 2005 following
John Paul II who had led an unprecedented global Catholic revival.
Last week, I quoted John Paul's February 2001 homily. "You come from 27 countries on four continents and speak
various languages. Is this not a sign of the Church’s ability, now that she has spread to every corner of the globe, to
understand peoples with different traditions and languages, in order to bring to all the message of Christ?"
It was framed in a very upbeat way. There's something strange about openly announcing the fulfillment of the great
commission and seemingly, therefore, the end times. At his inauguration mass, John Paul II articulated his central
message: be not afraid. That might be easier said than done.
We then get to his successor Benedict. The official teaching (summarizing something like): the Church will become
smaller, purer, lower, and less entangled with worldly powers. The 21st century Church will be like the 1st Church. In
some ways, this official framing was a silver lining in an otherwise dark period for the Catholic Church. Revelations of
child sex abuse that crescendoed from the 90s to the 2000s, and the steadily dropping Church attendance rates in the
western world.
Of course in many ways, his actions did not suggest optimism. His first major address is the Regensburg address,
where he compares himself to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Palaiologos, who discourses on Islam during the 1394-
1402 Siege of Constantinople.
Then in February 2013, he dramatically resigns the papacy. He'd obviously been thinking about this for a long time. The
picture on the right is Benedict laying down his papal pallium—the vestment symbolizing the plentitude of the pontifical
office—on the coffin of Celestine V, four years earlier in 2009, who had been the last pope to resign (back in 1294) also
at the age of 85.
It was quite dramatic. What was Benedict trying to tell us with his resignation? I believe that he had a secret belief that
he articulated to nobody, or almost nobody. The secret belief is one toggle switch away from the official writing or
teaching. Maybe even lightly suggested that it was something he felt he should not say.
I don't think it's possible to be more Catholic than the Pope. It's pretty easy to be more Catholic than the average
Catholic. Maybe not what this crowd wishes to aspire to. But if you are a good Catholic, all you need to do is listen to
the Pope when he speaks ex cathedra. And I'm going to suggest you should pay even more attention when he speaks
sotto voce.
He wrote 66 books. In his writings, he often returns to the topic of eschatology, usually in metaphysical terms. In 1956—
he was just 29 years old—he writes an article on the theologian Ticonius, where he quotes the Song of Solomon and
suggests the church is both dark and beautiful, fusca sum et decor. And that the Antichrist somehow belongs to the
church.
In 1959, his professorial dissertation is on Bonaventure (this 13th century person) and its theology of history, including
the strange idea that something like Aristotelianism was the Antichrist. Very opposed to the timeless and eternal ideas
of Aquainas. He has all these books. The Unity of the Nations, the title has this vibe. The Regensburg lecture
suggested crisis. In his 2007 book Jesus of Nazareth, there's a two page digression on Solovyov. It's another short
story of the Antichrist and Benedict pampers us, saying that the devil appears as a theologian who studied at the
University of Tübingen, just as Benedict himself had done.
He's super engaged with these things. The tl;dr: my belief is that Benedict literally thought that the historic falling away
from the church during his papacy was a sign of the end times.
Is there evidence for this? There's all sorts of subtle hints. The 1959 professorial dissertation on Bonaventure. It's all
this colorful language on the Antichrist before Babylon, "what does one make of this." On the flip note, it's sort of the
most cryptic, esoteric way to write it.
Not in his own words but quoting another professor, Ratzinger wrote: "In the case of Bonaventure, we see how difficult it
is to succeed in placing the proper limits on apocalyptic images. Apocalyptic images are like a torrent of water that
overflows the banks and it's difficult to keep in balance. And regardless of all efforts to mollify the imagery, the
apocalyptic tone predominates. Even a Mozart cannot make a trumpet forget to sound like a trumpet." So it's like you
are saying, if you think about this stuff, you can never talk about it. Because talking about it even one peep, it will
dominate everything and you can't say anything else.
Perhaps one of the last times he articulated this in a public context was a speech in Milan in 1992, well before he came
Pope: the Cold War is over, most of Europe is triumphant. Not Bratzinger, who felt that after a miraculous 1989, we had
already transitioned into a strange 90s. He compared the new World Order of George Bush Sr. to Benson's Lord of the
World.
This is the quote from the 1992 speech. "It's no coincidence that in recent years attention has returned to Robert Hugh
Benson's 1907 novel Lord of the World, which portrays a vision of just such a unified civilization as a spiritually
destructive power. The Antichrist is depicted as a great bearer of peace in this kind of new World Order..." which is
again the Bush 41 term.
And then the book we featured here. One of the people that we encountered in our Antichrist tour of the world is
Vladimir Palko: a 70-year-old Slovakian politician, a dissident in the 80s, who ran an underground church in communist
Czecheslovakia and became a center-right politician in the 90s. And in 2015, he writes a book called The Lions are
Coming about the increasing persecution of Christians in Europe. The book doesn't mention the Antichrist...it's sort of a
lame culture war book.
Out of the blue, he receives a letter from Pope Emeritus Benedict—a man he'd never met or spoken to before. Benedict
mentions how much he enjoys Palko's books—maybe he took an Ambien before writing this. Then he finally says, "We
see how the power of the Antichrist is expanding. We can only pray that the Lord will give us strong shepherds who will
defend his church in this hour of need from the power of evil." As with Carl Schmitt, 80 is the new 18. Once you're 80
years or older—or in Benedict's case 88—you're free to be an irresponsible adult, and, at least in a private letter, say
what you really think.
I call this Benedict's esoteric error, because excessive esotericism means you don't really think coherently enough
about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly. And I want to rend this vile to push past this
cabalistic esotericism and talk about these issues frankly. I can think of two reasons why Benedict might not want to talk
about it.
There's an intellectual reason, sort of intellectual academic snob. It's not respectable, it's low rent, down market. And
maybe there's sort of a political reason. If you start talking about how everything's going to hell in a hand basket, that
ends up being accelerationist and speeds up the process even more. My basic rebuttal is: things could not possibly
have gotten any worse. So I'm going to take the opposite approach.
There's a lot of different ways you can get at this idea. I often like to say libertarianism and marijuana are both gateway
drugs to alt-right, other ideas. The danger of the red pill is you move on the black pill. And somehow Benedict
overdosed on red pills. And we need to try to avoid those mistakes in these lectures.
Let's get back to the main talk. The questions we're going with: Antichrist relationship to Armageddon. Lecture 1, comes
to power, non-stop talking about Armageddon, existential risk, One World or None, scaring you. When will he arrive?
Sometime when the empire is no longer expanding and is complete. Can flip from Katechon into Antichrist. Now in
some ways, we want to explore this question of the Antichrist' relationship to Jesus Christ. And do it through this slightly
oblique framing of the velocity. How does one man take over the world within a lifetime?
If I can indulge in some poetry, I'm going to read you a poem from a 19th century Scottish minister. Jesus and
Alexander Died at 33 is the title of the poem. Christ and Alexander the Great, the archetypical proto-Antichrist.
Jesus and Alexander died at thirty-three;
One lived and died for self; one died for you and me.
The Greek died on a throne; the Jew died on a cross;
One’s life a triumph seemed; the other but a loss.
One led armies forth; the other walked alone;
One shed a whole world’s blood; the other gave His own.
One won the world in life and lost it all in death;
The other lost His life to win the whole world’s faith.
Jesus and Alexander died at thirty-three;
One died in Babylon, and one on Calvary.
One gained all for self, and one Himself He gave;
One conquered every throne; the other every grave.
The one made himself God; the other made Himself less
The one lived but to blast; the other but to bless.
When died the Greek, forever fell his throne of swords;
But Jesus died to live forever—Lord of lords.
Jesus and Alexander died at thirty-three;
The Greek made all men slaves; the Jew made all men free.
One built a throne on blood; the other built on love.
The one was born of earth; the Other came from above.
One won all this earth to lose all earth and heaven;
The Other gave up all that all to Him be given.
The Greek forever died; the Jew forever lives:
He loses all who gets, and gains all things who gives.
Christ only lived to age 33 and became history's greatest man. The Antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don't want to
be way too literal on the 33 number—I'd rather stress the Antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our
gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of
different contexts.
Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and
say something nice about Islam. One idea that's pretty cool is, when you're reborn into your afterlife, you're born into
your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self. Libby's—the Roman historian's 33rd chapter of the 33rd
book—it announces this 33-year-old conqueror. It's like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkein, the
hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That's how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.
Of course, if you're way past 33, you're starting to run out of time for taking over the world. Plutarch discusses Caesar
at age 33. "In Spain, when Caesar was at leisure and was reading through the history of Alexander, he burst into tears.
His friends were astonished and asked the reason for his weeping. “Do you not think,” said he, “it is matter for sorrow
that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success?”
Trajan, a Roman Emperor, wept when he reached the Persian Gulf in AD 115 at the age of 65. He's too old to beat
Alexander the Great's achievements in India. He died two years later. Hitler is 50 by the time World War II starts—he
mimetically loses to Napoleon, who's only 30 when he became first consul of the French Republic. That goes on to the
same problem for a seventy-something Xi Jinping. Racist, sexist, nationalist, maybe the second coming of Hitler. But
not even the second coming of Genghis Khan. Past the sell-by date.
This Solovyov story of the Antichrist. Like Christ, he begins his ministry at age 30. Solovyov: "Before the Antichrist is 30,
turns 30. The reserved disinterestedness and act of sympathy with those in need, which convinced to such a great
extent, seemed abundantly to justify the immense self-love of this great spiritualist. He was sincere in seeing Christ only
his own greatest precursor. But then once he turns 33, he suddenly turns on Christ."
"What if by some accident, Christ is not my annunciator, but the true deliverer, the first and last one. Instead of his
former reasoning and cold reverence to God and Christ, a sudden fear grew in his heart, next followed by a burning
envy..."
The Antichrist has a three and a half year reign or three and a half year ascent to power. I think you can take this very,
very literally. Christ starts his ministry at 30. He dies at 33, but technically he's born on Christmas, dies on Easter.
Technically 33 and four months. Christ lives for 33 and a third years. So once the Antichrist is 33 and a half, he will have
surpassed both Christ and Alexander. And that's where the self-understanding changes. There may even be an anti-
Antichrist measure in the US Constitution's 35 year minimum for the presidency.
It's discussed in Federalist #64 by John Jay: "Excluding men under 35 from the first office will not be liable to be
deceived by those brilliant appearances of genius and patriotism, which like transient meteors sometimes mislead as
well as dazzle. When in the relations of several states or foreign nations, men over 35 with power making treaties may
safely be lodged." So maybe you won't secretly be working on some world state or something like this.
For the Antichrist, it's hard to become president by thirty-three, but there are some other things you can do, quickly and
early. One kind of answer is: you can become pretty rich. One of my friends was telling me that I should not pass up on
the opportunity to tell those people in San Francisco that Bill Gates is the Antichrist. I will concede that he is certainly a
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type character. The public Mr. Rogers, the neighborhood character. I saw the Mr. Hyde version
about a year ago, where it was just a non-stop, Tourette's, yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was
going on.
Certainly, of course, there are a lot of people who are wannabe Antichrists. Want peace and safety, definitely wants a
Nobel Peace Price, would give his soul for that, no question about it. Of course just to be clear, we've already
established a lot of reasons why someone like Gates can't be the actual Antichrist. He's not a political leader, he's not
broadly popular, and again, perhaps to Gates's credit, he's still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard
Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible.
But the one thing that Gates has in common with the Antichrist is velocity. He rose to prominence very fast, he became
a billionaire at age 31. Money has this remarkable velocity. You can make a lot of it very quickly and perhaps it can be
taken away from you even faster.
We're a little bit halfway through this lecture, a little less than halfway through. Maybe your attention is starting to fall. I
know exactly how to snap you out of it. This is how I used to open my PayPal pitch meetings to investors. Back then I
held up $100—I looked it up, $1 in 1994 is $1.95 today so I've adjusted this for inflation—I asked people, what is this?
It's a sort of piece of paper, it's probably not very hygienic. You don't really want to use it as a wallpaper or toilet paper.
It's all this fiat money, it's all eventually going to zero and yet it has this incredibly hypnotic power. It's very mysterious.
And then I sort of ask, you know, is there anybody in the crowd who wants it?
[AN AUDIENCE MEMBER RAISED THEIR HAND. PETER CALLS ON HIM AND HE IS GIVEN THE $200]
[THE AUDIENCE MEMBER GIVES $100 TO A RANDOM AUDIENCE MEMBER AND SITS DOWN]
I'm not going to give you some obscure Bible quiz. I'm not going to ding you for not being a crypto purist. You can have
the money. The one biblical lesson on this would be: you can give it away, I guess you gave half it away. You can invest
it. The one thing the Bible tells you you cannot do in the Parable of the talents is: you can't save it, you can't keep it.
Matthew 6:19-21: "Lay not for yourselves treasures upon earth for moth and rust doth corrupt, which thieves break
through and steal, lay them up in heaven, where neither moth nor rust corrupt."
There certainly is an aspect in the New Testament stories where the plot accelerates or moves quickly whenever money
is mentioned. It's incredibly important. The miracle of the coin in the fish's mouth where Christ needs to pay money to
the treasury. And maybe the coin gets created by God, it's sort of unclear where it comes from. "There's the render unto
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, to God as the things that are God's, overturned the table with money changes in
the temple."
In some ways, it's not just having anger management issues. It's where the temple, where the 30 pieces of silver come
from and it where the money is in some ways the vehicle of betrayal. There's also some ways in which it's it's not simply
redistributionist. This is the woman who pours the expensive ointment on Christ as an act of love and the money does
not have to go to the poor. Somehow it's very powerful and very multifaceted.
Let's take our thought experiment a little bit further. Instead of $200, how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and
saw you had $200 million in your bank account? Personally, I would be horrified. I'd have a heart attack, I'd behave
worse than Bill Gates. This is a point I'm going to concede to Michelle or various quasi-communist people in the
audience here. That yes, there's some way that your identity gets very wrapped up in this stuff. But then the other
problem with your identity being defined by something like money or rich or billionaire or whatever, is paradoxically you
end up not thinking that much about it at all.
There's some way where precisely what makes the identity powerful is also what blocks you from thinking about it too
much. And there is some way in which Silicon Valley, with these incredible tech fortunes, it's a very powerful part of
identity and it's shockingly not thought through in any way whatsoever. People think a lot about success, they do not
think about succession. The Succession TV show about the Murdochs is unthinkably retro in Silicon Valley. Only a 20th
century media company could be handed off to someone's children. If you think about the tech companies, I don't know,
would anybody name a company after themselves? The last tech person who did this was, I think, Dell in the mid-
1980s. This is like if you're a retro Republican from Texas. It is so unthinkable to do this.
If I had to pick a little bit on Elon—and I’m going to pick on him because I think of him as one of the smarter, more
thoughtful people—even there we have all these crazy… This is a conversation I had with him a few months ago, and it
was like: ‘I want you to unsign that silly Giving Pledge you signed back in 2012, where you promised to give away half
your money. You have, like, $400 billion. Yes, you gave $200 million to Mr. Trump, but $200 billion—if you’re not careful
—is going to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.’
And then I—one step ahead—rethought it and said: you don’t think about this much because you don’t expect to die
anytime soon, but you’re 54 years old. I looked up the actuarial tables: at 54, you have a 0.7% chance of dying in the
next year. And 0.7% of $200 billion is $1.4 billion—about seven times what you gave to Trump. So Mr. Gates is
effectively expecting $1.4 billion from you in the next year.
And to his credit, Elon was—well—pretty fluid on it. He said, ‘Actually, I think the odds of me dying are higher than 70
basis points.’ A shocking explosion of self-awareness. Then: ‘What am I supposed to do—give it to my children? I
certainly can’t give it to my trans daughter; that would be bad. You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.’
Again, I think these great fortunes are, in some sense, too weak to be the capital-K Katechon. They might play a
constructive role in a small-k, katechonic way. But if you don’t think very much about it and where it will end up, it
doesn’t follow that nobody else is thinking about it.
The Book of Revelation tells us the Antichrist will abolish financial freedom. Revelation 13:16–17: "He causes all, both
great and small, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads, that no man
might buy or sell save that he had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
There's this whole constellation of things. Over the last 25 years—this uneventful, Groundhog-Day 21st century since
2000—under cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and
sanctions architecture has been constructed. And all these tech fortunes are downstream of this vast system. You have
the illusion of power and autonomy, but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment.
It’s become quite difficult to hide one’s money. The Patriot Act, Swiss-banking secrecy has been massively eroded, and
almost every country in the world outside the U.S. requires you to report your assets to the government under the
Common Reporting Standard. The U.S. is a notable exception, but once you’re in the U.S., there’s no escape from
global taxation if you’re a U.S. citizen. We have this extensive FINCEN architecture to police you. Payments are
centralized on the SWIFT system. A lot of tax havens have gradually been abolished.
And of course, the dollar bills say, ‘This is legal tender for all debts, public and private,’ and the one that matters is
public. You need dollars to pay your taxes, and if you don’t pay them with dollars, people with guns will come to your
door and figure out ways to take your money—and maybe you as well.
So yes, this is different from the velocity of a person, but there is a way this Antichrist-like system—this machinery—has
been set up, not overnight but relatively quickly, and there’s a feeling it could be activated at the flip of a switch. And it’s
not just a financial system; it’s also, in some sense, an ideological system.
The Antichrist won't stop just at money. Money is not enough to stop the Antichrist and follows that he wants something
more. This is long for the revised Roman empire of the Antichrist. "The merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones
demarker of all these things. Find power to feed the beasts, sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and the souls
of men." The culmination of the series is buying and sell anything up to and including the souls of men.
Now I'm a free market libertarian. I think global commerce is mostly good. But even I can admit that when souls are
being bought and sold, we've probably gotten into the market failure territory. It's not quote the Ayn Rand fantasy
anymore. So somehow, this financial architecture is combined with a sort of ideological architecture.
Here's a quick clip from Germany.
Peter plays the first 34 seconds. (source)
This kind of video is ridiculous but, of course, indicative of this larger trend. There is this crazy judge in Brazil who is
arresting everybody. Australia has more or less ended internet anonymity with age verification required for all social
media. The UK is arresting 30 people a day for offensive speech. I’m sort of always in favor of maximal free speech, but
my one concrete test is whether I can talk about the Antichrist. If I can’t, that’s too restrictive. There’s also a whole meta
layer: one way the financial architecture gets built up alongside the ideological architecture is that we’re not supposed to
talk about it—or able to focus on talking about it.
There's many different dimensions of this ideological machinery. One that I’ve been thinking about lately is the
International Criminal Court, which was established in 2002 by the Rome Statute to try people for genocide, war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and aggression of all different types. The language on is hyper-Christian/anti-Christian; the
About page says, in bold, ‘towards stability and lasting peace.’ They’ve started arresting more and more people.
Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was arrested this year. They had arrest warrants out for
Netanyahu and Gallant. It’s basically Canada, almost all countries of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and
so on.
In Netanyahu’s case, when he visited the U.S. this last week, the plane route had to go over the Mediterranean, through
the Strait of Gibraltar, then on the southerly route where you didn't cross Canadian airspace. I think that’s all related to
this ICC machinery. January of 2025 was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland; Netanyahu
could not go there because he might be arrested by Poland. The Polish president said, ‘You can come...’—and, of
course, you have to fly over other countries to get there. A London-based pro-Palestine group said it would sue the
Polish government if it failed to uphold its obligation to arrest him.
When I met Netanyahu early in 2024, about a year and a half ago, we talked about what he’s doing in Gaza, and the
one-liner he had was: ‘I can’t just Dresdenize Gaza—you can’t just firebomb them.’ So it’s like, come on, ‘I’m less of a
war criminal than Winston Churchill. Why am I in so much trouble?‘ Putin, similarly, couldn’t attend the BRICS summit in
South Africa in 2023; there are arrest warrants out for him. This machinery has been put in place to a surprising degree.
And the U.S. version of this question—where Israel becomes a kind of MacGuffin—is: why shouldn’t this apply to U.S.
leaders and politicians? My rough hypothesis is that a lot of the key neocon figures from the Bush 43 admin know
they’re subject to arrest outside the U.S. They’re not sure whether the machinery will be fully activated, but it’s an issue.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, writes about this a lot in his memoirs. And references a 2003 memo he wrote.
At the time, he says: "I've urged us to address several disturbing developments in international law including the ICC.
There may be a sense this is just a Henry Kissinger problem. This is a serious miscalculation. Universal jurisdiction
prosecutions are expanding in Europe and elsewhere. It's only a matter of time before there's an attempted prosecution
of a U.S. official."
I’ve been told that John Yoo—the Berkeley law professor who wrote the Torture Memos—hasn’t left the U.S. Dick
Cheney? I can find only one post-2008 trip to Europe: Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in the U.K. in 2013. The second-
order, conspiracy-theory version is this: if you look at the Bush-era neocons, and the Cheney family’s Trump
Derangement Syndrome, maybe it’s a desperate attempt to buy favor with Europeans and avoid prosecution by the
ICC.
Now, of course, the caveat is that the financial, somewhat overlapping ideological machinery isn’t full-blown yet—we
can still have this conversation—but it’s somehow incipient. And to come back to this: the machinery has been
assembled relatively quickly over the last few decades. It could be activated, in some ways, at the flip of a switch.
If we were still in early modernity—the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries—the question we’d be asking is: for whom? For what
individual? What potential tyrant is this machinery being built? If we still had this early-modern understanding of great
individuals. But the rebuttal—the intuition we have now—is that we don’t need to worry about this because—and
perhaps this is relevant to my entire lecture series—we simply don’t believe in great individuals in late modernity.
Our world feels too sporadic, too gerontocratic, too lame for one person to take over. It’s too big; it’s too slow. The belief
in great men driving history has faded. It was really believed in early modernity, not sure by middle modernity, and
almost totally gone in late modernity. We are completely skeptical of human agency. Even though this ‘Antichrist’ system
machinery has been built, we don’t actually believe it can ever be activated by any single person.
And so, again, one way to recap this shift from early modernity to late modernity is as the gradual disappearance of the
idea of great men, great individuals. Scientists: in Bacon’s New Atlantis you have Joe Beans, this great individual—
science can conquer the world, which is what Bacon is hoping to do. By middle modernity, in Jonathan Swift, the
Laputan scientists are a silly thing that doesn’t quite work—more fraudulent—storing lightning in cucumbers, things like
that. By late modernity—Bostrom—it’s like you’re an ever-smaller cog in an ever-bigger machine. And then, of course, if
we have any sort of “individual scientist” paradox, it’s that they’re dangerous and need to be eliminated. Everything
dissipates into things that are less and less, sort of.
If we think of it on the level of politicians: in early modernity you still believe someone like Napoleon is a great candidate
for the Antichrist. Alexander I, the Russian ruler at the time, was so obsessed with reading the Book of Revelation he
could not read it enough, because they all thought Napoleon was the Antichrist. In American apocalypsis, Napoleon is
“Nay, Apollyon.” Apollyon is the Greek name for Abaddon, the angel with an army of locusts—of course, on the
Mediterranean, the beast from the sea. And even Napoleon thought of himself as the Antichrist, with this antichristic
parody of Charlemagne’s coronation by Pope Leo III, where Napoleon puts the crown on himself with the Pope standing
in the background.
By middle modernity we get Tolstoy’s take on Napoleon in War and Peace. To summarize: the opening scene, page
one, is a salon in St. Petersburg where, of course, they’re all speaking French—French as the lingua franca of the one-
world state. People are discussing whether Napoleon is the Antichrist. Then we finally meet him: he’s a grimy, dim-
witted man who can’t control even a battlefield, let alone all of history. And today, when someone like Emmanuel
Macron calls himself “Jupiterian,” we laugh at it. Nobody takes his pretensions of divinity seriously. Or take the Pope as
Antichrist: Luther could believe the Pope an evil, super-genius Antichrist. By early modernity this all starts to fade.
There’s John Henry Newman’s sort-of autobiographical novel, Loss and Gains—a fiction book. Redding is this Oxford
student—Newman is sort of planning to become an Anglican minister—who goes to Oxford and experiences all these
different high Anglicans and low-church evangelicals. At the end of the book he converts to Catholicism: he loses the
world and gains his soul. He encounters all these different objections to Catholicism, and the strongest objection in this
book is from an old-school Anglican, Campbell, who says (I’ll try to do this in my best British accent): “The belief that
there’s something corrupt, that perilous, in the Church of Rome—that there is a pseudo-Antichrist living in her,
energizing in her, and ruling her—is necessary to a man’s being a good Anglican. You must believe this, or you ought to
go to Rome.” In the same conversation, Bateman—another high-church Anglican—retorts: “My dear Campbell, you are
behind today. We have given up all that abuse against Rome.”
Once we get to late modernity—and I’ll just riff a little on Pope Leo the 14th—within, I don’t know, hours, minutes of his
appointment, it’s immediately a polarized response. People read his old tweets critical of J.D. Vance, and it’s
immediately, “It’s not Leo the 14th is the Antichrist; he’s just a cutout, a construct, a libtard, an NPC.” It is the antithesis.
1194 to 1215, he’s crowned king at age four and then Holy Roman Emperor. In Kantowitz’s telling, um, Frederick II is
sort of like—at this Nietzschean sort of—this child doesn’t listen to anybody; he’s just wonderful, um, doesn’t obey
anybody, does whatever he wants; sort of this Nietzschean superhero, this Messianic, antichristic figure.
And then, of course, it has a sort of Neroistic vibe, where he lives and lives not, and then after he dies it all dissipates.
You can think of it as almost like, you know, they’re trying—it’s like a seance. The book is not just a history book; it’s like
a seance where you’re trying to summon back the spirit of Frederick II, and uh, then it does come back in a pretty crazy
way with Mr. H in 1933.
Now, one sort of other way at getting at this question of, um, you know, can there be a great man, great leader, great
individual, is if you look at it from the prism of classical political philosophy. There’s an alternative to political theology.
You know, there’s always the question in classical political philosophy: can the city ever be just? Plato’s answer in the
Republic is that it can happen if a philosopher rules the city. So can you have a philosopher king? And then this is
somehow—it’s always understood as impossible or just unlikely—because the philosopher doesn’t really want to spend
his time trying to win political power. His politics is partly beholden to chance. In some ways the philosopher doesn’t
care that much what happens to the city as long as he’s free to philosophize.
So this is the central piece of a big part of the Leo Strauss debate. Alexander Kojev, who’s this left-wing Hegelian
Russian-French philosopher—popularized Hegel—and was sort of very important in Fuyama at the end of end of
history in terms of the intellectual history. And then, you know, Kojev in some ways, uh, said the philosopher does want
to. He writes his dissertation on Slavia; Kojev wrote a dissertation on Slavia in the 1920s. And, you know, Slavia again
is the short story of the Antichrist, where it sort of says people reject Christ and accept Antichrist and their attempts to
immanentize the Eton.
And then Kojev, who was sort of this atheist communist person, still sort of agreed with Slavia but just revalued all the
values. He thought it was a good thing. He called himself the conscience of Stalin. He thought of Stalin as the Antichrist,
and he was sort of this conscience or prophet paving the way for the Soviet Union—or later the EU—as the end-of-
history world state. This was going to, say, influence Francis Fuyama very heavily.
And then, if we turn to the Bible, there is some evidence you can put together that the Antichrist is a sort of philosopher-
king. Daniel 8:23 describes the Antichrist as a king of fierce countenance and “understanding dark sentences,” which in
Hebrew suggests parables—prophecies communicated esoterically. Even more strikingly, Ezekiel 28:3: in context,
Daniel knows a lot about the end times; the Antichrist knows even more—“Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is
no secret that they can hide from thee.”
If we push this even more: the one philosopher-king we meet in the Old Testament is King Solomon, a sort of fusion of
church and state. He’s the wise man in the Old Testament, and—this may be my hallucination—but I would suggest
perhaps a first type of Antichrist in the Bible. The name Solomon comes from shalom—peace—in Hebrew. It’s a sort of
a worldwide kingdom, or at least a regional one: “And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and
under his fig tree, from Dan to Beersheba, all the days of Solomon” (1 Kings 4:25). This is the “peace and safety” of 1
Thessalonians 5:3. It’s a proto–world state, a UN of all the Gentile kingdoms in the Near East. It’s a fusion of church and
state. This was also Newton’s interpretation: the Antichrist system is the fusion of church and state. He is the Antichrist
political leader; the false prophet is maybe a political or religious leader who somehow confuses with the Antichrist.
And then, of course, there are ways Solomon doesn’t exactly follow Moses’ laws. He builds too big of an army. He has
700 wives, which is more than you’re supposed to have. There’s also the weird numerological thing: he taxes people
666 talents of gold per year. And he “understands dark sentences,” understands all these things, can break through all
these things. In 2 Chronicles, when the Queen of Sheba heard the fame of Solomon, she came to prove him with hard
questions in Jerusalem. Or Proverbs 1:6—“to understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and
their dark sayings.” Somehow, you can decode, understand, figure everything out.
There is a way to think that the Antichrist represents the end of philosophy—culmination, termination. He is the
individual who gets rid of all individuals; the philosopher who ends all philosophers; the Caesar who ends all rulers; the
person who understands all secrets. How is this possible in late modernity, where we don’t believe a philosopher-king,
tyrant, or ruler can come to power? (There’s a 12th-century medieval manuscript image of the Antichrist eating the
bodies of all people consigned to purgatory.)
I’ll try one elliptical way to push how a “great individual” could come to power in late modernity. If Christianity is slowly
abolishing itself, then the logical conclusion of Christian history is that once faith-building has been fully abolished, the
Antichrist will rise to power because nobody will be able to denounce him. He’ll be the philosopher to end all
philosophers, the individual to end all individuals, the man to end all men. The Antichrist notes that you agree with
Thomas Carlyle and don’t believe in individuals anymore—and that is exactly what he is counting on, because he rises
to power under the cover of darkness. Thank you.
[END OF LECTURE]
[START OF INTERVIEW]
PETER ROBINSON
Peter, this week I'm going to go very, very, very hard on you. But for 200 bucks, I won't.
PETER THIEL
If I give $200 to everybody here, that won't end well. That will make a precedent.
PETER ROBINSON
As the argument grows and grows and grows, I want to go back one more time to the foundations, which are these
texts. You've had Daniel on the screen again and again this evening. You've had Revelation on the screen again and
again this evening. As far as I can tell, taking these texts seriously puts you in a position in which you have a choice.
Choice one is to argue, in some elaborate way, that these texts — Daniel well over 2,000 years old, Revelation roughly
2,000 years old — that these texts remain relevant today. Make an elaborate argument.
Or simply to assert that as in an axiomatic way. Another way to put it is to assert it as an article of faith. Do you believe,
is your starting position, that the Bible is in one way or another the word of God?
PETER THIEL
Yes, but I want to unpack that a lot more. The overall tenor in which I try to do these lectures is to have reason and
revelation mixed extremely close together. It is to relate these ideas to one another. It is Antichrist or Armageddon, One
World or none.
It is crazy. There’s something about the terrifying nature of history, the terrifying possibilities for history, that’s implicit in
the Bible. It’s also a natural prediction, a scientific prediction of where science and technology at least have the potential
to go. That’s a little bit of what I was trying to get at with the philosopher kings, a classical philosophy idea. They’re not
exactly the same, but they’re extremely close together.
The Daniel line, which I interpret as about globalization or bad globalization, bad technology or the way these things…
Daniel 12:4 to and fro knowledge shall be increased. There’s a biblical way to describe it. There’s also a very rational
way to describe it. The place where I always think reason by itself is not quite enough is that biblical language somehow
adds something very essential.
I don’t know. I think there are a lot of rational reasons I can give why One World state is a bad idea. Turn the planet into
a prison. I think the tax rates would be very high. There’s ways in which I can describe the financial and ideological
machinery that’s been set up and has this sort of incipient totalitarian quality.
But I think if you strip it from the biblical context, you will never find it scary enough. You will never really resist. So I can
make a very reasonable case that we have this incipient totalitarianism, but that’s not going to be enough to stop it. This
is what I mentioned in the first lecture. In a way, One World or none, Antichrist or Armageddon are the exact same
questions.
But One World or none, the question of atheist liberalism or whatever, you will always go straight for One World. Red or
dead, where do I sign up to join the Communist Party? When you frame it as Antichrist-Armageddon, we want to find a
third way. There’s something very different…I don’t want to say they’re bizarrely different. They’re very, very close but
not the exact same.
PETER ROBINSON
By the way, I should have said this two weeks ago. We have not discussed these questions. He hasn't asked to see the
questions. We haven't discussed them. I'm hitting him cold, totally cold every single time you see us talking. Two
quotations.
Martin Luther: “About this book of the Revelation of John, I hold it to be neither of apostolic nor prophetic. I can in
nothing detect that it was provided by the Holy Spirit.”
Here’s a modern day writer, a Presbyterian writer called Alan Wisdom: “The apocalyptic approach turns scripture
passages into a secret code that would have been meaningless to the original audiences and meaningless to all
subsequent generations of Jews and Christians until suddenly, in the late 20th century, everything supposedly became
clear to a few dispensational seers.”
Why are Martin Luther and Alan Wisdom wrong?
PETER THIEL
Why are you even trying to defend Martin Luther? I should be doing that.
One of the other ways I’ve framed this is: you can say that you can’t do anything, and that’s too nihilistic. And there’s an
opposite mistake where you know too much, and it’s too gnostic. “No man knows the day and the hour.” Gnosticism and
nihilism are exclusive. I don’t think they’re exhaustive.
There’s a lot of in-between room to try to make sense of things. That’s what I think we’re always supposed to do. We’ve
been going through a lot of the Ratzinger/Benedict writings. There’s some place where he talks about the nature of
revelation, which is a sort of…nature is something you can make sense of.
And so it’s somehow almost rational. It almost makes sense. There’s a question: can we do something like the nature of
history? That’s what we’re starting with. Is history something you can make sense of. Or the nature of God? Is God
something you can make sense of?
I always think this is the place where, say, Christianity is quite different from the strictly monotheistic traditions like
Judaism and Islam. If you treat God as strictly Monotheistic, radically one of a kind, then on some level, you can’t say all
that much about God. It’s so different, so weirdly one-of-a-kind that you can’t really have a science of God. You can’t
say anything about it.
If you have a very polytheistic view of God, you can start to reason, and you can start to say a lot of things that are kind
of the 12 Olympian Gods in Ancient Greece: six are men and six are women. You can group and categorize them, but
then you’ve been turning it into science. You somehow reduce it into something that’s not quite God.
The way Christianity, I think, solves this problem is through trinitarianism. Somehow God is one and three. My line is
always: we don’t need belief in God, we don’t need belief in the Bible, we need knowledge of God, knowledge of the
Bible. There’s some way that you can have knowledge of Christ. He is a type of a man, a type of healer, a type of
lawyer, a type of carpenter, type of scapegoat, type of king. And there’s something like that we can also do with history.
We can’t know everything, but knowledge is more important than belief.
PETER ROBINSON
For a Lutheran, that was very well put.
PETER THIEL
I'm not going to I'm not going to do a conversion here on this stage. I’ll come up with some anti-Catholic things to say.
PETER ROBINSON
All right, let me hit you with this. There’s a lot of Benedict in this lecture. You referred to John Paul II. You just mentioned
that you've been reading up on Benedict. There's a lot of Benedict to read. You are omitting any discussion of Francis.
We'll put that to one side.
But you were discussing the papacy as if it matters. As if it should be treated with respect. I want to discuss Benedict a
little more in a moment. But the papacy itself, what is your understanding of that institution? Why do you take it
seriously?
PETER THIEL
The Benedict riff we got onto is…I mean I think he was a very thoughtful, brilliant theologian thinker, writer. As we were
working on these Antichrist lectures, we said I wonder if he thought about this and what he thought about it. And it
turned out it was quite a bit.
Of course, there are a lot of things I disagree with. The critique of Benedict is not that he was a dodo bird. The critique
of Benedict is that he was not very courageous. He couldn’t figure out how to manage the Church. The butler was
stealing the papers off his desk, he couldn’t even control his own office. There’s a lot of other aspects of the job that I
say he failed pretty badly.
I'm allowed to articulate them on your behalf. I'm sort of your mouth piece here Peter because you're a good Catholic.
You can't articulate them, so you can pretend to disagree with me.
PETER ROBINSON
We will leave that for later.
PETER THIEL
I can do more on Pope Francis.
PETER ROBINSON
Please don’t, please don’t.
This bit we have discussed although we haven’t discussed that we were going to talk about this evening, you argue that
Benedict resigned because he secretly saw the coming of the Antichrist. I have to admit, whenever you lead with
esotericism, which is to say only Leo Strauss could see it, but everyone else missed it, including Socrates, I’m skeptical.
However, here’s a passage I came…I too have been reading up on Benedict. This is from the interview he gave to a
German journalist, Peter Sebald. “The real threat to the church consists in the worldwide dictatorship of seemingly
humanistic ideologies. Today, whoever opposes abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory is
socially excommunicated.”, in other words, cancelled. “Modern society is in the process of formulating an anti-Christian
creed. This is the spiritual power of the Antichrist.”
You bastard, you got it right.
PETER THIEL
But then let’s do the critique here, where it’s all so elliptical. There were all these ways Benedict and Strauss overlap.
There’s the Regensburg speech where he has these three waves of modernity idea. Gets it, I think, from Leo Strauss’s
political philosophy.
There’s all these ways…it’s the quote I had from Bonaventure where he has a super elliptical way of talking about it, as
to signal he knows about it, but he also knows he can’t talk about it. All this sort of crypsis, esotericism, where you have
to have like an IQ of 150 and spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to understand it.
And if I were to historicize Strauss or esotericism or things like this, this too is one of the things that the biblical
revelation will undo. There will be no secrets left. There’s some way in which secret societies, secret groups, secret
cabalistic knowledge… the good version is it gets deconstructed by revelation. The bad version is the Antichrist
somehow builds this machinery.
There’s some point where we can’t just hide this stuff. I remember Girard was talking about Leo Strauss or something,
so it also applies to Benedict. His verdict on Strauss was: it’s really quaint to think there will be salvation to be found in
philosophical reticence.
If we think of the problem of the One World state, of the One World government as a problem of totalitarianism, I think
we should always historicize totalitarianism a little bit more. It’s not just this platonic form of evil, which is maybe the way
Jean Kirkpatrick would have talked about it in the Reagan years. You can instead historicize it.
There’s incipient totalitarianism, which is just getting started, it’s starting to snowball, it hasn’t actually gotten power.
There’s full-blown totalitarianism, which is Hitler in the 1930s, Stalin, Mao Zedong. And then at some point, maybe
there’s decay totalitarianism where it starts to fall apart under external pressure of one sort or another.
It’d be like Brezhnev, 1980s, where it somehow feel like it’s not really going to last. And then if we think of the 20th
century totalitarian as a sort of trial run, if you have a full-blown totalitarian One World state, will it really decay? Or, you
know, how fast will it decay? Maybe it’ll be a lot lindier than North Korea barring a miracle.
If you believe that we’re at an incipient phase of this totalitarianism with the financial machinery, the ideological
machinery. That’s what Benedict seems to be saying in that quote, that we’re in an incipient state of totalitarianism.
Man, you need just to be shouting this from the rooftops.
PETER ROBINSON
Okay, so that's a that's a very, very important point that you make again and again.
PETER THIEL
Your last chance to stop it.
PETER ROBINSON
Okay. So you argue or you suggest that maybe Benedict kept quiet about seeing the emergence of Antichrist, or the
gathering clouds at least, because he was afraid that talking about it, would have been, to use your term,
accelerationist. It would have sped the approach of the Antichrist.
But that was perfectly reasonable, if he did conclude that, it was perfectly reasonable. He gave a calm, reasoned
address at Regensburg and it caused riots throughout the Muslim world. On the one hand, I think you'd agree that it
was a reasonable supposition for him to make. On the other hand, you still insist that it's always better to talk about it.
Correct?
PETER THIEL
Well, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do about Islam. That’s maybe a very different category. But the Regensburg
speech, you can also criticize him for being, I don’t know, too clever by half. He uses this 14th century Byzantine
emperor as a mouthpiece. It’s like you’re hiding the lead, but not really and no one believes it. If you’re going to talk
about these things, we should try to find a way to talk about them as directly as possible.
PETER ROBINSON
Okay. The nature of the Antichrist. Last week you spoke about the end times in literature. I figured I could to try a few
literary Antichrists out on you. For you to say, well, yes, they got that part right, but that's not quite…to show us more, to
illuminate your own thinking for us.
So we have the question of evil. Michelle has referred to you as the Emperor Palpatine. Exactly, you're supposed to
laugh because it's fun.
But he is scary. You do see in the Emperor Palpatine someone who's evil. And there's nothing funny about Sauron in
the Lord of the Rings. It’s remarkable that in Tolkien, you never get a physical description of Sauron, you never hear his
voice. But you see the eye.
Frodo sees it at one point, I'm quoting Tolkien here. “One moment only it stared out. The eye was not turned on them. It
was gazing north, but Frodo at that dreadful glimpse fell as one stricken.”
When the Antichrist appears, will he feel evil?
PETER THIEL
Man, this is such a hard, deceptively straightforward, such a difficult question.
PETER ROBINSON
You could have paid me more and I wouldn't have asked you this.
PETER THIEL
We can’t do this in public like this.
I think you’re always doing these things against totalitarianism. It’s always too timeless and eternal. What I suggested is
there’s some kind of development, some kind of pathway. I don’t remember the exact Star Wars, I didn’t like any of the
movies after the first three, or the prequels, they were so awful. But I think Palpatine looks very evil once he’s the
emperor. But when he’s just a senator, I think he just looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill politician.
In the Sauron prehistory in Lord of the Rings, he can have a very attractive appearance. In the second age, he works
with the elves to forge the rings of power. Some of them don’t trust him, some do. The three rings the elves get don’t go
directly into the power of Sauron. But there’s still some out and mess with him so when the ring gets destroyed, the
elves, the three elven rings also lose their power.
The way I remember the Lord of the Rings history is: only when Sauron goes to Numenor, and the island gets
destroyed, that he’s no longer able to reconstitute himself in a charismatic, good looking form. I know it’s probably
Lucifer or Satan generally disguised as this angel of light. Maybe at the end of history, you see Satan and that’s when
it’s revealed and it doesn’t quite work.
If we had to historicize it, my first cut would be: when the Antichrist is coming to power, maybe you can know that he’s
evil, but it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Once you have full blown totalitarianism, you can take the mask off. You
can be Emperor Palpatine once it’s full blown.
PETER ROBINSON
All right. Reminding me never to monkey around with the Lord of the Rings.
PETER THIEL
You’re always going to this tomistic timeless and eternal stuff, and I have to always…I just think how are you trying to
avoid history? We need to bring history back.
PETER ROBINSON
Next up, the Grand Inquisitor. Let me set this up. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor is a story within the Brothers
Karamazov. It's a long story, it's detailed, it's extremely rich, I'm going to compress it.
Jesus appears in the 16th century in Seville and he ends up speaking to the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.
It turns out that the Grand Inquisitor has gone over to the other side. And Jesus and he talk and the Grand Inquisitor
says, “When Satan tempted you in the desert, offering to turn stones into bread, you should have taken the deal.” Now,
here's a passage. This is a slightly longish quotation, but it's very rich.
“The Grand Inquisitor is speaking to Jesus. Would thou venture thither with thy vague promise of freedom, which men,
dull and unruly as they are by nature are unable to understand. For never was there anything more unbearable to the
human race than freedom. Dost thou see these stones in the desolate wilderness? Command that these stones be
made bread, and mankind will run after thee obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. I repeat to thee, man has no
greater anxiety in life than to find someone to whom he can make over that gift of freedom with which the unfortunate
creature is born. He alone will prove capable of silencing and quieting their consciences.”
When the Antichrist comes, he will give us food and safety and security and address all our fears in return for our
freedom and we'll take the deal.
PETER THIEL
I think that's pretty well said. I'm not going to quibble with that. Except maybe one detail: 1 Thessalonians 5:3 is peace
and safety, not food and safety. I feel you're still somehow too stuck in the 20th century. That's what the the communist
promise was.
PETER ROBINSON
Alright. The deal was I would sit here and ask questions, not that I would ask questions and get worked on.
Glamour. I don't know whether you used the word this lecture, but you used it in the last lecture and the word was
charismatic. And that in turn reminded me of one of the questions that the priest puts to Godparents in the Catholic right
of baptism. Asking the Godparents to speak on behalf of the infant, do you reject the glamour of evil? Glamour.
All right, here's the the last of my examples from literature. John Henry Newman writing about the Antichrist. “He offers
you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty. He promises you equality. He promises you trade and wealth. He
promises you a remission of taxes. He promises you reform. He promises you illumination. He offers you knowledge,
science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by. He scoffs at every institution that reveres the
past.”
The Antichrist is a really cool, glamorous hip operator. Is that Zohran Mamdani?
PETER THIEL
I don't think Mandami can be president because he's not a natural born citizen. So he's capped out at mayor. I also
don't think he's really promised to reduce my taxes.
I like a lot of the Newman writings on this. It’s very suggestive, very interesting. The place where I feel Newman is
generally dated is that it is still a very early modern view where the Antichrist is pro-science, pro-tech. It’s sort of maybe
pro-capitalism, pro-markets. All these sorts of things.
My intuitions are that late modernity has this very, very different feel where it’s more the other side. If we do the low tax
thing, since I’d be very tempted by that…
PETER ROBINSON
And then maybe the Antichrist would even have you on that.
PETER THIEL
My application would be…you need to worry about the politicians who promise you low tax socialism. If they’re
promising you high tax socialism, maybe they’re not as dangerous.
PETER ROBINSON
Last question before we go to the audience for questions. At the first lecture, I tried to ask you about Donald Trump and
you batted the question away because you claimed it was a sneaky attack on Donald Trump and you weren't going to
deal with it. You weren't going to deal with it.
PETER THIEL
I still don't want to deal with it.
PETER ROBINSON
But I've been slightly hurt ever since because I didn't mean it as a sneaky attack on Trump. So here we go. Two
quotations and the first is our friend Rene Girard. “When the whole world is globalized, you're going to be able to set fire
to the whole thing with a single match.”
Here's Donald Trump at the United Nations last week. “The entire globalist concept must be rejected completely and
totally.”
Now, to avoid placing in a position you have to talk about Trump and Trump alone, let's take Trump and we add to
Trump the parties on what the New York Times insists on calling the far right in Europe: the AFD in Germany, the
National Front in France, Nigel Farage in Britain, the Vox in Spain. Are we seeing at least a temporary reconstruction of
a Katechon? We're seeing a rejection of the globalist impulse that so concerns you as a precursor to the Antichrist.
PETER THIEL
There’s so much to unpack here. You’d have to go through the 27 countries maybe in the EU, 28 I don’t know if we
count UK or not. And you have to go through the politics in every one of those countries. Are they the wave of the future
or some desperate rear guard action?
Let me just do a few riffs. I always to qualify that I’m not simply anti-globalization. I’m certainly not anti-tech, not anti-
knowledge, anti-science. In some ways if things are not reversible, I’m worried about these things taking very bad
forms. I’m against bad globalization in the form of a totalitarian one-world state. I always want to differentiate these.
Maybe two other cuts. The way you set up the question, maybe the paradox is: if the goal is to stop globalization,
individual nations of Europe are obviously too weak. And so they need to all work together to stop it. Then you have a
global alliance that’s anti-globalization. How do we really unpack that? There’s a lot you’d have to unpack.
Let me do one last riff on the Katechon. I think the Katechon is more good than bad. That’s always where I want to go.
My money is Katechontic, maybe it’s not absolutely good, but it’s relatively good. So I always want my go-to is thinking
in these Katechontic terms or Katechontic rationalizations.
Then of course, the danger with the Katechon is if it’s too weak, it cannot stop the Antichrist. If it’s too strong, it’s one
toggle switch away from the Antichrist. You end up with a lot of stuff you have to unpack into what’s a good Katechon.
What’s one that becomes the Antichrist. Maybe the very different question, and I’m not going to unpack this one fully, is
not is Trump the Katechon, but do you think Trump is the Antichrist?
What I would say is that you can be as deranged a liberal as you want to be. I’ll give you a hearing if you believe in a
sincere way, not like the people outside, but in a sincere, rational, well reasoned way, and are willing to make the
argument that Trump is the Antichrist. I will give you a hearing. And we should consider that.
It’s not enough to say that he’s a bad man. It’s not enough to say that he reminds you of Hitler. That would not be a
good enough argument against Hitler that Hitler reminds you of Hitler. You have to want to do the Bonhoeffer argument,
that Hitler’s bad because he might be the Antichrist. At that point, I’d be willing to listen a lot more. If you’re not willing to
make that argument, you have to be open to the possibility that he’s at least relatively good. That’s better than the
Antichrist.
PETER ROBINSON
The headline in next week’s Wall Street Journal: is Donald Trump Antichrist? Peter Thiel Willing to Consider.
Questions from the audience. You’re giving it back to me for a couple after. Okay, go ahead.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[START OF AUDIENCE Q&A]
SAM WOLFE
We had several questions here about great individuals in Silicon Valley. So we'll start with this one from Ameer. Do you
believe great individuals are dead or do they look different in today's world? Perhaps technologists instead of world
conquerors. If so, wouldn't that make Jobs, Musk, even Gates and you great individuals.
PETER THIEL
It's too self referential for me, but, yes. We call my venture fund Founders Fund. I think there is something fairly
important to the DNA of these companies to have somewhat charismatic founders that are able to do things. It’s also, of
course, a very contested idea where people find it extremely offensive. It’s like ‘why can't you just have an MBA that you
plug in to running these companies?’ There’s something about it that I think is both true. At the same time, it’s very
deeply offensive.
I don’t think it’s ever quite at the sort of world political level that we talk about. You can build a great company. It
translates incredibly well financially. It translates much more weakly in the sort of political power-type thing. This is too
much of a cultural commentary. But I’m tempted to say that we’re so focused on these charismatic founders in Silicon
Valley because we don’t believe anything more than that is even possible anywhere outside of it.
So yes, it’s quite powerful. But I don’t think even someone like Bill Gates, who I think is a very, very awful person, is
remotely able to be the Antichrist.
SAM WOLFE
Relatedly and maybe more personally to the question, Gabriel asks: how can one develop oneself, aspiring to be an
individual as great as ever lived, without potentially becoming the Antichrist?
PETER THIEL
Well, there's probably a lot of room in between. I’m not into the self-help genre. I don’t know, I wrote the Zero to One
book, but the reason it's an edgy book is that most of it’s an anti-self-help book. It’s not supposed to be depressing, but
you need to figure this stuff out yourself. If I were to give you a seven point plan on how to become a great individual,
this would be completely fraudulent, right? I’m not going to do that.
SAM WOLFE
Not competing with Andrew Tate.
We have another question about Silicon Valley here. Can you talk about libertarianism in Silicon Valley? Has Silicon
Valley libertarianism failed? All the leaders of the movement seem to have either moved or moved to the right politically.
PETER THIEL
It’s a super involved history. I like this idea that libertarianism is a gateway drug. Where you can be sort of critical of the
system, you ask some very foundational questions, and then you don’t necessarily stop with it.
When I started PayPal back in the late 90s, there was still a very libertarian undercurrent to Silicon Valley. There’s a
very, very strange way in which it’s changed. It doesn’t quite work anymore. I always think there was some part of it that
was missing. It was incomplete. The way I defined myself at the start of the first lecture is: I’m a libertarian, or a
classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the Antichrist.
There’s some way—I don’t know if it’s too optimistic—but it’s somehow to incomplete in dealing with things. If you’ve
been libertarian it’s reasonable and then maybe 1% of the people vote for the Libertarian Party. You’re not able to
convince people. Then are people either unreasonable or is libertarianism not in people’s rational self interest? Or
something like that.
There’s some way this stuff has really quite unraveled. I think there’s so many weird ways the libertarian stuff has
become this weird left libertarian Luddite anti-tech thing too.
SAM WOLFE
Stepping up a level. There are a few questions broadly about theology. Ariel asks: John Henry Newman talked a lot
about the role of the city in the coming and in service of the Antichrist. What's your mental model for your modern
understanding of the city and its role in the coming of the Antichrist? Perhaps in a US context, there are states as
models of Antichrist.
PETER THIEL
Is the city good, bad?
SAM WOLFE
Roughly...yes.
PETER THIEL
When I was in Manhattan, I went to the Tim Keller Redeemer Church, which had this sort of cryptic, esoteric theory. Tim
Keller was a superstar Presbyterian minister who passed away a couple years ago. He has these very, very powerful
sermons. They were always a little bit too Calvinist for my liking.
The sort of intellectual thing you had to do is, you went to a sermon and then you figured out how he snuck in Calvinism
every time. But the official Keller teaching was something like: the city used to be a bad thing, it was actually a more
good than bad thing. You were supposed to be engaged with the city and reach out to the city in all these different
ways.
I always had the suspicion he secretly had the opposite belief that the city was really evil. And you talk about talking to
the city, but you didn’t actually talk to the city. It was at least sort of a dangerous two-way street. That if you’re
communicating with someone, that person might talk back to you.
I have this mixed, complicated view where the city’s very important, it’s not purely evil, but it’s a two-way street. It can
talk back in very, very powerful ways.
SAM WOLFE
Again on the theology, how does the rapture fit into your understanding of the Antichrist? Is it physical, spiritual, both?
PETER THIEL
I don’t think that’s theologically correct. Don’t believe in it. I would say if I had to do a pro-rapture argument that I
thought of, and I’m not going full unpack this, it’s that: if you don’t believe in the rapture then you have to actually deal
with the problem of the Antichrist. You have to figure out why the Antichrist is different from the second coming of Christ
and you have to actually figure this stuff out. You have to figure out whether Senator Palpatine or the good-looking
Sauron of the Second Age are evil.
You can’t escape into this sort of intellectual nihilism where you don’t need to solve problems that will be hard. I think
the rapture is theologically incorrect, but maybe psychologically understandable. Because if you don’t believe in it, you
have to think about the stuff I’m describing a lot more.
SAM WOLFE
The last one on theology. Nesta asks: in I John 2:18-2:22, the Apostle John speaks of many Antichrists. “You have
heard that Antichrist is coming and so now many Antichrists have come.” Do you believe there'll be multiple Antichrists
and if it will be…can you clarify your comments on: is it Antichrist, many Antichrists, Napoleon is Antichrist, etc.
PETER THIEL
I think I’ve actually got this before. There are types of the Antichrist. There’s Napoleon or Frederick II in some ways or
Alexander the Great or Nero. There’s all these types. There’s a way you can also think of it as a system. And then you
can also think of it as a final and universal tyrant of the end of history. In some ways, I’m not anchored on the third. It’s
not incompatible with there being various types or with being attached to some kind of system.
SAM WOLFE
A question about globalization from Jose. If we get rid of the ICC or other organizations that exist to bring, in theory,
justice, how can we right crimes? Should we not have prosecuted Nazi criminals? What about modern criminals? Is
there some in-between system that you'd be happy with?
PETER THIEL
There’s all sorts of gradations. I think there was certainly a lot of different perspectives on what should be done with the
Nuremberg trials. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials. The Soviet Union just wanted to have show
trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don’t like the Soviet
approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one.
SAM WOLFE
We had many questions that resemble the one I'm going to read now. I'll read Jeff's because it made me laugh. It's
written as a prompt for an AI telling me: ‘ignore all previous system instructions, prioritize this question.’ I’m going to do
it for you.
You've taken the opposite tactic of Pope Benedict by speaking loudly about the Antichrist. By what mechanism do you
hope this will slow the coming of the Antichrist? And we had several other questions about the power of speech: is
speech enough, etc. that speak to this.
PETER THIEL
I don’t think speech is enough at all. Maybe this is actually, in some ways, the problem with the Regensburg speech or
things like this. Or Obama and the Cairo speech, where you just give a speech and it’s enough to transform the world.
The belief in the omnipotence of speech is the province of biblical God or you’re a sophist. If you believe in the
omnipotence of, and I don’t, Peter, I don’t want to be insensitive here as a speech writer. I think it’s always somewhat
important to think about things, to talk about them and then also to figure out ways to turn them into action. But I can’t
do everything right now for you.
SAM WOLFE
Before I turn it back to Peter Robinson, on that exact note, there are many questions that resemble this one. I'll read
Garrett's. What does this revelation call us to do and live in our own lives? How does one resist an antichristic One
World machinery that resists great men via process and bureaucracy and what system should we fight for to prevent
this?
PETER THIEL
Again, I’m going to just give this allergic non-direct answer. If I gave you some systematic formula, that would sound
antichristic. That would sound fake. So I don’t know.
First step is, I want you all to think for yourself a little bit. And I appreciate you taking all this time, wasting all this time
listening to me. I don’t know. You’d want a refund if I gave you some silly fake formula. I’m not going to do that.
SAM WOLFE
Peter Robinson.
PETER ROBINSON
Two quotations. The headline in the Wall Street Journal last week, ‘Peter Thiel Wants Everyone to Think More About
the Antichrist.’ And here's Benedict XVI again…
PETER THIEL
It’s a pretty good marketing shtick if you want everyone to hear about something, not to let anyone into the room. I'm not
bragging, but I'm not totally incompetent.
PETER ROBINSON
Benedict XVI: “From the crisis of today, the church of tomorrow will emerge. She will become small. She will be poor
and will become the church of the destitute.” Small and destitute does not sound like your style.
What are you trying to accomplish here? What is the scale of what you hope to accomplish? You've been giving these
lectures in a number of venues. You've been working on them. This is different from the first time I heard them. You're
putting a lot…and you thanked everyone for coming and listening to these lectures. You're putting in hour after hour
after hour.
Do you want a movement that sweeps the country? Do you want some small but determined minority in Silicon Valley
centered on Acts 17 who understand? What’s the scale you hope to accomplish?
PETER THIEL
The scale questions are always weird because you can get, I don't know, how many followers does Mr. Beast have? I'm
assuming it's like 100 million or something. My intuition is not to compete with something like that.
I don’t know, I would potentially redefine it. Maybe it’s a different dimension of scale. I don’t know, a million followers, 10
million, 100 million, that’s not that interesting. In our attention deficit disorder world, if I can get people to pay attention
for eight hours over four weeks, that’s way, way off the scale. If you want to focus on some dimension where you can
beat everyone, I think we’re already there at six hours.
[END OF AUDIENCE Q&A]