[START OF LECTURE 4: THE NEW ROME]
PETER THIEL
Thank you. There's always so much ground to cover in all of these. There was so many good questions people ask and
you know, can be expanded in all these ways. One of the questions someone asked me last week was about thoughts
on the city. And maybe it's related to the Antichrist or is the city a good place, bad place. I want to begin by expanding
on that a little.
Of course, it's not immediately clear what a city is. I grew up in a place called Foster City just south of here. Maybe it's a
town. Somehow very different from something like San Francisco. And Foster is a town. San Francisco is the truly
global world city. And these world cities are extremely strange, very paradoxical places. There's all these different cuts
we can have. A few that are more reductionist and then try to give some that are a little bit more holistic.
San Francisco presents itself as an extremely liberal, friendly place. But if you look at, let's say, the Genie coefficient, an
indicator of income inequality, it is 0.518, which makes it roughly on par with Brazil or Zambia. So it's one of the most
unequal places in the world. I have this sort of Henry George-ist theory that reduces 80% of cultural wars to economics
and 80% of economics to real estate. If you think about these world cities in terms of real estate, somehow a crazy
amount of value gets captured by the landlords, the real estate. The basic math in a place like San Francisco is the
inelasticity of real estate is -2. Which means that to increase the supply by 1%, the average price does gown 2%.
Therefore, the more housing you have, the less it's worth and this leads to all kinds of weird dynamics where all sorts of
crazy things seem like they're defects. We can't build houses, we can't redesign, and can't do anything new is actually
the way to keep up the property values.
In Southern California in a Malibu context, if you're maximizing value, you should not be buying fire insurance, you
should be selling it because your risk is that there aren't enough fires. If 10% of the housing in Malibu burned down, the
rest will go up 20%. And so in some sense, the homeowners are structurally long arson. Or they're long...or they're
somewhat copacetic of homeless people running around with flame torches, or you know, a woman named Kristen
running the fire department that has no water. Or a zoning commission that doesn't allow infrastructure investment.
There are probably even crazier ways you can think of it in a place. Probably wanting to think in fully intentional terms
but something like, I don't know, the crime or things like this. Or maybe the homeless people pooping everywhere or the
Islamic grooming gangs in the UK. You can think of these just, well this is sort of what serves people right who can't
afford to live on Nob Hill or in Mayfair because it has the effect of increasing the value of that real estate more than it
decreases it. So a lot of very weird things.
There's a way you can think of San Francisco, a place like this, a whole city, as an extremely Darwinian, Malthusian
place. Although, it also in some sense is an anti-Darwinian place since there are more dogs than babies or children in
San Francisco. By the way, there are not particularly many dogs. It's below the national average on that statistic. It's
really awful though, so it's very Darwinian place where people don't reproduce and you have to somehow turn yourself
into a pretzel to explain how this all makes a lot of sense.
If you were to take a less reductionist account, you think of these cities as immortal beings where the average city that
has ever existed, still exists. And it's very different from companies, which tend to be a mortal being. It's like the power
of principalities. It's like angel or demon. One of the problems with the immortal being is that if it goes bad, it can go bad
for a long time. The kind of mistake people make, like me make, believe that at some point it just got so crazy it'll
commit suicide and it'll end, and it never actually happens
If you contrast with something like, I was on the Meta/Facebook board for 17 years. You could say there were ways
Zuckerberg was very stubborn, but still you yell at him and said, you better do this. And then six months later, he'd listen
and things would change. Because it was always if the company's doesn't adjust, even if you're a really big M-word
company like Meta, the motor or something like that. You're somehow more fragile than San Francisco. If you imagine
running for, or telling the city of San Francisco if you don't change, something bad's going to happen. The feeling is, it's
been said for a long time, I don't believe you. There's somehow these very paradoxical places.
Then of course, even more holistically, you can think of these world cities as somehow very deeply linked to the world
empire, to the world state. There's Oswald Spengler Decline of the West. In the late state of the civilization, somehow
the world city becomes very important.
"“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.
In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid
masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply
contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very
great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end—what does it signify? France and England have already taken the
step and (Everything's concentrated in London and Paris). Germany is beginning to do so. After Syracuse, Athens and
Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions to lie
outside the radiation circle of one of these cities of old Greek Macedonia to be the Scandinavian North to become
provinces."
In the times of the Roman Empire, Rome's population was something like a million. I think the second largest city was
Alexandria which was maybe one quarter of that population. Something like this is true of Paris for Napoleon and
London for the British Empire. The Bible does say these cities are ambiguous, that sort of historical pagan paradigmatic
world city is Babel, Babylon, the archetypical evil city of the One World state. But then there's also the new Jerusalem,
the garden transformed into a beautiful future city. And there is Rome, the ambiguous middle where the stakes are high
and that's where you can still have debates where the fate of the world is decided.
Recapping where we've been. Two basic new entrants on this list from the time. It's the age of discovery and early
globalization leading to the global financial ideological architecture of the One World state. The way these systems are
built out. Early modernity still believes in great individuals, late modern people are ever smaller cogs in ever smaller
machines.
What I want to always stress is this sense of change. The sense that Christianity is not one of the great features of
history, history is one of the great features of Christianity. You think about fantasy literature: this is the difference
between a non-Christian, R.R. Martin Game of Thrones. It's a nihilistic, unceasing cycles of violence. Nothing ever
progresses, you're just in this Groundhog Day. Lord of the Rings, Tolkein, it's a story of progress, history, one time world
historic. You have to have a feel for the time you're at.
This is sort of a graphical description of this transition from the pre-human societies to pre-Christian. Before Christ,
problems were solved with bloody scapegoating of the victim, the story gets whitewashed, retold as ritual. But the origin
is extremely violent, not some platonic idealization. And there's some way that Christ's death reveals the innocence of
the scapegoat and the victim deconstructs this process. Even if you take a sacrificial view of Christ's death, he was the
last sacrifice. He was sacrificed so we don't have to be. It, of course, doesn't fully abolish scapegoating. We have this
sort of complicated, in-between process. But in some ways, maybe this is the motor that drives the arc of history for the
last 2,000 years.
At the end of the sacrificial cycle has also catalyzed scientific and technological progress. You can't blame a witch for
religious problems. You have to seek natural, scientific explanations. Linear history and progress become thinkable.
Again, to recap this theme of history. In some sense, even the great 19th, 20th century pagans knew that we could
never return. You cannot go back. There's this force to history. And what's so powerful about these thinkers is that
they're always one toggle switch away from the Christian progressive historical sense.
Nietzsche, Antichrist 1888. "He wants to leave Christianity behind, but he acknowledges how hard it is. We've won back
for ourselves as Nietzsche. Today, a new view of reality with unspeakable amounts of self-constraint for we all have bad
instincts, the Christian instincts somewhere within us." Again, the Antichrist's place in history comes after Christ to
finally defeat him. But like the real Antichrist, he sort of knows that he will lose and the return to pagan morality is
impossible.
Spengler, who writes Decline of the West, 1918. Again, on the surface is this timeless and eternal rise and fall of
empires, a classical view. But the deeper thing is somehow, the West is different. Ancient Greece and Rome had a
geometric form of the present, the immediate. The Arabic, early Christian civilizations were the magian sort of this
world, the cavern of Algebra. But the West was this Faustian culture that yearned for infinity. It's going to cover the
whole planet. And then once you have infinity, what comes after that? It's sort of framed cyclically, but it suggests
adjacent to the opposite.
Churchill you have to always think of as this sort of fairly Antichristian person, yet he knew how to always use historical
context. June 18th, 1940 he addresses the House of Commons: "On this battle, beginning of the impending battle of
Britain, depends the survival of Christian civilization on depends on British life and the long continuity of our institutions
and our empire. Let us therefore brace ourselves for our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its
Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say this was their finest hour." And then April 8th 1945, Victory in
Europe Day. "In all our long history, we've never seen a greater day than this."
Or to take another somewhat haunting version of this impossibility of return. It's a letter from Edward Teller, the
inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, to his fellow nuclear physicist, Leo Szilard. July 4th, 1945, just as the atom bomb is
about to be used. To Szilard from Teller. "I've spent some time thinking about your objections to an immediate military
use of the weapon we may produce. I decided to do nothing. I should like to tell you my reasons. First of all, let me say
that I have no hope of clearing my conscience. The things we're working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting
or fiddling with politics will save our souls." The end is, again, a sense of history and irreversibility. "I feel that I should do
the wrong thing if I try to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it to escape."
Augustine, City of God argues that the city of man and the city of god are not the same. And then more pointedly, that
the end of the Roman Empire, in some sense, is not the end of the world. And this, I will argue, sort of was the minority.
In some sense, Augustine was writing it as a Christian apologist or propagandist to defend Christianity from claims that
it had weakened and feminized the Roman Empire. And less generously, I suspect he was haunted like Nietzsche and
Spengler by the fear that the opposite belief was true, and that the world was ending.
I disagree with the Lutherans on the identity of the Antichrist, with the early reformers. I don't think the Roman Empire
ended in 476 and the Antichrist has been the Pope ever since. There's ways to stress the role of Catholicism, the Pope
is a parallel power, some ways competitive and some ways complementary to the Roman Empire. You know, the
emperor is the visible empire, the soul Invictus, invincible son. And he has, as his opponent successor, the vicker of the
invisible empire, [latin[ the servant of the servants of God.
If you think that Augustine is wrong about the disjunction he wants to draw, and the Lutherans are wrong that it ended, it
seems to me there's only one other possibility left. And that's the one I'm going to explore in this lecture. That in some
sense, the fourth kingdom of Daniel, the fourth and final one being the Roman Empire. If in some sense the Roman
Empire is the Katechon, the end of the Roman Empire is the end of the world. And then that in some sense, the Roman
Empire has never ended and you have to ask, where is Rome today?
This question was still seriously thought about less than 100 years ago. We found so many different rabbit holes we
went down. This is from August 13th, 1932. Two early journalists from the Sunday School Times, a weekly sort of
fundamentalist evangelical Christian paper in Philadelphia, are interviewing Mussolini in Italy. Their last question to him
was: do you intend to reconstitute the Roman Empire? It sort of has all these riffs. The answer: "One cannot revive a
dead empire, nor are we calling it to being. We can only revive its spirit be governed by the same disciplines."
Somehow yes, he bring Rome back in some way. And then just hear Mr. Morton from the Sunday School Times: "'You
have to speak to them, the teaching of the Bible regarding the reforming of the Roman Empire. Time is predicted of
God, speaking of the alliance of northern nations that should likewise take place.' Mussolini leans back in his chair and
listens and is fascinated. 'Is that really described in the Bible?' he says, 'And where is it to be found?'"
It's sort of like, you are going to be the future Roman Emperor. This is predicted in the Bible. He's interested and then
he promises to send him some books on the subject and told him where to find it. You know, they were literally asking
Mussolini if he is the Antichrist. And then the Bible reference to the king of the north is Daniel 11:21. It's a form of the
Antichrist. These journalists perhaps took the idea slightly too literally. They believe the new Rome would be co-located
with the old Rome.
Now I'm going to play you two quick videos of people thinking about the same question, where we might find the new
Roman Empire. The first is a video from 1999 about financial photography and tax jurisdictions. Hopefully after three
lectures on this material, you will understand the subtext of the material.
Peter plays a video of himself speaking at The Independent Institute on October 20th, 1999. 55:02-58:00. [video]
"I think that government actors who are intelligent and who understand what's happening have realized on some implicit
level that the only way they're going to stop this kind of digital revolution is to hang together. They either, they must
hang together less they all hang separately for exactly the same reason that otherwise, you'll have money going to
offshore jurisdictions where there's low taxes, privacy rights, things like that that are enforced. And the the classic
example I cite in this regard, and I think this is there's a very powerful push on this, is the whole formation of the Euro
trading zone in Europe in the last year. Perhaps the single biggest push for it was this realization that jurisdictional
competition was inexorably pushing things in the direction of free markets. Western Europe today, the 15 governments
in Western Europe, I believe that 14 of them are effectively run by social Democratic governments. It is the most left
wing configuration in the history of Western Europe in terms of the politicians who run it. They're not interested in a
common currency because it helps business or it facilitates trade, even though those are the kinds of reasons that
initially were used to push it and that were part of what drove. They're interested in it because they see it as the first
step towards political union and they see political union as a precondition for preserving the welfare state and the
massive governmental apparatus as it today exists in Western Europe. The euphemism that a lot of politicians like to
use in Western Europe is something called tax normalization. And what that means is that there should be no unfair tax
competition which arises whenever one jurisdiction chooses to use lower taxes than another jurisdiction. And in a
context of Western Europe where the jurisdictions are relatively small, it's possible for people to move to lower
jurisdictions such as the UK or Ireland, which are relatively lower than France and Germany and Italy, you want to
harmonize these taxes and basically prevent this. Of course, Western Europe itself is not a logical stopping point. I
mean sort of the one thing that's gone wrong with their plans is that the globalization has gone even faster than their
political consolidation. So they're able to consolidate these jurisdictions in Europe into a single large jurisdiction. But at
the same time, there are all these offshore jurisdictions that have popped up and so on. And so you have people like La
Fontaine, the former finance minister in Germany and the current finance minister in France and a lot of these
countries. urging that transactions [to] offshore jurisdictions be shut down. That basically it be made illegal to have
offshore tax havens. And again, if you just sort of think about how in the world can this happen or what does this mean?
Well what it means is that politically, you have to create a de facto global government. You have to basically turn the
whole planet into a prison to prevent anyone from escaping because so long as there is a single place left to go, you will
be able to do this."
I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world's powers and
principalities. So it was natural to think about the Antichrist in the context of the world of financial architecture. I'll will still
defend PayPal has more good than bad. It's not timelessly eternal. In some ways it got co-opted and new things needed
to be built like Bitcoin and Tether. My decision, perhaps a mistake, perhaps understandable was to be somewhat cryptic
about this. You know, you don't want to scare investors too much. I'm not sure what they would say if I had been less
cryptic. Of course, the downside of being cryptic is that you don't really think through the ideas. I thought through them
less. And of course, I was a little bit too literal on the idea of the European Union as simply the reconstituted Roman
Empire.
Here's another video from the Reverend Ian Paisley, Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in Northern Ireland, reaming
the Pope during his speech to the European Parliament in 1988.
Peter plays 'Ian Paisley Heckles the Pope (1988)'. Full video. [video]
At any rate, Northern Ireland is still pre-1648 in some ways.
Now, Paisley and I made the same mistakes as the journalist interviewing Mussolini. We all thought the new Rome
would be co-located with the old Rome. The journalist thought the city of Rome, Paisley the Vatican, I thought the EU.
So we perhaps took this stuff somewhat too literally and not sufficiently seriously.
To understand where the new Roman Empire is today, we should look back to the history of what the medievals called
the Translatio Imperil, the transfer after Rome falls 476. Authority transfers to the East Roman Empire. And in 800 to
Charlamagne's Holy Roman Empire. The sort of crisis was triggered by the Empress Regent Irene, who was the East
Roman Empress. She gauged out the eyes of her son Constantine VI, the rightful heir, assuming his title as Empress.
This was seen as illegitimate usurpation, partially because of how she got the job, partially because medievals didn't
believe a woman could be a violent and forceful Katechon.
799 People Leo III was also blinded and exiled, and it looked like both the Imperial Papl thrones were back into the
catacombs gone, and the Antichrist was near. St. Jerome had calculated the end of the world as falling on 801. So they
deseperately needed an emperor. And this last day of the year 800, Christmas Day, Charlemagne gets crowned and it
translates to the Holy Roman Empire, which lasts til Napoleon abolishes it in 1806. And then Napoleon the sort of
would-be Antichrist is defeated by Russia and Britain.
In some sense, there are perhaps two candidates for the successors to Rome. For all sorts of reasons, I don't
particularly like the Russian theories of all these ways where you have Putin describing himself as the Katechon and the
last Christian leader in the world. It's hard to look into someone's heart. I always suspect he's more of a KGB agent than
a Christian. And then, of course, to be a Katechon, you have to be strong enough to possibly become the Antichrist.
And Russia is simply no more than a foreign in size of West. It's not nearly powerful enough to take over the world. It
cannot simply be the Katechon or the new Rome.
If we ask the question where Rome is today, I would say that a reconstituted Roman Empire that unites the world needs
three key elements. A military superpower. Daniel 2:40, "Fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron, for as much as iron
breaketh in pieces and doth all things. As iron that breaketh all these shall break in pieces and bruise." A financial
superpower. Revelation 13:17, "No man might buy or sell save he that hath the mark or the name." And in some sense,
it's an ideological or religious power. Possible if like Matthew 24:14.
The early modern powers somehow never quite achieved this. Probably the sort of Catholic attempt at at a world
empire was, in the early days of exploration of Spain and Portugal, explored the whole world. But already in 1494, the
Pope issues the treat of Torsos, which splits the world into two. So you have Charles the Spanish emperor is the new
and improved Roman Emperor. new and improve Holy Roman Empire, plus Ultra, beyond the Gates of Hercules, but it's
not a world state. And then, most of the world remained unconquered and then even as far as Spain and Portugal went,
they had a short-lived union from 1580 to 1640. But by then, Holland and Britain had navies and sort of contested the
seas.
Then of course, you have battles in the early 18th century, 1701 to 1714. This is how the map changes in Europe.
Between the beginning and the end of the war of Spanish succession, where Spain and France were going to unify. You
can see the map basically did not change. This was probably the last attempt to create the Catholic world empire, would
have been uniting those two countries. I had these discussions with these reactionary traditional Catholics in Harvard
with Adrian Vermule and his gang a few months ago. And they sort of dreamed about a unified Caesar Papist empire
that never was in the Middle Ages. This was, by the way, the Newton description of the Antichrist, was that it was
Caesar Papist fusion. The emperor was the Antichrist, the Pope was the false prophet, and when these things are fused
you have this Caesar Papist one world state. And of course the history was the emperors and the Popes mostly were
fighting each other. They were never really fused. But then I think things do start to change in the 19th century.
And perhaps the first real candidate we get for a new reformed Roman Empire is the British Empire, in the 19th century.
There's the Pax Romana issued by Caesar Augusts. Britain resists it with Pax Britannica. Their naval supremacy means
that, you know, 72% of the world is oceans. If you control the oceans, you control in effect the world. And then of
course, there's a way that the naval power is tied to economic and financial superpower: protects trade goods, services,
oversees telegram cables, communicates information about the stock market and other less important things.
And of course, there's a religious component, a Christic, antichrist. It's a way to spread the crown's gospel. Different
mission societies to bring light to God to all part of darkness. Alfred Tennyson, Queen Victoria's poet laureate,
articulates this vision of this grand ambition of world empire as early as 1842 in Loxley Hall. " dipped into the future far
as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be. Till the war drum throb no longer
and the battle flags were furled in the parliament of man, the federation of the world. There the common sense of most
shall hold a fretful realm in awe and the kindly earth shall slumber lapped in universal law."
They're sort of dominated by some of the Catholics like John Henry Newman, his friend Cardinal Manning, a British
cardinal in the late 19th century. They worried about the dark side of this empire. Was it going to be a Christian empire
or was it potentially going to become an empire of the Antichrist? Manning writes a book in 1861, the Pope and the
Antichrist, and basically suggests that England and Britain is the simply the prelude of Antichrist.
And then some were predictive of World War I. " It will not be long before European war will wear out and waste the
powers of Christian society, including Protestant and Catholic alike and will give a fatal predominance to the anti-
Christian society. Britain ran the world, more precise London ran the world. And it would have been natural for the
British Prime Minister, maybe not think of Christ, but at some point to think he might be the Antichrist." This is sort of
one deep rabbit hole we've gone down that, Sam and Nathan from working with them on these lectures, that what
Cardinal Manning and John Henry Newman likened at least one British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli comes to
power in 1868. And then in 1874 to 1880, the Catholics like Manning restrained the medeval view of the Antichrist belief
to be Jewish. He is the first Jewish Prime Minister. Manning is sort of touched on in Newman's four lectures. And of
course, what Disraeli stood for was two things: one nation conservatism, the classless society and imperialism. And if
you combine those two, don't you get the sort of homogenous one world state.
If you go back into the Disraeli history, in some ways, maybe you think there's going to be the Antichrist. But he writes
these novels in the 1840s like Tancred, where it prophesies that England should be the ruler of West and East, a
synthesis of Judaism and Christianity. And then in some sense, it's fulfilled when Queen Victoria becomes Empress
Victoria of India in 1877. Disraeli creates the empire and Queen Victoria likes him a lot because she's not merely queen
but becomes the Empress.
There's probably a lot I can say about the relation of the Jews to the Antichrist. The final semitic rebuttal, just to get it on
the table, is that the Jews in the Bible are described as a stubborn and stiff necked people. Which is mostly a bug, but
maybe in the end times, it is a feature because, this is sort of the wya Soloyvov phrased it, that they're too stubborn to
accept Christ, they will be too stubborn to be charged by the Antichrist. And so, they become the center of resistance to
the Antichrist in the Solovyoy narrative.
There's a letter from Newman 1888 where it's like near miraculous deliverance from Disraeli. Hopes never to return.
There's always sort of the factoid question, who's the first Catholic Prime Minister of the UK? There's none until Boris
Johnson. Where if you think of this a little bit, the Anglicans were still worried about the Catholic Antichrist till very, very
recently. And it wasn't known that he was going to be Catholic until he got married to his third wife and get became
Catholic. So some sort of antichrist parody of King Henry VIII. But whatever you might say about Boris, he's clearly no
longer Antichrist material. He's more of a church now. He was maybe LARPing as Disraeli before, but then as Johnson
put it to me, we had a rather large empire, but it didn't last very long.
So 1820, Napoleon, and then it peaks in 1919. They start by losing Ireland in 1922. In 1945, they lose Canada. Then by
'59, it starts to fall apart after India goes in '47. By the Suez crisis by '74, it's basically gone.
But the dream of the world empire didn't die. In some ways, Woodrow Wilson, the architect of the League of Nations,
kept a copy of Tennyson Watts poem in his pocket at all times, which is what I read from the Victoria Nobel Laureate.
And perhaps America is the place that could reboot Rome more than Britain ever could. Certainly a lot one can say on
this, but everything from the architecture in Washington D.C., it sort of looks like what you'd expect a new Rome to look
like.
There's of course a lot being said on the complicated history between US and Britain. There can only be, you know, one
world state. It's called the special relationship, which is probably a great euphemism for an extremely conflicted
relationship. Where in all sorts of ways, probably the US played a key role in both moderating but also accelerating the
decline of the British empire and transitioning it all, in various ways. We're going to talk about it through all these
perspectives, because there can be only one world state.
Then of course, you have all these Pax Americana ideals. There's the JFK commencement speech, American
University 196 where he tries to sort of outdo Benjamin Disraeli. Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men
and women. Not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time. The Pax Americana would be universal and eternal
peace. Of course, there are all these ways America is the melting pot of Europe, a better candidate than other smaller
European nations speaking recreation of the Roman Empire. "The whole earth was of one language and one speech",
Genesis 11:1.
There's a whole bunch you can say about the English speaking language. So again, the chance to be a world language.
Starting in Britain but certainly in the 21st century. Even if you go back to the ratification debates of the Constitution, the
writes use Roman pseudonyms, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Public, Brutus, Cato, Seneca, etc. etc. And then
of course, if you do sort of a comparison with the European Union, in the US, coinage has the picture of Augustus
Caesar, is on the coin. And we still have the American Caesar on our dollar bills, whereas if you look at the ridiculous
European bill, they're no people left, there are no individuals let. It's a whole genealogy where the US dollar comes
from, the Holy Roman Empire Current, and that's what is traced back to the Middle Ages.
This is a picture from the US Department of Defense, the Department of War, view of the world where it represents the
different combatant commands. This maybe is not a perfectly accurate map of what's gong on on the ground in the
world, but there's sort of a sense that the US empire is greater than all others that have responsibility for the entire
world.
Now this is not meant to be an anti-British or anti-American lecture. It's just that America is, at this point, the natural
candidate for Katechon and Antichrist, ground zero of the One World state, ground zero of the resistant to the One
World state. The US world police is the one truly sovereign country. They always say the president is the mayor of the
US and the dictator of the world. International law gets defined by the US. That's sort of NATO's prime, to see in some
ways, coordination of the world's intelligence agencies. Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is
not really run by shadowy international organizations, it's basically American. And perhaps always a very important
feature is the reserve current status of the dollar, where it's sort of the backstop for all the money. The petro dollar
regime, there's sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money
gets recycled into the US.
Then of course, there's sort of a way where from a certain perspective, the US is also the place that's the most outside
the world state. In many ways, it's probably one of the best tax havens, at least if you're not a US citizens. And then
there are all these ways the the US is a kind of ideological superpower. Christian, ultra-Christian, anti-Christian sense,
woke Protestant liberation theology, social gospel, social justice. City on a hill, this institution serves as a beacon of light
for other nations and honor.
In all these ways, we used to be able to have this conversation. In some ways, FDR encapsulated this dual nature of
the US. This sort of way it was the Katechon that defeated Nazism, appointed Truman as his successor instead of
Henry Wallace, the actual communist who was the vice president from '40 to '44. But then of course, there were all
these ways a lot of people thought that FDR was suspiciously close to the Antichrist. In 1933 he seizes all the gold. You
have the National Recovery Act with the blue eagle as a symbol, made people think of the mark of the beast. Abolishes
prohibition, which seemed somewhat simple. Still in 1933, social security, that sounded like peace and safety as in 1
Thessalonians 5:3, "Giving up your rights to the state of the Antichrist." 1941 gives the four freedoms: freedom of
speech, expression, worship, then also freedom from want. Freedom from fear. Suggests this extreme version.
And there was some way that in evangelical Christianity, this became very distorted in the Cold War, where it became
very hard to think about how the US might fit into this. Of course, there are all these ways the presidency changed over
time and had these different moments. The technological one that I always think is extremely important was something
like 1945...Lincoln, you know, sort of weakened the states. FDR was the New Deal and sort of centralized things even
more in the federal government. But 1945, with nuclear weapons. It really shifts the balance of power from Congress to
the president. You don't have time for Congress to declare war, to decide who to attack. The president, in some sense,
becomes this semi-divine being destroying the world and has no time to consult Congress or anything like this.
We had these two very crazy, somewhat agentic presidents, Kennedy and Nixon. I think it was a little point during the
Watergate stuff in '73, '74 where Nico was threatening to launch nukes. It was sort of like trying to convince people that
he was really stressed out and maybe they should lay off not he Watergate investigation. He told Kissinger to get on his
knees and pray that there would not be a nuclear war in the West wing of the White House. And maybe he was crazy,
maybe he was pretending to be crazy. There's always a question, whether this got somewhat off-ramped in recent
daces. And then the other sort of moment, I always insist in my rough tell of this history, its hat perhaps 1973 Watergate
was in some sense the deep state taking over some of the power of the presidency. Which is a subtle thing, but there
was some symbiosis, some competition where you can think of the deep state president as the Katechon or potential
Antichrist. The US deep state as the Katechon system or the Antichrist system. Certainly one of the candidates that I
would give for a Katechon post-1945.
We've gone through different versions. We've gone through anti-communism or Christian democracy in Europe. But
perhaps a really big one on a system level is something like the deep state. It was, you know, agentic, it was pretty
violent. I always think the Church Committee Hearings, the anti-CIA hearings in the 70s, had the effect...it's called the
Central Intelligence Agency. You have to always think of that as a fake thing. The name itself is a cover story. It's
because the Central Intelligence Agency sounds like you're just collecting data. It's like some metaphysical
contemplation. It's like monks int he Middle Ages of the internet or something like this. It should really be named the
covert operations agency or something like that. So CIA was a cover story for the real name.
There's this history of you know, all these crazy things that the deep state did. Some of these were justified, some of
these were parallel. I grew up in Northern California, I spent a lot of time in Stanford. There's sort of this crazy MK Ultra.
My favorite Tom Wolf novel is the Electric Koolaid Acid Test. Sort of the origin of the LSD movement in the West Coast
with Ken Kesey sort of starts in, he's a grad student in the English department at Stanford in 1958. You can get paid an
extra $75 a day, which was a lot of money in 1958, to do some random drug. And you had to go to Menlo Park Veterans
Hospital and they gave him LSD. And then it was actually a CIA program that, they thought, LSD was a technology. It
was a sort of arms race with the communist and the fascists and the Nazis. They were very good at propagandizing and
brainwashing people, and maybe the LSD could be a technological way you could deprogram, reprogram people. And
that was just sort of the stuff we did.
There are points where it becomes formalized and perhaps as it gets formalized, it works less well. I always have this
theory that, the sort of violent part, in some sense, of Bush 43 was sort of maybe the last hurrah. Where you had the
Torture Memos and how you could waterboard someone, and the formalization is almost the last step before something
stops working altogether. So it's like all the low down people, you know, we shouldn't be waterboarding people. We
want a memo giving us exact guidelines on how to do it. And then you put out a memo and then, eventually people find
out about the memo and it's like what in the world are you doing? It's when these things are informal, they somehow
can perhaps last longer.
You know, by 2005 in Guantanamo, you were way better off as a Muslim terrorist in Guantanamo, the liberal lawyers
had taken it over by 2005, than as a suspected cop killer in Manhattan. In Manhattan if you were a suspected cop killer
back in 2005, you know, there was some informal process they had for dealing with you. Guantanamo, it was
formalized. Initially, they did some bad things and then very quickly, they weren't able to do anything, anymore. And this
is again sort of revelatory unraveling process.
You always wonder where in the history we are. How much longer can this form of the Katechon still last? I sort of have
this suspicion that maybe 2017, when we started using the word deep state, that's itself a sign of the end. When you
call it for what it is, it somehow can no longer quite function. I don't know CS Lewis had that idea strength. So futurist,
they summon Merlin comes back from the Athurian legend and whatever they tell Merlin, "hatever spirit may still linger
in you has gone 1500 years farther away from us since your time. You shall not lift your little finger in this age of early
and water. It never was very lawful even in your day. Remember when we first knew that you'd be awake, we thought
you'd be on the side of the enemy. And because our Lord does all things for each one, the purpose of your reawakening
is that growing souls should be saved."
There were sort of all these ways these Katechon structures worked. There were ways to map them to the US. And
there's sort of a question where, you know, where this goes from here. There's a lot of different glosses on this, but you
know, there have been these different forms of the Roman Empire.
But I've come to think of America as the last and final form of the Roman Empire. There is no successor. And so the
end of the America would be the end of the world, or the beginning of the Antichrist. It's of course possible there can be
different successors. It's really, really hard to picture. Even fi you think about the Britain to America transition, there was
something natural about it. English speaking country, you could shift to. Had sort of this continuity with the past and with
Roman history. And my sense is the stakes are really high. There were a long line of these Roman empires. But the
biblical view of history does say that at some point, one of these will be the last one.
And perhaps the most plausible turn people always give is something like China. And there are all sorts of things that
can go very haywire with China, and can go very wrong. But if we think of China in terms of the criteria that I laid out, I
don't think it ever coms close to being a plausible contender. It's perhaps semi-military superpower. The military hasn't
really been tested since 1979. Very unclear how that works. There's some possibility not he military dimension, but it's
not a financial superpower. It doesn't want a reserve current like the Roman denarius or the US dollar. Because if you
carry a reserve currency, you got to have an open capital account. You need to let people put money into China. That
just undercuts public control mechanisms too much. It's not an ideological supoerwe. You know, Mandarian's just too
hard to learn. And we all know it's kind of overworking. I don't when people learning Mandarin peaked. Maybe that was
like 2007. Anyone who learned Mandarin, it's okay, you can tell me you wasted your time. Venture capitalists who spent
the last decade on China waster their time.
And then, if we even compare it to something like the Soviet Union or communism, there was an element of that. You
know, a charismatic ideology of sorts. I don't think people study Xi Jinping thought anywhere outside China. It is
incredibly low on that side. And there's sort of a joke that's about the deep state or why America is seemingly the only
candidate right now. Why is the US the only country in the world where a revolution is impossible? Because we're the
only country without an American embassy.
And so of course, the confessional thing I'm supposed to say is that even I find this all very hard to believe. I can't quite
overcome my fantasies of seasteading or obtaining a New Zealand passport. I just chatted with Elon, where he said,
you know, some story about everything being bad in New Zealand. And I told him, yeah, maybe Mars was more likely
than New Zealand.
There's sort of all these ways that it's really hard to come to grips with how high the stakes are. You know, how singular
the moment in our time is.
Let me maybe close by coming to back to the place of the city. Perhaps the one thing that feels hard to figure out with
America as the new Roman Empire is: where is Rome? There is a strange way, there are all these ways where, what
Katechon is life in the US. Maybe it was the deep state, maybe still the president. But there are all these things one can
be critical. But one part that does not exist in the US, and has not yet existed, is the sort of world city as the political
capital. It was never fully centered on Washington. For very most of the 20th century, New York City was the financial nd
economic capital. It was sort of a rival or maybe Los Angeles was in some ways, you know, the ideological capital that
produced so many of the ideas in the second half of the 20th century. And so there was the Katechontic feature of the
US where the world cities were more than one. They were decentralized in some ways.
And then of course, the history of the lat quarter century, maybe the 21st century is the way in which Silicon Valley or
this place, San Francisco has slowly won out over New York and simply become the other center of power. Of course in
a perverse way, to go through all the ways to link the military and financial and ideological superpower with the big tech
companies. There are all these ways we can be critical of them. And you know, go on with this anti-San Francisco rant.
It's a godless liberal place filled with hordes of Satanists. But perhaps almost all of this is offset by this one very
important way in which it's Katechontic in a still really good way, where it's not Washington. It's 2400 miles away from
Washington.
Even if you know, we start companies like PayPal or Palantir and try to have alternatives and get partially co-opted,
they're never going to be simply in sync with DC> The challenge on something like the Palantir side, I mean it was like
they didn't trust us in DC. We probably had a lot of reasons not to trust us. And I think this is even true of the most woke
big tech companies. Even a place like Google is very far out o sync. If you sort of imagine the US in a very different
context. If you imagine it like the UK, where the financial, cultural, economic, political power is all in London or Paris or
you know, Rome for the Roman Empire, Constantinople for the East Roman Empire. Or let's say Moscow, the third
Rome where everything is centered on one city. That is a place where things are, still so much healthier, so much better
here.
I'm supposed to do some kind of advertisement for Act 17. The non-egalitarian, very heretical though I'll give you is
perhaps, you know, whatever you're doing here in San Francisco is more important than everything everybody's doing
in Christian work in the rest of the world combined. We just need to maintain a perspective on how important these
cities are and how central they are. That also means that those of you who've been indulging me in these lectures over
the last few weeks, you're playing an extremely important role in that future of this country and our world. I hope you've
been giving some choice thing a harder look about what it looks like.
Maybe it's a bad thing on my end that I'm motivated by something like this. But you know, I don't know. Maybe sort of to
think that we stand ready again to battle for the Lord gets me out of bed.
Thank you very much.
[END OF LECTURE]
[START OF INTERVIEW]
PETER ROBINSON
If San Francisco is in important ways the new Katechon, why haven't you moved back?
PETER THIEL
Probably have an easier question.
PETER ROBINSON
All right, China. The role of China. China, you already said doesn't even come close to the United States...
PETER THIEL
I confess that I don't believe this. I confess that I can't psychologically believe everything I told you. I believe it's correct.
It's reasonable what I told you, but I confess it's too scary to think about.
PETER ROBINSON
And with that, there are hors d'oeuvres still left out there.
Okay, so well let's go through pieces of the argument. China, not even close to the United States' military power,
technological dynamism, reserve currency on and on and on. What about the destructive power of China? You had your
second to last slide was can Rome survive the century, the new Rome, the United States. And up in that corner was a
nuclear cloud.
is China the principal threat to the United States?
PETER THIEL
Yeah, sure. I think China..I mean it could destroy the world. It could have happened in the Cold War with the Soviet
Union. But I don't think...that's very different from China being the successor Roman Empire or the Soviet Union being
the successor Roman Empire. Even if that happened... and I don't know, I'm sort of inclined to think that, it's like, in the
first lecture, I went through this whole trichotomy of, you know, Cold War II or World War III. World War III is an unjust
war. But the thing I found myself far more worried about is the unjust peace to end Cold War II rather than, you know,
sleepwalking into the full-fledged nuclear World War III.
So it's possible, but the good part of America ends is more likely with the unjust peace than the unjust war. I still think
that's where the risks really lie.
PETER ROBINSON
I want to take you back through this continuity of Rome from Rome all the way to Pax Romana, all the way to Pax
Americana. And just take you through that one more time a little bit more slowly because it's absolutely central to the
lecture this evening. So, I'll set this up. It'll take me a moment to set it up and frankly I'm repeating what you said.
St. Augustine writes the city of God in the first quarter of the fifth century and he's responding to the sack of Rome in
410 by Alaric. Augustine argues that although the city of man, Rome is mortal, the city of God is eternal and he implies
that civilization can continue without Rome. The Lutheran critique is that Rome falls finally in 476 when the German king
Odoacer invades and it's over. Peter Thiel, "I disagree with Lutherans that the Roman Empire ended in AD 476."
Okay, so that's where you make your claim that we've had a couple of millennia of continuity. Can you just speak us
through that? What is it that puts Pax Americana in continuity with this empire that ended 2000ish years ago?
PETER THIEL
I articulated a lot of different ways in which it's continuous. Let me push on one dimension of this. I don't even think the
Augustine view is the main Catholic view on this. Maybe if we were to drill into the language more, it's always this
distinction between Catholicism and Roman Catholicism. And if it's Roman Catholicism, which I like better because it's
the one that combines the sort of political with the metaphysical. And that's one in which in some sense the Romanist,
the Romanitas remains important.
If it's mere Catholicism, whether of the escapist metaphysics of Pope Benedict or the communism of Pope Francis,
that's what's downstream of the August. But if it's Roman Catholicism, that's I think pretty close to my view. So if you
asked your question about is it compatible with Catholicism, maybe, but is the Augustine view compatible with Roman
Catholicism? I wonder if the question itself suggests the answer is no.
PETER ROBINSON
Michelle do we have the Papel New Zealand here? Well I'll send them some notes.
So, you sketched out continuity between Rome and America. Pax Romana, Pox Americana. The United States as the
Katechon. What is it that the Katechon is preventing? In Thessalonians where Paul very briefly mentions the Katechon
is the evil one, it's the great apostasy. But I just discussed this with Russell Berman the other day. There was this
feeling that on the other side of Rome and on the other side of American power, there's chaos, danger, brutality. There's
something, there's some kind of darkness and violence is always being held at bay. It feels that way. Is that correct? Is
that a correct gut feel for what the Katechon is holding back?
PETER THIEL
Yeah, but it probably has. I don't know, it has this...on the other side it can be satanism, it can be sort of pandemonium
where it's just total chaos. Or it can be totalitarian where, you know, this satanic tyrant. And you know, there's probably
some way you're preventing chaos and preventing tyranny. I've always put the stress more on, there's probably some
combination of both, right? I would always stress more it's against the totalitarian tyranny of the One World state. And
this is again where it's right on the borderline between faith and reason, because there are very reasonable ways I can
articulate why the One World State is dangerous. You know, may be very, very bad. If it goes bad, it's very hard to see
how it gets reversed.
It's like North Korea covered the whole planet. Where would that, how would that change? It would require some kind of
miracle or something. So yeah, there's sort of a very rationalist logic I can give. And then I still think that somehow, the
biblical language is so valuable with is.
PETER ROBINSON
Okay. It it falls to me, I think. I've been thinking through this evening, I've thought to myself it would fall to me to sum up
a little bit. And this is going to be a little bit painful for you because in summing up, I'm going to be complimenting you.
But as painful as that may may be for you, I'll be nearly as painful as it will be for me.
PETER THIEL
I'll suffer.
PETER ROBINSON
I think I can condense this month of lectures, these four lectures into four points.
You and St. John of Patmos. Do you like that comparison? You and St. John of Patmos, the author of the Book of
Revelation, chapter 1 verse 9 in Revelation, "I John, your brother and companion in tribulation." John gives us his
vision. There's a lot of very scary stuff in Revelation. There's a great deal that's difficult to grasp that requires meditation
and pondering and study. But John gives us Revelation to help us, to be helpful. Likewise, Peter Thiel.
Item two. Nowhere, anywhere in all of American academia does anyone, anyone take the book of Daniel or Revelation
seriously. Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel alone insists on placing the apocalyptic texts at the very center of our attention.
PETER THIEL
Am I a genius or am I an insane person?
PETER ROBINSON
This is not going to end all that well for you, so leave it.
Item three, for almost 2,000 years, nobody could make sense of the prophecies of Antichrist. An evil figure takes over
the world, how? Nobody could work out how that might happen. Peter Thiel comes along and says, oh yeah, I'll tell you
how it could happen. The Antichrist will play upon our fears, the fears of nuclear weapons, fears of a climate crisis, fears
of AI, and like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky, the Antichrist will offer us safety and security in return for our
freedoms. Peter Thiel, and as far as I'm aware, only Peter Thiel has identified that extremely plausible, frighteningly
plausible mechanism for the rise of the Antichrist.
Item four, and this is the last one. Peter reminds us of the Katechon, the force that stands between us and chaos,
whatever form chaos or tyranny, and and traces the Katechon through history, and then concludes plausibly, and maybe
really unanswerably, that the final Katechon in all of human history is America. As far as I am aware, that too is an
original contribution to our thinking about where we stand at this moment in time.
Did I get that right?
PETER THIEL
I won't quibble man, I'm tempted to quibble.
PETER ROBINSON
See, I said really nice things and now he's going to tell me I was wrong about this and wrong, go ahead.
PETER THIEL
Let's just try to deflate myself a little bit. I think people have thought about this a lot for centuries, this topic. And I think
people have not thought about it that much in recent times.
PETER ROBINSON
Why? So why? So this notion of the book of Daniel, book of Revelation, taking scripture seriously.
PETER THIEL
John Henry Newman thinks about it. There there are people like, you know, Pope Benedict who think about it but don't
talk about it. So, you know, I don't know, I think there's a...
you know, Stanford University has over 3,000 faculty, only Renee took it seriously and he's gone.
PETER ROBINSON
Stanford University has over 3,000 faculty, only Rene took it seriously and he's gone. Why has it disappeared from
American academic?
PETER THIEL
Why questions are hard to answer. I do think...one of the other things that I've tried to push throughout my lectures is:
it's so important to resist this fragmentation, hyper-specialization. It always feels like the only way you get a comparative
advantage is that you're a narrow, narrow subject matter expert on something. It's the pen factory from Adam Smith on
steroids where, you know, everybody is an expert at some tiny piece and you're destined to become an ever smaller
cog in an ever bigger machine.
And I don't know, if you're staring a company, if you're just living a life, you want to try to...it's supposed to make sense
and you're supposed to someway, your life your work and your faith and your world fit together and make sense.
I can understand why it's been off-ramped and why it's inefficient. But yeah, there's probably a lot of room for people
doing this. So that would be my default why explanation.
PETER ROBINSON
Um, Davos man. I'm going to ask you about something that I think I consider a hopeful sign. And since you don't like
answering why questions, I'll ask how.
Samuel Huntington in, and Sam Wolfe might know the year, I think it was 1994, Samuel Huntington, the late great
political scientist at Harvard, wrote an essay, a very grim essay, arguing that for the very first time in the history of the
United States, the country had produced a class of people who had no use for the country itself. Truly internationalist,
impatient with national borders, and he named this group of people Davos man, after of course, Davos, Switzerland
where the World Economic Forum met each year.
And it seemed to me a perfectly plausible argument, and it seemed to me to describe the rise of...you make the point
about this is over breakfast at one point that when you were starting PayPal, Silicon Valley felt like the Wild West. And
20 years later, it had come to feel like an imperial capital. So, in the imperial phase, Huntington's notion that these
people who are running these gigantic corporations were turning into Davos men, that made all the sense in the world
to me.
It seemed entirely plausible. And Peter Thiel endorses Donald Trump, what was it 11 years ago, the first time he ran for
president, and they turned on you so viciously that you left. There may be other reasons for leaving, but but you left.
Flash forward to this past January when you had an inauguration party to celebrate Donald Trump's return to power,
half of Silicon Valley was in your house in Washington. Mark Zuckerberg was there, the Winklevi twins were there, Sam
Altman turned up.
So, you've got Elon Musk who...was what it, the the acronym became the name of it?
PETER THIEL
DOGE.
PETER ROBINSON
DOGE, exactly. As far as I can tell, Elon Musk was acting out of genuinely patriotic motives. So, you'd expect them all to
be Davos men, but something has changed. I'm not going to say why. I'm going to say what.
PETER THIEL
I do think, again, I always want to be sort of very categorical here that, you know, One World state is not simply anti all
forms of globalization. There's some way in which it's hard to see a real alternative to some form of globalization in the
21st century. But yes, I think people, the telling of the history of the 1990s, it was somehow, there was no alternative to
globalization and then this led people to not think hard about what form it took. And when you don't think hard, it's far
more likely the details get messed up and it's sort of bad.
And yeah, Davos, there's a theory of how and works and in practice, it's just some crazy racket where, you know, I think
Klaus Schwab sort of thrown out was pretty disgusting, sort of the whole thing is kind of a scam. Which maybe that was
actually healthier than if it was really satantic. Although it's sort of more satanic than you know, merely bad than truly
evil. Evil sense.
And you know, there was some way this stuff really hasn't quite worked. And there's sort of all these different forms
where thinking, it got off-ramped. You don't want to...I don't know, there's all these anecdotes I can get. There was an
obnoxious conversation I had with Henry Kissinger in November 2017. I think he was 93, 94 years old. And it was sort
of talking about China and it's like, you know, 'I think it's really important for people like you to spend a lot of time going
to China because I don't really think we should have a nuclear war with China. But I have more important things to do. I
can't make money there, it's too hard. I don't want to invest in relationships with people there. It's just not the thing for
me to do.' And it he found that sort of distressing.
But yeah there was some way where it just didn't quite work as advertised. And there all these, I know this boomer thing
of different sorts. There are all these different variations of this discussion I remember having over the years.
PETER ROBINSON
How much of this argument? No, let me put it this way. How much of America alone, America alone and America the
last Katechon, do you think Kissinger understood? Do you suppose Nixon understood? Do you suppose...you keep
skittering away every time I...
PETER THIEL
Well I think the history is really complicated with China, right? In 1972 when Nixon went to China, the Soviet Union, I
mean it's sort of hard to measure, it had about four times the GDP of China. And so the plan was, it was anti-soviet. The
plan was to work with China as an anti-communist measure against the Soviet Union. And that was, I think, still the
plan, I know that was still the plan in the Reagan years. Reagan was quite pro-China because it was anti-Soviet and
that was the more powerful form of communism you needed to oppose.
And then yeah at some point, some of these globalist institutions were no longer run by the New Dealers, they got
hijacked by China. They were sort of on autopilot, it went haywire and people did not update for a long time. The way I
always tell the history is you had Tianamen in June of 1989 and then the Berlin Wall comes down November of '89, five
months later. And if that history had been reversed, if Tianamen was June of 1990 say, maybe everything would have
been different. Because in the summer of '89, Brent Scowcroft, the Bush 41 national security advisor, a month later he's
in Beijing, tells people in Beijing, we don't care because we're still anti-soviet, that's the main thing we have to do. If this
happened one year later, maybe we would have updated much earlier.
But instead we were on this zombie globalization or the Fukuyama argument won the day, and we stayed on that track
for 28 years or so. So yes, I think there are all these pieces that have, you know, not quite worked. And partially need to
be rethought in different ways. That's probably what happened on so many of these company levels. On the
Facebook/Meta level, I remember I was in Beijing in 2015 and I was, you know, for some reason my Zero to One book
got pushed like crazy by the Communist Party. I got this rock star treatment. I have some conspiracy theories on what
was really going on. But anyway, and there's sort of all these ways it's hard to form a close relationship with these
people that are sort of tied up in this totalitarian communist web.
People still tell you things and in the hotel lobby, I ran into some people from Facebook who were working on getting
into China. And then a bunch of people told me, well of course Facebook's never going to get into China. And you know,
Facebook in 2015, it was just unthinkable that you could have globalization, you could have good world in which
Facebook was not ultimately in China. We were just...in all sorts of ways to make that happen. And then there's some
point where Zuckerberg updated, partially updated. And they didn't give a big public speech on it, but at some point, this
isn't quite going to happen and maybe it's not the end of the world if it doesn't happen.
PETER ROBINSON
I remember hearing Rupert Murdoch saying something around 2000. Rupert Murdoch saying, a lot of people are going
to make a lot of money in China over the next 25 years and they're all going to be Chinese.
PETER THIEL
I don't know if he thought that in 1999.
PETER ROBINSON
Oh, no, exactly, exactly.
A tale of two decades. Again, it'll take a moment to set this up and I'm coming to a question but the context is important.
1970s, high inflation, high unemployment, the erosion of our geostrategic position in the Cold War as the Soviets build a
deep water navy and expand their presence in Latin America, Asia, Africa. President Jimmy Carter, this is amazing to
me. Carter says in his famous Malaise speech in 1979, "the crisis strikes at our national will." Then in the 1980s,
Reagan presides over a recovery. Economy booms, morale improves. And that slogan 'Morning Again in America' may
sound terribly trite today, but it rang true enough to voters that they awarded Reagan 49 out of 50 states when he ran
for re-election in 1984. 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and in 1989, just one decade later, the Berlin Wall fell. If
the United States is, as you believe and as you have convinced me, the last Katechon, that it really is, in a deeper way
than we might have previously looked, than we might have understood before listening to these four lectures, what
Lincoln called the last best hope of earth. The last best hope of earth. Do we have it in us? Then the most important
question in American politics right now is, do we have it in us to orchestrate another renewal like the one that took place
in the 80s.
PETER THIEL
Yes, but I'm super, I'm always hesitant to give these systematic answers because it's not Calvinist. It's not written in the
stars that we have it in us. These are choices we have to make. And so it's not for me to say. It's for people here to
make choices to decide. And it's never that deterministic. So you know, extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, those
are the things that we should really resist because they both sort of collapse to not doing anything. So yes, if you
always be quiet, if you had to choose to be, a little bit more on the hopeful side, on the side that there are possibilities.
There are things you can do and things like this. But I think the healthy attitude is, you know, hope with very, very
moderate optimism.
And I can come up with all sorts of things that seem crazier and worse. The financials, the deficits, you know, all these
things seem really strangely off. But yes, I remember what it felt like in 1979 and you know, the thing that was healthy,
people thought the world was coming to an end. But they still thought they could do something and then maybe we'd
be...maybe it'd be better if people were more alarmed. If they really thought it was as crazy as '79. These things are
always deeply ambiguous. Like this is where...the point of these lectures is not to simply reassure people. And you
know it's not...
PETER ROBINSON
I think I can speak for everyone that you've not simply reassured us.
PETER THIEL
It's not Jordan Peterson that, you know, when you get out of your bed, you make your bed. You have to do more than
that, okay? I'm not going to be laying in the bed.
PETER ROBINSON
All right, we have to make choices. We have to make choices as citizens. Lightning round. 2028 presidential
candidates. I'm going to the voting booth in 2028 thinking Antichrist or Katechon?
JD Vance.
PETER THIEL
All right. I'm just going to give you the questions that I'm worried about with these people. Or where I'm hopeful and
where I'm nervous.
I'm very pro-JD Vance. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close to the Pope. And so we have all these
reports of fights between him and the Pope. I hope there are a lot more. It's the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry
about. By the way, I've given him this feedback over time. And you know with the sort of...I don't like his popism, but
there's sort of a way if I steel manned it. It's always, you have to think about whether if you say you're doing something
good, whether it's a command, a standard or a limit, or whether in philosophical language, is it necessary or sufficient.
And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis's health, it's as a command, as a necessary thing.
Okay, that's...if you're a lot more if you're a good Catholic. But what I hope it really means is that it's sufficient, and that
he's setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, who listen to the Pope too much. And perhaps all
you have to do to be a really food Catholic is pray for the Pope. You don't really need to listen to him on anything else.
And if that's what JD Vance is doing, that's really good. I'm worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion.
PETER ROBINSON
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
PETER THIEL
Well, the initials are worrisome.
It's again, you have the American Pope and if you have a woke American Pope and you get a woke American
president, you would get the Caesar-Papist fusion for the first time in history. So there is...she is Catholic.
PETER ROBINSON
That's two answers I was looking for.
PETER THIEL
But I want to be careful not to flatter her too much. I think one of the ways these things always get reported is, I
denounce Greta as an Antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she's maybe sort of a type or a shadow
of an Antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don't want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn't
take her as the Antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I
just gave.
PETER ROBINSON
Gavin.
PETER THIEL
You know, I actually held a fundraiser for him back in 2003 here in San Francisco. And I'm tempted to talk about that a
lot, because it might hurt him.
I would say that if we go to the Katechontic thing and the US is that, tech and politics are radically separate, Silicon
Valley is really, really separate from DC in an extreme way. If these things could be fused, the say someone like that
perhaps represents a way to do that. That's the part where, if there was a way to...you know, he was the governor of
California, he was the mayor of San Francisco. In a way, San Francisco is more important than California. The world
city is more important than just this sort of silly province called California. And if you could fuse Washington and San
Francisco, that's a very dangerous thing. It's kind of, it's sort of in a way the last president where such a fusion of sorts
happened. I think it was FDR with New York and D.C. So that's the piece that would be tricky.
And you know, by the way, these things have been very, very unfused historically. Back in 2008, one of my liberal
friends was trying to get 75 tech-type people to endorse Obama and they got like 68, 69 and thought maybe they could
get me. I told them, man, if there are only six or seven, you want to be in the minority. It's more valuable to be one of the
seven than one of the 68. And then his counterpoint was, well, you know, we need to all get on board with Obama
because he's going to win and then we'll have an influence. And then, the really crazy...and then in a way, Obama....if
you think about the primary in 2008, the Democratic primary, Obama had the students, the minorities, the young people.
Hillary was the finance world in New York, the unions. Hollywood was sort of split 50/50 between Obama and Hillary.
But Silicon Valley was the one sector of the economy that went all in for Obama. But it didn't work at all.
And then if you fast forward to the Obama cabinet, there were zero people from Silicon Valley. There was no
representation at all. And so, even Obama was very far from anything resembling a fusion. And then the question Is
whether Newsom will be like that or different.
PETER ROBINSON
Sam, questions from the audience and then a last question or two.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[START OF AUDIENCE Q&A]
SAM WOLFE
Excellent. So Peter, you talked a lot about how San Francisco is kind of Katechontic because of its distance from
Washington D.C. Is there some way in which San Francisco suffers as a global city due to its monomaniacal focus on
software versus say the cultural and intellectual output of a city like London.
PETER THIEL
I don't know. Yes, but I think it's a strangle unbalanced city in a way. I do think the tech piece is extremely important.
And so yeah, maybe there's a certain narrowness ti pretend to just be focused on tech and nothing else. I gave all these
arguments for being generalists and so there's something like that that's unhealthy. But also, it's also very Katechontic
in terms of, at least, not being fused with the politics. And so I do think if you imagined all these tech companies being
based in DC, I don't know maybe the people in them would think about things more. Maybe they'd be grouped even
more homogeneously. So I don't know, my placeholders would be less healthy if San Francisco was five miles from
D.C.
SAM WOLFE
Kitha and Gareth asked similar questions about America's ideological capital and ideological empire. And they both
want to ask about academia at this point. On one level, you have all these anti-academia rifts. On another, academia
seems to be incredibly weak at this point. Does this represent a waning of the American ideological empire?
PETER THIEL
I'd say at least the academic part, you know, has waned a lot. At least some place like Boston would have been that
part. And yeah, there's all sorts of very strange ways it's declined. I don't know, I have all these crazy riffs on it. But I
think maybe the only people who still believe in academia are right-wing Republicans. You know, if President Trump
were here, he would tell you that he went to Wharton, Penn, it's an Ivy League school, they only take really smart
people. Only the smartest of the smart people. And you know, we think it's kind of cool that JD Vance went to Yale Law
school and somehow survived the gauntlet, that's pretty cool.
And if you look at the Democratic candidates, practically nobody is left from these places. I mean Clinton was a Rhodes
scholar, Yale law. Hillary was Yale law. Kerry was Harvard. Obama was Harvard law. And then, we have this, I don't
know, it just has collapsed, where the academia thing it's like NPCs or the academic thing has collapsed. Biden was
from the very bottom half of the University of Delaware and then Kamala was Howard, which is not quite Harvard even
though she told people that she'd rather go there. And then I think Walz was even dumber. Gavin Newsom is University
of Santa Clara. So there's a version where, I don't know, the center left people really don't believe in these places
anymore.
SAM WOLFE
As an alternative American ideological power, to what extent is money and capitalism the American religion? How do
you speak think about the concept of money playing the role historically held by religion and God? This is a question
from James.
PETER THIEL
I don't know, it's always a very important thing. It's a pretty dangerous thing. I gave the riff last week, if I had 200 million
in my bank account I'd be freaked out. That was both an introspective admission that too much of my identity is
wrapped up in money. And then there's another layer where too much of...whenever you have a strong identity, as like a
billionaire, you have a really strong identity, there's also a way where you don't think about that identity very much. You
don't think about, you can't imagine it's ever going to change. Yo think it's very robust and you don't think about it very
much.
Yeah I think there's some way that money is very important, it's maybe too important to our identities. But at the same
time, we don't think enough about all these different dimensions of it. Both you know the nature of physical currency, the
payment system, the reserve status of the dollar, all these super complicated tax things. Inheritance laws. You know, all
these sorts of..you know, how do you transfer money to the future. All these really interesting, deep questions that we
are sort of blocked from thinking about because it's so important. If it was less important maybe we'd think about it
more.
SAM WOLFE
Isabella asks, America changes a lot even from administration to administration. What are the core essences of
America that make it the final form of Rome? What is what is the unchangeable part, the untransferable part?
PETER THIEL
I certainly think there's a lot that was fairly continuous. And yes as a course, the system in some ways is designed to
stress differences, maybe exaggerate small differences. But I don't know, if I had to do the Katechontic part of foreign
policy of the US president, you know, there was sort of an element of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. It was
very, very important. And it was not perfect and there were sort of various failure points.
And basically the rule was, whenever a country got nuclear weapons, we get a major war. So you get '49, Korean War
starts a year later. China '64, Vietnam war starts a year later. And I think the rough logic is that, you know, China can
send weapons to North Vietnam, you can't retaliate agains China and there's sort of this impunity for that. And you
know, that was sort of an important Katechontic role of the president. It was probably a major function of the US deep
state was to figure out what was going on, monitoring these programs. And that was sort of continuous from all of them.
There's a version where I'd say Clnton was maybe the worst president. And by this account, we're going to get North
Korea, the AQ Khan network and somehow the genie was partially let out.
But you know, they're doing nuclear weapons in the 21st century. And that was one way where things were pretty
continuous from Bush 43, Obama, Trump, even Biden.
SAM WOLFE
Two part question on American Empire. Benny asked, you said that once the deep state was named as such in 2017,
its power was waning. Does the same not apply to the phrase American Empire? And the follow-up question from
Hannah is, is the CIA not more or less on the side of the Antichrist at this point?
PETER THIEL
I mean there's a long history of how the deep state changed and certainly in the 60s, 70s, 80s, I think you had to score
it as, you know, Katechontic. I don't know, the Antichrist is left wing, the communists were in the State Department, the
CIA was sort of this rogue thing outside the State Department. When Carter has the Halloween Day massacre in 1977
where he fires 30% of the people at the CIAm, it's probably not because the CIA is, you know, too much on the side of
the peace and safety One World state. I think even in the Reagan years, I would still score it as quite different. And then
yes, there's this complicated history where these things shifted.
By a Clinton version, where NGOs, you know, somehow the person going to the climate change conference to take
notes replaces the person being James Bond. And so, you can sort of imagine that those types of people come with
somewhat different world views and ideologies. And there was some complicated way it got scrambled by Bush 43. And
then, Obama really ramped it off. But I think the main dimension I would say is that the fire question sort of modiefies
the second. So these things really, really, really decayed.
There's a Palantir story. We were going to work with the NSA say back in '09, '10, and it somehow got blocked by the
top management. And it was, in some ways, fortunate that we didn't work with the NSA since they were so incompetent.
They couldn't even stop Snowden and if we were too entangled with them, we would have gotten tagged with this. So
be careful what kinds of customers you have.
But the rough theory we have on why it was blocked at the NSA, one of the reasons, was that there was a crazy
amount of insanity going on between the NSA and the FBI. With the FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
sort of weaponized all these crazy ways against people. And it didn't start with the Russia gate hoaxes in 2016, 2017.
It'd been going on for a decade before that. And even if you had the third party vendor that just looked at the metadata,
maybe it would make it transparent and undermine it. My default placeholder is by 2017, there were parts of the deep
state that were in this very left wing, anti-Trump thing where they could get weaponized like crazy. And when we fast
forward to 2025, somehow that process was made so transparent that I get the sense nothing like this is happening.
I mean the Russia conversation is completely different character from 2017. Even the anti-Russia, pro-Russia, it doesn't
seem like you're going to get a FISA investigation on you if you say something that's pro-Russia at all. And somehow,
some of the machinery was exposed, we exposed how the sausage making factory works, it somehow stops working. I
don't know what the right metaphor is, but it's like if you have to watch a YouTube video of foie gras being made every
time you eat foie gras, you might become a vegan. And I think the CIA, the internet, and other things like this have put
the CIA on a vegan diet over the last decade.
SAM WOLFE
Slightly dangerous question here from Jean, who says, how can you make predictions about the next century and
ignore the immense demographic change in America? A demographic simply not tested for.
PETER THIEL
The demographics are always a very tricky thing to talk about because it either ends up being super politically correct or
super political incorrect. And it's very hard to sort of calibrate, you know, some in between version of this. And I don't
know, it's somewhat determinist. There are things about it that are probably not great. On the other hand, it's not as
determinist as people would think. And if I had again, you know, riff on this in the presidential context, in 2016, if you
had fast forward to 2024, you would have said the Republicans obviously are never going to win another election
because their old voters are white and old. And so many of them will be dead in eight years. They are never, ever going
to win another election. And then 2024 was not a landslide, it was, you know, a solid win. And it meant that there were
millions and millions of people from all these demographic groups that people thought would never vote Republican,
where you had to get them to change their minds.
So yes, there's some element to demographics that matters. But I think the scale on which it's happening in the US is
not so severe that it can't be overcome by a good argument or something like this. And if one side, say the left ,
believes in absolute demographic determinism that you are reduced to your traits, you are nothing more than your sex,
gender, whatever, you are reduced to these sub-rational factors. And the other side still believes that people are
persons and we should make rational arguments. I think 2024 is in some ways the refutation of the demographics.
There's probably some point where this stuff breaks down. The Europe thing seems messed up to me. The European
demographics stat that I always give is you know, Continental Europe, not UK, not Russia, that 100 years ago, there
were 10 million Jews and 5 million Muslims. And today it's 1 million Jews and 50 million Muslims. The relative ratio
changed 100 to 1. And that probably makes a certain difference. And so, there's some point where these things matter
but there's some point where if you're too deterministic on them, that's a very big mistake as well.
SAM WOLFE
The last question before I turn it back to Peter Robinson. Yulman asks, Peter, could we have a new series of lectures in
the near future?
PETER ROBINSON
You come up here and talk about the end of the world and you've got an audience treating you as if you're a rockstar.
PETER THIEL
People want to hear something that's true for change, you know.
PETER ROBINSON
Closing questions, closing these four lectures. What you're talking about is free will, the choices that we make. And
there's a tension between a kind of quietism, say your prayers, believe. Say your prayers, do your work, say your
prayers. And a kind of pure activism, which is go out and do everything you can, quit your job, go volunteer on the JD
Vance campaign in 2028.
So striking that balance between quietism on the one side and kind of hyperactive, feverish activism on the other. So
we've got here highly educated, plugged into the most dynamic city in the most dynamic country in the world and all
capable of paying $200 a pop for these four lectures. I don't know. Let's just say wait prayer versus activism. Can you
suggest these people leave their, I know you, I know you don't like giving advice, but just weigh prayer and faith versus
political analysis and activism.
PETER THIEL
The way I feel about these questions is that they're always to say they're just very bad questions and just the wrong
questions.
The Bible verse that I always cite on this, I'm going to garble this, like 1 Corinthians 13:13, "if these three remain, faith,
hope and love, the greatest is love." And you're sort of asking about the tradeoff between the faith you need for prayer
and the hope you need for politics. And surely what that verse tells you is there is no tradeoff at all. That's an atheist
question. The atheist question suggests there's some kind of some kind of water bed thing where you go down on one
up on the other, right? So basically the atheist perspective is that, faith is something losers need to have who have no
hope. But maybe if you have more hope, you have more faith. If you have more faith, you have more hope.
And so I don't know. That would be sort of the the the first cut answer. I think the Thucydides' account of the war, sort of
again classical world context. Because it's as the Athenians lose the Syracuse expedition, that they lose hope that
they're going to win the battle, they also lose faith and they start cursing the gods as they lose hope. When hope fails,
faith fails, when faith fails, hope fails. They're just deeply, deeply linked. So yes, I don't know. I don't think the JD Vance
campaign should hire you if you're not praying for his election too.
PETER ROBINSON
You notice that in the space of seven minutes, he called me first a conservative Catholic and then an atheist.
This is the last. Do I get two more?
PETER THIEL
I just said your question was.
PETER ROBINSON
So you said a couple of times that the end of the Cold War strike you as miraculous, that all kinds of people came
together in just the right way. So let's take that notion seriously. John Paul II said from the Logia in St. Peter's in his first
appearances as Pope, and then again and again and again and again throughout his 32 years as Pope, be not afraid.
It seems to me that that fits our argument, fits your argument. Now I'm thinking of it as our argument. That when the
Antichrist comes, what he will be doing is playing upon our fears. Very understandable fears, fears of nuclear weapons,
fears of violence in society. Charlie Kirk that rattled the entire country for two or three weeks. Imagine if something like
that happened once every week or so.
All right. So does it does it follow...we had the Charlie Kirk funeral, which was a kind of religious revival meeting. We
see statistics of young people particularly, well, let's put it this way: down at Stanford, the whole field of the Catholic
chaplaincy has within the last 18 months become much more, this was not the way things were supposed to end in the
Francis Papacy, which was progressive and liberal, it's become more conservative and orthodox. It feels, and there's
some statistics that begin to provide real evidence, that particularly among young people there's a return to faith, to
religion, particularly to Christian religion.
Good probably, but also necessary. Is this is this is this a useful thing for the nation?
PETER THIEL
Yes. I think in all these ways it's good, desirable, necessary. But I prefer to maybe to do this more a little bit on the
personal virtue, and I sort of normally hesitant on this, which is you know, find no fear. If you say it's a vice, it's
something like cowardice. Courage is probably the virtue and then there's some extreme where people are reckless and
foolhardy. So yes, you're not supposed to be a coward, you're not supposed to be a foolhardy.
But I do think at the margins, people are...courage is the virtue in shortest supply in our country. There's a, I don't know,
Katechontic somewhat pagan pre-christian version. But all I would say is that's one that I always think is very much in
short supply, very underrated. And that's where I go with it.
PETER ROBINSON
Four lectures, ladies and gentlemen, and they come out come down to a call for courage.
PETER THIEL
Thanks for braving, having the courage to brave the satanic hordes outside.
[END OF AUDIENCE Q&A]