# Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech (Parts I and II), Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson - Speaker: Peter Thiel - Venue: Hoover Institution, Stanford. Uncommon Knowledge (video podcast) - Date: Recorded 8 October 2024. Part I released 18 November 2024; Part II released 7 December 2024. - URL: Part I: https://www.hoover.org/research/apocalypse-now-peter-thiel-ancient-prophecies-and-modern-tech ; Part II video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ydZX8ajBa4 (Hoover channel) - Source method: Third-party transcripts published by The Singju Post (https://singjupost.com/transcript-apocalypse-now-peter-thiel-on-ancient-prophecies-and-modern-tech/ and https://singjupost.com/transcript-of-part-ii-apocalypse-now-peter-thiel-on-ancient-prophecies-and-modern-tech/). Spot-checked against the Hoover page excerpt (the "frying pan into the fire" passage matches word for word). In Part II the transcriber labels Robinson "INTERVIEWER". --- ## Part I PETER ROBINSON: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. The End Times, Armageddon, the Antichrist. If you suppose the only people who take those concepts seriously are snake handlers and the hollers of Kentucky, think again. Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I’m Peter Robinson. Peter Thiel earned his undergraduate and law degrees here at Stanford. He was a co-founder of PayPal, the firm that all but invented FinTech, the first outside investor in Facebook, the firm that all but invented social networks, and a co-founder of Palantir, the firm that all but invented defense tech. Although he’s staying out of politics, this year, Mr. Thiel has had a hand in launching the careers of a number of political figures, including J. D. Vance. Mr. Thiel speaks often on philosophy, religion, tech, and society in forums as diverse as the Cambridge Union, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Joe Rogan Experience. You gave Joe Rogan three hours. Peter, it’s about time you came back. PETER THIEL: I was trapped for three hours there. ## The End Times PETER ROBINSON: Peter Thiel on The End Times. Today, by the way, this is going to be episode one of two, our first conversation on this very large topic. Peter, two quotations. Matthew 24:35-36, quote, “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven,” close quote. Peter Thiel, we don’t know the day and the hour, but maybe we can guess the century. Explain yourself. PETER THIEL: Well, man, you know, this is a very broad topic. It’s in this larger question about the extraordinary history of our time. The modern world, maybe Renaissance onward, has been this world of ever-progressing scientific and technological development. And there is this very profound sense that there are things that change, the dimensions of technology, military technology, communications technology, where things are not timeless and eternal. There was a gunpowder revolution in the 17th century, and that changed the social structure and the political structure. And there is a certain arc to history. It’s not just technology, but it is a driver. And certainly, and again, many different ways of getting at this, but there certainly are dimensions of the technology that have become extremely powerful in the last century or two that have an apocalyptic dimension. And perhaps it’s strange not to try to relate it to the biblical tradition. Nuclear weapons can rain down fire and brimstone and destroy the world. And then we have a biblical tradition that maybe doesn’t say that this is inevitably going to happen, but that something like this might well happen if humans are left to their own devices. Should we at least be asking questions, figure out ways for these things to inform one another? ## The Role of Universities PETER ROBINSON: So obviously, we’ll come in a moment to the analyses, to the signs of the times. But first, a moment on why you’re asking these questions. And as I understand your argument, Peter, you feel you need to ask them and to prompt a conversation, at least in part, because universities won’t, which is odd in some ways. The biblical framework, these texts may be 2000 years old, but they’ve informed Western civilization and taken up the time of scholars through these centuries. It has been an understanding in Western culture, Western culture at least, that history is going someplace. And if there is an endpoint, no matter how far off in the future it may be, we’re closer to it now than we were 2000. All right. So all of these seem to me plausible, valid, and serious questions. Why are universities ill-equipped to grapple with this? PETER THIEL: Well, that’s very over-determined. But certainly, there’s some relationship between the university and the universe. It is supposed to somehow, in its ideal form, in its early modern 17th, 18th century form, the university was supposed to represent some kind of integration of knowledge across a lot of disciplines where they all would fit together. And for a variety of reasons one can cite, this has broken down over time. There are ideological reasons, but maybe there also are practical reasons where the amount of knowledge became too great for any single person to master. And then you had division of ever narrower sub-disciplines. Adam Smith has this metaphor in the 19th century of a pin factory, manufacturing pins, and there are 100 people in the pin factory, and they’re all doing different things, and nobody knows how to make a pin anymore. So it’s efficient, but it’s this hyper-specialization. And there’s probably been an analog to that on the university side where maybe someone like Goethe could still understand something about everything, or Hilbert, a great mathematician around 1900, could still understand all of math. And he would set these 25 problems for the 20th century for mathematicians to solve, in some ways, set the agenda for the field of mathematics. And even as rigorous a subject area as mathematics, in some ways, has devolved into something close to literary theory where, you know, one mathematician doesn’t know what the other one’s doing, and it’s sort of these very incommensurate modes of discourse, and anything that has to do with making sense of the larger whole has gotten badly lost. And I thought for a long time that we need to ask a variety of questions about the larger whole. You know, one kind of a scientific and technological question is simply, are we still progressing as we were in early modernity? Are things, by whatever metric you choose, are they getting better? Is life expectancy going up? Is the GDP increasing? Is the quality of life by various metrics going up? Are we going faster? You know, we’re moving from planes to supersonic planes to space planes. And that seems like a very basic kind of macroeconomic question, incredibly hard to ask, but surely an important one. And then, you know, there are, and I’ve spoken about this in many other contexts, but my intuition is that in many places there’s been relative stagnation, the hyper-specialization disguises a certain type of decadence. We have these narrow experts saying how, you know, wonderful they are, the cancer cell people sell it. Cancer researchers say they’re going to cure cancer in the next five years, and the string peoples say they’re the smartest physicists and they know everything, but maybe it’s just some weird academic power game where they’re blocking everybody else, and on and on. And so there is, you know, even before we get to the big question of history, there’s a question just of, you know, the history of science and technology. It progressed a lot. Maybe it’s progressing more slowly. Why has that changed? What’s going on there? PETER ROBINSON: You said, so fragmentation, hyper-specialization in the university, the feeling of kind of disintegration into silos, that’s one aspect of it. Another aspect of it, I’m checking this, and this is the form of a question, is whether an extreme rationalism maybe emerges from that specialization or maybe informs it. But I’ve heard you say, I’ve got a quotation here from you, “under the rationalist view, you can’t even talk about the end of your own life, let alone the end of the world.” That there’s something about the regnant view, I’m trying to resist the word ideology, because ideology isn’t quite the right, but the way the university conducts its business rules out questions of life, death, sin, redemption, the meaning of history. And yet those are the, so what I’m trying to get at is special, hyper-specialization, yes. Is there also something else, something about the sheer, the regnant view that makes it very hard for universities to grapple with big questions? PETER THIEL: Yes, they seem hard to grapple with it. Why is probably harder to say? Certainly, if we do something like the radical life extension project, you know, people in the 17th, 18th centuries were very optimistic about it. Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon, you know, you had all these ideas that you could extend human lifespan by centuries. As late as the late 19th, early 20th century, there was a movement called Cosmism in the sort of, around the time of the Soviet revolution, 1920s Soviet Union. And it claimed that for the revolution to succeed, you had to physically resurrect all the dead people using science. And it was workers of the world unite, and to sort of get with the times, their slogan was dead of the world, unite. And then, of course, they didn’t make much progress on this. And then at some point, by the time you get to Stalin and the show trials, and the death seemed to be going up, not down. But there was a moment when they thought it might even be possible. There was an incredible ambition and incredible energy to modern science. It was perhaps downstream from Christianity. If the promise of Christianity is a physical resurrection, then science could offer that too. It was a possibility. Maybe it was a rival to Christianity. You know, you don’t need Christianity if we can do it through science. And then there is a strange way that the project in many dimensions feels very exhausted, even though, of course, people still genuflect to science. They believe in science with a capital S. But the ambition has been really beaten out. If you look at the individual scientists, it’s sort of, it’s much less of this sort of heroic, you know, bold figure breaks with dogmas and thinks for him or herself. And it’s much more, you know, in late modernity, you’re, I don’t know, you’re just a robot in a, you know, ever smaller talk in an ever bigger machine or something like this. ## The Apocalypse PETER ROBINSON: Right. This notion of the end of times in the biblical framework, Rene Girard, Rene Girard, an important figure here, professor of French literature here at Stanford, but also a theologian. I think it’s fair to call him a theologian and philosopher, wrote very, very widely, although that was outside his Stanford work. You became friends with him. It happens that he was a neighbor of mine. We both knew Rene. All right. Rene Girard in 2009. Few still talk about the apocalypse. The apocalypse, of course, is the word referring to the destruction or end of the world, as described in the book of Revelation. Rene: “Few still talk about the apocalypse. And they usually have a completely mythological conception of it. Strangely, they do not see that the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing and that is looming over our own heads is entirely sufficient to trigger the worst,” close quote. So there we come to the first question about how you understand these things. The apocalypse, as presented in the biblical framework, as symbols of spiritual realities or the apocalypse as a plain prediction about how the world could or indeed will end. PETER THIEL: Yeah, it’s, let’s see, it is the way Girard would have put it and the way I came to see it as well, was it in some sense, the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do in a world in which they have ever more powerful technologies, in which there are no sacred limits on the use of these technologies, in which human nature has not, you know, maybe not gotten worse, but has not gotten better. And it has this sort of, you know, limitless violence aspect to it. And I think Girard had all these sort of provocative formulations, like it is just a scientific prediction of what humanity is likely to do in a world of ever more powerful, ever more powerful technology. And then, you know, there sort of are all these different things when we say in terms of the biblical apocalyptic accounts, but Girard was very skeptical of the idea that somehow the violence came from God. And he always thought that, you know, atheists and fundamentalists disagree on the secondary and relatively not so important question of whether or not God exists. But they agree on the far more important question that one of God’s attributes is violence. And so the violence comes from God. And this is, you know, this is the new atheist. PETER ROBINSON: In the evangelical view, the destruction of the world is God exercising justice on the world. PETER THIEL: It is. Yeah, right. It’s some version of justice, anger, wrath, some version of the anger, wrath of God. And then, you know, the atheist one’s a little bit stranger because you don’t really believe God exists. But still, it is somehow, you know, it’s not humanity. Humanity, you know, is not that dangerous, at least in sort of the mainstream, you know, Lockean, Rousseauian accounts. PETER ROBINSON: So you’ve made the point, I must admit, I’d forgotten this. You’ve made the point that Rene used to observe that the church, the Catholic Church in its liturgy and in homilies used to make quite a lot of the end times and warn people to prepare for judgment and so forth. Up until 1945, when the church seems to have decided to go easier on that because people needed comfort more than exhortation about the end times. Obvious point. What happened in 1945? PETER THIEL: Well, we got nuclear weapons and the stuff became real in a way that seemed completely implausible in the 17th, 18th century. I mean, when people were writing about these things in the 18th, even 19th century, it was the idea that the world was just too big a place. It could not possibly be destroyed. We didn’t believe God would do it. We no longer believe that God was so violent that God would do it if he existed. And then the technology was getting more powerful, but it didn’t quite seem possible to do something on a worldwide scale. The Napoleonic wars are quite violent. World War I is significantly worse, but it’s still somehow localized. It’s not the whole planet. And then there is something that gets released with nuclear weapons and maybe even more with thermonuclear weapons. And then you end up building not dozens, but thousands and thousands of them in the 60s and 70s. PETER ROBINSON: Rene’s point that the apocalyptic literature correctly read is simply a prediction of what human beings will do to each other suddenly becomes, up until 1945, quite a minute, how could human beings possibly be responsible for the end of the world? And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the answer is only too obvious. PETER THIEL: There’s liberal theologian writing in 1780, the argument for why you should read apocalyptic literature is because occasionally you get these millenary movements and people go crazy. And it’s worth reminding yourselves of the madness of crowds. And then the secondary reason you can read it is for your amusement. And that was sort of the enlightenment optimism circa 1780. And there were, of course, all these incredibly scary ideas. The Antichrist would kill so many people, he would come with a crematorium to burn the bodies of all the people he killed. And it was just this sort of war of medieval notions people had. And of course, then after the end of Hitler in 1945, this stuff just wasn’t so funny anymore. And then Gerard’s intuition was that it’s almost like when a knowledge becomes too real and too close, it’s like some, I don’t like psychological repression or something like this, but you want to sort of steer away from it. PETER ROBINSON: We can’t bear to look at it. PETER THIEL: We don’t want to talk about it quite as much. We need to reassure people, we need to tell people this is not really what it’s about. And of course, there were all these strange elements of the mythical that were brought in. It was named after all these terrible gods from ancient Greece, with Saturn, the god who ate his own children, and Zeus throws down thunderbolts, and we have fire raining down with Jupiter rockets from the heavens. There was this strange return of the mythical in this very, in the equations of the physicists. ## The Threat of Advanced Technology PETER ROBINSON: Development since 1940. Again, Rene, “the violence we ourselves are in the process of amassing.” So development since 1945, two quotations here. Sir Martin Rees in his 2003 book, “Our Final Century.” There’s a cheerful title for you. “The nuclear threat will be overshadowed by others that could be as destructive and far less controllable. Advanced technology will offer new instruments for creating terror and devastation. Instant universal communications will amplify their societal impact.” This is over 20 years ago. “Disastrous accidents, for instance, the unintended creation and release of a noxious, fast-spreading pathogen are possible. I think the odds are no better than 50-50 that we will survive to the end of the present century.” Quotation two, Revelation 16:16, “and the demonic spirits assembled the kings at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.” I want to get the word Armageddon in here, because you use it. It’s important in your analysis. Okay, so the notion is the idea of some kind of final cataclysmic event. Revelation tells us that in a book written some 2,000 years ago. Martin Rees’s book is written 21 years ago, and it’s all entirely plausible. PETER THIEL: Sure, and I think there is a way we can come back to this in describing all of this in a much more rationalist, non-theological way. So you can talk about existential risk, and there is existential risk of nuclear war. There’s existential risk of bio-weapons or dangerously engineered bio-weapons, maybe of AI and killer robots or autonomous weapon systems guided by AI. There is existential risk around the environment, maybe not just climate change, but maybe there’s all sorts of other dimensions where there’s some argument. We have one planet, and you want to be a little bit careful and not mess it up totally. ## Artificial Intelligence PETER ROBINSON: Peter, on AI, I’ve never had a chance to just put this one to you. I’ve never, I don’t know as much about it as you, obviously, but I’ve been aware of a technology that was so polarizing from the get-go. There are plenty of people who say, calm down, AI is going to lead to one medical breakthrough after another. It’ll produce such abundance that we don’t need to worry about jobs. We’ll be able to provide for our pets one. And then, of course, there’s this other strain that will have military, well, here, Henry Kissinger. I found this good quotation from Kissinger’s last book, which he wrote with Eric Schmidt. Quote, “if you imagine a war between China and the United States, you have artificial intelligence weapons. Nobody has really tested these things on a broad scale, and you can’t tell exactly what will happen when AI fireplanes on both sides interact. So you are then in a world of potentially total destructiveness,” close quote. And your view, how are we to understand AI? PETER THIEL: Well, partially it’s unknown. It can mean a lot of different things. It’s poorly defined. AI can mean the next generation of computers, the last generation of computers, anything in between. You know, I think the classic definition of AI was something that passed the Turing test and that could fool you into thinking it was a human being. In some sense, that had not been passed, but was passed by ChatGPT in late 22, early 23. And so that is a pretty significant development. PETER ROBINSON: Does it feel like an inflection point as important as 1945? PETER THIEL: I think it’s on par. Let’s say in the computer world, I think it’s on par with the internet in the late 90s. And then there are so many different ways it can be applied that it’s, you know, that are good and that are dangerous that it’s hard to know how to quite weight them all out. But if I had to score the Silicon Valley debate, I’m not on the Luddite side. I always try to be more on the pro-tech side. But if I had to score it as a debate, I do believe the effective altruists are winning the argument. And the argument is something like there are a lot of dangerous corner cases with this technology and we should be really careful. We don’t quite know how it’s going to work. Maybe it doesn’t become a godlike intelligence, which is some of the sort of futuristic transhumanist nonsense. But it could just be this autonomous weapon system on a drone where we want to make them autonomous because if you have a human in the loop, the human gets jammed. So there’s a logic to a lot of these things where, and then the aspects of it become more first strike type weapons. And there’s some kind of crazy arms race between the US and communist China. Then how does this affect that arms race and change it? So there are sort of a lot of questions like that. I would say the larger existential risk point that I’ve always made is that there’s a way in which the people who are worried about these existential risks, and you can also criticize them and criticize them for being Luddites and et cetera, but you can also criticize them for not being apocalyptic enough because most of the time they’re just focused on one. It’s like the nuclear weapons people are still just talking about nukes and Greta, it’s just the climate. She’s not worried about AI and she’s not worried about nukes and much less the COVID virus that was bioengineered in the Wuhan lab or something like this. I’ve often thought you should get all these people who are worried about existential risk in a room and they have to fight it out and decide which ones really matter and how to prioritize them. And in some sense, the scary answer is there’s some truth to all of them. And then if we were to do that exercise fully, what I would want to do is I would also like to throw in one more existential risk that in my mind is as big as all these technological risks of nuclear war and runaway bioweapons and weaponized AI with autonomous weapon systems. And that’s the risk of a totalitarian one-world government. And again, like with all the other existential risks, it’s hard to know how to measure these things probabilistically because we only have one world. Once you get a totalitarian one-world government, you can’t reverse it. And then the reason I like to throw that risk in is that it seems to me that the implicit solution to existential risks of all the other sorts is to lean in to a sort of very non-democratic one-world state that will highly regulate and stop these technologies. And if Greta gets everyone on the planet to ride a bicycle, maybe that’s a way to solve climate change, but it has sort of this quality of going from the frying pan into the fire. ## The Slowing of Progress PETER ROBINSON: Right. Again, if I understand your argument, this is already clear in the way we lead our lives in this slowing of progress. Now, this seems to me is worth dwelling on because it shows that the fear is real and has genuine effects in the way we all lead our lives, but we have to spend a moment or two defining it. So if I may, let me start with a quotation from you. “There has been a narrow cone of progress around computers, the internet, and maybe now artificial intelligence. But if tech means producing more with less, then we should be seeing dramatic economic progress. We don’t. The millennials are not dramatically better off than their boomer parents,” close quote. Okay. So you mentioned it a moment ago, but return to this notion of slowing technical progress, this great disappointment by contrast, what we see around us today, what we feel around us today, by contrast with a century or so ago. PETER THIEL: Or even late 60s. PETER ROBINSON: Yes, yes. PETER THIEL: Star Trek, the sort of optimistic science fiction of the 50s and 60s, where we’d have flying cars, you’d have supersonic aviation everywhere, all sorts of cures for diseases. And yes, there was an incredible amount of progress in this world of bits, much less in the world of atoms. I always think a lot of what we do is embedded in this physical world of atoms. And so when that slows, that’s definitely felt as quite stagnant. The question I always then get at, and then you get into endless debates, is this true? Or is there still a lot of progress? How would one measure it? I tend to measure it in things like these economic terms and the way that the average millennial is having a tougher time than their boomer parents at the same point in life. And so at least there’s something, even if we’re not completely stuck, it’s in some sense not really moving as fast as it used to. And then there’s always a question of why this is, and why questions are overdetermined. And as a libertarian, I always like to say it’s too regulated, and the FDA regulates the drugs too much. If you regulated drugs, if you regulated video games like the FDA regulates drugs, we’d still all just be playing Pong. And so there’s a libertarian anti-regulatory thing. There is an argument that the schools aren’t teaching people, and they’re not teaching people to be scientists. Some of the educational institutions are broken, this sort of an anti-liberal argument. Some truth in all of this. There is a Tyler Cohen argument that somehow the low-hanging fruit was picked. There was a bunch of easy discoveries to make, and now nature’s cupboard is kind of bare, and you have to reach really hard to make a modest discovery. And maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s just sort of a self-serving excuse of baby boomers who didn’t do as much as the generations that came before. But it is very striking. One way to quantify this, even if we say the rate of progress in broad fields is the same as it was a hundred years ago, not that it’s slowed, but even if we say it’s the same, if you think of PhDs, there are probably a hundred times as many PhDs today as there were in, say, 1924. And so it’s the same rate of progress. And the average PhD is 99% less productive than people were a hundred years ago. And that doesn’t seem like a very healthy scientific ecosystem. So there’s some sense that maybe it’s slowed. But the overarching explanation that I’ve come to think is a very important one is just this idea that in some way, science and technology were this trap that humanity was building for itself, that there were these apocalyptic risks, and maybe going very slow was better than racing towards Armageddon. I was born in 1967. I always often express frustration that I’m stuck in these office buildings or houses that are decades old. There are all these parts of our society that feel lame, slow-changing, low energy, low testosterone, nothing is going on. And then I do wonder if we were in a Judson’s type world, we might not even be sitting here to talk about it. It might have self-destructed by that. If you had a JFK as president on amphetamines going mano a mano with Khrushchev, it worked. In 1962, it would have worked every time. PETER ROBINSON: So by the way, I didn’t make a note of this, but someplace I saw you say that Facebook had 10 years of good press. In other words, 10 years of optimism before the project curdled in the public mind, and that AI went from good to bad in about a month. This loss of optimism. So I have a quotation here, “there are many explanations for this deceleration in tech,” this is you, “but the explanation, I believe, tech got scary. We’re leery of it now. We’re not embracing it in the way that we used to.” Add to that the notion that, again, I’m thinking this through, but I’m putting it to you as a question. This isn’t the way things were supposed to be when the Cold War ended. PETER THIEL: Sure. PETER ROBINSON: Right? Sure. Russia was supposed to work. There was a democracy and free markets. And instead, we have this crazy man, Putin, invading Ukraine. By now, there should have been at least some kind of rudimentary peace in the Mideast. Perhaps the most striking contradiction of what we expect was that by now, China was supposed to be democratic, it was supposed to follow the pattern of South Korea and Taiwan, where first you have economic growth and economic growth creates expectations, including expectations of freedom, free speech, and these countries become democratic. China was supposed to follow that. Things are not going the way they were supposed to. Add to that our own sense of polarization in this country, that this country somehow, and there’s just a lot of feeling of it’s subjective. It’s very difficult to get at, but it feels to me as though there’s a lot of free floating dread. And it’s hard to articulate. PETER THIEL: Very hard. I’ll give one example and you can think about this what you will, but a lot of my conservative friends are very critical of Fauci and all the lockdowns and the masks and the social distancing and the vaccine that didn’t really work. And on the surface level, these critiques are, I think, quite legitimate. It was not the correct protocol for some kind of flu. It was, however, roughly the right protocol if you thought it was a bioweapon. And if you think it’s a very dangerous, humanly engineered bioweapon, those are roughly all the kinds of things that you might do. And so the kind of critique I have of Fauci is that, yeah, that’s what he was scared of, I think. That’s why I steel man him, give him the benefit of the doubt. And then the real critique is that you weren’t supposed to infantilize our population and not talk about it. And that’s what he was scared about. And he was so scared about it, he couldn’t even talk about it. And there probably are a lot of things like this where, yeah, there is this pretty inchoate fear, but we’re so scared we can’t even talk about it cogently. ## The Concept of the Catechon PETER ROBINSON: There’s one more concept we need to flesh out, a term that you use. We’ll put all the pieces of this together, although that may happen in the second part of our conversation. And that is the catechon. The term comes from the Greek for he or that, which restrains. We’ll come in a moment to your analysis of the catechon through history. But first, again, the concept itself, St. Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians, chapter two, verses six to seven. “And now you know what is restraining,” again, in Greek catechon. “And now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. Only he who restrains,” the catechon, “he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way,” close quote. Now, that’s a very enigmatic passage. The church has never defined the term. The church fathers, the early writers and thinkers in the church, wrote about it, but tended to add that their views were speculative. So we don’t have any thoroughly worked out theology of the catechon, but we do have, 2,000 years ago in St. Paul, a notion of some force holding back chaos, holding back evil, holding back some force that’s restraining. We get to Cardinal Newman, writing in the 19th century, Cardinal Newman, a great thinker and theologian, in my judgment, the best pro stylist of the whole century in English. Cardinal Newman writes, “we know from prophecy that the present framework of society and government is that which withholdeth,” again, the catechon. So he identifies it with a framework of society and government. All right. That’s my little effort to present the concept of the catechon. You use that concept how? You identify the catechon through history. PETER THIEL: Yes. As you said, it’s a rather mysterious concept. You can identify it with the good aspects of the Roman Empire, certain political aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, individuals, institutions that somehow are trying to hold this runaway chaos in check. I don’t think it’s purely reactionary. You can think of Metternich post-Napoleon, this sort of catechontic, but he’s also modernizing. It is a thing of history though. And so there are ways to do it that can be good for a time, but that will not necessarily work for all times. But I would always maybe go back to the apocalyptic specter would be Antichrist or Armageddon. And I think there is a lot in this runaway science technology that’s pushing us towards something like Armageddon. And then there is the natural pushback on this is we will avoid Armageddon by having a one world state that has real teeth, real power. And the biblical term for that is the Antichrist. And the Christian intuition I have is, I don’t want Antichrist. I don’t want Armageddon. I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both. And then certainly there are ways that you defer it if you can. You try to do new things. I don’t think it’s a purely reactionary thing. It’s not a pure Benedictine option where you just retreat into a monastery or something like that. I think that’s the most accelerationous thing possible. That’s resisting. It sort of clears the field. It’s like the Lord Acton line, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. And so this is where I’m always, the Benedictine option can be good for personal sanctification, but to the extent we’re talking about society. PETER ROBINSON: Rod Dreher wrote a book about this. The idea is that Christians simply drop out. Society is going in the wrong direction and Christians simply drop out. PETER THIEL: And I don’t want to argue with him on the level of personal sanctification or people saving their souls. My political social intuition is that it’s the height of irresponsibility because that is just in effect hitting the accelerator towards the Antichrist Armageddon. ## The Antichrist in Scripture PETER ROBINSON: Okay. Let’s finish this first part of our conversation with more on the Antichrist. Let me take a moment to set this up, if I may. A few passages from Scripture. Daniel chapter 7, “in the first year of Belshazzar, king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream. There before me was a beast, fearful, terrifying, very strong. It had great iron teeth and it ate its victims and trampled their remains underfoot.” Second Thessalonians chapter 2, we’re back to St. Paul. He’s writing about the end times. “It cannot happen until there has appeared the wicked one, the lost one, the enemy who raises himself above every object of worship and flaunts the claim that he is God.” Revelation chapter 13, “then I saw a beast emerge from the sea and they prostrated themselves in front of the beast saying, who can compare with the beast? Who can fight against it? And all the people of the world will worship it.” There are people who take all of this seriously. We’ve already quoted Rene Girard. We’ve already quoted Cardinal Newman. But Daniel dates from the Iron Age. Thessalonians and Revelation are 2000 years old. Contemporary society, we sit here in Stanford University, contemporary society all but ignores these texts or derides them of interest only to snake handlers, as I mentioned, snake handlers in Kentucky hollers. You are no snake handler. PETER THIEL: Not that I’m aware of. PETER ROBINSON: Not that I’m aware of. So we’ll come to how the Antichrist might arise, what we must do to people. We’ll come to that in our second conversation. But the first thing I want to establish is why do you take this seriously? PETER THIEL: Well, again, one can take it seriously without taking it completely literally. But just let me maybe defend Daniel and the Old Testament prophet. And if you contrast it with, let’s say, a Greco-Roman understanding of history, Thucydides, Herodotus. Thucydides writes the account of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. And it has a timeless and eternal character. It’s the rising power against the existing power. Athens, the rising power. And the Thucydides trap is when this repeats itself with Wilhelmine Germany against Britain in 1914, or perhaps today, China against the US. It’s timeless and eternal. The particulars don’t matter. The speeches people give don’t matter. Thucydides makes them up. And it’s sort of like a natural, cyclical kind of a view of history or one where there is no specific history. By contrast, I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say something like Daniel was the first historian where the things that matter are one time and world historical. And there was a creation, there was a fall, there’s a mosaic revelation. It’s going somewhere. And the choices people make matter. And some of the choices matter in a very, very big way. And in this way, that Christ’s ministry and death and resurrection was a part of history or a hinge moment of history. And then there are ways it continues. And I think that that’s sort of a feel for history. And something like Hegel is just a pale shadow of the Judeo-Christian sense of history. You know, you could say, we’re going to have to qualify this very carefully, but you could say that the New Testament God is the first progressive because the new supersedes the old. And so it’s the first time that there is something new, just by virtue of it being new, something new that comes in through history. All these ways you have to qualify it. If you go too progressive, you get to something like Marcion or Marx. But if you say it’s all in the Old Testament, that’s not quite right either. PETER ROBINSON: So you take it seriously because you don’t believe history is Groundhog Day. It doesn’t happen over and over and over again, this cyclical aspect, the eternal recurrence, in some fundamental way, the meaninglessness of it. History is going someplace. And if it’s going someplace, that means there will be an endpoint. PETER THIEL: And there are important things that will happen that are different from things that happened in the past. And so if we want to have a feel for our times, for what is going on in the world in the early 21st century, there are ways we can try to reference it to the past. You could say there’s some parallel between the decline of the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire. But the differences are surely really important. It’s happening in a world of nuclear weapons and instantaneous communication. And and, you know, it’s happening in a very post-Christian or hyper-Christian world, not in a pagan world. And somehow, the classical approaches to history always downplay the things that are, you know, one-time, unique, world historical. And I think we should take our bearings more from that. PETER ROBINSON: Peter Thiel, thank you. Join us for part two. This is a sentence I never thought I’d utter. Join us for part two to hear about the Antichrist. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson. ## Part II ## Introduction INTERVIEWER: One of the most sophisticated men in America, brilliant or bane, an immensely successful entrepreneur, one of the most sophisticated men in America taking ancient prophecies seriously. Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I’m Peter Robinson. Peter Thiel received his undergraduate and law degrees here at Stanford. He cofounded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook, and cofounded Palantir and remains an important tech investor. He has also established himself as a remarkable thinker. A self-described contrarian, Peter Thiel has never proven more contrary than in taking seriously the biblical framework for probing the meaning of history and what ancient prophecies might help us to think, to understand about our predicament today. I should note that although viewers will find this second conversation interesting enough on its own, I’m sure of that, the conversation may prove even more striking if they’ve already watched our first conversation, which you’ll be able to find on YouTube. Peter, welcome back. ## The Antichrist: Ancient Prophecy in Modern Times INTERVIEWER: The Antichrist. Cardinal Newman, the great nineteenth century author and theologian, writes that it is the duty, that’s a quote from Newman, the duty of believers, quote, “ever to be watching for the end times,” and above all, to keep in mind the great and awful sign of which Saint Paul speaks to the Thessalonians. The emergence of, quote, “the very image of Satan, the fearful and hateful antichrist,” close quote. As I understand your argument, you hold, one, that the prophecy of an antichrist in one way or another remains valid or at least useful. Two, that it remains our duty, again, Cardinal Newman’s word duty, to watch for the signs that it might emerge. And three, that that duty is now almost entirely neglected and forgotten. Fair? PETER THIEL: Yes. INTERVIEWER: Okay. Tell us, go ahead. PETER THIEL: There’s so many different things one can say about it. I think it was Ivan Illich who said that in the time before Christ, there were many forerunners to Christ. In the time after Christ, there will be many forerunners of the antichrist. So in some sense, it’s a type. So Nero was a type of the antichrist, or maybe Napoleon was a type of the antichrist. It’s someone which aspires for world domination, the creation of this sort of one world state. In some ways Alexander the Great was sort of a pre-Christ prototype of the antichrist. It’s very parallel to Christ. They both die at thirty-three. Alexander conquers the world. Christ saves us. It’s a sort of a compare and contrast. But in some sense, the antichrist as an idea is something that really comes into being in the world after Christ. And there’s a lot of things about it that are mysterious. In some ways, the antichrist copies Christ. The antichrist pretends to be greater than Christ. Hyper-Christian, ultra-Christian, and then maybe only ultimately, deeply, deeply anti-Christian. INTERVIEWER: So you point… Go ahead. PETER THIEL: And then you can think of it as the system, where maybe communism is a one world system. So it can be an ideology or a system. And then of course, you can also think of it as Newman did, where it’s sort of the final dictator of one world state, where it’s still stressed more as a person. You can leave it as a type, a system, a person. It has something to do in this post-Christian world. It is in some ways related to Christ in a very complicated way. So the theological question you can always ask is, is it possible to be too Christian? And in theory, no. But in practice, if you think you’re more Christian than Christ, you’re in trouble. ## Fictional Portrayals of the Antichrist INTERVIEWER: From a prophecy two thousand years old to our own times, you draw attention to two portrayals, fictional portrayals of an antichrist from about a century ago. Vladimir Solovyev, a Russian mystic, in 1900 wrote a novella, “A Short Tale of the Antichrist,” and then a 1905 novel by a Roman Catholic English priest called Robert Hugh Benson, and the novel is “Lord of the World.” In both of these fictional accounts, the Antichrist emerges as a charismatic figure, a kind of Superman. Solovyev, quote, “There was a remarkable person. Many called him a superman. He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul, he preferred himself.” In Benson, the Antichrist is portrayed again as a charismatic figure. He becomes president of Europe. Then in some mysterious way, he’s elected president of the world. But in both of those fictional accounts of a century ago, there’s a plot hole. We don’t we’re not given the mechanism by which this strange charismatic figure achieves dominance. And your argument is, again, if I understand it correctly, that now, today, a century after Solovyev and Robert Hugh Benson, we can understand a mechanism. We could imagine a mechanism by which such a figure might emerge. PETER THIEL: By the way, those are both fantastic books. I have a preference for the Solovyev one, but Benson and Solovyev are both terrific books. There are all these extraordinary ways that they still resonate one hundred years later. So Solovyev envisions the United States of Europe, sort of a European Union, the super state. In Benson, the Antichrist is a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. And I was a bit nervous about Bernie Sanders. INTERVIEWER: Not too much on the nose. PETER THIEL: There are elements of them where—by the way, you’re not quite the only person. I noticed in reading up on this, Benedict XVI several times mentioned approvingly the Robert Hugh Benson book, and Pope Francis over and over again has referred to it. So two popes and Peter Thiel. There are all sorts of parts of it where they have this feeling of being near great literature. But the plot hole is how does a world takeover actually happen? And it’s kind of not a deus ex machina, but it’s like a daemonium ex machina. It’s like the antichrist just gives these hypnotic speeches where nobody can remember a word and then sort of just swindles people’s souls out of them and they submit to this totalitarian state or something like this. And I think if we were to speculate on how to solve that plot hole, we have an answer in the world after 1945 that people in 1900, early twentieth century, were not yet scared of apocalyptic weapons. They could not imagine anything of the scale that we have by the second half of the twentieth century. And so the antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon. ## One World or None INTERVIEWER: Let’s show this brief video, which we will edit into the show, of course. “One world or none.” [Video plays: “There is no secret. When a neutron strikes the atom is swift. The least neutrons flick other atoms, the result is atomic energy.”] INTERVIEWER: So that’s the 1946 video. Everything about it, the images, the tension in the narrator’s voice, the background music, is to be scary. The choice is this or one world. That dates from 1946, as I said, but here’s a quotation from just a few years ago. From a paper titled “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” by the very hip technophilosopher Nick Bostrom. Quote, “What is needed to solve problems that involve challenges of international coordination, challenges such as nukes, pandemic dangers, techno threats, what is needed is effective global governance.” Franklin Roosevelt designed the United Nations to serve in some way as a kind of world parliament after the end of the Second World War. The United Nations didn’t work, but maybe FDR was just ahead of his time. PETER THIEL: Well, it is the same. This is the plot hole in Solovyev and Benson. And it’s an interesting question. What is the difference between the very secular language, “one world or none,” and then the sort of overly religious question, “Antichrist or Armageddon.” And my thesis is they’re somehow the same. If I had to say what the difference between those two ways of asking the questions are is, “antichrist or Armageddon,” it sounds like they’re both bad options. And that way of asking the question, it pushes us to find a third way and not to just steer from one into the other. “One world or none,” those sound like they’re exclusive, but they’re also exhaustive possibilities. And since we don’t want to have no world, we want the one world. ## The Problem with Global Governance INTERVIEWER: Harvard Law School, Adrian Vermeule, wants big government. He’s already argued for continent-wide government which would represent a step toward global governance. And his view is that if the government is based on some understanding of Christian ethics and you make sure that it reflects subsidiarity, the principle that problems should be solved by the smallest unit possible, then big government coordination, international coordination—this is a good thing, not a bad thing. And you just don’t buy that. PETER THIEL: I do not buy it. I think I’m much more in the Lord Acton camp that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it would be a power with no check. There would be no outside left. It would be, in a sense, the biggest crowd. It would be the biggest bubble. Probably a place where the Bible differs from enlightenment rationality. Enlightenment rationality believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the madness of crowds. And if you have a world state that’s in some sense the largest crowd, it’s the whole humanity closing in on itself—it’s a global mob. So there are these intuitions that are probably adjacent to ideas about the fallen nature of man and original sin that make me nervous about the one world state. Subsidiarity is good in theory and practice. The devil is in the details. And if too much of the power has to be at the top level—if you absolutize things like climate change or nuclear weapons control or things like this, that has to all be at the top echelon. It’s not going to be decided by the city of Palo Alto or by some kind of a subsidiary layer. I have sort of more prosaic intuitions where I wonder what would be the marginal tax rates in one world state where people couldn’t move. I suspect they would be quite high. It sort of would be like East Germany with no escape. You couldn’t move to Texas or Florida and get to zero income tax. And then I think California would push them higher and the US would push them higher. And the limit of that seems quite bad. And then of course, if you go down the Bostrom argument, you need effective global government and extremely effective global policing. And so if you think about things like AI technology, we have to stop anyone from programming the AI. And so you have to, in some sense, monitor every keystroke everywhere. So something that’s powerful enough to control the whole world. INTERVIEWER: So this goes back to your argument in our first conversation that for the first time in history, we can actually imagine human beings destroying the world. That’s quite a plot. Now, also, we have the mechanisms that would make world government a gigantic global surveillance state plausible. PETER THIEL: That seems plausible too. And I think, again, to come back to the Solovyev-Benson plot hole, on its own, they both seem not that desirable. Why would we have a crazy surveillance state? Why would we do this? But if you’re scared enough of these things, that’s the weapon. And this is where my speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time. INTERVIEWER: Peter Thiel, the Antichrist would talk about Armageddon all the time. He’d scare people, and then offer to save them. PETER THIEL: Yes. It’s the First Thessalonians 5:3, the slogan of the antichrist is “peace and safety.” And there’s nothing wrong with peace and safety, but you have to imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things. Then that’s where peace and safety gets you way more than it would have in 1750. INTERVIEWER: René Girard, in “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning,” one of his books: “The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver.” PETER THIEL: There are probably all these elements where it’s downstream from Christianity. You can think of “the poor shall inherit the earth,” Sermon on the Mount. Marxist theory is we’re going to be more Christian. We’re going to accelerate it. We’re going to bring it about faster. So the antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as a great redistributive figure, as an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist—all of those kinds of things. And these things are not simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong. There are ways Christ wants to unify the world. # Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech ## The Parable of the Good Samaritan and Forced Globalism PETER THIEL: You have the parable of the good Samaritan where you should take care of people even if you’re not related to them. That’s good to act like the good Samaritan and to take care of people not just in your family or tribe or country. But if you force everyone to be a good Samaritan and you force a borderless world, that’s somehow adjacent. Somehow it’s an intensification, but it’s somehow also very much the opposite. ## Scylla and Charybdis: The Twin Dangers INTERVIEWER: Scylla and Charybdis. And we come here. It’ll take me another moment to set this up, but we come here. We depart now from Peter Thiel’s analysis, and we come to Peter Thiel’s exhortation. What needs to be done? Step or two to complete the analysis and then leads to what needs to be done, what we need to questions at least we need to be asking. Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus is on his way home, and he has to sail past two sea monsters. Scylla is a six-headed monster who will devour sailors, and Charybdis is a whirlpool that swallows ships whole and then spits them back out. And, of course, they stand for sort of the horns of a dilemma. That’s the way Scylla and Charybdis get used, the phrase. Peter Thiel, everyone is worried about the Charybdis of Armageddon, nukes, pandemics, AI. Everyone is worried about the Charybdis of one world government, the Antichrist. Explain. PETER THIEL: Well, this just seems obviously correct. If you think about the language that we’ve been using in this program, Armageddon is not that taboo. You can just talk about that by referencing the newspapers. We are sleepwalking into Armageddon, maybe not in Ukraine or the Middle East, but maybe with Taiwan and China. So there are all these—everybody feels the dread. We can use Armageddon, and maybe it’s literal, and maybe it’s metaphorical, but that’s totally acceptable. So that tells you that’s not the thing that’s taboo. Antichrist is like, “Wow, what planet are you from?” And so that tells me that the existential risks are very selective of the sort that we’ve given, and the fears about a one world state are downplayed because they are the solution to the other ones. That is, the self-governing, politically atheist, humans governing themselves solution to Armageddon is what Bostrom says. It’s effective world government with extremely effective policing to stop dangerous technologies from being developed and to force people to not have too diverse a set of views because the diversity of views is what’s going to push some scientists to develop technology they shouldn’t be developing. And so we are just so grooved to the Antichrist solution. Don’t worry about it because it presents itself as the solution to all these others. And then my intuition is that what that tells me is that we should worry about both, but if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one’s worried about it. And of course, I don’t know how literally one should take these biblical accounts, but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first. Because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist perhaps. The Antichrist comes first. It doesn’t quite work. The one world state doesn’t work. It still goes haywire. Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad, and you still get to Armageddon. But that’s what comes first. ## Three Possibilities for the Future INTERVIEWER: As I understand it, you see three possibilities here. Now we begin to move toward what is to be done. One is to end globalization outright, end world trade, but that would produce a dramatic, all but unthinkable, drop in living standards. So end globalization, but that’s all but unthinkable. Two, permit globalization to continue in an unfettered manner, but that would be likely to lead to world government. Three, permit globalization to continue but only in a permissible, good, salutary way, limited, tame it, make sure it never supplants nation states. Quote Peter Thiel, “Our only chance of achieving good globalization is to be critical of globalization, to recognize the narrowness of the path.” Peter? PETER THIEL: Well, the way I would frame that is it’s certainly hard to see how things can work if we completely deglobalize. If you go back to this world that’s completely separated and with no trade, no flow of ideas between different parts of the world. INTERVIEWER: Eliminate the Internet and container shipping, and you’ve got it. PETER THIEL: It’s easier said than done. And but then it’s precisely because we can’t simply turn the clock back on all globalization that we end up having what I would call this Stockholm Syndrome. And we, is globalization more good than bad? Is it just sort of a corrupt racket where, I don’t know, North Korea exports plutonium and counterfeit hundred dollar bills and imports Swedish prostitutes and whiskey or whatever they import? And so if you have this view that no globalization can’t be an option, you will have too Panglossian view of globalization. And this is my critique of the Fukuyama, Clinton, Bush, WTO, the new world order, free trade. It was always abstracted. Everything takes care of itself. It will all work out for the best. And at a minimum, you need to just always think there are so many bad forms of globalization. Our only chance of getting to a good one is to realize how tough it is. Maybe we should have trade treaties. We should negotiate them. They should always be negotiated by people who don’t believe in free trade. If you have someone who believes in free trade, we don’t need to pay attention to the details. It all always will work out for the best. So, yes, there’s a way I think one should try to negotiate these treaties, but you always want someone on your side who deeply doesn’t believe in it and who is going to hold out for all sorts of terms. And that’s sort of how we might get our way through. But I think we had all these versions of this, there’s this strange Chimerica, the sort of mythical fusion of China and America that is maybe twenty-eight years from Bush forty-one to Obama from something like ’88 to 2016. And we don’t want to go to a nuclear war with China. We probably don’t want to go to a major war, but it’s a very complicated way to manage this relationship. And simply the Panglossian intuitions that everything will automatically work out don’t probably don’t quite make it. There’s always a book I like to reference from 1910, “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angel. This is a pre-World War I book. 1910. And it is the world is connected through trade and finance that there cannot be a world war because it would just destroy more than it would create. And it was a massive bestseller in 1910. Angel actually gets a Nobel Peace Prize for the book in 1933 even though spectacularly wrong. But one of the lines in it was Britain going to war with Germany makes as much sense as London invading Hertfordshire, the adjacent county to London. It was just the stock market would go down more and you couldn’t do this and everyone would lose—yet that happened. And so the sort of glib globalization I think is not going to work and we need to ask a relentless number of hard questions about it. ## Technology and Growth PETER THIEL: I think we have to find some way to talk about these technologies where the technologies are dangerous, but it’s probably, in some senses, even more dangerous not to do them. It’s even more dangerous to have a society where there’s zero growth. If we go full on with the Club of Rome limits to growth, we have this fully Luddite program. That, again, my intuition is that that will end very badly politically. It’s going to be a zero sum, nasty, Malthusian society, and it will push towards something that’s much more autocratic, much more totalitarian because the pie won’t grow. People will be much nastier. ## Political Implications INTERVIEWER: So let me ask what you’re asking for a little bit here. You said at the Cambridge Union earlier this year that you were going to stay out of politics this time. So I won’t ask you about politics exactly. But you are arguing that we should be supporting candidates who put America first. Is that roughly where we’re going here? Skeptics of free trade, this all tends toward one side of the political argument. Or are you aiming this at universities and simply calling for renewed, far more practical debate, far more alive to the dangers that we now face that have never been faced by humanity before? PETER THIEL: Well, my starting answer for all these things is always, surely the first step is to think about these things really hard. Ask the questions that are not being asked. Questions that are not being asked. Maybe the way I framed them are too dramatic, but if that’s what it takes for us to ask these questions, that’s better than being stuck in some weird silly Groundhog Day game. I think my intuition is the stakes are very high. The political stakes are high because there are a lot of crazy things that can happen. It’s hard to evaluate which of these candidates are better. But it’s not just about the price of eggs or marginal inflation rates or things like this. It is about maintaining freedom in the US and also not sleepwalking into Armageddon. ## Awakening Sleeping Consciences INTERVIEWER: Peter, I have a confession to make. In my mind, when you first started talking about Scylla and Charybdis, this analysis, I wronged you. I thought to myself, this is Peter being Peter. He loves building intellectual models. He has the kind of mind that goes in that direction, Hegel, Weber, Strauss. Reality is of second order. The real importance here is the model, the intellectual model, because you enjoy it for its own sake. And I do think you do that—you do have a mind that looks for structures and frameworks. But here, then I come across this passage from our old friend Renée. This is Renée Girard in 2009: “The more probable the apocalypse becomes, the less we talk about it. Therefore, we have to awaken our sleeping consciences.” And I thought, this is not a game for Peter. You are taking this seriously. You believe that you see questions that need to be asked that are not being asked, and you are trying to awaken our sleeping consciences. Will you accept that compliment? PETER THIEL: I’ll take that. INTERVIEWER: So, Peter Thiel, I’m quoting you now. “What I hope to retrieve is a sense of the stakes of the urgency of the question. The stakes are really, really high. It seems very dangerous that we’re at a place where so few people are concerned about the Antichrist.” PETER THIEL: All the reasons we’ve gone through this. ## Public Response INTERVIEWER: What kind of response have you been getting? By the way, you haven’t written a book. I understand you’re thinking about a book on this, but you haven’t written a book yet. You’re still going through various iterations to talking to small groups of people. I heard you give a series of talks on this. What has the response been? PETER THIEL: It certainly takes a while for people to get into the frame, and then people are extremely engaged. And there is—it’s not like the anxiety doesn’t exist. It’s not like people think everything is quite as normal as it should be. And I think the point of it is not to be, in some sense, defeatist. This is just inscribed in the future. The point of it is to start thinking about what can be done, what some of the choices are. And Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, we can envision a third way. One world or none. That’s pretty hard to envision a third way. And so that’s where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it’s actually more hopeful. One world or none, those are the two options if you’re a political atheist. We have human self-government or human self-destruction. And it’s a choice of two incredible evils. And I don’t think these things are—I’m not a Calvinist. I don’t think these things are determined. INTERVIEWER: Or predestined. PETER THIEL: I always believe there’s a space for human agency, for us to shape history and a step has to be not to just bury our heads in the sand or whatever the equivalent is. ## The United States as Katechon or Antichrist? INTERVIEWER: So the United States, two quotations. Ronald Reagan: “It’s always been my belief that by a divine plan, this nation was placed between the two oceans to be sought out and found by those with a special brand of courage and love of freedom.” So could it be that the United States is itself a katechon, a restrainer, a force that by its economic power and military might and the example it sets to the world holds back the chaos. I would like to believe that. You and I aren’t that far apart in age. We both grew up when the country still worked under Reagan. Here’s a second quotation. This is Peter Thiel, quote, “one obvious candidate for the Antichrist is the United States.” Answer that without breaking my heart, please. PETER THIEL: I think the US is a natural candidate for both. Certainly, the Cold War history, 1949 to 1989, I think Christian democracy was catacontic. Anti-communism was the supranational ideology that stood against the one world state of communism. But if you think that the one world state is a military power, it’s a financial economic power, it is somehow an ideological power, there still is a natural way where if things go wrong in the US, it would be the fulfillment of FDR’s vision of the new dealers running the world. And so the US is, yeah, it is ground zero of globalization, and it’s ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization. We’re both. That’s why it matters so much. The president of the United States maybe is the katechon. Maybe it’s a type of antichrist. But presidential elections matter. They don’t matter for the president of Europe. And I think the intuition that they matter in the US is correct. I’m not saying that will be the case for all time, but certainly second half of the twentieth century and still today. ## Personal Faith and Political Action INTERVIEWER: A couple of last questions here. Renee Girard again in 2009, quote, “to make the revelation wholly good and not threatening at all, to eliminate this fear, this dread, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ,” close quote. Renee himself, as you know, ended his life as a very devout Catholic. Has this analysis had any effect on your own religious life, or is it in some way a kind of cop out to say, “oh, no. All we need to do is all practice personal holiness as best we can”? PETER THIEL: Well, Girard always said, you just need to go to church. Right. And I try to go to church. Renee would be very happy. And then at the same time, I also think that there is some part of it that is political or social or something like that. And maybe it’s always a way in which I’m not as much of a saint as I should be. But I want to always try some of both. Right. Both the personal and the political. I think Mother Teresa was a greater saint than Constantine, but there’s still a part of me that has a preference for the Christianity of Constantine. We still need something like that. ## Fear Not: Divine Assurance and Human Agency INTERVIEWER: Revelation is a very frightening book in my judgment in any event. We’ve got plagues and beasts and the end of the world. But at the very beginning, I went back to prepare for all of this. I went back and looked at Revelation again. At the very beginning of the vision that Saint John describes in the book of Revelation, here’s what we get: “Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning, I saw one like a son of man. His voice was like the sound of rushing water, and his face shone like the sun. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me saying, fear not. Fear not. I died, and behold, I am alive,” close quote. So what are we to do with this “fear not”? You’ve mentioned this a number of times, this notion. It’s always the problem in trying to understand history. What is going to happen no matter what we do, and what scope is there for personal action. “Fear not” is an injunction in the book of Revelation from Christ himself. So Christians are meant to take it very seriously. But you could easily take it as a kind of, “oh, it’ll all work out. There’s nothing I need to do. There’s nothing any of us need to do. It’s out of our hands. It’ll all work out.” What do you do with “fear not”? PETER THIEL: Well, this is sort of starting to get way, way, way above my theological pay grade. But I think it means something. I think God will work it all out no matter how bad the choices are we make. And so in some sense, in the end, God will work it out. And then at the same time, I’m not sure that we should always be looking at it from God’s point of view. From a human point of view, human agency matters. It surely matters a lot. ## Advice for the Young INTERVIEWER: Last question. Let me quote you one final time. Quote, “maybe people think about this stuff a lot more than they let on,” close quote. So what do you have to say to some bright twenty-something who does think about this stuff? What should some young American read? What should he or she do? What advice about how to lead a good life when we think we may be in the end times? What advice do you have for a young Peter Thiel? PETER THIEL: I’m always so bad in this department, but I’ll stumble through it. I think, if it’s too high a lift to go to church or something like that, I would say that it’s important to try to find a way to integrate your life. We’re fragmented in all these different ways and to integrate the knowledge, to connect what we think is going on in your life with history, with our society. We need to somehow not have this postmodern MTV-like incoherence. And there’s some way that asking these questions is a way to try to—we need somewhat more integration. We need to somehow pull things back together. It’s what the universities were supposed to do. Don’t think they will do it. INTERVIEWER: After years of deconstruction, you’re calling for an active reconstruction. PETER THIEL: Yeah. It may not happen in the progressive cult that is the university. But still, there’s, you know, it is really a time for Reconstruction. INTERVIEWER: Peter Thiel. Thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson.