Behind the Bastards - Part One: Peter Thiel and the Anti-Christ

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Robert sits down with Sarah Marshall to discuss just what Peter Thiel believes about the antichrist and who he thinks is destroying the world. (2 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cool Zone Media Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans is still waking up, still kind of hungover, which I know I've introduced like a third of our episodes that way, and it might lead some of you to wonder, does Robert have a problem? And the answer to that question is, no, I have a solution. Sophie, how are you doing today? I'm in pain, but my best friend's here, so. That's a win. and you my other best friend

I have two I have two It's okay I know where I stand I know where I stand Yeah Sarah Marshall Welcome to the show Hello Robert

A pyramid is the strongest shape Or well I guess a triangle That's right But a pyramid if you're in marketing I Sophie I'm so happy to be here with you My legend my queen And Robert

You A guy who is also here I'm just kidding Thank you So I like, and I think of you every time I see a goat. Every time you see a goat. Okay, that's good, because there's a lot of those out there. You and Sophie were talking about your beautiful friendship, and it made me think about

the differences between, like, deep male and deep female friendships, because when I was thinking back to my stories with my best friend, it's all the different times that either I puked on Lenny or Lenny puked on me. I have one of those stories, but only one. Yeah. Well, no, I have two. I have two. Anyway.

Yeah, that's good. That's a good number. That's a good number. Yeah. It's a, I mean, what do you think that you're kind of the stuff of your intimacy with your male friends is about? I don't know. You know, honestly, I think a big part of it's just male or female friends is just that kind of, that kind of bone deep trust where you feel as comfortable with another person as you do, like, feeling alone on your

couch. Yeah. I would say that's about the highest level of intimacy in or out of a romantic relationship that exists. Just to say, Robert, I would love to puke on you. Thank you, Sophie. That's very sweet. You won't happen one day. You guys just keep putting in your hours.

I've avoided puking on you for the same reason. I've had, I think I've puked on more people than the average person. The most at once was like nine. But, yeah. Wow. The most at once. I'm proud of that. It took some work.

It took some work in elevation. I like to stay in and, you know, watch the Drew Carey show. So I don't get the opportunity as much. It's a great shame. Yeah. You know, now that you think of it, I've never puked on someone while watching the Drew Carey show. So there may be a causative effect. Speaking of great shows, I would like Sarah to plug.

her new show for our audience. I have a show to plug. Yes. And Sophie, you have been such a help to me in my show advertising tour, going hither and yon, ringing my cowbell, telling people about my new show, which is called The Devil You Know. It's from CBC podcasts. It features such iconic performances as our dear friend Jamie Loftus performing the book Michelle Remembering. Oh my God. Yeah. That's a win. That just needed to happen. And now it's happened. And it's also, you know, an attempt to kind of tell the story of the satanic panic and its initial spread in the 80s. It's sort of long shadow in the 90s and how it came back in a way that suggests it never went away in the present day by talking to individual people whose lives were dramatically affected and often, you know, pretty much destroyed by it. And but, and yeah, it's also.

I think not that depressing. Yeah. I really want to emphasize that. Yeah. I've had an argument with a friend about like whether or not, like, because his argument was that Kissinger's diplomacy was the book that you needed to read in order to really understand like American statesmanship. And I was like, no, it's Michelle remembers.

That's the book you need to read if you want to understand how politics works in this country. You know, you said Americans saw. And I was like, psychopaths, no, okay. Weird. High thumb. I think that, yeah, I think that's true. And it stands to reason that the book that explains America is Canadian. Yeah, yeah. Often is, this is the case. Often that's the case. I would love to hear your thoughts on Michelle remembers because it's a book that, like, defies description, you know? I mean, it's a book that I think says a lot about how irrationality can be foundational to a lot of people's fundamental beliefs about how the world works. And it's also a book about how, I mean, the story of the book and how it became popular and what happened during its creation is incredibly relevant for like foundationally how everything from like reality TV to like. like modern politics works in this country.

Like, it's the story of a fantasy overtaking reality in the minds of tens of millions of Americans based on nothing but like, I'd rather believe that there's, that satanic pedophiles run the country than anything else. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, like, one of the things we're trying to get at, and which is, you know, kind of this enduringly fascinating thing of, like, why did people, why did it feel less scary in a way to believe in what was seemingly the scariest thing possible. Yeah. And

there's, you know, that's actually very relevant to what we're talking about today, all of this, both how irrationality and fantasy become like the undergirding aspects of people's understanding about reality and how about these things have come to completely dominate U.S. politics and culture because they primarily, primarily because they dominate the thinking and the rationality of the power elite in this country. And that's why today, you and I, Sarah, are going to be talking about Peter Thiel's weird obsession with the Antichrist. Oh, my God. Oh, this is amazing.

Wow. Because I know that he's a handful. And I feel like I've heard probably from Sophie that this exists. He's a bushel and a peck. Yeah. I'm so excited. Is Peter Thiel? Is this the guy who took down Gawker all by himself?

He sure did. With Hulk Hogan? Well, with Hulk Hogan. And Hulk was a load-bearing part of that. He got Hulk Hogan to Hulk out all over Gawker and journalism and free speech. So that's nice. This is an I-Heart podcast. The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years.

Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls. came forward with a story. America, y'all better work the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And to binge the entire season, ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. On a cold January day, in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.

Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are. get your podcasts. On this podcast, Incells, we unpack an emerging mindset.

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Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. So we've done a two-parter on Peter about his life and background, but this is the guy. He's the co-founder of PayPal. He actually was the guy who kind of like orchestrated Elon Musk's ouster from the company, and they were at odds. Now they're friends again.

It's a beautiful story, you know. I'd watch an HBO original movie about that. Absolutely. That would be like a six out of ten, you know? Starring Jeremy Strong. And, I was going to say Jared Leto for both of them. Oh, that works too. He's the only man upsetting enough to play both those guys.

It will make test audiences puke on each other. Poor Jesse Eisenberg. I realized the other day, because I saw him in that Kieran or Rory Kolkin, which one of the Kolkens was in the movie with him. Karen Kolkin. And he was good. And I was like, oh, I've hated Jesse Eisenberg for years. I guess because he just did a good job of playing Marks.

Zuckerberg. Like, I think I just hated him because he did a job well. He really did, though. But the thing is, he kind of always plays guys who you're like, no, get away from me. Yeah, you don't seem safe. Like, I'm watching my drink around you, Jesse Eisenberg. Which, you get. I don't think real Jesse Eisenberg has earned that kind of suspicion. Biggest all of his characters. You're like, look, it's not to be rude, but I'm going to be a little rude. It's fine. Yeah. You upset me on some fundamental level. There's something. something wrong in the pit of your soul, Jesse Eisenberg. And I'm glad you've been able to turn that in your career.

Yeah. But yeah, you're not welcome in my house. Good for him. Wow, guys. Sorry if you're listening to this podcast, Jesse Eisenberg. We're really taking no prisoners. This is, you know, you have to be provocative in today's political wins, and we're doing it. You have to be ruthless to get into the mood to talk about the things Peter Thiel believes about the world.

Because despite being an aspiring immortal CEO king and one of the major. patrons of the modern far right. And the guy who got J.D. Vance's career started. You know, he funded his campaign. He funded, he's, he's his mentor. Despite all of that, Peter Thiel. I imagine being that guy's mentor. You're like, hey, buddy, you killed the Pope and your face still looks like a catcher's

mint? Yeah. Still doing good? Why don't you have an apple juice or an apple sauce? Yeah, why don't you sit down over here next to me? Yeah, despite, I mean, maybe or because of. Sports reference. That was so beautiful.

Did I? Oh, catchers. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, that's kind of a classic MST 3K descriptor of like, I don't know, a Robert Zadar type. I will do all the baseball references I can. Robert Zadar. Oh, Zadr. The kids don't know Robert Zadar, you know?

I'm glad we do. Kids, look up Robert Zadar. It's spelled how you would think. Z apostrophe D-A-R, obviously. Yes. Yes, he had a condition. That's why his face looked like that. and it's often fatal, but in his case,

he was like right in the sweet spot where it just made him an incredibly in-demand character actor during the 1980s. Yeah, you played a lot of alien prison guards. A lot of alien prison guards, yeah. Anyway, Robert Zadar, not much to do with Peter Thiel, but the other stuff we were talking about does. Okay, Peter Thiel.

I've got back and forth in my studies on Teal, and I think in the biographical episodes we did about him, I concluded he's one of the very few of these guys who, like, scares me because of how intelligent and disciplined and patient and competent he is. And the fact that disciplined intelligence and patience with him are married to like $30 billion in net worth, right? Which is a dangerous mixture for a guy who thinks democracy should come to an end and is actively working to further that goal. This week, I think I have to make a mea culpa because I don't entirely agree with that anymore. Oh, that's exciting. I may have overestimated his intelligence and cunning, which I don't, he's still a dangerous man, right?

I think he's out of his mind, and I think he's out of his mind in part because he's not as smart as certainly he thinks he is and not as smart as maybe I thought he was. And, you know, it's tough for me to tell entirely what's going on here, but I've become increasingly convinced that he's, like, unwell in a way that's leading him, that's, It's made him less functional as a person. And I kind of think this Antichrist obsession is an example of that because this is, it's very disordered thinking that you see when you like listen to him, try to explain his beliefs, which I'm going to do to you. I'm going to try to walk you through everything. He recently did a four-day lecture series laying out his theories on the Antichrist.

There have been articles about this. Yeah, if you're like reasonably online, you might have seen something about this. because the lectures weren't public, but they were publicly advertised. The page for the registration for these lectures is still up on some service called Luma that I'd never heard of before this. But it was in the Embarcadero in San Francisco on September 15th was the first of these. And it was called the Antichrist, a four-part lecture series. And the picture of this is just like Peter Thiel from 15 years ago underneath the logo of the group.

that supported this speech, the Act 17 collective. It's weird how young. Sophie can pull up that and then like a modern-day photo of Peter Thiel. It's just like, it's fitting, I guess, for a guy whose most public obsession is with living forever. But, yeah. So the event summary reads, you are warmly invited to a series of four lectures by Peter Thiel,

addressing the topic of the biblical Antichrist. Peter is a technology entrepreneur and investors. who has spent much of his career writing and speaking about how his Christian faith informs his understanding of the world. His remarks will be anchored on science and technology and will comment on the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist. I have 2025 Peter up on the screen for you, Robert and Sarah. I'm just going to say it, last place in the Katie Lang tribute competition. That's a fair comparison, Sarah.

And I love Katie Lang. That's not the thing. the point here yeah no and i love peter teal you know and i mean certainly the lord loves him but maybe not anybody else yeah i don't know about the lord but yeah possibly possibly um if i were jesus i would simply be looking at a lot of people who talk about me a lot and being like i don't know you please stop implying that we're friends this is yeah i'm sending you a cease and desist Yeah, it's got to be like I'm sure you've experienced the same thing like when you get like a degree of fame every now and then you'll meet fans who will like talk about something you did that meant something to them and the way they will explain it's like that doesn't sound familiar to me at all. That's what you took out of of that. That's not what I meant in any way.

Can I, do I say that to you? Do I say like, oh no, that had nothing to do with like you've read in something completely absent there? Or do you just like smile and nod? People think I often or remember me saying something that I feel like is smarter than I said because I don't know it any longer. But then you're like, did I know it at one time? And then I said it and then I forgot it. Or are they confusing me with some other show they listened to that same day?

It could be that too sometimes. It's very interesting. I've seen it all happen where it's like, no, that was a guest who said that. And you just like transposed it to being me. Thanks for giving me credit. Yeah. I've been listening to Simpsons commentaries, and one of the things the writers kind of consistently talk about is like, who wrote that?

Was that your joke? Was that my joke? I can't remember. Or like someone being like, I love that joke in that episode you wrote. And they're like, I didn't write that joke. Yeah. And I love that that's kind of a consistent thing. Yeah.

Yeah, this is my favorite thing you did. Well, I didn't. So you're like that I was near it and I was around. So yeah, I was in the room. I was in the room when that joke was made. Absolutely. I midwifed that joke. Yeah, I provided moral support to the birth of that joke.

Yeah. So this summary of Peter's lecture on the Antichrist goes on to note that Peter's thinking about the Antichrist, his beliefs on this subject, draw from the work of several prominent theologians and philosophers. These include Renee Gerard, Jonathan Swift, and former Bastards Pot alumni Carl Schmidt. Now, if you haven't listened to those episodes, I would recommend listening to the Karl Schmidt episodes. The gist of it is Schmidt was a right-wing political philosopher, and when the Nazis came to power, they basically called him up and said, hey, you're writing the educated

justification for why Nazism is good. Like that, we need you to come in and do that, right? Yeah, it's not great. And, you know, Schmidt was a perfect fit for this job because his earlier work had been a huge influence on a lot of prominent Nazis. So he helped influence the Nazis and how they took power. A big thing he wrote about was how to use effectively the creation of borders in order to destroy liberal democracy. Basically, his kind of, in a nutshell.

Seems to be working. It does. It works very well. And he's the guy who, the basic idea was that like any time you, every society, no matter how liberal a democracy, draws a line between like who are members of the community and who aren't, who is a citizen and who isn't. And wherever you find that line, anytime there's a border, that's the thing you can use to destroy that liberal democracy because you figure out where that is and you start pushing it inward. And you start trying to define other groups as not part of the community, right? And that's kind of the fundamental weak point that all liberal democracies have. And it's, you know, in a way, it's kind of the other side of the anarchist belief that,

like any border implies the violence of its maintenance, right? The existence of a border fundamentally implies violence because that's the only way to maintain a border. And what Schmidt was saying is the existence of a border is an opportunity to carve groups of people out of the body politic in order to gain authoritarian political power, right? That's Carl Schmidt, who Peter Thiel loves and sees as a big influence, right? So he's not being subtle about any of this. He's like, here are my top three influences.

One of them helped the Nazis so much. My buddies. Yeah, these are all my faves. Well, and it's the other guy that he listed there, Rene Gerard, is a, I mean, neither of these guys are like exactly household names. But Gerard, a big part of, like, his belief system was the idea of, like, scapegoating, right? And how, like, scapegoating works within, you know, and, like, why communities pick scapegoats and like how the whole process works and that's also like a major influence on

Peter Thiel like that which is you know not again if you look at the kind of politics like the right wing politics that he's supported during like his lifetime it makes sense that he finds these kind of things influential like so Schmidt's essential idea is that like once a human society like has reached the level where most people's basic needs are sad satisfied. They're still like unmet desires, but people don't know like entirely what it is that they want that they don't have. And so they engage in mimicry where they like look at what their neighbors who are doing the best have. And they seek to, they aspire to mimic the most impressive people in their society. Right. And because people are never really satisfied

and this memetic rivalry never really leads. I mean, it's never something that you can actually, like, achieve or, like, get the things, these unfilled desires can't really be met. And so people need, like, an explanation for why it doesn't work, for why they're not happy. And that tends to get channeled into a war of all against one via what Gerard called a scapegoat mechanism, right? And so these are the two huge, like Schmidt and Gerard are the two huge, like, like, pillars of Peter Thiel's, like, personal philosophy. And one of the things Gerard believed is that Christianity kind of marks this

turning point in human consciousness because, like, the crucifixion narrative is fundamentally Jesus being murdered in an act of collective violence against a scapegoat, right? And so, like, that's kind of this, that Christianity leads to this sort of epiphany by which human beings have started to realize that, like, the scapegoating rituals that we engaged in are wrong, and it's, like, a bad thing to do. And, yeah, that's, that's kind of where Gerard goes. Peter Thiel winds up taking this in some weird places, right? Where basically Gerard's attitude was that you have to reject scapegoating, because, like, Christ's example is proof that it's fundamentally evil and wrong. and Teal's kind of interpretation from that

is that you can't really avoid scapegoating like that's the inevitable path forward and so it's kind of a thing you have to it's a tool you have to make use of this like human need to scapegoat is a thing that you can use to drive politics as essentially where Peter Thiel takes this guys because Gerard is not advocating that sort of behavior.

Right, well, We're all watching that happen, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's not to Derry Queen, that's for sure. No. So these are Peter Thiel's kind of favorite philosophers that have inspired his takes on the Antichrist. And unfortunately, full audio of these talks is not available publicly. Seven hours or so have been leaked to a couple of different outlets.

I don't have them tragically. But we do have one attendee took word for word nearly notes of the first lecture, which got him kicked out of subsequent lectures. We've got that, and we've got articles that have summarized and quoted directly from Teal in these lectures. So I feel pretty confident that I can explain what this motherfucker believes to the extent that it will ever make sense. So before we get into that, we should talk about the group that funded this lecture series, which is the Acts 17 Collective. You would have seen that on the photo of Peter that we post a little bit earlier if you're watching it. The name of the Act 17 Collective is based on Chapter 17 of the book. of Acts and, you know, the Bible.

And this chapter concerns, hmm? She said Bible. You said Bible, Sarah goes, heard of it. Heard of it, heard of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You might have caught this one. And it's the New Testament, which if you're not into religion, it's the aliens to the Old Testament's alien.

Oh, God, that's so true. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Jesus is sort of a Ripley figure. I think a lot of people have argued that over the years. He was clearly heavily inspired by Ripley. Yeah, unless he's, yeah, there's a little bit of newt in there, too, though. There's a little bit of newt in there, sure, absolutely.

I think the Apostle Paul is Hicks. Generally, biblical scholars agree that the Apostle Paul was inspired by Corporal Hicks. Yeah. So chapter 17. Yeah, there's a broad consensus. You have to really read the original Aramese. that aliens was written in to get a lot of that. James Cameron writes exclusively in Aramaic.

He's a real problem for a lot of his collaborators. So Act 17, the chapter that's in concerns Paul and some of his companions on like a trip through Greece. They're not just in Greece or they're not just in Athens, but it's like they spend a lot of time in Athens arguing about religion with philosophers, right? They're going to these different markets and public places and synagogues. talking to, like, educated scholars about religion to, like, argue that, hey, Christianity is, is a thing. Basically, I'm summarized, I'm yada yadaying this a lot. But, like, it is, like...

Have you thought about Christianity? Yeah. Have you thought about Christianity in, like, a logical and, like, like, sense? Like, he's trying to make the intellectual. This is, like, that chapter is, like, Paul arguing and debating with a lot of intellectuals about his new religion, right? It's like Shark Tank. Yes, it's like the Shark Tank part of the Bible.

Yeah. He's got a, hey girl. You got a hey girl. And I say, girl, whatever. Is that a shark tank joke, Sophie? How am I supposed to get that? No, it's for the youths. Ladies who peaked in a high school on MLM Facebook 10 years ago, kind of a thing. Oh, it is that.

It is still happening. But, yeah. It is definitely that for Paul, where he's like sliding into the DMs of a friend from high school who happens to be like a rabbi being like, hey, I'm doing this new thing. You want to hear about it? Can I get you to show up? Like, well, there'll be free makeup. We'll give you free makeover.

Talk about Jesus. There's going to be snacks. We're going to learn about leggings. Yeah. And also Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus wants you to sell these leggings.

No, that is exactly what's going on, basically. And the Act 17 Collective is inspired by this chapter, dedicated specifically to spreading Christian doctrine to political and cultural elites in Silicon Valley, right? Which is why that chapter makes sense, right? Because Paul is kind of talking to these sort of intellectual elites. Act 17 is like, we need to be proselytizing, not to the poor, not to the huddled masses, you know, not to the people that like Jesus talked to, but like the billionaires. We need to convert the billionaires. So it's the opiate of the few now.

Right. Exactly. I mean, they are obsessed with not dying. So it does make sense that they would be like, yeah, yeah, my immortal soul. Yeah, that's the ticket. Yeah, flipping the chair around backwards. You kids are interested in eternal life, huh? I know a guy who offers eternal life.

You don't even have to take your son's blood, Peter. Exactly. Well, you do have to take the son's blood. The son, somebody's son's blood. That's right. That's a lot less gross. You just have a cracker and some grape juice. That's right.

And if you want to be immortal listeners, whatever sponsor of the podcast comes on next will ensure that you never die just you though heard that all i know is what i've been told and that's a half-truth is a whole lie for almost a decade the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in graves county kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story. I'm telling you, we know Quincy Kilder, we know. A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran. My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I would. I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find. I did not know her and I did not kill her. Or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said it. They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.

They made me say that I poured gas on her. From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame. America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns. Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike. This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer. She just started going off on Eve and I hit her. I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her. On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.

The state has asked for an execution date for Krista. We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live? We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike. Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. From the studio who brought you the Pikedin Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incells.

I am a loser. If I also a woman, I wouldn't date me either. From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset. If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you. A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women. The seat of loneliness explodes. I just hate myself. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

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I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place. It's a way of life. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of, and thousands you haven't. We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork and solving these crazy crimes. Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, Forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back.

I hope you're enjoying your new immortality. You know, you're going to watch everyone that you love and care for die, everything that you care for end. Eventually watch the stars themselves wink out, but, you know, have fun with that. I didn't think it through. People never do with the mortality. Also, what about the scenario where if you're immortal and everyone else dies and then there aren't people to maintain nuclear reactors and they all melt down and then the globe is covered in nuclear fallout?

What are you going to do then, Dracula? I feel like I can maintain a nuclear reactor. Yeah. The one in your area is going to be. So you're going to take care of the one in Washington. So we'll be okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that'll be good. I mean, all that nuclear waste from the Hanford site's going to poison all of the waters, but that'll happen anyway. Good stuff. I mean, where else are we going to get those albino gaiters or whatever they have up there? Exactly, you know? I assume that in a couple of generations, it'll be gator territory. The Pacific Northwest will warm up enough finally.

Then I could have a gator farm in my yard. You were always meant to be gator territory, really. Yeah. Everywhere was. Everywhere was. So, yeah, the Act 17 Collective dedicated to preaching to the most needy in our society, which is tech billionaires. Yes. Well, they do have the heaviest hearts I've heard.

Yes. In the Egyptian sense, yes. It's funny. What I think is funniest about this is, like, the Act 17 works perfectly as a name. Like, you're referencing a part of the Bible that's relevant to what the group does. But they needed to make it into a backronym anyway. which I don't understand. Because, like, no, it already works.

Why would you make this an acronym? But they did. And so they've decided that acts also stands for acknowledging Christ in technology and society. All right. All right. Again, unnecessary. But I hope you're happy, I guess. You got a background in Max, you know?

Sure, man. Yeah. So the organization was founded by, or he's co-founded by Michelle Stevens. And she, I mean, she was some sort of entrepreneur. She was involved in tech to some extent and kind of did this after she left a company. Her husband, Trey, was one of the first, Trey Stevens, is one of the first Palantier employees and now works for Peter's venture capital fund as a partner. So this is a guy who was involved in Peter's military spying company. Oh, good.

And also his VC fund. And it's his wife that founds the Act 17 collection. And I found an interview with Michelle, where she explains how the group came about, and so this is their origin story, per Michelle. By the end of 2023, my company was winding down, and my husband's 40th birthday was that November. I wanted to celebrate big. We invited over 220 of his closest friends to a three-day birthday party in New Mexico called the Roast, the Toast, and the Holy Ghost. On the Holy Ghost Day, we thought we'd have a sort of remixed church service. Wouldn't it be funny if we tricked a bunch of people into going to church?

We served caviar bumps, breakfast pizza, mimosas, and spiked coffee. DJ Canvas had come out with his crew to play a Saturday night set, remixing all of our beloved movie-themed songs into a trap beat. He also does this for Christian and worship music. He's got the best dance moves. No wonder nobody likes white people. Yeah, that made me cringe nearly to death. Sarah, I'm going to be honest.

It's also funny that they're like, isn't it fun and subversive to have caviar bumps and then go worship christ and it's like no because like the whole problem in america arguably is that the prosperity gospel has taken over christianity and it's no longer a moderating influence on capitalism right yeah and that the and also it's gross and silly to be doing that it's gross stop it yeah it's it's just deeply upsetting and it's this it's this fundamental poisonous thing that stands against most of what the religion has at least publicly stood for over the course of like the history of the faith. Like it's fundamentally a heretical interpretation of Christianity, I think.

Right. Like if you take the good parts of Christianity, which I feel like most people would acknowledge that there are like at least some good ideas in there. Like one of the main themes is like, don't eat caviar off each other's hands. while a huge percentage of the population is in dire poverty. That's like it's one of the main things. Yeah, you don't have to like the religion to be like, okay, well, the one time that like literally God beat people up, it was because they were money changing in the temple.

Yeah. Probably shouldn't have money changers. You might not like money changers at all, actually. It's so funny. It's like. Which is just what Peter Thiel and his friends do. do that's what a venture capital fund is they're changing money and also PayPal where you literally just move money around for a fee yes yes it's it is really it's just it's fascinating and it's like

what is it like to become enthusiastic about a belief system that your actual beliefs are pretty much contrary to you know I'm very curious about that that's that's the and the answer is you have to like remake the belief system into something that is not, does not familiar to most people who actually, like, are members of the faith. Like, you have to create your own Christianity, which is what Peter's done. That's effectively what these Antichrist lectures are. Is him reinventing Christianity for billionaires? So he's the Antichrist.

Yes. That is the twist at the end of this. Before we get to that, though, you have to hear a little bit of DJ Canvas. Oh, no. I just, I needed to, I try, I, I didn't have the courage, the raw heroism to look at examples of his dance moves. So we're going to have to leave those to our imagination. But I did find his just got saved mixtape. And Sophie's going to play you like 15 seconds of that.

So let's hear it. I am not forgotten. I am not forgotten. I am not forgotten. God knows my name. I am not forgotten, I am not forgotten, I am not forgotten. God knows my name, he knows my name. There you go, see?

Okay. Who wouldn't want to get down to that with Peter Thiel and a bunch of Venture Capital guys? Thanks for that. The thing is, like, if I met like some, I don't know, 15-year-old Bible camp goer who was like, I love this song. I would be like, that's nice. Good for you. I don't care. Yeah. But that it's like, like, so directly about this idea of like being rescued from being one of the downtrodden. And it's like, you're the one who's treading on people. Yeah. Everyone knows your name. You're one of the most famous people in the world. Like, you're all wealthy and powerful. You've got buildings with your name on it. I mean. You have everything that you've ever wanted. Yeah. You don't need God. You are God in society as we have it set up, you know?

Yeah. I also. love that they're like, this music is just so bumping, it'll trick people into going to church. It's not going to seem like Christian music at all. It's like, hmm. Yes, tricky. I want you the audience to imagine you're at this birthday party. This guy is laying down what we, what we'll, we'll call it a beat, right? And people are dancing as well as you'd expect a bunch of tech elites to dance. And then, while this is all going on, Peter Thiel gets up spontaneously. And in Michelle's words, quote, gave a 55-minute lecture on forgiveness and miracles. No, no. God, it's like in succession when you're like, why do these people keep throwing parties?

They're so bad at parties. Just stop having them. Is this even a party? You're too evil. That's abuse to be. That's like torture. Like the CIA didn't do that shit back during the fucking. At the very least, it's that timeshare thing, you know, where you just have to attend a short sales pitch.

Yeah. And I'm imagining, too, like the dawning realization. Like, oh, wow, Peter's talking. I thought we were all dancing. Okay, he's probably just doing a little quick toast. No, no. He's not doing a half an hour. Not doing a toast. Like, I actually have to go to the bathroom. Yeah. Oh, my God. I need to get a drink. Maybe do some caviar bumps. I don't know. Michelle stated, we were blown away. A lot of people were looking like he had tin heads. Like, what are you talking about? And I'll believe that. I'll believe that. I'll believe. that being the response to this. Yeah. So she says the reaction was mixed. Some of her Christian friends were angry that she'd put a non-ceminary trained guy up and had him give a sermon that like, this is heretical.

He doesn't know what he's talking about. This is certainly not Christianity that he's ranting about. It's kind of weird that you did this to all of us. But she said some other Christian friends of hers were like, you just tricked over 200 people into going to church. And that's good? We like it. We think that's great.

And so this is the origin of the Act 17 collective. Anytime a boring guy forces you to listen to him for an hour, that is church. That's church. Yes. This podcast has often been church. Running into someone you kind of know. Church. That's a kind of church.

Getting an Uber driver who just immediately starts talking for the entire drive about like his weird philosophical beliefs. That's a kind of church, you know? Thank you, Dale, for informing me about the dangers of vaccines. You know, I wouldn't have known without that right. Yeah, that's a big one. God. The important thing is that Peter Thiel has the freedom to express himself.

God knows he hasn't had access to in society before. Yes, yes. Our culture has really cracked down on Peter Thiel's ability to express his beliefs to the world. And, yeah, so the purpose of the Act 17 Collective is specifically to trick San Francisco. Franciscans, who Michelle describes as one of the most unchurched cities in America, into going to church and becoming Christians, right? That's what this group exists to do. They have Unitarianism.

That's enough. Right. Unitarians are nice and not bigots. That's kind of the whole point. And these people want to be assholes. Right. Oh, I see. That's key.

Because one of the most prominent members of the Act 17 collective is Gary Tan, who is the CEO of Y Combinator, which is a tech startup incubator. He's hosted several Act 17 events in his home, which is a former church, including one with former Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, about the holy shift across life, AI, leadership, and faith. And for an idea of some of the other things Gary Tan is into, I'm going to quote from a 2024 article in the New Republic by Gilderan, which is writing about a Twitter rant that Tan went on January of 2024.

Posting on X, formerly Twitter. Tan wished death upon a majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Fuck Chan, Peskin, Preston, Walton, Melgar, Ronan, Sapphire, Chan as a label and motherfucking crew, wrote Tan, name-checking, Severn Progressive Supervisors, and a hyper-cringy attempt to adapt, Tupac Chakours, hit him up to his drunken rants. Die slow, motherfuckers. For good measure, he posted a photo of his personal liquor cabinet. Its inscription, Gary Tan, SF Social Media Troll, Twitter Menace.

on his liquor cabinet, man. Well, it's not like anyone in local office in San Francisco has ever been famously assassinated by a crazy guy. Yeah, yeah. That did really piss people off for that exact reason. Yeah. Yeah. God.

Yeah. Very godly behavior. Super godly. Super godly. Now, another godly thing Tan did was fund the recall campaign against progressive district attorney Chesa Buden. He also promised to wipe out super godly. supervisors who expressed worries about the safety of driverless taxis, telling them your days are numbered?

You know, if you use death threats all the time, it doesn't mean anything. Yeah. Exactly. And it's very funny to be like, you think these are unsafe, I'll kill you. And then like three months later, a cruise taxi pins a pedestrian and drags her across the payment, which leads to Cruz losing its operating permit and receiving a $1.5 million fine. Yep. Although, which I'm sure they could afford. I'm sure, but maybe they weren't super safe, Gary? Driverless cars don't kill people, I kill people. That's right. Jerry Tan does. Oh, my God. Tan had delete his tweets, threatening city supervisors, as you brought up, due to the Harvey Milk of it all, right?

Because a bunch of them received death threats after he threatened to kill them because he has fans who are, you know, assholes. Jesus is like, leave me out of this one. Right. Gary put out a statement directed by a crisis PR firm and said, I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision. Tan is one of a chunk of wealthy reactionaries using their money to try to change progressive San Francisco into something of a haven for far-right plutocrats. He's a big network state guide like Peter Thiel.

And, you know, the fact that the city is already very friendly to these guys doesn't matter. Because, again, you know, it's really the thing Gerard picked up on. which is that once people have everything they need, they're still unhappy. And because that unhappiness fundamentally can't be dealt with in the ways that they try to, like the things that they think will make them happy simply don't. They just find someone to be angry at. They need a scapegoat, you know? And for Jerry Tan, it's the progressives in San Francisco.

That's why Jerry's unhappy. And what they don't realize is as a secret to happiness is small, achievable goals in a sort of vague general progression. So, you know, you're like, I want to get better at baking. I want to make a Bouch de Noelle for Christmas. I'm going to spend three months developing my Bouchton O'L skills. But instead, because they have no patience,

they just want to destroy a democracy because that feels like it would be faster. I don't know. Maybe it is. Well, I think it's just because for these guys, there's so little that they can really say. There's nothing above them. There's no, they have all of the money.

There's no one who can tell them what to do. So the only thing theoretically above them is the state. And so is the government. And so they define, and honestly, most of the government is in their pocket. Like, as a general rule, lawmakers are not anti-Silicon Valley billionaires. So instead they pick, like, the thing they can't control, which is the small number of people who get elected, like, on progressive agendas, trying to fix price. problems. And those are the people who don't, like, because those are the only people in politics who aren't going to pretend to respect you, to love you, right? Because they're kind of fundamentally

in opposition to guys like you. And so you have to, that's who's responsible for all of the problems. That's who does everything wrong. You know? That's why I'm unhappy. Because someone's out there doesn't like me or is making my life marginally harder. Respect me. I mean, it's the reason why so many famous people lost their minds as soon as they got access to Twitter, right, is like being confronted with the fact that people dislike you and disrespect you. And that's just life. Maybe you could be a better person. You just normally don't hear about it in detail, you know. Yeah. And so having the ability to reach for that knowledge. Yeah. It is kind of this, yeah, like a fascinating, I don't know, experiment in terms of what

would happen if people suddenly became telepathic because in a way people did. Yeah. Especially twice Carol Oates. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the, it's the, it's a same reason why, like, so many people high up in, like, our media class, like, the folks who write for the, like, columns for the New York Times consider, quote-unquote, wokeism and cancel culture, a bigger problem than any of the things that are actually going to kill them. Because, like, it's this, no, people, I went to Harvard or Yale or whatever, and my family name is this, and I have this fancy job. And people are calling me an idiot.

That shouldn't be allowed. That's got to be illegal that they're calling me a dip shit for my dip shit. opinions. And it's like they were calling you an idiot before East didn't know about it. Yeah. Yeah. You just, yeah, you, you, you couldn't see it and people weren't sharing it 100,000 times. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, they're a bunch of very healthy people, these, these billionaires. They're thriving. They're doing great. Yeah. They're doing great. And they have now formed Act 17 because they want to establish a theocracy that makes it illegal to not like them or respect them. Right? That's the gist of the Act 17 collective, in my opinion. And obviously, as I noted, they were inspired by a rant Peter Thiel gave at a birthday party about Christianity. And so it's only fitting that they would host a four-part lecture series by him about the Antichrist.

During the first of these lectures, Michelle Stevens, the founder of the collective, introduced Peter on September 15th by calling him one of the great Christians of our time, as well as one of the great capitalists. Oh, okay. Sure, those two things seem like they should go together. We're going to start with the most detailed information of God, which is the almost word-for-word notes on lecture one titled, Knowledge Shall Be Increased. Now, the attendee who published his notes on this lecture was the head of protocol research at a software company called Sucinct, and his name is Kshichi Kulkarni.

And from what I can tell, Kulkarni is a fan of Teal. I don't think he posted these notes as like a work of undercover reporting. I think he was just super enthusiastic and kind of ignored that the event itself warned people not to share and spread what they heard inside. Like folks weren't supposed to record this and stuff. He was like, he's just modest. It's so great. People are going to want to know. People need to read this.

Kolkarni was banned from listening to other lectures, but his notes are, as far as I can tell, from other reviews that include quotes from Peter Thiel. Pretty close to one to one. So Teal opens his lecture with a quote from the book of Daniel. But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book. Even to the time of the end, many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. And this is like talking about the end of days, right? But thou, O Daniel, shut up. Shut up.

Shut up. That's all. Yeah, shut up, Peter. Teal interprets this as Daniel, who he describes as a biblical historian, predicting that knowledge would increase vastly towards the end of time. and, quote, as knowledge increased, apocalyptic fears would mount, leaving room for a tyrant to rise. Now, there's a lot that's wrong with these few sentences.

And, like, first, I don't really, that's not the only, certainly not. I think he got that from the omen. Yeah, right. That's not really what Daniel's saying, that, like, an increase in knowledge will increase apocalyptic fears, which will let a tyrant.

For the one thing, that's not how the Antichrist comes to power. Yeah, that's a lot to get. from the word increase. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. You're reading a lot in there. And he's like, and that tyrant is me.

Yeah. Yeah. You'll be surprised at who he thinks that tyrant is, Sarah. I'm excited for that reveal. That's going to be really fun for you. Sandra Lee. It's my guess. No.

It's weirder than that. Or her de facto first lady of New York, Sandra Lee. Just like to mention that. Nope. Although he's probably, she's probably, on his list. I'll give you that. But yeah, we'll get to that.

So the other thing that Peter says here that's really questionable is he describes Daniel as a historian. Like, in fact, he describes Daniel as the first historian, right? It's like the first person to really think of history in a modern way. That's very silly. And it's kind of worth noting biblical scholars debate ferociously whether or not Daniel was writing reliable accounts of history, whether or not he was effectively trying to write a history, right? Because there's the two broad interpretations of like how the book of Daniel was

written as. One is the author, Daniel, had these experiences with he and his friends and chronicled them, right? That he's like writing an account of things that he saw and did. And he's including in their genuine prophecies that he made that were fulfilled in some cases centuries later, right? That's the traditional interpretation of the book of Daniel, right? Modern biblical historians have pointed out that it there's a lot of evidence that suggests that the author of the book of Daniel was someone who would have been alive centuries after the actual biblical Daniel and that the book of Daniel couldn't have been written contemporaneously right in other words like this is more of like a work of historical fiction than historical fact it's kind of like one of the

arguments the real Daniel is supposed to have been a member of the Judean nobility who is taken to Babylon during the Babylonian captivity and became popular at Nebuchadnezzar's court. He eventually became a dream interpreter and a prophet. And again, up until like the 19th century, it was widely agreed that this historical guy wrote the book of Daniel and filled it with prophecies he had at the time that were proven right later. Now, there's a good write-up on the biblical hermeneutic stack exchange with citations, which summarizes the modern critical argument about Daniel. Quote, the book of Daniel is replete with historical inaccuracies regarding the Babylonian and Persian periods, indicating it was written quite some time after those

eras. Between this point and the independent nature of the court tales, the person of Daniel appears to be a literary fabrication, not a historical figure, and hence not the author of the book. Davies, who is a biblical scholar, suggests that this Daniel character may not have been a well-known figure in Jewish culture before the book was completed, and Collins is one scholar to suggest the very name Daniel was chosen for the anonymous Jewish sage of the folklore out of the inspiration from the ancient sage, Danil, mentioned by Ezekiel and Ugaritic texts, right? So the likeliest, and the thing widely believed by biblical scholars today, is that this, because of some very fundamental historical inaccuracies in the book of Daniel, this was written later, and Daniel was never meant to be a real person, like the name was taken by an ancient sage. Yeah, the same way that Benicula wasn't actually written by a dog.

Exactly, exactly. Well, there's a lot of scholarly debate about that. that's true. Yeah. But, you know, I'm a believer. It feels like it's, to me, kind of the marker of a good historian to understand that people in the past also enjoyed using literary devices, you know? Yes, and that there's also this, it's weird to me how, despite how much some people who are religious emphasize the importance of faith, there's this idea that like, well, but no, if it's not literally Daniel that wrote this about his literal life, then that would be saying that the Bible doesn't have value. And it's like, why not? Like, you know, sometimes it gets a little frilly, you know, it's a work of literature. Let them have their literary devices. Yeah. It doesn't bother people. with other kinds of literature that it's not literally true, that Eragorn, son of Erethorn, isn't a real historical figure. People have still changed their lives as a result of those books, you know? Right. But I don't know, maybe they just don't have that much faith. And I guess Peter doesn't, because again, he always describes Daniel as absolutely the guy who wrote the book

of Daniel and as a historian, as a real historian. And you know he's real because he made predictions about the future that happened. And again, historians will say, well, because they happened before the He couldn't have just said that in the future. It's like if you could write a historical fiction about a guy who's a prophet and include a bunch of shit about World War II and your book set in 1910, that doesn't mean you prophesied World War II. You're just looking, you're just writing fiction. Wouldn't it be great if some guy saw that coming? Yeah. I mean, it's like, I don't know, and just any kind of nostalgia media like that 70s show where they're like, oh, kids, stop playing with the long.

Lawn darts. Isn't it funny that we know now what that's about? How many kids they'll kill? In the time where this is set? Yeah. Yes, that's exactly what's going on in the book of Daniel. And speaking of lawn darts, this podcast is sponsored entirely by lawn darts. Lawn darts, aren't there too many kids in the world? Yeah, the Love Canal didn't get enough of them. That's right.

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Great stuff. So I don't have, when it comes to the biblical scholarship was the book of Daniel written by, I mean, I'm pretty convinced that it was written later, and Daniel is a historical fiction and amalgam of different people and whatnot. But, you know, there's arguments scholars will make either way. What's interesting to me is that Teal doesn't reference these arguments at all. He doesn't even mention them, which I could, it could just mean that he has a strong biblical literalism stance and he disagrees with those takes. But the fact that doesn't mention them at all, I kind of wonder if he just doesn't know because he doesn't actually like read curiously about stuff like this. Yeah, I could believe that he doesn't really care about scholarship on the Bible.

He reads it and takes whatever is useful to him out of it and has no interest in what anyone else has said about it. Well, and this feels like he's doing like his impression of a smart person. And I feel a lot of people's smart person impression is like, I read the Bible and I figured out what it's about without the benefit of ever reading any one else's thoughts about it ever. And it's like, that's not what intelligence is about. Intelligence doesn't mean that you never listen to anyone else for your whole life. No, no, nor is it like, well, I assume this, the English translation of this has all of the context that's useful in understanding it historically, right? Right.

There's no need to, like, look back at the different ways that this is different things have been interpreted, different translations. Like, there's no value in any of that. They got it right with the King James version. That's the official version now. God said so. This one I found in the hotel is going to take me home. Yeah, and I feel like what people maybe who, I don't know, look down on scholarship as a pursuit, don't realize about it, maybe. And maybe disdain it because they understand this kind of collaborative quality to it.

Is it let anything you figure out in an academic setting or really like any, you know, kind of real pursuit of learning and research is you're standing on the shoulders of everyone else who's thought about it and worked on it in the past. And there's, and you have an awareness that you're only doing like an extra little millimeter of progressing an idea. Yeah. And that's also something a guy like Peter Thiel can't accept. Like the collaborative nature of like through which actual knowledge is built. is fundamentally, that's why all these guys are so bullish on AI, is it subhorrent to them that other people have thought thoughts that they haven't thought or that they didn't think first or that they might not understand, you know? It's this, a healthy person understands there's things

that are beyond me, even if I'm very smart. I'm not smart in every area, you know, I think I'm certain that like Stephen Hawking wouldn't have like gotten angry if somebody had tried to explain to him how like, oh, yeah, your fridge is broken, Stephen, and this is what's wrong, because I doubt Stephen Hawking knew much about how refrigerators worked, right? And I'm sure he was humble enough to be like, well, no, I need to get a repair guy. Or someone's like, this is what happened on EastEnders for the past 10 years. Sure. Or this is what this verse of the Bible, you know, how it was translated a thousand years ago. And so it might mean something different. Actually, intelligent people have a degree of humility in terms of the things they don't know. And I think to a guy like Peter Thiel,

the idea that, like, there might be anything important that he doesn't know is deeply offensive. And I think that's the Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell, which is why, like, no, all that matters is what I know and what I can have this robot summarize. It can do everything else because other kinds of knowledge than the ones I have and other kinds of skill aren't real knowledge or skill, because I don't have them. That's my interpretation of Peter Thiel, you know? Yours may, where's my very? Well, I guess, like, kind of toddler-like anger at anything that eluse your grasp.

So you have to kind of shrink the world to fit your own worldview. And that's what he's doing with the Bible here, because it's important to Peter that Daniel is a real prophet and a real historian because he interprets Daniel 124, which I quoted earlier, as a prophecy. Now, this is the idea that, like, oh, what he's saying is that knowledge increases, which leads to us expecting an apocalypse, and that creates room for a tyrant. that's not really how the Bible foresees the Antichrist rising, you know, but apocalyptic fears have been with us as long as civilization, right? Like, it's not a thing that starts with Christendom, and it's not a thing that starts with Daniel, right? The book of Daniel didn't invent apocalyptic beliefs.

And it's one of those, you'll sometimes hear it claim that prior to the year 1000, Christendom was convulsed that, like, the last millennium, there were a bunch of specific fears that the world was going to end then. And this is actually not really accurate, but it's not accurate because people didn't really agree what year it was on a wide scale back then. However, as Peter Steinfels wrote in a 1999 article for the New York Times, so were there religious terrors and overwrought expectations of the final judgment in the year 999? Absolutely.

And also in the years 899, 1199, 1299, you name it. One might as well turn the question around and ask, how could it have been otherwise, right? In other words, it wasn't so much that people were obsessed with the year 1,000. It's that they have always, people did not widely agree on what year it was at all times in the past. But people have always expected the end of the world was around the corner, no matter what year they thought it was going to happen. That's just natural human nature, right? It just makes sense. Well, and also, you know, not to, this is just me kind of guessing.

But I feel like if you look at human history, there are plenty of civilizations that have ended, right? or that have come very close to it through, you know, plague or being built next to a volcano or massive floods or whatever else. And so it feels like this idea of destruction that will eventually come for everyone. Sure. Is it just something that you would develop as an idea based on what it feels like to exist as a human being? Yeah, that makes complete sense. And like it is this, like, you can't, how can you, how could some,

somebody lived through like the black death and be in like a city where 75% of the population dies. Like that is an apocalypse that you've lived through. Just like, I mean, fuck, if you lived in Berlin in 1945, you're living through an apocalypse or Hiroshima, you know? Like, that's an apocalypse. What else would you call that? We create, yeah, humans create a lot of them or witness a lot of them. And I do feel like post-pandemic, I have this feeling of like, all right, we can have another of these. I don't know. That's not unprecedented anymore. So, So what's next? Honestly, might be nice.

We all got a couple of weeks off last time, you know? Sure. Before we descended into, you know, more fascism for several years. We had a couple of weeks where things were really chilled. Yeah. Really got to catch up on Netflix, yeah. Made that dog on a coffee. Got to rewatch some good TV shows.

Yeah. So in that article, Steinfels goes on to quote Bernard McGinn, who's a scholar of medieval religion from the University of Chicago, who said, medieval folk lived in a more or less constant state of apocalyptic expectation. And if that sounds kind of chillingly familiar to you, it's because we haven't changed, really. We're the same as people back then, and we expect the world to end just like they did in some different ways, you know?

And our tummy is hurt for different reasons and sometimes the same. Some of them the same, yeah. And obviously there's different theories as to why do people always think the world is going to end? You know, you can, that's a lot of ink has been spilled on that topic. But I think it boils down to two factors. And neither of which really involves an increase in knowledge like Peter is obsessed with. I think the two big factors are, number one, the apocalypse makes for good entertainment. People are interested in the idea of the world ending.

And number two, it's less scary to imagine the world ending than to imagine yourself dying in the world going on, which is what will happen, right? To everybody. Yeah. And especially for a guy like Peter. or teal yeah right and it's right and especially if you're you know an egomaniac who no one is restraining any longer you're like look i everyone has to go out with me ultimately somehow oh my god i i am certain that he would prefer a nuclear holocaust to himself dying alone while the world continues right he would prefer his last year's going to be the second one god willing you know yeah um i just hope

those bunkers ain't deep enough or the security their security guides will take them out i'm sure um they haven't figured out the shock collars well enough now that said i will i will acknowledge one thing that peter says that i agree with is that i think apocalyptic fears have in the past and do today provides space for a tyrant to rise you know and one of the things that i think i don't think peter realizes but is clear to me studying his beliefs about the antichrist is that he justifies his yearning for a tyrant, his desire to end democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. He justifies that as the only way to stop the Antichrist and the end of the world, which is deeply anti-Christian, because Peter's whole idea, he says he's a Christian.

He says, I am a believer that the Antichrist will come and bring about the end of days, but I also think it can be stopped, and that's a good thing, which is like not the religion, my dude. Right. Like, you can't stop the antichrist. Isn't it? Don't you kind of have to just go through the whole thing? Yeah, it's key. It's pretty important.

Right. It's like the last, you know, the final conflict of the movie. You can't just cut that scene out. Yeah. And that's important for you to understand it, that Peter's belief is not the standard Christian apocalyptic belief that you've heard even from like weirdo fundamentalist, you know, who believe in the rapture. Peters is all of that except, but we can.

the bad stuff if we put the right dictator in today. It's actually amazing because he's made himself the main character of the Bible, which I haven't. I can't think of another person who's managed to do that. They usually stick with the characters that are in there. Jesus did, you know. And yeah, and like, you know, and people, you know, we're very familiar with people using Jesus as a proxy for their own desires.

But to actually write self-insert Bible fan fiction. It's stunning. Yeah. It is. It's stunning. It's really some impressive stuff. And it's very funny. We're barely into Peter's, like, the first episode of Peter's speech.

So I'm going to read for you now. It started with him quoting that passage from the book of Daniel. Here's the second paragraph of his speech. In late modernity, such worries of the apocalypse are unfashionable. And the Antichrist is a forgotten figure. And I'm sorry, I lied. We couldn't get through the whole paragraph. Because that first sentence.

Like, what world are you living in, man? I know. Have you seen movies? Where have you heard of the Antichrist, Peter Thiel? It was probably growing up watching The Omen starring Gregory Peck, just like everyone else did. Have you talked to a person? Yeah.

And this is a load-bearing belief of his that churches don't talk about the apocalypse of the Antichrist anymore. They talk about it constantly. Like, are you, how do you think this? And just to add some polling data here, in 2013, the public policy polling conducted a series of a survey on conspiratorial beliefs among American voters. 13% of respondents in 2013 believed Barack Obama was the Antichrist, another 13 were unsure. And 73% stated they didn't think Obama was the Antichrist, but all of them were aware of the concept of the Antichrist, Peter. I mean, this isn't new, yeah.

It's sweet. And it's, it's Satan's kid, you know, it's really, it's, it's little Nicky. It's his, it's his, you know, look, if Satan is, uh, uh, Francis Ford Coppola, uh, the Antichrist is Nicholas Cage, who also would be a good pick to play the Antichrist. I'm just saying, you know? Oh my God, yes. That has to have happened in 1994 and we forgot about it. It better of, yeah, yeah, we, it just skipped us by. I watched him play a surfer recently. Not a great movie. Wow. Not a great movie. Sorry, guys. I appreciate that Nicholas Cage, well, I apparently can't say no.

You know, they're just like, will you be in this really inappropriate role? And he's like, yes. He's also an Australian in that. And they just explained it by being like, oh, we moved to America, California when I was young. It's like, you still don't really sound Australian to me, Nicholas Cage. All right, Mel Gibson. But also, I will watch you do anything for roughly 90 minutes. So I guess I'm the fool here.

And often an additional 30. Yeah, many cases more than that. So I'm going to actually read another paragraph, Peter said. This time you'll get the whole paragraph, but it's just as insane. And so like, hold your questions till the end, Sarah, but I know you're going to immediately have them. Our universities tell us that fears of the apocalypse are irrational and that the world is simply getting better. And yet our news tells us otherwise. We are worried about existential risks from AI, bio-webubble,

and nuclear war, how can we understand our apocalyptic time? And, like, what universities are you, you think college professors are telling all their kids the world is always getting better? And that's what, like, who, where, what are you basing this on? What college classes? Maybe he read Candide and he was like, so that's what they do in college. That's what professors must feel all the time. Famously, a colleague, you spend four years with people saying, everything's fine, don't worry

about it. Don't even think about it. It's great. Well, that's what's so weird to me about this, is that, like, Peter hates universities in the standard right-wing way. So I'm not surprised that he's critical of professors, but the standard right-wing critique of professors in the university isn't they think the world's getting better. Right. It's that, like, all of these leftist academics are telling everyone capitalism is fucked up and the climate change is cut. It's the opposite of that. That's such a weird thing for you to say, being you, Peter. It feels like kind of classic like freshman comp writing where you're like, I'm going to invent a problem that doesn't exist in order to justify the importance of my position. And it's like, all right, you just made that up, but whatever, fine, keep going.

And it's like, yeah, like, I get that you're, you can, you're creating strawmen, but like you're creating conflicting strawmen. Like, your strawmen aren't internally consistent, which is kind of weird, right? Anyway, after this, Peter goes on to state that the apocalypse is not a fixed date on a calendar. And he briefly summarizes the hilarious history of people trying to predict the end of days. Then he writes, still, if the day and the hour remain hidden, perhaps we may at least suspect the century. Now, I would argue this is just as delusional as trying to predict the day of the apocalypse, but it is much smarter from a gambler's point of view. And Peter Thiel is a degenerate gambler, right? like you got a lot of space to be wrong if you're just like oh it'll happen sometime in the 21st century right

like that is the smart play you'll be dead before people know you're totally wrong yeah absolutely yeah uh now next he tells his audience that if we are to take the antichrist seriously and again for peter the antichrist and the apocalypse are both synonyms we have to ask four questions these four questions are what is the antichrist's relationship to armageddon when will he arrive what is his relationship to Christ, and who is the Antichrist? Now, Peter's selective reading of scripture concludes that the Antichrist is the final antagonist before the Revelation of Christ and Armageddon, quote, The Beast of the Sea heading a world government.

He will come after many forerunners and will deceive the faithful by appearing more Christian than Christ. Now, for that last question, who is the Antichrist? Peter notes that the Antichrist, depending on who you listen to, could be a single person or a system or a type that repeats across history, right? And next he has a digression where he claims that David from the Bible was the first real historian, quote, because he foresaw a one-time sequence of world empires, whereas classical historians like Thucydides saw only cycles, quote, Athens versus Sparta, Germany versus Britain, and China versus America were one and the same. They were just steps in an eternal recurrence. And I know there's a lot that's wrong there. We'll get back

to the Antichrist stuff, but I have to correct Peters talking about history, because this is not fair to Thucydides or to classical thought, and nothing he's saying here is, like, accurate historiography, right? Classical thinkers did talk about the cyclical nature of history. Like, Thucydides talked about that, but he wasn't saying that, like, history is trapped in these, like, cycles of, like, it's the same thing happening over and over again. He was making the same observation and modern people do looking at history, which is that like, oh, people make the same mistakes a lot, huh? Like, there's a lot of similarities in history that rhyme because we keep fucking up in similar ways. Right.

I'm going to, here's a quote from Thucydides himself, just to make that point. If my work is judged useful by any who shall wish to have a clear view, both of the events which have happened, and those which will someday, according to the human condition, happen again, in such and such-like ways, it will suffice for me. So Thucydides is saying, my work is a success. if it leads people to understand the human condition and the patterns that we go through as people, right? Like the patterns in history as a result of the human condition. That's a very like modern thing, really, in a lot of ways. I think it's actually comports pretty well with modern historiography,

which is like the exact same things don't repeat, but people make similar choices historically in similar situations. And that's why you study history. Like I actually think Thucydides is saying something timeless here. And Peter is saying that, no, no, no, this guy is, this is a classical person who's trapped with like a very limited view of history that's fundamentally wrong, because he doesn't believe history can progress, you know, which is not what Thucydides is saying. He's making a point about human nature. He's got to create another meaningless straw man in order to make his theoretical point, yeah.

Yes, in part because Daniel has to be the first real historian, you know. Because historians predict things that have. haven't happened yet. Right. That's what being historian is. Robert, my question is, do we have any from the source, do they say, like, how the audience is reacting to this, like, 55-minute thing? They seemed engrossed from the reports I've heard, like, mostly interested. People kept showing up. I don't know. I don't have the audio, so I can't hear, like, what the reaction was. Was there a lot of applause? Was it all people being polite to Peter because they work in his VC fund? These are the unknowns, you know? to me so i can't answer that question accurately sophie but it's a good question um so peter claim his justification his explanation for why daniel was the first real historian is that daniel was the first historian to realize that world empires would all fall in succession leading ultimately to the

end of the world and the coming of god's kingdom now okay daniel i mean he that he made a that's kind of what he predicted but not in a way that's accurate to modern history because because, and this is critical, Sarah, Daniel prophesied four earthly kingdoms rising and falling in succession, and then after vows, four kingdoms rise and fall, we'll get the end of days in God's eternal kingdom, right? And the first, we know what the kingdoms were. The first was Babylon, which did indeed rise and fall. The second was Persia. The third was Greece. Some of what Daniel wrote is often seen as him having predicted Alexander the Great, although again, it was written after Alexander's time probably right um probably and then the fourth kingdom that

rosentfall was probably Rome right that that's what Daniel was prophesying now if you're a history no talk right you might be saying at this point I feel like there's been a lot of empire since the Roman Empire fell yeah it feels like the Ottoman Empire springs to mine sure that's a good the British Empire yeah that's a big one the American Empire you know Yep, falling as we speak. Obviously, the Canadian Empire, the most powerful and evil of them all. Oh, yeah, yeah, the seat of global Satanism, according to Michelle remembers. So there you go.

Yes, yes. And anyway, Peter's stance seems to be that, like, Daniel was right. But that, and again, Daniel is literally the guy who wrote the book of Daniel and literally historian, but also the four kingdoms thing was figurative, right? He wasn't literally talking about the actual historical. empires he was talking about. It's figurative when it helps my argument. Yeah. Which is the only way, because, like, again, he missed a lot of history after the Roman

Empire in between that and the apocalypse. And as a result, I might suggest that, like, well, Daniel clearly didn't foresee anything past the Roman Empire in terms of empires rising and falling. Maybe Thucydides' way of looking at history, you know, seeing patterns of human behavior and seeing how they influence historic events rather than trying to. to predict specific events. Maybe that's a more productive way to look at history. Maybe Thucydides was a better historian than Daniel.

No, the correct way to look at history is self-insert fan fiction. We've been over this. That's right. Make yourself the most important character in history. Why bother studying anything if you can't be the main character of it? Right. I've always felt that way anyway. So thank you for reinforcing my belief system here.

Oh, yeah. Anyway, in his next paragraph, Peter continues to be dizzingly wrong. From 1750 to the early 1900s, technology accelerated at a pace that defies comprehension. In the 20th century, lifespans doubled. We moved faster physically. Steam engines led to automobiles and jet airplanes. In the 21st century, technology only means information technology. Progress in all other fields has halted.

The question naturally arises, is the singularity in the past or in the future? He doesn't know what singularity means. No, he doesn't. And he doesn't know. Or anything. a very, if all you care about is like the consumer tech industry. It's a, I understand how your attitude could be. Nothing is progressing aside from information technology. Smartphones aren't really improving anymore. Tablets are kind of laptops, all of these things that used to be wildly

different every year are only kind of a little bit different now with every new innovation. Progress has stopped. If you only look at technology in like gadgets, a guy keeps in his living room or their pocket. I get how you might say that. And clearly that's how Peter Thiel thinks about technology because he's a terminal narcissist, right? Who can only see progress through the lens of the parts of the tech industry

he makes money on. But the idea that, like, all other fields of scientific endeavor have stalled in the last couple of decades is insane nonsense. I mean, for example, MRI vaccine technology advanced rapidly in very recent history, right?

That doesn't count. Peter for some reason. But, you know, what does it matter if something advances if you can't make exponential profits off of it? Who cares? Yep. Yep. And that's clearly what's going on here.

I don't even know, like, should I, like, I have, I had a rant in here about, like, car tech, like automobile safety technology, just as, like, a point of how wrong he is. Because, like, it's Matt, like, since the 1980s, like, there's a little bit of debate about this. But, like, anti-lock brakes became normal in the 1980s. And kind of after that, you've started getting an increasing variety of, like, what are called advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS. This includes everything from, like, collision warnings to automated emergency braking

and electronic stability control, lane assist, all that kinds of stuff. And, like, electronic stability control or ESC systems alone have been shown to reduce single vehicle fatal crash fatality chances by between, like, 40 and 56%. There's a 2017 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that shows that some of these rear braking systems have reduced rear-in collisions by 27%. The data overall suggests that automated emergency braking, combined with a warning, reduces rear-in crashes by between 50 and 56%. And altogether, newer cars have something like a 50% lower fatality risk in crashes than cars built in the late 50s. This is a staggering degree of improvement, and a lot of it's occurred in the last, like, 20 years. Again, during this period of time where Peter was like, nothing's getting better.

Well, a lot is. It's just not what you care about. Right. Yeah, we have kind of reached the apex of what a screen can do, probably. Like, you can't get, like, that's fine. There's other things. Cancer is to research, you know? We're still making headway in other areas.

It's fine. It's so weird to be like, well, TVs are as good as they're going to get all the progress. is halted now. There's nothing else. So we might as well give up, I guess. Yeah. I'm ready for the apocalypse if my TV is not going to keep improving. Yeah. You can't make the images any smoother. Yeah. And it's just really telling that, like, Peter's identity is like, only information technology is still advancing. And it's like, yeah, because that's the only technology you're looking at, right? You don't care about car safety. You don't care about any of these other fields. Well, if he's not paying attention to it,

it doesn't exist, you know? It's like when a baby drops something. Yeah. And there's a, there's a very funny at this point in his write-up that he made of Peter's speech, Cocharnie, the guy taking the notes, includes a graph. And I don't know. I think that Peter's presentation had a graph like this. I don't know that. Maybe, but it's so funny, Sarah. Look at this beautiful thing. There's two graphs. One is labeled in the past and one is labeled in the future. And the one that says in the past shows the line basically going as an S curve, but like it's going rapidly up, knowledge on the x-axis, time on the y-axis, or did I fuck up the axes? And then it's showing, it's showing knowledge going up massively over time and then plateauing

suddenly. And then the one labeled in the future shows knowledge at a steady rate until it shotguns up rapidly over time. I guess that's Peter predicting that knowledge. Can we knowledge will. Yeah. Can we see the raw data for these charts? What is the data? What is knowledge based on? How are we defining knowledge? In the future, when? How do we know? Why do we have a chart of the future? It's because he's a true historian, like, Daniel, who wrote the book of Daniel, duh. Yeah, I love fake graphs. And this is a beautiful fake graph to me. It's perfect. I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Other than, like, AI will increase the rate of knowledge, maybe. It looks like that's kind of what he's trying to say. But he's arguing certainly that right now we're stuck. Like science is stuck, you know? And this is like the core of everything Peter believes and like why he is so supportive of radical political change is that he thinks it's death for the human race that science is stuck. And as a spoiler, the Antichrist is all of the anti-science people who want to stop AI research, who want to stop drilling for fossil fuels. Like who wanted like that, that is his doom loop, right? Peter says, quote, we are running

a Red Queen's race, working harder, running faster, yet standing still. Wages have stagnated, health is plateauing, and optimism is fading. Nixon declared a war on cancer in 1971, promising victory by the bicentennial in 1976. No president today would dare to clear a war on Alzheimer's. And like, I mean, yeah, man, because we didn't beat cancer in 1976, right? Yeah, Nixon was very brave. Hey, if he hadn't got, if he hadn't resigned, maybe he would have cured cancer. Sure. It's like, I don't know, maybe the fact that this didn't work last time is why presidents don't say shit like that anymore. Because it's like dumb. It's like dumb.

It's a stupid thing to do. It's a grandiose and over-the-top thing to say. And I get that it's personally disappointing to you that the presidents don't act more megalomaniacal. But it is also the idea that like, oh, wow, it's fun that he recognizes regular people, their wages are standing still. Like, things like quality of life increases have plateaued. aren't getting better at the rate they used to, and yet my wealth as a billionaire has increased massively while like regular wages are stagnant. Rich people like me, the top 1% of the top 1% are getting a lot more. Hmm, wonder if those are connected. I wonder if maybe all of the

benefits that should be spread out throughout society in order to do things like increase life expectancy and increase average wealth and like ensure people are able to retire and all this stuff that translates to quality of life, I wonder if the fact that all that money is going to me has anything to do with this stagnation. Nah. No. Antichrist. Yeah. In his next paragraph, Peter gets to the core of why he's so angry at science and academia. Science once promised radical life extension. Today, the closest we come to mastery over death is legalized euthanasia. What? And I, yeah, no? Peter, that's not true? Like, he just, he just, hasn't he i don't think anyone has given him feedback on this draft no no and it's like

yeah this is very clearly a man without an editor for sure he needs a editor he needs a producer he needs a single person to say no i feel like science never promised radical life you probably read like an article and like people where someone who wasn't a scientist talked about radical Or a grifter talked about radical, and you bought it because you're not that smart. Maybe that's who promised radical life. I think some con men promised you radical life extension. And as you age and none of the nonsense you're doing really works the way it's supposed to, you realize you've been conned and you're blaming science as opposed to the grifters that you listened to

and gave a lot of money. I think maybe that's what's going on. And blaming science for your magical thinking not working as well as it used to. And also just like the closest we come to master of her death is legalized euthanasia. Again, like fucking the most recent vaccine technology leaps. And like life expectancies have increased in a lot of ways for a lot of specific illnesses. There are a lot of new medicines that didn't exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago that exists now. And like absolutely.

I mean, we have gene modification technology, you know, yeah. Like, I realize euthanasia is exciting, but come on. Yeah. There's a ton of medical improvements and even breakthroughs. Just none of them mean that you'll live forever because that's not possible, Peter. But basically, he's like, science is in the direction. We might as well all kill ourselves. But wait, there's more.

But wait, there's more. It's like looking at, it's like looking at like the aerospace field and being like there's been no progress in the last 30 years because we haven't developed faster than light travel. Because I didn't see it on TV, so I assume it didn't happen. Right. But like planes are a lot. safer. Like, plane crashes are a lot rarer. Like, isn't that count as an improvement? No, fuck you. We don't have warp speed. I'm angry. Um, yeah. Anyway, we'll talk some more about

Peter Thiel and what he believes. And specifically, we're going to talk about who he thinks the Antichrist might be and part two. But this is part one. It ran a little long, but thank you, Sarah, for indulging me. Thank you. This has been a horrifying journey. Yeah? How do you feel about Peter. He seems smart. I feel like he's a tiny little baby, and I can't wait to see him become even tinier before my very eyes next time. Yeah. Robert, who is your antichrist, Robert? Who do I think the antichrist is? Honestly, like, Peter Thiel's not a bad pick. If you're kind of going, though, with the more traditional view of it needs to be somebody who's, like, popular, who's, like,

widely beloved, you know, by people who's able to, like, get a large following together. I feel like Mr. Beast. I feel like Mr. Beast, very probable Antichrist. Yeah. I can see it. There's nothing behind his eyes. We can all agree on that, right? Yeah.

That black eyes, like a doll's eyes. Yeah, doll's eyes. And I'm glad that you brought up Jaws because I do think that the solution to Mr. Beast is the same as the solution to the shark and jaws. Yep, make him bite into an oxygen tank. Yeah, I'm going to crowdfund a shitty boat, like not a good boat, like a fucked-up looking boat that I've been living on for a while. That's named after the thing that almost ate you when you were younger.

Or no, it's called the orca, I guess. It's named after the only thing that can eat the thing that almost ate you when you were younger. Right, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's going to be great. Anyway, if you haven't watched the original Jaws, go listen to Jaws. plug your plug-able, Sarah. Yeah. Go listen to The Devil You Know. It's out right now from CBC Podcasts.

It's my new miniseries about the Satanic Panic and all of the truly wonderful people who got caught up in it. And I was so happy to get to talk to you today about something that scares me so much more than any depiction of the devil. And I cannot wait to resume. Yay. Excellent. All right, everyone. Part one is done. Go away for a while.

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