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

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Robert answers the big question: who does Peter Thiel think the antichrist might be? And we learn about the time he considered cryonically freezing his own head after death.   Check out Sarah’s new show here: https://link.mgln.ai/6Pab8jSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coalzo Media Uh, welcome behind the bastards back to podcast, people bad about tell all them you. I'm Robert Evans, uh, and yeah, uh, with me again for part two of our episode on what Peter Teal thinks about the Antichrist. Um, I'm, I've just, I'm, I'm sorry that that's, that's what we're talking about right now. I love it. We're getting right to the heart of the matter, you know? Because people are like, do you want to talk about the economy?

And I'm like, no, no. No, I don't want to talk about the economy. I'm tired of talking about the economy. Tell me about what these idiots think. Tell me what they believe. Absolutely. So here we are. Sarah Marshall, you got anything you want to plug here at the start

before we dive back into it? Yeah. I have a new podcast about the Satanic Panic and the, the whack-a-do horrible things that the fear of a Satan who never showed up to the party caused self-described good and law-abiding people to bring about. And it's a sad show, it's a fun show, it's a show about history, it's a show about today. It's called The Devil You Know. It's all right now with CBC podcasts.

And, of course, I also host a show called You're Wrong About, and you can listen to that too. And it's a, you know, we have fun while trying to get to the bottom of things, much like you do. Right, right. We're talking today about Peter Thiel being wrong about something important. And we're also talking about the devil he knows, or at least who he thinks the devil might be. Yes, his fantasy devil, perhaps. His fantasy devil, I guarantee you're not going to see where this is building to. My question is, Sarah, who is your fantasy devil?

Oh, yeah, there you go. Peter Cook and bedazzled, of course. Oh, you know, Sarah, you could not have said anything that would have gotten me more on your side than that. I love the original bedazzled. Right. He's the best Satan easily by a mile. Tell me why you think that is. And people haven't seen this movie enough.

It's a delight. It's Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I respect, both from a theological standpoint and from just an entertainment standpoint, the idea of a devil. who is whose primary focus is not on acts of grand evil but on acts of

petty annoyance like that scene where he's just like casually scratching records and then putting them in the mail is so funny to me

and there's a scene where he's ripping the last pages out of novels yes yes and there's that I mean my favorite part I guess spoilers

for the film bedazzled which is half a century old but there's a great scene there's a great scene where the guy who's soul he's the devil is trying to

to win, and he are talking. And the guy, the human asked him, like, why did you rebel against God in the first place? It seems like he had a pretty sweet deal. And the devil, the devil like gets up on top of, I think it's a mailbox or something. And he's like, okay, I'm going to like walk you through what it was like back then. I'm God. Start praising me. And the guy's like, goes around. Like, I praise you. Keep going. Keep praising me. Keep praising me. And he goes on like this for a while. And eventually the guy's like, hey, can we take a break? And maybe I get up there for a minute, and the devil's like, that's exactly what I thought. Yeah. Exactly. Right? And it plays on, you know, the feeling that a lot of us have in Sunday school or equivalent that like, you know, that the character of God in the Bible is insufferable, you know?

And I don't know if that plays into our topic today, but I have always noticed it. And especially, and I also really love the Cartmanland episode of South Park where Kyle's faith is challenged and so is parents tell him the story of Job. And he's like, why would God do that to a good man? Why is he like this? And it's like, why would God do that? Because like, Satan you expect to like try and be a trickster. But the fact that God is like, hey, yeah, I should ruin this guy's life and see if he

still praises me. That's a good use of my time. You're like, hmm. Yeah. The devil comes out looking comparatively good in that story because it's less of a betrayal from him he's just an asshole yeah i yeah anyway watch watch the original bedazzled you don't need to watch the one made and or listen to my podcast yeah you can watch that one it's cute it's fun if you want but yeah peter cook and dudley more one of the great comedy duos and i i do

feel like the idea of just the the trickster devil is so beautifully embodied there and that it's interesting to me that the devil is kind of the trickster character and we took the trickster who's in most cosmologies and made him evil, which is a very different, yeah, a very different role to play. Yeah. So, I don't know, folks, watch Bedazzled. It's more biblically accurate than Peter Thiel's lecture on the Antichrist. I'll say that.

There you go. Yeah. That feels so true. This is an I-Heart podcast. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricanedobolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, do I have scurvy at 3 a.m. And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look

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ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mals in Belgium, women began to go missing. It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them. The murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence. Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your 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 IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I had planned Sarah for us to get through the first one of Peter's, like the notes on his first lecture faster than we did. we didn't get through that even.

We might have to do like a day-long staged event doing that, like when Andy Kaufman read the Great Gatsby. Yeah, I'm ready. Yeah. Or I could just get the Embarcadero to host me while I talk for four days about Peter Thiel's lectures on the Antichrist and why they're very silly. People would go. I would love it.

But we're going to have to cut through the remainder of that first lecture before we get into who he thinks might be the Antichrist. And so when we left off... I do feel like you've given me a pretty clear sense. of how unhinged this whole theology is. Yeah. I'm glad we at least landed on that. So when we left off with Peter, he was complaining that science promised to make us immortal and it failed to deliver, which it didn't, but nonetheless. Next, Peter says that after the development of the atom bomb, quote, technology itself became

apocalyptic. And in 1945, the National Committee on Atomic Information published One World or None, which is generally agreed to have been like the first atomic scare movie. Like this is the first like what if a nuclear war movie, right? Oh, boy. And the gist of this is that nukes were really dangerous and the only rational solution to a world in which everyone has nukes is a strong United Nations that can put an end to war and ensure nuclear weapons are never used en masse, right? Yep. I would say, I think most people would say like, yeah, it's pretty reasonable reaction to nukes. It's kind of the theme of a lot of Twilight Zone episodes as well.

Pretty reasonable. Right. Yeah. Fairly middle of the road concept. It's also, yeah, it's also, this is also like a reaction to World War II where it's like we should probably have some sort of like international law. So like if a country's doing war crimes, there's some sort of mechanism. The United States from doing the things that we will choose to do again. Yeah. I mean, we don't really do this.

The ISIS, I mean, we briefly, Serbia, we punish briefly. But that's kind of it. you know, in terms of international law. I'm cutting things down a little bit. But we never, this is not a thing that ever really happens. But it is a thing. Peter Thiel is in a lot of ways a very old-fashioned kind of paranoid. The U.N. is the devil, the Antichrist, wants the U.N. to take over the world kind of guy.

He's the Sterling Hayden and Dr. Strange Love kind of a role that's so crucial in American politics. And Dr. Strangelove is going to come up in a little bit here. You're going to hear what Peter thinks about that movie. Oh, no. But it's not, it is, he tries to dress it up because he knows that, like, well, cranks are the guys who think that any reasonable person can be like, well, the UN never came even anywhere close to being a one world government. Like, at no point did it have even a fraction of that much power, obviously. And if it did, then, you know, they would have solved more problems, you would think.

Maybe things would be better. Peter is that kind of a crank, but he doesn't want you to think about that. So he has to dress this up in, like, theological terms and shit. He can't just be the guy down at the feed store. Because really, he's, like, you know, Dale from King of the Hill, but he has to make it seem important. Right. And so he says that, you know, this movie, One World or None, was the birth of when we started seeing technology itself as like apocalyptic, right? And this is bad because Peter is blaming, basically, the fact that we don't make scientific advancements anymore on this train of thinking that starts.

you know, with this nuclear paranoia of this idea that, like, well, technology is bad. And that's why we're not progressing technologically. Of course. And I feel like I've explained enough why this is all nonsense. Yeah. Also from a film history perspective, that's even wrong. Because, like, what do you call Metropolis, baby? Frankenstein.

Yeah. Sure. Seriously. I mean, the movie and the book, but yeah, there's all, there's so much we could critique about this, but I need to read you this next line. coincidentally, this is also when the Catholic Church stopped giving apocalyptic sermons. Did it? Is that true? I don't know what the fuck you're talking about because I went to, like my dad was Catholic. I didn't only go to Catholic Church, but I went to Catholic Church a good amount as a little kid. And I remember the priest talking about the end times and the second coming. It wasn't the only thing. It's certainly not as much of a focus in Catholicism as it is as it is in a lot of like evangelical Christian sects. But it's not.

not talked about. He's like Catholics aren't talking about it constantly and therefore they're not doing it at all. Yeah. I guess my citation here is like I went to church as a kid, what the fuck are you basing this on, Peter? Like, that's just not true. And it's also like, well, Catholicism's just one chunk of Christianity and a lot of Christian faiths and priests and pastors over the last 75, 80 years have talked about the apocalypse in different ways. It's a common subject.

This whole pillar of his belief system, which is that people don't really talk about the antichrist or the apocalypse anymore outside of technology causing it. Right. It's like, no? It's like in the late 20th century, people talked about it, you know,

an unbelievable amount and like pretty consistently. And, you know, it's, right. It just feels like he's arguing whatever he feels like he needs to in order to justify the point he wants to make thing by thing. Yeah, his issue is that, like, all of the people who are pushing these secular apocalyptic fears about, like, fertility collapsing or bio-weapons or AI are kind of playing into the real Antichrist because the Antichrist wants to stop technological progress, right? That's the argument he's making, yes. Fascinating. The Antichrist is Amish.

Yeah, or a Luddite, right? Yeah. Now, Peter, the other thing, I mean, and that's really what he believes. He does believe the Antichrist is a Luddite, and he also misunderstands Luddites, whatever. Of course, yeah. He also, he goes on, he's angry that he doesn't like secular apocalyptic fears. And he complains, he lists that, like, oh, regular people, when they talk about the apocalypse, they're always worried about, like, nuke's or biological weapons or AI or, you know, the children of men, fertility collapse. And that's really incomplete.

Quote, we should add the risk of the biblical Antichrist, manifesting as a one-world government. Here, the secular maps neatly onto the theological, the one-world state of the Antichrist, on the other hand, and the no-world of Armageddon. And, like, first off, that's not really a risk because, like, no one to think, no reasonable person thinks a one-world government is anywhere close to a reality. I mean, yeah. It's just not a realistic fear. Like, even if that was a bad thing, it's not a realistic fear. looking at the world today. Yeah.

And the whole, this idea that like, oh, the secular maps onto the theological. You've got the one world state of the Antichrist and then the no world of Armageddon. And like, those things are only mapped neatly if you're an idiot. One world or none is arguing in favor of a strong UN and a strong international criminal court to stop world leaders from doing crimes against humanity. That's not a one world state. Like the movie that he argues for is not advocating a one world state. and neither are most people who want a stronger U.N. or ICC, basically zero percent of people,

including me, who support a stronger ICC, want to one-to-one world state. You just want there to be punishments for genocide, right? Right. And in this case, it feels like people, including Peter Thiel in this case, are betting themselves into pretzels to justify their desire to get to kill whoever they want and call it morally good. Yeah. And I think with Peter, because I don't think Peter's specifically all that motivated to kill specific groups of people, but I think Peter sees if there's an international criminal court, if there's a higher international law of any kind, then that means I'm bound by law somewhere. And that's wrong. That's fundamentally wrong for anyone to be able to punish me Peter Thiel or hold me accountable for any of my actions

whatsoever. That's the worst thing that can happen. Because I'm baby, but I'm also the most powerful person in the world, or I should be. And I should be because of how smart I am. But also, who will stop me? Someone please stop me. No, no one stopped me. Yeah. Fucking Peter. So this next paragraph is, I've said this several times. This is where things get really crazy, but this is where things get really crazy. This is where things get really crazy. It's been really crazy. It's been pretty crazy, but it's about to be crazier. We should at least suspect that the apocalypse in our newspaper headlines is the apocalypse of the Bible. This is not mysticism. but simple extrapolation of human nature.

Wisdom has not increased, even if information has. The one point on which the atheist and fundamentalist agree is that violence comes from God. The Christian, however, knows it comes from man. I know, right? What the fuck? Are you? Wait, Peter. What are we saying?

I think, let me tell you what I think he's arguing here. I think he's saying that atheists, obviously fundamentalists believe that all, everything comes from God. So that includes all violence. Atheists blame all violence on religion. Yeah, that makes sense when you put it that way. I was an angry atheist. I'm not an angry atheist anymore. I'm still more or less an atheist.

I've never met an atheist who thinks all violence is caused by religion. Right. I've never met a one. That's a crazy thing to believe. There's certainly capitalism looking at you, kid, and a lot of other stuff. Yeah, some dude like murdering his wife because he doesn't want to pay. alimony. That's not God. That kind of stuff happens. Like a fucking a rapist committing rape isn't like God didn't make him do that. Right. Obviously there's rapists who do it through. Sorry.

Of just sort of male entitlement and just, you know, yeah, there's, anyway. But it's like, this is the kind of writing where it's like you have to kind of simplify everything into an either or it feels like. Right. Which again is very eighth grade. And it's, it is very like, it's like how a 12-year-old debate bro Christian kid talks about a, like when I was a 12-year-old right-wing debate, bro. This is how I thought about atheism, right? But it's like a straw man that an adult wouldn't have. You would hope not.

It's such an absurd idea, but both the atheist and the fundamentalists believe all violence comes from God. Counterpoint. No? It's like, you've never talked to an atheist. I mean, yeah. No one thinks that. I don't even think, I guess, like, fundamentalists would argue that everything comes from God or whatever. So, yeah, but, like, even then, I think most, very few of them would phrase it that way, even of the religious fundamentalists that I know.

That's just a weird way to phrase anything. Like, you're, well, in any argument, based on there being, like, a few key groups of people who all think the same thing as each other. They all think this, never, yeah. Exactly. And it's this, weirdly enough, this sentence of all of the reading I've done on Peter Thiel. And I have read extensively. I've read a lot of most of the interviews he's done over the years. I've read a lot of his own writing. You've been through a lot.

This is the thing that scares me most. This scares me more than any of his anti-democratic polemics where he's talking about the need for a dictatorship. Because the fact that he would think this and say this is evidence that there is a disconnect in his mind between what he thinks people believe and actual humanity. And that disconnect is so, it's very upsetting to. me like that's scary how disconnected he is from reality i would say i i am upset by this yeah um now from here peter argues that if we're heading for war or armageddon then it's not if it's reasonable to think that there might be a an apocalyptic war right then it's not unreasonable to worry that an antichrist might rise to power promising to end wars and bring stability back right

if it's reasonable to say we might have a war that ends humanity it's not it's got to be reasonable also to say that the Antichrist might promise rise to power, promising to stop that war, right? Both of those are logical things. And let's give him that. That's a nonsense point in and of itself, but let's pretend that makes sense. Sure, whatever. Peter somehow doesn't draw a connection from that to like, well, an Antichrist might rise to power, promising to stop World War III, to the fact that Donald Trump, who he supported, got elected promising to stop, like literally saying, I will avoid World War III. If you vote for me, we'll stop having a, we won't have World War III, but Kamala will lead us there, or Biden will lead us there. Like, that literally is directly what Trump said. I'm not editorializing in any way. Oh, I know. You know this, Peter, right? Like, anyway, Peter just doesn't deal with this. Instead, he focuses. Right. Who's to say this thing that actually happened obviously isn't relevant? Well, let's talk about how scary it would be if it happened in an imaginary way. So we can ignore the real way that it did just happen. Yeah.

Let that be fun. The Bible literally says that many Christians, many believers will be tricked by the Antichrist when he rises to power, promising to fix a lot of this shit. And Donald, I, Peter, literally believe the Antichrist will rise to power, promising to stop World War III. Donald Trump rose to power, promising to stop World War III. Obviously, none of this is worth talking about. Completely irrelevant.

Instead, Peter now talks about two different, like, 80-year-old novels about the anti-year-year-old novels about the antichrist from like the early 20th century both of which he brings these he summarizes them i don't think we even need to talk about the novels because what he's what he's pointing out is that both of these novels about the antichrist and most antichrist narratives all have a plot hole which is that they don't explain how the antichrist will actually seize power quote in late which is like a weird thing to care of anyway whatever in late modernity we finally have the answer to how the Antichrist will rise to power, by talking constantly of Armageddon, or in secular terms of existential risk. He, the Antichrist, rides the wave of

apocalyptic anxiety. Oppenheimer lamented, we need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head. Nick Bostrom has proposed preventative policing and global compute governance in his vulnerable world hypothesis. Elyzer Yudkowski's latest book is, if anyone builds it, everyone dies. And Peter is saying all three of these guys are potential antichrists or servants of the Antichrist, right? Because they're spreading as he gives this lecture series, it's entirely about his apocalyptic beliefs. He's saying these guys who are talking about Armageddon are all clearly agents of the Antichrist, if not the Antichrist themselves, because no one else would talk about the Antichrist or the Apocalypse so much, as he talks about the Apocalypse.

Except him. It's fine with him. And this whole thing is built on paradoxes because it's like we have to avoid a one-world government by giving all of our power to a dictator who will protect us from another dictator, question mark, you know? Yeah. And it's the funniest thing to me, we'll get to his other antichrist. The fact that he's like a Leeser Yiddkowski, maybe an Antichrist, right?

Certainly an agent of the Antichrist. And we've made fun of him on this show a lot, right? Like he's an AI risk dude. And obviously, I don't like AI. I don't, but not because the, like, Yadkowski is like a rationalist who believes in, he's like a member of a cult, kind of the leader of a cult based on these like deranged ideas of rationality. And he thinks AI is dangerous because AI will become a god that, and it will, any AI god we create will inevitably want to kill us all. I mean, it's dangerous enough in terms of taking all our jobs. You know, we can just start with that.

Sure. Yeah. No. He's not one of the It'll Take Our Jobs thing. He doesn't care about artists making a living. Yudkowski cares about. He believes that the Harlan Ellison short story, I have no mouth, but I'm a scream. That's what he literally thinks AI will do, right? But before that, it'll take our jobs.

It'll take our jobs, exactly. And it's fun because, like, Peter Thiel funded Yudkowski. in his early career, his, like, rationalism and stuff. Like, Peter gave this guy money and supported the growth of, like, the rationalist subculture in the Bay Area. And then he was like, wait, no, not that. No, yeah, he's literally said, he says in this lecture that he thinks Yudkowski is deranged now because Yidkowski's anti-AI.

So he has a former mentee who then takes his ideas in a direction he doesn't like, and he's like, that guy could be the Antichrist. I mean, if nothing else, doesn't this story make you feel better about your own beefs, you know? Yeah, I do kind of think Garrison might be the Antichrist, you know, my protege, one-time protege, but, yeah, that's separate. One's protege could always be the Antichrist. I mean, Sophie, it's certainly not impossible. Garrison is an perfect angel. Sophie is the one you least suspect, you know, when you think about it, so.

Yeah, it could be Sophie. Sophie. I've accepted that a while ago. I think it's Paul Pierce anyways. You think it's Paul Pierce? Okay, sure. Why not? So this is kind of where I've decided to get into the most publicized feature of Peter's Antichrist Lectures, which is his predictions as to what modern fit people might be the Antichrist in disguise. So obviously, Yidkowski, you know, is at least in consideration. Guy I've never heard of, obviously. Right. This guy might. Must be it. And Peter not only hates Yidkowski, he feels the need to analyze him as a possible antichrist, because Yidkowski's main claim to fame now is he's trying to, like, warn people about

AI and stop AI development. And AI is the only thing that could give Peter a return on his financial investment commensurate to what he thinks he deserves. So obviously Yidkowski's evil for trying to stop this stuff, you know. Can we also appreciate that like, even if you're, you know, like, I don't think that the kind of person who wants to go to a four-part lecture series on the Antichrist is, like, my kind of person. But even so, I do feel like you would assume you were in for something different than a guy being like, here are people I don't like personally and why I think they're the Antichrist. Like, that's taking it to another level.

You're like, oh, gee, I just expected a PowerPoint. That's what we're doing. Yeah. And it's because basically Peter's primary claim here is that the Antichrist is anyone warning people about the apocalypse and trying to save the world. But not me. If that's not the Antichrist, that's an agent of the Antichrist, except for me, except for me, obviously. And Donald Trump, you know.

So here's a quote from his first lecture. My thesis is that in the 17th and 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of crazy evil science. In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It's someone like Greta or a Leaser Yiddkaus. He says he specifically, and he'll go in later and be like, I don't think Yadkowski is. He definitely thinks Greta Tunberg might be the Antichrist. He very directly is clear about that.

He thinks Greta Tunberg could be the Antichrist. What is it about her that so unnerves tyrants? I mean, I guess the fact that she's, you know, very smart and impossible to corrupt. Yeah, the truth. Speaking the truth to power, she's proved to, I mean, honestly, like, I've been just shocked at how continually good her takes have been. Just because, like, anytime someone gets famous, that famous, that young, like, you expect, okay, at some point, they're going to, like, either buy into a conspiracy theory or get something, gets something weird. And she's just, like, really consistently got a great head on her shoulders. Yeah.

And so that scares the hell out of them. Yeah, great. And can't be convinced to look away, which I do feel like, you know, everything you've been talking about, I mean, we've been joking about it, but so much of it is like, what in the world is that thing? Look away. Let me do a little sleight of hand over here. It's because parlor tricks. I think fundamentally why they, why he hates her and why she is hated by a lot of these guys so much is not that they're scared of the. because obviously she doesn't have any power.

She's like somewhat influential, but she can't, she's not going to throw Peter Thiel in prison or destroy fault. She simply does not have the power. She's not a corporation. She's just a person with morals, yeah. She's just a person with morals and basically zero real world power. Yeah. But she is emblematic and embodies a fact, which is that I'm not a believer in, oh, justice will

win out the bark, the arc of history. bins towards like I don't I think that's a silly stance but inevitably in the future if there are people they will realize that Peter Thiel and all of his ilk during this period of time were deranged monsters who destroyed the environment and who allowed and who fought viciously against any attempts to reduce the harm humanity was doing to the biosphere in order to make themselves wealthier and they will be hated as a result that's just a fact But not by that many people, because so many people will have died as a direct result of their actions and inactions. Yes.

Like, I think Greta represents the reality that in the future, these people, like, won't, they won't be able to, especially after they're dead, keep up the lie that they were fighting against all this disinformation from the left and pretend, you know, the climate change fake. Like, that lie won't hold up at a certain point. Well, and that they're working so hard to create a mythology. where, like, the story changes every day based on what needs to be true for them to be right and that that kind of mythology won't perpetuate itself forever

and keep protecting them. Yeah. Exactly. Like, there will be a future in which the bullshit that they have spent their lives propping up is not widely believed.

And that doesn't mean it'll be a perfect future or even a more just future. It just means that in the future people will know what a scumbag Peter was. And that's why he is so scared and hate.

of her, right? I think that's it. Yeah. And also that he's going to die and other people will continue to live and sail around. Yep. He's going to die probably sooner than he expects, like most people, and a lot of folks are going to be happy because it'll be good when he dies. Anyway, speaking of death, advertisements are a kind of death. That's what in French, the word for advertisement means the little death. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled,

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I will have my revenge. This is Incells. Listen to season one of Incells on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young woman in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up, I wanted to scream.

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This is Levitown, a new podcast. from iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg, and kaleidoscope. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, yes. Talking about my flawless knowledge of French. And talking about Peter Thiel's belief that fucking Credit Tunberg is the anti-crise. So let's talk about this from a theological standpoint.

because one thing the book of Daniel is pretty clear about vis-a-vis the Antichrist is that the Antichrist is a political leader of some sort. He has described repeatedly as a prince or a king. Now, I could see being like, well, obviously, that's, if we're going with the Bible is true, but not always literally, you know, these are apocryphal stories. Okay, a king could be a stand in for a president or a senator, sure. but a young lady who sometimes tries to deliver food on a boat, there's no, that's not a, there's no way to like describe Greta Tunberg as a king or a prince. Same with Elysia Ead Kasky. Like, they're not political leaders.

And the anti-gris definitely is. Like, again, Peter's selective embrace of literal readings of the Bible here really biting him in the ass. You're like, it's all very literal unless I need it to being so figurative that it completely goes in a new direction. Thank you. I also love his fundamental, like, oh, you don't understand Dr. Strangelove, like, the movie at all, because the idea that, like, well, in the 17th or 18th century, the Antichrist would have been Dr. Strange Love, right?

I know. Well, no. Such a random reference. Yeah. Right. For one thing, like, in the movie of the same name, he's not a political leader. He's the president's scientific advisor. And he's not responsible for the apocalypse.

At least not primarily, right? Now, the same act of Peter Sellers does... He's mainly delivering exposition, right? Exactly, yes. And, like, it is true. Peter Sellers also plays the president, right? He plays Moly. He plays Dr. Strangelove and the president

that Strangelove is advising. But even if you're saying, well, that means they're the same person, that doesn't Peter Sellers as the president being the Antichrist doesn't make sense in that movie? It's just embarrassing to misremember a movie in your big speech. It's so bad. Yeah. Like, you could rewatch it. you're writing a four-part lecture series, man.

Also, in the 17th century, the Antichrist would not have been a character from a 1960s movie, but it would have been the Antichrist, just like the, you know, the devil's kid or whatever. Yeah, it would have been a king or something. Like in the Bible. A text people knew better than a movie that wouldn't come out for 300 years. I also think, again, I don't, maybe he hasn't even seen the movie, because it sounds like Peter thinks Dr. Strangelove causes the apocalypse in the movie Dr. Strangelove.

He's like, well, you know, it's about an atomic bomb, and it's called Dr. Strange Love. So probably Dr. Strangelove made the bomb, obviously. I mean, I didn't have time to watch it, but I deduced it because I'm so smart. That must be what happens. And, like, no, for the record, if you haven't seen it, Dr. Strangelove is a mad scientist and a Nazi. Yeah. But he doesn't, there's a crazed U.S. general who launches the initial nuclear strike. Who's as American as can be.

Right. And, like, the government, like, we try to reach out. out to the USSR in our bunker and are like, these are where their missiles are coming in. You can shoot them out of the sky. Like, please, we don't want to actually have a nuclear war. This is a fuck up. And the USSR is like, oh, well, we actually built a doomsday device

that will go off automatically and we can't stop it, right? Right. And the premise is like, what if an American general lost his mind and there weren't adequate safeguards in place before he could cause mutually assured destruction? And it's like, oh, yeah, I guess, I mean, that's certainly not a problem we're having now. Right, exactly. Certainly no more relevant now than it was back then. But it's like neither the president nor Dr. Strange Love or Antichrist figures. No one really is

in the movie Dr. Strange Love actually. No, they're not. But it's particularly weird to say Dr. Strange Love is the Antichrist because he doesn't incite the action. Like that just isn't accurate have you ever seen because you know the omen has two sequels and they're not that good oh god yeah it does the second one has sam neil in it and he plays the adult damian and he's like taken over the world and he's all charismatic and i think in politics and dating a newscaster lady yeah but the movie like doesn't really know what to have him be doing because it is like what would the antichrist believe like what would his whole deal be you know like people are kind of like reluctant to state that.

Yeah. And so it's like you get to sort of align it with whatever you know people already find threatening at that time, which, you know, hence all the Obama stuff. Right, right, right, exactly. So the fact that, you know, he listed Greta Tunberg and Elisa Hidkowski as possible antichrist, both of those things are insane. At least Tunberg, she is like popular. She has a lot of like followers and people who care about what she says.

Elyzer Yudkowski, he's got his little cult, but he's not, you really, you think he's got the juice to even be on the list of potential Antichrist? You're vastly overestimating this man's charisma. Right. This weirdos charisma. He's not even in the top thousand. No, no. I am a more realistic antichrist than fucking Olyzer Yudcast.

No, I put Jeb Bush way ahead of him, honestly. Yes, Jeb is much closer. So after this, in the second lecture, Peter apparently goes into more detail about his beliefs on the Antichrist, per the Guardian. Quote, Teal goes on to identify the legionnaires of the Antichrist as people like at least Yadkowski, Nick Bostrom and Greta Tunberg, who argue for world government to stop science. So that's at least a little more realistic.

He's like, well, maybe they're not the Antichrist, but they're at least his legionaires. Oh, my God. Okay, man. And again, I shouldn't have to say neither Yedkowski nor Tunberg nor Bostrom want to stop all science, right? They both have specific issues. that exactly they're very specific issues with specific technologies but peter can't stand that because again they'll get in the way of his profit right like that's really what this comes down to i it's it's very

banal but that is the truth of it peter goes on to say the legionaries of the antichrist like elizier yidkowski nick bostrom and greta tunberg argue for world government to stop science the antichrist has somehow become anti-science and no they just don't when the washington post reached out to Edkowski for a statement. He replied, My understanding is that authorities for multiple Christian denominations have stated that Teal's views, identifying the Antichrist with proposals to regulate the AI industry, are not deemed by them to be compatible with conventional Christian belief. It's one of his few statements that I'm like, yeah, that's a good response. Yeah. I mean, that's the nice thing

about standing next to someone who's completely off their cracker. You get to seem a little bit more normal. Very, seem much more reasonable. Now, I will say Greta's response was much better because her spokespeople, whoever the post reached out to on her team, didn't comment, which is the best response to Peter Thiel declaring you the Antichrist or one of his legionaries. It's just don't, what are you going to say? You really shouldn't have to issue a statement saying you're not the Antichrist whenever someone accuses you of it or else, you know, no one would ever get anything done in this country. I guess I feel like if I was in that boat, I would be like, yes, Peter, I am the Antichrist.

And I'm coming for your soul, buddy. Like, I talked with the devil and we have a plan for you. You don't even know how we're ensnaring you. We got you, baby. We got you. Now, at the same time in his second lecture, Peter talks about his Luddite antichrist candidates, like right while he's doing that. He floats another name as a potential antichrist, briefly before kind of explaining why he doesn't think this guy is the antichrist. And that name is Mark Andresen.

Now, Mark Andresen is the co-founder of Anderson Horowitz. He is a fellow big tech AI venture capitalist ghoul. And actually, I'd be like, yeah, Mark Andreessen, not a bad Antichrist candidate. He is evil. But Peter hates him, not because he's a monster trying to destroy all art in human culture and replace it with AI slop, which is literally what Mark Andreessen wants, right? That's his stated goal. Mark is the author of something called the Techno Optimist Manifesto.

which argues that AI will solve all problems, including, like, climate change. All of our serious life-threatening issues will be solved by a super-intelligent AI. Therefore, anyone who tries to slow or stop AI development is evil and needs to be destroyed, killed if necessary. Is what you're, it is insinuated heavily, not directly stated, but like, anything you can do to stop the people who are anti-AI is justified because they're trying to kill God, you know? That's Mark Andreson. Great. A lot of really well-balanced people with a lot of power in this world is what I'm learning more and more. Sane billionaires, all of them, all of them sane.

And it's funny to me that as nuts as he is about this, Peter recognizes how crazy Mark is. Because his issue with Mark Andreessen is that he's putting out gobbledygook AI propaganda. Fair enough. Weirdly. He is because, yeah, I think his issue is Yudkowski's anti-AI stuff is that it will inevitably become a god that's evil. And And Andresen is just like the opposite, where he's like, it will inevitably become a god, but good, right? And so I guess Peter rejects both of them. But he says this when he brings up Mark in the context of the Antichrist. It's not Andresen, by the way. I think Andresen is not the Antichrist. Because, you know, the Antichrist is popular. Oh, that's beautiful. That is some funny shade. But I thought I'd say his name and the word Antichrist in the same sentence several times. Several times. I didn't need to bring it up, right? Next, he goes up. on to Bill Gates, who he notes, you know, it's reasonable to put him on the list, but he thinks Gates is ultimately unlikely to be the Antichrist, even though he describes him as a Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type character whose positive public face is just a mask. Quoth, Peter, I saw the Mr. Hyde version about a year ago, where it was just a nonstop Tourette's yelling swear words, almost incomprehensible what was going on. And I don't have trouble believing that Bill Gates is a dick. Yeah. I'll give you that. Peter? I'll give you that.

I'll give you, I don't have trouble believing he's a Jacklin Hyde. Clearly, his wife left after the Epstein stuff for a good reason, you know? Now, as I noted, reporters with the Guardian, namely Joanna Boyan, Derek Kerr, and Nick Robbins Early actually got trans, like all seven hours of Peter's Antichrist lectures and listened to them, which I have not been able to do yet, maybe one day. Oh, yeah. And on the subject of Bill Gates and their article, they write something very funny. Ultimately, Teal concedes Gates cannot be the Antichrist, bringing up the topic more than once. He's not a – and here's – that's so funny. He really is stuck on that. He's not a political leader. He's not broadly popular. And again, perhaps to Gates' credit,

he's still stuck in the 18th century alongside people like Richard Dawkins who believe that science and atheism are compatible. What? And that's fundamentally – he believes – well, because being anti-science is what makes you the Antichrist. So that must mean that you can't be pro-science and not critical. Christian. It's actually impossible. Walk it off. Walk it off, Peter. This is disordered thinking. This is like, there's something actually wrong here. This is like, if he weren't a billionaire, his family, would be like, hey, buddy, do you want to, should

we try a new medication for you, bud? Yeah. You want to go feed some squirrels? Yeah, something to take your mind off the crazy. Why don't we put this manifesto in the drawer? Yeah, we'll come back to this tomorrow. Peter. Maybe we'll keep working on this. Yeah. Why don't we have some hot soup? Yeah. Some soup, maybe a cup of coffee, you know, maybe some tea. Caffeine's probably bad for you right now, huh?

Just get off the Sandy Christ thing for a while. You've been screaming about Bill Gates for 45 minutes. Yeah, but I guess like part of the Great American Dream of becoming a billionaire is that no one can tell you how crazy you sound, you know? That's the whole. And that, yeah, that's part of why they're angry at the people they're angry at. They're doing a bit more research around this area. It makes it very clear why Peter Thiel hates Bill Gates so much, aside from the fact that Gates seems to annoy a lot of people in general by being a dick. You know, Microsoft Word had some, you know, some tricky areas, let's say.

Sure, yeah. But it can't just be that because Teal is friends with Elon Musk. So the fact that Bill Gates is just an asshole can't explain it, right? Yeah. So, and I think I figured out what it is, which is that Bill Gates has made a big public show of wanting to give away and convince other billionaires to give away most of their fortunes before they die, right? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

without which I would not have probably gotten to hear Morning Edition for many years. There you go, yeah. My ex-wife wouldn't have had a laptop in elementary school, you know? Yeah. So I think that's really his issue with Gates. And I think that in part because of what I found in a Washington Post article because the Post also got access to the tapes

and an article by Natasha Tiki, Elizabeth Dwashkin, and Garrett DeVink. They wrote this. The investor, Teal, said he recently encouraged Musk to renege on his 2012 commitment to the Giving Pledge Movement, co-founded by Gates, which asks wealthy people

to commit the majority of their fortune to charitable causes, according to the recordings. And this is Teal here. $200 billion, if you're not going to be careful, is going to left-wing nonprofits that are going to be chosen by Bill Gates. Teal said he warned Musk,

according to the recording, painting the philanthropist is among the malevolent forces besetting technologists. That's his hatred of Gates. Gates wants to billionaires to give away their money to these evil left-wing causes, and he convinces Musk to stop. He funded too many modern dance troops, therefore Antichrist. It's like you need to have higher standards for your Antichrist behavior, I got to say. Yeah.

And it does, you know, Teal's positive on Musk now, I think because Musk is useful. He also, in this lecture series, has nice things. to say about J.D. Vance, whose political career he paid to get off the ground. Per Maggie Dupree, writing for futurism, Teal, quote, described himself as very pro vice president, J.D. Vance, to whom Teal has given millions in campaign funds. He's the only person who is. He did express that he's concerned the VP whose Catholic might give too much credence to the Pope. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close to the Pope, said Teal, per the Guardian. And so we have all these reports of fights

between him and the Pope. I hope there are a lot more. And that's like my issue with J.D. Vans is that he might be a papist. Okay. Great. Well, we've gone back to Puritanism in this country. We have to worry about papistry now on top of everything else. It's also like, I mean, look, I don't believe in antichrist stuff. I never have. I'm not a devil believer, you know, which is part of my interest in the satanic panic, which it just seems like extra wild when. you're not afraid of Satan yourself. I grew up afraid of a lot of things. I was afraid of the Bermuda Triangle,

but I wasn't afraid of Satan because that just wasn't, didn't seem relevant to my life. It's not a real thing, yeah. If I were to pick an antichrist today, it would obviously be Trump. Like, he's really behaving very antichristy, and it's just

so funny to have him leading a party that has become so much about, you know, this kind of death cult, and Armageddonism. And they're like, but not you, sir. And it's like, but just look at him. Not the obvious guy.

Yeah. Like, and it's, again, like, even the things you name in this are clearly more relevant to Trump that fucking Greta Dunberg or whatever. I mean. Now, outside of this frankly unhinged lecture series, back in June, Peter gave an interview to Ross, do that, doubt that, whatever is, however you say his fucking last name at the New York Times. And Ross, he's one of the worst writers alive. He used to be the senior editor of the Atlantic, and I think he might be the most up his own ass conservative writer in the country. He was Bill Crystal's replacement and a massive downgrade for Bill Crystal, even. He's both entirely uncritical of big tech and pro everyone should be religious.

And so he and Peter Thiel are peas in a pod. And during that interview, Ross asks what Peter thinks about the techno-optimist manifesto that Mark Andreessen's self-published in 2023. And again, that's basically saying we have to accelerate at all costs, the growth of AI, because it will solve all of our problems. So slowing things down as AI down is the same as committing mass murder. Oh, my God. Yeah. Think about the studio Ghibli-esque portraits of your husband that will never be drawn. Exactly, exactly.

It's a fate worse than death for all of us. And the fact that, like, the document is generally considered to be a foundational text for effective accelerationism. You know, that's kind of the philosophical name for what Andresen is preaching. And that's close to what Peter Thiel advocates, because he's literally arguing that Greta Tunberg might be the Antichrist, or is at least furthering the Antichrist's agenda because she's skeptical about AI and fossil fuels and shit. And I'm the Antichrist, too. Congratulations to me.

Like, Teal definitely thinks the same way, but I think he's incapable. I think why he has to reject Andresen is that he can't speak positively about a peer with the same ideas if they had if they put those ideas down first yeah and so he says this about the essay it represents a kind of corporate utopianism in the 1990s there was a broad cultural optimism that technology would solve everything but by 2025 that optimism is shrunk today's visions are narrower less inclusive and less confident the grand utopian projects have given a way to incremental gains overshadowed by fears of collapse oh and that's accurate but like the problem again he's not capable of like looking what he's literally saying the visions are

narrower the optimism has shrunk that doesn't mean that like we're not making technological progress but it does mean that like there's a problem in how people are visualizing progress right yes yeah and it's like perhaps people are more pessimistic and perhaps even more reasonable because of how horrible everything's been for the last 30 years. Exactly. I realized that in the 90s, it was a utopian time when Starbucks had, like, big upholstered chairs in them and he could sit there for a long time

and he could buy your Norwich Jones CDs. But that's over, man. Yeah. Right. And the article is just a great example. There's so much, Ross just lets Peter say nonsense without ever questioning him. It's like one of the worst interviews I've ever read. It's like he's accidentally a great interviewer

by being a terrible interviewer. because he gets lets him say stupid stuff. You did, yeah, you do get more out. There's no, like, Peter drops the line again. He makes the claim that, like, after 1945, church has stopped preaching in-times sermons. And, like, question, Peter. No, they didn't. Really?

Where did all those left-behind movies come from? The left-behind books. Massively popular, Peter. Like, Anne had nothing to do with technology, by the way. That's not how the anti, I mean, surveillance tech, I guess. But the Antichrist doesn't rise to power on the back of fears about. fucking AI or whatever. Anyway, I don't know how Peter can think this true.

I don't know how Ross can't question any of this other than Ross is just like the fucking boot-lickeriest boot-licker, whoever looked a goddamn boot. He's like, I hear you got some good blood for me later on. Right. One of the weirdest things to me here is that like, Ross is theoretically a Christian. He's a big C.S. Lewis fan. And Peter is theoretically a Christian. But then in this interview, Peter describes the choice,

presented by the Bible in the book of revelations as antichrist or Armageddon and that this is unacceptable and thus quote we must find a third path right it's me which is like no it doesn't that's not like for one thing the Bible doesn't present a choice it just says there's an antichrist and that leads to the second coming in an Armageddon and everything's going to get all weird and then people are going to get up out of their graves it's going to be wacky you guys Guys, yeah. Yeah. It's not like you have an option to change that if you're going to believe it.

You have to just like, you know, God knows no one has ever been selective about their beliefs as a Christian. Yeah. It's this both that like Ross doesn't question Peter on this. Yeah. And also, this is so heretical. Like, I'm not a, I don't care personally, but like, you should. But don't you think that it's like weirdly become like a tenet of moderns. of American, I don't know, like political Protestantism, I guess, that, like, we allow people

a much freer hand in terms of doing their own interpretations, then... Absolutely. Yeah, it seems like things have gotten a little bit over the top. I mean, and that's, that is definitely true that, like, we, like, that's a major factor in, like, the birth of Protestantism, right? Is this idea, this, this ongoing thing that, like, well, anyone can be a priest. or a pastor. Anyone can speak the word, right? And like, widening the circle of the people. Right. Anyone can speak in tongues at a certain point if they feel like it. Anyone can interpret the

Bible, sure. But even so, it is kind of very fundamentally heretical to be like the Bible says there's, we have to choose between, you know, the Antichrist or the Apocalypse. But I think there's a third way because Peter is literally saying, I think we can avoid the biblical apocalypse by getting our politics right. I mean, actually, we're kind of getting into. to Joseph Smith territory, right? Where you're like, I believe in the Bible, but also, I'm adding stuff. Yeah, I think we can rewrite the ending of the Bible. And also, I need to have sex with your wife.

Yeah, yeah. It's weird, right? And especially because Peter describes himself as a little Orthodox Christian, which, like, this is not anywhere close to Orthodoxy, right? The idea that you're arguing, God might let us avoid having an anti-Christ. and an Armageddon and still live forever. That's not Christian theology. That's Peter Deology.

You're right. That's like getting into your starting to found your own religion at that point, which you certainly have the resources to do. That's, I would argue, what Act 17 is doing is they are not spreading Christianity to Silicon Valley elites. They are creating a new, like a Mormonism for rich people. They're hybridizing Christianity with like Silicon Valley Billing. culture. Oh, no. Now, that's the Antichrist. The cursed child of two evil parents. That is the antiest of Christ.

And it is kind of weird to me. Part of what's strange is that, like, he wants to avoid the biblical apocalypse. And I think what that means is that Peter Thiel is so clearly scared of death that he can't even embrace everlasting life. Like, he would prefer, he vastly would prefer. some scientist keeps his body alive than like Jesus ensures him eternal life in heaven? He's like, I believe in you, God, but stay the fuck away.

Yeah, mm-hmm. That's fascinating. It's the most reasonable thing that I've, you know, theorized him thinking this whole time in a way. Yeah. Yeah. And also it's like, it's the,

this thing of like, you know, because I do feel like if you look at sort of the sum of human experience, it's like, organized religion facilitates a lot of horror and a lot of evil and it also facilitates a lot of structure and a lot of just a lot of stability in people's lives

and I think one of the positive elements of it is the feeling of allowing yourself to not be in control and sort of believing in something not even necessarily a higher power like it's a 12 steps kind of a thing although that certainly is helpful for a lot of people too because the sort of like the ability to believe in something beyond yourself and to sort of maybe use religion

to get out of the human urge towards solipsism. It feels like this is like, no, I'm actually using religion to become more self-centered than ever. Isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just like the idea that, yeah, you're so scared of death that you can't even,

even the idea of heaven. You can't even become an angel. We have to find a fix for that. Right. You'd rather be like a death becomes her, you know, person just walking around, getting hairline fractures and gluing yourself back together. And again, Ross, who is a useless thinker and a useless writer and a waste of column inches for the New York Times, can't even question that. There's only one really valuable thing about the article that he writes interviewing Teal, which is that it includes a fascinating segment where Peter talks about his early attempts

to secure eternal life for himself. And I'm just going to read, I'm going to read a long quote from the interview here. He used to. Peter, I remember 1999 or 2000 when we were running PayPal. One of my co-founders, Luke Nosek, he was into Alcor and cryonics and that people should freeze themselves. And we had one day where we took the whole company to a freezing party.

You know a Tupperware party? People sell Tupperware policies. At a freezing party, they sell, and Ross butts in here, was it just your heads? What was going to be frozen? Teal. You could get a full body or just a head. Ross, the just-ahead option was cheaper.

Teal, it was disturbing when the dot-matrix printer didn't quite work, and so the freezing policies couldn't be printed out. Okay. I miss dot-matrix printers. That's funny. I think a critical and thoughtful interviewer might have said something like, hey, it kind of seems like a lot of companies in the life extension space, like the guys who were selling you youthful blood to inject into your body,

are like questionable and sketchy and maybe con men. Has repeatedly encountering stuff that doesn't work or is sketchy, like Alcor not being able to make a printer work, has any of that made you reevaluate whether or not you're just following for a series of cons, like the old pharaohs of Egypt, taking fucking stricnine or whatever to make themselves live forever? Or like, are you still good? You still following all that? Like, Ross doesn't ask this at all.

No. Instead, when Peter talks about how this cryonics company couldn't even get a printer to work, Ross nonsensically adds, technological stagnation once again, right? No. Which is like, no, that's not what that's an example of at all, period. But Peter responds, but in, it kind of ignores Ross. But in retrospect, it's also a symptom of the decline because in 1999, this was not a mainstream

view, but there was still a fringe boomer view where they still believed that they could live forever. And that was the last generation. So I'm always anti-boomer. But maybe there's something we've lost even with this fringe boomer narcissism, where there were at least a few boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who's a millennial believes that anymore.

I don't even know what that aside was about. What is that even about? So you're anti-boomer because they thought they could live forever, but you can? Yeah. Or just like, you know, say more about what did it feel like to think about getting your head sawed off by these people? How much did

just the head cost versus the body? Say more about that. Exactly. Would they give you someone else's limbs or put you on a big robot body like Robocon? Right. Yeah. So we're almost done here. I want to end by talking a little bit more about Renee Gerard and Schmidt and some of, some of Teal's philosophical beliefs. But first, let's have an ad real quick. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyankawali, a double board certified physician.

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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 podcasts. From the studio who brought you the Pikeson 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. A seed 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. At a deadly tipping point. Incells will be added to the terrorism guide.

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In 2020, a group of young woman in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

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Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so we're back. And I talked up at the start about Carl Schmidt, who's the Nazi philosopher who discussed how to destroy democracies in a way that Peter Thiel followed. And René Gerard, who is this, he's this big belief in sort of like this memetic theory of like, like memetic rivalry, right? where, like, people, once they cover their basic needs, still want things. And so they kind of pick, well, what is this other guy who seems to be doing better than me have? And they, like, that's kind of memetic rivalry.

But it doesn't make people happy. So they need scapegoats, you know. And Gerard's attitude was like Christianity brought an, it should have brought an end to that. It's certainly evidence that we need to bring it into that. It's bad to scapegoat groups of people. And Christ was kind of like, that's why he was killed, right? He was made into a scapegoat, and that's, like, the final evidence that it's wrong to do that. You know, that's Gerard's attitude.

Peter claims to be a major follower of Gerard's, and he's gone to a bunch of gatherings. And, in fact, in 2004, he and one of his mentors organized a week-long seminar on René Gerard at Stanford. And they invited Gerard, who was alive at the time. And they also invited a scholar of Carl Schmidt, who was also like a peer of René Gerard, named Wolfgang Pallabur, who is... Pallabur is one of Peter Thiel's favorite intellectuals. That is a hell of a name. It's quite a name.

And Teal is very, like, is a huge, big fan of this guy. And a major, like, cites him quite frequently and has invited him to a number of these different events, right? This 2004 seminar on Gerard is right after Peter Thiel got rich, after he, like, sold PayPal. So he funds this thing. And the theme of the conference is politics and the apocalypse. And the type, like, that theme was suggested by Wolfgang Palaver, like, before, well, they were

planning the event. So this is obviously, it's a couple of years after 9-11. And people who are, you know, what you'd call memetic theorists, these folks who, like, buy into a lot of Gerard's beliefs about memetic rivalry are, are trying to figure out, like, did the, was 9-11, like, an example of, like, planetary memetic rivalry? This, like, was it, did it come out of anger from one part of the world at, like, all of the things that the West has that they don't have, which is very much kind of in line with, like,

a lot of what Bush was saying, you know, not exactly, but you can see some people, they're jealous of our freedoms, right? Yes. So kind of one of the questions that these, these Gerard fans,

these memetic, you know, theoreticians are talking about is like, is that kind of, does that explain what was going on there? Or is there something else for us to take out of this? And Teal's attitude was that the primary thing that 9-11 showed us is that the West can't protect itself. He wrote a paper right before this

event in which he stated, the brute facts of September 11th demand a re-examination of the foundations of modern politics. Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment. And his big attitude here is that, like, Osama bin Laden is thinking rationally in a modern political sense, but the West is not, right? And we haven't realized the actual nature of the fight. And if Carl Schmidt were in charge of things, our response to 9-11, the just response would be to call for a crusade against Islam, right? Of course.

Like, that's the rational response. Yeah, it's very rational to try and eradicate a religion I find generally. Mm-hmm. I mean, yeah, and that is, like, literally, like, Teal's argument is that, like, this is where, this is, like, the fundamental irrationality that the West indulged in is not seeing it as a holy war, is not seeing it as a fundamental clash of civilizations. We didn't do that enough, which, like, I mean, we did the people you would have supported then, George W. Bush. Like, that is how they framed it, and it failed. That was very much how Alan Jackson was describing the situation. And so, again, he's, like, really recommending antichristy behavior.

We must say, I also realize I keep saying it like antipasto, but, you know. But I think that's the way to say. What if it was delicious? Yeah, what if the antichrist tasted better? Yeah, what if there were some olives? But was less filling at the same time. Just a nice cold snack on a summer's day, you know, when you've got pasta coming later. Yeah, like I'm on tuckie cold snack.

Yes, exactly. So Wolfgang, like, Peter is a huge fan of him specifically because of how Wolfgang interpreted a lot of Carl Schmidt's writing and like some essays that he wrote on like what Carl Schmidt meant and kind of his, like, how his concept of the political functioned. And that's what he bases a lot of his like, well, we're doing the wrong things after 9-11 on, is his ideas of like how Schmidt would have handled things instead. And I want to quote from an article in Wired kind of summarizing. this journey. It would quickly become apparent that Teal had spent some time considering the paper Palava presented the day the two men met in 1998. The strange new thoughts Teal wanted his audience to entertain

where it turned out largely those of Carl Schmidt. But where Palaver had been repulsed, Teal extolled Schmidt's robust conception of the political in which humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies and everything else's delusion. The high point of politics, Palabar quote Schmidt is saying, are the moments in which the enemy is in concrete clarity recognized as the enemy. In Teal's mind, Osama bin Laden was capable of this kind of politics.

The West, with its fetish for individual rights and procedures, was not. So Palliver is quoting Schmidt as being like, this guy believed that the high point in politics was the defining of an enemy, right? And getting a group of people, getting a community to recognize an enemy. And that's a lot of, I mean, that's where Schmidt kind of goes in with Gerard, is they both had this concept of like scapegoating as being important. But Schmidt is like, this is how you gain power. This is actually how you destroy democracy is by finding an enemy, defining them as not part of the community and excising them.

And then you continually push that barrier. And if you don't do that, you're a moron. Right. Yeah. And Pallava is saying that's what Schmidt believed because he was bad, right? And that that's like a, like, that's an awful thing to believe. this is what Schmidt was advocating. And Teal is like, no, that's awesome.

And Pallover, like, their relationship with the last 20 years has been Palliver gradually realizing Peter Thiel likes him because he describes accurately what a monster believed. And Peter Thiel is the same kind of monster. Yep. Yeah. What a fun day at Stanford. It's awesome. To continue from that wired article, Schmidt, Teal conjectured, would have responded to 9-11

by calling for a holy crusade against Islam. But the West was instead slipping beyond politics altogether. Teal seemed to fear towards the creation of a bland world-embracing economic and technical organization. This was Schmitz's nightmare scenario. In such a world, Thiel said, a representation of reality might appear to replace reality. Instead of violent wars, there could be violent video games. Instead of heroic feats, there could be thrilling amusement park rides. Instead of serious thought, there could be intrigues of all sort as in a soap opera.

But that counterfeit reality, Teal argued, would be just the brief harmony that prefigures the final catastrophe of the apocalypse, the harmony in Schmidt's telling of the Antichrist. Teal's discussion of Schmidt didn't mention the Hitler or the Nazis once. Irrelevant. Who cares? Yeah. Why does it matter that this guy was a Nazi and arguing for Nazis? What matters is that we need to take his idea about picking an enemy. And it's actually a really bad thing if people are playing video games instead of fighting in real wars. That like that is the path to the Antichrist, like we're replacing the real heroism with fictional heroism. It's a very

fascist idea. It's fundamentally a very fascist idea. So basically he's like, yeah, like, if we don't become fascist, we're going to, we have to become fascist to protect ourselves from the Antichrist, sweetie. Yeah. And kind of the conclusion Teal draws from Palaver's writing about Schmidt is that, because Schmidt's fundamentally suggested, like, we have to have these dramatic solutions to the problem, like, to deal with the enemy. A final solution, if you will. A final solution, he's a Nazi, right? Teal pulls back from that, but he's, his solution is a, you have to fortify the modern

West. And you can't do that through democracy, right? So you have to, you have to hide, you have to trick people into, in order to get around democratic institutions because those aren't going to like, you can't actually work through them. So I'm going to quote from Teal directly. Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider the secret coordination of the world's intelligence services as the decisive path to a troubly global Pax Americana. In other words, what we need to do is develop. A one-world government.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. Just a one-world surveillance super system controlled by Peter Thiel. That's very different. Not a one-world government. No, no. We do need, Teele says, a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy. But that's not a one-world government, right? Right. It's just a surveillance state that I'm in charge of, you know?

So basically you're saying it would be terrible if somebody did the things that I want to do myself. It has to be me. Right. Exactly. Ah, God. Yeah, it's awesome. You know, and it, there's that Wired article does a really good job of talking about Palaver's kind of dawning horror as he realizes that like he's been reading all the old papers of mine about Schmidt, but interpreting them as like this guy's awesome and I want to do all the things he's suggesting. It's like when Oliver Stone realized all these guys were getting into finance because they loved his movie that they never saw the last quarter of apparently.

And it's been like Gerardians in general. like people who are like, like our followers of Renee Gerard in his intellectual tradition have, like, this has been kind of a growing horror for a lot of them. And I think that probably should have started earlier because like it has often been said that Renee Gerard was kind of the inventor of the like button on Facebook for good reason because Peter Thiel has justified him betting on Facebook by saying, quote, I bet on mimicists, right? like on memetic, this idea that like memetic rivalry is the underpinning of Facebook, right? It's the underpinning of social media. I'm going to, both people being jealous and wanting to imitate the lives of other people they see on, right? And so people have been saying since the early 2000s that like Gerard is kind of, Gerardian

philosophy is kind of baked into a lot of the most toxic stuff about social media. But what really fucked a lot of these people up is kind of, more recently, because when they saw J.D. Vance during the 2024 election, start lying about Haitians and, like, knowingly spreading, like, lies about, like, Haitians eating dogs and stuff, because this is classic scapegoating, right? Yeah. And this is, again, Gerard was saying it's bad to do that. Vance, who calls himself a Gerardian, is clearly just saying, like, oh, Gerard kind of explained how scapegoating works, and I like that, right? It feels like reading a book on, or an article on child abuse and like the psychological effects that like beating your child

has on them and your takeaway is like, wow, if I beat my child, they're going to be a lot more obedient and do more chores. I'm going to do that. Hey, everybody. This article says you should beat your child. And the person who wrote it is like, what? Yeah, exactly. It's this, it's so, like, I'll quote, like here's, because Vance has directly stated that coming to understand Gerard influenced his Christianity, quote, Oh my God. Yeah, he spoke of his theory of meetic rivalry that we tend to compete over the things

that other people want, spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale. But it was his related theory of the scapegoat and what it revealed about Christianity that made me reconsider my faith. It made me realize that I could be a Christian and an absolute dickwad who didn't care about human beings or human suffering.

And that was very inspiring to me. Yeah, Gerard's saying, Christ was killed because he was turned into a scapegoat by these powers, you know, doing the thing that authoritarian monsters always do, which is create and destroy scapegoats to distract people from the fact that the system is unjust in making them unhappy. And Vance is like, yeah, this changed, like, the idea of Christ as a scapegoat made me realize that I could lie about Haitians to become the vice president. Like, that's basically what Vance is saying. That's, that's nice. It's the good free, yeah, it's the, there are, it's cool.

I think J.D. Vance could have had less education and would have been just fine. Yeah. Less access to education for one Apple action. Right. To continue from that wired article, for some Gerardians, this was a breaking point. The memetic theorist Bernard Peret lambasted Vance and his billionaire mentor in a French political journal, accusing them of casting a shadow over Gerard's legacy. Within months, several more prominent Gerardians followed suit.

It's difficult to claim Gerard, who fundamentally believes that violence is linked to exclusion and at the same time accuse Haitians of eating dogs. Gerardian scholar Paul Dumoisier told a Canadian newspaper. Either you didn't understand Gerard or you're a liar. I mean, when he put it that way. And I guess this is where we'll kind of close, you know. Calling the burn unit for Peter Thiel in this very satisfying little way. And J.D. Vance. Yeah, this little, I mean, fucking pilavers apparently.

emailed him a few times being like, how are you okay with this? You know, how is anyone okay with this? Well, and it's like they may have way too much power and it may be horrifying to contemplate, but nothing will ever make them less idiotic than they clearly are. And there's something nice about that. It's scary, but at least we can feel superior. Yeah, there's a good bit at the end of that wired piece. where I think Palaver kind of reveals that he has Teal's number,

what I've observed are traces of deep fear, he told me. Fear of death, fear of terrorism. And it all comes down to a lack of trust in a craving for security, Pallavis expects. There are so many cases where he expresses fears and concerns and need for protection, Palliver says. And if your main thing is seeking protection, you play with fire. And I guess that's kind of where. Fat head.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I would say it's Peter can recognize that fears of the apocalypse and the end of days could allow an Antichrist to take power, but doesn't understand that in his own life, your own fear of that is leading you to embrace what is effectively the Antichrist, right? You're so scared of dying that you are embracing apocalyptic, like, just extremely Dane, you're playing with fire. You are, you are embracing authoritarianism. You are welcoming the Antichrist in because you're so scared of death. And there you go. And because you're so rich,

everyone else has to welcome the Antichrist along with you, apparently. And none of your weird, like, hoax medicine attempts to extend your life have proven to work. And you're just going to blame Greta Thunberg by saying she's anti-science because you can't just acknowledge that the thing you wanted is something that rich powerful people have always wanted and never gotten because it's impossible and you're no different from the pharaohs and they're never going to get it nope you will die and be forgotten too and you know and that's kind of nice that's good it's good that's why i'm fundamentally optimistic because of death right i think it's a good thing in the long run that people die and that we're never going to like immortality is not real and i know they get ever will

be right none of these people are ever going to be around forever and a lot of them are going to like nothing will be choke on a bit of toffee or something and sure you know not enough of them but yeah no not enough but they all something will get all of them like it will everyone and that's good it's good that people die if if someone actually created an immortality cure uh i would i would want to stop that i think that that's broadly i don't think it's possible it's a silly thing to even theorized, but it's bad, it would be bad if it was real. Well, and also, like, even if that dead existed, it would only exist for, like, the worst people in the world, you know?

Exactly, yes. Yeah. And it would be the end of progress fundamentally if, like, people stopped dying, you know? Like, that's just, it's, it's not even good theoretically. Yeah. I get, people get angry whenever I bring this up where they're like, so you don't want to cure cancer. I'm like, if you cure cancer, people will still die.

You won't cure cancer also. But like... Also, there's like 8 million cancers to cure. You know, you just pick one and just keep going until you got a bingo. No, I believe if we do cure, if we were to cure all of the current cancers, then we would start seeing different weird cancers that people don't get right now because they just don't live long enough for them to happen, but we'll keep experiencing new cancers. You start getting the like biblical patriarch 800-year-old guy cancer.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and also it's like, think about how bored people are now. and how much more bored we would be if we were immortal, you know? Yeah, again, and that's the thing Gerard, like, that's kind of something Gerard was dealing with, is like this, you know, when people's needs are met and they're still unhappy, like, God, imagine the trouble we would cause for each other if we lived forever. Yeah, how much worse memetic rivalry would be. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, anything else? well thanks for telling me about someone so horrible and embarrassing that they yeah i have come around to your moral of well let's embrace death because at least he's going to get that guy yeah yeah let's embrace death like let's all cheer death on as it goes after peter teal um death wielding a sickle like a polo mallet right alloping towards another billionaire yeah exactly um you know and let's all encourage

I encourage Peter Thiel to explore the ocean floor, like those other guys. I hear there's a lot of good stuff still down there. You could find those other guys. Yeah. You can bring up their vaporized remains or whatever. No, they're all, they need to be rescued. They're all still down there. They're playing Parchese.

Only you, Peter. Only you can save them. With Poseidon. Yeah. The Antichrist is down there. Plugables before we roll out here? Yeah. Yeah. So, well, you can find me at my show You're Wrong About, where we talk about the folly of man and iconic bimboes and misunderstood history and all kinds of fun stuff. And also at my new show, The Devil You Know, which is from CBC podcast. You can find it wherever. You listen to podcasts. And it's about the satanic panic and also all the horrible things that people do and use Satan as an excuse to do, which is, of course, very relevant.

to today and it's uh we got to talk to some amazing people and i'm so happy to get to share their stories with everybody i'm happy to uh both for that and because the episode is over and so i get to not work anymore all right everybody you stop working too i don't care what you're doing if you're a heart surgeon listening to this cut stop walk away walk away are you raising a bridge get out of there pilot jump out of the plane you know put on your put on your backpack with the in it and get out of there. Everyone quit working right now. Whatever thing you're doing.

Whatever whatever Robert Antichrist Evan says. Here we go. If you're the antichrist, stop antichristing this minute. Get a foot bath going. I would be such a good antichrist. Yeah, but unfortunately, Greta Tunberg took the job from me. Yeah. She's pretty good, too.

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