Decoding the Gurus - Peter Thiel: The Techno-Apocalypse is Nigh

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

In this episode, Matt and Chris tackle the big ideas—or at least the ones rattling around in Peter Thiel’s mind. Tech billionaire, venture capitalist, and political kingmaker, Thiel has long been a looming figure in Silicon Valley, known for his deep pockets, contrarian takes, and peculiar philosophical musings. But beneath the surface-level libertarian posturing, what does Thiel actually believe? And does it hold up to scrutiny?The decoders dig into Thiel’s recent interview on Uncommon Knowledge, where he waxes biblical about end times, interprets the katechon with all the confidence of a medieval theologian, and seamlessly blends venture capitalism with prophecies of the Antichrist.Along the way, they explore Thiel’s method of connecting historical dots with pure vibes, and his Jetsons Fallacy, the deep disappointment that the world looks more like The Office than a 1960s vision of the future. They dissect the Sensemaker Aristocracy surrounding him—with its reverent back-patting and strange mix of deference and obfuscation that turns tech moguls into prophets. They also highlight Thiel’s bizarre leaps in logic, from citing biblical prophecies to warning about one-world free-trade Communist government conspiracies and his confusing stance on technological progress—simultaneously lamenting stagnation while fearing we’re racing too fast toward Armageddon.Of course, no billionaire worldview would be complete without some COVID conspiracies, and Thiel delivers, crafting an elaborate Fauci Bioweapon Paradox in which the pandemic response was simultaneously overblown and also secretly justified because the virus was (obviously) engineered.So is Peter Thiel a visionary? A libertarian Cassandra? Or just a very wealthy man with a lot of half-formed ideas and a habit of mumbling them into microphones? Matt and Chris wade through the mess so you don’t have to. Stay till the end for the Revolutionary Leprechaun Theory of Western Civilization… if you dare.LinksHoover Institute: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech (Part 1)Hoover Institute: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech (Part 2)WIRED article on the Thiel, Hogan, & Gawker business

Hello and welcome to the Cardina Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer, trying to understand what they're talking about. As always, I'm Matt Brown. Chris, as always, is with me. No, I'm happy to see you, Chris. You're an anthropologist, I'm a psychologist, And we're here to talk about a candidate guru. He could be a guru. He might not be.

We'll see. He probably is, isn't he? Probably is. Probably is. Probably is. Yes. We promised that we would cover Curtis Jarvan and Peter Teagle. We promised that we would do them for quite some time, and we just never got around to it because they're quite annoying people. But in this occasion, we decided it's 2025, we're going to be good boys, we're going

to keep to our resolutions. And even though Curtis Jarvan was very annoying, we said, we must not just go back into those waters. Our personal feelings, what we might prefer, that doesn't come into it. We are servants to the discourse. That's right. Peter Thiel has been on the list for a while. He's a figure.

If you don't know who Peter Thiel is, then first of all, congratulations. You're probably... Good job. You're better off not knowing, but you probably heard the name and you might be a bit vague on some of the details. So Chris, what's the deal with Peter Thiel? What's the deal with Peter Thiel? Well, he is a American rich person, a billionaire, made his money in the tech boom, involved with PayPal and Facebook and all this kind of thing.

And then became a, or maybe he was at that time, but a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, put a bunch of money into various companies, hired Eric Weinstein, I think, for over a decade to just be Eric Weinstein. And yeah, he has a company called Palantir, which helps do a variety of things, but including anti-immigration technology, like keeping track of identities and that kind of thing. And he invests in a bunch of companies. And he is also a conservative libertarian. Is that the way to put it? He, you know... Well, we'll find out, won't we?

We'll find out. He's... I think that's what he's identified as, technically. Yeah, yeah. But as we'll see, he's pretty bespoke. Pretty bespoke. Is he that bespoke? Is he?

Nothing he said surprised me for the Silicon Valley libertarian. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but I was surprised about the biblical prophecies of apocalypse. That wasn't on my bingo card. So you know. No, but that yeah, that's no that's standard like the even the Rationalists are worried about the like the AI dragon that what's his name?

Malik or whoever the god of AI who's gonna torture them all for not making them quicker You heard about this? You heard about this? You heard about this? You know, the rationalists, they're kind of potential future AI God that will be very upset for anybody who did anything that would prevent the AI God from coming and would like just be set to put people into perpetual torment. So your goal if you're like a proper rationalist should be to hasten the arrival of the AI gods, what doesn't torture you for eternity. Yeah, that's, that's right.

There are, there are multiple groups out there with sort of apocalyptic world views. You've got the AI, Doomers, good old, yeah. Yeah. You know, that's why Cassandra complex is on the Garamata cruise. That's why, but look, we're spoiling the surprise. Why don't we, why don't you tell us about the clip you've got for us today and we'll start going through it. Yes. So we're looking at Teal on an interview which came out last year, actually at the end of last year from the Hoover last year, actually at the end of last year from the Hoover Institution associated with Stanford University with a guy called Peter Robinson. I'll have things to say about him too, but it's an

interview where it's talking about Teal, big ideas, his concerns about the apocalypse, the Bible, AI, various other things. It's a big idea. So big, it had to be separated into two parts on YouTube. Yes, there are two interminable parts to this. Yes, so that's an interview that we're looking at, a relatively recent one, the relevant one. And one other thing that people might know Teal from just before we start is that he also bankrupted Gawker. Gawker was like a kind of online gossipy, snide, like tech journalism, but culture, just, just a general, like celebrity culture website. But I believe they outed Teal as gay and he didn't like that. And then Gawker posted a sex tape of Hulk Hogan and Papa the love sponge, his wife. And then Hulk Hogan sued Gawker successfully, but he was able to do that

because of the financial backing of Peter Thiel. So Thiel took down Groker and this was a big deal back in the day. Yeah. So, yeah. So moral of the story, don't make an enemy of of, uh, Dylan, which I'm sure we'll do. I'm sure we'll do. Yeah. That was to do with a whole sexcapade. I think a cucking, uh, like consensual cucking. So look into it at your own peril. Okay.

That's, that's all I'll say there. But this does not involve BobbitteloveSponge. Okay, it doesn't come up in this conversation. What this conversation is about. Well, why don't we let Peter Robinson, who by the way, was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan, relevant context here. Wow, I did not know that. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't make sense. It does. It does make sense given I think there was an astrologer at the White House at certain times. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Okay. All right. Another piece of the puzzle. Let's hear his framing. You might hear some motifs that are familiar.

So here's his little introduction to the interview. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. The End Times, Armageddon, the Antichrist. If you suppose the only people who take those concepts seriously are snake handlers and the hollers of Kentucky, think again. Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now. Yes, so that's the introduction. I like the classical music. We've heard that before on some of these things. It definitely gives an air of gravitas to this. And this is conducted under the auspices of a prestigious American academic institution, isn't it? So, you know, the listener should be prepared for some pretty high-level intellectual

stuff. Yeah, yeah. And always that kind of classical music thing. I think this is a kind of think tank associated with the university. So like slightly conservative leaning. I saw that there was an interview with Mark Andreessen just posted up on this. So, you know, take that for what it's worth, but just to highlight more, you know, like for most interviews in general, people introduce people with a positive spin. This is a fantastic guy. He's done a lot of things. Let's consider it. But this interviewer, he has this ability to imply that he's in the presence of just a genius, a wonderful man, somebody that he's so lucky to be able to sit down with.

This is the introduction to the second part of the conversation. One of the most sophisticated men in America, brilliant or vain, an immensely successful entrepreneur. One of the most sophisticated men in America, taking ancient prophecies seriously. Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now. Yeah, what a sophisticated gentleman. Urbein, some would say. Like, we've made the comparison of the whole like sense maker, gurus fear thing to the French court or the aristocratic courts. They're not beating these allegations of these kind of introductions.

You know, this fantastic gentleman of great breeding and intellect who is willing to entertain the court today with discussions of fantastical apocalyptic stories from the Bible. Indeed, indeed. The framing is great. The setup is good, yet already picking up strong indications that we're going to be dealing with some weighty and rigorous academic ideas here. So, yeah, let's see whether we'll get into it. Yeah, get into it. Come on, stop messing around, Chris. No more classical music. whether or not the question measures up. Yeah, get into it. Come on, stop messing around, Chris. No more classical music.

Well, that's it. That's true. There is no more classical music to hear, but there are a lot of quotations. The way this interview is conducted is kind of like a quotation prompt session. Here, let me read you some quotations. Nye, you respond to them.

OK, let's finish this first part of our conversation with more on the Antichrist. Let me take a moment to set this up, if I may. A few passages from Scripture. Today, by the way, this is going to be episode one of two, our first conversation on this very large topic. Peter, two quotations. I've got a quotation here from you. Under the rationalist view, again, Renee, the violence, we ourselves are in the process of amassing.

So development since 1945, two quotations here. We'll have military, well here, Henry Kissinger, I found this quotation from a book, Kissinger's last book which he wrote with Eric Schmidt. So if I may, let me start with a quotation from a book, Kissinger's last book, which he wrote with Eric Schmidt. So if I may, let me start with a quotation from you. There has been, so I have a quotation here, there are people who take all of this seriously. We've already quoted René Girard, we've already quoted Cardinal Newman. But Daniel dates from the Iron Age. And you'll hear the delivery of Peter Robinson

and his kind of forming presentation in this clip. This is from the very start of the interview. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Peter Thiel earned his undergraduate and law degrees here at Stanford. He was a co-founder of PayPal, the firm that all but invented fintech, the first

outside investor in Facebook, the firm that all but invented social networks, and a co-founder of Palantir, the firm that all but invented defense tech. Although he's staying out of politics, this year Mr. Thiel has had a hand in launching the careers of a number of political figures, including JD Vance. Mr. Teal speaks often on philosophy, religion, tech, and society in forums as diverse as the Cambridge Union, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Joe Rogan Experience. You gave Joe Rogan three hours. It's about time you came back to the three.

I was trapped for three hours there. Peter Teal on The End Times. Today, by the way, this is going to be episode one of two, our first conversation on this very large topic. Peter, two quotations. Matthew 24, 35, 36. Quote, heaven and earth will pass away, but of that day and hour no one knows, not even

the angels of heaven, close quote. Peter Thiel. We don't know the day and the hour, but maybe we can guess the century. Explain yourself. Yeah. So Peter Thiel is responsible not only for Eric Weinstein, but also we need to thank him for JD Vance. He's kind of like a bit of a power behind the throne. He's a backer to a large degree, but he's got his own ideas too. He supported Trump. He was a big person supporting Trump in 2016. So, yeah, he is a very wealthy mega donor to Republicans and somebody that funds think tanks. He had a thing where he paid people not to go to university,

a kind of libertarian drop out incentive kind of thing. Yeah, went from the school of life, school of hard knocks. Yeah, yeah. What I did, but maybe it works for some. Yeah. OK, so at what I did, but maybe it works for some. Yeah. Okay. So, start off with these quotes. Bible prophecies and Peter Thiel saying that maybe we can predict when this Bible prophecy

will come true, at least down to the century. I like the end times. Yes. And Thiel's response to this is indicative of the way that he talks throughout this interview. So I just want to give a taste of that. Right. So he was asked there, you know, prompted with these roller grief portents from the Bible and Peter Teals own speech and then asked, explain yourself, Peter. What did you mean? Exactly. And here's Teals answer to that. And here's Teal's answer to that. Well, man, you know, this is a very broad topic. It's in this larger question about the extraordinary history of our time. You know, the modern world, maybe Renaissance onward, has been this world of ever-progressing scientific and technological

development. And there is this very profound sense that there are things that change. There are dimensions of technology, military technology, communications technology, where things are not timeless and eternal. There's sort of, and there was a gunpowder revolution in the 17th century, and that changed the social structure and the political structure. And there is a certain arc to history. It's not just technology, but it is a driver.

And certainly, and again, many different ways of getting at this, but there certainly are dimensions of the technology that have become extremely powerful in the last century or two that have an apocalyptic dimension. And perhaps it's strange not to try to relate it to the biblical tradition. If nuclear weapons can rain down fire and brimstone and destroy the world, and then we have a biblical tradition that maybe doesn't say that this is inevitably going to happen, but that something like this

might well happen if humans are left to their own devices, should we at least be asking questions? Figure out ways for these things to inform one another? So the first part of that, not a particularly profound insight, I think, which is that there is kind of a directional arc to history. Things don't just go in circles, there is technological progress and probably cultural and sociological progress of various kinds. That's been going on for a couple of thousand years, at least. Fair enough. I don't dispute that. But it's at the second bit

where he sort of lays out his thesis in a nutshell, doesn't he? He says that given that the Bible talks about apocalyptic world ending end times. And given that that kind of thing might happen, mainly through the potential for nuclear war or some other technology run amuck, maybe a grey goo kind of explosion where little self-replicating nanobots eat the world. So therefore it would be crazy for us not to use the Bible as a lens through which to understand current events and current risks. Is that a fair summary? That's a fair summary, yeah. And the delivery style, as you said, it's kind of halting, not particularly loquacious, a bit similar to Curtis Yorvin. And Elon Musk, I have to say.

Oh yeah, actually more closer to Elon Musk. Yes. So like there's big ideas, but it's kind of that impression that you get that he's such a genius that it's he doesn't communicate very well, but he's he's got a bit lot of big ideas bubbling there. Yeah, they're not they're not as articulate as Brett or Eric Weinstein. They should get coaching or something from us. Or even Rogan. But no, I think that's part of the point is, though, that they're a

little bit, you know, off and not creating delivery because they're thinking in a different way like Teal, I believe has reference being neurotypical, having autism, right? So has Elon Musk, so too many people in the tech center. So yeah, just mentioning that because you're going to hear it through our delivery. And like you said, the logic is. We might be capable now of destroying the world for technology. The Bible includes discussion of end times. Therefore, why wouldn't we link discussions of this topic to the Bible? And the logic there seems somewhat shaky, given that you could just look at almost literally any religious tradition, and they almost all, without exception,

have millenarian components. Right? Yeah. So like Norse mythology has, is it Ragnarok? Things like that. This is one that springs to mind. So why pick Christianity in particular? And if you concede that, okay, well, most religions and traditional belief systems have some kind of apocalyptic stuff in them, it seems like a stretch to say, well, therefore, they can guide us as to how we should, I don't know, conduct arms control agreements to try to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It's not apparent why there should be any insights to be gleaned from this relatively superficial correspondence.

What sort of guidance religious scripture would give us to solve one problem? But maybe he'll explain, Chris. Maybe. I think the argument is going to be that it provides an important lens. That's the kind of defensible position that gives you a vocabulary to discuss these issues. But the other reason that people discuss these things is because they think that the Bible contains prophetic insights because it is a divine manuscript. And I think that Thiel might hold some views on that as we'll see later. But in any case, the conversation moves on.

And you know, this is a kind of big question, right? You know, the apocalypse technology, things developing. But you know where you can't talk about big questions? University. That's the problem. Sure. So obviously, we'll come in a moment to the analysis, to the signs of the end times. But first, a moment on why you, to the signs of the end times. But first, a moment on why you're asking these questions. And as I understand your argument, Peter, you feel you need to ask them and to prompt

a conversation, at least in part, because universities won't. Which is odd in some ways. The biblical framework, these texts may be 2,000 years old, but they've informed Western civilization and taken up the time of scholars through these centuries. It has been an understanding in Western culture, Western culture at least, that history is going someplace. And if there is an endpoint, no matter how far off in the future it may be, we're closer to it now than we were 2000.

All right, so all of these seem to me plausible, valid and serious questions. Why can't, why don't universities, why are universities ill-equipped to grapple with this? Well, that's very over-determined, but certainly anything that, you know, if there's some relationship between the university and the universe where you're, it is supposed to somehow in its ideal form in its early modern 17th, 18th century form, the university was supposed to represent

some kind of integration of knowledge across a lot of disciplines where they all would fit together. And for a variety of reasons one can cite, this has broken down over time. There are ideological reasons, but maybe there also are practical reasons where the amount of knowledge became too great for any single person to master. And then you had ever division into ever narrower sub-disciplines.

Yeah, in the first part, Chris, the interviewer says, well, given that human history seems to be evolving, which I think one would accept there is kind of an evolution that we tend to see over 2000 years. But then they sort of slip in, well, it's evolving towards some point, some fixed point, which actually that's not quite the same thing. It's a bit like evolution, right? There is a bit of a directed thing in evolution, but it's not evolving. Organisms don't evolve towards some sort of goal.

So he slips that in because of course he wants to make it sound like, well, given that it's obvious that global civilization is in some sense evolving, then it must be evolving to a point. And the Bible makes a prediction about what that point is, which is apocalypse. And then he asked the question, why aren't universities discussing this important idea? Well, I guess the simple answer is because it's stupid, right? Like that's a silly topic for any kind of investigation, philosophical, sociological, scientific. It's just a random thought bubble that doesn't even make sense, right? a random thought bubble that doesn't even make sense, right? Well, I would instead challenge the premise that universities aren't like, it might be

a stupid notion that there's a teleological orientation to history and thought and that kind of thing. But it is certainly something that philosophers have often talked about, Danfologians. And to my knowledge, they are still doing that. We're in universities. We can't, we can't. Like, did the theologians stop theologizing? I haven't noticed that. And the arts and humanities have a whole bunch of different schools that have, you know, different approaches and different views. And there seems to be no shortage of people offering big ideas. Like I think this is the issue with their cartoonish image of the past where it's like these intellectual giants. You know, he's talking about how in previous times, science and knowledge, it was all unified. People learned all disciplines and tried to integrate it holistically.

And now modern universities have become less ambitious. They're specialized, right? You focus on individual subjects. Now, I presume he's talking about the origins of universities in the medieval 12th century or whatnot, when they were primarily religious institutions. And then, of course, you did have theology mixed in with everything. It would be like going to a Quranic university as well, right? Where Islam would be included in the kind of syllabus. So that is true. But obviously over time, universities developed more specialized and discipline specific thing because knowledge advanced. Right. Like, and, and also in the enlightenment and Renaissance periods and whatnot, there,

there was also the eventual removal of religion as the overarching framework in everything. But you were evil to study science without having to adhere to religious dogma. But they seem to be pining for that period, which is, I guess you can present it as a better time. But yeah, like nothing. And did you hear as well, Matapet, where he said, no, university representing the universe, he did that sense maker, you know, word play.

The university and the universe, Matt, you know, those are related words. I missed that. Did he like a little play there? Dear, oh dear. Well, it's a minor point that a little thing that annoyed me was when he talked about the reasons why universities aren't investigating these deep fundamental questions like maybe the apocalyptic predictions for the Bible are going to predict the future for us. Peter Thiel says, oh well, the reasons are overdetermined. And I really hate that's just a little word calling things overdetermined.

It's a little tech geek term. He should just say, look, there are many reasons why they're not investigating these big questions. It's just these little pretentious tech geek things. It's an example of our pseudo profound bullshit stuff, Chris, where people use that. Just these little signifiers that you're a deep technical thinker. Yeah, that's I noticed that as well. It is the the

language of the the uber tech or the kind of rationalist set, right? They like that. So it's like the reference to Bayesian ism, where Bayesianism is a perfectly reasonable and justifiable thing and the useful thing to discuss, but 90% of the time, you should set your priors when you hear Bayesian reasoning invoked in a podcast that it's not going to be invoked for anything good or appropriately. Yeah, indeed. Indeed.

So modern universities, Matt, they don't talk about the big ideas. And they're also, as he talked about, they're kind of getting into endless specialties, dead end disciplinary cul-de-sacs where people don't see the big picture. So let's hear a bit more about that. And then, you know, there are, and I've spoken about this in many other contexts, but my intuition is that in many places there's been relative stagnation, the hyper-specialization, disguises as a certain type of decadence. We have these narrow experts saying how wonderful they are.

The cancer cell people sell it. Cancer researchers say they're going to cure cancer in the next five years. And string people say they're the smartest physicists and they know everything but maybe it's just some weird academic power game where they're blocking everybody else and and and and on and on and so um so there is a so there is you know even before we get to the big question of history there's a question just of you know the history of science and technology it progressed progressed a lot. Maybe it's progressing more slowly. Why has that changed? What's going on there? A rather Weinsteinian presentation there of science and academia, right? There's a decadence

mark. The cancer people are claiming that they're going to cure cancer in five years. The string theorists, those arrogant bastards are preventing anybody from doing real geometric unity based research. And yeah, it just a lot of echoes here of the Weinsteinian view of science as a bunch of like self-interested people that are keeping the real ideas down through their kind of chlorine cronyism and suppression of true genius, right? Yeah, exactly. Decadent is the right word to describe

what they think of modern science and academia, which kind of conflicts a bit with how they also feel that the speed of advancements in science and technology is an existential threat to us, but we could talk about that later. But certainly they feel that everything is politics. You can't trust anything that any of them is saying. They're probably up to no good. Yes, indeed. And, you know, there's this thing, Matt, where I don't think they actually pay much attention to science in general, because you know that thing about in five years,

we're gonna have this new technology? That is a joke within skeptic communities. Anytime you see a press release for new battery technology or a new drug or whatever, the kind of selling point is always, if you invest in this or if we can build this technology in five years, we will have like a huge breakthrough. Right. And obviously as the five years go, we do get breakthroughs, but not every technology turns out to be as revolutionary as the people claim.

But he's presenting it as if that's what science is about, like trying to do that. That's what all the scientists are doing. And that's more like, that is the marketing pitch. That's not science. Like scientific projects are longer term, like the human genome project. There is progress being made, but he's kind of talking about the discourse

of individual groups hyping particular scientific discoveries or this kind of thing. And I think that's the engagement that a lot of these tech people have is that they are listening to pitches or they're reading articles and then, you know, like cancer research has just been progressing, right? Like I'm not under the impression they're going to cure cancer in five years. There's far too many different types of cancer and they are making progress in like getting treatment rates up. They are making progress across a whole bunch of different therapies to try and detect and treat cancer.

And it is working. But there's, I think, very few people except for the people like Peter Thiel that imagine, are kind of disappointed that they're not able to cure all cancers within five years. Yeah, I guess it's a common perspective that's coming around these days, like Sabine Hassenfelder, for instance, implies something very similar, really, about the state of physics. So, yeah, I mean, whatever. I don't agree for now, I'm just observing. We're just processing the big ideas. Well, speaking of processing big ideas,

Peter Robinson is a fucking sense maker, Ma, is a sense maker. And I'm going to, I submit to you, my honor, what is it? I submit to you. Oh, you have some additional evidence you would like to put before the court. I have, yeah, I would like to bring to the court's attention exhibit A in the matter of Peter Robinson being a sense maker.

Listen to this. You said so fragmentation, hyper-specialization in the university, the feeling that of kind of disintegration into silos, that's one aspect of it. Another aspect of it, I'm checking this, this is the form of a question, is whether an extreme rationalism maybe emerges from that specialization

or maybe informs it, but I've heard you say, I've got a quotation here from you, under the rationalist view, you can't even talk about the end of your own life, let alone the end of the world. That there's something about the regnant view, I'm trying to resist the word ideology because ideology isn't quite the right, but the way the university conducts its business rules out questions of life, death, sin, redemption,

the meaning of history. And yet those are the, so what I'm trying to get at is hyper-specialization, yes, is there also something else, something about the sheer, the regnant view that makes it very hard for universities to grapple with big questions. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, why aren't we like, why are you studying what you're studying? Why am I specialized in gaming research? Why? Why are we trying to figure out the answer to life, the universe, and everything all at once?

You know, the Bible, sin, morality, life, redemption, women. Why are we doing it all at once in one great, amazing framework? Also, ideology, not quite the right word, not the specific right word. Regnant. Regnant. Maybe that is a better word. Maybe that is a more precise. I had to look up that word.

Oh, you ignorant as Chris. You're not equipped to deal with ideas on this level, clearly. This is what sense-speakers do, though. They're like, you know, I don't think dominant is quite correct. It might be prevailing. It's prevailing, maybe what we mean here, right? Let's explore the distinction between his dominant and regnant, Chris, because I think that could illustrate.

Yeah, I know. Silly. Yeah, I know, silly. Anyway, pretentious, pretentious. And I think the pretentiousness and the big words I think can help conceal the fact that what is being proposed here is really quite silly. Like, first of all, Peter Thiel's big idea is that Bible scripture predicting the end times, we should be looking to that

to deal with problems today somehow. OK. And then the second idea is that why are academics and scientists specializing on their little things like, you know, viruses or cancer or addiction? Why aren't we thinking about redemption and sin? That's what we should all. I mean, like, there actually are. Yes, I know. I know what you're going to say. Like there actually are. Yeah, I know.

I know what you're going to say. Like there are some academics who do that, thankfully, relatively few proportionally to them, because it is something of a waste of time because you end up doing stuff like this. But anyway. Yeah, yeah.

And the other aspect that clearly puts us in the sense speaking realm is sense speakers must imply that rationalism, science, it's too limited. It's causing problems, right? There's a mystical element to the universe. There's a meaning crisis, Matt, and it cannot be solved with your rationalist science, right? Take off your lab coat, put down your beakers. It's time to think big.

Pick up your Bible, grab your bongo drums and get in the sense making circle. We're going to sense make the shit out of this. So yeah, that's pretty much it. It may sound like we're being mean, but I think that is what they are proposing. That is what they're talking about. They're just doing it with big words and dramatic pauses. But so let's see the argument develop on. We've heard about how people's ambitions have become smaller, more parochial.

Think about the people in the ancient time, or even just a hundred years ago. What did they seek to do? Yes, they seem hard to grapple with it. Why is probably harder to say? Certainly, if we do something like the radical life extension project, do something like the radical life extension project. People in the 17th, 18th centuries were very optimistic about it. Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon, you had all these ideas that you could extend human lifespan by centuries. As late as the late 19th, early 20th century,

there was a movement called Cosmism. Yes, they seem hard to grapple with it. Why is probably harder to say? Certainly, if we do something like the Radical Life Extension Project, people in the 17th, 18th centuries were very optimistic about it. Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon, you know,

you had all these ideas that you could extend human lifespan by centuries, you know. As late as the late 19th, early 20th century, there was a movement called Cosmism and the sort of, around the time of the Soviet Revolution, 1920s Soviet Union. And it claimed that for the revolution to succeed, you had to physically resurrect

all the dead people using science. And it was workers of the world unite and to sort of get with the times, their slogan was dead of the world unite. And then of course they didn't make much progress on this. And then at some point by the time you get to Stalin and the show trials and the death seemed to be going up, not down, but yeah. But there was a moment when they thought it might even be possible.

There was an incredible ambition and incredible energy to modern science. It was perhaps downstream from Christianity. If the promise of Christianity is a physical resurrection, then science could offer that too. It was a possibility. Maybe it was a rival to Christianity. You don't need Christianity if we can do it through science. And then there is a strange way that the project in many dimensions feels very exhausted, even though, of course, people

still genuflect to science. They believe in science with a capital S, but the ambition has been really beaten out. So the good old days, Chris, when scientific folks talk seriously about raising the dead. Yeah, well, not just scientific folks, also the communists, apparently they envisioned like reusing the dead and creating like a zombie revolution. And they give up on that idea too early, man. They had good ambitions, but they just give up. Whatever happened?

Like why have they given up on Floxton? Why have they given up on,logston? Why have they given up on... Oh, what was the Victorian spiritualism? Theosophy? Theosophy? Or... Could be. Could be what I'm thinking of. Anyway, so, but those were the days when people thought big. Like Greek philosophers wondered if maybe the whole world was made out of water. You know, exciting, you know, out of the box kind of thinking. out of water. You know, exciting, you're out of the box kind of thinking.

I, you know, one bit that gets me here is like Teal's understanding of Christianity, right? So I get it, Matt. I get it that like, you know, Christianity includes that there will be an afterlife. People will be raised from the dead like Jesus. There's heaven and that kind of thing. But he's quite focused on the physical aspect of the resurrection, right? He's like Christianity said there would be a physical resurrection, right? Then science came and his ideas, now maybe science decided it was going to physically resurrect people because it was influenced by Christianity or, or another alternative is it wanted to be a rival source for physically resurrecting people so that you wouldn't need Christianity.

So it's like premises that the main motivation is physically resurrecting the dead. That's the primary goal in both those systems. And now that ambition, the original ambition to resurrect the dead has been beaten out of science. There's only a few brave pioneers like Brian Johnson still keeping that flame alive. So that's the thing, isn't it? He feels like things have gone awry because scientists aren't seriously working on living forever, right? Why can't we live forever? Well, why aren't the scientists brave enough to tackle that problem, Chris? And of course,

the answer is it's more complicated than that. You know, actually scientists from all kinds of disciplines are trying to find ways to help us live longer. But you know, just, you know, waving a magic wand and doing something to ourselves so we live forever. It's not as easy as it sounds, Peter Thiel. So it's like, it's just like a childish, I mean, look, I don't understand, I mean, I don't understand why we're just being hypercritical here, but I think it's fair to say that's a childish view of science, like how come it hasn't delivered flying cars and why don't

we live forever yet? Yeah, why aren't we live forever yet? Yeah, why aren't human lifespans hundreds of years longer? And you're like, because it's, we are like biological entities, right? And there's a lot of complex things going on there. And it may be the case that in the future, genetic technologies and ability to rejuvenate cells and immune systems and whatnot mean that we end up with vastly increased lifespans. But the issue is that humans did increase their lifespans quite a lot from previous eras by addressing

infectious diseases and hygiene and this kind of thing. But there's a limit so far that we're heading, right? That like the thing that was holding back lifespans is not that... No, no, Chris. The thing that's holding us back is we're just not trying hard enough. That's the issue. Yeah, so just that the whole premise is kind of like... Well, it's not like if the option was available that nobody is interested in life extension technology or that kind of thing. But it's just like you said, it's a complex

topic. In any case, part of the issue, Matt, is the lack of scientific heroes in our current era. Yes. Yes. If you look at the individual scientists, it's much less of the heroic, bold figure breaks with dogmas and thinks for him or herself. It's much more, in late modern era, you're just a robot in an ever smaller cog in an ever bigger machine or something like this. Right.

I mean, look, the most reasonable version of this is, isn't there a popular movement in, at least there was, to sort of encourage more cross-disciplinary work, encouraging, you know, scientists who are specialized in particular silos to kind of share ideas across them. That's maybe the fair version of what he's saying. Yeah, yeah, that is a positive spin to put on it. Interdisciplinary knowledge and approaches can be beneficial, and there is issues with academic siloing. That is all true, right?

But what he's heartening back is to the gentleman scientist era, this notion that there are like, you know, intellectual giants astride. And where are they now, Matt? Where are the intellectual giants that have mastered all disciplines? Like, I guess it was Eric. Where's our Newton? Where's our Darwin, Chris? Yeah. And I mean, in fairness to him, he does give one explanation for this, which I think is true, even though he discounts it, which is that it's harder to discover new things once stuff has already been discovered.

Once Darwin did his thing with evolution, then the next person that comes along could just be just as smart, as talented as Darwin, just as willing to think outside the box. But the fact is, evolution has already been largely figured out. So things get more difficult. Yeah, that was one good thing that he referenced, which is a very relevant explanation. And he credits it to Tyler Cowen, but he doesn't spend much time on it. It just says it's one possible account. But I did recognize that that was a good thing that he

describes, but he definitely does not dwell on that. So I'll just play it because it's an example that he's not always saying things that are just silly and childish. And then there's always a question of why this is. Right. And why questions are overdetermined. And as a libertarian, I always like to say it's too regulated and the FDA regulates the drugs too much. And, you know, if you regulated drugs, if you regulated video games like the FDA regulates drugs, we'd still all just be playing pong. And so there's a libertarian anti-regulatory thing.

There is a argument that the schools aren't teaching people and they're not teaching people to be scientists. Some of the educational institutions are broken. This is sort of an anti-liberal argument. Some truth in all of this. There is a Tyler Cohen argument that somehow the low-hanging fruit was picked. There was a bunch of easy discoveries to make, a Tyler Cohen argument that somehow the low hanging fruit was picked.

There was a bunch of easy discoveries to make, and now nature's cupboard is kind of bare, and you have to reach really hard to make a modest discovery. And maybe that's true. Maybe that's just sort of a self-serving excuse of baby boomers who didn't do as much as the generations that came before.

But it is very striking. One way to quantify this, even if we say the rate of progress in broad fields is the same as it was 100 years ago. Not that it's slow, but even if we say it's the same, if you think of PhDs, there are probably 100 times as many PhDs today as there were in, say, 1924. And so it's the same rate of progress, and the average PhD is 99% less productive

than people were 100 years ago. And that doesn't seem like a very, you know, healthy scientific ecosystem. So there's some sense that, you know, that maybe it's slowed. So much there. Yeah, so much there. I realized I gave him too much credit

because he did raise that objection. But he immediately dismisses it, basically. I can't miss that as well. Yeah, I mean, some would say this, but actually we're just not trying hard enough. That's the simple reason. And by the way, Chris, we'll return to this, I think. But here he mentions, I think, one

of the first contradictions that he sort of wraps himself up in, which is, like as a libertarian, he feels that one of the explanations for this lack of scientific development is, you know, like too much regulation, too many constraints on scientists by government and stuff. But as we'll hear, he thinks that it is a big existential risk that these crazy mad scientists are running amok and dabbling with powers they don't comprehend. And later on, he talks about the need for more control to try to prevent Armageddon. But then I think he dismisses that.

Anyway, it's all very complicated. I'm running ahead of myself. No, but well, he's talking about the need to loosen up regulation on drugs. Presumably that would include vaccines, but Thiel is very much in the set that views COVID vaccines as being potentially dangerous and rushed too quickly and all that kind of thing. So his worldview is like inherently self-contradictory. And he is talking about in the 1920s, we had less PhDs. And he, he, he throws out, he did the thing, Matt, about referencing overdetermined. Again, I heard that the, you know, this is overdeterm determined. And then he says, average PhD noise, 99% less productive than in the 1920s. I would really love to see how that is quantified. And I think the way

he's doing the equation is like, if you have 1000% less PhDs in the population, that would be like the rate of progress should be, you know, applying like that, we should be making 1000 times more discoveries than we made in the 1920s, but like, just, just think about it, right? Like, cause if you think of the progress from 1920 to 1950, right, there was significant development in those 30 years, rocket technology and various other things developed with the help of some world wars. But if you think of the progress from 1990 to now, 2025, that's just 30, 35 years.

So we've had the internet, we've had mRNA vaccines, we've had AIs in just the past couple of years, we have CRISPR, we have, you know, all these new technologies that are developing, we have iPhones, right? We have the internet now in the palm of our hand, the high speed internet, we have, you know, satellites, reusable rockets satellites, reusable rockets, like the Elon Musk thing. There's self-driving cars running around San Francisco. Yeah, so that progress, it's completely slowed down. There's nothing happening. And you're like, what the f*** are you talking about? Compare the technology from 1920 to 1960 even, and you see a significant speeding up of technological progress. And the other contradiction is that this progress that occurred, whether it was splitting the atom in the 40s or self-driving cars now, that happened via specialists working in their tiny little solace.

It didn't happen from people talking about theology and redemption. Obviously, it wouldn't ever happen from people approaching it like that. So yeah, look, I think another way to illustrate why it's just a very childish view of how scientific progress works is you can take a specific thing that we're looking to improve and life span's a good one right so there were very large increases in life expectancy in in many parts of the world from say the 1800s say 1850 to 1950 right great big jump go another 100 years or almost 100 years forward to today, and the increase has been less, right? Even though, you know, we've optimized a hell of a

lot of things. God, we've got a whole internet of health optimizers doing their level best to make this more healthy. Yeah, microplastics. Yeah, but the sheer fact is it gets more difficult. Hopefully everyone can see that, right? To to increase the average life expectancy from, say, 50 years to 75 years is a lot easier than going from 75 to 125. Right. Of those 20 years, same doesn't matter. The point stands. So, yeah, I mean, it's just I return to the take that he is expressing fundamentally very childish.

Oh, well, I might have an illustration of that. So immediately after this, he is talking about, you know, maybe it would have been better. Maybe there are advantages to going slow. So listen to this. And maybe maybe going very slow was was better than, you know, racing towards Armageddon. And so and so we are as I always I was born in 1967. You know, I always often express frustration that, you know, stuck in these office buildings or houses that are decades old. There are all these parts of our society that feel lame, slow changing, low energy, low testosterone,

nothing is going on. And then, I do wonder if we were in a Jetsons type world, we might not even be sitting here to talk about it. It might have self-destructed by that. If you had a JFK as president on amphetamines going mano a mano with Crusher, it worked. In 1962, it wouldn't have worked every time. Low testosterone, what's our problem, Chris? But it's very confusing, as you said. What is the problem and what is the solution? On one hand, he's saying that we're in a rut, nothing's happening. We don't think big anymore. We're not building enough new buildings. Enough. That's right. Everything's really boring and low T. But at the same time, he's concerned about this racing

towards Armageddon and, you know, Khrushchev and people, like, you know, real men doing ambitious things. If we took that approach, then we might blow ourselves up, you know, in a nuclear war or something. So, like, what's his concern and what's his solution? I'm not sure. Well, he seems to think the Jetsons world, like he really wants the Jetsons world. Like he was promised robot, meads, flying cars and, you know, Astro the dog and that didn't show up and that's

been disappointing. He has to look at boring old buildings and walk upstairs. But he's also part of that movement, Matt, of fetishizing the past. He's talking about biblical prophecies and later he's going to talk about going to churches, famously buildings, which are rebuilt every 20 or 30 years to improve with modern technology. It's internally inconsistent, his ideology, because here he kind of said, we need to be doing away with the past, advancing things, coming into a Jetson-style future, maybe with high tea, men will be men, braggadocious people. But it could be dangerous, but the risks might be worth the rewards. But at the same time, we need to return to Christian values. We need to remember the insights from the Bible and the traditions that have been missed from these Victorian era.

So like, does he want the techno utopia that is like breaking with the shackles of the past, or does he want to return to traditional Christian-informed social values and a technological approach which is informed by biblical prophecies and this kind of thing. Like it's a it is internally inconsistent because fundamentally he is a teenage boy who wants to live in the Jetsons future. That's the extent he knows philosophers, he knows big words and he's read books. But he's like I think it's because it is this immature desire for I was promised the Jetsons and I've got the actual 2025 and it's not like the Jetsons. So what's gone wrong? Yeah, yeah. So it is quite confused and we'll hear more contradictions and conclusions. But yeah, so far, I think Curtis Yavne is an excellent comparison here. Someone who also knows big words but is very inarticulate as well and doesn't seem to be very good at connecting his different thoughts together.

But let's hear from more from Peter Thiel. Maybe we're being unfair. Yes. Well, there was reference, Matt, we talked about there about regulations and how they're hamstringing science, the progress of science. There was some discussion of Mr. Fauci. He's a figure that shows up and also the origins of COVID. So I think this is worth mentioning just to show the kind of like level of scientific knowledge that we're dealing with here. So here's him talking about people being worried about the wrong things and then we'll get the Fauci. There's a way in which the people who are worried about these existential risks, and you can also criticize them and criticize them for being Luddites and etc. But you can also criticize them for not being apocalyptic enough,

because most of the time they're just focused on one. You know, it's like the nuclear weapons people are still just talking about nukes, and Greta is, you know, it's just the climate. She's not worried about AI, and she's not worried about nukes, and much less the COVID virus that was bioengineered in the Wuhan lab or something like this. And then I've often thought you should get all these people who are worried about existential

risk in a room and they have to fight it out and decide which ones really matter and how to prioritize them. And in some sense, the scary answer is there's some truth to all of them. Yeah, yeah. Of course, he's a big believer in the Wuhan virus leak and the culpability of Fauci. Irresponsible Fauci, playing God, you know, funding dangerous research. But before he's saying that there's too much regulation, researchers aren't taking enough risks, except for Fauci,

who was taking too many risks, floating with this dangerous new mRNA technology. So what else was he saying there, Chris? Well, he said, yeah, so he referenced the people are worried about individual risks, but they're not looking at it, you know, holistically, like the way he is and putting them all together. All of them are risks, right? So Greta is just about climate change. Other people are just worried about nukes.

He's worried about everything and things that other people haven't noticed. And he makes reference that the fact that COVID was bioengineered in the Wuhan lab. Like that's absolutely established fact, right? That is pure science now, Matt. It's been established. And if you think that he isn't making that particular argument, there is a bit where he decides to steel man what Fauci did during the pandemic. So let's hear his steel man approach to that.

I'll give one example. And you can think about this what you will, but a lot of my conservative friends are very critical of Fauci and all the lockdowns and the masks and the social distancing and the vaccine that didn't really work. And on the surface level, these critiques are, I think, quite legitimate. It was not the correct protocol for some kind of flu. It was, however, roughly the right protocol if you thought it was a bio weapon. And, you know, if you think it's a very dangerous, humanly engineered bioweapon, those are roughly all

the kinds of things that you might do. And so the kind of critique I have of Fauci is that, yeah, that's what he was scared of, I think. That's why I'd steelman him, give him the benefit of the doubt. And then the real critique is that you weren't supposed to infantilize our population and not talk about it. And that's what he was scared about. And he was so scared about it, he couldn't even talk about it.

And there probably are a lot of things like this where, yeah, there is this pretty inchoate fear, but we're so scared, we can't even talk about it cogent-ly. It's just confusing Chris, help me out. Can I give you an example? So he's saying his conservative friends are saying, the masks didn't work, the lockdowns were useless, and it was all for like a mild illness that didn't really do anything.

He says that's all true. That's all pretty right. And also the vaccines don't really work. That's all granted, Matt. Granted that is true. But what his conservative friends don't understand is what Fauci is doing doesn't make sense if the coronavirus is what it appeared to be. But if you knew it was a bioweapon and you were afraid, those measures make sense. So what Fauci was doing, if we steal money, is that he was doing the correct protocol for a bio weapon. And that's why he was introducing all this draconian stuff. And he was scared, but he couldn't tell the people about the actual reason.

So that's the, that's the steel man for like what she did. So that's the steel man for him. Oh, like what she did. So Fauci was instrumental in creating this bio weapon or this accelerated, irresponsible mRNA. I mean, he doesn't say that's here. Yes, like, but like, I can have it. He did say before that Fauci is calculable for funding the dangerous research. And so I think he's saying that Fauci then suspected that actually what was going on here

was a bioweapon that he had a hand in creating, right? Because he funded the research. I don't think that matters to you. It's more that Fauci's knowledge of like what was actually going on and where the real origins of COVID were enabled him to perceive the danger. And that's why he engaged in these things that ultimately were unnecessary, but that are coherent if you see through the nine dimensional chess game that's being played. Now, the problem here is, I hope, well, one, that that's absolute bollocks. There's no evidence for this.

So that's Thiel's version of a steelman of Fauci's position. That's his best effort, the steelman, what Fauci was doing. I can do a bit better than Thiel. What Fauci and other public health experts were doing when they were advocating masks and lockdowns and this kind of thing is they were engaging the public health measures to try and reduce the spread of a pandemic virus that killed over 7 million people. And vaccines were

developed quickly that proved to be effective in helping to treat and control the virus. And over time, things were left. Now, some statements at various times were made that were stronger than they should have been, various regulations by Public Health were not properly like too strongly enforced or were not enforced like consistently. All that is true. But the Steelman version is that that is actually what happened. There actually was a virus.

There was a global pandemic. It was a dangerous virus. And governments around the world, not just Fauci, were responding in the way that you would to an infectious virus by trying to limit people getting together infectious virus by trying to limit people getting together in groups and overwhelming their medical services, like what happened early in the pandemic in several countries. Right. So he cannot even imagine that very basic thing.

Like he cannot use the theory of mind to imagine like he could even present that as an alternative and say, no, there's reasons that I don't think that's the key is, but that's the steel man version of it. But his steel man is a fantasy. It's a fantasy where like Fauci is dealing with a secret conspiracy and he's, he's actually a good guy, but he just, he wasn't honest with us. I hear you. Yeah. I think the point is there is that he's just extremely conspiratorial.

It is, it is thinking like he can't even non-scientific. Like he says the vaccines didn't work. That the virus was just like a flu, you know, no, it was not. And the numbers reflect this. Like there's a reason that Italy isn't shut down every single year because of flu pandemics or flu outbreaks. There's a reason that this was different, but they don't just people died.

People died. Their deaths are recorded. They know people that died. And and yet they act as if that didn't happen. And the vaccines were actually, you know, the danger. But it's been, if you knew science, if you know statistics, if you know public health information, you know that is untrue. So Peter Clay lives in a conspiratorial anti-science world. Indeed. When I was in New York, I hung out with Jonathan Howard, previous guest and friend

of the podcast. We went down and visited his hospital where he works, where he volunteered to help out as a frontline responder during the very first time they hit New York City and things were very bad. He was pointing out the spots where there were trucks, where they were loading dead bodies. And I think that kind of thing is easy to forget when people focus on the inconvenience and the hassles and did they get something wrong about Mars or whatever. There was a lot of legitimate panic, but it was a very dire situation that needed a strong

response. But yeah, like you said, the reality of what actually happened doesn't actually penetrate the way they think about it. No, but they're constantly back patting themselves for their level of knowledge and insight. That's the thing. So when you hear things like this, you have to place the rest of the stuff that maybe you don't know that Tila is referencing into that context. Right. Like maybe he is making accurate claims. Maybe he's presenting something accurately or maybe he's bullshitting

with extreme confidence like Curtis Jarvan. So that's just like an illustration that I definitely know that what he's describing is wrong, but he's confidently and he's even doing a show of I'm being especially generous here. Like I'm game planning out, you know, a way that Fauci is innocent in a certain sense. That's his best effort and his fucking shit. So after that depressing cul-de-sac, why don't we have another little interlude with sense-making from Peter Robinson? Here's a sense-making term. A term that you use will put all the pieces of this together, although that may happen

in the second part of our conversation, and that is the catacombs. The term comes from the Greek for he or that, which restrains. We'll come to in a moment to your analysis of the catacombs through history, but first, again, the concept itself, St. Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 2, verses 6 to 7, and now you know what is restraining, again in Greek katakon, and now you know what is restraining, that he may be revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, only he who restrains, the katakon, he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way." Now that's a very enigmatic passage. The Church has never defined the term. The Church Fathers, the early writers and thinkers in the Church,

wrote about it, but tended to add that their views were speculative. So we don't have any quite, any thoroughly worked out theology of the catacombs, but we do have, 2,000 years ago in St. Paul, a notion of some force holding back chaos, holding back evil, holding back some force that's restraining. So here we have some biblical theology, a fine reading about some quote about Catacombs. Catacombs and something restraining, whatever, disorder, chaos, cataclysm. And now Peter Thiel, interpret this for us. Two thousand years later.

Two thousand years later. 2000 years later. It's impressive that they managed to do it so seriously. The other thing that reminds me of is that Christian guy who had those very serious discussions with, what's his name? Jonathan Pajol? No, no, no. Think further back in time. The Cycle Squared guy. James Lindsay. James Lindsay and what was the name of the Christian guy he was talking to?

Oh, Michael O'Fallon. Michael O'Fallon. Thank you. He also had, as an interviewer, had the ability to ask some incredibly stupid questions, but with that tone of weighty tone, very lofty, academic, well-informed. This is an extremely nuanced thing we're investigating. But what he's asking Peter Tilton to do, inviting Till to do, is interpret a 2000-year-old random biblical passage and just look into those tea leaves and tell me what it means for us today. This is Sans Mekur Katnip, right? There's some ambiguity about a specific word, right? People are not sure exactly what the original word is referring to and biblical scholars haven't...

We don't know what it means, but we do know what it means, but we know that it's incredibly significant. A lot hangs by getting the interpretation of this right. You've mentioned this word. This is a word. You just lost it. Let's get more into this word. Maybe we can talk about this word for a while. This is what Satsvikars love to do. The only thing that's

messing is like, Katakyn sounds a bit like Katakom. And these are different words. There's a completely different spelling and etymology. But isn't the sound maybe there's some connection there? You know, like this is, this is what they like to do. Just to highlight, but as you said, it's just an invitation to connect that to your mind palace of concepts, like what concerns you? So let's hear Tito's answer about the mysterious concept of the catacomb and what it might be referencing.

Yeah, it's, as you said, it's a rather mysterious concept. You can identify it with the good aspects of the Roman Empire, certain political aspects of the Roman Catholic Church, individuals, institutions that somehow are trying to hold this runaway chaos in check. I don't think it's purely reactionary. You can think of Metternich post-Napoleon as sort of catacontic, but he's also modernizing.

It is a thing of history, though. And so there are ways to do it that can be, you know, good for a time, but that will not necessarily work for all times. And then, but I would always maybe go back to, you know, good for a time, but that will not necessarily work for all times. And then, but I would always maybe go back to, you know, the apocalyptic specter would be, you know, Antichrist or Armageddon.

And, you know, I think there is a lot in this runaway science technology that's pushing us towards something like Armageddon. And then there is, you know, the natural pushback on this is we will avoid Armageddon by having a one world state that has real teeth, real power. And the biblical term for that is the Antichrist. And the Christian intuition I have is, I don't want Antichrist.

I don't want Armageddon. I would like to find some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both. And then certainly, there are ways that you defer it if you can. It's interesting that he equates the Antichrist with this one-world government scenario that as a good libertarian and a conspiratorial one at that, he's very afraid of. But I mean, that's not true though. That seven leaps down the ladder of logic, right?

Or seven leaps up. You can go down or up, I suppose. But like, just the way it's put together, it always amazes me the way they talk about these connecting, you know, the kind of concepts together so confidently. There's so many very, very large leaps and premises that are required to follow him up his, you know, semantic ladder, but they're just like nimbly jumped over. Of course, the only solution to run away. So again, now we're back on technology has gone crazy.

We're running headlong. So forget about the stagnation thing. Technology is on a runaway train to disaster. What would stop it? The only solution that is kind of presented that everybody agrees. Fundamentally, this is what we've all agreed is one word government. One word government. One word government, which is also the anti-Christ.

So we don't want that. We don't want that. And Christians don't want the anti-Christ. Do Christians not want the Armageddon? I guess, like, I thought you can't prevent the, like... Well, that's the thing. Isn't that Jesus coming back? Again, this is like, it's a very selective interpretation, isn't it?

Yeah, you can't tell Jesus not to come back. He's not saying, you know, if you guys don't head off the Antichrist, I'm going to come back. You better stop him or I'm coming back. That's not the way it works, I believe. Who you, you better stop him or I'm coming back. Like that's, that's not the way it works. I believe like, who knows, right? There are, you know, flavors of extreme religious people that want to hasten the final battle between good and evil. And, you know, this is why certain radical Christians tend to support Israel, right? Because they kind of want to see this. So if you have that type of Christian you're wanting to bring on Armageddon. But Peter Thiel is apparently not that kind of Christian theologian. He thinks we want to avoid the Armageddon.

And the Bible is not so much a prophecy of what will happen, but rather a warning. Like, watch out, you got to be careful. You want to avoid Armageddon. So anyway, it's all just Stephen Leyser's stupid. It's really not worth trying to understand what he means, I don't think. But in the Book of Revelation, the end of days is like,

God's judgment, the final, the kingdom of heaven is established and what the sort of like the end of the world, but the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, but he's kind of like talking about, well, if we go between this middle path, we could just divert Armageddon and the Antichrist. And like, I don't know, it's a heterodox interpretation of biblical prophecy, it feels like. But like we said, the basic premise, just like with Fauci, right, he's aligning over so many other possibilities. What about just the thought I've had off the top of my head, what if you didn't have a one world government, but you had various agreements between different nation states

worked out for, you know, international bodies where people debate and disagree or agreements being made or or what if you had transnational companies that also were hampered by regulations from different economic institutions or governing bodies or this kind of thing. Like, no, no, it has to be a one world totalitarian state. That's the only way. That's the only option. The premises laid on each other and then clambered up are huge. They lead to like massive leaps, but it's never called by the interview.

You know, Peter Robinson is just interested in words, right? And this is a pretty good interpretation of the mysterious word of the catacombs. Yeah, well, I returned to my assessment of it being very childish. I always had a bit of a prejudice against libertarians for having this simplified, childish, absolutist kind of view of the world. And, you know, Peter Thiel exemplifies that, I think, where, yeah, you can have complete freedom, complete, you know, libertarian dream, or one world government. There's one of the two. I am going to go on, Matt, to outline this free path system that he talks about. But before that,

you know, as I said, we're taking a sense making interlude. And during this interview, Peter Robinson realises that he wronged Peter. And like a good sense maker, he needs to make amends. Peter, I have a confession to make. In my mind, when you first started talking about Cillian Charybdis, this analysis, I wronged you. I thought to myself, this is Peter being Peter. He loves building intellectual models. He has the kind of mind that goes in that direction, Hegel, Weber, Strauss.

Reality is of second order. The real importance here is the model, the intellectual model, because you enjoy it for its own sake. And I do think that you do have a mind that looks for structures and frameworks. All right. But here, then I come across this passage from our old friend René. This is René Girard in 2009. The more probable the apocalypse becomes, the less we talk about it. Therefore we have to awaken our sleeping consciences."

And I thought, this is not a game for Peter. This is serious to you. You believe that you see questions that need to be asked that are not being asked, and you are trying to awaken our sleeping consciences. Will you accept that compliment? I'll take that. And you'll accept that confession?

Confession. All right. So Peter Thiel, I'm quoting you now. What I hope to retrieve is a sense of the stakes of the urgency of the question. The stakes are really, really high. It seems very dangerous that we're at a place where so few people are concerned about the Antichrist." Close quote. Sense-makers are just like a different breed.

They have to be stopped, Chris. They have to be stopped. It is like a French court though. Will you, Good Sir, accept that compliment from me? My confession, if you will. But I dared to touch you, sir. I fought with you. You were being too abstract and obstruse. What a fool I was, sir. Will you accept that compliment? I see now that you are motivated by a profound concern for humankind. Yeah, and your ideas are wonderful.

You're a genius like Freud or Weber or Hegel, you know, Peter Thiel. You've been spoken for ages, but not just as a genius, but a pragmatic man. Like it's it's so self-important. And they do it with like these really intonations. Yeah. This is serious. This is not a joke. It reminds me of Eric Weinstein.

You know, I'm serious. This is no laughing matter, right? And this is so funny because of the contrast between the pretentiousness and the self-importance with which they take themselves and how they frame it. And just the utterly silly juvenile ideas that are actually being expressed there. I mean, and it doesn't help. You know, you can cite various people. I went and checked a lot of those citations that they mentioned. And, you know, yes, there is some weird philosopher person

who was writing stuff down in some dense speculative. René Girard. René Girard, dense speculative social commentary infused by theology. Doesn't make it any less stupid. So yeah. Well, this is one of the issues. And I have other examples of this is like sense makers.

And in particular, this guy, Peter Robinson, tends to be like, if he can find a quote which has said something similar to Peter Taylor, even if Peter Taylor has been inspired by the quote, like if it's somebody that they both know, because it turns out they both know Rene Girard and René's work in it. So like presenting a quote from Girard and then presenting Tito saying the same thing as Girard, not that surprising. You took something he said and kind of said it in your own words. What do you think this means?

What do you think this means? René's point that the apocalyptic literature correctly read is simply a prediction of what human beings will do to each other suddenly becomes up until 1945, he said, wait a minute, how could human beings possibly be responsible for the end of the world? And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the answer is only too obvious. And you have, there's all this sort of, you know, there's liberal theologian writing in 1780. The argument for why you should read apocalyptic literature

is because occasionally you get these millenarian movements and people go crazy and it's worth reminding yourselves of the madness of crowds. And then the secondary reason you can read it is for your amusement. And that was sort of the Enlightenment optimism circa 1780. And there were of course all these incredibly scary ideas. The Antichrist would kill so many people,

he would come with a crematorium to burn the bodies of all the people he killed. And it was just this sort of lured medieval notions people had. And of course then after the end of Hitler in 1945, this stuff just wasn't so funny anymore. It wasn't so funny anymore. And then Gerard's intuition was that it's almost like

when a knowledge becomes too real and too close, it's like some, I don't like psychological repression or something like this, but you know, you want to sort of steer away from it. We can't bear to look at it. We don't want to talk about it quite as much. We need to reassure people. We need to tell people this is not really what it's about.

And of course, there were all these strange elements of the mythical that were brought in. It was named after all these terrible gods from ancient Greece, the Saturn, the god who ate his own children, and Zeus throws down thunderbolts, and we have fire raining down with Jupiter rockets from the heavens. So there was this strange return of the mythical in this very, in the equations of the physicists.

When Rene Girard is the largest single influence on Peter Thiel, and Peter Thiel is arguably simply recycling a selected few of his more speculative theological ideas, you can't then cite René Girard as evidence to buttress Peter Thiel's ideas, right? Yeah, but this is the way they operate. It's kind of like this person said this in kind of lofty sounding philosophically dense terms. And someone else has said it, Nye Hugo, right? This is how this interview function says,

I have collected two quotes, what is a Bible quote and what is like from you. And Nye, I would like you to riff on that. And just to provide the contrast, so you mentioned that this is fundamentally stupid, what they're talking about. Or just like very superficial, roller juvenile, the way they're addressing it. So just listen to this. But if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist, because no one's worried about it. And, of course, you know, I don't know how literally one should

take these biblical accounts, but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first, because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist, perhaps. The Antichrist comes first, doesn't quite work. The One World State doesn't work. It still goes haywire. Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad and you still get to Armageddon. But that's what comes first. Yeah, so he's still riffing.

He's using the Bible, just to remind people, he's using Bible prophecies, linking it to the One World Government, Armageddon. What's maybe gonna happen is that there's gonna be a One World Government that's gonna be set up to try to control and reduce the risk of nuclear weapons or AOI or something like that, but it's not really gonna work. The AOI is gonna get out of control,

nuclear bonds will go off. Fauci will create a new virus. Who knows, right? And then Armageddon is going to happen anyway. So that's one possible scenario that he's imagining. Yeah, that's it. No, Matt, you sound like a silly scholar who isn't taking these biblical prophecies seriously enough.

You're part of the problem. Let Peter Robinson explain. Then I saw a beast emerge from the sea, and they prostrated themselves in front of the beast saying, who can compare with the beast, who can fight against it, and all the people of the world will worship it." Close quote. There are people who take all of this seriously. We've already quoted René Girard,

we've already quoted Cardinal Newman. But Daniel dates from the Iron Age. Thessalonians and Revelation are 2,000 years old. Contemporary society, we sit here in Stanford University, contemporary society all but ignores these texts or derides them as of interest only to snake handlers, as I mentioned, snake handlers in Kentucky hollers. You are no snake handler.

Well, you take this stuff. Not that I'm aware of. No, not that you're aware ofllers. You are no stake handler. Well, you take this stuff- Not that I'm aware of, no. Not that you're aware of, not that I'm aware of. So, we'll come to how the Antichrist might arise, what we must do to prevent- we'll come to that in our second conversation. But the first thing I want to establish is, why do you take this seriously? Well, again, one can take it seriously without taking it completely literally, but just let me maybe defend Daniel and the Old Testament prophet. And if you contrast it with, let's say, a Greco-Roman understanding of history, Thucydides Herodotus, Thucydides writes the account of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta. And it has a timeless and eternal character.

It's the rising power against the existing power. Yeah. So I like that. I mean, these ideas might sound crazy. They might sound ridiculous, but you're not a steak handler. You're not a weirdo. You're a serious guy. Why do you take this seriously? Rich people, Matt, a rich billionaire is taking biblical prophecies seriously.

Doesn't that make you think, can you imagine? And did you read that? There was mention of a beast and who can fight against the beast. Not enough people are focusing on these biblical passages. Why aren't people talking about this more? Why are they focused on things like cancer treatments and mRNA vaccines and stuff? Why aren't they focused on biblical passages? You could equally ask, why aren't they focused on passages in the Buddhist Canon or the Vedas, right? Like, you know, just Ullur. But no, like, set that aside, Matt. They

also have wisdom that we might be willing to extract. Like, oh, yeah, it's that notion. And then you get the Kurdish Arvin, you know, demonstrating knowledge of history and well, let me compare the Old Testament. And I hate the thing what they do. Teal is like, let me just defend Daniel and the Old Testament against, you know, but Robinson isn't attacking the Old Testament, right? He's the one saying. So they always present it like they're having a constructive dialogue. And let me put this point, but they're in complete agreement. These two guys think we should be spending more time on the Old Testament and taking it more seriously. But the way they respond is as if there's a dialogue.

You know, like there's a well, you know, like there's a, well, you used a criticism there of that point, but let me put it to you why we should take the Bible seriously and very clear Robinson wants us to take the Bible very seriously. So you don't need to adopt that. They told you me you and I of course agree on this like fundamentally, but the silly older people. We are both super into biblical prophecies.

Yeah. So I understand that you're presenting this so I can jump off, but like, let's just be clear, you know, there isn't any disagreement. You and I are in exactly the same page, but yeah, that's not the way it's presented. Oh dear. No, no, indeed. Well, is there more of this, Chris? I mean, how much more can we learn about biblical processes? There's more words, Matt. There's more quotations.

Peter Robinson is very, very excited to talk about various things that he's come across. There is one thing at the end, you know, these silly academics, Matt, and modern people who are not focused enough on the Bible, what they need is like a 14-hour seminar with Jonathan Peugeot and Vervecky and Peterson. Like, good thing Jordan Peterson's around because he certainly takes the Bible seriously enough, right? He devotes enough time and intellectual space to it. But just to show you said, you know, where does this go? Here is how the thing wraps up. So remember how it started.

We've looked at various things, right? This is just the end. There's other things to show, but listen to the ending. So the United States, two quotations, Ronald Reagan, it's always been my belief that by a divine plan, this nation was placed between the two oceans to be sought out and found by those with a special brand of courage and love of freedom, close quote. So could it be that the United States is itself a catacombs, a restrainer,

a force that by its economic power and military might and the example it sets to the world holds back the chaos. I would like to believe that. You and I aren't that far apart in age. We both grew up in the, when the country still worked under Reagan. Here's a second quotation. This is Peter Thiel, quote, one obvious candidate for the Antichrist is the United States. Well, I think the US- Answer that without breaking my heart, please. I think the US is a natural candidate for both. And certainly, the Cold War history, 49 to 89, I think Christian democracy was catacontic. I think anti-communism was the super national ideology that stood against the one world

state of communism. And then I think, but yeah, if you want, again, this is very speculative, but if you think that the one world state is a military power, it's a financial economic power, it is somehow an ideological power, there still is a natural way where, if things go wrong in the US. Okay, great, yeah, so we hadn't worked that in,

American exceptionalism. At least the real American. Under Reagan. Yeah. So we hadn't worked that in American exceptionalism. At least the real American. Under Reagan. Yeah, under Reagan. Like the real America that has like a role to play in these biblical prophecies to be perhaps the guiding hand, the act that prevents the world from sliding either into one world government slash the devil running everything or nuclear apocalypse. The United States and its exceptional Christian systems will prevail, perhaps.

Yeah. And there was a callback to cataconic. He got that in there as an adjective. Christian democracy was cataconic. an adjective like the Christian democracy was cataconic. But like, yeah, so the US, you know, if it goes down the Bernie Sanders route, that will be one word government communism, you know, the Antichrist, basically the US becomes the embodiment of the Antichrist. But there is another route map. There is the other route where we can avert Armageddon if we become Peter T. libertarian mentalists. Can I just say as well, can I just say, Matt, would you allow me? By all means, good sir. Thank you. Thank you so much.

I'll just make this point. I'll make this point. But is there anything more self-serving than saying, let me quote from you, from the guy I was a speechwriter for, right? The president I was a speechwriter for. When the country worked under this random president I've selected, the one that I was a speechwriter for. And then let me quote you. Right. I've got to quote you. And then let's let's hear your thoughts about these two things. So like I just it's so self-serving. It's like, now tell me how the country can return to when it was good under my president and how you are correct in your assessment. You know, square this thing for me. And for God's sake, Peter, don't break my heart.

Don't break my heart. Don't break my heart. I hate this. I really hate this cat because of his delivery. So it creates on me so much the really dramatic American cordier. Yeah, it is this American thing, isn't it? Where I mean, not all Americans, I isn't to say, but you know, the Eric Weinstein breed of Americans who he seemed to be

copying their idea of an English European gentleman, and intellectual and a savant. And they, they talk in this way about the silliest things. So, but they're so self satisfied, and they talk in this way about the silliest things. They're so self-satisfied and they're so proud of themselves for doing so. Amazing. And it's so predictable, right? Of course Reagan would be the person being cited here, right? Well, anyway, Matt, that Bernie Sanders quote. Well, anyway, Matt, that Bernie Sanders quote. You draw attention to two portrayals, fictional portrayals of an Antichrist from about a century ago. Soloviev, Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian mystic, in 1900 wrote a book or a novella, The Short Tale of the Antichrist, and then a 1905 novel by a Roman Catholic English priest called Robert Hugh Benson, and the novel is Lord of the World. In both of these fictional accounts,

the Antichrist emerges as a charismatic figure, a kind of Superman. Soloviev, quote, There was a remarkable person, many called him a Superman, he believed in God, but in the depths of his soul he preferred himself. In Benson, the Antichrist is portrayed again as a charismatic figure. He becomes president of Europe. Then in some mysterious way, he's elected president of the world. But in both of those fictional accounts of a century ago, there's a plot hole. We're not given the mechanism by which this strange charismatic figure achieves dominance. And your argument is, again, if I understand it correctly, that now, today, a century after Soloviev and Robert Eubenson,

we can understand a mechanism, we could imagine a mechanism by which such a figure might emerge. Yeah, by the way, those are both fantastic books. I have a preference for the Soloviev one, but Benson and Soloviev are both terrific books. There are all these extraordinary ways that they still resonate 100 years later. So, you know, Slaviov visions the United States of Europe, so it's sort of a European Union, the sort of super state, you know, and Benson, the Antichrist is a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. And I was a little bit nervous about Bernie Sanders, but so there are too much on the nose. Okay, I can't remember the context of that, Chris.

That the, so this is him saying the antichrist, you know, this whole discussion is free him the rind apocalypse. People are concerned about apocalypse, but they're not concerned about the right apocalypse, but what they should be concerned about. Right. Is the antichrist. I see. I see.

And now they're getting a handle on the kinds of conditions under which such a person would emerge. They refer to the Antichrist. And as the framing mechanism often goes during this conversation, here's two quotes or two books that have mentioned this concept and now you riff on this and Peter's riff is that because in a novel from the turn of the century the Antichrist was a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont that this made him... A bit worried about Bernie Sanders, kind of a joke I suppose, maybe. worried about Bernie Sanders, kind of a joke, I suppose. Maybe. But he doesn't really explain, they're talking about the conditions and so on, but he hasn't really added anything to it,

apart from saying that he's read a couple of books. Well, let me give you some more grinding for this, the Antichrist mod, what of thing well, or maybe we should first like let's consider another quote The choice is this or one world That dates from 1946 as I said, but here's a quotation from just a few years ago It's from a paper titled the vulnerable world hypothesis by the very hip techno philosopher Nick Bostrom quote What is needed to solve problems that involve challenges of international coordination, challenges such as nukes, pandemic dangers,

techno threats, what is needed is effective global governance. Franklin Roosevelt designed the United Nations to serve in some way as a kind of world parliament after the end of the Second World War. The United Nations didn't work, but maybe FDR was just ahead of his time. Yeah, well, it is the same. This is the plot hole in Slavia v. Benson.

And it's an interesting question. What is the difference between that? We have this very secular language, one world or none. And then there's the sort of overly religious question, antichrist or Armageddon. And aren't they, my thesis, they are somehow the same. And if I had to say what the difference between those two ways of asking the questions are is, you know, Antichrist or Armageddon, it sounds like they're both bad options.

And that way of asking the question, it pushes us to find a third way and not to just steer from one into the other. One world or none. One world or none. It's a choice between Armageddon or one world government slash the Antichrist. Yeah. And we're looking for a third option. Is there anything else? Well, the vulnerable world hypothesis by the very hip techno philosopher Nick Bostrom. That's very hip, very, very in the zeitgeist. I hate the way this guy Robinson talks about drinks.

I know it's a fine deal, but just, you know, he's so this guy's ideas are so, so incredibly pressing, so important right now. Like I said, I know he's so yeah, he's so hot right now. But yes. So look, the first part is that the Armageddon, Matt, getting to there and the rise of the Antichrist, what is that going to, like, how does that happen? And he's saying, well, you know, first there is these humanitarian efforts and this kind of view that we need to solve big problems. So we need to turn to someone, a man, Matt, a man that maybe in other words that we couldn't control, right, a man that we thought we could understand. But yeah, so there's these problems,

there's solutions being positive to the UN, so on. But Peter has his concerns and let's hear a bit more. He can flesh this out more. You know, I, and you just don't buy that. I do not buy it. I think, I don't know, I'm much more in the Lord Act in camp that, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it would be, it would be a power with no check.

There would be no outside left. It would be, you know, in a sense, it would be the biggest crowd. It would be the biggest bubble. You know, probably a place where the Bible differs from Enlightenment rationality. Enlightenment rationality believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the madness of crowds. And if you have a world state that's in some sense the largest crowd, it's the whole humanity closing in on itself. It's a global mob. So there sort of are these intuitions are probably adjacent ideas about the fallen nature of man and original sin that make me nervous about the one world state.

I was so confused. So for a while there I was thinking that he was equating this one world state, which is the only thing that you can do to solve any global problems like nuclear arms control, carbon taxes on emissions. It all requires a single unified state, a single unified state and like the Antichrist kind of evil leader ruling over it. Yeah, ruling over it, but actually not. It's actually, it's actually a crowd. It's a mob. Like the one world state is actually an institution of a mob. So it's not a person anymore and now it's a mob. But also, Matt, the enlightenment, like, there's so many things that are like confusing, but it's just like this, like, you know, the Jordan Peterson technique of jump from premise to

premise to premise, but each one is like, sheiky. So you know, never, never spend any more time in it. Because like the view that enlightenment believes in the wisdom of the crowds. I thought the enlightenment if it was was kind of believes in democracy. Sure, but believes in science and progress, but does not say that the rabble, the crowd is the possessor of the correct wisdom. It was more like, you know, the enlightenment had a bit of elitism avoided. Yeah. Yeah.

It was a heavy emphasis on like rationality and wisdom and all that stuff. Yeah. You've got those virtues. Yeah. There were democratic and progressive aspects, but they weren't like militant. No, I would, you know, it wasn't like a militant type of democracy. Um, like, like, like socialism a bit later on. Not that it was...

No, which he seems to be connecting that to... Yeah, but he's contrasting that with the Bible anyway. So he's saying rationalists, humanists, atheists say that... They think democracy gets you good things. They think democracy gets you good things. They think democracy but the Bible knows that. It doesn't right because you have just a big group of people system a crazy mob so. Yeah we're not really sure where this is leading but there are thoughts okay we've got more we've got more so let's let's continue a time the friend in our first the first part of this conversation That for the first time in history, we can actually imagine human beings destroying the world. That's quite a plot now also

We have the mechanisms that would make world government a gigantic global surveillance state is plausible that seems plausible too and And and then I think again to come back to the salavia of Benson-Plothill, on its own, they both seem not that desirable. Why would we have a crazy surveillance state? Why would we, you know, why would we do this? But if you're scared enough, if you're scared enough of these things,

that's the weapon. And this is sort of where my speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time. And- Peter Thiel, the Antichrist would talk about Armageddon all the time, he'd scare people, and then offer to save them. Yes, it's the 1 Thessalonians 5.3, the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.

And so, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety, but you have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is, you know, Armageddon and the destruction of all things. And then that's where peace and safety gets you way more than it would have in 1750. So Chris, when the interview started off, it sounded like Peter Thiel was more concerned about these existential threats, you know, runaway AI, nuclear weapons, climate change even. And now it seems that actually his thesis is that these things are not actually the most dangerous thing that he's predicting they're going to be used as an excuse, a rationale for a strong man or a one world government, a 1984 George Orwell type scenario to institute a global surveillance state. So this is his, in square quotes, big square quotes, thesis. Is Peter Thiel the Antichrist?

I'm just floating at big ideas here. So Peter Robinson, the interviewer guy, mentions somebody's going to come who's just going to be constantly talking about Armageddon and making people afraid. And global surveillance technology, like say Palantir technology, provides for governments, right? Like Peter Thiel's company, which provides intelligence agencies with software to help them keep track and counterterrorism and all this kind of thing. So somebody is going to come, who's going to scare lots of people, and he's going to be offering solutions and he'll be riding on the back of resources and mega surveillance

technologies and AI. It sounds a lot like Peter Diehl. The only bit that doesn't is that he's saying he'll be talking about humanitarian efforts and stuff like that, which he doesn't. I'm just wondering, he seems to match four out of five or so of the characteristics of the Antichrist he's concerned about. He could be a meta Antichrist. He's talking a lot about the risks of one world government and the Antichrist and could be supporting, I don't know, people like Donald Trump to come to power. Who's going to promise to save them from this runaway globalism and authoritarianism? Well, Matt, hold on. But you know, Christians, some of them, they get caught up on these concepts like the Good Samaritan, right, or humanitarian efforts, these kind of things.

And Thiel just wants to caution about misinterpreting them. So let's see, you know, what he has to say about these good Christian lessons. So there is, yeah, the Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as a great, you know, it's redistributive, it's an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist, you know, all of those kinds of things. And these things are not, you know, simply anti-Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined

with state power that something is very wrong. There are sort of ways Christ wants to unify the world. You have the parable of the Good Samaritan where you should take care of people even if you're not related to them. It's good to act like the Good Samaritan and to take care of people are not just in your family or tribe or country.

But but then if you if you force everyone to be a good Samaritan and you force a borderless world that's that that's it's it's somewhat it's somewhat adjacent. Somehow it's an intensification, but it but it's somehow also very much the opposite. Yeah, I think it teals framing. It can be quite difficult to identify who the Antichrist is because they could be doing a bunch of stuff that seems good, you know, redistribution, being into justice and peace and so on. Promising that kind of thing.

Redistribution, Matt, is not a good thing. Be careful. Careful. Yeah, that's a comment. It's not good for a good thing. Be careful. Careful. Yeah, that's a good thing. Not good for a libertarian, I know. But Chris, here's my thesis. Christ himself, he was famously into redistribution, sharing things, giving away your wealth and justice and peace and things like that.

Maybe Christ is the Antichrist. I'm just following his logic here. Just I know it's a big idea to process. Well, I like it, but I also like that in this event, he's like the good Samaritan. You might interpret that as saying, like, take care of people who aren't in your family or tribe or country or religious group. And this being a good thing, right? The good Samaritan. But he wants to say, but just remember,

it's not actually that good. It could be harmful to be too welcoming to immigrants or like not as strong enough on a border control. But he doesn't actually do anything to justify it, except saying, actually do anything to justify it, except saying, but that's wrong. Right. So don't try to interpret it that way because this is what the Antichrist is up to. And it's just like, I mean, okay, you know, I understand that that is what Peter Thiel would think is the important thing, but he hasn't done much work there in like arguing that the actual interpretation of the Good Samaritan is don't provide. He hasn't done much work throughout this to be fair, Chris. I mean, starting from the very original premise, which is that the scriptures written in the Old Testament, or even New Testament,

but a couple of thousand years ago, at least in the Middle East, that they contain signs and portents and the secret key that you can do a close reading of the original text to figure out what sorts of things to look for in the present day and that we should use these ideas of the Antichrist and one world government and so on to understand everything that's going on. He hasn't done much work to be fair to convince us that this is a useful thing to do. He has responded to a lot of quotes though, Matt. That is fair. He's heard a lot of quotes and he's riffed on them. And this next step. So this baby. Look, Matt, we're getting to it.

OK, just relax. He's he's building an argument. This is all just the foundations. But you remember Curtis Sharvin and he was like, the normie game is to be a Nazi or not a Nazi. And I don't play that game because I'm beyond the Nazi. I'm a monarchist. Like, Nazism is too boring. It's so droll to be a Nazi or an anti-Nazi.

It's like they spoke to the aristocratic monarchist. Yeah. Elizabethan monarchist in the 21st century. Have you considered that? It's blown your mind, hasn't it, little man? That's what Jarvin was about. I mentioned that just by the by before I played this clip of Teal. We can use Armageddon and maybe it's literal and maybe it's metaphorical, but that's totally acceptable.

So that tells you that's not the thing that's taboo. Antichrist is like, wow, what planet are you from? And so that tells me that the existential risks are very selective of the sort that we've given, and the fears about a one-world state are downplayed because they are the solution to the other ones. That is, you know, the self-governing, politically atheist, humans-governing-themselves solution to Armageddon is, you know,

it's what Bostrom says. It's effective world government with extremely effective policing to stop dangerous technologies from being developed and to force people to not have too diverse a set of views, because the diversity of views is what's going to push some scientists to develop technologies they shouldn't be developing. And so we are just so grooved to the Antichrist solution. We don't worry about it because it is actually, it presents itself as the solution to all these others.

And then my intuition is that what that tells me is that, you know, we should worry about both. It's really hard to follow his argument. Did you have trouble? No, no. I do. I do. I mean, you just threw your idea.

In short, inarticulate, but yeah, okay. Reprise it for me. Just take, take this to a crisp. Okay. So he's saying it's perfectly socially acceptable to be concerned about Armageddon, literal or otherwise, or metaphorical, like Greta Thunberg, just as much as him, and Elon Musk, and all people in the left concerned about global warming. They're all concerned about Armageddon and like the-

Metaphorical Armageddon, Armageddon meaning- Or literal, doesn't matter. It's a normal thing that people are concerned about. matter. It's a normal thing that people are concerned about. The Antichrist is considered a weird thing to talk about. It's only religious nutjobs that are concerned about the Antichrist or conspiracy theorists. But that tells him that that's something that we actually should be looking about because it's the thing you're not allowed to talk about. It's the thing you're not allowed to talk about. And then the solutions to Armageddon, which are world government, effective policing, humanitarian efforts, all these. That is actually a total control over scientists so that they don't develop potentially dangerous technologies.

Yes, correct. But that's what's going to lead to the Antichrist, which will bring about Armageddon. So the efforts to stop the Armageddon are going to lead to the Antichrist, which is going to create Armageddon. No, I thought, well, the Antichrist is going to be promising to stop Armageddon. But the Antichrist is promising to stop Armageddon. That's the appeal. Yes, he's just promising, but he's going to hasten that. So, look, I'll give you the, here's another little short summary of it, Matt. But if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist, because no one's worried about it. And, of course, you know, I don't know how literally one should take these biblical accounts,

but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist, perhaps. The Antichrist comes first. It doesn't quite work. The one world state doesn't work. It still goes haywire. You know?

Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad and you still get to Armageddon. But that's what comes first. Right. Right, right, right. Okay. It's a communist one-world government created by Bernie Sanders or some other anti-Christ. But they still meet the AI.

We don't know. Yeah, they could be Jewish. Somebody once mentioned in the book they were Jewish. You know, that's a metaphor, not whatever. And I know I'm reprising the Teotchia from the Curtis Sharven, but this does strike me as very Warhammer 40k, right? Like first you have this, the Antichrist Emperor who arises, but in his hubris, or no, actually he wants Armageddon, so secretly he was plotting to unleash the AI God, which would destroy mankind. And then like, it's, but he talks about it as if, you know, like in this, this kind

of self serious way that this is, well, I've just worked it out. I've looked through the possibilities and Yeah, he's talking about it like it's a sober evaluation of current world events rather than like a totally speculative, theologically inspired thought bubble about a bunch of shit that isn't even close to happening. I mean, he's talking about a scenario where we have a communist one world government that fails to keep control over the AI that then unleashes Armageddon and kills everyone.

So that's something we should be. What's your problem? Of all the things to worry about, Chris, we're going to add this to the list. I was worried enough about global warming. Now I've got to worry about that. I noticed this thing in the previous Peter Tille talk, where he outlined like three possible paths for humanity. And I believe it's three paths. I can't remember exactly, but I think one was Islamic Sharia law over the world, like a global caliphate. There was like techno utopia. And then there was like one world government.

I think that was the free, right? So techno utopia. That's what we want. I remember it had been like there's only three possible futures that I've seen. I just selected those three, right? What are the actual pictures of the future people have in Western Europe that are different from the present? Because if it's just Groundhog Day, if it's an internal Groundhog Day, that's not charismatic, that's politically weak.

And I believe there are three pictures that people have. Behind door number one is Islamic Sharia law, and if you're a woman, you'll be wearing a burqa. So that's a very different picture. Behind door number two is the Chinese communist AI that will be monitoring you all the time in every way possible. It's sort of the big eye of Sauron to use the Tolkien reference

that will be looking at you in all times and all places. And behind door number three is Greta Thunberg and it is you'll be puttering around with an e-scooter and you'll be recycling everything. And those are the only three doors. There are no other doors available. I didn't want to make a pro-Greta argument, but I actually, I can understand why she's relatively

more charismatic than the big eye of Sauron and the ISIS Sharia law. And you have to understand that if you're going to create an alternative, you have to have an alternative specific picture of the future. You have to have an alternative of what the future can look like. And until you have that, she's going to win. You mean Greta? Yes.

Wow. I'm just thinking in case you Chris, but did he fail to do the work to kind of substantiate these three? Yeah, yeah. No effort was put into it. Like why those three? Why not a future where we all ride around on dinosaurs that we've reconstructed from ancient DNA?

Has he considered super intelligent ips rising via us stimulating them and them taking over in humans to send envirovirus into a more animal like existence? So it becomes an ape planet, if you will. That's an incredibly novel and scary thought there, Chris. Well done. No, it is possible, Matt. It's not impossible. And is anybody worried about that? No, no one's talking about it, which is suspicious when you think about it. I mean, it is suspicious.

But so the interviewer helps to, you know, set the lay of the land that we've built to. Like what I just outlined, he has three possible paths that mankind can go on. So let's see what the three paths are. As I understand it, you see three possibilities here. Now we begin to move toward what is to be done. One is to end globalization outright, end the world of end world trade, but that would produce a dramatically all but unthinkable drop in living standards. So end globalization, but that's all but unthinkable.

Two, permit globalization to continue in an unfettered manner, but that would be likely to lead to world government. Three, permit globalization to continue, but only in a permissible, good, salutary way, limited, tame it, make sure it never supplants nation states. Quote, Peter Thiel, our only chance of achieving good globalization is to be critical of globalization, to recognize the narrowness of the path. Peter? Yeah, interesting, isn't it?

So we're shifting to globalization now. We've got these three options, right? Paths, three paths, Matt. There is a golden thread, a golden path that we can take, but it's a narrow path. A narrow path. On the left, we can shut it all down. You know, just good old-fashioned nation- nation states pursuing their own interests, rubbing up against

each other. Just like the good old days. All global trade ended. Ended. Completely ended. Yeah. I mean, that's a safe option. That's impractical.

Well, it's impractical, yeah, because we'd see a big drop in living standards, but it would prevent the rise of the anti-crush. You have to admit that. Yes, that's true. Yeah. Now, on the other hand, we've got, you know, continued global trade, where people, you know, there's containerships, unlimited containerships are going to and from China and Europe, Australia and the United States and even Ireland, Chris. And that inevitably obviously is going

to lead to a one world government. This is Yes, that's the problem. That's the unfortunate side effect that can't be avoided. If we allow unfettered trade and again, it's completely unfettered, man. No regulation, nothing, just pure trade. If we do that, that is inevitably going to create the anti-Christ and lead the Armageddon. Well, you know, Australia recently, well, not recently, like 20 years ago, I think, like kind of started eliminating all tariffs on trade inputs and exports.

And, you know, I felt the antichrist encroaching, I have to admit, down under. So anyway, so there's that, that option, which is obviously very bad. And so we've got this other option where we have a little bit, we have a little bit of globalization, Chris. Yeah, with strong nation states, maybe people that want to make their countries great again, but that are engaging robustly in the exchange of nations, but recognizing that they are individual nation states with their own people, their own character that must remain somewhat, you know, just within their own spheres of interest, right? And this line of thinking about, you know, nationalism and national priorities and,

you know, America or whatever country first, that's completely in line with the theological stuff you were so into just a few minutes ago. Did you see a continued golden thread? Well, certainly if you interpret the Good Samaritan parable as telling you that you shouldn't treat people outside your tribe that well, it does align with its interpretation. But that is a non-standard interpretation. But you know, the thing that gets me here is like, so they set up a free trade, no regulation, just everything, you know,

like one world communism, right, that is one path, one world communism, Antichrist world. The other one is like absolutely restricted. No global trade. Shut it all down. Everyone is isolated. If only there was a third more reasonable option and that there is, luckily, it's Peter Thielworld, right? Like I can think of many other options in between those two extreme options that I don't think many people actually endorse, but they are presenting that like, but you, Peter, you have found, you know, the one way that we don't have to go down those two extremes, you find the middle path between them.

And it's like, actually, almost all political platforms that I recognize in the modern era that have any degree of popularity to them are nearer of those two extremes. No, I mean, like in many ways, this Peter Till solution is what we currently have in the world. Yeah, it is. Yeah. Like Australia is known as one of the most liberal, like free trading type of states, right?

Our economy is more connected to the rest of the world than most other economies. We also have one of the highest rates of immigration, but it's not uncontrolled. Like the Australian government is incredibly pragmatic about all of these policies and they're all done in a very self-interested, very kind of normal, everyday sort of thing. So I guess what Teal's doing here, Chris, is that old-fashioned debating trick of the false dichotomy. He's been setting up these restricted sets of options, these dichotomies that you can choose between. And they're just like, none of them are actually real, right? They're just in his head. Yeah, well, let's hear a little bit about that dichotomy that you just set up, right,

Matt? So is it a false dichotomy? Let's hear Tito lay it out for us again. And Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, you know, we can envision a third way. Right. One world where none, that's pretty hard to envision a third way. And so that's where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it's actually more hopeful. One world where none, those are the two options if you're a political atheist. Right.

We have a human self-government or human self-destruction. And then, you know, it's a choice of two incredible evils. And then I think, I don't think these things are, you know, I'm not a Calvinist. I don't think these things are, you know, I'm not a Calvinist. I don't think these things are determined or predestined. I always believe there's a space for human agency for us to, you know, shape the history. And the first step has to be not to, you know,

not to just bury our heads in the sand or whatever the equivalent is. You accused him out of setting up a false dichotomy. How wrong I was. I take it all back. What did he describe? He said that was a political atheist. Political atheist. Political atheist.

If you only have two choices. Two choices. One world government or no government at all. That's have two choices, two choices, one word government or no government at all. That's your two choices. Well, he described it like human government, like human government, which I think he means to democracy. Or human self-destruction. Yeah.

Human word, so I guess one word government or complete self-destruction. Yeah. So basically it's so confusing because he's equating so many things. So human self-government or kind of democracy is equivalent to one world government, which is also equivalent to the Antichrist. That's the Antichrist. Yeah. Yeah. And a kind of a communistic, authoritarian police state. George Orwell. Bernie Sanders or someone like that.

All those things are the same thing, which is a lot to wrap your head around. And the other side is basically Armageddon self-destruction. And these are both clearly bad things. And he's saying we shouldn't, you know, we have to, we have to open our minds and think about a third way. It's just mind blowing stuff, Matt. It's mind blowing. It's what you said before, Chris.

It's very hard to engage with and I'm trying to, but he just layers so many premises on speculative thought bubble premises on top of other ones. And you're at a point where it's like, well, what the hell are we even talking about? It's like a fantasy, like incepted into several levels of other fantasies. My mind can't deal with it. I know it is like saying, you know, we have three options, absolute fascism, like a totalitarian repressive fascist state, pure and bridled communism, dictatorial,

everything centralized, no free markets, everything locked down or for adoption, which is neither of those and leads to human flourishing. I'm not quite sure. He hasn't really articulated what this thing is, but he's working on it, right? Well, well, so his answers, Matt. Yeah, I haven't I haven't done justice because he is asked about, you know, providing his answers and they might not be entirely concrete. But but listen to this. Well, my, look, my my my starting answer for all these things is always, surely the first step is to think

about these things really hard. And ask the questions that are not being asked. Maybe the way I frame them are too dramatic, but if that's what it takes for us to ask these questions, that's better than being stuck in some weird silly Groundhog Day game. You know, I think the... My intuition is the stakes are very high. The political stakes are high because it's, you know, there are a lot of crazy things that can happen.

It's, you know, it's hard to evaluate, you know, which of these candidates are better. But that's, it's not just about the price of eggs or marginal inflation rates or things like this. It is about maintaining freedom in the US and also not sleeping up walking to Armageddon. I love it. I love it.

You have to answer no. Did you follow that? I did. I did. I did. I got it. So look, I mean, he's totally right. We do need to think about it hard.

That's step one. Step one, think about it hard. We got to ask the hard questions, Chris. We got to have the conversations. That's what one. Step one. Think about it hard. We got to ask the hard questions, Chris. We've got to have the conversations. That's that's what we need to do. They're trying to stop us doing that. They don't want us to. They don't want us to.

But we have to because the stakes are incredibly high right now. Crazy things could happen. And what we want is somehow to have freedom and avoid Armageddon. Yeah. So, I mean, that sounds great. I mean, good stuff. Also America, in America in particular, like, you know, these guys are American. He is like, he was, he was just before arguing against the internationalist thing.

So his solution doesn't necessarily include us, Chris. But that's fine. That's fine. We'll figure out our own solutions. Don't worry, Peter. We're fine. Yeah. So, does that solve it? Maybe you said he doesn't have very clear solutions. It sounds to me like he pretty...

Well, he doesn't have a plan, but he has the concepts of a plan. I know. The freedom and avoiding Armageddon. That's a great plan. I'm happy to be a part of it. Yeah, yeah, that's it's it's impressive, isn't it? It's a sense-making credos

in a way. Chris, I'm going to stop you there. I can't give him I can't put him into the sense-making category because the sense-makers, for all their faults, are at least extremely eloquent. They're like jazzing and bebopping and improvising all over the place, whereas Peter Thiel is like banging a little drum with a stick. He's not in time. He's not improvising. It's not good sense-making. Yeah, well, that's true. It's not great,

eh? Sense-making. But, you know, Matt, look, we've been a bit cruel. Let's consider some insights, some religious insights that they might have that have been... This is towards the end of the conversation, you know, the rounding on the... they've been on a veritable tour of philosophy, history, ancient texts, tomes, insights, you know. It's been an intellectual tour de force so far. It has, it has. So let's wrap up with a couple of reflections from Peter, like big thoughts, big thoughts. from Peter, like big thoughts, big thoughts. René himself, as you know, ended his life as a very devout Catholic. Has your... has this analysis had any effect on your own religious life, or is it in some way a kind of cop-out to say,

oh no, no, all we need to do is all practice personal holiness as best we can. Well, Gerard always said, you know, you just need to go to church. And I tried to go to church. And then at the same time, I also think that there is some part of it that is political or social or something like that. And maybe it's always a way in which I'm not as much of a saint as I should be, but I keep thinking we have to also try,

I want to always try some of both, both the personal and the political. You know, I think Mother Teresa was a greater saint than Constantine, but there's still a part of me that has a preference for the Christianity of Constantine. We still need something like that. All right. Big thoughts, Matt. Big thoughts, yeah. So, you know, his analysis, which is, I think, a generous term for what he's done, but leave that aside. So, his analysis is a strongly theological one that permeates his entire understanding of the world and what's going to happen. And what are the implications, Chris, for his own personal Christian practice? He tries to go to mass. He tries to go to mass.

His friend Gerard gives the same advice I give to him and Peterson and all of the sense-making elk. I give to him and Peterson and all of the sense-making elk. If you care so much, if you're so deeply invested, just go to Mass. The Christians have been telling you this for a long time. They will not shut up about all the other stuff, but just go into the boring bit that the Christians all over the world have been doing. And they don't seem that interested in it, but at least he says he's going to church, right? And the fact that he likes Constantine's Christianity better than Muller-Turizzo's will set aside the various controversies around Muller-Turizzo's version of Christianity and its, Moller-Therese's version of Christianity and it's, you know, prioritizing suffering. But Constantine, I wonder why Thiel would find him an appealing character, you know,

a kind of Christian leader. A Roman emperor, right? Yeah, who placed a huge amount of support, Christianity and helped it spread. So yes, that does sound like somebody who might find more appealing than a, yeah, Muller-Theresa type figure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he doesn't give any of the reasons why there it's just.

Well, I think the thing is political, right? He says things should be like a little bit political. We should be able to be Christian and a little bit political as well. But he well, it does go on, Matt. So there's a little bit more to this reflection. So listen, this because, you know, we've been talking about humans trying to do the human things and try to resolve things, but maybe that's not the solution.

Well, I… man, this is sort of starting to get way, way, way above my theological pay grade, but I think it means something. I think God will work it all out, no matter how bad the choices are we make. And so in some sense, in the end, God will work it out. And then at the same time, I'm not sure that we should always be looking at it from God's point of view. And from a human point of view, it surely matters a lot.

All right, last question. Let me quote you one final time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, the human agency thing notwithstanding, it's clear that, like, he's 100%. He's a gopher and Christian, 100%. Is he? This is why he's looking, I assume this is why he's looking at the old scriptures and finding solutions and understandings for the modern world. I mean, like, if you're a hardcore Christian, that Deirdre Teal seems to be, maybe not an orthodox one, Chris, maybe doesn't go to mass, but he

clearly is a big believer. No, he does go to mass. He said he goes to mass. He tries to go at least. All right. So, yeah, I mean, that's it. That's it in a nutshell. Like, if you're a super duper Christian and you believe the Bible is either literally true or it contains all the keys to all the puzzles a bit like Jordan Peterson, then you know, you're gonna do what he does where you do these fine readings of Scripture and then you see signs and portents and symbols of antichrists and Armageddon's and final conflicts between God and the devil and whatever. I mean, that's what you're going to do. And if you accept those

premises that the Bible is like a secret decoding codex for figuring everything else out, then you might go along with him some way. but if you're not, then you're basically for the first hurdle, don't you? Everything after that is just, you know. Yeah, I just see in Jordan Peterson and Peter Thiel and figures like them. And maybe this is a I think that is common in Christianity and all religions. So it's not special to them. But I see a lot more of them reflected than their interpretations of the religion than the religion. Right. Like his reinterpretation of the Good Samaritan, for example, is counter

textual, I would say. And it's just like Peter Thiel is concerned with globalization and all this kind of thing. So the Antichrist is now a communist one world, like a communist free trade person. It's a tricky figure, the Antichrist, but it is a humanitarian free trade communist. And yeah, it's that it is put into the mouth of religion and prophecy. And as you can see in this conversation, they really like having these quotations to jump from biblical. You know, things are not particularly clear, so they can provide a nice jumping off point.

But it's all just a way to add profundity to their fairly predictable, fairly boring political and social perspectives, which are, you know, conservative, somewhat authoritarian leaning and yeah, like, you know, super pro-capitalist as it pertains to them. Yeah, yeah. Like libertarian, but authoritarian in the sense of, like, I don't know, like he's kind of vague about this stuff, but the great and the good, a bit like, yeah, like Curtis Yarvin, like, like Curtis Yarvin, like, like they don't like the communist version of authoritarianism, that's for sure. Yeah, democratic one. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. In fact, long before I heard of

any of these jokers, Chris, my one of my main disputes with Christianity and virtually all organized religions with these sets of scriptures is the way that their body of scripture functions as like a Rorschach test, right? It's like all of this, like a mishmash of stuff that doesn't really make sense and doesn't really hang together, but it's sufficiently vague, at least after it's been translated three or four times, such that pretty much anyone can read it and find a justification or a rationalization or science importance that predict, you know,

anything that they wanted to believe in the first place in terms of how they actually operate, you know, in this world. You know, if you're a Calvinist and you're into this or whatever, or if you're a crusader heading off to the Middle East, or if you're Ronald Reagan or a Quaker or whatever, it's incredibly varied. Or that's just the Christian versions, right? There is obviously Muslim and Jewish versions and other religions have them too.

And you see such diversity in how this stuff gets interpreted. It really illustrates that their utility is nothing except for a self-justification scheme. Often. This is the view of two atheists. Yes, this is true. And even if you're religious and you find the Bible and whatnot, like divinely inspired, I think the Bible and lots of Christians are also warning other Christians not to insert

themselves too much into interpreting the Bible. I think where they went wrong, Chris, is they should never have translated the Bible into English. They should have kept it in the Latin. Only the priest should have been able to read it and it would have prevented a lot of this nonsense from. I think Curtis Jarvan is actually for that. Pretty sure he's on board with that too. But, you know, so let's hear the final thoughts, Matt. Those were just the second to last thoughts.

Here's the actual final concluding thoughts for this episode. You know, if it's too high a lift to go to church or something like that, I would say that it's important to try to find a way to integrate your life. To, you know, just fragment in all these different ways and to integrate the knowledge, to connect, you know, what we think is going on in your life with history, with our society. We need to somehow not have this postmodern MTV-like incoherence. And there's some way that asking these questions is a way to try to, you know, we need somewhat more integration. We need to somehow pull things back together. It's what the universities were supposed to do.

Don't think they will do it. But you know, you have to figure out. After years of deconstruction, you're calling for an active reconstruction. Yeah, it may not happen. The progressive cult that is the university. But still, it is really a time for reconstruction. Peter Thiel, thank you. Yeah, definitely not going to happen. The progressive cult. Progressive cult of the university. Yeah, but there's no need to go to church.

I mean, that's too high a lift. That's, yeah, we can't. People are busy. You know, you can't go to church. Screw them. I went. I went. I suffered.

You guys can do it if you're going to talk about Christianity so much. That's right. He's an atheist and he's been to church more than you. Yeah, yeah. So it's this Californian version of a Christianity, right, Barrett? You know, you just pick and choose the bits that fit into your own personal mantras and shit. That's self-actualization stuff. It's a poison, man. It is a poison. You know, they talk about MTV. Like, who is watching MTV to get their

kicks these days? Sorry, Peter Taylor, you're a bit out of the times, but like really against the kids on their MTV. Like you could at least be talking about Mr. Beast or something, but maybe just know about him. Yeah. But like they are the, you know, this thing about self-actualized, find your real self, integrate to history, all these epifemoral trinkets that normal society forwarded. That is so ancient, that idea, that complaint. That is the thing which people just endlessly regurgitate. It is constantly repeated era after era that there is a, you know, there is the true path and there are these bubbles of modern society like the the wireless or the, you know, the novel or whatever. And these are distracting you from becoming an integrated, you know, stoic philosopher, whatever it is, Christian warrior, whatever you want to be. And they're all harkening back to this perception that there was a golden era when people were

people, where men fought big fights, when scientists reached for immortality and we have now fallen. Right. We need to get back to that. And actually, when you go back and look at history, there were always Peter Teals. There are always these waffling windbags, often people with a lot of resources and money that were given podiums to lament society and whatnot. And it's always the same message that like the problem is the kids today, the kids today with their things and we need to, we need to go back. We need to return.

Matt, that is always the message. It's today with the rock and roll music and their leather jackets. Slick back hair. Yeah, I mean, but it's weak source though, isn't it? Like it's such a generic kind of soft version of, you know. The version you're not allowed to talk about this since when? That's what I'm saying. Like everyone has been saying this in every generation, in every society. There are people that advocate for this. It's just conservatism. It's a particular brand of libertarian conservatism

with Teale. But like what is never said that he's talked about. Like, for art history, tons of people talk about the Antichrist Christians. Wouldn't shut up about him at one point in time. But like he's talking as if the world now is a rationalist techno utopia of, you know, but it isn't right. And it never has been. It always has people that are interested in mystical stuff and religion and metaphors and all this kind of stuff. And it's not forbidden.

People do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's been a perennial market for it. Ever since, ever since Jesus Christ was peddling the pedal in the street corners in Palestine 2000 years ago. And you know, at least you were saying something novel at the time, I think. Yeah, there were others saying that, but you know, yeah. Oh, God. So it's, you know, this is what, well, not weird. I've got this is a little bit of an indulgence, but if you would, if you would indulge me. That's right. Of course.

By all means. By all means. By all means. By all means. Well, the last thing I wanted to play, it's a little bit out of order, but this was the one part of the interminable two interview segments that had me sort of interested. And it's not that it's not due to detail, but I'll just play it for you and see if you recognize it. It's about Norman Angel.

There's there's always a book, you know, I'd like to reference from 1910, The Great Illusion by Norman Angel. This is a pre World War One book and it's in 2010. And it is the world is connected through trade and finance that there cannot be a world war because it would just destroy more than it would create. And it was a massive bestseller in 1910. Angel actually gets a Nobel Peace Prize for the book in 1933, even though sort of spectacularly wrong.

But one of the lines in it was, Britain going to war with Germany makes as much sense as London invading Hertfordshire, the adjacent county to London. And it was just the stock market would go down more. You couldn't do this, and everyone would lose. And yet that happened. And so the sort of glib globalization, I think, is not going to work. And we need to just ask a relentless number of hard questions about it. But then, yes, it's always in the details.

I think we have to find some way to talk about these technologies, where the technologies are dangerous, but it's probably, in some sense, it's even more dangerous not to do them. It's even more dangerous to have a society where there's zero growth. If we go full on with the Club of Rome, limits to growth, we have this fully Luddite program, that again, my intuitions is that that will end very badly politically. It's gonna be a zero sum nasty Malthusian society and it will push towards, you know, something that's much more autocratic, much more totalitarian because the pie won't grow.

People will be much nastier. So what you're asking for. And what interested you about that, Chris? Well, so that guy, that book is quite a famous book because it argued prior to World War II and prior to World War I, actually, that it would be extremely counterproductive for Haitians to go to war, given the economic interdependence of Haitians at that time. So that's interesting because this is like at the turn of the 20th century, right? And these arguments are often made now for why we couldn't have like a World War II type

scenario. China and the US, the markets are too interlinked. So it's interesting because it was wrong, right? However, when I looked into it, so he presents there that, you know, that guy said this was impossible and it turned out that he was spectacularly wrong. And then he talks about, you know, glib globalisation, let's try to say it'll make a better world and whatnot. But after I heard that, I was like, well, so if that guy was wrong, what did he do post-war? Because, you know, we did in 1910, there was World War I and World War II. So I'm just curious about what his post career was.

And I read a bunch of stuff that he argued, and he was much more interesting than what he references there, because rather than being glib, he instead references there because rather than being glib, he instead advocated, including in the lead up to World War II, that, you know, his argument, yes, you could say that he was too optimistic, but his argument was that it would have been economically disastrous for countries to do that. And he was right. I mean, it was economically disastrous and that he had underestimated like the power of nationalism and whatnot. So instead, he argued for the need for international cooperation. So, you know, the United Nations institutions coming together, cooperations, the military deterrence, all these kinds of things. So he had got a pragmatic response, which emphasized international cooperation and alliances in response. And he tried to encourage that in the pre-war period with Germany and in the

post-war period, and he still went around lecturing it and kind of promoting these things. So Thiel presents him as like a kind of naive fool who just had this unwavering face, but he wasn't. He was actually pragmatic. And the third way where he's like, it's only a one world government is the only option and unbridled globalization. That's not what he argued for. He argued for cooperation amongst democratic nations to like fight back against

autocratic tendencies, all very reasonable stuff. But he only tells the initial part of his story as a warning. Right? And it's... Yeah, his over-optimistic prediction being wrong. But of course, his logic is right in the sense that war between industrialized countries as an alternative to peacefully trading with one another and so on is incredibly a lose-lose

situation. But he just underestimated the potential for nationalist and authoritarian ideologies to basically trump rational self-interest and taking huge gambles, essentially, that they could just take what they wanted. Yeah, so, you know, I mean, yeah, like, I think his analysis is right. Like, I think even today that the high amount of trade that goes on, say, between China and the United States puts a break on tensions rising between them because it does hurt both of them. Every time tensions rise, both have to pay an economic cost. And I think it does put a break on, say, China having a go at Taiwan because, you know because they factor in, but it's not a... But to be clear, it is possible that China could invade Taiwan, right? Yes.

Like that's the point. This is where I was getting to, but it's not a panacea. It puts a break on it. But those forces of either China to say, look, I really, really want to take Taiwan and I'm prepared to suffer the consequences and tough. If we suffer economically, same for other countries as well in terms of wanting to exert power and influence at the risk of suffering economic setbacks. It puts a break on it, but it doesn't solve it. So I think Teal's conclusion there, which is that, oh, you know, globalization, cooperation, and multilateral agreements and cooperation between nations is a waste of time because it didn't stop World War II is, yeah,

simplistic and not very useful. Yeah. So, you know, we used to like to try to end on the like positive note and there's a clip of Teal talking reasonably about AI. But I think this Norman Angel, like even though he is arguing against it, at least he is an interesting figure and a reference. So I don't think he did justice to that person's output overall, but he did relatively accurately represent the original book, right? And he was using it to make a point that is related to what he wants to argue. So good job. Good job. Good job, Peter.

So what about your overall thoughts, Matt? Big thoughts. Any, Matthew? No, I've sometimes said, you know, in my... Let me give you a quotation to finish with. Peter Thiel is a blowhard idiot. Matthew, your thoughts? Sounds like something I'd say. Yeah, like the other person he was referencing is Rene Girard. They both love Rene Girard a lot. And I did a bit of a little digging into Rene Girard and really,

I mean, we could have gotten into Rene Girard, but there's no point. I have a lot of clips. I've read in Girard, but maybe we'll save it for the grometer. We're giving Jouard fame. Let's see, it is, the way Jouard would have put it, and the way I came to see it as well, was that in some sense, the apocalyptic prophecies are just a prediction of what humans are likely to do in a world in which they have ever more powerful technologies,

in which there are no sacred limits on the use of these technologies, in which human nature has not, you know, maybe not gotten worse but has not gotten better. And it has this sort of, you know, limitless violence aspect to it. It's, and I think Gerard had all these sort of provocative formulations, like it is just a scientific

prediction of what humanity is likely to do in a world of ever more powerful, ever more powerful technology. And then there sort of are all these different things one can see in terms of the biblical apocalyptic accounts. But Gerard was very skeptical of the idea that somehow the violence came from God. And he always thought that atheists and fundamentalists

disagree on the secondary and relatively not so important question of whether or not God exists. But they agree on the far more important question that one of God's attributes is violence. And so the violence comes from God. And this is the new atheists. In the evangelical view, the destruction of the world is God exercising justice on the world.

It is. Yeah, it's some version of justice. Anger, wrath. Some version of the anger, wrath of God. And then the atheist one's a little bit stranger because you don't really believe God exists, but still it's somehow, it's not humanity. Humanity is not that dangerous, at least in sort of the mainstream lock-in, Rousseauian accounts. Yeah. OK, big thoughts on Peter Thiel. Yeah, you know what I'm going to say.

Really, really, he's not very good. He was surprisingly not good. He was Curtis Yarvin level, inarticulate and incoherent. The little amount of substance that he's got to him seems to be completely lifted from other people, like René Girard, whose thoughts weren't very good either, but at least I think managed to express them more eloquently. And so he really struggles.

He just proceeds with those, you know, you said it best in terms of layering one premise on top of another. We're asked to just go along and accept, oh, okay, yes, the Bible gives us prophecies and science to look for. Okay, oh, okay, yes, the Bible gives us prophecies and science to look for. Okay, yep, I'll accept that. I don't know why we should think that these ancient scriptures should provide the secret key that unlocks everything to understand what's going on today. But yep, I'll accept that. Okay, so now I need to accept that the one law government is equivalent to the Antichrist. There's also communism and a few other things as well that I've forgotten.

And you know, that is in contrast with some other very unlikely scenarios in these false dichotomies. And then Peter Thiel offers really nothing on top of that fiction, in terms of a solution to this artificial dilemma that he set up, apart from we should what? Have asked the questions, have these conversations because crazy things could happen. We just want to have a lot of freedom and avoid Armageddon. But you know, that's the extent of his thinking on this, which, you know, there's just nothing there. So yeah, Peter Thiel should just, he's a billionaire.

He should just retire's a billionaire. She just retired or mentioned. And like, I understand this is kind of like a recreational hobby for him. And being outspoken, I understand now, like when we covered Eric Weinstein, I was always wondering, like, why would why would Peter Thiel fund this guy? Like, now I know. Yeah, yeah, they're they're essentially the same. Like, this is one of, yeah. They're they're essentially the same. Like this is one of the things about people whenever they are positing that

like to support of Eric is super strategic and stuff. And like, in a way, yes. But the overlap is that like he ideologically aligns with Eric almost entirely. And so Eric has somebody waffling around, criticizing the institutions saying the scientists are wrong, you know, the real intelligent people have been suppressed, the universities are decrepit. That's all that stuff that he completely agrees with. So that he would give him money so he could run around doing that. It makes perfect sense to me. Like, it's not an incoherent position for him to take at all. I think an incoherent position would money, so he could run around doing that, it makes perfect sense to me. It's not an incoherent position for him to take at all.

I think an incoherent position would be for him to give Eric control over monetary funds. Set that aside. There's little evidence that that actually happens. So there we go. There it is. I've already said my part about like the way I regard this as frankly just presented as if it's something new and exciting and edgy. You know, he also is like, oh, I'm saying the things which nobody, you know, I think he's going to write a book about the Antichrist or whatever. But it's the same as Curtis Sharvin. They want to pose as these intellectual provocateurs.

But what they're selling is just bog standard conservatism and libertarian economic stuff. And weird ass speculative, interpretive theology. And religious stuff, like an apocalyptic religious theology. Who cares? Like boo, get off the stage. It's not edgy enough. It's not interesting. No, no, there are a time, a dozen, and there's, there's, the people who probably shouldn't be in universities doing it better in the most sophisticated way. I mean, one thing that Notabye Teedle, that we haven't covered that much, but which is certainly true is that he has a lot of resources. He provides a lot of money to people like Curtis Sharvin, Eric Weinstein, also Farla Wright,

people on the hard right, neo-Nazi egyptian, if not neo-Nazi themselves, fringe. And yeah, like that's important to note that like for all his superficial philosophy and theological pretensions and whatnot, he is actually somebody that has effects on the world and, you know, donates money to political campaigns and that. So I'm not saying don't pay any attention to that man. I'm just saying he is the Wizard of Oz. The man behind the curtain is a very boring, normal person. Right. Like not this intellectual genius. They're all so far, like not these super geniuses with all these insights and knowledge of philosophy and history.

It feels much more like the people that like to imagine themselves like that. And in reality, you just have, you know, like his comments on COVID, he doesn't read research papers, right? He's just discourse surfing. Most of his things are just citing people that are maybe a little bit obscure, but are relatively well known by other people that have time to read. What I mean is like, he isn't somebody digging up obscure texts or considering these things that other people have never considered before. He's just in the vein of a very well established political wing. Yeah, there are no sort of exciting, dangerous, tantalizing ideas here. It's just recycled.

Joss, but even the thing about living forever, as he mentioned, the great sieges of in the Chinese turn of the century era back in the Warren States period, they were also wanting to live forever. So that's not even new. Right. But the other thing about him is that he's very much on par with this trend that we've seen where like so much of this Guru discourse has taken this swerve towards religion. Yeah. Like the whole premise of our show, Chris, was on secular Gurus. And that's true to a

large degree. But of course, people like Peugeot and Jordan Peterson have been always like that. But I guess getting more strident and more transparent in terms of how much they do have this. This is very weird. Yeah, spiritual religious worldview that affects everything that they say. But other people like Huberman and so on, like, more and more I'm seeing just this religious talk is coming into it. And I'm worried it's a trend, isn't it? It is a trend. Yeah. But I mean, that's the thing. That's kind of the point is, for me, all the solutions that they offer, it's always like go to mass, get interested in a specific set of conservative philosophies and maybe support people like Trump. There's like four or five things. Make it good and stand up straight. Yeah, and it's always the same. At least Peter Thiel is going to mass. I'll give that credit.

Or he's trying to. He's trying to go to mass. So at least that's one up than a lot of them. Yeah, at least that's right. At least he's trying to go to mass. That's, that's more than the rest of them will do. Yeah. But it feels like this is their solution to the way they frame the problem of the modern world.

The meaning crisis, Chris, the meaning crisis. They are in the meaning crisis. It's their meaning crisis. Like they're. I'm not having a meaning crisis, Chris, the meaning crisis. They are in the meaning crisis. It's their meaning crisis. Like, I'm not having a meaning crisis. I know what stuff means. Thank you very much. As I keep saying, I've went to mass much more than almost all of them that talk about it. And I feel like I already understand what they're arguing.

You know, if you just understood that, you know, then you would be a libertarian. I'm like, no, no, you wouldn't. There's other assumptions that go into that. It's a particular brand of Christianity that you're interested in. Yeah, but that's it. But also, it has to be said, Chris, very much like Jordan Peterson, he doesn't have a conventional reading of Scripture that would be totally in accordance with the Catholic Church or any Protestant denomination in terms of how they read it. It's exactly what you said, which is he's got his own incredibly bespoke, weird-ass

interpretation of it, which just happens to concord and overlap with and jigsaw puzzle intersect with all of his pre-existing political and social views, very much like Jordan Peterson. So they're not even proper religious people. This is religion functioning as a kind of a call to authority type argumentation, where they can just feed it into the stuff that they already believe. I can't agree. I can't agree. So they're still done. He's in the rearview mirror.

We'll get out of this right wing morass of reactionaries. Yeah, give me something fresh, something different. I'm tired of them. They're boring. Yeah, they do not spark joy. They do not spark joy. Now, Matt, before we go, before we're out of here for this week, I am just going to reference the review of reviews. I've just got two little small ones.

We haven't done this in a while. So I'll just read them. You know, the palate cleanser before we do the Patreon shout outs. And in this case from Ian Pillage said, five star negative review. OK, this is essential listening and my favorite parasocial relationship, which makes it even more painful that I've never received the shout out for my admittedly mediocre financial contribution. So, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian, Ian Yeah, chin up, right? Right.

Right. Right. Right. Ian. Sorry. Can we give Ian the best shout out we've ever given anyone? Yeah. Well, let's just say that we appreciate all financial contributions.

No matter how small. No, no. As Jesus said, the meek shall inherit the earth. Let he who is last be first or whatever the case might be. So don't you don't you dare. OK, don't you dare put down your contribution to the DTG empire. You are an important cog in our imperial machine. It gets that marching.

Does Ian know about our platinum tier? Our platinum tier where, like, it's expensive. It costs a lot of money, but it's a better shot at platinum tier. We will fly to wherever you live and me and Chris will take you around the town and we'll laugh at all your jokes. It's not even on. It's not even listed. This is a special offer for you, Ian. That's the Platinum tier. Like a great night out with me and Chris. We'll get you rollicking drunk. You'll have a great time. And then we'll just leave you like in the street.

At the Platinum Plus tier, we'll also put you in an Uber and make sure you get home straight. This is great. This is great. Individual power, sociality reinforcement. So yeah, DME or email me for details of the pricing structure for those two options. DM Matt. So they go in, those are your shout out. And thank you for the nice review. We might be encouraging bad behavior who ripped this, but you know, if you haven't got a shout out and you want that and you're waiting nice review. We might be encouraging bad behavior. But, you know, if you haven't got a

Shiretipe and you want that and you're waiting for it. Yeah. Well, just send me a message. Like it is because there's so many that I have to get for the backlog. If, you know, just just send me the message. This is how to push it up.

In Chris's defense, he can't organize himself out of a paper bag. So, you know, getting on top of all of the Patreons and who deserves a shout out and who have already showed up, that's beyond him. Beyond him. So just, if you're feeling neglected, send him a message. Yeah. Yeah.

And there we go. And now the other one, Matt, this is a rather specific complaint. Or maybe it's not. Maybe this is just a general listener that has an issue. So the title is The Episode on Gabber Mattes. That's they've picked the business of S, but there's nothing there anyway. And this is by Ma Isso from UAE, United Arab Emirates. OK, we have a listener in the UAE. The conversation reminded me of the cheap, envious, and superficial chat women have in the afternoon.

Right. I didn't learn anything from your silly chat, guys. Nothing. You don't offer any alternative of Dr. Mate's claimant theories. Laughing and using that cheap, unscientific, sarcastic tone. Kudos to Dr. Mate for the wisdom and light he has been bringing to the world. Why are you reading it in a Borat voice, Chris?

But I mean, I don't disagree. That wasn't my Borat voice. This is my like, you know, religious fan of Gaber Mate voice. Yeah, that's not my Borat voice. Okay. That's good. So how are we discussing him in the... Read me again a bit. Cheap, unscientific sarcastic tone, but also... Oh yeah, cheap came up again. Cheap, envious and superficial chat that women have in the afternoon.

That's fair. That's a fair comparison. Well that gives a picture of the political and social views of this particular Gabor Mate fan as well. So is there someone overly invested in Gabor Mate or is it the long term listener that this was the straw that broke the camel's back? It's hard to say. That's a drive by review. That's someone who popped in, listened to beer then BAM and then he's off again. So he won't hear this. That's great. Thanks for your input. We value your feedback. We do. And we normally stop at 2, Matt, but just to bring us back up because that that was a one-star review. That hurt our souls. Last one. 5-star. Two fine blokes. Crocodile Dundee and the Lucky Charms mascot combine forces.

By D. Milstein from the United States. So there we go. That's a positive message. A cheap shout at me, but that's fine. That's the way it goes. We don't mind national stereotypes here. DT. We're fairly accurate. Yeah, fairly accurate. I mean, Chris, Chris is smaller than me a bit. So, you know, I think. OK, channel mascot. That's just because you're very tall.

OK, I see him. Yeah, he's a leprechaun. I get it. I mean, I did get that. I had that. But I just hadn't seen what he looks like. Well, I'm not ginger. So there is that, Matt. There's that way. You are nimble.

You are very nimble. I've seen you climbing up walls. I'm nimble. I'm the... Leprechauns are nimble. Oh, you see me? I'm gone with my particles. Yeah.

You'll never get it. Come here, you. Why did I change? I changed to Eastern European. You'll never get it. Come here, you. Why did I change? I changed to Eastern European. You'll never get it in front of me. That's not what leprechauns sounds like. Well, there we go. Oh, yeah.

Well, actually, I'll just give a little tip to people. You know, we were talking about this before, Matt. We have our own sense speaking sessions and Jordan Peterson, this is kind of like for the real hardcore, they get the final insight. They've had to listen to Peter Thiel's draws. In previous episodes, they had to listen to Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, various people. But Jordan Peterson talked about how dragons are guarding gold and that this invites us to challenge the predators. That is the human spirit. that this invites us to challenge the predators, right? That is the human spirit.

If you just extend it a little bit further, Leprechauns, Matt, a very important symbol in Western culture. Some would say the foundation of Western civilization, but let's not go there. Also small manlike creatures that are tricky and hoard gold. Right. So I think the message there, they're not predators, right? They're not predators. They're not trying to eat people, but they are tricky small men.

And they do have a treasure that if you best them. You have a treasure. Yeah, if you best them. So I think the message for Irish culture is that you should beware small, tricky men, and if you best them, riches beyond your reward are available. So have you considered that, Matt? I like it. I like it. Well, I definitely like it more than the what was it?

The grumpy snake. What was the emergency snake? The eternal emergency snake. He actually has two qualifiers. But yeah, so wisdom to end this podcast. We've left you with some things to consider. The rule of leprechauns in Western civilization. We've insulted your ears with so much nonsense this episode. I am sorry. If you're using this podcast to go to sleep, first of all, I endorse that. And two, I hope you fell asleep some time ago. Sweet dreams. Quite right.

But hopefully not in time up because the last thing we got to do is shout out to Peatrons. We've got to do it. They deserve it. We got to do it. I'm just gonna do it collectively. Okay. Okay. Here we go.

Okay. So these are conspiracy hypothesizers. Eugene Chan, Tony Isensei, Becky Rose, Alexander Gustafson, Liam McMahan, Teris Holman, George, George Daniel Kunz, Eric Farr, Alex Tamsarin, John Zarabef George, John Gillan, Said Polat, Andy Domnick, Zapfod's Revenge, Alexander Acker, Marlon Massey, Eric Hawkins, DC Matt 6X, Thomas Reagan, Jamie Flynn, Nick, Tim Roy and the Nesh. Oh, and Rory. Also, 332. They are all conspiracy hypothesizers. Fantastic. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions. And they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference. This kind of shit makes me think man it's almost like someone is being paid like when when you hear these George Soros stories he's trying to destroy the country from within. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. There you go. Some great quotes for some wise men.

Revolutionary geniuses, Matt, the ones that get access to the decoding academia series, 41 episodes existing of that and probably more actually, because I sometimes don't put the numbers on the back, but they are William M. Amy Wright. Josh Lemmer. Now, that's OK. Odd McNuttie, Serena. Joe Pedro Lima Delgado.

Derek Yu, Mandy Thompson, Justin B, Aftab Grewal, Dominic F, Kalista Sanderson, and Brian Farrington and Samuel Weiss. Love it. Thank you. Love where you are. Big tier. Not showing behind, not showing off. Yeah, not showing off. Yeah. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the

time. And it is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath, I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now that's just a guess and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.

Chris, I do want to do the Sensimakus again. Like the real Sensimakus. I kind of want to go back to that side though. Well, yeah, he'd be fun too. But I mean, having had Peter Thiel and Curtis Yalvin do like they're really simple version of a crappy basic version of it. I want to hear a real auto do it like like we did before. Those guys are amazing. Okay, so the last one, the DCG Galaxy brain figures, the shining stars in our patron sky. Harder to find, harder to see, but on a good night you can see some of them.

So you can see. You have to turn off all the lights. You don't want any light. Yes, be quiet. It's there for a long time and you will see Kimberly Beer, good name, Harold Charmers. Harold Charmers. Oh, yeah. And OK, I'm going to. So few, Chris. So few.

So this is this is a figure of the way this stupid list is organized. It's nothing. It doesn't reflect on us. OK, Joe. good old Joe. Sorry. Diana. Like these people were just a single name because it counts so many, right? It should be like a bomb that just sits all about John Pole. John Pole, also John and Matt, Ian, Waffle Truck, Neil VDP and Justin Powell. These valiant few, they support us so much. Never, never before in the history of mankind, just so much.

Yeah, well thank you. You are the real ones. You rock our world. Yeah. You rock our world. Consider Platinum Tier or Platinum Tier plus. Good options. Yeah.

Yeah. Here we go. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe.

I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Ha ha ha, yeah. Hi, Scott Adams. Scott Adams. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to know.

Well, there we go, Matt. We're done for today. We're going into new waters, uncharted waters. Next time, it'll be a surprise for people. And I look forward to talking to you on the supplementary material soon enough. Yep. Yep. Now you know what the deal repeated deal. And you probably wish you didn't. There's not much there. But now we know he's done, we're moving on. Good night. Good night, God bless, and let's hope we can steer this golden path between Armageddon and the Antichrist.

God bless us all. The Hey.