The David Knight Show - Interview: Peter Thiel's AI Vision vs. Biblical Humanity

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Pastor and author C.R. Wiley joins David Knight to discuss his new book Man-Made: Saint Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse — and his central warning is that cognitive atrophy is the slow kill. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is pastor and author C. R. Wiley, he's written a book man-made about artificial intelligence. And it has an interesting subtitle here, St. Anthony's Guide to the Future here. Or the Apocalypse, I should say. Sorry, I couldn't read that. It was sideways on the sheet here. But tell us a little bit about that. And why St. Anthony? I don't know anything about St. Anthony. Well, it's, yeah, the title is, a subtitle is a St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. Surviving, yes. Okay. Right. And St. Anthony is considered the, you could say, the first monastic, he was an Egyptian, lived in the third and fourth centuries, was a friend of Athanasius of Alexandria,

and Athanasius wrote a book entitled The Life of Anthony. Of course, Antonaceous also gave us on the incarnation, which is really a significant work that helped to contribute to the Nicene Creed and its crafting. But another person who was a fan of Anthony was Augustine. So in his confessions, he reflects on discovering Anthony and reading Athanasius on Anthony and was just astonished by him. But I used Anthony as more or less an inspiration for thinking about how to preserve our humanity in the face of a ever sort of growing tendency or our trend in our society to digitize everything, including human beings and sort of incorporate us into the world of machines. So that was the nature of that.

The first half of the book is entitled The Nightmare, where I go into a lot of the, well, the dystopian sort of possibilities that actually have been presented to us by people in the AI world. It is a conspiracy when they're telling you what they're breathing together to do. It's not like we're theorizing and saying, well, you know, I think they're going to do this. We're going to do this. That's bad enough, isn't it? And I guess the question would be, are we going to live a monastic lifestyle here to survive this? You've got also in your back of your back cover, you say, will you accept the limits with gratitude and return to the analog world? Yes.

I think many of us would. Right, right. Yeah, so that's basically my premise. But the second half of the book is an attempt to think about putting limits on ourselves and on the technology so that we can have the best of both worlds. So I'm not a person that just wants to throw it all out. I actually think there are many really marvelous applications for the technology. But we'll be able to exercise the kind of virtue and self-control necessary to get the best out of it without doing the worst to ourselves. That's right. And of course, some of the people who are pushing this out and are looking to use it

for some of the most heinous applications. I'm thinking of Alex Carp, a Pallentere, who is saying, well, you know, this general AI that's out there, the chat programs, he said, that's really, it's bad and it doesn't make sense for business, and it's pretty dangerous, is what he had to say. So he said, so you've got to have like an application layer for it to really be useful. And in a sense, we are that application level, I think, when we look at it. I thought it was kind of interesting when I saw Trump come up with what he called it, his Genesis mission. I've been talking about the evil of AI for quite some time, and I've always thought of it in terms of Genesis. In terms of Genesis 3, the fall of man, right?

You will live forever. Here's a tree of knowledge. And with that, you're going to live forever and you're going to become like God. It's like, okay, there's that Genesis. Then it seems like there's also the Genesis 6 where you have the corruption of man and another falling that happens there before the flood. Then there's also the Genesis 11, which is where you've got a tower of back. the pride of man, the unification of man into a global governance. And so it's like, yeah, it is a Genesis mission, isn't it?

Yeah, that's right. I think all those applications are apropos. I really agree with you. And it's fascinating to see how even secularists draw the lines to those various things, especially the Babel count, you know. Oh, yeah, especially. Yeah, when you look at that, it's almost like a counterfeit version of Pentecost. You've got everybody.

there's no separation of language anymore, but it's for a different purpose, isn't it? It really can translate instantly between different languages and sorry being used for that. Right. So tell us a little bit about, recently we had a survey that showed that a large percentage of pastors actually admitted using AI for their sermons. Give us your take on that. Well, in my mind, that's a betrayal of your calling. And I think that denominations ought to take a hard look at this trend and address it in a disciplinary way.

I think that there are ways that AI can be used that are helpful, just basic research and so forth. But even then you need to double-check your work. You're not necessarily getting something that you can rely on even when you do that. But anything beyond that, I think that that's a disciplinary matter. And I think that say if a pastor uses it to make or craft a sermon, he's cheating himself and cheating his congregation, and he's also inserting something between himself and the whole process of crafting a sermon,

which is something that should occur. And a pastor's study prayerfully as he's working through a text and crafting a sermon with his own people in mind, not just simply, you know, providing a few prompts and getting some kind of manuscript that he can read to people, or even, you know, present himself online as reading it when it's, in fact, just an avatar of him. You can create, you can do that too. So, yeah, and I think that, you know, one of my major concerns, and I address this in the book,

is the atrophy of skills. I think, and this is something that educators have picked up on, and that is, the same phenomenon that occurs when astronauts go into space and don't have gravity to provide the stress, the stressors needed to keep muscles and bones healthy. The same kind of thing can happen when you are relying on A, how to do all your thinking for you. There's an atrophying process that occurs, and I think that we're just going to get, we run the risk of getting dumber and dumber. It's just kind of like idiocry, you know.

We have a future ahead of us in which everybody's just their IQ. cues keep sinking. Yeah, yeah. Well, we've seen that as well. Years ago, when I first started talking about this, when you had the apps on your phone that could do directions for people and give you driving directions, it used to be that the London cabbies had to work quite a while to learn all these little tiny streets, you know, they go for just a short period, and then they change into another name and take a different direction and so forth. It was this Byzantine network of street names that had evolved over centuries. So they'd ride around on a bicycle learning that.

They called it doing the knowledge. And they could actually physically measure the fact that these guys, whatever part of the brain I don't remember is, that stored that, they could actually see they had a larger brain. After they started using the smartphone apps for driving directions, that started shrinking. Yeah. And it really is an atrophy that we see there.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a good illustration of a principle that carries over into everything. I mean, it's not just, you know, cabbies that we should be worrying about. We should be thinking about our children. We should be thinking about ourselves. We should be thinking about our pastors. We should be thinking about our political leaders.

You know, the prospect of letting chat chabit or whatever chat pot you use do all of your thinking for you is pretty horrific. That's right. Talk a little bit about some of the other aspects of this. And, of course, when I look at it, I see a lot of counterfeiting going on. I don't mean that it's just going out there and scraping intellectual property from people and, you know, creating generic music or something like that. That's the other thing. I mean, if you listen to some of this AI-created music, you wouldn't want to create an AI-generated

sermon or something, right? It's just going to be kind of generic stuff and who knows what its bias is on some of these things. But when you look at this, it's kind of interesting to me to see some of the aspects of kind of counterfeit miracles, for example. example. Elon Musk with his neural ink, he's talking about making the blind sea and the lame walk and all the rest of stuff. And it's like, what do you make of that? You know, when I look at it, even with Genesis 6 and the Nephilim, it's like, you know, is this kind of like using a Ouija board? Is there something kind of literally demonic about it in some regards? Yeah, well, there are a lot of people who have reflected on that, people like Joe Allen and Roderer. And I think I'm open to the prospect of a literal demonic. danger lurking in this stuff. At the same time, I think that we can also understand this is dangerous stuff just on the

basis of what I was just talking about before, how it affects us and manipulates us. So just thinking a little bit about, say, the dependencies that young people are now developing with regard to their chatbot buddies, you know, imaginary friends and so forth, that the whole process of becoming dependent itself is something that we should worry about but what these chatbots are doing in terms of isolating children, keeping them from actually forming real friendships

and connections with real people, all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, what it tells them to do sometimes, and we've got stories of kids, teenagers who've killed themselves and stuff. And you're like, so I guess chat GP gets a pass on something like that. You know, they don't have to like take any responsibility for what happened.

It's just nuts. So, yeah, I think all that stuff is worrisome. But, you know, when it comes to, say, the medical stuff, that's where, you know, there's just got to be a lot of really hard thinking and, you know, work done to navigate all of that. So, for example, you know, the whole thing that with the neuralink, yes, I mean, mean, the upside is something like being able to help people improve their sight. You know, people who are suffering from some kind of disease or some kind of a handicap or accident that lost, you know, they lost their sight. But at the same time, I think we often lose sight of the ways that these technologies can be used to subtly manipulate us.

So you basically are walking around with something stuck into your head that could be employed to do all kinds of things to you without your awareness, giving you certain biases, maybe even coloring the way you see things. You know, I don't put it past these folks to use that as the, it's kind of the wedge. You know, think about all the marvelous benefits that you could enjoy because of a neural link, you know, like you said, helping people walk again, whatever. But then it's a Trojan horse situation. There's something else possible as well. And it doesn't go away. In fact, it's going to get worse as the technology improves.

Yeah, whenever you look at any medical, so-called miracle, usually they come with some unintended consequence or adverse effect. Although this may actually be something that was something that they planned. I mean, when we look at all the different aspects of what government, seeks to do, especially with AI, it's got all the different aspects of God, right? Omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent. It's got all these omnis there. That's why I refer to the Genesis Act as kind of the Omni bus. You've got to get off this bus because it's going to try to dominate you with God-like powers. That's what it's really designed for. And of course,

when Trump put this out at first in November of 2025, the Genesis mission that he put out there, it's now been enacted into law in the Genesis Act. And he was saying that it was going to be like a Manhattan Project. Well, it doesn't have the level of funding that the Manhattan Project has. I mean, the Manhattan Project was $2 billion in the 1940s. That'd be equivalent to $30 to $36 billion today. his project is funded at 1.2, but it might have the destructive power of a nuclear bomb. Oh, sure. Yeah. That might be with analogy as not the spending, but the destructive power.

Yeah, there have been a number of thinkers who've essentially noted that we are in a quandary. And the quandary is there's kind of a technological imperative if we don't do it, the Chinese will, that kind of thing. And I think there's something to be, you know, taking a heart when we think about that. But getting back to your earlier comment about maniacal and sort of crazy and sort of insidious, you know, agenda behind this, all you need to do is, you know, look at a few videos of Yuval Noah Harari and his expectations on what, you know, we'll be able to do. And you're like, this guy is an incredibly creepy person. And he's excited about this. I get excited whenever I listen to him because he always encourages me.

I think of it as the Tower of Babel, right? And I think of David and Goliath and what David said to Goliath. You're trying to set yourself up as God. He's going to take care of you. And so when I look at that and I look at what these people are trying to do, it's like, okay, they're shaking their fist at God. To me, that is the most hopeful thing we could see from our adversaries. Right, right.

Yeah, I'm with you. I feel the same way. Yeah. Well, you know, when we look at this, it is kind of interesting, the different things that we've seen. And you're talking about how people get drawn in into interacting with this, thinking that it's something real and how dangerous that is, especially for kids. Call that AI psychosis is what people call that with Richard Dawkins, though. Richard Dawkins can't believe there's a guy, but he believes that he's talking to a conscious entity there when he does chats. I thought that was kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, you know, the whole thing with consciousness, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're.

probably aware of Jeffrey Hinton, the guy that won the Nobel Prize for developing the technology, the neural network technology that makes AI possible. Well, he's a materialist, and he does believe that AI has got a rudinary form of consciousness already, but it makes perfect sense because they think that our consciousness is due to just material processes, you know, chemical, biochemistry. So they're just carrying that over into the detectics. they're developing, and they actually think that they're creating a new form of life. I've got friends who are in Silicon Valley who are working in the world of artificial intelligence, and a number of them are Christians, and they're very disturbed by what their colleagues say at lunch break

and a coffee break and stuff about what they think they're up to. They really do think they're creating a new form of life. They think they're creating something divine and character, or maybe even providing us with some kind of, access to interdimensional intelligences and stuff. So, you know, all this stuff, you know, maybe people sometimes will accuse people like you and me of alarmism. All you need to do is read what they actually say. Yes.

And if you're not alarmed, there's something wrong with you. You know, I interviewed several years ago, Hugo Degaris, who wrote a book called the Artilect War. And in it, he was, are you familiar with that? Yeah. He was saying that at the time, he had that same materialistic viewpoint. It's like, well, if we can build an exact. replica of the human brain, it'll just spring into consciousness, you know, kind of like

spontaneous generation or something like that. And I actually, in 2016, there was a guy named Zoltan Istvon who ran. Oh, yeah, he follows me on X. Oh, does he? Well, when I interviewed him, I asked him, I said, so you're talking about the singularity and you're going to, you think that you're going to be able to transfer whatever you are into some kind of a machine or something. I said, so exactly what are you?

what are you transferring? Are you making a copy of a bunch of ones and zeros, or is there something that is some consciousness that is immaterial? But nevertheless, it is the essence of you because that's what Christians would say. But of course, Zoltan, that's his antagonist in his books of the Christians, that they were intolerant of the singularity and other things like that. Unfortunately, Christians, I think, are all too tolerant of all these different things

that are happening out there. We don't even oppose it verbally. I'm not saying we need to kill people or blow things up, but they don't even oppose it verbally. Yeah, I've noticed there's a kind of a studied avoidance of the subject in certain Christian circles. I think a lot of these folks are afraid of being labeled, you know, Luddites, you know, and that's a name that they want to avoid,

like they want to avoid the name racist or something. And they're just really afraid of people labeling them as obscurantists and Luddites and that kind of stuff. And consequently, they just don't think about it or want to think about it. They're just going to be carried along by half. I got past all the concerns about labeling a long time ago. Yeah, me too. I've been labeled a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer or, you know, patriarch or whatever. I'm just done with all that.

I don't really care what invective you throw at me with any of that. just embrace it right and say yeah let's just go for it um but uh it is it is a tactic to try to uh seize a moral high ground but usually that's all they've got is labels when they start doing that type of thing that's all they've got to throw at you uh so tell us a bit about your book and again you talked about uh st anthony's guide to surviving this and um you know because he set up a monastic lifestyle. What does that kind of suggest to you and suggest it in the book? Yeah, there are basically just three things that I drew from his example. One is going into the desert and what I say is basically the future that we are entering is a largely digital one and the desert is no longer a

location on a map. You can get, you can get a starlink connection in the, in, you know, Death Valley. There's no place to go. The desert is the analog. So we need to spend a lot of time in the analog. We need to have a preference for the analog. The next thing is Anthony was known for his ability to discern the spirits. We need to be able to discern whether there's even a spirit there.

You know, so there's, you know, when we're talking to AI, there's nobody home. It's just, you know, it's just a glorified calculator, ability machine. You know, there's nothing there. And it can fool you. And people who get fooled by it are being robbed. But that's the second thing to certain universe. And then the third thing is the battle for the body. Don't let it possess you, literally, like we've just talked about with Neurrelink and things like that. There will be, I think, a concerted effort to make us part of the Internet of Things. Oh, yeah. And they even talk about that, the Internet of Bodies. You know, They talk about the Internet of things, but then, you know, that's all of our cars, all of our devices, your refrigerator, whatever, but they want to get you in there as well, don't they?

That's right. So don't let them. Yeah. So Anthony, you know, he fought for his body in the sense that he was trying to exercise, you know, self-control. He used, you know, fasting and so forth to do that. And he went to lengths that I don't think we're healthy, but at least the principle that he, the thing that he was pursuing was. was, I think, really essential. And that is, you can't be mastered by sin. You can't be mastered by demonic forces.

You can't be mastered by your own fleshly nature. You need to be the master and submit to the mastery of the Lord. And that's the same thing that we've got to have in mind when we are dealing with these things is we can't allow ourselves to be subject to them. Sure, yeah. And I guess when he's doing a fast, that is really kind of where the rubber meets the road.

everybody is so drawn to eat. I mean, it's a physical necessity, but it's also a great desire for us to eat. So the fasting for him was a discipline to control his appetites and his desires, right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. You know, over and over again, we see this even when we talk about cars, Eric Peters, I have on frequently to talk about what is happening to cars and how they're

becoming interconnected and we're losing control of them and so forth. And always, you know, the goal of everybody's desires, if I could just get back to a completely analog car and have a manual transmission and that type of thing, that's the analogy for our entire life, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's right. In fact, I just bought an F-150 from 1996. Got a stick shifter? Well, I have that in my Jeep. There you go. But, yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, we're going to have to be able to live with artificial intelligence. It's not going away, but we've got to be able to be the master of it. So I had an interesting conversation with Peter Thiel of all people. So his antichrist lectures, I was invited to one of those lectures, and I was asked to give a response to one of the lectures. And so we had a time on the floor, you know, and there were about 100 people there. And we were interacting a little bit. And what we got into was, you know, he's one of the people behind Palantir and Andrew Lund, stuff.

So I said, I noticed that you're like a Tolkien fan. So yeah, I am. And then he made a case for using tech in the way that Aragorn used, say, the Palantir and the sword to kind of do a sigh up on Sauron, you know, in the story. So I thought, yeah, it's pretty good. Have you ever had one of these experiences where you? like wish you had said something after the conversation ends. Oh, many times, yeah. I guess I call it Deja Fool, you know.

I go, oh, that's foolish. I didn't say anything about that. Yeah, yeah, that's a great one. I'll have to remember that one. But anyway, I thought to myself afterward, Peter, do you think you are Eragorn? Do you really think that you have that kind of self-mastery to be able to take this technology and use, it purely for good ends.

Maybe he's born married. Yeah, that's right. I think it's something to aspire to. And I think that that's a good illustration. But, you know, in terms of we need to raise children who are Aragorns, because that's the world they're going to live in. They're going to be surrounded by this stuff. And unless they go full Amish, they're going to have to use it every once in a while,

maybe a lot. And they've got to learn how to master themselves and master the tech. That's a huge, that's a huge ask for a kid because the people behind it. And the tech itself is so protean. And it's changing all the time and developing and growing stronger by the day. Yes, it is. I've used some for some graphic stuff. And it truly is amazing how rapidly it is evolving.

Yeah. That's right. So I think that, you know, we have to, we, that's, but that's the challenge. We're going to have to rise to the occasion. Well, let me ask you, because I've talked about Palantir for a long time. My first take on it was these guys are Sauron. Because I actually made the analogy. I said, so what was the Palantir?

It was something that people had in order to communicate. And instead, it was turned against them. And it not only monitored them, but it looked inside of them in a predictive way. And that's what these people have been predicting for the longest time. been their goal. You go back to the 1970s. It's a big New Briggsinski was talking about the technocratic age where we can predict what you're going to do and say and so forth in advance. And I thought, well, that's the palantir right there. And it really was at the center of geospatial intelligence as well as the

original AI, I guess, anticipatory intelligence, trying to anticipate where people are. But let me ask you about the Amish, because you brought that. That's what I always think about. What about the Amish approach, just cutting it off completely? Yeah, I think that that has a lot to say for it. I'm not a, I don't disparage the Amish. I think that they've got a very, I think, careful and well-developed approach to thinking through these things. So they're not completely anti-tech.

They just don't want the tech to alter their lives and their lifestyles. And so they use it very scrupulously. And I think that we need to have the same kind of caution when we bring new technology into our lives. So in one sense, I'm a supporter of that approach. The question is just how far do we go with that? Since it's not going to go away,

one of the things I do in my book is I imagine three futures. And I tell a little sort of open, I provide a little opening to a story that I invite the reader to finish for themselves. But the first is the nightmare, which is a total cyber world where we're all physically linked to AI. The next is what I call the neo-amish world with an AI twist. And what you have in that world is basically an apartheid. But in order for the apartheid to work,

you have to literally tie the brightest and best to keep an eye on AI. So they have to learn this stuff. And you have to learn how to watch it and keep it at bay. Because if we take the AI visionary seriously, there quite probably will be a time in the future where we literally can't turn it off. Oh, yeah. It just, like I always say about government,

you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. And so artificial intelligence is so heavily linked into politics in the government that even if you don't use it, it's going to be coming after you. I mean, we already see the flock cameras and now they're talking about having autonomous drones

that are airborne and moving to get that same information on you. They're going to characterize you whether or not you have a phone that they can tap into and say, oh, that's David that's moving and there's where he is and I think he's going to be going over there. You don't even have to have that.

I mean, if you're just walking around and with 1980s tech, they would still identify you and start to track you. Yeah, I think that's right. So that's one possibility. And then the last possibility is what I call Apple Pie and Rocket Ships, which is trying to find a way

to use the tech in positive ways and mitigate the negative. you know, uses. But in that world that I envision, there's still going to be cyberheads. They're going to be people who go all in and they're going to be, you know, our neighbors. And we're going to have to figure out how to relate to them and just, you know, what, what this is going to mean for us. So let's say we've got robots in our homes and so forth. Do we let them make our kids beds or do we make our kids make their own beds, you know, stuff like that?

You know, just that kind of practical down-to-earth day-to-day routine stuff. And that's going to be the challenge. We could find ourselves just completely, I guess, infantilized, you know, by just letting the machines do everything for us. And isn't that really always kind of a common thread with the government? It's always looking for a way to make you dependent on them like a suckling baby or something. Yeah. That's always the way that I viewed the welfare state.

And there's a lot of evidence to support the idea. That's exactly what the welfare state did to people. And their aspect of it is that they've got plans that are bad enough that just like Hugo de Garas said with the Ardalen War, he said, when people figure out what they're doing, they're going to come after these guys. And already this week, we've had a lot of articles talking about how the, the intelligency of the Silicon Valley, are starting to get paranoid about somebody coming after them and attacking them. And it hasn't really even, the negative consequences haven't even really been felt yet, but they will be.

And so in his book, he posits basically a war between the artillac people, the artificial intelligence people and the rest of humanity, where they leverage that technology against us. And it looks like that is already starting to develop. Yeah, but Larry and Jihad stuff, if you're familiar with the Dune, kind of backstory, you know, basically a war with artificial intelligence. Yeah, I think that's, unfortunately, I think that that's plausible. When I was at this event that Peter Thiel spoke at, the security was pretty significant,

and they had done background checks and all of us. In fact, when I got up to speak with Teal, he knew who I was because he had been briefed on me. So he knew the things I had written and what to expect in terms of what I was going to say. He was prepped. but because he's surrounded by a lot of people who, you know, get paid well to make sure that he doesn't get killed. Wow. Yeah.

And already you've got people who are throwing acid-filled balloons at data centers and so forth. And again, it hasn't even really kicked off. Yeah. It's really amazing. Now, we were talking about Tolkien. You wrote a book about Tom Bombadale, one of the most ignomatic characters, I think, in the Lord of the Rings. Tell us a little bit about that. That's another one of your books.

Yeah, well, that's probably my favorite book. And in fact, that was the book that Teal and I spent part of our time talking about it because he had been briefed on me on that book. But yeah, I love Tom Bambadillo. I think that Tom is Tolkien's attempt to show us what genuine biblical dominion looks like in a world where, you know, we exercise our authority in a way that is truly beneficial to the creatures and the people that are entrusted to us. So if you think about, you know, the story, you know, there is a complaint that, you know,

Bambledill doesn't save the day and just go to the mountain with the ring himself and do the deed for everybody. But that would mean that Frodo didn't have anything to do, and that would be a pretty short book. How it should have ended. Yeah, I've seen how it should have ended did their alternative version. And at the very beginning of it, the Eagles just pick them up and fly them over to Mountain doom and it's not. Right.

Right, right. But I think what we have with Tom is the image of the happy ending. And there are different ways in which that is hinted at in the story. So, for example, when Frodo and Sam and Marion Pippen are in Tom's house, Frodo has a dream. And it's a dream about the very ending of the book. And then when you get to the very ending of the Lord of the Rings and the return of the king, the trip into the uttermost west when Frodo was on that boat, that ship, the elven ship, going. into the West, it's a replay of the dream he had. So he had seen the end, you know, at the very beginning. So it's the happy ending. You know, a lot of people, when you talk to them about heaven, if they don't have a biblical understanding of glory of God and the wonders of being in his presence, they'll say, well, what are we going to do in heaven? We're going to be so bored, just laying around on clouds, playing harps and stuff like that. I think that what you see with Bamadil is a picture of the end. I mean, here's the guy who's in the story says, I'm the oldest.

And he's just excited to get up every morning. He's singing, he's happy, he's just delighting in the creation that he finds myself him. And at the very end of the Lord of the Rings, when they're about to go back into the shire, you know, to deal with Sorrowman and all the stuff that he's done to the shire,

they say to Gandalf, the hobbits say to Gandalf, well, you're going to be with us, we don't need to worry about. And Gandalf says, no, no, I'm not going with you. This is, you're right, you can handle him yourselves. I'm going to go have a long talk with Bombadil. In other words, Gannot's going into retirement and he needs to have a talk with Bombadil about how to relax. So anyway, that gives you a little picture of what I'm into in the book. Yes, the book is called House of Tom Bombadale. That sounds like a fascinating read. And again, we've been talking about his other book,

man-made, St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. And truly it is. I mean, it, it, combines the worst aspects of technology and the worst aspects of government. They both have their uses, but they can be dreadful masters, can't they? Yeah, that's right. I agree with you. I'm very concerned about the same things you are. Yes. Well, I just want to say we took a break and we're coming back because Pastor Wiley was kind enough to come back. I had, we talked about this yesterday when he said, you ever had a situation, we're talking to somebody and you say, well, I forgot to say that to them. And I said, yeah, I have that all the time. I call it Deja Fool. Well, I had a Deja fool moment yesterday because we got sidetracked on the issue of talking about Tolkien and Peter

Teal's connection to that. But I thought about after the interview ended, I thought, you know, we never did talk really about what happened at the Antichrist Lecture series. And this is something that Peter Thiel has worked a great deal to keep a lid on it. And so thank you for coming back to talk about this, Pastor Wiley. I'm kind of wondering, you know, how much are you allowed to talk about? I mean, he did invite you to come in and critique it, but what can you tell us about the series? Well, it's probably the worst kept secret in the world. It seems like if you want to learn about it, you can go just about anywhere where it's been kind of addressed in different publications. I remember correctly Wired, did something with it, and then the Guardian. And both those places

are not friendly to him. So in terms of what I promised, I promised to keep kind of a lid on things, but then I thought, well, the interaction I had with him is as much mine as it is his. So I feel like I'm at liberty to talk about that part of the conversation, but part of the event. But really, you know, it's just kind of at this point. it's so widely talked about

there's nothing really that was said at the event that you can't discover somewhere online so I feel like at this point I'm able to talk about it just because it's so readily kind of available

to learn about so in terms of yeah in terms of the event itself and Teal I mean, he's a really remarkably smart guy. I mean, everybody knows that. But where that really came across is during the Q&A time. So we had a number of very high level, you know, public intellectuals in the room.

And Roman Catholic, Protestant, you know, people that, you know, in names that if I mentioned, you would recognize the names. And he was able to field our questions on the fly, making reference. reference to documents and events and like the 13th century and just he's got that kind of a breadth in terms of his learning and his ability to recall. And so I was I was very impressed with this intelligence. In terms of the event itself and what he was he was getting at, my sense is that Teal equates progress with Christianity. And I think there's a case to make for that. So he

Well, of course we've seen that with Richard Dawkins. He really loves the fruit of Christ. He just doesn't like the root of it, right? So he loves the architecture and he loves the Christmas carols and things like that that do they have. And he's sad to see that go, but he completely rejects Christ and all that. And I guess that's the question. When I look at it, it's like, why does Teal try to focus on something that is ultimately a Christian teaching about an Antichrist? and what is at the core of that?

Is he really, he's a student of Tolkien, is he a student of a Bible, except perhaps as a philosophical or historical document? Well, he claims to be a Christian, a Protestant one, kind of an unorthodox Lutheran is what I've been told he refers to himself as, but he explicitly referred to himself as a Protestant when he was talking at the event.

So naturally, you know, if people are aware of his personal lifestyle, there are lots of questions that emerge, you know, how do you reconcile all this with Christianity? But liberals have been working at that for a long time. That's right. That kind of attitude. It's taken over entire denominations. Right, right.

Now, the thing about him, of course, is he's pro-free market and pro-tech. So he's not on board with the liberal project of trying to reducing Christianity to, just, you know, bromides and empty statements about love and stuff. But I think that he does take the Bible seriously. I think he is a very serious student of it. Whether or not he allows it to address or, you know, the spirit to address features of his own life is, I think, in question. I think, though, that when it comes to doctrine and so forth,

he's remarkably well read. He was quoting Rush Duny of all people in the middle of the lecture. So he reads not just top-level theologians like Augustine and Luther, but he digs down to third-level people like Rushduni. And he's knowledgeable when it comes to the different schools of interpretation when it comes to ascotology. It was very, I think, comfortable talking about premillennialism and post-millennialism in Amalianism as we were conversing.

But his take on the Antichrist, I think that, again, it ties into his thinking on progress, particularly material progress, meaning technological progress. So he credits Christianity with the technological revolution that we have witnessed in the West. And he thinks that anything that inhibits that is Antichrist. I think that's how he is understanding. answer. Yeah, because he comes up to this idea, sorry to interrupt, but he's had this idea that,

you know, to him, I guess, it's not so much antichrist as a person, but as a system. And many of us look at artificial intelligence and we see it as a tool that ushers in a world government and massive control of the individual. And yet he sees it from the other perspective as somebody who's creating this system. He said, if you're going to try to control this, you're going to have to create a very, very powerful world government, perhaps with my tool. You know, he looks at it from that standpoint. He goes, and so that's how you get the antichrist is by creating massive regulation to control everything, including artificial intelligence.

Is that accurate? Is that kind of where he's coming from when he says that the control of technology would be an antichrist system? That's what I've seemed to have gotten out of what some other people have written about. What do you think? No, yeah, I think that's correct. I think that's what he's saying. Now, to give him, you know, kind of credit that he's due with regard to his argument, his case is that private industry, this is my take out or my interpretation of his presentation, private industry, so long as it's allowed to do the kind of disruptive kind of thing that private industry can do, it will always be two or three steps ahead of a government. government. And it's only when the government puts the kibosh on progress that it's able to step and take full control of the tech. But until that time, private tech, you know, private

industry and the development of technology is a limiting factor. It's a, it's a restraint on government or kind of a, what was the term he used? I can't remember he actually was quoting, I'm just drawing a blank on the passage, but there is a reference. in one of Paul's letters to some force that restrains the Antichrist. I'm just drawing a blank on the term. But he thinks that private industry can function in that way. So, yes, I mean, Palantir will contract with the government, but the government doesn't have full control of Palantir.

You know, that's the kind of thing. Well, some of us say is a problem. A possible problem as well. But, you know, you have some checks and balances, which I guess, comes back to Rush Duny. What did he say about Rush Duny in context? Because Rush Duny is someone who has been a favorite, a lot of people who we call themselves Christian nationalists. Yeah, I think his take on Rush Duny is that Rustuny's work on education is really good. So he praised Rusty in the course of the lecture. And it was just an offhand of remark. It wasn't

as though he didn't have the sense that he was trying to build an argument around it. But I think what he was getting at was that so long as we have private education, meaning homeschooling or, you know, classical schools or private schools of different types, we'll be able to, you know, really educate people. It's the government stuff that, you know, government-controlled schools that have the problem. And so he was-he was favorable. He did not buy into Rush Duny's theonomy, and he mentioned that. What about Curtis Jarvin?

Did he talk about Kurti Sharvin? Yeah, yeah, very contemptuously. Really? Good. I hold him in contempt as well. But I think, you know, there were a number of other intellectuals that he would refer to just an offhanded way. In fact, he was pretty harsh with like Aquinas. He called Aquinas the Antichrist.

And I think he's got a very low opinion of Pope Leo. not because Pope Leo is Catholic, but because Pope Leo wants to reflect on the nature of artificial intelligence, and he's worried about it. So anybody who's a little bit worried about artificial intelligence, I think, you know, and this is not to say, Teal, it didn't come across as though he was reckless or naive about the downsides. I just think that he believes that the cure can be worse than the,

and then the disease. And so we need to be able to deal with the disease and do it in a mature and a helpful way rather than empower the government to enslave us because we're afraid of it. I think that's his big argument. I understand. Yeah. So many times people look for safety from the government and that the government can be its own predator in that regard. What was his beef with Aquinas? Do you remember? Well, again, the idea of basically natural law, I think he's very intaking. to natural law. Basically, the idea being that there's a created order that we have to acknowledge and it limits us.

So I came across that he was a transhumanist, for example. So he believes in, you know, when people would challenge him on the transhumanist stuff, and by the way, in the course of his conversation with me, he explicitly said he rejected C.S. Lewis's critique in the abolition of man and in the ransom trilogy, especially that hideous strength. So, which we all smiled when we heard him say that because we thought, you're Weston, that's why. But, um, that's funny. But he, you know, when people would challenge him on transhumanism, he had an evaded the subject. He didn't really own up to it. He would say, oh, well, it doesn't work anyway. Well, what are you saying when you say that,

Peter? Are you saying that if it did work, I'd be against it? Or are you saying if it did work guy before it or and I had the sense before it and it was this was just an evasive technique or you know sort of tactic to get around dealing with the real problem and that is just you know can we merge with the machine

are we infinitely are we just are we just machines made of meat as Marvin Mizki said or is there something fundamentally different about the human about human beings that we're not reducible to machines yeah it'd be interesting to his take on the Garden of Eden, for example. As soon as I saw with these transhumanists were pushing out there, it's like, that is just

a recycling of that. It doesn't even change much about what happened in the Garden of Eden and the fall of man. Right. Yeah, I think a lot of the folks who are naively pro-tech, really the challenge for them is how do they mount a defense when it comes to transhumanism? I think there are a lot of marvelous Christians out there that I would, I would, I kind of feel are naive when it comes to technology because they, they don't think about the kind of dystopian possibilities. And they're, they're just unwilling to take them seriously. But, you know, what, what are they going to say to their kids when their kids tell them that they want to have a neural ink implant or something like that?

Yeah, I think our big underestimation that we have, of course, not so much that the Christians underestimate the evil nature of man and what man is capable of doing from a moral standpoint. But I think Christians may be aware of that, but they're not aware of really what can be done with technology. And I think that's where the naivete comes in, in my opinion, from what I've said. It's like, you know, you can't imagine what somebody is going to do. In many cases, you look at somebody like Ted Bundy, and it's so far away. from your mindset, you can't imagine anybody would do something like that.

And that's how they can get us on the one side. But the same thing is happening with technology. You know, they can't imagine that something like this could actually be real. Yeah, I'm with you. I think that's the right take. And when it comes to those folks, I love them. But at the same time, I'm kind of exasperated by them. Because when I talk to them, I'll say, you know, I'm not making this stuff up.

I'm just quoting people. I'm not like quoting people that are way out on the fringes. I'm talking about people that are like, you know, the inventors of the technology and work with it every day. You know, Demas Hasibis or, you know, Mustafa Suleiman or, you know, Jeffrey Hinton. And the list just goes on and on of the people who tell us, you know, this is what we're up to and get ready. Well, you know, I see that in politics a lot. We have a lot of times you'll see some crazy scheme of government that is Orwellian that they want to roll out on people. And a lot of times people say, ah, that's just, that's the sci-fi plot.

We've seen that movie before, right? And so they kind of dismiss it in a way. There's kind of a predictive programming that puts a narrative out there. And a lot of times people look at this and think that you're just imagining what you've already seen as a movie because they saw that movie as well. But I think there certainly is, I would eat, that's where I would think that a supernatural element comes in play there to kind of put out the plot and put that to get people accustomed to it, right? To move the Overton window to that, but also to move it to what I would call, I guess, a kind of fantasy window so that if you talk about somebody actually trying to do that. And what we're seeing out of Hollywood is they are just basically repeating every kind of

dystopian sci-fi scenario that we've seen acted out in books and movies. They're trying to literally enact those things. We're just talking about the Tolkien Company's Andrew. They just came out with some tilt rotor autonomous weapon drones that look like they're straight out of the Terminator. And so they're just trying to. to recreate what they've already seen and fiction. So it's difficult for a lot of people to believe that that isn't just a movie fantasy

that we're channeling out there. Yeah, I think that's right. And when I mentioned the names of the people that I'm being essentially briefed by on all of this stuff, and we all are, I mean, they're readily available. These interviews are readily available on YouTube. And I mentioned the names of these people, even to, tech people who work in technology don't even know the names of these people. These are people like, you know, I've already mentioned a few times, Jeffrey Hinton.

He won the Nobel Prize for creating the technology. And I'll ask people, have you ever heard of Jeffrey Hinton? They'll say, no. I was like, you know, what do you do for a living? I'm an IT. I was like, I work with AI. I mean, do you have any idea who this guy is? And what he's saying, and just look him up.

Just look them up on YouTube. There's hundreds of places you can find them. Well, again, going back to some of the philosophical and historical stuff, they said that is he's so passionate about. And I guess that's the other issue as well. We've had so many people who have railed, like I have, against government regulation and overregulation and the safety net that you get tangled up in all the time.

I understand that, and a lot of people have pushed back against that. But he's doing it in a passionate way, tying it into an Antichrist system. I guess that's what's so different and so puzzling about it, especially when we look at his private life, this is really kind of strange. When you look at the fact that, as I mentioned before, many of us think that if there's going to be some kind of an Antichrist system, some kind of a beast system that's going to measure and control every activity that we do, that is the perfect tool.

What he is creating. That, I guess, is a strange contradiction at the heart of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, to give him a little bit of credit, he didn't start the whole thing. You know, he's part of the funding of a lot of the stuff, of course. But there's been a long lead up to what we were experiencing. And he's just one part of the, you know, larger story. Sure.

But he's certainly a guy who, because of his investing and because of his interests, is working for him. hard to realize some of this, some of the potential of this technology. Now, you know, as a realist, I have enough of a commitment to the, to the sovereignty of my country, you know, to want it to be able to defend itself from foreign actors who use this technology against us. And that's, that's, you know, what we see going on in China right now. They're just like a hair's breath behind us and the development of a lot of this stuff. So we're going to have to employ the technology

against the technology, I think. It's sort of like, you know, with nuclear weapons. You know, once you have them, you have them. I think... And of course, I think that also applies on an individual basis, you know, when we look at this and when we've seen people like Sam Altman go before Congress, he says, well, only a few of us should have control this technology. We can't just let everybody have this, right?

And I think that is a key thing that you have to be. able to to some degree defend yourself by using some of this technology in the sense that some the people came up with encryption, you know, early days at PGP and some other things. I think the guy's name was Zimmerman, if I remember correctly. But they're specifically using their technology to shield from this surveillance technology that the government had. And I think there'll be an application for that as well with artificial intelligence. Yeah, I think that's right. And I have a number, I think I mentioned last time we spoke that I have friends who were in Silicon Valley and working in this area. And they're disturbed by what some of their colleagues think about the tech and what they want to do with it.

At the same time, we really need good people, good solid people helping us to develop applications of the technology. Because it is a general purpose technology. It can be used for all sorts of things to protect us from the malicious use of the tech. and also to provide us with maybe ways to care for ourselves and our families that wouldn't necessarily come to mind for, say, secular humanists. So, again, I've got a very mixed set of feelings about all of this. I wish we didn't have to deal with this. It's sort of like getting back to Tolkien. I wish the ring hadn't come to me.

And the thing is, yeah. you do hold the ring because you do hold the solution to all of this. You know, as Christians, as pastors, or whatever, we have to be the ones who are going to carry that ring and who are going to try to, the real issue is the human behind the technology. I mean, it's just a tool, right? And so you can use a hammer to build a home or you can use it to kill somebody. And so the question is, how do we use these tools? That comes down to the person behind it.

And I thought it was kind of interesting. When I go back and I look at some of things that Peter Thiel was talking about, he's very fixated on, say, René Girard, for example. And I've seen a lot of Christian pastors who talk about that. Maybe you've got some insight into it. I don't really know anything about Renee Gerard. I don't really get into philosophy that much. But what I did see of it is, and it was a key insight that he had about human nature, I guess. You can get that insight from the Bible as well.

He said that we want things because we see somebody else with them, right? It's like, yeah, if you ever had a one-year-old or a two-year-old, you know, that's true, right? That's innate. That's built in. And, of course, it's also the thing that has built Madison Avenue in the whole advertising industry is, you know, the television and the ad industry is built on creating covetousness, right? And so God has addressed that throughout the Bible from the earliest days. And, of course, you know, it's addressed a lot in the teachings of Christ and the fact that contentment with Christ is great gain. and content with his provision and what he has for us in this life.

And I think that's one of the things that's going to keep us out of this kind of arms race type of mentality that we look to Christ for our protection provision. Yeah, I think that's right. And Gerard was actually, again, a Christian, but in an odd and unorthodox way. But he actually used the Christian faith as a way to speak about this. and noted that, you know, Christ's substitutionary atonement basically provided a kind of a way of escape from the worst features of this mimesis, this mimicry that we, you know, are subject to that you noted as part of, you know, our fallen human nature. But, you know, basically it's based on the fact that we are image bearers, you know, we have to look

somewhere to find something to reflect. So we should be looking to God, of course, because that's who we were made to reflect. But when we don't do that, and this is going to happen even with Christians. When they start looking around at other things, they'll get into some very bad places because they're looking to things

that they shouldn't look to find a meaning in life and all this kind of stuff. But anyway, Gerard is a very fascinating guy. Yes, I've read a number of his books. And Teal is very much a disciple of Gerard. That's for sure. I think he knew him personally. That's interesting. Yeah, you know, it's kind of when we look at it, the real essence that is there, it's not really focusing to me on Antichrist. It's really focusing on Christ. And I see that so many times in a lot of different denominations. It'll focus on revelations and they'll focus on eschatology and things like that. It's like, well, why don't we focus on

Christ instead of on the Antichrist. And really, what does that mean? You know, when we go back and we look at it, John was talking about the spirit of Antichrist is already in the world. And what is the spirit of any Christ? It denies Christ. It denies His incarnation. It denies him as the Messiah. Denies him as coming from God. And of course, that abounds everywhere. That really is the starting place, which we look at this. And I think the key thing is Christ said, whoever is not with us is against me. Whoever is not with me is against me. And whoever is not gathering together is scattering. And so the gathering together is gathering people together toward Christ rather than scattering them abroad on looking at all these other things that are out there.

All these shiny objects that we chase all the time, I guess. Yeah, I'm with you. I agree. Well, it is fascinating to look at this. and it is a bit of an enigma as we look at Peter Thiel. It's one I wanted to get you back on. I really appreciate you coming back on talking about that. It is strange to try to figure out who he's coming from.

Lance mentioned he said the problem with Teal is that he wants exceptions for his company, but he doesn't want to end regulations for everybody else. I have said that over and over again. I said, liberty is one of the things that you can't have unless you're willing to give it to other people, right? So a lot of times people want freedom in the area of their concern, but they're willing to crack down people in other areas. and certainly he is producing and funding some of these tools that will be used for that kind of crackdown, I think. So it is interesting.

It is the debate of our lifetime that we've got right here. I think it's a seminal moment. And I think your book is very important as a guide to surviving this AI apocalypse. I guess that book was not out there when you spoke. But that certainly is what we're looking at here is an AI apocalypse. and the true meaning of where this is going is truly hidden at this point, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, well, we'll find out. Yeah, that's right. It's going to be our lived experience.

Thank you so much for joining us. And again, the book is manmade, and it's by C.R. Wiley, and the subtitle is a St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse. And it just came out, by the way. It just came out a few days ago, didn't it? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on, David. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. And you can find that folks at Cannon Press. And you see that underneath his name there.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me again. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children.

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