Peter Thiel—the prominent tech entrepreneur and thinker—returns to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson to discuss his views on the end times, technology, and societal progress. Thiel delves into the historical and philosophical context of apocalyptic thinking, referencing biblical texts and the work of René Girard. He argues that modern technological advancements, such as nuclear weapons and AI, have apocalyptic potential and should be taken seriously. Be sure to come back for part two of this conversation in which Thiel discusses the concept of the Antichrist.
Recorded on October 8th, 2024
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>> Peter Robinson (00:00):
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
(00:02):
The end times. Armageddon. The Antichrist.
If you suppose the only peoplewho take those concepts seriously
are snake handlers in the hollersof Kentucky, think again.
Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
(00:28):
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.
Peter Thiel earned his undergraduate andlaw degrees here at Stanford.
He was a co-founder of PayPal, the firmthat all but invented FinTech, the first
outside investor in Facebook, the firmthat all but invented social networks.
And a co-founder of Palantir, the firmthat all but invented defense tech.
(00:51):
Although he's staying out of politicsthis year, Mr. Thiel has had a hand in
launching the careers of a number ofpolitical figures, including JD Vance.
Mr. Thiel speaks often on philosophy,religion, tech, and
society in forums as diverseas the Cambridge Union,
the Aspen Ideas Festival andthe Joe Rogan Experience.
(01:11):
You gave Joe Rogan three hours.
Peter, it's about time youcame back to this triathlon.
>> Peter Thiel (01:16):
I was trapped for three hours there.
>> Peter Robinson (01:17):
[LAUGH] Peter Thiel on the end times.
Today, by the way,this is going to be episode one of two,
our first conversation onthis very large topic.
Peter two quotations,Matthew 24:35-36, quote,
heaven and earth will pass away,but of that day and hour,
(01:38):
no one knows, not even the angelsof heaven, close quote.
Peter Thiel,we don't know the day and the hour,
but maybe we can guess the century,explain yourself.
>> Peter Thiel (01:52):
Well, man, this is a very broad topic.
It's in this larger question about
the extraordinary history of our time.
The modern world from maybeRenaissance onward has been this world
(02:12):
of ever progressing scientific andtechnological development.
And there is this very profound sensethat there are things that change.
There are dimensions of technology,military technology,
communications technology,where things are not timeless and eternal.
(02:33):
And there was a gunpowderrevolution in the 17th century and
that changed the social structure andthe political structure.
And there is a certain arc to history.
It's not just technology,but it is a driver.
And certainly, many differentways of getting at this, but
(02:54):
there certainly are dimensions ofthe technology that have become
extremely powerful in the last century ortwo that have an apocalyptic dimension.
And perhaps it's strange not to try torelate it to the biblical tradition.
If nuclear weapons can rain down fire andbrimstone and
(03:16):
destroy the world, and then we havea biblical tradition that maybe
doesn't say that this isinevitably going to happen.
But that something like this mightwell 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?
>> Peter Robinson (03:36):
So obviously,
we'll come in a moment to the analyses,to the signs of the end times.
But first a moment on whyyou'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,
(03:56):
because universities won't,which is odd in some ways.
The biblical framework,these texts may be 2000 years old,
but they've informed Western civilizationand taken up the time of scholarship.
Through these centuries,it has been an understanding in
Western culture at least,that history is going someplace.
(04:20):
And if there is an end point, no matterhow far off in the future it may be,
we're closer to it now than we were.
All right, soall of these seem to me plausible,
valid, and serious questions.
Why are universities illequipped to grapple with this?
>> Peter Thiel (04:37):
Well, that's very overdetermined, but certainly anything
that there's some relationship betweenthe university and the universe.
Where it is supposed to somehow,in its ideal form,
in its early modern,17th, 18th century form,
the university was supposed torepresent some kind of integration
(05:00):
of knowledge across a lot of disciplineswhere 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 maybethere also are practical reasons where
the amount of knowledge became toogreat for any single person to master.
(05:20):
And then you had ever division intoever narrower sub disciplines.
Adam Smith has this metaphor inthe 19th century of a pin factory,
where you're manufacturing pins and thereare 100 people in the pin factory and
they're all doing different things andnobody knows how to make a pin anymore.
So it's efficient, butit's this hyper specialization.
(05:41):
And there's probably been an analogto that on the university side, where
maybe someone like Goethe could stillunderstand something about everything.
Or Hilbert, a great mathematician around1900, could still understand all of math.
And he'd set these 25 problems forthe 20th century for
mathematicians to solve, in some ways setthe agenda for the field of mathematics.
(06:06):
And even as rigorous a subject area asmathematics in some ways has devolved into
something close to literary theory,
where one mathematician doesn'tknow what the other one's doing.
And it's sort of these veryincommensurate modes of discourse, and
anything that has to do with making senseof the larger whole has gotten badly lost.
(06:30):
And I've thought for
a long time that we need to ask a varietyof questions about the larger whole.
One kind of a scientific andtechnological question is simply,
are we still progressing aswe were in early modernity?
Are things by whatever metric you choose?
Are they getting better?
Is life expectancy going up?
Is the GDP increasing the quality oflife by various metrics going up?
(06:54):
Are we going faster, moving from planesto supersonic planes to space planes?
And that seems like a very basickind of macroeconomic question,
incredibly hard to ask, butsurely an important one.
And I've spoken about thisin many other contexts, but
(07:18):
my intuition is that in many places,there's been relative stagnation.
The hyperspecialization disguisesa certain type of decadence where you have
these narrow experts saying how wonderfulthey are, the cancer cell people sell,
cancer researchers say they're gonnacure cancer in the next five years.
And the string people say they'rethe smartest physicists and
(07:40):
they know everything.
But maybe it's just someweird academic power game
where they're blocking everybody else andon and on.
Even before we get to the big questionof history, there's a question just of
the history of science andtechnology, it progressed a lot.
(08:00):
Maybe it's progressing more slowly.
Why has that changed?
What's going on there?
>> Peter Robinson (08:04):
You said so.
Fragmentation, hyperspecialization in the university,
the feeling of kind ofdisintegration 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 ormaybe informs it.
(08:28):
But I've heard you say,I've got a quotation here from you.
Under the rationalist view, you can'teven talk about the end of your own life,
let alone the end of the world.
That there's somethingabout the regnant view,
I'm trying to resist the word ideologybecause ideology isn't quite the right.
But the way the university conducts itsbusiness rules out questions of life,
(08:55):
death, sin, redemption,the meaning of history.
So what I'm trying to getat is hyper specialization,
yes, is there also something else,
something about the regnant viewthat makes it very hard for
universities to grapplewith big questions.
>> Peter Thiel (09:17):
Yes, they seem hard to grapple with it,
why is probably harder to say.
Certainly if we do something likethe radical life extension project.
People in the 17th, 18th centurieswere very optimistic about it.
Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon,
(09:39):
you had all these ideas that you couldextend human lifespan by centuries.
As late as the late 19th, early 20thcentury, there was a movement called
cosmism in the sort of around the time ofthe Soviet Revolution, 1920s Soviet Union.
And it claimed that forthe revolution to succeed,
(10:02):
you had to physically resurrect allthe dead people using science and
workers of the world unite andto 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 youget to Stalin and the show trials and
the deaths seem to be going up,not down, but.
>> Peter Robinson (10:21):
There was a moment when they thought it might even be possible.
>> Peter Thiel (10:24):
There was an incredible ambition,
an incredible energy to modern science.
It was perhaps downstream fromChristianity, 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.
(10:45):
You don't need Christianity ifwe can do it through science.
And then there is a strange waythat the project in many dimensions
feels very exhausted.
Even though of course, people stillgenuflect science, they believe in
science with a capital S, butthe ambition has been really beaten out.
(11:05):
If you look at the individual scientists,
it's much less of this sort of heroic,bold figure,
breaks with dogmas andthinks for him or herself.
And it's much more in late modernity,you're just a robot in a ever smaller cog,
(11:26):
in an ever bigger machine orsomething like this.
>> Peter Robinson (11:30):
All right, this notion of the end of times in
the biblical framework, Rene Girard,
Rene Girard is an important figure here.
Professor of French literature hereat Stanford, but also a theologian,
I think it's fair to call hima theologian and philosopher.
(11:52):
Wrote very, very widely, althoughthat was outside his Stanford work.
You became friends with him,it happens that he was a neighbor of mine,
we both knew Rene.
All right, Rene Girard in 2009.
Few still talk about the apocalypse,the apocalypse,
of course, is the wordreferring to the destruction or
end of the world as describedin the book of Revelation.
(12:14):
Rene, few still talk about the apocalypse,and
they usually have a completelymythological conception of it.
Strangely, they do not see thatthe violence we ourselves are in
the process of amassing andthat is looming over our
own heads is entirely sufficientto trigger the worst, close quote.
(12:34):
So there we come to the first questionabout how you understand these things.
The apocalypse aspresented in the biblical
framework as symbols ofspiritual realities, or
the apocalypse as a plain prediction abouthow the world could, or indeed will end.
>> Peter Thiel (12:54):
Yeah, let's see, it is the way Girard 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 predictionof what humans are likely to do.
In a world in which they haveever more powerful technologies,
(13:15):
in which there are no sacred limitson the use of these technologies,
in which human nature has maybe notgotten worse, but has not gotten better.
And it has this sort of limitless
violence aspect to it.
(13:38):
I think Gerard had all theseprovocative formulations,
like, it is just a scientificprediction of what humanity is
likely to do in a world ofever more powerful technology.
And then there sort of are all thesedifferent things one can say in
terms of the biblicalapocalyptic accounts.
(13:59):
But Girard was very skeptical of the ideathat somehow the violence came from God.
And he always thought that atheists andfundamentalists disagree on the secondary
and relatively not so importantquestion of whether or not God exists.
But they agree on the far more importantquestion that one of God's attributes
(14:22):
is violence, and so the violence comesfrom God and this is the new atheist.
>> Peter Robinson (14:28):
In the evangelical view,
the destruction of the world is Godexercising justice on the world.
>> Peter Thiel (14:34):
It is, yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (14:35):
Right.
>> Peter Thiel (14:36):
It's some version of justice.
>> Peter Robinson (14:39):
Anger wrath.
>> Peter Thiel (14:40):
Some version of the anger wrath of God and
then the atheist one'sa little bit stranger because
you don't really believe God exists butstill it's not humanity.
Humanity is not thatdangerous at least in sort of
(15:02):
the mainstream lock inRousseauian accounts.
>> Peter Robinson (15:07):
So you've made the point I must admit I'd forgotten this.
You've made the point that Reneused to observe that the church
the Catholic Church in its liturgy andin homilies used to make quite a lot
of the end times and warn people toprepare for judgment and so forth.
(15:28):
Up until 1945 when the church seemsto have decided to go easier on
that because people needed comfort morethan exhortation about the end times.
Obvious point what happened in 1945>> Peter Thiel: well we got nuclear
weapons and the stuff became realin a way that seemed completely
(15:49):
implausible in the 17th,18th century I mean when people were
writing about these things inthe 18th even 19th century it was.
The idea that the world was just too big aplace, it could not possibly be destroyed,
we didn't believe God would do it.
We no longer believed that God was so
violent that God would do iteven if you believed he existed.
(16:13):
And then the technology wasgetting more powerful, but
it didn't quite seem possible todo something on a worldwide scale.
The Napoleonic wars are quite violent.
World War I is significantly worse, but
it's still somehow localized,it's not the whole planet.
(16:37):
And then there is something that getsreleased with nuclear weapons and
maybe even more withthermonuclear weapons.
And then you end up buildingnot dozens but thousands and
thousands of them in the 60s and 70s.
Rene's point that the apocalyptic literature correctly read is
simply a prediction of what human beingswill do to each other suddenly becomes.
(16:59):
Up until 1945, he says, wait a minute,
how could human beings possibly beresponsible for the end of the world?
And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the answer is only too obvious.
>> Peter Thiel (17:10):
There's liberal theologian writing in 1780.
The argument for why you should readapocalyptic literature is because
occasionally you get these millenarianmovements and people go crazy.
And it's worth reminding yourselvesof the madness of crowds.
And then the secondary reason youcan read it is for your amusement.
(17:31):
And that was sort of the Enlightenmentoptimism circa 1780.
And there were all theseincredibly scary ideas.
The Antichrist would kill so many people,
he would come with a crematorium to burnthe bodies of all the people he killed.
The sort of lurid medievalnotions people had.
And of course then afterthe end of Hitler in 1945,
(17:55):
this stuff just wasn't so funny anymore.
And then Girard's intuitionwas that it's almost
like when a knowledge becomes too real andtoo close.
I don't like psychological repression orsomething like this, but
you wanna sort of steer away from it.
>> Peter Robinson (18:14):
We can't bear to look at it.
>> Peter Thiel (18:16):
We don't want to talk about it quite as much.
We need to reassure people.
We need to tell people this isnot really what it's about.
And of course,
there were all these strange elementsof the mythical that were brought in.
It was named after all theseterrible gods from ancient Greece.
Saturn, the God who ate his own children.
And Zeus throws down thunderbolts, and
(18:38):
we have fire raining down withJupiter rockets from the heavens.
So there was this strangereturn of the mythical in this
very in the equations of the physicists.
>> Peter Robinson (18:51):
Development since 1940 Again, Rene,
the violence we ourselvesare in the process of amassing.
So development since 1945,two quotations here,
Sir Martin Rees in his 2003 book Our FinalCentury, there's a cheerful title for you.
The nuclear threat will be overshadowed byothers that could be as destructive and
(19:13):
far less controllable.
Advanced technology will offer newinstruments for creating terror and
devastation.
Instant universal communicationswill amplify their societal impact,
this is over 20 years ago.
Disastrous accidents, for instance,the unintended creation or
release of a noxious,fast spreading pathogen are possible.
(19:34):
I think the odds are no betterthan fifty-fifty that we will
survive to the end of the present century.
Quotation two Revelation 16:16 andthe demonic spirits
assembled the kings at the placethat in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
I want to get the word Armageddonin here because you use it,
(19:59):
it's important in your analysis.
Okay, so the notion is the idea of some
kind of final cataclysmic event.
Revelation tells us that in a bookwritten some 2,000 years ago,
Martin Rees book is written 21 years ago.
(20:19):
And it's all entirely plausible.
>> Peter Thiel (20:22):
Sure, and I think there is a way we can come back to this in
describing all of this in a much morerationalist, non theological way.
So you can talk about existential risk andthere is existential risk of nuclear war.
There's existential risk of bioweapons or
(20:45):
dangerously engineered bioweapons,maybe of AI and
killer robots orautonomous weapon systems guided by AI.
There is existential riskaround the environment,
maybe not just climate change, but maybethere's all sorts of other dimensions
where there's some argumentwe have one planet and
(21:08):
you wanna be a little bit careful andnot mess it up totally.
>> Peter Robinson (21:11):
Peter on AI I've never had a chance to just put this one to you.
I don't know as much aboutit as you obviously, but
I've been aware of a technology thatwas so polarizing from the get go.
There are plenty of people who say,
calm down, AI is gonna lead to onemedical breakthrough after another.
It'll produce such abundance thatwe don't need to worry about jobs.
(21:33):
We'll be able to provide forour, that's one.
And then of course there's this otherstrain that we'll have military.
Well, here, Henry Kissinger,I found this quotation from a book,
Kissinger's last book, which he wrote withEric Schmidt, quote, if you imagine a war
between China and the United States,you have artificial intelligence weapons.
Nobody has really tested these thingson a broad scale, and you can't tell
(21:57):
exactly what will happen when AIfighter planes on both sides interact.
So you are then in a world of potentiallytotal destructiveness, close quote.
And your view,how are we to understand AI?
>> Peter Thiel (22:12):
Well, partially it's unknown,
it can mean a lot of different things.
It's poorly defined, AI can meanthe next generation of computers,
the last generation of computers,anything in between.
I think the classic definition of AI wassomething that passed the Turing test and
that could fool you into thinking it wasa human being in some sense that had
(22:36):
not been passed, but was passedby ChatGPT in late 22, early 23.
And sothat is a pretty significant development.
>> Peter Robinson (22:45):
And does it feel like an inflection point as important as 1945?
>> Peter Thiel (22:50):
I think it's on par, let's say, in the computer world,
I think it's on par withthe Internet in the late 90s.
And then there are somany different ways it can
be applied that are good andthat are dangerous that
it's hard to know how toquite wait them all out.
(23:14):
If I had to score the Silicon Valleydebate, I'm not on the Luddite side.
I always try to be moreon the protect side.
But if I had to score it as a debate,
I do believe the effectivealtruists are winning the argument.
And the argument is something like,
there are a lot of dangerous cornercases with this technology and
(23:36):
we should be really careful,we don't quite know how it's gonna work.
Maybe it doesn't becomea godlike intelligence,
which is some of the sort offuturistic transhumanist nonsense.
But it could just be this autonomousweapon system on a drone where we
want to make them autonomous,because if you have a human in the loop,
(23:58):
the human gets jammed.
So.
There's a logic to a lot of these things.
And then there are aspects that becomemore first strike type weapons.
And there's some kind of crazy armsrace between the US and communist China.
Then how does this affectthat arms race and change it?
So there are sort of a lotof questions like that.
(24:22):
I would say the larger existentialrisk point that I always made is that
there's a way in which the people whoare worried about these existential risks.
And you can also criticize them.
You can criticize them forbeing Luddites and etc.
But you can also criticize them fornot being apocalyptic enough.
(24:44):
Because most of the time,they're just focused on one.
It's like the nuclear weapons peopleare still just talking about nukes.
And Greta, she's, it's just the climate.
She's not worried about AI and she'snot worried about nukes, and much less
the COVID virus that was bioengineeredin the Wuhan lab or something like this.
(25:08):
And then I've often thought you shouldget 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 andhow to prioritize them.
And in some sense, the scary answeris there's some truth to all of them.
And then if we were to do that exercisefully, what I would wanna do is I would
(25:32):
also like to throw in one moreexistential risk that, in my mind,
is as big as all these technologicalrisks of the nuclear war and
runaway bioweapons and weaponizedAI with autonomous weapon systems.
And that's the risk ofa totalitarian one-world government.
(25:54):
And again, with all the other existentialrisks, it's hard to know how to
measure these things probabilisticallybecause we only have one world.
Once you get a totalitarian one-worldgovernment, you can't reverse it.
And then the reason I liketo throw that risk in
(26:15):
is that it seems to methat the implicit solution
to existential risks ofall the other sorts is
to lean in to a sort ofvery non-democratic,
one-world state thatwill highly regulate and
(26:36):
stop these technologies.
And if Greta gets everyone onthe planet to ride a bicycle,
maybe that's a way tosolve climate change, but
it has sort of this quality of goingfrom the frying pan into the fire.
>> Peter Robinson (26:51):
Right, again, if I understand your argument,
this is already clear in the way we leadour lives in this slowing of progress.
Now, this, it seems to me,
is worth dwelling on because itshows that the fear is real and
(27:11):
has genuine effects in the waywe all lead our lives.
But we have to spend a moment ortwo defining it.
So if I may,let me start with a quotation from you.
There has been a narrow cone of progressaround computers, the Internet,
and maybe now artificial intelligence.
But if tech meansproducing more with less,
(27:32):
then we should be seeing dramaticeconomic progress, we don't.
The millennials are not dramaticallybetter off than their boomer parents,
close quote.
Okay, soyou mentioned it a moment ago, but
return to this notion ofslowing technical progress.
(27:53):
This great disappointment, by contrast,what we see around us today,
what we feel around us today,by contrast with a century or so ago.
>> Peter Thiel (28:00):
Or even late 60s.
>> Peter Robinson (28:03):
Yes, yes, okay.
>> Peter Thiel (28:04):
Jensen's Star Trek, the sort of optimistic science fiction of
the 50s and 60s where, yeah,we'd have flying cars,
you'd have supersonic aviation everywhere,all sorts of cures for diseases.
And yes, there was an incredible amountof progress in this world of bits,
much less in the world of atoms.
(28:24):
I always think a lot of what we do isembedded in this physical world of atoms.
And so when that slows,that's definitely felt as quite stagnant.
The question I always then get at,and then you get into endless debates,
is this true, oris there still a lot of progress?
How would one measure it?
(28:45):
I tend to measure it in thingslike these economic terms
in the way that the average millennial ishaving a tougher time than their boomer
parents at the same point in life.
And so at least there's something,even if we're not completely stuck,
it's in some sense not reallymoving as fast as it used to.
And then there's alwaysa question of why this is.
>> Peter Robinson (29:07):
Right. >> Peter Thiel
why questions are overdetermined.
And as a libertarian, I alwayslike to say it's too regulated and
the FDA regulates the drugs too much.
And 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 libertariananti-regulatory thing.
(29:31):
There is a argument that the schoolsaren't teaching people and
they're not teachingpeople to be scientists.
Some of the educationalinstitutions are broken.
There's sort of an anti-liberal argument.
Some truth in all of this.
>> Peter Thiel (29:43):
There is a Tyler Cowen argument that somehow,
the low-hanging fruit was picked.
There was a bunch ofeasy discoveries to make.
And now,nature's cupboard is kind of bare, and
you have to reach really hardto make a modest discovery.
And maybe that's true.
Maybe that's just sort of a self-servingexcuse of baby boomers who didn't do
(30:04):
as much as the generations that camebefore, but it is very striking.
One way to quantify this, even if wesay the rate of progress in broad
fields is the same as it was 100years ago, not that it's slowed.
But even if we say it's the same,if you think of PhDs,
there are probably 100 times as manyPhDs today as there were in, say, 1924.
(30:28):
And so it's the same rate of progress.
And the average PhD is 99% less productivethan people were 100 years ago.
And that doesn't seem like a veryhealthy scientific ecosystem.
So there's some sensethat maybe it slowed.
But the overarching explanationthat I've come to think is a very
(30:51):
important one is just this idea that,in some way, science and
technology were this trap thathumanity was building for itself.
That there were theseapocalyptic risks and
maybe going very slow was better
(31:12):
than racing towards Armageddon.
And so, yeah, I was born in 1967.
I always often expressfrustration that I'm stuck
in these office buildings orhouses that are decades old.
(31:32):
There are all these parts ofour society that feel lame,
slow-changing, low energy,low testosterone, nothing is going on.
And then I do wonder if wewere in a Jetsons type world,
we might not even be sittinghere to talk about it.
It might have self-destructed by that.
>> Peter Robinson (31:52):
Right.
>> Peter Thiel (31:53):
If you had a JFK as president on amphetamines going mano
a mano with Khrushchev, it worked.
In 1962, would it have worked every time?
>> Peter Robinson (32:04):
So, by the way, someplace, I didn't make a note of this,
but someplace I saw you say thatFacebook had ten years of good press.
In other words, ten years of optimism,
before the project sort ofcurdled in the public mind.
And that AI went from good to bad inabout a month, this loss of optimism.
(32:26):
So I have a quotation here,there are many explanations for
this deceleration in tech, this is you.
But the explanation I believe,tech got scary.
We're leery of it now, we're notembracing it in the way that we used to.
Add to that the notion that,again, I'm thinking this through,
(32:47):
but I'm putting it to you as a question.
This isn't the way things were supposedto be when the Cold War ended, right?
>> Peter Thiel (32:56):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (32:58):
Russia was supposed to work, there was democracy and
free markets.
And instead, we have this crazy man,Putin invading Ukraine.
By now there should havebeen at least some kind of
rudimentary peace in the Mid East.
Perhaps the most striking contradictionof what we expect was that by now,
(33:18):
China was supposed to be democratic.
It was supposed to follow the patternof South Korea and Taiwan,
where first you have economic growth, andeconomic growth creates expectations,
including expectations of freedom,free speech, and so forth.
And these countries become democratic.
China was supposed to follow that path,
(33:39):
things are not going the waythey were supposed to.
Add to that, our own sense ofpolarization in this country,
that this country somehow, and there'sjust a lot of feeling of, it's subjective.
It's very difficult to get at, but
it feels to me as though there'sa lot of free floating dread.
>> Peter Thiel (34:01):
And it's hard to articulate.
I'll give one example, andyou can think about this what you will.
But a lot of my conservative friendsare very critical of Fauci and
all the lockdowns and the masks and
the social distancing andthe vaccine that didn't really work.
And on the surface level, these critiquesare, I think, quite legitimate.
(34:25):
It was not the correct protocol forsome kind of flu.
It was, however, roughly,
the right protocol if youthought it was a bioweapon.
If you think it's a very dangerous,humanly engineered bioweapon,
those are roughly all the kindsof things that you might do.
(34:49):
And so, the kind of critiqueI have of Fauci is that,
yeah, that's what he was scared of,I think.
That's the way I'd steel man him,give him the benefit of the doubt.
And then the real critique is that,
you weren't supposed to infantilizeour population and not talk about it.
And that's what he was scared about,and he was so scared about it,
(35:11):
he couldn't even talk about it.
And there probably are a lot of thingslike this where, yeah, there is this
pretty inchoate fear, but we're so scaredwe can't even talk about it cogently.
>> Peter Robinson (35:24):
There's one more concept we need to flesh out,
a term that you use.
We'll put all the pieces of this together,although that may happen in the second
part of our conversation,and that is the katechon.
The term comes from the Greek forhe, or that which restrains.
We'll come in a moment, to your analysisof the katechon through history, but
(35:48):
first, again, the concept itself.
St. Paul in his letter tothe Thessalonians, chapter 2 verse 6 to 7,
and now you know what is restraining,again, in Greek, katechon.
And now you know what is restraining,that he may be revealed in his own time.
For the mystery of lawlessnessis already at work,
(36:08):
only he who restrains the Ketachon,he who now restrains will do so
until he is taken out of the way,close quote.
Now, that's a very enigmatic passage.
The Church has never defined the term.
The Church fathers, the early writers andthinkers in the Church,
wrote about it, but tended to addthat their views were speculative.
(36:32):
So we don't have any thoroughlyworked out theology of the catacomb,
but we do have, 2,000 years ago in St.
Paul, a notion of someforce holding back chaos,
holding back evil,some force that's restraining.
(36:56):
We get to Cardinal Newman, writing inthe 19th century, Cardinal Newman,
the great thinker andtheologian, in my judgment,
the best prose stylist ofthe whole century, in English.
Cardinal Newman writes, we know fromprophecy that the present framework of
society and government is that whichwithholdeth, again, the Katechon.
So he identifies it with a frameworkof society and government.
(37:19):
All right, that's my little effort topresent the concept of the katechon.
You use that concept how,you identify the katechon through history.
>> Peter Thiel (37:31):
Yeah, as you said, it's a rather mysterious concept,
you can identify it with the goodaspects of the Roman Empire,
certain political aspects ofthe Roman Catholic Church, individuals.
Institutions that somehow are trying
to hold this runaway chaos in check.
(37:55):
I don't think it's purely reactionary,you can think of Metternich
post Napoleon as sort of katechomatic,but he's also modernizing it.
It is a thing of history, though.
And so, there are ways todo it that can be good for
a time, but that will notnecessarily work for all times.
(38:19):
But I would always maybe go backto the apocalyptic specter,
would be Antichrist or Armageddon.
And I think there is a lotin this runaway science
technology that's pushing ustowards something like Armageddon.
(38:44):
And then there is the naturalpushback on this is,
we will avoid Armageddonby having a one world
state that has real teeth, real power.
And the biblical term forthat is the Antichrist.
And the Christian intuition I have is,
(39:07):
I don't want Antichrist,I don't want Armageddon.
I would like to find some narrow pathbetween these two where we can avoid both.
And then certainly, there are waysthat you defer it if you can,
you try to do new things.
(39:29):
I don't think it's a purelyreactionary thing.
It's not a pure Benedictine option whereyou just retreat into a monastery or
something like that.
I think that's the mostaccelerationist thing possible.
>> Peter Robinson (39:46):
You quit resisting.
>> Peter Thiel (39:47):
You quit, it sort of clears the field, it's like the Lord Acton
line, all that is necessary for evilto triumph is that good men do nothing.
And so this is where I'm always, it can bethe Benedictine option, it can be good for
Personal sanctification, butto the extent we're [CROSSTALK] talking
about society, our first->> Peter Robinson: Rod Dreher wrote a book
about this,
the idea of going to the [INAUDIBLE] theidea is that Christians simply drop out.
(40:10):
Society is going in the wrong direction,and Christians simply drop out,
that's roughly the idea.
I don't want to argue with him on the level of
personal sanctification orpeople saving their souls.
My political,social intuition is that it's the height
of your responsibility becausethat is just, in effect,
(40:32):
hitting the accelerator towardsthe Antichrist, Armageddon.
>> Peter Robinson (40:36):
Okay, let's finish this first part of our conversation with more
on the Antichrist, let me takea moment to set this up, if I may.
A few passages from Scripture,Daniel, chapter 7,
in the first year of Belshazzar,king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream.
There before me was a beast, fearful,terrifying, very strong, it had great
(41:00):
iron teeth, and it ate its victims andtrampled their remains underfoot.
Second Thessalonians,chapter 2, we're back to St.
Paul, he's writing about the end times.
It cannot happen until therehas appeared the wicked one,
the lost one, the enemy who raiseshimself above every object of worship and
flaunts the claim that he is God.
(41:22):
Revelation, chapter 13, then I sawa beast emerge from the sea, and
they prostrated themselves infront of the beast, saying,
who can compare with the beast,who can fight against it?
And all the people of the worldwill worship it, close quote.
There are people who takeall of this seriously,
(41:42):
we've already quoted Rene Girard.
We've already quoted Cardinal Newman,but Daniel dates from the Iron Age.
Thessalonians and Revelation are 2000years old, contemporary society.
We sit here in Stanford University,contemporary society all but
(42:02):
ignores these texts or derides them.
Of interest only to snake handlers,as I mentioned,
stake handlers in Kentucky hollers,you are no snake handler.
>> Peter Thiel (42:14):
Well- >> Peter Robinson
Not that I'm aware of,no.
>> Peter Robinson (42:17):
Not that you're aware of [LAUGH] not that I'm aware of, so
we'll come to howthe Antichrist might arise.
What we must do to prevent, we'll cometo that in our second conversation.
But the first thing I want to establishis why do you take this seriously?
>> Peter Thiel (42:31):
Well, again,
one can take it seriously withouttaking it completely literally.
But just let me maybe defend Daniel,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
(42:53):
the Peloponnesian wars between Athens andSparta.
And it has a timeless andeternal character,
it's the rising power against the existingpower, Athens is the rising power.
And the Thucydides trap is when thisrepeats itself with Wilhelmine Germany
against Britain in 1914, orperhaps today, China against the US.
(43:15):
It's timeless, internal,the particulars don't matter,
the speeches people give don't matter,Thucydides makes them up.
And it's sort of like a natural,cyclical kind of a view
of history orone where there is no specific history.
And then, by contrast,I do not think it's an exaggeration
(43:37):
to say something like,Daniel was the first historian where
the things that matter are one time andworld historical.
And there was a creation,there was a fall,
there's a Mosaic revelation->> Peter Robinson: History going
someplace.
It's going somewhere, and the choices people make matter,
(43:59):
and some of the choicesmatter in a very big way.
And there's a way that Christ'sministry and death and
resurrection was a part of history ora hinge moment of history.
And then there are ways it continues, andI think that's sort of a feel for history.
(44:20):
And something like Hegelis just a pale shadow
of the Judeo-Christian sense of history.
Again, you have to qualifythis very carefully,
but you could say thatthe New Testament God
is the first progressive becausethe new supersedes the old.
(44:42):
And so it's the first time that there is
something new just byvirtue of it being new.
There's something new thatcomes in through history,
all these ways you have to qualify.
If you go too progressive, you get tosomething like Marcion or Marx, but
if you say it's all in the Old Testament,that's somehow not quite right either.
>> Peter Robinson (45:04):
So you take it seriously because you don't believe
history is Groundhog Day.
It doesn't happen over andover again, this cyclical aspect,
the eternal recurrence.
Then in some fundamental way, themeaninglessness of it, history is going
someplace, and if it's going someplace,that means there will be an end point.
>> Peter Thiel (45:27):
And there are important things that will happen that
are different from thingsthat happened in the past.
And so if we want to have a feel forour times,
what is going on in the worldin the early 21st century,
there are ways we can try toreference it to the past.
(45:52):
You can say there's some parallel betweenthe decline of the United States and
the fall of the Roman Empire, but thedifferences are surely really important.
It's happening in a worldof nuclear weapons and
instantaneous communication, andit's happening in a very post Christian or
hyper Christian world,not in a pagan world.
(46:15):
And somehow the classicalapproaches to history always
downplay the things that are onetime unique, world historical,
and I think we should takeour bearings more from that.
>> Peter Robinson (46:32):
Peter Thiel, thank you. Join us for part 2.
This is a sentence Inever thought I'd utter.
Join us for part two to hear aboutthe Antichrist, for Uncommon Knowledge,
the Hoover Institution andFox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge.
(00:02):
The end times. Armageddon. The Antichrist.
If you suppose the only peoplewho take those concepts seriously
are snake handlers in the hollersof Kentucky, think again.
Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now.
[MUSIC]
(00:28):
Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.
Peter Thiel earned his undergraduate andlaw degrees here at Stanford.
He was a co-founder of PayPal, the firmthat all but invented FinTech, the first
outside investor in Facebook, the firmthat all but invented social networks.
And a co-founder of Palantir, the firmthat all but invented defense tech.
(00:51):
Although he's staying out of politicsthis year, Mr. Thiel has had a hand in
launching the careers of a number ofpolitical figures, including JD Vance.
Mr. Thiel speaks often on philosophy,religion, tech, and
society in forums as diverseas the Cambridge Union,
the Aspen Ideas Festival andthe Joe Rogan Experience.
(01:11):
You gave Joe Rogan three hours.
Peter, it's about time youcame back to this triathlon.
>> Peter Thiel (01:16):
I was trapped for three hours there.
>> Peter Robinson (01:17):
[LAUGH] Peter Thiel on the end times.
Today, by the way,this is going to be episode one of two,
our first conversation onthis very large topic.
Peter two quotations,Matthew 24:35-36, quote,
heaven and earth will pass away,but of that day and hour,
(01:38):
no one knows, not even the angelsof heaven, close quote.
Peter Thiel,we don't know the day and the hour,
but maybe we can guess the century,explain yourself.
>> Peter Thiel (01:52):
Well, man, this is a very broad topic.
It's in this larger question about
the extraordinary history of our time.
The modern world from maybeRenaissance onward has been this world
(02:12):
of ever progressing scientific andtechnological development.
And there is this very profound sensethat there are things that change.
There are dimensions of technology,military technology,
communications technology,where things are not timeless and eternal.
(02:33):
And there was a gunpowderrevolution in the 17th century and
that changed the social structure andthe political structure.
And there is a certain arc to history.
It's not just technology,but it is a driver.
And certainly, many differentways of getting at this, but
(02:54):
there certainly are dimensions ofthe technology that have become
extremely powerful in the last century ortwo that have an apocalyptic dimension.
And perhaps it's strange not to try torelate it to the biblical tradition.
If nuclear weapons can rain down fire andbrimstone and
(03:16):
destroy the world, and then we havea biblical tradition that maybe
doesn't say that this isinevitably going to happen.
But that something like this mightwell 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?
>> Peter Robinson (03:36):
So obviously,
we'll come in a moment to the analyses,to the signs of the end times.
But first a moment on whyyou'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,
(03:56):
because universities won't,which is odd in some ways.
The biblical framework,these texts may be 2000 years old,
but they've informed Western civilizationand taken up the time of scholarship.
Through these centuries,it has been an understanding in
Western culture at least,that history is going someplace.
(04:20):
And if there is an end point, no matterhow far off in the future it may be,
we're closer to it now than we were.
All right, soall of these seem to me plausible,
valid, and serious questions.
Why are universities illequipped to grapple with this?
>> Peter Thiel (04:37):
Well, that's very overdetermined, but certainly anything
that there's some relationship betweenthe university and the universe.
Where it is supposed to somehow,in its ideal form,
in its early modern,17th, 18th century form,
the university was supposed torepresent some kind of integration
(05:00):
of knowledge across a lot of disciplineswhere 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 maybethere also are practical reasons where
the amount of knowledge became toogreat for any single person to master.
(05:20):
And then you had ever division intoever narrower sub disciplines.
Adam Smith has this metaphor inthe 19th century of a pin factory,
where you're manufacturing pins and thereare 100 people in the pin factory and
they're all doing different things andnobody knows how to make a pin anymore.
So it's efficient, butit's this hyper specialization.
(05:41):
And there's probably been an analogto that on the university side, where
maybe someone like Goethe could stillunderstand something about everything.
Or Hilbert, a great mathematician around1900, could still understand all of math.
And he'd set these 25 problems forthe 20th century for
mathematicians to solve, in some ways setthe agenda for the field of mathematics.
(06:06):
And even as rigorous a subject area asmathematics in some ways has devolved into
something close to literary theory,
where one mathematician doesn'tknow what the other one's doing.
And it's sort of these veryincommensurate modes of discourse, and
anything that has to do with making senseof the larger whole has gotten badly lost.
(06:30):
And I've thought for
a long time that we need to ask a varietyof questions about the larger whole.
One kind of a scientific andtechnological question is simply,
are we still progressing aswe were in early modernity?
Are things by whatever metric you choose?
Are they getting better?
Is life expectancy going up?
Is the GDP increasing the quality oflife by various metrics going up?
(06:54):
Are we going faster, moving from planesto supersonic planes to space planes?
And that seems like a very basickind of macroeconomic question,
incredibly hard to ask, butsurely an important one.
And I've spoken about thisin many other contexts, but
(07:18):
my intuition is that in many places,there's been relative stagnation.
The hyperspecialization disguisesa certain type of decadence where you have
these narrow experts saying how wonderfulthey are, the cancer cell people sell,
cancer researchers say they're gonnacure cancer in the next five years.
And the string people say they'rethe smartest physicists and
(07:40):
they know everything.
But maybe it's just someweird academic power game
where they're blocking everybody else andon and on.
Even before we get to the big questionof history, there's a question just of
the history of science andtechnology, it progressed a lot.
(08:00):
Maybe it's progressing more slowly.
Why has that changed?
What's going on there?
>> Peter Robinson (08:04):
You said so.
Fragmentation, hyperspecialization in the university,
the feeling of kind ofdisintegration 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 ormaybe informs it.
(08:28):
But I've heard you say,I've got a quotation here from you.
Under the rationalist view, you can'teven talk about the end of your own life,
let alone the end of the world.
That there's somethingabout the regnant view,
I'm trying to resist the word ideologybecause ideology isn't quite the right.
But the way the university conducts itsbusiness rules out questions of life,
(08:55):
death, sin, redemption,the meaning of history.
So what I'm trying to getat is hyper specialization,
yes, is there also something else,
something about the regnant viewthat makes it very hard for
universities to grapplewith big questions.
>> Peter Thiel (09:17):
Yes, they seem hard to grapple with it,
why is probably harder to say.
Certainly if we do something likethe radical life extension project.
People in the 17th, 18th centurieswere very optimistic about it.
Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon,
(09:39):
you had all these ideas that you couldextend human lifespan by centuries.
As late as the late 19th, early 20thcentury, there was a movement called
cosmism in the sort of around the time ofthe Soviet Revolution, 1920s Soviet Union.
And it claimed that forthe revolution to succeed,
(10:02):
you had to physically resurrect allthe dead people using science and
workers of the world unite andto 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 youget to Stalin and the show trials and
the deaths seem to be going up,not down, but.
>> Peter Robinson (10:21):
There was a moment when they thought it might even be possible.
>> Peter Thiel (10:24):
There was an incredible ambition,
an incredible energy to modern science.
It was perhaps downstream fromChristianity, 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.
(10:45):
You don't need Christianity ifwe can do it through science.
And then there is a strange waythat the project in many dimensions
feels very exhausted.
Even though of course, people stillgenuflect science, they believe in
science with a capital S, butthe ambition has been really beaten out.
(11:05):
If you look at the individual scientists,
it's much less of this sort of heroic,bold figure,
breaks with dogmas andthinks for him or herself.
And it's much more in late modernity,you're just a robot in a ever smaller cog,
(11:26):
in an ever bigger machine orsomething like this.
>> Peter Robinson (11:30):
All right, this notion of the end of times in
the biblical framework, Rene Girard,
Rene Girard is an important figure here.
Professor of French literature hereat Stanford, but also a theologian,
I think it's fair to call hima theologian and philosopher.
(11:52):
Wrote very, very widely, althoughthat was outside his Stanford work.
You became friends with him,it happens that he was a neighbor of mine,
we both knew Rene.
All right, Rene Girard in 2009.
Few still talk about the apocalypse,the apocalypse,
of course, is the wordreferring to the destruction or
end of the world as describedin the book of Revelation.
(12:14):
Rene, few still talk about the apocalypse,and
they usually have a completelymythological conception of it.
Strangely, they do not see thatthe violence we ourselves are in
the process of amassing andthat is looming over our
own heads is entirely sufficientto trigger the worst, close quote.
(12:34):
So there we come to the first questionabout how you understand these things.
The apocalypse aspresented in the biblical
framework as symbols ofspiritual realities, or
the apocalypse as a plain prediction abouthow the world could, or indeed will end.
>> Peter Thiel (12:54):
Yeah, let's see, it is the way Girard 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 predictionof what humans are likely to do.
In a world in which they haveever more powerful technologies,
(13:15):
in which there are no sacred limitson the use of these technologies,
in which human nature has maybe notgotten worse, but has not gotten better.
And it has this sort of limitless
violence aspect to it.
(13:38):
I think Gerard had all theseprovocative formulations,
like, it is just a scientificprediction of what humanity is
likely to do in a world ofever more powerful technology.
And then there sort of are all thesedifferent things one can say in
terms of the biblicalapocalyptic accounts.
(13:59):
But Girard was very skeptical of the ideathat somehow the violence came from God.
And he always thought that atheists andfundamentalists disagree on the secondary
and relatively not so importantquestion of whether or not God exists.
But they agree on the far more importantquestion that one of God's attributes
(14:22):
is violence, and so the violence comesfrom God and this is the new atheist.
>> Peter Robinson (14:28):
In the evangelical view,
the destruction of the world is Godexercising justice on the world.
>> Peter Thiel (14:34):
It is, yeah.
>> Peter Robinson (14:35):
Right.
>> Peter Thiel (14:36):
It's some version of justice.
>> Peter Robinson (14:39):
Anger wrath.
>> Peter Thiel (14:40):
Some version of the anger wrath of God and
then the atheist one'sa little bit stranger because
you don't really believe God exists butstill it's not humanity.
Humanity is not thatdangerous at least in sort of
(15:02):
the mainstream lock inRousseauian accounts.
>> Peter Robinson (15:07):
So you've made the point I must admit I'd forgotten this.
You've made the point that Reneused to observe that the church
the Catholic Church in its liturgy andin homilies used to make quite a lot
of the end times and warn people toprepare for judgment and so forth.
(15:28):
Up until 1945 when the church seemsto have decided to go easier on
that because people needed comfort morethan exhortation about the end times.
Obvious point what happened in 1945>> Peter Thiel: well we got nuclear
weapons and the stuff became realin a way that seemed completely
(15:49):
implausible in the 17th,18th century I mean when people were
writing about these things inthe 18th even 19th century it was.
The idea that the world was just too big aplace, it could not possibly be destroyed,
we didn't believe God would do it.
We no longer believed that God was so
violent that God would do iteven if you believed he existed.
(16:13):
And then the technology wasgetting more powerful, but
it didn't quite seem possible todo something on a worldwide scale.
The Napoleonic wars are quite violent.
World War I is significantly worse, but
it's still somehow localized,it's not the whole planet.
(16:37):
And then there is something that getsreleased with nuclear weapons and
maybe even more withthermonuclear weapons.
And then you end up buildingnot dozens but thousands and
thousands of them in the 60s and 70s.
Rene's point that the apocalyptic literature correctly read is
simply a prediction of what human beingswill do to each other suddenly becomes.
(16:59):
Up until 1945, he says, wait a minute,
how could human beings possibly beresponsible for the end of the world?
And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the answer is only too obvious.
>> Peter Thiel (17:10):
There's liberal theologian writing in 1780.
The argument for why you should readapocalyptic literature is because
occasionally you get these millenarianmovements and people go crazy.
And it's worth reminding yourselvesof the madness of crowds.
And then the secondary reason youcan read it is for your amusement.
(17:31):
And that was sort of the Enlightenmentoptimism circa 1780.
And there were all theseincredibly scary ideas.
The Antichrist would kill so many people,
he would come with a crematorium to burnthe bodies of all the people he killed.
The sort of lurid medievalnotions people had.
And of course then afterthe end of Hitler in 1945,
(17:55):
this stuff just wasn't so funny anymore.
And then Girard's intuitionwas that it's almost
like when a knowledge becomes too real andtoo close.
I don't like psychological repression orsomething like this, but
you wanna sort of steer away from it.
>> Peter Robinson (18:14):
We can't bear to look at it.
>> Peter Thiel (18:16):
We don't want to talk about it quite as much.
We need to reassure people.
We need to tell people this isnot really what it's about.
And of course,
there were all these strange elementsof the mythical that were brought in.
It was named after all theseterrible gods from ancient Greece.
Saturn, the God who ate his own children.
And Zeus throws down thunderbolts, and
(18:38):
we have fire raining down withJupiter rockets from the heavens.
So there was this strangereturn of the mythical in this
very in the equations of the physicists.
>> Peter Robinson (18:51):
Development since 1940 Again, Rene,
the violence we ourselvesare in the process of amassing.
So development since 1945,two quotations here,
Sir Martin Rees in his 2003 book Our FinalCentury, there's a cheerful title for you.
The nuclear threat will be overshadowed byothers that could be as destructive and
(19:13):
far less controllable.
Advanced technology will offer newinstruments for creating terror and
devastation.
Instant universal communicationswill amplify their societal impact,
this is over 20 years ago.
Disastrous accidents, for instance,the unintended creation or
release of a noxious,fast spreading pathogen are possible.
(19:34):
I think the odds are no betterthan fifty-fifty that we will
survive to the end of the present century.
Quotation two Revelation 16:16 andthe demonic spirits
assembled the kings at the placethat in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
I want to get the word Armageddonin here because you use it,
(19:59):
it's important in your analysis.
Okay, so the notion is the idea of some
kind of final cataclysmic event.
Revelation tells us that in a bookwritten some 2,000 years ago,
Martin Rees book is written 21 years ago.
(20:19):
And it's all entirely plausible.
>> Peter Thiel (20:22):
Sure, and I think there is a way we can come back to this in
describing all of this in a much morerationalist, non theological way.
So you can talk about existential risk andthere is existential risk of nuclear war.
There's existential risk of bioweapons or
(20:45):
dangerously engineered bioweapons,maybe of AI and
killer robots orautonomous weapon systems guided by AI.
There is existential riskaround the environment,
maybe not just climate change, but maybethere's all sorts of other dimensions
where there's some argumentwe have one planet and
(21:08):
you wanna be a little bit careful andnot mess it up totally.
>> Peter Robinson (21:11):
Peter on AI I've never had a chance to just put this one to you.
I don't know as much aboutit as you obviously, but
I've been aware of a technology thatwas so polarizing from the get go.
There are plenty of people who say,
calm down, AI is gonna lead to onemedical breakthrough after another.
It'll produce such abundance thatwe don't need to worry about jobs.
(21:33):
We'll be able to provide forour, that's one.
And then of course there's this otherstrain that we'll have military.
Well, here, Henry Kissinger,I found this quotation from a book,
Kissinger's last book, which he wrote withEric Schmidt, quote, if you imagine a war
between China and the United States,you have artificial intelligence weapons.
Nobody has really tested these thingson a broad scale, and you can't tell
(21:57):
exactly what will happen when AIfighter planes on both sides interact.
So you are then in a world of potentiallytotal destructiveness, close quote.
And your view,how are we to understand AI?
>> Peter Thiel (22:12):
Well, partially it's unknown,
it can mean a lot of different things.
It's poorly defined, AI can meanthe next generation of computers,
the last generation of computers,anything in between.
I think the classic definition of AI wassomething that passed the Turing test and
that could fool you into thinking it wasa human being in some sense that had
(22:36):
not been passed, but was passedby ChatGPT in late 22, early 23.
And sothat is a pretty significant development.
>> Peter Robinson (22:45):
And does it feel like an inflection point as important as 1945?
>> Peter Thiel (22:50):
I think it's on par, let's say, in the computer world,
I think it's on par withthe Internet in the late 90s.
And then there are somany different ways it can
be applied that are good andthat are dangerous that
it's hard to know how toquite wait them all out.
(23:14):
If I had to score the Silicon Valleydebate, I'm not on the Luddite side.
I always try to be moreon the protect side.
But if I had to score it as a debate,
I do believe the effectivealtruists are winning the argument.
And the argument is something like,
there are a lot of dangerous cornercases with this technology and
(23:36):
we should be really careful,we don't quite know how it's gonna work.
Maybe it doesn't becomea godlike intelligence,
which is some of the sort offuturistic transhumanist nonsense.
But it could just be this autonomousweapon system on a drone where we
want to make them autonomous,because if you have a human in the loop,
(23:58):
the human gets jammed.
So.
There's a logic to a lot of these things.
And then there are aspects that becomemore first strike type weapons.
And there's some kind of crazy armsrace between the US and communist China.
Then how does this affectthat arms race and change it?
So there are sort of a lotof questions like that.
(24:22):
I would say the larger existentialrisk point that I always made is that
there's a way in which the people whoare worried about these existential risks.
And you can also criticize them.
You can criticize them forbeing Luddites and etc.
But you can also criticize them fornot being apocalyptic enough.
(24:44):
Because most of the time,they're just focused on one.
It's like the nuclear weapons peopleare still just talking about nukes.
And Greta, she's, it's just the climate.
She's not worried about AI and she'snot worried about nukes, and much less
the COVID virus that was bioengineeredin the Wuhan lab or something like this.
(25:08):
And then I've often thought you shouldget 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 andhow to prioritize them.
And in some sense, the scary answeris there's some truth to all of them.
And then if we were to do that exercisefully, what I would wanna do is I would
(25:32):
also like to throw in one moreexistential risk that, in my mind,
is as big as all these technologicalrisks of the nuclear war and
runaway bioweapons and weaponizedAI with autonomous weapon systems.
And that's the risk ofa totalitarian one-world government.
(25:54):
And again, with all the other existentialrisks, it's hard to know how to
measure these things probabilisticallybecause we only have one world.
Once you get a totalitarian one-worldgovernment, you can't reverse it.
And then the reason I liketo throw that risk in
(26:15):
is that it seems to methat the implicit solution
to existential risks ofall the other sorts is
to lean in to a sort ofvery non-democratic,
one-world state thatwill highly regulate and
(26:36):
stop these technologies.
And if Greta gets everyone onthe planet to ride a bicycle,
maybe that's a way tosolve climate change, but
it has sort of this quality of goingfrom the frying pan into the fire.
>> Peter Robinson (26:51):
Right, again, if I understand your argument,
this is already clear in the way we leadour lives in this slowing of progress.
Now, this, it seems to me,
is worth dwelling on because itshows that the fear is real and
(27:11):
has genuine effects in the waywe all lead our lives.
But we have to spend a moment ortwo defining it.
So if I may,let me start with a quotation from you.
There has been a narrow cone of progressaround computers, the Internet,
and maybe now artificial intelligence.
But if tech meansproducing more with less,
(27:32):
then we should be seeing dramaticeconomic progress, we don't.
The millennials are not dramaticallybetter off than their boomer parents,
close quote.
Okay, soyou mentioned it a moment ago, but
return to this notion ofslowing technical progress.
(27:53):
This great disappointment, by contrast,what we see around us today,
what we feel around us today,by contrast with a century or so ago.
>> Peter Thiel (28:00):
Or even late 60s.
>> Peter Robinson (28:03):
Yes, yes, okay.
>> Peter Thiel (28:04):
Jensen's Star Trek, the sort of optimistic science fiction of
the 50s and 60s where, yeah,we'd have flying cars,
you'd have supersonic aviation everywhere,all sorts of cures for diseases.
And yes, there was an incredible amountof progress in this world of bits,
much less in the world of atoms.
(28:24):
I always think a lot of what we do isembedded in this physical world of atoms.
And so when that slows,that's definitely felt as quite stagnant.
The question I always then get at,and then you get into endless debates,
is this true, oris there still a lot of progress?
How would one measure it?
(28:45):
I tend to measure it in thingslike these economic terms
in the way that the average millennial ishaving a tougher time than their boomer
parents at the same point in life.
And so at least there's something,even if we're not completely stuck,
it's in some sense not reallymoving as fast as it used to.
And then there's alwaysa question of why this is.
>> Peter Robinson (29:07):
Right. >> Peter Thiel
why questions are overdetermined.
And as a libertarian, I alwayslike to say it's too regulated and
the FDA regulates the drugs too much.
And 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 libertariananti-regulatory thing.
(29:31):
There is a argument that the schoolsaren't teaching people and
they're not teachingpeople to be scientists.
Some of the educationalinstitutions are broken.
There's sort of an anti-liberal argument.
Some truth in all of this.
>> Peter Thiel (29:43):
There is a Tyler Cowen argument that somehow,
the low-hanging fruit was picked.
There was a bunch ofeasy discoveries to make.
And now,nature's cupboard is kind of bare, and
you have to reach really hardto make a modest discovery.
And maybe that's true.
Maybe that's just sort of a self-servingexcuse of baby boomers who didn't do
(30:04):
as much as the generations that camebefore, but it is very striking.
One way to quantify this, even if wesay the rate of progress in broad
fields is the same as it was 100years ago, not that it's slowed.
But even if we say it's the same,if you think of PhDs,
there are probably 100 times as manyPhDs today as there were in, say, 1924.
(30:28):
And so it's the same rate of progress.
And the average PhD is 99% less productivethan people were 100 years ago.
And that doesn't seem like a veryhealthy scientific ecosystem.
So there's some sensethat maybe it slowed.
But the overarching explanationthat I've come to think is a very
(30:51):
important one is just this idea that,in some way, science and
technology were this trap thathumanity was building for itself.
That there were theseapocalyptic risks and
maybe going very slow was better
(31:12):
than racing towards Armageddon.
And so, yeah, I was born in 1967.
I always often expressfrustration that I'm stuck
in these office buildings orhouses that are decades old.
(31:32):
There are all these parts ofour society that feel lame,
slow-changing, low energy,low testosterone, nothing is going on.
And then I do wonder if wewere in a Jetsons type world,
we might not even be sittinghere to talk about it.
It might have self-destructed by that.
>> Peter Robinson (31:52):
Right.
>> Peter Thiel (31:53):
If you had a JFK as president on amphetamines going mano
a mano with Khrushchev, it worked.
In 1962, would it have worked every time?
>> Peter Robinson (32:04):
So, by the way, someplace, I didn't make a note of this,
but someplace I saw you say thatFacebook had ten years of good press.
In other words, ten years of optimism,
before the project sort ofcurdled in the public mind.
And that AI went from good to bad inabout a month, this loss of optimism.
(32:26):
So I have a quotation here,there are many explanations for
this deceleration in tech, this is you.
But the explanation I believe,tech got scary.
We're leery of it now, we're notembracing it in the way that we used to.
Add to that the notion that,again, I'm thinking this through,
(32:47):
but I'm putting it to you as a question.
This isn't the way things were supposedto be when the Cold War ended, right?
>> Peter Thiel (32:56):
Sure.
>> Peter Robinson (32:58):
Russia was supposed to work, there was democracy and
free markets.
And instead, we have this crazy man,Putin invading Ukraine.
By now there should havebeen at least some kind of
rudimentary peace in the Mid East.
Perhaps the most striking contradictionof what we expect was that by now,
(33:18):
China was supposed to be democratic.
It was supposed to follow the patternof South Korea and Taiwan,
where first you have economic growth, andeconomic growth creates expectations,
including expectations of freedom,free speech, and so forth.
And these countries become democratic.
China was supposed to follow that path,
(33:39):
things are not going the waythey were supposed to.
Add to that, our own sense ofpolarization in this country,
that this country somehow, and there'sjust a lot of feeling of, it's subjective.
It's very difficult to get at, but
it feels to me as though there'sa lot of free floating dread.
>> Peter Thiel (34:01):
And it's hard to articulate.
I'll give one example, andyou can think about this what you will.
But a lot of my conservative friendsare very critical of Fauci and
all the lockdowns and the masks and
the social distancing andthe vaccine that didn't really work.
And on the surface level, these critiquesare, I think, quite legitimate.
(34:25):
It was not the correct protocol forsome kind of flu.
It was, however, roughly,
the right protocol if youthought it was a bioweapon.
If you think it's a very dangerous,humanly engineered bioweapon,
those are roughly all the kindsof things that you might do.
(34:49):
And so, the kind of critiqueI have of Fauci is that,
yeah, that's what he was scared of,I think.
That's the way I'd steel man him,give him the benefit of the doubt.
And then the real critique is that,
you weren't supposed to infantilizeour population and not talk about it.
And that's what he was scared about,and he was so scared about it,
(35:11):
he couldn't even talk about it.
And there probably are a lot of thingslike this where, yeah, there is this
pretty inchoate fear, but we're so scaredwe can't even talk about it cogently.
>> Peter Robinson (35:24):
There's one more concept we need to flesh out,
a term that you use.
We'll put all the pieces of this together,although that may happen in the second
part of our conversation,and that is the katechon.
The term comes from the Greek forhe, or that which restrains.
We'll come in a moment, to your analysisof the katechon through history, but
(35:48):
first, again, the concept itself.
St. Paul in his letter tothe Thessalonians, chapter 2 verse 6 to 7,
and now you know what is restraining,again, in Greek, katechon.
And now you know what is restraining,that he may be revealed in his own time.
For the mystery of lawlessnessis already at work,
(36:08):
only he who restrains the Ketachon,he who now restrains will do so
until he is taken out of the way,close quote.
Now, that's a very enigmatic passage.
The Church has never defined the term.
The Church fathers, the early writers andthinkers in the Church,
wrote about it, but tended to addthat their views were speculative.
(36:32):
So we don't have any thoroughlyworked out theology of the catacomb,
but we do have, 2,000 years ago in St.
Paul, a notion of someforce holding back chaos,
holding back evil,some force that's restraining.
(36:56):
We get to Cardinal Newman, writing inthe 19th century, Cardinal Newman,
the great thinker andtheologian, in my judgment,
the best prose stylist ofthe whole century, in English.
Cardinal Newman writes, we know fromprophecy that the present framework of
society and government is that whichwithholdeth, again, the Katechon.
So he identifies it with a frameworkof society and government.
(37:19):
All right, that's my little effort topresent the concept of the katechon.
You use that concept how,you identify the katechon through history.
>> Peter Thiel (37:31):
Yeah, as you said, it's a rather mysterious concept,
you can identify it with the goodaspects of the Roman Empire,
certain political aspects ofthe Roman Catholic Church, individuals.
Institutions that somehow are trying
to hold this runaway chaos in check.
(37:55):
I don't think it's purely reactionary,you can think of Metternich
post Napoleon as sort of katechomatic,but he's also modernizing it.
It is a thing of history, though.
And so, there are ways todo it that can be good for
a time, but that will notnecessarily work for all times.
(38:19):
But I would always maybe go backto the apocalyptic specter,
would be Antichrist or Armageddon.
And I think there is a lotin this runaway science
technology that's pushing ustowards something like Armageddon.
(38:44):
And then there is the naturalpushback on this is,
we will avoid Armageddonby having a one world
state that has real teeth, real power.
And the biblical term forthat is the Antichrist.
And the Christian intuition I have is,
(39:07):
I don't want Antichrist,I don't want Armageddon.
I would like to find some narrow pathbetween these two where we can avoid both.
And then certainly, there are waysthat you defer it if you can,
you try to do new things.
(39:29):
I don't think it's a purelyreactionary thing.
It's not a pure Benedictine option whereyou just retreat into a monastery or
something like that.
I think that's the mostaccelerationist thing possible.
>> Peter Robinson (39:46):
You quit resisting.
>> Peter Thiel (39:47):
You quit, it sort of clears the field, it's like the Lord Acton
line, all that is necessary for evilto triumph is that good men do nothing.
And so this is where I'm always, it can bethe Benedictine option, it can be good for
Personal sanctification, butto the extent we're [CROSSTALK] talking
about society, our first->> Peter Robinson: Rod Dreher wrote a book
about this,
the idea of going to the [INAUDIBLE] theidea is that Christians simply drop out.
(40:10):
Society is going in the wrong direction,and Christians simply drop out,
that's roughly the idea.
I don't want to argue with him on the level of
personal sanctification orpeople saving their souls.
My political,social intuition is that it's the height
of your responsibility becausethat is just, in effect,
(40:32):
hitting the accelerator towardsthe Antichrist, Armageddon.
>> Peter Robinson (40:36):
Okay, let's finish this first part of our conversation with more
on the Antichrist, let me takea moment to set this up, if I may.
A few passages from Scripture,Daniel, chapter 7,
in the first year of Belshazzar,king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream.
There before me was a beast, fearful,terrifying, very strong, it had great
(41:00):
iron teeth, and it ate its victims andtrampled their remains underfoot.
Second Thessalonians,chapter 2, we're back to St.
Paul, he's writing about the end times.
It cannot happen until therehas appeared the wicked one,
the lost one, the enemy who raiseshimself above every object of worship and
flaunts the claim that he is God.
(41:22):
Revelation, chapter 13, then I sawa beast emerge from the sea, and
they prostrated themselves infront of the beast, saying,
who can compare with the beast,who can fight against it?
And all the people of the worldwill worship it, close quote.
There are people who takeall of this seriously,
(41:42):
we've already quoted Rene Girard.
We've already quoted Cardinal Newman,but Daniel dates from the Iron Age.
Thessalonians and Revelation are 2000years old, contemporary society.
We sit here in Stanford University,contemporary society all but
(42:02):
ignores these texts or derides them.
Of interest only to snake handlers,as I mentioned,
stake handlers in Kentucky hollers,you are no snake handler.
>> Peter Thiel (42:14):
Well- >> Peter Robinson
Not that I'm aware of,no.
>> Peter Robinson (42:17):
Not that you're aware of [LAUGH] not that I'm aware of, so
we'll come to howthe Antichrist might arise.
What we must do to prevent, we'll cometo that in our second conversation.
But the first thing I want to establishis why do you take this seriously?
>> Peter Thiel (42:31):
Well, again,
one can take it seriously withouttaking it completely literally.
But just let me maybe defend Daniel,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
(42:53):
the Peloponnesian wars between Athens andSparta.
And it has a timeless andeternal character,
it's the rising power against the existingpower, Athens is the rising power.
And the Thucydides trap is when thisrepeats itself with Wilhelmine Germany
against Britain in 1914, orperhaps today, China against the US.
(43:15):
It's timeless, internal,the particulars don't matter,
the speeches people give don't matter,Thucydides makes them up.
And it's sort of like a natural,cyclical kind of a view
of history orone where there is no specific history.
And then, by contrast,I do not think it's an exaggeration
(43:37):
to say something like,Daniel was the first historian where
the things that matter are one time andworld historical.
And there was a creation,there was a fall,
there's a Mosaic revelation->> Peter Robinson: History going
someplace.
It's going somewhere, and the choices people make matter,
(43:59):
and some of the choicesmatter in a very big way.
And there's a way that Christ'sministry and death and
resurrection was a part of history ora hinge moment of history.
And then there are ways it continues, andI think that's sort of a feel for history.
(44:20):
And something like Hegelis just a pale shadow
of the Judeo-Christian sense of history.
Again, you have to qualifythis very carefully,
but you could say thatthe New Testament God
is the first progressive becausethe new supersedes the old.
(44:42):
And so it's the first time that there is
something new just byvirtue of it being new.
There's something new thatcomes in through history,
all these ways you have to qualify.
If you go too progressive, you get tosomething like Marcion or Marx, but
if you say it's all in the Old Testament,that's somehow not quite right either.
>> Peter Robinson (45:04):
So you take it seriously because you don't believe
history is Groundhog Day.
It doesn't happen over andover again, this cyclical aspect,
the eternal recurrence.
Then in some fundamental way, themeaninglessness of it, history is going
someplace, and if it's going someplace,that means there will be an end point.
>> Peter Thiel (45:27):
And there are important things that will happen that
are different from thingsthat happened in the past.
And so if we want to have a feel forour times,
what is going on in the worldin the early 21st century,
there are ways we can try toreference it to the past.
(45:52):
You can say there's some parallel betweenthe decline of the United States and
the fall of the Roman Empire, but thedifferences are surely really important.
It's happening in a worldof nuclear weapons and
instantaneous communication, andit's happening in a very post Christian or
hyper Christian world,not in a pagan world.
(46:15):
And somehow the classicalapproaches to history always
downplay the things that are onetime unique, world historical,
and I think we should takeour bearings more from that.
>> Peter Robinson (46:32):
Peter Thiel, thank you. Join us for part 2.
This is a sentence Inever thought I'd utter.
Join us for part two to hear aboutthe Antichrist, for Uncommon Knowledge,
the Hoover Institution andFox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
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