Part One: Peter Thiel and the Anti-Christ

Speaker 1 Cool zone media.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans is still waking up, still kind of hungover.

Speaker 1 Which I know I introduced like a third of our episodes that way, and it might lead some of you to wonder: Does Robert have a problem? And the answer to that question is: no, I have a solution.

Speaker 1 Sophie, how are you doing today?

Speaker 1 I'm in pain, but my best friend's here, so that's a win.

Speaker 4 And you, my other best friend.

Speaker 3 I have two. I have two.

Speaker 1 It's okay. I know where I stand.
I know where I stand. Yeah.
Sarah Marshall, welcome to the show. Hello, Robert.

Speaker 1 A pyramid is the strongest shape, or well, I guess a triangle, but a pyramid if you're in marketing.

Speaker 1 I, Sophie, I'm so happy to be here with you, my legend, my queen, and Robert. You,

Speaker 1 a guy who is also here. I'm just kidding.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 I think of you every time. Thank you.
an honor. I see a goat.

Speaker 1 Every time you see a goat. Okay.
That's good because there's a lot of those out there.

Speaker 1 You and Sophie were talking about your beautiful friendship. And it made me think about the differences between

Speaker 1 deep male and deep female friendships. Because when I was thinking back to my stories with my best friend, it's all the different times that Linny, either I puked on Lenny or Lenny puked on me.

Speaker 1 I have one of those. So there's some differences, but only one.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, no, I have two.

Speaker 1 I have two.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's good. That's a good number.
That's a good number.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's a, I mean, what do you, what do you think that you're kind of

Speaker 1 the stuff of your intimacy with your male friends is about?

Speaker 1 I don't know. You know, honestly, I think a big part of it's just male or female friends.

Speaker 1 It's just that kind of, that kind of bone-deep trust where you feel as comfortable with another person as you do, like feeling alone on your couch.

Speaker 1 I would say that's about the highest level of intimacy in or out of a romantic relationship that exists.

Speaker 4 Just to say, Robert, I would love to puke on you.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Sophie. That's very sweet.
It'll happen one day. You guys just keep putting in your hours.
I've avoided puking on you for the same reason.

Speaker 1 I've had, I think I've puked on more people than the average person. The most at once was like nine.

Speaker 1 But yeah. Wow.
The most at once.

Speaker 1 I'm proud of that. It took some work.
It took some work and elevation. I like to stay in and, you know, watch the Drew Carey show.
So I don't get the opportunity as much. It's a great shame.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've, you know, now that you think of it, I've never puked on someone while watching the Drew Carey show. So there may be a causative effect.

Speaker 4 Speaking of great shows, I would like

Speaker 4 Sarah to plug her new show for our audience.

Speaker 1 I have a show to plug.

Speaker 1 And Sophie, you have been such a help to me in my show advertising tour,

Speaker 1 going hither and yon, ringing my cowbell, telling people about my new show, which is called The Devil You Know. It's from CBC Podcasts.

Speaker 1 It features such iconic performances as our dear friend Jamie Loftus performing the book Michelle Remembers. Oh my God.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a win. That just needed to happen.
And now now it's happened.

Speaker 1 And it's also, you know, an attempt to kind of tell the story of the satanic panic and its initial spread in the 80s, its sort of long shadow in the 90s, and how it came back in a way that suggests it never went away in the present day by talking to individual people whose lives were dramatically affected and often, you know, pretty much destroyed by it.

Speaker 1 And but, and yet, it's also, I think, not that depressing. Yeah.
Really want to emphasize that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I've had an argument with a friend about like whether or not, like, because his argument was that Kissinger's Diplomacy was the book that you needed to read in order to really understand

Speaker 1 American statesmanship. And I was like, no, it's Michelle Remembers.
That's the book you need to read if you want to understand how politics works in this country.

Speaker 1 You know, you said Americans su, and I was like, psychopaths. No.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Weird. I thought

Speaker 1 I think that, yeah, I think that's true. And it stands to reason that the book that explains America is Canadian.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Often this is the case. Often that's the case.
I would love to hear your thoughts on Michelle Remembers because it's a book that like defies description, you know?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a, it's a book that I think says a lot about how irrationality

Speaker 1 can be foundational to a lot of people's fundamental beliefs about how the world works.

Speaker 1 Like, it's, and it's also a book about how, I mean, the story of the book and how it became popular and what happened

Speaker 1 during its creation is incredibly relevant for like foundationally how everything from like reality TV to like modern politics works in this country.

Speaker 1 Um, like it's the story of a fantasy overtaking reality in the minds of tens of millions of Americans based on nothing but like, oh, I'd rather believe that there's that satanic pedophiles run the country than anything else.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that's like one of the things we're trying to get at and which is, you know, kind of this enduringly fascinating thing of like, why, why did people,

Speaker 1 why did it feel less scary in a way to believe in what was seemingly the scariest thing possible?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's, you know, that's actually very relevant to what we're talking about today, all of this, both, both how irrationality and fantasy become like the undergirding aspects of people's understanding about reality.

Speaker 1 And how about these things have come to completely dominate U.S.

Speaker 1 politics and culture because they primarily, primarily because they dominate the thinking and the rationality of the power elite in this country.

Speaker 1 And that's why today you and I, Sarah, are going to be talking about Peter Thiel's weird obsession with the Antichrist. Oh my God.
Oh, this is amazing. Wow.
Because I know that he's a handful.

Speaker 1 And I feel like I've heard probably from Sophie that this exists. This is a bushel in a a pet.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm so excited.
Is Peter Thiel, is this the guy who took down Gawker all by himself? He sure did. This is the guy who funded, well, with Hulk Hogan.
Hulk was a load-bearing part of that.

Speaker 1 He got Hulk Hogan to Hulk out all over Gawker and journalism and free speech. So that's nice.

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Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 we've done a two-parter on Peter about his like life and background, but this is the guy. He's the co-founder of PayPal.

Speaker 1 He actually is the guy who kind of like orchestrated Elon Musk's ouster from the company, and they were at odds. Now they're friends again.
It's a beautiful story, you know?

Speaker 1 I'd watch an HBO original movie about that. That would be like a six out of 10, you know? Starring Jeremy Strong and Jeremy Strong.
Oh, I was going to say Jared Leto for both of them. Oh, that works.

Speaker 1 He's the only man upsetting enough to play both those guys. It'll make test audiences puke.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 On each other. Or Jesse Eisenberg.
I realized the other day because I saw him in that Kieran or Rory Kolkin, which one of the Kulkins was in the movie with him.

Speaker 1 Kieran Kolkin. And he was good.
And I was like, oh, I've hated Jesse Eisenberg for years. I guess because he just did a good job of playing Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 1 Like, I think I just hated him because he did a job well. He really did, though.
But the thing is, he kind of always plays guys who you're like,

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 get away from me. Yeah, you don't seem safe.
Like, I'm watching my drink around you, Jesse Eisenberg.

Speaker 1 Which again,

Speaker 1 I don't think real Jesse Eisenberg has earned that kind of stuff. They just all of his characters.
You're like, look, it's not to be rude, but I'm going to be a little rude. It's fine.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You upset me on some fundamental level. There's something wrong in the pit of your soul, Jesse Eisenberg.
And I'm glad you've been able to turn that into a career.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
You're not welcome in my house.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Sorry if you're listening to this podcast, Jesse I'm really taking no prisoners. This is, you know, you have to be provocative in today's political wins, and we're doing it.

Speaker 1 You have to be ruthless to get into the mood to talk about the things Peter Thiel believes about the world.

Speaker 1 Because despite being an aspiring Immortal CEO king and one of the major patrons of the modern far right, and the guy who got J.D. Vance's career started, you know, he funded his campaign.

Speaker 1 He funded, he's his mentor.

Speaker 1 Despite all of that, Peter Thiel.

Speaker 1 Being that guy's mentor. You're like, hey, buddy, you killed the Pope and your face still looks like a catcher's mitt.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's fine. Still doing good?

Speaker 1 Why don't you have apple juice or an applesauce? Yeah, why don't you sit down over here next to me?

Speaker 1 Yeah, despite. Sarah, you made a sports reference.
That was so beautiful. Oh, Kecksures Mitt.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, that's kind of a classic MST3K descriptor of like, I don't know, a Robert Zadar type. I will

Speaker 1 do all the baseball references I can. Robert Zadar.
Oh, Zeno. Kids don't know Robert Zadar.
You know, I'm glad that

Speaker 1 Robert Zadar. It's spelled like Robert Zadar.
Z apostrophe D-A-R. Yeah, obviously.
And yes, he had a condition. That's why his face looked like that.
And it's often fatal.

Speaker 1 But in his case, he was like right in the sweet spot where it just made him an incredibly in-demand character actor during the 1980s. Yeah.
He played a lot of alien prison guards.

Speaker 1 A lot of alien prison guards. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Robert Zadar, not much to do with Peter Thial, but the other stuff we were talking about does.

Speaker 1 Okay, Peter Teal.

Speaker 1 I've gone back and forth in my studies on Thial, and I think in the biographical episodes we did about him, I concluded he's one of the very few of these guys who like scares me because of how intelligent and disciplined and patient and competent he is.

Speaker 1 And the fact that discipline, intelligence, and patience with him are married to like $30 billion in net worth, right?

Speaker 1 Which is a dangerous mixture for a guy who thinks democracy should come to an end and is actively working to further that goal.

Speaker 1 This week, I think I have to make a mea culpa because I don't entirely agree with that anymore. Oh,

Speaker 1 that's exciting.

Speaker 1 I may have overestimated his intelligence and cunning, which I don't, he's still a dangerous man, right?

Speaker 1 I think he's out of his mind. And I think he's out of his mind in part because he's not as smart as certainly he thinks he is and not as smart as maybe I thought he was.
And,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 it's tough for me to tell entirely what's going on here, but I've become increasingly convinced that he's like unwell in a way that's leading him, that's made him less functional as a person.

Speaker 1 And I kind of think this Antichrist obsession is an example of that because this is.

Speaker 1 It's very disordered thinking that you see when you like listen to him try to explain his beliefs, which which I'm going to do to you. I'm going to try to walk you through everything.

Speaker 1 He recently did a four-day lecture series laying out his theories on the Antichrist. There have been articles about this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if you're reasonably online, you might have seen something about this because the lectures weren't public, but they were publicly advertised. The page.

Speaker 1 for the registration for these lectures is still up on some service called Luma that I'd never heard of before this.

Speaker 1 But it was in the Embarcadero in San Francisco

Speaker 1 on September 15th, was the first of these.

Speaker 1 And it was called the Antichrist, a four-part lecture series.

Speaker 1 And the picture of this is just like Peter Thiel from 15 years ago underneath the logo of the group that supported this speech, the Act 17 collective.

Speaker 1 It's weird how young Sophie can pull up that and then like a modern-day photo of Peter Thial. It's just like

Speaker 1 it's fitting, I guess, for a guy whose most public obsession is with living forever.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 so the event summary reads: You are warmly invited to a series of four lectures by Peter Thiel addressing the topic of the biblical Antichrist.

Speaker 1 Peter is a technology entrepreneur and investor who has spent much of his career writing and speaking about how his Christian faith informs his understanding of the world.

Speaker 1 His remarks will be anchored on science and technology and will comment on the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist.

Speaker 4 I have 2025 Peter up on the screen for you, Robert.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to say it. Last place in the Katie Lang tribute competition.

Speaker 1 And that's a fair comparison, Sarah.

Speaker 1 And I love Katie Lang. That's not the point here.
Yeah. No.
And I love Peter Thiel, you know? Oh, you don't. And I mean, certainly the Lord loves him, but maybe not anybody else.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't know about the Lord, but yeah,

Speaker 1 possibly, possibly.

Speaker 1 If I were Jesus, I would simply be looking at a lot of people who talk about me a lot and being like, I don't know you. Please stop implying that we're friends.
This is,

Speaker 1 I'm sending you a cease and desist.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's got to be like,

Speaker 1 I'm sure you've experienced the same thing. Like when you get like a degree of fame, every now and then you'll meet fans who will like talk about something you did that meant something to them.

Speaker 1 And the way they will explain it is like, that doesn't sound familiar to me at all. That's what you took out of that? That's not what I meant in any way.
Can I, do I say that to you?

Speaker 1 Do I say, like, oh no, that had nothing to do with like you, you've read in something completely absent there, or do you just like smile and nod?

Speaker 1 People think I often remember me saying something that I feel like is smarter than I said because I don't know it any longer. But then you're like, did I know it at one time?

Speaker 1 And then I said it and then I forgot it. Or are they confusing me with some other show they listened to that same day? It could be that too, sometimes.
It's very interesting.

Speaker 1 I've seen it all happen where it's like, no, that was a guest who said that, and you just like transposed it to being me. Thanks for giving me credit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was, I've been listening to Simpson's commentaries, and one of the things the writers kind of consistently talk about is like, who wrote that? Was that your joke? Was that my joke?

Speaker 1 I can't remember. Or like someone being like, I love that joke and that episode you wrote.
And they're like, I didn't write that joke. Yeah.
And I love that that's kind of a consistent

Speaker 1 thing yeah yeah this is my favorite thing you did well i didn't you're like that i had i was near it and i yeah i was around so yeah i was in the room i was in the room when that joke was made absolutely i midwifed that joke yeah i provided moral support to the birth of that joke yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 So this summary of Peter's lecture on the Antichrist goes on to note that Peter's thinking about the Antichrist, beliefs on this subject, draw from the work of several prominent theologians and philosophers.

Speaker 1 These include Rene Girard, Jonathan Swift, and former Bastards Pod alumni Carl Schmidt. Now, if you haven't listened to those episodes, I would recommend listening to the Carl Schmidt episodes.

Speaker 1 The gist of it is, Schmidt was a right-wing political philosopher. And when the Nazis came to power, they basically called him up and said, Hey, you're writing

Speaker 1 the educated justification for why Nazism's good. Like that, we need you to come in and do that, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 1 And, you know, Schmidt was a perfect fit for this job because his earlier work had been a huge influence on a lot of prominent Nazis. So he helped influence the Nazis and how they took power.

Speaker 1 A big thing he wrote about was how to use effectively the creation of borders in order to destroy liberal democracy. Basically, his kind of in a nutshell.
It seems to be working. It does.

Speaker 1 It works very well. And he's the guy who,

Speaker 1 the basic idea was that, like, anytime you, every society, no matter how like liberal a democracy, draws a line between like who are members of the community and who aren't, who is a citizen and who isn't.

Speaker 1 And wherever you find that line, anytime there's a border, that's the

Speaker 1 thing you can use to destroy that liberal democracy because you figure out where that is and you start pushing it inward and you start trying to define other groups as not part of the community, right?

Speaker 1 And that's kind of the fundamental weak point that all liberal democracies have.

Speaker 1 And it's, you know,

Speaker 1 in a way, it's kind of the

Speaker 1 other side of the anarchist belief that any border implies the violence of its maintenance, right?

Speaker 1 The existence of a border fundamentally implies violence because that's the only way to maintain a border.

Speaker 1 And what Schmidt was saying is the existence of a border is an opportunity to carve groups of people out of the body politic in order to gain authoritarian political power, right?

Speaker 1 That's Carl Schmidt, who Peter Thiel loves and sees as a big influence, right? So he's not being subtle about any of this. He's like, here are my top three influences.

Speaker 1 One of them helped the Nazis so much.

Speaker 1 My buddies. Yeah, these are all my faves.

Speaker 1 Well, and it's the other guy that he listed there, Renee Girard, is a, I mean, neither of these guys are like exactly household names, but Girard, a big part of like his belief

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 the idea of like scapegoating, right? And how like scapegoating works within, you know, coal and like why communities pick scapegoats and like how the whole process works.

Speaker 1 And that's also like a major influence on Peter Thiel, like that, which is, you know, not again, if you look at the kind of politics, like the right-wing politics that he's supported during like his lifetime, it makes sense that he finds these kind of things influential.

Speaker 1 So Schmidt's essential idea is that

Speaker 1 once a human society has reached the level where most people's basic needs are satisfied,

Speaker 1 there's still unmet desires, but people don't know

Speaker 1 entirely what it is that they want that they don't have. And so they engage in mimicry, where they like look at what their neighbors who are doing the best have.

Speaker 1 And they seek to, they aspire to mimic the most impressive people in their society, right?

Speaker 1 And because people are never really satisfied, and this mimetic rivalry never really leads, I mean, it's never something that you can actually like achieve or like get the things that these unfilled desires can't really be met.

Speaker 1 And so, people need like an explanation for why it doesn't work, for why they're not happy.

Speaker 1 And that tends to get channeled into a war of all against one via what Gerard called a scapegoat mechanism, right?

Speaker 1 And so these are the two huge,

Speaker 1 like Schmidt and Girard are the two huge like pillars of Peter Thiel's like personal philosophy.

Speaker 1 And one of the things Girard believed is that Christianity kind of marks this turning point in human consciousness because like the crucifixion narrative is fundamentally Jesus being murdered in an act of collective violence against a scapegoat, right?

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 like that's kind of this, that Christianity leads to this sort of epiphany by which human beings have started to realize that like the scapegoating rituals that we engaged in are wrong and it's like a bad thing to do.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, that's that's that's kind of where Gerard goes. Peter Thiel winds up taking this in some weird places, right? Where

Speaker 1 basically Gerard's attitude was that you have to reject scapegoating because like Christ's example is proof that it's fundamentally evil and wrong.

Speaker 1 And Thiel's kind of interpretation from that is that you can't really avoid scapegoating. Like that's the inevitable path forward.

Speaker 1 And so it's kind of a thing you have to

Speaker 1 it's a tool you have to make use of. This like human need to scapegoat is a thing that you can use to drive politics.

Speaker 1 That's essentially where Peter Thiel takes this guy because Gerard was not advocating that terror behavior.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, we're all watching that happen, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. It's it's not to Dairy Queen, that's for sure.
No.

Speaker 1 So these are, these are Peter Thiel's kind of favorite philosophers that have inspired his takes on the Antichrist. And unfortunately, full audio of these talks is not available publicly.

Speaker 1 Seven hours or so have been leaked to a couple of different outlets. I don't have them, tragically.

Speaker 1 But we do have one attendee took word-for-word nearly notes of the first lecture, which got him kicked out of subsequent lectures. So we've got that.

Speaker 1 And we've got articles that have summarized and quoted directly from Teal in these lectures.

Speaker 1 So I feel pretty confident that I can explain what this motherfucker believes to the extent that it will ever make sense.

Speaker 1 So before we get into that, we should talk about the group that funded. this lecture series, which is the Acts 17 Collective.

Speaker 1 You would have seen that on the photo of Peter that we posted a little bit earlier if you're watching it.

Speaker 1 The name of the Acts 17 Collective is is based on chapter 17 of the book of Acts and, you know, the Bible.

Speaker 1 And this chapter concerns...

Speaker 4 She said Bible.

Speaker 7 You said Bible, Sarah Ghost, heard of it.

Speaker 1 Heard of it. Heard of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 You might have caught this one.

Speaker 1 And it's the New Testament, which, if you're not into religion, it's the aliens to the Old Testament's alien. Oh, God, that's so true.

Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Jesus is sort of a a Ripley figure.
I think a lot of people have argued that over the years. He was clearly heavily inspired by Ripley.

Speaker 1 Yeah, unless he's, you know, there's a little bit of newt in there, too, though. There's a little bit of newt in there.
Sure, absolutely.

Speaker 1 I think the Apostle Paul is Hicks.

Speaker 1 Generally, biblical scholars agree

Speaker 1 that the Apostle Paul was inspired by Corporal Hicks.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So chapter 17.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a broad consensus.

Speaker 1 You have to really read the original Aramaic that Aliens was written in to get a lot of that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 James Cameron writes exclusively in Aramaic. That's a real problem for a lot of his collaborators.

Speaker 1 So Acts 17, the chapter that's in, concerns Paul and some of his companions on like a

Speaker 1 trip through Greece. They're not just in Greece, or they're not just in Athens, but it's like they spend a lot of time in Athens arguing about religion with philosophers, right?

Speaker 1 They're going to these different markets and public places and synagogues and they're talking to like educated scholars about religion to like argue that hey christianity is is a thing basically i'm summarized i i'm i'm i'm yada yadaing this a lot but like

Speaker 1 it is like have you thought about christianity

Speaker 1 Yeah, have you thought about Christianity in like a logical and like sense?

Speaker 1 Like he's trying to make the intellectual, this is like, that chapter is like Paul arguing and debating with a lot of intellectuals about his new religion, religion, right?

Speaker 1 It's like which is relevant.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's like the shark tank part of the Bible. Yeah.
It's Sarah's. You got a seller.

Speaker 1 You got a hay girl.

Speaker 1 And I say, girl, whatever.

Speaker 1 Is that a shark tank joke, Sophie? How am I supposed to get that? Oh, it's for those ladies who peaked in high school on MLM Facebook 10 years ago kind of a thing. Oh, it is that.

Speaker 1 It's not happening, but yeah.

Speaker 1 It is definitely that for Paul, where he's like sliding into the DMs of a friend from high school who happens to be like a rabbi being like, hey, I'm doing this new thing.

Speaker 1 You want to hear about it? Can I get you to show up? Like,

Speaker 1 there will be free makeup. We'll give you free makeover.
Talk about Jesus. There's going to be snacks.
We're going to learn about leggings. Yeah.
Right. And also Jesus.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Jesus wants you to sell these leggings. No, that is exactly what's going on, basically.

Speaker 1 And the Acts 17 collective is inspired by this chapter dedicated specifically to spreading Christian doctrine to political and cultural elites in Silicon Valley, right?

Speaker 1 Which is why that chapter makes sense, right? Because Paul is kind of talking to these sort of intellectual elites.

Speaker 1 Acts 17 is like, we need to be proselytizing, not to the poor, not to the huddled masses, you know, not to the people that like Jesus talked to, but like the billionaires.

Speaker 1 We need to convert the billionaires. So it's the opiate of the few now.

Speaker 1 Right. Exactly.
I mean, they are obsessed with not dying. So so it does make sense that they would be like, Yeah, yeah, my immortal soul.
Yeah, that's the ticket.

Speaker 1 Yeah, flipping the chair around backwards. You kids are interested in eternal life, huh? I know a guy who offers eternal life.
You don't even have to take your son's blood, Peter.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, you do have to take the son's blood. The son's, somebody's son's blood.
That's right. Less gross.
You just have a cracker and some grape juice. That's right.

Speaker 1 And if you want to be immortal listeners, whatever sponsor of the podcast comes on next will ensure that you never die. Just you, though.

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Speaker 1 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season three is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 1 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

Speaker 1 This season, they're covering it all, from circuit culture to hookup horror stories to locker room shenanigans. No stone is left unturned.
And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze.

Speaker 1 So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate.

Speaker 1 Oh, and this season, they want to hear your stories. Their call-in segment is getting even hotter, and they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.
No pressure.

Speaker 1 So if you're ready for round three, just push play. Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 New episodes every Thursday.

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Speaker 1 And we're back. I hope you're enjoying your new immortality.

Speaker 1 You know, you're going to watch everyone that you love and care for die, everything that you care for end, eventually watch the stars themselves wink out but you know have fun with that i didn't think it through you never people never do with immortality also what about the scenario where if you're immortal and everyone else dies and then there aren't people to maintain nuclear reactors and they all melt down and then the globe is covered in nuclear fallout what are you gonna do then dracula i feel like i can maintain a nuclear reactor yeah the the one in your area is gonna be so you're gonna take care of the one in washington so we'll be okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That'll that'll be good.
I mean, all that nuclear waste from the Hanford site is going to poison all of the waters, but that'll happen anyway. Um,

Speaker 1 I mean, where else are we going to get those albino gators or whatever they have up there? Exactly. You know, um, I assume that in a couple of generations, it'll be gator territory.

Speaker 1 The Pacific Northwest will warm up enough finally that I could have a gator farm in my yard. We were always meant to be gator territory, really.
Yeah, everywhere was. That was great.
Everywhere was.

Speaker 1 So yeah, the Act 17 collective dedicated to preaching to the most needy in our society, which is tech billionaires. Yes.
Well, they do have the heaviest hearts, I've heard.

Speaker 1 Yes. In the Egyptian sense, yes.

Speaker 1 It's funny. What I think is funniest about this is like the Act 17 works perfectly as a name.

Speaker 1 Like you're referencing a part of the Bible that's relevant to what the group does, but they needed to make it into a backronym anyway, which I don't understand. Cause, like, no, it already works.

Speaker 1 Why would you make this an acronym? But they did. And so they've decided that ACTS also stands for acknowledging Christ in technology and society.

Speaker 1 All right. All right.

Speaker 1 Again, unnecessary, but I hope you're happy. I get it.
I got a backrony. I got a

Speaker 1 sure, man. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the organization was founded by, or at least co-founded by Michelle Stevens.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 she, I mean, she was some sort of entrepreneur. She was involved in

Speaker 1 tech

Speaker 1 to some extent and kind of did this after she left the company.

Speaker 1 Her husband, Trey, is one of the first, Trey Stevens, one of, is one of the first Palantir employees and now works for Peter's venture capital fund as a partner.

Speaker 1 So this is a guy who was involved in Peter's military spying company. Okay.
And also his VC fund. And it's his wife that founds the Act 17 Collective.

Speaker 1 And I found an interview with Michelle where she explains how the group came about, and so this is their origin story per Michelle.

Speaker 1 By the end of 2023, my company was winding down, and my husband's 40th birthday was that November. I wanted to celebrate big.

Speaker 1 We invited over 220 of his closest friends to a three-day birthday party in New Mexico called The Roast, the Toast, and the Holy Ghost.

Speaker 1 On the Holy Ghost Day, we thought we'd have a sort of remixed church service. Wouldn't it be funny if we tricked a bunch of people into going to church?

Speaker 1 We served caviar bumps, breakfast pizza, mimosas, and spiked coffee. DJ Canvas had come out with his crew to play a Saturday night set,

Speaker 1 remixing all of our beloved movie-themed songs into a trap beat. He also does this for Christian and worship music.
He's got the best dance moves. No wonder nobody likes white people.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 that made me cringe nearly to death, Sarah. I'm going to be honest.
It's also funny that they're like, isn't it fun and subversive to have caviar bumps and then go worship Christ? And it's like,

Speaker 1 no, because like the whole problem in America, arguably, is that the prosperity gospel has taken over Christianity and it's no longer a moderating influence on capitalism. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that the and also it's just gross and silly to be doing that. It's gross.
Stop it. Yeah.
It's it's just deeply upsetting and it's this

Speaker 1 It's this fundamentally poisonous thing that stands against most of what the religion has at least publicly stood for over the course of like the history of the faith.

Speaker 1 Like it's it's fundamentally a heretical uh interpretation of Christianity, I think. Right.

Speaker 1 Like if you take the good parts of Christianity, which I feel like most people would acknowledge that there are like at least some good ideas in there.

Speaker 1 Like one of the main themes is like, don't eat caviar off each other's hands while a huge percentage of the population is in dire poverty. That's

Speaker 1 one of the main things. Yeah, you don't have to like the religion to be like, okay, well, the one time that like literally God

Speaker 1 beat people up, it was because they were money changing in the temple. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Probably shouldn't have money changers that probably shouldn't. He might not like money changers at all, actually.
It's so funny. It's like, which is just what Peter Thiel and his friends do.

Speaker 1 That's what a venture capital fund is. They're changing money.

Speaker 1 And also PayPal, where you literally just move money around for a fee. Yes.
Yes. Yeah.
It's, it is really, it's just, it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 And it's like, what is it like to become enthusiastic about a belief system

Speaker 1 that your actual beliefs are pretty much contrary to? You know, I'm very curious about that. That's, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 And the answer is you have to like remake the belief system into something that is not, does not familiar to most people who actually

Speaker 1 are members of the faith. Like you have to create your own Christianity, which is what Peter's done.

Speaker 1 That's effectively what these Antichrist lectures are: him reinventing Christianity for billionaires. So he's the Antichrist twist.
Yes.

Speaker 1 That is the twist at the end of this. Yeah.
Before we get to that, though, you have to hear a little bit of DJ Canvas. Oh,

Speaker 1 I just, I needed to, I tried, I didn't have the courage, the raw heroism to look at examples of his dance moves. So we're going to have to leave those to our imagination.

Speaker 1 But I did find his Just Got Saved mixtape, and Sophie's going to play you like 15 seconds of that.

Speaker 1 So let's hear it.

Speaker 1 I am not forgotten.

Speaker 1 I am not forgotten.

Speaker 1 God knows my name. He knows my name.
There you go. See?

Speaker 1 Okay. You wouldn't want to get down to that with Peter Thiel and a bunch of venture capital guys.
Thanks for that. The thing is, like, if I met like some,

Speaker 1 I don't know, 15-year-old Bible camp goer who was like, I love this song. I would be like, that's nice.
Good for you.

Speaker 1 I don't care. Yeah.
Yeah. But then it's like,

Speaker 1 like, so directly directly about this idea about like being rescued from being one of the downtrodden. And it's like, you're the one who's treading on people.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Everyone knows your name.
You're one of the most famous people in the world. Like you're all wealthy and powerful.
You've got buildings with your name on it.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have everything that you've ever wanted. Yeah, you don't need God.
You are God in society as we have it set up, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I also love that they're like, this music is just so bumping, it'll trick people into going to church.

Speaker 1 It's not going to seem like Christian music at all. It's like,

Speaker 1 it's tricky. And I want you,

Speaker 1 the audience, to imagine you're at this birthday party. This guy is laying down what we'll

Speaker 1 call it a beat, right?

Speaker 1 And people are dancing as well as you'd expect a bunch of tech elites to dance.

Speaker 1 And then, while this is all going on, Peter Thiel gets up spontaneously and, in Michelle's words, quote, gave a 55-minute lecture on forgiveness and miracles.

Speaker 1 No!

Speaker 1 I don't!

Speaker 1 God, it's like in succession when you're like, why do these people keep throwing parties? They're so bad at parties. Just stop having them.
Is this even a beautiful

Speaker 1 evil? That's abuse to be. That's like torture.
Like the CIA didn't do that shit back during the day.

Speaker 1 Well, at the very least, it's that timeshare thing, you know, where you just have to attend a short sales pitch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I'm imagining, too, like the dawning realization, like, oh, wow, Peter's talking. I thought we were all dancing.
Okay, he's probably just doing a little quick toast. No, no,

Speaker 1 he's not doing it.

Speaker 1 Not doing a toast. Like, I actually have to go to the bathroom.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I need to get a drink.
Maybe do some caviar bumps. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Michelle stated, we were blown away. A lot of people were looking like he had 10 heads.
Like, what are you talking about? And I'll believe that. I'll believe that being the response to this.

Speaker 1 So she says the reaction was mixed. Some of her Christian friends were angry that she'd put a non-seminary trained guy up and had him give a sermon that, like, this is heretical.

Speaker 1 He doesn't know what he's talking about. This is certainly not Christianity that he's ranting about.
It's kind of weird that you did this to all of us.

Speaker 1 But she said some other Christian friends of hers were like, you just tricked over 200 people into going to church and that's good. We like it.
We think that's great.

Speaker 1 And so this is the origin of the Act 17 collective. Anytime a boring guy forces you to listen to him for an hour, that is church.
That's church. Yes.
This podcast has often been church.

Speaker 1 Running into someone you kind of know.

Speaker 1 Church. Church.

Speaker 1 That's a kind of church. Getting an Uber driver who just immediately starts talking for the entire drive about like his weird philosophical beliefs.

Speaker 1 That's a kind of church, you know? Thank you, Dale, for informing me about the dangers of vaccines. You know,

Speaker 1 I wouldn't wouldn't have known without that right. Yeah, that's a big one.
God.

Speaker 1 The important thing is that Peter Thiel has the freedom to express himself, which God knows he hasn't had access to in society before. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Our culture has really cracked down on Peter Thial's ability to express his beliefs to the world.

Speaker 1 And yeah, so the purpose of the Act 17 collective is specifically to trick San Franciscans, who Michelle describes as one of the most unchurched cities in America, into going to church and becoming Christians, right?

Speaker 1 That's what this group exists to do. They have Unitarianism.
That's enough. Right.

Speaker 1 Well, Unitarians are nice and not bigots. That's kind of the whole point.
And these people want to be assholes. Right.
Oh, I see.

Speaker 1 That's key.

Speaker 1 Because one of the most prominent members of the Act 17 collective is Gary Tan, who is the CEO of Y Combinator, which is a tech startup incubator.

Speaker 1 He's hosted several Act 17 events in his his home, which is a former church, including one with former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger about the holy shift across life, AI, leadership, and faith.

Speaker 1 And for an idea of some of the other things Gary Tan is into, I'm going to quote from a 2024 article in The New Republic by Gilda Ran, which is writing about a Twitter rant that Tan went on January of 2024.

Speaker 1 Posting on X, formerly Twitter, Tan wished death upon a majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Speaker 1 Fuck Chan, Peskin, Preston, Walton, Melgar, Roan, and Sapphi Chan as a label and motherfucking crew, wrote Tan, name-checking seven progressive supervisors in a hyper-cringy attempt to adapt Tupac Shakur's hit him up to his drunken rants.

Speaker 1 Die slow, motherfuckers. For good measure, he posted a photo of his personal liquor cabinet.
Its inscription, Gary Tan, SF social media troll, Twitter menace. On his liquor cabinet, man.

Speaker 1 Well, it's not like anyone in local office in San Francisco has ever been famously assassinated by a crazy guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. That did really piss people off for that.
For example,

Speaker 1 God. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very godly behavior.

Speaker 1 Super godly. Super godly.
Now, another godly thing Tan did was fund the recall campaign against progressive district attorney Chessa Buddin.

Speaker 1 He also promised to wipe out supervisors who expressed worries about the safety of driverless taxis, telling them your days are numbered.

Speaker 1 you know if you use death threats all the time it doesn't mean anything yeah exactly and it's very funny to be like you think these are unsafe i'll kill you and then like three months later a cruise taxi pins a pedestrian and drags her across the pavement which leads to cruise losing its operating permit and receiving a 1.5 million dollar fine yep although which i'm sure they could afford i'm sure But maybe they weren't super safe.

Speaker 1 Gary. Driverless cars don't kill people.
I kill people. That's right.
Jerry Tan does. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 Tan had delete his tweets threatening city supervisors,

Speaker 1 as you brought up due to the Harvey milk of it all, right? Because a bunch of them received death threats after he threatened to kill

Speaker 1 them

Speaker 1 because he has fans who are, you know, assholes.

Speaker 1 Jesus is like, leave me out of this one. Right.

Speaker 1 Gary put out a statement directed by a crisis PR firm and said, I am sorry for my words and regret my poor decision.

Speaker 1 Tan is one of a chunk of wealthy reactionaries using their money to try to change progressive San Francisco into something of a haven for far-right plutocrats.

Speaker 1 He's a big network state guy like Peter Thiel.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the fact that the city's already very friendly to these guys doesn't matter because again,

Speaker 1 you know, it's really the thing Gerard picked up on, which is that once people have everything they need, they're still unhappy. And

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 that unhappiness fundamentally can't be dealt with in the ways that they try to, like the things that they think will make them happy simply don't. They just find someone to be angry at.

Speaker 1 They need a scapegoat, you know? And for Jerry Tan, it's the progressives in San Francisco. That's why Jerry's unhappy.

Speaker 1 And what they don't realize is there's a secret to happiness is small, achievable goals and a sort of vague general progression. So, you know, you're like, I want to get better at baking.

Speaker 1 I want to make a Bouche de Noel for Christmas. I'm going to spend three months developing my Bourche de Noel skills.

Speaker 1 But instead, because they have no patience, they just want to destroy democracy because that feels like it would be faster. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Maybe it is.

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's just because for these guys, there's so little that they can really say. There's nothing above them.

Speaker 1 They have all of the money. There's no one who can tell them what to do.
So the only thing theoretically above them is the state and so is the government.

Speaker 1 And so they define, and honestly, most of the government is in their pocket. Like, as a general rule, lawmakers are not anti-Silicon Valley billionaires.

Speaker 1 So instead, they pick like the thing they can't control, which is the small number of people who get elected like on progressive agendas trying to fix problems.

Speaker 1 And those are the people who don't like, because those are the only people in politics who aren't going to pretend to respect you, to love you, right?

Speaker 1 Because they're kind of fundamentally in opposition to guys like you.

Speaker 1 And so you have to, to that's who's responsible for all of the problems that's who does everything wrong you know that's why i'm unhappy

Speaker 1 because someone's out there doesn't like me or someone out there in my life marginally harder disrespect me

Speaker 1 i mean it's it's the reason why so many famous people lost their minds as soon as they got access to twitter right is like being confronted with the fact that people dislike you and disrespect you and that's just life uh maybe you could be a better person but like normally don't hear about it in detail you know and so having the ability to reach for that knowledge,

Speaker 1 it is kind of this, yeah, like a fascinating,

Speaker 1 I don't know, experiment in terms of what would happen if people suddenly became telepathic, because in a way people did. Yeah.
Especially Choice Carol Oates.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's the, it's the same reason why like so many people high up in like our media class, like the folks who write for the, like columns for the New York Times consider quote-unquote wokeism and cancel culture a bigger problem than any of the things that are actually going to kill them because like it's this no people i i went to harvard or yale or whatever and my family name is this and i have this fancy job and people are calling me an idiot they that shouldn't be allowed that's got to be illegal that they're calling me a dipshit for my dipshit opinions and it's like they were calling you an idiot before you just didn't know about it yeah you just yeah you you were you couldn't see it and people weren't sharing it a hundred thousand times um

Speaker 1 yeah anyway they're they're a bunch of very healthy people, these billionaires. They're thriving.
They're doing great. Yeah.
They're doing great.

Speaker 1 And they have now formed Act 17 because they want to establish a theocracy that makes it illegal to not like them or respect them. Right.
That's the gist of the Act 17 collective, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 And obviously, as I noted, they were inspired by a rant Peter Thiel gave at a birthday party about Christianity.

Speaker 1 And so it's only fitting that they would host a four-part lecture series by him about the Antichrist.

Speaker 1 During the first of these lectures, Michelle Stevens, the founder of the collective, introduced Peter on September 15th by calling him one of the great Christians of our time as well as one of the great capitalists.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Sure, those two things seem like they should go together.

Speaker 1 We're going to start with the most detailed information I've got, which is

Speaker 1 the almost word-for-word notes on lecture one titled, Knowledge Shall Be Increased.

Speaker 1 Now, the attendee who published his notes on this lecture was the head of protocol research at a software company called Succinct. And his name is Kshichi Kulkarni.

Speaker 1 And from what I can tell, Kulkarni is a fan of Teal. I don't think he posted these notes as like a work of undercover reporting.

Speaker 1 I think he was just super enthusiastic and kind of ignored that the event itself warned people not to share and spread what they heard inside. Like folks weren't supposed to record this and stuff.

Speaker 1 He was like, he's just modest. It's so great.
People are going to want to know. People need to read this.

Speaker 1 Kulkarney was banned from listening to other lectures, but his notes are, as far as I can tell, from other reviews that include quotes from Peter Thiel, pretty close to one to one.

Speaker 1 So Thiel opens his lecture with a quote from the book of Daniel. But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end.

Speaker 1 Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

Speaker 1 And this is like talking about the end of days, right?

Speaker 1 But thou, O Daniel, shut up. Shut up.
Yeah, shut up, Peter.

Speaker 1 Thiel interprets this as Daniel, who he describes as a biblical historian, predicting that knowledge would increase vastly towards the end of time.

Speaker 1 And, quote, as knowledge increased, apocalyptic fears would mount, leaving room for a tyrant to rise. Now, there's a lot that's wrong with these few sentences.

Speaker 1 Like, first, I don't really, that's not. the only sentence.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 That's not really what Daniel's saying, that like the an increase in knowledge will increase apocalyptic fears which will let a tyrant for one thing that's not how the antichrist comes to power yeah that's a lot to get from the word increase yeah yeah

Speaker 1 you're reading a lot in there and he's like and that tyrant is me yeah

Speaker 1 yeah uh you'll be surprised at who he thinks that tyrant is sarah i'm excited for that reveal that's that's gonna be really fun for you um sandra lee it's my guy

Speaker 1 it's weirder than that. Former de facto First Lady of New York, Sandra Lee.
Just like to mention that. Nope.

Speaker 1 Although he's probably, she's probably on his list. I'll give you that.
But yeah. Okay.
We'll get to that.

Speaker 1 So the other thing that Peter says here that's really questionable is he describes Daniel as a historian. Like, in fact, he describes Daniel as the first historian, right?

Speaker 1 As like the first person to really think of history in a modern way.

Speaker 1 That's very silly. And it's kind of worth noting.

Speaker 1 Biblical scholars debate ferociously whether or not Daniel was writing reliable accounts of history, whether or not he was effectively trying to write a history, right?

Speaker 1 Because there's the two broad interpretations of like how the book of Daniel was written is one is

Speaker 1 the author, Daniel,

Speaker 1 had these experiences with he and his friends and chronicled them, right?

Speaker 1 That he's like writing an account of things that he saw and did, and he's including in there genuine prophecies that he made that were fulfilled in some cases centuries later, right?

Speaker 1 That's the traditional interpretation of the book of Daniel, right?

Speaker 1 Modern biblical historians have pointed out that there's a lot of evidence that suggests that the author of the book of Daniel was someone who would have been alive centuries after the actual biblical Daniel, and that the book of Daniel couldn't have been written contemporaneously, right?

Speaker 1 In other words, like this is more of like a work of historical fiction than historical fact is kind of like one of the arguments.

Speaker 1 The real Daniel is supposed to have been a member of the Judean nobility who was taken to Babylon during the Babylonian captivity and became popular at Nebuchadnezzar's court.

Speaker 1 He eventually became a dream interpreter and a prophet.

Speaker 1 And again, up until like the 19th century, it was widely agreed that this historical guy wrote the book of Daniel and filled it with prophecies he had at the time that were proven right later.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a good write-up on the biblical hermeneutic stack exchange with citations, which summarizes the modern critical argument about Daniel.

Speaker 1 Quote, the book of Daniel is replete with historical inaccuracies regarding the Babylonian and Persian periods, indicating it was written quite some time after those eras.

Speaker 1 Between this point and the independent nature of the court tales, the person of Daniel appears to be a literary fabrication, not a historical figure, and hence not the author of the book.

Speaker 1 Davies, who is a biblical scholar, suggests that this Daniel character may not have been a well-known figure in Jewish culture before the book was completed, and Collins is one scholar to suggest the very name Daniel was chosen for the anonymous Jewish sage of the folklore out of the inspiration from the ancient sage Danil, mentioned by Ezekiel and Ugaritic texts, right?

Speaker 1 So the likeliest and the thing widely believed by biblical scholars today is that this, because of some very fundamental historical inaccuracies in the book of Daniel, this was written later, and Daniel was never meant to be a real person.

Speaker 1 Like the name was taken by an ancient sage. Yeah, the same way that Benicula wasn't actually written by a dog.
Exactly, exactly. Well, there's a lot of scholarly debate about that.
Well, that's true.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But, you know,

Speaker 1 I'm a believer. It feels like it's, to me, kind of the marker of a good historian to understand that people in the past also enjoyed using literary devices, you know? Yes.

Speaker 1 And that there's also this, it's weird to me how, despite how much some people who are religious emphasize the importance of faith, there's this idea that like, well, but no, if it's not literally Daniel that wrote this about his literal life, then that would be saying saying that the Bible doesn't have value.

Speaker 1 And it's like, well, why not?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 you know, sometimes it gets a little frilly. You know,

Speaker 1 it's a work of literature. Let them have their literary devices.
Yeah. It doesn't bother people with other kinds of literature that it's not literally true.

Speaker 1 That Aragorn, son of Arathorn, isn't a real historical figure. People have still changed their lives as a result of those books, you know? Right.

Speaker 1 But I don't know, maybe they just don't have that much faith.

Speaker 1 And I guess Peter doesn't, because again, he always describes Daniel as absolutely the guy who wrote the book of Daniel and is a historian, as a real historian.

Speaker 1 And you know, he's real because he made predictions about the future that happened. And again, historians will say, well, because they happened before the person who

Speaker 1 said that

Speaker 1 in the future.

Speaker 1 It's like if you could write a historical fiction about a guy who's a prophet and include a bunch of shit about World War II in your book set in 1910, that doesn't mean you prophesied World War II.

Speaker 1 You're just looking, you're just writing fiction.

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be great if some guy saw that coming? Yeah,

Speaker 1 I mean, it's like, I don't know, in

Speaker 1 just any kind of nostalgia media, like that 70s show where they're like, oh,

Speaker 1 kids, stop playing with the lawn darts. Isn't it funny that we know now what that's about? How many people in the time where this is set? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes, this is, that's exactly what's going on in the book of Daniel. And speaking of lawn darts, this podcast is sponsored entirely by lawn darts.
Lawn darts, aren't there too many kids in the world?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Love Canal didn't get enough of them. That's right.

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Speaker 1 Okay, if you thought season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season three is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

Speaker 1 They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

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Speaker 1 We're back. We're thinking about all the things that used to kill kids back before we decided to make the world safe.

Speaker 1 And and uh uh yeah now things are good it's a safe world for children things are perfect now yeah

Speaker 1 no complaints yeah uh that's why so many schools have metal detectors

Speaker 1 um great stuff so i don't have when it comes to the biblical scholarship was the book of daniel written by i mean i'm pretty convinced that it was written later and daniel is a historical fiction and amalgam of different people and and whatnot.

Speaker 1 But, you know, there's arguments scholars will make either way. What's interesting to me is that Teal doesn't reference these arguments at all.
He doesn't even mention them, which

Speaker 1 could just mean that he has a strong biblical literalism stance and he disagrees with those takes.

Speaker 1 But the fact that he doesn't mention them at all, I kind of wonder if he just doesn't know because he doesn't actually like

Speaker 1 read

Speaker 1 curiously about stuff like this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I could believe that he doesn't really care about scholarship on the Bible. He reads it and takes whatever is useful to him out of it and has no interest in what anyone else has said about it.

Speaker 1 Well, and this feels like he's doing like his impression of a smart person.

Speaker 1 And I feel like a lot of people's smart person impression is like, I read the Bible and I figured out what it's about without the benefit of ever reading anyone else's thoughts about it ever.

Speaker 1 And it's like, that's not. what intelligence is about.
Intelligence doesn't mean that you never listen to anyone else for your whole life.

Speaker 1 No, no, nor is it like, well, I assume this, the English translation of this has all of the context that's useful in understanding it historically, right? Right.

Speaker 1 There's no need to like look back at the different ways that this is different things have been interpreted, different translations. Like, there's no value in any of that.

Speaker 1 They got it right with the King James Version. That's the official version now.
God said so. This one I found in the hotel is going to take me home.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I feel like what people maybe who, I don't know, look down on scholarship as a pursuit, don't really realize about it, maybe, and maybe disdain it because they understand this kind of collaborative quality to it is that anything you figure out in an academic setting or really like any,

Speaker 1 you know, kind of real pursuit of learning and research is you're standing on the shoulders of everyone else who's thought about it and worked on it in the past.

Speaker 1 And there's, and you have a, you know, an awareness that you're only doing like

Speaker 1 an extra little millimeter of progressing an idea. Yeah.
And that's also something a guy like Peter Thiel can't accept.

Speaker 1 Like the collaborative nature of like through which actual knowledge is built is fundamentally, that's why all these guys are so bullish on AI is it's abhorrent to them that other people have thought thoughts that they haven't thought or that they didn't think first that they might not understand.

Speaker 1 You know, it's this, a healthy person understands there's things that are beyond me, even if I'm very smart. I'm not smart in every area, you know?

Speaker 1 I think I'm certain that like Stephen Hawking wouldn't have like gotten angry if somebody had tried to explain to him how like, oh, yeah, your fridge is broken, Stephen, and this is what's wrong.

Speaker 1 Cause I doubt Stephen Hawking knew much about how refrigerators worked, right? And I'm sure he was humble enough to be like, well, no, I need to get a repair guy.

Speaker 1 This is what happened on EastEnders for the past 10 years. Sure.
Or this is what this verse of the Bible, you know, how it was translated a thousand years ago.

Speaker 1 And so it might mean something different.

Speaker 1 Actually, intelligent people have a degree of humility in terms of the things they don't know.

Speaker 1 And I think to a guy like Peter Thiel, the idea that there might be anything important that he doesn't know is deeply offensive.

Speaker 1 And I think that's the Silicon Valley ideology in a nutshell, which is why, no, all that matters is what I know and what I can have this robot summarize.

Speaker 1 It can do everything else because other kinds of knowledge than the ones I have and other kinds of skill aren't real knowledge or skill because I don't have them.

Speaker 1 That's my interpretation of Peter Thiel. You know,

Speaker 1 yours may vary. Well, I guess like kind of toddler-like anger at anything that eludes your grasp.
So, you have to kind of shrink the world to fit your own worldview.

Speaker 1 And that's what he's doing with the Bible here, because it's important to Peter that Daniel is a real prophet and a real historian, because he interprets Daniel 12, 4, which I quoted earlier, as a prophecy.

Speaker 1 Now, this is the fact, the idea that, like, oh, what he's saying is that knowledge increases, which leads to us expecting an apocalypse, and that creates room for a tyrant.

Speaker 1 That's not really how the Bible foresees the Antichrist rising, you know, but apocalyptic fears have been with us as long as civilization, right?

Speaker 1 Like it's, it's a, it's not a thing that starts with Christendom and it's not a thing that starts with Daniel, right? The book of Daniel didn't invent apocalyptic beliefs.

Speaker 1 And it's, it's one of those, you'll sometimes hear it claimed that prior to the year 1000, Christendom was convulsed, that like the last millennium, there were a bunch of specific fears that the world was going to end then.

Speaker 1 And this is actually not not really accurate, but it's not accurate because people didn't really agree what year it was on a wide scale back then.

Speaker 1 However, as Peter Steinfels wrote in a 1999 article for the New York Times, so were there religious terrors and overwrought expectations of the final judgment in the year 999? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 And also in the years 899, 1199, 1299, you name it. One might as well turn the question around and ask, how could it have been otherwise, right?

Speaker 1 In other words, it wasn't so much that people were obsessed with the year 1000.

Speaker 1 It's that they have always, people did not widely agree on what year it was at all times in the past, but people have always expected the end of the world was around the corner, no matter what year they thought it was going to happen.

Speaker 1 That's just natural human nature, right? It just makes sense.

Speaker 1 Well, and also, I mean, you know, not to, this is just me kind of guessing, but I feel like if you look at human history, there are plenty of civilizations that have ended, right?

Speaker 1 Or that have come very close to it through, you know, plague or being built built next to a volcano or

Speaker 1 massive floods or whatever else. And so it feels like this, this idea of destruction that will eventually come for everyone

Speaker 1 is just something that you would develop as an idea based on what it feels like to exist as a human being. Yeah, that makes complete sense.

Speaker 1 And like, it is this, like, you can't, how can you, how could somebody live through like the, the black death and be in like a a city where 75% of the population dies?

Speaker 1 Like that is an apocalypse that you've lived through. Just like, I mean, fuck, if you lived in Berlin in 1945, you're living through an apocalypse, a Hiroshima, you know? Like,

Speaker 1 that's an apocalypse. What else would you call that? We create, yeah, humans create a lot of them or witness a lot of them.

Speaker 1 And I do feel like post-pandemic, I have this feeling of like, all right, we could have another of these. I don't know.
Like,

Speaker 1 it's not unprecedented anymore. So what's next? Honestly, might be nice.
We all got a couple of weeks off last time, you know? Sure.

Speaker 1 Before we descended into

Speaker 1 fascism for several years, we had a couple of weeks where things were really chilled. Yeah.
Really got to catch up on Netflix. Yeah.
And got to re-watch some good TV shows. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So in that article, Steinfelt goes on to quote Bernard McGinn, who's a scholar of medieval religion from the University of Chicago, who said, medieval folk lived in a more or less constant state of apocalyptic expectation.

Speaker 1 And if that sounds kind of chillingly familiar to you, it's because we haven't changed, really.

Speaker 1 We're the same as people back then, and we expect the world to end just like they did in some different ways, you know? And their tummies hurt for different reasons and sometimes the same.

Speaker 1 So some of them the same, yeah.

Speaker 1 And obviously there's different theories as to why do people always think the world is going to end. You know, you can, that, that's a, a lot of ink has been spilled on that topic.

Speaker 1 But I think it boils down to two factors, and neither of which really involves an increase in knowledge, like Peter is obsessed with.

Speaker 1 I think the two big factors are: number one, the apocalypse makes for good entertainment. People are interested in the idea of the world ending.

Speaker 1 And number two, it's less scary to imagine the world ending than to imagine yourself dying in the world going on, which is what will happen, right? To everybody.

Speaker 1 And especially for a guy like Peter Thiel.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right. And right.
And especially if you're, you know, an egomaniac who no one is restraining any longer, you're like, look, everyone has to go out with me ultimately.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I am certain that he would prefer a nuclear holocaust to himself dying alone while the world continues, right? He would prefer his last years be in a bunker.

Speaker 1 God willing, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just hope those bunkers ain't deep enough. Or the security, their security guards will take him out, I'm sure.

Speaker 1 They haven't figured out the shot collars well enough.

Speaker 1 Now, that said, I will, I will acknowledge one thing that Peter says that I agree with is that I think apocalyptic fears have in the past and do today provide space for a tyrant to rise, you know? And

Speaker 1 one of the things that I think, I don't think Peter realizes, but is clear to me studying his beliefs about the Antichrist is that he justifies his yearning for a tyrant, his desire to end democracy and replace it with a dictatorship.

Speaker 1 He justifies that as the only way to stop the Antichrist and the end of the world, which which is deeply anti-Christian, because Peter's whole idea, he says he's a Christian.

Speaker 1 He says, I am a believer that the Antichrist will come and bring about the end of days, but I also think it can be stopped. And that's a good thing, which is like not the religion, my dude.
Right.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't stop. the Antichrist.
Isn't it? Don't you kind of have to just go through the whole thing? Yeah. It's key.
It's pretty important. Right.

Speaker 1 It's like the last, you know, the final conflict of the the movie. Yeah.
He just cut that scene out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that's, that's important for you to understand is that Peter's belief is not the standard Christian apocalyptic belief that you've heard even from like weirdo fundamentalists, you know, who believe in the rapture.

Speaker 1 Peter's is all of that except, but we can stop the bad stuff if we put the right dictator in today. It's actually amazing because he's made himself the main character of the Bible, which

Speaker 1 I can't think of another person who's managed to do that. They usually stick with the characters that are in there.
Jesus did, you know.

Speaker 1 And yeah, and like, you know, and people, you know, we're very familiar with people using Jesus as a proxy for their own desires. But to actually write self-insert Bible fan fiction,

Speaker 1 it's stunning.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. It's stunning.

Speaker 1 It's really, it's really some impressive stuff.

Speaker 1 And it's very funny.

Speaker 1 We're barely into Peter's, like the first episode of Peter's speech. So I'm going to to read for you now.
It started with him quoting that passage from the book of Daniel.

Speaker 1 Here's the second paragraph of his speech. In late modernity, such worries of the apocalypse are unfashionable, and the Antichrist is a forgotten figure.
And I'm sorry, I lied.

Speaker 1 We couldn't get through the whole paragraph. Because that first sentence, like, what world are you living in, man? I know.
The Antichrist is a forgotten figure.

Speaker 1 Where have you heard of the Antichrist, Peter Teal? It was probably growing up watching the omens during Gregory and Peck, just like everyone else did. Have you talked to a person? Yeah.

Speaker 1 and this is a load-bearing belief of his that churches don't talk about the apocalypse of the Antichrist anymore.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 are you,

Speaker 1 how do you think this?

Speaker 1 And just to add some polling data here, in 2013, the public policy polling conducted a series of a survey on conspiratorial beliefs among American voters.

Speaker 1 13% of respondents in 2013 believed Barack Obama was the Antichrist. Another 13 were unsure.

Speaker 1 And 73% stated they didn't think Obama was the Antichrist, but all of them were aware of the concept of the Antichrist.

Speaker 1 I mean, this isn't new. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's Satan's kid, you know? It's really

Speaker 1 exactly. It's little Nikki.
It's his, it's his, you know, look, if Satan is

Speaker 1 Francis Ford Coppola, the Antichrist is Nicholas Cage, who also would be a good pick to play the Antichrist. I'm just saying.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 That has to have happened in 1994, and we forgot about it. It better have.
Yeah. It just skipped us by.
I watched him play a surfer recently. Not a great movie.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Not a great movie. Sorry.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that Nicholas Cage will apparently can't say no.

Speaker 1 They're just like, will you be in this really inappropriate role? And he's like, yes. He's also an Australian in that.

Speaker 1 And they just explain it by being like, oh, we moved to America when California when I was young. It's like, I don't, you still don't really sound Australian to me, Nicholas Cage.

Speaker 1 All right, Mel Gibson.

Speaker 1 But also, I will watch you do anything for roughly 90 minutes. So I guess I'm the fool here.
And often an additional 30. Yeah,

Speaker 1 many cases more than that.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to actually read another paragraph, Peter said. This time you'll get the whole paragraph, but it's just as insane.

Speaker 1 And so like, hold your, hold your questions till the end, Sarah, but I know you're going to immediately have them.

Speaker 1 Our universities tell us that fears of the apocalypse are irrational and that the world is simply getting better. And yet, our news tells us otherwise.

Speaker 1 We are worried about existential risks from AI, bioweapons, and nuclear war. How can we understand our apocalyptic time? And, like, what universities are you

Speaker 1 think college professors are telling all their kids the world is always getting better? And that's what happened. Like, who,

Speaker 1 where,

Speaker 1 what are you basing this on? What college classes?

Speaker 1 Maybe he read Candide and he was like, so that's what they do in college. That's what professors must feel always.
Famously, in college, you spend four years with people saying, everything's fine.

Speaker 1 Don't worry about it. Don't even think about it.
It's great. Well, that's what's so weird to me about this is that like Peter hates universities in the standard right-wing way.

Speaker 1 So I'm not surprised that he's critical of professors, but the standard right-wing critique of professors in the university isn't they think the world's getting better. Right.

Speaker 1 It's that like all of these leftist academics are telling everyone capitalism is fucked up and the climate change is coming. It's the opposite of that.

Speaker 1 That's such a weird thing for you to say, being you, Peter. It feels like kind of classic like freshman comp writing where you're like,

Speaker 1 I'm going to invent

Speaker 1 a problem that doesn't exist in order to justify. the importance of my position.
And it's like, all right, you just made that up, but whatever, fine, keep going.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, like, I get that you're, you can, you're creating straw men, but like, you're creating conflicting straw men.

Speaker 1 Like, your straw men aren't internally consistent, which is kind of weird, right?

Speaker 1 Um, anyway, uh, after this, Peter goes on to state that the apocalypse is not a fixed date on a calendar.

Speaker 1 Uh, and he briefly summarizes the hilarious history of people trying to predict the end of days.

Speaker 1 Then he writes, Still, if the day and the hour remain hidden, perhaps we may at least suspect the century. Now,

Speaker 1 I would argue this is just as delusional as trying to predict the day of the apocalypse, but it is much smarter from a gambler's point of view. And Peter Thiel is a degenerate gambler, right?

Speaker 1 Like, you get a lot of space to be wrong if you're just like, oh, it'll happen sometime in the 21st century, right? Like, that is the smart play.

Speaker 1 They'll be dead before people know you're totally wrong. Yeah.
Absolutely. Which is ideal.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, next, he tells his audience that if we are to take the Antichrist seriously, and again, for Peter, the Antichrist and the apocalypse are both synonyms, we have to ask four questions.

Speaker 1 These four questions are, what is the Antichrist's relationship to Armageddon? When will he arrive? What is his relationship to Christ? And who is the Antichrist?

Speaker 1 Now, Peter's selective reading of scripture concludes that the Antichrist is the final antagonist before the revelation of Christ and Armageddon, quote, the beast of the sea heading a world government.

Speaker 1 He will come after many forerunners and will

Speaker 1 deceive the faithful by appearing more Christian than Christ. Now, for that last question, who is the Antichrist?

Speaker 1 Peter notes that the Antichrist, depending on who you listen to, could be a single person or a system or a type that repeats across history, right?

Speaker 1 And next he has a digression where he claims that David from the Bible was the first real historian, quote, because he foresaw a one-time sequence of world empires, whereas classical historians like Thucydides saw only cycles.

Speaker 1 Quote, Athens versus Sparta, Germany versus Britain, and China versus America were one and the same. They were just steps in an eternal recurrence.
And I know there's a lot that's wrong there.

Speaker 1 We'll get back to the Antichrist stuff, but I have to correct Peter's talking about history because this is not fair to Thucydides or to classical thought.

Speaker 1 And neither, nothing he's saying here is like accurate historiography, right? Classical thinkers did talk about the cyclical nature of history.

Speaker 1 Like Thucydides talked about that, but he wasn't saying that like history is trapped in these like

Speaker 1 cycles of like it's the same thing happening over and over again.

Speaker 1 He was making the same observation modern people do looking at history, which is that like, oh, people make the same mistakes a lot, huh?

Speaker 1 Like, there's a lot of similarities in history that rhyme because we keep fucking up in similar ways. Right.
And I'm going to, here's a quote from Thucydides himself, just to make that point.

Speaker 1 If my work is judged useful by any who shall wish to have a clear view both of the events which have happened and those which will someday, according to the human condition, happen again in such and such like ways, it will suffice for me.

Speaker 1 So Thucydides is saying, my work is a success if it leads people to understand the human condition and the patterns that we go through as people, right?

Speaker 1 Like the patterns in history as a result of the human condition. That's a very like modern.
thing, really, in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 And I think is actually comports pretty well with modern historiography, which is like the exact same things don't repeat, but people make similar choices historically in similar situations.

Speaker 1 And that's why you study history. Like, I actually think Thucydides is saying something timeless here.

Speaker 1 And Peter is saying that, no, no, no, this guy is, this is a classical person who's trapped with like a very limited view of historic, of history that's fundamentally wrong because he doesn't believe history can progress, you know, which is not what Thucydides is saying.

Speaker 1 He's making a point about human nature. He's got to create another meaningless straw man in order to make

Speaker 1 a theoretical point. Yeah.
Yes. In part because Daniel has to be the first real historian, you know? Because historians predict things that haven't happened yet.
Right.

Speaker 1 That's what being a historian is.

Speaker 4 Robert, my question is, do we have any from your from the source, do they say like how the audience is reacting to this like 55-minute thing?

Speaker 1 They seemed engrossed from the reports I've heard, like mostly interested. People kept showing up.
I don't know. I don't have the audio, so I can't hear like what the reaction was.

Speaker 1 Was there a lot of applause? Was it all people being polite to Peter because they work in his VC fund? These are the unknowns, you know,

Speaker 1 to me. So I can't answer that question accurately, Sophie.
But it's a good question.

Speaker 1 So Peter claimed his justification, his explanation for why Daniel was the first real historian is that Daniel was the first historian to realize that world empires would all fall in succession, leading ultimately to the end of the world and the coming of God's kingdom.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 Daniel, I mean,

Speaker 1 he made a, that's kind of what he predicted, but not in a way that's accurate to modern history because and this is critical sarah daniel prophesied four earthly kingdoms rising and falling in succession and then after those four kingdoms rise and fall we'll get the end of days and god's eternal kingdom right and the first we know what the kingdoms were the first was babylon which did indeed rise and fall the second was persia the third was greece some of what daniel is wrote is often seen as him having predicted alexander the great although again it was written after Alexander's time, probably, right?

Speaker 1 Probably. And then the fourth kingdom that rose and fall was probably Rome, right? That that's what Daniel was prophesying.
Now, if you're a history note.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You might be saying at this point, I feel like there's been a lot of empires since the Roman Empire fell. Yeah,

Speaker 1 the Ottoman Empire springs to mind. Sure, that's a good thing.
Holy Roman British Empire. Yeah, that's a big thing.
The American Empire, you know? Yep, falling as we speak.

Speaker 1 Obviously, the Canadian Empire, the most powerful and evil of them all. Oh, yeah, yeah, the seed of global Satanism, according to Michelle Remembers.
So there you go. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 anyway, Peter's stance seems to be that, like, Daniel was right,

Speaker 1 but that, and again, Daniel is literally... the guy who wrote the book of Daniel and literally a historian, but also the four kingdoms thing was figurative, right?

Speaker 1 He wasn't literally talking about the actual historical empires. He was talking about

Speaker 1 because, like, again, he missed a lot of history after the Roman Empire, in between that and the apocalypse.

Speaker 1 And as a result, I might suggest that, like, well, Daniel clearly didn't foresee anything past the Roman Empire in terms of empires rising and falling.

Speaker 1 Maybe Thucydides' way of looking at history, you know, seeing patterns of human behavior and seeing how they

Speaker 1 influence historic events rather than trying to predict specific events. Maybe that's a more productive way to look at history.
Maybe Thucydides was a better historian than Daniel.

Speaker 1 No, the correct way to look at history is self-insert fan fiction. We've been over there.
That's right.

Speaker 1 That's right. Make yourself the most important character in history.
Why bother studying anything if you can't be the main character of it? Right. I've always felt that way anyway.

Speaker 1 So thank you for like reinforcing my belief system here. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, in his next paragraph, Peter continues to be dizzyingly wrong. From From 1750 to the early 1900s, technology accelerated at a pace that defies comprehension.

Speaker 1 In the 20th century, lifespans doubled. We moved faster physically.
Steam engines led to automobiles and jet airplanes. In the 21st century, technology only means information technology.

Speaker 1 Progress in all other fields has halted. The question naturally arises: is the singularity in the past or in the future?

Speaker 1 He doesn't know what singularity means. No, he doesn't.
And he doesn't know.

Speaker 1 This is a very, if all you care about is like the consumer tech industry, it's a, I understand how your attitude could be. Nothing is progressing aside from information technology.

Speaker 1 Smartphones aren't really improving anymore.

Speaker 1 Tablets are kind of laptops, all of these things that used to be wildly different every year are only kind of a little bit different now with every new innovation. Progress has stopped.

Speaker 1 If you only look at technology and like gadgets a guy keeps in his living room or their pocket, I get how you might say that.

Speaker 1 And clearly, that's how Peter Thiel thinks about technology because he's a terminal narcissist, right? Who can only see progress through the lens of the parts of the tech industry he makes money on.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the idea that like all other fields of scientific endeavor have stalled in the last couple of decades is insane nonsense. I mean, for example, mRNA vaccine technology

Speaker 1 advanced rapidly in recent history, right?

Speaker 1 That doesn't count to Peter for some reason.

Speaker 1 What does it matter if something advances if you can't make exponential profits off of it? Who cares? Yep. Yep.
And that's clearly what's going on here.

Speaker 1 I don't even know, like, should I like, I have, I had a rant in here about like car tech, like automobile safety technology, just as like a point of how wrong he is, because like it's mat, like since the 1980s,

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 there's a little bit of debate about this, but like anti-lock brakes became normal in the 1980s.

Speaker 1 And kind of after that, you started getting an increasing variety of like what are called advanced driver assistance systems or ADAS.

Speaker 1 This includes everything from like collision warnings to automated emergency braking and electronic stability control, lane assist, all that kinds of stuff.

Speaker 1 And like electronic stability control or ESC systems alone have been shown to reduce single vehicle fatal crash, crash fatality chances by between like 40 and 56 percent.

Speaker 1 There's a 2017 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that shows that

Speaker 1 like some of these like

Speaker 1 rear braking systems have reduced rear-end collisions by 27%.

Speaker 1 Um, like the data overall suggests that, like, automated emergency braking with combined with a warning reduces rear-end crashes by between 50 and 56 percent.

Speaker 1 And altogether, newer cars have something like a 50 percent lower fatality risk in crashes than cars built in the late 50s.

Speaker 1 This is a staggering degree of improvement, and a lot of it's occurred in the last like 20 years. Again, during this period of time where Peter's like, nothing's getting better.
Well, a lot is.

Speaker 1 It's just not what you care about.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, we have kind of reached the apex of what a screen can do, probably.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't get it. You know, that's fine.
There's other things. There's other things.

Speaker 1 Cancers to research. You know, we're still making headway in other areas.
It's fine.

Speaker 1 It's so weird to be like, well, TVs are as good as they're going to get. All of progress is halted now.
There's nothing else. No.
we might as well

Speaker 1 give up, I guess. Yeah.
I'm ready for the apocalypse if my TV is not going to keep improving. Yeah.
You can't make the images any smoother.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And it's just really telling that, like, Peter's attitude is like, only information technology is still advancing.

Speaker 1 And it's like, yeah, because that's the only technology you're looking at, right? You don't care about car safety. You don't care about any of these other fields.

Speaker 1 Well, if he's not paying attention to it, it doesn't exist. You know, it's like when a baby drops something.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's a there's a very funny at this point in his write-up that he made of Peter's speech, Carney, the guy taking the notes, includes a graph.

Speaker 1 And I, I don't know, I think that Peter's presentation had a graph like this. I don't know that, maybe, but it's, it's so funny, Sarah.
Look at this beautiful thing. There's, there's two graphs.

Speaker 1 One is labeled in the past, and one is labeled in the future. And the one that says in the past shows the line basically going as an S curve, but like it's going rapidly up.

Speaker 1 Knowledge on the X axis, time on the Y axis, or did I fuck up the axes?

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 it's showing knowledge going up massively over time and then plateauing suddenly. And then the one labeled in the future shows knowledge at a steady rate until it shotguns up

Speaker 1 rapidly over time. I guess that's Peter predicting that knowledge will happen.
Yeah, can we see the raw data for these?

Speaker 1 What is the data? What is knowledge based on? How are we defining knowledge?

Speaker 1 in the future when how do we know why do we have a chart of the future it's because he's a true historian like daniel who wrote the book of daniel duh yeah i love i love fake graphs and this is a beautiful fake graph to me it's perfect i don't even know what you're trying to argue other than like ai will increase the rate of knowledge maybe it looks like that's kind of what he's trying to say but he's arguing certainly that right now we're stuck like science is stuck you know and this is like the core of everything peter believes and like why he is so supportive of radical political change is that he thinks it's death for the human race that science is stuck.

Speaker 1 And as a spoiler, the Antichrist is all of the anti-science people who want to stop AI research, who want to stop

Speaker 1 drilling for fossil fuels, like who want to like that, that is his doom loop, right? Peter says, quote, we are running a red queen's race, working harder, running faster, yet standing still.

Speaker 1 Wages have stagnated, health is plateauing, and optimism is fading. Nixon declared a war on cancer in 1971, promising victory by the bicentennial in 1976.

Speaker 1 No president today would dare declare a war on Alzheimer's. And like, I mean, yeah, man, because we didn't, we didn't beat cancer in 1976, right? Yeah, Nixon was very brave.

Speaker 1 Hey, if he hadn't got, if he hadn't resigned, maybe he would have cured cancer. Sure.

Speaker 1 It's like, I don't know, maybe the fact that this didn't work last time is why presidents don't say shit like that anymore. Cause it's like dumb.

Speaker 1 It's like dumb.

Speaker 1 It's a stupid thing to do. It's a grandiose and over-the-top thing to say.
And I get that it's personally disappointing to you that the presidents don't act more megalomaniacal. But

Speaker 1 it's also the idea that, like, oh, wow, it's fun that he recognizes regular people, their wages are standing still.

Speaker 1 Like, things like quality of life increases have plateaued and things aren't getting better at the rate they used to.

Speaker 1 And yet, my wealth as a billionaire has increased massively while like regular wages are stagnant. Rich people like me, the top 1% of the top 1% are getting a lot more.
Hmm.

Speaker 1 Wonder if those are connected.

Speaker 1 I wonder if maybe all of the benefits that should be spread out throughout society in order to do things like increase life expectancy and increase average wealth and like ensure people are able to retire and all this stuff that

Speaker 1 translates to quality of life. I wonder if the fact that all that money is going to me has anything to do with this stagnation.
Nah.

Speaker 1 Antichrist. Yeah.

Speaker 1 In his next paragraph, Peter gets to the core of why he's so angry at science and academia. Science once promised radical life extension.

Speaker 1 Today, the closest we come to mastery over death is legalized euthanasia. What? And I, yeah,

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 Peter, that's not true. Like,

Speaker 1 he just

Speaker 1 hasn't, he, I don't think anyone has given him feedback on this journey. No.

Speaker 1 No. And it's like,

Speaker 1 yeah, this is very clearly a man without an editor, for sure. He needs an editor.
He needs a producer. He needs a single person to say no.

Speaker 1 I feel like science never promised radical life. You probably read like an article in like people

Speaker 1 where someone who wasn't a scientist talked about radical or a grifter talked about radical and you bought it because you're not that smart. Maybe that's who promised radical life.

Speaker 1 I think some conmen promised you radical life extension.

Speaker 1 And as you age and none of the nonsense you're doing really works the way it's supposed to, you realize you've been conned and you're blaming science as opposed to the grifters that you listened to and gave a lot of money.

Speaker 1 I think maybe that's what's going on here. And blaming science for your magical thinking not working as well as it used to.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And also just like the closest we come to mastery of a death is legalized euthanasia. Again, like fucking

Speaker 1 the most recent vaccine technology leaps and like life expectancies have increased in a lot of ways for a lot of specific illnesses.

Speaker 1 There are a lot of new medicines that didn't exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago that

Speaker 1 exist now. And like,

Speaker 1 absolutely. Gene modification technology.
Yeah. You know, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like I realize euthanasia is exciting, but come on. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a ton of medical improvements and even breakthroughs, just none of them mean that you'll live forever because that's not possible, Peter. But basically he's like, science is in the dictionary.

Speaker 1 kill ourselves. But wait, there's more.
But wait, there's more.

Speaker 1 It's like looking at, it's like looking at like the aerospace field and being like, there's been no progress in the last 30 years because we haven't developed faster-than-light travel.

Speaker 1 Because I didn't see it on TV, so I assume it didn't happen. Right.
But like, planes are a lot safer. Like, plane crashes are a lot rarer.
Like, isn't that count as an improvement? No, fuck you.

Speaker 1 We don't have warp speed. I'm angry.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, we'll talk some more about Peter Thiel and what he believes. And specifically, we're going to talk about who he thinks the Antichrist might be in part two.
But this is part one.

Speaker 1 It ran a little long, but thank you, Sarah, for indulging me. Thank you.
This has been a horrifying journey. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How do you feel about Peter? He seems smart. I feel like he's a tiny little baby.
And I can't wait to see him become even tinier before my very eyes next time. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Robert,

Speaker 4 who is your Antichrist, Robert?

Speaker 1 Who do I think the Antichrist is? Honestly, like, Peter Thiel's not a bad pick.

Speaker 1 If you're kind of going, though, with the more traditional view of, like, it needs to be somebody who's like popular, who's like widely beloved, you know, by people who's able to get a large following together.

Speaker 1 I feel like Mr. Beast.

Speaker 1 I feel like Mr. Beast, very probable Antichrist.
Yeah. You can

Speaker 1 There's nothing behind his eyes. We can all agree on that, right? Yeah.
That black eyes, like a doll's eyes. Doll's eyes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm glad that you brought up Jaws because I do think that the solution to Mr. Beast is the same as the solution to the shark and Jaws.

Speaker 1 Yep. Make him bite into an oxygen tank.
Yeah. I'm going to crowdfund a shitty boat, like not a good boat, like a fucked up looking boat that I've been living on for.

Speaker 1 It's named after the thing that almost ate you when you were younger. Or no, it's called the orca, I guess.

Speaker 1 It's named after the only thing that can eat the thing that almost ate you when you were younger.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So yeah, that's going to be great. Anyway, if you haven't watched the original Jaws, go listen to Jaws.
Plug your pluggable, Sarah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Go listen to The Devil You Know. It's out right now from CBC Podcasts.
It's my new mini-series about the satanic panic and all of the truly wonderful people who got caught up in it.

Speaker 1 And I was so happy to get to talk to you today about something that scares me so much more than any depiction of the devil. And I cannot wait to resume.
Yay.

Speaker 1 All right, everyone. Part one is done.
Go away for a while.

Speaker 3 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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