Brad Unfiltered: The Gospel of Peter Thiel (Part I)
In this recording of a livestream from October 6, 2025, Dr. Brad Onishi delves into the complex religious worldview of Peter Thiel, exploring his beliefs about Christianity, technology, and the future. Thiel's perspective on Armageddon, the Antichrist, and the role of innovation in society is examined, alongside his influences from political theorists like Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. The discussion also touches on the concept of mimesis and scapegoating in human behavior, and how these ideas shape Thiel's vision for a future led by tech founders.Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
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It's good to be with you today and uh want to talk about the gospel of Peter Teal.
So let's do it.
All right.
So I've been thinking about Peter Thiel and his religious worldview for a little bit now and thought today was a really good day to jump into that.
Want to say thanks to all of you who are here and uh say that this is part one.
I don't think we're gonna get to everything today.
So if we need to do this again next week, I'll be back.
And we'll uh we'll do this until we feel like we've got it all covered and until people are no longer interested.
I'm Dr. Brad O'Neisy, co-host of this podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
I'm a scholar of religion, the author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, the founder of Axis Mundi Media.
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All right, let's get into Peter Thiel.
His his worldview is complex and it's confusing, and it's it's just not easy to digest.
I think a lot of you are aware that he's been talking about Armageddon and the Antichrist and so many other things for quite a while now.
And it's hard to dissect all of that.
So I want to get some things clear today.
And these are the things we're gonna try to accomplish today.
We want to get to Thiel's Jesus.
Who is that?
We want to get to what he means by the Antichrist.
We want to get to what he means by Armageddon.
What is Christianity to Peter Thiel?
And what is his vision for the future?
Now in an hour, we can't get to everything.
We can't get to how this all fits into the details of Palantir or Seasteading or him and Elon Musk or whatever.
There's there's a lot to say there.
And uh in the future, I'm happy to go there.
But for now at least, it's it's just not gonna be possible to get to all of it.
I want to lay a foundation and then see if we can come back and do the rest here in the future.
All right.
So we're gonna try to get those terms kind of figured out.
And I'm gonna start with with a kind of thesis that I think should guide us.
And if you're looking for something to like digest right away and and write down or remember, it's this.
Thiel has in the past kind of described himself as religious but not spiritual.
And I think that's a guiding light for what's to come.
He's a religious person.
He believes deeply in Christianity.
Yet he's not spiritual.
And you might be thinking, well, that doesn't make sense.
And that's fair.
You might be familiar with people who say, oh, I'm spiritual but not religious.
Well, Thiel is religious but not spiritual.
He draws deeply on the Bible, on Christianity, on the figure of Jesus.
He obviously is very interested in Armageddon and the Antichrist, but he does so in a way that is not necessarily metaphysical or spiritual in nature.
And we're gonna try to fail that out here as time goes on.
Thiel believes that technology is akin to creation and that technological breakthroughs are akin to miracles.
So when you think about technology, he thinks of that as kind of the image of God.
That when we are doing tech innovation, we're doing the work of God as God created everything supernaturally.
And when when you think about miracles, he's like, well, miracles are just tech breakthroughs.
Okay.
He believes in Jesus, but not the one you've heard of, and we'll get to that here in a second.
And he believes the path forward for him and a few others is one that is a narrow path through Armageddon and the Antichrist.
This is not one that is for everybody.
And I'm gonna be very clear.
I don't think Peter Thiel has any interest in being a hero for humanity.
I also don't think that he is the the big bad other Nazi that something.
Now that doesn't get me wrong.
I think that he's got a very destructive view of things.
However, there's been a lot of work recently that's basically tried to pin down Peter Thiel as a Nazi, interested in Carl Schmidt and all that.
And therefore he's just mimicking Nazi ideology.
There are elements of his worldview that are, to me at least, exclusionary, bordering on white supremacist, and so on.
But that headline of like Peter Thiel Nazi because Peter Thiel interested in Karl Schmidt, I don't think that holds very well.
Okay.
So let's try to figure out how all these things work together.
His Jesus, his Christianity, his view of Armageddon, his view of the Antichrist, um, and so many other things.
A couple of uh months ago, Peter Thiel gave an interview with Ross Doubthat at New York Times, and it was clipped endlessly.
And in that, when I watched that, here's here's to me, here's what I've written down about how I how he looks to me in that interview.
He looks like a brain trying to explode from its casing.
The extruded vein, like a python, extends across his forehead, which is shiny with sweat.
Looking at him, one would assume his resting state is tense rage.
Every breath sounds like seething.
Despite the guise of casualness, a fashionable t-shirt, a nonchalant mid-fate haircut, blue dockers.
There's nothing easy about this man.
He looks, as George Packer once noted, uncomfortable having a body.
This was June 2025.
And here is a clip of that interview where Dao Tat asks him if he wants humanity to survive.
You would prefer the human race to endure, right?
You're hesitant.
Well, I don't know.
I I would I would um hesitation.
It's a long hesitation.
There's so many questions in place.
All right.
So I mean, if you know Thiel and you've ever watched him, this is kind of what he does.
He he does a lot of hemming and hawing.
There's a lot of filler words.
But this is bad.
He's asked if he wants humanity to survive, and he doesn't have a clear answer.
Now, Dalfhat asks him later, you know, what about the Antichrist?
And this led to another viral moment because he talked about Greta Thunberg, and we'll get to Greta here later in in today's you know live stream, but he seemed way more at ease talking about the Antichrist in Armageddon than he did talking about whether or not humanity should survive.
And, you know, some of you know that well, let me back up.
A lot of people were like aghast at this.
They were just like, I can't believe that Peter Thiel is so interested in Armageddon and the Antichrist.
Like, where did this come from?
This is crazy, right?
Some of you know that tonight is his last lecture in a set of lectures about the Antichrist.
It's in uh San Francisco.
It is uh totally off the record.
You're not supposed to videotape it or anything.
The Antichrist, a four-part lecture series, and it's gonna finish up tonight at the Commonwealth Club, okay.
So, you know, this is this is this is something that he's into, but it's not new.
And I think this is something that I want to sort of make sure we know from the start.
He's been talking about Armageddon, the Antichrist, Jesus, the Bible.
He's been talking about this for a long, long time.
So I could play you a clip from uh what he said there uh to Ross Dalthat a couple months ago, but here's a clip from last year.
There's clips from 2023.
Basically, since the pandemic, he's been talking about this topic.
I think it was Ivan Illich who said it before.
You can think of it as a system, you know, uh, where maybe maybe communism is a one world system.
So it's it could be an ideology or a system.
Um and then, of course, you can also think of it as um as Newman did, where it's it's it's sort of the final dictator of the of the one world state, where it's it's still you stress it more as a person.
You can think of it as a type, a system, a person.
How does a sort of world takeover actually happen?
And it's kind of a not a deus ex machinab, like a daemonium ex machina.
It's like the antichrist just gives these hypnotic speeches where nobody can remember a word and then Sort of just swindles people's souls out of them and they submit to this totalitarian state or something like this.
And um, and um, I think I think if we were to speculate on how to solve that plot hole, we have an answer in the world after 1945.
That's uh um people are in in 1900, 19, early 20th century, people were not yet scared of apocalyptic weapons.
They could not imagine, you know, anything of the scale that we'd have by the second half of the 20th century.
And so uh, and so um the Antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon.
Okay, we're gonna see this over and over again.
That Peter Thiel does think Armageddon is possible, and he thinks that it could be nuclear, it could be AI, it could be nanobots, it could be the climate crisis.
Uh he talks about it this way at least, in terms of some of the threats.
And he's not always clear that he believes in all of those, but he at least acknowledges that those are things people are afraid of.
I think I can characterize Thiel as seeing some credible uh threat of something like a species defining catastrophe.
But for Thiel, every time he brings up the threat of Armageddon, he brings up the Antichrist.
Because for him, the threat of Armageddon means that we all want to play it safe.
And if we all want to play it safe, we will be susceptible to a leader, a charismatic leader who will lead a one world government, and that will be the antichrist.
Now, we got to flesh out some things in order to sort of get there.
That's that's part of the answer.
What is the long division?
I'm gonna do some of that long division now, okay?
And and and flesh out that answer and a bunch more dimensions of Thiel's techno theology, his religious but not spiritual Christianity.
In 2004, Peter Thiel wrote an essay called The Straussian Moment.
And Peter Thiel has given lectures, he has done podcast interviews, he has written op-eds.
There are so many pieces of the Peter Thiel corpus.
But to me, this essay called The Straussian Moment is the essay that really is the Dakota ring for his work.
Why?
He wrote this essay after a uh a conference with political theologians and scholars who are interested in the work of a man named Renee Girard.
And we'll get to him in a minute.
If you don't know who that is, don't worry.
Here's the point for now.
This was a gathering of academics and intellectuals.
And they eventually collected all the the conference papers and they put them into a volume that was published by Michigan State Press.
Peter Thiel helped to pay for a lot of that.
But this is that place where like Thiel wanted to be a real intellectual.
So he had to flesh out his thinking.
You know, like when you're a billionaire and you show up to a podcast interview or to give a keynote or to talk at Harvard, you can just say some stuff.
People are going to be so thrilled you're there, and be so stoked that you're in their class or or on their podcast.
And you don't have to kind of provide any of that rigor.
In this essay, though, he did.
And to me, that's why it's a kind of decoder ring for understanding uh his entire worldview, uh, or at least a foundation for his worldview.
So he's writing this essay in 2004, and it's it's fresh off uh uh after 9-11.
The question on his mind is well, how do you get to a place where 9-11 doesn't keep happening, where there's terrorist attacks continually in the United States, where there's endless violence across the world.
I think personally, Peter Thiel was afraid.
Like, are we gonna get attacked over and over again living in this country?
I think a bigger question he had was, well, what do we do now?
Because this seems to have changed everything.
We don't seem to be able to live in a world that we did before 911.
That whatever post-war consensus, whatever safety you felt as an American, whatever order there was in the world is done.
So what do we do now?
Well, he first turns to Carl Schmidt.
And this is where so many journalists and others have really gotten kind of like a lot of words published.
Because any time you mention Carl Schmidt, you're gonna get notoriety because Carl Schmidt was a political theologian in Weimar Germany, and then he became a Nazi.
And he he lend a lot of his thinking to Nazis.
His, when you think of Carl Schmidt, you think of anybody trained in political science, the history of ideas, philosophy knows he was a Nazi, period.
Okay.
So if you're interested in Thiel, or I'm sorry, if you're just in Schmidt, Peter, uh, people are gonna be like, uh, okay, scary.
And Peter Thiel is.
So what does he get from from Schmidt?
What is it that he takes away from him?
What he takes away from Schmidt is this idea that to be a human being is to be divided by questions of ultimate meaning, ultimate meaning, of a value.
We have personal passions, and we rarely agree on those.
So politics is the field of battle in which the division of our passions and our piety takes place.
And we have to choose between friends and enemies, people that share those passions and those values, and people who don't.
And for Schmidt, this is the famous friend-enemy distinction you might have heard about.
When you have different values, different passions, different piety, you just it's you you fight.
You dominate or be dominated.
There's not a world of like pluralism and living together.
There's not a world where like my neighbor is Hindu and I'm atheist and the people across the street are Jewish and others are or Muslim and humanist and everyone else and different races, different religions, and we all live in this kind of universal harmony of pluralism and representative democracy.
Nope, it's either get or be got.
And after 9-11, unfortunately, Thiel seems to kind of come down with Schmidt on this idea.
That we are not all gonna get along in this kind of universal way, and Osama bin Laden showed him that.
That's what Thiel takes away.
Osama Bin Laden was rich, he was an oil magnate, it didn't matter.
He still attacked the quote unquote the West.
So that's a problem.
And if we follow Schmidt, we're just gonna get violence, we're gonna get conflict.
Now, unfortunately, Thiel seems to buy a lot of this.
Fortunately, he says, Schmidt's not the answer.
I mean, fortunately maybe a strong word.
But Schmidt is not the answer.
Why?
Schmidt's not the answer because Thiel says in this in this essay, if we follow him, okay, we will we will enter limitless destruction through technology.
That's what Peter Thiel says.
Why?
Because of nuclear war.
Like you just saw a clip where he talked about 1945.
So for Peter Thiel, what changes after 1945, the atomic bomb, nuclear power, is if you do Schmidt's friend-enemy thing without any kind of guardrails, you're gonna end up in nuclear war, and we're all gonna die.
So that doesn't seem good.
And that doesn't seem the answer.
So he needs another answer, okay.
So now he turns to the political theorist Leo Strauss.
Some of you know who Leo Strauss is, some of you are like, never heard that name before.
Leo Strauss is a mid mid-20th century thinker.
Somebody who corresponded with Carl Schmidt at times, somebody who taught at the University of Chicago for about 20 years, is very famous, and is somebody who, among other things, is is fairly beloved by conservative political theorists.
Why?
Because Strauss believed that there is a kind of natural good or right that humans should follow.
That instead of a universal set of values, oh, my neighbor's Muslim, I'm atheist, they're over there Jewish, they're Christian, they're they're humanist, all that.
We're all good.
We can be neighbors.
No, I'm not better than you, you're not better than me.
Strauss is sort of like, look, there is a natural good.
There's a right way to be human.
And the American founding was trying to lead towards that good democracy, representation, equality, all that.
But but the problem is, American society has been based on the idea of those great values, but it's been protected by what?
It's been protected by espionage and violence and secrecy and all of that.
It's like every 90s spy movie, where in order to protect American democracy, the spies, the CIA have to like do stuff that's totally not okay, destroy people's lives, overrun due process, hold people without a trial, all of that to save the great nation.
And the lesson that Thiel takes away here, and some of you might be Straussian, and you're like, I this is not Strauss, get out of here.
That's fine.
I'm just following what Thiel says.
Okay, I'm rehearsing Thiel's position.
That for Teal, there's a great danger Here, and a great opportunity.
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Violence, exclusion, lack of due process, lack of representation, a lot of Americans are gonna sort of give up on the ideals of what this country supposedly was built on.
And what you're gonna lead to, and this is where Teal, I think agrees very much and is actually welcoming, is you're gonna get to a place where democracy is no longer the governing structure.
When he finishes this section of the essay, he quotes Oswald Spengler, also somebody from early 20th century Germany, also somebody with illiberal ideas.
And he said he quotes him, uh, his book, The Decline of the West.
And part of the passage reads like this Caesarism, as in Caesar, quietly and inexorably approaches.
The fates lead the willing, they drag the unwilling.
So for Thiel, there is this sense that like after 9-11, there was an apocalypse.
And by apocalypse, he means an unveiling.
He's always talking about unveiling, and this comes from uh a book called The Sovereign Individual, which is a story for another time.
But it was an unveiling that democracy is not going to survive.
And Peter Thiel's pretty, if you read closely, he's pretty excited about that.
That we're probably going to get something closer to Caesarism or something else rather than this idea of the city on a hill.
And that that's that's kind of where we go.
And for Teal, it's worth saying this if you want to get to the Bible.
The skepticism about democracy is biblical.
He argues that whereas the Greek philosophical tradition prioritizes a community of wise people, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures teach us to follow a single great leader.
This is what he said in an interview.
You know, for a biblical scholar, I would sort of ask the question is there a single incidence in which the unanimity of the crowd is right?
This is from 2023 at Stanford.
I think it's always wrong.
Joseph is right, his brothers are wrong.
The Tower of Babel, the global crowd is completely wrong.
Christ is abandoned.
Somehow reason tells us to believe in the wisdom of the crowds, but revelation tells us to be skeptical.
So if Athens teaches us democracy, Jerusalem leads to Caesarism.
That's where we are at this moment.
Okay, so so far, here's what we've got.
Peter Thiel, after 9-11, sort of thinks we're headed toward the end of democracy.
And he thinks that's biblical because the crowds voting, the masses, they never get it right in the Bible or anywhere else.
Now, he doesn't necessarily want Carl Schmidt's endless violence.
And I don't think for him, Strauss is the answer because Strauss basically just leads to destruction.
But what's next?
If democracy is going to fall, if Caesarism is on the horizon, well, what does that look like?
And how do we how do we operate a path forward?
What is what do we do here?
Okay.
Well, in order to understand that, we have to go to his famous and most favored uh college professor, and that is Renee Girard.
A lot of you are probably familiar with the fact that Peter Thiel was very interested and has been very interested in Rainish Renaissance Gerard since the 1990s.
Renee Girard is a is a literary theorist.
He's a philosopher of religion.
He died in 2015.
He was very close to Peter Thiel, at least in in some sense.
And Thiel, if you said, hey, who was the most influential person on Peter Thiel's thinking, it is Renee Girard.
Okay?
There's not time here to go through a comprehensive kind of overview of Girard.
There's no time to flesh out where Thiel gets Girard wrong and is reading him incorrectly and all that.
But if we follow Girard and Thiel's reading of Girard, we'll get to Thiel's Christianity.
Okay, I promise.
So there's two things that Peter Thiel takes away from Renee Girard.
You ready?
Number one is this time is linear.
Okay?
That unlike other religions that teach cycles, that teach us that time is a loop, whether that's dharma, whether that's karma, whether that is anything else.
He thinks that Christianity and Judaism's innovation is linear time.
Okay.
There's no like return to what was.
Instead, we're always moving forward.
Okay.
A lot of you probably know that Peter Thiel is a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings.
And his senior quote in his high school yearbook was this: the great adventure is what lies ahead.
Today and tomorrow are yet to be said.
According to his biographer Max Chafkin, he said later in his life that he'd memorized the entire passage, which continues, the chances the changes are all yours to make.
The mold of your life is in your hands to break.
Max Chafkin, his biographer, says it would become in a way the motto of his life.
Four decades later, in 2024, he talked about this in an interview with Tyler Cowan.
If you're watching this, you can see the quote on the screen.
I think there is some kind of meaning to history.
I think it has a certain type of linearity to say.
Let's say the Judeo-Christian view of history, distinct from, let's say, the classical Greco-Roman one.
I don't know if you can have a concept of history that's cyclical.
And so if you look at Thucydides, where it's this great period of peace that leads to this great war between Athens and Sparta, there's nothing particular in the history.
None of the details matter in Thucydides.
He makes up all the speeches and so on.
And then you contrast that with something like the book of Daniel in the Bible, where it's a succession of four kingdoms and it's a one-time world history where everything that happens is unique, not to be repeated.
And there's sort of a sense in which I would say the first real historian was Daniel.
So for Peter Thiel, the idea that history is linear is really, really important.
Why?
Because if it's not, what else are we doing?
He thinks he can create history.
Humans are here to make history.
Nothing is determined.
He says in other interviews, he's not a Calvinist.
He does not believe in predestination.
He does not believe that things are foreseen.
Humans have the power to create time, and history goes from A to Z. It does not reverse on itself.
And if you if you look at his his thought closely, this comes through loud and clear all the time.
Now, the second thing he takes from Renee Girard, and this is this is the most important thing, is the idea that we as human beings are mimetic.
What does that mean?
That we are mimes, that we copy each other all the time.
That human nature is about us copying each other.
The basis of society is replication and a desire to be like those around us.
So according to Girard, or at least Thiel's Girard, human nature is distinct from other forms of life due to our acute capacity for mimesis.
Okay.
Here's what Thiel says about this.
All cultural institutions, beginning with the acquisition of language by children from their parents, require this sort of mimetic activity.
And so it is not overly reductionist to describe human brains as gigantic imitation machines.
I'm getting distracted.
This is a lot to take in.
Wake up.
You ready?
You're playing on Instagram right now, something's going on, you're texting somebody.
Here we go.
For Peter Thiel, humans in their default fallen state, Are just gigantic imitation machines.
And this is Peter Thiel's greatest fear for himself that he will be just a gigantic imitation machine like everybody else.
Now, he's clear that we exist because we imitate, right?
That that's how we learn language.
That's how we learn to do things.
That's how we we gain tools and skills.
But that's not all to being human, is there?
I mean, isn't there something better?
Isn't there something more?
And that something more is why he turns to Christianity, okay.
For Teal reading Girard, innovation is rare.
The predominant majority of people in business and culture and politics, it's all based on a copycat mentality, a gigantic imitation economy.
Okay?
This is why Peter Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook.
He says, he says, I'm quoting him.
He bet on my Facebook is about mimesis.
We get on social media, we copy each other, we mime each other, we take things from other people.
It's a gigantic imitation machine.
Social media.
And that's why he invested, and that's why that made him very, very, very rich.
He continues to be on Facebook's board today.
Now, one of the problems is that my leads to conflict.
You want what your neighbor has.
You covet what your neighbor has.
We will hurt them.
We will take from them.
We will even kill them to have what they have.
It could be riches, it could be beauty, it could be land, it could be resources, but we will kill.
Okay.
Now, this leads to a familiar endpoint, the threat of unlimited violence.
We're back to Schmidt, we're back to 9-11, all that.
But Thiel says, look, this is where Girard's really helpful.
Because for Girard, what happens in human societies is that we find a scapegoat.
We find somebody to blame for our problems.
If these people would disappear, we would be happy.
If they would just not, if they would go away, we we would feel better.
So if you want to break the fever, reset the cycle, you need a scapegoat.
Someone or something to blame.
Me versus you, us versus them.
Now, you might be thinking, and I'm not going to get to this today, but you might be thinking, oh, it makes sense.
Palantir, immigrants, ice.
If you blame illegal people who are quote unquote illegal, people who are undocumented, that will make Americans feel better.
Okay?
So that's that's something to discuss for another day.
But for Teal, there's this sense that the scapegoat is what will lead to a temporary peace.
If you can blame them, it helps, quote, to unite the community and bring about a limited peace for the survivors.
That murder is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions and is remembered and transfigured in the form of myth.
The scapegoat becomes a god, a saint, a spirit, who's viewed as the door that opened the way for the group's peaceful coexistence.
Remus and Romulus fought, and one of them won, and one of them became the namesake of Rome.
That murder was celebrated forever.
Cain killed Abel.
There's so many different examples of this.
So for Teal, the way sometimes that humans get out of this cycle of unlimited violence is scapegoat.
But there's also another dimension this, and this is where we really have to pay attention.
Again, if you're like, man, kind of heavy today, dude.
Like, you know, this is this is a lot.
Hang with me for another couple minutes.
For Teal, sometimes the scapegoat, the person who's been blamed for the society's problems, the person who has everything that society wants, the person who is better looking and richer and more charming and has all the houses and land and property and animals and everything else.
That person is usually the one that's killed and we feel better.
Do you all remember when when Elon Musk was in the head of Doge and we ran him out of town?
Everyone is so mad at Elon Musk.
And they kept doing doge to this day, but like Elon Musk isn't there, so we all feel better.
the richest man in the world, to Peter Thiel, that's a scapegoat, right?
Well, we got rid of him and we feel better.
Great.
But what if the person with everything, the person who is envied and hated and copied by everybody else, can postpone their sacrifice as a scapegoat?
Here's what Peter Teal says.
I'm quoting him.
One working theory is that monarchy originated in this way.
Kings became scapegoats who had not yet been killed.
Every king was a living God.
Every God was a murdered king.
And he draws on examples from the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians, the Zulu kingdom, in order to support his thesis.
Monarchy arose in human societies when the scapegoat simply figured out how to maintain his power and delay his execution.
The king is the man with everything who has not yet been killed.
Now, one of the things that you should take away here is that Peter Thiel believes that a lot of times people like him, people who are rich and successful, are hated, not because of any injustice or real wrongdoing, because they are the scapegoat.
They're being made the one who society targets to feel better.
And therefore, they are the real victim.
He has taught this lesson well to JD Vance.
If you're being attacked, if you're being maligned, if the masses are unhappy with you, it is not because you've done something wrong.
It is because you are being made the victim of their suffering.
They want what you have.
And of course they're attacking you for that.
You are the scapegoat.
Or they're trying to make you the scapegoat, and you can't let them.
Now, you're like, all right, you promised to get to Christianity, dude.
Come on, let's get to it.
The king is the scapegoat who has not yet been killed.
We got to hold on to that.
We're going to come back to it.
Now, let's connect one more dot, okay?
For Teal, Jesus is the King of Kings.
Right?
So for most Christians, King of Kings means Peter Teal's Jesus is the king of kings because he is the Lord of all creation, the savior of the entire world.
For Teal, he's the king of kings because he is the one who saves us from our fallen nature as gigantic imitation machines.
Jesus is the one who inspires us to be innovators, to be kings on earth, to not be copycats, to not simply waste our lives away liking things on Facebook as mimes.
For Teal, and I'm quoting him here, the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen.
That's the natural thing in a Christian sense.
That sounds like Christianity, right, y'all?
Y'all know Christianity.
That sounds like it.
But then he goes on to say this.
Christ's redemption saves humanity from sin.
I'm going to quote him here.
The word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament.
This is what he said to Ross Dalthat in 2025.
And so there's a world in which, a sense in which the way I understand the Judeo-Christian inspiration is it is about transcending nature.
It is about overcoming things.
For Peter Teal, Christianity helps you transcend your fallen nature.
Well, what's your fallen nature?
Well, your fallen nature is to be a gigantic imitation machine.
Nothing but a mime, nothing but a copycat.
If you're going to follow Jesus, you're not going to help the poor.
You're not going to help the outcast.
You're not going to look out for the vulnerable.
You're going to be a king.
How?
By being an innovator.
By being somebody who's a true original, by being somebody who is something different from the crowd.
Okay.
Technology involves the creation of radically new things that have not existed.
And globalization maps to the continual copying things that have existed.
If you want to be somebody who is the image of God, then you are going to be a creator.
Or you're going to be a founder.
After Christ, the king is not only the one who is the living scapegoat, but is the rare innovator in society, the non-mimetic one.
The king is the founder.
You want to write something down?
You want to like look up from what you're doing, you want to try to zone in on your attention again.
Teal's technology Says that the most important contemporary kings are the founders of tech startups.
If technology is creation, if technology is miracle, if after Jesus innovation is what it means to transcend your fallen nature as a gigantic imitation machine, well, who does that?
Tech founders.
Those who take us beyond duplication to innovation.
Now don't get it wrong, Tal doesn't think there's that many.
He thinks most of Silicon Valley is a gigantic imitation machine, but there's a few.
There's a few founders.
There's a few kings.
Tech for Teal will redeem the world.
The founders following Jesus will save us if we let them.
Here's what he says.
We tend to think of monarchy as a dead and defunct institution, but is it really?
This is him in 2012.
Tech founders are the innovators, the rare species of human that does not simply copy everyone else.
Tech founders operate as monarchs within their organization.
And they are, oops, sorry, I lost my place.
Tech tech founders are monarchs within their organization.
So what what Peter Teal says in a 2012 interview is that the founders of startups are more like kings, more like autocrats, more like Caesar than anything else.
And it should be that way.
They should have the power to form their company, not according to a democracy, not according to a uh a sense of having to share power with the masses.
But in a tech startup, there's almost unilateral power on the part of one person who has a vision for something new, a vision for a new founding.
Okay.
Now, what he says in that lecture is that we should let those people off the hook.
That the people who don't follow the rules, the people who don't play by society's game, the people who have a different understanding of things, they're the ones that will lead us to new places.
Now I don't have time today to go all the places he thinks they'll take us, but that includes seasteading, like forming countries like Waterworld in Kevin Costner's ancient film, Out to Sea.
He believes that's a network cities, autonomous zones and places in Latin America or on Native American reservations, Indian reservations in the United States.
It might include interplanetary travel and habitation.
Allah going to Mars or somewhere else.
It could mean a lot of things.
People who have a vision that others can't see.
So the king is the one who follows Jesus, is the true original.
And we should let those people off the hook.
Now, what does this have to do with Armageddon?
What does that this have to do with the Antichrist?
He believes that the Antichrist is the person who stands in the founder king's way.
That if you're going to have somebody who can imagine a third way between limitless violence and the exhaustion of democracy, if you're going to forge a new path for humanity or at least a small bit of humanity that will survive, who will stop, who will stop you?
The Antichrist.
The Antichrist, Peter Thiel says over and over and over again, always promises peace.
But the Antichrist promises peace so they can take power.
Okay.
So they can get what you want.
Let's look at this clip.
You know, I should I should uh not need to remind you that in the uh, you know, in the sort of quasi-mythological New Testament account, the the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.
And um, and uh, and that there is there is, you know, we're told that um there's nothing worse than Armageddon, but perhaps there is.
Perhaps we should fear the Antichrist, perhaps we should fear the one world totalitarian state uh more than Armageddon.
Now, for Teal, the person who uh promises safety, and what what is what are the things that we're afraid of?
Well, Thiel says, look, there's a lot of professors out there, a lot of politicians out there that Want to tell you there's four things we should be afraid of.
AI, climate crisis, nuclear weapons, and nanotechnology.
So what they want to do is this.
And he he always mentions this professor at Oxford, Nick Bostrom, who I used to study, actually.
And Nick Bostrom gave a paper in 2019 where he said, look, if we're gonna not kill ourselves planetarily, then we need protections against those things.
Nuclear weapons, AI, nanobots, uh, and we need to take drastic action against the climate crisis.
And for Teal, taking those actions would stifle any form of innovation.
It would lead to groupthink.
It would lead to nothing, but but the thing that he fears the most, which is a system where there's no true originals, where the person who would innovate us out of the problem, who would find a new way, would not be allowed to do so because they would be limited.
This is why he thinks Greta Thunberg may be, or someone like Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist.
The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop.
In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
So if you've seen that headline and you're like, what is he talking about?
He thinks that Greta represents a one world totalitarian state that controls everything to the point that this mythological innovator founder king will not be allowed to do what they need to do to save us.
Okay.
Here's another clip that that kind of outlines how he thinks about these things.
And then but I would always maybe go back to, you know, the um the apocalypse would be, you know, um antichrist or Armageddon.
And um, and uh, you know, um I I think there is there is a lot in this runaway science technology that's pushing us towards something like Armageddon, and then um, and then there is you know,
the natural pushback on this um is we will avoid Armageddon by um by having a one-world state that has real teeth, real power, and uh the the biblical term for that is is is the antichrist.
And uh and the you know, the the Christian intuition I have is you know, I I don't want antichrist, I don't want Armageddon.
I would like to find some narrow path between between these two where we can avoid both.
And that's and then that is that is Peter Thiel.
He wants to be the guy that finds the narrow path.
So I think a lot of folks are like, oh, Peter Thiel's just a Nazi who wants to like do what the Nazis did.
And don't get me wrong, if you pay attention enough to Peter Thiel, he he has very he has very racist views, seemingly, about many people.
But I don't think Peter Thiel is trying to be a big bad other.
I don't think he's Franco.
I don't think he's Mussolini, I don't think he wants to be any of that.
I think he sees that as trite.
He wants to be a true original, and those people are not original.
When you think of the Lord of the Rings, he's not the one who's trying to save the world, okay.
But he's also aware, at least in his mind, that the people that might try to save the world, Greta or anyone else, will try to stop him from truly innovating society.
So he wants to find a narrow path.
He wants to prevent Armageddon.
He does not want the the this the world to end, but he also does not want people to prevent him from doing what he needs to do to find this innovative third way forward through technological innovation, through interplanetary habitation, seasteading, network states, something beyond the nation state, beyond democracy, beyond liberalism, beyond all of that.
Something new, something singular.
He does not care about you and me.
Like, you know how the kids talk about an alpha male or a beta male, which is awful and a whole framework I hate.
But then sometimes they talk about A Sigma, the cool guy who doesn't care.
He's not playing the game.
He doesn't want to be the top dog and he's not some sort of beta, whatever, whatever that means.
He's a Sigba.
He's the guy who's outside the game and he's so cool because he doesn't care.
Teal, in many ways, is trying to be the guy that's like, look, I'm not here to save the world.
But I'm also not on the side of those who tell you they're saving the world and protecting you from danger.
Why?
Because he cares about all of us?
No.
Because he wants to save all of us?
No.
For Teal, following Jesus is about innovation and transcending the gigantic imitation machine to create miracles and do things that map onto the image of God.
Even if he's the only one that can do it and there's not enough humans left on the planet to have any kind of flourishing or millions and billions of people suffer, that is not what it means to follow Jesus for Peter Thiel.
Okay.
The way I would put it is that he doesn't want to take us back to a Pax Americana.
He doesn't want to also, I don't think, affect a kind of Holocaust, like some people would argue that you know, he has some kind of Nazi ideology.
He's a founder, not a hero.
His ultimate goal is not to ascend to the top of the political pile, but to find an innovation beyond what he says is quote, the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called democracy.
So he invests in life extension and cryogenics, seasteading.
He's interested in transhumanism and cyberspace and autonomous networks of cities.
He's interested in surveillance technologies and so on.
He no longer believes, and he said this, quote, that politics encompasses all possibilities of human life.
Or all possible futures of our world.
And here's the here's the quote.
A better metaphor is that we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.
The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed.
We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire.
Unlike the world of politics and the world of technology, the choices of individuals may still be paramount.
He says the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe.
And George Packer, who wrote about Peter Thiel in the New Yorker about 10 years ago, says there's no doubt who that is.
That is Peter Thiel.
All right.
Got a little bit of time for questions.
I'm going to keep talking here for a second.
But if you have questions and you want to put them in the chat, go ahead.
I will try to answer a few and get to those.
So in conclusion, Peter Thiel is somebody who is religious but not spiritual.
He believes that Christianity is about transcending our fallen nature.
And our fallen nature is that we are gigantic imitation machines.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But Jesus led on a led us to a path where we could be more than that.
We could be innovators, kings, founders.
He believes the contemporary kings are not, unlike in the Zulu kingdom or in the ancient Aztec kingdom or somewhere else.
He does not believe that those kings are the royalty who are the head of nations.
Instead, he believes they're tech founders.
Tech is the miracle that will lead us forward.
Tech is the thing that will save us.
So he sees this narrow path where he can be the guy, the scapegoat who is not yet victimized, the scapegoat who's not yet killed, the scapegoat who becomes a living God, a king.
And maybe that person who saves the world through machinery and technological breakthrough.
That's his goal.
The goal is not one side or the other.
He's bigger than that.
He's more than that.
That's an old story.
Do you know how like trite it is to see that the guy trot out to be the knight in shining armor?
That's nothing original about that.
Pete Heggseth, he's a joke.
Peter Thiel's way more than that.
He's not just some guy trying to ride a horse and save the day.
He's following Jesus' footsteps.
He's going to change the world through innovation.
Now, that doesn't mean that any of us will be around to experience it, but he's hoping he will be and maybe a few others.
So, question from Daniel is what action should we be taking now that we have this understanding of Teal's theology and philosophy?
What, you know, what impact can we have?
Well, I think one thing for me at least is to see why Teal and Christian nationalists, Christian supremacists, Catholics like J.D. Vance, do have some sense of resonance among them.
They, in some ways, want the same thing, even if they're coming from very different vectors.
A lot of people are like very confused as to how the tech side of MAGA and Trump's coalition can coexist alongside the traditional Catholic side or the Christian reconstructionist side, Doug Wilson.
And I think if you think about what we've talked about today, what you can see is that, yeah, all those groups, and this is what my book is about, all those groups are looking past democracy, past liberalism, past representative government to some form of Caesar, some kind of monarch, some kind of dictator.
Now they have very different visions of what that might look like.
But all of them agree that democracy is not the answer.
Democracy is probably the thing getting in our way, and we need to get past it.
And so to me, understanding that opens up a world where we can understand why they can work together so easily.
You can start to see those resonances very clear once you start to notice.
You you can see that there's a sense of pronatalism.
There's a sense of civilizationalism, that they believe they're fighting to save civilization, right?
Whether it's Teal or somebody who's in the Silicon Valley world around him.
So I think that helps us, okay?
I think it also helps us to see something about Teal that he has purposely cultivated over the last 20 years, and that is you'll never see Teal in the spotlight like Elon Musk.
Why?
Because Elon Musk is the scapegoat.
Elon Musk put himself out there and became king, co-president, and he got run out of town.
Now, don't get me wrong, he's still rich, he's still alive, all that.
But Peter Teal's very aware.
Like if you act like Elon Musk, you're gonna get vilified by the public.
So he's in public enough that we all know who he is, but it's to give a lecture, it's to give a keynote.
It's not to hold a chainsaw on stage, right?
It's not to put his feet up on the oval office desk and talk like he's the president.
Peter Teal's like, if you do that, they're gonna make you the scapegoat and you're gonna be out of town quickly.
Why is he not the CEO of Palantir?
He's the chairman of the board.
Why?
Because if you push someone out in front of you, it's more likely they're gonna go get Alex Carp than you.
Right?
It's more likely, and he says this in 2012 at Stanford, if you have a co-founder or someone else beside you, it's hard to like figure out who to who to who to who to put out there, okay, as the scapegoat.
All right, other thoughts.
What long form articles would you suggest?
There's there's a bunch of good ones, and there's a bunch of bad ones.
Let me find one that I think is is fairly good, and it's not fairly good, it's really good.
Um, I don't agree with all of it, and I don't think it actually gets to the heart of what I'm interested in, but it is really good, and I want to just give credit to that and and be clear.
Uh, it's called The Real Stakes and a Real Story of Peter Teal's Antichrist Obsession by Laura Bullard at Wired.
It came out last week.
Um, and there's another one that nobody knows about.
Um, and that I'm gonna find it right now.
Um it's called From Philosophy to Power Um at Salmagundi magazine.
Um, and it's by Paul Leslie.
And those are both long form and they're really good.
Now you can also read The Contrarian by Max Chafkin, which is his biography.
It's not necessarily going to give you the theological end of this, but it is there.
Gil Duran is a is a journalist who's written a lot about this.
Gil has taught me a lot about Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley, but I don't necessarily agree with all of his takeaways about why Peter Thiel is interested in Carl Schmidt, and I don't think that Peter Thiel is interested in holy war, for example, which Gill kind of thinks he is.
So I think Gilderan's really helpful here, even if I don't agree with everything he's he's been concluding about about Peter Thiel.
So um that's that.
All right, y'all.
Appreciate all of you.
Appreciate what you're doing.
All right, one more question.
We got a little bit of time, so I'll give you one more question.
This is from Jane.
Does Peter Teal have influence over J.D. Vance andor the religious right?
And the short answer is yes.
Yes.
Peter Thiel has a tremendous influence over JD Vance.
J.D. Vance is always crediting Peter Teal as somebody who's changed his life almost more than anyone.
And you can see in J.D. Vance a sense of learning from Peter Thiel about the scapegoat, about monarchy, about sovereignty.
He talks about he doesn't talk about monarchy.
He knows that's not allowed.
But he does talk a lot about victimhood and also destroying the federal government and creating an unbound executive.
I'm writing about J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel, but the short answer for today is that I really think Peter Thiel, just as Peter Thiel has Alex Carp out there in front of Palantir.
I think Peter Thiel wants J.D. Vance out there in front of the United States government.
I think he sees JD as his guy.
It's you know, Trump is destroying things.
Trump is ending democracy in the United States in a way that I think Thiel has been kind of waiting for and hoping for.
Peter Thiel was the first Silicon Valley investor to support Donald Trump in 2016.
Now they're all on board now, but Peter Thiel was there way before Zuckerberg and you know everyone.
Okay.
So Thiel sees Trump as a destroyer.
He he wrote about this in the Financial Times after the election, that Trump is an apocalypse, meaning an unveiling of the rot of the United States democratic system.
J.D. Vance to me is his vision for the future.
And so there's tremendous influence on JD Vance.
Um another person says, does he have or is trying to get influence outside the USA?
Yeah.
I mean, he has influence everywhere.
Um he's one of the richest people in the world.
Um he has investments all over.
So I think the short answer is yes.
Once again, he's not directly involved, say like Elon Musk, but he does he does have influence in a lot of places.
All right, y'all.
We're out of time for today.
I'll try to do some more of this next week and connect the dots to Palantir, surveillance, ice, uh, maybe talk a little bit about seasteading and Mars and network cities and all that stuff, and talk a little bit more how this relates to the religious right, JD Vance and Christian nationalists and others.
So if you can hit subscribe on our YouTube channel, that would help us out a lot.
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