Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures Reveal More About Him Than Armageddon

Yes.

It wasn't a "secret meeting". It was a meeting of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, which anyone can join for about $90. I used to have a membership. Here's the event.[1] There is a recording. Here is the MP3 file.[2] Transcription of the first 30 minutes (of 67) via free web site. [3]

Notes:

On being a VC:

When you invest other people's money, you're trying to always do two things. Number one, get good returns. Number two, look like you're going to get good returns. And there's a surprisingly large disconnect between those two things.

So I like long term because again, that's less competitive. It can't be super long term. This was always the disconnect between, say, Japanese and US approaches to business. US businesses we always critique for being on this quarterly earnings cycle. Japan argued in the 80s that it had much longer time horizons. And there's a point where long term can be just a euphemism for procrastination or for avoiding accountability. But yeah, I think in its best form there are definitely things that take five or ten years to build and we should be building more of those.

On education:

My claim has been that over the last 40 years there's generally been less innovation in the world of atoms. It's not been a good idea to go into all the engineering disciplines that had to do with atoms. It was not a good idea to become a nuclear engineer, a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an aeroastro engineer. And so we had less innovation in areas like energy or transportation.

Not seeing the "antichrist lectures". Sounds like standard VC speak. Am I missing something here?

Was there some other talk, also held at the Commonwealth Club, at which Thiel spoke?

[1] https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2014-09-30/peter-thi...

[2] https://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20140930...

[3] https://audiototext.com/?order_id=e0a6efe8-c656-4746-b93c-f4...

Daub is a professor at Stanford and a has written a lot about silicon valley and its influence on broader culture. He's worth a read.

Wrong. The problems come from regulation itself. From bureaucracies that freeze innovation, protect incumbents, and smother experimentation under compliance costs, etc.

> Sadly, the whole culture around SV is based on libertarianism, so regulation isn't even considered.

Thiel actively supported one of the least libertarian candidates in US history. Whatever reputation he has for having libertarian views is nonsense.

No libertarian would try to control others based on his/her religious beliefs, and no libertarian would be remotely comfortable with any of the heavy handed stuff in Trump's platform.

In my view, what happened to Thiel and Musk is that they succeed in business and everyone starts respecting them and treating them like deities. They want to believe it is justified rather than simply people trying to manipulate them, which leads to a reinvention of self where they perceive themself to be a bit superhuman or important to the world. They act, they explore new areas, they act more. They usually do not experience as much reward from additional success in business, they are typically poorly socialized and fail to create a solid support network of people who know them and care about them. They realize money doesn't really help, fine food doesn't help, expensive possessions doesn't help. Even positions where they occupy a top hierarchical role end up feeling lacking.

What's left is the allure of tradition, religion, blood, war, progeny, and the trajectory of civilizations. They admire the brutality and decisiveness of medieval kings and the idea of theirs being destiny rather than luck. They then try to figure out how to believe they are deserving and suitable for the unique kind of destiny they realize can be theirs.

Most of us do not have to worry about hearing the voices they hear calling them to this destiny. One can see it on Elon's face. He's quick to sweat, quick to contemplate how his every decision will be more significant to the world than the entire lives of thousands.

Day after day of waiters, concierges, personal assistants, aides, advisors, trainers, masseuses, chefs, SVPs, etc. all at their absolute service. They must ask themselves again and again endlessly "what do I want? What do I really want?" Ultimately they realize that all they really want is to shape the world like so many kings or prime ministers or philosophers have. But theirs is a different skill-set. In spite of their desire they are not philosophers, not kings, not literati, not demagogues.

So they struggle to become that which they are not so they can do more than order a delicious lunch and pay for everyone else's and listen to everyone's flattery.

They want to shape the world with who they are, but part of them realizes it was luck and the are not as unique as they hoped. So they find ways to feel special like cultural supremacy, authoritarianism, buying favor with politicians or religious leaders, etc.

> artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing.

Those are big concerns for the next 20-30 years. At any one time, they rarely hit the headlines. But their effects accumulate.

We may be in the runup to WWIII in Europe. Read up on the runup to WWII, the "phony war". The Chancellor of Germany said recently "We are not at war, but we are not at peace either".

Jobless and drowning in cash is rough.. it takes a toll on the strongest of minds.. meandering through the day, aimless, chasing the next high. Realizing that being handed a mic wherever you go is now your life. Cursed to be incapable of achievement because what else remains to be achieved. Minimizing your taxes?

I get this sense often when the "famous" tech CEOs talk, they sorta come across like that uncle that you humor at Thanksgiving dinner. My best guess is there's a selection bias in that the more grounded ones are less likely to speak publicly and be in the news.

Why would it have to be veiled?

When you start with the antichrist as a real person and contemporary threat everything that comes after is gonna fall apart. I agree with RFK on ultraprocessed foods and weightlifting, the health benefits of which are well-established by science; but I'm not going to agree with him on dismantling the FDA, ending vaccinations for everything, and that germ theory is a scientific conspiracy.

Hit piece? Thiel does it to himself

Thanks for unilaterally deciding what I should read, Hunter! So nice of you.

Sometimes people deserve to be hit. Say something bad about my kids, get hit (by me physically for being dumb)... Call someone the antichrist, get hit (by the news, metaphorically, for sounding like you've lost the plot)

> If he supports this sort of technocratic tyranny, why he's talking about it at all? If he's against it, why is he trying to whitewash AI?

Consider the possibility that the lense(s) through which you see and hear him are distorting reality.

The biblical antichrist/world government thing has been linked to so many things. People were against the UN in the 1940/50s because they thought it was part of the apocalypse and anti-christ.

I quoth Common Sense 1952-04-01:

"The United Nations, which had its birth in the San Francisco conference—set up by a group of which Alger Hiss was secretary, is no doubt a forerunner of the coming “one world” dictatorship by “one man”—the anti-Christ The UN has ruled out Christ entirely and its headquarters are a convenient spy nest for the Reds."

https://archive.org/details/sim_common-sense_1952-04-01_159/...

This is just the same fanatical brainmelt that imagines wild conspiracies in every generation. Before the UN it was The League of Nations (Which the US didn't join) and before that "catholic imperialism".

Just because Theil has money doesn't mean we should take him seriously. The same nonsense just gets re-contextualized for every generation.

"Jesus' second-coming in your lifetime!" I mean true believers don't want to think they're going to miss out I guess...

The article agrees:

> This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.

> you get the guest's best shot at telling you what he's about. Not someone else's mockery of it.

If you want to his own words, you can read his recent essay on the topic:

https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/

Is it also possible he’s scared of any collective action because collective action chips away at his power as a billionaire?

I see it more like a flagrant attack on collective action. If you are part of the billionaire class, this is very attractive, because your biggest threat are the pitchforks. The powerful will like this message.

Will be presented? We currently have a large number of people shouting that climate change is a world ender, that AI will become one, and that the next pandemic likely will be one.

Which makes it easy for the wanna-be world dominators. They don't have to manufacture the belief in the crisis; that's already here. They just have to exploit it.

(Or maybe they did have to manufacture belief in the crisis, but we're past that point now...)

Beyond actual power there is a big issue with attention inequality. I like that term.

Not sure if I “like” him but he has unique takes that help me think about things in new ways.

I suspect that it's people who are absolutely unable to "put themselves in other's shoes"(c) so to speak. They can't think abstract enough to imagine themselves a different person in different circumstances. So from this starting point they threat every external/outside restriction on them as an attack. They are worse off after such restriction hence it is completely bad. People who try to attack him personally (via laws, regulation, activism etc.) the most are the worst and he predicts that there will be some ultimate devil who will attack poor Thiel the most in a near future. Thus he complains about common humanity problems like climate change, because he couldn't care less about climate change, his funds allow him to never experience it until his death. While regulation coming from that topic is abhorrent, because he sees it as an attack on himself. Same with taxes, urban development, education (elite already have enough 100k/year schools no more required, helthcare and so on)

People who like his speeches or similar thoughts, think the same way. They think it's a global attack on themselves, so they tend to look out for the new leaders to defend against it.

> My 2c is that most tech is actually good and 90% of public disdain comes from social media and phone addiction

That's a huge part of it but not only. Tech is being used to remove humans from the loop of interactions, people feel disdain to have to answer a robot when trying to call somewhere to get support (banks, telcos, etc.), they also disdain being surveilled all the time, online or offline, it's enabled by "tech"; there's disdain for applications to jobs, grants (scientific or cultural) being triaged by robots, one just feel swallowed by a system they have no power to appeal, the robots decided and there's no one to talk to about it.

There's a lot of tech that is useful, I don't disagree with that, but I don't think the disdain comes only from social media/phone addiction, those are just the more visible, talked about parts of it. In my immediate circle of the non-tech people they just constantly feel the encroaching of tech mediating real humans, we're being herded by a multitude of systems working on their own programming, and people just defer to those systems.

A prime example of such systems going haywire was the British Horizon Post Office scandal, a system to automate detection of fraud was trusted more than any human, causing untold suffering to postmasters flagged as criminals, pushing some to the point of suicide.

The trend for now is for this to only increase, more automated systems taking over decision-making roles, people who would be making decisions just blindly deferring to the system, with no recourse or way out for anyone affected.

It's bleak, it's understandable that people don't like this. I've been working in the tech industry for 20+ years and I don't like what it is now.