00:00:00
>> Peter Robinson: Welcome
to Uncommon Knowledge.
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The end times. Armageddon. the Antichrist.
00:00:05
If you suppose the only people
who take those concepts seriously
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are snake handlers in the hollers
of Kentucky, think again.
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Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now.
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[MUSIC]
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>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to
Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.
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Peter Thiel earned his undergraduate and
law degrees here at Stanford.
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He was a co-founder of PayPal, the firm
that all but invented FinTech, the first
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outside investor in Facebook, the firm
that all but invented social networks.
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And a co-founder of Palantir, the firm
that all but invented defense tech.
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Although he's staying out of politics
this year, Mr. Thiel has had a hand in
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launching the careers of a number of
political figures, including JD Vance.
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Mr. Thiel speaks often on philosophy,
religion, tech, and
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society in forums as diverse
as the Cambridge Union,
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the Aspen Ideas Festival and
the Joe Rogan Experience.
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You gave Joe Rogan three hours.
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Peter, it's about time you
came back to this triathlon.
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>> Peter Thiel: I was trapped for
three hours there.
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>> Peter Robinson: [LAUGH]
Peter Thiel on the end times.
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Today, by the way,
this is going to be episode one of two,
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our first conversation on
this very large topic.
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Peter two quotations,
Matthew 24:35 - 36, quote,
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heaven and earth will pass away,
but of that day and hour,
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no one knows, not even the angels
of heaven, close quote.
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Peter Thiel,
we don't know the day and the hour,
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but maybe we can guess the century,
explain yourself.
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>> Peter Thiel: Well, man,
this is a very broad topic.
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It's in this larger question about
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the extraordinary history of our time.
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The modern world from maybe
Renaissance onward has been this world
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of ever progressing scientific and
technological development.
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And there is this very profound sense
that there are things that change.
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There are dimensions of technology,
military technology,
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communications technology,
where things are not timeless and eternal.
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And there was a gunpowder
revolution in the 17th century and
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that changed the social structure and
the political structure.
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And there is a certain arc to history.
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It's not just technology,
but it is a driver.
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And certainly, many different
ways of getting at this, but
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there certainly are dimensions of
the technology that have become
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extremely powerful in the last century or
two that have an apocalyptic dimension.
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And perhaps it's strange not to try to
relate it to the biblical tradition.
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If nuclear weapons can rain down fire and
brimstone and
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destroy the world, and then we have
a biblical tradition that maybe
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doesn't say that this is
inevitably going to happen.
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But that something like this might
well happen if humans are left
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to their own devices.
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Should we at least be asking questions,
figure out ways for
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these things to inform one another?
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>> Peter Robinson: So obviously,
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we'll come in a moment to the analyses,
to the signs of the end times.
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But first a moment on why
you're asking these questions.
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And as I understand your argument,
Peter, you feel you need
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to ask them and to prompt a conversation,
at least in part,
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because universities won't,
which is odd in some ways.
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The biblical framework,
these texts may be 2000 years old,
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but they've informed Western civilization
and taken up the time of scholarship.
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Through these centuries,
it has been an understanding in
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Western culture at least,
that history is going someplace.
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And if there is an end point, no matter
how far off in the future it may be,
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we're closer to it now than we were.
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All right, so
all of these seem to me plausible,
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valid, and serious questions.
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Why are universities ill
equipped to grapple with this?
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>> Peter Thiel: Well, that's very
overdetermined, but certainly anything
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that there's some relationship between
the university and the universe.
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Where it is supposed to somehow,
in its ideal form,
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in its early modern,
17th, 18th century form,
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the university was supposed to
represent some kind of integration
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of knowledge across a lot of disciplines
where they all would fit together.
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And for a variety of reasons one can cite,
this has broken down over time.
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There are ideological reasons, but maybe
there also are practical reasons where
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the amount of knowledge became too
great for any single person to master.
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And then you had ever division into
ever narrower sub disciplines.
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Adam Smith has this metaphor in
the 19th century of a pin factory,
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where you're manufacturing pins and there
are 100 people in the pin factory and
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they're all doing different things and
nobody knows how to make a pin anymore.
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So it's efficient, but
it's this hyper specialization.
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And there's probably been an analog
to that on the university side, where
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maybe someone like Goethe could still
understand something about everything.
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Or Hilbert, a great mathematician around
1900, could still understand all of math.
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And he'd set these 25 problems for
the 20th century for
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mathematicians to solve, in some ways set
the agenda for the field of mathematics.
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And even as rigorous a subject area as
mathematics in some ways has devolved into
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something close to literary theory,
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where one mathematician doesn't
know what the other one's doing.
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And it's sort of these very
incommensurate modes of discourse, and
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anything that has to do with making sense
of the larger whole has gotten badly lost.
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And I've thought for
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a long time that we need to ask a variety
of questions about the larger whole.
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One kind of a scientific and
technological question is simply,
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are we still progressing as
we were in early modernity?
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Are things by whatever metric you choose?
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Are they getting better?
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Is life expectancy going up?
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Is the GDP increasing the quality of
life by various metrics going up?
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Are we going faster, moving from planes
to supersonic planes to space planes?
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And that seems like a very basic
kind of macroeconomic question,
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incredibly hard to ask, but
surely an important one.
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And I've spoken about this
in many other contexts, but
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my intuition is that in many places,
there's been relative stagnation.
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The hyperspecialization disguises
a certain type of decadence where you have
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these narrow experts saying how wonderful
they are, the cancer cell people sell,
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cancer researchers say they're gonna
cure cancer in the next five years.
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And the string people say they're
the smartest physicists and
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they know everything.
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But maybe it's just some
weird academic power game
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where they're blocking everybody else and
on and on.
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Even before we get to the big question
of history, there's a question just of
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the history of science and
technology, it progressed a lot.
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Maybe it's progressing more slowly.
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Why has that changed?
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What's going on there?
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>> Peter Robinson: You said so.
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Fragmentation, hyper
specialization in the university,
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the feeling of kind of
disintegration into silos.
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That's one aspect of it,
another aspect of it, I'm checking this,
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this is the form of a question,
is whether an extreme rationalism
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maybe emerges from that specialization or
maybe informs it.
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But I've heard you say,
I've got a quotation here from you.
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Under the rationalist view, you can't
even talk about the end of your own life,
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let alone the end of the world.
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That there's something
about the regnant view,
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I'm trying to resist the word ideology
because ideology isn't quite the right.
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But the way the university conducts its
business rules out questions of life,
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death, sin, redemption,
the meaning of history.
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So what I'm trying to get
at is hyper specialization,
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yes, is there also something else,
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something about the regnant view
that makes it very hard for
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universities to grapple
with big questions.
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>> Peter Thiel: Yes,
they seem hard to grapple with it,
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why is probably harder to say.
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Certainly if we do something like
the radical life extension project.
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People in the 17th, 18th centuries
were very optimistic about it.
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Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon,
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you had all these ideas that you could
extend human lifespan by centuries.
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As late as the late 19th, early 20th
century, there was a movement called
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cosmism in the sort of around the time of
the Soviet Revolution, 1920s Soviet Union.
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And it claimed that for
the revolution to succeed,
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you had to physically resurrect all
the dead people using science and
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workers of the world unite and
to sort of get with the times.
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Their slogan was Dead of the world,
unite and then of course,
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they didn't make much progress on this.
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And then at some point, by the time you
get to Stalin and the show trials and
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the deaths seem to be going up,
not down, but.
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>> Peter Robinson: There was a moment when
they thought it might even be possible.
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>> Peter Thiel: There was
an incredible ambition,
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an incredible energy to modern science.
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It was perhaps downstream from
Christianity, if the promise of
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Christianity is a physical resurrection,
then science could offer that too.
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It was a possibility,
maybe it was a rival to Christianity.
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You don't need Christianity if
we can do it through science.
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And then there is a strange way
that the project in many dimensions
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feels very exhausted.
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Even though of course, people still
genuflect science, they believe in
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science with a capital S, but
the ambition has been really beaten out.
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If you look at the individual scientists,
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it's much less of this sort of heroic,
bold figure,
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breaks with dogmas and
thinks for him or herself.
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And it's much more in late modernity,
you're just a robot in a ever smaller cog,
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in an ever bigger machine or
something like this.
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>> Peter Robinson: All right,
this notion of the end of times in
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the biblical framework, Rene Girard,
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Rene Girard is an important figure here.
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Professor of French literature here
at Stanford, but also a theologian,
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I think it's fair to call him
a theologian and philosopher.
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Wrote very, very widely, although
that was outside his Stanford work.
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You became friends with him,
it happens that he was a neighbor of mine,
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we both knew Rene.
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All right, Rene Girard in 2009.
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Few still talk about the apocalypse,
the apocalypse,
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of course, is the word
referring to the destruction or
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end of the world as described
in the book of Revelation.
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Rene, few still talk about the apocalypse,
and
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they usually have a completely
mythological conception of it.
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Strangely, they do not see that
the violence we ourselves are in
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the process of amassing and
that is looming over our
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own heads is entirely sufficient
to trigger the worst, close quote.
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So there we come to the first question
about how you understand these things.
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The apocalypse as
presented in the biblical
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framework as symbols of
spiritual realities, or
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the apocalypse as a plain prediction about
how the world could, or indeed will end.
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>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, let's see, it is
the way Girard would have put it, and
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the way I came to see it as well,
was that in some sense, the apocalyptic
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prophecies are just a prediction
of what humans are likely to do.
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In a world in which they have
ever more powerful technologies,
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in which there are no sacred limits
on the use of these technologies,
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in which human nature has maybe not
gotten worse, but has not gotten better.
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And it has this sort of limitless
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violence aspect to it.
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I think Gerard had all these
provocative formulations,
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like, it is just a scientific
prediction of what humanity is
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likely to do in a world of
ever more powerful technology.
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And then there sort of are all these
different things one can say in
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terms of the biblical
apocalyptic accounts.
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But Girard was very skeptical of the idea
that somehow the violence came from God.
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And he always thought that atheists and
fundamentalists disagree on the secondary
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and relatively not so important
question of whether or not God exists.
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But they agree on the far more important
question that one of God's attributes
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is violence, and so the violence comes
from God and this is the new atheist.
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>> Peter Robinson: In
the evangelical view,
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the destruction of the world is God
exercising justice on the world.
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>> Peter Thiel: It is, yeah.
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>> Peter Robinson: Right.
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>> Peter Thiel: It's
some version of justice.
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>> Peter Robinson: Anger wrath.
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>> Peter Thiel: Some version
of the anger wrath of God and
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then the atheist one's
a little bit stranger because
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you don't really believe God exists but
still it's not humanity.
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Humanity is not that
dangerous at least in sort of
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the mainstream lock in
Rousseauian accounts.
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>> Peter Robinson: So you've made
the point I must admit I'd forgotten this.
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You've made the point that Rene
used to observe that the church
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the Catholic Church in its liturgy and
in homilies used to make quite a lot
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of the end times and warn people to
prepare for judgment and so forth.
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Up until 1945 when the church seems
to have decided to go easier on
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that because people needed comfort more
than exhortation about the end times.
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Obvious point what happened in 1945
>> Peter Thiel: well we got nuclear
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weapons and the stuff became real
in a way that seemed completely
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implausible in the 17th,
18th century I mean when people were
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writing about these things in
the 18th even 19th century it was.
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The idea that the world was just too big a
place, it could not possibly be destroyed,
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we didn't believe God would do it.
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We no longer believed that God was so
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violent that God would do it
even if you believed he existed.
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And then the technology was
getting more powerful, but
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it didn't quite seem possible to
do something on a worldwide scale.
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The Napoleonic wars are quite violent.
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World War I is significantly worse, but
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it's still somehow localized,
it's not the whole planet.
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And then there is something that gets
released with nuclear weapons and
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maybe even more with
thermonuclear weapons.
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And then you end up building
not dozens but thousands and
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thousands of them in the 60s and 70s.
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>> Peter Robinson: Rene's point that the
apocalyptic literature correctly read is
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simply a prediction of what human beings
will do to each other suddenly becomes.
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Up until 1945, he says, wait a minute,
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how could human beings possibly be
responsible for the end of the world?
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And after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the answer is only too obvious.
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>> Peter Thiel: There's liberal
theologian writing in 1780.
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The argument for why you should read
apocalyptic literature is because
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occasionally you get these millenarian
movements and people go crazy.
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And it's worth reminding yourselves
of the madness of crowds.
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And then the secondary reason you
can read it is for your amusement.
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And that was sort of the Enlightenment
optimism circa 1780.
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And there were all these
incredibly scary ideas.
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The Antichrist would kill so many people,
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he would come with a crematorium to burn
the bodies of all the people he killed.
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The sort of lurid medieval
notions people had.
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And of course then after
the end of Hitler in 1945,
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this stuff just wasn't so funny anymore.
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And then Girard's intuition
was that it's almost
00:18:03
like when a knowledge becomes too real and
too close.
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I don't like psychological repression or
something like this, but
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you wanna sort of steer away from it.
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>> Peter Robinson: We
can't bear to look at it.
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>> Peter Thiel: We don't want
to talk about it quite as much.
00:18:17
We need to reassure people.
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We need to tell people this is
not really what it's about.
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And of course,
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there were all these strange elements
of the mythical that were brought in.
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It was named after all these
terrible gods from ancient Greece.
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Saturn, the God who ate his own children.
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And Zeus throws down thunderbolts, and
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we have fire raining down with
Jupiter rockets from the heavens.
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So there was this strange
return of the mythical in this
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very in the equations of the physicists.
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>> Peter Robinson: Development
since 1940 Again, Rene,
00:18:54
the violence we ourselves
are in the process of amassing.
00:18:57
So development since 1945,
two quotations here,
00:19:02
Sir Martin Rees in his 2003 book Our Final
Century, there's a cheerful title for you.
00:19:09
The nuclear threat will be overshadowed by
others that could be as destructive and
00:19:13
far less controllable.
00:19:15
Advanced technology will offer new
instruments for creating terror and
00:19:19
devastation.
00:19:20
Instant universal communications
will amplify their societal impact,
00:19:25
this is over 20 years ago.
00:19:27
Disastrous accidents, for instance,
the unintended creation or
00:19:31
release of a noxious,
fast spreading pathogen are possible.
00:19:34
I think the odds are no better
than fifty-fifty that we will
00:19:39
survive to the end of the present century.
00:19:42
Quotation two Revelation 16:16 and
the demonic spirits
00:19:47
assembled the kings at the place
that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
00:19:53
I want to get the word Armageddon
in here because you use it,
00:19:59
it's important in your analysis.
00:20:02
Okay, so the notion is the idea of some
00:20:07
kind of final cataclysmic event.
00:20:11
Revelation tells us that in a book
written some 2,000 years ago,
00:20:16
Martin Rees book is written 21 years ago.
00:20:19
And it's all entirely plausible.
00:20:22
>> Peter Thiel: Sure, and I think there
is a way we can come back to this in
00:20:27
describing all of this in a much more
rationalist, non theological way.
00:20:34
So you can talk about existential risk and
there is existential risk of nuclear war.
00:20:41
There's existential risk of bioweapons or
00:20:45
dangerously engineered bioweapons,
maybe of AI and
00:20:50
killer robots or
autonomous weapon systems guided by AI.
00:20:56
There is existential risk
around the environment,
00:21:00
maybe not just climate change, but maybe
there's all sorts of other dimensions
00:21:05
where there's some argument
we have one planet and
00:21:08
you wanna be a little bit careful and
not mess it up totally.
00:21:11
>> Peter Robinson: Peter on AI I've never
had a chance to just put this one to you.
00:21:16
I don't know as much about
it as you obviously, but
00:21:19
I've been aware of a technology that
was so polarizing from the get go.
00:21:24
There are plenty of people who say,
00:21:26
calm down, AI is gonna lead to one
medical breakthrough after another.
00:21:29
It'll produce such abundance that
we don't need to worry about jobs.
00:21:33
We'll be able to provide for
our, that's one.
00:21:36
And then of course there's this other
strain that we'll have military.
00:21:41
Well, here, Henry Kissinger,
I found this quotation from a book,
00:21:44
Kissinger's last book, which he wrote with
Eric Schmidt, quote, if you imagine a war
00:21:49
between China and the United States,
you have artificial intelligence weapons.
00:21:53
Nobody has really tested these things
on a broad scale, and you can't tell
00:21:57
exactly what will happen when AI
fighter planes on both sides interact.
00:22:01
So you are then in a world of potentially
total destructiveness, close quote.
00:22:08
And your view,
how are we to understand AI?
00:22:12
>> Peter Thiel: Well,
partially it's unknown,
00:22:15
it can mean a lot of different things.
00:22:18
It's poorly defined, AI can mean
the next generation of computers,
00:22:22
the last generation of computers,
anything in between.
00:22:25
I think the classic definition of AI was
something that passed the Turing test and
00:22:31
that could fool you into thinking it was
a human being in some sense that had
00:22:36
not been passed, but was passed
by ChatGPT in late 22, early 23.
00:22:42
And so
that is a pretty significant development.
00:22:45
>> Peter Robinson: And does it feel like
an inflection point as important as 1945?
00:22:50
>> Peter Thiel: I think it's on par,
let's say, in the computer world,
00:22:54
I think it's on par with
the Internet in the late 90s.
00:22:58
And then there are so
many different ways it can
00:23:03
be applied that are good and
that are dangerous that
00:23:09
it's hard to know how to
quite wait them all out.
00:23:14
If I had to score the Silicon Valley
debate, I'm not on the Luddite side.
00:23:19
I always try to be more
on the protect side.
00:23:23
But if I had to score it as a debate,
00:23:25
I do believe the effective
altruists are winning the argument.
00:23:29
And the argument is something like,
00:23:31
there are a lot of dangerous corner
cases with this technology and
00:23:36
we should be really careful,
we don't quite know how it's gonna work.
00:23:41
Maybe it doesn't become
a godlike intelligence,
00:23:44
which is some of the sort of
futuristic transhumanist nonsense.
00:23:48
But it could just be this autonomous
weapon system on a drone where we
00:23:53
want to make them autonomous,
because if you have a human in the loop,
00:23:58
the human gets jammed.
00:24:00
So.
00:24:00
There's a logic to a lot of these things.
00:24:04
And then there are aspects that become
more first strike type weapons.
00:24:08
And there's some kind of crazy arms
race between the US and communist China.
00:24:13
Then how does this affect
that arms race and change it?
00:24:17
So there are sort of a lot
of questions like that.
00:24:22
I would say the larger existential
risk point that I always made is that
00:24:28
there's a way in which the people who
are worried about these existential risks.
00:24:35
And you can also criticize them.
00:24:37
You can criticize them for
being Luddites and etc.
00:24:40
But you can also criticize them for
not being apocalyptic enough.
00:24:44
Because most of the time,
they're just focused on one.
00:24:47
It's like the nuclear weapons people
are still just talking about nukes.
00:24:52
And Greta, she's, it's just the climate.
00:24:56
She's not worried about AI and she's
not worried about nukes, and much less
00:25:01
the COVID virus that was bioengineered
in the Wuhan lab or something like this.
00:25:08
And then I've often thought you should
get all these people who are worried
00:25:13
about existential risk in a room,
and they have to fight it out and
00:25:18
decide which ones really matter and
how to prioritize them.
00:25:22
And in some sense, the scary answer
is there's some truth to all of them.
00:25:26
And then if we were to do that exercise
fully, what I would wanna do is I would
00:25:32
also like to throw in one more
existential risk that, in my mind,
00:25:37
is as big as all these technological
risks of the nuclear war and
00:25:42
runaway bioweapons and weaponized
AI with autonomous weapon systems.
00:25:47
And that's the risk of
a totalitarian one-world government.
00:25:54
And again, with all the other existential
risks, it's hard to know how to
00:25:59
measure these things probabilistically
because we only have one world.
00:26:04
Once you get a totalitarian one-world
government, you can't reverse it.
00:26:11
And then the reason I like
to throw that risk in
00:26:15
is that it seems to me
that the implicit solution
00:26:21
to existential risks of
all the other sorts is
00:26:25
to lean in to a sort of
very non-democratic,
00:26:30
one-world state that
will highly regulate and
00:26:36
stop these technologies.
00:26:39
And if Greta gets everyone on
the planet to ride a bicycle,
00:26:43
maybe that's a way to
solve climate change, but
00:26:46
it has sort of this quality of going
from the frying pan into the fire.
00:26:51
>> Peter Robinson: Right, again,
if I understand your argument,
00:26:56
this is already clear in the way we lead
our lives in this slowing of progress.
00:27:04
Now, this, it seems to me,
00:27:07
is worth dwelling on because it
shows that the fear is real and
00:27:11
has genuine effects in the way
we all lead our lives.
00:27:16
But we have to spend a moment or
two defining it.
00:27:18
So if I may,
let me start with a quotation from you.
00:27:22
There has been a narrow cone of progress
around computers, the Internet,
00:27:27
and maybe now artificial intelligence.
00:27:29
But if tech means
producing more with less,
00:27:32
then we should be seeing dramatic
economic progress, we don't.
00:27:37
The millennials are not dramatically
better off than their boomer parents,
00:27:42
close quote.
00:27:43
Okay, so
you mentioned it a moment ago, but
00:27:48
return to this notion of
slowing technical progress.
00:27:53
This great disappointment, by contrast,
what we see around us today,
00:27:57
what we feel around us today,
by contrast with a century or so ago.
00:28:00
>> Peter Thiel: Or even late 60s.
00:28:03
>> Peter Robinson: Yes, yes, okay.
00:28:04
>> Peter Thiel: Jensen's Star Trek,
the sort of optimistic science fiction of
00:28:09
the 50s and 60s where, yeah,
we'd have flying cars,
00:28:13
you'd have supersonic aviation everywhere,
all sorts of cures for diseases.
00:28:19
And yes, there was an incredible amount
of progress in this world of bits,
00:28:23
much less in the world of atoms.
00:28:24
I always think a lot of what we do is
embedded in this physical world of atoms.
00:28:30
And so when that slows,
that's definitely felt as quite stagnant.
00:28:37
The question I always then get at,
and then you get into endless debates,
00:28:41
is this true, or
is there still a lot of progress?
00:28:43
How would one measure it?
00:28:45
I tend to measure it in things
like these economic terms
00:28:48
in the way that the average millennial is
having a tougher time than their boomer
00:28:52
parents at the same point in life.
00:28:54
And so at least there's something,
even if we're not completely stuck,
00:29:00
it's in some sense not really
moving as fast as it used to.
00:29:04
And then there's always
a question of why this is.
00:29:07
>> Peter Robinson: Right.
>> Peter Thiel: And
00:29:08
why questions are overdetermined.
00:29:13
And as a libertarian, I always
like to say it's too regulated and
00:29:16
the FDA regulates the drugs too much.
00:29:18
And if you regulated drugs,
if you regulated video games like
00:29:22
the FDA regulates drugs,
we'd still all just be playing Pong.
00:29:26
And so there's a libertarian
anti-regulatory thing.
00:29:31
There is a argument that the schools
aren't teaching people and
00:29:34
they're not teaching
people to be scientists.
00:29:37
Some of the educational
institutions are broken.
00:29:39
There's sort of an anti-liberal argument.
00:29:40
>> Peter Robinson: Some
truth in all of this.
00:29:43
>> Peter Thiel: There is
a Tyler Cowen argument that somehow,
00:29:46
the low-hanging fruit was picked.
00:29:49
There was a bunch of
easy discoveries to make.
00:29:51
And now,
nature's cupboard is kind of bare, and
00:29:54
you have to reach really hard
to make a modest discovery.
00:29:58
And maybe that's true.
00:29:59
Maybe that's just sort of a self-serving
excuse of baby boomers who didn't do
00:30:04
as much as the generations that came
before, but it is very striking.
00:30:09
One way to quantify this, even if we
say the rate of progress in broad
00:30:14
fields is the same as it was 100
years ago, not that it's slowed.
00:30:19
But even if we say it's the same,
if you think of PhDs,
00:30:23
there are probably 100 times as many
PhDs today as there were in, say, 1924.
00:30:28
And so it's the same rate of progress.
00:30:30
And the average PhD is 99% less productive
than people were 100 years ago.
00:30:37
And that doesn't seem like a very
healthy scientific ecosystem.
00:30:42
So there's some sense
that maybe it slowed.
00:30:46
But the overarching explanation
that I've come to think is a very
00:30:51
important one is just this idea that,
in some way, science and
00:30:56
technology were this trap that
humanity was building for itself.
00:31:01
That there were these
apocalyptic risks and
00:31:07
maybe going very slow was better
00:31:12
than racing towards Armageddon.
00:31:16
And so, yeah, I was born in 1967.
00:31:21
I always often express
frustration that I'm stuck
00:31:26
in these office buildings or
houses that are decades old.
00:31:32
There are all these parts of
our society that feel lame,
00:31:36
slow-changing, low energy,
low testosterone, nothing is going on.
00:31:42
And then I do wonder if we
were in a Jetsons type world,
00:31:46
we might not even be sitting
here to talk about it.
00:31:50
It might have self-destructed by that.
00:31:52
>> Peter Robinson: Right.
00:31:53
>> Peter Thiel: If you had a JFK as
president on amphetamines going mano
00:31:57
a mano with Khrushchev, it worked.
00:32:00
In 1962, would it have worked every time?
00:32:04
>> Peter Robinson: So, by the way,
someplace, I didn't make a note of this,
00:32:07
but someplace I saw you say that
Facebook had ten years of good press.
00:32:12
In other words, ten years of optimism,
00:32:15
before the project sort of
curdled in the public mind.
00:32:18
And that AI went from good to bad in
about a month, this loss of optimism.
00:32:26
So I have a quotation here,
there are many explanations for
00:32:30
this deceleration in tech, this is you.
00:32:32
But the explanation I believe,
tech got scary.
00:32:37
We're leery of it now, we're not
embracing it in the way that we used to.
00:32:41
Add to that the notion that,
again, I'm thinking this through,
00:32:47
but I'm putting it to you as a question.
00:32:51
This isn't the way things were supposed
to be when the Cold War ended, right?
00:32:56
>> Peter Thiel: Sure.
00:32:58
>> Peter Robinson: Russia was supposed
to work, there was democracy and
00:33:01
free markets.
00:33:02
And instead, we have this crazy man,
Putin invading Ukraine.
00:33:05
By now there should have
been at least some kind of
00:33:09
rudimentary peace in the Mid East.
00:33:12
Perhaps the most striking contradiction
of what we expect was that by now,
00:33:18
China was supposed to be democratic.
00:33:21
It was supposed to follow the pattern
of South Korea and Taiwan,
00:33:25
where first you have economic growth, and
economic growth creates expectations,
00:33:31
including expectations of freedom,
free speech, and so forth.
00:33:35
And these countries become democratic.
00:33:37
China was supposed to follow that path,
00:33:39
things are not going the way
they were supposed to.
00:33:43
Add to that, our own sense of
polarization in this country,
00:33:47
that this country somehow, and there's
just a lot of feeling of, it's subjective.
00:33:54
It's very difficult to get at, but
00:33:56
it feels to me as though there's
a lot of free floating dread.
00:34:01
>> Peter Thiel: And
it's hard to articulate.
00:34:04
I'll give one example, and
you can think about this what you will.
00:34:08
But a lot of my conservative friends
are very critical of Fauci and
00:34:12
all the lockdowns and the masks and
00:34:15
the social distancing and
the vaccine that didn't really work.
00:34:19
And on the surface level, these critiques
are, I think, quite legitimate.
00:34:25
It was not the correct protocol for
some kind of flu.
00:34:31
It was, however, roughly,
00:34:34
the right protocol if you
thought it was a bioweapon.
00:34:39
If you think it's a very dangerous,
humanly engineered bioweapon,
00:34:44
those are roughly all the kinds
of things that you might do.
00:34:49
And so, the kind of critique
I have of Fauci is that,
00:34:53
yeah, that's what he was scared of,
I think.
00:34:58
That's the way I'd steel man him,
give him the benefit of the doubt.
00:35:01
And then the real critique is that,
00:35:03
you weren't supposed to infantilize
our population and not talk about it.
00:35:08
And that's what he was scared about,
and he was so scared about it,
00:35:11
he couldn't even talk about it.
00:35:13
And there probably are a lot of things
like this where, yeah, there is this
00:35:18
pretty inchoate fear, but we're so scared
we can't even talk about it cogently.
00:35:24
>> Peter Robinson: There's one
more concept we need to flesh out,
00:35:27
a term that you use.
00:35:29
We'll put all the pieces of this together,
although that may happen in the second
00:35:34
part of our conversation,
and that is the katechon.
00:35:37
The term comes from the Greek for
he, or that which restrains.
00:35:44
We'll come in a moment, to your analysis
of the katechon through history, but
00:35:48
first, again, the concept itself.
00:35:50
St. Paul in his letter to
the Thessalonians, chapter 2 verse 6 to 7,
00:35:55
and now you know what is restraining,
again, in Greek, katechon.
00:36:00
And now you know what is restraining,
that he may be revealed in his own time.
00:36:05
For the mystery of lawlessness
is already at work,
00:36:08
only he who restrains the Ketachon,
he who now restrains will do so
00:36:13
until he is taken out of the way,
close quote.
00:36:16
Now, that's a very enigmatic passage.
00:36:19
The Church has never defined the term.
00:36:21
The Church fathers, the early writers and
thinkers in the Church,
00:36:27
wrote about it, but tended to add
that their views were speculative.
00:36:32
So we don't have any thoroughly
worked out theology of the catacomb,
00:36:40
but we do have, 2,000 years ago in St.
00:36:44
Paul, a notion of some
force holding back chaos,
00:36:50
holding back evil,
some force that's restraining.
00:36:56
We get to Cardinal Newman, writing in
the 19th century, Cardinal Newman,
00:37:01
the great thinker and
theologian, in my judgment,
00:37:04
the best prose stylist of
the whole century, in English.
00:37:07
Cardinal Newman writes, we know from
prophecy that the present framework of
00:37:11
society and government is that which
withholdeth, again, the Katechon.
00:37:15
So he identifies it with a framework
of society and government.
00:37:19
All right, that's my little effort to
present the concept of the katechon.
00:37:25
You use that concept how,
you identify the katechon through history.
00:37:31
>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, as you said,
it's a rather mysterious concept,
00:37:35
you can identify it with the good
aspects of the Roman Empire,
00:37:40
certain political aspects of
the Roman Catholic Church, individuals.
00:37:45
Institutions that somehow are trying
00:37:50
to hold this runaway chaos in check.
00:37:55
I don't think it's purely reactionary,
you can think of Metternich
00:38:00
post Napoleon as sort of katechomatic,
but he's also modernizing it.
00:38:05
It is a thing of history, though.
00:38:08
And so, there are ways to
do it that can be good for
00:38:13
a time, but that will not
necessarily work for all times.
00:38:19
But I would always maybe go back
to the apocalyptic specter,
00:38:27
would be Antichrist or Armageddon.
00:38:31
And I think there is a lot
in this runaway science
00:38:36
technology that's pushing us
towards something like Armageddon.
00:38:44
And then there is the natural
pushback on this is,
00:38:49
we will avoid Armageddon
by having a one world
00:38:54
state that has real teeth, real power.
00:38:59
And the biblical term for
that is the Antichrist.
00:39:04
And the Christian intuition I have is,
00:39:07
I don't want Antichrist,
I don't want Armageddon.
00:39:13
I would like to find some narrow path
between these two where we can avoid both.
00:39:21
And then certainly, there are ways
that you defer it if you can,
00:39:27
you try to do new things.
00:39:29
I don't think it's a purely
reactionary thing.
00:39:32
It's not a pure Benedictine option where
you just retreat into a monastery or
00:39:38
something like that.
00:39:40
I think that's the most
accelerationist thing possible.
00:39:46
>> Peter Robinson: You quit resisting.
00:39:47
>> Peter Thiel: You quit, it sort of
clears the field, it's like the Lord Acton
00:39:50
line, all that is necessary for evil
to triumph is that good men do nothing.
00:39:54
And so this is where I'm always, it can be
the Benedictine option, it can be good for
00:39:59
Personal sanctification, but
to the extent we're [CROSSTALK] talking
00:40:03
about society, our first-
>> Peter Robinson: Rod Dreher wrote a book
00:40:06
about this,
00:40:07
the idea of going to the [INAUDIBLE] the
idea is that Christians simply drop out.
00:40:10
Society is going in the wrong direction,
and Christians simply drop out,
00:40:13
that's roughly the idea.
00:40:15
>> Peter Thiel: I don't want to
argue with him on the level of
00:40:18
personal sanctification or
people saving their souls.
00:40:24
My political,
social intuition is that it's the height
00:40:28
of your responsibility because
that is just, in effect,
00:40:32
hitting the accelerator towards
the Antichrist, Armageddon.
00:40:36
>> Peter Robinson: Okay, let's finish this
first part of our conversation with more
00:40:41
on the Antichrist, let me take
a moment to set this up, if I may.
00:40:47
A few passages from Scripture,
Daniel, chapter 7,
00:40:50
in the first year of Belshazzar,
king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream.
00:40:55
There before me was a beast, fearful,
terrifying, very strong, it had great
00:41:00
iron teeth, and it ate its victims and
trampled their remains underfoot.
00:41:06
Second Thessalonians,
chapter 2, we're back to St.
00:41:08
Paul, he's writing about the end times.
00:41:11
It cannot happen until there
has appeared the wicked one,
00:41:14
the lost one, the enemy who raises
himself above every object of worship and
00:41:19
flaunts the claim that he is God.
00:41:22
Revelation, chapter 13, then I saw
a beast emerge from the sea, and
00:41:26
they prostrated themselves in
front of the beast, saying,
00:41:30
who can compare with the beast,
who can fight against it?
00:41:34
And all the people of the world
will worship it, close quote.
00:41:40
There are people who take
all of this seriously,
00:41:42
we've already quoted Rene Girard.
00:41:44
We've already quoted Cardinal Newman,
but Daniel dates from the Iron Age.
00:41:50
Thessalonians and Revelation are 2000
years old, contemporary society.
00:41:55
We sit here in Stanford University,
contemporary society all but
00:42:02
ignores these texts or derides them.
00:42:07
Of interest only to snake handlers,
as I mentioned,
00:42:10
stake handlers in Kentucky hollers,
you are no snake handler.
00:42:14
>> Peter Thiel: Well-
>> Peter Robinson: You take this stuff.
00:42:16
>> Peter Thiel: Not that I'm aware of,no.
00:42:17
>> Peter Robinson: Not that you're aware
of [LAUGH] not that I'm aware of, so
00:42:20
we'll come to how
the Antichrist might arise.
00:42:23
What we must do to prevent, we'll come
to that in our second conversation.
00:42:26
But the first thing I want to establish
is why do you take this seriously?
00:42:31
>> Peter Thiel: Well, again,
00:42:32
one can take it seriously without
taking it completely literally.
00:42:37
But just let me maybe defend Daniel,
the Old Testament prophet.
00:42:43
And if you contrast it with, let's say,
a Greco-Roman understanding of history.
00:42:48
Thucydides, Herodotus,
Thucydides writes the account of
00:42:53
the Peloponnesian wars between Athens and
Sparta.
00:42:57
And it has a timeless and
eternal character,
00:43:00
it's the rising power against the existing
power, Athens is the rising power.
00:43:06
And the Thucydides trap is when this
repeats itself with Wilhelmine Germany
00:43:10
against Britain in 1914, or
perhaps today, China against the US.
00:43:15
It's timeless, internal,
the particulars don't matter,
00:43:18
the speeches people give don't matter,
Thucydides makes them up.
00:43:22
And it's sort of like a natural,
cyclical kind of a view
00:43:27
of history or
one where there is no specific history.
00:43:32
And then, by contrast,
I do not think it's an exaggeration
00:43:37
to say something like,
Daniel was the first historian where
00:43:41
the things that matter are one time and
world historical.
00:43:46
And there was a creation,
there was a fall,
00:43:50
there's a Mosaic revelation-
>> Peter Robinson: History going
00:43:53
someplace.
00:43:54
>> Peter Thiel: It's going somewhere,
and the choices people make matter,
00:43:59
and some of the choices
matter in a very big way.
00:44:03
And there's a way that Christ's
ministry and death and
00:44:07
resurrection was a part of history or
a hinge moment of history.
00:44:12
And then there are ways it continues, and
I think that's sort of a feel for history.
00:44:20
And something like Hegel
is just a pale shadow
00:44:25
of the Judeo-Christian sense of history.
00:44:30
Again, you have to qualify
this very carefully,
00:44:34
but you could say that
the New Testament God
00:44:37
is the first progressive because
the new supersedes the old.
00:44:42
And so it's the first time that there is
00:44:44
something new just by
virtue of it being new.
00:44:47
There's something new that
comes in through history,
00:44:50
all these ways you have to qualify.
00:44:53
If you go too progressive, you get to
something like Marcion or Marx, but
00:44:58
if you say it's all in the Old Testament,
that's somehow not quite right either.
00:45:04
>> Peter Robinson: So you take it
seriously because you don't believe
00:45:09
history is Groundhog Day.
00:45:12
It doesn't happen over and
over again, this cyclical aspect,
00:45:16
the eternal recurrence.
00:45:18
Then in some fundamental way, the
meaninglessness of it, history is going
00:45:22
someplace, and if it's going someplace,
that means there will be an end point.
00:45:27
>> Peter Thiel: And there are important
things that will happen that
00:45:30
are different from things
that happened in the past.
00:45:34
And so if we want to have a feel for
our times,
00:45:40
what is going on in the world
in the early 21st century,
00:45:46
there are ways we can try to
reference it to the past.
00:45:52
You can say there's some parallel between
the decline of the United States and
00:45:57
the fall of the Roman Empire, but the
differences are surely really important.
00:46:02
It's happening in a world
of nuclear weapons and
00:46:05
instantaneous communication, and
it's happening in a very post Christian or
00:46:11
hyper Christian world,
not in a pagan world.
00:46:15
And somehow the classical
approaches to history always
00:46:20
downplay the things that are one
time unique, world historical,
00:46:27
and I think we should take
our bearings more from that.
00:46:32
>> Peter Robinson: Peter Thiel,
thank you. Join us for part 2.
00:46:36
This is a sentence I
never thought I'd utter.
00:46:39
Join us for part two to hear about
the Antichrist, for Uncommon Knowledge,
00:46:44
the Hoover Institution and
Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
00:46:49
[MUSIC]
