Peter Thiel says Antichrist ‘Wants a Nobel Peace Prize.‘

Earlier this week, I obtained transcripts of four private lectures Peter Thiel delivered to San Francisco tech elites about the coming of the Antichrist...Yes, really.

I reviewed audio recordings to confirm authenticity, though I agreed not to publish them for security reasons. I’m always cautious about materials obtained this way. But Reuters, The Guardian, and The Washington Post also obtained transcripts and published stories confirming their authenticity. I also reached out to Thiel’s organization for comment but received no reply.

As I wrote in my recent New Republic essay, Thiel’s main argument is that politics should be framed apocalyptically, and that Silicon Valley—potentially an agent of the Antichrist—should be empowered to do whatever it wishes because it alone can save (or destroy) the world.

“Am I a genius or an insane person?” asked Thiel in his fourth lecture. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive...

I’ll have more substantial commentary later, but here are some quick highlights from his bizarre and disjointed secret lectures, which combine intellectual grandiosity with a pronounced sense of unresolved existential terror.

The Antichrist Wants A Nobel Peace Prize

Thiel regularly claims the Antichrist will be someone or something with the slogan of “peace and safety.” This is based on a very specific and disputed interpretation of scripture.

In his San Francisco talk, Thiel got even more specific. He says the Antichrist will be someone who longs for a Nobel Peace Prize:

Certainly, of course, there are a lot of people who are wannabe Antichrists. Want peace and safety, definitely wants a Nobel Peace Prize, would give his soul for that, no question about it.

As with all of Thiel’s DIY theology, this has zero basis in scripture. But this is a stunning declaration at a moment when President Donald Trump has been openly begging and pining for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump has been publicly demanding the coveted and prestigious award, which Barack Obama received in 2009. In fact, Trump had launched a full-on campaign to get the Nobel (which failed).

From the Wall Street Journal:

He has been fixated on the prize, and for months, domestic supporters and international leaders seeking his favor have joined him in a vociferous campaign.

So, is Thiel saying Trump might be the Antichrist? Keep reading...

The Antichrist Will Be Fast

Thiel says “velocity” will be a major hallmark of the Antichrist, as the Antichrist will move quickly to take control of the world.

The emphasis on speed is curious, as velocity is a hallmark of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality. In fact, many in tech now call themselves “accelerationists” and believe humanity must tumble headlong to wherever technology might take us.

They are rushing to disrupt entire economies and systems, and to rapidly scale “godlike” AI “superintelligence” systems which, they claim, might just destroy all of humanity.

Says Thiel:

Tonight I'll continue this investigation by asking the seemingly narrow question of the velocity of the Antichrist. What I mean by that is: the Bible says that one man will take over the entire world. He only has one lifetime to do that. How on earth can he achieve that? It sounds like medieval fantasy.

After jokingly considering whether Bill Gates might be the Antichrist, Thiel shoots down the idea and says:

But the one thing that Gates has in common with the Antichrist is velocity. He rose to prominence very fast, he became a billionaire at age 31. Money has this remarkable velocity. You can make a lot of it very quickly and perhaps it can be taken away from you even faster.

At this point in the transcript, Thiel—worried that the audience might be losing interest—pulls out $200 and hands the money to a random audience member. 

Anyhow, tech moves fast, money moves fast—and so does Thiel’s Antichrist.

Taxes and Governments Are The “Machinery” of the Antichrist

Thiel claims a vast “machinery” of the Antichrist has been put in place over the last three decades to increase financial surveillance and keep the wealthy from hiding their money:

Over the last 25 years—this uneventful, Groundhog-Day 21st century since 2000—under cover of relative peace and safety, an incredible machinery of tax treaties, financial surveillance, and sanctions architecture has been constructed. And all these tech fortunes are downstream of this vast system.

It's become quite difficult to hide one's money. The Patriot Act, Swiss-banking secrecy has been massively eroded, and almost every country in the world outside the U.S. requires you to report your assets to the government under the Common Reporting Standard.

The U.S. is a notable exception, but once you're in the U.S., there's no escape from global taxation if you're a U.S. citizen. We have this extensive FINCEN architecture to police you. Payments are centralized on the SWIFT system...

But Silicon Valley Is Helping to Build This Antichrist “Machinery”...

Thiel mentions that Silicon Valley has become completely entwined with government, making it a key part of the very machinery he criticizes:

“And then of course, the history of the last quarter century, maybe the 21st century is the way in which Silicon Valley or this place, San Francisco has slowly won out over New York and simply become the other center of power. Of course in a perverse way, to go through all the ways to link the military and financial and ideological superpower with the big tech companies. There are all these ways we can be critical of them. And you know, go on with this anti-San Francisco rant.

He even appears to admit that his own companies have contributed to this feared Antichrist machinery:

I was working at PayPal at the time trying to build the technology to evade these policies of the world's powers and principalities...I'll will still defend PayPal has more good than bad. It's not timelessly eternal. In some ways it got co-opted and new things needed to be built like Bitcoin and Tether."

And:

Even if you know, we start companies like PayPal or Palantir and try to have alternatives and get partially co-opted, they're never going to be simply in sync with DC.

At various points in his lectures, Thiel suggests that a) tech is helping to build the Antichrist’s infrastructure b) tech must resist becoming the Antichrist and c) tech is humanity’s best hope against the Antichrist.

It’s a message that’s as convoluted as it is self-serving.

The Antichrist is Likely Gen Z

Since the Antichrist needs to take over the world quickly, Thiel says the Antichrist must be a young person. He goes on an odd numerological riff about the number 33. Since Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great died around that age, Thiel assumes that the Antichrist must take over the world before reaching the mystical 33 years.

Buckle up for some florid poppycock here:

Christ only lived to age 33 and became history's greatest man. The Antichrist has to somehow outdo this. I don't want to be way too literal on the 33 number—I'd rather stress the Antichrist will be a youthful conqueror; maybe in our gerontocracy, 66 is the new 33. But something like these numbers do occur almost mystically through a number of different contexts.

Buddha begins his travels at age 30 and experiences Nirvana, ego death, at age 33. But I had to be ecumenical and say something nice about Islam. One idea that's pretty cool is, when you're reborn into your afterlife, you're born into your 33-year-old self. Your 33-year-old self is your best self ... It’s like Alexander at the peak of his power. Or even in Tolkien, the hobbits have a coming-of-age ceremony at 33. That's how old Frodo is when he inherits the ring.

Of course, if you're way past 33, you're starting to run out of time for taking over the world.

Thiel even suggests that the United States Constitution requires the president to be at least 35 years of age as an “anti-Antichrist measure”:

The Antichrist has a three and a half year reign or three and a half year ascent to power. I think you can take this very, very literally. Christ starts his ministry at 30. He dies at 33, but technically he's born on Christmas, dies on Easter...

Technically 33 and four months. Christ lives for 33 and a third years. So once the Antichrist is 33 and a half, he will have surpassed both Christ and Alexander ... There may even be an anti-Antichrist measure in the US Constitution's 35 year minimum for the presidency.

There is no evidence to suggest that the framers of the Constitution considered the potential age of an Antichrist when setting the minimum age for the presidency. Thiel’s assertion appears to be pure esoteric/occult/numerological speculation.

However, since Trump is 79 and Thiel is 57, this choice to point the finger at young people conveniently removes them from Thiel’s list of Antichrist suspects...for the most part.

When considering the question of whether Trump is the Antichrist, Thiel said:

What I would say is that you can be as deranged a liberal as you want to be. I’ll give you a hearing if you believe in a sincere way, not like the people outside, but in a sincere, rational, well-reasoned way, and are willing to make the argument that Trump is the Antichrist. I will give you a hearing. And we should consider that.

A Thiel spokesman clarified his comments to the Post:

Peter doesn’t believe Trump is the Antichrist. His challenge was for Trump’s liberal critics to make that case if they want Peter to hear them out, and he knows that in practice they can’t and won’t do so.

By the way: It’s not clear why Thiel believes it is his role to determine the identity of the Antichrist!

Thiel Names More Antichrists

As usual, Thiel points the finger at more potential Antichrists. Conveniently, these suspects are people or things he doesn’t like.

He suggests that centralized government and tech regulation are Antichrist-adjacent, along with the surveillance “machinery” of government and tax authorities. He names so-called “Luddites”—Greta Thunberg, along with AI critics Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky—as possible agents of the Antichrist.

Yudkowsky fired back, telling the Post that “my understanding is that authorities from multiple Christian denominations have stated that Thiel’s views, identifying the Antichrist with proposals to regulate the AI industry, are not deemed by them to be compatible with conventional Christian belief.”

Belief In God Is Not Necessary

Thiel has previously said he is religious but not spiritual. He expands upon that theme:

My line is always: we don’t need belief in God, we don’t need belief in the Bible, we need knowledge of God, knowledge of the Bible. There’s some way that you can have knowledge of Christ. He is a type of a man, a type of healer...a type of carpenter, type of scapegoat, type of king. And there’s something like that we can also do with history. We can’t know everything, but knowledge is more important than belief.

So, is religion a tool for imposing hierarchy and order, rather than a literal belief system? That won’t go over well with believers.

Concluding his fourth lecture, Thiel makes an unusual remark about Acts 17, an organization seeking to spread Christianity in Silicon Valley (and host of his lecture series):

I’m supposed to do some kind of advertisement for Act 17. The non-egalitarian, very heretical thought I'll give you is: perhaps, you know, whatever you're doing here in San Francisco is more important than everything everybody's doing in Christian work in the rest of the world combined.

So, after four nights of lecturing about the Antichrist, Thiel proclaims that evangelizing to the comfortable and privileged in San Francisco beats serving the poorest of the poor around the world.

And Jesus wept.