What’s in Peter Thiel’s new Antichrist lecture?

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Brendan Bordelon (0:33)

Hello, and welcome to Decoded. I'm Brendan Bordelon.

Calder McHugh (0:36)

And I'm Calder McHugh. Today on the show, you'll get an exclusive look at billionaire Peter Thiel's latest lectures on the end times. We'll discuss what Thiel's new messaging around religion tells us about his political priorities.

Brendan Bordelon (0:47)

And a DC lobbying group focused on virtual reality tech is closing its doors. What does that mean for the metaverse? Can we trust that big tech is making the right bets on the future this time around?

Calder, you're going to start us off today with some interesting tape from Peter Thiel. Where was Thiel speaking and what did he say?

Calder McHugh (1:09)

So Thiel has been speaking in Nashville. He is in the middle of a four part lecture series on the Antichrist. This is quite similar to a couple of other lecture series that he's given both in San Francisco and in Rome over the course of the last year. And I was able to get recordings of his first two lectures. These lectures are supposed to be no phones allowed, but we still managed to get a recording here at Decoded. And we also managed to see transcripts of all four of his Antichrist lectures from San Francisco in late 2025

So we're able to compare and contrast in a really interesting way in terms of what he's saying now versus what he's saying in San Francisco.

Brendan Bordelon (1:43)

So obviously it's so great that we got these recordings, we got these transcripts. I mean, this is like a very interesting talk that Thiel has been giving. But I got to ask, why is Thiel using the Antichrist to talk about AI regulation?

Calder McHugh (1:54)

So it's a great question, and I think it's one that a lot of folks are asking.

I think part of it honestly is a bit of a marketing tool. He's doing these off-the-record sessions, they feel kind of exclusive. They're about the Antichrist, which is something that people in tech are not talking a lot about. Thiel himself grew up religious. He's sort of has been talking about religion quite a bit more in the last few years in particular. The way he's done these Antichrist lectures, I would say, is it's sort of the result of a lot of these conversations that he's been having and a lot of these sort of other talks that he's been giving. And if you look at the transcripts, they are about the Antichrist for sure, but it's sort of more broadly his philosophy.

He talks about his AI philosophy a lot within these lectures, and specifically, he makes this comparison to the Antichrist and government or figures can overregulate AI. You know, he thinks of those figures as potential Antichrist type figures, but he's also talking about all kinds of stuff that he's interested in. He is at one point talking about the Japanese manga series One Piece, woven throughout his second lecture. There's a lot of discussion of the Nazi jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt. There's a huge gap between a lot of his influences, but he's bringing them all together in what he hopes is a coherent ideology about how he thinks about the world.

Brendan Bordelon (3:11)

What stood out to you the most in these lectures?

Calder McHugh (3:13)

Yeah, so one thing that was quite different from the San Francisco lectures to the Nashville lectures was he talks quite a bit about Pope Leo, the 14th. So he really makes it clear he's not a fan of the Pope's messaging around AI. You might remember in the Pope's first encyclical, which came out in May, he warned in some ways against the dangers of artificial intelligence. And this is a commentary that he's been continuing to make since the encyclical came out. But in these lectures, Thiel suggests that Pope Leo's comments had an ulterior motive.

Peter Thiel (3:42)

It's very hard to get to the ground truth of what's going on with AI, because almost everybody is stressing the issue has ulterior motive.

Many people, for example, know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to use their unpopularity. Both Obama and the Pope call him to this category.