Peter Thiel and the AntichristBelow is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.”
Douthat: There’s also a macroscopic question that you’re interested in. We’ll pull on the religion thread a little bit here. You have been giving talks recently about the concept of the Antichrist, which is a Christian concept, an apocalyptic concept. What does that mean to you? What is the Antichrist?
Thiel: How much time do we have?
Douthat: We’ve got as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.
Thiel: All right. Well, I could talk about it for a long time. I think there’s always a question of how we articulate some of these existential risks, some of the challenges we have, and they’re all framed in this sort of runaway dystopian science text. There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. What do you do about nuclear weapons? We have a United Nations with real teeth that controls them, and they’re controlled by an international political order. And then something like this is also: What do we do about A.I.? And we need global compute governance. We need a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke, to make sure people don’t program a dangerous A.I. And I’ve been wondering whether that’s going from the frying pan into the fire.
The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
Now, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but one question is — and this was a plot hole in all these Antichrist books people wrote — how does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic, hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it. It’s this demonium, Ex-Machina —
Douthat: It’s totally — it’s implausible.
Thiel: It’s a very implausible plot hole. But I think we have an answer to this plot hole. The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
Douthat: I want to suggest a middle ground between those two options. It used to be that the reasonable fear of the Antichrist was a kind of wizard of technology. And now the reasonable fear is someone who promises to control technology, make it safe and usher in what, from your point of view, would be a universal stagnation, right?
Thiel: Well, that’s more my description of how it would happen.
Douthat: Right.
Thiel: I think people still have a fear of a 17th-century Antichrist. We’re still scared of Dr. Strangelove.
Douthat: Yes, but you’re saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say: You must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon.
Thiel: Yes.
Douthat: I guess my view would be, looking at the world right now, that you would need a certain kind of novel technological progress to make that fear concrete.
So I can buy that the world could turn to someone who promised peace and regulation if the world became convinced that A.I. was about to destroy everybody. But I think to get to that point, you need one of the accelerationist apocalyptic scenarios to start to play out. To get your peace and safety Antichrist, you need more technological progress.
Like, one of the key failures of totalitarianism in the 20th century was it had a problem of knowledge — it couldn’t know what was going on all over the world. So you need the A.I. or whatever else to be capable of helping the peace and safety totalitarian rule. So don’t you think you essentially need your worst-case scenario to involve some burst of progress that is then tamed and used to impose stagnant totalitarianism? You can’t just get there from where we are right now.
Thiel: Well, it can ——
Douthat: Like, Greta Thunberg is on a boat in the Mediterranean, protesting Israel. I just don’t see the promise of safety from A.I., safety from tech, even safety from climate change right now as a powerful universal rallying cry, absent accelerating change and real fear of total catastrophe.
Thiel: Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is ——
Douthat: I think it is not — in its current form.
Thiel: I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.
Douthat: In a declining, decaying Europe that is not a dominant player in the world.
Thiel: Sure. It’s always in a context.
We had this really complicated history with the way nuclear technology worked, and — OK, we didn’t really get to a totalitarian, one-world state. But by the 1970s, one account of the stagnation is that the runaway progress of technology had gotten very scary, and that Baconian science ended at Los Alamos.
And then it was: OK, it ended there, and we didn’t want to have any more. And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted.
Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over ——
Douthat: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. We’re ending in the apocalyptic, and you’re ——
Thiel: But my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won. And yeah, it was not literally Charles Manson ——
Douthat: OK. I want to stay with the Antichrist, just to end. And you’re retreating. You’re saying: OK, environmentalism is already pro-stagnation, and so on. OK, let’s agree with all that.
Thiel: No, I’m just saying things are powerful.
Douthat: But we’re not living under the Antichrist right now. We’re just stagnant. And you’re positing that something worse could be on the horizon that would make stagnation permanent, that would be driven by fear. And I’m suggesting that for that to happen, there would have to be some burst of technological progress that was akin to Los Alamos, that people are afraid of.
And my very specific question for you: You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
Douthat: I mean, to be clear, I don’t think that’s what you’re doing either. I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.
Thiel: Well, there are these different gradations of this we can describe. But is what I’ve just told you so preposterous, as a broad account of the stagnation, that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safetyism? This is I Thessalonians 5:3 — the slogan of the Antichrist is “peace and safety.”
And we’ve submitted to the F.D.A. — it regulates not just drugs in the U.S. but de facto in the whole world, because the rest of the world defers to the F.D.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission effectively regulates nuclear power plants all over the world. You can’t design a modular nuclear reactor and just build it in Argentina. They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators. They’re going to defer to the U.S.
And so it is at least a question about why we’ve had 50 years of stagnation. And one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is that something happened culturally where it wasn’t allowed. And the cultural answer can be sort of a bottom-up answer, that it was just some transformation of humanity into this more docile kind of a species. Or it can be at least partially top-down, that there is this machinery of government that got changed into this stagnationist thing.
Nuclear power was supposed to be the power of the 21st century. And it somehow has gotten off-ramped all over the world, on a worldwide basis.
Douthat: So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist, in that telling. Do you think God is in control of history?
Thiel: [pause] Man, this is again — I think there’s always room for human freedom and human choice. These things are not absolutely predetermined one way or another.
Douthat: But God wouldn’t leave us forever under the rule of a mild, moderate, stagnationist Antichrist, right? That can’t be how the story ends, right?
Thiel: Attributing too much causation to God is always a problem. There are different Bible verses I can give you, but I’ll give you John 15:25, where Christ says, “They hated me without cause.” So all these people that are persecuting Christ have no reason, no cause for why they’re persecuting Christ. And if we interpret this as an ultimate causation verse, they want to say: I’m persecuting because God caused me to do this. God is causing everything.
And the Christian view is anti-Calvinist. God is not behind history. God is not causing everything. If you say God’s causing everything ——
Douthat: But wait, but God is ——
Thiel: You’re scapegoating God.
Douthat: But God is behind Jesus Christ entering history, because God was not going to leave us in a stagnationist, decadent Roman Empire, right? So at some point, God is going to step in.
Thiel: I am not that Calvinist. And ——
Douthat: That’s not Calvinism, though. That’s just Christianity. God will not leave us eternally staring into screens and being lectured by Greta Thunberg. He will not abandon us to that fate.
Thiel: For better and for worse, I think there’s a great deal of scope for human action, for human freedom. If I thought these things were deterministic, you might as well just accept it — the lions are coming. You should just have some yoga and prayerful meditation and wait while the lions eat you up. And I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Douthat: I agree with that. And I think, on that note, I’m just trying to be hopeful and suggesting that in trying to resist the Antichrist, using your human freedom, you should have hope that you’ll succeed, right?
Thiel: We can agree on that.
Douthat: Good. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.
Thiel: Thank you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html 
