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- [00:00]
A
Going online without Express VPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time you're probably fine. That nice person at the table next to you will watch out for your best interest. But what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, airports? Your online data is not secure and it doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack someone. A smart 12 year old could do it, but that data is valuable. Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person by selling your information. The Dark Web but the type of encryption that ExpressVPN uses would take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to break into. And this works on all devices.
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B
It's easy.
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A
You just fire up the app, click on one button, and whatever device you're using will now be secure. So I don't know about you, but I've been a victim of identity theft in the past. It is very time consuming, it is very annoying. It is disquieting and traumatizing. And so this is why I use ExpressVPN. Especially when I'm doing research for this podcast and I have to be on Rumble and Telegram and clicking all kinds of links and cruising around the Internet into spaces where all manner of bad guys could be hanging out. But thankfully, you probably don't have to do that. Nonetheless, it's good to keep your data secure in a variety of situations. So you can do that today by visiting expressvpn.com conspirituality that's E X P R E S s v p n.com conspirituality to find out how you can get up to 4 extra months free. Expressvpn.com conspirituality what if I told you.
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The biggest crime story of our time is happening right under our noses and we're all witnesses. I'm Matthew Remsky of Conspirituality Podcast and I want to introduce you to Lawless Planet. This is a new podcast from Wondery that exposes the dark underbelly of the climate crisis. From the Amazon rainforest to small town America, host Zach Goldbaum uncovers shocking tales of murder, corporate cover ups and greed. You'll hear about the brave activists risking their lives for their belief, the corrupt tycoons destroying ecosystems for profit, and the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. This isn't some distant threat. It's happening right now. Each episode drops you into a battle for our planet's future. We're talking mysterious deaths, daring heists and billion dollar scams, all with the fate of our world hanging in the balance. This is Lawless Planet. You can follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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C
Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
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B
I'm Matthew Rimsky.
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A
I'm Julian Walker.
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C
You can find us on Instagram and threads at conspiritualitypod as well as individually on Blue Sky. You can search for our names there. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality. You can also support us by grabbing our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [03:39]
A
Conspirituality 280 Peter Thiel is Definitely not the Antichrist Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is no cuck philanthropist like Bill Gates. The co founder of Palantir is leading his company at the bleeding edge of mass surveillance and facial recognition, predictive policing and AI assisted warfare. He also fancies himself a political player responsible for funding his protege JD Vance to being a heartbeat away from the presidency. Considering this cv, the announcement that Thiel would give a series of four lectures on the Antichrist was puzzling. Why would a tech bro with notoriously awkward and inarticulate speaking style hold forth on religious prophecy? Or would this be a coming out party where he would finally confirm his alliance with Satan? Now that the lectures have happened, we can finally tell you and later we'll frame it in the context of Thiel's mentor, Rene Girard. But first, let's talk about the sperm count of boys and the exciting new initiative to make Europe healthy again this week in Spirituality.
- [04:56]
C
That's right Julian. If you thought incessantly hearing about boys sperm counts and being told that women's bodies are not really their own was only for Americans. We have great news to our overseas listeners. Make Europe healthy again has arrived. That's right, some of Maha's biggest luminaries have decided that Americans aren't the only ones worthy of being grifted. There's another 50 countries to be monetized across the pond. Well, if you include Vatican City. But why not? They have plenty of money to spend on supplements. Mayha. Mija. Shit. I don't know which one it is. I haven't heard it said out loud yet. It's very new. But we'll go with me because there's very, very egotistical. MIHA was founded by Dr. Maria Huber Hogg, who lists herself as a medical doctor, yet fails to say former in her bio. O so she's a leading vaccine skeptic in the European Union and even founded a political party in Austria, but failed to win even one seat in the 2024 European elections. The former general practitioner and emergency room doctor led several rallies against COVID 19 measures in Austria. And she's big on the idea that lots of people suffer from vaccine injuries. She's also a signatory of the. Oh, fuck. Matthew, I don't know. Heidelberger. Oh, shit. Oh, okay, Julian, step it in. That is the Heidelberg doctor's declaration, and it's a conspiracy document that claims COVID 19 vaccines are not so safe or effective after all. You might be surprised to learn that Huber Hogg also questions the idea that humans cause climate change change. And she wants to exit the EU green deal. And her political party wants all those damn immigrants out of her country. Rounding out miha's leadership, we have Vice President Rob Roose, and he's a former far right Dutch politician who's into nationalism and not so into COVID 19 policies. He also spoke at CPAC's 2023 edition in Budapest. So maybe Tucker Carlson buddied up with him. You have Chief Strategic Officer Dr. Andrea Lamont Nazarenko, PhD, a quantitative and community psychologist who fancies herself as a health freedom advocate on a mission to, quote, awaken others to the power of natural health care. She writes about the gut microbiome being, as I said, a psychologist. And surprise, she's married to a chiropractor. And then there's the director of Global Partnership, Stephanie Lind, who organized the online Health Freedom Summit all the way back in May 2020. We covered that way early in our duties here. And her social media feed is filled with anti vax talking points. And finally, we have Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who we've also covered. He's a British cardiology who cut his teeth talking shit about statins. Well before COVID 19. He also promotes high fat diets, and he ended up becoming a loud critic of MRNA COVID 19 vaccines. MIHA has a large steering committee and international advisory board as well. There are Many names you might recognize. We have our old pal Sergi.
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A
Come on.
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C
Green Med Info founder who's most recently been going to war with Wikipedia because they say honest things about him on his page. He's also been how dare they. Pretty hardcore after friend of the pie Jonathan Jerry. MIHA is also sponsored by Global Wellness Forum which is a chairman and founder of. You have Children's Health Defense president Mary Holland, who is a close compatriot of RFK Jr. Tony Lyons, founder of Skyhorse Publishing and co founder of Maha Pack, the fundraising arm of the anti Vax movement. I shared a video which he has taken off social media where he said all the funds he makes from Skyhorse is going into that movement. This was years ago. So he is right. He is hardcore into that. And then you have Brian Hooker who is a compatriot of Andrew Wakefield. He regularly spreads misinformation on children's health defense TV shows. There are a few dozen others listed. Many of them have Dr. At the front of their name. I reviewed a dozen or so names that I didn't know and every time I looked one up I discovered that they lost their medical license due to spreading Covid misinformation or they'd written a paper about how masks really, really suc. Now what is MIHA doing? Here's their mission statement.
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B
To nurture a Europe where people reclaim their power, their voice, their health and their traditions by protecting the essentials of life. Clean food, water, air, earth, space and safe communities. We help to empower nations to build supportive systems that break cycles of chronic disease, promote vitality and honor culture, sovereignty, peace and human dignity.
- [10:13]
A
Oh, there's several dog whistles in there, right?
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B
There are a lot. Yeah. So. So traditions and then there's kind of a listing of ayurvedic elements and. But then they include safe communities in there instead of the fire element.
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D
Yeah, Yep.
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A
And sovereignty.
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B
And sovereignty becomes like a classic health value and space. Right.
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C
They must be. They must be shareholders in SpaceX.
- [10:36]
B
Right.
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C
So far. MIHA had recently had a launch event in Brussels which honestly looked like other Baja event. Malhotra and Huber Hogg spoke, as did Robert Malone, the self proclaimed inventor of MRNA technology, which you might be surprised to learn is not true. In fact, Malone also spoke before the EU Parliament last week about why Europe really needs to adopt an American attitude toward health. You know, because things are going great over here. Now at the moment it appears that this is just a European extension of the wellness to conspiracy pipeline. America gifted to the world. I'm sure many events outside parliament parliamentary buildings are going to be following quite soon as well as online and in real life events that cost hundreds of dollars to attend because words like freedom and sovereignty are in the title. And once they realize that grift isn't enough, maybe they'll even partner with Mickey Wellness to offer their very small online following. Miraculous immune boosting supplements.
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B
You know about Malone encouraging Europeans to adopt an American and attitude towards health. You know, first of all, great report, Derek. This is I think an amazing development. I think it's really important too. But my instinct about Maha in the US has always been that its entrepreneurs are kind of in this gold rush to exploit, you know, what we've noted as this widening gap in healthcare. And so the cranks and the quacks, facilitated by a lot of propaganda about what socialized medicine actually is, can take advantage of a kind of sour grapes attitude, you know, in an immiserated public. Like the feeling of oh, I don't want or deserve socialized medicine anyway, it's too expensive. Why should I pay for my neighbor's diabetes? The weights will be too long, I won't have enough choice, the doctors aren't competent and so on. RFK Jr worked his ass off to destroy healthcare infrastructure in the U.S. but in terms of public opinion he was, he had a head start like he was starting on third base. But the entry barriers for cranks and quacks are different I think, and higher in the EU where there's 27 countries that have socialized medicine and citizens have loved it for a very long time.
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A
Yeah, it's really fascinating, Matthew. It's such a layered and kind of complex topic because the European market for complementary and alternative medicine is actually bigger.
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B
It's bigger. Right.
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A
Than the American one. Right. And, and especially in Germany and then in the Scandinavian countries a lot of people use complementary and alternative medicine already. So it's a popular thing in wealthy countries.
- [13:14]
B
Yeah. So Sayer G isn't walking, he's walking not only into a pre existing market trying to say like oh, we can help you use what you already have in terms of alternative medicine to replace what you have. He's not really walking into the American landscape where people are really, really looking for alternatives. So I'm going to predict that MIHA will progress a lot more slowly as part of the general sort of right wing to fascist turn. In Europe where we already have seven EU countries now led by hard right governments. There are nationalist parties that hold 200 seats in Brussels at this point. MIHA boosters aren't also as likely to attack doctors and hospitals directly. I think they're going to focus on austerity arguments. Right. Like you guys can't afford all these costs and then the costs that you can't afford are going to be pinned to immigration and the sicknesses of poverty that are worsened by austerity, of course, and things like the idea that autism comes from bad parenting. So I don't think they're going to attack the existence of public health care because that's a loser, but rather they're going to attack its scope, the cost efficiency and the bureaucratic control, not so that they can improve it, but so that they can like remove it from the state's commitments or at least try to. I think they're going to advocate for mixed public private systems emphasizing choice, choice, competition, personal responsibility. All of this is happening here in Canada and it's all dog whistling for privatization. And I think what might be clarifying about this to anyone in the US who's thinking about socialized medicine is that in these mixed economies it's really hard. It has to have support from citizens because it is a slam dunk good. But it will always be under pressure from the money. And so when I hear like, why can't we have the Nordic model? All I can think of is like, well, I hope you try. It's really good to try. Ultimately, you may only get as much healthcare as capital wants you to have and there will be downwards pressures on it, you know, for the long term.
- [15:20]
C
You mentioned 27, but in reality that's specific to socialized medicine. There's only one country that does not have a fully universal system. That's Albania.
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B
Right.
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C
Some micro states like Monaco also have mixed healthcare systems. But the reality is you are not going to find in any of those countries hundreds of thousands of people going bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills. Which happens everywhere in America.
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B
Right?
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A
Yeah.
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C
So only Albania lacks the infrastructure. Every other country has some sort of safety net that will protect them from ever going bankrupt or stop them from receiving care.
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B
And that's why Malone's comment about you should switch to an American system is so salient here. Right. Because what's he actually saying? What's he actually saying?
- [16:05]
A
Well, maybe he's referring to the American system that they're trying to, to popularize. Right. Which, which is this idea that you're, you're personally responsible for your, your own health and here's a bunch of natural methods for you to take that kind of responsibility.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And I think, you know, for me, the. The point is usually not that it's poor people who have no healthcare that are seeking out alternative medicine. It's. It's usually wealthy people who are taken in by this idea or relatively wealthy people taken in by this idea of self optimization. I think that's a. That's a stronger as the sector.
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B
Yeah. But both, whoever is it's being marketed to, both depend upon, like demonizing the actual institutional care, the scientific method, the notion of expertise. So there's a lot of entry points.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. There's all sorts of opportunistic back and forth in terms of the dynamics you're talking about.
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D
For sure.
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C
Just a note on Malone. I posted on Monday a thread on our social media channels, but Malone wrote an essay on his substack about the Make America Healthy Commission, which is Kennedy's supposed wrangling in of all the agencies. And he released their budget for. Or Kennedy released the budget that they're asking Congress for, which is $20.6 billion in 2026, which, you know, is bureaucratic. It's not surprising that is what health care funding entails. But what I found interesting, it's 393 pages. I read through a lot of it, is that they. They completely cut the department $101 million that goes to teen pregnancy prevention.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And they cut 300 million or so dollars from family planning. And just to note, because of the Hyde Amendment, that does not include abortions because you cannot federalize abortion. You can't earmark any federal money for abortions. But it does include counseling on whether or not you want to have children. And. And they also completely cut 100 or so million dollars. This is random. But from tobacco prevention program. That is now gone. So. And what. When I was reading through it, they are putting a lot more investments in things like embryo adoption and pro family planning. So this is a very Christian nationalist, sort of pronatalist.
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B
Yeah.
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C
Budget that's happening right now. So Malone is basically saying this is the kind of system that we want, which would probably match, you know, Russia throughout most of the 20th century in terms of trying to make people have babies. But we are seeing it put right before us now, you know, on the paper.
- [18:44]
B
You know, I don't know anything about Malone's personal life, but it just feels to me like so many of these guys are living in this perpetual Norman Rockwell postcard painting of what they want families to be like because perhaps they have such shitty family experiences themselves. I mean, who. Who would listen to Robert F Kennedy Jr's opinions on how many children you should have or what the perfect family should be like. It's just like, come on. Like, I think it seems to me that the connection between idealized family fantasies really and these programs is really, really strong and sort of like predictive of what they want, what they want to be true for themselves.
- [19:26]
C
Perhaps Just a final word to all of our European listeners. You're welcome. We've been very selfish in keeping all, all the pseudo scientific loons to ourselves. I'm sure you have some. But we got. We got the best. We got the greatest over here. Now you can have them too. Seriously, take them. All of them. Please take them. Derek here, co founder of Conspirituality and podcast accountant. We all bring our personal strengths to this podcast. And given that I've worked for a number of fintechs tech companies over the last decade. I handle the receipts. I've seen a lot of good and not so good all in one business solutions in my time and Found does it really well. Found identifies tasks that create the most hassle for small businesses. Categorizing expenses, tax prep, invoicing, budgeting. And they built an app that does it all directly from your business checking account. They have automated expense tracking, finding write offs and budgeting for tax time, along with things like sending invoices and paying contractors. All from one app. So if you run a small business, take back control of your business Today. Open a Found account for free at found.com that's f O-U-N-D.com found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with Found.
- [20:58]
A
All right, remember, the machine knows if you're lying.
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B
First statement. Carvana will give you a real offer on your car.
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A
All online.
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B
False.
- [21:06]
C
True.
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B
Actually, you can sell your car in minutes.
- [21:08]
E
False.
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B
That's gotta be true again.
- [21:11]
A
Carvana will pick up your car from your door or you can drop it.
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B
Off at one of their car vending machines.
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A
Sounds too good to be true.
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B
So true.
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A
Finally caught on. Nice job. Honesty isn't just their policy, it's their entire model. Sell your car today too, Carvana.
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C
Pickup fees may apply.
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A
Abercrombie Kids knows how to make outfitting easy. Mix and match sets are their ultimate outfit hack for fall. Their sweatshirts and sweatpants are super cozy and they always have the cutest colors and patterns. Shop Fall's easiest outfit at Abercrombie Kids in the app online and in stores.
- [21:57]
C
Peter Thiel knows about the Antichrist.
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A
Peter Thiel knows about the Antichrist.
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B
I'm Peter Thiel and I know about the Antichrist.
- [22:13]
A
Okay, so that was south park and we are gathered here today to talk about the Antichrist. I mean to talk about Peter Thiel and his totally normal lectures about the Antichrist. Now it's easy to confuse the man for his subject when his surveillance technology is currently being used to direct the ICE agents terrorizing American neighborhoods and is set to play a role in the supposed anti terrorism pre crime crackdowns on the violent left. Because Thiel claims that the goal of the Antichrist is to establish a one world totalitarian state, not unlike what he's helping Trump to do.
- [22:48]
C
We shouldn't limit Thiel's love of surveillance to just Palantir. I mean he has one and it cuts across his companies. But he also Co founded PayPal, which while a breakthrough in how we move money around the world for the digital age, truly, he was also an early adopter in moving crypto, cryptocurrency around through PayPal. And it aspires to be the settlement solution for the planet. So there's a lot of tracking involved in that. Teal was also an early investor in Facebook which really exposed the world to the surveillance capabilities of social media. His VC portfolio includes all sorts of companies that track you and handle your money like stripe ramp, LinkedIn, Yelp, even Friendster for those of us old enough to remember that, Jen, my first social media platform. And of course he's invested in defense tech company Anduril Varda Space Industries which is mining space minerals for use in earth medicine. And DeepMind, Clearview AI, the facial recognition tech. I mean we could go on. The list is very long, you know.
- [23:53]
B
Listening to you go through the list here, especially of the social media related platforms. My whole segment is going to be about like Girard's theory of mimetic desire. And the contradictions in his investment strategies are so powerful because with every social media investment he is investing in the thing that his mentor is really warning about with regard to the creation of envy. So anyway, this is a tangle that, that, that we'll get into.
- [24:21]
A
Yeah, the ironies are almost as thick as his complete lack of self awareness about the ironies as he steps onto that stage. So talks a little bit about his, his professional background in terms of his intellectual hobbies. Peter Thiel, as you're referencing, Matthew, went to Stanford. He was involved there in an intimate reading and discussion group with Promine, Rene Girard who's well known for describing how the social process of scapegoating restores order and peace. Thiel is influenced as well by the anti enlightenment writings of Leo Strauss, which. Now, stop me if you've heard this before, guys, harken back to a more ancient synthesis of biblical revelation and political philosophy. He also cites Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmidt as a central influence on how he thinks about executive power and quote, unquote, political theology. Now, Thiel himself has penned controversial essays bemoaning welfare beneficiaries and women getting the vote and saying he, quote, no longer believes that democracy and freedom are compatible.
- [25:23]
B
Let me just ping behind the Bastards on Carl Schmidt, because there's two episodes that show exactly what it takes for a legal theorist in the 1930s to basically create the permission structure for a formally democratic state to become authoritarian. And he does it, like, meticulously, step by step. It's very chilling, actually. And so when we think about how our own legal systems are holding up against the onslaught of Trumpism, it's really informative to think about Carl Schmidt.
- [25:52]
C
Yeah.
- [25:52]
A
All right, so there's background. Let's set the lecture stage. These four talks by Peter Thiel were given in late September on San Francisco's downtown waterfront. They were sold out at $200 per person per lecture, and no video or audio record was allowed. The series was presented by an organization called the Acts 17 collective. Now, that's a reference both to chapter and verse in the Bible, but it's also a nifty acronym for acknowledging Christ in technology and society. That spells acts. So I imagine that the membership of that group was pretty well represented in the audience, along with the Bay Area tech aficionados who've not been put off so far by Thiel's politics.
- [26:37]
C
They're always looking for a Good acronym, but Acts 17 is very specific. That's where Paul announces the one true God. Right. This isn't a new idea. This goes back to the Old Testament. But it certainly affirms the Christian belief that they found the right one. And that's how Thiel often presents himself, as if he found the right angles and beliefs on technology, philosophy, religion, whatever's thrown his way, he's got the right one.
- [27:04]
B
Yeah, and he wants it to be part of an intellectual discourse course. And I think that's reflected in the acronym because, yes, that is Paul's overall mission in the book of Acts, but I think that these guys are picking up on the fact that Paul is on a road trip through many different cultures during this time. And he's learning as he goes, maybe like an AI bot how to address himself to each. So he's trying to talk to Jewish thinkers, Epicureans, he's talking to. To Stoics. So I think it's their hint at that we are universalizing our ideas. We're trying to figure out how to talk to everybody. Maybe to form a kind of globalized cabal system. Yeah, perhaps, or something like that.
- [27:46]
A
Perhaps an AI chatbot who was made sentient by being struck by lightning on the Damascus. Right?
- [27:52]
B
Yeah, Zap.
- [27:53]
A
So the Guardian acquired secretly recorded audio of these talks and has published summaries and transcripts. They describe the lectures as meandering, weaving biblical passages together with recent history, philosophy, conspiracy theories and references to TV shows, video games. And of course, it wouldn't be Peter Thiel if we didn't have references to J.R.R. tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
- [28:18]
C
How would he not know it was going to get recorded? Like you have to know in this time, there is a company that exists in America that you can forces you to put your phone in a pouch and it electromagnetically seals it so you can't use it. And that company actually does $100 million a year in RE. So it's pretty popular. But it's mostly a comedy shows and they're expanding the music venues. And I feel like in any way, someone in a room, if you're not doing that, Mr. Surveillance Tech Guy would have to know that it was going to get recorded. So I wonder how much of him was just like, yeah, it's going to get out there, I don't care.
- [28:51]
B
Or maybe Palantir itself recorded him and then somebody hacked into Palantir to get the lectures.
- [28:57]
A
Yeah. Now Scouts honor everyone. No one's going to record anything in here, right? We'll all just do it on the honor system. So he kicks off the whole series like this. What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of Antichrist. An evil king or tyrant or anti messiah who appears in the end times. So an Antichrist type figure will usher in Armageddon by cultivating fear of existential threats. Fear of existential threats from things like AI, climate change and nuclear war. Claims says Peter. Peter Thiel claims, excuse me, that the slogan of the Antichrist. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety. What will they then? Not escape the day of the Lord. So in these transcripts from the tapes acquired by the Guardian, Thiel says, because we know World War III will be an unjust war, war that pushes Us, we're going hard toward peace at any price. What I worry about in that sort of situation is you don't think too hard about the details of the peace and it becomes much more likely that you get an unjust peace.
- [30:09]
B
You know, I think Jordan Peterson wants a word from his deathbed because this sounds awfully postmodern and meta. Right. It's not. People aren't afraid of the things that they're afraid of, or you shouldn't be afraid of actual things. Things we're going to be afraid of fear itself. And really, like if that's the main hook, I think, I mean, from the jump, it seems to me that these talks probably reflect his mental health more than anything else. Like specifically how he's managing his solipsism and how everything seems to be about him. It's not actual material problems that are the problem, but fear of material problems. Fear that will accelerate to the point at which it will challenge his chosen fantasy world or limit his ability to act within it. And as we'll see, there's a twisted thread here that stretches back to his intellectual influences about envy being the root of human sin. And if he really holds onto that, the fear that normal people have of techno ghouls like him isn't really fear, it's envy of his power. And so this is why Greta Thunberg envies him. And. Yeah, so we're going to get to that.
- [31:15]
A
Yeah. So in terms of his claim that the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, here he's referring to. To 1 Thessalonians 5:3, which reads, While people are saying peace and safety, destruction will come on them suddenly as labor pains on pregnant women, and it will not, and they will not escape. So let's just pause here to acknowledge this. Is Peter Thiel using Bible prophecy to make a case for why he's on the side of God and Jesus and people advocating peace and safety are in league with the devil.
- [31:49]
B
So. And it's not just a simple reading of while people are not expect destruction will come upon them. You're having a peaceful day and the hurricane comes. It's not. It couldn't be that simple.
- [31:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. So it's that the clinging to the idea of peace and safety is the actual thing that brings about the destruction that comes upon you suddenly.
- [32:08]
B
Yeah, Wild, wild stuff.
- [32:10]
A
We don't have clips from these specific talks, but I found that there was a really interesting recent interview, it's about a year ago from the Hoover Institution that was done by Peter Robinson. Very well known interviewer. And we're going to use some of those clips because the content is very, very similar. Regarding Rene Girard. He still refers to his ideas, Matthew, and the interviewer actually uses this as part of how he legitimizes Thiel in the introduction. And he refers to Thiel as being one of the most sophisticated thinkers in the world and references his friendship with Rene Girard as evidence of this. And the biblical the Bible verses serve a very similar function. And in the discussion that we're about to hear, a clip from Thiel starts off by claiming that the Catholic Church used to talk a lot more about Armageddon, but then in 1945, they just stopped mentioning it altogether. And he muses that perhaps the emergent reality of nuclear weapons made it too scary of a topic for the pulpit. Then they take this little detour into talking about AI. But Thiel, as you'll hear, finds a way to bring it all back around. And you'll hear his central actual big idea here.
- [33:20]
D
I think the classic definition of AI was something that passed the Turing test and that could fool you into thinking it was a human being in some sense that had not been passed, but was passed by ChatGPT in late 22, early 23. And so that is a pretty significant development.
- [33:41]
F
Does it feel like an inflection point as important as 1945?
- [33:45]
D
I think it's on par, let's say, in the computer world. I think it's on par with the Internet in the late 90s. There's a way in which the people who are worried about these existential risks, you can also criticize them for not being apocalyptic enough because most of the time they're just focused on one. It's like the nuclear weapons people are still just talking about nukes. And Greta is just the climate. She's not worried about AI, and she's not worried about nukes, much less the COVID virus that was bioengineered in the Wuhan lab or something like this. And in some sense, the scary answer is there's some truth to all of them. What I would want to do is I would also like to throw in one more existential risk that in my mind is as big as all these technological risks of nuclear war and runaway bioweapons and, and, you know, weaponized AI with autonomous weapon systems. And that is that's the risk of a totalitarian one world government.
- [34:47]
C
Then why the fuck did you donate $1.25 million to Trump for his 2016 campaign? And I know you sat out Donating to him the last two elections. But you've also been donating to many Republican candidates that are full on maga. That kind of feeds into the whole fear that you're describing now. I also love how Teal is like, why isn't Greta worried about this? Yeah, some people do just fine keeping the focus on one issue. They don't think they know everything about everything. Peter Thiel, and she has been extremely effective at that one issue. Teal's brain is always all over the place, and it's like we can see the corkboard threads unspooling every time he opens his mouth.
- [35:29]
B
Well, she has been very focused on the environment, but also she multitasks. And in fact, that's part of how, you know, her star has kind of fallen in a lot of mainstream sources because she started connecting her activism over the environmental issue with decolonization projects and the genocide in Gaza and so on. But, I mean, she does have a unifying focus. I think that Thiel has a pseudo unifying focus, which is his own brain. But, yeah, there's no accounting for the inconsistencies, I don't think. But he's also saying that Greta and others are pushing people to take their eye off the ball of global authoritarianism. But given that he's at the center of global authoritarianism, I mean, shouldn't he be grateful for the distractions? Like, he imagines that with Palantir and Infinite Money, he is the protector against globalization. He's a real Tony Stark character. It's like the military is messing up with all of this technology. I should take it all over. And if I take it all over, it's going to be okay.
- [36:34]
A
Yeah. And we also see with this kind of epiphania, as you're pointing out, Derek, with, like, the unspooling of the corkboard, like, you can. You can shift perspective. You can turn on a dime and say contradictory things, and it doesn't matter because you're just on the way towards your next apophenic claim. Like, make up your mind. Is it the. That all of these people that he's going to say represent the Antichrist are being too alarmist, or is it that they're not apocalyptic enough because they're not, like, combining all these things? It's just.
- [37:01]
C
It's.
- [37:01]
A
It's bizarre. Furthermore, he says that climate alarmists like Greta are actually tools of authoritarianism because they pretend to care about saving humanity, but that's all a ruse to establish total control. There's a quote that the Guardian published from Thiel's first lecture, which says the Antichrist comes to power by talking constantly about Armageddon, about rumors of wars, and scaring you into giving him control over science and technology. So it's right in this wheelhouse. Let's turn now to see what Thiel sees as the harbingers of this one world dictatorship that he equates with the Antichrist. So I'm wondering, could it be transnational corporations, rising ethno nationalist populism, the brutal and bloody leveling of Gaza? Perhaps it's the vision of a one world caliphate as held by the Islamists. So to find out, we'll start here with Peter Robinson. Going first to the Bible, a few passages from scripture.
- [38:01]
F
Daniel, chapter seven. In the first year of Belshazzar, King of Babylon, Daniel had a dream. There before me was a beast, fearful, terrifying, very strong. It had great iron teeth and it ate its victims and trampled their remains underfoot. Two Thessalonians, chapter two. We're back to St. Paul. He's writing about the end times. It cannot happen until there has appeared the wicked one, the lost one, the enemy who raises himself above every object of worship and flaunts the claim that he is God. Revelation, chapter 13. Then I saw a beast emerge from the sea, and they prostrated themselves in front of the beast, saying, who can compare with the beast? Who can fight against it? And all the people of the world will worship it. Close quote.
- [38:52]
A
So I just have to say here. I'm pretty sure that these types of quotes, all of these different reference points, including the biblical quotes, will have come out of some kind of preparatory process enacted with Peter Thiel to say, well, these are my sources for the types of claims that I'm making. That's the colorful language of prophecy. And in the dodgy art of interpretation, we may wonder what might embody this terrifying beast with a great iron teeth that crushes its victims. But, guys, it's been under our noses all along. It's the International Criminal Court.
- [39:29]
C
You know, this just also shows why you can't disentangle reading religious texts with the history of the cultures that wrote it. If you're thinking about when these texts were written. Yeah, Humans were not yet fully apex predators. I mean, gunpowder existed, but not everyone was carrying around firearms at that time. So what you have is people being much more likely to be clawed by actual beasts, killed regularly in Harappan civilization in these areas in the Fertile Crescent. And you read them today, and we have no awareness of what that is. We have no idea what it's like to walk outside and fear for our lives from animals, from beasts. And yes, of course, there's colorful metaphors and imagery with the, you know, the Loch Ness version that's happening there of this monster. But understanding that they also reflect real fears and paranoia that they're experiencing on a daily level that we don't have to grapple with today. And so we take those metaphors and then we try to make it fit into our paradigms, which is what Teal's doing all the time with science and technology here. And it's so disingenuous, but it also evokes the emotions that he's looking for, at least into people who follow him.
- [40:47]
A
Yeah, as if somehow this has all been predicted by wise sages and seers from long ago, that the International Criminal Court and the un, which spring up and become these terrible beasts that are the arms. It's amazing. They'll become the arms and the teeth of this systemic version. So he's got a couple different ways he thinks about the Antichrist. This is the systemic version of the Antichrist, which as made manifest by these governing bodies. And the Guardian also quotes Teal elaborating during one of the Q and A portions of the lectures. He says they've started arresting more and more people. He's talking about the icc, Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines. It's a travesty, guys.
- [41:31]
B
Oh, my God. Yeah, let him free. Free Duterte. Free Duterte, free. What the fuck is he talking about?
- [41:36]
A
And then he says they had arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. He says that the UN and the ICC during this Q and A are hastening Armageddon.
- [41:46]
B
You know, it's reminding me that, you know, the late Charlie Kirk famously said that empathy was this New Age scam. We probably have all felt very confused as we listen to that crowd and the Jordan Peterson acolytes attack the virtue of empathy. And this tracks back to one of the most reactionary ideas that he pulls out of his. His history with Girard, that he describes modern empathy as a beast like, instead of beast, Girard talked about Satan, who runs the most powerful anti Christian movement by radicalizing the concern for victims in order to paganize it. So John Gans in his excellent series on Substack on Girard says, quote, satan trying to make a new start and gain new triumphs, borrows the language of victims. And so Thiel will see this in movements that position themselves as liberatory and reproach. Christianity for not defending victims hard enough. So this beast of empathy is the Antichrist because it pretends to out Jesus. Jesus leaving Jesus's true function of rule and order making by the wayside. So yeah, that's where this is all coming from.
- [42:50]
A
When asked by an astute questioner during the Q and A, so what would we do with war criminals like the Nazis if we abolish the ingenuity National Criminal Court. This was Thiel's answer. It was sort of the US that pushed for the Nuremberg trials.
- [43:05]
B
Yeah, sort of.
- [43:06]
A
The Soviet Union just wanted to have show trials. I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. And I don't like the Soviet approach, but I wonder if the Churchill one would have actually been healthier than the American one. Incredible. So back to Robinson's interview with Teal Matthew. I think you'll especially love this particular clip, Renee.
- [43:33]
F
Rene Girard in I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, one of his books, the Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver.
- [43:46]
D
I think there are all these elements where it's downstream from Christianity you can think of the poor shall inherit the earth. Earth, Sermon on the Mount. Marx's theory is we're going to be more Christian, we're going to accelerate it, we're going to bring it about faster. So there is, yeah, the Antichrist probably presents as a great humanitarian, as a great, you know, it's redistributive, as an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist, you know, all of those kinds of things. And, and these things are not simply anti Christian, but it is always when they get overly combined with state power that something is very wrong. It's good to act like the Good Samaritan and to take care of people, not just in your family or tribe or country. But then if you force everyone to be a Good Samaritan and you force a borderless world, it's somehow adjacent, somehow it's an intensification, but it's somehow also very much the opposite.
- [44:57]
B
Okay. Yeah.
- [44:59]
C
Okay.
- [45:01]
B
Yeah. I mean, all I can think is that, is that so much of this is based on. You can't possibly imagine people collectively agreeing to provide for one another in some sort of better way. That has to be a deception. It has to be a betrayal waiting to happen. Because we're not really like that. We're not really like that. Right.
- [45:20]
C
Well, it's just repackaged Reaganomics. I mean, it didn't start with Reagan. I just hear trickle down theory throughout that.
- [45:25]
B
Yeah.
- [45:26]
C
And I don't know what sort of charitable endeavors Teal donates to, if any. I'm sure he has multiple houses, many places. I'm sure he uses a vast amount of resources for his own life as a billionaire. And he's not out, you know, actually on the ground helping people. So it's just such a skewed philosophy. And he gets to, he gets to sit there and say it and be given a platform for it, even though it's all utter bullshit.
- [45:50]
A
Yeah. And the idea that any of this should be taken intellectually seriously is, is just so laughable because I just hear his brain doing this thing where he's like, here are five different political positions that I have. How do I weave them into something that sounds like it has a myth or philosophical basis behind it? And it's just, and it's just nonsense. You even hear him in there, you know, referring to. It would be distributive. It would. So it would be Marxist. It would attempt to appear philanthropic by. While actually having some kind sort of dark intention. And then he indirectly references someone that we'll talk about in a moment here by throwing in effective altruism, you know, which a lot of people who are on the more socialist side find actually pretty odious and fake. Right.
- [46:42]
B
There's the entitlement involved in kind of winging it. Because the Guardian report starts by saying he's kind of meandering, he's pulling stuff, he's sort of cross referencing. It sounds like he's working from cue cards or he's got his notes app open on his phone or something like that. And kind of just being off the cuff. It's just incredible. I wonder if this is how board meetings are run or whether everything is kind of an extension of, okay, let's get the top management or my top employees together and we're just going to like, bullshit about things and. But this was public for some reason.
- [47:16]
C
Well, who, who was one of his main advisors for years? Fucking Eric Weinstein. Of course they're just riffing it. They're just going into those board meetings. Just whatever's coming out of their brain is, is spilling onto paper and, and their poor assistant has to try to keep track of all that.
- [47:30]
A
Yeah. Can you imagine a meeting between the two of them when Weinstein is, is running the hedge fund and making a case for his choices in this kind of like completely scrambled way?
- [47:40]
B
I can kind of understand the drive to create AI systems that can then summarize that bullshit. Right. It's like if you had something very effective, that could record three hours of that crap and then print out, like, the bullet points, that would be pretty useful, I think, for everybody downstream in the company.
- [48:00]
A
Certainly saves time. All right, so to wrap this all up, according to his most recent lecture, the question is, who does Peter Thiel think could be the Antichrist? Because again, it's definitely not him. Guys, stop it. It's not him. It turns out that he speculates in the lectures about three people he says are anti tech Luddites. And those would be, as already mentioned, Greta Thunberg, but also Elizier Yudowski and Marc Andreessen. Because of course, these people, people fit the mold. They're prone to warning everyone about existential threats to humanity. Greta on climate, Yudowski and Andreessen on AI. And then he jokes, it can't really be Andreessen because the Antichrist would be popular. And so he switches Andreessen out for philosopher Nick Bostrom, who writes about human extinction threats. He explains that he hates to disappoint people because it can't be Bill Gates. He's not a political leader, and he's also not broadly populated. Unlike Thiel, Bill Gates has actually devoted a significant amount of his time and money to philanthropic projects, which I guess is in this upside down theology, means he's at the very least, Antichrist adjacent.
- [49:12]
B
You know, one painful contradiction in all of this is that he's always talking about people who expose information. Like, I'm not sure where Andreessen fits in on that with regard to AI, but with Yudowski and Thunberg, it's pretty clear. But Thiel's entire business is about gathering information and surveillance. So the conflict is here is between exposing and hiding. Like, who gets to be. Who gets to be the truth teller.
- [49:40]
C
I guess you don't have to be sure about Andreessen. I'm sure most listeners who don't follow tech didn't get the joke, but it is a joke. He was kidding because he hates Andreessen. He called the tech utopian manifesto that we did a whole episode on. He called that gobbledygook propaganda. Oh, so he. He is not a fan. So, yeah, it's. Nick Bostrom was the real target. He was just trying to like, give a wink, wink to the audience with that.
- [50:05]
B
Got it, Got it. So Andreessen is like a competitor in.
- [50:07]
C
The space, actually a thought competitor, because Andreessen also intellectual self. Yes. As an intellectual, he writes these long, meandering essays like Tech Utopian Manifesto. And he's done that for years. So they, they are very much in competition, just like Teal and Musk. I've always been in competition.
- [50:26]
B
Yeah, it's like if Charles Eisen and Aubrey Marcus got, got into a beef or something like that. They did a rap battle, right?
- [50:33]
A
That guy is so full of shit. I'm really going to enlighten you as to what it means to be truly sovereign. So Thiel is not entirely sure who the Antichrist is. But age is apparently important because as is often the case with prophecy, we've seen this before. There's some mysterious numerology at play. Play. So here's the quote. Christ only lived to age 33 and became history's greatest man. The Antichrist has somehow to 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. Livy's The Roman historian's 33rd chapter of the 33rd book. It announces his 33 year old conqueror. 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. Guys, I have to take it back. He's a brilliant intellectual and analyst of mythological texts and their cross referenced meaning.
- [52:09]
B
Yeah, I mean, but he does have some mix ups in there. I mean, Buddha is kind of the outlier because I think he's trying to ping ego death with these comparisons. But I also think that with bringing up 33 all the time, he's pinging a kind of end of growth, an avoidance of middle age and decline, which I think is gonna track into the supplements and you know, biohacking stuff as well. It's really a. I feel like there's a young man fetish going on here. It's also highly individualistic in name calling. All of these people. Very lone hero, very sort of celibate, monastic stuff.
- [52:48]
C
Well, let's remember Teal is also a main funder of the steroid Olympics next year.
- [52:52]
B
Oh, right.
- [52:53]
C
So he does have longevity issues or aspirations. He can't even. He can't even get his numerology right, though. Buddha started traveling at 29, he experienced nirvana at 35. That comes across in all the texts because after reaching nirvana, he taught for 45 years and died at 80. That is so clear. Yeah, that I can't believe. I don't even know what he was looking at to get that number. But he's just making up to fit into his brain numbing numerology.
- [53:21]
A
Well, the whole thing about the age 33, that, that is something I've seen in a lot of different places, that it's. It's the mystical age where you. You either attain enlightenment or you, You. You become the sacrificial messiah.
- [53:34]
B
Yeah, I. I think I. What I love most about the Buddhists, the Buddha's end, is that I think it was food poisoning at the end.
- [53:41]
C
Yes.
- [53:42]
B
Yeah, it's like a bad piece of. Of bork or something.
- [53:45]
C
Something. Yeah. Well, basically, I mean, there, you know, a lot of vegetarians like to say because of nonviolence, that the Buddha was vegetarian. And there, There is some evidence that he promoted that. But his bigger thing was if you go into someone's house and they offer you food, you take it no matter what it is. And you know, as the stories go, he. He knew that he was going to get the poisoned food that night, but he also knew that they didn't know they were giving it to him. So, you know, it was just. It's. It's all rewriting rev history in that sense to tell a good story. But that is how he supposedly perished.
- [54:32]
A
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- [55:03]
E
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- [56:12]
A
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- [57:53]
B
Okay, I think we can agree that Thiel is melted, but taking his intellectual history seriously, I think is important because I think it tells us something about what hooks this crowd into the Christian story in what I would say is not an illegitimate way. There's something compelling here, and so here's the most succinct overview that I can muster of Rene Girard, and this comes from my own reading. But I also want to ping, as I did before John Ganz's reviews on Substack and the work of Matt Sitman and Sam Adler Bell on Know youw Enemy. They have a great episode on that. So Girard did teach Thiel at Stanford, and he was a scholar of French fiction who said that all great novels are rooted in triangulation and envy. So he's mainly like 19 century novels, early 20th century novels, real classics. And he discovered that really the protagonists desire things because other people desire things, that they desire lovers because other people desire lovers. They desire wealth because wealth is important to someone else. They desire a station in life because somebody else has it. They desire technology or amusement. I can definitely say, as a parent in capitalism, this makes a lot of intuitive sense with regard to how world building happens, how desires actually emerge. Like I'm nodding along as I. As I get this down. And extrapolating from these novels, Girard imagined what he called the mimetic theory of desire. And, you know, it's a desire based in imitation or mimesis, and that that applies itself to all areas of life and human development, and it is our source of competition and eventually crisis. He says that the frustrations of envy are at the root of human and mob violence. And that accumulates over time as the envies increase and inequalities increase. And he says that long ago we figured out how to channel and expiate those frustrations onto scapegoats who were ritually murdered in a form of sacred violence. So that's another key term in Girard, sacred violence. And he argues eventually that that's actually it's an adaptation, but it's delusional and it's unnecessary. And I think that this resonance is very clear in the right wing's deep anxiety around cancellation. There's always this sort of worry about I'm going to be taken out by some, you know, complaint or some sin in my past, or I'm going to be made an example of. And so I think this scapegoating idea is very, very important to people like Thiel. Now, Girard is a Catholic, and he has this Catholic theology that proposed, and this is his development, really, that what was world changing about Jesus? And I should say that, you know, he's coming at this from an anthropological view, which makes him more attractive to the entire intellectual set on the conservative side, because, you know, he's apparently being evidence based about this. But he says that Jesus is world changing because he exposes the brutality and corruption at the Heart of mimetic desire. Because Jesus is clearly innocent, he's blameless. Therefore the murder is wrong. And his actual resurrection is proof that the murder is delusional, that it didn't need to happen, that it's not actually what works to expiate the sins of humanity. Now this, combined with the invocation to universal love, challenged an ancient status quo quo. More importantly, the challenge was not based in overcoming the material causes of mimetic desire, which are inequality full stop, but by invoking a moral and spiritual revolution, realizing that the mob was simply wrong not only about thinking the scapegoat could alleviate the pressure, but they were wrong about harboring envy at all. And so what ultimately emerges from downstream of Girard is really useful for rich guys because it's a non Marxist critique of capitalism that celebrates and warns against envy. Girard's ideas on desire, envy, jealousy and rivalry can offer a kind of critique, like a description of the market system's competition, which is often murderous. But this is a phenomenon that Marx saw as inescapable. Thiel, inspired by Gerard, acts as though he can harness mimetic desire to produce the correct level of competition and innovation to retain the order and value producing side of capitalism. But he has to suppress the violent outcomes of inequality. So it's. And I think maybe that's where the surveillance comes in. It's right. You really want everybody to be well behaved while this is going on. So I think it's very attractive to bookish businessmen and entrepreneurs because it offers a very powerful vision of domination and control by knowing the secrets of humanity, that people want what others want, allowing them to harness it. And the danger is that they'll be seen as the bad guy, they'll be seen as someone to blame. So if Christ is the figure who proves the immorality of scapegoating because as God, he is blameless. Who is the Antichrist and why is it?
- [63:27]
A
Greta Thomas that's what we need to know, right?
- [63:31]
B
So Girard argues. So we've sort of. I'm going to unpack what we've kind of flagged before. He argues that the most powerful anti Christian movement is the one that takes over and radicalizes concern for victims. And this is interpreted as the aim of the secular left or wokeism. So Satan borrows the language of victims to regenerate violence by imitating Christ's innocence while still calling for retribution against the purveyors of inequality.
- [64:01]
A
I just have to ask. This is the second time this question has come up for me. Matthew. I Don't know enough about Rene Girard. Are these ideas at all in reference to the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church?
- [64:15]
B
Not that I'm aware of.
- [64:16]
A
Okay.
- [64:18]
B
And as far as I've seen, and in the bio reading that I've done, I, I don't, I'm, I'm not aware it might be so, so listeners, correct me if I'm wrong.
- [64:29]
A
Those are not the victims that he's referring to.
- [64:31]
B
No, no, no. He, he's, he's referring to victims who don't acknowledge their own capacity for inner transformation. Okay, Right. So, so victims not of materiality, but of their own mentality.
- [64:46]
C
Okay.
- [64:46]
B
I, I, I might be wrong, but I don't know that he has a critique of the institutional church that way.
- [64:52]
A
Well, what I mean actually is that there would be a critique against the church being held accountable because this was part of a project of the Left to use this victim narrative in order to repaganize society.
- [65:06]
B
Yeah. Something to look into. So his real target is that if you level society through democratic equality, you wind up with a kind of universal endpoint, envy and rivalry, because everyone is theoretically on the same strata, making everyone a potential competitor. So part of what Thiel is arguing is that Thunberg's appeal to universal equality returns us to the Stone Age of unresolvable mimetic desire, where scapegoats like him must be killed. So that's Girard. And as far as, as well as I can understand it now. And I think it's really interesting because I think it provides a number of hooks for Thiel's concerns, whether or not he's coherent about them or not. But I think he has this sense that Girard is a masterful thinker and that what he's inherited intellectually has a solid foundation. And it's all very paranoid and it's explanatory in a holistic sense. And one of the things that Sitman and Adler Bell point out is that in this way, it competes with a kind of intellectual rigor on the left that conservatives have always envied. So one of the things that leftists have in their overarching analysis of power is something that Paul Ricoeur called this hermeneutics of society suspicion. It's this quick and dirty way of defining each new situation according to power dynamics. So this is basically Marx and Freud, to some extent, Nietzsche saying that beneath the surface, the surface of normative manners and law lie the machinations of power and greed. And the basic Marxist perspective on capitalism is that, of course, the person in power is fucking you over. The basic Freudian point of view is is that that guy probably also wants to actually fuck you. Now, as a leftist, in my opinion, this analysis tends to be accurate with regard to my understanding of capitalism. But I also agree with Eve Sedgwick that what it does within communities is it breeds a kind of paranoia. It can make people hyper vigilant about everybody else's intentions, even if they're on the same side. And so she argues from a feminist position that we should at all times try to be generous as we listen to our fellows and not let the internalization, this suspicion, destroy relationships. Now, fascism also provides a quick and dirty lens for viewing all social phenomenon. And that's the lens of is it pure or impure? But for those who still have manners, who don't really want to use that language yet, and Thiel really isn't there, I don't think Girard provides a polite lens because this theory of mimetic desire kind of boils down to locating a lot of human suffering and misbehavior behavior back to envy. And so it gives this knee jerk, holistic sort of intuitive response coming from the right that when faced with a complaint or a grievance about inequality or justice, there can be this immediate defensiveness that orients around the feeling of, well, who do you think you are? Like, why do you think you deserve what I have? Why don't you work on your jealousy? Why don't you work on your envy? Why don't you get a job?
- [68:32]
C
Job?
- [68:33]
B
So that's how they tackle the original sin of envy. Whereas the leftists are attacking the original sin of greed. And I think this shows up in many different places, like even going back to J.D. vance's childless cat lady comment. The underlying point is that childless people, according to Vance, are embittered because they envy people who have children and meaning in their lives. Or so he thinks. So in the same way that Marx and Freud provide this hermeneutics of suspicion around the motivations people have in capitalist systems, Girard provides his own version of that. And it's powerful, I think, to the point of tautology. Because if I walk up to Peter Thiel in the street and I say, hey, you should be ashamed of yourself for being a billionaire. Nobody deserves money like that. How can I actually prove that I'm not simply envious of him? Like, how would I refute him saying, oh, you're jealous? Like, I can't really. I could give my moral analysis, but even at the end of all of that. He said, nah, you know, still, I think you probably want what I have. And I don't know what would jostle that from him because it's almost a metaphysical belief about the nature of, you know, human psychology. So I just have to prove it through the rest of my life by what I do. But we're not talking about concepts that are chewed on and debated within communities and then acted out like we're talking about this lecture in San Francisco. We're talking about discourse. First books and articles and then all accelerated on the Internet.
- [70:06]
C
I'm having one issue with this analysis and it's just more of a question. But like, when it's framed this way, it's presenting as if the right never, never discuss issues of greed and the left never bring up envy. I don't think that's possible or true at all.
- [70:24]
B
Yeah, these are generalizations. It's not that Marx dismisses the idea that people can be personally envious. It's that if there is personal envy, it probably has a structural referent. It probably has a location in some form of inequality that exists outside of the person's psychology, and that is being. And they're being provoked by it. Right. Not that people can't be envious, but that. But that there's a reason for it.
- [70:51]
C
How does something sit outside of someone's psychology when it's interconnected with the society they live in?
- [70:56]
B
Well, that, that there's a structural purpose or cause for provoking a psychological response. It's not. Sitting outside is maybe not a good phrase, but like, it's, It's. It's a psychological response to an existing material reality. Right?
- [71:10]
A
Yeah. So the way, the way that you're putting it is that the, the envy may well be there, but the source of the envy is not.
- [71:18]
B
It's not moral. It's not. It's not you. It's not. It's not your sin. It's not as. It's not a cardinal sin. Yeah, it came from somewhere.
- [71:26]
A
Naming it as envy is not a dismissal of the fact that the envy is coming from inequality.
- [71:32]
B
Yeah, right. I think the last thing that I'd note is that because so much of the focus is on victimology and the erasure of unworthy victims and comparing the toxic mimic of the identity politics victim to the perfect innocent victim of Jesus, they're spending a lot of time thinking about victims. And I think you gotta wonder why somebody who's making drones that shoot at children lining up for flour in Gaza has to think a lot about why victims are grifters or despicable or not worth thinking about. I think you really have to wonder why the guy from South Africa who grows up in the most famous period of decolonization why he has to concentrate so much much on unworthy victims. I think you got to wonder why when all the available data shows you how many people in the world you could put in permanent housing for a fraction of your net worth. Why are these guys obsessed with victims? Girard had a sophisticated analysis of victimhood and sacrifice in Christianity, but I think that what trickles down to teal is really only enough maybe to help expiate guilt. Worried about your future in tech? Master new skills, accelerate your team's interaction, impact and redefine what's possible. With pluralsight, we're more than just another online learning platform. We're shattering the skills gap and shaping future generations of technologists. Transform your work, transform your team. Ready to tap in? Visit us@pluralsight.com to learn more.