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A.I., Mars and Immortality: Are We Dreaming Big Enough? | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat — Transcript

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0:00Is Silicon Valley recklessly ambitious?
0:03What should we fear more:
0:06Armageddon or stagnation?
0:10Why is one of the world’s most successful investors worrying
0:13about the Antichrist?
0:16My guest today is the co-founder
0:18of PayPal and Palantir, and an early investor
0:22in the political careers of Donald Trump and JD Vance.
0:26Peter Thiel is the original tech right power player,
0:30well known for funding a range of conservative and simply
0:34contrarian ideas.
0:36But we’re going to talk about his own ideas because despite
0:39the slight handicap of being a billionaire,
0:42there’s a good case that he’s the most influential right
0:45wing intellectual of the last 20 years.
0:54Peter Thiel, welcome to "Interesting Times."
0:57Thanks for having me.
0:58You’re very welcome.
0:59Thanks for being here.
1:00So I want to start by taking you back in time,
1:04about 13 or 14 years.
1:06You wrote an essay for National Review.
1:08The conservative magazine called "The End of the Future."
1:12And basically the argument in that essay
1:16was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing
1:20modern world was just not nearly as dynamic
1:23as people thought,
1:24and that actually, we'd entered a period
1:27of technological stagnation.
1:29That digital life was a breakthrough, but not
1:33as big a breakthrough as people had hoped.
1:37And that the world was kind of stuck, basically.
1:40And you weren’t the only person to make arguments like
1:43this, but it had a special potency coming from you
1:46because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten
1:50rich in the digital revolution.
1:53So I’m curious: In 2025, right.
1:56Do you think that diagnosis still holds?
1:59Yes, I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis.
2:06It was never an absolute thesis.
2:08So the claim was not that we were absolutely, completely
2:11stuck.
2:12It was in some ways a claim about the velocity had slowed.
2:17It wasn’t 0, but that we were, I don’t know. From 1750 to 1970,
2:24200 plus years, were periods of accelerating change where we
2:28were, relentlessly.
2:29We’re moving faster.
2:31The ships were faster, the railroads were faster,
2:34the cars were faster, the planes were faster.
2:36It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions.
2:39And then that in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.
2:47There was, I always made an exception
2:49for the world of bits.
2:51So we had computers and software and internet
2:54and mobile internet.
2:56And then the last 10, 15 years you had crypto and the A.I.
3:00revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big.
3:04But the question is: Is it enough to really get out
3:10of this generalized sense of stagnation?
3:13And there’s an epistemological question you can start with
3:16on the "Back to the Future" essays:
3:18How do we even how do we even know whether we’re
3:22in stagnation or acceleration?
3:24Because one of the features of late modernity
3:26is that people are hyperspecialized.
3:29And so, can you say that we’re not making progress in physics
3:34unless you’ve devoted half your life to studying string
3:37theory?
3:37Or what about quantum computers?
3:39Or what about cancer research and biotech and all
3:45these verticals?
3:47And then how much does progress
3:50in cancer count versus string theory?
3:53So you have to give weightings to all these things.
3:55So it’s, in theory it’s an extremely,
3:57an extremely difficult question to get a handle
4:01of because - yeah, the fact that it’s so hard to answer that we
4:03have ever narrower groups of guardians guarding themselves
4:07is itself cause for skepticism.
4:09And so yes, I think broadly we’re in this world that’s
4:16still pretty stuck.
4:17It’s not absolutely stuck.
4:19Yeah. You mentioned "Back to the Future."
4:20We just showed our kids the original "Back
4:24to the Future."
4:24The first one with Michael J. Fox and of course-
4:27Yeah, it was like 1955 to 1985, 30 years back.
4:30And then the "Back to Future II"
4:32was, I think 1985 to 2015, which
4:35is now a decade in the past.
4:37And that’s where you had flying cars.
4:39And the 2015 future is wildly divergent from the 1985.
4:43The 2015 future.
4:44did have Biff Tannen as a Donald Trump-like
4:47figure in some kind of power.
4:50So it had some kind of prescience.
4:52But yeah, the big, the big noticeable thing
4:56is just how different the built environment looks.
5:00And so one of the strongest cases for stagnation that I’ve
5:03heard is that yeah, if you put someone in a time machine from
5:07various points, they would recognize themselves to be
5:10in a completely different world if they left 1860 or 18
5:1490 to 1970, if those were the 80 years of your lifetime
5:17or something like that.
5:18But the world just to my kids, even as children of 2025,
5:22looking at 1985, it’s like the cars were a little different.
5:25And no one has phones, but the world seems fairly similar.
5:31So that’s a kind of non-statistical.
5:34But that’s the common sense.
5:36That’s the common sense understanding.
5:38But are there what would convince you
5:40that we were living through a period of takeoff.
5:43Is it just economic growth.
5:44Is it productivity growth.
5:46Like what are their numbers for stagnation versus dynamism
5:50that you look at.
5:51Sure it would be.
5:52Well, the economic number would just
5:54be what are your living standards compared
5:57to your parents.
5:58If you’re a 30-year-old millennial or how are you
6:05doing versus when your parents,
6:07your Boomer parents were 30 years old,
6:08how did they do at that time.
6:10There are intellectual questions.
6:13How many breakthroughs are we having.
6:17How do we quantify these things.
6:19What are the returns of going into research.
6:22There certainly are diminishing returns
6:24to going into science or going into academia generally.
6:27And then maybe this is why I’m so much of it feels like this
6:31sociopathic, Malthusian kind of an institution,
6:35because you have to throw more and more and more at something
6:38to get the same returns.
6:39And at some point, people give up and the thing collapses.
6:42Well, right.
6:43So let’s pick up on that.
6:45Why should we want growth and dynamism because, as you’ve
6:50pointed out in some of your arguments on the subject,
6:52right, there is a kind of cultural change that happens
6:55in the Western world in the 1970s,
6:58around the time you think things slow down and start
7:01to stagnate, where people become very anxious about
7:04the costs of growth, the environmental costs,
7:06above all.
7:07And the idea being end up with a widely shared perspective
7:13that we’re rich enough.
7:16And if we try too hard to get that much richer,
7:19the planet won’t be able to support us.
7:21We’ll have degradation of various kinds.
7:24And we should be content with where we are.
7:27So what’s wrong with that argument.
7:30Well, I think there are deep reasons
7:33the stagnation happened.
7:34So there are always three questions
7:36you can ask about history.
7:36What actually happened.
7:37And there’s a question you get to what should be done about
7:39it.
7:40But there’s also this intermediate question why did
7:42it happen.
7:43People ran out of ideas, I think
7:45to some extent the institutions degraded
7:49and became risk averse.
7:51And these cultural transformations
7:52we can describe.
7:54But then I think to some extent,
7:56also people had some very legitimate worries
7:59about the future, where if we continue
8:01to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating
8:04towards environmental apocalypse
8:07or nuclear apocalypse or things like that.
8:10But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future,
8:14I do think the society.
8:17I don’t it unravels.
8:18It doesn’t work.
8:20The way middle the middle class.
8:23I would define the middle class
8:25as the people who expect their kids to do better
8:27than themselves.
8:28And when that expectation collapses,
8:31we no longer have a middle class society.
8:33And maybe there’s I mean, maybe there’s some way you can
8:36have a feudal society in which things are always static
8:39and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can shift to some
8:43radically different society, but it’s not the way.
8:45It’s not the way the Western world.
8:47It’s not the way the United States has functioned
8:49for the first 200 years of its existence.
8:53So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation
8:58in the end, it’s that they will rebel and pull things
9:03down around them in the course of that rebellion.
9:05They may rebel or our institutions don’t work.
9:10All of our institutions are predicated on growth.
9:13Our budget, our budgets are certainly
9:15predicated on growth.
9:16Yeah if you say, I don’t Reagan and Obama Reagan was
9:22consumer capitalism, which is oxymoronic.
9:26It was borrow you don’t save money as a capitalist.
9:30You borrow money.
9:31And Obama was low tax socialism,
9:33just as oxymoronic as the consumerist capitalism
9:39of Reagan.
9:40And yeah, I low tech socialism way better than high tax
9:45socialism, but I worry that it’s not sustainable.
9:49At some point you either the taxes go up
9:52or the socialism ends.
9:54So it’s deeply, deeply unstable.
9:58And that’s why people are they’re not optimistic.
10:02They don’t think we’ve hit some stable the Greta future.
10:07Maybe it can work.
10:08This is the Greta Thunberg.
10:10Just to be clear, that’s a reference to Greta Thunberg,
10:13the activist best known for anti-climate change protests.
10:18Who to you, I would say represents
10:20a kind of symbol of a anti-growth, effectively
10:25authoritarian, environmentalist
10:27dominated future.
10:29Sure but we’re not there yet.
10:31We’re not there yet.
10:32It would be.
10:33It would be a very, very different society
10:35if you actually lived in a kind
10:37of degrowth small Scandinavian villages.
10:41I’m not sure would be North Korea, but it would be.
10:43It would be super oppressive.
10:45One thing that’s always struck me is that when you have this
10:52sense of stagnation, a sense of decadence,
10:56right to use a word that I like to use for it
10:59in a society.
11:01You then also have people who end up
11:03being kind of eager for a crisis, right.
11:06Eager for a moment to come along where they can.
11:10They can radically redirect society from the path it’s on.
11:14Because I tend to think that in rich societies
11:16you hit a certain level of wealth.
11:18People become very comfortable,
11:19they become risk averse, and it’s just hard.
11:22It’s hard to get out of decadence, into something,
11:25into something new, without a crisis.
11:27So the original example for me was after September 11.
11:31There was this whole mentality among foreign policy
11:33conservatives that we had been decadent and stagnant,
11:36and now is our time to wake up and launch a new crusade
11:41and remake the world.
11:42And obviously that ended very badly.
11:44But something similar it was Bush 43
11:46just told people to go shopping right away.
11:48So it wasn’t anti decadent for the most part.
11:52So there was maybe there was some neocon foreign policy
11:57enclave in which people were LARPing as a way
11:59to get out of decadence.
12:01But the dominant thing was Bush 43 people telling people
12:05just to go shopping.
12:06So what risks should you be willing to take
12:08to escape decadence?
12:10It does seem like there’s a danger here where the people
12:17who want to be anti decadent have to take on a lot of risk.
12:21They have to say, look, you’ve got this nice, stable,
12:23comfortable society.
12:25But guess what.
12:25We’d we’d like to have a war or a crisis or a total
12:31reorganization of government and so on.
12:33They have to lean into danger.
12:36I don’t know if I have to answer.
12:38I don’t know if I have to give you a precise answer,
12:41but my directional answer is a lot more.
12:43We should take a lot more risk.
12:45We should be doing a lot more.
12:46And I can go through all these different verticals.
12:52If we look at biotech, something like dementia,
12:56Alzheimer’s, we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years.
13:01People are completely stuck on beta amyloid.
13:04It’s obviously not working.
13:06It’s just some kind of a stupid racket where the people
13:10are just reinforcing themselves.
13:12And so Yes, we need to take way
13:15more risk in that department.
13:16Well, let’s I want to ask to keep us in the concrete.
13:20I want to stay with that example for a minute
13:22and ask, O.K, what does that mean.
13:25Saying we need to take more risks in anti-aging research.
13:30Does it mean that the FDA has to step back and say,
13:34anyone who has a new treatment for Alzheimer’s can go ahead
13:38and sell it on the open market.
13:40Like what is risk in the medical space look like.
13:45Yeah you would take you would take a lot more risk.
13:48If you have disease, there probably are a lot more risks.
13:53You can take.
13:54There are a lot more risks the researchers can take.
13:57Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity
14:00where people Yeah, they thought
14:03we would cure diseases.
14:04They thought we would have radical life extension.
14:07Immortality that was part of the project
14:10of early modernity.
14:11It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet it was
14:14and maybe it was maybe it was anti-Christian,
14:17maybe it was downstream of Christianity.
14:19It was competitive.
14:20If Christianity promised you a physical Resurrection science
14:26was not going to succeed unless it promised you
14:29the exact same thing.
14:30But I remember 1999, 99 2000.
14:33When we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders,
14:37Luke Nozick, he was into Alcor and cryonics and people
14:40should freeze themselves and and we had one day
14:44where we took the whole company to a freezing party,
14:46a Tupperware party.
14:47People sell Tupperware policies at a freezing party.
14:50They sell their.
14:51Was it just your heads.
14:52What was going to be frozen.
14:53You could get could get a full body or just a head.
14:57Just the head was cheaper.
14:58It was disturbing.
14:59With a dot matrix printer didn’t quite work.
15:01And so the freezing policies couldn’t be couldn’t be
15:03printed out.
15:04But in retrospect, this was still technological stagnation
15:09once again.
15:09But it was.
15:11But it’s also a symptom of the decline because in 1999,
15:15this was not a mainstream view,
15:17but there was still a fringe Boomer view where they still
15:20believed they could live forever.
15:22And that was the last generation.
15:24And so I’m always anti Boomer, but maybe there’s something
15:27we’ve lost even in this fringe Boomer narcissism where there
15:31were at least a few boomers who still believed science
15:35would cure all their diseases.
15:38No one, no one who’s a millennial believes that
15:40anymore.
15:41I think there are some people who
15:44believe in a different kind of immortality, though,
15:47right now.
15:49I think part of the fascination with A.I.
15:54is connected to a specific, a specific vision
15:57of transcending limits.
16:01And I’m going to ask you about that after I ask you about politics, because one
16:05of the striking things I thought about your original
16:08argument on stagnation, which was mostly about technology
16:11and the economy, was that it could be applied to a pretty
16:14wide range of things.
16:15And at the time you were writing that essay,
16:18you were interested in seasteading.
16:20This idea of ideas of essentially building
16:22new polities independent of the sclerotic Western world.
16:28But then you made a pivot in the 2010s.
16:31So you were one of the few prominent, maybe
16:34the only prominent Silicon Valley
16:36supporter of Donald Trump.
16:38In 2016, you supported a few carefully selected
16:43Republican Senate candidates.
16:45One of them is now the vice president
16:47of the United States.
16:49And my view as an observer of what you were doing
16:53was that you were basically being a kind of venture
16:56capitalist for politics.
16:58You were saying, here are some disruptive agents who might
17:02change the political status quo,
17:04and it’s worth a certain kind of risk here.
17:08Is that how you thought about it.
17:09Sure there were all sorts of levels.
17:11I mean, one level was yeah, it was these hopes that we could
17:15redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading to
17:18or whatever the metaphor has really
17:21changed course as a society through political,
17:24through political change.
17:25Maybe a narrower a much narrower aspiration
17:28was that we could maybe at least
17:30have a conversation about this when someone like Trump
17:34said, make America great again.
17:36O.K is that a positive, optimistic, ambitious agenda,
17:42or is it merely a very pessimistic assessment
17:49of where that we are no longer a great country.
17:52And I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump
17:56would do in a positive way.
17:58But I thought, at least for the first time in 100 years,
18:02we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush
18:08nonsense.
18:09And that was not the same as progress,
18:13but we could at least have a conversation.
18:15In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy.
18:18I had these two thoughts and in 2016,
18:22and you often have these ideas that
18:23are just below the level of your consciousness.
18:27But the two thoughts I had that I wasn’t able to combine
18:29was, number one, no, nobody would be mad at me
18:34for supporting Trump if he lost.
18:37And number two, I thought he had a 50/50 chance of winning.
18:40And then I had this implicit, why would nobody be mad at you
18:45if he lost.
18:45It would just be such a weird thing and it wouldn’t really
18:47matter.
18:48But then I thought he had more.
18:52He had.
18:52I thought he had a 50/50 chance because the problems
18:55were deep and the stagnation was frustrating.
18:58And then the fantasy I had was yeah, if he won,
19:02we could have this conversation.
19:03And the reality was people weren’t ready for it.
19:06And then maybe we’ve progressed to the point where
19:10we can have this conversation at this point in 2025,
19:14a decade after Trump.
19:15And of course, you’re not a zombie left wing person.
19:20Ross but but this is I’ve been called many things.
19:24Many things I’ll take.
19:25I’ll take whatever progress I can get.
19:27So from your perspective of.
19:29So let’s say there’s two layers.
19:31There’s a basic sense of this society needs disruption.
19:36It needs risk.
19:38Trump is disruption, Trump is risk and Trump is.
19:41And then the second level is Trump
19:42is actually willing to say things
19:43that are true about American decline, right.
19:47So do you feel like you as an investor, as a venture
19:50capitalist, got anything out of the first Trump term.
19:56Like what did Trump do in his first term
19:59that you felt was anti decadent or anti stagnation?
20:03If anything, maybe the answer is nothing.
20:05Well I think we I think it took longer
20:09and it was slower than I would have liked.
20:12But we have, we have gotten to the place where a lot
20:18of people think something’s gone wrong.
20:20And that was not the conversation
20:22I was having in 2012, 2013, 2014.
20:25I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012
20:28and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.
20:32I was on the there’s a stagnation problem,
20:35and all three of them were versions of everything’s going
20:38great.
20:39And I think at least those three people have,
20:41to varying degrees, updated and adjusted.
20:45Silicon Valley is adjusted and Silicon Valley, though
20:49has more than adjusted.
20:50A a big part of Silicon Valley on the stagnation
20:53on the stagnation, stagnation.
20:55But then a big part of Silicon Valley
20:58ended up going in for Trump in 2024, including, obviously,
21:04most famously, Elon Musk.
21:05Yeah, this is deeply linked to the stagnation
21:07issue in my telling.
21:09I mean, these things are always super complicated,
21:11but my telling is I don’t.
21:13And again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people.
21:16But someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook meta.
21:21And in some ways, I don’t think he was very ideological.
21:25He didn’t think this stuff through that much.
21:28It was the default was to be liberal.
21:31And it was always what if the liberalism isn’t working,
21:35what do you do.
21:36And for year after year after year,
21:37it was do more if something doesn’t work,
21:40you just need to do more of it.
21:41And you up the dose and you up the dose and you
21:43spend hundreds of millions of dollars
21:44and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.
21:48And at some point, it’s like, O.K, maybe this isn’t working.
21:53So they pivot.
21:54So it’s not a pro-trump thing.
21:56It’s not a pro-trump thing, but it is just both in public
22:00and private conversations.
22:02It is a kind of sense that Trumpism and populism in 2024,
22:08maybe not in 2016, when Peter was out there
22:12as the lone supporter.
22:14But now in 2024, they can be a vehicle
22:17for technological innovation, economic dynamism.
22:22So that’s your framing it really,
22:25really optimistically here.
22:26So I. Well the people but I think I know you’re
22:29pessimistic.
22:29You frame this optimistically.
22:32You’re just saying these people are going to be
22:33disappointed and they’re just set up for failure.
22:37And things like, I mean, people
22:38expressed a lot of optimism.
22:40That’s all I’m saying.
22:41Elon Musk expressed a lot of I mean,
22:44he expressed some apocalyptic anxieties
22:46about how budget deficits were going to kill us all.
22:48But he came into government and people around him came
22:51into government basically saying,
22:53we have a partnership with the Trump administration,
22:56and we’re pursuing technological greatness.
22:59I think they were optimistic.
23:00And so I’m you’re coming from a place of greater pessimism
23:05or realism.
23:06So I’m just what I’m asking for is your assessment
23:09of where we are, not their assessment.
23:11But like, do you think does populism in Trump 2.0
23:16look like a vehicle for technological dynamism to you.
23:21It’s still by far the best option we have, I don’t think.
23:27I don’t know.
23:28Is Harvard going to cure dementia by just puttering
23:33along, doing the same thing that hasn’t worked for 50
23:37years.
23:37So that’s just a case for it.
23:41Can’t get it, can’t get worse.
23:42Let’s do disruption.
23:43But the critique of the critique of populism right
23:47now would be Silicon Valley made an alliance
23:50with the populists.
23:51But in the end, the populists don’t care about science.
23:54They don’t want to spend money on science.
23:56They want to kill funding to Harvard just because they
23:58don’t like Harvard.
23:59And in the end, you’re not going to get the kind
24:03of investments in the future that Silicon Valley wanted.
24:07Is that wrong.
24:09Yeah, but it.
24:11We have to go back to this question of, how well is this.
24:16Is the science working in the background.
24:18This is where the new dealers.
24:20Whatever was wrong with them.
24:21They pushed science hard and you funded it,
24:25and you gave money to people and you scaled it.
24:28And whereas today, if there was an equivalent of Einstein
24:34and he wrote a letter to the White House,
24:36it would get lost in the mail room,
24:38and the Manhattan Project is unthinkable.
24:41If we call something a moonshot the way this is
24:44the way Biden talked about, let’s say, cancer research,
24:47a moonshot in the 60s still meant that you went
24:50to the moon.
24:51A moonshot now means something completely fictional.
24:53That’s never going to happen.
24:54No, you need a moonshot for that.
24:56It’s not like we need an Apollo program.
24:58It means it’s never, ever going to happen.
25:00And so.
25:01But it seems like then you’re still in the mode of for you,
25:05as opposed to maybe for some other people in Silicon
25:08Valley.
25:09The value of populism is in tearing away the veils
25:13and illusions, and we’re not necessarily in the stage where
25:16you’re looking to the Trump administration to build
25:21the new, to do the Manhattan Project, to do the moonshot.
25:23It’s more like populism helps us see that it was all fake.
25:27You need to try to do both.
25:28And they’re very entangled with each other.
25:33And I don’t know, there’s a deregulation of nuclear power.
25:38And at some point, at some point we’ll get back
25:41to building, new nuclear power plants or better designed
25:46ones, or maybe even fusion reactors.
25:49And, and so, yes, there’s a deregulatory,
25:53deconstructive part.
25:55And then at some point, you actually to get
25:59to construction and it’s all things like that.
26:02So yeah, in some ways, in some ways you’re clearing the field
26:05and then but you’ve maybe but you’ve personally stopped
26:08funding politicians I am schizophrenic on this stuff.
26:13I think it is.
26:15It is it’s incredibly important and it’s incredibly
26:18toxic.
26:19And so I go I go back and forth
26:23on incredibly toxic for you personally for everybody,
26:29everybody who gets involved.
26:30It’s 0 sum.
26:31It’s crazy.
26:32And then it’s and then in some ways because everyone hates
26:36you and associates you with Trump.
26:38Like how is it toxic for you personally.
26:42It’s toxic because it’s in a zero sum world.
26:47The stakes in it feel really, really high.
26:51And you end up having enemies you didn’t have before.
26:55It’s toxic for all the people who get involved in different
26:57ways.
26:58There is a political dimension of getting "Back to the Future."
27:01I don’t know.
27:03This is a conversation I had with Elon back in 2024.
27:08And we had all these conversations.
27:10I had the seasteading version with Elon where I said
27:14if Trump doesn’t win, I want to just leave the country.
27:18And then Elon said, there’s nowhere to go.
27:21There’s nowhere to go.
27:22This is the only place.
27:23And then you always think of the right arguments
27:25to make later.
27:26And it was about two hours after we had dinner and I was
27:29home that I thought of, wow, Elon,
27:31you don’t believe in going to Mars anymore.
27:342024 2024 is the year where Elon
27:38stopped believing in Mars.
27:39Not as a silly science tech project, but as
27:44a political project.
27:45Mars was supposed to be a political project.
27:47It was building an alternative.
27:49And in 2024, Elon came to believe
27:51that if you went to Mars the socialist US
27:55government, the woke A.I., it would follow you to Mars.
27:59It was the dumbest meeting with Elon that we brokered.
28:03He was doing DeepMind.
28:04This is an A.I. company.
28:05Yeah this was the rough conversation was Dennis tells
28:08Ellen, I’m working on the most important project
28:10in the world.
28:11I’m building a superhuman A.I.
28:13And Ellen responds to Dennis, well,
28:15I’m working on the most important project
28:17in the world.
28:17I am turning us into an interplanetary species.
28:20And then Dennis said, well, my A.I.
28:24will be able to follow you to Mars and.
28:26And then Ellen went quiet.
28:28But in my telling of the history,
28:31it took years for that to really hit Ellen.
28:34It took him until 2024 to process it.
28:36But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars.
28:39It just means that he decided he
28:40had to win some kind of battle over budget deficits
28:44or wokeness to get to Mars.
28:46What does Mars mean.
28:47Is it a Yeah.
28:48Is it.
28:49And again, it’s what does Mars mean.
28:51Well, it was is it just is it just a scientific project
28:57or is it I don’t know.
28:59Is it like A.I. don’t know, high vision of a new society.
29:02Yeah Heinlein.
29:03Populated by many, many libertarian paradise
29:07or something like Elon Musk.
29:09Well, I assume it was concretized that specifically.
29:12But if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that
29:18Mars is supposed to be more than a science project,
29:20it’s supposed to be a political project.
29:22And then when you concretize it,
29:24you have to start thinking through,
29:25well, the I woke, I will follow you,
29:27the socialist government will follow you,
29:29and then maybe you have to do something other
29:31than just going to Mars.
29:32O.K., so the woke A.I.
29:36Artificial intelligence seems like one.
29:40If we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception
29:43to stagnation.
29:44Yes it’s the place where there’s been.
29:45Yes remarkable progress.
29:48Surprising to many people.
29:49Progress it’s also the place we were just talking about
29:51politics.
29:52It’s the place where the Trump administration is, I think,
29:56to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they
30:00wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public
30:05private partnerships.
30:07So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.
30:12And you are an investor in A.I.
30:15What do you think you’re investing in?
30:20Well, I don’t know, there’s a lot of layers to this.
30:31So I do think I know there’s one,
30:36one question we can frame is just how big how big a thing
30:40do I think AI is.
30:42And I don’t my stupid answer is it’s somewhere it’s more
30:48than a nothing burger and it’s less than the total
30:52transformation of our society.
30:53So my placeholder is that it’s roughly on the scale
30:56of the internet in the late 90s,
30:58which is I’m not sure it’s enough to really end
31:02the stagnation.
31:03It might be enough to create some great companies.
31:06And the internet added maybe a few points, percentage points
31:12to the GDP, maybe 1 percent to GDP growth every year
31:16for 10, 15 years.
31:18It added some to productivity.
31:19And so that’s of roughly my placeholder for I.
31:22It’s the only thing we have.
31:24It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced.
31:26This is the only thing we have.
31:27I’d like to have more multi-dimensional progress.
31:29I’d like us to be going to Mars.
31:31I’d like us to be having cures for dementia.
31:33If all we have is I will take it.
31:37There are risks with it.
31:38There are obviously there are dangers with this technology.
31:44So you’re a skeptic.
31:45But then you are a skeptic of what you might call
31:51the superintelligence cascade theory,
31:54which basically says that if AI succeeds,
31:57it gets so smart that it gives us the progress in the world
32:02of atoms, that it’s like, all right, we can’t cure dementia.
32:06We can’t figure out how to build the perfect factory that
32:12builds the rockets that go to Mars.
32:13But I can and and at a certain point,
32:16you pass a certain threshold and it gives us
32:19not just more digital progress, but 64 other forms
32:23of progress.
32:24It sounds like you don’t believe that,
32:26or you think that’s less likely.
32:28Yeah I somehow don’t know if that’s been really the gating
32:36factor.
32:37What does that mean.
32:38The gating factor.
32:39It’s probably a Silicon Valley ideology.
32:42And maybe in a weird way it’s more liberal than
32:45a conservative thing.
32:46But people are really fixated on IQ in Silicon Valley
32:51and that it’s all about smart people.
32:54And if you have more smart people, they will.
32:58Do great things.
33:00And then the economics antique argument
33:05is that people actually do worse.
33:08The smarter they are, the worse they do.
33:10And, it’s just they don’t know how to apply it or our society
33:14doesn’t know what to do with them and they don’t fit in.
33:17And so that suggests that the gating factor isn’t IQ,
33:20but something that’s deeply wrong with our society.
33:24So is that a limit on intelligence
33:26or a problem of the personality types.
33:29Well, it’s human superintelligence creates.
33:32I mean, I’m very sympathetic to the idea.
33:34And I made this case when I did an episode of this podcast
33:39with AI accelerationist that just throwing
33:43that certain problems can just be solved
33:46if you ramp up intelligence.
33:47It’s like we ramp up intelligence and boom,
33:49Alzheimer’s is solved.
33:50We ramp up intelligence and the I can,
33:53figure out the automation process that builds you
33:55a billion robots overnight.
33:57I’m an intelligent skeptic in the sense I don’t think.
34:01Yeah, I think you probably have limits.
34:03It’s hard to prove one way.
34:06It’s always hard to prove these things.
34:08But I until we have the superintelligence,
34:10I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot
34:14of smart people and things have been stuck for other
34:18reasons.
34:19And so maybe the problems are unsolvable,
34:22which is the pessimistic view.
34:24Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all.
34:26And it’s a deeply unsolvable problem.
34:27There’s no cure for mortality.
34:30Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem,
34:32or maybe it’s these cultural things.
34:34So it’s not the individually smart person,
34:38but it’s how this fits into our society.
34:41Do we tolerate heterodox smart people.
34:44Maybe it’s maybe you need heterodox smart people
34:47to crazy experiments and if the AI is just conventionally
34:56smart, if we define wokeness, again,
35:01wokeness is too ideological, but if you just define it
35:03as conformist, maybe that’s not the kind of smartness
35:07that’s going to make a difference.
35:09So do you fear, then, a plausible future where AI,
35:15in a way becomes itself stagnation,
35:17that it’s like highly intelligent,
35:19creative in a conformist way.
35:21It’s like the Netflix algorithm.
35:24It makes infinite O.K movies that people watch.
35:28It generates infinite O.K IDs.
35:30It puts a bunch of people out of work
35:32and makes them obsolete.
35:34But it doesn’t.
35:35It like deepens stagnation in some way.
35:37Is that a fear.
35:39It’s like people just outsource.
35:45It’s quite possible that that’s certainly a risk.
35:48But I guess where I end up is I still
35:54think we should be trying.
35:56And that the alternative is just total stagnation.
36:00So yeah, there’s all sorts of interesting things going
36:02to happen with maybe drones in a military context are
36:06combined with AI and O.K, this is kind of scary or dangerous
36:10or dystopian or it’s going to change things.
36:12But if you don’t have AI, Wow, there’s just nothing going on.
36:19And I don’t this is there’s a version of this discussion
36:22on the internet where did the internet lead to more
36:27conformity and more wokeness.
36:30And yeah, there are all sorts of ways where it didn’t lead
36:33to quite the cornucopian diverse explosion of ideas
36:37that libertarians fantasized about in 1999.
36:42But counterfactually, I would argue that it was still better
36:45than the alternative, that if we hadn’t had the internet,
36:50maybe it would have been worse.
36:52I bet it’s better than the alternative.
36:54And the alternative is nothing at all.
36:56Because the.
36:56Look here’s one place where the stagnation arguments are
37:00still reinforced.
37:01The fact that we’re only talking about I feel,
37:05is always an implicit acknowledgment that.
37:08But for we are like in almost total stagnation.
37:14But the world of A.I. is clearly filled with people who
37:19at the very least seem to have a more utopian,
37:25transformative, whatever word you want to call it view
37:27of the technology than you’re expressing here.
37:30And you were mentioned earlier,
37:32the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life
37:36extension and doesn’t anymore.
37:38It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply
37:41involved in artificial intelligence
37:43see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism,
37:46for transcendence of our mortal flesh,
37:50and either some kind of creation of a successor
37:53species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.
37:57And do you think that’s just all kind of irrelevant
38:02fantasy, or do you think it’s just hype.
38:06Do you think people are trying to raise money by pretending
38:09that we’re going to build a machine.
38:12God right.
38:13Is it hype.
38:14Is it delusion.
38:15Is it something you worry about.
38:17I think you would.
38:18You would prefer the human race to endure.
38:20You’re hesitating.
38:23Well, I Yes, I would.
38:29This is a long hesitation.
38:31There’s a long hesitation.
38:32There’s so many questions.
38:33And should the human race survive.
38:38Yes O.K. But I also would.
38:44I also would like us to radically solve
38:47these problems.
38:48And so it’s always I don’t know.
38:54Yeah transhumanism is this the ideal was
38:59this radical transformation where
39:01your human natural body gets transformed
39:05into an immortal body.
39:07And there’s a critique of let’s say,
39:11the trans people in the sexual context or I don’t
39:14transvestite is someone who changes their clothes
39:18and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where
39:21you change your I don’t penis into a vagina.
39:24And we can then debate how well those surgeries work,
39:27but we want more transformation than that.
39:30It’s the critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural.
39:33Man, it’s so pathetically little.
39:35And we want more than cross-dressing or changing
39:39your sex organs.
39:39We want you to be able to change your heart
39:42and change your mind and change
39:44your whole body and then orthodox Christianity.
39:48By the way, the critique orthodox Christianity has
39:52of these things don’t go far enough like that.
39:55Transhumanism is just changing your body.
39:57But you also need to transform your soul,
39:59and you need to transform your whole self.
40:02And so.
40:03But the other one.
40:04Wait wait wait, sorry, I generally agree with your
40:09what I think is your belief that religion should
40:14be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress.
40:17I think any idea of divine Providence
40:20has to encompass the fact that we have progressed
40:23and achieved and done things that
40:25would have been unimaginable to our ancestors.
40:29But it still also seems like, Yeah,
40:32the promise of Christianity in the end is you get
40:35the perfected body and the perfected soul through God’s
40:39grace.
40:39And the person who tries to do it on their own
40:42with a bunch of machines is likely to end up
40:45as a dystopian character.
40:47Well, it’s.
40:52Let’s articulate this.
40:54And you can have a heretical form of Christianity.
40:57That says something else.
40:59I don’t know.
41:01I think the word nature does not occur once
41:04in the Old Testament.
41:05And so if you and there is a word
41:12in which a sense in which the way I understand,
41:17the judeo-christian inspiration is it
41:22is about transcending nature.
41:24It is about overcoming things.
41:25And the closest thing you can say to nature is that people
41:30are fallen and that that’s the natural thing in a Christian
41:34sense, is that you’re messed up.
41:37And that’s true.
41:39But there’s some ways that with God’s help are supposed
41:46to transcend that and overcome that.
41:48But the people, if you just present say you’re accepted,
41:52present company accepted.
41:53Most of the people working to build
41:56the hypothetical machine.
41:57God don’t think that they’re cooperating with Yahweh,
42:02Jehovah, the Lord of hosts.
42:04They think they think that they’re building immortality
42:07on their own.
42:08Yeah, right.
42:08We’re jumping around a lot.
42:10A lot of things.
42:11So again the critique I was saying is they’re not
42:15ambitious enough.
42:15From a Christian point of view,
42:17these people are not ambitious enough.
42:18Now then we get into this question.
42:20Well, are they not.
42:22But they’re not morally and spiritually ambitious enough.
42:25And are they.
42:26And then are they are they still
42:28physically ambitious enough.
42:30And are they are they even still really transhumanists?
42:34And this is where O.K. Man, the cryonics thing that seems
42:40like a retro thing from 1999.
42:42There isn’t that much of that going on.
42:43So they’re not transhumanists on a physical body.
42:45And then, O.K, well, maybe it’s not about cryonics,
42:48maybe it’s about uploading.
42:49O.K, well, it’s not quite.
42:51I’d rather have my body.
42:52I don’t want just a computer program that simulates me.
42:55So that uploading seems like a step down from cryonics, but.
42:59But then even that’s it’s part of the conversation.
43:05And this is where it gets very hard to score.
43:07And I don’t want to say they’re all making it up
43:09and it’s all fake, but I don’t think you think some of it’s
43:13fake.
43:14I don’t think it’s fake implies people are lying.
43:18But I want to say it’s not the center of gravity.
43:21Yeah and so there is.
43:23Yeah, there is a cornucopian language.
43:26There’s an optimistic language.
43:28A conversation I had with Elon a few weeks ago about this
43:31was, he said, we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots
43:38in the US in 10 years.
43:39And I said, well, if that’s true,
43:41you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits
43:44because we’re going to have so much growth.
43:46The growth will take care of this.
43:47And then.
43:48Well, he’s still worried about the budget deficits.
43:50And then this doesn’t prove that he doesn’t believe
43:53in the billion robots.
43:54But it suggests that maybe he hasn’t thought it through
43:58or that he doesn’t think it’s going to be as transformative
44:01economically or that there are big error bars around it.
44:05But yeah, there’s some way in which these things are not
44:09quite thought through.
44:10If I had to give a critique of Silicon Valley,
44:12it’s always bad at what the meaning of tech is
44:17and the conversations, they tend to go into this
44:21microscopic thing where it’s O.K, it’s like,
44:24what are the IQ, Helo scores of the AI.
44:28And exactly how do you define AGI.
44:30And we get into all these endless technical debates.
44:34And there are a lot of questions
44:37that are at an intermediate level of meaning
44:40that seem to me to be very important, which is like,
44:42what does it mean for the budget deficit.
44:44What does it mean for the economy.
44:46What does it mean for geopolitics.
44:48One of the conversations, we had recently was
44:53and I had was, does it change the calculus
44:58for China invading Taiwan, where
45:01we have an accelerating AI revolution in the military.
45:05Is China falling behind.
45:07And will this and maybe on the optimistic side,
45:11it deters China because they’ve effectively lost.
45:15And on the pessimistic side it accelerates them because they
45:18know it’s now or never.
45:19If they don’t grab Taiwan now they will fall behind.
45:23And either way, this is a pretty important thing.
45:26It’s not thought through.
45:27We don’t think about what AI means for geopolitics.
45:30We don’t think about what it means for the macro economy.
45:34And those are the kinds of questions I’d want us to push
45:36more.
45:37There’s also a very macroscopic question that
45:41you’re interested in that, will pull on the religion
45:45thread a little bit here.
45:46You have been giving talks recently
45:50about the concept of the Antichrist, which
45:54is a Christian concept, an apocalyptic concept.
45:57What does that mean to you.
45:59What is the antichrist?
46:00How much time do we have.
46:01We’ve got as long.
46:03As much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.
46:07All right, well, I have A.I. could talk about it,
46:09but we’re near time.
46:10I mean, but no, I think there’s always a question,
46:18how do we articulate some of these existential risks,
46:24some of the challenges we have.
46:25And they’re all framed in this runaway dystopian science
46:30text.
46:31There’s a risk of nuclear war.
46:33There’s a risk of environmental disaster.
46:35Maybe something specific like climate change.
46:37Although there are lots of other ones
46:38we could come up with.
46:39There’s a risk of I don’t know, bioweapons.
46:43You have all the different sci-fi scenarios.
46:45Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
46:48But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame
46:52of talking about existential risks,
46:54perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type
46:58of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one
47:02world totalitarian state because I would say
47:05the political solution, the default political solution
47:11people have for all these existential risks is one world
47:17governance.
47:18What do you do about nuclear weapons.
47:21We have a United Nations with real teeth that controls them.
47:26And it’s they’re controlled by an international political
47:30order.
47:31And then something like this is also,
47:37what do we do about A.I. and we need
47:40global compute governance.
47:41We need a one world government to control all the computers,
47:46log every single keystroke to make sure people don’t program
47:50a dangerous A.I.
47:51And I’ve been wondering whether that’s going from
47:55the frying pan into the fire.
47:57And so the atheist philosophical framing
48:01is one world or none.
48:03That was a short film that was put out by the Federation
48:06of American Scientists in the late 40s,
48:08starts with a nuclear bomb blowing up the world.
48:11And obviously you need a one world government
48:13to stop it, one world or none.
48:16And the Christian framing, which in some ways
48:20is the same question, is Antichrist or armageddon?
48:24You have the one world state of the Antichrist,
48:27or we’re sleepwalking towards Armageddon.
48:30One world or none.
48:31Anti-christ or Armageddon.
48:33On one level are the same.
48:35Question now, I have a lot of thoughts on this topic,
48:40but one question is and this was
48:44a plot hole in all these Antichrist books
48:48people wrote, how does the Antichrist take over
48:50the world.
48:51He gives these demonic, hypnotic speeches and people
48:55just fall for it.
48:56And so it’s this plot hole.
48:58It’s this demonic.
48:59It’s totally it’s implausible.
49:01It’s a very implausible plot hole.
49:02But I think we have an answer to this plot hole.
49:05The way the Antichrist would take over the world
49:08is you talk about Armageddon non-stop,
49:11you talk about existential risk non-stop.
49:13And this is what you need to regulate.
49:16It’s the opposite of the picture of baconian science
49:19from the 17, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like
49:24some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this
49:29machine to take over the world.
49:30People are way too scared for that.
49:33In our world, the thing that has political resonance
49:36is the opposite.
49:37It is.
49:38It is.
49:39The thing that has political resonance
49:41is we need to stop science.
49:42We need to just say stop to this.
49:45And this is where Yeah, I don’t know.
49:47In the 17th century, I can imagine a Doctor Strangelove
49:51Edward Teller type person taking over the world.
49:55In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
49:59O.K, I want to suggest a middle ground
50:00between those two options.
50:02It used to be that the reasonable fear
50:05of the Antichrist was a kind of Wizard of technology,
50:09and now the reasonable fear is someone
50:12who promises to control technology, make it safe,
50:15and Usher in what, from your point of view,
50:18would be a kind of universal stagnation.
50:20Well, it’s more that’s more my description of how it would
50:24happen.
50:25So I think people still have a fear of a 17th century
50:29anti-christ.
50:30We’re still scared of Doctor Strangelove, right.
50:32But you’re saying you’re saying the real Antichrist
50:34would play on that fear and say,
50:36you must come with me to avoid Skynet,
50:39to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear armageddon?
50:42Yes And I guess my view would be looking at the world
50:45right now, that you would need a certain kind
50:49of novel technological progress
50:52to make that fear concrete.
50:56So I can buy that the world could
50:59turn to someone who promised peace and regulation.
51:03If the world became convinced that I was
51:07about to destroy everybody.
51:08But I think to get to that point,
51:11you need one of the accelerationist apocalyptic
51:14scenarios to start to play out to get your peace and safety
51:19anti-christ, you need more technological progress.
51:22Like one of the key failures of totalitarianism in the 20th
51:25century was it had a problem of knowledge.
51:28It couldn’t know what was going on.
51:30All over in the world.
51:31So you need the A.I. or whatever else
51:34to be capable of helping the peace and safety totalitarian
51:38rule.
51:40So don’t you think you need essentially need your worst
51:45case scenario to involve some burst of progress that is then
51:51tamed and used to impose stagnant totalitarianism.
51:56You can’t just get there from where we are right now.
51:59Well, it can Greta Thunberg’s on a boat
52:02in the Mediterranean.
52:04Protesting Israel the.
52:07I just don’t see the promise of safety from A.I.,
52:12safety from tech safety, even safety from climate change
52:16right now as a powerful universal rallying cry.
52:20Absent accelerating change and real fear
52:24of total catastrophe.
52:26I mean, these things are so hard to score,
52:28but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful.
52:34I don’t know if it’s I don’t know if it’s absolutely
52:37powerful enough to create a one world totalitarian state.
52:40But man, it is.
52:42I think it is not.
52:43It is in its current form.
52:44It is.
52:45I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe
52:47in Europe.
52:48They believe in the green thing
52:51more than Islamic Sharia law or more
52:54than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover.
52:59And the future is an idea of a future that looks
53:01different from the present.
53:02The only three on offer in Europe
53:04are green, Sharia and the totalitarian Communist state.
53:11And the green one is by far the strongest
53:15and in a declining, decaying Europe.
53:18But it’s not a dominant player in the world.
53:20It’s always in a context.
53:21And then, I don’t we had this really complicated history
53:27with the way nuclear technology worked.
53:30And we O.K. We didn’t Yeah.
53:33We didn’t really get to a totalitarian one world state.
53:37But by the 1970s, one account of the stagnation is that
53:42the runaway progress of technology had gotten very
53:46scary and that baconian science, it ended at Alamos.
53:51And then it was O.K. It ended there.
53:54And we didn’t want to have any more.
53:56And, when Charles Manson took LSD in the late 60s
54:03and started murdering people, what he saw on LSD,
54:06what he learned was that you could be like Dostoevsky,
54:10an anti-hero in Dostoevsky, and everything was permitted.
54:13And of course, not everyone became Charles Manson,
54:15but Charles Manson.
54:17But crucially of the history, everyone became as deranged
54:20as Charles Manson.
54:21But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist
54:24and take over the world.
54:25I’m just.
54:26I’m just.
54:26We’re ending.
54:27We’re ending in the apocalyptic.
54:28No, but you’re my telling of the.
54:30My telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did
54:34win and they.
54:36But we landed.
54:37We landed on the moon in July of 1969.
54:41Woodstock started three weeks later.
54:43And with the benefit of hindsight,
54:45that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.
54:47And yeah, it was not literally Charles Manson.
54:49But you’re just I want to stay with the Antichrist just
54:53to end.
54:53Because and you’re retreating, you’re saying,
54:57O.K environmentalism is already pro stagnation
55:00and so on.
55:00O.K, let’s agree with all that.
55:03I’m just saying we’re not living under we’re not living
55:06under the Antichrist right now.
55:08We’re just stagnant.
55:09And you’re positing that something worse could be
55:12on the horizon.
55:13That would make stagnation permanent.
55:15That would be driven by fear.
55:17And I’m suggesting that for that to happen,
55:21there would have to be some burst of technological
55:24progress that was akin to Alamos that people are afraid
55:28of.
55:29And I guess this is my very specific question for you,
55:33right.
55:33Is that, well, you are you’re an investor in A.I.
55:37You’re deeply invested in Palantir,
55:40in military technology and technologies,
55:43of surveillance and technologies of warfare
55:46and so on.
55:46And it just seems to me that when you tell me
55:50a story about the Antichrist coming to power
55:54and using the fear of technological change
55:57to impose order on the world, I
56:01feel like that Antichrist would maybe
56:02be using the tools that you were, that you were building.
56:07Wouldn’t the Antichrist be like,
56:09great we’re not going to have any more technological
56:12progress.
56:12But I really like what Palantir
56:13has done so far right.
56:16I mean, isn’t that a concern.
56:18Wouldn’t that be the irony of history would be that the man
56:22publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally
56:26hastens his or her arrival.
56:31There look, there are all these different scenarios.
56:35I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
56:38I mean, to be clear, I don’t think that’s I don’t think
56:41that’s what you’re doing either.
56:42I’m just interested in how you get to a world willing
56:46to submit to permanent authoritarian rule.
56:49Well, but again, there are these different gradations
56:56of this we can describe.
56:58But is this so preposterous, what I’ve just told you,
57:04as a broad account of the stagnation that the entire
57:08world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safety.
57:14This is a first Thessalonians 5’ 3.
57:16The slogan of the anti-christ is peace and safety.
57:19And we’ve submitted to.
57:22The FDA regulates not just drugs in the US, but facto
57:28in the whole world.
57:29Because the rest of the world defers to the FDA.
57:31The Nuclear Regulatory commission
57:33effectively regulates nuclear power plants
57:35all over the world.
57:36People you can’t design a modular nuclear reactor
57:40and just build it in Argentina.
57:42They won’t trust the Argentinian regulators.
57:46They’re going to defer to the US.
57:48And so it is at least it’s at least a question about why
57:52we’ve had 50 years of stagnation.
57:54And one answer is we ran out of ideas.
57:57The other answer is that something happened culturally
58:00where it wasn’t allowed.
58:02And then the cultural answer can be a bottom up answer,
58:05that it was just some transformation of humanity
58:09into the more docile kind of a species,
58:14or it can be at least partially top down
58:18that there is this machinery of government that got changed
58:24into this stagnation thing.
58:26I think something like this nuclear power was supposed
58:29to be the power of the 21st century.
58:32And it somehow has gotten off, ramped
58:36all over the world on a worldwide basis.
58:39So in a sense, we’re already living under a moderate rule
58:43of the Antichrist in that telling,
58:46what do you think God is in control of history.
58:50I mean, this is again A.I. think there’s always room for human
59:02freedom and human choice.
59:05These things are or at least where we are today.
59:10These things are they’re not absolutely predetermined one
59:18way or another.
59:18But God wouldn’t leave us forever under the rule
59:24of a mild, moderate Antichrist, right.
59:29That can’t be how the story ends, right.
59:31It’s attributing too much causation to God is always
59:38a problem.
59:39I know there are different Bible verses I can give you,
59:41but I’ll give you John 1525 where Christ says,
59:46they hated me without cause and so as all these people
59:51that are persecuting Christ have no reason,
59:55no cause for why they’re persecuting Christ,
59:58and if we interpret this as a ultimate causation verse,
1:00:03they want to say, I’m persecuting because God caused
1:00:06me to do this.
1:00:07God is causing everything.
1:00:09And the Christian view is anti-calvinist.
1:00:12God is not behind history.
1:00:14God is not causing everything.
1:00:16If you say God is causing everything, but God is.
1:00:18But wait.
1:00:19But God is.
1:00:19You’re scapegoating God, but God is your scapegoat.
1:00:22But God is behind Jesus Christ entering history
1:00:25because God was not going to leave us
1:00:28in a stagnation as decadent Roman Empire, right.
1:00:31Well, so at some point, at some point,
1:00:34no, no, at some point God is going to step in.
1:00:36I am not, I am not, I am not that Calvinist.
1:00:39And that’s not Calvinism, though.
1:00:41That’s just Christianity.
1:00:43God God will not leave us eternally staring into screens
1:00:48and being lectured by Greta Thunberg, right.
1:00:50He will not abandon us to that fate.
1:00:54It is.
1:00:55It is.
1:00:57There is a great, I don’t know,
1:01:00for better and for worse.
1:01:01I think there’s a great deal of scope for human action,
1:01:06for human freedom.
1:01:08If I thought these things were deterministic,
1:01:13you might as well maybe just accept it.
1:01:15The lines are coming.
1:01:17You should just have some yoga and prayerful meditation
1:01:20and wait while the lines eat you up.
1:01:22And I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed to do.
1:01:24It’s no, I agree with that.
1:01:27And I think on that note, I’m just trying to be hopeful
1:01:30and suggesting that in trying to resist the Antichrist using
1:01:35your human freedom, you should have hope that you’ll succeed.
1:01:39We can agree on that.
1:01:41Good Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.
1:01:44Thank you.

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