Peter Thiel's Armageddon speaking tour has, like the world, not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon, the scriptural term for "that which withholds" the end times; traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world's most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies.
But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world, in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel's katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show, which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but it has been reconstructed by talking to people who were there.
The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel's chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. Thiel identifies as a "hardcore Girardian." On the evening of the unpublicised lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. From the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon, and all the things he believed were "not enough" to prevent it. By Thiel's telling, the modern world is scared, way too scared, of its own technology. Our "listless" and "zombie" age, he said, is marked by a growing hostility to innovation, plummeting fertility rates, too much yoga, and a culture mired in the "endless Groundhog Day of the worldwide web." But in its neurotic desperation to avoid technological Armageddon, the real threats of nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, runaway AI, modern civilisation has become susceptible to something even more dangerous: the Antichrist. According to some Christian traditions, the Antichrist is a figure that will unify humanity under one rule before delivering us to the apocalypse. For Thiel, its evil is pretty much synonymous with any attempt to unite the world. "How might such an Antichrist rise to power?" Thiel asked. "By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety." In other words, it would yoke together a terrified species by promising to rescue it from the apocalypse.
By way of illustration, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist might appear in the form of someone like the philosopher Nick Bostrom, an AI doomer who wrote a paper in 2019 proposing to erect an emergency system of global governance, predictive policing, and restrictions on technology. But it wasn't just Bostrom. Thiel saw potential Antichrists in a whole zeitgeist of people and institutions "focused single-mindedly on saving us from progress, at any cost." So, humanity is doubly wrecked: it has to avoid both technological calamity and the reign of the Antichrist. But the latter was far more terrifying for the billionaire at the podium. For reasons grounded in Girardian theory, Thiel believed that such a regime could only, after decades of sickly, pent-up energy, set off an all-out explosion of vicious, civilisation-ending violence. And he wasn't sure whether any katechons could hold it off.
When Thiel was finished, a moderator kicked off the Q&A session by noting, in so many words, that the speech had been a huge bummer. If the world was hurtling toward an apocalyptic crisis, he asked, what might the billionaire suggest we do? Fend off the Antichrist, came the reply. But beyond that, Thiel said that he, like Girard, wasn't really in the business of offering practical advice. A few moments later, someone in the audience stood and offered a correction. "It's not true what you said about Girard," a man's voice said. Thiel, who often has a tendency to stonewall or steamroll his interlocutors, squinted in the speaker's direction, trying to determine exactly who was pushing back. The voice had the rounded vowels and soft Rs of a recognizably Austrian accent and conveyed a quiet, familiar authority. "On many occasions," the speaker went on, "young people asked Girard, 'What should we do?' And Girard told them to go to church." Thiel finally seemed to recognize who was speaking. He leaned in toward the microphone: "Wolfgang?" The voice belonged to Wolfgang Palaver, a 64-year old theologian from Innsbruck, Austria, whom Thiel had last seen in 2016, the year they both delivered eulogies at Girard's funeral. Palaver has a round face, a bookish white moustache, and eyes permanently crinkled at the corners by laugh lines. But that night in Paris, there was no trace of humour in his voice. And he evidently commanded the billionaire's respect.
Six months later, Thiel delivered his Armageddon lecture again, now at The Catholic University of America. According to a recap posted by one attendee, Thiel's argument was pretty much the same. Except this time Thiel told his listeners how they might personally navigate the slender path between Armageddon and the Antichrist: "Go to church." In an October interview at the Hoover Institution, Thiel echoed the line again: "Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church." This spring, during one of the podcaster Jordan Peterson's many failed attempts to interject, Thiel cut him off: "Girard's answer would still be something like: You should just go to church."
It's not just that line. Although Thiel has never publicly acknowledged Wolfgang Palaver, the Austrian theologian's influence arguably runs through nearly everything Thiel has ever said or written about the Antichrist and the katechon. In the 1990s, Palaver wrote a series of papers about Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist tapped by the Nazis to justify Germany's slip from democracy to dictatorship. Palaver's papers critiqued a lesser-known, theological, and apocalyptic line of Schmitt's thinking, and they seem to have fascinated Thiel ever since the two men first met in 1996. In his recent doomsday lectures and interviews, Thiel's language often mirrors Palaver's scholarship directly, sometimes closely paraphrasing it. You know you live in strange times when one of the most influential billionaires in the world, an investor who lit the financial fuses on both Facebook and the AI revolution, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir and launched the career of an American vice president, starts dedicating his public appearances primarily to a set of ideas about Armageddon borrowed heavily from a Nazi jurist.
But the times have been even weirder for Palaver. A lifelong peace activist, he first wrote about Schmitt's apocalyptic theories in hopes of driving a stake through their heart. Yet for years now, Palaver has watched as his own Girardian take on Schmitt seems to have provided a roadmap not only for Thiel's speaking tour but for his considerable strategic interventions in global politics, from his investments in military tech to his role in shaping the careers of JD Vance and Donald Trump to his support of the National Conservatism movement. If Thiel takes his own thinking seriously, he seems to regard these moves as interventions in the end of human history. For the past year or so, the two men have been in regular touch, meeting together once at Thiel's home and debating with each other over text and email. In August, Palaver even hosted Thiel at the University of Innsbruck for a two-day, closed-door "dress rehearsal" of the billionaire's four-part San Francisco Antichrist lecture series. In an interview with the Austrian news outlet Falter, Palaver said he'd agreed to the event with Thiel "in the hope of getting him to reconsider his positions." In my own months of conversation with Palaver, he has said he fears that the investor has arrived at a potentially catastrophic interpretation of Schmitt. And believe it or not, the nature of Palaver and Thiel's relationship gets even more complicated. Palaver has been reluctant to oppose Thiel publicly, and inconversations he sometimes downplays his own influence and disagreements with the billionaire. Perhaps that's because, as followers of Girard, both men believe that any two figures who oppose each other strongly enough, as Palaver has opposed Schmitt, as Thiel opposes the Antichrist, are bound to mimic each other and become entangled. As Thiel himself has said, "Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist."
In some ways, Palaver and Thiel have always been mirror images of each other. Palaver grew up in a small town in the Austrian Alps, less than an hour from the German border. The landscape of his childhood was idyllic: rolling valleys and meadows, dotted with small churches and boxed in by towering, snow-capped mountain ranges. The historical context was less so. Palaver was born 13 years after the Allies dropped their last bombs on Austria, and within a month of his fourth birthday, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. He spent his early adulthood in a Europe still awash in fear, and many of his intellectual interests have been shaped by this looming shadow. Thiel grew up in the opposite hemisphere, in a suburb of San Francisco that was neither Alpine nor dangerous, yet the shadow of Armageddon appears to haunt him with a similar intensity. And yet the two men's interests intersect: Palaver's lifelong devotion to Girardian moral philosophy collides with Thiel's obsession with practical power, technology, and the end of history. The combination produces a strange, almost comic dissonance: a billionaire investor with one foot in tech startup capitalism and the other in apocalyptic theology, and a theologian with one foot in moral contemplation and the other, inexplicably, in real-world politics.
Thiel's obsession with Armageddon is not purely esoteric. It is a lens through which he approaches the real world. Facebook and Palantir are not just profitable ventures; they are tools for navigating mimetic rivalry, controlling the spread of desire, and managing societal risk. Investments in AI and deeptech are moral interventions as well as financial strategies. His political manoeuvres, supporting figures like Vance, shaping the contours of National Conservatism, even dabbling in presidential campaigns, are all exercises in managing the precarious balance between technological catastrophe and the Antichrist's global unification. Palaver's warning remains implicit in every lecture, every interview, every offhand mention of churchgoing: there is a moral imperative that precedes the strategic. The path to salvation, the path to preventing the Antichrist, is first spiritual, then practical. Thiel's blend of Girard, Schmitt, and Palaver suggests a worldview in which moral guidance, political strategy, and technological intervention are inseparably intertwined, a framework for navigating a world in which every action has eschatological consequences.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/