Thanks. Most sites including that one require a subscription but I found a very rough, apparently auto-generated transcript available here:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010244372/peter-...

It unfortunately doesn't include niceties like attributing who said what, but it's enough to get the gist.

Edit: This isn't a transcript of his lectures. It's a podcast where he talks about some of his general ideas, with this idea of the antichrist appearing only briefly at the end.

Annoyingly, it seems someone recorded these lectures and leaked the audio to left wing papers, who then of course didn't publish transcripts but only their own personal interpretations of them, telling readers what to think. How very on-brand.

This guy belongs in an institution, not in control of an entire power apparatus.

And what makes you think that's nonsense?

It's disappointing but unsurprising how little the HN crowd is able to engage with these sorts of abstract discussions. I swear it's got much worse here over the years for anything other than arguing about kernels and AI.

Thiel is painting with words as the Book of Revelations itself does, so trying to interpret all this literally will of course sound like nonsense. Revelations describes Jesus as a "lamb with seven eyes and seven horns", which like the rest of the book is meant symbolically.

So Thiel doesn't literally believe Greta Thunberg or the Pope have horns and a forked tail. The last link sums it up correctly:

> In Thiel’s apocalyptic vision, the Antichrist isn’t a horned beast so much as a seductive movement bent on halting human progress.

At his exclusive lectures in San Francisco, Thiel argued that the ultimate end-times tyrant would come as a “luddite who wants to stop all science,” using doomsday fears to seize global control over technology.

He railed against “legionnaires of the Antichrist” in today’s world — a cast that, in his view, includes environmentalists, international agencies and regulators who urge caution on AI or climate change.

If you think progress is the highest form of salvation from human's naturally fallen state, then those who want to halt progress would be the opposite of that. Hence the anti-christ.

The biblical/Christian spin on this argument probably helps him attract attention to these ideas but the idea that leftism is anti-progress is hardly new - anyone observing the way the Soviets approached technological development could have argued that - so the religious framing might just obfuscate things rather than bring clarity. Especially as the Book of Revelations is one of the most symbolically obfuscated books of the Bible and reads like it was written in a kind of code meant only to be understood by Christians at the time it was written.

I can see the logic of talking to the people who believe they will live forever, once you start wondering "what if people could actually live forever?"

He's probably interested in getting an angle on the whole thing since he knows Christians will get more nervous as tech develops, and they still have a lot of power in this world. Primitive takes on new tech developments can be detrimental to humankind at large. Talking in the abstract of course, I'm not sticking up for any of his points, I don't even really know them to be honest.

As for the other party, probably curious on what he has to say, considering he's up to speed with today's tech and future perspectives on it.

If tech really finds a way for humans to proceed further in a different form that will be a major headache with religious people. One simple argument for changing form is that the Sun will eventually scorch Earth so we do have an expiry date. And there's no way we're making it out of here in this current form, this is developed for the conditions of this planet, forcing it in other environments will eventually wipe us out. So logically we'll have to change form if we want to make it outside of this planet.

In this sense, religious people can condemn humanity to basically death if they block tech developments, thinking some god will "save" us, and by "save" I mean let wipe.

So not as clear cut. You might hate the guy but he's not dumb, I think he knows what he's doing, or at least trying to do. But I have no clue on the "how", so I cannot talk about what he wants to do, specifically, with humans.