Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech

>> Peter Robinson: One of the most sophisticated men in America. Brilliant urbane, an immensely successful entrepreneur. One of the most sophisticated men in America taking ancient prophecies seriously, Peter Thiel on Uncommon Knowledge now.

>> Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Peter Thiel received his undergraduate and law degrees here at Stanford.

He co-founded PayPal, became the first outside investor in Facebook and co-founded Palantir and remains an important tech investor. He has also established himself as a remarkable thinker, a self-described contrarian. Peter Thiel has never proven more contrary than in taking seriously the biblical framework for probing the meaning of history and what ancient prophecies might help us to think, to understand about our predicament today.

I should note that although viewers will find this second conversation interesting enough on its own, I'm sure of that the conversation may prove even more striking if they've already watched our first conversation, which you'll be able to find on YouTube. Peter welcome back. The Antichrist. Cardinal Newman, the great 19th century author and theologian, writes that it is the duty, that's a quote from Newman, the duty of believers, quote, ever to be watching for the end times quote.

And above all to keep in mind the great and awful sign of which St. Paul speaks to the Thessalonians. The emergence of, quote, the very image of Satan, the fearful and hateful Antichrist, close quote. As I understand your argument, you hold one, that the prophecy of an Antichrist in one way or another remains valid or at least useful.

Two, that it remains our duty, again Cardinal Newman's word duty, to watch for the signs that it might emerge. And three, that duty is now almost entirely neglected and forgotten, fair?

>> Peter Thiel: Yes, yeah.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, go ahead.

>> Peter Thiel: I mean, there's so many different things one can say about.

There's a, I think it was Ivan Ilyich who said that in the time before Christ there were many forerunners to Christ. In the time after Christ there'll be many forerunners of the Antichrist. So in some sense it's a type. So Nero was a type of the Antichrist or maybe Napoleon was a type of the Antichrist.

It's someone who aspires for world domination, the creation of this sort of one world state. In some ways Alexander the Great was sort of a pre-Christ prototype of the Antichrist. It's very parallel to Christ. They both die at 33. Alexander conquers the world, Christ saves it. So sort of a compare and contrast.

But in some sense the Antichrist as an idea is something that really comes into being in the world after Christ. And then there's a lot of things about it that are mysterious. In some ways, the Antichrist copies Christ, the Antichrist pretends to be greater than Christ, hyper Christian, ultra Christian, and then maybe only ultimately, deeply anti Christian.

>> Peter Robinson: Go ahead.

>> Peter Thiel: And then you can think of it as a system where maybe communism is a one world system. So it can be an ideology or a system. And then, of course, you can also think of it as Newman did, where it's sort of the final dictator of the one world state, where it's still.

You stress it more as a person. You can think of it as a type, a system, a person. It has something to do in this post Christian. It's something that's sort of a possibility in this post Christian world. It is in some ways, and it's related to Christ in a very complicated way.

So the theological question you can always ask, is it possible to be too Christian? And in theory, no. But in practice, if you think you're more Christian than Christ, you're in trouble.

>> Peter Robinson: From a prophecy 2000 years old to our own times, you draw attention to two portrayals, fictional portrayals of an Antichrist from about a century ago.

Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian mystic, in 1900, wrote a book or a novella, a short tale of the Antichrist and then a 1905 novel by a Roman Catholic English priest called Robert Hugh Benson, and the novel is Lord of the World. In both of these fictional accounts, the Antichrist emerges as a charismatic figure, a kind of superman.

Soloviev quote, there was a remarkable person, many called him a superman. He believed in God, but in the depths of his soul, he preferred himself. In Benson, the Antichrist is portrayed again as a charismatic figure. He becomes President of Europe. Then in some mysterious way, he's elected President of the world.

But in both of those fictional accounts of a century ago, there's a plot hole. We're not given the mechanism by which this strange charismatic figure achieves dominance. And your argument is, again, if I understand it correctly, that now, today, a century after Soloviev and Robert Hugh Benson, we can understand a mechanism, we could imagine, a mechanism by which such a figure might emerge.

>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, by the way, those are both fantastic books. I have a preference for the Soloviev one. But Benson and Soloviev are both terrific books. There are all these extraordinary ways that they still resonate 100 years later. So Soloviev envisions the United States of Europe, so sort of a European Union, the sort of super state, in Benson, the Antichrist is a Jewish socialist senator from Vermont.

And so I was a little bit nervous about Bernie Sanders, but there sort of are elements of them where.

>> Peter Robinson: By the way, you're not quite the only person I noticed in reading up on this, Benedict XVI several times mentioned approvingly the Robert Hugh Benson book. And Pope Francis over and over again has referred to it. So two popes and Peter Thiel.

>> Peter Thiel: So there's some all sorts of parts of it where they have this feeling being near great literature. But the plot hole is sort of like, how does this sort of world take over actually happen? And it's kind of not a deus ex machina, but like a daimonium ex machina.

It's like the Antichrist just gives these hypnotic speeches where nobody can remember a word and then sort of just swindles people's souls out of them and they submit to this totalitarian state or something like this. And I think if we were to speculate on how to solve that plot hole, we have an answer in the world after 1945 that people are.

In 1900, early 20th century, people were not yet scared of apocalyptic weapons. They could not imagine anything of the scale that we'd have by the second half of the 20th century. And so the Antichrist takes over by talking about Armageddon.

>> Peter Robinson: Let's show this a brief video which we will edit into the show, of course.

>> Peter Thiel: One world or none.

>> Peter Robinson: Exactly.

>> Leslie Richard Groves Jr: There is no secret. When a neutron strikes, the atom is split. Release neutrons, split other atoms, the result is atomic energy. Shall the people of the world use this energy for the destruction or the betterment of mankind?

>> Peter Robinson: So that's a 1946 video.

Everything about it, the images, the tension in the narrator's voice, the background music, is to be scary. The choice is this or one world. That dates from 1946, as I said. But here's a quotation from just a few years ago. It's from a paper titled the Vulnerable World Hypothesis by the very hip techno philosopher Nick Bostrom.

Quote, what is needed to solve problems that involve challenges of international coordination, challenges such as nukes, pandemic dangers, techno threats, what is needed is effective global governance. Franklin Roosevelt designed the United nations to serve in some way as a kind of world parliament after the end of the Second World War.

The United Nations didn't work. But maybe FDR was just ahead of his time.

>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, well, it is the same. Look, this is the plot hole in Solovyov and Benson. And it's an interesting question. What is the difference between, we have this very secular language, one world or none, and then there's the sort of overly religious question, Antichrist or Armageddon?

And my thesis, they are somehow the same. And if I had to say what the difference between those two ways of asking the questions are, is, Antichrist or Armageddon, it sounds like they're both bad options. And that way of asking the question, it pushes us to find a third way and not to just steer from one into the other. One world or none, those sound like they're exclusive, but they're also exhaustive possibilities. And since we don't want to have no world, we want the one world.

>> Peter Robinson: Harvard Law School, Adrian Vermeule, wants big government. He has already argued for continent-wide government, which would represent a step toward global governance.

And his view is that if the government is based on some understanding of Christian ethics and you make sure that it reflects subsidiarity, the principle that problems should be solved by the smallest unit possible. Then big government, international coordinate, this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

And you just don't buy that?

>> Peter Thiel: I do not buy it. I think, I don't know, I'm much more in the Lord Acton camp that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And it would be a power with no check. There would be no outside left. In a sense, it would be the biggest crowd, it would be the biggest bubble.

Probably a place where the Bible differs from enlightened rationality. Enlightened rationality believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the madness of crowds. And if you have a world state that's in some sense the largest crowd, it's the whole humanity closing in on itself.

>> Peter Robinson: Global mob.

>> Peter Thiel: It's a global mob. So there are sort of are these intuitions that are probably adjacent to ideas about the fallen nature of man and original sin that make me nervous about the one-world state. Subsidiarity is good in theory and practice. The devil is in the details. And too much of the power has to be at the top level.

If you absolutize things like climate change or nuclear weapons control or things like this, that has to all be at the top echelon. It's not gonna be decided by the city of Palo Alto or by some kind of a subsidiary layer. I have sort of more prosaic intuitions where I sort of wonder what would be the marginal tax rates in a one-world state where people couldn't move, and-

>> Peter Robinson: High.

>> Peter Thiel: I suspect they would be quite high. It sort of would be like East Germany with no escape, and-

>> Peter Robinson: You couldn't move to Texas or Florida and get a zero income tax rate.

>> Peter Thiel: And then I think California would push them higher, and the US would push them higher, and the limit of that seems quite bad.

And then, of course, if you go down the Bostrom argument yet, you need effective global government and extremely effective global policing. And so if you think about things like AI technology, it's just we have to stop anyone from programming the AI. And so you have to, in some sense, monitor every keystroke everywhere.

So sort of something that's powerful enough to control the whole world.

>> Peter Robinson: So this goes back to your argument in the first part of this conversation, that for the first time in history, we can actually imagine human beings destroying the world. That's quite a plot. Now, also we have the mechanisms that would make world government.

A gigantic global surveillance state is plausible.

>> Peter Thiel: That seems plausible, too. And then I think, again, to come back to the Solovyov-Benson plot hole, on its own, they both seem not that desirable. Why would we have a crazy surveillance state? Why would we do this? But if you're scared enough, if you're scared enough of these things, that's the weapon.

And this is sort of where my speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time. And-

>> Peter Robinson: Peter Thiel, the antichrist would talk about Armageddon all the time. He'll scare people and then offer to save them.

>> Peter Thiel: Yes, it's the 1 Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety, which is nothing wrong with peace and safety. But you have to sort of imagine that it resonates very differently in a world where the stakes are so absolute, where the stakes are so extreme, where the alternative to peace and safety is Armageddon and the destruction of all things.

And then that's where peace and safety gets you way more than it would have in 1750.

>> Peter Robinson: 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.

>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, I think there are all these elements where it's downstream from Christianity. You can think of the poor shall inherit the earth, Sermon on the Mount. Marxist theory is, we're gonna be more Christian, we're gonna accelerate it, we're gonna bring it about faster. So there is, yeah, the Antichrist probably Presents as a great humanitarian, it's redistributive, it's an extremely great philanthropist, as an effective altruist, all of those kinds of things.

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. There are sort of ways Christ wants to unify the world. You have the parable of the Good Samaritan, where you should take care of people even if you're not related to them.

And it's good to act like the Good Samaritan and to take care of people who are 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, somehow it's an intensification, but it's somehow also very much the opposite.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, Scylla and Charybdis, and we come here. It'll take me another moment to set this up, but we come here. We depart now from Peter Thiel's analysis, and we come to Peter Thiel's exhortation, what needs to be done. Step or two to complete the analysis and then leads to what needs to be done, the questions at least we need to be asking.

Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus is on his way home, and he has to sail past two sea monsters. Scylla is a six-headed monster who will devour sailors. And Charybdis is a whirlpool that swallows ships whole and then spits them back out. And of course, they stand for sort of the horns of a dilemma.

That's the way Scylla and Charybdis get used the phrase Peter Thiel. Everyone is worried about the Scylla of Armageddon, nukes, pandemics, AI. Everyone is worried about the Scylla of Armageddon. We're not worried enough about the Charybdis of one world government, the Antichrist, explain.

>> Peter Thiel: This just seems obviously correct.

If you think about the language that we've been using in this program, Armageddon is not that taboo. And we just talked about that by referencing the newspapers.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Peter Thiel: We are sleepwalking into Armageddon, maybe not in the Ukraine or the Middle East, but maybe with Taiwan and China.

So there are all these-

>> Peter Robinson: Everybody feels the dread.

>> Peter Thiel: We can use Armageddon, and maybe it's literal and maybe it's metaphorical. But that's totally acceptable. So that tells you that's not the thing that's taboo. Antichrist is like, wow, what planet are you from?

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Peter Thiel: And so that tells me that the existential risks are very selective of the sort that we've given.

And the fears about a one-world state are downplayed because they are the solution to the other ones. That is the self-governing, politically atheist humans governing themselves. Solution to Armageddon is, it's what Bostrom says, it's effective world government with extremely effective policing to stop dangerous technologies from being developed.

And to force people to not have too diverse a set of views, because the diversity of views is what's going to push some scientists to develop technologies they shouldn't be developing. And so we are just so grooved to the Antichrist solution. We don't worry about it because it presents itself as the solution to all these others.

And then my intuition is that what that tells me is that we should worry about both. But if you had to prioritize them, you should be way more worried about the Antichrist because no one's worried about it. And of course, I don't know how literally one should take these biblical accounts, but in the biblical accounts, the Antichrist comes first because people are more scared of Armageddon than the Antichrist, perhaps.

The Antichrist comes first, It doesn't quite work, the one world state doesn't work, it still goes haywire. Maybe you have a fantastic communist government, but somehow the AI still goes mad and you still get to Armageddon. But that's what comes first.

>> Peter Robinson: As I understand it, you see three possibilities here.

Now we begin to move toward what is to be done. One is to end globalization outright, end world trade. But that would produce a dramatical, all but unthinkable drop in living standards. So end globalization, but that's all but unthinkable. Two, permit globalization to continue in an unfettered manner, but that would be likely to lead to world government.

Three, permit globalization to continue, but only in a permissible, good, salutary way. Limited, tame it, make sure it never supplants nation states. Peter Thiel, our only chance of achieving good globalization is to be critical of globalization, to recognize the narrowness of the path, Peter.

>> Peter Thiel: Well, the way I would frame that is it's certainly hard to see how things can work if we completely deglobalize.

If you go back to this world that's completely separated and with no trade, no flow of ideas between different parts of the world.

>> Peter Robinson: Eliminate the Internet and container shipping, and you've got it.

>> Peter Thiel: I don't think that's easier said than done.

>> Peter Robinson: If much, yes.

>> Peter Thiel: It's easier said than done.

But then, it's precisely because we can't simply turn the clock back on all globalization that we end up having what I would call this Stockholm Syndrome. And is globalization more good than bad? Is it just of a corrupt racket where North Korea exports plutonium and counterfeit $100 bills and imports Swedish prostitutes and whiskey or whatever they import?

If you have this view that, no globalization can't be an option, you will have two Panglossian view of globalization. This is my critique of the Fukuyama, Clinton, Bush, WTO.

>> Peter Robinson: The New World Order, free trade, it'll all take care of itself.

>> Peter Thiel: It was always abstracted. Everything takes care of itself.

It will all work out for the best. And at a minimum, you need to just always think, there are so many bad forms of globalization, our only chance of getting to a good one is to realize how tough it is. Maybe we should have trade treaties, we should negotiate them.

They should always be negotiated by people who don't believe in free trade. If you have someone lives in free trades, we don't need to pay attention to the details, it always will work out for the best. So, yes, there's a way I think one should try to negotiate these treaties.

But you always want someone on your side who deeply doesn't believe in it and who is going to hold out for all sorts of terms. And that's sort of how we might get our way through, but, But yeah, I think we had all these versions of this. I think there's the strange Chimerica, the sort of mythical fusion of China and America that is maybe 28 years from Bush 41 to Obama, from something like 88 to 2016.

And yeah, we don't wanna go to a nuclear war with China, we don't probably don't want to go to a major war. But it's a very complicated way to manage this relationship. And simply the Panglossian intuitions that everything will automatically work out probably don't quite make it. There's always a book I like to reference from 1910, the Great Illusion by Norman Angel.

This is a pre-World War I book, 1910. And it is the world is connected through trade and finance that there cannot be a world war because it would just destroy more than it would create. And it was massive bestseller in 1910. Angel actually gets a Nobel Peace Prize for the book in 1933, even though sort of spectacularly wrong.

But one of the lines in it was Britain going to war with Germany makes as much sense as London invading Hertfordshire, the adjacent county to London. And it was just the stock market would go down, more couldn't do this and everyone would lose, and yet that happened. And so, the sort of glib globalization I think is not gonna work.

And we need to just ask a relentless number of hard questions about it.

>> Peter Robinson: Got it.

>> Peter Thiel: But then yes, it's always in the details. I think we have to find some way to talk about these technologies where the technologies are dangerous. But in some sense it's even more dangerous not to do them.

It's even more dangerous to have a society where there's zero growth. If we go full on with the club of Rome limits to growth, we have this fully Luddite program that again, my intuitions is that that will end very badly politically. It's gonna be a zero sum nasty Malthusian society and it will push towards something that's much more autocratic, much more totalitarian, because the pie won't grow.

People will be much nastier.

>> Peter Robinson: So what you're asking for, well, okay, so let me ask what you're asking for a little bit here. You said at the Cambridge Union earlier this year that you were going to stay out of politics this time. So I won't ask you about politics exactly, but you are arguing that we should be supporting candidates who put America first.

Is that roughly where we're going here? Skeptics of free trade, this all tends toward one side of the political argument? Or are you simply, is this an X or 2? Are you aiming your? Are you aiming this at universities and simply calling for renewed, far more practical debate, far more alive, to the dangers that we now face that have never been faced by humanity before?

>> Peter Thiel: Well, my starting answer for all these things is always, surely the first step is to think about these things really hard. And-

>> Peter Robinson: Ask the questions that are not being asked.

>> Peter Thiel: Ask the questions that are not being asked questions that are not being asked. Maybe the way I frame them are too dramatic.

But if that's what it takes for us to ask these questions, that's better than being stuck in, I don't know, in some weird, silly groundhog day game. I think my intuition is the stakes are very high, the political stakes are high because there are a lot of crazy things that can happen.

It's hard to evaluate which of these candidates are better. It's not just about the price of eggs or marginal inflation rates or things like this. It is about maintaining freedom in the US and also not sleepwalking into Armageddon.

>> Peter Robinson: Peter, I have a confession to make. In my mind, when you first started talking about Scylla and Charybdis, this analysis, I wronged you.

I thought to myself, this is Peter being Peter. He loves building intellectual models, he has the kind of mind that goes in that direction Hegel, Weber, Strauss. Reality is of second order. The real importance here is the model, the intellectual model, because you enjoy it for its own sake.

And I do think that you do have a mind that looks for structures and frameworks. All right, but here, then, I come across this passage from our old friend Rene. This is Rene Girard in 2009, the more probable the apocalypse becomes, the less we talk about it. Therefore, we have to awaken our sleeping consciences.

And I thought, this is not a game for Peter. You are taking, this is serious to you, you believe that. You see questions that need to be asked that are not being asked, and you are trying to awaken our sleeping consciences. Will you accept that compliment?

>> Peter Thiel: I'll take that.

>> Peter Robinson: And you'll accept that confession. All right, so, Peter Thiel, I'm quoting you now. What I hope to retrieve is a sense of the stakes, of the urgency of the question, the stakes are really, really high. It seems very dangerous that we're at a place where so few people are concerned about the Antichrist, close quote.

>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, it's all the reasons we've gone through.

>> Peter Robinson: Okay, what kind of response have you been getting, by the way, you haven't written a book. I understand you're thinking about a book on this, but you haven't written it yet. You're still going through various iterations, talking to small groups of people.

I heard you give a series of talks on this. What has the response been?

>> Peter Thiel: It's certainly. It takes a while for people to get into the frame and then people are extremely engaged and there is, it's not like the anxiety doesn't exist. It's not like people think everything is quite as normal as it should be.

And then I think the point of it is not to be in some sense defeatist, this is just inscribed in the future. The point of it is to start thinking about what can be done, what some of the choices are. And Antichrist or Armageddon, that framing, we can envision a third way, one world or none.

That's pretty hard to envision a third way. And so, that's where I think the biblical language, it sounds crazier, but it's actually more hopeful. One world or none, those are the two options if you're a political atheist.

>> Peter Robinson: Right.

>> Peter Thiel: We have human self-government or human self-destruction. And it's a choice of two incredible evils, and I don't think these things are, I'm not a Calvinist.

I don't think these things are determined- Predestined. Predestined, I always believe there's a space for human agency, For us to shape the history. And the first step has to be not to just bury our heads in the sand or whatever the equivalent is.

>> Peter Robinson: So, the United States, two quotations, Ronald Reagan.

It's always been my belief that by a divine plan this nation was placed between the two oceans to be sought out and found by those with a special brand of courage and love of freedom, close quote. So, could it be that the United States is itself a catacon, a restrainer, a force that by its economic power and military might and the example it sets to the world, holds back the chaos?

I would like to believe that, you and I aren't that far apart in age, we both grew up when the country still worked under Reagan. Here's the second quotation, this is Peter Thiel, quote. One obvious candidate for the antichrist is the United States.

>> Peter Thiel: Well, I think the US-

>> Peter Robinson: Answer that without breaking my heart, please.

>> Peter Thiel: I think the US is a natural candidate for both, and certainly the Cold War history, 49 to 89, I think Christian democracy was catacontic. I think anti-communism was the supranational ideology that stood against the one world state of communism.

Again, this is very speculative, but if you think the one world state is a military power, it's a financial, economic power, somehow an ideological power. There still is a natural way where if things go wrong in the US it would be the fulfillment of FDR's vision of the New Dealers running the world.

And so the US is ground zero of globalization and it's ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization, we're both. That's why it matters so much, the President of the United States maybe is the catacomb, maybe it's a type of antichrist, but presidential elections matter. They don't matter, President of Europe, and I think the intuition that they matter in the US is correct.

I'm not saying that will be the case for all time, but certainly second half of the 20th century and still today.

>> Peter Robinson: A couple of last questions here, Rene Girard, again, in 2009. Quote, to make the revelation wholly good and not threatening at all, to eliminate this fear, this dread, humans have only to adopt the behavior recommended by Christ, close quote.

Rene himself, as you know, ended his life as a very devout Catholic. Has this analysis had any effect on your own religious life? Or is it in some way a kind of cop out to say, no, no, all we need to do is all practice personal holiness as best we can?

>> Peter Thiel: Girard always said you just need to go to church, and I try to go to church.

>> Peter Robinson: Rene would be very happy, somewhere he is pleased.

>> Peter Thiel: And then at the same time I think that there is some part of it that is political, or social, or something like that.

And maybe it's always a way in which I'm not as much of a saint as I should be, but I keep thinking we have to also try. I wanna always try some of both, both the personal and the political. I think Mother Teresa was a greater saint than Constantine.

But there's still a part of me that has a preference for the Christianity of Constantine, we still need something like that.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, Revelation is a very frightening book, in my judgment. In any event, we've got plagues and beasts and the end of the world. But at the very beginning, I went back to prepare for all of this, I went back and looked at Revelation again.

At the very beginning of the vision that St. John describes in the Book of Revelation, here's what we get. Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning, I saw one like a son of man. His voice was like the sound of rushing water, and his face shone like the sun.

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, fear not. Fear not I died, and behold I am alive, close quote. So what are we to do with this fear not? You've mentioned this a number of times, this notion.

It's always the problem in trying to understand history. What's going to happen no matter what we do, and what scope is there for personal action? Fear not is an injunction in the book of Revelation from Christ himself. So Christians are meant to take it very seriously, but you could easily take it as a kind of, it'll all work out.

There's nothing I need to do. There's nothing any of us need to do, it's out of our hands, it'll all work out. What do you do with fear not?

>> Peter Thiel: Well, this is sort of starting to get way, way, way above my theological pay grade. But I think it means something, I think God will work it all out, no matter how bad the choices are we make.

And so in some sense, in the end, God will work it out. And then at the same time, I'm not sure that we should always be looking at it from God's point of view and from a human point of view Human agency matters. It surely matters a lot.

>> Peter Robinson: All right, last question. Let me quote you one final time. Quote, maybe people think about this stuff a lot more than they let on, close quote. So what do you have to say to some bright 20-something who does think about this stuff? What should some young American read?

What should he or she do? What advice about how to lead a good life when we think we may be in the end of times? What advice do you have for a young Peter Thiel?

>> Peter Thiel: I'm always so bad in this department, but-

>> Peter Robinson: Stumble through it.

>> Peter Thiel: I think if it's too high a lift to go to church or something like that.

I would say that it's important to try to find a way to integrate your life to just fragment in all these different ways. And to integrate the knowledge, to connect what we think is going on in your life with history, with our society. We need to somehow not have this postmodern MTV like incoherence, and there's some way that asking these questions, we need somewhat more integration.

We need to somehow pull things back together. It's what the universities were supposed to do, don't think they will do it, but you have to figure-

>> Peter Robinson: After years of deconstruction, you're calling for an act of reconstruction.

>> Peter Thiel: Yeah, it may not happen, the progressive cult that is the university, but still it is really a time for reconstruction.

>> Peter Robinson: Peter Thiel, thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge of the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.