151. The Black Horse: Peter Thiel, a Surprisingly Deep Thinker

0:00You are listening to Seeking the Hidden Thing with Cryptos. Greetings, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Seeking the Hidden Thing podcast. It is my pleasure to have on, again, an old friend of the show, the Black Horse. Welcome, Black Horse. Well, thank you for having me, Harry, don't. I'm doing very well, actually. I've been inhaling chlorine for two days now. My children got involved in competitive swimming, and that is the striver sport of striver

1:07sports. And so being a class trader, of course, you can't, in order to be fully strosy, and you have to do all the things that proper strivers do, and one of those is having your children in competitive swimming. So, well, yeah, so there we go. I have been inhaling chlorine, and the air in the pool, it goes up and down, and today was particularly, it was hot, humid, and the air is nasty. My sinuses are all dried out, and I had to take Advil when I got home, so, but there we go. So here I am. Go ahead. I am particularly good today, because we are here to talk about one of the earliest dissident intellectual influences of my life, a huge number of people kind of entered these spaces in and around 2020.

2:10But my history in non-standard politics goes back a lot farther, and it goes back a lot farther, in large part, thanks to Peter Teele. Yeah, because you messaged me about a week ago, and you said, have you ever read any Peter Teele? He's a surprisingly deep thinker, and I'm like, you know, I never really have, I've never even really, I never really thought of Peter Teele as a quote unquote thinker. And then you sent me a bunch of links, and which thankfully like our friend's skeptical waves has narrated them digitally. And then I was printed them off and read a few, and you are absolutely correct that Peter Teele is a remarkably deep thinker, and is not afraid to go into areas that are very much taboo. So he addresses, you know, the question of diversity, he addresses the question of the end, you know, are we actually making human, is human progress still a thing, was it ever a thing?

3:15And then also the question of the, the neutral society of the West, is it sustainable? Well, the other thing that is notable about Teele is that he did most of his intellectual work at it, not during the period where people, like Peter Teele has been very famous since he became the first outside investor in Facebook, right? He made most of, he made a lot of money in PayPal, but he ascended to the top of the American merchant oligarchy as a consequence of the, the first outside investment in Facebook, and notably as a result of the production of Palantir, which is an extremely important technology as part of the military industrial complex, which made him, took him from an interesting outside thinker to an element of the US governing class, but most of his interesting

4:19work and actually all occurred long before any of that happened. Back when he was right, he was 95 up to, like the articles that we have are all between 95 and 2010. Yeah. Well, before in Walteness really hits the scene in and around 2010, and by that time Peter Teele had already pretty much told you it was all going to happen. Well, and the diversity myth, which is written while Peter Teele was still a student at Stanford, is essentially identical, and I don't mean this with criticism to Jeremy Carl, but there's, nothing in Jeremy Carl's book circa 2024 that isn't also in the diversity myth in 1995. Yeah. So, and Jeremy Carl is more after the facts, sort of documenting it in gruesome detail, and explaining to you that this is all of the result of a diversity agenda, and this is exactly why it's happening.

5:19But what's in one of the things that's interesting about the diversity myth is as the policy is that these are coming down, he is articulating precisely what the consequences of them will be. Right? So, the great war on campus at Stanford when he's writing this is the war to end the Western civilization curriculum. Right? So, prior to the early 90s, every student that passed through Stanford had to take a core curriculum on Western civilization that involved reading the classics and involved imbibing the narrative, the central narrative of Western civilization from basically from Greece through to the birth of modernity. Yes. And what's really interesting is, Teal's willingness to embrace a, or to acknowledge,

6:20I would say, this is basically a Marxist analysis, but all of this is happening because of money, which I don't know how many, like, I don't know what your familiarity is with Malcolm Cayuna, but he has made that point again and again that a lot of these policies are basically ways to pay off certain interest groups or to fund certain interest groups. The question of diversity in a prosperous society tries to answer the question of how do society apportion the rewards from the immense prosperity that Western industrial capitalism has generated? And the question of diversity is a way of saying that, well, these should be apportioned fairly. Right. It's a spoiled system. A spoiled system.

7:21And so, all of the things like that, you know, come into it and he highlights a number of things in real estate and university development. But you look at a lot of these programs that I think I sent you a piece the other day on elite theory that came up in Aaron Ren's recent studies, somebody's explaining elite theory in terms of this very thing, that a lot of what you're seeing today in terms of these diversity initiatives are really open, are just merely opening up new sort of clientele to, or maybe not even open up, but to preserve existing clientele in your political base, to keep them in a position where they feel secure in their superior social position. Well, and when, if you roll back the tape to the early 90s, the period that informs the writing of the diversity myth, you're dealing with a completely different society, mass

8:26immigration has not happened yet. And Nor has, if you, the effect of the Civil Rights Act and disparate impact and the cluster of rulings in the early 90s, that vastly expanded disparate impact as a body of law, had a kind of, the first people to get filled into these positions were the most competent people who could possibly fill them. So most people, when the first diversity hires entered these institutions, took entirely the wrong lesson because the first, as a massive victory and said, this is wonderful. We need to do more of this because this is great. Well, but also the first person who was hired was probably somebody who was actually qualified for the position. Yes.

9:27And maybe he had been excluded because of the color of his skin. Yeah, I mean, maybe. But the, when you, if you imagine this as like a school yard draft, always the first person picked out out of the pool is the best. Maybe the captain is better, but the first person you pick is a pretty good player. The more people you pick, the, the state of the, the game changes quite a bit over time. Yes, it does. Well, and you don't even have to get that far down the list, right? Like your best friend who's not a great athlete might understand why you pick two or three guys ahead of him, but your best friend is not going to, is not going to be cool with the fact that he got picked last when you divvied up the teams. So you might pick him third and everybody's looking like, oh, he picked him because he's his best friend, right? But that's, but that's in a sense, this is the kind of thing that, that, that Tiel notes is that you, and he was noting this in originally, because the book that, or he, the speech was given in 2023, but it's, it's from the book, The Diversity Myth came out in, in 1995.

10:291995. Yes. Right. And so he's, he's basically noting in 2023 that I was right about everything. Yes. You know, and I, there, there is something satisfying about just taking a room of, of high powered people and just pointing out to them that, you know, hey, I was, you know, I was right about this. And so we're in this spot that we're in, in part because we drop the ball, but this, but this, this, this is where then I think, and just to be clear, because Tiel's greatest insight in the diversity myth, myth is that hiring is not just a spoil system, hiring is a competence hierarchy that has a spoil system attached to it. And so I, I mean, this is fairly obvious if you are, are kind of honest about it, but I, 1995 was not a particularly honest time, nor is academia a particularly honest place.

11:35And so having the courage to point out that actually handing out centricures, that if this practice continues on any kind of long term basis, what was an attempt to distribute spoils according to political priorities is going to rapidly transform into something very different. And that, that's the thing that Tiel was right about that nobody else was talking about in, in the 90s. And, and not only that is that when it begins to get entrenched, that, you know, like he mentions the Nobel Prize guy at Stanford, who then thought that because he now had received a Nobel Prize, that he would then be gifted and privileged with pure academic immune, real academic freedom, yes, real academic freedom, and begin to investigate the question of, is science actually happening at Stanford?

12:37And of course, the answer is, of course, not, of course, not, of course, not, of course, not. Stanford, since the post, since like the 1960s, and I like, I love Tiel's like commentary and, and the, the result of that was as you would expect it. It's just, it's, it really is beautiful. And, you know, Tiel, very famous critic of academia, runs the Tiel Fellowship where he bribed students to drop out of Ivy League institutions, in order to do something useful instead of being a student. The infamous Tiel Bucks. Yeah. Well, I mean, the Tiel Fellowship was before Tiel Bucks. Tiel Bucks were supposed, was his supposed patronage scheme for the online right. I've never been able to figure out whether Tiel Bucks were real or not, but it's, I strongly suspect that they're not as real as people imagine. They're more of a meme than something substantial. And if they are substantial, the people who have them are keeping it very, very quiet.

13:40Well, you know, if they are substantial, I mean, Mr. Tiel, we are doing a podcast on your intellectual contribution. Yeah. You know, my DMs are open. Does he maintain a Twitter presence? He does, but he says nothing on Twitter. Maybe we'll have to tag him when we, when we do the announcement. And, and now that we said nice things about him, maybe we can be set up for life. Yeah. Deep and intelligent research this way. But I think that the, this is the kind of thing that he, he notes, though, is that this question of political correctness, that there are certain truths you can't notice, that there are certain things you can't say, and that a system, a certain system of spoils is going to be imposed, that you then cannot talk about, is going to have predictable results on sort of one of the key foundational pillars of Western society.

14:40And that is human progress, in a sense, the overcoming of, and, and this, I think people don't realize, in a sense, how, how vital this really is, and then for the guys that really understand this, you know, and recent is another one, I think, who really does get it in that regard. That human progress has always been about overcoming the Malthusian trap. Yeah, this is absolutely correct. Teal notes this. But the basic idea is that the postwar structure, and we can talk about this more when we talk about the Straussian moment, which in my, my opinion, is the most profound essay that anyone in the, in the early 2010s ever wrote. The Straussian moment occurs right at the moment where the economic growth of the society at large can no longer compensate people to forget about their real meaning needs.

15:44So when, now this is, looks like it's part of a book, right, because I, it starts on page 189, right, on the printout that I have. So the Straussian moment is originally published in, I think, I think it's in first well, that's a good question. I don't know where you've published it. I think it was in one of these like old Neocon mags. Oh, the big magazine. So I like it. You have the addition of such and such and such and such. So that would, okay, that would make sense then, because it doesn't, it has the feeling, I mean, it is an article, um, it's a lengthy one. And I was kind of curious because it didn't say anywhere on here where, so it was presented as a conference paper and then published in, uh, studies in violence, mimesis and culture in absolutely obscure academic journal in, it was presented first at, at, at a conference in 2004 and then, uh, published in 2007 and, uh, didn't really rise to prominence or more than a decade thereafter.

16:49Yeah. Now, this case, so now when was that written in that was in, um, so it was presented as a conference paper in 2004. Okay. So that would be, and then it was published in 2007. Yeah. So that would be a thing of his, his, his comments on, on human progress. Okay. So let's, so the Straussian moment, um, he's, he's working through this idea of kind of what is the West in that regard. Well, so there are a number of defining elements of his view of the world. Which are laid out in the Straussian moment. The first thing, Athens and Greece thing is where he begins, right? This, this, this, this conflict between Athens and Greek or Athens and, and Jerusalem, right? Yeah. So you, I just, for, to glory for the city, or you pursue a right relationship with God, but you cannot pursue both at the same time, the arties. Yeah.

17:50But in terms of the themes of it, like, he, he lifts that directly from Leo Strauss, right? So Tiel is part of this collection of thinkers at Stanford, along with Reneja Rard and, uh, the various other disciples of Strauss who all go on to become like Neil, Neil cons in the, uh, 2000s, Tiel falls is somewhat different path. But already in the Straussian moment, you can, you can see Tiel's highly contrarian stagnation thesis where he argues that since the 1970s, there has been essentially no progress in areas of science outside computing. He lays out the fact that this collapse in progress is going to lead directly to the end of the post war consensus, uh, as, as it has been known.

18:52And you're going to see first order questions, that is questions of meaning, questions of, uh, religion, questions of ethnicity, uh, re-emerge as elements of the political discourse. Uh, and that the consequences of that are potentially, um, apocalyptic and scope. Yeah, and he, he makes a very cogent case that the West was founded by setting aside a series of questions. So he begins this, the question of human nature, and this will be on page 191. We'll link to this in the, in the show notes. Um, what is, or from the enlightenment on modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central. What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this?

19:54And for the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature. Right. So, uh, and he ties this intimately back to the, the moment of, um, the enlightenment, right? So he marks the moment of the enlightenment as the end of the 30 years war in the peace of Westphalia. Right? Oh, yeah. That's right. 16 Ford, what is it? 1648 at the peace of Westphalia? Yeah, 1648, the peace of Westphalia. And what he says is that the wars of religion in Germany, the 30 years war being the climax represent this, um, spasm of the pre-modern mind, fighting over these first order questions, of it, nesty, questions of religion, questions of human nature, uh, questions of the nature of the authority, the Catholic church, and the, the, the, the treaty of Westphalia and the, in light, the quote, enlightenment that follows are a consequence of the choice to

20:59abandon these questions and to put it colloquially, focus on making money, making material progress instead. By means of like using, harnessing the power of science and the, and machines to, to make money and control reality and, and, and, well, and in teals thinking as an investor, essentially reallocating all of these resources, which were dedicated to fighting over these primary questions and allocating them instead to maximizing the commercial potential of the West. Yes, and it, it, so it, and he puts it this way, which is the language was interesting, right? So, you know, um, instead, it recognized, you know, the older tradition recognized that humans are potentially evil or at least dangerous human beings, you know, and, and the, this idea says, as we, we set aside this notion that human beings have the potential for evil or, which is the, the, the term dangerous is that schmitty in term. Um, and which he, he does then raise

22:05Smith later, but it's a clue to where he's going with this is like, yeah, the only author that really uses the term dangerous is Carl Schmitt, um, to describe sinful human beings. Um, but he says basically that whole idea that humanity is a threat was set aside and, and asking the question of why humanity is a threat. Well, I also don't think you can read the Straussian moment as an essay without poppers, the open society and its enemies in your other hand. Um, actually, yeah, in study, it's like, they basically says that human beings instead are just homoeconomicists. We're not spiritually human beings at all. We just basically desire to satisfy our material needs. Yes. And Teal is implicitly presenting the argument that you can convince people to live as homo-economicist, as long as the material standards of living continue to go up. And then he points out

23:06the material standards of living are not going to continue to go up. And that is in a sense, and this is where, and finding a lot of people think about it, it begins with a fundamentally in a sense, religious question or a rejection of a religious question. We're not going to talk about that anymore. But in reality, modernity has really been, the sense we can use the power of reason science and technology to overcome the Malthusian trap. And it's, it's that he puts another quote, right? Because he talks about this notion of, you know, since the city and the church reproach one another with the vanity of their sacrifice, the individual is the man who rejects each form of sacrifice and defines himself by this refusal. So that's what he talks about, and that's actually got a footnote in it from number four. I like to see where he draws that from. I didn't bother to look at first, but this is great podcast, and we're just doing our research on the air. So that's from

24:08Manette, the city page 35. So he, but he's basically saying is that this rejection of the, of human nature is also at the same time a rejection of sacrifice. And I think that's very, very important that you must sacrifice yourself for one or the one or two realities, either for the glory of the city and its prolonged life or for the glory of gone and your relationship with it, but both require sacrifice and both have been held in the west have been held in tension and competing with each other. So which sacrifice will dominate? And modernity said, like, screw it, we're not going to sacrifice for anything. We're just going to make so much abundance that we don't need to sacrifice at all. Yes. And now you end up with the Boomer generation. And the Boomer generation are really a several hundred year conclusion of a sense achieving what the appearance of

25:12achieving that prosperity is that we don't have to make sacrifices anymore. Yeah, I mean, I think Teal would not have written this in 2003, but I think subtextually he's pointing out that just like the peace of Westphalia was the moment after the peace of Westphalia looked in horror back at the 30 years war, which in which a huge fraction of the population of central Europe was exterminated. Half of Germany. Yeah, there there was a similar social moment in the aftermath of the conflicts of the first half of the 20th century. The first and second world war, the iron curtain descending over Europe, the Ukraine famine, all of that packaged together created a comparable moment in the early postwar period where in elite culture, the decision was taken

26:12to banish these first order questions again. And it's interesting as you know, we've seen certain conflicts come up in the news like for example that one about taking down the the demonic or the the altar to Satan in the Iowa State House. Yeah. Right. And how, you know, we can't do that because it would it would it would damage freedom of religion. And you can begin to see that even among many who consider themselves to be Christians, that they're those Christian commitments are subordinated and operate within a larger order. And and Teal talks about he says, and next questions of virtue and religion became private questions polite and respectable individuals learn not to talk about them too much because they could lead to nothing but unproductive conflicts. And so this then becomes the primary commitment of the of the of the of the modern public space is to avoid basically it's almost like we like the World War II narrative, right? It's the never again.

27:16So we're now going to we're never again going to have a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, right? We're never going to have this type of, you know, deep conflict over the meaning of, you know, God, human nature, sin and theology and all this kind of stuff. I think Peter Teal would say that it's a that popper is doing again at a dot at an at an elevated level what the piece of Westphalia did for the conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Yeah. In many ways, maybe World War II is just like the the the the piece that emerges after World War II, what we call the mid-century consensus is a new Westphalia recapitulation of Westphalia. That that's exactly right in Teal's view that it's I mean, it's like Westphalia on steroids because Westphalia banishes certain religious questions. They get, you know, it happens in Germany with Westphalia, but it happens all over Europe as a result of these very, very intense ethnic and religious wars. The the post-war consensus is what popper would call the open society

28:27and its enemies. The decision is a decision to banish an even larger set of questions from society so that even to ask them is a cardinal sin against against the social order. Yeah. And then what's really interesting then is he uses via John Locke and the influence that Locke had on the the founding era of the of the United States. And I think he's I think as he goes through it, that Teal is correct in this, that America as a country is in many ways the instantiation of the peace of Westphalia. That's correct, yes. As a political state. Yeah, so if you look at the first amendment to the constitution, the first amendment to the constitution is the if you look at the peace of Westphalia, the peace of Westphalia says that kings have the right to decide churches within their own borders. The American constitution

29:33originally says that states have this right, so it's a direct lift. But the way the first amendment gets recapitulated as America develops, it becomes instead a command to banish religious questions from the public square altogether, which is like it's not the peace of Westphalia, it's not the enlightenment, it's something even more aggressive at banishing these first order questions. And what Teal goes on to say is he draws in on Locke because basically what what Locke is trying to say is that you can talk about Christianity and Christian values and Christian morality as long as you're not really passionate about it. So you can have all of this stuff there and it can be a feature that doesn't disappear from our public space, but they're once they enter the world of the public space, they're not supposed to

30:34inspire any passion in you. They're just there as in a sense artifacts of things that we talk about and if they have more meaning for you in the private space, that's fine. We can be a quote-unquote Christian country. We're going to have all of these Christian symbols. We're going to talk about them all, but we're not going to do so with any kind of passion. They're just going to be kind of there. And I think that's sort of the essential point is that in a sense that the sort of civic Christianity that you get then in the United States has all of the sort of the veneer of Christian language, but none of the passion. And that in some sense, and this is a sense where the conservative right, the big sin of the conservative right, is being passionate about their Christian faith. Well, and I also think that a lot of the same perspectives presented by Teal in the diversity myth allowed him to see the fundamental unsustainability of that

31:34civic model of Christianity, right? Because if you privatize Christianity and if you remove the, if you neuter it as a public witness, it becomes intergenerational in communicable. And so for a lot of the same reasons, Teal predicts the collapse of the, of academia, most formatively, but also of American business more broadly. You can lift the same framework and point out that the, that the open society that is imposed in the West after the Second World War is not generationally transmissible in the same way as a society with a greater degree of openness to asking these primary questions. And I think this is one of the things that's

32:37unstated in the essay, the Straussian moment is why is the Straussian moment now, right? Why is the moment where the banishment of these primary questions ends? Why does Teal think that this is going to occur in the period after 2005? He points to material progress as an element, right? The society can no longer buy off these people. But what he doesn't point out, which is obvious in retrospect, is that there are other reasons, the collapse in birth rate is a great example of another reason why this consensus is unsustainable. The inability of the West to make a case against mass migration, right? To make an ethical case in contrast to the, there's an economic case presented in the 90s and early 2000s for why mass migration should happen. And there's no ability because of

33:40this consensus not to talk about primary questions to articulate why mass migration is a crime, at least within elite culture. And I think the, Teal is sensing, but does not articulate, that these trends are going to meet in the coming years to create a moment where it is impossible to avoid the reemergence of these questions. Well, and as you can see, the same question of mass immigration from the critical side reentering into the discourse is that it reenters in on the economic vectors. Like when you see the studies coming out of Denmark and so forth, they're basically, well, at the promised economic gains that they said we're going to happen, didn't happen. And in fact, it's making things worse. And so now we need to pivot away from these because we've got, we've deepened the problems that we had. We, we were trying to address rather

34:40than solving them. But as you say, they're in, but in neoliberal world, they're trying to address this question without addressing the primary question. They're trying to do it within the framework of this Western world where you have religious, cultural, societal pieces there that we could, in some sense, we can talk about being a Canadian, like the nation of Canada. But we can talk about Canada, but Canada is not really supposed to mean anything to you. It's all, like there's a kind of, there's a vibes to it, but it's very, very fairy and it doesn't connect with the deepest core of your being. But it motivates you, but it doesn't, but doesn't motivate you too much. Well, and in my, from my perspective, the magic of the Mark Carney moment is how do we figure out how to send millions of people back where they came from? Well, not arguing that we're doing so in order to protect our, our ethic interests in the country. Yeah. And so you're, you're basically

35:43in a fundamental contradiction. And in part, and this is the, the other piece that you're talking about that, and I, I raised this, I actually got a response from Mark and Drieson on Twitter about this is that, you know, when he talked about sort of like, okay, we need to end woke. And what did he say? Well, we need to get back to focusing on making excellent products again, you know, just, manufacturing really good things. And there was a disconnect in the sense that this idea that we could just focus on homoeconomicus and just making excellent products, ultimately that doesn't fulfill some of the deepest needs of human beings, which are ultimately spiritual. And so the real problem in a sense is the nihilism in the West is that nothing, if you, if you, if you do this world of John Locke, where we have no meaning in life and we can talk about religion and we can talk about Jesus, but Jesus can't really be, oh, you can't really mean a whole lot and you can't take it all too seriously, but you can still talk about it. And if you think more in your pride, that's fine.

36:45But once you go down that road, you really, what you discover as we're discovering today, is that people want meaning in their life. And so in many ways, wokeness was a way, and Teal addresses this as a religious question, that that wokeness is a reemergence of the religious without having to have religion. But in the same time, it doesn't work because it really, in the end, it doesn't provide the meaning because ultimately, as you say, it's, you know, as he notes as well too, you know, it's ultimately a jobs program for certain constituencies, right? So there, there is a sense where even the things that they want to have give meaning, don't give meaning. And you look at the number of people who are on SSRIs, you look at the number of people who try to escape into video games. It's just like, it's on and on and on. All of the ways that people are trying to escape from the reality that their lives don't mean anything. Well, and I think at this point, it is important to note that the defining characteristic of the period between when Teal wrote this in 2003. And as we sit here today in 2025, the

37:55defining characteristic of the intervening period is the hardening of the security state in order to keep these questions from reemerging, right? Exactly. That's a really good insight. Yeah, instead of, yeah, instead of simply, it's not so much to say is that they don't want us talking about the really deep questions of life. Well, so instead of allowing the reemergence of these questions naturally, the decision of our ruling class or end instead of finding a way to deliver enough material prosperity to make these questions disappear in the minds of the population, they instead went a third way, which is to exclude the questions as a matter of force, right? So in the United Kingdom today, if you attempt to ask serious questions about religion or ethnicity, you'll find yourself in a prison cell very, very quickly. Yeah, go try praying outside an abortion clinic. Yes, stand still. Actually, all you have to do is just stand still with your hands clasped

39:00in front of an abortion clinic. And you can be arrested. And like they, like, how do you, like, I think the one person that was on video, like, how do you know that I'm praying? And the underlying issue here is that simply to ask the question, not even to try to answer it in the affirmative, simply to ask the question of whether something meaningful is occurring at an abortion clinic is to undermine the consensus, which means it cannot be tolerated. Yes. And in some ways, even things like the Trump movement or like the Mark Karni resurgence are all efforts, like, rear guard efforts to reinvigorate public Christianity. Nobody still wants to talk about these deeper realities, like, you know, like, why do we need to impose tariffs

40:00and make ourselves lots of money again? You know, why do we need to reinvigorate American, you know, industry? Well, we just, you know, and what, well, I get a tremendous amount of pushback from this across every platform because I repeatedly make the argument that the problem in the West is not that we're too poor. Right? If you look at, like, I don't think there's a single problem in the United States that is defined by a lack of resources. I don't think that's the problem with birth rates. I don't think that the problem with the, I don't think there's a single problem in the United States that is a consequence of not having enough money. Well, yes and no, I don't disagree with you, but I think, but if you read to a point, it is that there's a perception that people don't have the kind of money that they thought they should have. Well, and if I put my elite hat on, right, imagine myself as part of the governing class. No, I put my hat on as part of the

41:03governing class of the American Empire, then every problem is a result of Americans not having enough money. And I think this is, right, I think this is the basic, this is one of the basic contrasts that come out here. The entire governing class of the American Empire would like to continue to continue to banish these questions of meaning because it's the only way to properly manage the empire they've assembled. And the only way they can think of to banish these questions is to deliver enough material prosperity to, you know, pay everyone off to make the questions go away. Which then, yeah, and it's interesting because like teal himself, he says it this way too, he says, and so in a somewhat paradoxical manner, the unknowable of X leads to classical liberalism and the very strong assertion of the different rights that belong to the unknowable X, the freedom of religion, where we can never know what people are truly thinking in the temple of their minds, the freedom of speech where we cannot irrefutably criticize the way people express themselves,

42:05the right to property and commerce, where we cannot second guess what people will do with the things they possess. Capitalism concludes Nobel laureate Milton Friedham is simply what humans do when they are left alone. So this in a sense encapsulates this world of homoeconomicus, a world with, with thin meaning, where we have these declared rights, but yet nobody can talk about the actual content of the stuff that you might express in the public space, which means that the God which stands behind this moment is a God which cannot defend itself. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he has this beautiful line, the right in the middle, a billionaire, and I love this, that a billionaire would say this, right? Locke would dismiss out of hand, Ballsack sweeping in subversive notion, that quote, behind every great fortune, their lies, a crime unquote, seemingly written without irony by a billionaire.

43:08Well, I think he would say that the crime of the American, the crime behind the billionaire class in the American Empire is the extermination of the values of the old world. Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think it sees through in all of this stuff and the the hypocrisy of this coming from like a billionaire, homosexual, who has become extremely wealthy as a consequence of Facebook of all things. One of the greatest distractions ever invented. It's clear. Yeah, it's a fascinating, anyway, he's an interesting guy. But I think at this juncture, we should probably move forward to his thought post the early 2000s. And that would be the one on what is it? The title didn't get replicated on my printout,

44:12but that's the one about in 2011 about the the horseman of the apocalypse. Well, so Teal has from, so he wrote a couple of articles on this topic in the early 2010s, then he disappeared from politics after Trump was elected, disappeared from public life to a significant extent. Then he reappeared in 2024, 2025, doing a series of lectures contemplating publishing a book about the apocalypse of John. This was after he finally, after he came out publicly as a Christian, after he accidentally, as a result of Gawker came out as, shall we say, unorthodox in his private behavior. And you know, the the thing which I find fascinating,

45:19I mean, he writes about this in the 2011 piece. This is a little bit more developed in his lectures to the Hoover Institution to the Manhattan Institute in 2024. So Teal articulates that if you sat in Western Europe in the 2010s, there were kind of three futures that exist in front of you. There's a kind of stagnant future in which you know, we're going to de-industrialize, we're going to recycle a lot and you know, everybody's going to ride like an electric scooter to work and we're going to have population decline and we're going to come to a state of oneness with nature. There's a second future presented, which is the kind of totalitarian AI state where our entire lives are going to be

46:28curated and managed and all notions of privacy are going to disappear. But there's going to be tremendous material progress because AI is going to, you know, take us forward into the future. And then maybe the third state is a state where the entire population of the west is replaced in his in his version of this futures replaced by Islam, right? Because Islam is in his conception is immune to modernity in a way that Western populations are not. They refuse to participate in the banishing of primary questions from their conception of reality. And so as a result in Teel's initial conception, their, you know, immune to modernity and will eventually kind of demographically replace the west. Now, you can talk about why these three

47:28futures might have some holes in them that that's another discussion. But when he says these are the futures that kind of materially presented themselves to Western Europeans, you can kind of understand why environmentalism might be the most popular of these futures. But the one which we are actually engaged in when he starts lecturing in 2024, he makes clear the one we're actually engaging in is this project where where we're going to live in the totalitarian AI state, right? The other two potential futures are essentially foreclosed at this point as goals for elite culture. There's only one future left. And he starts lecturing on one, Renas Gerard's conception of the end times as a kind of tension between the possibility of apocalyptic violence and the emergence of totalitarian one-world governance in order to

48:36banish the possibility of apocalyptic violence, right? Yeah, and it's all in a sense what he's, what he's laying out. I think against this background is an analysis very similar to Joseph Tainters, the collapse of complex societies, where he details in granular form the way that real wages have been stagnating. Economic growth has been stagnating. Scientific development has been stagnating. Nothing has like this idea of human progress has been stagnating. And there is, there is a, when you look at the whole process of the offshoring of production to Europe or to Asia, that you can see, if you see it from the lens of elite theory where and then using the diversity, the diversity argument, so you have these client classes that you've elevated and made part of the elite class. So how do you then sustain them and keep them

49:41loyal? Well, you, in a sense, make all of the costs of their life cheaper so that it appears that they're either staying the same or getting better in their life because everything that they deal with is cheaper. So you then, you know, you have, you can bring in cheap labor, you know, so a new servant class, you can have cheap goods to buy and so forth. And, but nobody, in a sense, notices that gradually the world is becoming more and more precarious from the bottom up and is beginning to, you know, and so some of these, the, the, the, the, the tech overlords, in a sense, Peter like, like Mark and Jason and Peter Teal begin asking this question, well, can we, in a sense, jumpstart progress again where we can drive the engine of, of, of growth and so forth that can allow for real, you know, can we actually overcome the Malthusian question, right? So if you read Teal between 2000 and 2012, he thinks that he's quite optimistic that, you know, maybe the West can

50:47restart dissension of growth and, you know, he writes zero to one and all of these great pieces about how maybe we can escape this, this moment that way. When you hear him lecturing in 2024, he's essentially given up on this prospect, right? We're now in the future where the thing that stands between us and apocalyptic confrontations between the emerging geopolitical blocks is this kind of, well, he would, he would say that within elite culture, the perception is that there's two choices. There is a future in which nation states are allowed to re-emerge as the primary nexus of power and the violent confrontations between those nation states re-emerge as part of the norm of how the world is managed and the

51:55inevitable consequence of that is an apocalyptic level of violence unleashed by the technology that has developed between 1500 and now. Yeah, just sort of the competition over scarce resources. In a sense, again, you know, violence generated by the Malthusian problem or worry over the Malthusian problem. And so that's like in order to banish that violence, the only other technique available is to have a very strong one-world government, one-world government, you know, exactly that everything is managed in real time down to like just like the micron level where your whole life is managed. And it has to be managed this way because otherwise we can no longer sustain. Well, otherwise the conflict would emerge into the open and you would have this and violence in the competition for resources would re-emerge. It's almost something like

52:58you know, without the foreshadowing of pre-cognition, but you know, that movie with Tom Cruise, you know, you're battling pre-cry, right? Yes, exactly. But you would basically, you know, the algorithms will get to the point where they would watch your actions and there would be, you know, you might get locked up for like three weeks for your own good because, you know, the algorithm is determined that given the set of circumstances, the likelihood that you're going to commit a crime of passion in the next month is high. And so for your own good, we're just going to incarcerate you for the next month. Yes. And Teal would basically say that's exactly like the state which is emerging is a state in which totalitarian force is deployed in order to prevent the re-emergence of the political coalitions which would kind of create this kind of collapse into violence.

54:05And if you listen to Teal and his lectures, he's making an impassioned plea in elite culture to hold intention these two risks, the risk of apocalyptic violence from allowing the re-emergence of the strong gods, intention with the risk of totalitarian, like a totalitarian AI state creating permanent stagnation and kind of destroying the world in that way. And he frames this discussion in the frame through the revelation framework and says like the risk which is embodied in the the anti-Christ is essentially the risk of a totalitarian one-world government. And this is this is the risk that is being entirely dismissed by our governing class while they're completely obsessed with the risk of all the tribulations which are described in revelation, right? Yeah, and he works for the four orcs. But there's an anti-Christ notion in the Straussian

55:09moment as well too that we are actually building the anti-Christ. Yes, and he argues that we're building the anti-Christ to fend off the four horsemen. Yeah, because we sense apocalypse is coming. And see, here's the thing though, and I think this is in some ways where something is missing in a sense from Teal's analysis in a sense that there it's a it's a similar to the kind of thing with Jordan Peterson where at a certain point in time we can talk about all of these religious realities. We can talk about having meaning in life, but you have to actually then pursue that meaning as the highest order of the highest good in your life in a sense that I really actually want to meet God and create a world that is in a sense sacral space that's ordered around this hired reality and then subordinate everything else.

56:09Because if that also happens, and even if there isn't apocalyptic violence, it still means the end of the West because now the homoeconomicus is now subordinated to a spiritual man. And so whatever route they choose, like either way, and this is the thing he notes in the pieces, that it doesn't matter which way you go, the West is going to come to an end because it's unsustainable. It's internal contradictions are beginning to collapse in on itself now. And so I guess the only hope that he's saying, like, well, we can run ahead of it. And if we can maybe we manage all the pieces with strong AI, we can continually stay ahead of the game. And I don't think he I don't think he actually think like when he's writing in the 2010s, I think he thinks that maybe that'll work, but he could do that, but not today anymore. When he's writing in the 20 when he's speaking in the mid 2020s, he's actually saying the effort to do this is going to destroy it is going to be worse than the solution of allowing these questions to reemerge and allowing apocalyptic

57:10violence. Okay, that's yeah, that's okay. I can see that now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that would that would make sense. Yeah, so but at the same time then, so if we try to solve the problem, we destroy ourselves anyways, but the problem is destroying us. Yes. And so this is the, you know, Peter Tiel, like like both you and I are is in this sense, kind of a collapseitarian, even though I would say he's a tech optimist collapseitarian, which is a very strange thing to me. I guess you're you're allowed when you're a tech billionaire, you're allowed, but it is the sense and I think this is why you and I come back to this again and again and again, that ultimately, you know, as Christians, that the nihilism question that lies behind all of this, that you know, this, this, this setting aside the modern, the modern project of set assying all of these deep questions of human nature and the meaning of life and all the rest of these things are going to reemerge because people just they

58:14cannot function like I talked about this two podcasts ago with with Mercia Elliott and in the discussion of Mercia Elliott where we talked about the sort of the burden of history that, you know, if you are the center of driving events forward, then you have to create meaning for everything around you and people just can't do that. They want to live in a world like the ancients did where the world itself is suffused with meaning and then they sense a sense, give themselves to the meaning that that presents itself to them, right? And this is and this is the world that modernity has denied to us and you talk about like, like Heidegger talks about being inframed in the technological and I've used those examples of how you go from like working with wood to doing tools to power tools to then, you know, CNC machines and then sitting in a control room operating the CNC machines and then operating the CNC machines over the internet from a control room halfway around the world. Well, when you're in that control, that empty sterile control room

59:17and you're asking like, what is this all for? You know, like, the you now have to invest some effort to to wind the world to such a spot where you can encounter the world again. Like, like, you ask yourself, why do people take such satisfaction today from things like cooking and working with hand tools and so forth because they want to be confronted with the real again and and these things in count, you know, help them to encounter the world as it is, but there's also encountering God as it is, as he is, right? And so this this is that question I think that lies behind everything else and why we keep coming back and why, you know, this is I think what Peter Tiel is talking about here is very, very important because he focuses a spotlight on the nihilism question without necessarily coming up with an answer for. Well, and this is the interesting thing about Tiel. One of the things that tremendously frustrates me about most thinkers, especially in the online space, is there they have a propensity to offer fake solutions in the absence of real solutions. Exactly. And Peter Tiel has the intellectual

1:00:22courage to just to know that there that he has no solution. Yeah, or he or he maybe thought there was one for a while, but now is recognized like, yeah, no, that's not going to work. Yeah, it's not going to work. I'm not going to pretend that it's going to work. I also think that it's not going to work, you know, you can't it's a Ponzi scheme and it's it's done, you know, and you know, that that that is what it is. And you know, you know, perhaps he, you know, people should be praying for someone like Peter Tiel because, you know, as you say, he's a surprisingly deep thinker. And if he can make that leap to say that, you know, all of these other questions that have upon which my life has been built, you know, staying ahead of the Malthusian crisis with through technological advancement, that I would be better served by, you know, seeking first after the Lord and his righteousness and society would be better off doing the same. Or as he says, the,

1:01:24you know, the other old one was the glory of the city and the nation, you know, and that's those, those two poles, right, that he said ground themselves to dust in the Middle Ages. And I think he's there's something to that observation. But that this this question of of meaning and nihilism is really the central question of our age today and and there's really no getting away from. Well, I also think that given that there is no given that there is no solution to permanently banish these questions, I think the moment that confronts our elite class is the requirement to have the courage to allow them to reemerge and to rehumanize themselves by taking sides in those questions, right? Exactly. Well, and here's a thing, you know, I don't know the degree to which people are Jungians are so forth, right? But Jungians psychological his theories of of mind and thought are based around, you know, binary choices that we make, right? So that our brains that either

1:02:30choice neither is good or bad, you know, you're an introvert, you're an extrovert, you're an intuitive, you're a sensei to these types of things, right? But what he argues is that as you make these preference choices, the other side of that preference gets pushed into the background and remains primitive. And I think there's and then so what happens is when you're stressed, when you know, you're tired, you're worn out and or your meat needs are not being met, you know, it's those primitive side of yourself that remains erupt in ways that you evidence those behaviors in ways that are self-destructive and unhealthy. And I think there is something to that as a human psychological dynamic. So if you apply that to a society and we have pushed these questions down and they've remained primitive and unformed and we haven't dealt with them and we haven't grappled with them meaningfully for 250 years. Well, you know, or since, you know, like I think

1:03:31of doing it shortly after the piece of Westphalia, but you know, for the for the majority, the last 150 to 250 years, we have been pushing these under the surface. So as you say, our elites could, you know, maybe go through therapy or sorry, but they could allow these questions to surface when society isn't fully stressed to then embrace them in a way that doesn't end up in apocalyptic violence because if you continue to sit on them and sit on and sit them, when they do erupt, they will be everything that Peter T. L. Fears they will be, they will be like sort of that apocalyptic violent outburst. And I think those are minds. I think it's your mind because you've suppressed this vital core of yourself for a hundred years or more. I think of the the famous interaction this month between Steve Laws and Andrew Gold on on British TV where for those who don't know Steve Laws has been involved with the British National Party for a long time. And in his interview with Andrew Gold, he made the case for total remigration of every person who is even partly not

1:04:38British. Right. So if they have an ethnic component to their makeup, which is not, I think he said not not more than three quarters British, then they need to go, they need to be exiled from the country. Right. This is an extreme, this is like a very, very extreme position. But it's a position which will inevitably emerge in a society where the ethnos is threatened, but the ethnic question cannot be discussed by people who have a normal psychology. Right. Or have a psychology suited suited to proper leadership. Right. This is the question of the city and the glory of the city as you know what I mean. Yeah. That that deal is talking about in this thing. And so yeah, if you suppress that impulse and you suppress it and you suppress it and when it does emerge, it will emerge again with a kind of apocalyptic violence. And it will emerge from

1:05:39the people who are so out there on the psychological spectrum that they're completely unsuited to leading the the palace in the moment at which they reemerge. Yeah. And so you're going to get, I mean, this is why I wrote the piece, the great gamma male crisis because the people who are emerging to try to address these, these meaning needs or it's one of the reasons I wrote this piece are people who are singularly unsuited for leadership and would never under any normal circumstance be selected as leaders of these people groups. And yet they're being driven into positions of leadership because of the because of the implacability of the of the people who should be the leadership class of these peoples. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Which was why it was

1:06:40interesting. Like, you know, it's when you said to me, you know, like, have you have you read much Peter Tilly's a surprisingly deep thinker and I'm like, all right, you know, okay, send me the links. But I was actually, you know, that this it's been a it's been an interesting couple of weeks, you know, working my way through these essays. And it you're absolutely right, though, BH that that he is he's put a finger on in a sense the core problems. Like, and he's just arrived at he's done his reading, done his homework and he's putting his finger on the core problem. He's willing to admit that he doesn't have the answer. And I think because of his intellectual and faith commitments, I'm not sure he's quite ready to come to the answer that needs to be embraced. But he's able to like, there is real value in seeing the problem. And there's also as we've, many of us have in this space of noted, there's real value in reading people who were seeing the problem

1:07:46before it became a problem because these are the guys that you really want to listen to because they're the ones who are able to see things that you probably can't. Well, and I think it's worth noting for our audience that in 1995, he was writing about the diversity delusion. And in 2025, he's writing about the apocalyptic risks of consolidated managerial governance. And the violence, which will be unleashed if that totalitarian managerial government collapses. Right. So he is, if the pattern holds 20 years later, as it's unfurling, people will be writing about the crisis, Teal predicted 20 years in advance. Yeah, I'll be 78 at the time. So maybe. Well, I mean, this is why it's urgent for me because I have kids and grandkids,

1:08:48nieces, you know, that I know that they're going to live in this world. So we need to get them ready. Well, I consistently write in my Twitter profile something to be effective. You will live to see the end of the day. And this is my consistent thesis that it's, you know, it, I don't know whether it's 10 years or whether it's 30 years. But if you're like under 40 in this moment, you can't defer these questions because the contradiction that that Teal is noting has an expiration date, and that expiration date is not 2140. It's, it's much sooner than that. Yes. Yeah. And then all the signs are there. And I, like, I wrote something, a, a, a sub-stack post where I pointed out that, you know, that the sign that the West is, is, or that the American Empire is in decline, is that it wasn't able to integrate Russia and China as a seamless member

1:09:54of the global community, but instead created two power blocks that now oppose them. And the degree of cope with which people were coming in the sense of like nobody wants to see the fact that the American Empire, you know, empires don't come decline in a smooth linear line. There's ups, there's downs, there's, you know, and if you look at the history of the Roman period, there's periods of reform, there's periods of further decline and reform, but it never goes back to the height that it was added. It's very height. And it just, until such a time, is it just can no longer sustain itself and its internal contradictions open it to, you know, if, if the, if the Roman Empire was not pushed from the outside by the Germanic tribes, it would have, it would, it would have collapsed from within very shortly after that period, anyone's. Yeah, I mean, the, the British, there's 70 years between maybe 80 years between the repeal of the Corn laws and when it becomes obvious

1:10:57to every person on the planet that the British Empire is in rapid decline, right? Yeah, after the First World War, it becomes obvious to every person that the British Empire is in decline. But the seeds of that decline go back to the mid 1850s, right? Yeah. Well, and, and if you look, if you can, if you, if you accept both like Teal's analysis, and, and also the collapse of, I'm drawing on Teal's analysis. Yeah, that, that, that, tanters enough, there you go, that the 70s and, and Teal draws the same moment that the 70s was the tipping point. So if you give it 70 or 80 years, you're looking at 20, 40, 20, 50. Yeah. And so that, that's, you, you have a whole collection of indications that point to the, the position we're in as a late imperial position. And exactly when it tipped, when the whole thing

1:12:01tipped over is a, if you could answer that question, you'd be, you know, a sage or an oracle or something. But you can certainly, uh, notice the signs of the, uh, the end of summer. The, the harvest is past. The summer is over. And, uh, here we are in this moment. And one of the reasons why we talk about, you know, the Christian faith, religious, and, and that the, you know, looking at the administrative state as a false god and the realization that the, the, the, the quote unquote, the answer is in a renewed dedication to, you know, the pursuit of god and, and, and, you know, what that looks like from a political social economic perspective. Neither you are, and I know exactly we kind of have a few things that we kind of tool around with. But the, the ultimate recognition is that the fundamental question of our age is the nihilism question

1:13:01and just the, the, the, the ranks spiritual emptiness with which the modern age has left us, it has pushed that question so deep into our subconscious that, that part of what we're trying to do right now is to surface that question for people so that our people can get through this moment, healthily, and that we can then be guides to those who are, you know, we can be the sane one is in, in a world that is collapsing all around us. Yeah. Um, I mean, the, the other element here, um, in the essay, the Straussian moment, uh, Peter Teal says that something, something to the effect of the great, one of the great intellectual, um, crimes of the 18th and 19th century is to, paper over, uh, like if you ask, uh, in 18th or 19th century philosopher, uh, what happens at the moment of the foundation of, uh, of the civilization of a foundation of a new order, they'll say something

1:14:04like, uh, at the end of the 30 years war, everybody, uh, you know, sat down a, a nice circle and wrote a social contract and that social contract, we see as the piece of Westphalia and Teal would note that, uh, Teal drawing on, um, what's his name, Gerard would say, actually know that that's not what happens, what you're doing is you're excluding the role of the apocalyptic violence associated with the collapse of the Old Order, right? There's some sense in which the Old Order had to be sacrifice, and this is a something too, like if you look at the Gerardian sacrifice and you look at the, like the sacrificial lamb, in many ways it was Christianity that had to be sacrificed in order to make room for the modern world, for the modern Western world. That's right. Christianity became the, the sacrificial lamb, you know, like the, like that Old Testament and was sent out into the desert so that Western modernity could rise. I would say that

1:15:05Christian both questions of religion and questions of ethnos are scapegoated for the problems of the Old World. The city and the church, the city and the both of them alike. Yeah, that's right, right? Greece and, and, and Jerusalem, the questions that arise in both of those places were sacrificed. Yes, that, that, that would be, that would be fairer the way of saying what, what Teal is saying. And what I would say is, like understanding, it's important to understand that as these questions reemerge, they're not going to reemerge intellectually, they're going to reemerge in an embodied way. Yeah. And, and this is again too, another thing that we need to work at to guide, because again, what we're trying to do is, well, you're going to have to live through this period or your children will. And so you need to understand. We need to understand, like, how can we as Christians also address the problem of the city, right? And, and we have to do so in a way that preserves the integrity of our Christian faith and doesn't subordinate it to yet another master

1:16:10or allow it to be, you know, so how can we get? And I think a lot of Christians are deathly afraid of the question of ethnos that arises out of the question of the city. And so they went, we're not going to talk about that. And what that doesn't, that doesn't help the problem, because like, as we said, you need to talk about it to get that out there. So you're not afraid of it, and you're not burying it in your subconscious, your social and collective subconscious. Well, you cannot negotiate a solution, which is reasonable and which is an expression of statesmanship. If you cannot, honestly, speak about the issue. All right. I'm running up on time. Is there anything else you wanted to cover in this? No, no, but it's a shame that we're running out of time because we had the former leader of the conservative party of Canada, Aaron O'Toole, already to come on for a brief interview. And to talk with some of these issues, because I know that like Aaron himself is a techno optimist in terms

1:17:12of these Malthusian questions. But unfortunately, we're not going to be able to do it today, because we've just run out of time. Yeah, the great Lockheon scholar will not be able to grace himself, grace us with his presence. So it's a shame. We'll get to him in the future, but today it's not going to happen.