It wasn't a "secret meeting". It was a meeting of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, which anyone can join for about $90. I used to have a membership. Here's the event.[1] There is a recording. Here is the MP3 file.[2] Transcription of the first 30 minutes (of 67) via free web site. [3]
Notes:
On being a VC:
When you invest other people's money, you're trying to always do two things. Number one, get good returns. Number two, look like you're going to get good returns. And there's a surprisingly large disconnect between those two things.
So I like long term because again, that's less competitive. It can't be super long term. This was always the disconnect between, say, Japanese and US approaches to business. US businesses we always critique for being on this quarterly earnings cycle. Japan argued in the 80s that it had much longer time horizons. And there's a point where long term can be just a euphemism for procrastination or for avoiding accountability. But yeah, I think in its best form there are definitely things that take five or ten years to build and we should be building more of those.
On education:
My claim has been that over the last 40 years there's generally been less innovation in the world of atoms. It's not been a good idea to go into all the engineering disciplines that had to do with atoms. It was not a good idea to become a nuclear engineer, a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an aeroastro engineer. And so we had less innovation in areas like energy or transportation.
Not seeing the "antichrist lectures". Sounds like standard VC speak. Am I missing something here?
Was there some other talk, also held at the Commonwealth Club, at which Thiel spoke?
[1] https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2014-09-30/peter-thi...
[2] https://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/cc_20140930...
[3] https://audiototext.com/?order_id=e0a6efe8-c656-4746-b93c-f4...
https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectur...
You, my friend, are ill-informed. The idea of the antichrist has deep and complex origins that developed over centuries, blending Jewish apocalyptic expectations, early Christian theology, and later medieval interpretation.
I can point you to Bible scholars talking about this topic if you're interested. There are many accessible videos on youtube, for example, from informed Bible scholars - of which Thiel absolutely is not.
John 2:18 — “Children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that Antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.”
1 John 4:3 — “This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.”
Thanks Peter, brave try
This sentence is such an acronym to taste and the English language that it may be hard to get through. Thought I do appreciate the offhand comparisons to Peron. I guess I’ll struggle through it.