Peter Thiel tells the crowd in Nashville that those most bothered by his interest in life extension technology are liberal atheists.
The exceptions in that camp, he says, are retro figures like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins—in Thiel's judgment, an 18th-century fossil who continues to believe in the compatibility of atheism and science—and artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky.
According to Thiel, Yudkowsky went from something like an early modern transhumanist in the mid-2000s to what he calls a late modern Luddite today.
(Thiel funded Yudkowsky's AI org, then known as the Singularity Institute, in the mid-2000s before the two parted ways.)
At his second Nashville Antichrist Lecture, Peter Thiel comments on the gender ratio in the crowd while weighing in on the current Christian revival—one he says has a "very strange character."
Contrasting a half-pagan, katechontic motive for going to church—meeting your spouse—with an ultra-Christian one more aligned with immanentizing the eschaton—saving your soul—the venture capitalist says that people decades ago went to church with mixed motives, in part to save their souls but also to find friends, business partners, and spouses.
The gender dynamics at the (heavily male) Nashville lecture illustrate how much that has fallen away, he says.
The challenge, Thiel says, is finding something in between what he describes as two extremes.