The Tech Billionaire Doomsday Preachers (E346)

QAA Podcast

Julian Feeld, Travis View & Jake Rockatansky

News

4.5 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why do tech oligarchs keep proclaiming that the end is nigh? From Elon Musk warning of the civilizational-level threat of the “woke mind virus,” to Marc Andreessen declaring that “any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” to Peter Thiel’s fixation with the Antichrist, billionaires are insistent that the stakes of their ventures are nothing less than apocalyptic. To better understand the paranoia of Silicon Valley overlords, Travis, Jake, and Julian are joined by Chris Marquis, Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at the University of Cambridge and author of the book The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs. Christopher Marquis https://chrismarquis.com/ Christopher Marquis at Jacobin https://jacobin.com/author/christopher-marquis The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-profiteers-how-business-privatizes-profits-and-socializes-costs-christopher-marquis/ecaf3d412fe119c2 Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium QAA episodes: https://www.patreon.com/qaa The first two episodes of Annie Kelly’s new podcast miniseries “Truly, Tradly, Deeply” will be released on the Cursed Media podcast network on the 29th of October. www.cursedmedia.net/ Cursed Media subscribers also get access to every episode of every QAA miniseries we produced, including Manclan by Julian Feeld and Annie Kelly, Trickle Down by Travis View, The Spectral Voyager by Jake Rockatansky and Brad Abrahams, and Perverts by Julian Feeld and Liv Agar. Plus, Cursed Media subscribers will get access to at least three new exclusive podcast miniseries every year. www.cursedmedia.net/ Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast. SOURCES Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/ The Techno-Optimist Manifesto - Marc Andreessen https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm
0:02.0	Oh,
0:03.0	Oh,
0:04.0	Oh,
0:05.0	Oh,
0:07.0	Oh,
0:08.0	Oh, If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet.
0:36.3	Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode
0:38.3	346, the tech billionaire doomsday preachers. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky,
0:44.8	Julian Fields, and Travis Vue. The oldest and most primal mass paranoia is fear of the apocalypse.
0:52.7	The worry that the world, as we we know it is on the cusp of
0:55.5	being destroyed either permanently or as a step towards the path of creating a new world is in some
1:00.9	of the oldest religious traditions and texts. But in the 21st century, the most widely
1:05.5	followed doomsday preachers aren't hyper-religious. They're billionaires who made their
1:10.6	fortune in Silicon Valley.
1:12.4	They say that civilization is dangerously fragile and the only way to avoid total disaster
1:17.8	and instead put humanity on the path towards universal prosperity is by never regulating tech
1:24.1	or regulating tech on their terms, never increasing their taxes or really never saying anything bad about them ever.
1:30.3	Probably the most colorful example of this is Peter Thiel's obsession with the Antichrist, though people like Elon Musk and Mark Andrisian have also repeatedly warned that humanity is on the path to destruction.
1:42.3	This reminds me of like one of my favorite literary phrases in French,
1:46.1	It's Féterre, de plus en plutoir, and it's just, it's getting later, later and later.
1:51.8	And as we see the waning light in our own lives, we can't help but wish on some level
	...

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