Where Is the Antichrist? (ft. Peter Thiel)

First Things Podcast

First Things

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Peter Thiel joins Rusty Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about his recently co-authored essay, "Voyages to the End of the World," from the November 2025 issue of the magazine.

Transcript

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0:22.1	That's first things.com slash subscribe.
0:30.2	Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.
0:32.6	This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.
0:39.8	I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things Magazine. And I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.
0:49.2	I'm really delighted today to have with me Peter Thiel, one of the co-authors of Voyages to the End of the World
0:56.5	in the November 2025 issue of First Things Magazine. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. Thanks for having me.
1:04.7	Voyages to the end of the world, there's a kind of double entendre there.
1:19.1	You've got a, you've got three seafaring figures in Gulliver's Travels and the New Atlantis and then in, and what's the one piece is the, one piece is the, is it Ojo or Odo?
1:26.6	Odo, yeah. But it also means the... Is it Ojo? Odo. Odo.
1:27.8	Yeah.
1:32.2	But it also means the end of the world, as in the end of times.
1:33.0	Is that fair?
1:33.6	Yes.
1:43.3	Well, it's a kind of a bit of a Straussian essay, or should I say, Baconian, insofar as you... Really, it's a lot of exegesis of these four texts,
1:48.7	but it does suggest a kind of underlying concern,
1:53.4	and I want to sort of explore whether this is accurate,
1:56.2	of the emergence of the Kosevian universal and homogeneous state.
2:01.8	Is that fair that that's kind of, you want to plant in the reader's mind that they should be
	...

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