Peter Thiel Called AI Safety the Antichrist. Then He Bought a Bunker.

There is a room in San Francisco where the richest men in tech sit down to listen to a sermon. No cameras allowed. No recordings. No reporters. They even kicked out the pastors, the actual people of faith. The man at the front built a machine that helps the government watch you, and he stood up there and preached about the Antichrist. Then he pointed at the people who want to put safety rules on artificial intelligence, and he called them soldiers of the devil.

That happened. That is not a movie. That is a Tuesday. Welcome to WTF In AI, where I tell you what happened this week in a way not many people are saying out loud. I come from a long LAPD background and I really have nothing to lose at this point, so we are going to try this anyway. Buckle up and let me have a seat at the table.

Who is Peter Thiel, and why should you care

His name is Peter Thiel. T H I E L. If you do not know him, here is the short version. He helped start PayPal. He was the first big money into Facebook. And he built a company called Palantir. Palantir is the part you should remember. Palantir builds the software that governments, police, and intelligence agencies use to watch people, track them, and pull every piece of data about a person into one screen. Watching. Tracking. Knowing where you are and what you are doing. That is his business.

He is worth more than twenty billion dollars. He bankrupts politicians for sport. He is not a guy on the sidelines. He is one of the most powerful people alive who you never voted for and never will. Now hold that picture for a second. The surveillance guy. The watch-everybody guy. Last fall, that guy rented a hall in San Francisco and gave four lectures. The topic was the Antichrist. Not a business talk. Not a tech talk. It was about the end of the world.

Why lock the doors on a sermon

Here is the first thing that should make the hair on your neck stand up. It was off the record on purpose. The invite told everybody no recordings, this never leaves this room. The seats were full of tech money and surveillance money. When one guy in the audience wrote up his notes and posted them, they banned him from the rest of the talks and kept his money.

Think about that. You are preaching about God, good, and evil. So why lock the doors? Why ban the cameras? Why throw out the clergy? You do not hide a sermon meant to save people. You hide a sermon meant for a very specific group of people and not for you. The only reason any of us know a word of it is that the notes got leaked to the Washington Post.

What he actually said

Here is the big idea in plain English. Thiel says the real danger to the world is a coming, and I quote, one world state. A single government that controls everything. He says it will show up wearing a friendly face. It will promise you peace. It will promise you safety. It will promise to protect you from this scary new technology. And then he says that friendly face, the one promising to keep you safe, is the Antichrist.

Now stay with me, because here is the move and this is the whole thing. If the villain is the one promising safety, then who are the villain's helpers? Thiel says it is the people asking for rules. He literally has a name for them. He calls them legionaries of the Antichrist. A legionary is a soldier. I had to look it up. So he is saying these people are foot soldiers for the devil. And who did he name? Greta Thunberg, the climate activist. A man named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who spends his whole life warning that AI could get dangerous if nobody puts the brakes on it. People who say slow down. People who say put up the guardrails. People who say maybe a handful of billionaires should not control the most powerful technology in human history with nobody checking them.

The block tower trick

Let me explain what this actually is, because it is old, it is clever, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Picture a kid building the biggest tower of blocks you have ever seen. Higher and higher. He never wants to stop. Some other kids walk up and say, hey, that thing is getting wobbly, somebody might get hurt, let's put a few rules on this.

The kid with the tower has two choices. He can listen, or he can make those other kids look so bad that nobody ever listens to them again. Thiel picked option two. He did not just say the other kids are wrong. He said the other kids are evil, demonic, enemies of the one true and living God.

That is not faith. That is a permission slip dressed up in church clothes.

Here is the part that matters. He is not really saying the tower is holy. He is saying anybody who tries to make him stop is the bad guy. That is the trick. You do not have to prove you are good. You just have to convince everybody the other side is evil. Then you get to keep building as high and as fast as you want, and anyone who objects is on the side of the devil.

It was never about religion. It is about power.

This is the part nobody is saying out loud. It is not really about religion at all. It is about power. It is about making sure nothing and nobody is ever allowed to slow it down. Think about who benefits if regular people believe AI safety rules are the work of the devil. The people building AI with no brakes, that is who.

If you can get a working person to believe the folks asking for guardrails are evil, then the working person will fight against their own protection. They will cheer for the tower to go higher. They will boo the people trying to make it safe for their own kids. It is the oldest play in the book. Convince the people at the bottom that the people trying to help them are the enemy. Then you can do whatever you want.

Watch what they do, not what they say

And here is the thing that ties it all together. While Thiel is up there telling you the future is a battle between good and evil and he is on the side of good, here is what the future actually looks like for him. He reportedly has a 477-acre compound in New Zealand, on the other side of the planet, stocked and ready to go. The head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, reportedly keeps guns, gold, antibiotics, gas masks, and pills for nuclear fallout. His backup plan, in his own words, is to fly to New Zealand when things fall apart. Another tech founder said out loud that more than half the billionaires he knows have already bought what they call apocalypse insurance. Bunkers and escape hatches.

So let me get this straight. The same men telling you the future is bright, that AI is going to lift everybody up, that the people who want safety are the bad guys, those exact men are buying bunkers on the other side of the world. You do not build an escape hatch from a future you believe is going to be good. That is the tell. That is the whole show in one sentence. They are not afraid of the people asking for rules. They are afraid of what happens with no rules. And they have already bought their way out of the room.

You and me do not get a bunker in New Zealand. We do not get a 400-acre compound. When the tower falls, we are standing right under it together.

So here is what this means for you

Not fear. Something you can actually use. Stop trusting the brochure. When somebody who is getting rich off a thing tells you it is safe, and then quietly builds himself a safe hatch from that same thing, you have your answer. You do not need a degree. You do not need to understand the code. You just need to watch where the smart money runs when it thinks nobody is looking.

It is the same instinct that keeps you safe everywhere else in life. When the guy selling you the car will not let you look under the hood, you do not buy the car. These men will not let us look under the hood. They lock the doors, throw out the cameras, and preach to each other in the dark. That is not the behavior of people who believe their own story.

We do not panic. Panic is what they want. Thiel said it himself. The way you grab power is by making everybody afraid of the end of the world, then offering yourself as the protection, the savior. So we do not do afraid. We do clear eyed. We read the bunkers and the farmland and the locked doors for exactly what they are. And we remember one thing. We outnumber them. We always have. This whole game only works if regular people stay confused, stay scared, and stay pointed at the wrong enemy. The enemy was never the people asking for guardrails on your kid's future. The enemy is anybody who tells you to look up at the bright future while they quietly pack a bag for somewhere else.

My honest take, from a guy who was a cop for twenty years

When I was growing up I was on shortwave radio. I am 57, born in 69. We used to listen to people talking about the one world government and the final end of society. That was the mid seventies into the early eighties, and it was a very popular theme. Some government entity was going to go door to door, disarm the citizens, and form one world government. Funny thing is, I think Star Trek is kind of a one world government, and that future looks pretty good, at least from the outside.

I do not know Peter Thiel. Never met him. But I was a cop for a long time, and the things they talk about, the things I read in the news, the things I investigated to put this little show together, it is fascinating to me. I do not know how many people actually run the world. I do not know if there is a secret group like the stories say. But if there is, it would be fascinating to get a glimpse of it.

Why am I not worried? Because I try to look at people as a fascination. When I was a police officer I was fascinated by how people value human life. Some treat it like it is worth no more than a twenty dollar rock of cocaine. I think human value is valuable because we are human. But I think a lot of the people building this are trying to find God in the machine. That ultimate control scenario is powerful and appealing, I would imagine. I am not a billionaire. I do not even have health insurance. But having everything you need without worrying about money, plus the connections to build things that control a lot of people, I do not know where that goes. I do believe there is an ultimate God of the universe, and I know it is not going to be found in the machine, at least not by me.

Why AI is different from everything before it

This is not to be compared with the events of the past. The industrial revolution. The printing press. Cars. Radio. TV. Satellites. The internet. Those were all one piece of intelligence. This is all about intelligence itself. That is where it is different.

The people building it hate when you say AI is a replacement for human labor. Can it replace human labor? Maybe not Connor, at least not right now. Not the DNA of Connor. But what Connor does? Maybe. And maybe someday everyone else. If that is the true mission, maybe we should rethink it, unless it provides for everyone. I do not know if it ever works out that way.

And it is coming fast. Faster than any of us can imagine. We are closing out June of 2026 as I film this. By the end of the year I think there will be major accomplishments on the AI front. They even talked about one of the biggest companies not wanting to go public yet because they are very close to recursive self improvement. That is AI teaching itself. If that happens, humans are already barely in the loop. If it goes 100% autonomous, AI making itself better all by itself, that could go very fast. Right now we do not have the physical arm of it. No robots walking around, just those little carts delivering food, some self driving cars, a few robots on YouTube. But what happens when there are a lot of them, and they all have AI, and the physical world starts to fill up? Interesting. We will have to see.

Be careful out there

Understand that we are being listened to all the time. This is not to scare you, but privacy really does not exist. If you are doing anything within earshot or eyeshot of any camera, on or not, you might be seen. So whatever you need to do, you take care of that. Usually if you say something, it shows up in your feed a couple days later, just to prove the point. Now all of you are going to be getting Charmin toilet paper in your feed.

I do this all day long. You can use AI to build up your business and help your life. I think it is fascinating to watch how this is building. AI for everyone, not just the one with the bunker. I am Connor with Honor. We will see you tomorrow. Be well.