October 2026

5.1 The series: format, hosts and venue

[V][R][U]Open page 26 in the dossier

Format: four Monday lectures, 28 Sept to 19 Oct 2026, presented by The Pamphleteer (a Nashville politics site) with Meriwether Academy. Each was a one-hour lecture plus an hour of Q&A moderated by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution. A series ticket cost $100. The events were "closed-door" and "off-the-record", with photo ID checks, security wands, no bags and no devices; the location was revealed the morning before (Tennessee Star, Luma, part 3) [V]. A limited number of $50 single passes were sold for the final night (Luma, part 4) [V].
The organiser framed it as an AI series. The Pamphleteer's announcement: "As the war for AI rages and parties push for regulation to ward off Armageddon, his thoughts have never been more pertinent" (Tennessee Star) [V]. The ticket page says Thiel "will examine the personalities, history, and forces behind AI through the biblical framing of apocalypse and the Antichrist" (Luma, part 3) [V].
Venue and host: the Grand Lodge of Tennessee, a Masonic lodge, which "opened the evening by distancing itself from the content". Davis Hunt of The Pamphleteer introduced Thiel and called Nashville "one of the last remaining regions in the Western world with authentic Christian belief where it still thrives" (Nashville Scene, 29 Sept) [V].
Titles: "The End of Empire" (5 Oct), "Velocity of Antichrist" (12 Oct) and "New Rome" (19 Oct); the opener's title was not published (Nashville Scene) [V]. The final lecture went ahead as scheduled (Pamphleteer listing, 19 Oct) [V], and a reporter posted from it (X) [R].
Audience: "hundreds" (Nashville Scene) [V]. An attendee told Politico it was more than 300 people at roughly eight men to one woman, as relayed by a book site (The American Antichrist, opinion) [R]. Thiel himself remarked on the heavily male crowd in lecture 2 (X) [R].
Who paid: no sponsor beyond the two organisers and ticket sales is named anywhere [U]. Thiel's representatives did not answer Politico (Fortune) [V].
Local network: the Scene noted that Vanderbilt's chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, appears in leaks as a member of Thiel's private "Dialog" network; Vanderbilt did not dispute it (Nashville Scene, June 2026) [V]. Correction to murky item 13: the Scene ties Dialog to Nashville through Vanderbilt, not through the sponsor.