October 2026
5.3 Comparison with the earlier series
| Series | Dates and venue | Access | What was said or new | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | Four lectures from 15 Sept 2025, Commonwealth Club; $200 tickets, sold out | Off the record; recordings leaked to the Guardian, the Washington Post and others | Greta and Eliezer as Antichrist types; "legionnaires of the Antichrist"; tax-haven rules as a sign ("It's become quite difficult to hide one's money"); lecture 3 on "velocity"; lecture 4: "America is, at this point, the natural candidate for katechon and antichrist, ground zero of the one-world state, ground zero of the resistance to the one-world state" | Guardian, WaPo [V] |
| Paris | Monday 26 Jan 2026, Académie des sciences morales et politiques; invited by Chantal Delsol | Closed; a 23-slide outline was given to attendees | An "expanded version" of SF lecture 1; the Antichrist is "not only a medieval fantasy"; Greta and "anti-AI altruists" named; about 30 protesters; lunch with Foreign Minister Barrot, whose aide listed "digital regulation" as a topic; Palantir serves France's DGSI and Airbus | Politico Europe, Politico Europe (FR) [V] |
| Rome | Four lectures, Sunday 15 to Wednesday 18 Mar 2026, undisclosed venue | Invitation-only | Organised by the Vincenzo Gioberti Cultural Association and the Cluny Institute; the Angelicum and the Catholic University of America disowned it; Italian lawmakers called his ideas "scandalous" and asked for transparency on the government's ties to Palantir; Benanti's essay "should we burn Peter Thiel?" | NCR (AP), CNN, Fortune [V] |
| Between Rome and Nashville | 30 June 2026, Aspen Ideas; 13 July 2026, First Things essay with Sam Wolfe | Public | Aspen: Leo is "working for the Chinese Communists" by backing AI rules. First Things: "I did not come to Rome to try to be more Catholic than the pope", and Benedict XVI "believed he was living in the end times" | CNN, First Things [V] |
| Nashville | Four Mondays, 28 Sept to 19 Oct 2026, Grand Lodge of Tennessee; $100 | Closed, no devices; recordings of lectures 1–2 leaked to the Scene and Politico | Same structure as SF. New: Obama and Pope Leo named, more on effective altruism, the ICC and bank-secrecy rules listed as the Antichrist's "system", and a final lecture naming the US as the New Rome | §5.2 [V/R]; Fortune [V] |
What changed: the argument has barely moved since San Francisco; the four-part structure and the US-as-katechon finale repeat [V/V-s; Guardian, Politico extract] (Guardian). What changed is the targets. In 2025 he named activists (Thunberg, Yudkowsky). In 2026 he names office-holders and institutions: the pope (Aspen, First Things and Nashville), a former president, and the ICC (CNN, Fortune) [V]. The Nashville series also runs while Altman and Musk publicly back Amodei's call to slow frontier AI, so Thiel is now out of step with the AI CEOs, not speaking for them (same Fortune source) [V].