Alongside Thomas Carlyle—whom, to repeat, he speculates may have written a kind of disguised Antichrist manifesto through his book on great men—venture capitalist Peter Thiel draws attention to a less famous author, Ernst Kantorowicz. Kantorowicz was a right-wing, German-Jewish intellectual—in Thiel's words, "sort of a Bronze Age Pervert." Kantorowicz, Thiel notes, belonged to poet Stefan George's "somewhat occult" circle. (In a previous lecture, Thiel recited George's poem on the Antichrist; here he notes in passing that George's Theosophically inclined circle adopted the swastika before the Nazis.) In Thiel's account, George urged Kantorowicz to revitalize a listless, Weimar-era Germany through a biography of medieval Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The leader, declared by Pope Innocent IV to be a forerunner to the Antichrist, comes across as messianic, Nietzschean—as a child, defiant, and (per Kantorowicz's biography) later interpreted, depending on the observer, as either Satanic/Antichristic or, on the other hand, as a Christlike savior figure, perhaps protected by God. Thiel argues that the biography can be read both as history but also as a kind of séance gone wrong—one that brought something like the spirit of Frederick II in a way that went terribly awry.