Angry Planet - Welcome to the Nerd Reich

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comWe’re living in a bizarre age of technofascism. The richest man who has ever lived, a man who dreams of colonizing Mars with his children, is America’s CEO. Donald Trump, the man people voted for, is just the chairman of the board.What does Elon Musk believe? Is there a playbook for DOGE? How bad are things going to get? On this episode of Angry Planet journalist Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich newsletter, walks us through what’s coming.Over on The Shatter Zone, journalist and former Angry Planet guest Robert Evans has published a document that Democratic think tanks are passing around. It gives extra context to Duran’s reporting. All the major players and themes we talk about in this episode are there: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, the Butterfly Effect.If you want to understand why so many federal workers are getting fired and the Silicon Valley ideology that’s infected D.C., then give us a listen.Curtis Yarvin’s unimpressive programming career“Democracy doesn’t work”Bullshit and cherriesRAGE and RebootThe Chairman of the BoardIt’s always about the money“Move fast and break things” comes to D.C.The Engineer’s DiseaseNick Land is mentioned and I’m sorry“Trump is more intellectual property than man.”The horror of comedySelling the Nerd Reich to the Religious RightThe Nerd ReichAI Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes Blasted on Government Office TVsTrump’s AI Gaza Video Is the Tip of a Horrifying ‘Gaz-A-Lago’ IcebergTechno-Fascism Comes to AmericaCurtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator PlaybookSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. I am here with Jason Fields. Jason, how are you feeling?

Uh, how do you feel when the apocalypse rolls around? I mean, you know, better and worse. It's just a time of great change. It's fine. it's fine. Most of us will get to the other side of this. It's only been 30 days, you know, maybe the best is ahead of us. Sure.

So I wanted, so I've been wanting to do this episode specifically for a long time, and we've kind of touched around the edges of it over the few years. We had a guy come on and talk about kind of Peter Thiel's biography, and we talked about Curtis Yarven a little bit in there. but I've been thinking a lot lately about how we kind of have this rubric these rubrics from history we use

to explain like the current moment the ones that that we lean on I would think on the show because we do a lot of history stuff is like collapse of Rome and Third Reich I think what's happening now demands new and different thought forms and metaphors and ideologies. I think that what we're living through

maybe rhymes with some of that stuff, but is different. And here to help us work through how it's different and how it's the same and how all of this stuff is kind of following plans that have been out in the open for a while is Gil Duran. Gil, can you introduce yourself and kind of tell us about your work? My name is Gil Duran. I'm a freelance journalist. I spent the last year looking deeply into different extreme ideologies coming out of tech and Silicon Valley with a particular interest in something called the network state, which seeks to replace existing governments with governments run by billionaires all over the world. Before that, I spent about 17 years in politics as a communications senior advisor to people like

Jerry Brown, Diane Feinstein, Kamala Harris. But I started my career as a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley. back in the late 1990s and transitioned into politics after the journalism business got rough. And in 2018, after my political career, I was sort of bored and feeling unfulfilled since I'd never really expected to work in politics anyway. And I got the opportunity to return to journalism as the editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. And that began the second phase of my journalism career, which led me into this particular story at this particular time, very, very unexpectedly. I never reviewed myself as somebody who covered tech. Definitely, I cover politics.

And unfortunately, tech has now become politics. Yeah, we live in this world where, as we will get into more, a tech guy is running the country, I think. I think that's fair to say. I don't think that that's a controversial statement to make. I mean, he was at a live streamed cabinet meeting talking about Elon Musk, standing up while everyone else was sitting down, including the president. explain what was going on. He looks like to me a guy that is in a leadership role. And I've, as a tech journalist for a long time, I have really been interested in the ideology of Silicon Valley, what these guys think, what they feel, what they want to do. And they've told us, and we didn't always listen. So you're kind of covering this in your newsletter called Nerd Reich. And the first piece that you did that caught my eye was reboot revealed Elon Musk's CEO dictator playbook. So we're going to get real granular with some of the stuff at the top and explain some of the personalities.

Who is Curtis Jarvin? Curtis Jarvin is a software programmer, mostly based in San Francisco, who in the early 2000. who in the early 2000s started writing under the name Mincius Moldbug, a series of essays largely focused on the need to replace democracy with dictatorship. Back then, he's sort of an anonymous troll, not using his real name. People who'd known him a long time say he's always been like that, and people probably didn't take him too seriously. But he caught the ear of some important people eventually,

most notable Pierre Thiel, who by, you know, a few years later was investigating, along with Andreessen Horowitz in Curtis Jarvin's software idea for something called Erbit to create this decentralized peer-to-peer computer network on libertarian vision. And he became known for his ideas as Peter Thiel's House philosopher. And he's continued to write these things in subsequent years and laying out more aggressively and in more detail how one might go about replacing a democratic government with a sort of corporate tech dictatorship. I've got a dumb question about Yarvan, though.

Was he a particularly good programmer? Was there something other than his writing that made him stand out to these tech folks? All I can say is that as far as he can tell, he's been working on this idea, Erbit, since 2002, and in 2025 it only has a few thousand subscribers and is mostly a text-only message board as far as I can tell. So, you know, people have become billionaires multiple times over in that time. So I'm not sure that technology has been his strong suit as much as the ideas that he's been willing to publicly state. Now, I'm not myself a coderary programmer or anything like that. But it seems like, you know, my newsletters have as many users as his service does.

And so, you know, and I'm assuming I'm making more of a profit as well. So again, this is not what I do. I have a website and it sometimes gives me money. So that seems to be what you're supposed to do. And so that's as much as I can say about that. It hasn't really taken off. But his ideas have had a lot more success, unfortunately. What is his big idea?

Before we get into like rage and reboot, like what would you describe as his ideology or philosophy, kind of writ large? Well, an important thing to understand is the guys like Jarvin, they actually didn't come up with these ideas. They just sort of repackaged them in a new way that caught the attention of certain people. The idea of a dystopia where the wealthy rule over everyone else in a sort of dictatorship, totalitarian, authoritarian, authoritarian state is very old, right? It's in George Orwell's 1984. It's in a story that E.M. Forster wrote in the early 20th century where everything is run by machines. It's in all through science fiction, you find this kind of dystopia.

In a way, all these guys have done is say, hey, here's an ideology that would make us into the villains of all of science fiction. Let's pursue that. But you have to go back to 1997 when this very strange and apocalyptic book was published called The Sovereign Individual by two right-wing kind of conspiracist thinkers with Oxford Educations, mind you. And the book, The Sovereign Individual predicted a few things. It predicted that the information age would mark the end of democracy, that Cryptoferralian. Currency, called it cybercurrency, would rise and undermine government's ability to control money, would suck all the tax revenue out of government coffers, and that this would lead to the collapse of nation states, which would create a lot of violence as people who no longer had a place in the world or at a job, struggled to find something to do in a world of scarcity. But meanwhile, a so-called cognitive elite would rise up, become richer and freer than ever, and have to find a way to structure enclaves or governments where they would be safe from the chaos that. would be created by the information age. Now, crazy book, right? But smart guys wrote it looking ahead of the future. They got a few things wrong. They didn't see the rise of China and they thought it'd be global cooling, not global warming. But this book made a massive impression on a guy named Peter Thiel.

And by 1999, Peter Thiel's giving a speech. You can find it on YouTube where he's talking about how this currency, this digital currency is going to rise. It's going to be a huge problem. It's going to undermine the power of traditional governments. And so Yarvin's ideas are really just a rehashing and a continuation and a building out of this sort of prophecy that was made in that book, The Sovereign Individual. And I wrote about that book earlier this week in the Nerve Reich. I gave a summary of it. So that's the first thing I'm going to say. These guys are getting a lot of credit and they have been very influential.

But we have to go back and look at the source of their ideas. And you can go back even further than that. And I certainly will be doing so. But Jarvin's main idea is a continuation of the sovereign individual. nation states are going to collapse. Democratic order is going to collapse. And now is the time to build what's going to exist and dominate in the 21st century and beyond a government ruled by tech corporations that is not democratic, where if you have the money to buy your way into a corporate government, you are a subject of that corporate government. You have no rights except whatever privileges that the corporate government gives to you. And if you don't like it, supposedly you can leave. Sort of like if you change your internet provider or your phone company, that's the idea of what government will be. And this really goes against everything that is sort of plausible in human history for the most part, you know, national identity, country identity. And so it's interesting to see these guys sort of made up with the right wing because I think most MAGA voters

would not be down with the idea that America doesn't matter and America is going to collapse and that the collapse of America is going to be a good thing. I want to mention snow crash just for a second. I mean, because that's another book that other people may have read where at least elements of what you're describing really nicely played out. It's right there on my shelf right behind me, Snowgrass. Yeah, Snowcratch,

Cryptonomicon, I mean, parable, the sewer, dune, there's a lot of books you can look at and you see these sort of similar ideas. So basically, the idea of YARPIN is, look at all the villains in science fiction, let's create an ideology that would bleed to the creation of that dystopia.

That's what we have in his, he calls it patchworks. The idea of, patchwork is instead of nations, you divide everything up into these little corporate territories. And the corporate territory uses surveillance of everything to ensure security and control pretty much every, you're free except to not be under surveillance and not be under the complete authority of the corporate government. He lays this all out. It's been updated later by another thinker named Balaji Svinawasa into the network state. But that's the core idea of Yorvan.

Democracy and nation states are not good. They're going to collapse. They deserve to collapse, and we're going to create something else that's pretty much a corporate dictatorship to replace them. Why do they deserve to collapse? The critique seems to be that democracy doesn't work and it's bad and it hasn't solved all the problems and it just creates more problems. But the other part to understand about these guys is that they're not intellectuals. They are pseudo-intellectuals. They pretend to be smart. They pretend to understand things like history.

Look, I'm not a historian, right? I studied a lot of politics, but I'm not a political. scientists. These guys act like they're all of it altogether, political science historian, but when you look at what they're actually doing, and I'm working on a piece actually that categorizes their argument style, because they all have it in common. They take something in history, completely misinterpret or warp it, cherry pick whatever facts they want, all to fit their thesis and try to say that everything in history proves that what I'm saying is right. Now, a critical thinker and an intellectual is also aware of the contradicting information, and you have to make your presumptions

and your predictions based on a more nuanced version of things. For instance, I think that most tyrannies have a history of collapsing and being overthrown. And I think that'll happen with whatever these guys are trying to do. However, in history, we see that sometimes tyranny can last a few decades or longer. So the question is, will this last a long time, 10, 20 years, the rest of our productive lives, or can we overthrow it, overturn it in a couple of years in the next election or whatever, right? So, you know, but they cherry pick the information and pretend they know what they're talking about. For instance, Jarvin has been on this kick lately about saying that Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

president was a dictator, basically, was a monarch, and we're living under his dictatorship still, even though he's dead. Well, none of that's true. That's all a bunch of bullshit. He was elected multiple times. He was a very beloved politician. He was president during a Great Depression and a war. But he did have opposition from business.

He had opposition from Congress. He had to win elections. a couple of years after his death, the opposite party. One, that kind of thing doesn't happen in a dictatorship, right? So, again, they use these kind of bullshit examples to make their claims. And one of those claims to your question is the idea that democracy doesn't work. But in reality, the whole reason these damn guys exist in the first place is because we have a democracy, because we have a government that invested in creating things like computing power in the internet and spaceflight.

Elon's entire fortune is built on $38 billion in government investment. These are the people who have benefited the most from democracy, the most from federal government, and what they want to do now is pull the ladder up and destroy it for the rest of us. It's a very selfish and narcissistic ideology, one that's not based in any way on fact. So I hesitate to go too much into his arguments because they're all bullshit. But the idea is that democracy doesn't work. But I would say that the fact that these guys can openly walk around saying this kind of shit is proof that we have a democratic open society that allows people to have different opinions.

And, you know, if anything, Garvin has certainly not been censored. His insane ideas for destroying this country have gone straight to the top. Well, he was profiled in the New York Times, right? Finally. Yeah. After, after kind of poking around the edges of everything for a long time, just a few, it was like two months ago, he was in there, right? Oh, yeah. Two days before the inauguration, I believe. Mm-hmm. I was writing about Yarbone in July. I wrote a big profile of him and his ideas, and I was late to the game.

You know, it's amazing to me that I think there'll be a reckoning later that the entire political media establishment missed the rise of this thing for the most part. And it may turn out to be the most important political story in American history if it results in the end of the countries we know it. I had just one thing I had an interesting recent experience that just shows to me how pervasive some of these ideas are. and how you can sell it to people who really don't have a stake in it. I was at the Air and Space Museum out in Virginia, and I live down in the Washington area. And there's a guy giving a tour. And he's pointing at NASA developed planes. He's pointing at the space shuttle and giving a lecture about how private money is really where invention comes from.

I mean, it's the – and the federal government is actually really hard. harmful in terms of, you know, developing new technologies and things. It was the strangest thing I ever saw. I mean, did he not see what he was literally pointing at? Well, if they don't want to see it, they're not going to see it, right? The truth is that all the private depends on the public, public investment, not just directly in companies, but in roads, in infrastructure, in national security, that ensures that people feel safe to be consumers, to buy things, that there's going to be a future. And there's been a tremendous amount of public investment in the private companies owned by the particular people now, so obsessed with undermined. with undermining and dismantling our government. You know, if tech fascism wins in the United States, it will have been subsidized by the federal government for decades, right?

These guys have been the biggest welfare queens in history, sucking down subsidies and tax breaks and you name it, and government contracts, right? Government contracts. One of the things Elon is doing is getting rid of the government oversight of his companies now that he's in control of the government. So I think this will be, if we survive this, this is going to be a big lesson for everybody about the problem of concentrating too much power in the hands of a small minority of people

who then go crazy and try to not only bite the hand that feeds it but chop the hand off. All right, let's get into rage and reboot. Because that was, when I started reading that, I was like, oh, there is a playbook here. This is, this was all pitched before. And this was the, coming across it in your blog is the first time I'd seen.

it. So what is rage? Well, in 2012, Yarvin, again, the computer programmer, who was the House philosopher of Peter Thiel, gave a speech. And you can find this speech on YouTube. And in the speech, he outlined the idea for something he called rage, retire all government employees. And his basic thesis is that the president in elections don't really run the government. The government is run by a bureaucracy that stays in power no matter what. And so the only way to really remedy this, is to take over the government and basically purge the bureaucracy of anybody who believes in anything except doing whatever the leader, the ruler, the dictator says. So you purge the government of career civil servants, replace them with loyalists.

That was the basic idea of rage, really targeting the federal government for dismantling. An important thing to understand here is that Curtis Sharper's parents were both federal bureaucrats, lifelong career civil servants, right? So we have a bit of an Easter egg here in terms of the formation of this extremist ideology. Who do they work for? I'm not entirely clear. I'm doing a little more research into that. But he has said it.

Others have said it. They were both lifelong civil servants. And so I guess at an early age, Jarvin develops this disdain for bureaucracy, government. And he grew up, I think, in the Washington area. In 2022, he updates the idea for rage to something he calls the butterfly revolution. Revolution. And he writes on his substack, which is called Gray Mirror, it's paywall, just so you know, that if Trump were to win a second term, a thing he could do would be to install a CEO style dictator, a CEO to run the government in his stead, basically, and that that CEO should be charged with purging the bureaucracy, as he outlined in the rage idea, get rid of all the civil servants who are loyal to the idea of democratic governance and democracy, replace them with loyalists. So you build this loyalist army to come in and take over the government. And we see now Elon Musk surrounding himself with all these young 19 and 20 somethings who are doing whatever he says and have no relevant life experienced, except they've worked for Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. And then you start to dismantle all these public institutions collapsing as much as you can, finding out what works and what doesn't based on taking things away, right? The via negativa basically, just take as much of it away as possible. We see that happening. And so that's kind of where we are now.

I think, you know, rage, R-A-G-E has become dodged, D-O-G-E. And I know people pronounce that a different way, but I don't because these people are dodging democracy and they're dodging accountability. And I think we've got to call it something that's a little more fitting and doesn't go along with their little joke pronunciation. Although the fact that he named it for a cryptocurrency that has been pumping for so long is an important key to all this stuff too. And so that's where we are right now, I'd say, you know, what I wrote in that piece,

was that, and look, I'm a rational guy. I'm a straightforward thinker. I was in politics for a long time, advising very high-level people in places like Washington and Sacramento. I am open to the idea that it's just completely a coincidence that everything they're talking about and have been talking about for decades, the same group of tech people is absolutely just a coincidence. It's happenstance, right? But I think we have to also entertain the possibility that all the things they've been talking about for decades and that are happening now is exactly what them doing. what they said they would do. And that's important because there's more to the plan than just these steps. I'm so curious as to how Trump is going along with this or seems to, you know, you mentioned the concept that you mentioned is him being chairman of the board in your piece, as opposed to actually CEO. And I think people who understand corporate governance, I think will get that right away, people who don't. Well, you should read up, I guess. Anyway, it seems so strange to me that this guy, he's such a weirdo and all the other things about him, but he's willing to stand back and let Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and all these other thinkers come in and do what they're doing. Do you have any insight

into that at all? Does this make sense to you? Well, I think the relationship is more that of a puppet and a puppet master. No puppet. No puppet. Trump is making a lot of money, right? This is about money for Trump. And he just got connected to the major money supply. What's the first thing that happened? The weekend for his inauguration, his meme coin drops a windfall, right? This is about money. And basically, in my opinion, he has sold the presidency to Elon Musk. Elon Musk is essentially the acting president, which means we're in a constitutional crisis because a foreign-born person cannot be the president of the United States. We have an unelected foreign-born billion. being the president. And that explains Trump's passivity and his impotence, right? Elon's doing whatever he wants. Half the time in the stories I'm reading, the White House is surprised and the president's aides are concerned, but they can't do anything about it. As you mentioned earlier, Matthew, Elon stands and is the boss in the room and the president of the United States is sitting right there. You know, that's just not the way politics traditionally works. You never take the limelight from the boss.

And that's an ancient rule. The first rule of the 48 laws of politics, which is an interesting book that compiles all the main lessons of political history by Robert Green, who's a great, very readable writer, is never outshine the master. Never ever make a powerful person feel inferior to you because that's the death knell in politics. Elon Musk seems to have no problem violating this rule. And I would say that he has paid a very high price for the privilege of overshy. and essentially punking the president of the United States. High price in dollars, I'd say, in dollars or in crypto. This is one of the things that's been kind of fascinating to me is, I think I was certainly

one of these people, a lot of people I know made this early prediction that, like, you know, Trump can't hold a personal relationship with anybody like Musk for very long. They're both two, their personalities are both too big. This is all, like, two, they'll make it two weeks. This will all crumble apart. here we are 30 days later Trump or Musk attending the cabinet meeting standing up

the president sitting down they're giving joint interviews together he's he's sitting in on international relations telephone calls he's putting out kind of his own government statements and seems to be rampaging and doing whatever he wants

and it has just been and I thought for sure when an AI generated video of Musk or of Trump sucking Musk's toes was played on a loop in the office of the urban development that that would be the end of it that he would see that and be like

you know what maybe this has gone too far but it's here we are it's still continuing do you really like do you really think that it's money that it's just simply cash this guy would have been gone on day two in any of their circumstances there's no other explanation, I think.

What is it? He just thinks Musk should run the country. Polls even show that it's very unpopular, even with Republicans, that Elon Musk has so much power. I saw Puck published a focus group of swing state voters, right? And no one likes Musk. Musk popularity is dropping around the world. Tesla is dropping, right? And none of it seems to matter.

So I don't know of anything. you know, Trump has a hard time keeping a good relationship with people, but he's never lost his affinity and desire for money. And it seems that this whole deal has immediately plopped, you know, tens of millions of dollars into his lap from crypto. And believe me, they're just getting started. This is open corruption and naked greed. And they seem to be playing as if they've already gotten away with it. And that's very interesting to me. Either they know something we don't know or their supreme arrogance and hubris. is going to be their downfall. We don't know yet, though. I think one thing that we're learning right now is how much of a, pardon the sexism, but gentleman's game politics has always been. You know, you mentioned FDR and eventually he tried, he wanted to stack the Supreme Court, but he obeyed what the Supreme Court told him to do. I mean, he actually followed the law. And there's no reason to do so. if you're the president and you can get other people to actually follow you and do what you want to do.

I mean, as has been pointed out, many times, the Supreme Court has no army. And just very interesting how all you have to be is unscrupulous, nasty, brutish, I guess he's quite tall. Anyway, but... Power belongs to those who will take it. Right, right, right, right. I mean, that seems to, I think we're learning that, right? I mean, we learned that throughout the entire history of humanity, right? But like, that's one of the other things that's been striking me about the current moment is that we had a pretty good thing.

For all of its faults and its problems, and there were many, we had a pretty good thing going for a pretty long time. And a lot of it was held up with, as you said, gentlemen's agreements. Yeah. Norms and laws that are being flagrantly disobeyed and tossed aside. and it does seem to be that the heart of the power like the blueprint for the power play comes from the move fast and break things world of Silicon Valley. Those are the guys that finally figured out or maybe not figured out but finally had the gumption to just go ahead and start smashing stuff. You know, as Musk said in the cabinet meeting, look, we're going to make some mischiefs. mistakes. We're going to break some things, and we'll fix them afterwards, and it'll be fine.

Yeah, so move fast and break the United States of America. So what is it about Silicon Valley? What is it, is it just that it makes people rich or made these people rich? And I think we should really point out they're all boys. These are West Coast where the West Coast. Yeah, the one woman went to jail, right? Elizabeth Holmes. Oh, yeah, that's true. Anyway, but the Silicon Valley ethos, I mean, if I create a video game, am I going to become a total asshole? Yes. Okay. There are a few who don't seem to be like that, but I do think that it gives rise to this sort of idea of supremacy, that you are of a superior intelligence because you understand technology and because you have managed to make a lot, a lot of money.

And something I observed while I was working in politics was it seemed to me that if you have power, then you want money. If you have money, then you want power. If you want both, then you kind of want to live forever and be God. And that's where you start to have a problem. And so I think we're at the part where the people with money have realized that they have power, they're using it. And we're also starting to see their ideology get really, really weird. And they're starting to talk a lot more about God and living forever. getting off the planet and being bigger than being human.

And so I think that theory that I kind of thought up a long time ago that crossed my mind is coming to fruition because we do see this weird interesting turn. You know, there's this bundle of ideologies that a couple of researchers Tim Nek-Gabrew and Emil Torres put together called Tescrieal, T-E-S-C-R-E-A-L, transhumanism, extropeanism, singularitarianism, rhaps. nationalism, cosmism, effective altruism, and long-termism. I can't believe I remembered all of them

off the top of my head. But it's these ideas that have bubbled up out of Silicon Valley that essentially amount to an ideology of tech supremacy. We are smarter than everyone.

We are richer than everyone. And it is our destiny to rule the world. And you see this coming out in terms of this sort of abundant agenda, which basically amounts to let tech people do whatever

they want without regulation and they'll save us, right? trying to put this softer touch on it. It's kind of a very, what you might call a neoliberal repackaging for the tech age. And we see it coming out in terms of the cosmism. Elon Musk's desire, his belief he's going to escape, that we're going to escape the planet, become multi-planetary.

And there's this growing group of people who are trying to do weird stuff to try to not die. There's this one guy going around saying he's not going to do. die. He's got something called don't die. He'll sell you some powders and an olive oil called snake oil. We all know he's going to die. We're all going to die one day. Maybe not today. Maybe we'll live longer thanks to technological developments. But there's a certain point at which we know you cannot continue to survive. And if your heart and lungs stayed intact, your eyes and your ears and all the things that make life good would deteriorate. But then they have this idea we're going to merge with computers and machines. Right. So it's getting really weird. And they have this completely vastly different

idea of the future. And, you know, the other part of it is this obsession with pro-natalism in breeding, which they sort of have in common with the right wing. We're actually on an overpopulated planet. We have a lot of people living in poverty and suffering because the abundance we already have is not shared in some equitable fashion. We'd have created an economy that can sustain everybody in a healthy, safe, and prosperous way. Yet they were arguing that We need to have more babies somehow. And when you think about what that means to be arguing for more children to be born among a certain group of people on a world that's already overpopulated, you get more toward this idea of eugenics that's very popular among some circles of Silicon Valley coming out of Stanford over the past century. So we don't have to, we don't have time to go down every one of those rabbit holes right now.

But there's a lot to this and a whole range of weird stuff. And I'd say the most important letter in Tesquil is the L. That's long-termism. And at the heart of that is the idea that all that matters is what we do for the long-term future of humanity, for the billions and billions of human beings who have not yet been born. The people here on the earth now don't really matter. And we, the tech elites, the cognitive elites from the sovereign individual, are the ones who are going to make it possible for billions of people to be born in the future and for our species to survive. Therefore, we should have all the power to do whatever we see fit to save humanity from itself. And so you get to a point where you've got a tech savior complex. And I think that's very much on one level what's playing out here. I think Elon Musk thinks he's the most important person in history and that he should basically be on the level of a god and do as he pleases. And what's scary is that he somehow has already managed to become president of the United States.

So he is not just talking or thinking, he is moving and making these things happen. When you talk about all the technologies that you, you know, getting off the planet, becoming one with machines, it's just fascinating how, I mean, I've read all of these books. I think Matthews read these books. I don't know if you have, but they're very persuasive in a, you know, and they're fun. Well, they also never end well. They don't end well. They're usually tales of hubris. But some of them, like I would mention specifically, we've got two fantastic defense contractors named after items in the Lord of the Rings. You have Anderil from Palmer Lucky, right?

Flabe of the West, yes. Yes. Right, exactly. You know, a sword from Lord of the Rings. And then you have Palantir, which is a way of seeing. into the future and the world, and it's a little orb, and if you've been watching the movies, they look pretty cool, the big marbles.

Anyway, I mean, I'm just saying, these guys, they're so influenced by fiction. Can they just not tell what's fiction and what isn't anymore? Well, they have the power to manifest fiction in real life. And if you had that power and that money, wouldn't you try to remake the world in the image of your favorite science fiction? They call it hyperstition. right, the idea of creating a story and then making it real.

I think it comes from Nick Land, another dark enlightenment philosopher like Curtis Jarvin, this neo-reactionary idea, hyperstition. You can look that one up. So I think to your question, I think the other part of it is that they have this weird thing where they reverse everything. Like I said, they want to be the villains in science fiction. They also want to be the villains of Lord of the Rings, right? I read Lord of the Rings.

It's about the little hobbits trying to save the mankind from the evil, powerful, overlords and their dark magic who want to destroy the world, right? With what? The ring, this form of technology that they're fighting over control of. Will this, this magical ring stay in the possession of the good and be kept from destroying the world? Or will it fall into the hands of evil and unite, you know, the evil forces for destruction? They seem to sympathize with the villains of the story. And it's not just science fiction or fantasy where they do this. So there's a Catholic theologian who was named René Girard. And his name comes up a lot with people like Peter Thiel and others.

In recent years, I noticed them mentioning Gerard a lot. I'm like, why are all these tech guys name-checking a Catholic theologian who taught at Stanford for many years? So that's one reason why. But if you look at the main contribution of René Girard to our contemporary thinking, it was two concepts he's known for. One is the scapegoat. He observed that all through human history, we have a tendency to find a scapegoat, make them the problem, punish them, destroy them in order to absolve our own sins or dissatisfactions. And then later the scapegoat is sort of worshipped or given a place of honor, at least in certain traditional primitive circumstances, but that a danger in society is that we're always looking for a scapegoat. The other part of it was memesis, the idea that desire is created. we get our desires from what we perceive other people desiring. This is a pretty well-known concept in social psychology. But Renee Gerard was critiquing these things,

memesis in the scapegoat. What these guys have done is weaponize them, right? It's all about scapegoating. It started for me here in San Francisco with the scapegoating of the district attorney Chesa Budin, who was turned into the target for every problem in the city, even though he'd only been in office for a year, and they had him successfully recalled. I saw this as like a test run of tech political power.

All these billionaires, you know, David Sachs and white combinator Gary Tan and others suddenly became these big figures in our lives, constantly harping about politics. And all the politicians tried to cater to them. And they were branded by the media as moderate when there was nothing moderate about their politics at all. And they do that now with DEI, with trans people. They're constantly promoting a new, target, which is another thing they have in common with MAGA, the scapegoating of people,

of immigrants, for instance, right? If you have a, if you're worried about underpopulation, well, we have a whole population of people just dying to come here and work and be a part of our economy, right? But if you don't want those people, you scapegoat them, right? They're the problem. So we see them using scapegoating. Now they're scapegoating bureaucrats, the federal government, you name it, the constant scapegoating. And I think Gerard would be horrified by how these guys are using his idea, memetics and scapegoating, to just constantly create this rolling scapegoating mechanism

that is very present. So my point there was that they take an idea, they reverse it, weaponize it, and use it to serve their own ends. This seems to be a very, I almost feel like they have some kind of AI system coming up with this shit for them,

because it's happening in such a rapid pace, and they're deploying things so rapidly everywhere that it seems like there's a degree to which it is potentially mechanized, which is not unusual. You've got chatbots and all these different things going on. I'm sure they're a couple of years ahead of where the rest of us are, just as they were with Cambridge Analytica. The other thing I'd say, too, is that it's interesting with Trump. Trump, in a way, is our first AI president, right? He came to power through social media algorithms. He became the biggest algorithm in our country in an American politics off of Twitter, which really caught the attention of Elon Musk so much so that he goes and buys Twitter. and installs himself as the main algorithm of Twitter. And before Twitter, Trump used another sort of technological advance, which was reality TV, engaging in this parisocial relationship with viewers for years in which he's the strong leader who makes all the decisions absolutely firing people all the time in this sort of game of just demonstrating his power and his potency and his competence, right? So in a way, Trump is a technology president more than any other in history.

And that is, I think, one of the reasons why he has somehow merged and made it up with these guys. They're basically acquiring an asset. And, you know, I don't know what they do once Trump's gone. That's why they're trying to find a way to get him a third term. But because they don't have the charisma and the power that Trump has amassed, right? So that's a big problem for them in the future. What do we do after Trump? Because I think Elon Musk is going to be the most hated man in the world pretty soon. And I don't think J.D. Vance has the charisma. And, you know, if you look at the political pinch films in this country, they tend to swing pretty harshly. You know, we stick our finger in the spokes and we don't like how that feels. And then we want to go the other direction. And so, you know, presuming that there are future elections, I think they could be in a lot of trouble. The polls already indicate that people are souring on this particular project. And believe me,

It's only going to get worse. Yeah, Trump is more intellectual property than man, almost at this point, isn't he? Well said. I was thinking about this morning because I was writing about the horrifying AI-generated Gaza video. NBC News tracked down, because Trump didn't make that, obviously. NBC News tracked down the original account that had made it. It was made like a couple days after Trump gave him. is the Riviere of the Mediterranean speech,

where he kind of pitched the idea of doing, you know, Gazelago, as they called it. And I kind of took that and I started looking through and found where a whole bunch of accounts on X and some other shadier websites had kind of taken that idea and like started shifting it, like started making memes and generating all these AI content. There's a lot more stuff than just that video.

that Trump's True Social account promoted. But the other thing that I thought was really interesting that I saw is there was also a lot of Gaza Lago branded meme coins and NFTs that are floating around now. One of them has a market cap of $200,000. So someone has minted out of nothing a Gaza Lago meme coin and is making money off of it. and has a website and has generated, use it AI to generate all of this Trump slash Gaza branded imagery. So yeah, I think that isn't it fun to consider that for the rest of our lives, Trump will be a brand that reverberates through the consciousness even long after he's dead.

Yeah, I think that'll be the case. I mean, he's sort of become an icon and almost a spiritual figure to many of these people, especially after the shooting that has happened. And I think for the people whose minds he has infected, he will always retain this sort of status. One thing I wanted to say about the whole Gazzalago meme, you know, part of that is trolling. But when I look at that and also the same idea with taking Greenland or taking Panama,

you got to remember that part of this tech ideology is the network state, creating new countries in independent or privately owned territories that these tech guys will own and control and it will not be democracies. So while they are trolling, they are trolling in a very specific way. We're going to seize new land and we're going to turn it into something else, right? Gazalago or, you know, an American Greenland where we control it or we're going to own the Panama Canal. And there are cities, they've already built a few of these things. there's Prospera in Honduras, which is a tech, you know, kind of Bitcoin city there that they're in a big fight with the Honduran government about because the government no longer wants them. There's a plan to build a city called Praxis somewhere in the Mediterranean or maybe Greenland, the CEO has said. There's this idea for building this new tech city in California, about 60 miles north of San Francisco called California Forever. Massive resistance from both Republicans and Democrats in Solano County. So when I see them doing this, I see this an area of about, you know, people view it obviously

and necessarily as an attack on the Palestinian people. But underneath that, an important part of the trolling is seizing territory to create a new city owned by billionaires, right, and an attendant meme coin pump scheme. This is very much the theme of the next few years. Grab land, pump meme coins, a mass wealth. and property toward building this new future where nation states will collapse and we will own our own countries that will be absolutely surveillance security countries and will escape the destruction and violence that will be unfolding all around the world because tech has sucked

out all of the meaning and viability from the lives of the majority of people on the planet. I think we should always pay attention when they're joking. When they're laughing, when they're saying it's just a meme. I think he should always sit up and pay a little bit more attention when they say that. That was what Elon Musk led with during his CPAC interview. He got up there, you know, he got the chainsaw, he swung it around, and he sat down and said, I am become meme. And one of his big pitches was that, you know, comedy is legal again. We're all going to get to have fun, right?

Can you talk about this, like this jovial, meme-drenched kind of attitude that Silicon Valley has adopted? Sure. This is how they normalize and introduce ideas and socialize those ideas, right? Dr. George Laykoff, a cognitive scientist with whom I've done a lot of work, calls this the trial balloon. You throw something out there to test public reaction. And often you can use it to deflect or distract from other things that are happening, but you get everybody attacking your idea. And the research shows you get everybody to attack an idea, it makes a lot of people think about the idea.

And some people might think, well, that's not a bad idea. Ha, ha. That's funny. Yeah, we should take Gaza and make it into a tech colony, right? So it's partly outrage to spread the idea and to recruit more members. And also, at a point, there'll come a point where the media talks about these things as if they're absolutely normal because it's not news anymore. It's old news. And so you read the newspaper, and it seems normal that Trump might build a new tech city in Gaza or in Greenland or in Panama or wherever.

You know, this idea they're trying to do now in San Francisco. There's this idea to build a so-called freedom city in the Presidio to take over this kind of national park area and build a new city, a private city there, which is going to be highly unpopular. But Trump has already made moves to disband the Presidio trust, which oversees the Presidio. So we see these ideas popping up. They're not just joking. It starts as a joke, but, you know, people thought Trump's candidacy was a joke back in 2015, 2016. By now we should know it's not a joke. And I would also say, I've been thinking about this today and it's a bit non-sequitur. But there are a lot of people in the democratic, pro-democracy, liberal side of things who really have a need to see their enemies as incompetent and stupid and moronic. And I understand that on a distrable emotional level. But don't delude yourself. These guys are kicking the Democratic side's ass right now. They have power. They are very strong. serious. They have very clear ideas. They will make mistakes. They will mess things up. There are things they don't know. But they are extremely serious and strategic. What we're seeing right now is not chaos. All the little jokes and ideas that seem random, they've written about these things. There's books about

them. There's conferences about them. And they are moving toward that goal. And so if you don't understand that structure, then you're the stupid one. You're the moron. You're the incompetent. You've got to wake up and see that these guys have a plan. It's been an open site for a long time. And as good as it feels to think they're just dumb, the reality is a lot scarier than that. You know, along this line, I think we're talking about an orthodoxy that's being developed, right? And that even billionaires are being forced into line with it. And what I'm thinking of specifically, because you mentioned in your article about how the media, taking over the media is part of all this. You know, every institution that upholds democracy, knock them down either one by one or all at once, I guess all at once.

The Washington Post yesterday decided that they only are going to represent one type of opinion and very loudly. And of course, the opinions, it sounds like it's completely right down the line of, quote, personal freedom and democracy. Sorry, sorry, sorry, free capitalism, free market. So Jeff Bezos, who seemed like maybe he was a little bit of an outlier. He's in the fold now, bully with this stuff. And I'm wondering if you feel like there is an orthodoxy being enforced. And if anybody in Silicon Valley can actually stand up against it.

Is there anyone out there pushing in the other direction? Not in a visible way and not in an effective way so far. I've had some conversations with some people who have been funders of things in the past. And there's this attitude like, well, this is not the time. Oh, there's stuff happening. We're just not doing it in front. I think you'll find very few people more cowardly than somebody with a billion dollars or more than a billion dollars, right? They have to, they're more scared than anybody.

You'd think that somebody living on the margins in this country would be more terrified. but these guys are terrified to speak out. And not only to speak out, they're scared of being on the wrong side, of the side that's not winning, right? And I think part of the recruitment process here is this pressure of we have power and, you know, join us or be on the outside forever. And as we're seeing, there's a lot of weak-minded billionaires who just jumped right on it. And maybe they kind of wanted to because, you know, it'll be better for them. They think if billionaires are in charge and their taxes go down and they don't have regulations and rules anymore and they can get even richer. But I don't think they've thought out what the ramifications are going to be when people wake up and get angry and take to the streets and want accountability for the destruction that a small group of wealthy individuals has inflicted on the majority of people, right?

They're not thinking it through. But another thing I can say in having known a few billionaires is they're never the smartest person in the room, right? They might have been good at one thing that helped them make their money, but they're especially dumb because they're surrounded by people who make them feel brilliant. you rarely find a billionaire who allows people around them to challenge him. And so they're going to make all these moves and the people around them are incentivized to just fluff up their egos because that's what keeps their own personal money flowing. And so you're going to see billionaires especially go over to this side or stay neutral, you know. But I would really have to wonder how many people are investing privately in all the companies and funds that these guys are putting together. I think that should be a future focus of, you know, you cannot support democracy and invest.

in fascism. But that's an idea for another time. But I think that we don't really see an organized resistance yet. And I'm not sure that we're going to see the real push come from wealthy people who also kind of have an incentive if fascism wins. Right. Like, I don't know that that if they're not out there already, what exactly are we waiting for? What more do we need to see? I think that the lack of resistance has only been read as permission to go even farther, faster, right? I think there are people who wanted the impression that you can negotiate with these people or pressure them to be better versions of themselves.

That's just not how it works. And if you are not resisting it, fighting it, speaking out, planning for a better future, then you are pretty much complicit, I would say. I said in a recent interview, there's two kinds of fascists. Enthusiastic ones and unenthusiastic ones. But if you're going along with this, you're one of them. Can we talk about your piece from the 26th, which is another thread I want to pick up? How you sell this to the base?

How you sell this to normal people? How do you sell this to ultra-religious conservatives? You get into that in this speech about a Catherine Boyle speech. Yeah. Catherine Boyle is a general partner at Andrewson Horowitz and a former Washington Post writer. And earlier this week, she gave a very strange speech in which she basically positioned the state or government as the eternal enemy of the family. And multiple times she says that all of human civilization and history is a struggle between the family and the state, which is, again, completely. pseudo-intellectual BS. She tries to use a quote from Plato to justify this.

This is like an undergrad level misinterpretation of that particular thought that Plato was describing or explaining, and nobody is even going along with that in modern democratic society. So, again, they use some little thing that's misinterpreted and builds an entire argument off of it. So this idea is that the state or government is the enemy of the family, and now we're in a position, thanks to technology, to do away with the state, to do away with the government, and that tech is much better suited to work directly with families to help their autonomy and their freedom and their, etc. Mind you, these are the tech companies that have created algorithms

that have exploited and ruined the minds of children that have surveilled and mined our data and our privacy, that have enabled all kinds of bad, that have fractured our attention spans and turned our families into a bunch of zombies who just stare at their phones all day and don't talk. I mean, we could go on and on all day about the harms tech has caused the families, right? There are some good things that have come out of tech as well. We all love tech. We're all using tech all the time, right? But it's this very awkward argument that tried to appeal to a conservative audience who was speaking at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute to basically position tech companies as an alternative to government. And I thought that was very strange. And one of the things she did that was, the weirdest of all, and we're seeing a lot more of this now in these tech speeches, was she made a sort of quasi-religious argument.

She positioned herself as a mother and talked about the loving order, this Christian concept, and that, you know, her most important job is as mother. And as a mother, you know, you think about the fact that the holy family from the Bible was torn apart by the state. and that, you know, the Virgin Mary, you know, the mother of Jesus had to watch as her son was executed by the state. Therefore, all of history is this story of the state doing bad things to the family. And it was so bizarre to hear this Silicon Valley executive make this very strange kind of dark evangelical argument that government killed Christ, therefore government is bad. Right? I don't think there's another way to interpret. There's no other reason to bring that up. up. And that was like the basis of her argument. And it was just very strange to see, but we're seeing a lot more of this attempt to marry tech with evangelical sort of apocalyptic religion. And in recent Financial Times op-ed, Peter Thiel made this very religiously themed argument for Trump's second term. He referred to it as an apocalypse or apocalypsis, an unveiling. And that it was sort of a revel

and that now everything will be known and everything will be cleansed. And if you confess and get on the right side of things, you can be forgiven. All of these religious themes, this billionaire is hitting in an op-ed. They're making a very conscious effort to adopt religious language in order to solidify an alliance with the religious right in this country because they view them as a very important part of this authoritarian project. And there was a mention yesterday actually in the New York Times, like one or two lines about how, In Silicon Valley, people are like moving toward religion more now. There's been this push here as well. You've got this, I think, Trace Stevens of, was it, Anderil, and Gary Tan of Wycombinator are going to have this talk about their religious faith and scripture and how scripture relates to the tech quest. Last year, Gary Tan of Y Combinator did a talk with Peter Thiel at a converted church that Tan owns in San Francisco, where they talked about like Jesus and religion, right? there's this weird movement to recruit Silicon Valley people into religion, but that it's a very tech-tinged version of the Christian ideology. Meantime, they're speaking directly to the evangelicals in this very apocalyptic language. There's also this idea that some people have proposed that the creation of AI is the creation of God and that God will not be created.

We are not created in the image of God. We will create God in our own image. And I think that that image is going to look a lot like certain tech billionaires who are currently have their fingers around the throat of American democracy. The rush towards artificial general intelligence is very interesting to me. Because, A, I think it's based on a fictitious model of human cognition that says that we are like computers, and I think that's wrong. But yeah, so much of this stuff sounds so bad shit insane. but this is the stuff that the listeners, you have to understand that these people are saying a lot of this stuff explicitly.

I have heard tech AI people that work in AI say that they are trying to build God, literally. That is what AGI is. That is explicit. One of the guys that was ousted from Open AI lost his board seat. literally thought that the thing that they had built was a god and would do rituals in the, among the cubicles, burned the thing in effigies, said that it had to be controlled and constrained. He's got a new company coming out. It has not put out a product yet, but has a $30 billion evaluation.

So look forward to that. So I just want to make clear that like a lot of, you know, maybe six months or even a year ago, a lot of the stuff would sound conspiratorial and looney tune. But these are the people that are in control. This stuff is real. This is the ideology of the people that are steering the ship right now. I just really want to make that explicit. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's a revenge of the nerd situation in some ways. I mean, it really is. I mean, some of this stuff is, and I speak as a nerd. I really do. If you guys had ever met me, you'd know. But, and I'm bringing my child up in that religion as well, nerddom and all that. But the power fantasies, the need to take on the world, the misogyny, all this stuff, it really does fit into a pretty basic sociological pattern, I think. Oh, definitely.

And, yeah, I sometimes hear from nerds who are. are upset by my use of nerd to describe the nerd rike. But, you know, I'm a nerd too, so I get to do it. I can do it as well, you know, so this is a certain kind of nerds. And I found, you know, I didn't come up with that name. I was given to me by somebody in crypto when I wrote about, when my story started going viral, they said, you know, we've been called these guys the nerd rike for years. And I thought, wow, and I looked it up and no one was really using it. And so I immediately rebranded it. And some people don't like that name, but for various reasons, but my audience has really grown and the number of people are really starting to get it.

And a lot of people get it instantly when they hear that. So I think it's working. And I would eventually like to branch beyond that. I think there needs to be an organization focused on this particular issue, something like a center on tech extremism. And that takes it very seriously with research, with, you know, journalist interface, with policymaker interface. But for now, I've got the nerd right. And I see a lot more reporters starting to pick up the story, which is my goal all along. Yesterday, the New Yorker declared that techno-fascism.

has come to America. And that was really a big moment to see that, you know, my friends who've been looking at me kind of strange for the past year, like I fell down at rabbit hole, I can send them all the New Yorker and say, I was just telling you what everyone else was going to be writing about in the year. So as a tease to see us out,

we're a little bit over an hour now. Will you tell us about, you hinted earlier in the conversation that you're going to be getting into the deeper roots of Silicon Valley and where this ideology comes from. Are we going like 1960s, 1970s? Like what are you looking at that you're about to dredge up for us? You have to go all the way back to the beginnings of civilization early on through things like feudalism, you know, the rise of different tribes and structures of government. I mean, our form of government comes to us through the Greeks and the Romans and then through the English, right?

And our form of government was an attempt to prevent the catastrophes of the past by accounting for all the different pressures. that occur in the society and the need for the people to have a say, but for a slower moving chamber like the Senate and for a balance between the executive, the legislative and the legal branches, right? Our government can be frustrating, but it's basically a very sound and time-tested theory. What they want to return to is more something like feudalism, and from that you get through the fascist ideologies of the 20th century to some new versions of that coming out of the late 70s, 80s, and 90s. and I won't say more on this right now, but you cannot underestimate the degree to which psychedelic drugs have played a tremendous role

in what is happening to our world today. And I say that as somebody who has a favorable view of psychedelics, but garbage in, garbage out. You give psychedelics to a good person, they might see God philanthropic, give them to a bad person who's into fascism.

They might think they are now the god of fascism. So, you know, if I had my way, I'd work on something called the Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley, fascism in the war on America. And maybe I'm in the middle of some projects that might lead to that eventually. But for now, it's an emergency.

And I'm just trying to get out there as often as I can, inform as many people as I can in whatever way I can. And I'm glad to see other reporters starting to do it because it can't, it's going to take everybody. And really, it's shameful with the major newspapers and me out. Let's miss this. It was wide in the open. You know, I didn't find any secret documents.

These guys have been saying this stuff for years. All I did was sit down and listen. And I don't even really have the. capacity or the funding could do so, but I did it anyway. And all of these organizations, with all the funding and all the researchers, they just didn't do it. And if they had, maybe people would have had a better idea of what was coming. And maybe it could have been stopped. But I think there was a massive failure of the press to do its job. And the press is now going to suffer greatly. Fascism is not good for journalists, FYI. So in case people don't know that out there, they think it's just another interesting story to cover. Gil, where can people find your work? at www. www.thenerdrike.com and I also have a YouTube channel where I've been dropping videos

and I've only done one but I've got 30,000 views and my friends have convinced me you have to do that now to reach more people and sadly it works believe me. I'm not really a guy

who wants to look at the camera and tell you stuff but I'm a writer. Well, you were wonderful on our program. Thank you so much for coming on to it. Thank you.

I imagine, I think we'll have you back, probably. That's all of this episode, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, AngryPlanetpod.com, you know the drill. Subscribe, get early access to all of the shows, commercial free, several days early. There's just so much domestic stuff going on. I think there's going to be a lot more

newslettering happening in the near future. I don't want to promise anything, but there's a lot of material to work with right now. Stay safe out there. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Please stay safe and sane until then.