Tech Fascism Has Come for American Democracy w/ Gil Durán

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It's not just anti-status, it's anti-human the world they're planning, right?
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You know, democracy means like of the people, right?
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The demos, the people.
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And what they want, as Paulina Borsuk wrote, is a world that works like a computer, where everything is hierarchical and fixed and controlled, and where they're the ones who control it.
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Gil is the author of the brilliantly titled The Nerd Right, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.
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He also writes a newsletter of the same name, if you want to sign up for that.
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At a time when these Silicon Valley billionaires are throwing around their weight, making sure that their power is felt, as we talked about with Molly White recently, deploying large amounts of cash in order to try to influence the upcoming elections in the United States.
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I thought it would be a good opportunity to have Gill back on the show to discuss his book, of course, but also to discuss the implications of all this.
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And of course, how we got to this point, right?
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How these billionaires who run Silicon Valley, but also increasingly so much of our world, became so influential, how they think about the world and how that now shapes the world that so many of us live in because they are so powerful and they can deploy their wealth in basically whatever way they want in order to shape political systems, in order to shape policies, to reflect what they want the world to be, regardless of what the rest of us want the world to be.
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And so we get through kind of the early libertarian phases of Silicon Valley, talk about what that was, why these people were looking at the world in that way at that time, and how that has morphed into what Gil calls Silicon Valley fascism, right?
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You know, this fascist ideology that has gripped so many of these people from Peter Thiel all down the line to many of his followers.
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And certainly, as Gill talks about, and as Gil has written a lot about, the network state movement headed up by Balaji Srinivasan, which of course we've talked about on the show before, but you know, tries to create these cities effectively outside of state and government control, where these tech billionaires could effectively do what they want, can run it as they want, you know, can make sure that life in these cities aligns with how they think a society should work, regardless of whether that is actually how a society would be good for the vast majority of people who typically live in a society, but maybe wouldn't self-select to live in one of these libertarian tech cities that are designed for tech billionaires and not for regular people.
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And so ultimately, if these tech billionaires are wielding that power in that way, it's a clear threat to democracy, right?
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Not just if they can carve themselves out from it, but also how they're trying to erode democracy itself in order to ensure that governments work for them rather than for the publics that are supposed to elect them and that they are supposed to serve.
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So this book and Gil's work is effectively trying to do a wake-up call, right?
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To make people realize what is happening here so that hopefully we can push back before this gets too far down the track.
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So I would recommend checking out the book.
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And certainly if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice.
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And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won's Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations, looking into so many aspects of the tech industry, including the ideology that that drives so many of these people at the top of the industry.
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Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
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Gil, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.
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Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely.
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I'm always happy to talk to you because you have such a great perspective on, you know, the ideology of these tech billionaires that are shaping so much of our lives.
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You know, a very important topic for this show and that the listeners are very interested in.
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And of course, you have a new book out called The Nerd Right that really digs into this and gives us the bigger picture, fully fleshed out, of the kinds of things that you have been writing about and talking about for a few years now.
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But, you know, now it's all in one place.
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So we can get, you know, the kind of good uh analysis that you've been giving us uh all there.
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And so I wanted to start because I was really intrigued by something that you opened the book with, right?
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And this is the speech that Joe Biden gives near the end of, or you know, right at the end of his presidency.
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It's his final speech, where he calls out a tech industrial complex and an oligarchy that is forming in the United States that is, you know, really a threat to American democracy.
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And I'm wondering for you why this was really significant and something to really call out uh in order to frame this discussion of the tech billionaires that you that you have written so so well.
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I chose to start with Biden's speech because it was really interesting to me that he chose in his final speech as president, sitting behind the resolute desk, to go after Silicon Valley and to name the fact that a radical cabal of capitalists in Silicon Valley had become a threat to democracy.
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And as I say in the book, it's not clear why he didn't say this earlier, like while he was president of the United States wielding immense power.
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He says it on the way out the door, and then a few days later, hear all these Silicon Valley billionaires lined up behind Donald Trump, and Elon Musk throws two Hitler salutes at the inauguration uh ceremonies.
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So to me, I started there because a lot of people really haven't heard the true story of what's going on with Silicon Valley and how it's been taken over by a cult of radical billionaires who see the destruction of democracy through technology as their destiny in the 21st century.
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And I felt like a lot of people need to hear it first from someone like Biden.
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I'm talking about Democrats who are not on the left, people who uh might hear something like this and think it's too far-fetched.
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But Joe Biden himself warned us that this was happening.
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He warned us far too late.
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So I wanted to start there so that people understood this is not just me saying this.
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This was the last president of the United States saying this, and possibly the last democratically elected president of the United States if we don't find a way to beat back these billionaires.
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Yeah, I think very well said.
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And I and I think it's a good reason to do that, right?
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You know, this is someone that a lot of people trust.
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Obviously, there's a lot of divisiveness in the United States, but if he is saying this, you know, there it carries a certain degree of weight that, you know, maybe if you or I is saying it, it's not deemed as uh as important, but it grants some legitimacy to this criticism that you are levying in the book.
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And and I wanted to know, you know, before we dig into this further, how you got into doing this kind of work and this analysis that eventually led you to write this book, digging into it to the degree that you have.
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For me, it started in San Francisco, where I was the editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner, covering these recall elections to remove four politicians from office in San Francisco in 2022.
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And I took an interest in that because recall elections that are successful are very rare.
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California law allows you to get enough signatures and then try to recall a politician from office, push them out of office early before their term is up.
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And recalls that are successful are rare because they're so expensive.
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But in this case, you had a Republican billionaire and some San Francisco venture capitalists team up to recall four different politicians in one year.
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So this was highly unusual, as was the site of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who are generally framed as liberal leaning, teaming up with a Republican billionaire to oust these politicians who, while some of them were not great, usually just give them their four years and then toss them out of office in the next election.
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And so they were able to create this panic using all these interesting social media tactics.
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There were a lot of trolls, there was a whole network of bots at one point, but really created this panic in liberal San Francisco that the only way for us to save the city was to throw these politicians out.
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And I felt while there were some legitimate criticisms of these politicians, none of them had committed any kind of crime or corruption scandal.
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This was just political anger at things they said or even lies that were being told about some of them.
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And that that was interesting to me because I spent a lot of my career in politics as a Democratic strategist, and I had never quite seen something like that before.
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This joining of tech money and Republican money to create a completely delusional moral panic that succeeded in driving four politicians from office.
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So I was like, well, what is that exactly?
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I wanted to know it because considering myself an expert on California politics, if there's something I haven't seen before, I want to know all about it, because I thought I knew everything.
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And by digging into the layers of that, I discovered that there was something much deeper going on.
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And that some of these Silicon Valley guys, many of them close confidants of Peter Thiel, were rolling out a new kind of political strategy that called for Silicon Valley to pair with the MAGA right-wing billionaire movement to become a powerful force capable of completely disrupting American politics.
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And I didn't think that we would be witnessing that so soon.
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I thought it'd be something five or ten years down the road.
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I felt like I was writing early.
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But then J.D.
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Vance got on the ticket and everything changed.
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It was pretty startling to see just how quickly it seemed like the tech industry embraced the Republican Party and how quickly they were kind of let in under the second Trump administration.
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You know, certainly those kind of ties were there before.
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You know, you talk a lot about Peter Thiel in the book, and I want to come back to talking about him a bit more.
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But, you know, in California politics, obviously the tech industry played a major role for many years, right?
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And so why did we see this shift in what seemed like such a short period of time away from a tech industry that seemed to be more supportive or backing of the Democratic Party, at least I think how many people kind of saw it over a long period of time, to going so much behind the Republican Party.
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And as you're saying, you know, trying to unseat certain candidates and things like that.
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Like what was occurring there and and why was it happening so seemingly quickly?
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I think the seeds of right-wing fascism were always there in Silicon Valley early on.
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And as you know, there were some writers who captured that early on.
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People like David Columbia.
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If you go back to the 90s and 2000, you had Paulina Borsuk writing for Wired and Mother Jones.
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Her book Cyber-Selfish largely talks about these guys, and this was 30 years ago.
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Then you had people like Barb Brook and Cameron who wrote an essay called The Californian Ideology, all the way back in 1995, which really spelled out what we're seeing now.
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This selfish, formerly libertarian pose becoming something far worse, this anti-government hatred carried by the richest, most successful men in the world who were largely created by government subsidies, contracts, and investments.
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So I think it was always there, but I think there was an opportunistic phase where a lot of these Silicon Valley oligarchs pretended to be liberals or Democrats, or maybe even felt that way, because it was in their best interest to do so, because Democrats had power, because Democrats had the access to contracts.
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And so there was this time, especially in the early Obama years, when Silicon Valley seemed very liberal-coded.
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Obama was the social media president.
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He was very pro-tech, very pro-Silicon Valley.
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But what we've seen is this surge in the billionaire class.
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And as these men have become richer, they have become more insane.
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And some of them were sort of already on that track.
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Peter Thiel, for example, has been anti-government for a very long time.
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And you can go back to the late 90s, as I do in the book, and find him talking about how crypto was going to completely disrupt nations and democracy and government would be unable to do anything about it.
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And what's happened is he has been able to sort of crypto peel a lot of his fellow billionaires into this kind of idea.
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Now we see even people like Sergei Brin, who was padding around in Crocs, looking like a dad on a weekend 10, 15 years ago, becoming totally Trump pilled.
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And so I think it's because their definition of their self-interest has changed.
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They needed Democrats to get rich, to get contracts, to gain credibility.
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And now they're done with government.
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They're done with pretending to be nice.
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They want to kill democracy.
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They want to have total power and control, no regulation, no law.
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They want to be above everything, even mortality itself for a lot of these guys.
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And so I just think we see a mirror here of the self-interest of the oligarchs.
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Whatever suits them, depending on the year or the decade of the situation, they morph into it.
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But now the masks are fully off and they want this to all be over with.
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Yeah, I think that's really well put, right?
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And it gives us a good insight into how things are shifted and what was always there.
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And I do want to pick up on what you were saying about Teal, right?
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Because if we think about, say, the inauguration of Trump, right?
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And you have all these tech billionaires lined up there, Teal is not one of the faces among them, right?
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And at the time, a lot of people are talking about Elon Musk in particular because, you know, he's jumping on the stage with Donald Trump.
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And as you say, he's doing the Nazi salute in the days after.
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You know, he's the guy who looked very publicly put a lot of money behind Trump.
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But in the book, you write that Teal's influence was probably quite a bit wider than Elon Musk's.
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And, you know, he had a bunch of people placed throughout the Trump administration, but, you know, publicly wasn't really the face of what was going on here.
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Um, so can you talk a bit about the influence that Teal wielded?
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And, you know, as you're talking about his ideology there, where does that actually come from?
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When does he start to form that ideology that we now see playing out today?
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Well, Elon Musk is sort of like a teenage kid who didn't get enough attention from his parents.
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So now he's so hungry for attention, jumping around on stage behind Trump like a lunatic, waving a chainsaw around.
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He really wanted the attention.
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Teal is a lot more mature and sophisticated and understood that it's a good thing and a bad thing to be in proximity to power.
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A lot of what you see in Teal's thinking over the years is kind of being on both sides of things, understanding there's a benefit and there's the opposite of the benefit.
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So he stayed away from the front row and tried to keep his face off of the cameras.
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But all throughout the administration, it was really Teal's influence that we saw spreading everywhere, starting with J.D.
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Vance, the vice president, who was almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel.
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At every step of J.D.
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Vance's career, it has been Thiel who has been the driving force and the funder.
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He talked him out of being a lawyer when he met him at Yale Law School.
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He made him a venture capitalist in San Francisco, even though by all means J.D.
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Vance was a pretty mediocre one, didn't last long.
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He boosted Vance's book, Hillbilly Elogy.
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He uh funded J.D.
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Vance's own venture capital firm when he moved back to Ohio, and then invested$15 million in his Senate campaign when Vance decided to run for Senate.
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In addition, he helped convert J.D.
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Vance into a Trump supporter and a Catholic, and then made the peace between Trump and Vance when Vance was going to be a nominee for vice president, because Vance had infamously previously called Donald Trump America's Hitler.
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So at every step of the way, you have a guy here who is wholly dependent on one billionaire, Peter Thiel.
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So Peter Thiel's the real power behind the throne here, I would say.
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And that's important because if you look back at the radicalization of Silicon Valley, a lot of it traces back to Thiel.
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And Thiel's radicalization seems to trace back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which was this sort of conspiracy theory kooky doom book that was published about how everything's going to change in the 21st century.
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And its predictions, which Till regards as prophecy, but were largely rehashed arguments from the cypherpunks and science fiction and things that had existed in other formats, but were just sort of collated into this kooky doom book.
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The thesis, which Till regards as prophecy, was that in the 21st century technology would collapse nation states and overthrow democracy.
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And the main two technologies that would do that would be something called cybercurrency, crypto, and advanced automation, or AI, which would collapse the economy by taking all the jobs, leading to chaos and widespread violence, necessitating that smart investors who could anticipate this coming and make the right moves would have multiple passports and move as sort of stateless cognitive elites, a term taken from eugenics, to rule over the world free from democracy, regulation, and law.
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A crazy book.
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And the reviews of the time were like, this book is not uh credible, there's no this stuff's not gonna happen, it's doom and gloom.
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But the book had such a deep impact on Teal that he has credited for being one of the inspirations for starting PayPal, which he saw as an early attempt to create the digital currency that was predicted in the sovereign individual, or I should say that was regurgitated in the sovereign individual.
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And in 2020, when the book was reissued, he wrote the preface for it.
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And since 1997, there's been this long line of people also being inspired by the sovereign individual.
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He sort of made it a thing.
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If you want to be in the know, if you want to be part of this sort of right tech right club, you gotta be like, oh yeah, the sovereign individual, which is hilarious because whenever you see these influencers talking about how great this book is, and when you realize that it's actually a kooky conspiracy theory book written by two of the guys who helped start Newsmax and who spread the conspiracy theory that the Clintons had a bunch of people murdered while they were in the White House, you get a very different impression of the person who's pretending to be very smart because they've read The Sovereign Individual.
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I know a lot more about those that book and the people who wrote it than I ever expected to.
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And you know, one thing is that people often say that Peter Thiel's an intellectual, Silicon Valley intellectual.
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He's not.
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Peter Thiel's a pseudo-intellectual.
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He reads a handful of dumb things that confirm his priors, and he goes around giving speeches for the next 30 years on that.
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And in 1999, he gave a speech in Oakland at this Libertarian Institute in which he predicted that this new currency would change everything when it came along.
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And that Washington would be too dumb to understand what was happening.
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And it would happen so quickly they would have no idea.
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And it was the currency that could not be stopped.
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And he goes on to become a major investor in Bitcoin, in crypto, etc.
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And now we see crypto swallowing our political system whole.
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In the United States, crypto has gone from zero in politics to now being the biggest player in politics, hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into control elections.
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So prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling.
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And Peter Thiel got his from the sovereign individual.
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And when you understand what that book is about, about destroying democracy, about destroying nations like the United States, so that a handful of oligarchs can thrive and rule the future, then you look at what's happening today in the news, you see a lot of similarities and scary parallels.
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Absolutely.
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And you know, even when you're describing what this sovereign individual is supposed to be, like it immediately makes you think of who Peter Thiel has become, right?
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You know, when you're talking about having the multiple passports and trying to be the investor, kind of, you know, uh being prepared for this kind of a future, it also feels like, you know, it very much inspired his ideology, but has also kind of shaped the way that he has acted as a person in the world in order to try to realize this kind of life, right?
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In fact, the sovereign individual recommended that these cognitive elites gather multiple passports.
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And two of the countries it recommended, of the five or six it recommended, were New Zealand and Argentina.
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Well, Teal got a New Zealand passport, I believe, in 2011, and now he's bought a$12 million mansion in Argentina.
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He's still following this kooky damn book.
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And it's amazing that uh there are people who mention that he has this fixation with the book, but if you go deeper and see the degree to which it is still dictating his behavior as a man who's almost 60 years old, it's very, very, very strange.
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We all go through phases with books, but he's been on this for quite a long time.
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And if you want to understand what's happening uh in this country and in this world and what Silicon Valley is up to, you can read that book.
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I don't recommend buying it, get a used copy if you can.
00:21:13.359 --> 00:21:15.039
Probably you can find a PDF somewhere.
00:21:15.200 --> 00:21:20.240
But in a strange coincidence, my publisher actually has the rights to the sovereign individual.
00:21:20.319 --> 00:21:24.400
So we're kind of it's like karmic that I would come back later and expose it.
00:21:24.480 --> 00:21:26.400
But um, you know, that was a long time ago.
00:21:26.720 --> 00:21:29.519
Are are you gonna write the introduction to the next edition?
00:21:29.920 --> 00:21:31.279
I'm I might actually.
00:21:31.440 --> 00:21:33.839
We need we do need a critical edition of the sovereign individual.
00:21:33.920 --> 00:21:39.200
And I feel like if people one of the criticisms I get is like, well, this is all weird and nobody believes that, and blah, blah, blah.
00:21:39.279 --> 00:21:41.599
I'm like, look, don't listen to me, go read the sovereign individual.
00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:45.920
And then and start with the preface by Peter Thiel saying how important this book is.
00:21:46.160 --> 00:21:54.160
And then come back and talk to me about whether what I'm saying, having read the book, is realistic and scary or something that nobody needs to worry about.
00:21:54.319 --> 00:21:55.839
Because I think we really need to worry about it.
00:21:55.920 --> 00:22:04.160
And I leave it up to readers, I think people are smart, uh, but when you see how Much I string together, you know, none of the stuff I write about is a secret.
00:22:04.480 --> 00:22:10.799
Most of what I is in my book has been said in their podcasts, in their manifestos, in their essays, in their interviews.
00:22:11.039 --> 00:22:13.599
They want you to know what they believe.
00:22:13.920 --> 00:22:15.680
They want you to know what they're up to.
00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:21.839
And they strangely understand that most of the mainstream media and political class won't touch it.
00:22:22.000 --> 00:22:27.279
Their defense shield is that it's so damn weird that it's almost a cloak, an invisibility cloak.
00:22:27.599 --> 00:22:40.400
And the only thing I've done differently is take them seriously, is take them at their word and assume that they mean what they say when they say that democracy will not survive the 21st century.
00:22:40.799 --> 00:22:41.200
Yeah.
00:22:41.359 --> 00:22:52.079
It's like, and again, like it's not even like just read the sovereign individual and see what it says, but read the book that has been out since 97, that has been shaping the way that Peter Thiel thinks for almost three decades now.
00:22:52.319 --> 00:23:01.599
And, you know, you can then see how he has acted based on what he has taken from that book and other and other books, you know, uh other things that that we'll talk about.
00:23:01.839 --> 00:23:12.559
But one of the things that stood out to me in in reading the book and and the types of ideas that are influencing people like Teal is also to think about this notion of cyber libertarianism, right?
00:23:12.640 --> 00:23:14.720
And you were mentioning some of these ideas earlier.
00:23:14.880 --> 00:23:17.759
And of course you mentioned David Columbia, who who wrote this book.
00:23:17.920 --> 00:23:28.000
Um, but on the one hand, you have this elite group of people like Teal who are very invested in trying to break down the state, you know, trying to empower themselves and what have you.
00:23:28.160 --> 00:23:47.279
But then you look at this kind of broader set of ideas that have just kind of seeped into digital politics that are also kind of inherently anti-statist, and that a lot of people who, you know, like the internet, like being online, have just kind of been told is the kind of political program that we need in order to support kind of a digital environment.
00:23:47.440 --> 00:23:54.480
I wonder what you think about that and how they have very successfully seeded these many of these ideas into the broader conversation.
00:23:54.880 --> 00:24:00.720
It's too bad that Golombia died so young, because I really feel that if he were here, I wouldn't have been the one writing this book.
00:24:00.880 --> 00:24:02.640
I feel like he would have gotten it first.
00:24:02.799 --> 00:24:08.319
He already did in the last chapter of Cyber Libertarianism, is about how this is becoming fascism, right?
00:24:08.400 --> 00:24:13.359
And we weren't quite to the point where we could see everything we now see, but he saw it coming.
00:24:13.519 --> 00:24:20.160
And it was also in his work in Cyber Libertarianism that I first learned about Paulina Borsuk, who it turns out lives a few miles from me.
00:24:20.240 --> 00:24:23.519
And now her book is being reissued because of a blue sky thread I did.
00:24:23.599 --> 00:24:26.799
So there's been this sort of Gumbia magic that's still going on.
00:24:26.880 --> 00:24:32.559
That's kind of to me the happiest part of this is that I was able to get Paulina the attention she deserves.
00:24:32.720 --> 00:24:34.880
And I I first heard that name from him.
00:24:35.119 --> 00:24:40.640
But it's not just anti-status, it's anti-human, the world they're planning, right?
00:24:40.880 --> 00:24:43.200
You know, democracy means like of the people, right?
00:24:43.279 --> 00:24:44.640
The demos, the people.
00:24:44.960 --> 00:24:55.119
And what they want, as Paulina Borsuk wrote, is a world that works like a computer, where everything is hierarchical and fixed and controlled, and where they're the ones who control it.
00:24:55.359 --> 00:25:08.319
They don't like the messiness of democracy where all of these different people have a say, where poor people are equal to the rich, even though that's not how it really works, as we all know, where women and people of color are rising in power.
00:25:08.559 --> 00:25:15.200
In fact, in 2009, Peter Till wrote that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy were compatible.
00:25:15.359 --> 00:25:23.599
And he explained that the extension of the voting franchise to women and other groups was part of the problem, which is a completely insane thing to say.
00:25:23.680 --> 00:25:29.920
And remember, this is a few months after Obama takes office when most of us are feeling kind of hopy and changey here in the United States.
00:25:30.079 --> 00:25:35.680
And he's just sees an apocalyptic bleak outlook.
00:25:35.920 --> 00:25:45.200
So I think that's the important thing to remember is that these are people who are not really able to relate to regular human beings, probably not ever.
00:25:45.440 --> 00:25:51.440
But the more money that they've had has made them completely alienated from the normal human experience.
00:25:51.680 --> 00:25:59.359
And being so alienated from the normal human experience, they still wish to control how the world works for everyone else.
00:25:59.599 --> 00:26:07.119
And one of the saving graces here is that they're so bad at politics, they don't really understand how normal people think.
00:26:07.200 --> 00:26:08.640
Look at the AI industry.
00:26:08.880 --> 00:26:12.880
The AI industry's main message has been we're going to kill all the jobs.
00:26:13.759 --> 00:26:14.880
That's anti-politics.
00:26:14.960 --> 00:26:19.039
In in American politics, I think in politics everywhere, you promise to create jobs.
00:26:19.200 --> 00:26:25.680
When something's a bad bill that the Republicans don't like, that's good for workers or whatever, they call it a job killer.
00:26:25.839 --> 00:26:34.880
Well, AI is supposedly, according to the AI companies, the greatest job killer the world has ever seen, the job killer to end all job killers.
00:26:35.039 --> 00:26:43.519
And as an added bonus, they like to say that it might also wipe humanity from the face of the planet unless we give them trillions and trillions of dollars to make sure that doesn't happen.
00:26:43.759 --> 00:26:45.920
So this is not how normal people think.
00:26:46.160 --> 00:26:50.720
This is the insanity of the billionaire class becoming the talking points of capitalism.
00:26:50.799 --> 00:26:54.079
And I call it apocalypse capitalism in the book.
00:26:54.240 --> 00:26:56.240
They're basically thinking the world is ending.
00:26:56.319 --> 00:26:58.400
A lot of these guys are in an apocalyptic mode.
00:26:58.559 --> 00:27:01.839
The country's gonna collapse, the world order's gonna collapse.
00:27:02.000 --> 00:27:04.880
They're all promising abundance, but they're building bunkers.
00:27:05.039 --> 00:27:06.799
Almost all of them are building bunkers.
00:27:07.119 --> 00:27:12.000
So they're promising uh abundance, but they're also gonna take away all the jobs.
00:27:12.079 --> 00:27:16.160
And they're fighting communism, but they're saying everybody's gonna get a check from them.
00:27:16.400 --> 00:27:20.960
So they're all these, again, back to the the, I call it Tillian inversion.
00:27:21.200 --> 00:27:23.119
Everything is itself in the opposite.
00:27:23.359 --> 00:27:31.920
We don't like communists, but we're gonna make sure everybody has a share in the company, and the AI will be the state, and the AI will be the country, and the AI will be the economy.
00:27:32.079 --> 00:27:40.640
This is what happens when you're a billionaire and you think you know how everything works and you think you're really smart, and nobody can tell you that you're you're fucking crazy and delusional and should shut up.
00:27:40.799 --> 00:27:42.559
And thankfully they're not shutting up.
00:27:42.640 --> 00:27:47.359
Some of them are now trying to roll back the job stuff, but uh, you know, they should have known that from the beginning.
00:27:47.519 --> 00:27:51.200
So basically, it's anti-statist because it's anti-human.
00:27:51.359 --> 00:27:53.039
Democracy exists for people.
00:27:53.279 --> 00:27:57.680
The public means we all contribute and we all get a share, we're all taken care of.
00:27:57.839 --> 00:28:03.440
They want to reinvent that so that they never have to deal with anyone else's opinion and they have no laws and rules.
00:28:03.599 --> 00:28:06.319
And that that's really the crisis that's been created here.
00:28:06.400 --> 00:28:10.240
The existential crisis is that they have enough money to try.
00:28:10.480 --> 00:28:13.440
I'm not sure they have enough wherewithal to succeed.
00:28:13.599 --> 00:28:19.759
But by lining up behind Trump, you know, they see Trump as a technology for destroying democracy very quickly.
00:28:20.000 --> 00:28:24.559
So they're funding the Trump regime because he might do anything.
00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:30.160
Maybe he'll even find a way to interfere with or disrupt or cancel or steal the election.
00:28:30.319 --> 00:28:32.079
And they'll be totally on board with that.
00:28:32.240 --> 00:28:40.720
So for them, they've run out of just silly food delivery apps to fund, and now they're funding the death of democracy if they can get away with it.
00:28:41.119 --> 00:28:46.960
Yeah, and it certainly protects them from uh, you know, being held accountable for anything that they have done.
00:28:48.079 --> 00:28:50.160
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00:29:54.319 --> 00:29:56.960
But you know, you mentioned the AI stuff there.
00:29:57.039 --> 00:30:02.000
And it's like, on one hand, the world that they're creating and how there's this going to be this powerful AI.
00:30:02.079 --> 00:30:15.359
And then you even listen to people like Elon Musk, and he says we're basically going to be like the Labrador retrievers to this all-powerful AI, kind of like treating us as its pets, which is just like, what kind of world are these people living in, right?
00:30:15.440 --> 00:30:17.359
And and this is what I want to kind of ask you, right?
00:30:17.440 --> 00:30:22.799
Because we've been talking about the sovereign individual and and where some of these kind of Telian ideas come from.
00:30:22.960 --> 00:30:28.799
But how does it go from this guy who in 1997 is not very influential, right?
00:30:28.880 --> 00:30:30.880
You know, he becomes more influential over time.
00:30:31.039 --> 00:30:45.359
How does it go from, you know, this guy having these weird kind of libertarian right-wing beliefs to so much of the industry following this kind of ideology, adopting this kind of ideology, certainly, you know, in the late 2010s and in the early 2020s?
00:30:45.519 --> 00:30:46.400
How does this expand?
00:30:46.480 --> 00:31:00.079
And how do so many of these billionaires come to start believing uh, you know, these ideas about, you know, needing to ensure their power and use technology in the way that, in the way that they want to to build this basically authoritarian society?
00:31:00.400 --> 00:31:10.319
The way I think of it is that Peter Thiel created a cult, a cult of billionaires who believe that it's their destiny to destroy democracy in the 21st century using technology.
00:31:10.480 --> 00:31:12.400
And there's some millionaires too.
00:31:12.559 --> 00:31:16.799
But you know, the right has a good grasp of the need to create a culture.
00:31:17.039 --> 00:31:25.440
Starting small, starting on internet chat rooms, starting in weird publications, starting in strange private little retreats and meetings.
00:31:25.519 --> 00:31:32.720
You know, Till goes around speaking at law schools and colleges to undergrads and graduate students to sort of spread his message.
00:31:32.960 --> 00:31:37.519
He understands the importance of starting a conversation that could eventually snowball.
00:31:37.680 --> 00:31:40.960
Cults can be small but can become huge at some point, right?
00:31:41.119 --> 00:31:49.519
Christianity started as a small cult for hundreds of years that a lot of people didn't take seriously, and then boom, it it took over large parts of the world.
00:31:49.680 --> 00:31:54.559
So he's very much into that idea in Zero to One, his book on startups.
00:31:54.640 --> 00:31:59.200
He says you should model yourself after a cult and an organization of total dedication.
00:31:59.440 --> 00:32:09.920
So what he did was sort of as people, as he became more powerful, and as more people sought him out and he became the mentor to them, he immersed them in these ideas.
00:32:10.079 --> 00:32:12.319
He introduced them to these ideas.
00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:14.160
And some of them already kind of had them.
00:32:14.240 --> 00:32:26.000
He he was the main reason why anybody's ever heard of Curtis Jarvin, who did a bunch of psychedelic drugs in his uh closet, and then wrote a new fantasy version of fascism for the 21st century.
00:32:26.160 --> 00:32:28.079
And this is a guy no one should have ever heard of.
00:32:28.240 --> 00:32:30.319
Curtis Yarvin is a loser.
00:32:30.640 --> 00:32:37.039
And yet Thiel and Andreessen and others spread him around Silicon Valley like gospel.
00:32:37.279 --> 00:32:49.680
This idea that democracy should be replaced with dictatorship and that slavery was natural, and all these terrible ideas of Jarvin that no one that anyone should be ashamed to be associated with.
00:32:49.839 --> 00:33:05.039
And from Yarvin, you get Balaji Srinavasan, who takes Yarvin's idea of replacing democracy with patchworks of corporate controlled governments, and Balaji Srinavasan creates an idea called the network state, which is a thinly disguised version of Yarvin's patchwork.
00:33:05.279 --> 00:33:07.839
And so, and then this becomes a big thing.
00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:12.640
Andreessen and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong are pushing this.
00:33:12.799 --> 00:33:18.319
And then you get all of these young people who want to be big timers in Silicon Valley repeating this stuff.
00:33:18.400 --> 00:33:19.279
They know nothing about it.
00:33:19.359 --> 00:33:21.680
They don't know where it comes from, they don't know why it's stupid.
00:33:21.839 --> 00:33:30.319
But if you want to fit into this culture, if you want to qualify for these venture capital dollars and be in the cool fascist club, you got to go along with it.
00:33:30.480 --> 00:33:39.440
And so you see the rise of these cults, the test crial cults, transhumanism, singulitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, long-termism.
00:33:39.599 --> 00:33:48.799
And so from this very small group of men, Thiel and his disciples and his fellow travelers, you get a movement that J.D.
00:33:48.960 --> 00:33:52.559
Vance is even quoting Curtis Jarvin, you know, by 2021.
00:33:52.880 --> 00:33:54.960
And that's kind of what happened, I think.
00:33:55.119 --> 00:34:03.039
And if you look at what happened during the last election, presidential election in the US, you suddenly had all of these venture capitalists standing up and saying, I'm for Trump.
00:34:03.200 --> 00:34:04.000
I'm for Trump.
00:34:04.240 --> 00:34:06.079
I was a Democrat, but now I'm for Trump.
00:34:06.160 --> 00:34:08.159
And they did a big fundraiser in San Francisco.
00:34:08.320 --> 00:34:14.159
So Thiel is obsessed with this idea called mimetic rivalry, which is that people mimic the desires of others.
00:34:14.320 --> 00:34:17.440
You get your desire from seeing what other people consider desirable.
00:34:17.599 --> 00:34:30.480
And so he's created these sort of loops of mimetic rivalry, where people adopt this idea that the United States doesn't need to survive the 21st century, that actually venture capitalists, it's cool to be for Trump, and you should be like these guys.
00:34:30.559 --> 00:34:31.519
And we saw this happen.
00:34:31.679 --> 00:34:36.880
Dozens of venture capitalists who had claimed to be Democrats before now suddenly being for Trump.
00:34:37.119 --> 00:34:42.639
So on your basic level, he understands how persuasion works in social groups.
00:34:42.880 --> 00:34:46.719
And it makes sense because he's the first major investor in Facebook.
00:34:47.039 --> 00:34:54.480
And Facebook is completely based on sorting people by social groups, persuading and manipulating their opinions and perceptions.
00:34:54.719 --> 00:35:01.760
And so he's done that on the white on the mass scale by investing in things like Facebook and Palantir.
00:35:02.159 --> 00:35:12.400
And he's done that on a on a personal level by personally creating this sort of cult of people who have now brought the tech right to the front of American politics.
00:35:12.639 --> 00:35:16.480
Unfortunately for him, the more people know about this stuff, the more they hate it.
00:35:16.639 --> 00:35:22.639
So he didn't figure out the whole part of politics where you gotta do stuff that people like that people feel is good for them.
00:35:22.800 --> 00:35:22.960
Right?
00:35:23.119 --> 00:35:25.519
Again, billionaires don't have normal brains.
00:35:25.599 --> 00:35:26.559
They don't think normally.
00:35:26.719 --> 00:35:29.199
They think, wow, this sounds good to my fellow billionaires.
00:35:29.519 --> 00:35:31.039
Let's go tell everybody about it.
00:35:31.199 --> 00:35:33.119
And instead, you get massive rejection.
00:35:33.280 --> 00:35:35.599
This is an extremely unpopular regime.
00:35:35.920 --> 00:35:47.199
And that explains why Curtis Sharvin has been openly weeping in his interviews and warning that everybody has to all the tech fascists have to leave the country because they're gonna get got if they stay here and the Democrats win.
00:35:47.280 --> 00:35:50.719
So this is this is why they want to get rid of democracy, right?
00:35:50.800 --> 00:35:53.760
So they don't need to make the sell to the broader public.
00:35:54.079 --> 00:35:55.920
Yeah, democracy is accountability.
00:35:56.000 --> 00:35:59.440
And um, you know, he's been calling for Trump to go more extreme.
00:35:59.679 --> 00:36:01.760
That this is you gotta do the thing.
00:36:02.079 --> 00:36:08.000
Gotta and now we see them raising the alarm about the communist threat to our country.
00:36:08.159 --> 00:36:09.199
They're thinking about it.
00:36:09.360 --> 00:36:12.719
I don't know if they got the guts to pull it off, but they're thinking about it.
00:36:12.800 --> 00:36:16.800
And probably if someone puts five billion more in crypto on the table, he'll try.
00:36:17.119 --> 00:36:28.159
Yeah, you know, one of the things that stands out to me in hearing you lay all that out, like I think you're giving us a really good insight into how these ideas have grown, you know, the types of ideas that these people have come to and why they have.
00:36:28.400 --> 00:36:36.159
But one of the things in hearing you talk about it is just, you know, the work that goes into listening to all this, to delving into it.
00:36:36.239 --> 00:36:46.320
You know, for years, I was like listening to every stupid thing that Elon Musk would say because I was like, I need to know what this man is saying so I can like relate it to other people, right?
00:36:46.400 --> 00:36:51.199
Because so much of the coverage of Musk was so positive and everything he's saying is wonderful.
00:36:51.360 --> 00:36:57.039
When actually, when you listen to it, it was kind of like crazy and ridiculous and not very intelligent at all in many cases.
00:36:57.199 --> 00:37:06.960
And so I wonder for you, you know, you have now spent a lot of time digging into what these people are saying, what these people are reading, you know, just trying to understand how these people think.
00:37:07.280 --> 00:37:09.119
What is that actually like?
00:37:10.480 --> 00:37:14.159
The good thing is that I I had a really rough childhood with a lot of poverty and violence.
00:37:14.239 --> 00:37:18.079
So I have a very high capacity for dysfunctional, bad things.
00:37:18.320 --> 00:37:22.000
I think that's why I was so good in politics during my political career.
00:37:22.320 --> 00:37:31.679
And there are probably a lot of jobs I could have done, you know, if I if I had the aptitude to be a doctor, I would have probably been an emergency room doctor because I mean I'm very squeamish, don't get me wrong.
00:37:31.760 --> 00:37:35.199
I don't think I could be a doctor, but uh, I like high-intensity things.
00:37:35.280 --> 00:37:45.599
And when I realized how important this ideology had become and how powerful it was getting, I realized that I needed to immerse myself in it and to tell people about it.
00:37:45.920 --> 00:37:52.559
Because establishment media was completely apparently oblivious to it, not interested in it at all.
00:37:52.960 --> 00:37:55.199
A lot of people still won't touch it.
00:37:55.280 --> 00:37:58.480
I think it's starting to change a bit because it's become too obvious.
00:37:58.719 --> 00:38:03.360
And so I just considered it my patriotic duty in a way.
00:38:03.519 --> 00:38:11.840
There were days certainly when when I didn't have a book deal and I'm writing something for my newsletter when it had like 20 subscribers, and I'm like, why am I doing this today?
00:38:12.000 --> 00:38:15.840
The sun is shining, I could go do something else, go do something more pleasant.
00:38:16.000 --> 00:38:20.639
But I just had this obsession with figuring this out and with explaining it to people.
00:38:20.800 --> 00:38:24.320
And I ended up burning a tremendous amount of my own money on it, even.
00:38:24.400 --> 00:38:28.719
This was um, you know, a good thing a book deal came along because this would have been really ruinous for me.
00:38:28.880 --> 00:38:32.400
I would have uh uh really done the things you're not supposed to do at my age.
00:38:32.480 --> 00:38:34.000
You know, I'll be 50 this week.
00:38:34.159 --> 00:38:36.239
So uh but it all worked out in the end.
00:38:36.480 --> 00:38:43.760
But uh it's just one of those things where looking back now, now that the book's coming out and that people have heard this, it's gaining.
00:38:43.840 --> 00:38:46.800
Uh it's one of those things things you hear about where you just have to take the risk.
00:38:46.960 --> 00:38:50.880
If you have this feeling that you have to do something, you have to follow that intuition.
00:38:51.039 --> 00:38:55.760
And this could have also ended with me just getting a job and disappearing and not doing.
00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:00.960
I came that close to taking a job before the book deal came, and that would have required me to stop writing publicly.
00:39:01.119 --> 00:39:13.280
So uh I think um I just couldn't turn away and I couldn't understand for the life of me why we weren't reading about this in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or other major outlets.
00:39:13.599 --> 00:39:17.119
It seemed to me that it was important knowledge for people to have before the election.
00:39:17.440 --> 00:39:18.880
And there were people who had mentioned it.
00:39:19.039 --> 00:39:25.920
The New York Times has had articles about the Dark Enlightenment and the New Right, but no one really went and put it all together.
00:39:26.079 --> 00:39:26.880
And I can get why.
00:39:26.960 --> 00:39:31.679
That was pretty painful to listen to six hours of Biology Srinavasan on a podcast.
00:39:31.920 --> 00:39:33.760
I mean, that guy's worse than Fidel Castro.
00:39:33.840 --> 00:39:35.599
He just goes on and on and on and on.
00:39:35.679 --> 00:39:41.280
I I get kind of exhausted by, you know, 45 minutes and and uh get tired of hearing myself speak very easily.
00:39:41.440 --> 00:39:43.920
Anyway, you know, it was just a job that had to be done.
00:39:44.159 --> 00:39:50.079
And I would be very glad if someone else had done it, but it didn't really seem like anyone was going to do the thing that I'm doing.
00:39:50.239 --> 00:39:56.960
No, I was very inspired by the work of Quince Lobodian, a historian who's written a lot about some of these underlying ideologies.
00:39:57.199 --> 00:40:04.880
There's an activist in San Francisco named Emily Mills, whose early Twitter threads on the network state were really where I first was like, well, what is that weird thing?
00:40:05.039 --> 00:40:24.880
She was the first to make the connection between what happened in San Francisco and the network state ideology because Gary Tan, the president of Y Combinator, is a very proud member of the network state cult that believes they're going to replace democracy with these privatized cities or else with governments that answer to tech, which is largely what has happened in San Francisco.
00:40:25.119 --> 00:40:28.960
Silicon Valley has pretty much bought up the political power right now.
00:40:29.280 --> 00:40:36.079
And it happened to coincide with a nationwide downturn in crime, so they're pretending like they're winning somehow.
00:40:36.239 --> 00:40:42.079
But as someone who's in politics a long time, I gotta let them know that crime goes back up, you know, it's all cyclical.
00:40:42.400 --> 00:40:43.519
You haven't solved anything.
00:40:43.920 --> 00:40:46.159
Problems never stop occurring in politics.
00:40:46.480 --> 00:40:52.800
But when you have a bunch of millionaires screaming all day that everything has to be done differently, then you create a crisis.
00:40:52.880 --> 00:40:55.679
But the the crisis will come for them as well.
00:40:55.920 --> 00:40:58.000
So yeah, that was basically it.
00:40:58.079 --> 00:41:02.159
I felt like, you know, there are other books that will be written on this stuff, no doubt.
00:41:02.320 --> 00:41:06.960
And there are things I didn't get around to or say, I think this has to be a whole area of study.
00:41:07.119 --> 00:41:10.960
I think this should be a beat at every major publication in the world.
00:41:11.199 --> 00:41:24.000
Because if the oligarchs succeed in toppling our democracy by pairing up with this MAGA fascist movement, that'll be the most important story in the history of the United States, how we ended, how our nation died.
00:41:24.159 --> 00:41:29.039
And so I would highly encourage editors at these big publications to start paying attention.
00:41:29.199 --> 00:41:34.880
And, you know, the moment they are start writing about this, I'd be happy to go do something else because this is some pretty dark stuff to think about all day.
00:41:35.039 --> 00:41:35.920
And it's not about me.
00:41:36.000 --> 00:41:40.000
It was just I was in the position to see what wasn't being done.
00:41:40.239 --> 00:41:49.519
And that is what I try to do in my book is tell people what exactly is happening right now and why and what they want, and to some degree how we can stop it.
00:41:49.760 --> 00:41:50.639
Yeah, absolutely.
00:41:50.719 --> 00:41:53.199
And I do want to get to that part a bit later in our conversation.
00:41:53.360 --> 00:42:02.880
But to pick up on what you were saying there, like, do you have an idea of why these major publications still don't pay more attention to what we're seeing with these tech billionaires and the ideology that they have?
00:42:02.960 --> 00:42:12.639
Like, like you say, you know, we often see kind of dedicated articles that are related to this, um, but then that won't be reflected in like, you know, the kind of general technology coverage that they do, right?
00:42:12.719 --> 00:42:20.719
It's like, you know, a one-off feature piece, but then that doesn't seem to be picked up into the broader way that they approach reporting on the tech industry.
00:42:20.880 --> 00:42:25.679
And it really stands out to me just recently because we saw this interview that The Economist did with Elon Musk.
00:42:25.840 --> 00:42:42.159
And while there was some pushing on his politics and, you know, the actions that he has taken, there was still a lot of like, you know, agreeing with his positions and, you know, justifying them to a certain degree, and the editor-in-chief doing interviews after where she was declaring that she was not an Elon Musk hater and she still thought he was a genius and all this kind of stuff.
00:42:42.239 --> 00:42:51.119
So, what do you think kind of motivates that and and and motivates them not to go harder on these people who, as you say, are very clearly threatening democracy in this moment?
00:42:51.920 --> 00:43:01.679
Well, that Economist interview was sent out as part of the insider newsletter for The Economist, sponsored by Anthropic, brought to you by Anthropic.
00:43:01.920 --> 00:43:13.119
So a lot of media outlets are highly dependent on ad revenue and partnerships with technology companies, with Silicon Valley, with corporations in general.
00:43:13.280 --> 00:43:25.360
And increasingly, a lot of the business sections of, or The Economist is a business magazine, but business sections of newspapers and other publications use as a revenue model events.
00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:33.039
And to have events as your revenue model, you got to make sure people will come to them CEOs, famous venture capitalists.
00:43:33.519 --> 00:43:41.119
And you're not going to have a successful events revenue stream if you're really pissing these people off, if you're really hitting them where it hurts.
00:43:41.280 --> 00:43:47.039
Maybe if they go too far, you have to do that, if they have a serious criminal case against them or whatever.
00:43:47.199 --> 00:43:57.440
But we've largely seen this cloak of invisibility around the extremist anti American, anti democracy ideology of these tech zillionaires.
00:43:57.760 --> 00:43:59.119
And so I think that's one level of it.
00:43:59.199 --> 00:44:00.559
People will say that's That's not true.
00:44:00.719 --> 00:44:01.840
Oh, we don't do it that way.
00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:03.440
But yes, you do do it that way.
00:44:03.599 --> 00:44:03.920
Right.
00:44:04.079 --> 00:44:06.239
Yes, you are dependent on that revenue stream.
00:44:06.480 --> 00:44:22.000
The other part of it, I think, is the editing class is very allergic to anything complex or complicated or scary or that seems to them conspiratorial, regardless of how much evidence there is that it really matters and has to be taken seriously.
00:44:22.239 --> 00:44:31.360
What I found is that younger reporters in the newsroom reach out and express interest or admiration in my work, but they're not allowed to write about this stuff.
00:44:31.599 --> 00:44:33.280
They don't exactly say that all the time.
00:44:33.440 --> 00:44:37.440
A few have pretty much said that, but their editor's like, no, we're not touching that.
00:44:37.599 --> 00:44:48.639
The San Francisco Chronicle has written a few stories about actual network state projects on the network state dashboard, biology's official dashboard, and they won't say that it's a part of the network state, right?
00:44:48.800 --> 00:45:00.559
So there's a ban on calling it the network state, or so here's this tower they're trying to build on Market Street in San Francisco and have it be its own society and selling citizenships.
00:45:01.199 --> 00:45:05.679
And you're not going to say that that's literally on the network state dashboard.
00:45:05.840 --> 00:45:14.159
So there's some kind of bar to recognizing the power of this cult ideology, or that it is actually a cult.
00:45:14.320 --> 00:45:19.840
And in San Francisco, that's not unusual because the newspapers completely missed the Jim Jones thing, right?
00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:21.280
Until it was far too late.
00:45:21.440 --> 00:45:32.400
In fact, the reporter who broke the bad stories about Jim Jones, who ended up killing all of his followers in Guyana, had to go write it for a magazine that would allow him to touch the subject, right?
00:45:32.480 --> 00:45:36.239
So history repeats itself sometimes, but I do think that's changing a bit.
00:45:36.400 --> 00:45:41.440
And my hope is that the book will help editors understand that this is all nailed down and real.
00:45:41.599 --> 00:45:45.840
And sometimes what you have to do is frame it up for people, help them understand why it's important.
00:45:46.079 --> 00:45:49.519
For example, people were like, why are you talking about Balaji Srinavasan?
00:45:49.599 --> 00:45:50.000
Who cares?
00:45:50.159 --> 00:46:10.480
Well, now the Wall Street Journal is working on a big story about Balaji Srinavasan because he just got thrown out of Malaysia, where his cult was trying to start a sovereign nation on a failed housing development and calling it tech Zionism in a Muslim country, and this came to light, and tens of thousands of Malaysians expressed outrage and they got thrown out of the country.
00:46:10.639 --> 00:46:11.920
Now they're moving to Kazakhstan.
00:46:12.079 --> 00:46:19.360
So part of it is people understanding that the stuff I've been writing about, the stuff other people have been trying to raise awareness about, does matter.
00:46:19.519 --> 00:46:22.639
And it's starting to be clearer to people why it matters.
00:46:22.800 --> 00:46:28.079
And I think people have had a hard time understanding how these things all connect, you know.
00:46:28.320 --> 00:46:37.039
Although it's been exhilarating for me, I wrote about Yarvin's connection to Vance in July of 24, and then the New York Times didn't interview Yarvin until like the day before the inauguration.
00:46:37.280 --> 00:46:39.440
So they are moving slowly.
00:46:39.519 --> 00:46:44.559
And I would argue that we need the press to understand you got to move more quickly on this stuff.
00:46:44.719 --> 00:46:49.519
I know it seems fringe, but these guys are really into fringe, crazy ideas.
00:46:49.679 --> 00:46:52.480
And these ideas wouldn't matter if they weren't billionaires.
00:46:52.880 --> 00:46:56.000
And I think editors need to understand that they no longer create reality.
00:46:56.159 --> 00:46:59.360
The editors don't create reality, the billionaires create the reality.
00:46:59.519 --> 00:47:08.159
And when they say these things and they put millions and tens of millions of dollars into these things, we have to take them seriously because it tells us where they're where we're going.
00:47:10.239 --> 00:47:16.719
And I hadn't even considered the events business kind of side of the equation and talking about that and the revenue stream that comes from it.
00:47:16.800 --> 00:47:29.679
But hopefully, you know, the fact that you have a book on this subject gives editors an opportunity to have you on or to write articles about your book that, you know, brings in some of these perspectives a bit more as an introduction to kind of widening out this conversation.
00:47:29.840 --> 00:47:34.800
But I wanted to go back to something that we were talking about a bit earlier, and this is the relationship with Trump, right?
00:47:34.960 --> 00:47:42.079
And in the book, you talk about how the Trump family has become very close with the tech industry and kind of enmeshed in the tech industry.
00:47:42.320 --> 00:47:53.039
Can you talk to me a bit about that and how that shapes, you think, the politics of this moment and ensures that the Trump administration is further serving the interests of the tech industry?
00:47:53.519 --> 00:48:01.519
The Trump family is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley, especially crypto.
00:48:01.920 --> 00:48:12.320
Donald Trump used to call crypto a scam against the dollar and say that it was not real and that there's only one real currency in the United States, the dollar.
00:48:13.199 --> 00:48:20.960
And now he's become the crypto bro in chief, which coincides with him becoming a crypto billionaire.
00:48:21.280 --> 00:48:26.079
And Trump literally became a crypto billionaire on the day he returned to the White House.
00:48:26.320 --> 00:48:37.280
And his sons have also followed suit with all kinds of crypto businesses and interests, and people know they can go buy their coins, and that's the way to do business with the Trump family.
00:48:37.440 --> 00:48:44.079
What crypto has done is finally found a real use case besides crime and terrorism and scams.
00:48:44.480 --> 00:48:48.000
It is a weapon of mass corruption.
00:48:48.159 --> 00:48:55.679
It is a towering mechanism by which politicians in the United States can be openly bought and bribed.
00:48:55.920 --> 00:49:03.599
And it's so vast the scale of corruption of the Trump crime family that it's hard to even make it news anymore.
00:49:03.760 --> 00:49:03.920
Right?
00:49:04.079 --> 00:49:19.119
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, they have published this, but it doesn't seem to be slapping people in the face the way it would if, say, Kamala Harris earned$1,000 from crypto while being in the White House, which would, I think we'd have the editorial boards calling for impeachment.
00:49:19.440 --> 00:49:27.280
Instead, they are siphoning up billions of dollars and adding more Silicon Valley interests all the time.
00:49:27.440 --> 00:49:32.000
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, has now become a billionaire, has his own AI company.
00:49:32.159 --> 00:49:34.880
So you see this joining of forces.
00:49:35.119 --> 00:49:41.840
The Trump family has become Silicon Valley, and the Silicon Valley has become the Trump family.
00:49:42.000 --> 00:49:57.360
And they have a regime that is combining government power, politics, crypto, AI, surveillance, defense technology, and religion into one bundle of power that they're trying to control.
00:49:57.519 --> 00:49:59.599
And that's why I call it fascism.
00:49:59.840 --> 00:50:06.079
That bundling of everything under one regime is a hallmark of fascism.
00:50:06.400 --> 00:50:09.119
And we'll see how far they can get with that.
00:50:09.280 --> 00:50:19.519
But I think we have to realize that with Trump being for sale, all it takes is someone willing to pour billions of dollars into their crypto schemes to get what they want.
00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:33.360
And that leaves us open to all kinds of problems because people from other countries who do not have our best interests in mind can manipulate this president very easily, be it Russia or China or whoever.
00:50:33.679 --> 00:50:38.639
And this is the nightmare of the founding fathers.
00:50:38.960 --> 00:50:47.119
What we revealed with this technological fascism is that there's massive vulnerabilities in our government.
00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:52.800
We were absolutely susceptible to overthrow if only the wealthiest men in the country.
00:50:52.960 --> 00:50:54.719
A lot of these guys, by the way, are immigrants.
00:50:54.800 --> 00:50:55.599
They weren't even born here.
00:50:55.679 --> 00:50:57.280
You can't be president if you weren't born here.
00:50:57.440 --> 00:51:09.199
And I hate to say it, but I'm kind of thinking that that's the one form of bigotry we should actually be okay with because seeing what the foreign-born billionaires are doing to our country just through political corruption is bad enough.
00:51:09.360 --> 00:51:12.079
I mean, Trump was born here and he's still betraying the country.
00:51:12.320 --> 00:51:14.639
But yeah, there would have been a future.
00:51:14.880 --> 00:51:21.360
We probably wouldn't have lasted if the British could have sent a rich guy over to become the first president and being like, we're going back to the monarchy, right?
00:51:21.519 --> 00:51:25.119
They were trying to guard against this oligarchic betrayal.
00:51:25.280 --> 00:51:27.119
And I really think that's what's happening here.
00:51:27.280 --> 00:51:31.920
This country's being betrayed by the wealthiest people in the country.
00:51:32.079 --> 00:51:40.239
And not just the oligarchs who are directly lining up with Trump, but all the oligarchs and billionaires and rich people who are staying silent about it.
00:51:40.400 --> 00:51:46.480
Where are all the billionaires fighting against this, willing to go to jail or prison or even die for their country?
00:51:46.719 --> 00:51:47.039
Right?
00:51:47.280 --> 00:51:50.480
No matter what happens, they're just gonna tend their own gardens.
00:51:50.559 --> 00:51:55.280
And so that's why in my book I say we can have billionaires or we can have democracy.
00:51:55.440 --> 00:51:56.639
We cannot have both.
00:51:56.800 --> 00:51:58.800
Because the billionaires aren't doing us any good.
00:51:58.960 --> 00:52:01.440
They're only doing tremendous amounts of evil.
00:52:01.679 --> 00:52:10.480
And if they get their way, there'll be even more destruction and damage ahead, because once again, that's the self-fulfilling prophecy that they're following.
00:52:10.800 --> 00:52:11.280
Definitely.
00:52:11.440 --> 00:52:14.639
And I want to pick back up on that, what you're saying there in just a second.
00:52:14.800 --> 00:52:17.360
But before I do, I want to ask you about AI, right?
00:52:17.440 --> 00:52:18.639
Because you mentioned AI before.
00:52:18.719 --> 00:52:20.400
You're talking a lot about crypto there.
00:52:20.639 --> 00:52:26.719
What role do you see the generative AI moment playing into this kind of rise of tech fascism as well?
00:52:26.880 --> 00:52:33.599
And how does it play into the growth of this authoritarian ideology being pushed by the tech industry?
00:52:34.079 --> 00:52:37.599
I think LLMs have helped to create a lot of psychosis.
00:52:37.920 --> 00:52:54.000
It seems to me like a lot of the gobbledygooks some of these venture capitalists are spewing, both in their writing, on their social media, and in the way they think now, has been highly influenced by them being in these self-affirming loops with LLMs.
00:52:54.559 --> 00:53:00.800
And LLMs hallucinating a path to victory and endless success and immortality here.
00:53:00.960 --> 00:53:02.559
I think that's been part of it.
00:53:02.800 --> 00:53:15.360
The other, I think, big way that AI matters is it's very useful for propaganda, for producing propaganda at mass scale, whether it's video or writing, you can just do these things a lot more quickly with a lot fewer people.
00:53:15.599 --> 00:53:35.920
And of course, the most important layer is how much money is being produced for the venture capitalists, for these AI oligarchs, on the way to figuring out whether this is just a bubble or whether this is actually the beginning of the end of humanity and the beginning of the great transhuman test real age, right?
00:53:36.079 --> 00:53:37.679
Which I don't fully believe in, by the way.
00:53:38.000 --> 00:53:39.679
I don't necessarily believe in all their mythologies.
00:53:39.760 --> 00:53:41.199
I think that's what they want to happen.
00:53:41.360 --> 00:53:44.159
It's not necessarily what has to happen.
00:53:44.480 --> 00:53:54.960
So I think that the right now what we're seeing, we saw it with crypto in 24 and again this year, and with Elon Musk, AI is now becoming a massive player in political spending.
00:53:55.199 --> 00:54:03.760
So you're going to have these guys spending half a billion dollars in the midterms to get politicians, to buy politicians who will serve their interests.
00:54:03.920 --> 00:54:11.440
And so, regardless of what ends up being the story with AI over the long term, and I don't think all AI is a useless technology.
00:54:11.679 --> 00:54:15.039
I think it's been done in a very unethical and destructive way.
00:54:15.280 --> 00:54:22.639
And I don't think that it needs to swallow up everything and that we all have to give everything to it and nothing will be left for humans to do.
00:54:22.719 --> 00:54:24.480
That's that's part of the mythology.
00:54:24.800 --> 00:54:33.199
I think in medicine, figuring out diseases, mathematics, uh things like that, there could be some reduces for this stuff.
00:54:33.440 --> 00:54:55.920
But the part where it seeks to replace all human productivity and creativity is part of the economic hustle of trying to justify the multi-trillion dollar investments they're seeking to say somehow this will all be paid off because all of the revenue generated on the entire planet and the universe will somehow come back to us and then to you, right?
00:54:56.079 --> 00:55:02.079
That's the pitch, which is why people hate it because you're saying all of us don't matter and all of you do matter.
00:55:02.239 --> 00:55:18.639
So I think that right now the main use of AI like crypto is to produce all of this money and power to take control of our politics and make sure that our government works to create more money and power for these guys, regardless of where the product ends up going.
00:55:18.800 --> 00:55:24.719
Right now, I think the main product is power and who destroy who controls the future.
00:55:25.679 --> 00:55:28.079
That seems to be their main obsession.
00:55:28.400 --> 00:55:38.559
To me, the the biggest use of an LLM is as an advanced uh web engine, search engine, and then you have to be careful because it'll hallucinate things.
00:55:38.639 --> 00:55:44.480
So to me, it's like people are like, you should use it for research, but I don't want to introduce any false links that don't exist.
00:55:44.559 --> 00:55:47.519
That's just just you know, uh, you have to double check everything.
00:55:47.599 --> 00:55:52.320
So I don't understand why an advanced search engine is the world disrupting technology.
00:55:52.480 --> 00:56:00.880
And of course, there are more things you can do with it, but we're seeing the backlash, not just against the jobs, but with people, you know, now you've got AI programs to hunt AI writing.
00:56:01.039 --> 00:56:03.440
And so check this, check out this economic model.
00:56:03.599 --> 00:56:07.760
On one hand, it's telling you rewrite this with AI, push this button.
00:56:07.920 --> 00:56:12.079
And on the other hand, it's like, here's the AI detector to see if it's AI.
00:56:12.239 --> 00:56:20.400
So why are you encouraging people to use AI to write and then selling a product that helps to shame them and suppress them for writing with AI?
00:56:20.559 --> 00:56:24.719
Because you just need to find revenue out of any damn hole that will spit it, right?
00:56:24.880 --> 00:56:25.760
That's insane.
00:56:26.000 --> 00:56:33.440
So I think that's kind of and also if you if you can't trust AI because it hallucinates, how can you trust AI detection if it hallucinates?
00:56:33.599 --> 00:56:39.679
So we're just in this hallucinatory hall of mirrors where the only goal is to get money at every turn.
00:56:39.840 --> 00:56:45.039
No matter what you do, you have to give your money to us, which is largely the world that Silicon Valley has created, right?
00:56:45.199 --> 00:56:52.719
There are not many things we can do on the day-to-day without somehow paying these guys and using their products.
00:56:53.039 --> 00:57:00.159
And that used to just seem like, wow, how nice of Google to provide free email, like in this is like 20 years ago when everybody went to Gmail.
00:57:00.320 --> 00:57:16.159
And now it has a very different feeling when you understand the actual business model of not only harvesting our data, which is bad enough, but using the money to take control of our politics and support policies that are directly harmful and destructive to us and our families.
00:57:16.480 --> 00:57:22.480
So AI is just that on steroids, allegedly.
00:57:22.719 --> 00:57:22.960
Right?
00:57:23.039 --> 00:57:28.880
I mean, there was a this moment, now we're seeing just backlash against the data centers, which is which gives me a lot of hope, you know.
00:57:29.039 --> 00:57:37.440
I have a a cousin who's never been involved in politics, never expressed an interest, and now she's helping organize a protest against data centers in our rural hometown.
00:57:37.599 --> 00:57:39.519
And I had nothing to do with that, right?
00:57:39.599 --> 00:57:41.360
Like I just saw it on Instagram.
00:57:41.519 --> 00:57:42.480
Like, that's amazing.
00:57:42.639 --> 00:57:44.400
That's how deep this this is going.
00:57:44.480 --> 00:57:45.679
And I think people get it.
00:57:45.840 --> 00:57:53.119
But you know, when the AI companies spend all their time telling everybody we're going to destroy everything, maybe you're going to radicalize some people.
00:57:53.360 --> 00:57:55.360
And maybe that's not such a bad thing.
00:57:55.679 --> 00:57:56.480
No, not at all.
00:57:56.639 --> 00:57:58.159
And and I love to hear that story, right?
00:57:58.239 --> 00:58:00.079
Like, and that's what I feel as well.
00:58:00.159 --> 00:58:11.199
Like, seeing the data center protest does give me a lot of hope because you have so many people who, you know, aren't traditionally politically activated, you know, of many different political stripes all coming together to say, this is unacceptable.
00:58:11.360 --> 00:58:12.000
This is not right.
00:58:12.079 --> 00:58:16.639
You know, what these companies are doing is not something that we accept, and they're working together to try to stop it.
00:58:16.719 --> 00:58:18.400
And I think that's fantastic, right?
00:58:18.480 --> 00:58:21.360
And that's kind of where I want to end off our conversation as well, right?
00:58:21.440 --> 00:58:31.679
You've given us a lot of insight into this tech fascism that these companies and these billionaires are building and the threats that it poses in the United States, and I would say beyond the United States as well, right?
00:58:31.760 --> 00:58:36.079
As they have the influence in so many other countries, you know, you mentioned even Malaysia trying to push them out.
00:58:36.239 --> 00:58:39.280
And so what do you think is the counter to this, right?
00:58:39.360 --> 00:58:42.960
You know, how is the power of these billionaires actually reined in?
00:58:43.119 --> 00:58:44.320
What does that look like?
00:58:44.559 --> 00:58:46.800
And, you know, do you see hope on that front?
00:58:47.039 --> 00:58:50.719
But also, you know, you've we've been talking a lot about the Republicans.
00:58:50.960 --> 00:58:58.639
Why have the Democrats not worked more aggressively in trying to push back against this, you know, attempted takeover by the tech industry?
00:58:59.119 --> 00:59:03.599
The Democrats are just as addicted to billionaire money as the Republicans are.
00:59:04.000 --> 00:59:21.840
And so you've seen Democrats who should really know better, remain silent on Silicon Valley's complicity in what's happening in our country and continue to speak positively and vote in favor of bills that the crypto industry is pushing with a gun to the head of anybody who doesn't vote for it.
00:59:22.000 --> 00:59:27.760
You know, a$10 million gun that will come after you and drive you out of politics if you don't do what they want.
00:59:28.079 --> 00:59:29.840
And it's the money addiction.
00:59:30.159 --> 00:59:40.400
And I think we need leaders who are so powerful and so righteous and so courageous that the money doesn't matter.
00:59:40.639 --> 00:59:45.679
That people understand that this is a that it's a data center trying to take down this politician.
00:59:45.760 --> 00:59:49.039
And we have some of those people appearing uh on the landscape.
00:59:49.199 --> 00:59:53.039
James Tallerico has a very eloquent takedown of what's happening.
00:59:53.199 --> 00:59:55.280
Jasmine Crockett also did.
00:59:55.360 --> 01:00:00.079
Uh Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ron Wyden.
01:00:00.159 --> 01:00:03.440
We do have some politicians who are speaking directly to this.
01:00:03.599 --> 01:00:12.559
But there are others, like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, the state with all the tech oligarchs, the home of Silicon Valley, who really won't say a word against these guys.
01:00:12.719 --> 01:00:13.039
Why?
01:00:13.280 --> 01:00:15.920
Because he's going to run for president and he wants their money.
01:00:16.000 --> 01:00:22.159
And he doesn't seem to understand that Silicon Valley is no longer about innovation and creativity and technology.
01:00:22.400 --> 01:00:24.159
Silicon Valley is about fascism.
01:00:24.400 --> 01:00:26.639
Silicon Valley is trying to destroy this country.
01:00:26.800 --> 01:00:31.440
And so anybody who can get their money is not a threat to them.
01:00:31.599 --> 01:00:32.880
And that's a problem, right?
01:00:32.960 --> 01:00:36.800
Because these are Newsom is someone people see as a potential leader.
01:00:36.960 --> 01:00:48.880
But I do think that the groundswell of public awareness we're starting to see with the data centers, which, you know, the data centers are like the monster that comes to eat your community and invade your town.
01:00:48.960 --> 01:00:52.800
It's like an alien, someone in California described it as an alien invasion.
01:00:52.960 --> 01:01:03.280
It's like the aliens landed and suddenly they're powerful and they're here and we're trying to stop them, but for some reason our politicians have been zombied out and won't help us, and they want to give the aliens what they want.
01:01:03.599 --> 01:01:18.159
So I think that awareness is going to continue to rise and that the politicians like Newsom, who are followers rather than leaders, they follow polls, are going to have to come around at some point and realize you can't be a data center Democrat.
01:01:18.320 --> 01:01:20.079
You can't be a crypto democrat.
01:01:20.239 --> 01:01:25.840
You can't be in league with the fascists destroying our country and be the ones who lead us out of this.
01:01:26.079 --> 01:01:33.360
But I really think that's going to come from the people and from the leaders who are listening to people, who are speaking directly at this.
01:01:33.440 --> 01:01:35.440
You know, they can't hurt Elizabeth Warren.
01:01:35.519 --> 01:01:36.800
They can't hurt Bernie Sanders.
01:01:36.960 --> 01:01:40.079
Their power is impervious to the billionaire money.
01:01:40.239 --> 01:01:49.360
And if you're a politician who's a Democrat and you don't have the guts or the talent to be able to, or the courage to be able to reach that level, you don't belong in the game right now.
01:01:49.519 --> 01:01:53.199
We need people who who like, please spend$20 million against me.
01:01:53.280 --> 01:01:56.320
I'll be out there every day telling everybody they're spending that money.
01:01:56.480 --> 01:02:01.360
And and so that's going to be that's part of the problem, the addiction to money.
01:02:01.599 --> 01:02:04.000
But I do think we're starting to see public awareness.
01:02:04.159 --> 01:02:09.599
People don't like the billionaires, they're afraid of the billionaires, they don't like AI, they don't want data centers.
01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:13.039
And I think the data centers are kind of a metaphor for the whole thing.
01:02:13.360 --> 01:02:16.639
Again, this alien invasion of our country.
01:02:16.880 --> 01:02:26.400
We wake up and the richest men in the world, the billionaires, those who have uh gotten the most out of this system, openly trying to destroy it, partnering with the Trump regime.
01:02:26.719 --> 01:02:28.800
And it's like a Twilight Zone episode.
01:02:29.039 --> 01:02:32.320
But we have to make it clear that we know what's happening.
01:02:32.559 --> 01:02:39.519
We have to name names and make it clear that there will be accountability and severe consequences if we can if we can get them.
01:02:39.760 --> 01:02:51.280
And we have to make sure that we push for leaders, not just in politics, but in media, in society, who are speaking directly to this threat because this battle is not going away.
01:02:51.519 --> 01:02:57.599
The battle against the billionaire oligarchs of Silicon Valley is gonna be ongoing through the 21st century.
01:02:57.840 --> 01:03:02.639
And it's an existential battle because if they win, our lives are essentially over.
01:03:02.800 --> 01:03:05.119
Look what's happening with the USAID cuts, right?
01:03:05.360 --> 01:03:16.719
If these guys make everyone else poor and they're the only rich ones, you cannot trust that we're all gonna get a welfare check or a share of the extreme superabundance because we already have abundance.
01:03:16.880 --> 01:03:19.599
It's just not rationally or reasonably distributed.
01:03:19.840 --> 01:03:24.079
And Elon Musk said recently, money's not gonna matter in 10 years.
01:03:24.239 --> 01:03:26.480
Then why is he trying to become a trillionaire?
01:03:26.639 --> 01:03:30.159
Why are all these guys hoarding all their money if money's not gonna matter?
01:03:30.320 --> 01:03:30.639
Right?
01:03:30.800 --> 01:03:34.320
Why are they building bunkers if the future is bright?
01:03:34.639 --> 01:03:37.760
Because they know something that we don't, or so they think they do.
01:03:37.920 --> 01:03:42.559
So we have to know something that they don't, which is that their plans are not gonna work.
01:03:42.800 --> 01:03:47.039
And that the people should not be afraid of the billionaires.
01:03:47.360 --> 01:03:49.440
The billionaires should be afraid of the people.
01:03:49.599 --> 01:03:56.159
And we all have to do a lot of work to do to make sure that that is the case uh very quickly, very soon.
01:03:56.800 --> 01:04:02.400
And as you say in the book, you know, there's only about a thousand billionaires in the United States and about 3,500 worldwide.
01:04:02.559 --> 01:04:05.519
So the number is not even that huge of people that need to be taken on.
01:04:05.599 --> 01:04:07.039
They just have a lot of power.
01:04:07.360 --> 01:04:09.599
Gil, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:04:09.679 --> 01:04:10.719
It's a fantastic book.
01:04:10.880 --> 01:04:17.039
And I also want to wish you both an early birthday as we talk right now, but also a belated birthday for when the show comes out.
01:04:17.199 --> 01:04:19.599
Uh, thanks so much for uh for taking the time.
01:04:19.920 --> 01:04:20.800
Thank you.
01:04:21.679 --> 01:04:26.480
Gil Duran is the author of The Nerd Right, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.
01:04:26.639 --> 01:04:30.800
Tech Won's Save Us is made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marx.
01:04:31.039 --> 01:04:32.320
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01:04:32.400 --> 01:04:37.119
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