How Tech Billionaires Broke Democracy | The Spill

[00:00:00] Amy Westervelt: Hello, and welcome to The Spill. I’m Amy Westervelt. This is our weekly newscast in the Drilled feed in between narrative seasons, where we bring you conversations amongst ourselves about things that are happening in the climate world, and also interviews with authors, experts, and other interesting folks working on climate.

Today, I’m excited to bring you an interview I did with author Gil Duran. He wrote the book The Nerd Reich about techno-fascism in Silicon Valley, and he and I talked about a lot of places where our books intersect.

My book, Brought to You By, focuses on the information ecosystem and how corporations have polluted it, including the tech industry with its creation of a whole parallel media ecosystem. And Gil’s book focuses on what these guys’ ideology is and how and why they became so anti-democratic. [00:01:00] It was a really interesting conversation.

I hope you enjoy it.

A condensed version of this conversation ran earlier this month in Lit Hub. We’ll stick a link to that in the show notes

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss our next episode.

Now here’s my conversation with Gil.

[00:01:20] Gil Durán: I’m Gil Duran. I’m an independent journalist. And I’m the author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

[00:01:28] Amy Westervelt: The best named book in the business. Where, when did you, like, come up with the Nerd Reich name?

[00:01:33] Gil Durán: After I had written a few stories on these guys, I had one that went really viral on Balaji Srinivasan, the former Coinbase CEO,

[00:01:40] Amy Westervelt: Mm.

[00:01:42] Gil Durán: Who is the author of this network state cult to build these new tech cities. And someone reached out to me because Balaji and his flying monkeys were attacking me for two days straight on Twitter.

[00:01:51] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:01:51] Gil Durán: And they said, “You know, we’ve been calling this the Nerd Reich for years.” And this was someone from the crypto world. And I thought, “Wow.” And I looked, and the URL was available. [00:02:00] No one was really using it. I talked to the folks who were– The folks who were using it weren’t using it anymore. So that’s where it came from,

[00:02:06] Amy Westervelt: It’s so good. It’s like, it’s just so perfect to describe them. Okay. I wanna ask you about The Sovereign Individual, this weird little book that Peter Thiel seems to, to really love. Talk about how, how you came across it and, um, and what exactly this book is.

[00:02:25] Gil Durán: In researching the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires, it’s hard not to come across The Sovereign Individual. It’s this 1997 business doom book. I think Quinn Slobodian called it an apocalypse business book that counseled investors how to prepare for the coming collapse of democracy and the entire world order. it specifically said that two technologies, cyber currency or crypto and advanced automation, what we would call AI, would lead to the collapse of nations like the United States, but that savvy investors could profit by making the right choices ahead of time

[00:02:58] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:02:58] Gil Durán: to prepare for this new world. [00:03:00] So it comes up a lot, and it’s name-checked as this brilliant tome that predicted Bitcoin, which is not true.

[00:03:07] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:03:07] Gil Durán: The authors of The Sovereign Individual largely hashed together older ideas from the cypherpunks, and so that’s how I first became aware of it. Now I’ve read it more times than I would like to admit, but it really became a guiding post, a prophetic text for some influential Silicon Valley billionaires, even though it’s a pretty schlocky, apocalyptic, tome.

[00:03:28] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. It’s, it’s not good. Um, and it’s super derivative, right? It comes from actually all of these other places. It reminds me of there’s a guy that, um, that I’m obsessed with named Antony Fisher, who started one of the first think tanks back in, like, the ’50s, right? He was a, an adherent of Hayek’s and, like, really into the Mont Pelerin society and all that stuff, and he started the Institute for Economic Analysis, and then he ended up starting this network called the Atlas Network that’s [00:04:00] like…

[00:04:00] Gil Durán: Mhm

[00:04:00] Amy Westervelt: you’ve probably heard of them. Um, so The way that Peter Thiel is about the Sovereign Individual, this guy was about The Road to Serfdom, which is Hayek’s big thing. But he actually never read the original. He read the the Reader’s Digest version.

[00:04:14] Gil Durán: That’s all it takes is a summary of the ideas sometimes, you know?

[00:04:18] Amy Westervelt: Yeah, yeah. Um, I also, I’m, I’m curious for your thoughts on, like, a lot of people talk about how The Sovereign Individual includes this public choice theory notion in it as well, the idea that, like, no one really cares about the common good, and anybody who says otherwise is, like, actually just using that idea to try to sell you something, which I’ve always thought of as, like, I don’t know, just something that explains these guys’ sociopathy to themselves.

But I’m curious what you think about that aspect of the book.

[00:04:53] Gil Durán: They hate the public and the common good, and so they think everyone else shares this idea. But I think most people don’t. A lot of which [00:05:00] you run across with this type of ideology, some call it libertarian, anarcho-capitalism, has definitely morphed into fascism, is this idea that nothi– none of this works and nobody wants it, and we’re just gonna do something different. But it’s simply not true. The system of government that

[00:05:15] Amy Westervelt: Yeah we have, as imperfect as it is, comes out of thousands of years of trial and error, all the way back to the Greeks for categorizing what works and what doesn’t. And oligarchy and tyranny don’t work. You need a society, you need… You know, our entire country and the wealth of all these billionaires was built off of a robust private sector that invested in technology, that invested in defense.

[00:05:35] Gil Durán: I mean, that’s where Silicon Valley comes from. Silicon Valley was created

[00:05:37] Amy Westervelt: Right

[00:05:39] Gil Durán: by the government. None of these people have a right to get out. This is like a gang. You’re in it. We paid for you. You’re in it for life. You don’t get out of this because now you’re rich, and you don’t wanna pay taxes, and you think you’re– can survive on your own. As a species, we can’t survive on our own. Our parents don’t just, like, dump us on the street and make us start… know, we, we can’t survive until a, a, an, an [00:06:00] appropriate age, and it takes a long time for human beings. We’re a social creature. We are interdependent,

and these guys have a mythology that somehow they did it all themselves when most of them are government welfare kings, so

[00:06:13] Amy Westervelt: It seems to me, and I, yeah, maybe you’ll disagree, but it seems to me that people are very resistant to the idea that these guys genuinely have these beliefs, even though they’ve, like, said them out loud a lot of times. What is that? Why do you think people are so resistant to taking these guys at their word?

[00:06:34] Gil Durán: I think there’s two parts to that. A, most of the general public hasn’t heard this stuff because the mainstream press refuses to talk about it for the most part.

Maybe in little dribs or drabs here and there as some oddity on the margins of Silicon Valley society. What’s happened, however, is these ideas have moved into the center of our politics through

through J.D. Vance, into our political system. Crypto, which very few Americans [00:07:00] use and which has no real use case besides crime, gambling, human trafficking, and now political corruption, has become the biggest player in our political system, the biggest donor, with hundreds of millions of dollars on hand for the

midterms Why is that? Why is this little-used, weird, scammy product now the biggest monster in the room? Well, when you start asking that question, you get into the same stuff I’ve been writing about,

They have an entire ideology behind this stuff. The i-idea of crypto is that it’s gonna destroy the government and replace the government.

And so I think the media has tried to ignore that. I think on one level, editors think, “Well, we’re not gonna give those stupid ideas any attention. We’re not gonna give them any oxygen.” But that’s based on the presumption that newspaper editors and TV editors decide reality. Billionaires have the power now to just impose these ideas through culture, through social media, through politics, and so on one level, it’s that.

I also think there’s an [00:08:00] allergy complicated narratives, and I also think that there’s an allergy to ideology.

[00:08:07] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:08:07] Gil Durán: Here we are in the what, the tenth year of Trump, and people still don’t understand on a deeper level why does anybody support Trump? What is it about this scammy billionaire from reality TV that– who’s clearly not a Christian or a family man even, that appeals to evangelicals, right?

And there are people like George Lakoff and others who have explained the appeal of Trump to the right-wing brain. But most of the media coverage is like a dog chasing a ball. The politician or whatever throws a ball, everybody chases it, everybody kind

of tells the same story. So they’re not really talking about the more systemic matters, and I just think we have a, a, a media that’s largely got a model based on superficial stories about what’s happening, and the deeper ones get told after the fact once it’s too late.

[00:08:51] Amy Westervelt: It’s a perfect segue to talk about this, like, control that, that these guys have built. Uh, I, I think of it almost as, like, a parallel [00:09:00] media ecosystem that’s now surpassed the traditional media ecosystem. And sometimes I’ll talk to people and they’ll act, um, like it was, a mistake or an unintentional consequence of building these platforms, that they, like, eroded the business model for journalism, that they, you know, created a situation where these guys have a lot of control over information flows, all of that stuff.

I’m curious to hear what you think about how important that’s been to their ability to, to kind of have this takeover, that like, on the one hand, there are all of these problems with how mainstream media covers stuff, but on the other hand, they’ve built this parallel ecosystem that is now, I would say, more influential than traditional media

[00:09:51] Gil Durán: That’s what they call it, a parallel system, a parallel media, a parallel politics

Parallel education is another big point for them. [00:10:00] They understand how influence and persuasion work in society. They understand how opinions and brains are shaped by information, by words, by stories, by narratives, and they want to control that. They hate that the media, which they regard as liberal because it’s based in truth, reason, and rationality, has so much power,

and they seek to destroy that power and replace the press with propaganda that serves their own interests. They’re very explicit about that, and look, that’s why they’re trying to buy up all the channels, CBS, CNN, or creating their own media channels.

You know, OpenAI just bought their own podcast, right? Whatever happened… I think that’s the last we anybody heard of it, and, uh, Andreessen Horowitz is going into trying to create its own media. Those things will flop and fail. I don’t think most people are really interested in a venture capital’s media organ.

But you do have some of these podcasts that break out, like the All-In podcast, which is just these four right-wing venture capitalists sitting around talking for, for hours.

[00:10:59] Amy Westervelt: Yeah[00:11:00]

[00:11:00] Gil Durán: so they do have some success, but that’s the idea, is to replace the existing establishment with their own establishment. And because of the way the finances work and the money works, they’ve had some, some luck with that.

I mean, just last week, the McClatchy newspapers where I used to work laid off a ton of people, half the reporters at the Lexington Herald Leader where I started, the entire editorial board except the editor at The Sacramento Bee, where I was the editorial page editor. So

[00:11:23] Amy Westervelt: I mean, every week I feel like there’s a new story about mass layoffs at some outlet or another. And I mean, these guys, they’ve built a parallel media ecosystem– and somehow managed to create it so that they don’t have any of the responsibilities or liabilities of traditional publishers too.

So they’re not responsible for anything that goes on the platforms. They’re not even regulated by the same agencies that regulate other media. It’s just a free-for-all.

[00:11:54] Gil Durán: Influencers are typically not journalists. Some are,

But most aren’t.

[00:11:58] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:11:59] Gil Durán: I saw one [00:12:00] very big influencer last year do a whole massively viral thing about how Donald Trump’s about to give Peter Thiel Washington, DC, the city, to run as his own fiefdom, and this is delivered while the person is walking down a street talking, looking into the camera.

None of this is natural or normal, and I had people writing me like, “Why aren’t you writing about this?” I’m like, “Because it’s not true.”

There’s– show me a fact. And by the way, there was no follow-up

Thiel’s not in DC. He doesn’t own it, and the person’s on to new stuff, right? So you gotta be- watch out for some of these things, because

we’re just as susceptible as the MAGA people are to

[00:12:33] Amy Westervelt: Yeah Yeah

[00:12:33] Gil Durán: these disinformation stories that confirm our biases or tell us something we wanna hear

[00:12:36] Amy Westervelt: No, totally. I see it happen all the time actually, I keep seeing this thing happen with people involved in various sort of progressive causes or, like, on the left, right?

Where they’re like, “We should use the same tactics as the right-wing guys to do, to get, like, our thing out.” Um, but they’ll often, like… I don’t know. It’s like they, they don’t understand that, they still need to [00:13:00] fact-check. They still need to… You know what I mean? It’s like, okay, if you, if you don’t wanna just be part of the, the larger kind of cluttering of the information ecosystem, it’s, it’s not helpful for you to create, like, what this guy did in DC.

That kind of stuff is not helpful to, to people understanding the situation because it just makes them feel like they can’t trust anything that they’re hearing or seeing anywhere.

[00:13:21] Gil Durán: Yeah. It, it, um, serves to absurdify things that should be treated seriously,

[00:13:28] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:13:28] Gil Durán: Right? And I feel like when that viral misinformation went out, it made my job harder because now people think I’m doing that.

I’m just telling the scary story, whereas I’m hyperlinked and highly aware of the deep pockets of these guys who could sue me into oblivion, right?

So I have to get the facts straight. I can’t slip

up Right

There are people who put stuff out there. I’m like, “That’s not true.” The algorithm rewards lies, rewards anger, rewards outrage, and that’s what people are going for, a lot of people.

There are some good [00:14:00] influencers. There’s a lot of great influencers. But some of these people who are trying to straddle the line between… who are jumping on the news

[00:14:06] Amy Westervelt: and

[00:14:06] Gil Durán: pretending

to add to it

[00:14:07] Amy Westervelt: News influ- the newsfluencers

or whatever.

[00:14:11] Gil Durán: And there are

some good ones of

those

[00:14:11] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:14:12] Gil Durán: but you gotta beware. You gotta check facts, and if

[00:14:15] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:14:15] Gil Durán: someone is telling you something that you find out is not true,

[00:14:17] Amy Westervelt: ya

[00:14:18] Gil Durán: gotta unfollow

[00:14:19] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Okay. I wanna talk about network state. You mentioned it, at the top. But I wanna start with seasteading ’cause as someone who, like, was in the Bay Area for a really long time, I really have such vivid memories of this being, like, a, a trend in the, you know, kind of early dot-com days and, um, and kind of, like, rolling my eyes at it and thinking it was dorky, and really it took me quite a while to understand that it was sort of…

There was, like, a more nefarious nature underneath it. But tell me, what is seasteading?

[00:14:50] Gil Durán: The basic idea of seasteading is that you could escape from democratic governments, laws, and regulations by establishing your own territory out in [00:15:00] the middle of the ocean. it was an idea funded by Peter Thiel back in the late 2000s, early 2010s, to establish the Seasteading Institute, which would start creating these projects around the world.

However, the idea didn’t really pan out because nobody really wants to live out in a rusted oil barge in the middle of the ocean or on a ship right? It’s like being on the cruise from hell. You know, a lot of the times these guys don’t really understand how people in society work. There’s a reason we’re in cities like San Francisco and New York or even Austin or wherever

[00:15:30] Amy Westervelt: Yes

[00:15:31] Gil Durán: These things have grown over time. These are places people want to be. There’s a long history and culture and infrastructure there. And in a way, it’s funny, I was just watching Going Clear, the Alex Gibney documentary on scientology

[00:15:41] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:15:42] Gil Durán: and, well, L. Ron Hubbard’s whole thing was to try to do stuff on boats to escape

[00:15:46] Amy Westervelt: Yeah!

[00:15:46] Gil Durán: Rules and laws.

That’s what Sea Org is about!

[00:15:49] Amy Westervelt: Yep

[00:15:49] Gil Durán: So basically they didn’t even invent anything new with seasteading. It’s sort of a Scientology knockoff, and it sputtered out. But then seasteading becomes an idea to create these things on land instead. [00:16:00] So evolving from the ocean to the land, just like any primordial creature would, uh, that’s how smart the tech bros are.

[00:16:08] Amy Westervelt: I wanna ask you about that too, because it does frustrate me how much people are still in love with the idea that these guys are geniuses, and I’m like, “They’re just not.” What, what is so attractive about that idea to people, do you think? So I was a clean tech reporter in San Francisco in the early 2000s, right?

So I reported on, the early Tesla stuff, and also when there was that whole scandal of, like, Elon Musk claiming to be the founder, but he wasn’t, he was just a late-stage investor, and, like, you know, all of these stories. Um, so, like, very early on, he also… I don’t know. He, he’s been lying for a long time, and his ideas are wacky.

He’s been talking about the Mars thing forever, and it’s never made sense, all of that stuff. But every time I would write about it, I would get this, like, swarm of Muskrats being like, “You’re an idiot,” and you know, “He’s a [00:17:00] genius,” and blah, blah, blah. And I still think even now, when I think his, his star has definitely dimmed f- for quite a few people, people think of him as this genius.

They’ll even say things like, “I don’t really like his politics, but you can’t deny that he’s really brilliant.” Um, I can deny it, and I will. Uh, so yeah, what, what do you think it is that makes people so attached to the idea that these guys are geniuses?

[00:17:26] Gil Durán: There’s an old Yiddish saying that captures it well: If you’re rich, you’re also smart, handsome, and can sing. People think that, people think that rich people are good at everything

[00:17:36] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:17:36] Gil Durán: and they’re not. And then the rich people start thinking they’re good at everything because they’re egomaniacal and then everyone’s telling them they’re good at everything, and then you find out they’re not.

Do you remember when Elon Musk said that COVID was gonna be over by April 2020, and that the panic was dumb?

[00:17:50] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

I mean this guy should have never been listened to again. He’s an idiot.

[00:17:54] Gil Durán: The billionaires are really, really, really dumb about things they don’t understand or know about. And there might be a few things that they’re really [00:18:00] good at, like making money or finding a business opportunity.

Some of them have some kind of technical knowledge or skill that contributed

[00:18:06] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:18:06] Gil Durán: something that was valuable in the market. But that doesn’t make them good at everything. You know, I’m pretty smart at political analysis. You don’t want me to conduct, you don’t want me to conduct your appendicitis surgery,

[00:18:17] Amy Westervelt: Right, right

[00:18:18] Gil Durán: But I know that I know what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. Now, give me a few billion dollars, and I might lose track of that, right? I might

forget what I’m good

at Yeah

at or not because I think we’re dealing with an era of billionaire psychosis here. It’s really clear that the money toxifies their brains and is r- resulting in some pretty insane behavior, and it’s become

contagious Yeah

You know, Elon Musk was talking about the, the mind virus he was fighting. He is the damn mind virus. They’ve all got a mind virus. Everybody

knows This is not like it was ten years ago or fifteen years ago when a lot of liberal, c- climate conscious people thought Elon Musk was a wonderful hero who was trying to save the world with electric cars, and it turns out people were fooled.

This guy was always this kind of percolating [00:19:00] problem, and now he’s come

[00:19:02] Amy Westervelt: Yeah out fully as a fascist ideologue. I mean, he gave a damn Hitler salute at the inauguration. And you’re right,

Yeah all the Tesla drivers we know are rationalizing their choice by saying, “Well, it’s half this and half that.” But

that’s not

how it works.

[00:19:18] Gil Durán: You’re… You know, you can’t be halfway and half not. I mean, uh, I don’t understand why anybody’s still s- driving a Tesla or supporting this guy in any way, shape, or form.

[00:19:26] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Okay. I wanna talk about how the Greenland stuff is connected to network state and why that still seems to be a surprise to people. Like, again, it’s been out loud for awhile What, what does Greenland have to do with network state?

[00:19:46] Gil Durán: At the heart of the network state ideology, which basically proposes that tech billionaires should seize power in the twenty-first century using technology, is colonialism, the idea of [00:20:00] claiming more land, of creating a new frontier,

[00:20:03] Amy Westervelt: Yep

[00:20:03] Gil Durán: of hogging up and hoarding resources for yourself. Greenland has a lot of different resources, rare earths, um, other deposits, uh, shipping lanes that might melt with climate change

and lucrative new trade routes. And, uh, it, it’ll be a nice place to live if the planet heats up, apparently. You know, it’ll melt, and there’ll be green, wonderful, cooler temperatures up there. And so it’s this prized piece of land that Trump has had his eye, eye on for quite some time. What’s happening now is the tech billionaires are also on this idea, and some of them are backing a project called Praxis, which had proposed to build a new

[00:20:43] Amy Westervelt: tech

[00:20:44] Gil Durán: city on Greenland. They’ve been looking at the Mediterranean, the Middle East.

[00:20:49] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:20:49] Gil Durán: they looked in Dominican Republic. I’m not really sure Praxis is a solid proposal anymore.

You know, I wrote about that early on, and then Reuters did a whole story on it, and, like it was real. And, and [00:21:00] you got one of Peter Thiel’s deputies as the ambassador to Denmark.

And well you know, so everywhere you look, you see the same group of people, uh, kinda lining up to be a part of this, and you’re starting to always see as well the idea for some kind of weird new billionaire funded city. And that is the network state idea. In fact, they’re proposing to build one on the ruins of Gaza. Jared Kushner,

[00:21:23] Amy Westervelt: Yep

[00:21:24] Gil Durán: Trump’s own son-in-law, is pushing that. So there’s this idea, this apocalyptic idea that instead of digging their own personal bunkers, the billionaires have to create new territories that will be designed to protect them and empower them in this terrible future they’re creating with technology where you won’t be able to live in countries like the United States or regular cities anymore.

[00:21:46] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:21:46] Gil Durán: Again this is an apocalyptic cult. There’s no reason to believe that has to be the future. But they seem to have watched Elysium one too many times, and they can’t quite build one in space yet, so they’re trying to build

[00:21:56] Amy Westervelt: Ja

[00:21:56] Gil Durán: them here on land.

[00:21:58] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. I watched [00:22:00] this bizarre interview with, Dryden Brown, I think his name is, the guy that came up with Praxis, right? And, like, again, I just… every time I see these guys talk, it’s perplexing to me how anyone gives them the time of day, let alone millions of dollars. Um, but Peter Thiel did, and he, he talks about this Greenland idea both as, um, like a training ground for all the people that are go- gonna go b- move to Mars, right?

Because the, like, topography and climate of Greenland is, like, in his words, as close as we can get to Mars. By the way, not true, and this guy obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he’s like, “Oh, yeah, this is how we’re gonna, like, prep ourselves to live on Mars.”

Okay, you know what? I’m just gonna share some of this video with you so that you can see exactly what I’m talking about

[00:22:48] Dryden Brown: It’s very cold there. It’s very barren. They don’t really have trees, greenland is very interesting. I mean, I think there aren’t many frontiers left on Earth, and there’s a particular kind of person that finds, you know, that kind of challenge really [00:23:00] attractive, right?

It’s like we have to figure out… You know, E-Elon’s talking about- you know, sending Starship to Mars in, like, a couple of years. We have to figure out how we’re going to build, you know, build a city on Mars. Greenland is the best, the best sort of half step towards Mars. It’s the best, like, you know, sort of training ground for building a Martian society.

[00:23:16] Amy Westervelt: And he’s, like, obsessive about this, colonial thing, but also this vision of him and his friends as being, like, I don’t know, this, this, like, idea of going back to, like, when men were men, and we were all pioneers and, like, forging the frontier, whatever.

And I’m like, okay. Like, um, you live in a house with 20 other dudes, and you have, like, a suit of armor at the door.

You know what I mean? Like… Yeah

[00:23:48] Gil Durán: Uh, people who like to brag about masculinity always seem to be really struggling with it. For a lot of us, that’s not a problem, you

[00:23:54] Amy Westervelt: Too true, yes.

[00:23:56] Gil Durán: I can box, I can shoot a gun, I can cook a dinner, I can change [00:24:00] a diaper. W- all of that is things men can do. You don’t have to worry about certain specific activities.

And if you’re worried about those activities,

[00:24:08] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:24:08] Gil Durán: well, you should see a doctor or therapist, talk to somebody about it. ‘Cause you just– you don’t have to live in that trap of always being terrified that you’re not man enough.

I don’t really get that whole masculinity discourse at all. I think it’s pretty easy to be a man.

It’s pretty incentivized to be a terrible man.

 And I can’t think of anything less masculine than always whining about masculinity, by the way.

[00:24:24] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. It does seem to be a thing that these guys glom onto a lot though. Okay. I wanna talk about JD Vance because you have quite a bit about him in the book. I think that there’s a lot of people still who are really, really convinced that, like, if we just get rid of Trump, then that solves all of the problems, right?

And, and are not seeing this bigger picture, or that Vance is so much scarier and worse than Trump. Whenever I talk to people about this, they’ll say like, “Oh yeah, but he can’t get elected ’cause he’s so weird and unlikable.” And [00:25:00] I’m like, I- it’s cute that you think elections are gonna still be a thing when all this goes down, but like, you know, this guy is very dangerous.

Tell me why we should take him seriously as a threat

[00:25:14] Gil Durán: No one took Trump seriously either in twenty sixteen. It was a big joke. Ha ha ha, they’re putting Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton. This is over before it starts. A lot of us thought that, right? We

didn’t see it

coming

[00:25:25] Amy Westervelt: Yep

[00:25:26] Gil Durán: And so I think we can never, ever again think that someone being awful and unlikable and terrible is, uh, an impediment to the presidency.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last ten years, even trying to overthrow the government of the United States

didn’t stop Trump from getting back into power. So we need to wake up to where we really are, y’all. Like, we are not in a place where logic and reason, uh, are, are the overriding concerns for a large subset of voters.

[00:25:56] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:25:57] Gil Durán: Vance is very dangerous. The tech bros, [00:26:00] these billionaires will do anything to get him elected because he’ll do whatever they want. He’s a radical extremist who has quoted the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, specifically that Donald Trump should purge the government and defy the courts if they try to stop him.

This is a, a guy who’s a Harvard trained– no, a Yale trained lawyer saying that the President of the United States should defy the justices of the Supreme Court. If you get this guy in there, he’ll go all the way. He’ll go full Nazi. He will try his best to make sure we have an emergency that means that he now has full power. He’ll, he’ll finish the job where Trump didn’t. Trump seems mostly interested in naps, Natalie, and crypto these days, right? And believe me, I don’t discount all the evil and harm

[00:26:45] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:26:45] Gil Durán: that Donald Trump has done. But, um, Vance is a zealot, is an ideologue, and is not obsessed with money, he’s obsessed with power, and he is almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel

at every step of his [00:27:00] career, it’s been Peter Thiel who made him a venture capitalist instead of a lawyer, who funded his own venture capital firm, even though Vance was not much of a venture capitalist.

He made Vance a Catholic, even though Peter Thiel is not a Catholic. He made him a senator by getting Donald Trump to endorse him, even though Vance had called Trump America’s Hitler,

[00:27:18] Amy Westervelt: Mhm.

[00:27:19] Gil Durán: and he poured $15 million dollars into the race, which changed the whole dynamic. Vance was losing that Senate race until Thiel and Trump jumped in. And then they got him on the vice presidential slot in the 2024 election, where they proceeded to do the whole purge that Vance had said he should do, quoting Curtis Yarvin, by the way. J.D. Vance quoted Curtis Yarvin. So yeah, and also Trump’s in very bad health. The thing everyone’s celebrating, “Oh, Trump’s not going to make it.

He’s not going to

last I know

That’s exactly the kind of dynamic that puts Vance in power.

[00:27:51] Amy Westervelt: I know. Yeah

[00:27:53] Gil Durán: These billionaires are going to be so scared about the failure of this project that Vance will be incentivized to do his very worst, and they’ll probably spend, [00:28:00] um, more money than has ever been spent in the history of the world to make this man president.

So he should not be underestimated,

[00:28:08] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:28:08] Gil Durán: and he’s extremely dangerous

[00:28:10] Amy Westervelt: Yeah, yeah. Can we talk about the Antichrist idea?

[00:28:17] Gil Durán: It’s related

[00:28:18] Amy Westervelt: It shows up so much. Um, yeah, like what, what is the obsession with the Antichrist? I hadn’t known until I read your book that, that there’d been all this discourse presenting Peter Thiel as the Anti- Antichrist almost in like a good way as well. Um, and then he had this whole rant about Greta Thunberg being the Antichrist.

Why does this come up so much with these guys?

[00:28:43] Gil Durán: Oh, because of Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel’s been obsessed with the Antichrist for a while. It’s now come to be his defining obsession, I would say. He’s literally traveling the earth giving four-day lectures on the Antichrist. He’s done this in Austin, at [00:29:00] Harvard, at Oxford, uh, in San Francisco, and at the outside the gates of the Vatican, and in Austria. in the Vatican and Austria, the theologian all blasted him and said, “This is poppycock. What are you talking about? This

This is, like, not theology. It’s some kind of do-it-yourself apocalypse rhapsody he’s saying.” And basically, what Thiel’s doing in his Antichrist speeches is portraying our current predicament as an existential battle between good and evil. his upside-down backward version of Christianity, which I call anti-Christianity because it focuses on the Antichrist, not on Jesus Christ, like most Christianity focuses on Jesus, is that the tech bros are on the side of God, and everyone else who’s against them is on the side of the Antichrist.

And anybody who sto- tries to stop tech acceleration to- toward this maximal AI eat the world universe is, uh, threatening the continuation of humanity. And it [00:30:00] goes a lot of places. I mean, I’ve got a

[00:30:02] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:30:02] Gil Durán: transcript of his San Francisco lectures, and it’s very rambling, very strange. It shouldn’t take four days to lecture on the Antichrist.

And a military industrial complex surveillance government contractor billionaire, the co-founder of Palantir, should probably not be the person telling us about the Antichrist, especially when his very strange and dangerous protege, J.D. Vance, is a heartbeat away from the presidency. You know, Peter, are you trying to tell us something? Blink twice if it’s J.D. Vance. I mean, what is

he talking

about Yeah. Yeah

So it’s a– I think on the other hand, it’s an effort to make the strange ideas coming out of Silicon Valley about the creation of an AI godlike force that’s gonna give us eternal life and multi-planetary travel and create this super abundance. It’s trying to put a Christian mask on those ideas, right? Because in a way, when you

look at what Silicon Valley’s promising via AI, it’s the Christian eschatology story. The [00:31:00] God is coming,

God’s gonna grant us eternal life, and we’re gonna go into the heavens, the stars, and we’re gonna have abundance, paradise.

I think Thiel is trying to meld the two together with a Christian mask to maintain the alliance with the MAGA base of evangelicals.

[00:31:14] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Do you think there’s an aspect to the apocalyptic predictions mixed with the accelerationism, and then, yeah, his whole spiel about the Antichrist too, that there’s an aspect to all of it that’s like, I don’t… It’s almost like if evangelicals tried to have total control over the Rapture, you know what I mean?

It’s like, we’re gonna, like, wait for it, but actually we’re gonna manufacture it, and then we’ll be the ones that know when all the stuff is happening, so we’ll benefit from it too. I don’t know. It just seems like a, like a weird control fantasy

[00:31:53] Gil Durán: Peter Thiel’s Antichrist sounds a lot like Peter Thiel, or at least like a [00:32:00] venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, someone who will travel the world preaching doom and apocalypse, scaring people in order to propose a solution, a technological solution that will be a tricky way for them to gain power over the entire world with a guarantee of peace and safety, right?

This is all what Thiel says his Antichrist would be. That’s why he tries to point the finger at AOC or Greta Thunberg or anyone who wants to regulate AI.

[00:32:26] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:32:27] Gil Durán: But it’s quickly reversible to say, “Hey, aren’t you talking about yourself?” I mean, literally, Palantir is a surveillance technology company

[00:32:34] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:32:34] Gil Durán: that was established after 9/11 to guarantee peace and safety.

[00:32:38] Amy Westervelt: Mhm.

[00:32:39] Gil Durán: So it’s weird. I almost think Thiel’s doing it on purpose. I think he wants us to ask the question of whether he is the Antichrist. I mean, there’s no other reason for him to be so closely associating his name with the Antichrist. You know, even the Catholic Church

doesn’t really talk about that stuff

[00:32:53] Amy Westervelt: It’s so weird

[00:32:53] Gil Durán: anymore because it’s too dark.

But I think the good thing is that, again, one of those things where apparently no one’s telling Peter Thiel, “You really [00:33:00] shouldn’t be talking about the Antichrist right now, dude.”

[00:33:02] Amy Westervelt: These guys have no, no people around them anymore at all. Yeah

[00:33:06] Gil Durán: he’s, he’s scaring the hell out of people and waking them up to what’s really going on here, and that’s why I chose to tell people more about what he’s really saying.

He also says that the United States will be the cradle of the Antichrist or of the Katechon, this mysterious force that stops But I think the main point is here there, there’s no reason for Peter Thiel to be talking about the Antichrist

[00:33:28] Amy Westervelt: It’s just so, it’s so bizarre. Um, relatedly, what is it that they hate so much about the, about the climate movement, climate activists, Greta Thunberg? They’re, they have such a bee in their bonnet about it. I, I don’t know if it’s just because they think that those people are the most against AI ’cause of the environmental impact of data centers and all that kind of thing or, or something else

[00:33:57] Gil Durán: They hate all political [00:34:00] philosophies that call for action in the service of the collective good,

[00:34:04] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:34:05] Gil Durán: right?

[00:34:05] Amy Westervelt: Anything that’s, like, not individualistic. Yeah

[00:34:09] Gil Durán: They should be able to maximize their self-interest even if it comes at the detriment of everyone else. Even if it destroys the Earth, nothing should stand between these capitalists and their profits and their ambitions for power.

And some of these people believe, “Well, we gotta become multi-planetary anyway, so this is the thing that will force us to leave Earth in order to survive.” And the problem with that is that there are no other planets where we can live, as far as we know, and it

[00:34:38] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:34:38] Gil Durán: would take thousands and thousands of years to get there.

Thousands and thousands of years on a ship. Probably wouldn’t even get very far before we got hit by an asteroid or a rock or lost our oxygen supply. So there’s

[00:34:47] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:34:48] Gil Durán: no way that we’re all gonna get out to some of the… A- again, this is an apocalyptic fantasy they’re living in,

[00:34:53] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:34:53] Gil Durán: But they really cannot see past their own greed and self-interest, and they hate the idea that the continued [00:35:00] survival on Earth will require us to act in the best interests of the majority of people here

[00:35:07] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:35:07] Gil Durán: to save the planet, to stop burning fossil fuels and pur- pursuing destructive economic policies and goals.

And so they feel very threatened by this, and this is why they hate democracy, by the way, because democracy gives everybody a vote, and they don’t want that.

[00:35:22] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. As in so many other ways, it’s like this thing where they think they’re doing something really new and it’s just like a completely tired, old idea. It’s like they’re, they think they’ve reinvented colonialism, uh, you know? It’s they’re disrupting, um, just bog standard colonialism and, like, the thing elites have been afraid of since people first started talking about democracy.

It’s just, like, the same shit over and over again. Um, except they have, like, the endless money cheat now. You know?

[00:35:56] Gil Durán: it’s– And they’re also, you know, reviving [00:36:00] eugenics and

racism

and

[00:36:01] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:36:02] Gil Durán: misogyny and, um,

apocalyptic

millenarian psychosis. It’s all… You

[00:36:09] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:36:09] Gil Durán: know the funny thing is that the guys who claim they’re gonna take us into the future seem to wanna take us into the past more than anything else

[00:36:14] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. They really wanna go back to, like, I don’t know, the Industrial Revolution, I guess, would be a perfect time for them. It’s very strange.

[00:36:23] Gil Durán: Balaji Srinivasan actually points to Ida Tarbell as

one of the main

enemies

[00:36:28] Amy Westervelt: My hero. Yeah.

[00:36:30] Gil Durán: of

progress The an- the original Antichrist. Yeah.

Because of what she did to Rockefeller. And so right

there you this Yeah, yeah

idea that capitalist power should be unmitigated and anyone who stands in the way of that, like an investigative journalist,

[00:36:45] Amy Westervelt: Yeah

[00:36:46] Gil Durán: is

bad And no, she died in like 1941 and he’s still mad about her.

He, he has written about this quite a few times about Ida Tarbell and what she did to Standard Oil and it’s pretty amazing. Like, they tell you exactly who they are by choosing who the heroes [00:37:00] and villains are and they’re villains who think they’re heroes. That’s

[00:37:03] Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

[00:37:03] Gil Durán: a big part of their mythology

[00:37:05] Amy Westervelt: Yeah. I have to show you that I have an Ida Tarbell tattoo right here.

[00:37:11] Gil Durán: wow