The Nerd Reich | Gil Durán

[00:00:00] Lock your doors, close the blinds, change your passwords. This is Secrets and Spies. Secrets and Spies is a podcast that dives into the world of espionage, terrorism, geopolitics, and intrigue. This podcast is produced and hosted by Chris Carr.

[00:00:30] I feel that some of the greatest threats to democracy at this time are actually coming from the tech sector. So today, I'm joined by Gil Durán and we're discussing his book, The Nerd Reich. I hope you enjoy this episode. I think it's a really important one. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Take care. The opinions expressed by guests on Secrets and Spies do not necessarily represent those of the producers and sponsors of this podcast.

[00:01:07] Gil, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for having me. Excellent. Well, for the benefit of the listeners, please can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Well, my name is Gil Durán and I am a journalist who spent a lot of my career in politics as an advisor to people like Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, the governor of California, Senator Dianne Feinstein. And then returned to journalism, which was where I started my career in the late 90s in Silicon Valley at the San Jose Mercury News.

[00:01:34] In 2018, I left behind my consulting to go back to being a scribe and been doing that ever since and fell into the interesting world of tech politics a few years ago when venture capitalists launched efforts to take over the city government of San Francisco

[00:01:52] and got very interested in the way that venture capitalists who claimed to claim to be Democrats were partnering with Republican billionaires in order to disrupt the politics of a very liberal, famously progressive city. And they succeeded in doing that. But I became aware of some more radical strains of political thought coursing through Silicon Valley.

[00:02:16] And that's what led me to writing a series on the subject and eventually a book just as this thing emerged for everyone to see in national politics with the partnership of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and billionaires and the Trump administration. And my book pulls all those threads together and tells that story. Brilliant. Well, for years, Silicon Valley has sort of been seen as this sort of quirky West Coast bastion of liberalism and technological optimism.

[00:02:44] In 2017, much of the technology industry appeared to be resisting Donald Trump. But by 2025, some of these more powerful figures were embracing him. So what happened? I think there was a long term radicalization of some of these Silicon Valley figureheads and billionaires. I think the number one radicalizing element was the amount of wealth that they have now. I think that we're seeing an outbreak of billionaire psychosis in many ways.

[00:03:09] Their hunger for power and for dominance has become so pronounced and they seem to have no limit to what they feel they can express in terms of their needs to control, to have influence, to make the rules. So I think that's the number one thing that's been radicalizing is they have so much money that they've lost touch with reality.

[00:03:31] And they feel that because of their money and their influence in the world, they have the right to rival even the government that largely helped create them through taxpayer funded contracts and infrastructure in the very freedom that makes the United States a place to launch your business and become a billionaire.

[00:04:17] But there were some other elements as well. They're mostly aloof from electoral politics. It would become a big problem. She was way ahead of her time. Her book, Cyber Selfish, actually, is being republished on September 15th with a new introduction by me. And it's sort of like you could read it and it's written 25 years ago, but it's talking about the people we see today. There were others as well, but they were largely ignored.

[00:04:37] What happened, though, was through the 2000s and the 2010s, there was a series of events, I think, that helped to push these guys toward an apocalyptic mindset. There was the Great Recession and the economic meltdown of 2008. There was the election of Barack Obama, our first black president, which launched this whole radical right wing movement desiring to completely change how things work and eventually gives rise to the MAGA movement.

[00:05:04] There was the rise of Donald Trump as president, which was a shock to the system and a massive disruption that showed that anything is possible. Even the unthinkable becomes possible under Trump. There was the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, which scared the hell out of a lot of these people. It made them feel like liberals and women and people of color were gaining way too much control in society.

[00:05:29] And then you had the pandemic, which had us all isolated and talking to ourselves or our small groups of people for a year. And I think a lot of these guys thought this is it. This is the defining moment when everything changes. And when we come out of this, nothing is ever going to be the same. And I tell that story in my book, how during the pandemic, there was this sort of silo of venture capitalist thought that was becoming more radicalized. And then we come out of that. And here we are suddenly.

[00:06:00] The social media is full of venture capitalists and billionaires spouting manifestos, partnering with Trump. Trump returns to power. There's the next big disruption. After trying to overthrow democracy on January 6th, 2021. Donald Trump, who should still be in prison right now if we had enforced the laws of this country and done the right thing, returns to power. And these guys all line up behind him, even though, as you said, they had previously opposed him. And so I think there was a series of events.

[00:06:29] And unfortunately, we're seeing that having a lot of money doesn't mean you have any wisdom, doesn't mean you have a good sense of moral right and wrong, and doesn't mean you can be trusted to make the right decision in a crisis. I think they've made the wrong decision here. And we're all living with the consequences. But I think the consequences are going to come back to haunt them in the end. Yeah. And do you think the wider public understands how profound that political transformation in Silicon Valley has been?

[00:06:58] I think people have a sense that something has gone deeply wrong with Silicon Valley and with the billionaires. We see it in the polls. For a long time, Americans admired the wealthy, admired billionaires. We're taught that if you're rich, you're better, you're smarter, right? You deserve it. You somehow found a way to win. You worked really hard and you have a lot of money. And so for a long time, you've had this high impression of the wealthy in American society.

[00:07:21] They're considered, I think, in a subconscious way, you're never overtly told, but always subconsciously understand is that rich people are better for a reason. They figured out something you didn't and they're more disciplined and they're stronger, etc., etc. But I think that people see that this has gone way too far and these billionaires aren't smarter and aren't better than anyone else. And they have become dangerous because they have so much power.

[00:07:46] And we see that manifesting in the protests against data centers, which are basically physical manifestations of billionaire power on the land. Come to your community to suck up your water and pollute your air and drive up your energy costs, all for the promise of killing all your jobs and potentially wiping humanity off the face of the planet. This is the marketing of the AI billionaires is that this is the disruptive technology that will destroy everything.

[00:08:12] And so we see them sinking in the polls at the same time that our inequality is spiraling out of control. So I think they get a sense on one level that the billionaires have gone off the edge. But the problem is that the media in the United States has largely ignored the story of the tech billionaire radicalization. Acts like, well, it must be taxes and regulations or self-interest.

[00:08:34] When instead there's a pronounced ideology here, an idea that the 21st century will spell the death of democracy and lead to the rise of a new system in which these tech elites will rule instead of government or perhaps as the government. And for some reason, the mainstream press seems very allergic to talking about that, even though, as you see in my book, a lot of the story I tell is told in the words of these guys. They're very loud about it.

[00:09:03] It's not a secret. And the only thing I've done differently is listen to what they've said about democracy and why it's bad, why it needs to be replaced and taken them at their word. Because what they've been saying for decades, Peter Thiel in particular, is now what appears to be happening every time I look at a newspaper or look at a newscast on TV, right? It's the same stuff. And the hundreds of millions of dollars that Silicon Valley is pouring into our election system right now is unprecedented. It came out of nowhere.

[00:09:32] It's grown like a cancer. And that's exactly what it is, a cancer on the body politic. And so I think that the reason my book is a bestseller is not because I'm the greatest writer, though I'm pretty good, right? But I'm a first-time author. It's hard to make that list as a first-time author. Well, congratulations. Oh, thank you. It's because no one else is telling the story in the mainstream journalism. And I want to note that there have been academics and activists trying to raise the alert on these issues.

[00:09:59] What I've done is scrape that all together into a book that's very readable and accessible for normal people. And I think that's what the power of it is. And unfortunately, I mean, my hope is that the press will have to talk about this more. They've, you know, this idea, this ideology is called the dark enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement. And it's been talked about before in the press. The New York Times has written about it. The New Yorker's written about it.

[00:10:28] Some of the tech publications in the U.S. wrote about it earlier in like 2014, 2015. But for some reason, as this thing reached the peak of its power under Trump's second return to the White House, everyone decided to stop talking about it as it is now more important than it has ever been. And that's really what my book is about.

[00:10:49] It's about this dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary, tech fascist ideology and how it went from being on the fringes of weirdo internet blogs to the center of the Trump White House. Yeah. And if we strip away all the kind of terminology, what do people at the center of this movement actually sort of believe is wrong with liberal democracy? And how important is this idea of a cognitive elite that the smartest, most technologically capable people are better and equipped to govern the public?

[00:11:17] The problem with democracy is that it gives everyone a vote. In a democracy, you're equal to everyone and everyone's equal to you, theoretically, right? Or you're not better than anyone and no one's better than you, at least when you go into that voting booth. And I think a lot of these guys see a future in the United States in particular where the demographics are going to shift in a major way. And it's going to be a white minority nation and people of color and women are going to have more power.

[00:11:46] And I think that terrifies them because they are paranoid and they believe that this will be the end of them. It will be their destruction. Everyone's going to come for their money and punish them for all the bad stuff they've done. So that becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy because now they are being hated because of the things that they're doing. But the hierarchy that they wish to see, this cognitive elite idea is at the center of it all.

[00:12:12] And a lot of other scholars would point out that this is highly rooted in eugenics. The idea that some people are naturally superior to others. They're more intelligent for genetic reasons and they should be the ones who rule. There's no reason why these highly intelligent beings should be subject to democracy, which gives everyone else a chance to vote whether or not they are millionaires or billionaires or tech founders or what have you.

[00:12:41] And you see that idea recurring of this hierarchy. And the term cognitive elite appears in this 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual. And that's kind of a good way to understand what this whole thing is about. The Sovereign Individual was this book that predicted that in the 21st century, democracies and nation states would disappear from the earth forever.

[00:13:03] They would be destroyed by technology, specifically something called cyber currency, a new digital money that would undermine government authority. We would call that crypto and advanced automation, which would eat up all the jobs and create economic chaos and deprive people of meaningful work, which is the narrative around AI now that's going to automate majority of jobs. And this would create this massive upheaval and economic collapse that would lead to the collapse of nation states.

[00:13:31] And the book suggested that savvy investors, so-called cognitive elites or sovereign individuals, could profit from this situation by making the right bets in advance, bets on technology. And then they would flit around the world to different jurisdictions, sort of digital fortress societies that would now cater to their needs as everything else fell apart around them. And this was a kooky book in 1997 to be predicting the end of nations.

[00:14:00] And it was poorly reviewed. I think Publishers Weekly said it's an apocalyptic exercise that is unconvincing. But the book was so influential on Peter Thiel that he has credited it with being part of the reason he started PayPal. Because it was, he says, an effort to get ahead of this digital currency to create a digital money. And Peter Thiel is the PayPal and Palantir billionaire who's largely at the center.

[00:14:25] A very pro-Trump guy who, in my book, is the center of this sort of cult of apocalyptic billionaires who believe it is their destiny to destroy democracy. And so the important thing about the cognitive elite term, though, is that it comes from a different book. A book called The Bell Curve from 1994, which was a very controversial early race science book that argued that intelligence is genetic.

[00:14:51] And it was sort of, you know, a big early success for the racist science crowd who always wants to argue that white people are naturally more intelligent than everyone else. And so there's a direct through line there to this eugenics, racist thinking, to the sovereign individual, to this idea that tech founders and engineers should be the people who run society. And that idea goes way back, all the way through the early part of the 20th century.

[00:15:19] You see this idea that technology means everything can become more efficient automatically through technology. Therefore, the people who control technology should control everything, not politicians and not democracy, because that's how everything will be better and more effective and efficient is through basically, you know, algorithms, not voting. Yeah, I've actually had friends in the technology sector who used to believe that, who thankfully have changed their opinions now. But yeah, yeah. It's a seductive idea. It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is.

[00:15:47] So if democracy is the problem in their eyes, what do they want to replace it with? And where does the network state fit into that vision? So in this world where democracy collapses, what do people do? What do people of means do? I mean, it's kind of silly to not have the United States, which is probably the number one protector of capitalist billionaires in the world.

[00:16:06] It's one of the strange contradictions of this whole ideology is that these men have all become fabulously wealthy in this country, but they somehow want to tear it down. Right. It doesn't like a good idea. But so you get this idea that comes out of this ideology that we have to prepare for a new world where the United States doesn't exist.

[00:16:28] And in a way, you can trace it back to Ayn Rand's writings and Atlas Shrugged, where there's this hidden valley where all the wealthiest and the wealthy elites go to hide. Galt's Gulch is the world falls apart and everybody begs them to come back and rule over us because everything was better when the billionaires were in charge.

[00:16:48] Curtis Yarvin is the San Francisco computer programmer who in the early 2000s starts writing a blog called Unqualified Reservations. And his main argument, and he wrote under a pen name, Mincha Smoldebug, is that American democracy is an outdated software system. And that, in fact, democracy was a mistake. That authoritarianism is the natural order of the world.

[00:17:17] And that we should scrap democracy and return to dictatorship, which would be better for everyone. And in his blog, he laid out a plan called Patchwork, which was a future in which the country would be broken up into little corporate fiefdoms run by authoritarian corporations that would have absolute power over their citizens. Everyone would be under constant surveillance. And these authoritarian governments could even execute citizens for no reason.

[00:17:46] That's how much power they would have. And he had described a future San Francisco called Friscorp, where the poor people, the unproductive people, could even be turned into biodiesel to fuel those city buses. But he said, oh, that wouldn't be nice because nobody would want to ride on a bus fueled by human remains. But he called instead for a humane alternative to genocide to deal with the unproductive people. So he lays out this idea of Patchwork in a very long essay.

[00:18:14] And a few years later, another guy named Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz's partner, creates this idea called the network state, which is basically taking Yarvin's Patchwork idea and putting it in a venture capital friendly format. The idea being that just like you do startups and new companies disrupt the world, you can create startup nations that will also disrupt the world order.

[00:18:42] And that, in fact, the future is this the startup nations that are called network states. You get a bunch of people together online. You crowdfund territory somewhere. You create a new nation. And, again, this is a sort of unusual idea, but it has some major fans, people like Marc Andreessen, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, the billionaire novel Ravikant, all write glowing blurbs for the cover of the book.

[00:19:09] And there's now even a venture capital firm, Pronomos Capital, that exists to fund these projects all over the world and has a dashboard where they claim dozens of these things are already underway. But I think the important thing to realize is that the Balaji Srinivasan network state idea comes from Yarvin's Patchwork.

[00:19:27] It's a very thinly disguised rehash because Srinivasan needed to get the patchwork idea away from Yarvin and these kooky ideas about humane alternatives to genocide and turning poor people into biofuel and make it something more friendly to investors. But the network state idea has itself now become radical and extreme, and we can get into that.

[00:19:50] But the other important point about this is that Curtis Yarvin was largely supported and popularized and even funded by Peter Thiel starting in around 2009 when Thiel wrote an essay in which he said he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible and came under a lot of fire. And Curtis Yarvin came to his aid, and they became friends after that. And at the same time, Balaji Srinivasan is another protege of Peter Thiel.

[00:20:19] So at the center of the main force that keeps these ideas moving and becoming popular and hip in certain circles of Silicon Valley is Peter Thiel. And it's interesting, there's a paradox kind of here because a lot of these people are celebrated for their intelligence and rationality, but obviously you're arguing that a lot of their technological beliefs kind of collapse very quickly under scrutiny. So how do you explain that? Billionaires are very, very dumb about things they don't know about.

[00:20:46] They just don't know they're dumb because no one ever tells them that they're dumb. You know, there are different kinds of intelligence guys, right? Like farmers and others like that are going to survive much better in apocalypse. People who know how to live off the land than a billionaire who has everything flown in and catered and sanitized, right? So there's different kinds of knowledge sets for different kinds of problems.

[00:21:12] And these guys may have been good at figuring out how to make a lot of money or in some cases figuring out a certain angle on technology that created something useful. But that doesn't extrapolate to understanding how everything works. Politics is largely about understanding what normal people want, what most people view as the challenges to be solved. And if you're a billionaire who's detached from all that, you're not going to have any understanding of that.

[00:21:41] And you're going to do things like say, hey, we've created a new technology that's going to kill your job and might wipe our species off the planet. But don't worry, we're going to make a lot of money doing it. This is the kind of messaging coming out of Silicon Valley these days. It didn't used to be that way, right? And I want to be clear, I'm not anti-technology. I'm on technology all day, right? We can see each other and you couldn't do this back in the 90s or the early 2000s, right? That was still science fiction.

[00:22:11] And that's how technology has been sold to us. Connectivity, empowerment. We can do more. We can communicate more. But now there's been this dark turn where everything's like we're headed toward this apocalyptic phase and we have no choice. It's supposedly inevitable. And so that marketing there is another sign of the billionaire psychosis stupidity where why would you ever say such a thing? You know, advertising is based on people feeling safe and happy.

[00:22:37] And in American politics, you always promise to create more jobs, not less. You promise you're going to make people's families safer and more secure and that the future is going to be better. They have somehow reversed all of that. Any campaign intern could have helped them not do that, right? But yeah, so the billionaires don't understand everything.

[00:22:58] They have decided to try to take control of a political discourse and they have completely toxified it and damaged themselves greatly, if not destroyed themselves completely. So I think that's part of the revelation here is that they actually don't know better than everyone else, you know? And as much as people like to deride politicians, they do understand how to stay in office and how to appeal to people, what's possible, what's not possible.

[00:23:26] To a billionaire, everything is possible, even imposing Armageddon and dictatorship the world, even though you don't have the power to do that. And the polls are slipping by the day. Let's take a break and be right back with more.

[00:23:57] Just before we get back into the interview, if you're enjoying this episode, please consider buying us a coffee at buymeacoffee.com forward slash secrets and spies. Thank you. So there may be people listening to this who think this sounds like a new conspiracy theory. What would you say to them? It's not a theory if it's on the record. And most of my book is told in their own words. And I leave it for the reader to judge whether the things that the billionaires have been saying they're going to do are the things that the billionaires are doing right now. And I think it's a question that needs to be asked.

[00:24:27] I think that the fact that the mainstream media is not telling people about this is a serious violation of journalistic ethics. You have to provide proper context to people so that they understand what's actually happening. And it's not going on right now. And this stuff's all on the record. You know, I did a lot of reporting for my book, but a lot of the stuff I did, I pulled from things that are publicly available still on YouTube.

[00:24:52] For example, if you go on YouTube right now and you do a search for Peter Thiel, Libertopia 2010, L-I-B-E-R-T-O-P-I-A, you'll find a speech in which he says that government is fundamentally evil. And he says that technology is an incredible alternative to politics that will basically solve the problem of having to deal with voters. This is 2010, mind you. It's still online, right? That quote about technology being an incredible alternative to politics is the beginning of my book.

[00:25:20] You can look up Curtis Yarvin 2012 and find the speech where he lays out a plan to purge the federal government of civil servants and install a dictatorship in its place. Loyalists who will do what the dictator says. That's the plan. He calls it retire all government employees rage that became Doge with Elon Musk at the head of it, right? You can go back in 1999 on YouTube again.

[00:25:47] Peter Thiel gives a speech where he says this new currency will change everything, completely disrupt the way the world works, and Washington will be too stupid to stop it. They won't even know what the hell it is and what it's really doing. That's from 1999. It's still on YouTube. So even if you don't buy my book, right, go and listen to those speeches and do your own research if you want. But this stuff is on the record. It's real.

[00:26:14] And if these guys didn't have billions of dollars, we might be able to say pay. So what? People say crazy things. They believe kooky stuff, freedom of speech, whatever. But these are the most influential men in the United States, if not the world, at this present moment. And it seems to me like they're doing the thing that they've been talking about doing. But again, I leave it to the reader to decide. I've made my case.

[00:26:37] And I'd say this, that if we look back 10 or 20 years from now, I think I'll feel pretty good about my reporting during this period. I don't know about people at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major papers, however. Let's dive a bit into Peter Thiel. So if you could talk to us a little bit about his background, who he is politically, and in simple terms, what he really wants, and why and how he's become so important.

[00:27:05] So Thiel went to Stanford, got a philosophy degree, went to Stanford Law School, became a lawyer, didn't want to do that. And then became a hedge fund manager and happened to find himself back in Silicon Valley at the right time, late 90s, when things were about to take off in the dot-com boom. And ended up investing in helping co-found PayPal.

[00:27:27] Originally was called Confinity, but then he merged it with another company across the hallway from his office run by a guy named Elon Musk, who is pursuing a similar goal. And PayPal ends up making him wealthy, makes him a multimillionaire, which he then leveraged into becoming a billionaire with investments in things like Facebook.

[00:27:45] He was the major first investor in Facebook, also co-founded a company called Palantir, which has gone on to become a major surveillance software company with massive government contracts all over the world. And so Thiel is always a right-wing guy.

[00:28:05] Back in the 90s, he was militating against diversity efforts on campus and pushing right-wing politics and was an early supporter of Donald Trump, a rare venture capitalist billionaire who supported Trump in 2016. And that seemed very unusual at the time, but Thiel has this sort of power to make things go his way. He sort of is able to exert this gravitational pull.

[00:28:35] And so what seems unusual and like a bad move in 2016 supporting Trump becomes where all the rest of these guys are in 2024, standing behind Trump. And so along the way, I mentioned earlier, Thiel was greatly inspired by this book, The Sovereign Individual.

[00:28:52] Thiel is able to spread these ideas around and convert other people to this idea while funding people like Balaz Yushinivasan and Curtis Yarvin to create a scene, a sort of milieu, where it's cool to question the value of democracy, the merits of dictatorship, and whether we're on the cusp of some sort of apocalyptic change that will make this new science fiction-like world possible.

[00:29:21] Thiel is also famously obsessed with Lord of the Rings. He names his companies typically after things that appear in the Lord of the Rings. The Palantiri Stone is this kind of magical all-seeing orb from the Lord of the Rings. Valor Ventures, Mithril Capital, where J.D. Vance worked. So that's another person he collects along the way is a young J.D. Vance who is convinced to not be a lawyer, kind of like Thiel didn't want to be a lawyer after going to law school,

[00:29:50] and becomes a venture capitalist instead and is now the vice president. So Thiel has sort of been able to create this whole scene, and now we see it really merging this tech right-wing scene and becoming the major animating force behind Trump's MAGA movement here in 2026. Now you just touched on J.D. Vance. So he seems to be the point where this story moves from Silicon Valley to the heart of American government.

[00:30:19] So how important was Thiel to Vance's rise, and what evidence is that Vance has sort of absorbed his ideas and ideas associated with thinkers like Curtis Yarvin? J.D. Vance marketed himself as a hillbilly in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. But he's more of a Thielbilly if you really look at the details. At every step of J.D. Vance's career, he's been funded and supported and guided by Peter Thiel.

[00:30:44] He first met Peter Thiel at Yale Law School when he was a student there, and Thiel was giving a speech. Thiel likes to go around giving speeches at law schools and grad schools, speaking to young people who will soon be very influential in the world. And Vance said that it was one of the more significant moments of his life and that Thiel was possibly the most intelligent person he'd ever met. So he writes Thiel an email, and lo and behold, in two years' time, he's in Silicon Valley working at a venture capital firm that was co-founded by Peter Thiel.

[00:31:14] He didn't last very long there and was sort of remembered as a lackluster character. But he went back to Ohio to start his own venture firm eventually, and it was with money from Peter Thiel. So even though he had not impressed his colleagues, he had impressed Peter Thiel. And when J.D. Vance decided to stop being an atheist and become a Catholic, it was because he was inspired by the ideas of Peter Thiel, which Vance has written about in his new memoir of his conversion to Catholicism.

[00:31:43] Peter Thiel's ideas were the main linchpin of his conversion, which is strange because Peter Thiel is not even a Catholic. And when he decided to become a politician and run for Senate in Ohio, the only reason he won was because Peter Thiel made a massive investment, $15 million, setting a record for individual spending in a Senate race at that time. And Peter Thiel also was able to broker Donald Trump to endorse Vance,

[00:32:08] which was strange because Vance had previously called Donald Trump America's Hitler, as well as cultural heroine and an opioid of the masses. Remember, Vance was a never-Trump guy. But suddenly he decides to change his religion from atheist to Catholic and also change his political beliefs from anti-Trump to a rabid Trump supporter. And then when Donald Trump is running for president again,

[00:32:38] and it's clear he's going to be the nominee, it was the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley, including Thiel and his close cronies, who lobbied to have J.D. Vance become the vice president. A guy who had called Donald Trump America's Hitler becomes Donald Trump's vice president and main attack dog. And J.D. Vance is a dangerous, radical extremist. If you look at some of the ideas he laid out on tape, again on YouTube, earlier in his career,

[00:33:08] in 2021, when he was gearing up for his Senate race, he went on this right-wing podcast and he said that in 2024, he believed Donald Trump would return to power. And that was a crazy thing to say in 2021. January 6th was fresh in our minds and we thought that was over with, most people. That's not going to happen. Donald Trump's lucky he's not in prison. He's shamed for the rest of his life. No dice. But Vance said he thought Trump would return to power in 2024. And he said when Trump did return to power,

[00:33:38] there was something specific he should do. And then he said, well, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. This is J.D. Vance, name-checking Curtis Yarvin. And then he laid out Yarvin's plan to purge the federal government, that the president should denazify the federal bureaucracy, as if the civil servants are Nazis who had to be eliminated from the population of government workers. And if the courts try to stop him from doing this, J.D. Vance said,

[00:34:05] the president should challenge them to make him stop. What are you going to do? What's your power? And this is a radically anti-American extremist idea, the idea that the law and the Constitution don't matter. Remember, J.D. Vance is a Yale-educated lawyer. He certainly knows what he's saying. But he literally name-checked Curtis Yarvin. Why? Because he's a tillbilly. He comes from the till milieu. And he got immersed in these ideas out in Silicon Valley, right?

[00:34:33] And for some reason, nobody ever asks J.D. Vance about this stuff. Doge literally happened. And even the Washington Post ended up writing that Doge was inspired by Yarvin. You know, speaking to your earlier point that some people might think my work is a little conspiratorial. In February of 2025, I wrote a piece at my website, thenerdrike.com, about how Doge was inspired by Yarvin. It was clearly Yarvin's idea for retiring all government employees.

[00:34:59] Two months later, the Washington Post did a story confirming all of that with people inside of Doge saying that. Now, my story went viral with the people on social media, right? But that can happen even if something's not solid. But then the Post did it. And I was like, I've noticed one of those early moments where I'm like, I'm not on the wrong track here. Like, I know what I'm seeing. I'm seeing the things that these guys have been talking about happening in real time. And even the Washington Post had to acknowledge that. So Vance is a part of this ideology.

[00:35:28] In fact, when he was chosen, the venture capitalists, these radical ones, celebrated and said, one of our own is now in the White House. And I think he's vastly more dangerous than Donald Trump because I think J.D. Vance is really into this stuff. And if you go deeper into it, the idea here is that a dictator is better than a democracy. And if J.D. Vance knows enough about Curtis Yarvin to know his whole plot for purging the federal government,

[00:35:54] he certainly knows the dictatorship is the main point of all of Yarvin's writings. And this guy is now a heartbeat away from the presidency. Yeah. Now, we haven't talked about Elon Musk yet. So Elon Musk is obviously a very different person from Peter Thiel. But where does he sort of fit into this story? And how important was Musk and the wider Silicon Valley ecosystem to Trump's return to the White House? Elon Musk's ego, I think, is his main animating force here.

[00:36:23] And for a long time, he was sort of beloved by liberals. I mean, Tesla was built on liberal money, people who wanted to solve climate change by getting off of fossil fuels. That was the main customer base for a while. And Musk, who has turned out to be a horrific, racist, radical extremist in almost every way, seemed like a self-effacing, humble, positive guy who was trying to do something good for the future of humanity.

[00:36:51] Looking back, I was in the room with Elon Musk a couple of times back during my career in politics, usually when a Democratic politician I worked for was doing some kind of favor for Tesla. And he just seemed very humble and kind of shy. That was my impression of him. And it's completely the opposite of what he actually is now, right?

[00:37:12] But he was sort of keeping that under control when he needed government loans and contracts and subsidies and bills to help enable his business back then. Now we've seen his true face. And I think, you know, I don't know that Musk is studied in these right-wing ideologies to the degree that Thiel is. But I think he's naturally inclined toward them as a result of his wealth and his ego.

[00:37:43] Elon clearly thinks he's the cognitive elite. He is the person who is the most important person in history. And that he should get his way on everything or else, I mean, he said it as much. We will never become multi-planetary if I don't get to do the things I'm doing, right? He's got this fantasy that he's the reason human beings are going to go live in space on other planets, which by the way is completely unscientific poppycock. You know, it would take thousands of years on ships to even get to the nearest habitable planet.

[00:38:13] And there's no evidence that we could live there. Our brains have been warped by space movies. Yeah, yeah. We think that's how it would work, but it would not. There's a great book called More Everything Forever by Adam Becker that everyone should read. It debunks, Becker's an astrophysicist. It debunks all these dumb things we've been taught about what's possible. Elon Musk's main marketing strategy is going to go to Mars. You just live underground on Mars. The worst day on Earth when the asteroid hit was better than the best day on Mars because we have life here.

[00:38:42] You don't have life on Mars. Why wouldn't we try to do everything to save this planet? But I digress. So Musk clearly just like Trump in a way, almost exactly like Trump. It's not that he's got the ideology. It's just that he has the desire to have the power. And so he naturally fits into this. And he's got all these the richest man in the world, right? So he can pour hundreds of millions of dollars into this thing. And then it becomes the key figure in Doge. And I should say in 2022, Curtis Jarvin updated his idea for purging the federal government.

[00:39:11] To get a little more specific, he said that if Trump returned to power, Trump should appoint a CEO to purge the federal government. And then Trump should act as the chairman of the board while the CEO ran roughshod over the government and did all the dirty work. And that's sort of exactly what happened under Trump, right? And in a way, what Jarvin does, some people get mad that I pay attention to Jarvin's writings. They think he's a clown and a troll, doesn't deserve attention.

[00:39:42] But what I find is that Jarvin actually says out loud early what the internal conversations are in this sort of tech billionaire milieu. And what you see happen is exactly that. The Trump administration regime is totally merged with Silicon Valley. A lot of Peter Thiel's deputies from his entire career are now in high positions in the Trump White House.

[00:40:05] Bloomberg did a count last year, and it was like 16 people from Thiel's close, tight network are now in positions of great power, not to mention J.D. Vance as vice president. And basically, that's what's happening. You've got the corporate CEOs inside of the government, and Musk's doge was a part of that and did a lot of damage in the time he was there. And he's probably still doing damage that we don't see as much because we don't have this bombastic character throwing it in our faces all of the time.

[00:40:35] So the other thing I would say, finally, after Elon Musk and Trump broke up, another way the tech guys are stupid, anybody in politics would know. You can have two major egos competing for the camera, right? It was never going to work out that Elon Musk is overshadowing Trump. This is a fundamental of politics. You know, politicians, even on the city council level, will fight over who gets the better seat at the dinner, right? The egos are massive, even on the lower level.

[00:41:02] So on the top level, it was never sustainable for Elon to be acting like the president. But when Elon Musk broke up with Trump and said he was in the Epstein files, caused all this drama around Epstein, he decided he was going to start his own third political party. And the person he consulted about that political party was, drumroll please, Curtis Yarvin. If this isn't what the billionaires are doing, it's certainly what they want us to think that they're doing. But I think they're actually doing it. Yeah. There's something quite ironic as well.

[00:41:31] Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both benefited from government contracts, yet they're trying to destroy the federal government. What do you make of all that? I think they have a hard time accepting the fact that they too are dependent on government. Most of these guys are government welfare kings. And even if you don't get direct contracts, which they do, right? Peter Thiel says government is fundamentally evil in 2010.

[00:41:59] Palantir is a major government military industrial intelligence complex contractor. How does somebody with that business model say that government is fundamentally evil? Peter Thiel to this day is described as libertarian. How can you be a libertarian who are against government power and intrusion and against government in general and be a government surveillance contractor? Right. This is the part of the problem I've been mentioning. Journalists don't understand any part of this. Even the basic terminology evades them.

[00:42:28] He gets to be a libertarian and a massive government welfare king. I think that the government and the public itself interferes with their myth of their self-made greatness because we're all dependent on the public. You know, the private depends on the public. Business depends on a strong public sector and a government that builds roads, that builds infrastructure, that maintains safety and security and national security.

[00:42:56] You can't have what we have in this country or in any of our countries without those elements. And so there's no way to ever say you did it all yourself, right? It came from this system and you owe a debt to that system. But in their mythology, they are self-made and they owe a debt to nobody. And in fact, they're angry that they have to pay taxes. So they got to where they were off of these robust public systems that create the conditions for billionaireism.

[00:43:25] Yet they want to pull up that ladder and destroy that very system because they're so hungry for power. They can't have any rivals, right? They can't have the government being more powerful than they are. And that's kind of really what this is all about. If you look at the Yarvin stuff, you look at the Balochina Vaston stuff, you look at Peter Thiel's speeches against democracy over the years. It's the idea that government should not be public. Government should be private. That power should not be democratized. It should be monopolized.

[00:43:55] And Peter Thiel famously speaks highly in favor of monopoly. He's like, no, competition is for losers. What you want is a monopoly. This is his book, Zero to One. In addition, he says that a good business or startup is a cult, an organization of total dedication. And I believe that's kind of what he did. He sort of built a cult of fellow billionaires who don't believe in democracy. So the core idea here is this tension between democracy and the public and monopoly and the private.

[00:44:23] They see the chance with their money and influence to disrupt and destroy the system, which is what venture capitalists do. Make disruptive investments that will yield an outsized return. And right now, I think the venture capitalists are clearly betting against democracy. Let's take a break and be right back with more.

[00:44:56] If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies and you'll get access to the ad-free versions of this show. Now we'll get back to the interview. Thank you for your support. And where does sort of AI fit into all this? Because there's a big hype around AI at the moment. And it just seems like it's potentially going to be the most destructive force for democracy. Where does it sort of fit into all this?

[00:45:21] In the prophecy of the sovereign individual book, right, this advanced automation was going to be the main disruptor of the economy that would create the conditions for the downfall of democracy. And that seems to be the narrative that these guys have largely followed. AI has been marketed as this apocalyptic force that's going to disrupt everything and we have no choice except to give into it and try to get on its good side.

[00:45:45] And, you know, if you look at what Sam Altman, another Thiel protege, by the way, is Sam Altman, who met his husband in Peter Thiel's hot tub at three in the morning and who Peter Thiel describes as a Messiah-like figure in the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. Sam Altman, when he talks about the future, it's the future in which the government will be an AI company and the AI company will be the government. And it'll be a government for the entire world, a monopoly.

[00:46:11] And don't worry, there won't be jobs and stuff, but everyone will get a share of what Altman calls universal extreme wealth. Basically, everyone will have a government welfare check and be cared for by this future AI government. Which is funny because in the United States right now, there's this big meltdown over democratic socialists winning elections in the left. Oh, socialism is so scary. But that's what the hell Sam Altman's promising through the AI apocalypse, right? We're going to have one government giving everybody a welfare check.

[00:46:40] How is that not worse even than socialism? The democratic socialists are only talking about health care and child care and fair wages. You know, not about nobody's going to have anything. And also, you think about that. How are you going to trust this authoritarian AI government, which you depend on for everything? What do rights look like in that situation? So the framing of AI has been apocalyptic, even at its best. And it doesn't have to be that way.

[00:47:08] In other countries like in East Asia, it's not viewed in the same way that we talk about in the United States. What's happened is that the framing of AI has become very religious in the United States. We're going to create God, this new super intelligence. We're about to transcend humanity and have this thing that no one fully understands and that there's no evidence it can actually even be built. We've got an industry, the AI industry, that has deliberately framed its product in human terms.

[00:47:38] You know, Claude is thinking, is processing, is, you know, sorting out the information. So the metaphor they've used is that it's this human-like intelligence that's going to become a god-like intelligence and going to disrupt everything. And so I think the key point on AI is that even if it doesn't do all those things, it's creating this whole new class of billionaires and further consolidating money and power in fewer and fewer hands. You know, we don't need a super intelligence in AI to destroy our democratic systems.

[00:48:08] We just need the people who control the narratives around AI to amass enough money to pump into these right-wing extremist politics at the moment. And then who knows what happens after that, right? So a lot of people describe it, some of these folks describe AI as the last invention. And you always see this connection between technology and fascism. The idea is that new technologies create massive advantages, but only if he sees them quickly. You'll have something no one else has.

[00:48:35] Weapons, planes, you name it. And that gives you the power to win very quickly before anyone else figures out what's happening or acquires those exact same tools and weapons. And so they see this as an inflection point. AI and crypto is the other part of that equation will enable us to create as much political disruption as we can and create this new world where we're no longer threatened by democracy. Again, it seems to be following the whole idea in the sovereign individual.

[00:49:04] And everybody who's around this idea is connected to Peter Thiel, the main proponent in the world of this book, the sovereign individual. In fact, one thing I left out earlier, in 2020, the sovereign individual was reissued. And it had a new introduction from Peter Thiel. Here he is 23 years later, right? Still putting his name on that book. Why? Because he wants people to know how important that book is.

[00:49:32] And if you can find a dusty old copy somewhere, you might look it up. People have written summaries of it online, things like that. But that's the scary world I think he perceives us heading toward. And it's one funny coincidence is that my publisher now owns the rights to the sovereign individual. So my book comes out. I mean, they didn't publish it originally, but there was some consolidation. And now they're – so I'm not saying to buy the book because we have the same publisher. I'm saying find a dusty copy or a summary. Yeah, or go to your library.

[00:50:02] Yeah, go to your library if they have it. This is not the kind of book generally that libraries keep, though. Perhaps they should have if they would have known that it would have become so important at some period in the future. What do you think is going to happen next? What should we be watching out for? And what can democratic societies actually do to kind of resist this concentration of politics and technological power?

[00:50:26] The only way to reduce the concentration of their influence on our politics is to reduce the economic inequality. You know, I believe we can have billionaires or we can have democracy in America. We can't have both because we have a system, unfortunately, where you can buy political power. And these guys have made it clear they're going to buy the whole thing in order to break it. And if you look at where our economic stratification is right now, it's becoming unsustainable.

[00:50:53] You can't have an economy or a society where a handful of the 1% of the 1% have most of the wealth and everyone else is struggling to survive. It doesn't make any sense. That's also why their promises of some future AI abundance don't make any sense. We already have abundance. It's just not rationally, justly, or intelligently distributed. Because we've got billionaires who are racing to become trillionaires and they're not sharing that wealth. They're not spitting it back.

[00:51:19] Right now we see the narrative around AI's layoffs, why we can have our software, our AI do all this work and we can keep more of the money, right? But what do you need all the money for in a world that's falling apart and where there's not a vibrant society to participate in? That's a big problem. So I think we have to realize that the billionaires in the United States have become radicalized against democracy.

[00:51:43] And that means that we have to become radicalized against billionaires because we have to defend the system we have. However imperfect it is, democracy is the technology for undermining the tyranny of these billionaires. And, you know, another way these guys are dumb, oligarchy is not a new problem. Rule by the wealthy few. The word comes from the Greeks who already understood this problem 2,000 years ago.

[00:52:09] There always occurs a situation where a wealthy handful of people decide they should have all the power in society. They start becoming tyrants. The majority of people eventually revolt and rebel. And there's usually a violent, bloody upheaval that leads to the establishment of a different form of government without oligarchy. Our systems of democracy come out of that long tradition.

[00:52:30] And the balance of powers that are the features of our liberal democracy are designed to prevent any one group from becoming so powerful that they impose a tyranny on everyone else that becomes destructive, whether it's the voters or whether it's the elites, right? That's what the whole system is. It's a balance of these powers. And so their desire to disrupt that balance is very dangerous because historically this does not end well for them.

[00:52:59] But they believe that AI is the game changer that will allow them actually to win this time, will allow the oligarchs to impose a permanent and eternal hierarchy that will then allow them to use their supposedly godlike AI to create eternal life. And go out into the stars and conquer other planets and create this super abundant paradise where they and their cognitive elite eugenics bred children will live in paradise forever.

[00:53:27] This is if you go deeper into the edges of the ideas that are being circulated in Silicon Valley right now. These cults, which are some called Tesquil, Dr. Timney Gebru and Emil Torres coined this term for these bizarre religious type AI beliefs that are circulating in high levels of Silicon Valley. And I should say that's the reason why they are so against democracy as well. You know, if you look at the hype around AI, there's this idea called accelerationism.

[00:53:54] And the idea is that we have to accelerate as quickly as possible because we don't have enough time. We have to create this super AI god, which they call the thermodynamic god, or which is described as this infinite boom loop that will be created if we just burn up the earth to use as much compute power as possible and create the super intelligence that will then solve all the rest of our problems.

[00:54:14] So part of the reason we have to get rid of democracy is that we don't have anything standing in the way of the billionaire AI guys pushing maximalist AI visions to achieve this religious apocalyptic idea of the super intelligent thermodynamic boom loop. Which, by the way, zero evidence that any of that's going to happen exists or is possible.

[00:54:42] Because in many ways, AI has become an apocalyptic religion. That's what it has in common with the MAGA movement. The base of the MAGA movement are these evangelical Christians who see Donald Trump as an instrument of God's vengeance come to earth to push out their enemies, the liberals, and bring about the second coming of Christ, right? Nothing is less religious than Donald Trump, but they see him as a tool or a weapon that's destroying the existing system and going to give them what they want. And AI is similar.

[00:55:12] The way that these guys push it, it's going to destroy everything. So you have these two apocalyptic belief systems that have merged that were at this turning point. But unfortunately for them, there's a wake-up call. The polls have turned. People are against Trump. They're against Vance. They're against billionaires. They're against AI, right? They really didn't sell this thing. And the big question is whether they feel they have to sell it or whether they feel they're powerful enough to force it on us anyway.

[00:55:39] And I guess we'll find out in the midterm elections if they're allowed to proceed fairly and freely. And it's crazy that that's even a question in the United States of America in 2026. Well, people out there listening to this who are concerned about everything we've discussed today, I mean, do you have any advice for them on how they can sort of push back? There are grassroots movements springing up all around the world right now. Purge Palantir, deflock to get rid of the flock surveillance cameras.

[00:56:07] Movements targeting billionaires, targeting wealth inequality, targeting this idea of an inevitable AI apocalypse. So I think the main thing for people to do would be, A, learn what's happening and tell other people about it. Whether it's from my book or from other sources, the billionaires have become radicalized. It's clear they're pushing this AI, drone, crypto, defense technology, surveillance, religion on everybody around the world. And there are movements like Purge Palantir, deflock pushing back against these things.

[00:56:37] So I'd say the best thing to do is get involved in those movements in your local community. Because that's where you're going to learn more about it and connect to other people all around the world who are already starting to push back en masse against this power. You know, my role as a journalist was to tell people the story of what's going on and I have some ideas about what should happen. But I think there are organizers in the field who are already way ahead of it and they're not talking and thinking, they're moving.

[00:57:04] And I think those movements are going to become much bigger over the next few years. And I think they're going to have an impact. So if you really want to get involved, look at who in your community is already organizing against this stuff and talk to them. Because that's how you get into the slipstream of the information and find out where this stuff is going. Yeah, well Gil, where can listeners find out more about you and your excellent book, The Nerd Reich? You can find me at thenerdrike.com and also have a podcast on YouTube called The Nerd Reich. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today.

[00:57:33] It's been a worrying discussion, but I think a very necessary one. So thank you. Well, there are more of us than there are of them. So if we wake up in time, we can make the changes that are necessary. Yeah, indeed. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well, everybody, that's it for today's episode. Thank you again for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber. Go to patreon.com forward slash secrets and spies. You'll get access to the ad-free versions of this show. Thank you for your support. Thank you for listening. Take care.

[00:58:32] Thanks for listening. This is Secrets and Spies.